The Beauty and the Sorrow (20 page)

The Russian artillery rarely responds to the Austrian bombardment. It is said that this is because of a lack of ammunition but there are actually plenty of shells stockpiled farther back. The bureaucrats in uniform who control these things are happy to keep them there, waiting for bigger things. The Russian army is planning a new offensive farther to the south, in the direction of the famous passes over the Carpathians (the “Gateway to Hungary”!), which still stink from the corpses left scattered everywhere after the hard but fruitless battles of the winter. The resources will be put to better use there. The question is whether that is really true: for some days now a sense of anxiousness has been spreading among the Russian units at Gorlice and a rumour has been going round that the Austrians opposite them have been reinforced with German infantry and heavy artillery.

On this particular Saturday Florence and the others at the hospital are woken before dawn by heavy artillery fire.

She tumbles out of bed. Fortunately she has been sleeping fully dressed. Everyone—everyone except possibly Radko Dimitriev, commander of the Russian Third Army—has been suspecting that something was about to happen. Explosions of varying strength and intensity become more frequent as the Russian artillery around them joins in. The bullets from exploding shrapnel shells clatter down on the streets and roofs.

Through the rattling windows Florence can see the lights playing against the still-dark sky. She can see the great lightning flashes from the muzzles of the guns and the subdued flashes from the explosions.
She sees the beams of searchlights and the bright, multicoloured light from flares mixed with a muted glow as fires begin to rage. They crouch indoors. The walls and floors are shaking.

Then the wounded start coming in:

At first we could cope; then we were overwhelmed by their numbers. They came in their hundreds, from all directions; some able to walk, others crawling, dragging themselves along the ground.

In such a desperate situation the only thing the hospital staff can do is to be brutally selective. Those who can stand up on their own get no help—they are just sent on their way after being told to try to get to one of the base units. There are so many unable to walk that they are laid out in rows out in the open air, where they are first given painkillers and then have their wounds tended. “The groans and cries of the wounded were pitiful to hear.” Florence and the others do what they can to help in spite of feeling that it is all in vain since this flood of ragged and torn bodies seems to be endless.

This goes on for hour after hour. Now and then there is a longer silence.

Daylight begins to dim and twilight falls.

Among the shouting and the screaming, shadowy figures move round illuminated by glaring, distant lights.

At around six o’clock the following morning Florence and her colleagues hear a new and terrifying sound: a sudden, vibrating roar like a waterfall, which is the noise of over 900 artillery pieces of every calibre imaginable all opening fire simultaneously—that is one for every fifty yards of the front. Seconds later comes the drawn-out, rough echo of the impact. The crash of metallic explosions in every key becomes a dense wall of sound, the din intensifies, whirls and spirals like some sort of natural force.

There is something new and unpleasantly systematic about this artillery fire and the way it is crashing down on the Russian front line. The German technical term is
Glocke
, a bell; the English, a creeping barrage. The fire waltz swings backwards and forwards and side to side along the Russian lines and connecting trenches. This is something quite different
from the casual, incidental bombardment by the Austrian artillery, something even more than yesterday’s thunderously powerful barrage. This is artillery fire as a science, calculated to the second and to the ton to produce maximum effect. This is something new.

They hear the word “retreat”—with disbelief at first.

Then the spectacle of long, uneven lines of mud-covered soldiers with weary faces passing them. Finally, the order for immediate withdrawal, leaving the equipment and the wounded. They are to leave the wounded? Yes, leave the wounded. “
Skoro! Skoro!
^jj
 … The Germans are outside the town!”

Florence takes her coat and her rucksack and rushes out of the building. The wounded are screaming, praying, swearing and begging the nurses “not to forsake them, for the love of God.” Someone grabs hold of the hem of Florence’s skirt. She twists the hand loose and disappears down the uneven road along with the others. It is a hot and sunny spring day but the light is nevertheless muted. The oil tanks outside the town have started burning and the air is filled with oily black smoke.
^kk

WEDNESDAY
, 12
MAY
1915
William Henry Dawkins dies at Gallipoli

We might perhaps wonder which was uppermost in his mind, his exertions on the shore or his toothache. In all likelihood it was the former. Dawkins was a conscientious and purposeful man. His visit to the doctor does show, however, that the toothache must have been there in the background all the time, a distraction, a filter,
^ll
and his experience of those days must have been a strange mixture of the grand-scale epic and
the limited and private—as always—with a sort of empty zone between the two: he probably quickly lost his grasp of ordinary things, such as which day of the week it was.

Ever since they had landed a full two weeks earlier the weather had been fine, though the nights had been cold. Two days before, however, it had started to drizzle. And it was still drizzling. The great numbers of people and animals moving back and forth between the shore and the trenches up on the steep hills have trampled the paths into sticky mud and it is difficult to move on the wet, slippery clay in the ravines. William Henry Dawkins and his corporal sleep in a covered cleft in the slopes by the shore. The only piece of furniture is an old armchair that floated ashore a few days ago and Dawkins sometimes sits in it when giving out his orders. When he wakes this morning it is raining hard.

Everyone can see that this grand operation has ground to a halt.

There are actually only two points at which the Allies have succeeded in creating real bridgeheads: one of them is right down at the southern point of the peninsula and the other is here at Gaba Tepe, on the western side of Gallipoli.
^mm
Dawkins and the others, however, landed at the wrong place, well over half a mile north of the intended spot. In one sense that was fortunate since the Ottoman defence was unusually weak at that point, the terrain being so rugged that the defenders judged it highly unlikely the Allies would even try to land there.
ⁿⁿ
The result was that the attackers could wade ashore without serious losses but, once there, it was only with the greatest of difficulty they could move through the confusing labyrinth of steep bush-covered ravines and sharp ridges that plunge steeply to the shore. By the time the hastily dispatched Turkish infantry had reached the place, the Australian and New Zealand companies had—at best—managed to advance a mile and a half inland. And that is more or less where it came to a stop, as an ironic reflection of the static Western Front. Just as in France and in Belgium, attack and counter-attack came in quick succession until both sides, relentless but exhausted, realised that their opponent was not going to be budged. At which point they settled down to the usual plodding drudgery of trench warfare.

Part of this drudgery is care, maintenance and the provision of food and water. Those in charge had actually given some thought to these things: they knew that access to water was going to be a problem, especially as the hottest season of the year was approaching. So when they landed they had with them barges loaded with water from Lemnos, water enough to satisfy the most immediate needs until the engineers managed to sink wells. Dawkins and his crew had worked quickly, building several wells and setting up access points to the vital liquid for both animals and men.

Not that it was ever a case of abundance. There was, for instance, insufficient fresh water for the men to wash in and so they had to look after their personal hygiene by bathing in the sea. They were, however, advised to avoid cleaning their teeth in sea water because of all the animal corpses floating around as well as the filth from the ships lying anchored offshore. One of the problems was that a great deal of fresh water was lost because the thin and fragile pipes bringing the water from the pumps at the wells were punctured so often, either by artillery fire or quite simply by careless soldiers letting carts and guns trundle over them. Dawkins and his men have consequently been busy for some time burying the pipes deeper.

It is an ordinary morning, though grey and rainy. Dawkins organises his troops in the usual order and allots the various groups their tasks for the day. One of them is to continue sinking the pipes into the ground. Little glory in it, and hardly a motif for a lurid print in some illustrated magazine, but necessary all the same. Several of the worst troublemakers in the company have happened to end up in his platoon. But a combination of the seriousness of the hour and Dawkins’s qualities as a leader—particularly his genuine care for his men—have helped calm down the worst of the unruliness and a marked sense of solidarity has developed between these apparently incorrigible moaners and skivers and their mild young captain.

It is still early when they set to work.

The rain is falling.

An unusually dangerous section awaits one of the groups this morning and it is easy to see where it is: there are thirty or more dead mules, killed by Turkish shells, lying along a stretch not much longer than a hundred yards. The ditch is already dug, however—it was dug at night. Now it is just a matter of laying the pipe and joining it up.
Everything is still calm and quiet. No sound from the Turkish artillery. The only unpleasant part is the dead animals, with their bellies swelling and stiff legs sticking out. The ditch goes past the cadavers, alongside them, under them and even through them in some cases. The seven soldiers become covered in blood. Dawkins is with them. The time is a quarter to ten.

Dawkins moves a little further down the ditch to inspect it. Then they hear the whine of a shell.

It is the very first one of the morning. The whine becomes a howl. The howl is followed by a hard, sharp report. The projectile explodes just above the heads of the seven crouching soldiers and their water-pipe, but it is a shrapnel shell and they are untouched: its payload of round bullets showers down into the ground fifteen yards further on. One of the soldiers, a man by the name of Morey, turns round. He is just in time to see William Henry Dawkins fall to the ground in that peculiar way characteristic of the severely wounded—the fall is not controlled by the body’s usual reflexes but by the simple laws of gravity.
^oo

They rush to him. Dawkins has been hit in the head, throat and chest. They lift him up from the wet ground and carry him to a shelter. Another shell explodes behind them with a short, powerful crash. They lay him down. Blood and rainwater run together. He says nothing. He dies before their eyes.

Sarah Macnaughtan makes the following entry in her diary on this day:

The other day I heard some ladies having a rather forced discussion on moral questions, loud and frank. Shades of my modest
ancestresses! In this war time, and in a room filled with men and smoke and drink, are women in knickerbockers discussing such things? I know I have got to “let out tucks,” but surely not quite so far!

Beautiful women and fast women should be chained up. Let men meet their God with their conscience clear. Most of them will be killed before the war is over. Surely the least we can do is not to offer them temptation. Death and destruction, and horror and wonderful heroism, seem so near and so transcendent, and then, quite close at hand, one finds evil doings.

A DAY IN THE SECOND WEEK OF MAY
1915
Laura de Turczynowicz sees a prisoner of war find a piece of bread in Suwalki

Laura hears a German nurse shouting at someone to stop at once. The yelling continues and Laura goes to see what it is all about. A Russian prisoner of war is grubbing around in a stinking heap of hospital rubbish and, refusing to let the German nurse’s protests put him off, he just carries on searching.

Parts of Laura’s grand house have been turned into a temporary hospital for all the civilian typhus cases in the town. She often works there herself. The building is afforded some protection by the notices warning about typhus, just as she herself is given some protection by the Russian Red Cross nurse’s uniform she wears. (Going out alone on these streets full of men in uniform can be an unpleasant experience for a woman, all the more so as drunkenness is becoming increasingly common.) Shielded by her uniform, she has started feeding some of the starving Russian prisoners kept in the town as labour. Among their other jobs they have dug up the corpses of fourteen soldiers buried in her garden after the fighting of last autumn.

There are few things that upset her more than the treatment of the Russian prisoners of war. They are undernourished, filthy, ragged, verminous, frequently ill, badly housed and badly treated. Worse, perhaps, than the filth and the wounds and the rags is the fact that they are, almost without exception, worn-out and broken men, who have lost all
hope and who, in their silent and submissive suffering, have begun to lose some of their humanity. They are being turned into, well, animals, or things even.
^pp
Laura is profoundly shocked by this and helps them whenever she can.