The Beauty and the Sorrow (13 page)

r
At the start of the war the shrapnel shell was by far the most common field-artillery projectile in all the armies. It is a typical example of a weapon that is brilliant on paper. Each shell contained several hundred hard lead bullets, which were ejected from the body of the shell by a small charge of black powder in its base and which thus made the whole thing function rather like a gigantic shotgun cartridge. The effect depended on a special timing fuse causing the shell to explode in the air immediately in front of the target—an operation that was not that simple. If it detonated immediately overhead, it meant that the bullets would just fly past the target. Furthermore, the target needed to be above ground, which was why this kind of projectile lost most of its value once the combatants had disappeared down into trenches. It was the black powder that created the characteristic, slightly downward pointing smoke cloud when a shrapnel shell detonated.

s
Kuhr gives the date as being 11 October, but that seems unlikely to be right, partly because the capitulation referred to happened on 10 October and partly because even German children did not go to school on Sundays.

t
The treatment of prisoners of war on the Eastern Front at this time—as Alon Rachamimov has shown—was far better than in the Second World War, during which both sides were guilty of numerous violations as well as clearly systematic maltreatment. Conditions were relatively humane during the First World War and over 90 per cent of prisoners of war returned home alive after the war. (Because of food shortage and, above all, typhus, German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners in Russian camps suffered most.)

u
It is still not known exactly how many men were lost but it is likely to be somewhere around 400,000—and this was in less than a month. The historian Norman Stone has written: “The pattern of the war was now set: in the west a stalemate, and in the east a more or less constant Austro-Hungarian crisis.”

v
The border between Galicia and Hungary.

w
The date is an estimate. The dating in Corday’s 1914–18 journal is rather erratic: the entries are chronological but it is not always possible to see when one date changes to another. His visit to his family in Saint-Amand Longpré took place sometime between 22 and 26 October and, since he had his professional duties to perform during the week, it seems reasonable to assume that he travelled during the weekend of 24–25 October.

x
He assumed the name Corday because his family was loosely related to Charlotte Corday, the woman who murdered the revolutionary leader Marat in 1793—a deed immortalised in Jacques-Louis David’s painting
The Death of Marat
. The fact that a staunch republican like Michel Corday chose to take the name of a Girondist like Charlotte Corday is interesting and suggests a degree of vanity or, at any rate, a desire to add a touch of notoriety to his background.

y
The date may have been a day earlier or a day later.

z
The officer commanding this section had been expecting an artillery unit as reinforcement, but as the result of a simple error Pollard’s infantry battalion had been sent instead.

aa
His Majesty’s Australian Transport.

bb
The first shots in the war between Germany and Great Britain were actually fired in Australia when a German merchant ship attempted to slip out of Sydney harbour on 4 August but was halted by warning gunfire.

cc
This was Maximilian von Spee’s Pacific Squadron, which was soon to make a name for itself and spread panic and destruction as it steamed east. At this point the squadron is off Chile on the west coast of South America, where on 1 November it inflicted a surprise defeat on a British flotilla at Coronel. Heavy British reinforcements were on the way to the South Atlantic to avenge Coronel and to stop von Spee and his squadron at any price.

dd
The education of new teachers in Australia relied on a kind of apprenticeship system whereby newly qualified candidates (“Junior Teachers”) worked in the class under the guidance of an experienced teacher.

ee
By this point the
Emden
had sunk seventeen merchant vessels and was already surrounded by an aura of romance, partly because of the cunning of her commander, Captain von Müller, but also because of his humanity. He always picked up the crews of vessels he sunk, treated them well and ensured that they were quickly put ashore. This chivalrous behaviour corresponded well to the expectations most people still had of the war.

ff
The part of the tent a soldier carried with him was humourously christened by the troops as “the hero’s coffin” since it was often used as a shroud for the fallen at field burials.

gg
A kind of marmalade made from a mixture of apples and oranges.

hh
A popular novel by the Danish author Christian Winther (1796–1876).

ii
An antiseptic.

jj
Later he actually did carry a small Danish flag with him into the field, which—together with Winther’s novel—he considered to be the embodiment of “the most precious of everything that is Danish.” So Andresen was by no means immune to nationalistic sentiments; it is just that his were not German sentiments.

kk
Particularly since Sembat had worked closely with Jean Jaurès, the socialist leader who tried to prevent the outbreak of war by calling a general strike but who was murdered on 31 July 1914 by a young French nationalist. And as if that was not enough, Sembat was also known to be the author of a widespread and widely discussed pacifist manifesto.

ll
Andresen is observing the same thing as many other people: that shrapnel shells, by far the most common type of artillery ammunition, have a negligible effect on troops who are well dug in.

mm
Barbed wire of the kind we now know was invented in the United States for agricultural purposes. It made animal husbandry possible on a completely new scale. The first mention of it in a military context—as a barrier against attack—is during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. It is known that American forces used barbed wire to protect their camps during the Spanish-American War of 1898. Even though barbed wire is referred to in British army ordinances as early as 1888, the opposing forces in 1914 went into battle without wire: the expectations were that the war was going to be both highly mobile and soon over. When the first trenches were dug in the early autumn of 1914, improvised barbed-wire barriers (at best) were constructed from wire collected from nearby villages. (It is clear that the phenomenon was still rather unusual since the term “barbed wire” does not occur immediately: some accounts, for example, refer to “barbed fence-wire” and at the early stage they used whatever wire they could get hold of, including wire without barbs.) Such defences, moreover, were often thin, frequently consisting of a single line of posts linked by three or four strands of wire. Soon, however, they began to produce barbed wire specially designed for military use: the barbed wire used in agriculture up until that point normally had seven paired barbs per metre whereas the new military wire had fourteen or more paired barbs a metre. The barriers also became wider and denser: a French ordinance of 1915 refers to a minimum barrier of two rows with the posts roughly three metres apart, whereas a British ordinance of 1917 prescribed that a barbed-wire barrier should be at least nine metres deep. And there were soon many variants in use, some of them moveable, such as “Spanish Riders,” “Cubes,” “Hedgehogs,” “Gooseberries” and “Knife Rests.” The British ordinance mentioned above also refers to a number of different types of fixed barbed-wire barriers such as apron, double apron, fence and apron, trip and loose wire, concertina (also called Brun wire), trip and crossed diagonals, rapid double fence, low wire, French rapid wire, high and low wire combination (this last named alone came in six different variants). There were also experiments with obstacles consisting of electric fencing but these were not found to be practical. The Frenchman Olivier Razac has written that barbed wire, although never a metaphor for the First World War, may be said to have played an important role in artists’ attempts “to give form to the monstrous sublimity of the destructive forces unleashed by modern war.”

nn
The onomatopoeia is Andresen’s own.

oo
This careful furnishing of the trenches—it would soon be possible to find bunkers with electric ceiling lights, carpeted floors and panelled walls—is a consequence of the fact that the German army in the west was already beginning to set its sights on long-term defence. For purely ideological reasons the French army did not wish to create the impression that it intended to remain in its trenches and thus its trenches remained relatively improvised throughout the whole war. Hardly surprisingly, the Austro-Hungarian army in the east was quick to make conditions comfortable for itself. There are even said to have been bunkers with glass in the windows, though there seems to be a touch of the oxymoron about that.

pp
The soup kitchen was Macnaughtan’s own. She started it on her own initiative and with her own money in order to alleviate the hunger and thirst of the less severely wounded soldiers who, because their injuries were less acute, often ended up waiting a long time for onward transport. She had three Belgian women as helpers.

qq
Respect for hierarchy was what decided the issue: how would it look if a lieutenant were to rise to his feet and put pointed questions to his absolute superior, the War Minister?

rr
Egypt had been under de facto British control since 1882. At this stage the powers in Britain were even beginning to plan the dissolution and dismembering of the Ottoman Empire, which would imply an almost unparalleled Allied expansion in the Middle East: Russia, for instance, was offered Constantinople.

ss
There were, however, no such problems.

1915

But the truth is, that personal experience in this thing called war is at best an awakening of memory from a dream of seas and foggy islands bewildering and confusing. A few personal incidents loom a little clearer, deriving what clarity they have from the warmth of personal contact. Then incidents fraught even with the greatest danger become commonplace, until the days seem to move on without other interest than the everlasting proximity of death. Even that idea, prominent enough at first, gets allocated to the back of one’s mind as a permanent and therefore negligible quantity.

EDWARD MOUSLEY

Chronology 1915