The Beauty and the Sorrow (48 page)

No trace of anything else. Corday has just read a letter written by a colonel and telling of an appalling event that happened recently at Verdun—yes, that battle is
still
going on, though with rather less intensity. (French troops attacked Douaumont a week ago and took some trenches. Two days ago German units mounted a counter-attack. Also, on the Somme, after being dormant for a time the battle has hotted up again: yesterday they used a completely new war machine for the
first time—some kind of motorised vehicle, armed with a cannon and machine gun, protected by armour plating and running on caterpillar tracks.)
^ttt
The colonel’s letter tells of a disused railway tunnel at Tavannes which the troops have been using for a long time as a bunker, cantonment and ammunition store. This blocked-off tunnel was always packed with people, either soldiers who have become separated from their units or men seeking shelter from the continuous shelling. On the night of 5 September one of the ammunition dumps exploded and between 500 and 700 soldiers died in the resulting fire. There has not been a single word about this in the papers. (Nor was the disaster reported to the leading politicians.)

Censorship is strict and its regulations wide, convoluted and inscrutable.
^uuu
The newspapers often contain white spaces where articles have been removed at the last minute. In other cases it is a matter of semantic manipulation—sometimes bordering on the ridiculous. Writers who use the expression “after the peace” are urged to write “in the post-war period.” A colleague he knows, who works in a neighbouring department, has just managed to convince the papers to stop using the words “horse competitions” and to use instead the phrase “equine selection tests.” “We are saved!” Corday snorts.

But it is not really the censorship or language regulations that Corday finds most upsetting, it is the fact that journalists are so willing to allow themselves to be turned into megaphones for nationalistic politicians and blinkered military men. Corday writes in his journal:

The French press has never revealed the truth, not even whatever truth is attainable under censorship. Instead we have been subjected to a heavy bombardment of fine-sounding prattle, of limitless optimism, of a systematic vilification of the enemy, of a determination to hide the horrors and sorrows of the war—and all this has then been concealed behind a mask of moralising idealism!

Words are one of the war’s most vital strategic resources.

In the afternoon Corday walks to his office in the ministry. Along the boulevard he encounters numerous bemedalled, wounded officers on leave: “They seem to have come here specially in order to receive their reward in the form of admiring glances.” He passes the queues outside grocers’ shops. A fairly important propaganda point so far has been that the Germans are suffering shortages of all kinds of goods whereas everything is available in France, but shortages have now begun to be felt here. Sugar is difficult to get hold of, butter is sold only in 100-gram rations and there are no longer any oranges in the shops. The city scene does, however, have one new element—the nouveaux riches, or NR, as they are sometimes known. They are black marketeers, war profiteers and others who have made big money out of contracts with the military or as a result of the shortages and the like. NR are a permanent feature of all the restaurants, where they are often to be seen eating the most expensive items and drinking the finest wines. Women’s fashions are extravagant and ostentatious and the jewellers have rarely done better business. The war is talked about less than ever, at least among the lower classes.

Michel Corday is working late this evening. He and a colleague from the Ministry of Education work long and hard on a report for the Committee on Inventions. It is almost two o’clock in the morning by the time they finish.

A DAY IN LATE SEPTEMBER
1916
Pál Kelemen goes to a railway restaurant in Sátoraljaújhely

Having more or less recovered from malaria and feeling well rested after his long convalescence (which has included both going to church and
indulging in drinking sessions), Kelemen has once again been given light duties. Today he is on his way back from the Carpathian front, where he was making a delivery with packhorses close to Uzok. A captain of infantry in Uzok has given him his first real leave for a year and a half—in discreet exchange for a pair of new and very smart riding boots. Kelemen’s destination is Budapest, and he is in the best of humours.

He has to change trains in Sátoraljaújhely and while waiting there he spends his time in the railway restaurant. It is full of passengers, old and young, women and men, civilian and military, “in disorderly confusion around tables covered with discolored cloths.” His eye falls on a young, highly decorated ensign with the face of a boy:

Seated at the head of one table, he is calmly eating a wedge of yellow, cream layer cake that lies on its side on his plate. His eyes move constantly about the hall but the gaze is blank and tired and returns each time to the slice of cake he is consuming with obvious pleasure. He wears a shabby general issue field uniform with both the large and the small silver medals on his breast. Probably returning from furlough on his way back to the trenches.

The lively picture of the restaurant is changing from moment to moment. But he sits there beside the wall, as if there were no confusion around him, concerned only with his own pent up thoughts—and the second piece of cake that is rapidly diminishing on his plate.

He takes a draught of water and helps himself to a third wedge from the pedestaled glass stand where the richly iced cake is set out, invitingly cut into portions. He is no longer eating because it tastes good. He is trying to store up in himself for the coming hard times, delicacies typical of home.

SATURDAY
, 23
SEPTEMBER
1916
^vvv
Paolo Monelli communes with a dead man on Monte Cauriol

By this point they have been on many dreadful mountains, but this one promises to be the worst of the lot. They stormed and took Monte
Cauriol about a month ago—a feat in itself, since the mountain is high and the Austro-Hungarian position was a strong one. Since then things have gone as they often do: after all the effort and losses involved they had insufficient strength to continue. The enemy brought up fresh troops and began a counter-attack—for no other reason than that this essentially meaningless spot was beginning to feature in communiqués and newspaper reports and was thus transformed into a trophy to be won or to be defended.

Monelli’s company have beaten back several counter-attacks. There are dead Austrians hanging on the barbed wire. But the Italian losses, too, have been very high. They are under almost continuous fire and artillery bombardment from the surrounding mountains. Monelli notes that practically no one is left from the original platoon. The stench of decomposing bodies hangs in the air day and night. There are twenty or more dead men rotting away in a crevice very close to them, one of whom is an Austrian medical officer. The body is lying in such a way that Monelli can follow the slow process of decay: yesterday the nose burst and some sort of green fluid began to seep out. Strangely, however, the corpse’s eyes remain almost unchanged and Monelli thinks they are staring accusingly at him. He writes in his journal:

It wasn’t me who killed you—and you were a doctor, so why did you go and take part in that nocturnal attack? You had a loving fiancée who wrote you letters, perhaps untruthful, but so comforting, and you kept them in your wallet. Rech took the wallet from you on the night they killed you. We’ve also seen her picture (a pretty girl—and someone made indecent comments) and photos of your castle and all the cherished possessions you had there. We piled everything in a little heap and sat around, ensconced in our bunker with a bottle of wine as reward for our toils and happy to have beaten off the attack. It wasn’t long ago that you died. You are already nothing, nothing more than a grey lump crumpled against the cliff, destined to stink. And we are so alive, ensign, so inhumanly alive that I’ve tried in vain to find a touch of regret in the depths of our consciousness. What good has it done you to have looked at the world with such avidity, to have held her young body in your arms, to have gone to war as if it were a vocation? Perhaps you too were intoxicated by the
great mission, by your place in the advance guard, by the fact that perhaps you were fated to sacrifice yourself? But dying for whom? The living who are in such a hurry, the living who have become used to war as the fierce rhythm of life, the living who do not believe that they themselves will need to die—they are no longer thinking of you. It is as though your death has not only ended your life but annulled it. You will still exist for a little while as a number on the sergeant’s muster-roll, a pathetic subject for memorial speeches; but you, man, you do not exist and it’s as if you never had existed. We call them dead men, but what’s lying there is actually no more than carbon and hydrogen sulphide, covered in ragged shreds of uniform.

The stench of the corpses in the crevice has become more and more distressing and when darkness falls four soldiers are given the job of dragging away the bodies. They are given a glass of brandy each and gas masks against the smell.

TUESDAY
, 26
SEPTEMBER
1916
Vincenzo D’Aquila is discharged from the mental hospital in Siena

It is exactly twelve o’clock. He is down in the inner courtyard with several other patients when the telephone call comes. One of the male nurses waves him over, tells him he is to report to the hospital superintendent’s office and adds: “Say goodbye to your buddies, Corporal, you’re leaving us.” D’Aquila calls to his brothers in misfortune, they say their goodbyes and wish each other well, and he is suddenly afflicted by contradictory emotions, “sadness over leaving the boys—gladness to be in the free air again.” After changing into his uniform and collecting his possessions he goes over to the administration building, finds the superintendent’s office and knocks on the door.

It is in Siena that D’Aquila has begun to return to life. He still believes it is necessary to stop the war and that war is unjust and wrong, but he now recognises that it is going to be difficult to take on such a colossal task while shut behind bars in a mental hospital. He has worked in the hospital laundry, hung up sheets and folded endless numbers of
pillowcases. He wants to be set free and declared of sound mind, and he will not actually admit he has been mad. The doctors have countered that by saying that if he has not been mad they are in no position to say now that he has recovered. In answer to a direct question, D’Aquila told them that he has no intention of ever going back to the front.

There are doctors who suspect D’Aquila of bluffing, of simulating mental illness, and there have been attempts to show him to be a malingerer. The business of sorting the malingerers from the genuinely afflicted is one of the main functions of the staff. Not that all the staff are equally zealous in this respect and D’Aquila has actually seen some of them helping patients to simulate their symptoms. They have warned them when the doctors are coming and they have smuggled food to those who are officially refusing to eat. D’Aquila himself is convinced that a high proportion of the mental patients he meets
are
malingerers and, without any sense of self-contradiction, he views them with a degree of scepticism that borders on scorn. At the same time, however, there are some people who suspect he is doing just that, especially since he has been heard to say things such as, “While the war is going on a mental hospital is better than a trench.” When not folding pillowcases or walking in the yard he has joined in with the other inmates, reading newspapers and magazines, playing cards and dominoes, and—with an earnestness that exceeds their knowledge—having endless discussions about the war situation and what can be expected next.

In August D’Aquila led a short-lived hunger strike against the monotony of their food: rice soup, for instance, was a permanent item on the menu. The result was a threatening dressing-down from the superintendent and three days’ solitary in a padded cell, and since then the superintendent has him marked down as a malingerer. Discharging the young man as having recovered is probably seen both as a way of getting rid of a troublemaker at the same time as punishing him: D’Aquila will now have to return to active service and if he refuses he will de facto be classed as a deserter.

The door opens and D’Aquila is received not by the superintendent but by one of the doctors, a little professor by the name of Grassi. The doctor shakes his hand and congratulates him on being discharged.

D’Aquila leaves Siena that day and travels to Rome. His journey takes him via Florence, where he has a few hours to wait for a connecting train. He walks out into the town but comes to an abrupt halt, amazed
and angry, on the beautiful Piazza della Signoria. With a sudden and resounding crash his different worlds collide. There is no sign here of the questions and torments that have been occupying him for the last year and which quite literally drove him out of his mind. There is nothing here that even suggests that a war is going on. People are drinking coffee, eating ice cream and flirting. In one part of the piazza there is an orchestra playing Viennese waltzes.

SUNDAY
, 15
OCTOBER
1916
Alfred Pollard finds traces of the summer’s battles on the Somme

The darkness of autumn. Cold. Damp. A full moon. Tonight Alfred Pollard is out scouting in no-man’s-land again. He is on the Somme. Face blackened with burnt cork and revolver in hand, he is creeping forward through an endless series of shell holes: