Dinant is a small city in the Walloon region of Belgium, on the Meuse River. It is one of those otherwise obscure places (Fort Pillow, Lidice, My Lai) that has lent its name to an atrocity. On August 23, 1914, in the early weeks of World War I, German troops slaughtered almost seven-hundred Belgian civilians – men, women, children – and burned down most of the buildings in the city. In her “Dinant, August 1914” (Arm in Arm, 2022), Catharine Savage Brosman describes the massacre as “foreshadowing the trenches.” True, but it also foreshadows the second round of German barbarism less than thirty years later.  “Late June ’14: an Austrian archduke died by an assassin’s hand. A pawn, that’s all. The chessboard changed; alliances and pride moved pieces toward an end none could forestall.   “Mid-August, Feast of the Assumption: war now two weeks old. In Belgium, on the Meuse, Dinant had been contested twice before. This time the Teuton forces would not lose.   “French fighters occupied the Citadel, when Jägers, with machine guns, overcame them, leaving one-half dead. The stronghold fell again that very day—a deadly game   “foreshadowing the trenches. Germans massed Their troops, secured pontoons. First, raids at night. The 23rd, they crossed: blast after blast, grenades and cannon, houses fired, to spite   “resistance. In one month, a thousand dead civilians, pillage, executions, rape, two libraries in ruins—and ahead four years of butchery, with no escape.   “To what avail were pacts, with Europe, torn, gouged out, perhaps nine million soldiers killed? Though time grew late, the peace was never born. War is the poisoned fruit that we have willed.”   In The Times on September 2, 1914, in response to Dinant and other German atrocities – known collectively as “The Rape of Belgium” – Rudyard Kipling published “For All We Have and Are”:   “Our world has passed away, In wantonness o’erthrown. There is nothing left to-day But steel and fire and stone!”

Some wartime casualties are time-released. Death is deferred. In his new collection, That Mad Game (Scienter Press, 2025), R.L. Barth devotes three poems to a civilian, the war correspondent Albert W. Vinson, who wrote about him leading a patrol of Marines in Vietnam in 1968. The briefest appears in a section Bob calls “Snowfall in Vietnam: Poems/Maxims,” and is titled “Stringers: i.m. A.W. Vinson”: “The newsmen with guts.” Bob is extending the logic of his devotion to concision and composing a poem of four words.  Vinson wrote a story about Barth’s patrol that was published on the Week End Feature Page of the Cincinnati Post & Times Star on November 16, 1968. Barth was from Erlanger, Ky., across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, and the story made him briefly a hometown hero. Vinson had served as a Marine during World War II and was seriously wounded by Japanese machine-gun fire. Only last year did Bob learn that Vinson had committed suicide in 1971. Bob includes “In the Mountains,” a three-poem sequence “in memory of Albert W. Vinson, who first placed these events on the record.” Finally comes “2nd Lt. Albert W. Vinson, U.S.M.C.,” subtitled “Talasea, New Britain 1944—Ononomowoc, WI 1971”:   “Those Japanese machinegun rounds That shattered shoulder, legs, and arms Killed you as surely as, years later, The freight train on that lonely night.”   Barth’s subject is not the history of the war in Vietnam. Rather, his focus is the impact that war had on the lives of young men born into safe, prosperous postwar America and thrown into a barbarous conflict without a coherent strategy, goal or widespread support at home. In his introduction to Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 (2018), Max Hastings writes “All wars are different, and yet the same.” In a section of his new collection titled “Coda: World Wars,” Bob includes poems dedicated to men who fought in previous wars. His is a poetry of remembrance, often across generations and centuries. Here is “Semper Fidelis: 1st MARDIV,” dedicated to Raymond Lawrence Barth (1921-2006), Bob’s father:   “A combat knife, web belt, some photographs, Chevrons, dog tags, and medals: epitaphs For both the recent dead and one to die. While placing his mementos where mine lie In the top dresser drawer, I contemplate The tours of duty that they recreate: Jungle terrain, twenty-six years apart, Guadalcanal and I Corps, war’s grim art. Their future dispensation? Surely lost. There will be no one left who knew their cost.”   Bob asked me to write a blurb for That Mad Game. It appears on the back cover:   “Bob Barth has said he could talk to a Roman legionary – a fellow warrior. His poems are compact, artfully crafted, unsentimental and mindful of earlier soldier-poets. They are the shoptalk of a fighting man, a Marine patrol leader in Vietnam. He takes his title – ‘War, that mad game the world so loves to play’ -- from Jonathan Swift, who reminds us of those who ‘so dearly pay.’”   Bob’s title is from Swift’s “Ode to Sir William Temple” (c. 1692):   “War, that mad game the world so loves to play,       And for it does so dearly pay; For, though with loss, or victory, a while       Fortune the gamesters does beguile, Yet at the last the box sweeps all away.”   Ours is a literary age in which most poems are stridently trivial and frequently incoherent. Bob writes with technical mastery of consequential things. Here is “Doughboys: Photograph c. 1917,” dedicated to Bob’s grandfather, Bernard Henry Benzinger (1894-1979), a World War I veteran:   “Around a folded blanket seven doughboys Intently watch the dice turn six the hard way. Like pre-noir tough guys, three or four clutch sawbucks Half curled, ready to shell out or increase A conscript private’s base pay. One, raffish, Tilts his campaign hat like an old salt. All seven would shame Bogart with the angle Of dangling cigarettes and arched eyebrows. But they're not tough guys, just heartbreakers all, Stunning the viewer with impossible youth.”

“April 17 [in 1778], being Good Friday, I waited on Johnson, as usual.”  As was the custom in school when I was growing up, I learned history as a rollcall of great men and memorized dates. “Abraham Lincoln” and “December 7, 1941” plugged leaks in my obligatory knowledge and that was the end of it. History was static, fixed like a photograph. To know it was an act of memorization, not moral imagination. Only later, as “History” and personal history blurred, and as Gibbon’s lessons slowly sank in, did I become intimate with the past. The minutiae of individual lives seemed not only more interesting but more charged with personal significance. “They” became “us.” Reading history is not unlike reading a great novel, say Daniel Deronda or Nostromo, fiction containing history and the lives of men and women not entirely unlike us. Cynthia Ozick recently referred to “the long and intertwined corridors of the past, and a conviction that a mind shorn of history is vacuous.”   Above, Boswell begins recounting yet another meeting with Dr. Johnson, 247 years ago. It’s a holy day:   “I observed at breakfast that although it was a part of his abstemious discipline on this most solemn fast, to take no milk in his tea, yet when Mrs. Desmoulins inadvertently poured it in, he did not reject it. I talked of the strange indecision of mind, and imbecility in the common occurrences of life, which we may observe in some people. JOHNSON. ‘Why, Sir, I am in the habit of getting others to do things for me.’ BOSWELL. ‘What, Sir! have you that weakness?’ JOHNSON. 'Yes, Sir. But I always think afterwards I should have done better for myself.’”   A history of religious practice and a good man’s tolerance and moral scruples is casually present in that passage. An exchange on travel writing follows. Boswell tells Johnson that A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) contains much he possessed even before leaving London:   “JOHNSON. ‘Why yes, Sir, the topicks were; and books of travels will be good in proportion to what a man has previously in his mind; his knowing what to observe; his power of contrasting one mode of life with another. As the Spanish proverb says, ‘He, who would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.’ So it is in travelling; a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.’ BOSWELL. ‘The proverb, I suppose, Sir, means, he must carry a large stock with him to trade with.’ JOHNSON. ‘Yes, Sir.’”   That’s says volumes about the worthlessness of most “travel writing,” as opposed to the work of Charles Doughty, Evelyn Waugh, Rebecca West, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Zbigniew Herbert and V.S. Naipaul. Among other qualities, their travel writing attends closely to history. After attending Good Friday services at St. Clement’s, Boswell recounts the chance reunion of Johnson with an old acquaintance, Oliver Edwards, from his Pembroke Colleges days. It’s a marvelous passage and I’ve written about it before. Johnson recalls drinking ale with Edwards and sharing lines of poetry. In reply, Edwards utters his “deathless remark”:   “You are a philosopher, Dr. Johnson. I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.”   Apart from Boswell’s literary gifts, think of the raw historical knowledge gleaned from a close reading and rereading of his Life of Johnson.   [Speaking of history, my youngest son, David Kurp, a senior at Rice University, has just had a paper, “Limits, Liberty, and Localism: The Shared Vision of Burke and Tocqueville,” published in the Spring 2025 issue of Rice Historical Review.]

Several years have passed since I last entered a bookstore selling new books, such as Barnes and Noble or the late Borders. Long ago they stopped feeling like home and a visit usually turned out to be a waste of time. Serendipitous discovery was rare. The portion of the goods on their tables and shelves that might potentially interest me was small. Most of the good stuff I already owned or didn’t want, and I could smell the algorithms mandating the stock. I’m seldom in the market for greeting cards, coffee mugs or tote bags.  So, like thousands of other readers, I rely on the few remaining used-book shops, online dealers and the occasional library sale. Much is lost, including a sentimental attachment to “real” bookstores, with their romantically crusty proprietors and bookshop cats, though something is sometimes gained – convenience, occasionally cheaper prices. Kingsley Amis’ “A Bookshop Idyll,” from his fourth book of poems, A Case of Samples (1957), reads like a report from a vanished kingdom. That was not his intent while writing it almost seventy years ago, but time sometimes adds layers of new meaning to literary works. It begins:     “Between the GARDENING and the COOKERY     Comes the brief POETRY shelf; By the Nonesuch Donne, a thin anthology     Offers itself.   “Critical, and with nothing else to do,     I scan the Contents page, Relieved to find the names are mostly new;     No one my age.”   Amis is ever alert to the predations of ego (including his own). The anthology is not a threat to the speaker. He continues:   “Like all strangers, they divide by sex:     Landscape near Parma Interests a man, so does The Double Vortex,     So does Rilke and Buddha.   “‘I travel, you see’, ‘I think’ and ‘I can read’     These titles seem to say; But I Remember You, Love is my Creed,     Poem for J.,   The ladies' choice, discountenance my patter     For several seconds; From somewhere in this (as in any) matter     A moral beckons.”   That some works are written for and marketed to women, and the same for men, is obviously true, but the lines have blurred since Amis’ time. With the growth in interest in “spiritual” matter and pop religion, no one would be surprised if a woman bought a copy of Rilke and Buddha. I once knew a woman who said the only poet she ever read was Rilke because he was “so spiritual.” Such a silly-sounding title might be written or read today by a man or woman. The poem concludes:   “Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart     Or squash it flat? Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart;     Girls aren’t like that.   “We men have got love well weighed up; our stuff     Can get by without it. Women don’t seem to think that’s good enough;     They write about it,   “And the awful way their poems lay open     Just doesn’t strike them. Women are really much nicer than men:     No wonder we like them.   “Deciding this, we can forget those times     We sat up half the night Chockfull of love, crammed with bright thoughts,     names, rhymes, and couldn’t write.”   Amis’ poem isn’t about books or bookstores or even poems after all. It’s about men and women and the truths and stereotypes that characterize us. Women possess certain advantages denied men, Amis suggests. With his echo of Byron’s Don Juan, he anatomizes us at our most hypocritical, vain and posturing but doesn’t dismiss us. For Amis, literature is meant to be interesting, amusing, even entertaining – qualities anathema to certain species of sticks-in-the-mud. That doesn’t mean lowbrow or one-dimensional. Consider Lucky Jim, Girl, 20, and Ending Up. He doesn’t harp but his focus is society and the social order, manners and morals. A consistent quality in Amis’ work, fiction or verse, is a comic surface with serious undertones.     Amis was born on this date, April 16, in 1922, and died in 1995 at age seventy-three.