INTENSITY OF LIFE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LII, Issue 16026, 18 September 1915, Page 2 (Supplement)

INTENSITY OF LIFE.

"WAR A GREAT REMEDY."

A CTEiorsLT human and pathetic document from a Vorticist in the French trenches, probably the last he wrote, appears in the second number of Blast. Its author is Henri . Baudier-Brzeka. sculptor, who, after months of severe fighting and two promotions for gallantry, was killed the other day'in a charge at Nueville St. Vaest. He says :—

I have been fighting for. tjjro months and .I- can now gauge the intensity of life. Human masses teem and move, are destroyed and crop up again. Horses are worn out in three weeks, die by the roadside. Dogs wander, are destroyed, and I others come along. " Life the Same Strength." With ( all the destruction that works around 'us nothing is changed, even super-! ficially. Life is the same strength, the moving agent that permits the small individual to assert himself. \ i The bursting shells, the volleys, wire entanglements, projectors, motors, the chaos of battle do not alter in the least, the outlines of the hill we are besieging. A company of partridges scuttle along before our very trench." It would be folly to seek artistic emotions amid these little works of ours. This war is a great remedy. In the individual it kills arrogance, self esteem, pride. It takes away from the masses numbers upon numbers of unimportant units, whose economic activities become noxious as the recent trade crises have shown us. My views on sculpture remain absolutely the same. It is the vortex of will, of decision, that begins. - I shall derive my emotions solely from I the arrangement of surfaces, I shall present mv emotions by the arrangement of mv surfaces, the planes and lines by which they are defined. Just as this hill, where the Germans are solidly entrenched, gives me nasty feelinz, solely because its gentle slopes are broken up by earthworks, which throw long shadows at sunset, fust so shall I get feeling, of whatsoever definition,- from a statue according to its slopes, varied to infinity. Experiment With a Rifle.; I have made an experiment. Two davs ago I pinched from an enemy a Mauser rifle. Its heavy unwieldly shape swamped me with a powerful image of brutality. I was in doubt for a long time whether it pleased or displeased me. I found that I did not like it. \

I broke the butt off and with my knife I carved in it a design, through which I tried to express a gentler order of feeling which I preferred. But I will emphasise that my design got its effect (just as the gun had) from a very simple composition of lines and planes.