The Beauty and the Sorrow (45 page)

THURSDAY
, 20
JULY
1916
Olive King distributes clothes in Salonica

The day begins to cool down. There are nine sacks lined up in the clothing store and Olive King is waiting impatiently. The sacks contain the clothes, equipment and personal possessions of nine patients due to be shipped out of Salonica today and her task is to ensure that they are issued to the rightful owners. None of them has arrived yet and she hopes to have time to bathe in the warm sea before the camp gates are locked. Eventually she goes over to the ward where the nine patients are and asks them to hurry up. Now she can hand out the sacks, but one of the patients opens his and protests that these are not his belongings. Accompanied by the patient, Olive King starts a hopeless search for the right sack.

She will not be able to bathe this evening.

She finishes a letter to her father instead and confesses to something she has hitherto treated as “a deep and dark secret”—the fact that she no longer has long hair:

I cut my hair when we first came out here (that’s why I’ve never sent you any snapshots since I’ve been here) & it’s just been the greatest imaginable blessing, saves such a lot of time & always tidy & comfortable. It really looks quite nice, & has grown so thick, & it’s lovely not having anything blowing in your eyes driving. As soon as it was done I couldn’t imagine why I’d never done it before.

Sarrail’s Army of the Orient is still in Salonica, in lofty defiance both of Greek neutrality and of the fact that there seems to be little or no point to the whole business any longer. The overcrowded city is now surrounded by a belt of fortifications almost as deep as those to be seen on the Western Front.
^yy
In other words, a standstill. What real fighting there is is going on up in Macedonia, nicknamed Muckedonia by the British troops because of the mud and dirt there. It is hotter than down on the coast and disease is rife up there, particularly malaria, but also dengue fever. Battlefield casualties are few.

Olive King is considering enlisting in the Serbian army, partly because she is tired of all the trivial jobs, all the waiting and all the well-organised inactivity in the fortified enclave of Salonica, and partly because she has discovered that the nurses in general and their new supervisor in particular detest women volunteers like her. King says that she has “had enough of women’s discipline—or rather, lack of it” and would rather work for a real military organisation. There is also another factor in the equation, in the form of a charming Serbian liaison officer she has become acquainted with. Large parts of what remains of the Serbian army have been shipped from Corfu to Salonica.

The evenings can be pleasant, at least as long as the wind is not blowing too hard and filling the air with dust. She reads or she writes letters. She and some friends sometimes find tortoises and organise races with them. Sometimes they crawl through the wire and go to a small café just
behind the camp. It is often empty and there they drink lemon juice and soda and dance for hours to the rasping tones of a wind-up gramophone. There are only two records of dance music—“Dollar Princess” and “La Paloma”—and they play them time after time.

MONDAY
, 24
JULY
1916
Sarah Macnaughtan dies at home in London

She regains hope after her return from Persia. For a while, anyway. Relations and friends visit, sometimes in such numbers that her maid feels compelled to impose a strict limit on how many minutes each can stay. The doctors are vague about what is wrong with her. It is possibly some sort of tropical disease and they have put her on a special milk diet, but she has trouble keeping it down. Just a month ago it seemed that she might recover: her weight increased, she began to organise her correspondence, she made short visits to her library downstairs and she talked of refurnishing the house. Plans were made to move out to the country so that she could enjoy the summer there.

Things have changed since then.

It is weeks now since she left her room, and yesterday she sank into a sort of coma. It is no longer possible to communicate with her.

Some headlines from today’s
Daily Mirror:
“British Smash Through Defences Into Pozieres”; “Drivers’ Protest—More Buses Stop Today”; “Big French Air Raid on Rhine Town”; “Is It to Be Another Year of War?”; “Last Week of Gorringtons Summer Sale”; “Red Cross Regatta on the Thames”; “Grand Duke Pushes on in Asia Minor.”

During the day, she unexpectedly becomes rather restless. Perhaps it is simply a fear of death, or perhaps her body is summoning its last reserves of physical and mental strength before her final journey. One of her sisters is downstairs playing hymns on an organ and the sounds can reach up to Macnaughtan through her open bedroom door. No one knows if she can hear them. She dies later in the afternoon. The room is full of flowers.

• • •

Michel Corday makes the following entry in his diary on the same day:

An old man in dirty-grey uniform, with a cap drooping over his ear, tawny top-boots, sword clanking against his spurs, a score of mysterious ribbons on his chest, so radiant with pride as to light up the whole boulevard. Next to him, there was a poor devil on two crutches, with his drill coat, his corduroy trousers, one leg amputated right up [to] the thigh. A pitiable contrast!

THURSDAY
, 27
JULY
1916
Michel Corday has dinner at Maxim’s

It is a beautiful, hot summer in Paris. The cafés are well patronised and the tables that cover the pavements are full. On Sundays the local trains out into the green countryside are packed with trippers. Groups of young women dressed in white swish along the streets on their bicycles. For those seeking the sea air, it is utterly impossible to find a vacant hotel room at any of the many resorts along the Atlantic coast.

Michel Corday and an acquaintance are in Maxim’s, close to the Champs-Élysées, and he is once more struck by the contrast between what he sees going on and what he knows to be going on. He thinks yet again about how infinitely far away the war seems to be. The restaurant is famous for its cuisine and for its fashionable art-nouveau décor, which has made it something of a time capsule, a refuge from the present, a reminder of happier days, a promise of a future. Yes, the war
is
a long way away, but it is nevertheless present, although people prefer to keep quiet about the way it manifests itself here—through alcohol and sex, or perhaps more accurately, drunkenness and lust.

The restaurant is full of men in uniform, from different branches of the armed forces and of many different nationalities. There are also a few well-known faces, such as Georges Feydeau, the writer of farces, and François Flameng, professor and war artist, whose watercolours are to be seen in virtually every new number of the widely read magazine
L’Illustration
. Flameng is one of those civilians who cannot resist the gravitational pull of the military world and he has come up with his own
uniform-like style of clothing: this evening he is wearing a kepi, a khaki jacket with rows of medal ribbons on the chest, and puttees. There are also women present, many of them—the majority, perhaps—are high-class prostitutes.

The quantity of alcohol consumed at Maxim’s this evening is enormous. There are some pilots who are having what is called a champagne dinner and eating nothing at all. The level of drunkenness in the place is high: incidents that before the war would have led to sharp reprimands or to people looking away in embarrassed silence are now tolerated or even give rise to appreciative laughter from the other diners. Corday sees some British officers who have imbibed so much that one of them can hardly stand: the man tries to put on his uniform cap but, to the obvious delight of those sitting around him, misses his own head. Two extremely drunk men are standing at separate tables and hurling crude insults at each other across the elegantly ornamented room. No one pays any attention to them.

The business of prostitution is being conducted with virtually no attempt at concealment. If a customer wants to buy the services of a woman he simply speaks to one of the restaurant managers. Corday hears one of them respond quickly to a potential client: “Ready and at your service this evening.” After which he names the price, provides an address and directions and concludes with “the hygiene requirements.”

Even in France, where legalised brothels have a long history, the war has led to a massive increase in the sex industry. This, of course, is due partly to increased demand—swarms of soldiers arrive in Paris on leave every day and whores have poured in from all over the country—but also because the authorities, encouraged by the military, frequently choose to turn a blind eye to the problem. Even so, arrests for illegal prostitution have risen by 40 per cent.

There has also been a significant increase in sexually transmitted diseases.
^zz
Many of the armies routinely issue condoms to soldiers going on leave. Not that it does much good.
^aaa
Surprisingly, not everyone tries to
avoid infection: infected prostitutes sometimes earn more than healthy ones since they attract soldiers who
want
to catch a venereal infection in order to evade service at the front. The most grotesque expression of this can be seen in the trade in gonococcal pus, which soldiers buy and smear into their genitals in the hope of ending up in hospital.
^bbb
Those who are really desperate rub it into their eyes, which often results in lifelong blindness.

Even the prostitutes are doing their bit for the war. Some brothels used to take in homeless refugees and Corday believes that all the high-class whores in Maxim’s this evening will have what is called “a godson.” This means that, for patriotic reasons, they have “adopted” a soldier, which in turn means that when that soldier comes home on leave the prostitute in question will have sex with him free of charge.

The drunken uproar in the restaurant continues, to the accompaniment of popping corks, shouting, laughter, shrieks, yells and chinking glass. An officer in a particularly well-tailored uniform roars: “Down with civilians!”

On the same day Florence Farmborough writes in her journal about a wounded young officer whose death she has witnessed:

The terrible odour of putrefaction that accompanies that form of gangrene was harassing us desperately, but we knew that it would not be for long. Before Death came to release him, he became calmer—he was back at home, among those whom he loved. Suddenly he seized my arm and cried, “I knew that you would come! Elena, little dove, I knew that you would come! Kiss me, Elena, kiss me!” I realised that in his delirium he had mistaken me for the girl he loved. I bent and kissed his damp, hot face, and he became more tranquil. Death claimed him while he was still in a state of tranquillity.

SUNDAY
, 6
AUGUST
1916
Elfriede Kuhr plays the piano at a party in Schneidemühl

It is a confusing time, dreadful and exciting, painful and alluring, agonising and happy. The world is changing and she is changing with it, both as a result of the things that are happening and also quite independently of them. Wheels are moving within wheels, sometimes in opposite directions, but still moving as one.

Once upon a time many people had rejoiced at the war as both a promise and a possibility, a promise that all that was best in mankind and culture might be realised, a possibility to tilt against the unease and the disintegration that had been discernible all over pre-war Europe.
^ccc
But wars are and always have been paradoxical and deeply ironic phenomena that frequently change what people want to preserve, promote what people want to prevent and demolish what people want to protect.

In complete contradiction to the fine hopes of 1914, there is a tendency for certain phenomena—traditionally lumped together under the heading of “dangerous disintegration”—to mushroom out of control. Many people are concerned about the ever-increasing freedom in relationships between the sexes and the growing levels of sexual immorality. Some of this is blamed on the fact that so many women, like Elfriede’s mother and grandmother, have been permitted or even compelled to take work previously done by men—men who are now in uniform. This has, of course, been absolutely crucial to the war effort and consequently should not really be called into question, but it is not difficult to find people who maintain that this “masculinisation” of women will prove to be fatal in the long run.
^ddd
Some of this is blamed on the fact that the long absence of men at the front causes a drastic increase in sexual demand,
which has in turn led to a huge rise in such behaviour as masturbation, homosexuality and extra-marital affairs, which were previously strictly forbidden or denounced.
^eee
(Germany, like France, has witnessed an increase in prostitution and sexual diseases.) Some of it is blamed on the fact that the ceaseless flood of men in uniform backwards and forwards across the country causes there to be a sudden excess of young, sexually active men in certain places at the very time there are fewer resident men capable of supervising the women left at home. A marked rise in extra-marital pregnancies and illegal abortions, for instance, has been reported from garrison towns. Schneidemühl is no exception to this: the town is home to an infantry regiment and to the well-known Albatros factory, which both manufactures military aircraft and brings in large numbers of young pilots for training.