The murals in the Sargent Hall; Sargent’s sophisticated medieval iconography; the world of artistic, scientific, academic excellence that was France before 1914; the Great War that crushed that civilization; the two admirable young lives snapped off short; the evil excellence of the Paris Gun; Sargent’s uncanny perceptions of all that, on canvas and on paper and finally on the walls of Sargent Hall: those points of light made a constellation, the outline of a story. The Great War destroyed the lives of eight million soldiers and another eight million non-combatants, each one the center of a story of loss and sorrow. We tell the story of two, and because we are historians and not poets, our story is a history and not an epic poem. The poetry, as Wilfred Owen observed, is in the pity.
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Painting Love and Loss
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