Posted by on Apr 9, 2016 in French Literature | 0 comments

In a frontline trench, Lieutenant William Kostrowitzky, alias Apollinaire, who became a French citizen only eight days ago, was reading Mercure de France when a burst of German shells wounded him in the temple and drops of blood stained Page 38 of Alfred Vallette’s literary review. It was around 4 pm on March 17, 1916, and the place was the forest of Buttes. Raphael Jérusalmy retraces twenty-four hours in the life of Lieutenant Kostro, better known by his pen name Guillaume Apollinaire, just before the impact that failed to kill the poet. He suffered shrapnel wounds in his right temple after the fragments of the shell pierced his helmet.

apollinaire

Evacuated to Paris and having undergone trephination, the poet of Alcools was dying from his injury and the Spanish flu two days before the armistice. Raphael Jérusalmy, former Israeli liaison agent and a present dealer of antique books in Tel Aviv, imagines that the particular volume of Mercure de France which was annotated by Apollinaire and stained with his blood, was recently found with a bookseller in Bavaria and that it carries the breath of the war to the enemy trench and was picked up by a sergeant named Günter, who kept it reverently and bequeathed it to his children. Mercury, the god of travel, would have thus crossed the battlefield and left with the Krauts, the German soldiers, some little reminders of the arts and letters of France.

Accurately, and with scholarship and imagination, Raphael Jérusalmy traced twenty-four hours in the life of Lieutenant Kostro before that impact that almost cost him his life. We thus find Apollinaire in the frontline of the trenches. The poet and his colleagues: Jojo-la-Fanfare, Trouillebleu, adjutant Gueularde, corporal Dontacte, Père Ubu  and their preposterous stories, and jokes. They were all colorful characters. The young Jojo, who sang in an operatic style would die in front of Apollinaire, hit by a bullet that went to his heart.

le-tour-eiffel
‘As the shells whispered around, it was the turn of “Cointreau-whiskey”, the nickname that his wartime friends had given him, to spread himself in the dirt — to spend the night, arms folded behind his head. Before falling asleep he would invent a few lines of verse that seemed to rise from the bottom of a deep slumber. The verse was not too bad. They were for his beloved Madeleine. He would forget them the next morning.’ The prose of Jérusalmy does full justice to the poetic brilliance of his hero. The book is embellished with quotations and excerpts from Apollinaire’s poems, mainly Calligrammes and verses composed in 1915 while the poet served in the artillery. A year earlier, in March 1915, Apollinaire wrote: ‘It’s amazing to be in the army and I think that’s the real job of a poet (…). I become a magnificent brutality. ‘

Jérusalmy makes us wade through the mud, tells us of the fear of those men, the long-awaited letters and packages, the flea and the vermin, the bad jokes. The poet was amidst that ‘routine massacre’ and ‘the mewing shells’ from the enemy guns that were renamed ‘shit eaters’ while all his friends were far away: Cocteau, Picabia, Picasso, Max Jacob…

line and wash drawing

The stroller of the two banks, who was initiated into the army in December 1914 dreamt of Paris, its docks, its terraces, the crates of its booksellers, its pubs and market stalls. He knows he will never see again one of his best friends André Dupont who died in the Battle of Verdun, a few days earlier, his body riddled with seventeen shrapnel.

Men of the future remember me

I lived during the eclipse of kings.

They died one by one, silent and sad

And such was their valour

That they turned into legends.

Nearly a century after the poet’s death in 1918, Jérusalmy beautifully revived this poetic flame of remembrance.

A soldier who stopped writing visual poems, Apollinaire wrote words of love to the ‘hot’ Madeleine, letters in which he considers that ‘the eyes of the infantrymen betray heartbreaking gleams’. Who would better understand a soldier who was anti-establishment yet disciplined, who explained to his superior that to have control he needed to write, to read, to dream, and proclaimed that war was a unique opportunity to ‘perpetrate absolute poetic act’ than the scholar and serviceman Raphaël Jerusalmy?

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Les obus jouaient à pigeon vole

by Raphaël Jerusalmy

Bruno Doucey, 180 p., 15,50 euros