The Beauty and the Sorrow (23 page)

The attack is successful. The losses are appalling.

FRIDAY
, 18
JUNE
1915
Rafael de Nogales witnesses the massacre in Sairt

They arrive rather too late, and he is very glad that they do. At a distance it is a pastoral idyll that opens out before their eyes. Herds of cows and buffalo are grazing quietly in the green fields and some dromedaries are resting by a spring under a turquoise sky. The town of Sairt is a peaceful sight: a labyrinth of oblong white houses with six slim minarets rising above them “like alabaster needles.”

They ride closer.

That is when Rafael de Nogales’s eyes fall on the hill.

That morning, with no beating about the bush (with a degree of satisfaction, in fact), a couple of the Turkish officers in his party said that now that all the preparations in Bitlis were complete they were just waiting for the order from above for the killing to start in Sairt. So they would have to hurry if he wanted to see it.

But they did not get there in time.

The hill lies right by the main road. It is covered with … something. Soon he can see what that something is. The slope …

 … was crowned with thousands of half-naked and still bleeding bodies, lying in heaps, tangled, as if in a last embrace in death. Fathers, brothers, sons and grandsons lay as they fell from the bullets or the murderers’ yatagans. Heartbeats were still pumping the life-blood out of some slashed throats. Flocks of vultures sat
on top of the heap, picking the eyes out of the dead and dying, whose rigid gaze still seemed to mirror terror and inexpressible pain, while carrion dogs sank their sharp teeth into entrails still pulsing with life.

The field of bodies stretches right down to the road and in order to advance they eventually have to let their horses jump over these “mountains of corpses.” Shocked and stunned, de Nogales rides into Sairt where the police and the Muslim part of the population are busy plundering the houses of the Christians. He meets some of the people in authority in the district, among them the head of the town’s gendarmes, who had personally led the massacre. De Nogales receives confirmation once again that the murder of all Christian males over twelve years old is not, as in the past, a more or less spontaneous pogrom but is actually a thoroughly planned operation conceived at the centre.

He is given quarters for the night in one of the plundered buildings. De Nogales realises now that the attack is no longer aimed only at Armenians but at other Christian groups as well. This house, in fact, belonged to a Syrian family. It has been stripped of its contents apart from a couple of broken chairs. There is no trace of its former owners with the exception of an English dictionary and a tiny little picture of the Virgin Mary hidden away in a corner. Bloodstains are visible on the floor and walls.

Later, as he sits with a group of very polite and pleasant officers outside the garrison mess, the ghastly scenes continue. He is horrified but does nothing to prevent them. With the help of a forced smile he mimics understanding. A mob goes by, dragging the corpses of some children and an old man, their skulls bouncing slackly on the round cobbles of the street. The people standing around spit or swear at the corpses. De Nogales also sees a group of gendarmes leading an old man of venerable appearance:

His black robe and purple cap clearly showed him to be a Nestorian bishop.
^yy
Drops of blood were trickling down his forehead and flowing down his cheeks like the scarlet tears of martyrdom. As he passed us his eyes gave me a long look as if he could see that I too was a Christian, but then he passed on and away to that dreadful hill.

At sunset Rafael de Nogales rides out of Sairt accompanied by his Albanian batman, the tall and well-built Tasim, and seven mounted gendarmes. De Nogales fears for his life. There is a rumour that those above want to see him liquidated, and doubts have been expressed as to his loyalty. The ride takes them south through trackless country. He wants to get to Aleppo. There he is going to apply for a discharge from the Ottoman army.

TUESDAY
, 22
JUNE
1915
Laura de Turczynowicz hears the fall of Lemberg being celebrated in Suwalki

A summer evening. Laura is in the house bathing the children. A church bell rings. Then another bell begins to toll, followed immediately by two more, three more, many more. It sounds as if all the churches in Suwalki are ringing their bells and the warm air is filled with their harmonious, vibrating tones. But why?

As usual, they know little or nothing about what is happening on the battlefields. The war for them is less an event to be followed than a condition to be endured. Which should not be taken to imply that the battles are meaningless: Laura and all those round her have been hoping and praying for a Russian breakthrough, for the return of the Russian army, for liberation. Recently, however, they have heard the distant roar of battle growing louder, then weaker and finally fading away. There are rumours of German victories. So what has happened?

She is still hanging on to that wild hope. The bells are ringing and Laura’s immediate thought is that the Russians have finally broken through and the Germans are ringing the bells to warn their troops in and around Suwalki that they are being encircled. A woman friend rushes in, out of breath, excited and expectant. What is happening?

Once she has got the children to bed Laura and her friend try to find out. They go out onto the balcony and look out over the streets. They can see German troops cheering and singing in the evening sunlight. Their disappointment is immediate: “We came down so rapidly from our high hopes, with hearts sick and sore from hope deferred, that I hardly cared what it was.” But what was it?

One of the German hospital assistants sees her on the balcony and shouts joyfully: “Lemberg has fallen!”

The Austro-Hungarian city, which has been in the hands of the Russian army since September last year, has been recaptured. It is a great victory for the Central Powers, almost enough—but only almost—to erase the memory of last year’s great defeat for the Austro-Hungarians in Galicia. It is also a personal disaster for Laura de Turczynowicz: Lemberg is where her husband, Stanislaw, is stationed
^zz
and she has not heard from him for a long time.

Anxiety and uncertainty overwhelm her. Is Stanislaw still alive? Has he been taken prisoner? Did he manage to get away? “The bells kept up their din—they seemed to beat one into the ground.”

WEDNESDAY
, 14
JULY
1915
Michel Corday celebrates Bastille Day in Paris

It is an overcast summer day with the sun occasionally breaking through the blanket of cloud. Michel Corday notes in his journal:

Silent crowds of people. Wounded men, some of them with limbs amputated, soldiers on leave in greatcoats faded by the sun. As many people collecting money as there are spectators, and they are asking for contributions to a variety of benevolent causes. The regiments march past with their bands; remember that all these men are on their way to the slaughter.

At the Place de l’Étoile he sees the Foreign Minister Théophile Delcassé arrive in an open motor car. Delcassé is probably the man who has worked hardest to bring Italy into the war and he is clearly hoping to be cheered. The great crowd remains silent, however.
^aaa
Corday interprets
the silence as an unconscious protest against the war but at the same time he suspects that there would have been wild jubilation if there had been a victory to boast of. (One of the attendants at the ministry discovered a while ago that the small flags marking the front lines on the department’s war map had cobwebs on them.) “The Marseillaise” rings through the air and woe betide anyone who does not remove his hat. There is the buzz of aeroplanes in the sky overhead.

President Raymond Poincaré speaks. Once again he produces an aggressive, highly emotive and cliché-laden speech about fighting “to the bitter end.” Poincaré is notorious for his ham-fisted rhetoric. An article by him was published in May that some people assumed, in view of all its banality, to be a parody: it proved to be authentic. The president points to the ultimate aim of the war, which is “to banish the nightmare of German megalomania.” Corday believes “There are premonitory signs here of the ill-omened results that could result from a one-sided peace. In that case he is condemning our country to a struggle so drawn out that it could almost be fatal.”

For once, it is almost possible to be conscious of the war even in Paris. Almost.

THURSDAY
, 29
JULY
1915
Elfriede Kuhr listens to nocturnal singing in Schneidemühl

It is dark. The air is warm. A late summer night. She does not know why she wakes up. Perhaps it is the bright moonlight. Because of the heat she is sleeping on a chaise longue out on the veranda. Everything is silent, utterly silent. The only sound to be heard is the reassuring tick of the grandfather clock in the living room. Quite suddenly Elfriede hears singing, faint but melodious and coming from the railway station next to the house. She pricks up her ears, does not recognise the tune and listens for the words. She hears more and more voices joining in and the singing
grows stronger: “Es ist bestimmt in Gottes Rat, dass man vom Liebsten, das man hat, muss scheiden.”
^bbb

The song rises ever stronger, ever more sonorous and clear into the bright, starry night sky, while she sinks, deeper and deeper and deeper. We are always reluctant to leave childhood and we do so step by step; at this moment Elfriede has been affected by one of those insights from which a child never really recovers and which an adult always laments. She curls up on her chaise longue and she weeps:

Why were the soldiers singing like this in the middle of the night? And why this particular song? It wasn’t a soldier’s song. Were the people singing it actually soldiers? Perhaps it was a transport train reaching our town and carrying army coffins with fallen men? Perhaps their mothers and fathers and widows and orphans and girlfriends were on the train? Did they weep as I wept?

Then she hears something from her grandmother’s bedroom—the sound of someone blowing their nose. Elfriede gets up, tiptoes carefully in to her grandmother and says beseechingly, “Can I creep into bed with you for a while?” At first her grandmother is reluctant, but then she lifts the covers and says, “Come on, then.” She cuddles up with her grandmother, presses her head to her grandmother’s breast and sobs. Her grandmother’s forehead is pressed against Elfriede’s hair, and Elfriede can feel that she is crying too.

Neither of them explains why, they make no excuses and they ask no questions.

SATURDAY
, 7
AUGUST
1915
Andrei Lobanov-Rostovsky is resting to the north-east of Warsaw

His company left the city yesterday, without losing any men, even though they had to travel along streets close to the river that were directly open to fire from German machine guns. They saw that the Germans were avoiding firing on civilians so Lobanov-Rostovsky hired civilian
horse-drawn cabs to disguise his own wagons. Today it is calm and they are taking advantage of it …

 … to rest and take stock of our position and war materials. We were told by the Staff that the enemy had crossed the Vistula in several places but so far was not molesting our forces except for small cavalry patrols which had appeared near by. On the other hand, strategically speaking, we seemed to be at the bottom of a sack as the two corps on our flanks had retreated more quickly than we had.

SUNDAY
, 8
AUGUST
1915
Vincenzo D’Aquila is laughed at in Piacenza

The smell of coal smoke. A baking sun. Dust. No one is there to meet them when the train stops at the station. The whole town seems empty of people, most of whom seem to have hidden indoors to avoid the worst of the heat. They have to find their own way through narrow, stifling alleyways to get to the army barracks to enlist.

He is more than a little disappointed not to be greeted with some gratitude at least, even if not with enthusiasm. D’Aquila and the rest of them have braved the Atlantic and the roving German U-boats in order to risk their lives “for the greatness of the Italian fatherland.” Early one bright summer morning he crept out of the house in New York, hid in the hall until his father had passed and then set off for the harbour, where the vessel that would take him to Europe was lying. Not just him: he was one of about 500 Italian-Americans who were intending to enlist in the Italian army. He remembers that all sorts of people were crowded together on board: “the fools and the wise, the strong and the weak. Every walk of life was represented: doctors and quacks, lawyers and shysters, workers and drones, adventurers and vagabonds.” He had also noticed, with some surprise, that many of them, in their eagerness, had come armed with weapons such as stilettos, small automatic pistols and sawn-off shotguns. He had walked impatiently round the foredeck waiting for the foghorn to announce that it was time to cast off, time for the adventure to begin. Vincenzo D’Aquila has thick, dark, curly hair, an
open face, with a straight nose and a weak mouth. The impression he gives is of someone rather uncertain and slightly shy.

He was already feeling the first pangs of disappointment when they stepped ashore into the Mediterranean sun in Naples. He had been expecting an enthusiastic welcome, been hoping for “frantic cheering, flag waving, band playing, scattering of flowers by pretty Neapolitan maidens.” Instead they were herded unceremoniously into a roasting-hot customs hall where they had to wait half a day before a lawyer in a Panama hat and light-coloured suit climbed up on a suitcase and gave a speech. That was all. Apart from that, no one seemed to care.