36

Machines

When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die.

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

Throughout the early summer of 1917, as Pershing refined his strategy and, in England, at the opposite end of importance, Archie Baxter hobbled through a painful convalescence, the war crept closer to Paris.

Bombing raids increased, often now at night. During a dinner at the Ritz hosted by Paul Morand’s fiancée and attended by the Beaumonts, Cocteau, and Proust, the lights went out. Morand wrote in his diary, “Searchlights in the starry skies from the direction of Le Bourget [military airfield]. Something like rockets; one by one the French planes climb up. Sirens wail.” To break the tension, Cocteau joked, “Somebody’s stepped on the toe of the Eiffel Tower, and it’s complaining.”

Roland Garros

A few nights after, at 10:00 p.m. on the evening of June 16, 1917, about twenty people gathered at Paul Morand’s apartment above the colonnades of the Palais-Royale. They’d been invited to the first reading by Cocteau of his new cycle of poems, Le Cap de Bonne-Espérance.

The guest list was distinguished—not surprising, since he’d compiled it. The event took place “under the high patronage” of his old companion in arms (and pajamas) Etienne de Beaumont, and wife. Their presence was appropriate, since Cocteau’s inspiration was the war: specifically, the war in the air. The poems were dedicated to his lover, the aviator Roland Garros, then a prisoner in Germany after having been shot down in Belgium. The Stars and Stripes published a harrowing account of his treatment in the prison camp at Küstrin.

This unfortunate had been led about with his hands tied, guarded by four men, one of whom was an officer, unbound only when his physical needs demanded, then forced to keep his arms in a horizontal position and made to sleep face downwards. While at Küstrin, an order came from Berlin that he should respond every two hours to roll-call, even during the night. This aviator, dragged from camp to camp, allowed only ten minutes’ notice of departure, was submitted to such horrible torture that he asked the German government by letter to be shot.

“Sultry,” wrote Morand of the evening. “Not a breath of air; not a sound; under a lamp, Cocteau opens a notebook in which words in his large, naïve handwriting run on and jostle one another in keeping with today’s aesthetic.”

The poems saluted Garros and such aviators as Léon Morane, who invented the monoplane, with its unexpectedly thick and—to Cocteau’s eyes—ungraceful single wing. To him, the ingenuity of such men recalled that of Napoleon, one of whose symbols, appropriately, was the industrious, often airborne bee.

The real subject of Cap de Bonne-Espérance, however, was the thrill of flight as experienced with Garros during their shared ascents. The opening of the cycle conveys Cocteau’s breathless, almost incoherent wonder at a night flight over Paris.

Garros of you

Garros here

we

You Garros

Nothing else but black silence

To Morand, the pauses and gaps evoked air pockets; moments when the sky no longer supported the flimsy plane and its daring pilot.

Seeing the world from the air was still novel enough for Cocteau to be impressed by aerial photographs shown to him by Garros at the military airport of Villacoublay. They included images of Malmaison, the château of Napoleon’s wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais.

A lunch at Villacoublay

One sees in a stereoscope

All the photographs

Malmaison

The lawn Bees

The harp of Josephine

a thick

wing broken.

You lived in her room

Dear creole

With heavy tread, mechanized war was bearing down on Paris. In November, near Cambrai, the British and Australians experimented with a new strategy. Four hundred British tanks attacked German positions, preceded by a “creeping barrage” of artillery and followed by infantry. In theory, high explosives would annihilate the enemy in his trenches. Tanks would plow them down, and infantry mop up the few survivors.

Nothing worked as expected. The barrage was badly directed. Many shells fell short, some among the advancing infantry. Tanks got stuck in ditches or mired in mud. The infantry, expecting to find demoralized enemy troops, had to fight for their lives. The attack forced a bulge in the German line, but the Allies were soon back where they started, except for 179 tanks destroyed, and 55,207 dead or wounded, against the enemy’s estimated 45,000.

Paris’s café strategists shook their heads. After seeing a newsreel of tanks in action, Cocteau, noting the way they reared up at hitting an obstacle, compared them to “a safe that falls from the top floor of a house, then stands on its hind legs like a dog and begs a sugar cube.” What next? Tanks and locomotives having sex, and giving birth to robot children?

For the first time, the war caused Cocteau to lose his temper. He raged against “this formless monster, which hops, flounders, tramples people in its clumsiness, eats them out of gluttony and vomits them right and left.” Among those it devoured was Roland Garros, who escaped from Germany, only to be shot down at Vouziers in the Ardenne just a few days before the end of the war.

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