The Beauty and the Sorrow (27 page)

Yesterday he received her reply. In her letter Mary expressed something close to dismay at his proposal, telling him that if she were ever to consider marriage he would probably be the last man she would choose. Shocked and depressed by the response, Pollard went off to a pub in a nearby village and got drunk on champagne. He was still drunk when he was woken up with the news of his mission.

A short bombardment begins at three o’clock and immediately afterwards the group of men sets off through the trenches in all the noise. There are tall, leafy trees all around them. They have gone little more than fifty yards when they are stopped by a tall barricade of sandbags. They all start throwing hand grenades over it:
Bang! Bang! Bang! Zunk! Zunk! Zunk!
Three minutes later the response arrives in the form of German stick grenades that come sailing down. More bangs and zunks. This continues
for a while until Pollard loses patience. According to the method he was taught at the grenade-training school, Pollard, as the leader, should be in position number five in the group, but he now goes to the front instead.

After three soldiers have each thrown five grenades in quick succession, Pollard and six men climb up out of the trench in order to circumvent the barricade. The Germans have obviously been expecting this because the men are immediately caught in cross-fire. Four of the six fall. Pollard, however, survives and jumps down into the trench, where he is met by the explosion of a German grenade. The shock wave hurls him back against the barricade and he can see small red spots all over his uniform where splinters have entered his body. He gets up.

His group tears down the barricade and rushes on through the twists and turns of the trench. They are throwing grenades in front of them the whole time. The Germans they are pursuing are falling back but others at the side climb up in the trees and open fire on Pollard’s group from a range of no more than forty yards. One by one Pollard’s men drop. He turns to give one of his soldiers an order but at the same moment the man receives a bullet in the throat. Pollard then enters a strange, dreamlike state:

It was just as though my spirit were detached from my body. My physical body became a machine doing the bidding, coolly and accurately, which my spirit dictated. Something outside myself seemed to tell me what to do, so that I was never quite at a loss. At the same time I felt quite certain I should pull through.

They reach a second barricade of sandbags and pass it in the same way as the first. As Pollard turns to one of his remaining men to hand him a sack of hand grenades, the man simply crumples. At the same moment he feels his right arm drop and the sack slip from his grasp. A bullet has gone right through the man in front of him, turned through 180 degrees and continued on into Pollard’s shoulder, blunt end first. There it lodges. Through a haze he sees a red patch spreading on the sleeve of his tunic. His knees give way. Someone gives him a mixture of water and rum to drink. He gets up unsteadily and urges his men on.

Among the last things he remembers is thinking that he must not faint: “Only girls faint.”

Then he faints.

SUNDAY
, 3
OCTOBER
1915
Vincenzo D’Aquila spends the night firing his rifle

The order is at once both clear and incomprehensible. This very morning Vincenzo and the others have been sent to the trenches as replacement troops for the 7th Company of the 2nd Battalion of the 25th Regiment. They are soaked after having spent the night in the open. The trench itself is right in the forward line, looking towards the cone-shape of Monte Santa Lucia on the Isonzo. D’Aquila ends up in a sideshoot of one of the sap trenches. There is a deep and steep-sided valley separating the Italian lines from the Austrian, and the latter also have the advantage of being at a higher level. D’Aquila’s company commander is a warrant officer by the name of Volpe.

The beginners are given instructions. Once the sun sets they must all start firing. All of them. And they should keep on firing all night. The aim is partly to disturb the enemy and partly to guard against possible surprise attacks in the darkness.

The last broken rays of the setting sun fade away on the horizon and the scene shifts from grey to black. The shooting starts. Along the whole section of the front held by the battalion rifle muzzles flash rapidly. D’Aquila is amazed by this aimless firing out into the darkness and by the enormous waste of ammunition: time after time he has heard how ill prepared Italy was for this war, how there is a shortage of everything from money and food to guns and ammunition and so on. He is also amazed that he, against all probability, is now in a position to take the life of another human being. Like very many of the other volunteers his thoughts have mainly focused on his
own
death, not on the fact that he is expected to kill other people.

D’Aquila looks at the sky. It is bright and starry. No, he neither will nor can kill anyone. But what will happen if he refuses to obey orders? D’Aquila comes to a decision. He wanted this, and he came here of his own free will. He will not refuse to attack when the time comes; when they tell him to leave the trench and storm those apparently impregnable Austrian positions up there on the small mountain, he will do so. He will take his chances. But he will not kill. No. Not now, and not ever. And perhaps some higher power will see his decision, recognise it with approval and, in the name of symmetry, spare D’Aquila himself from
all harm. D’Aquila raises his loaded rifle, aims it up into the darkened sky and pulls the trigger. In the course of the night he fires hundreds of rounds in this ineffectual and meaningless way.

Not until dawn is approaching does the firing begin to slacken off. As the wisps of morning mist rise, silence falls over the mezzotint autumn colours of the valley.

Pál Kelemen is on the Serbian border that morning and he notes in his journal:

We are in camp on the vast endless plain. Military and horses all around. Lead gray clouds hang low on the horizon. The Danube marshes start here; the rich Hungarian plain melts into the immense stretch of reed. German infantry is marching southward with resounding steps. Under the wind the sedge bows weakly, as if everything must tremble at the roar of the heavy guns over on the Danube.

WEDNESDAY
, 6
OCTOBER
1915
Florence Farmborough leaves Minsk suffering from toothache

There is a new bite in the air. Gradually the nights are getting longer and colder. One of Florence’s molars has been giving vague but definite twinges of discomfort that today has developed into a distinct and painful throbbing. She is sitting in her wagon, silent and dogged, her face covered by the veil she wears as protection against the sun and the dust on the march.

They left Minsk three days ago, its streets filled with people in uniform and its shop windows full of expensive goods. The city came as a revelation to her, not least because it sparkled with colours like pinks and whites, colours she and her companions have almost forgotten after months of existing with the many shades of brown of the earth, of the road and of uniforms. With simultaneous feelings of embarrassment and pride she and the other nurses have been able to compare themselves—badly fitting and discoloured clothes, rough, red and scabby
hands, weary and sunburnt faces—with the well-dressed and immaculately made-up society ladies of Minsk. And then they moved on, in slightly strange high spirits, to the familiar sounds of the dull echo of artillery fire and the indistinct buzzing of aeroplanes, passing through fields still green and woods turning yellow and red and rust-brown.

The great Russian retreat is practically at an end. Both sides are beginning to dig in for the winter. Florence’s unit is now marching at a noticeably slower pace. On an ordinary day the long, swaying column of horse-drawn wagons covers eighteen miles at most. But they are pleased to no longer be fleeing; they are even beginning to hope for a new turn of events.

Traces of the retreat are still visible in the surrounding fields and ditches. There are scores of dead animals of all kinds, animals that people had taken with them to prevent them falling into the hands of the enemy but which, fairly predictably, died as a result of the long daily marches. She sees dead cows, dead pigs and dead sheep. They awaken a memory:

I remembered seeing a horse fall during the early months of the Retreat; I think it was in the dreadful sand of Molodychi. The men cut it hastily out of the gun-carriage harness and left it lying by the roadside, without so much as a word of regret. As we passed, I remember how its sides heaved and its eyes looked at us like the eyes of a human being being forsaken, and left to suffer and die in solitude.

They come to a halt. The long column stops. They have reached a place where the road cuts across a peat moss covered with spruce trees and some of the wagons in the other flying unit have stuck fast. Slowly, one at a time, the wagons are dragged free, and then they scatter spruce branches over the ground to make passage a little more secure.

They jerk into motion again and Florence sinks back into her isolated world where little or nothing exists apart from that aching tooth. Only once does she lift her veil and that is when they drive into an area where the stench is unusually strong. She hears agitated and questioning voices. It turns out they are passing a heap of some twenty cadavers, many of them horses, that have been lying there infecting the air for weeks.

No one knows exactly what is to happen next. The latest order says
that they should attach themselves to the 62nd Division, which is located somewhere in the district.

Laura de Turczynowicz and the children are now on a transatlantic liner taking them from Rotterdam to New York. The quiet and security of Holland have been exchanged for all the noise and sense of isolation an ocean voyage involves. There are a number of American Red Cross nurses on board but Laura avoids them, having discovered that they are all pro-German. A doctor on board has examined the children and found them to be “surprisingly well” and only in need of “quiet for the nerves and proper food for the body.” But in spite of leaving Europe and the war behind her, Laura is still gripped by anxiety—it is as though anxiety has become a bad habit. In Holland she took the opportunity to send a telegram to Petrograd, to be forwarded to her husband, Stanislaw. In it she tells him that they are all alive and now on their way to the United States. But is Stanislaw himself still alive? It is a long time since she received any word of him. And does anyone know where Laura is going? Does she know herself? “The nearer we got to America the more alone I felt.”

THURSDAY
, 28
OCTOBER
1915
Vincenzo D’Aquila witnesses the unsuccessful storming of Monte Santa Lucia

It is like having a seat in the front row, and not just in a metaphorical sense. The position D’Aquila finds himself in really was designed for observation, a place from which the course of attacks could be monitored through field glasses. The weather is clear for once, so watching the columns storming up the mountainsides should not present a problem.

Orderlies, batmen and the rest of them have got the observation post ready. The damage done to the carefully applied camouflage of branches by the wind during the night has been fixed; tables and chairs have been laid out and the field telephones have been tested. Everything is overlaid by a fuzzy blanket of sound, in which the noise of one explosion scarcely has time to fade before another replaces it. On the other side of
the valley the final stage of Italian drum fire is pounding the Two Sisters—Monte Santa Lucia and Monte Santa Maria—and their forested slopes are wreathed in the white smoke from explosions. Binoculars and sherry are laid out.

Somewhere down there the 7th Company is waiting in a trench to start the attack. D’Aquila is not with them: with the unexpected help of his company commander he has managed to find a posting in which there is no risk of having to kill nor of being killed. He has become an assistant on the headquarters staff because, thanks to his American background, he has a novel and unusual skill—he can type. The shock that hit him that first night in the trench has not receded and D’Aquila has instead entered a state that resembles a confused religious crisis. It manifests itself in two ways: on one hand, it takes the form of brooding on what a Christian can permit himself to do in this situation; on the other, there is his hope that faith can somehow save him and, in his ever more agitated mind, this hope has gradually become his comfort. He has twice taken part in night patrols out into no-man’s-land and on both occasions, in spite of considerable dangers, has returned unharmed. Has he been chosen? And he sees his unexpected posting to the brigade staff as yet another intervention by a higher power.

What he experiences during his time on the staff, however, does not make him any the less anxious and guilt ridden. Rather the opposite.

The staff officers emerge from their protected bunker. They have breakfasted on chocolate and toast and rounded it off with wine. Now they go down into the well-protected observation post. All the underlings immediately make room for them and greet them with smart salutes. The senior officers accept the salutes in a rather distracted manner and take their seats. The orderlies push in their chairs and hand them binoculars.

The performance can begin.

The bombardment ceases. The last shells whistle through the cool air and fall on the Two Sisters. The bursts of white smoke disperse in the air.

Silence falls.

It remains silent for a long time.

Then it becomes possible to see movement in the forward Italian trenches. Spread-out chains of men in grey-green uniforms are beginning to move towards the steep mountainsides. One of these clusters of
men, scrambling, climbing, crawling and jumping, is D’Aquila’s company, the 7th. It all happens slowly. At this distance their posture and their way of moving is reminiscent of people looking for something. Then comes the hollow rattle of Austrian machine guns—Schwarzlose machine guns. One by one they open fire from invisible nests somewhere up there on the wooded peaks. In spite of days of bombardment the Italian artillery has failed to silence them. There are two weapons that now dominate the battlefields: the artillery and the machine gun. Ordinary foot soldiers have increasingly become their servants (and their victims), whose task is to occupy terrain that has been swept clean by the hail of shells and to protect the machine guns while they perform their function. As they are doing here. The machine guns rap and the lines of men are thinned out, slow down, fall to the ground, turn back.