The Beauty and the Sorrow (35 page)

It is close to midnight. I have left the company and start home along the river bank. The snowfall has ceased; everything lies wrapped in white. In the Turkish quarter of Sarajevo on the other shore, snow lies thick on the domes of the mosques, and when the gusty wind blows off the mountain peaks, part of the white cover glides down with a reverberating crash, breaking the calm of the sleeping country.

The streets are deserted. A turbanned night watchman shuffles away before me in his straw slippers. I reach the bank of the river Miljacka and stand on the corner just where the fatal shots were fired at the Crown Prince of the Monarchy. There is a marble slab on the wall of the house. June 28th, 1914.

From the center of the city, the fine musical tinkle of sleigh bells approaches. And now the sleigh too can be seen, turning toward the river bank, the light narrow vehicle drawn by small steaming horses.
In the uncertain sheen of the street lamp I glimpse the outline of a slight woman wrapped in furs and the silhouette of the man beside her. With rapid hoof-beats the whole vision flies away. The sleigh with the two lovers in it has already passed the third corner. The sweet tinkle grows faint, and I stand alone on the cold river bank below the marble slab at the source of world tragedy.

SUNDAY
, 16
JANUARY
1916
Florence Farmborough follows the course of a raid in the Chertoviche region

The cold and the heavy snowfalls are their most important allies. Both German and Russian armies remain stationary in rapidly dug trenches and overcrowded bunkers. Florence and the rest of the hospital unit have little to do. Most of their patients are suffering from injuries caused by the cold, or possibly from wounds resulting from a sniper’s bullet, since those specialists in preying on their fellow men are never so active as in situations like the present one.
^†

Florence is rather pleased with life just now. She has just had ten days’ leave in Moscow and really loved being there: “The light, the colour, the warmth, which I had so wished for—all were there.” She went to the opera, saw the ballet, even danced. And the quiet evenings at home with her host family, with soft cushions, singing and playing the grand piano, that too had been undiluted pleasure, though after a while she had been troubled by a vague sense of restlessness. Something was missing:

Gradually it was borne to me that to be happy while the world was unhappy, to laugh while the world was in pain, was incongruous; in fact, impossible. I realised that my happiness lay with my duty, and, as a Red Cross nurse, I had no need to be told where that was.

In the end she had found herself counting the days until she could put on her uniform again and return to the front.

It is not only Florence who is in a good mood. Morale has recovered a little since the long retreat of the autumn and winter. The deadlock of recent months has allowed the shattered divisions to fill their ranks with new blood, their supply trains with new provisions and their arsenals with new materiel. The army of tsarist Russia now has fully two million men at the front and almost every one of them has his own rifle, which is considered to be an unusually good situation.
^‡
The shortage of shells that was being talked about for the whole of last year—though it was to some extent exaggerated—has been dealt with: they now have about
1,000
projectiles for every field gun, which is thought to be ample. And all the men have been fully rested.

As a result of all this, optimism in the Russian army is growing again. The fact that they have lost about four million men in the course of little more than a year and a half has been more or less repressed
^§
and they hope—indeed, many of them believe—that the new year will at last bring the turning point they have been looking for and discussing. And there is a lot of talk of future Russian offensives.
^‖

There is a new spirit of aggression among the soldiers. Florence has known for a while that some sort of operation is being prepared along their sector of the front. Yesterday, at a dinner, she found out what it is to be: there is to be a reconnaissance in force by two battalions, which will target an important section of the German line of defence. The aim is to test enemy strength and to bring back some prisoners at the same time. Many of the men in the attack will be raw recruits, keen young men who have volunteered to be in the advance guard. Their job will be to stealthily cut passages through the German barbed wire—a dangerous task which, in their inexperience, they imagine is going to be little more than an exciting escapade. (They have been specially equipped
with snow camouflage in the form of white overalls.) Florence and a section of her unit are to remain in a state of readiness immediately behind the front line in order to treat the men who are wounded.

By morning they are ready to move forward and set up a first-aid station but the hours pass while they wait impatiently. They do not get their marching orders until almost half past ten in the evening. They had been intending to use tents but to their joy they are given permission to set up their equipment in a cabin in a small wood just over a mile behind the trenches. The weather is dreadful—a strong, cold wind and sleety rain.

The doctors are nervous. Who can predict how the Germans will respond to a raid like this? The front is still calm and quiet. Not a shot is to be heard. They sit and wait. And wait. Midnight passes. After a while the divisional commander turns up and they offer him tea. The waiting continues. At two o’clock the commander receives a telephone report. Good news and bad news: the first attempt to cut through the German wire had to be abandoned but another attempt is being made.

More waiting, more silence, then another telephone call. Everything is going according to plan. The reconnaissance units are working their way through the barriers. The people in the little cabin breathe out and exchange smiles of relief.

More waiting, more silence. Three o’clock comes, then four.

Then it happens.

The silence is broken by the combined growling roar of artillery pieces, machine guns and rifles. This must surely signal that the Russian attack has begun. The noise grinds on. Another telephone report. The reconnaissance group has been discovered at their task and now find themselves under heavy fire from the German artillery. The breakthrough has failed.

The wounded begin to come in, some carried on stretchers, others helped by their fellows, some limping in under their own steam. The scene is dominated by two colours—white and red. The blood stands out in sharp contrast on the soldiers’ new snow suits. She sees one holding a grenade in his hand, so shocked that he refuses to let go of it. She sees another man, hit in the stomach—his intestines are hanging out and he is already dead. She sees a third man, shot in the lungs and his breath is bubbling as he fights for air. She sees a fourth being given the last rites but he is already so far gone that he can hardly manage to swallow the wafer. White and red.

When it is all over Florence goes out into the fresh air. Everything is once again silent and calm, though the sound of scattered shots can be heard from a neighbouring sector. The reconnaissance force has failed, seventy-five men have been killed and about two hundred wounded. The commander of the regiment is missing and rumoured to be lying badly wounded somewhere out there in the wire and winter darkness.

TUESDAY
, 18
JANUARY
1916
Michel Corday takes the Métro to the Gare de l’Est

Cold air. Winter sky. This morning Michel Corday is accompanying an old friend to the railway station. The friend is an officer in the engineers and is returning to his unit. The two men take the Métro to the Gare de l’Est. In the underground they hear an infantryman on his way back to the front at the end of his leave talking to an acquaintance: “I’d give my left arm to avoid going back.” This is not just a figure of speech because Corday then hears the infantryman say he has been trying to get himself wounded as a way of being taken out of the front line: he did so by putting his hand through one of the loopholes in the trench under enemy fire and holding it there for an hour—without success.

Other topics of conversation on this day: the war has cost, on average, 3,000 human lives and 350 million francs
each
day. There is talk of reducing these costs in order to be able to fight for longer. The expression “war paid by instalments” is to be heard. There is also considerable agitation that Montenegro—France and Serbia’s Balkan ally—capitulated yesterday. Not that Montenegro had much choice: the mountainous little country was occupied by the same German-Austrian troops who pushed the Serbian army out of its own country. Someone also tells a story about the capture of a badly wounded German officer at the front: as he dies he whispers, “It’s true, isn’t it, that Goethe … is the world’s greatest poet?” This is seen as a typical expression of German self-conceit.

It is ten o’clock in the morning when Corday and his friend arrive at the Gare de l’Est. There are uniformed men everywhere, sitting in their hundreds on luggage trolleys or on the stone balustrades. They are waiting for their trains or for the clock to strike eleven: it is strictly forbidden to serve anything to drink to men in uniform before that
time.
^a
Corday has heard of a minister who wanted to buy a pot of tea for two women and the fiancé of one of the women, only to be politely refused because the fiancé was in uniform and the time was wrong. Then the minister tried to order tea just for the women and was again refused on the grounds that there was a risk that the soldier might drink some of the tea served to the women. The waiter did, however, point obligingly to the entrance and suggest a solution: the fiancé could do what an officer with another party was doing—leaving the tea room so that the people in his group could have something to drink.

The platform, too, is swarming with soldiers returning from leave. There are emotional farewells by the carriages, women lifting up their little ones so that the men hanging out of the windows can give them a last kiss. Corday observes the scenes in his usual voyeurish way. His eyes fall on a soldier whose face is completely contorted, transformed into a mask of sorrow. The man’s suffering is so obvious, so palpably clear, that Corday has to turn away. He leaves the platform without looking back.

WEDNESDAY
, 26
JANUARY
1916
Vincenzo D’Aquila is transferred to the San Osvaldo mental hospital

It is early and one of the orderlies brings in D’Aquila’s old uniform and tells him to change. He is then taken to an office where a doctor in a captain’s uniform is waiting. His name is Bianchi. D’Aquila salutes him smartly. The doctor receives him kindly and, feeling rather uncomfortable with the whole situation, hesitates. D’Aquila sees a pile of papers lying ready on the desk and manages to pick out fragments of what is written there. It is an order for him to be transferred for “observation and custody” to the San Osvaldo mental hospital. “Symptoms: cerebral typhus of a maniacal type—dangerous to himself and to others.”

D’Aquila has gone mad—or that is what the doctors think his behaviour demonstrates. In D’Aquila’s clouded and confused mind the whole experience of falling ill, followed by an apparently miraculous recovery,
has driven to an extreme his belief that he is somehow being “chosen.” His mind is filled with the wild idea that he has been brought back from the dead for a specific purpose by a higher power. And his mission? To stop the war. He imagines he can see the workings of the supernatural in the hospital wards. He believes he is performing faith healing.

And there is certainly no lack of people to heal. Immediately after his reawakening he was moved to a convent just outside Udine, where the military are sending soldiers with different kinds of mental problems. The number of cases is growing day by day. The doctors do not, in truth, know what to do with all these men with their strange cramps, grotesquely obsessional behaviour and inexplicable paralyses, men whose bodies are uninjured but whose minds seem to have succumbed. In a bed to the right of D’Aquila there is a young man who sits up every tenth minute, day and night, and carefully examines his pillow for lice. In the same ward there is a fellow who repeatedly thinks he is back at the front and rolls out of bed roaring, “
Avanti Savoia!
” He wriggles backwards and forwards on the cold floor, ducking to avoid imaginary bullets until he faints, at which point the orderlies pick him up. Then he remains unconscious until the next attack (both clinical and imaginary) sets him off again.

For lack of anything better, they call it “shell shock.”

D’Aquila has seen it all and been appalled by it. It has merely served to reinforce his firm conviction that he both must and actually
can
put a stop to this utter madness—the war. He had a prophetic dream one night: right outside the hospital he saw two groups of fighting men clash with each other and he went outside and stood between them:

With upraised hand I motioned to the soldiers to stop shooting. Next I felt a sharp pain on my right side where an enemy bullet had hit me. But I did not reel. Instead I calmly extracted the bullet with my fingers and held it aloft to show the combatants my invulnerability. Instantly the firing ceased, the men threw their weapons to the earth and started to embrace one another, crying, “The war is over!”

D’Aquila believes himself to be a prophet and argues, not without some finesse, with both doctors and priests. They call him mad, but it is the world that has gone mad, isn’t it? It may perhaps sound like some
gobbledegook philosophy when he says he will stop the war (him, just a solitary, unknown corporal) but surely someone must make a start, mustn’t they? So he has been wandering around in his dressing gown, preaching and debating. He suspects there are conspiracies. He thinks he has discovered secret messages from a higher power hidden in his underwear.