(The apparition vanishes.)
A turnip field in Bohemia. Two children carry a child’s coffin to the graveyard. They drop the coffin. They drag the body, which is lying in the field, back to the coffin and continue on their way.
(The apparition vanishes.)
Beside a large bakery a pile of rubble, slag, and industrial waste. Half-starved children hunt for bits of bread. They find an unexploded shell. They play with it. It explodes.
(The apparition vanishes.)
Line of hanged men in Nowy Sacz. Children push and twist the corpses.
(The apparition vanishes.)
A woman who has bought potatoes is killed by other people who didn’t get any. They stamp on the corpse.
(The apparition vanishes.)
A goods train on a railway track: the living quarters of a mass of bedraggled humanity; they are refugees, including pregnant women, old men dying, sick children.
(The apparition vanishes.)
In front of a hut in Volhynia. A peasant with his sheepdog. A soldier passes by and stabs the dog with his bayonet, wounding it.
(The apparition vanishes.)
Officers’ drinking bout. A lieutenant shoots a waitress.
(The apparition vanishes.)
Lull in the fighting on the Drina. A Serb peasant fetches water. A lieutenant on the other bank takes aim. He shoots the peasant dead.
(The apparition vanishes.)
Good Friday in a Parisian church. It is hit by a shell from the 120-kilometre cannon.
(The apparition vanishes.)
Easter Sunday. Russian prisoners of war, who have refused to carry out trench work under enemy fire, say their final prayers.
(The apparition vanishes.)
Soldiers in their death throes on the barbed-wire entanglements before Przemysl.
(The apparition vanishes.)
Hand-to-hand fighting and mopping up in a trench.
(The apparition vanishes.)
A schoolroom, hit by a bomb dropped from an aeroplane.
(The apparition vanishes.)
A soldier is dragged out of a mound of earth. His face is covered with blood. He spreads his arms like a cross. His eyes are lifeless.
(The apparition vanishes.)
A bomb falls from an aeroplane on a field dressing station.
(The apparition vanishes.)
A mine explodes. A soldier stretches his bloody arm stumps out towards the banqueting hall.
(The apparition vanishes.)
Double tableau. A German officer shoots a French prisoner who is begging for his life. A French officer shoots a German prisoner who is begging for his life.
(The apparition vanishes.)
Desolation on the Somme. Clouds of smoke like gigantic flags of mourning. Buildings collapse. Wells are blown up by sappers and filled with earth. Evacuation. Old people are chased out of their houses. People shivering with cold at the assembly points. Women fall to their knees before officers. Deportation to forced labour.
(The apparition vanishes.)
The Sorel dairy farm at Loison is reduced to ashes and 250 of the wounded housed there burned alive.
(The apparition vanishes.)
A hospital ship is sunk.
(The apparition vanishes.)
Longuyon set alight with barrels of petroleum, the houses and the church plundered. The wounded and small children burned alive.
(The apparition vanishes.)
Flanders. A gas mask sits before a cooking pot in a hut that has been plundered. On her lap a smaller gas mask.
(The apparition vanishes.)
A horse appears, the outline of the artillery piece it was made to carry marked in blood on its back.
(The apparition vanishes.)
Winter on the island of Asinara. Prisoners strip the clothes off comrades who have died of cholera. The starving eat the flesh of those who have starved to death.
(The apparition vanishes.)
Barracks in Siberia. Men crouch on the ground, their hair turned ashen, undernourished, in tattered uniforms, barefoot, staring blankly ahead, their eyes seeming hollows. Some sleep, some write, some exercise with shovels and practise rifle drill.
(The apparition vanishes.)
Thousands of crosses in a snowfield.
(The apparition vanishes.)
A battlefield. Craters and caverns. Paths through those barbed-wire entanglements still standing. Luxury automobiles arrive. Tourists disperse in groups, photograph each other in heroic poses, parody salvoes of gunfire, laugh, and shout. One of them has found a skull, puts it on the end of his walking stick and returns triumphant. A grief-stricken man interrupts, takes the find and buries the skull.
(Groans of the sleeping. The apparition vanishes.)
A procession of gas masks appears; they form up facing those present in the banqueting hall and appear to approach the table.
THE GAS-MASKS
Can masks still filter wondrous smells?
Our curiosity compels,
though we no more can swallow.
Alas, our plates contained today
dried veg, prepared the German way,
Green-cross grenades to follow.
(The apparition vanishes.)
In the very front line in the Carpathians. All is quiet. Standing corpses in the trenches. Men shoulder to shoulder, guns in the aiming position.
THE SOLDIERS WHO HAVE FROZEN TO DEATH
A night to freeze your breath.
Oh, who thought up this death?
While you sleep, undisturbed,
cold stars stare, unperturbed.
We died, without exemption,
but you’re beyond redemption!
(The apparition vanishes.)
An old Serb peasant digs his grave.
THE OLD SERB PEASANT
We stood around the family chest,
soldiers shouting: Where’s the rest?
They wanted more than what I gave,
that’s why I now must dig my grave.
We had no more, we stood there naked
with nothing more, that they could take it.
They put my children against the wall.
They’ll meet me at the trumpet call.
Burnt is my crop, burnt is my home,
so now I dig my grave alone.
My children are calling — yes, I’m coming!
Help me, Lord, enter the kingdom of heaven!
(The apparition vanishes.)
Crown Prince Wilhelm with the flamethrowers of the Fifth Army. As a greeting to the Crown Prince, the flames form a “W.”
THE FLAMES
We are the flames! The shape we form
has roasted in infernal fire
so many men, of women born,
who suffered for their heart’s desire.
“W” for Woe — scourge of our time,
devoid of sanity,
the Crown Prince plays his crazy game,