The Beauty and the Sorrow (36 page)

Captain Bianchi is strangely embarrassed, fiddles with his spectacles and blames orders from higher up. Once again D’Aquila starts arguing his case: it is the world that is mad, not him. He analyses, prophesies, orates: “Are we not told by Christ to love our enemies?” And so on. The captain listens patiently, shakes his hand, wishes him good luck and escorts him out into the yard, where an ambulance is waiting, its engine idling. As D’Aquila climbs aboard the engine splutters and cuts out. See, another sign from the heavens!

Eventually the driver and a mechanic get the vehicle started. They drive through Udine towards San Osvaldo at ferocious speed. The morning is cold and clear.

A DAY IN FEBRUARY
, 1916
Pál Kelemen watches transport convoys on a mountain road in Montenegro

So Montenegro—one of the enemies of the Central Powers, although perhaps not the most important of them—has been knocked out. Pál Kelemen and his hussars took part in the operations, once again without seeing any fighting to speak of. They are now back to their familiar old routine—road patrols and guard duty. He notes in his journal:

General Headquarters is being moved. As the railway bridge is not yet repaired, the provisioning service between the two stations is carried on by motor truck. But in spite of the very inadequate facilities for transporting the general food supply, all the vehicles have been requisitioned to help move Headquarters.

Columns of trucks wind over the mountains, packed with cases of champagne, wire-spring beds, floor lamps, special kitchen equipment, and various crates of delicacies. The troops
receive a third of their normal rations. The infantry at the front has had only a morsel of bread for four days, but the staff officers’ mess serves the usual four-course dinners.

SATURDAY
, 5
FEBRUARY
1916
Olive King is looking forward to a day off in Salonica

She is sharing a tent with three other women. They make their own breakfast in the morning on a portable British military stove fuelled with meta tablets: it is small and pretty ineffective but does manage to boil water for coffee and just about heat a tin of sausages. Not much is happening in Salonica. As usual. The front is quiet, so quiet that the troops in the front line have even started digging vegetable plots in which they intend to grow peas. The only warlike activities on offer are the bombing raids made by the occasional German Zeppelin. The first more serious raid was made at the end of December and there was a second one four days ago. The effect of these attacks has been negligible.

Just as on all the other static front lines, the war in the air has been given a degree of attention out of proportion to its real importance. It has to stand in for all those things people had hoped for from the war but which are now so difficult to find: colour, excitement and drama, a scenario in which the courage and skill of the individual has some significance. A shot-down German plane was paraded through the whole of Salonica with a great hullabaloo the other day. (The fact that it was forced down just behind the French lines was mostly a matter of luck: there was only one bullet hole in the whole aircraft, but the shot had gone through the petrol tank.) King was there to watch. Allied cavalry clattered along in the lead, followed by several motor cars full of proud Allied pilots; then came the aeroplane, in pieces, carried on three lorries; after that were more Allied motor cars, with another column of mounted troops bringing up the rear. King gives an account of the events in a letter addressed to her sister:

That was the limited procession, to impress the Dagos, & they certainly stared open-mouthed, but the amusing part was the mass of lorries, ambulances, cars, trams, bullock wagons, packhorses
& etc. which had been held up by the procession, & came straggling along after it.

In the darkness outside it is raining. King is lying in her tent writing to her sister and she keeps it short since she only has half a candle left. After that she goes to bed, which never takes very long. She simply takes her boots and skirt off and creeps half-dressed under the blanket and her overcoat. She and the other three in the tent have tomorrow off and she is looking forward to it. She is thinking of starting with a long lie-in, and for breakfast they will share the three eggs she bought earlier this evening.

SUNDAY
, 13
FEBRUARY
1916
Rafael de Nogales and the wild duck on the Tigris

There is a chill in the air. The morning’s rain has turned into a heavy snowfall by eleven o’clock and the flat desert landscape around them is transformed into an exotic white. Rafael de Nogales is on a steamship going south down the mud-coloured Tigris, towards the front. He is once again in search of battle and danger. He left his post on the staff in Baghdad yesterday in order to serve with a brigade of cavalry involved in the fierce battles around Kut al-Amara.

Apart from the cold, it is a pleasant, almost idyllic journey:

The only things to break the monotony of the landscape were the
djirts
and waterwheels turning slowly on both river-banks, the contours of which were broken at regular intervals by dusty groves of palm trees and small, yellow-coloured villages. Here and there flocks of wild duck flew with beating wings across the leaden sky, perhaps frightened into taking off when the crew of a dhow further upstream hoisted their triangular sail to the accompaniment of one of those long, mournful songs that resemble a wail of lament rather than music and which are as long drawn-out and melancholy as the horizon of the desert.

De Nogales had actually attempted to get a discharge from the Ottoman army when he arrived in Aleppo, exhausted and sick after his long
and dangerous ride from Sairt. Nothing he saw during the journey made him change his mind. Quite the reverse. Time after time he stumbled across traces of the massacre of Christians and he saw long columns of deported Armenians, above all women and children, being reduced to “filthy, ragged skeletons” as they were marched to death under the watchful eyes of Ottoman soldiers.

A telegram from the war ministry in Constantinople, however, informed him that his request had been rejected but offered him treatment in the headquarters hospital. De Nogales did not dare accept the offer: as a witness to the massacres he was in fear of his life. After being in close contact with the German military delegation in Aleppo, however, he felt sufficiently safe—after a month’s convalescence—to report for a new posting.
^b

First of all he landed up in an administrative job in a small, distant place in the province of Adana, where he carried on an unequal, but to some extent successful, struggle against the disorder, corruption and appalling incompetence that characterised the Ottoman army’s transport system. In December, however, an unexpected telegram summoned him to a new posting, this time on the staff of Baron Colmar von der Goltz, the German field marshal who was in command of the Ottoman Sixth Army in Mesopotamia.
^c

Still feeling some disquiet but eager for new excitement and glad to escape this internal exile along the caravan routes in Adana, de Nogales set off south towards the Mesopotamian front. The halting of the British push towards Baghdad was judged to be a great success and an even greater success was on the cards if the British corps surrounded in Kut al-Amara could be made to surrender. There is now fierce fighting going on around the small town, and also further downstream, where British units are attempting to force their way through to relieve the siege.

After travelling for a few hours they meet another boat on the river. The two vessels stop alongside each other and he sees a small man in the uniform of an Ottoman colonel come across on a gangplank. The man, who has a pointed beard and a “proud but unassuming” manner, is Nureddin Bey, the Turk who was not only in command when the British
advance was checked at Ctesiphon but was also largely responsible for the successful encirclement of Townshend’s corps. Nureddin is now on his way to Constantinople, “stripped and humiliated,” removed from his post as governor of Baghdad. Halil Bey, the new governor, may not be able to boast of any great military talent but he has first-class political contacts and now, with the scent of a great victory in the air, he is eager to usurp the role of official victor.
^d

Halil’s nephew was Enver Pasha, one of the leading Young Turks and an aggressive nationalist who was the driving force in taking the Ottoman Empire into the war on the side of the Central Powers. In practical terms Enver was now the ruler of the empire as a sort of military dictator, and it was he who had dismissed Nureddin from Baghdad and replaced him with his uncle.

Because of its scale this war produces heroes at a phenomenal rate and the newspapers are full of them. Once used, they are cast aside just as rapidly. Death or oblivion awaits most of them. Also in Baghdad is another architect of the victory at Ctesiphon
^e
—Field Marshal von der Goltz. In spite of his high rank the seventy-two-year-old German is virtually isolated, and he is ill, spending most of his days alone in a small, dirty tent.

As evening approaches, de Nogales sees rows of thin spirals of smoke “rising into a pepper and salt sky of grey and gold.” The front is not far away and they have reached the point at which river transport will become land transport. Here he can see the spinning cogs of the enormous machine that keeps the war going—most armies need something like fifteen men working behind the lines to supply one fighting soldier.

Weaponry has undergone great change over the past fifty years,
becoming ever more deadly, but the means of transport have hardly changed at all. This is one of the main reasons that the war so often stalls and becomes static. Once the trains have reached their termini the further progress of the armies relies on exactly what it relied on in Caesar’s or Napoleon’s day—the muscles in a man’s legs or in a horse’s back. But these ever more complex organisations demand more and more equipment, and the weapons, with their increasingly rapid rate of fire, demand more and more ammunition.
^f

The majority of campaigns, particularly those fought beyond the well-developed railway network of western Europe, are decided more by logistics than by tactics. However brave an army’s soldiers may be and however advanced their weapons, it will inevitably find itself at a disadvantage if the transport system that is supposed to support it is weak or underdeveloped. The conflict has increasingly become an economic competition, a war between factories. And logistics is the Ottoman army’s weak link.

During his service de Nogales has witnessed any amount of Ottoman ineptitude and corruption but on the Mesopotamian front they have mobilised everything they can. What de Nogales sees as his boat draws closer is, in its way, impressive. There is no mistaking the Turks’ determination or their energy. At the same time, however, there is something timeless about the scene:

With every moment that passed I could see more and more clearly the line of steamers, dhows, nankeens, terradas, cufas and rafts moored along the left bank of the Tigris, all busily loading or unloading military supplies and provisions, which were standing in tall, pyramid-shaped stacks along the steep banks of the river. Thousands of buffaloes, camels and other beasts of burden, tended by Arab herdsmen in picturesque dress, were grazing
peacefully over a vast expanse covered with white tents that spread as far as one could see in the hazy distance. Cavalry patrols and infantry platoons were marching backwards and forwards to the sound of military music through an enormous uniformed throng, from which rose a ceaseless mumble of voices like the roar of a distant sea. Now and then the hubbub was pierced by the shrill braying of the animals, the hoarse notes of sirens, the singing of imams calling men to prayer and the yells of Persian, Arab and Jewish merchants who, gesticulating grandly, offered our soldiers tobacco, olives and plates of greasy fare.

De Nogales spends the night aboard the
Firefly
, a sooty, bullet-riddled British gunboat that fell into Ottoman hands during the fighting at Umm two months ago. Both sides keep small flotillas of heavily armed boats on the Tigris, mainly to protect their own supply chain since the river, which is unusually difficult to navigate this year because of drought, is a living artery for both armies.

The faint roar of distant explosions can sometimes be heard and on the distant horizon oily smoke rises densely above some groves of palm trees. Somewhere over there is Kut al-Amara and its beleaguered defenders.

One of the men over there in the encircled town is Edward Mousley. At the moment he is suffering from dysentery and waking up this morning was more than usually unpleasant: apart from the inevitable diarrhoea he has severe pains in the small of his back and in his head, and he has a high temperature. The doctors’ orders are simple: “Improve your diet.” Mousley comments: “They might as well have recommended an ocean cruise.” Food supplies are slowly but surely shrinking in Kut al-Amara. Some of the men who want to stay on their feet at any price keep themselves going on opium pills and various other home remedies, such as a mixture of castor-oil and Chlorodyne, a well-known analgesic patent medicine with a minty taste: its active ingredients are opium, cannabis and chloroform.
^g

The situation at Kut al-Amara is unchanged—they are all waiting for new efforts to relieve them. Some of them are growing impatient whereas others are simply waiting, bordering on apathetic, having stopped believing in a quick rescue. They talk jokingly of feeling “siegy” or “dugoutish.” And the screw has just been tightened one more turn: they were bombed by an enemy plane today. Mousley despairs: “The circle is closed. We are being shot at from all directions, including above.” The most upsetting news of the day is that people at home in Britain do not know anything about what is happening in Mesopotamia; they think the corps has just gone into some sort of winter hibernation.