"I have made an experiment," wrote a French infantry sergeant from the trenches of World War I. "Two days ago I pinched from an enemy a Mauser rifle. Its unwieldy shape swamped me with a powerful image of brutality. I broke the butt off, and with my knife I carved a gentler order of feeling, a mother and child." A few days later, on the afternoon of June 5, 1915, an other German weapon put a bullet through the Frenchman's head. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, not yet 24, was dead.
Until the 50th...
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