The heavy cap glowed blue. It was exciting. She could feel the mare pulse under her, bringing and bringing her to the man. Then she had arrived. Stilled, she pressed into a stirrup and lifted, caressing the horse’s fragrant body as she descended its flank. Then she bent to the man on the ground, lifted him into the bed she had carried, and held him in her arms.
Motor ambulancemen John Dos Passos, Malcolm Cowley, E. E. Cummings, Harry Crosby, Ernest Hemingway
1.
2. Vienna, 1808: Erwachen heiterer Empfindungen bei der Ankunft auf dem Lande
The squire’s coverall is shiny with grease. His shoes are made of wood. His dark eyes are sunken and shadowed.
Standing between him and the slender knight he serves is a piece of high folk art: a coat of arms elaborated to teach Catholic France what its knights of the air live for. In the artwork, the body of one of France’s enemies has been brought back to earth, mockingly flattened out beneath a cross, and dropped between altar candles and the sign of the danse macabre. All around this composition the artist has drawn the sign of a heart, perhaps to signify that he lives on in control over the vanquished dead. But if this icon is a sacred heart, it is a lighthearted one.
Mais qu’il est jeune! qu’il est droit! comme il tient fièrement sa lance!
Qu’il fait de plaisir à voir dans le soleil, plein de menaces et d’élégance,
Tel que le bon écuyer qui soutient son maître face-à-face,
L’Ange . . . !Paul Claudel, “Strasbourg” (1913)
One level up, mounted on a wing above the companions, is the Lady they live to serve: a Lewis machine gun like the one that Jay Gatsby once told his squire Nick about. But this has arrived in the airy zone from outside the angelic order. As her image teaches you, Lewis the mitrailleuse — American-designed, British-made — is sole black steel. She is spectrally far from the rose comme une fiancée of Claudel’s cathedral stone.
But through her solitude she lives. Here in her prose she still is: as sun-touched on the photographic record now as she was then, in about 1916, when a curtain was drawn to open her dark closet for men to see. Age after age, libraries’ worth of history have burned to the muddy ground of Europe, but the opening to returning light always restores gleam to the ruins and their dead.
= Fascism, the operetta.
Three weeks into the Armistice, the dazzle painting still at its work of making illusion;
the hats waved as they had been in the days of plume;
perhaps a shouted word in a now dead language, such as “Hurrah!”;
on the evidence of this illusive little history, a belief that war can be over.
