Les Ailes rouges de la Guerre

The German army’s invasion of Belgium on August 4, 1914 marked a profound rupture for Émile Verhaeren. A militant francophile who had also been one of the most fervent supporters of German culture, he saw his cosmopolitan ideal shattered. In 1915 he published La Belgique sanglante, a virulent and accusatory collection of poems. This second collection, Les Ailes rouges de la Guerre, takes up several of its pieces and extends them in a tragic, prophetic vein.

From the treachery of the Reichstag to a final appeal to the German people, the poems express a patriotic anger and a lyrical intensity rare in the work of the Belgian poet, who died accidentally at the end of that same year, 1916. The volume bears a seventh-edition statement and is in modest condition (foxing), but it is a personal reading copy of Maurice Genevoix, with his manuscript ownership inscription on the title page, once again revealing the contemporary readings of the author of Ceux de 14.

Jean Norton Cru does not mention it in Témoins, owing to the poetic form of the collection.

Seventh-edition statement; foxing.