The Beauty and the Sorrow (16 page)

Macnaughtan is working her usual afternoon shift today—just like any other kitchen skivvy. It lasts from twelve to five and she serves dinner and washes up afterwards. She is bored. It is all in glaring contrast to her life before the war; she never gets to see interesting places now, nor meet interesting people. But she does not want to give up. She notes in her diary:

To give up work seems to me a little like divorcing a husband. There is a feeling of failure about it, and the sense that one is giving up what one has undertaken to do. So, however dull or tiresome a husband or work may be, one mustn’t give them up.

Afterwards she goes for a short walk on the sandy beach. She is annoyed. Her leather-covered Thermos has disappeared. Stolen, of course. Everything gets stolen. The front is quiet.

SUNDAY
, 7
MARCH
1915
Kresten Andresen sketches a donkey in Cuy

In his sermons the padre congratulates them on living in a momentous period. Then they sing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” missing out the second verse, however, since it could be interpreted as expressing doubt about armed might.
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The past few months have been strange. Battles have been both few and distant. During the whole of his time at the front Andresen has fired only three shots, and he is pretty certain that all three lodged somewhere in the defensive barriers in front of their position. Sometimes, when it has been really calm, he has felt that strange sense of unreality that sooner or later affects all the participants and which makes it difficult to imagine that there is actually a war going on.

Perhaps it is this calm and silence which has lately tempted him to feel—and it is mainly a feeling—that in some incomprehensible way this whole business is moving towards its close. In any case, he does a lot of
fantasising about peace. Andresen has also been having striking dreams: last night, for instance, he dreamt he was on the streets of London wearing his best confirmation suit, after which he was suddenly transported to his childhood home, where he was laying the dinner table.

Birdsong and a sky that forms a warm blue canopy over a landscape in which the dry yellows and browns are beginning to be touched with bright green. Spring has reached Picardy. The crocuses are in flower, violets and arum lilies are in bud in the woods, and Andresen has found both Christmas roses and snowdrops among the fresh ruins. This is usually the time for the spring sowing, but not here and not now. Andresen can just hear the sound of a steam-driven threshing-machine thumping away on some backstreet of the village. The grain the machine is spitting out will bring no benefit to the French farmers, however: they are even forbidden to plough their own land, a ban made even more bitter by the fact that it was not announced until they had already done much of the sowing—which will be no use to them now.

Andresen feels truly sorry for that part of the French civilian population that is still hanging on in the villages immediately behind the lines. Their food is …

 … extremely monotonous. The mayor gives them a few round loaves of bread, the size of an ordinary wheelbarrow wheel, half wheat, half rye. They usually eat it dry, sometimes with a little piece of meat or a couple of fried potatoes. Apart from that they live on milk, and some beans and beets.

Since he comes from a rural background himself, Andresen finds it easy to understand the French farmers’ worries; he also finds it hard to tolerate the thoughtless waste that is an everyday part of war. At the beginning of their time here they made their beds every night with new, unthreshed wheat from the fields. And over in Lassigny, which has been shot to pieces, some of the streets are covered with a thick layer of unthreshed oats, laid down to muffle the noise of wagon wheels.

Perhaps, too, it is the countryman in Andresen that has made him fond of Paptiste, a little donkey kept on one of the farms in Cuy. His affection is not reciprocated: the beast emits little grunts whenever someone approaches and shows signs of wanting to kick them. Andresen, however, finds this donkey irresistibly comic in its stupidity and
natural indolence. This particular Sunday he takes the opportunity to sketch a little portrait of the donkey as it stands there in the farmyard enjoying the warm spring sun. He is intending to send the drawing home when it is finished.

The donkey is not his only local acquaintance. He has also got to know two Frenchwomen in Cuy, one fair-haired, the other dark. They are refugees from a nearby village in no-man’s-land. Their acquaintanceship has probably been made easier by the fact that he is Danish rather than German. The dark-haired woman has an eleven-year-old daughter called Sous and she has christened Andresen “Kresten le Danois.” The dark woman has had no word of her husband since the end of August. “She is very unhappy.”

The other day they asked me when peace was going to come but I don’t know any more than they do. I comforted them as well as I could—they were weeping over all the misery. Otherwise you rarely see them cry, though they have every reason to.

Andresen has helped the dark woman to write to the Red Cross information bureau in Geneva to try to get news of her missing husband. He has also given Sous a doll, christened Lotte, which the girl happily pushes round in an empty cigar box. He has decided to try to make her a doll’s pram.

FRIDAY
, 12
MARCH
1915
Rafael de Nogales arrives at the garrison in Erzurum

What makes the greatest impression on him during the long and difficult march over snow-clad mountains is the fact that there are no trees to be seen. Nor birds. He had thought that there would at least have been ravens or vultures or other carrion eaters since towards the end of the journey he had seen the remains left after the great catastrophe at Sarikam?ᅟ—the bodies of thousands of frozen horses and camels. “It really must be a wretched country when even the birds of prey shun it.”

But he shows no signs of regret. This is what he wants.

When the war broke out last August there were many people who
travelled a long and tortuous road to Europe in order to take part in it. Rafael de Nogales’s road may, perhaps, not have been the longest but it was without doubt among the most tortuous. If anyone deserves the title “international adventurer,” he does. Born into an old family of conquistadors and freebooters in Venezuela (his grandfather took part in the fight for independence), he grew up and was educated in Germany, but was driven by a lust for adventure of the more unusual kind.

Rafael Inchauspe de Nogales Méndez is quite untouched either by the nationalistic fervour or by the semi-utopian energies that moved so many millions. Nor, by this stage, does he have anything to prove to himself or to others. Fearless, impatient and carefree, he has lived a life of ceaseless action for years. He fought in the Spanish-American War of 1898, took part—on the wrong side—in the Venezuelan revolution of 1902 and was consequently driven into exile, was a volunteer in the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 (where he was wounded), panned for gold in Alaska (and considers himself one of the founders of the city of Fairbanks), and worked as a cowboy in Arizona. Rafael de Nogales is now thirty-six years old, energetic, charming, tough, educated, short and dark, with an oval face, sticking-out ears and eyes close together. In appearance, de Nogales might be described as a Latin Hercule Poirot—well dressed, dapper, and with a small and very well-trimmed moustache.

As soon as the news of the war reached him he took a mailboat to Europe, determined to take part. The vessel’s name was
Cayenne
. His route was circuitous and when he finally reached Calais his arrival was filled with drama. The streets were deluged with refugees, mostly women and children carrying the “pathetic pieces” of what possessions they had managed to take with them. Time after time troops of soldiers or rattling artillery batteries went past, forcing people to hug the walls. Coming from the opposite direction they were met by cars loaded with wounded men in a variety of uniforms: “A battle seemed to be going on. God knows where.” He remembered two sounds in particular: the first was the threatening buzz of the aeroplanes that sometimes circled overhead—“steely, eagle-like”; the second was the ceaseless clatter caused by thousands of people in clogs passing along the cobbled streets. All the hotels were overcrowded and de Nogales was forced to spend the first night sleeping in an armchair.

His upbringing tended to make him favour the Central Powers but the news that German troops had marched into one of their smaller
neighbours made him “sacrifice my personal sympathies and offer my services to heroic little Belgium.” That proved easier said than done. Heroic little Belgium politely turned him down, at which he turned to the French authorities, but they refused to allow him into the regular army and then, feeling hurt and embittered, he was advised to try … Montenegro. That resulted in him being arrested there, up a mountain, as a spy. The Serbian and Russian authorities likewise rejected his offer, in the politest possible terms, but nevertheless … The Russian diplomat he met in Bulgaria suggested he might possibly try Japan: “Perhaps they will …” By this stage de Nogales’s irritation and disappointment were so great that he came close to passing out in the beautifully furnished hall of the Russian embassy in Sofia.

Rafael de Nogales simply did not know where to turn. Returning home was not an alternative, but nor could he stay “and do nothing, which would have been the end of me, if not from starvation then from boredom.” An accidental meeting with the Turkish ambassador in Sofia decided things: de Nogales made up his mind to enlist on the opposite side instead. At the beginning of January he signed up for the Turkish army and three weeks later left Constantinople to travel to the Caucasus front.
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Now the white mountains are behind them and they are riding past the small forts that form the fortress’s outer defences. The sky is grey, covering “this god-forsaken landscape like a leaden vault.” Here and there they can see freshly dug trenches—or perhaps they are mass graves? He sees frozen corpses. He sees dogs tearing at them. (Later they discover that a typhus epidemic is raging.) The party enters Erzurum. The town is not an inspiring sight and its narrow streets are full of snow. But Erzurum is buzzing with activity in spite of the cold, both in its bazaar, where the merchants are sitting cross-legged in rows, wearing furs and smoking their “eternal hubble-bubbles,” and in the garrison where units of soldiers, groups of bearers and caravans laden with materiel are coming and going. This is the headquarters of the Third Army or, at any rate, what is left of it.

In the afternoon de Nogales reports to the commander of the fortress, a colonel.

The war has ground to a halt because of the cold and the deep snow.
Nor is anyone going to risk another winter campaign so soon after the enormously costly failure back at the turn of the year when 150,000 men marched out and 18,000 returned. Even the Russians, more than satisfied by their great and unexpected victory, are simply watching and waiting in their virtually impregnable mountain positions right opposite Köprüköy.

Now and then the distant thunder of Russian artillery can be heard. The hollow rumble rolls through the enclosing mountainsides and the explosions sometimes set off avalanches on Mount Ararat: “Enormous white masses of ice slide down and fall from ridge to ridge, from cliff to cliff, until they smash with a formidable crash on the silent banks of the River Aras.”

THURSDAY
, 18
MARCH
1915
Pál Kelemen looks round an empty schoolroom in the Carpathians

The wound he received that night in the pass did not prove serious. He is now back at the front after a stay in a Budapest hospital and a period of convalescence, during which he was in charge of remounts
^j
in the Hungarian border town Margita, where he managed to start but never really consummate an affair with one of the carefully guarded middle-class girls, a strikingly tall and slim young woman.

The thrusts backwards and forwards in the various passes in the Carpathian Mountains have continued with wearisome predictability and an equally wearisome absence of any real result. Both sides have won some territory here and there in recent months, at the same time as losing enormous numbers of men, above all as a consequence of cold, disease and a shortage of provisions.
^k
Kelemen himself has smelled the stench which pervades these areas as old corpses thaw out at the same time as new corpses are added. Few people are talking any longer of a quick conclusion.

Kelemen’s unit is now serving behind the front, mainly as a kind of police reinforcement to protect and help the long, winding supply columns which are ever-present along the slushy roads. It is an easy job. And safe. Nor does he have any great desire to return to the forward lines. He and his hussars often billet themselves in empty schools in Hungarian villages. That is where he is today, as he writes in his journal:

In ruined schoolrooms turned into filthy stalls by the straw dragged in, the desks are like a terrified herd, dispersed, driven one upon the other, scattered about, and the inkstands are like buttons torn off of some holiday garment, lying as rubbish in the corners and on the window sills.

On the wall, the text and the music of the National Anthem, the map of Europe. The blackboard is lying backside up on the teacher’s desk. Flung about in the bookcase are copybooks, textbooks, slate pencils, chalk. All mere trifles, yet pleasing, at least to me after having breathed abominations for hours. When I read in these elementary school books the plain words: earth, water, air, Hungary, adjective, noun, God—somehow I find again that balance without which I have been tossed about so long, like a contraband ship, her rudder lost, on unknown seas.