Three Times Ten Million Thoughts

Carl Sandburg’s “The Four Brothers” is a fantastic poem that may actually be longer than the requirement for this blog… Found here, it is an incredibly lengthy work covering the events of World War II from the sidelong view of The Four Brothers—The United States, Great Britain, France, and Russia. This work stays true to Sandburg’s traditional form of prose-poetry with run-on sentences so long that they leave you winded and stuck in Albania and an insight on the human condition that leaves you speechless on top of it all.

While I’m admittedly biased in the area of Sandburg’s poetry (seeing as I kind of adore everything he’s ever written that I’ve read…), it’s still safe to say that he’s outdone himself with this particular piece. His point is clear, if not necessarily concise, and finds itself twisted into the identifying diction of a man that spent years people-watching, but I digress.

While projecting his pride for the countries that fought for a world that would know only peace, Mr. Sandburg also makes quite evident his feelings for their reign. Words like “gibbering” and “God’s great dustpan” leave a bit to be desired in his railing description of Russia’s great Romanoff family, and so, too, with Germany’s Hohenzollerns. His description of Adolf Hitler as a “half-cracked one-armed child of the German kings”, “a child born with his head wrong-shaped,/ The blood of rotted kings in his veins” is also fairly indicative of his feelings on the matter. Why call Hitler—a mass murderer, a man whose name is so well-known and feared that even children scorn it—a child if not to make a point? Why use the phrasing “blood of rotted kings” if not to make a point?

Exactly. No matter how subversively and keenly the great poet finds himself manipulating the words in his works, the message remains; the only way to end the madness was war. “There is only one way now” Sandburg wrote in what is assuredly one of my favorite stanzas of the piece, “only the way of the red tubes and the great price”. War was the only way out, so far had the world let Hitler go—a man driven mad by his ancestry and ambition, a man that spilt blood for a cause he deemed worthy, and The Four Brothers deemed terrible.

Now don’t hear me saying that Sandburg is condoning Hitler—he isn’t. There is no praise of the Kaiser that “will go onto God’s great dustpan”, but rather a leveling of the playing field, as he recognizes that the Four Brothers were, in objective terms, no better.

“The killing gangs are on the way”.

The Four Brothers did as their people wished, as they deemed right in the eyes of “God [who] is a god of the People. / And the God who made the world … is the God of bleeding France and bleeding Russia; / This is the God of the people of Britain and America”. They did what “three times ten million men” asked them to do, they avenged the lives lost and fought for the tortured, but they killed too, in what they thought was right.

I give kudos to Sandburg for pointing that out.