Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [150]
Facial identification systems have also been paired with television cameras to scan crowds at sporting events and at other venues in an attempt to identify terrorists, although it is not known how successful they have been. The use of such systems would be superior to fingerprinting in situations where it is impossible to take the fingerprints of every person present. Bertillon’s insistence that physical features are as definitive a means of identification as fingerprints may yet be confirmed.
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Guillaume Apollinaire, who had done so much to popularize and publicize the work of Picasso and others, knew that the war, like the art of his friends, was a profound break with the past. A poem he wrote about an automobile journey he had made just as the war clouds gathered reflected this sense of fracture:
The 31st of the month of July 19148
I left Deauville a little before midnight
In Rouveyre’s little auto…
We said farewell to an entire epoch
Furious giants were casting their shadows over Europe
And when after passing that afternoon
Through Fontainebleau
We arrived in Paris
At the moment the mobilization notices were being posted
We understood my friend and I
That the little auto had taken us into an epoch that was New
And then even though we were both grown men
We had nevertheless just been born9
Apollinaire was essentially a man without a country. France, his adopted homeland, classified him as Russian. In a burst of patriotism, and out of a desire to be born again as a Frenchman, he enlisted in the French army (unlike Picasso, who sat out the war in Paris and Rome, finding new mistresses and finally a wife). Writing to a friend about his assignment, Apollinaire quipped, “I love art so much that I have joined the artillery.” 10
He did well in the army, winning promotion to sergeant and then, after a transfer to the infantry, becoming an officer. This new assignment brought him into the trenches, the worst of all places to be in the war. He wrote: “Nine days without washing, sleeping on the ground without straw, ground infested with vermin, not a drop of water except that used to vaporize the gas masks.… It is fantastic what one can stand.… One of the parapets of my trench is partly made of corpses.… There are no head lice, but swarms of body lice, pubic lice.… No writer will ever be able to tell the simple horror of the trenches, the mysterious life that is led there.” 11
On March 18, 1916, while reading a copy of a literary magazine to which he regularly contributed, Apollinaire was wounded in the head when an artillery shell landed nearby. If he had not been wearing a helmet, he would have been killed outright, but even so the shrapnel pierced the helmet. Taken to an ambulance, he had pieces of metal (he called the wound “a splinter,” but it was more serious) removed from his skull. The doctor thought he would recover quickly, so, as was usual in trench warfare, Apollinaire was not immediately evacuated from the combat zone. A week later, however, his condition worsened, and he had to be transported to a hospital in Paris.
By May he was experiencing dizzy spells and paralysis in his left arm. The surgeons decided to do a trepanation—opening his skull to relieve pressure on the brain. Technically, the procedure was a success, for the paralysis and dizziness disappeared. Friends, however, thought Apollinaire had changed. One of them described him as “irascible and self-absorbed, dull-eyed, heavy-browed—that is what the trepanation had produced. His mouth was distorted with suffering—the same mouth that only a short time before had smiled so broadly as it uttered learned observations, jokes, delightful comments of all kinds.” 12
Fearing that his “cure” would qualify him to be returned to the trenches, a friend found Apollinaire a job in the military offices in Paris—as, of all things, a censor. Given