Français
Español
Italiano
Deutsch
Português
Though deadly and sacrilegious war
Grind our country down from battle to battle,
Never, beneath the sun, will a soul forget
Those who died for the world, over there
In Liège.
Like a mountain
That would walk and let fall in crashes
Its blocks
On towns and countryside,
Advanced the heavy and ferocious Germany.
Oh tragic moment!
People fled toward the unknown, frantically;
Only those of Liège resisted
That sinister collapse
Of men and weapons on the earth.
If they acted thus,
It is because they knew that into their hands was given
The fate
Of great Brittany and clear France,
And that their efforts had to,
After being relentless, double yet again
Into more sanguinary efforts.
Little did it matter
That in those dark times,
Against the countless empire they faced,
They were only a small number;
At every hour of the day,
Defending both their city and its forts in turn,
They fought a hundred battles in the intervals;
They killed on the run, and never tired
Of bloodying the soil at each of their steps,
And of being swift beneath the gusts
Of bullets.
Even when at night, in the sulfurous sky,
A prowling Zeppelin passed above them,
Marking them for strikes with its sudden light,
No one retreated, not even a step, backward;
But all leaped with such fierce impetus
Forward,
That the place they occupied remained empty
When swift death struck there.
At the attack, on the glacis,
When, rank by rank, the enemies presented themselves,
Beneath the curved and steady flash of the machine guns,
A tight fire, which, all at once, expanded,
Immeasurably threw them back,
And, rank by rank, struck them down
On the silent earth.
Chaudfontaine and Loncin and Boncelles and Barchon
Resounded with the steel noise of their cupolas;
They assumed night and day, upon their shoulders,
The charge and the thunder and the dread of the cannons;
To our troops lying
In the trenches,
Girls and boys
Distributed the bread
And brought back the beer
With good humor untamed and warlike.
There they spoke of feats accomplished simply,
And how, at such a moment,
The best of the regiments
Was to such a degree fury, carnage, and thunderbolt,
That never a troop of war
Was firmer and more terrible on the earth.
The entire city exulted
In living under the thunderbolt;
Heroism was breathed there
Like powder;
The human heart was composed there
Of a new substance
And the prodigy grew there
Each existence.
O you, the men of tomorrow,
Though deadly and sacrilegious war
Crush us again in a final battle,
Never, beneath the sun, will a soul forget
Those who died for the world, over there,
In Liège.
Emile Verhaeren
Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.
Text published on Poésies 123: https://www.poesies123.com/en/poem-the-men-of-liege-emile-verhaeren/