Banners – The Little Car

Poem by Guillaume Apollinaire Collection CalligrammesThemes WarPeriod 20th century

I shall never forget that nocturnal journey where none of us said a word
O dark departure where our 3 headlights died
O tender night before the war
O villages where the
BLACKSMITHS CALLED BACK
BETWEEN MIDNIGHT AND ONE IN THE MORNING
hurried
Toward LISIEUX the very blue
Or else
Versailles of gold
And 3 times we stopped to change a tire that had burst

On the 31st of August 1914
I left Deauville a little before midnight
In Rouveyre’s little car

With its chauffeur we were three

We bade farewell to an entire age
Furious Giants rose up over Europe
Eagles left their eyries awaiting the sun
Voracious fishes rose from the abysses
Peoples came running to know each other thoroughly
The dead trembled with fear in their dark dwellings
Dogs barked toward over there where the borders were
I went off carrying within me all those armies fighting
I felt them rise in me and spread out the lands where they
wound
With the forests the happy villages of Belgium
Francorchamps with the Eau Rouge and the boilers
Region through which invasions always pass
Railway arteries where those going off to die still greeted
a colored life
Deep oceans where monsters stirred
In old shipwrecked carcasses

Unimaginable heights where man fights
Higher than the eagle soars
There man fights against man
And suddenly falls like a shooting star
I felt within me new beings full of dexterity
Building and also arranging a new universe
A merchant of unheard-of opulence and prodigious size
Was laying out an extraordinary display
And gigantic shepherds led
Great silent flocks that grazed on words
And against which all the dogs on the road barked

And when after having spent the afternoon
Through Fontainebleau
We arrived in Paris
At the moment when mobilization was being posted
We understood, my comrade and I
That the little car had driven us into a New era
And although both of us were already grown men
We had nevertheless just been born

Guillaume Apollinaire

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-banners-the-little-car-guillaume-apollinaire/