The Beauty and the Sorrow (32 page)

‡
In the middle of December 1914 German cruisers bombarded Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby. Casualties, mostly civilian, amounted to 137 dead and 592 injured.

§
In this context a division is a distinct unit of a warship’s gunnery crew.

‖
If Loti is mentioned these days it is usually because he was much admired by Proust.

a
It is perhaps worth a mention that on this day three of the men involved in the assassination in Sarajevo at the end of June 1914 were hanged. Gavrilo Princip, the man who actually murdered the Archduke and his wife, escaped the death penalty because he was under the age of twenty at the time of the deed. Princip was placed under lock and key in the Theresienstadt fortress, condemned to twenty years’ imprisonment. He was to remain there until he died of tuberculosis on 28 April 1918, still fanatical and still untroubled by remorse for what he had caused.

b
The Ottoman attack in the east was not the only threat to the British presence in Egypt. Towards the end of 1915 a Wahhabite-inspired grouping in Libya, who were fighting in the name of Islam against both French and Italian colonial expansion in North Africa, began a series of attacks across Egypt’s western border. These attacks were supported by Ottoman units, and it took considerable effort on the part of the British forces to put a stop to them. (While on the topic of problems in North Africa, we should note that the troubles in Morocco that had started when it became a French protectorate in 1912 were still continuing.)

c
An old acquaintance from the cadet college in Duntroon.

d
The single word “Pontooning” often appears in his short diary during this period.

e
Red, green and white can be said to be the iconographic colours of night during the First World War. All the armies used rockets in these colours and they were used in combination to create different messages. Red usually meant “Enemy attack!” whereas green signified that one’s own artillery was firing too short and needed to advance its firing range.

f
The Germans undoubtedly had a number of local successes: they pulled off a complete encirclement at Augustów, where a whole Russian corps (Bulgakov’s XXth) was annihilated, and the German press was quick to beat the Tannenberg drum. Russian losses had been high, at times horrific, but German losses were also significant and, as mentioned, accompanied by few gains.

g
Even though she is convinced of the truth of the German atrocities, and equally convinced that Kaiser Wilhelm was a mad beast who must be stopped, she actually likes all the German prisoners she has met so far.

h
“Did we in our own strength confide, our striving would be losing,” and so on.

i
The name Constantinople (Konstantinye) was also used by the Turks at this time to describe modern-day Istanbul.

j
Remounts were horses brought in to replace those injured or killed.

k
The Austro-Hungarian army had lost about 800,000 men in terms of the dead, wounded or, above all, sick or frostbitten, since the turn of the year. These figures were not known, however, until 1918. All the countries kept the figures of their losses secret and to ask for them was considered little short of treason.

l
“Ambulance” was the term used in France for a military hospital at that date.

m
Cushing, educated at Yale and Harvard, had already by this time made a significant reputation for himself among his peers. Something of a prodigy, he became Professor of Surgery at Johns Hopkins University at the age of thirty-two and was a world-leading researcher in the area of various brain centres and their functions.

n
The term “trench foot” has not yet been coined.

o
A shell splinter or, to be more precise, a piece of shell.

p
A Hunter’s Wandering in Africa
and
Travel and Adventure in South-East Africa
. Selous had become particularly well-known because, like many other explorers and adventurers, he made lecture tours describing his experiences. He has a place in history as being, along with the famous Cecil Rhodes, the first to point to the Rhodesian high plateau as a suitable place for the British to settle and practise large-scale agriculture. Later, ironically enough, he himself discovered the great difficulties involved in this, difficulties that anyone who has read Doris Lessing’s African novels and short stories will be familiar with but which Selous, with his fervour for colonisation, gravely underestimated.

q
The commander of the battalion, Colonel Patrick Driscoll, was also the man who had initiated its formation. During the Boer War he had led a celebrated force of irregulars—Driscoll’s Scouts—and the idea is that the battalion should be a unit of a similar kind.

r
His Majesty’s Troop Ship.

s
The famous German field marshal, Paul von Hindenburg, stayed there when passing through. Laura found him to be a chivalrous but self-centred glutton. The fact that he is the commander-in-chief on this front—and therefore ultimately responsible for all the misery—makes him repulsive in her eyes.

t
Accusations of Jewish collaboration with the Germans fanned the flames of the old, ingrained Russian-Polish anti-Semitism. Even Laura has become suspicious of many of the Jews in the town.

u
A winter game among some of the bolder children in Suwalki was to go round the fields outside the town probing the snow with sticks to find the corpses of the slain.

v
As Niall Ferguson has shown, there was considerable hesitation among British politicians about whether Britain should enter the war at all. Why line up on the same side as autocratic Russia against a Germany that in many areas, not least social legislation, art and science, was seen as a model? To begin with, a majority of the government was quite clearly against entry. Some of them were prepared to accept a limited German breach of Belgian neutrality, others were ready—should it prove necessary—to allow British forces to breach that neutrality. They kept very quiet about that later.

w
In Dinant 612 people were murdered, in Andenne 211 and in Tamines 384; women and children were among the victims. The perpetrators were in all cases German regular army troops, whipped up to hysteria by alleged local guerrilla actions.

x
The first Zeppelin to be brought down by an enemy plane was LZ 37 on the night of 6–7 June. It is incorrect to say it was shot down: the British pilot responsible for the exploit, R. A. J. Warneford, was actually on his way to attack the huge Zeppelin hangars at Berchem when he happened to meet LZ 37. Warneford flew above the great vessel and bombed it, causing it to crash. Warneford was awarded the Victoria Cross for his action. Ten days later he lost his life in a very ordinary air accident.

y
What, of course, is most terrifying is that this is a completely new way of waging war. Firstly, to a very great extent it is the civilian population that suffers, and secondly, the threat comes from the air. The agitation in Britain was great and there were even demands that captured Zeppelin pilots should be executed.

z
The purpose of this badly planned and reckless operation was to use warships to blast a way first through the Dardanelles and then through the Bosphorus, primarily to enable the shipping of war materiel to the hard-pressed Russians. The intention was also to relieve them in the Caucasus, although the dangerous earlier Ottoman offensive had already ground to a halt in the cold, snow and chaos by this stage. It was also hoped that the Ottoman Empire could be knocked out of the war. There was constant debate between what were called the “westerners” and the “easterners,” in which the former (usually the military) wanted to prioritise efforts to break through on the Western Front, whereas the latter (usually politicians) wanted instead to operate against the weak flanks of the Central Powers, above all in the Balkan area and in the southern Mediterranean. The Dardanelles operation was to a large extent the idea of the young, manipulative and controversial First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. As early as 1907 the British navy had looked at the matter and come to the conclusion that it was impossible for a purely naval attack to succeed—but such mundane facts did not appeal to Churchill’s adventurous nature.

aa
This is a somewhat forced but not completely inaccurate summary of what was planned. Troops were necessary since bitter experience had shown that it would not be possible for Allied warships alone to secure the Dardanelles. The first task of land forces would be to knock out the coastal artillery batteries that were causing major problems for the Allied naval forces, particularly by their ability to direct accurate fire on the minesweepers that went ahead of the fleet.

bb
In his letters Dawkins expresses his growing animosity towards Egyptians, referring to them as, among other things, “contemptible.”

cc
Massacres of Christians had occurred before and the conflict between the Armenians and the Ottoman central authorities was an old one, but one that had become worse during recent decades. The Great War led to a sudden, unforeseen and particularly nasty deterioration. Many Turks were obsessed by a kind of anxiety about survival. In October 1914, when those in power in Constantinople took the decision to join the Central Powers, the Ottoman Empire had just lost yet another war (the First Balkan War, 1912–13, in which the Empire was defeated by the combined forces of Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania) and suffered yet again the loss of territories mainly inhabited by Christians. Other parts of the Empire, such as Egypt and the Lebanon, were de facto in the hands of the western great powers. It was uncertain whether this erosion was going to continue. A new ingredient—and a pretty deadly one—had just been added to this ancient witch’s brew: modern nationalism. Even before October 1914 this led the rulers in Constantinople to consider ideas of major ethnic relocations aimed at the creation of an ethnically uniform state or, at least, at freeing important provinces from their non-Muslim “tumours.” Simultaneously, among the increasingly hard-pressed minorities—particularly among activist Armenians—nationalism aroused separatist fantasies and the hope of a state of their own.

dd
Actually multiple fiascos, since it was not only the over-precipitate invasion of the Caucasus that had come to a bitter end. The Ottoman incursion into independent Persia had also ended in defeat by this stage. The Russian corps which had now reached Kotur Tepe was coming—victorious—from those operations.

ee
He handed over these seven men to a high-ranking local official who promised to protect them. Later, de Nogales discovered that the official had the prisoners strangled the very same night.

ff
They would later use several mortars more than 500 years old—with considerable effect, though also at considerable risk to the artillerymen.

gg
William Bridges, the commanding officer of the 1st Australian Division, whom Dawkins knew reasonably well since he had also been in command of the Royal Military College at Duntroon.

hh
The Ottoman infantry defending Gallipoli during these days was brave, outnumbered, had defective equipment and was simply being used as cannon fodder. This fact is well summarised in a famous utterance by the then commander of the 19th Ottoman Division, Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa Kemal, later famous as Kemal Atatürk. In a critical situation at Ariburnu on this very day, when he sent in a regiment whose ammunition was almost exhausted to stop a dangerous breakthrough by the Anzacs (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps), he shouted to his soldiers, “I am not giving you an order to attack, I am ordering you to die.” That unit, the 57th Regiment, was indeed annihilated. Q.E.D.

ii
The trench system in the east was rarely as well-developed and labyrinthine as in the west. This was mainly because the front, as has been noted, was more mobile. The distance between the enemy lines, perhaps a couple of hundred yards in the west and frequently much less than that, was often a mile or more in the east.

jj
Quickly!

kk
There are almost as many war cemeteries in this area as there are in Flanders and they can still be seen today by anyone driving along route 977 from Tarnów to Gorlice. In contrast to the situation in Flanders, many of these cemeteries are in a melancholy state of decay, which may sometimes be romantic but is often depressing. Most of them contain the bodies of soldiers from several different armies.

ll
Dawkins had visited the dentist several times while they were still in Egypt but all of the problems had clearly not been dealt with. As late as 10 May he was seeking medical help—on the shore—for his pain.

mm
Now best known as Anzac Cove.

nn
There was no longer any question of surprise: the repeated naval attacks on Gallipoli during the months beforehand meant that the Ottoman generals—under their German commander-in-chief, Otto Liman von Sanders—had their eye on the place and sent all the reinforcements they could scrape together.