On Receiving the First News of the War

by Issac Rosenberg

Snow is a strange white word;
No ice or frost
Has asked of bud or bird
For Winter’s cost.

Yet ice and frost and snow
From earth to sky
This Summer land doth know;
No man knows why.

In all men’s hearts it is:
Some spirit old
Hath turned with malign kiss
Our lives to mould.

Red fangs have torn His face,
God’s blood is shed:
He mourns from His lone place
His children dead.

O ancient crimson curse!
Corrode, consume;
Give back this universe
Its pristine bloom.

Isaac Rosenberg was born on November 25, 1890, in Bristol, England. He is considered one of England’s foremost “trench poets” and the author of two privately published folios, Youth (1915) and Night and Day (1912), and a poetry collection, Poems by Isaac Rosenberg (William Heinemann, 1922), published posthumously. He was killed in battle on April 1, 1918.

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Private Ernst Jünger, de-trained in France on Dec 27, 1914 at the age of nineteen.  Back in Germany four years later, he was away from the action, too badly hurt to continue. He is the youngest-ever recipient of the pour le Mérite.

It [the trench] seethed with English.  I fired off my cartridges so fiercely that i pressed the trigger ten times at least after the last shot.   Only a few got away.  A NCO was standing near me gaping at this spectacle with mouth agog.  I snatched the rifle from his hands in an uncontrollable need to shoot.  My first victim was an Englishman whom I shot between two Germans at 150 metres.  He snapped shut like the blade of a knife and lay still.

–excerpt Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger

Nothing is more certain than pain; it resembles life’s inescapable shadow grinding the grain ever finer and with ever more incisive rotations.

….In war when shells fly past our bodies at high speeds, we sense clearly that no level of intelligence, virtue, or fortitude is strong enough to deflect them, not even by a hair.  To the extent this threat increases, doubt concerning the validity of our values forces itself upon us.

–excerpt On Pain by Ernst Jünger

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