POEMS
179
Archduke, spotted with the blood that does, indeed, look exactly like
our own (the trees, too, arc human), has moustaches like a Keystone
Cop's. No one
is
laughing.
This, next week, is the war the crowds hear. The crowds in their
stiff straw hats, their starched high collars- the women in shirtwaists
or muslin, their hats shapeless with fruit and flowers- the crowds
stand in black under the summer sun, holding their rolled-up um–
brellas: does Job fear God for. naught? It is the world of Bernstein,
a universe where even the Accuser is troubled, and Time hesitates:
Surely these states are eternal? Troops march through the crowds;
some in blue swallow-tailed coats, their bayonets high as hop-poles;
some in grey. One of these, his pockets bulging, wears a round cap
like an old joke; he
is
smoking a cigar, and breaks ranks to take the
bouquet of a middle-aged woman, who holds the flowers out with
her left hand and bows her head so that her face is hidden. Next
page an old woman walking along a road, leading a white horse-he
is pulling off her home, in a wooden cart half again as high as she–
bows her head exactly as far. These are the poor, whom we have
with us: in their shoulders there is neither grief nor joy, something
more passive than acceptance.
The wet sand is torn by feet, the grass blows by the marsh':;
edge; here, lost in the flat land, seven soldiers are waiting. They lie
looking into the horizon, around the machine-gun they have brought
here on a cart; to the cart a dog is harnessed- a spotted medium–
sized dog, who stares backward and upward into the eyes of man.
Unorganized Innocence: an impossibility,
said Blake; but this was
possible; and it vanishes, leaving only this print, beneath the wave
that goose-steps into Brussels. Under the spiked enameled helmets,
behind moustaches issued with the cheap field-grey, the faces know
better than their game; but their officer, wood in his saddle, holds
his sabre out like Ney, and stares forward and downward into the
camera's lens.
Now the forts of Antwerp, broken into blocks, slide into a moat
as bergs break off into the sea; the blocks, metamorphosed into the
dead, sprawl naked as grave-mounds in the stalky fields; black crowds,
their faces fiery with evening, stumble through the typed bodies nailed
in rows outside a post-office; the innocent armies, marching over the
meadows to three haystacks, a mill-dam, and a hedge, dig a trench for
their dead and vanish there. Over them the machine-guns hammer,
like presses, the speeches into a common tongue: the object-language
of the Old Man of Laputa; here is the fetishism of one commodity,
all the values translated into a piece of meat. A wire-coiled Uhlan,
