All sorts of animals gambol and graze across the broad and welcoming paddock of this column. But today we welcome (pictured) our first ever blue horse. It is by the German expressionist painter Franz Marc (1880–1916).
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Gorgeous and welcome as blue horses always are, we do need an excuse to invite them on to the rolling expanse of this newspaper column. And our excuse is that Marc's work was one feature of Tuesday night's first of the nine Flowers of War concerts/symposiums.
Another feature of Tuesday's event at the National Gallery was Jacqueline Dwyer reading from the battlefield diary (Verdun, 1916) of her father, French soldier Jacques Playoust. We were privileged to talk to her in Canberra (she is in her 90s and lives in Sydney) on Tuesday. More of that interview in a moment.
Flowers of War, its movers and shakers explain, is a three-year project to uncover, perform, discuss and celebrate the music and art that creative men used to cope with the horror of World War I and to mark their experiences. Over the next three years, nine concerts of recently discovered music, diaries, poetry and art will be performed in Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne and France. Tuesday's concert, Life, Death and Transcendence, examined the music and the memories of the battle of Verdun in 1916.
Tuesday's occasion included a dramatic slide show based on the WWI sketches of the artist Marc, killed at Verdun in 1916. These sketches, discovered and arranged by Canberra musician and music-event wizard Chris Latham, were being shown for the first time.
The blue horses that Marc specialised in painting (had he ever portrayed Phar Lap we can be sure he would have rendered the famously red horse a fetching sky blue) were to him symbols of innocence and peace. It distressed him enormously to witness all the horses in battle at Verdun.
In conversation Jacqueline Dwyer explained that her father Jacques was just five when, in 1889, he moved to Melbourne from France. He was educated in Australian schools and so was substantially Australian when war broke out.
"But then when [in 1914] the German invasions began in Europe all these young men of French origin everywhere in the world were mobilised for the French army. They were all French citizens even though some had been born in Australia. So French citizens from all over the world were sent to the western front. He got the first available boat from Australia, at his own expense, in 1914. It took them three months to get there and then the French army said, 'Where were you?' He was almost taken for a deserter because he'd taken so long to get there.
"And so he found himself in 1916 sent to fight at Verdun where the Germans were coming in with great big artillery, all bombarding this tiny little area. He kept a diary there. I've often wondered why. Was it for company? Or was it simply to martial his thoughts? It's a tiny little volume. And [for he was a telephonist] it had the morse code and signals in the back. Sometimes he went over the top into no man's land to mend the wires."
At the National Gallery on Tuesday night and for Gang-gang on Tuesday morning she read some excerpts from the diary. The entry for April 9, 1916, records an especially ferocious German bombardment that all but destroyed the French trenches, leaving the French no shelter at all.
"Splinters and stones fly all around. We are buried several times ... unable to eat or smoke ... the worst day I have ever spent ... everyone at the end of their tether."
The diary became strongly anti-war.
"He expresses a lot of loyalty to his comrades," his daughter notes, "but he doesn't talk patriotism any more. He did at the beginning of the war but by the time this [Verdun] had happened he doesn't talk patriotism."
Instead he wrote, and his daughter read to us on Tuesday, "What a fearful thing this war is."
"Men in the prime of life, butchered. What for? All peace-loving men they were. Such situations drive one mad, little by little. The wind is in the Germans' favour, and the stench of the dead comes over our lines."
Then on April 31, 1916, he wrote: "Same old routine, delightful weather, country looking magnificent in these new spring clothes. But then one thinks of the dreadful tragedy that is going on yonder and still what remains in store for us. 'Le printemps magnifique a perdu son odor' a French poet once wrote. (The magnificent spring has lost its scent.)"
Jacques Playoust survived the war and remained in France for three years before coming home to Australia (bringing a French bride) for the remainder of his years.
Jacqueline Dwyer has been to Verdun, to exactly where her father fought and wrote his Verdun diary entries. Quietly but fiercely anti-war herself, she takes heart from what's become of that once-ghastly place.
"The beauty is that Verdun has become a shrine. [Going there] is a very, very moving experience. And children from French schools and from German schools are sent there always, as part of their education, so that they won't ever do it again."
"And they won't," she's sure.
"Today we see Angela Merkel [the German Chancellor] and Francois Hollande [the President of France] walking down the street together arm in arm. That can last."
