One Hundred Visions of War

<p><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>The One Hundred Visions of War of Julien Vocance (1878-1954) comprise some of the first haiku written in the West. Where classical Japanese haiku traditionally speaks of the beauty of Nature Vocance uses the form to a very different purpose depicting the horror and brutality of armed conflict as seen from the trenches during the First World War. Readers get a ground-level view of unimaginable slaughter. The value of Vocance's poetry lies in its witness to the experience of the human being caught up in a battle which as Wendell Berry put it the machines won. Only imagine: an obscure soldier-poet pits his human art against overwhelming military technology and his art survives.</span></p>