Homage to Marinetti (click to enlarge).
These are actually from a set of turn-of-th-20th-century French illustrations imagining the year 2000, but the belligerent ambiance of these two renderings, when set together, put me in mind of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the Italian Futurist poet who declared war to be “the world’s only hygiene.”
The Chromophile 
Funny how those illustrations were out of date just 15 to 20 years later…
Florian,
Absolutely. It’s kind of heartbreaking how quaint they look next to the real war that was just around the corner (not to mention war in the year 2000).
The disparity puts me in mind of the beginning of “Journey to the End of the Night” by Celine, in which he’s caught up in the stupid cheerful optimistic bloodlust that surrounds the beginning of the First World War and then is abruptly plunged into something so insane and tragic that his descriptions actually make you laugh, they’re so absurd and yet so obviously real.
Thanks for commenting.
Nas
Hm, I’ve never heard of “Journey to the End of the Night”… Is it worth reading? I’ve read “All Quiet On The Western Front” several times and I generally seem to have a thing for 1920s/30s literature.
No question–place it immediately on your “to read” list. It’s not for everyone, there’s no question of that, but you’ll know very quickly if it’s for you or not, and if it is, then you’re in for a ride.
Celine volunteered to fight in the First World War for his native France and was a decorated war hero. He also came out of the war thoroughly disillusioned with pretty much everything. He wrote Journey about the war and its aftermath and it became an immediate sensation. It’s a thoroughly scabrous diatribe (but a very blackly funny, intelligent one rather than a boring, irritating one) on the topic of the war, French civilization, and humanity in general. (Catch-22, which I love, doesn’t begin to approach the blackness of Celine’s black humor about war.)
He tended to the right politically and was a collaborator under the Vichy regime, but he was so disparaging of people and of political movements that it’s hard to take his politics as much more than a spiteful (if inexcusable) gesture.
Anyway, whatever his personal failings, his writing is awesome. He was loved by writers as disparate and wonderful as Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Kurt Vonnegut (Vonnegut wrote an introduction to one of his books).
One caution: be sure to get a translation by Ralph Manheim (one of the great translators, in honor of whom the PEN medal for translation is awarded — he was also translator for Gunter Grass). There are some very bad translations of Celine, but Manheim is both faithful and artful, so don’t settle for less.
(Incidentally, Journey to the End of the Night is also the source of the name for the Doors song “End of the Night” — Jim Morrison was another fan.)