The World War I Journal

A Scrapbook from the Great War kept by my granduncle in the 1930s in Venezuela

Gonzalo Jiménez

Undocumented histories usually end up being forgotten. During many years I thought that this notebook (you can see it completely here on Flickr) belonged to my grandaunt Clorinda Tans, the daughter of germans settlers who had established themselves in Puerto Cabello (Venezuela) and the mother of my uncle Federico Perez-Calvo Tans, being logical to conjecture that being a german citizen, she would be interested on Europe’s development during the Great War as it affected relatives and friends

But another attentive look to this old badly mothed-bitten kept accounting book clearly showed that it had belonged to my granduncle Renato Perez Calvo, an early XX Century Valencian Poet, who according to two surviving photographs, dressed very elegant with a tie and wore a thin moustache, elevated on its toes as all “Beautiful Era” (Belle Epoque) gentlemen used to do.

There, on the pages of this Patrick Dolande photographed accounting notebook, where the word “Own” was written, Uncle Renato transcribed its poems with a formidable handwriting, a graphic poem itself, and indicated which were unpublished or published, while the verses revealed that the sensibility of the poets of its era was tragic, aggressive and lovers of the night and of all impossible loves. “Daydreaming is the cause of sorrow”, he writes on a page. Being named his poems: “Strong Souls”; “Night and Dawn”; “My Sorrow” and “All which I Dearly Love”, all of which testify his feelings, on one of his unpublished poems, he writes:

The Thunder

I want — God told me — to make piles out of

those cities I once cursed,

And that by the impure song of its orgy

Out of pain, the convulsions occurs!

I wish that from your light, the explosions

will annihilate its shameless audacity,

And that my justly prophecy be complied

before the mute horror of the Nation!

And so quickly, accurate and brilliant,

Crumbling the temples and the palaces,

I reduced to dust, the powerful.

The sound of my voice was heard through the spaces,

Upon my omnipotent crash and

a cloud of dust seen on the environment!

Drawn on the even pages, are the poems and adheres on the odd pages, are three types of cuttings: those taken from the press, all yellowy; the ones extracted from magazines, still in good shape and the cigarette boxes medal and military figures trading cards or stamps. There are many leading European High Rank Officials and Royalties cuttings and stamps as if there were sports stars, being the Great War as a spectacle, the last armed conflict on which the aristocracy placed its meat (never better told) on the roaster.

Beside its portraits, singular and nobles, the images of the destruction, of the rumble and the parades, of the movements of the troops, with its anonymous soldiers posing for the cameras can be seen as a reminder that the Great War, being of the masses, was massive, total and apocalyptic. This notebook also reflects the impact and amazement of a poet living at the end of the world on a far-away-city, conscious that Humanity was witnessing a new face of the horror, as it may never had seen it before.

As a curiosity, there are nude cuttings from a photo studio and two arts works illustrations: “Perseo freeing Andromeda (group in marble by J. Pfahl) and “Siena Last Hours of Freedom”. The reverence for the classic was an imperative in any poet of the epoch, as it is seen on these verses found on the notebook:

May the ice of disenchantment

Your noble effort abandons!

You will win over humanity

Over all the perfidies.

If on the forge, you are Vulcano,

On the canvas, you are Tiziano

And on the marble, you are Fidias.

On a clipping, a date can be seen: December 01th, 1916. But on another page, there is evidence that maybe the notebook was assembled on a later date: the faces of Manuel Azana; Niceto Alcalá Zamora; Alejandro Lerroux and Jaime Aygude, four of the protagonists of The 01th of March of 1931 Saint Sebastian Pact, which established the bases for the II Spanish Republic.

As every scrap book, its purpose being the passion or the nostalgic, all which is the same, after Granduncle Renato died, keeping my grandaunts the notebook, they handed it to my uncle, Federico Perez Calvo, knowing that he would greatly enjoyed the military stories as well as the relatives and friends photographs that his mother received from Hamburg, Germany. Today it is almost impossible to rebuild their names and the histories beyond their faces, but when I hold them on my hands, some of that past outlives the oversight.