The Red Feast (poem)

When the war broke out in Europe, with millions of working-men flinging death and misery at one another, men like Chaplin, the world over, regarded it as the last straw. Was it not bad enough that these exploited creatures should be used as factory-fodder? Must they be cannon-fodder too? Why should they fight to increase the economic power of German traders? of British manufacturers? The war was a capitalist war between capitalist nations. What interest had the workers in these nations? in their winnings or in their losses? So ran the argument. Technically, Ralph Chaplin and his comrades had conspired to obstruct the war. Actually, they had lined themselves up solidly against the present economic order, of which the World War was only one phase. This was their real crime.

The Red Feast expresses sentiments that the war placed workers in harm's way to serve the vested interests of wealthy men who would never be called up to fight. A member of the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW, or “Wobblies”) he was the  editor of its eastern U.S. publication Solidarity. In 1917 Chaplin and some 100 other Wobblies were rounded up, convicted, and jailed under the Espionage Act for conspiring to hinder the draft and encourage desertion. He wrote Bars And Shadows: The Prison Poems while serving four years of a 20-year sentence. Chaplin was very disillusioned by the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and the evolution of the Soviet state and  particularly its involvement in American unions. Chaplin maintained his involvement with the IWW, serving in Chicago as editor of its newspaper, the Industrial Worker, from 1932 to 1936.

His anthology of poems is available free online 


The Red Feast

Go fight, you fools! Tear up the earth with strife
    And spill each others guts upon the field;
  Serve unto death the men you served in life
    So that their wide dominions may not yield.

  Stand by the flag--the lie that still allures;
    Lay down your lives for land you do not own,
  And give unto a war that is not yours
    Your gory tithe of mangled flesh and bone.

  But whether it be yours to fall or kill
    You must not pause to question why nor where.
  You see the tiny crosses on that hill?
    It took all those to make one millionaire.

  It was for him the seas of blood were shed,
    That fields were razed and cities lit the sky;
  And now he comes to chortle o'er the dead--
    The condor Thing for whom the millions die!

  The bugle screams, the cannons cease to roar.
    "Enough! enough! God give us peace again."
  The rats, the maggots and the Lords of War
    Are fat to bursting from their meal of men.

  So stagger back, you stupid dupes who've "won,"
    Back to your stricken towns to toil anew,
  For there your dismal tasks are still undone
    And grim Starvation gropes again for you.

  What matters now your flag, your race, the skill
    Of scattered legions--what has been the gain?
  Once more beneath the lash you must distil
    Your lives to glut a glory wrought of pain.

  In peace they starve you to your loathsome toil,
    In war they drive you to the teeth of Death;
  And when your life-blood soaks into their soil
    They give you lies to choke your dying breath.

  So will they smite your blind eyes till you see,
    And lash your naked backs until you know
  That wasted blood can never set you free
    From fettered thraldom to the Common Foe.

  Then you will find that "nation" is a name
    And boundaries are things that don't exist;
  That Labor's bondage, worldwide, is the same,
    And ONE the enemy it must resist.

Ralph Chaplin