Out of the nineteenth century, old and white, young and ochre, taken by surprise singing in the banks and stock exchange, in the anonymous managements of industry, in the evil-smelling ideologies of power, in the cathedrals scented with incense, in the solemn orgies and in the popular, recurrent sagas.

With banners, shields, crosses, sickles and axe harnessed; and flowers, pearls and rose petals gathered for the war and revolution, for the democracies and socialisms.

Oriented on computerised perspective projections and programmed on charismas of consensus, the volumes of the abodes do not find the times of the future, whilst the merchants satisfy the aggressions of pleasure. On the road the daily lament rolls in the early hours and then, after, even when the night is over, whilst a caravan burns a cardboard box on the town at the crevice of the last ford.

August nineteen hundred and fourteen.

The useless prolific massacre in the dens of freedoms, summoned out of boredom, cherished amid the ravines of justice, created with papier-mâché, swollen with the vocalises of peace shouted by the colours of chalk powder, exalted when senses are tentacles, putrefied in the biological body of individuals and masses.
Europe in the first, great, useless massacre with hats and spats, tacking silk threads, for filigrees of hypocrisy. The mind sparkles amid felt, amid neutral curtains and worn uniforms.
Gold does not resist tin and power does not measure its arms with eyes of consent.

In the streets of Paris: "It was so simple; all you had to do was not offer resistance; you simply had to say yes; you simply had to replace the difficult reflection on the events … with blind acceptance of the immediate future … What a relief to be able to kick the conscience!".
In the streets of Vienna: "Strangers addressed each other in the street in a friendly manner, people who had avoided each other for years held out their hand, everywhere, all you could see was passionately animated faces".

In the streets of Berlin: "At last, people dared to be what they were … for the first time in almost a quarter of a century it was possible to meet with pleasure, with a lightened conscience and without the fear of passing for traitors, everyone singing together the overpowering and moving hymn Deutschland, Deutschland, uber alles".

And so too in London and in Rome.
Like in the celebration of love of the Holi Indians: "At this point … without any limit, sexual practices of every kind replaced the normal divisions and differences between casts and separated families; unbridled libido flooded all hierarchies consolidated by age, sex, cast, wealth and power".

In the distance, the long trodden tracks and the last low tongues of fire. Asexual souls of evaporated mass utopias throb weakly.
And the veteran dreams: "I no longer wish to return home; I would like to live life on this street, studying the sky … evaluating the hours of the day on the intensity of the artillery fire. My Germany begins where the flames of battle flash and finishes at the end of the line of the train for Cologne. I cannot return home and pick up my old life".

Phillip Gibbs: "There was something odd. They wore civilian clothes again and looked at their mothers and brides more or less in the same way as young people did when leaving for work in peacetime before August 1914. Yet, they were no longer the same men: something within had changed".
And Robert Graves: "In most cases, the change lasted for another four or five years; and there were numerous cases of soldiers who, after forcing themselves to avoid a nervous breakdown during the war, surrendered miserably in 1921 or 1922".

The clear geometries to be thought out again collapse.
On the daily tears, without sky and leaves, the pastel colours do not reconcile fatigue and anguish, or the sour flow of insults.

With red eyes and black lips, they sing once more of class struggles, urban clashes and land for the peasants; women's freedom dies in the alcoves. And the farmers sing too, and the "masters", hypnotized by order, on the thrones of the bourgeois monarchies.

The present is already fascist and national socialist and for all, the sickle plays and the scissors ulcerate.