16
PARTISAN REVIEW
a denouement not yet achieved.
•.as
All this he found distorting and
unjust to the heroic intentions of the fighters:
Beliefs today are as fanatical, as intolerant, as they were in
1918. The vogue among intellectuals is Marxism in one form or
another, with its anti-war convictions. And American intellectual
Marxism is as like the Liberty Loan fanaticism of the war years
as one opposite can be like another.... Nothing which does not
conform to the official dogmas will be endured and any man wh. •
questions rJ!em, and certainly any man who makes fun of them,
will be strung up to the nearest lamp post of Marxian invective.
The fact that the lamp posts are incapable of bearing the weight
of a grown man is irrelevant: the will is there, and the spit balls,
and the squealing rage.
88
He admitted that Mr. Stallings' photographs formed "one of
the most compelling anti-war tracts ever produced;" he found that
the book renewed "all the sensations of loathing and hatred for
which its editor proposes," yet he nostalgically regretted that "the
feel and taste of the time itself" eluded the record-that feel and
taste which he has recently found so palatable in ·
The Ramparts
We Watch.
He sighed "that it is today not only immoral but
unfashionable as well to doubt that all the dead were victims-to
suggest that some few ridiculously believed in the thing for which
(or so they thought) they died.
"a.
Only a few years earlier l\:fr.
MacLeish's poem "Memorial Rain" implied that the dead had
indeed been hoaxed by official platitudes and mob-duping oratory,u
but now, in 1933, in "Lines for an Interment" he translated that
tragedy into an antidote of withering irony:
It's a long time to lie in the earth with your honor:
The world Soldier the world has been moving on....
We are all acting again like civilized beings:
People mention it at tea....
The Facts of Life we have learned are Economic:
You were deceived by the detonation of bombs:
You thought of courage and death when you thought of warfare:
Hadn't they taught you the fine words were unfortunate....
You can rest now in the rain in the Belgian meadow–
Now that it's all explained away and forgotten....
36
