On June 5^th British Art suffered a significant loss when the French-born painter and sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was killed in fighting at Neuville-Saint-Vaast. By all accounts a brave and even reckless soldier, Gaudier-Brzeska returned to his native France at the start of the fighting, enlisting in the infantry.

An artist who reveled in the raw power of creation, his sculpture was heavily influenced by non-European works from Africa and the Pacific islands.  Championed by Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, he was a leading figure in the Vorticist movement. It was perhaps fitting that Gaudier-Brzeska died in the trenches, where Vorticism expressed itself in carvings of flesh and bone.

On June 27^th, Gen. Vittoriano Huerta, the most hated man in Mexico was arrested in Newman, New Mexico. Huerta, an officer who built his career on ruthlessly suppressing popular insurrections, was widely seen as having betrayed President Francisco Madero and ordering his execution. He usurped the presidency for himself and, when finally overthrown by the revolutionary forces of Zapata, Obregon and Villa went into exile. While residing in New York City he plotted with representatives of Germany to return to Mexico and re-capture the presidency. Instead he was detained and taken to Ft. Bliss, Texas where he was held under house arrest. Released on bail but later re-arrested, he died in El Paso, Texas on January 13^th of the following year.

If I should die think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is forever England. There shall be

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,

A body of England’s breathing English air,

Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

And laughter, learnt of friends, and gentleness,

In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

“The Soldier.”

Rupert Brooke was a leading light in the Georgian School of English poetry that flourished during the Edwardian years. He looked more like a poet than any other poet since John Keats and, although he was a member of the Cambridge Apostles while at university, considered himself a Fabian and briefly ran with the Bloomsbury set, he wrote a very conservative brand of poetry, little changed since the time of Keats. (I always found it perversely amusing that “repressive” Wilhelmine Germany gave birth to revolutions in Art, Music and Literature, while free and open England produced warmed-over Romanticism.)

When war broke out Brooke enlisted in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserves and was commissioned as a Sub-Lieutenant. He was set to take part in the Gallipoli Campaign, but a mosquito bite became infected and he died aboard ship. He was initially buried on the Greek isle of Skyros. It was hardly a heroic death, and I’m sorry to say that I myself allowed his death on April 23^rd to pass unnoticed.

But it was hard not to take notice of Elbert Hubbard, especially after his inspirational tract “A Message to Garcia” appeared. Hubbard had begun as a disciple of William Morris both in regard to the Arts-and-Crafts Movement and in regard to Socialism. In 1895 he founded Roycroft, a group of workshops producing a variety of products from furniture to finely printed and bound books. His Roycroft Press in East Aurora, New York also issued a journal The Philistine in which his various “preachments” appeared. Although he remained devoted to the spirit of the Arts-and-Crafts Movement, his youthful enthusiasm for Socialism soon faded and was replaced by “Prison is a Socialist’s Paradise, where equality prevails, everything is supplied and competition is eliminated.”

Hubbard was at the height of his fame as a lecturer and homespun philosopher when he sailed aboard the RMS Lusitania, and on May 7, 1915, he shared the fate of 1,198 other souls when the liner was torpedoed and went down off the Irish coast. Ironically one of the things he had planned to do in Europe was attempt to secure an interview with the Kaiser. Perhaps he would have regaled him with these words:

It is not book-learning young men need, nor instruction about this and that, but a stiffening of the vertebrae which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies: do the thing—“Carry a message to Garcia.”

On November 3, 1914 one of the truly unique voices of world poetry was stilled. Georg Trakl, 27, a reserve lieutenant-pharmacist in the Austro-Hungarian army committed suicide by overdosing on cocaine while under observation at a military hospital. For those who knew Trakl’s work, this fate was “a death foretold.”

Trakl bridged the excesses of Late-19^th Romanticism and the dawning of a new Modernist poetics. He is usually classed among the Expressionist poets but he could just as easy be called one of the last of the Decadents. While much of expressionist poetry was rhapsodic in tone and given over to large Whitman-esque declarations concerning Mankind and Brotherhood, Trakl’s poetry was a poetry of rooms closed up too long, of shadows descending and roses wilting in their vases. While many Decadent poets dealt in poses and fired off there lines for effect, Trakl sadly was “the real deal,” a haunted man, a desperately unhappy man. Obsessed by his sister Grete, a confirmed drug addict—whose choice of pharmacy as a career was hardly accidental—nothing, neither his growing fame as a poet nor the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s awarding him a pension that should have allowed him to live comfortably as a writer,  brought him even a modicum of satisfaction.

Called to the colors at the outbreak of hostilities, this already unstable man was given the assignment to stand watch over soldiers seriously wounded in a battle fought at Grodek in the Ukraine. Unable to secure drugs to ease their sufferings or his own, he attempted to shoot himself and was promptly transferred to a military hospital in Krakow where he finally succeed in taking his own life.

“Grodek” was Trakl’s final poem.

At nightfall the autumn wood cry out

With deadly weapons and the golden plains,

The deep blue lakes, above which more darkly

Rolls the sun; the night embraces

Dying warriors, the wild lament

Of their broken mouths.

But quietly there in the pastureland

Red clouds in which an angry god resides,

The shed blood gathers, lunar coolness.

All the roads lead to blackest carrion.

Under golden twigs of the night and stars

The sister’s shade now sways through the silent copse

To greet the ghosts of heroes, the bleeding heads;

And softly the dark flutes of autumn sound in the reeds.

Oh prouder grief! You brazen altars,

Today a great flames feeds the hot flame of the spirit.

The grandsons yet unborn.

(translation by Michael Hamburger)