The Beauty and the Sorrow (65 page)

Now there is a halt. The whole battalion sinks down on the slope. Some of the soldiers take ration cans out of their knapsacks and with the long blades of their claspknives they lift out the food and shove it raw into their mouths. Their hands are black with dirt, horny, heavy moving. On their faces the wrinkles stretch and fold again as they chew. They sit on the wet stones and stare into the open tin cans without expression.

Their uniforms are made of more inferior cloth than was
prescribed. The soles of their boots are paper, turned out for the profit of the army purveyors exempt from military duty.

At this hour at home, in houses untouched by war, dinner is being laid. Electric bulbs shine. White napkins, fine glasses, silver knives and forks glitter in the light. Men, clean and in civilian clothes, lead ladies to the table. Maybe even a band is playing in a corner. Drinks sparkle. With easy smiles they talk of trifles—in mixed company, conversation should be light and pleasant.

Do they think this evening of the shabby troops who, masters of a superhuman task, make it possible for so much to be the same at home? The same?—Even better for a good many.

SUNDAY
, 11
NOVEMBER
1917
Florence Farmborough hears rumours of a coup

He is handsome, almost beautiful in fact, the twenty-year-old lieutenant who was brought in yesterday. Even as he was being carried in she noticed that he had “the regular classical features of the southern Russian; dark, curly hair; light grey eyes, heavily fringed with long dark lashes.” She has also noticed that his body is well formed. His name is Sergei and his batman is with him. The latter has told them that the lieutenant is the eldest of a family of seven children, that he volunteered at the age of seventeen and was selected for officer training.

The young lieutenant is a difficult patient. He is agitated, in pain, frightened and demanding; against the doctors’ express instructions, he wants to be lifted out of his bed; he shouts orders and yells at his poor batman, who obviously loves his lieutenant and makes awkward efforts to help him in every way possible. The prognosis is bad: the lieutenant has severe stomach wounds—his bladder is shredded and his intestines punctured in many places. But the surgeons have done what they can and all they can do now is hope for the best. The twenty-year-old lieutenant roars at his batman: “Away to the trenches, scoundrel! Away to the very foremost fighting line!”

Florence sees how the little man sidles away to the next ward to wait for his master’s temper to pass. For some reason the lieutenant calls Florence Zina: he is probably becoming delirious.

They are still in a relatively isolated location on the Romanian front, but some rather sensational news reached them from Russia today. There was a coup in Petrograd three days ago, organised by the Bolsheviks, one of the revolutionary factions. Unrest has been spreading ever since. The picture is still confused and contradictory and a great deal is merely rumour, but it seems that the Bolsheviks are now in power in Petrograd while the Kerensky regime is still hanging on in Moscow. “Our worst fears have been realised: a civil war is in progress in Free Russia.”

In the early afternoon someone makes the dreadful but not unexpected discovery that the lieutenant’s belly is becoming discoloured. Gangrene. His death is now just a matter of hours away.

She sits at his side all night and lets the male orderlies take care of any wounded who are brought in. The lieutenant is rapidly sinking towards unconsciousness and death. He shouts for his mother several times, and the only thing Florence can do is to dull his pain with heavy doses of morphine.

He dies at half past five in the morning and his body is carried out into a small room. Florence sees him lying there—sees it lying there, rather—with eyes closed and hands crossed. His batman is sitting beside him, his face rigid and pale. The thunder of the artillery sounds very close but the batman seems unconcerned.

Afterwards Florence writes in her journal:

I don’t think I could stand any more. I had always hoped that my war experiences would, despite their misery and bitterness, act as a stimulus to my spiritual life, would heighten my compassion, would “strengthen my soul in all goodness.” But now I wanted to find a quiet spot where the world was at peace.

On the same day Willy Coppens is at a party given by a British squadron in Uxem. He has been invited because he intervened in a dogfight between two British planes and seven Germans and his surprise action made the German pilots break off their attack. He writes:

The dinner was very lively. The expressions of gratitude from the pilots I saved from the attentions of the German squadron increased at the same tempo as the generous quantities of drink
that were consumed. I became more and more convinced that I really was a hero, helped in this belief by the assurances of the others and a variety of alcoholic mixtures.

When he eventually returns to his own base on his motorcycle Coppens is very drunk and in the cold night air repeats aloud that he is a hero. During the night his friends nail up the door to his room so that he has to climb out of the window in the morning.

WEDNESDAY
, 14
NOVEMBER
1917
Harvey Cushing takes the train from Paris to Boulogne-sur-Mer

Travelling by train is becoming more and more troublesome. To be sure of getting aboard it is necessary to be at the station at least an hour before the departure time and, once on board, the law of the jungle obtains, at least as far as getting a seat goes. Harvey Cushing has been on one of his many visits to Paris, where he is on various committees working to improve medical care in the forces and to spread knowledge of new methods of treatment. So that side of him is still alive—the practical and professional side, which was what drew him to France in the first place. But it is touch and go.

That, however, is not what is occupying Cushing’s mind today as he sits on the rocking train that is taking him back to Boulogne-sur-Mer and the hospital where he has just started work. The time is just after ten in the morning.

The people sharing the compartment with Cushing present a picture of how big and complicated this war has become. There is a middle-aged French couple, she wrapped in a travelling rug and he immersed in the morning paper. There are several Russian soldiers, one of whom has colossal white mutton-chop whiskers. There are a number of Belgian soldiers, easily recognisable by the small tassels that dangle from their caps and which Cushing considers “silly.” There is a Portuguese officer standing sulking out in the corridor (Cushing suspects that he has taken this man’s seat). There is a pilot dressed in a dark blue uniform reading the risqué magazine
La Vie Parisienne
, notorious for its pictures of scantily dressed women (frequently torn out and used as pin-ups in
the trenches and billets) and for the many contact advertisements from women seeking a (new) husband or, above all, from soldiers seeking a “godmother.” People know or suspect that most of these advertisements are code for temporary sexual contacts and the American troops have received warnings from on high, exhorting them not to buy this French scandal sheet.
^gg
Cushing has already started to put the prolonged and bloody battles around Ypres out of his mind. They finished just a week ago when Canadian troops finally took a heap of rubble, which was all that was left of the village that gave the battle its name—Passchendaele. It looks as if the British army command allowed the futile attacks to continue purely for reasons of prestige, refusing to call a halt to the whole thing until they could say that they had achieved their “aim.”

Some aim. Cushing is feeling dark and pessimistic today. “One sometimes wonders what it’s all about and what indeed we are all over here for,” he writes in his journal, “and why we are actually here.” Much of his gloomy mood is a reaction to the disturbing news from Russia and Italy. The Bolsheviks, with their slogan “Peace now!,” have seized power in the east and the badly mauled Italian army has retreated from one river to the next. Will they really be able to hold their new line on the River Piave? (The reason Cushing’s unit has had to take over the hospital in Boulogne-sur-Mer at such short notice is that the British unit that was running it has been ordered to move to Italy as quickly as possible.) Cushing himself feels that the Allies are in the worst state they have been in since the Battle of the Marne in 1914.

This mood of crisis leads, as always, to reproaches. Cushing glares at the Belgians and Russians in the compartment. The Belgians, he writes, no doubt wear those silly tassels “on the principle of dangling a wisp of straw before a reluctant mule.” And the Russians just eat and do nothing: “The men won’t fight of course and, worse, won’t work.” There is no solidarity among the Allies and reverses have come one after the other in rapid succession. Meanwhile, “the Hun is known to be planning to break the Western Front before spring.” No, Cushing is not particularly optimistic and, like millions of others, feels that his fate is in the hands
of distant forces, forces that no one can control any longer. “Some kaleidoscopic turn may alter our destinies at any minute.”

The pilot has put down
La Vie Parisienne
and started reading a novel with the title
Ma P’tite Femme
instead. The train is swaying and clunking along.

THURSDAY
, 15
NOVEMBER
1917
Paolo Monelli takes part in the defence of Monte Tondarecar

Wet snow and sludge. The army engineers have erected barbed wire on the shoulder of the mountain and that is where the enemy
must
be stopped. It is not the first time they have heard those words. Quite the reverse. They have heard them time after time during the last month, but the Italian retreat has continued in a series of leaps between mountain tops and rivers: from the Isonzo to the Tagliamento, from the Tagliamento to the Piave. On the Asiago plateau in the north the line is still more or less holding, but even there it is slowly moving back. If either front gives way, the other will automatically be left in a difficult, indeed impossible, situation.

The position they are to defend up on Monte Tondarecar is anything but ideal. The field of fire is useless and the sector that Monelli’s company has to defend is so long as to be ridiculous. On average he has eight men for every hundred metres. Monelli himself is controlled and determined, even though he has been shaken by the retreats and the threat of an Italian defeat—not just in a battle but in the war as a whole. He really intends to fight here, however bad the position and the odds. The latest entry he made in his journal is two days old. He wrote about how sad it was that all those mountains had now been taken by the enemy. “But,” he concluded, “when they come face to face with our pain and our hatred they will not get through.”

The attack they have been waiting for begins.

Enemy storm troops rush forward. Shouts and screams. Monelli glimpses a grey swarm moving rapidly. They are attacking in tight groups, unusually tight for 1917. They consist of their own equivalents in the enemy army—Austrian Alpenjäger. Shouts and screams and
gunshots. Weapons open fire, machine guns rattle, bullets whistle past. Monelli sees some of his own troops: De Fanti, Romanin, Tromboni, De Riva. They are unshaven and haggard and clearly just as determined to hold firm as he is. Their faces are remarkably calm. Shouts and screams and gunshots. The grey wave is slowing down, coming to a stop, being washed back. One of the other officers leaps up on the edge of the trench in triumphant ecstasy and screams abuse at the retreating enemy, who disappear back down into their own lines. They leave behind an uneven patchwork of motionless bodies. Shouts. Bodies hang heavily on the thin barbed-wire fence. That is how close they came.

This is repeated twice more. Then things settle down a little. A major in the artillery carefully looks over the edge and observes—with an expression that reveals his surprise—that the line actually did hold. He utters a few words of praise and disappears.

Monelli takes out his journal when the battle is over and, under today’s date, writes just three words: “
Non é passato
.” He did not get through. That is all.
^hh

MONDAY
, 3
DECEMBER
1917
Elfriede Kuhr watches a coffin leave Schneidemühl

The day is bitterly cold but she stands there anyway. She waits for two endless hours, holding in her hand a rose she has bought with her savings. At about half past two the first rattle of drums can be heard. Then more noises: first the tramp of boots marching in perfect time, then wind instruments, then singing. She can see the procession now: the band in field grey at the front, then the padre, followed by the hearse and the mourners, and lastly a guard of honour of soldiers in steel helmets and carrying rifles.

The mourners? She ought to join them—after all, she is one of them.

Lieutenant Werner Waldecker is dead. He lost his life when his plane crashed two days ago. Elfriede heard the news when she got to school
yesterday. It is as if there is a “gaping black hole” in her head and all her movements are mechanical. The hole has now been filled with two questions. The first is, what does he look like now? Has his head been smashed, shattered to pieces? The second, how am I to keep my feelings hidden?

The hearse rolls towards her. She sees the coffin. It is brown and has a flat lid with a wreath lying on it. When the hearse draws level with her she takes a few steps forward and throws her rose up on the coffin. The rose slips off and falls onto the street.