Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

                            Polished breastplate
                                the jagged hole
                                the bullet made

Café du Chassepot. The patron  hands me his grandfather’s rifle as if it were a holy relic. I recall the awe of a Bavarian lieutenant on cradling a Chassepot for the first time, in August 1870.  “A gorgeously worked murder weapon, and what a dainty little thing!”  The proud inventor stares down from the wall through the clouds of gaulloise smoke.

                   Death at a thousand metres
                        Antoine Chassepot
                   twirls his waxed moustaches

We toy with the finely milled, linen jacketed cartridges. They spill around Zola’s La Débacle which I had put down resoundingly on the bar. The carefully researched novel is my companion on this pilgrimage to the battlefield of Sedan. Notwithstanding the Chassepot, this was a catastrophic defeat for the French, leading directly to the two world wars.  In my thick Belgian French I declaim the historic pronouncement of general Auguste Ducrot, on discovering that the Prussians had encircled the fortress town:  “Here we are in a chamber pot, about to be shat upon.”

The rain has stopped. For a souvenir of us all I perch my camera on La Débacle: and rush round to get into the photo.

                                   Pre-set shot
                             my Chassepot grin
                              a fraction forced

I cross the canal which seals off a long, narrow loop of the Meuse. Into these few square miles the Prussians herded some 83,000 prisoners-of-war, already crazed with hunger, filthy, and without any shelter from the autumn rains. Zola’s two soldier heroes, Maurice and Jean, act as my guides and companions.  Wandering through an empty landscape of hillocks, little woods and unfenced fields, I find no memorials and meet no ghosts. Only on the printed page does this “Camp of Misery” come alive.

Dispirited, I sit on the river bank beneath an overcast sky.  134 years ago to the day the river here was swollen with the drifting corpses of men and horses, white and bloated. “A shot ripped through the profound silence. At once a death rattle, a splash of water, and the brief struggle of a body sinking to the bottom. It was probably some poor soul who’d got a bullet right through the heart as he tried to escape by swimming the Meuse” (p.360). The first drops of rain fall on my open book, and on the river.

                                  On the smooth surface
                                        each and every
                                        plop and ripple
                                        plop and ripple

On the following day I walk the killing fields north of Sedan.  Here is a graveyard whose wall was loopholed for musketry in 1870. It saw action again in 1914-18.  And aged French reservists crouched here in 1940, to be crushed beneath the tracks of General Guderian’s tanks.

Ossuaries display piles of smashed skulls and broken bones.  In the countless  military cemeteries I inspect the orderly ranks parading this slaughter.

                                        Wandering
                             through the rows of crosses
                                     soft red molehills

Sickened, I flee from Sedan’s vast ruined fortress to nearby Rheims. Here the cathedral has been blasted and gutted over and over again, but always rebuilt. Here men have made hundreds of stone angels. Many survive. One holds out his hand to me as if to offer something.

                                      In creamy stone
                                worn down by the years
                                      a faint smile still