The Beauty and the Sorrow (24 page)

Things did not improve when it was discovered that some of his papers had got lost in the bureaucratic muddle and the army officials initially refused to enlist him. He was not the only one getting cold feet: quite a few of those who had been on the ship had second thoughts by this stage and had either taken French leave or packed themselves off home to New York again. D’Aquila has not reached that stage: he is still curious “to see what a real war looks like.” (Although deep in his heart he is hoping that it will be over before he actually reaches the front, in which case he will be able to sail back to the United States without having to do anything to justify his status as hero.)

After weeks of waiting and just when D’Aquila is on the point of giving up, he is informed that they have found the missing documentation. After a hasty medical examination he is enlisted in the infantry and put on a train for Piacenza, where he is to do his basic military training. When the train stops at a small station along the way he sees a simple coffin containing the body of a dead soldier being lifted down on to the platform. The other volunteers are drinking wine and singing obscene songs.

The barracks of the 25th Regiment in Piacenza are virtually empty. Eventually they come across some men in uniform just sitting around. He and the other volunteers—with, one imagines, some pride—tell them why they have come. The uniformed men burst into mocking laughter. They find it incomprehensible—no, simply stupid—no, crazy—to leave a peaceful life on the other side of the globe voluntarily in order to take part in “the madness in which the old world was then engaged.” The new arrivals are greeted with a shower of abusive names: “fools,” “donkeys,” “boneheads.” The uniformed men themselves are intending to do anything they can to avoid the trenches. The volunteers are far from
welcome as far as they are concerned: by coming here they will merely lengthen this unjust war—and all the suffering.

D’Aquila is now more than a little disillusioned. These repeated disappointments have stirred a hint of doubt in his passionate and easily moved temperament. “Our full-blown bubble of self-glorification was finally beginning to burst.” He and his friend Frank, a naive and cheerful young man he met on the boat on the way over, go out into the town again. D’Aquila visits a barber to get a shave. They return to the barracks in the evening and are received by a non-commissioned officer. It is too late for regrets now. He spends that night in a large barrack room, sleeping on a mattress stuffed with straw.

WEDNESDAY
, 11
AUGUST
1915
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Andrei Lobanov-Rostovsky oversleeps in the neighbourhood of Tchapli
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The corporal was actually supposed to wake them all at one o’clock. When Lobanov-Rostovsky and the men in his company bedded down at the farm, the idea was that they would just rest for a couple of hours in the dark and then set off on the march again. They are well aware that the rearguard is due to continue its retreat at two o’clock and after that time there will be nothing between them and the pursuing Germans.

Just a couple of hours’ rest, then.

They are, in fact, beyond exhaustion. Earlier, Lobanov-Rostovsky was suffering from a lack of anything to do, now his problem is the opposite one. The company of sappers is fully occupied during the great retreat: if they are not blowing up bridges, setting fire to houses or tearing up railway lines, they have to assist various units in the building of trenches and everything that involves—not just digging or blasting their way down into the earth but also clearing fields-of-fire and erecting assault barriers. Unfortunately, they do not have any barbed wire, no more than they have planks and nails or even ammunition, but they
still erect posts which, at a distance, might fool the Germans into believing that the position is stronger than it really is. They have spent the last forty-eight hours building trenches for an infantry regiment—dreadful work and much of it done in the rain. They finished the position just in time to receive orders to abandon it.

The retreat goes on.

Lobanov-Rostovsky has a sensitive nature and he is not only tired, he is also depressed. He admitted this openly to his immediate superior, Gabrialovich, a day or so ago, confessing, “My nerves are beginning to go to pieces.” Gabrialovich was indifferent, suggesting that his lieutenant was not depressed, just tired. Then he started talking about something else. Lobanov-Rostovsky is also quite concerned about his books—he has some French novels and a number of bulky history books. Anton, Lobanov-Rostovsky’s loyal batman, sees no point in carting this lot around, especially as he is the one who does much of the carting. Lobanov-Rostovsky has to keep a careful eye on Anton to make sure he does not let the books disappear. The batman is particularly careless with the great three-volume work on Napoleon and Tsar Alexander by the French historian Albert Vandal: he often packs this in a way that puts the volumes at risk of sliding out while they are on the march.

So, just a couple of hours of rest, then. After that they will continue to retreat.

Lobanov-Rostovsky is the first to wake. He realises at once that something is wrong since it is broad daylight outside. He looks at his watch. Six o’clock. They have overslept by five hours.

He wakes Gabrialovich, not without some difficulty, who orders him to rouse the men, who are sleeping by the carts in the farmyard, and to bring them into the barn in complete silence. Then he is to take a cautious look to see whether the Germans have already occupied the town.

They have not.

They start moving immediately.

Their concern now is that, as well as being threatened by the German cavalry they know to be somewhere
behind
them, they are running the risk of being fired on by the Russian units retreating
in front of
them. No-man’s-land in every sense. What is more, they know from their own experience that all the bridges are being blown or burnt, so will there be any way for them to cross the river?

In order to limit one of these dangers they reverse the usual order
of march and put the wagons with the explosives, equipment—and books—in the lead and let the troops march along at the back. This seems to be effective since they reach the river without being attacked by their own side, and nor do they see any Germans. By great good fortune, on reaching the sparkling green river they find that one bridge is still standing: “Soldiers of an unknown regiment were preparing to destroy it and looked at us in wide-eyed amazement.”

They reach the railway that runs to Bialystok at around eleven o’clock—that is also in the process of being demolished. A large armoured train is steaming back section by section while soldiers tear up the track behind it. Lobanov-Rostovsky’s unit follows the train. First they blow up a bridge, then they come to a railway station which, as a matter of course, they set fire to.

The flames are already licking up the wooden walls of the building when Lobanov-Rostovsky notices a cat wandering around up on the roof, terrified and screaming helplessly. He goes and finds a ladder and climbs up to save the cat:

The animal was scratching with his claws in such terror that it was unsafe to attempt to climb down with him so I hurled him from the two-storey building. He made two somersaults in midair, landed on four paws, and, with his tail erect, disappeared into the bushes.

MONDAY
, 23
AUGUST
1915
Angus Buchanan guards the railway at Maktau

It is early morning. Standing guard is a cold business with the strong monsoon coming in from the south-west. At around half past five dawn begins to break and a wet mist rises and blankets the flat bush below them. The forms of the landscape become faint, vague, are blotted out. Visibility becomes virtually nil. Everything is silent except for the sounds of guineafowl, hornbills and other birds greeting the rising sun with their calls and chattering.

Buchanan and the rest of this temporary picket are guarding the Uganda railway, which passes through Maktau on its way up from
Mombasa on the coast to Kisumu on Lake Victoria. It has been a calm night. For once, one might say. Over the last week there have been almost daily engagements with German patrols from over the border who have been trying to sabotage the railway traffic. Yesterday they succeeded in blowing up a section of track, causing a train to be derailed.

That is what the war looks like in East Africa, at least for the moment: no major battles at all but patrols, skirmishes, tentative scouting, more or less successful ambushes—pinpricks across the borders. The distances are immense.
^eee
Roughly 10,000 armed men are looking for each other in an area the size of western Europe but where communications are almost non-existent. The most difficult task is not to defeat the enemy, it is to find him. Any sort of movement demands an army of bearers.

Both the climate and nature present a bewildering variety that is difficult to cope with. There is everything from damp, tropical jungle and snow-capped mountain massifs to dry savannah; what is routinely referred to simply as “bush” might consist of open plains resembling parkland or dense and almost impenetrable forests. What is more, the combatants are frequently moving across frontiers that in many ways are abstractions, arrogantly drawn on the map with a ruler and aniline pencil at some distant negotiating table in Europe without any noticeable regard for the people, languages and cultures of the places in question, nor even for the boundaries defined by nature herself.

Yet, however limited it may be, the fighting here has resulted in the colonialist logic that once created these peculiar frontiers, being replaced by a logic created by the war itself. Gone are the days of the autumn of 1914 when local governors attempted to prevent any military action. There is no longer any point in referring to old agreements or arguing that a war among whites will inevitably undermine their dominion over Africa’s blacks.
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The Belgians and the French have already marched into
Cameroon and Togo, and the rapid success of the latter invasion in particular has been the deciding factor in the decision that German East Africa must also be conquered. And just as the British fleet ignored right from the start the colonial administrators’ edict that there should be no war in Africa, a military leader on the German side—Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, who would soon achieve legendary status—disregarded the obstinate pacifism of his own civilian authorities, armed a steamship and sent it out to wage war on Lake Tanganyika, while also making aggressive raids into Rhodesia and British East Africa.

Which is why Angus Buchanan and the troops with him have just spent a cold and sleepless night on a hill near Maktau. German patrols are somewhere out there in the misty bush, though on this particular night they have kept their distance. Well, there are Germans and Germans: those in command of the small groups are Germans, clad in all the usual accoutrements of the colonists—light-coloured uniforms, cork tropical helmets and commanding appearance—but the soldiers are all professional native soldiers,
askaris
, who have been given the same training, weapons and trust as white soldiers. British decision-makers consider this to be utter madness: they want to avoid arming the Africans and hope instead to wage the war by bringing in units from South Africa and India, and by using white volunteers and troops shipped over from Europe.

Buchanan has seen little of the fighting so far, apart from one spectacular raid he and his fellow soldiers took part in last June. They attacked the small German harbour at Bukoba on the far shore of Lake Victoria. It took them a day and a half to cross the lake by boat, two days—part of the time in thunderstorms and torrential rain—to chase out the German defenders, and a couple of hours to loot the town. From a military point of view the action was meaningless, but it did serve to boost morale and looked good in the newspapers. Like quite a few of the events in this war, its primary purpose was to generate newsprint.

At nine o’clock in the morning Buchanan and his fellows are relieved. Taking their weapons and equipment, they walk back to camp through the shadows created by the fluttering leaves.

Life in the camp is the same from day to day. Reveille is at 5:30, parade and sick parade at 6:30, after which they work on the defences and fortifications until breakfast at 8:00. The meal almost always consists of tea, bread and cheese. Then another parade at 9:00, followed by more work on the defences and fortifications. As Buchanan’s own account tells us:

They laboured on in the heat, swearing and joking (I think a soldier will joke, aye, even in H—) and perspiring, and with faces and clothes smothered in the fine red lava sand, which was raised by the labouring picks and shovels, or which incessantly wafted downwards in gusts off the bare compound of the encampment.

The digging goes on until lunch, when they are given exactly the same food as in the morning except that the cheese is replaced by jam. The sun is now at its zenith in the blazing African sky and the heat makes physical work impossible so everything comes to a halt. Some of the men try to sleep “under stifling hot canvas,” others wash clothes, bathe naked or play cards in the shade. There are always great swarms of flies everywhere. At 16:30 there is another parade, followed by an hour and a half’s digging. Dinner is served after 18:00 and

consisted always of badly cooked stew, an unchanging dish which became deadly monotonous, and which, in time, many men could not touch, their palate revolted so strongly against the unseasoned, uninviting mixture.

The diet is sometimes varied with the contents of parcels from home, sometimes with the meat of an animal they have managed to shoot. And sometimes merchants from Goa turn up, but their wares are exceptionally expensive, at least in comparison to normal British prices: a pound of tea, which at home would fetch a price of 1s 10d, sells here for 2s 6½d; a bottle of Worcester sauce, which goes for 9d at home, costs 2s here. The incidence of ill-health has increased enormously in recent months and Buchanan believes that at least half the cases are a result of the lack of adequate nutrition.