The Beauty and the Sorrow (22 page)

In recent days, however, the situation has become severe around Roye, which lies only some six miles from the section of the front held by his regiment. They have been able to hear the sound of artillery fire day and night and it is said that the French infantry has broken through the line. He has been spared that battle, thank God. And that is not the only thing: since the hospital beds are soon going to be needed for the hordes of freshly wounded men, all the convalescents are to be evacuated—to Germany, according to the word that is going round.

He knows nothing of this at first, since he spends a large part of Sunday lying on the fresh green grass under a pear tree, the warm air filled with the softly rolling murmur of the distant guns. As evening approaches he goes and listens to a church concert and it is only when he has limped back to the hospital that he hears what is going on. Andresen immediately packs his things. To Germany! His weapons and the bulk of his military equipment go in one pile, his private possessions in another. Their names are called out, they are provided with travel documents, and each of them has a small cardboard label—name, unit, injury and so on—attached to his chest. Their marching orders come at eleven o’clock.

They climb into motor cars, five men to a car, and roar off into the summer night. Along the road they pass a number of high-ranking officers who are standing at the roadside studying a horizon which is sparkling with muzzle-flashes and shell-bursts, searchlights and the signal rockets that are slowly spinning down. But this is no longer of any concern to him.

We’re all off to Germany and I really don’t know how to express my joy. Away from the battle and away from the shells. Soon we shan’t be able to hear the guns any more. And we are travelling
through fertile countryside and past smiling villages. My travelling mood is one of joy, of Sunday peace and ringing bells. Home, home and onwards.

The intention is that they should change in Chauny and the rest of the journey will be by train. They gather in a large park and a doctor carries out a new examination of those waiting. When he reaches Andresen he studies his papers and then tears the cardboard label from his chest. That is the end of the journey for him. As far as the doctor is concerned Andresen is sufficiently recovered to return to the front in just a couple more days.

Andresen walks away, utterly crestfallen; everything is suddenly just “black and black.”

When he eventually returns to the park he sees the others all lined up. Several of them shout to him. His name has been called out—he is going to Germany after all! Andresen has hardly joined the ranks before it is discovered that he lacks the cardboard label on his chest. He is once again ordered to leave the group: “Farewell leave! Farewell home! I’m going back to the war again!”

FRIDAY
, 11
JUNE
1915
Florence Farmborough hears of the breakthrough on the San

This is their third week in Molodych. That first panic-driven retreat after the breakthrough at Gorlice has now been forgotten—well, almost forgotten. The Third Army has lost an unbelievable 200,000 men—140,000 of them as prisoners of war—since those days at the beginning of May, but now it has occupied a new and apparently strong position along the broad River San. Reinforcements have arrived, at last. And orders have come down from the highest level: here, right here, the Germans and Austrians will finally be stopped. No more retreats!
^uu
Battles have raged
along the river and both sides have made minor attacks.
^vv
One evening Florence saw large numbers of grey-uniformed German prisoners for the first time; they came walking along a road in the moonlight, wearing their typical pickelhaubes and guarded by mounted Cossacks. Rumour has it that the enemy has suffered major losses. There is new hope.

There is virtually no fighting going on where Florence is and that certainly reinforces the feeling that the crisis is probably over. There has been plenty of time for other things, such as washing down by the river and celebrating Italy’s entry into the war or her own name-day. She has done a lot of walking in the silent, green woods, picking the abundant flowers of early summer. Apart from the usual cases of typhus and cholera things have been so quiet that several of the nurses have become impatient and started talking of applying to other units where they might be of more use. Their superintendent has tried to calm them down, hinting that the unit will soon be moved anyway, possibly to the Eighth Army down at Lemberg and perhaps even to the Caucasus. (Good news of the kind everyone longs for is coming in from the Caucasus front: Russian units have begun moving south and across the Ottoman border, encouraged by talk of unrest and rebellion behind the Turkish lines.)

It is now three o’clock in the afternoon. Florence Farmborough is sitting outside her tent, resting after the day’s work. Everything is calm, as usual. She sees four orderlies carrying off some bodies in order to bury them in the improvised cemetery in the adjoining field. She hears the clapping noise made by a pair of storks that have built a nest on the thatched roof of a farm. A man from the other rapid-response unit comes up to her and hands her a letter addressed to their doctor. She asks him in passing how things are at his unit. The man tells her “with suppressed excitement” that bullets from shrapnel shells fell close to them that morning and the unit is preparing to move. The Germans have broken through on the San river!

She is shaken by the news but is not really convinced that it is true. She can, however, hear the noise of heavy artillery fire in the distance but, towards dinnertime, when she asks around among the others they are as sceptical as she is. After dinner she returns to her tent, which smells of
the heat. There she meets Anna, another of the nurses, and Anna wearily confirms the news. The rumours of a breakthrough on the San are true:

It is said they are pouring over in masses and nothing can stop them. We have the men, but we haven’t the means. Whole regiments are said to be without a cartridge, and only a certain number of batteries can continue shelling.

Anna adds: “The result will be that our armies will be butchered, and it is but a day’s march into Russia.” She conjures up a picture of a Russia invaded and laid waste and the mental image is too much for her. She throws herself down on the bed, covers her face with her arms and weeps noisily. Florence makes a clumsy effort to stem her tears: “ ‘Annushka,’ I said, ‘stop; this is not worthy of your nature.’ ” Anna removes her arms from her face and gives Florence a dark look: “ ‘Nature!’ she flashed, ‘what is this talk of nature?’ ” Then the words pour out of her. “ ‘Is it God’s nature to allow this wholesale destruction? Not only does one lose one’s nature among all this carnage, but one’s soul dies too!’ ” And she carries on weeping. Florence says nothing: “I did not attempt to comfort her; I could find no comfort to give.”

Then the final confirmation arrives in the form of an order to prepare to move. They start packing, a task that is interrupted when a large group of wounded men suddenly arrives:

When we saw them we knew that the worst had happened; they were dazed and their faces were lined with an anxiety which dominated the keenness of their pain and there was that something in their eyes that checked all questioning.

Darkness falls. The thunder of distant guns fades and falls silent. A battery of artillery pieces swings into a nearby field and unlimbers. Florence and the others take down their tents in the soft night mist. Then they hear noises from the road. When Florence goes closer she sees that it is full of mounted men—Cossacks. She sees a farm boy run past and disappear towards the woods, his head bent low. She hears screaming and tumult: the Cossacks are going through the farms systematically one by one and gathering all the animals they can take with them—pigs, cows
and chickens. They are also gathering all the men and tying them up.
^ww
Florence sees some Cossacks wrestling a young man to the ground while a woman screams shrilly.

Then the Cossacks go off along the road taking their two- and four-legged booty with them. The screams of the women continue without break. Later, when Florence and the rest of her unit move off in the darkness on their overloaded horse-drawn carts, the wailing can still be heard.

It is a beautiful, clear, starry night.

TUESDAY
, 15
JUNE
1915
Alfred Pollard is waiting for dawn at Hooge

It is a hot day, with no wind. They are in full battle kit and have eight miles to march before they reach the launching point for the attack. Things are easy at the start as they trudge along the always busy road from Poperinghe to Ypres. They are hemmed in by other units on foot, both large and small, and by “limbers drawn by horses, limbers drawn by mules; endless ammunition columns; siege guns and howitzers; strings of lorries; motor cycle dispatch riders.” They realise they are going to be taking part in a big and important attack since they can also see cavalry, battle-ready and waiting for that much-discussed hole to be punched
through the German lines at last so that they can pour through—sabres drawn, picturesque pennants waving and suitably dramatic poses—and make the war mobile again.

This is Alfred Pollard’s first attack. He is full of fervour, almost happy in fact. Months of frustration and disappointment are finally over. Up to this point the war has not turned out as he expected. He has been ill with jaundice, suspected of being a malingerer (him! malingerer!), been an officer’s batman and worked as a cook. The woman he has fallen in love with hardly ever writes. The war he had fantasised about has not yet materialised—far less the heroism he’d dreamt of. But now, at last.

The mood of the men in his unit undergoes a marked change the closer they get to the front. He knows the phenomenon:

Leaving the line, when every step means a further distance from bullets and shells, there is an atmosphere of gaiety; songs are heard, jokes are exchanged, laughter is frequent. Going up, on the other hand, is a very different business. There is an air of seriousness, remarks are answered in monosyllables; men are mostly silent, occupied with their own thoughts. Some laugh and chatter from a sense of bravado, or to prevent their imaginations from becoming too active; others to bolster up the shrinking spirits of their weaker comrades. Only a few are natural.

Immediately before the notorious stretch called Hell Fire Corner the mass of men marching in step along the road is directed away and out across the sun-warmed fields. They are still not under fire but a solitary shell comes whistling down from the blue sky, explodes and knocks the battalion’s mounted adjutant from the saddle. So it has started. The ranks go very quiet. “We were going into something of which we had no experience. No man felt sure he would live through the coming ordeal.”

Finally, they come to a halt in a field where they are to wait until dusk. During the wait the field kitchen is driven up and the soldiers are given hot tea. Immediately afterwards the horse-drawn kitchen wagons withdraw to the safety of the camp. As he watches them disappear Pollard wonders how many of his companions would really like to be going out of danger along with the cooks. Then he turns the question round and thinks that perhaps some of those leaving are envious of those who are staying.

When the sun goes down they continue their march. Spread out in a single line, they disappear into the half-darkness, following and stumbling along a railway track. The trenches waiting for them at the launching point for the attack are new, narrow and shallow. They have to wait there “herded into ours literally like sardines,” in full kit, sitting in uncomfortable positions. They smoke and chat. There are simple, rough ladders ready and waiting—they have only three rungs. Although nothing is going to happen before dawn and sleep is the only truly reliable blessing left to the soldiers of this war, Pollard finds it impossible to doze off:

Not only was I too uncomfortable but I was far too excited. In a few hours I was to go over the top for the first time. I felt no trace of fear or even nervousness; only an anxiety to get started. The hours seemed interminable. Would the dawn never come?

An hour before the attack Pollard is sent up to the forward line to act as runner for the first wave. He is pleased. He does not think of the fact that it increases his chances of being killed or wounded. It is not a case of ignorance on his part. (In March, at the same time as the battle later known as Neuve Chapelle was ending in failure and dreadful losses for the British, he watched at close quarters and in a state of impotent despair as an attacking unit was mown down virtually to the last man by the crossfire from German Maxim machine guns.) It is rather a case of Pollard’s naively childlike streak once again revealing itself: he feels that death can only strike others, not him. They have, moreover, been promised massive artillery support on this occasion—unlike in March when the contribution of the British artillery was little more than symbolic. And his role also means that he will increase his chances of doing what he has been longing to do for so long—use his weapons: “With luck I might bayonet a Hun.”

The artillery firestorm begins: “Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Swisch! Swisch! Swisch! Swisch! Crump! Crump! Crump! Crump! Crump!”
^xx
It is soon so fierce that shouting is insufficient to make himself
heard, he has to scream right in the ear of the man he is talking to. When soil begins to fall on his head now and again Pollard realises that the Germans are returning their fire. The soldiers around fiddle with their equipment. Their captain turns round in all the noise, smiles and mouths the words, “Only a minute to go.” They all stand up. The short ladders are put in place. The soldiers, their rifles with fixed bayonets on their backs, take up position by them, one foot ready on the lowest rung. The captain drops his hand as a signal and climbs up. Pollard is right behind him.