The Beauty and the Sorrow (28 page)

This jerky, disjointed procedure is repeated time after time down there in the valley. A company will rise from its trenches, work its way a little up the mountainside, lie down to avoid the lash of machine-gun fire and finally flee back, decimated. After a while another attempt will be made, which will also fail, since there are fewer men than before; they, too, will turn back, their ranks even thinner, only to be ordered out yet again. And so it continues.

D’Aquila is horrified, not just by the realisation that some of those dark, motionless stains on the distant hillside are his comrades but also by the indifference of the senior officers and the complete absence of any tactical finesse. All the warring parties have recognised by this stage that the firepower of the armies has become so overwhelming that attackers will inevitably suffer heavy losses. Yet many generals still subscribe to the pre-war illusion that it is possible to compensate for firepower with pure and simple willpower—the will to struggle on forward through the hail of bullets, irrespective of losses. But whose will, that is the issue? Towards the end of the day D’Aquila hears a conversation on the field telephone. The captain of a company of Alpini telephones and begs that his men be spared from making further attacks. His elite Alpine troops have stormed the mountainside fifteen times and fifteen times they have been beaten back. Of 250 men, barely twenty-five are left. The commander rejects the request and tells the man holding the receiver to remind the captain of the oath he swore to Italy and to the Crown.

The Alpini company attacks one last time. That attack also fails. The captain is not one of the survivors: the rumour is that he took his own life.

On 30 October D’Aquila is given an order to type out on his machine: it announces that all attacks are to be suspended for the present. Thus ends what has since been called the Third Battle of the Isonzo. Not a single one of its objectives has been achieved.
^mmm

A few days later the Italian army celebrates All Saints’ Day with particular reverence. D’Aquila eventually discovers that one of those killed in the unsuccessful attack was his good friend Frank.

Sarah Macnaughtan is on her way to the Russian front. She and her party have arrived in Petrograd on the 28th after a long journey through Norway, Sweden and Finland. They move into a hotel. Then there is the first of a series of meetings. (No one knows exactly where their unit is to be sent in.) She notes in her diary:

There is a story I try to tell, but something gets into my throat, and I tell it in jerks when I can. It is the story of the men who played football across the open between the enemy’s line of trenches and our own when it was raked by fire. When I had finished, a friend of mine, evidently waiting for the end of a pointless story, said, “What did they do that for?” (Oh, ye gods, have pity on men and women who suffer from fatty degeneration of the soul!)

SUNDAY
, 31
OCTOBER
1915
Pál Kelemen witnesses the hanging of a Serbian guerrilla fighter

The invasion of Serbia by the Central Powers is going completely to plan. Public opinion at home thinks that it is about time too: in 1914 the Austro-Hungarian army had gone on the offensive against their
Serbian neighbour on three occasions and three times it had been driven back. Not this time. On 6 October the combined German and Austro-Hungarian armies attacked, on 8 October they took Belgrade (for the third time since the previous August, incidentally), and on 11 October the Bulgarian army also invaded. The defeated Serbian forces are now retreating to avoid the threat of encirclement and huge numbers of civilians are accompanying them on their uncertain flight south.
ⁿⁿⁿ

Pál Kelemen and his hussars are among the pursuers. They are advancing rapidly in the late-October rain and there have been periods when he has not been out of the saddle for days at a time. They have ridden past burning, looted buildings, along roads overcrowded with refugees—mostly women of all ages and children. And all the time they have been riding towards the sound of distant gunfire.

This Sunday the squadron is standing by the ruins of a Serbian inn. Hundreds of wounded men are lying on the muddy ground surrounding the building. There is still fighting going on against the rearguard of the retreating enemy—not here, but two mountain ridges further on, which is why there is some consternation when a soldier is brought in with a leg wound during the afternoon. He has been fired on from a cottage. An hour and a half later another soldier arrives, having been shot at from the same place; this one has a stomach wound.

A patrol is sent to investigate and it returns after a short while, bringing with it a badly dressed individual of medium height. His hands are tied together. The patrol is followed by people who are clearly relations and neighbours of the prisoner—some women and children and several older men. Pál Kelemen notes in his journal:

They tried the man with the aid of an interpreter and heard the principal witnesses. It seems that, in spite of repeated warnings from his fellow villagers, he was firing viciously on our soldiers. As he surveys the crowd gathered there, he looks half savage, dropped from another world.

The sentence is soon passed; the guerrilla must hang.
^ooo

The cook of the station, a Viennese pork butcher, undertakes the role of hangman with pleasure. He fetches a long rope and gets hold of an empty box to serve as trap. The
komidatschi
is told to say his last prayers and answers that he does not need them. The women cry, the children whimper and stare, petrified, while the soldiers stand around the tree wearily matter-of-fact but with excitement in their eyes.

The
komidatschi
is brought up by two soldiers. He shows no particular emotion but looks around with a truculent stare as if he were insane. They put the sling around his neck and pull the platform from under his feet. The rope was not hung high enough, and, with a supplementary powerful tug, the butcher adjusts it. The man’s face is slowly distorted. Long jerking convulsions shake his body, dying. The tongue twists out of his mouth as he swings with stiffening limbs.

The spectators disperse in the twilight, the soldiers leaving first, then the civilians. Later Kelemen sees two soldiers coming along the road. They notice the body swinging in the autumn wind, go up to it and laugh. One of them gives the corpse a hard thump with the butt of his rifle, then they both salute and go on their way.

SUNDAY
, 7
NOVEMBER
1915
Richard Stumpf sees two acts of
Lohengrin
in Kiel

It is a pleasantly warm and sunny November day. SMS
Helgoland
is entering the Kiel Canal and rumours immediately begin to spread through the crew. Hard land battles have been raging around Riga and perhaps they are on their way up into the Baltic to offer support. Or perhaps the English are on their way in through the Great Belt. Or perhaps neutral Denmark is being dragged into the war. Or perhaps it is all … yet another torpedo firing exercise. Stumpf settles for the latter “so that I won’t be disappointed yet again.”

The atmosphere on board is dreadful. Stumpf and the rest of them are sick of the inactivity, sick of the worsening quality of the food, sick of the harsh discipline and sick of being bullied by the officers. The ship has a special punishment unit and every day twenty to thirty men can be seen running round and round the ship carrying their rifles and full battle kit. It takes very little to be punished: a dirty handbasin, a forgotten sock, a visit to the lavatory when on duty, an objectionable comment. Stumpf writes in his journal:

The fighting spirit of the crew has sunk so low that we would be delighted to get a torpedo in the belly. It’s what we would all like to see happen to our despicable officers. If anyone had been heard wishing any such thing a year and a half ago he would have received a good thrashing. There is an evil spirit loose among us and it is only our good upbringing that stops us imitating what happened in the Russian Baltic fleet.
^ppp
We all recognise that we have more to lose than our chains.

As they pass up through the canal Stumpf sees how the woods and hills shine in many different shades of yellow, red and brown. There will soon be snow.

It is evening when they arrive in Kiel. He notes that they have begun
to ease up a little on the blackout that used to be so strictly enforced. Is there something lurking behind that? Or is it just a sign that the serious and dedicated mood of the first year is slowly beginning to wear thin? The crew is allowed ashore. (Because, as he suspected, what they have to look forward to is not a battle but a couple more days of torpedo exercises.) Richard Stumpf rushes to one of the theatres in the city and manages to catch the last two acts of Wagner’s
Lohengrin
. Afterwards he comments in his diary:

It’s a pity I can’t get to more occasions like this. They make you feel like a human being rather than just a worthless beast of burden.

TUESDAY
, 9
NOVEMBER
1915
Sarah Macnaughtan watches soldiers drilling in Petrograd

Snow and cold. Sarah Macnaughtan is confined to her comfortable room in the Hotel Astoria nursing a lingering cold and studying Russian. Trying to, anyway. She is finding it difficult to concentrate. Her eyes are drawn time after time to the window and out over the open square in front of the hotel, where a troop of soldiers is drilling.

Macnaughtan and her companions have been in Petrograd for just two weeks and the time seems to have been wasted. Nothing has happened. They have no idea where their six ambulances are—the vehicles were sent by ship through Archangel—and nor do they know where they are to be sent to serve. If anywhere. In complete contradiction to earlier assurances, the Russian Red Cross is unwilling to accept them. And Russian bureaucracy has proved to be even more impenetrable than British. They are lost in a maze of meetings, audiences and formal dinners. All to no effect. She writes in her diary:

We want to be one in the great sacrifice war involves, and we offer and present ourselves, our souls and our bodies in great causes, only to find that there is some strange unexplained quality of resistance meeting us everywhere.

They are perhaps going to be sent to Dvinsk, where there has been heavy fighting ever since September—and perhaps not. The rumours emerging from the front are as confused as they are contradictory.

The soldiers on the square are drilling in the snow and Macnaughtan notes their inadequate clothing. Their coats are made of a cotton material, not of wool. This is just one example of the shortages that have hit Russia and her army. On the other hand, it is possible to get hold of just about anything if you have money. The well-heated hotel restaurant is full to overflowing every evening with well-dressed people gorging themselves on copious quantities of food and alcohol to the accompaniment of an orchestra. (She has a strong suspicion that some of the women are prostitutes.) She feels uncomfortable—sickened, even—when she is sitting in the restaurant.

And while this is going on, soldiers are starving, freezing, being wounded, maimed and dying at the distant front and there is suffering to be seen at close quarters, too. Just the other day Macnaughtan was helping to distribute food at a barracks full of people who had fled before the German advance in Poland. It is not just the smell and the disorder and the poverty that fills her with disgust, the people do so as well. The Polish refugees seem to her “as being very like animals, but not so interesting.” These are the lucky ones—many more are said to be still out on the roads, sleeping in the snow.

And here we are in the Astoria Hotel, and there is one pane of glass between us and the weather; one pane of glass between us and the peasants of Poland; one pane of glass dividing us from poverty, and keeping us in the horrid atmosphere of this place, with its evil women and its squeaky band! How I hate money!

These contrasts existed earlier, of course, but the war has made them more acute, more glaring and, morally speaking, more offensive. Which restaurants are the best is a popular topic of conversation.

It is probably all this hanging about and enforced inactivity that account for her lack of strength. The energy that flowed into her during her lecture tour of Great Britain has begun to leak away. She can feel her thought processes slowing down. When Macnaughtan arrived in Petrograd she had the idea that she would use the waiting time to write
another book, but she simply does not have the strength. She sniffs and leafs through her Russian textbook. The soldiers down on the square carry on drilling backwards and forwards. They lie down, stand up, lie down, stand up.

FRIDAY
, 12
NOVEMBER
1915
Olive King and the light in Gevgelí

She had never really wanted to leave France. In a letter to her stepmother in the middle of October she allows something approaching dejection to show through for once:

I sometimes feel I’m never going home, as if this rotten war were going on for ever. Every few weeks it seems to increase rather than slacken off, more countries getting dragged in, everything getting worse & worse. As for us, we don’t know at all where we are going …

Then the women in the Scottish Women’s Hospital heard that they were to be sent by ship to the Balkans, where a Franco-British corps under General Maurice Sarrail—sent in great haste and with almost no equipment—had landed in October at Salonica in neutral Greece in the hope of helping the Serbs by opening a second front.
^qqq
King did not want
to go at first. Ella, her big ambulance, was altogether too heavy and her engine too weak for the dreadful road conditions there.