The Beauty and the Sorrow (41 page)

As they pack their things, their mugs clinking as they are shoved back into the rucksacks, the soldiers start asking questions. Why are they retreating? Why don’t they stay and fight? Monelli has trouble coming up with answers:

What do they know and what do I know about what is happening? Nothing. We fight, we march, we halt, we are just numbers among the mass that pours forward, that manoeuvres along this mountainous front in the ice of the mighty Dolomite Alps, with a dull grudge in our hearts, a painful feeling of not knowing, of not seeing.

At the same time, in some distant castle with thick carpets on the floor, there are the people Monelli calls “those mysterious gods who spin the threads of our fate,” in other words, “an officer who writes, a clerk who copies, an adjutant who leaves the room, and a colonel who swears.”

This is the war. It is not the risk of dying, not the red firework display of a bursting shell that blinds us as it comes whizzing down (and rise to his feet, look around, quite confused by the great anguish
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), but the feeling of being a puppet in the hands of an unknown puppeteer—and that feeling sometimes chills the heart as if death itself had taken hold of it. Chained to the trench until orders to be relieved arrive as suddenly as a cannon shot or a snowstorm, tied to ever-present danger, to a fate that is inscribed with the number of your platoon or the name of your trench, unable to take your shirt off when you want to, unable to write home when you want to, seeing the most modest needs of
existence governed by rules over which you have no influence—all this is war.
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They continue in the darkness, uphill again. Their steps are heavy in the mixture of mud and snow. He sees yet another burning village and can hear explosions and rifle fire behind them. The rearguard—or, more accurately, the rearguard’s rearguard—is under attack: it is poor old da Pèrgine and his men.
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Their progress becomes even more leaden, staggering and vacant, their steps dully mechanical. After a while no one even has the energy to complain. Monelli and his companions have not slept properly for several nights and their weariness is painful, numbing, almost narcotic in its effect. Wrapped in the dull ache of exhaustion they let the world around flow slowly past, stripped of all its significance. They no longer pay any attention to explosions and burning houses, hardly think of the fact they are being pursued and could be attacked at any moment. Rests are no longer of much help either, since when they wake from a brief nap (on the ground, in the snow) they feel even more numbed, even more desperately grey and weary.

They walk on through the forest all night until a cold pale dawn arrives.

The sun is already rising when they reach their own lines. Two sentries try to stop them, demanding passwords. The exhausted men hurl a torrent of oaths at the sentries and stagger past them. Further on, they come across men from other companies and other battalions, a confused jumble of soldiers, carts and nervous mules, “the sharp sound of shod hooves on stone.” A light drizzle is falling.

Rest, at last, at last. Monelli crawls into a small tent. He falls asleep with his hands tightly clenched, and in his dreams he continues to march a march that has no end.

• • •

That same day René Arnaud and his battalion are still waiting in the village of Belval-en-Argonne. They can just hear the sound of the guns away at Verdun. They are extremely nervous, suspecting that they will soon be thrown into the great battle. Being at the front when things are calm can undoubtedly be dangerous but is not particularly costly in terms of lives: there might be the occasional raid to be undertaken, but it is mostly the British who do things like that. But to be sent to the front in the context of a major offensive is a completely different matter. Then there will inevitably be losses, huge losses:

We tramped around, swapped rumours and discussed things. I can still remember Truchet, the battalion doctor, standing there with his head bowed, legs apart and an anxious, restless expression on his face as, more nervous than ever before, he scratched his black beard with his left hand: “This is a disgrace! This slaughter should be stopped! They’re allowing thousands of men to be massacred just to defend a heap of out-of-date old forts. It is horrible! Oh, what a fine bunch of generals we’ve got.”

TUESDAY
, 30
MAY
1916
René Arnaud reaches the front line on Hill 321 outside Verdun

The worst mental suffering in wartime is when one’s thoughts rush off and anticipate what one has not yet done or experienced, when the imagination is given ample opportunity to consider the dangers that await—and to multiply them a hundred times over. It is a well-known fact that the fear induced by thinking of a danger is more nerve-racking than meeting the danger itself, in the same way that desire is more intoxicating than the satisfaction of desire.

So writes René Arnaud. The great battle has been going on almost continuously since the end of February, when the German army launched its carefully prepared offensive. Arnaud and his men knew that sooner or later it would be their turn,
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that they too would soon be travelling
up along “La Route,” the only road that can be used to supply this sector of the front and along which lorries pass at an average rate of one every fourteen seconds. To those who receive the order to march to Verdun it feels like a sacrificial progress.
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Arnaud has heard people talking about the statistics. An officer recently returned from Verdun said straight out, “The whole thing is very simple. You will be relieved when three-quarters of your men have been knocked out. That’s the going rate.”

Arnaud and the rest of his battalion have spent the day in the seventeenth-century citadel of Verdun, an enormous structure of staff rooms, stores, endless corridors, subterranean casemates and bombproof barrack rooms. A warm smell of cabbage, mouldy bread, disinfectant, sweat and sour wine permeates the whole place. The sound of distant shell-bursts, like a ceaseless growl, penetrates through the small loopholes in the three-foot-thick stone walls. The Germans have three times as many artillery pieces per yard of the front here as they had during the great breakthrough at Gorlice—and it shows.

The heat is stifling. Arnaud has been lying on his straw mattress thinking about the statistics. Three-quarters. Which of his men will not be returning from out there? Which of the battalion’s officers will get through the coming week without being wounded or killed? Statistically speaking, just three or four. Will he be one of them?

They receive their orders during the afternoon:

Tonight the 6th Battalion is to relieve the battalion from the 301st Regiment that has been stationed on Hill 321. The battalion will leave the citadel at 19:15 hours to arrive at 21:00 hours at the point where the road to Bras meets the Pied du Gravier ravine. A gap of 50 metres is to be observed between each group.

Arnaud talks to his men, who are busy filling their packs with tinned food, dry biscuits, tools and ammunition. The atmosphere is a nervous one. He tries to calm them, not by making patriotic speeches—he knows
that never works in this kind of situation—but by invoking precedent: “We have always been a lucky company. We are going to return from Verdun.”

They move out in single file in the dusk, group by group, out of the dark and safe interior of the citadel and through the empty and silent ruins of the town. Now and then a heavy shell lands close to the cathedral. The long chain of heavily laden men crosses the river by a pontoon bridge, its planks echoing under their feet. Arnaud looks at the dark water and wonders “how many of us will ever cross this bridge again.”

While they are taking a rest a man “with a flabby, swollen face and crafty eyes” comes up to Arnaud, holds out some papers and appeals to him. The man is clearly making a last-minute attempt to be excused. He points out he is a tailor and has never been in the front line before because he has a hernia. The papers confirm this. Arnaud, who is already bitter that, given the prospect of being sent to Verdun, one of the professional officers in the battalion suddenly managed to wangle a transfer to the baggage-train, merely snarls at him.

Arnaud cannot help feeling sorry for the man as he watches him going away crestfallen, his head bowed and the papers still in his hand. And he thinks that he, too, might have tried the same thing were it not for the badges of rank on his arm.

Immediately after this they pass a unit on its way out of the fire, all of them with muddied clothes and feverish eyes; he cannot help envying the young lieutenant commanding them—“How I wished I was him!”

They begin clambering up the high sides of the ravine that leads to the battlefield.

The thunder of the artillery grows, all the individual sounds merging together. The sky to the right of them is glowing where shells are falling over Fort de Douaumont, captured by the Germans on the fourth day of the battle and now a centre point for the fighting. Indeed, it has become more than that and is now a landmark, a magnet, a myth (for both sides), a symbol which, in the way of symbols, has acquired a significance beyond its strategic importance and become the focus of keen competition between German and French propagandists, its capture a measure of success at a time when successes have become more and more abstract in nature whereas reverses are all too concrete. Since the battle began at the end of February roughly twenty million shells have landed on the battlefield.

The darkness grows deeper as they continue moving forward along an empty road. Suddenly there is a lightning flash above them, followed by a short, sharp report. Instinctively they all duck. The first enemy shell. Now and then they take a break. They can smell the stench of rotting flesh. Arnaud is afraid and becoming more and more impatient. Finally, they meet their guide:

We set off at a fast pace, across a ravine, up some steep slopes, turned off to the right and then swung to the left. Shells were exploding on both sides of us. We jumped down into a connecting trench, climbed out of it again, leapt down again and at last scrambled up yet again. I was following in line behind the last group and was marching as though asleep.

They come to a halt immediately in front of a ridge that is being fired on by the German artillery. Their guide has disappeared into the night. Arnaud is under a lot of pressure: he has no idea where they are but he knows that they must be in position before sunrise. If they are not in a bunker by then they will be spotted by the German forward observers and machine gunners and that will be the end of them. So he goes to the front of the company and they quickly set off again, down into a little hollow peppered with shell holes, past a hill where 15cm shells are thumping down regularly in salvoes of four and into an empty connecting trench. They come across two officers half-asleep beside a lit candle in an improvised bunker: they have no idea where Hill 321 is.

Arnaud moves on, gambling that it is to their right:

I could already sense that cold edge to the air that means that dawn is not far off. I hurried along, followed by swaying bayonets and water bottles. If only we can get there before it’s light! In the distance the contours of the ridge were beginning to show up against a sky that was still dark. The bombardment became more intense, as it always does before dawn. “Get a move on! Get a move on!”

At last—bunkers, shadowy figures, Hill 321.
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He finds the commander of the battalion. He is given a guide to accompany them for the
very last section, up a seemingly endless slope. Once up on the plateau they are met by a hail of shells but still move forward. Then they meet a captain, the officer in command of the company they are to relieve. The handover in the grey light of dawn is the simplest imaginable—the captain points out where the Germans are, where the line of their own trenches runs and rounds it off with a quick, “This is the front line. Good night.”

What the maps show as a trench turns out to be little more than a ditch that is hardly a metre in depth. His soldiers lie down and soon go to sleep, leaning against one another. Arnaud himself is utterly exhausted, both by the physical exertions and by the enormous strain. He sinks down with his head between his knees. “I was on the battlefield at Verdun but was hardly conscious of the fact.”

WEDNESDAY
, 31
MAY
1916
Willy Coppens lists the accidents during the spring in Étampes

There is a special procedure to be followed whenever a fatal accident occurs. All flying comes to a halt, the flying machines are rolled into their hangars and all the trainees gather round to hold a wake over the mangled body—“a depressing business.” The funeral takes place the following day, and the citizens of the town and all the classes in the school, as well as the other trainee pilots, all file past the grave. (Those killed in accidents are always buried in Étampes’ own small cemetery.) Then the hangar doors are opened and flying lessons start again.

Willy Coppens has seen this procedure repeated many times during the spring. Accidents are, in fact, very common occurrences.
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It is the noise, above all, that sticks in his memory. First of all the screams of the spectators, followed by “that dreadful sound of splintering wood.” And finally, silence, that indescribable silence when the engine has stopped, the pieces of wreckage have settled and the body has hit the ground with a strange sort of dull crunch, that empty silence that lasts for a few seconds—and for eternity.