The Beauty and the Sorrow (15 page)

Now it is all behind her: six months at the private military hospital in Moscow; six months of diligent study to achieve her nursing qualification—she had no trouble with the practical side, it was the theory, in complicated Russian, that caused problems; the exam and the graduation ceremony in an Orthodox church, where the priest had trouble pronouncing her name—“Floronz”; and, finally, her efforts to be accepted for service with the newly formed Mobile Field Hospital No. 10 had been successful after the intervention—once again—of her former employer, the famous heart surgeon.

Farmborough writes in her journal:

Preparations for my departure are well under way. I am breathlessly impatient to be off, but there is much to be done and the Unit itself is not yet fully organised. My nurse’s dresses, aprons and veils have been made already, and I have bought a flannel-lined, black leather jacket. An accessory to the jacket is a thick sheepskin waistcoat, for winter wear, whose Russian name, “dushegreychka,” means “soul-warmer.” I hear that our Unit will be stationed for a time on the Russo-Austrian Front in the Carpathian Mountains and that we will have to ride horseback, as direct communication can be established there only by riding: so high boots and black leather breeches have been added to my wardrobe.

Today Suwalki is once again taken by German forces. This time, however, Laura de Turczynowicz and her family cannot flee since one of her twin boys has fallen ill with typhus and cannot be moved. She is missing
her husband, Stanislaw, more than ever. It is cold and they have deep snow. She writes:

Suddenly hearing an uproar, I saw some of the bad elements of the town looting, searching for food, knocking each other down, screaming—a horrid sight! The Jews, who were always so meek, had now more self-assertion, strutting about, stretching up until they looked inches taller. It was hard work to tear myself away from the balcony. I, too, seemed unable to control myself, running from the balcony to the child and from the child to the balcony.

At eleven the streets again grew quiet, the time was near, and I saw the first pikel-haube [
sic
] come around the corner, rifle cocked—looking for snipers! The first one was soon followed by his comrades. Then an officer, who rounded the corner, coming to a stop directly before our windows.

SUNDAY
, 28
FEBRUARY
1915
René Arnaud is given an insight into the logic of historiography on the Somme

A cold spring morning. The sun has still not risen but Ensign René Arnaud is already awake. He makes his usual tour of the trench in the half-light, goes from sentry to sentry—each is on duty for two hours—checks them and at the same time checks that the enemy is not getting up to anything. They all know that this is the best time of day for surprise attacks. Not that they are especially common here on the Somme.

In fact, this is a quiet sector. The risks are small. A German shell may perhaps whoosh overhead from time to time, but not heavy stuff—just the occasional 77mm with its characteristic
shooooo … boom
. Then there are snipers, of course, lying in wait for anyone who is careless, and there is the danger of using the connecting trench, which runs up over a hillock and is open at one point to fire from a lurking German machine gun. That is where his predecessor was killed, hit in the head by a bullet from that machine gun. That was also the very first time Arnaud had seen a man go down. When the body was carried past on a stretcher, its head and shoulders covered with a piece of tarpaulin and its red uniform
trousers hidden by blue overalls, Arnaud had not found it particularly upsetting in spite of his own lack of experience. “I was so full of life that it was impossible for me to see myself in his place, lying on a stretcher with that air of indifference that the dead always radiate.”

At the outbreak of war Arnaud was one of those who were jubilant. He had just reached his twenty-first birthday but looked scarcely a day older than sixteen. His only fear was that the war might finish before he reached the front: “How humiliating it would be not to get to experience the greatest adventure of my generation!”

This last hour as darkness slowly turns to light can be nerve-racking for the inexperienced:

When I halted at the edge of the trench and spied out over noman’s-land it would sometimes happen that I thought the posts holding our thin network of barbed wire were the silhouettes of a German patrol crouching there on their knees ready to rush forward. I would stare at the posts, see them move, hear their coats brushing against the ground and the sheaths of their bayonets clinking … And then I would turn to the soldier on sentry duty and his presence of mind would calm me. As long as he didn’t see anything, there was nothing there—just my own anxious hallucinations.

Then comes the moment when the horizon grows pale, the first birds start to sing and the contours of the terrain begin to emerge indistinctly in the milky-grey morning light.

He hears a shot. Then another, then two, then more. In less than a minute rifle fire is rattling all along the trench. Arnaud rushes back to wake the sleeping men. At the doorway of the bunker he is met by soldiers already on their way out, weapons in their hands and trying to put on their rucksacks at the same time. He sees a red signal rocket rise above the enemy lines. He knows what it is—a signal to the German artillery.
^e
The consequences are immediate: a storm of shells bursts in
front of, over and behind the French trench. The edge of the trench shows up against the flowing fire of explosions. The air is filled with “whirring, whining and explosions.” The smell of explosive gases is choking.

My heart was beating, I must have turned pale and I was shaking with fear. I lit a cigarette as I instinctively assumed it would help calm my nerves. I noticed the men crouched there in the bottom of the narrow trench with their rucksacks over their heads waiting for the barrage to finish.

It occurs to Arnaud that the Germans may already be on their way through no-man’s-land. He clambers quickly over the backs of the lying soldiers to where there is a bend in the trench from which he knows it is possible to view the enemy lines. The air is filled with crashing, howling and whizzing. Once he gets there he quickly becomes utterly focused on watching the Germans: “My concentration on what needed to be done freed me from fear.” He stares intently at the slope that separates the French and German positions. Nothing.

Slowly the barrage eases and dies away.

The dust settles. Silence returns. Reports begin to come in. Two men have been killed in the section alongside them, five in the company to their right.

Gradually Arnaud manages to construct a picture of what had happened. Two bored sentries had taken it into their heads to shoot at a flight of migrating birds; as far as anyone could judge they were curlews on their way up to their nesting grounds in Scandinavia. The shots had misled other sentries who, afraid there was some invisible danger, started shooting too. It took only a moment for this panic firing to run along the whole trench. The sudden shooting obviously led someone in the German trenches to fear an attack and whoever it was then brought their artillery into play.

They were able to read the official epilogue to this incident in a French army communiqué the next day. It read as follows: “At Bécourt, near Albert, a German attack was totally crushed by our fire.” Arnaud’s own comment was: “That’s how history is written.”

• • •

On that same day, William Henry Dawkins writes to his mother:

I received your letter dated 26th Jan during the week and it may be the last I receive in Egypt as we are moving shortly. To where no one knows. The 3rd Bde, 3rd FD Amb, 1st Fd Coy and 4th ASC marched out during the day for Alexandria and we will be following during the next fortnight. I tip the Dardanelles as our destination but it may be anywhere in France, Turkey, Syria or Montenegro. Anyway it is a move and at last we will be getting to work.

WEDNESDAY
, 3
MARCH
1915
Andrei Lobanov-Rostovsky and the great snowstorm at Lomza

Winter is coming to an end, as is the German February offensive. Both of these are phenomena which, in spite of the laws of meteorology and the plans of strategists, cannot be absolutely predicted. So when Lobanov-Rostovsky’s regiment is set the task of launching an attack—the last one or, perhaps, the last but one—in order to straighten out some little bend in the front line or to eliminate some threatening position or to carry out something or the other that will only really show up on the abstract 1:84,000 scale of the staff maps—well, it seems almost inevitable that there will be a severe snowstorm.

It has been a dreadful winter in many ways here in north-west Poland. Hindenburg’s most recent offensive has not had any great effect
^f
and the Russian front in this area has moved a little here and a little there, but it has held. Andrei Lobanov-Rostovsky belongs to a Guards division, one of those elite units that are frequently used as firefighters and moved backwards and forwards to wherever the danger is greatest. He has, however, been spared the worst of the fighting. First of all he was ill in Warsaw, after which he spent days getting in and out of railway
carriages or simply travelling on trains in one direction or another while the generals tried to decide where his division was most needed. “These oscillations in our itinerary showed that the situation was changing from minute to minute.” They finally detrained in Lomza and the division marched off to a line drawn on a map, north-west of the station. “And when the enemy approached, [this] became the front.”

The winter and the winter battles are supposed to be over. Now it is just a case of some fighting “of local interest.” The snowstorm is not allowed to hold up the Russian attack, which starts according to plan. Yet again Lobanov-Rostovsky is just an observer: he is, after all, a sapper and not really in demand in situations such as this. What he finds particularly frightening is to see how war, or perhaps more accurately, the generals, refuse to bow to the forces of nature: “The noise of the artillery preparation and the flares of the cannon, through the howling wind and the swirling snow, appeared more sinister than ever.” The losses are unusually high, even by the standards of this war, because the majority of the wounded freeze to death wherever they happen to fall. And those wounded men who do survive the wind and the snow and the temperatures below freezing often suffer from severe frostbite. The hospitals are full of amputees.

Andrei Lobanov-Rostovsky is not feeling particularly well. Above all, it is the uneventful waiting that is getting to him. He finds passivity and the lack of activity very depressing. The only thing that breaks the monotony is when a German plane flies over, usually at dusk or late at night, and drops a few bombs.

FRIDAY
, 5
MARCH
1915
Sarah Macnaughtan is serving soup in De Panne

She is back, but not in Veurne, which is now too dangerous, too close to the front. One of the nurses in her old field hospital was killed by shellfire and the house she lived in had all its windows blown out when a shell hit the house next door. So she is now in De Panne, a small seaside resort on the Channel coast, which is empty for the winter. There are a number of high-class hotels along the sandy shore and some of them have been turned into military hospitals. The front is within hearing.

What else could she do but come back? For a woman with her sense of duty and her principles there was no other choice. Her trip back to London at the beginning of January was never intended to be more than a short break and once she had recovered from her breakdown and rested for a while she returned via Calais. She is not, however, in good health and had spent more than a week confined to bed in an empty flat in Dunkirk. She still has her doubts, but she keeps them to herself. And her patriotism has certainly not been dented—indeed, her experiences have only served to reinforce it: “God knows, we are full of faults, but the superiority of the British race to any other that I know is a matter of deep conviction with me.”

Her doubts are more about war as a phenomenon and as a tool.
^g
She hates it not just for what it is doing to others but for what it is doing to her: “I think something inside me has stood still or died during this war.” And even though she is proud of what she and other women are doing, she is not entirely comfortable with what the war is doing to her sex. An example of what she means are the ugly, coarse, mannish clothes that so many women are wearing as if they were something quite natural. No, Macnaughtan longs for nice clothes, for good manners, for “beautiful things, music, flowers, fine thoughts.”

Macnaughtan is also finding it more and more difficult to work. As the front becomes ever more static and all hopes of a rapid victory disappear, the flexible and amateurish lack of rules and regulations has begun to be replaced by regulations, structures, systems. One Tuesday at the start of February a Belgian officer turned up at the railway station where she had her soup kitchen and threw them out of the small space they were using. (In formal terms, the soup kitchen is now under the Belgian army, the soup being cooked by other people and subject to official inspection.) And when she was in Dunkirk new regulations meant she was not even permitted to cross a particular bridge.

She feels that she is both unnoticed and unappreciated, and although it is quite out of character for her, she is actually feeling rather sorry for herself. When she fell ill immediately after arriving in De Panne no one took any notice: “Not a soul came near me, and I wished I could be a
Belgian refugee, when I might have had a little attention from somebody.”