The Beauty and the Sorrow (60 page)

This war is a ghost in grey rags, a skull with maggots crawling out of it. New, hard battles have been raging in the west in recent months. We are fighting at Le Chemin des Dames, at Aisne and in Champagne. The whole region is a field of ruins, blood and mud everywhere. The English have brought in a new and terrible weapon, an armoured vehicle on rollers which can get across any kind of barrier. These armoured vehicles are called tanks.
^p
No one is safe from them: they roll over every artillery battery, every trench, every position and flatten them—not to mention what they do to the soldiers. Anyone who tries to take shelter in a shellhole no longer has a chance. Then we have that beastly poison gas. The English and the French (unlike the German soldiers) still don’t have really safe gas masks with an oxygen supply. There is also a sort of poison gas that eats its way through clothes. What a way to die!

MONDAY
, 25
JUNE
1917
Paolo Monelli’s battalion enters the inferno on Monte Ortigara

Now it is their turn. They have been waiting for this moment. For about a fortnight they have watched battalion after battalion dispatched towards the top of Monte Ortigara and each time they have also watched the result: first to come are the stretcher-bearers with the wounded and the mules with the dead, then—after a few hours or a few days—what remains of the battalion trudges past. That is how it works, such are the mechanics of it. Battalions are sent into the mill of artillery fire and remain there being ground mercilessly down until they have lost the majority of their men. Then they are replaced by new battalions, which stay until they have lost the majority of their men. Then they are replaced by new battalions, which stay until they have lost the majority of their men. And so on.

It is called a materiel battle. Now and again one side or the other will mount an attack, through valleys filled with craters still warm from shell-bursts, up towards some peak or over rocky ridges. But, for the most part, the infantry has no other task than to hang on grimly to a particular point, a point that seems to them to have been chosen more or less at random but which has some significance in the cartographic reality inhabited by the general staff or in the deluded world of victory communiqués. These “points” are often places that God or the surveyors saw fit to give an elevation to, which elevation has then ended up firmly established on the map as 2003 or 2101 or 2105—figures which in due course are transmogrified into “hills” to be conquered or defended.
^q
Things look bad this morning. The thunder of artillery fire is stronger than ever when Monelli wakes at dawn. He crawls out of his sleeping bag and goes out to see what is going on. After a while the battalion is ordered to form up. They set off, a long line of silent, heavily laden men moving uphill, always uphill along a narrow track that runs along the high, steep rock wall. The sun is rising higher in a blue sky and it looks like being a hot day.

The soldiers’ faces express what Monelli describes as “a calm resignation in the face of the inevitable.” As far as possible he avoids thinking, tries to lose himself in details and practicalities. And it works quite well. He notes to his joy that his voice sounds crisp and controlled when he is giving an order to one of his subordinates. He tests his feelings: does he have any premonitions? No, he does not, but a line of poetry by Giosuè Carducci, the Nobel prizewinner, has stuck in his head:
Venne il dì nostro, e vincere bisogna
—“Our day has come, and we must be victorious.” Monelli feels he has been transformed into a tool, a good and strong tool governed by a power far outside his own body. He sees a column on its way out with its mules. He sees the clouds from bursting shrapnel shells, all black and orange.

Eventually they come to a cave, the mouth of which opens out towards the line of battle. Once they leave it they will come under direct fire. The mouth of the cave is narrow and crowded, full of telephonists and artillerymen who squeeze against the cold walls of the cave to allow Monelli and his companions through. They give him and the other Alpini long, searching looks that take Monelli by surprise and he immediately tries to put them out of his mind. But the thought has already sunk in: “Good God, so it’s that bad.”

The captain says just one word: “
Andiamo!
” Forward!

At which they take off at a run and rush one after another in quick succession out into the open air, rather like people jumping off the top board at a swimming baths. The Austrian machine guns begin to rattle. Monelli leaps forward and down. He sees a man hit in the head by a big shell splinter. He sees that the ground is full of small shell holes. He sees bodies, small piles of them at some points, and takes note that those places must be particularly dangerous, those are places to be careful. He takes shelter among some rocks and gathers his breath for the next stretch. “The whole of one’s life passes in a moment of remorse, a premonition comes to the surface and is dismissed with terror.” Then he sets off, hurls himself forward, some bullets whizz past—
zio, zio
—and he is past it. But he sees the captain lying back there.

They are warned about gas and he struggles to put on his gas mask. After five minutes he takes it off again—it is impossible to run with it on. They carry on down into the next dip in the ground. It is packed with dead bodies, both old corpses from the battles last year, which are now little more than skeletons dressed in rags, and fresh bodies, still
warm and still bleeding—but all of them are united in the same timeless state. Monelli comes to another dangerous passage. There is an Austrian machine gun ready and waiting further on and it opens fire on anyone who dares try to cross—six or seven men have already been mown down. He sees a man hesitate—his friend has just been hit. The man is talking about going back but the way back is just as dangerous. He sees the man cross himself and then throw himself out across the rocky slope. The machine gun spits but the man escapes and runs, jumps and tumbles on down the slope. Monelli does likewise.

It is about twelve o’clock. The sun is shining. It is hot.

Now it is uphill again, up over a ridge. And there, finally, Monelli reaches his company’s position. Position? It is no more than a long row of blackened rocks and great mounds of stones on a ledge, and they squeeze in behind them, motionless, silent, wide-eyed, utterly ineffectual under the heavy shelling, passive, but there. A young soldier sees Monelli and stands up to warn him, beckons him towards his own shelter, but is struck in the chest by a projectile and crumples.

Later Monelli and his battalion commander go looking for the brigade command post and eventually find it in a cave in the mountain. The sandbagged mouth of the cave is, as usual, jammed with people who have taken shelter from the constant artillery barrage. It is so overcrowded that the two of them climb over arms, legs and bodies and no one even reacts. The staff officers are located right at the back of the cave, where it is dark and absolutely silent. If Monelli and his commanding officer thought that the news that two battalions of reinforcements have arrived would be greeted with gratitude and perhaps even jubilation, they are disappointed. The staff officers have not heard of their arrival and greet them “without any enthusiasm.” The mood in the dark cool cave is gloomy, more than gloomy in fact—it is marked by humiliation and resignation, a feeling of being abandoned to the inevitable. The brigadier, overcome with weariness, says, “As you can see, we are surrounded by the enemy and he can do what he wants with us.”

In spite of that, they depart with an order to attack, improvised at random by the brigadier. Monelli thinks that someone at the highest level—the officer commanding the corps, perhaps—is in the process of a mental breakdown because the instructions they receive become increasingly contradictory and incoherent. When they do receive them, that is, since the constant artillery bombardment cuts the telephone
cables about every five minutes. Then men have to be sent out into the noise and the smoke and the whirring shell splinters to find and fix the break. Being a signaller is the most dangerous occupation up on Monte Ortigara.

But it is not only the signallers who are victims of one of the many paradoxes of the war—in this case, the fact that the ability of the armies to cause destruction has increased much more than the generals’ ability to control and direct their troops. Communications almost invariably break down during major battles, with the result that battles turn into a blind and confused melee of butting and jabbing amid the smoke of exploding shells.
^r
Darkness falls. The air is filled with three smells: the bitter odour of explosives, the sweet stench of putrefaction and the sour stink of human excrement. Everyone does his business wherever he happens to
be crouching or lying, simply taking down his trousers in full view of everyone else. Anything else would be stupid. Bitter, sweet, sour.

That night one of the companies attacks Hill 2003. They take it.

Three days later the Austrians take it back.

SATURDAY
, 30
JUNE
1917
Paolo Monelli returns from Monte Ortigara

He has survived five days up there. There have been times when they have been under fire from every point of the compass at the same time. It has sometimes felt as if the whole mountain was being criss-crossed by powerful electrical currents: the earth itself has trembled, jumped, crackled, hissed. They have lived with dead men, lived off dead men, using their ammunition, eating their rations, drinking from their water bottles, stacking their bodies on the top edge of the barricade to stop the bullets, standing on them to avoid frostbitten feet. After two days they had already lost every second man, dead, wounded or shell shocked. It has occurred to Monelli that maybe one in ten will come through unharmed and he hopes and prays to be one of them. When the enemy artillery holds fire for a while, he seeks omens by randomly consulting lines in his pocket Dante.

And he has survived.

Monelli notes in his journal:

A sense of dumb amazement at being reborn, at sitting in the sun in the doorway of the tent and receiving new impressions. Life is something good to eat and we chew it in silence with healthy teeth. The dead are impatient comrades who set off in haste on unknown missions of their own. We, however, feel how the warm caress of life reaches us. Sipping gently at some pleasing family memory, and then the relief of once again being able to tell the poor old folk down there that the prodigal son is returning—something one did not have the courage to think about on the day we set off.

THURSDAY
, 19
JULY
1917
René Arnaud sees Marie Delna receive a mixed reception in Noyon

Why shouldn’t a performance be concluded in the traditional way with “La Marseillaise”? The commanding officer of the division is surprised and not a little upset. The theatre director, probably a touch embarrassed and nervous, explains that they “have learned from bitter experience that with morale as low as it is at present it is better to avoid singing the French national anthem in front of the troops.”

It is three months since mutinies broke out in the French army and it is only now that the army can be considered fit for combat again. But only just. The tensions are still there under the surface.

The mutinies at the end of April are perhaps best described as an implosion of disillusion. The generals and the politicians blame socialist agitation, pacifist propaganda, the spread of revolutionary infection from Russia and so on. It has been a troubled spring in France in general. There is no doubt that there is the same war weariness as in Russia and, in some respects, it has manifested itself in the same ways: disobedience, strikes and demonstrations. These things are not, however, being driven by dreams of the future but by the nightmares of the present. And underlying everything is a colossal sense of disappointment.

The great French offensive in April began to the sound of the same fanfares of rhetorical exaggeration as the great offensive in Champagne in the autumn of 1915: the preparations were flawless, the Germans were at breaking point, a breakthrough was certain, the decisive point had been reached, victory was assured and so on. Sweeping promises that the war would be decided within forty-eight hours made even the most war-weary pull themselves together and make an effort.
Allons enfants de la Patrie / Le jour de gloire est arrivé!
But when the offensive ran into the sand with minimal success and maximal losses, something quite simply broke.
^s
Arnaud’s own battalion was not affected by the mutinies—it comes from the Vendée, a region with traditions that are anything but revolutionary. They first became aware of the events one night when they were supposed to come out of the front line after ten days there, but they were informed that their relief was being postponed for twenty-four hours. The battalion that was meant to be taking their place had refused to enter the trenches until a number of carefully specified demands had been addressed.

It is probably because his troops held firm during the mutinies that their commanding officer insists that “La Marseillaise” shall be sung at the end. The theatre director submits—reluctantly. Today’s theatre performance can also be seen as an expression of the solicitude the military command now feels compelled to demonstrate for its men as a result of the mutinies. The performance takes place alfresco so that as many men as possible can attend. Since it is high summer, being outdoors is no great problem.

Towards the end of the performance the star of the show takes to the improvised stage. The star is no less a figure than Marie Delna, perhaps the finest contralto in Europe, with a decade of successes behind her: the Paris Opéra, naturally, but also La Scala in Milan, Covent Garden in London and the Metropolitan in New York. A very big star, indeed. And big in girth too, these days, as Arnaud and the rest of the audience note: the fragile, sylph-like creature they are familiar with from posters and photographs has metamorphosed into an enormously fat woman. She sings as beautifully as before, however, standing on the stage in some sort of white chemise with a tricolour in her hand.
Aux armes, citoyens! Formez vos bataillons! / Marchons, marchons!
Thundering out such exhortations might well seem a touch provocative in the current situation when so many people are unwilling to do the first or the second, and especially the third.