Finale: An Essay in Fifty Centuries of Synthesis

The position of mankind in the Universe, elevation 313. A normal scenic section of a bulwark with trenches, stockades, and cannons. On the one hand, as if Wallenstein were laying siege to a fort in the Thirty Years War, and on the other, a post at any Russo-Japanese front around Liaoyang or Port Arthur in 1904-05 or during the First Imperialist War 1914-1918. Above elevation 313, the open celestial callote with zodiacs and a starry sky spreading in a nocturnal July horizon with glistening aestival planets in a wide range between Orion and Sirius. This play of light is being interrupted by short-lasting blinks of sunny daylight and a dark stormy nocturnal darkness with a baleful wind whistling. The daily and nocturnal lightings alternate at high pace, as if the whole post at elevation 313 rotated in a crystal ball, illuminated for a moment by a solar searchlight or wrapped in the veils of night.

A trench on the front-line. Soldiers in every costume of centuries past. From a Roman cavalry legionnaire with a red horse tail on his helmet, to a Hungarian hussar and a musketeer in a sixteenth-century lace collar, this motley crew lies all mixed up in the trenches waging a war. In the trenches, various exotic divinities from a bronze Buddha to a wooden Christ stand, and before these in Mohammedan arabesques scrawled inscriptions and before red and tricolor banners and Bushman gods kneel the Japanese in khaki uniforms and the Negroes of Central Africa in their greasy dark nudity and the national guardsmen and the carabinieri, and they are all praying, bowing, and lighting candles before the statues. It is a moment of repose between the frays and only here and there from time to time a solitary shot is heard. In a landward breeze the banners of all nations at war flutter and flap, the lion of the Venetian Republic mingling with the symbols of equatorial America and the blue-and-white Hellenic flag with the Union Jack in a preposterous polychromatic—black-yellow-red-white-green—motley, like at the Olympics or at football matches.

A soldier is praying to a Roman goddess bowing devoutly: Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, amen!

All the pious others join in a chorus in various tongues of all continents: Ave Maria, gratiae plena!

Voice of the first soldier, like the voice of a priest in a church at vespers: Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, amen!

Chorus: Ave Maria, gratiae plena, Dominus tecum.

This goes on all the time, ceaselessly, monotonously, in a maddening, completely senseless humdrum. To the left, sheltered underneath the wicker palisade, the guzzling soldiers sit, in helmets of modern attack columns and Spanish harquebusier visors, drinking, gambling, and playing at cards and making out with the canteen wenches.

Nervous and passionate voices of players and gamblers are heard: Ace of clubs! Ace of diamonds! Queen of hearts! Bank! Queen of hearts! Diamonds! Ace of spades! Clubs, bank! 'Tain't clubs but spades! 'Tain't seven but five! Bank! Bank 'tain't! I give, I don't! Black jack! Auf!

Voice of a debaucher: Hey-de-ho-lo, hey-de-lo-hay—Grant me heaven, Lord, or give me a gal—Death to the war, hail the brothel!

Voice of the pious soldier: Et libera nos a malo . . .

One of the pious falls dead.

Voice of the telephone operator underground: Hallo! This is the post at elevation three hundred thirteen speaking! Situation as before! One dead, two wounded!

The medical-corps personnel with huge red crosses on white sashes arrives...