Sweating Blood-Bloy

How little changes

First published in French in 1893, Sweating Blood describes the atrocities of war in 30 tales of horror and inhumanity from the pen of the "Pilgrim of the Absolute," Léon Bloy. Writing with blood, sweat, tears and moral outrage, Bloy drew from anecdotes, news reports and his own experiences as a guerilla fighter to compose a fragmented depiction of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, told with equal measures of hatred and pathos, and alternating between cutting detail and muted anguish.

The blurb is accurate. Bloy captures the grotesque.

Take this piece on Bismarck-The sacred truth—attested by a confidant standing above the slightest suspicion, Moritz Busch, the very-privy secretary of the Chancellor, who recorded his boss’s least mumble every waking hour—the whole truth and nothing but, is that the walls of Madame de Jessé’s house echoed with nothing but hoggishness and appalling stupidity.

I believe it was Bonald who declared the shockingly simple fact that the secret to governing men involves always wanting the same thing. That is to say, mediocrities are as well suited to the task as the most talented men. The supposed “Iron Chancellor,” who always wanted a Prussian Germany underneath his boot—and never so much as hinted at a single idea beyond this barbarous notion—clearly belonged to the first of these two groups.

Since national pride has barred France from admitting its defeat by simple brutes, people here have grown accustomed to viewing Bismarck as a colossal individual, one endowed with genius of quasi-superhuman dimensions.

Luckily, that Polyphemus’s toady has made a singular contribution to getting rid of this enormous joke. To be sure, he’s done so quite innocently— the poor man! He offers nothing but enthusiasm and positively drools in adoration. For him, it’s enough that Bismarck is Bismarck, and that he has bested “the Gauls.” In the best of faith, he means to glorify this “Luther of politics”—as he calls him in his clownish zeal—by offering these

Tischreden, wherein he has recorded, in utterly servile fashion, the most hackneyed commonplaces of the aged schoolboy and the wildest chunks of nonsense the exalted oaf ever belched after feeding.

I don’t know if this ghastly lackey is still alive to marvel at the Fraud who murdered hundreds of thousands of human beings—the one who made it his calling to be the abomination of all peoples on the globe. At any rate, his book is surely the most unforgiving ex-voto that, one day, the heirs ofthis defrocked servant will ever manage to set on the Chancellor’s abject grave.

In twenty thousand lines it’s impossible to unearth even the semblance of an idea. The only truly original thing to be found is the astonishing ugliness of the great man’s soul.

To be sure, such unsightliness was never rare in any epoch, but Bismarck’s case exceeds all measure. He comes across as a mixture of gorging, boorishness, and bloodthirsty hypocrisy most unsettling in kind.

“When I’m handed a lot of work,” he declares, “I must be well fed. I can’t conclude peace negotiations properly if I don’t have proper food and drink. That’s part of my job.”

This declaration couldn’t be more sincere: indeed, mention of anything at all leads straight to grub. The man talks of nothing but fat geese, pâtés, “fine sausages,” game, heady wines, and choice liqueurs. Needless to say, such delights should come as cheaply as possible. “Often,” his chronicler observes in despair, “it was hard to know where to put all those baskets, bottles, barrels, etc.”

Mastication is the sole issue—to such an extent that even military orders evoke a Teutonic hootenanny. For instance, 13 November: Fressbeutel (glutton)—Berlin; the previous day: Erbswurst (bacon-and-pea sausage)—

Paris.

The boss loved hardboiled eggs, because they make you drink—“but he could only eat three in a row. Once upon a time, he could consume eleven.”

By the grace of God, he never wanted for feeding frenzies. They were more enjoyable still when the Parisians were starving to death.

For our immense edification, the feather-wiper’s annals record the menu served on 23 December, “to provide an idea what the table of [his] Maecenas was like at Versailles”: soupe à l’oignon—port; filet of boar—beer from Tivoli; stew braised à l’irlandaise, roast turkey with chestnuts—champagne and red wine ad libitum. Finally, in conclusion, “magnificent dessert.”

That same day, General von Voigts-Rhetz had met with resistance at Tours and ordered the city to be shelled. As he plowed his way through the turkey, Bismarck offered his magnanimous assessment:“It was a mistake to stop firing as soon as they hoisted the white flag; I’d have kept on bombing until they sent four hundred hostages.”

This gentle soul spent his life regretting that, instead of all the prisoners just getting shot, they were fed; he didn’t come to terms with it until, after the Battle of Sedan, an even dumber act of generosity occurred—leaving the French army to inflict further damage because it hadn’t been annihilated altogether. A massacre of NINETY THOUSAND Frogs accompanied by choice cigars—now that would have been delightful!

“Eventually,” he said with good-natured charm, “we’ll just shoot all the male inhabitants.”

When Trochu asked for a cease-fire so that those who had fallen might be buried, he responded:

“The dead are just as happy above the earth as under it.”

And when Jules Favre complained that the sick and handicapped were being fired upon, he and the Institute for the Blind were handed an example of truly Prussian tact:

“I don’t know why the Parisians are upset. They do much worse: they shoot at our people—people who are hearty and hale.”

Finally, the selfsame Jules Favre told Bismarck that children still roamed the streets:

“That surprises me,” he answered. “You haven’t eaten them yet?”. https://www.scribd.com/book/472155196/Sweating-Blood