The Beauty and the Sorrow (26 page)

Laura feels surprisingly little as they leave the grand house behind them. In the same way as the house has been emptied of its contents bit by bit, she has been emptied of emotions. What had once been her home is now just a place of suffering.

Right up to the last minute she is afraid something is going to happen, that someone will suddenly appear and stop them. The station is full of German soldiers who will be travelling on the same train. The children and Laura and their white dog, Dash, climb down and Laura is introduced to the captain who is to be her escort on the journey. Laura is tired since she neither could nor dared sleep the night before, but the captain and his men are even more tired. They have been on the move for six weeks almost without a break and the German officer is so far gone in exhaustion that he can hardly make himself understood.

Laura takes charge of their luggage and makes sure that all three pieces are on board. Then it is time to say a few hasty words of farewell to the cook. Laura gives her a little money and tells her where she has hidden a bottle of ether to be used to put Dash down if there is insufficient food to keep him. It is impossible to take the little dog with them and he has begun to sense it and is becoming agitated.

Then the train departs.

Laura sees the cook disappearing from sight. She sees a friend of the family waving goodbye with her hat. She sees the flat, devastated autumn landscape open out round them. She sees ruins. She sees prisoners of war working. She feels relief but she also feels worried because they are on their way into the country of the enemy. East Prussia. Germany.

Marggrabowa. They get out to change trains and to have their papers inspected. The station is full of people, many of them well-dressed ladies and young women waiting for a transport train of wounded soldiers due to arrive soon. Laura and the children can find no bench to sit on so they sit on the floor in a corner and wait. Time passes. The children are tired and whining. People standing around look at them inquisitively. The children become more and more restless, moan and make a fuss. Laura is at the end of her tether and snaps at them to be quiet and, forgetting herself, does it in English.

The reaction from those around is immediate. “
Engländerin!
” a couple of the women shriek. Laura tries to explain—
“Nein, Amerikanerin!”
—but no one listens. She is surrounded by a circle of threatening figures, most of them women, who hurl abuse and throw things at her. Laura presses into the corner, hiding the terrified children under her skirts. After what seems like “a century” the officer escorting her pushes through the crowd and leads them away. They get into the waiting train and Laura sits rubbing gobbets of spit from her clothes.

Insterburg. It is evening by now and they change trains again. The children are “miserable, a little hungry and thirsty.” In spite of having first-class tickets they soon lose their compartment. The train rolls on all night through the dark, foreign countryside.

Berlin. It is six o’clock in the morning.

Three days later Laura de Turczynowicz and her three children cross the border into Holland. At Bentheim they and their luggage—what is left of it—are subjected to a thorough search. Under the supervision of a German official, a woman, they are stripped naked and their clothes are examined so closely that even the linings of their jackets and their shoes are slit open. Laura’s hair is parted with a toothcomb to ensure that there are no hidden messages written on her scalp. Apart from the
clothes they are standing in she is permitted to keep only the children’s birth certificates, three photographs and a prayer book. That is all. Then they are allowed to continue. As the train enters Holland she begins to shake uncontrollably.

SATURDAY
, 25
SEPTEMBER
1915
René Arnaud sees the start of the great offensive in Champagne

A south-westerly wind. Grey, low clouds. Rain. An ordinary autumn day. But here in south-eastern Champagne and also further to the north, up in Artois, it is anything but ordinary, for the big day—
le jour
—has at last arrived. In Champagne, two French armies—Pétain’s Second and de Langle de Cary’s Fourth—are about to attack on a front ten miles wide with the aim of driving the Germans up along the Meuse towards Belgium. That is one axis of the offensive. Simultaneously, in Artois, the British and the French are to attack round Loos and the Vimy Ridge. That is the other axis.

It is true that exactly the same thing was tried as recently as last spring, and in almost exactly the same places. And it is true that the successes were small and the losses considerable,
^ggg
but things are different this time: the preparations have been much more thorough and the numbers of attacking soldiers and supporting guns are much greater—about 2,500 artillery pieces have been installed in Champagne. No one seems to wonder whether all these weapons are perhaps being used in the wrong way: the only solution they can imagine is to use more weapons,
more guns, more shells. The solution to the equation equals mass and weight.
^hhh
And the aim of this double offensive has been set very high: it is not just a case of winning some ground; the aim is nothing less than “to drive the Germans out of France,” to quote Order of the Day No. 8565 issued by Joseph Joffre, commander-in-chief of the French army, to the troops who are now waiting to attack. The intention is that the order will be read out to the men. And this operation is to be no more than a beginning—breaking through the German lines here in Champagne and up in Artois will signal the start of a general offensive.

It marks a return to the illusions of 1914, more particularly to the dream of a rapid victory.
ⁱⁱⁱ
Expectations are pitched at the same very high level as the aims and the preparations: if Joffre can pull off what he is promising, the war could be over by Christmas!

René Arnaud is one of the men looking forward to the offensive. He has been impressed by the preparations in terms of their scale, their thoroughness, their mass and their weight: the enormous troop movements, the digging of new connecting trenches, the huge stockpiles of shells, the assemblage of both heavy and light artillery, the number of cavalry ready and waiting and, of course, “the constant buzz of brown and yellow aeroplanes above our heads, targeted unsuccessfully by enemy shells from which white puffs of smoke would suddenly burst into flower in the sky like Japanese paper flowers cast onto water, to be followed immediately by the sound of muffled explosions.” Based on the evidence he can see before him and on Joffre’s promise, Arnaud, too, is convinced that this is the turning point. He writes in a letter home:

Our commanders have promised us success to such an extent that they must be completely convinced of it. And if we were to fail, what a miscalculation that would be, what a crisis of morale and fighting spirit that would imply for all the troops engaged!

The preparations include the distribution of a completely new piece of equipment—the steel helmet. They are quite light, painted blue (to match the new, pale blue-grey uniform), decorated with a small ridge across the top and a flaming grenade badge on the front. The French army is the first to introduce this novelty. As with quite a few other “new” pieces of equipment (steel shields for the trenches, spiked clubs for assault troops, sharpened infantry spades and all the different kinds of hand grenade) they remind one of earlier centuries and reveal how, paradoxically, the hypermodern can be a return to the past. Helmets are a necessity in the trenches: it has become obvious that head wounds account for a disproportionately large percentage of battlefield injuries and that they are far more likely to be fatal.
^jjj
Although the helmets are unlikely to provide protection against a rifle bullet, they will stop a bullet from a shrapnel shell without difficulty. Arnaud and his men, however, find it difficult to take these contraptions seriously—they seem so … unmilitary: “We shrieked with laughter when we tried them on, as if they were carnival hats.”

Arnaud’s regiment, in a state of readiness for the start, is positioned in a wood out on the right flank. In front of them they can see a shallow river and beyond the river lies another wood, Bois de Ville, where the Germans are said to be, but they have seen and heard very little of the enemy. (The battlefield is, as usual, empty. Not a man in sight.) That wood is their first objective, once the main attack has secured the German forward lines, that is; then the idea is that the German defences on both sides of the breakthrough should be rolled up. When the German lines have “crumbled,” Arnaud’s regiment is “to pursue the retreating enemy with the assistance of the cavalry” and so on. Soon. Mass and weight.

They have been witnesses to the firestorm for four days now and it has undeniably been spectacular:

The shells from our 155mm guns have been falling regularly on the edges of Bois de Ville with terrifying explosions. From the protection of the raised ground behind us a battery of 75mm guns has been firing its four pieces one after the other, making the air vibrate as if from the ringing of four bells. The shells whined as they passed over our heads and then, after a short silence, came the four sharp barks as they struck home. Under this torrent of fire we thought that everything in the enemy lines must inevitably be pounded to dust.

The clocks are ticking away. The attack is set for 9:15. Arnaud peers through the misty grey rain at the point he knows the first attack will take place.

Then it starts. Arnaud sees very little. Just “black shapes advancing slowly in broken lines.” The dots work their way towards the German forward trenches, which are veiled in smoke. Then the attackers are swallowed up by the clouds and are no longer visible.

Soon there are rumours of a great victory and that the cavalry has broken through. There is great excitement. But why has Arnaud’s regiment not been ordered to attack? They remain in the wood and wait. What has happened?

Three days later, on Tuesday, 28 September, all attacks are called off. The offensive has been held by the German second line and by the rapid arrival of German reserves. (It has been proved yet again that soldiers on trains move faster than soldiers on foot.) The French have taken roughly two miles of ground at a cost of 145,000 men dead, wounded, missing or captured. Arnaud’s regiment never needs to attack Bois de Ville.

THURSDAY
, 30
SEPTEMBER
1915
Alfred Pollard is wounded outside Zillebeke

How is he supposed to feel? Pollard is depressed and hungover and ashamed, having just received a terrible dressing-down from the colonel because, in his haste, he forgot to put on his puttees. But he is also excited about the mission he has been given. He has always longed for a chance to shine—and now is his opportunity.

Not that he takes things easy. His platoon commander has had an eye on this big, aggressive and utterly fearless twenty-two-year-old who takes every opportunity to be involved in the fighting, who never fails to volunteer for dangerous tasks and who sometimes sets off into noman’s-land of his own accord. On one of these trips Pollard found in a crater a Burberry coat with only a few shrapnel holes in it and, alongside the coat, a detached head standing upright, with no sign of a body. He found the sight “so droll and yet so pathetic.” He now wears the coat in bad weather. He sometimes fantasises about the head. Was he a friend or foe? Was he a brave man, killed “whilst he was dashing forward in a charge full of the lust of battle” or was he just someone “cowering down in sickening fear”?

Pollard has just been promoted to sergeant and second in command of the battalion’s bombing platoon,
^kkk
which he trained himself and then, with his usual zeal, drilled time after time in the art of throwing grenades.

His moment has come. The great British attack at Loos began five days ago, well prepared and with large numbers of men, but yet again their efforts have failed to produce any significant results beyond colossal British losses. (Two of the divisions involved have lost half their strength, dead and wounded, in just a couple of days.) And as usual, the fighting has spread to other sections of the front. The Germans have detonated a large mine under the British lines in a wood the British call Sanctuary Wood
^lll
at Zillebeke outside Ypres, and then they occupied the enormous,
corpse-filled crater it made. Pollard’s bombing platoon has been ordered to retake the crater.

The platoon has been divided into two sections, one of them under Pollard’s command, the other led by the platoon officer, Hammond. The plan is that the two groups should work their way forward through the trenches and then move round the crater from opposite sides until they meet. Their main weapons are hand grenades, which they are carrying in sacks. The private soldiers are also carrying clubs for hand-to-hand combat. Pollard feels no fear of what is to come, in fact he is grateful to have been given the task. He views the whole thing as a bit of a competition and he is determined that his part of the platoon will get further round the crater than Hammond’s.

Pollard’s mind is not, however, entirely dominated by his eagerness for action. For some considerable time he has been corresponding with a woman whose family he knows, a woman who has been sending him gifts and friendly, encouraging letters. He is head over heels in love, has christened her “My Lady,” “the most divine and wonderful creature who has ever existed,” and—bearing in mind that severed head—he hopes that her name will be the last words to pass his lips if he should meet the same fate. (Her name, incidentally, is Mary.) A few weeks ago he wrote a letter in which he proposed to her.