'Our World Has Passed Away'

Dinant is a small city in the Walloon region of Belgium, on the Meuse River. It is one of those otherwise obscure places (Fort Pillow, Lidice, My Lai) that has lent its name to an atrocity. On August 23, 1914, in the early weeks of World War I, German troops slaughtered almost seven-hundred Belgian civilians – men, women, children – and burned down most of the buildings in the city. In her “Dinant, August 1914” (Arm in Arm, 2022), Catharine Savage Brosman describes the massacre as “foreshadowing the trenches.” True, but it also foreshadows the second round of German barbarism less than thirty years in the future. 

“Late June ’14: an Austrian archduke died

by an assassin’s hand. A pawn, that’s all.

The chessboard changed; alliances and pride

moved pieces toward an end none could forestall.

 

“Mid-August, Feast of the Assumption: war

now two weeks old. In Belgium, on the Meuse,

Dinant had been contested twice before.

This time the Teuton forces would not lose.

 

“French fighters occupied the Citadel,

when Jägers, with machine guns, overcame

them, leaving one-half dead. The stronghold fell

again that very day—a deadly game

 

“foreshadowing the trenches. Germans massed

Their troops, secured pontoons. First, raids at night.

The 23rd, they crossed: blast after blast,

grenades and cannon, houses fired, to spite

 

“resistance. In one month, a thousand dead

civilians, pillage, executions, rape,

two libraries in ruins—and ahead

four years of butchery, with no escape.

 

“To what avail were pacts, with Europe, torn,

gouged out, perhaps nine million soldiers killed?

Though time grew late, the peace was never born.

War is the poisoned fruit that we have willed.”

 

In The Times on September 2, 1914, in response to Dinant and other German atrocities – known collectively as “The Rape of Belgium” – Rudyard Kipling published “For All We Have and Are”:

 

“Our world has passed away,

In wantonness o’erthrown.

There is nothing left to-day

But steel and fire and stone!”