The Beauty and the Sorrow (18 page)

Laura cannot help hating the Germans. They are her enemies and they have occupied her home and transformed her life into one of perpetual darkness and anxiety. Not all Germans are the same, however, and some of them have been sympathetic and even helpful. But many of them behave in an arrogant, superior, self-confident and sometimes brutal manner. She has seen Russian prisoners of war being mistreated on numerous occasions. German propaganda, which talks about liberation from the Russian yoke, has had little impact, except possibly among the Jews of the region, for whom the occupation appears to offer relief from the arbitrary nature and ingrained anti-Semitism of the old regime.
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The strangely mixed behaviour—now helpful, now brutal—she has encountered from the German occupiers is to some degree a mirror image of official policy. In view of the current chaos, which was caused by the war but which the Germans in their arrogance are inclined to interpret as an inherent characteristic of eastern Europe and its motley and confusing mixture of peoples and languages, the high command in the east has introduced an ambitious and wide-ranging programme. It is intended partly to exercise complete control over the conquered areas and their resources and partly to save the inhabitants from themselves by instilling German discipline, German order and German culture into them.

The cannon are growling in the distance and Laura and the others live in constant hope that the Russian army will break through and liberate them. (They can usually tell whose artillery is firing since Russian batteries fire their guns to a particular rhythm: one—two—three—four—pause, one—two—three—four—pause.) She often fantasises that her husband, Stanislaw, is somewhere over there in the Russian lines, quite close, perhaps only five or six miles away, and that as soon
as the German front is broken she will see him standing there in front of her again. But mostly she is filled with a sense of complete isolation, trapped with her children in an absurd and comfortless limbo. New York is very, very far away. The children have Dash, their little white dog, to play with.

It is possibly the absurdity of the whole situation that makes her react to the orange. She sees an ordinary soldier on the street carrying a juicy looking orange, and he raises the fruit to his mouth and bites it. She stares, aghast. She would have given almost anything for that orange, to have been able to take it home to her children. She knows that is not going to happen. What really upsets her most, however, is the soldier’s manner—he eats it in such a slovenly way. The man chews his way through that beautiful, round, exotic, shining orange “as though it was something you ate every day here in Suwalki.”

When the wind blows from the west Laura can smell a pungency in the air. It is the smell of the carelessly buried dead of the past winter. Rumour says that there are tens of thousands of them.
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THURSDAY
, 15
APRIL
1915
Willy Coppens sees a Zeppelin outside De Panne

The enormous oval body of the airship moves majestically and almost silently across the evening sky. It is a dreadful but impressive sight indeed, bordering on the sublime. The fact that this is an enemy vessel is fairly irrelevant in the context. Just watching it reinforces Willy Coppens’s old desire to be a pilot—a desire which, strangely enough, the Belgian grenadier first felt in almost exactly the same place where he is now standing and watching the German Zeppelin steer out across the English Channel over De Panne.

He was five years old at the time and there among the sand dunes he had watched his first kite hovering in the breeze. Afterwards he thought the paper kite “possessed some kind of occult power which in an irresistible and inexplicable way drew me up towards the infinity of
the heavens.” As the thin line tautened in the wind it emitted a singing sound that made him tremble with excitement—and fear.

Willy Coppens is a soldier in the Belgian army, or what is left of it after last August’s German invasion—the invasion of the territory of a neutral state, which is what gave Great Britain its official excuse to enter the war.
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And he now finds himself in the strip of trench-scarred Belgian ground, stretching from Nieuwpoort on the Channel coast down to Ypres and Messines on the French border, that has remained unoccupied by the Germans. His parents and brothers and sisters are in Brussels on the other side of the front. When the order for mobilisation came last August he was called up into the 3rd Company of the 3rd Battalion of the 2nd Regiment of Grenadiers, and his service number was 49800. Then they just hung around the mobilisation area and he found this waiting so “awful” by the end that “when the declaration of war finally came, it came as a clear relief.”

The fact that his country was attacked and his home city occupied is something that obviously gives him energy and motivates him. The atrocities the Germans were guilty of during those weeks in August (the massacres at Dinant, Andenne and Tamines,
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the sacking of Louvain and so on), which Allied propaganda has returned to time after time, depicting, dramatising and embellishing them to the extent that the original atrocities have begun to disappear beneath a highly coloured blanket of clichés, are things that he never even refers to. Perhaps Coppens is one of those people who have come to believe that it was all nothing but propaganda. Perhaps new and more tangible and personal sufferings have already replaced these second-hand horror stories. Or perhaps the adventure of it all has gained the upper hand. He is, after all, only twenty-two years old.

But he certainly feels bitterness towards the Germans and has an intense hatred of them: afterwards, when thinking of that Zeppelin outside De Panne, he said that he “always regretted never having been given the job of bombing the enemy in his own country.” But that is not what he is thinking at this moment, during this April evening, as he watches the Zeppelin disappear out over the sea. The men on board are less objects of his hatred than of his envy, and as he watches it receding into the waning light he thinks “how wonderful it must feel for those on board.”

Coppens has actually applied for a transfer from the infantry to the air force. That was in January. He has still not received an answer.

The Zeppelin has already disappeared into the darkness by the time two Belgian planes come buzzing along in search of the great vessel. Coppens notes that they are “biplanes from a prehistoric era, quite unusable in war.” He suspects they have been sent up purely as a matter of morale, a theatrical exercise—they have to do something, after all. Nor has any pilot yet managed to shoot down a Zeppelin.
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They are still surrounded by an aura of technological invulnerability and brutality. Which is the reason the Germans use airships in spite of their vulnerability to anti-aircraft fire and their sensitivity to wind and weather. They frighten people. They are the first terror weapon.
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The Zeppelin that Coppens sees disappearing out over the Channel is one of a group of three to attack the south-east of England on this particular night. Zeppelin L 7 makes a sweep along the coast in the Norwich area but finds nothing worth attacking. Zeppelin L 5, under the command of Captain-Lieutenant Böcker, forms the spearhead of the
attack and drops bombs over Henham Hall, Southwold and Lowestoft but without hitting anything.

The only one of the three to cause any damage that night is L 6 under the command of Senior Lieutenant Baron von Buttlar. His airship reaches the coast north-east of London but since there is still a strict ban on attacking the British capital von Buttlar drops five explosive bombs and thirty incendiaries over Maldon and Heybridge. Then he turns back out over the sea.

He leaves behind him one damaged house and one wounded girl.

FRIDAY
, 16
APRIL
1915
William Henry Dawkins writes to his mother from the harbour on Lemnos

Finally on their way, and now they are no longer in any doubt about their destination—the Dardanelles. Rumours of the operation have been in the air ever since February. That is when news reached them that Allied warships, apparently to no great effect, had attacked the Ottoman artillery batteries blocking the straits, an attack that had been repeated a month ago with the same notable lack of success.
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As early as the end of March a large section of Dawson’s brigade had disappeared across the Mediterranean by ship to the island of Lemnos in the northern part of
the Aegean Sea. He himself stayed behind for a while in the big camp outside Cairo. He was very well aware, however, that something big was going on. He wrote in an earlier letter home: “Rumour has it that we are to form part of a huge army—French, Russian, Balkanese and British with the role first of subjugating Turkey and then marching on to Austria.”
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It is about time something happened. The months of inactivity, if exercises can be called inactivity, have had a corrosive effect on fighting spirit and above all on discipline. The Australians have shown a growing lack of respect for British officers, and soldiers of all nationalities have been behaving in an increasingly undisciplined way in Cairo. This culminated on Good Friday, two weeks ago, when riots broke out in the city’s red light district. Some people consider Cairo to be one of the world’s most sinful cities, full of brothels and gambling dens where those intent on pleasure can enjoy everything from narcotics to naked dancers. And in accordance with the old law of supply and demand all this has mushroomed thanks to the sudden influx of tens of thousands of young soldiers with a fair amount of money in their pockets. The problems are partly a result of the erosion of discipline and partly caused by growing friction between the troops and the local population.
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So on Good Friday hundreds of soldiers, primarily Australians and New Zealanders, started running amok on a street in the red light district. In a fit of unbridled disorder they smashed up bars and brothels, hurled the fittings out into the street and set fire to them. The noisy, violent mob grew as more and more soldiers joined them. The military police tried to intervene and were bombarded with bottles, so they opened fire, wounding four soldiers. British troops were summoned and went in with bayonets but were disarmed and had to watch their rifles being burnt. An attempt to use cavalry to subdue the rioters also failed. Little by little, however, the rioting died out of its own accord. Dawkins
had been there, helping out by manning a road block across one of the streets. During the days that followed a camp canteen and a camp cinema were burnt down by angry, violent troops.

Just over a week ago Dawkins’s unit was relieved to be leaving Egypt. The harbour in Alexandria had been full of troopships. Two days later they made land on Lemnos. The island is too small to house all of them so many of the soldiers have quite simply had to remain aboard the vessels that brought them here. Today William Henry Dawkins, aboard the troopship
Mashobara
in Lemnos harbour, is writing to his mother:

There are quaint old windmills here which are used for the grain. They are big stone buildings with large windmill sails. The place is very clean, so are the people, thank goodness, quite a contrast. Everything is covered with green grass and the fields are very pretty with their red poppies and daisies studded all round. We were all ashore yesterday—took the company for a little exercise and touring—best expresses the outing. The people here are like other places, all out to make as much as possible out of the soldiers. There are no large shops here so we strolled about, one with a round of cheese under his arm, another with a string of figs, another with a pocketful of nuts, another with a bag of biscuits and everyone trying to get rid of their stuff onto the others. We had a jolly time.

Dawkins knows that they will soon be moving on and he knows the task that awaits him and his company when the time comes: they are to be responsible for the brigade’s water supply. The
Mashobara
is carrying masses of pumps and pipes and drills and tools and digging equipment. In the meantime, one of the ships is being converted for special operations—they are, for instance, cutting large landing doors in the bows of the vessel. They have received the maps of the place where they are to be sent in. It is called Gallipoli and is a long, narrow peninsula that guards the entrance to the Sea of Marmara. He does not write anything about this in his letter, however, which he ends:

As I can’t think of any more news I’ll have to close. Sending you best love to all. Your loving son Willie xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx to the girls.

SUNDAY
, 25
APRIL
1915
Rafael de Nogales witnesses the destruction of the two most sacred buildings in Van

Dawn. He wakes from his sleep lying in a dream of down and Nile-green silk. The room around him is furnished in keeping with the luxurious bed: on the ceiling there is an Arabian lamp with different coloured crystals set in bronze; on the floor, hand-knotted rugs and a stand containing ornamental weapons of Damascene steel. There are also precious figurines in Sèvres porcelain. This used to be a woman’s room, as he can tell from the kajal pencils and carmosine red lipstick scattered on a small table.

Some distance away the Turkish artillery begins to come to life. Battery after battery opens fire. They add their sharp cracks to the thickening curtain of noise until everything sounds just as it usually does: explosions, crashes, thumps, booms, roars, shots and pained shouts.