Behind Their Lines: Sauvage

Showing posts with label Sauvage. Show all posts

Friday, October 20, 2023

Yesterday's hero

Stefan Sauer/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

“Amputation was a daily occurrence in Europe from 1914-18, as modern warfare tore men apart in unprecedented ways,” writes Alex Purcell in “Amputations & Prosthetic Limbs in the First World War.”*

The Great War tore men apart, both physically and mentally. In France, the military documented over 3.5 million wounded soldiers, an estimated 40% of those who served. Staggeringly, half of those were wounded twice, while an estimated 100,000 French combatants were wounded three or more times.**

The number of British First World War amputees is estimated to be at least 41,000; German amputees are estimated at 67,000, and French amputees numbered over 70,000.***

Marcel Sauvage was a young medical student in Paris when the Great War began. He served as a stretcher bearer, and while tending to the wounded at the Somme, he was seriously injured and gassed. Sauvage’s war poems were written between 1916 and 1920; “The Castigation” (translated from the French by Ian Higgins) describes a war that never ended for thousands who had fought and survived.

The Castigation
To Frédéric Lefèvre

In the street
The carts
On the cobbles, like clacking rattles,
The taxis racing off,
Red, rear ends smoking.
The tramcars squeal
Under their trolleys.
On the pavements
People walking, walking by, walking on.
Life’s strident bellow.
The city: Paris.

1916 French postcard
"School of Glory"

Bowling along came a posh
Limousine.
A beast of burden,
A man,
A sweating man
Dragging a handcart,
Got in its way.
A gentleman leaned out
From the posh limousine,
An elderly gentleman of means,
And shouted the following observation
At the poor poverty-stricken devil
Trapped in the swirl of the street:
‘You blithering idiot,
Serve you right if you got run over.’

I looked at the man
Who was dragging the handcart.
He said nothing, did nothing.
He had a wooden leg,
He was dragging a heavy handcart,
He was sweating,
He had two medals on his dirty lapel,
The Military Cross,
The Military Medal.
This was yesterday’s hero,
A martyr sweating,
Frightened, resigned—yet another
In the swirl of life.
The posh gentleman of means
Should have done him a favour
And run him over,
Poor b—.
—Marcel Sauvage, trans. Ian Higgins

What is the “castigation” referred to in the poem’s title? The elderly gentleman in the limousine harshly rebukes the war amputee, but it is the body of the veteran that silently accuses all who ignore him, the “People walking, walking by, walking on.”

Those who do notice the man with the wooden leg dismiss him as no better than a “sweating man,” a “beast of burden,” and a “blithering idiot.” Yet the silent, sweating martyr who says nothing and does nothing is imagined in the poem as a Christ-like figure. The prophet Isais said of Christ, “He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.”****

Sauvage’s poem extends this one veteran’s suffering to hundreds of thousands of amputees, writing that the man with the wooden leg was “yet another / In the swirl of life.” Just one more of the broken survivors.

The disfigured and mutilated bodies of the war’s soldiers were painful to confront, and the physical and mental agonies of veterans were typically disregarded by even physicians. Soldiers themselves seldom talked about their suffering: “in this sense, pain remained a family taboo .... The amputees explained, ‘We speak only when we know that we will be heard.’”**

Not only did the war wound soldiers, but it blinded and deafened entire populations to the repercussions of the violence.
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* Alex Purcell, “Amputations & Prosthetic Limbs in the First World War,” Through Veterans Eyes, 18 Sept. 2017, https://throughveteranseyes.ca/2017/09/18/amputations-prosthetic-limbs-in-the-first-world-war/
** Sophie Delaport, “Mutilation and Disfiguration (France),”1914–1918 Online, updated 24 Feb. 2015, https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/mutilation_and_disfiguration_france
*** Source for number of amputees: British and German, French.
**** Isaiah 53:7, New International Version Bible.

Wednesday, October 25, 2017

Recalling the Troops

Laferchou et les autres by Sebastien Roche

The Great War followed soldiers home. British war poets Siegfreid Sassoon and Wilfred Owen met in 1917 while both were patients at Craiglockhart undergoing therapy for shell shock. Sassoon’s poem “Survivors” describes the mental sufferings of soldiers who could not forget the war:

French victim of shell shock reacts to officer's cap

These boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk.

They’ll soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed

Subjection to the ghosts of friends who died,—

Their dreams that drip with murder; and they’ll be proud

Of glorious war that shatter’d all their pride…

Men who went out to battle, grim and glad;

Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad.

What the British referred to as shell shock (the term originated in World War I), the French named variously as obusite (from the word for artillery shell), commotional syndrome, war neurosis, or battle hypnosis. Some French physicians simply labeled the condition hysteria, a term with a long history that “also served to humiliate soldiers.”* French soldiers suffering from the trauma of the war faced an additional challenge:

Marcel Sauvage

Mental illness was still too closely tied to degenerates and drunks. While an amputee could easily be touted as a hero, a chronically confused soldier was not a model veteran…. The mentally alienated veterans sequestered in asylums were considered les morts vivants—‘the living dead.’ They were survivors of the war, but they were as good as dead to their families who saw them rarely and could no longer count on them for financial or emotional support….Even those who escaped institutionalization were seen to inhabit a realm that was somewhere short of truly living.**

Marcel Sauvage was nearly nineteen when the war interrupted his medical studies in Paris. Serving as a stretcher bearer at the Somme, Sauvage was seriously injured and gassed while recovering the wounded. A French newspaper commended his courage, describing him as a “stretcher bearer of absolute devotion” (brancardier d’un dévouement absolu).† Sauvage’s war poems were written between 1916 and 1920; his poem “Recall-Up” (Rappel) depicts memories that tortured many of the veterans of the First World War. The poem’s title carries a double meaning, suggesting the act of remembering as well as that of summoning the troops (in French, battre le rappel).

Recall-Up

Suppose, all at once,

Blood were to bead

From mahoganies

And walls and hangings

In your drawing-rooms?

Suppose, in the night, all at once

The lamps bled,

Lights like wounds?
Or your rugs swelled and

Exploded, like bellies of dead horses?

Suppose the violins

Took up

The tears of the men,

The last refrain of the men

With exploded skulls across every plain on the globe?

Suppose your diamonds, your bright diamonds,

Now were only eyes

Madness-filled

All round you, in the night,

All at once?

What would you tell of life

To a skeleton, suddenly there,

Stock-still, bone-bare,

Its only mark

A Military Cross?

--Marcel Sauvage, translated by Ian Higgins††

The poem begins by inviting readers to imagine or dream—“Suppose”— but the visions that follow lead on a journey into madness. Spreading out from the trenches, the war has polluted the very sanctity of home. Blood wells up from drawing room furniture and drips from curtains and walls; lamps bleed “like wounds,” and rugs bloat like the carcasses of dead horses until they explode under the internal pressure. Domestic objects of comfort and beauty are transformed into hallucinations of horror, and even the glitter of diamonds shifts to reveal glowing eyes of madness that stare out from the dark.

Sound is also distorted, as the music of violins sobs with the last refrain of men dying horribly, their skulls exploded by machine gun fire, shrapnel, and shell. In the poem’s final chilling image, we stand before the skeleton of a dead French soldier who stands bone-bare, wearing only his medal of bravery, the Croix de Guerre. What can we tell him of life, we who have inhabited the haunted minds of les morts vivants—‘the living dead’?

In 1929, Sauvage published Le Premier Homme Que J’ai Tué (The First Man I Killed). The book recalls how at the age of twenty, a young soldier thrusts his bayonet into the body of a German soldier and watches him die. For many of the soldiers of the Great War, the battles continued to rage long after the Armistice was declared and the Treaty of Versailles was signed. Theirs was a war that never truly ended.

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*Gregory M. Thomas, Treating the Trauma of the Great War: Soldiers, Civilians, and Psychiatry in France 1914-1940, Louisiana State University Press, 2009, pp. 20-21.

** Thomas, Treating the Trauma, pp. 125-126.

†Bulletin des Ecrivains de 1914-1915-1916-1917, June 1917, p. 2.

††Many thanks to Ian Higgins for generously discussing his translation of the poem and for granting permission to include it on this blog.