The Beauty and the Sorrow (37 page)

Mousley notes in his journal:

I finished [reading] a novel today. It has at least made me long for England again. We are all full of longings; and the chief blessing of civilisation is that it supplies the wherewithal to quieten them. Lord! For a glass of fresh milk and a jelly. Temperature 103° and shivering. I am going to have an attempt at sleeping. Everything is quiet. The sentry’s steps beside my roof make the earth shake. It is the seventieth day of the siege.

MONDAY
, 14
FEBRUARY
1916
Kresten Andresen is in Billy-Montigny and thinking of peace

Winter turning to spring. Puddles covered with ice. The landscape is light brown. There have been some quiet months, which has pleased him. Andresen has had a few tours of duty in the front line but as a digger, not as a fighter. During the day they sat in a cellar listening to the shellfire, and at night they marched up to the forward line and dug and dug. Their positions are in a state of constant development, both in depth and extent, and the sight of mile after mile of deep trenches and ever thicker
belts of barbed wire has become depressing rather than impressive. He has told himself and the others that a solution by military means is no longer possible—the more time passes, the more impenetrable the lines become. He has also heard that this is one of the sectors where the German and the French soldiers have come to a kind of silent understanding to leave each other in peace as far as possible. Now and then, however, severe fighting breaks out and then dies away just as quickly, following a logic he finds impossible to discern.

Apart from the nights of digging Kresten Andresen has been having a relatively comfortable life. He has been spared anything really unpleasant and any great danger, but he is still unsettled and longing for home. He has withdrawn from his German comrades to a great extent, finding them over-partial to drink, and even from everyday life, which he finds monotonous and melancholy. They sometimes play practical jokes on each other, like putting pepper in each other’s “pig snouts”—soldiers’ slang for gas masks. Whenever he can he seeks out other Danes to talk to and spend his time with. He has been reading Molière and become friendly with one of the draught horses. When news reached them that Montenegro had capitulated to the Austro-Hungarians, it was enough to set off endless speculation that this was just the first step, that others would soon follow suit and a general peace would break out by Easter or not long after. And so on. Andresen writes in his diary:

The offensive that was going on here has now come to a complete halt and everything is perfectly calm. It’s a long time since I heard the big guns. And I believe the war will be over before August. But that doesn’t mean that we’ll get home immediately. There is bound to be a terrible mess in all the old world. I believe that life will stop for a while before blooming with renewed vigour.

SATURDAY
, 19
FEBRUARY
1916
Sarah Macnaughtan is on her way from Kasvin to Hamadan

At eight o’clock they get into the motor car and set off. The low houses of Kasvin soon disappear behind them and the plain opens out. Snow everywhere. The wind is piercingly cold. She thinks: “I always had
an idea that Persia was in the tropics. Where I got this notion I can’t say.” Northern Persia—that is where Macnaughtan and her party have ended up.

The road that brought them here has been crooked and unpredictable. At the beginning of December the Russian authorities—in the shape of a grand duchess—finally informed them that they would be serving in the Caucasus and so they travelled there by train via Moscow. The further south they get (Vladikavkaz, Tblisi, Batumi and back to Tblisi), the vaguer the idea of the “Front” becomes. Where is the “Front” actually?
^h
And what are they actually supposed to be doing? Only one of the ambulances they shipped out from Britain has got through and it turns out to be in need of repairs. (The car they are driving is one she bought in Tblisi with her own money.) And are motor vehicles any use at all on the awful mountain roads down in the Caucasus? The only thing they know is that a Russian infantry division has advanced quite a long way into Persia and the fighting is said to be continuing.

The fact that the war has spilled over into neutral Persia and that her unit will be working to support an army of invasion is not something that Macnaughtan has given any great thought to. Events are following a logic of escalation of their own,
ⁱ
separate from and beyond the high-flown ideals she was doing so much to propagate during last summer’s lecture tour. When one is submerged, as Macnaughtan is, in an ever-changing torrent of events, it is difficult to say what is what, what has anything to do with the High Ideal or the Struggle for Victory, or what is simply an expression of crass national self-interest or equally crass imperial expansionism. Does she really want to ask herself those questions anyway? Russia, when all is said and done, is an ally of Britain.

But her nagging doubts have been stirred into life again.

The motor car drives on along the frozen road, hemmed in by high
banks of snow. There is a sharp wind. They stop at a small tea-house, eat some sandwiches and drink a glass of port: “I think a glass of this just prevented me from being frozen solid.” Then they drive on, slowly leaving the plain behind them and travelling up into the mountains. She is freezing.

The experiences of these past months in Russia have, however, served to reinforce her conviction that the British are superior to all other peoples and cultures. And, half-jokingly, she has begun to wonder whether they are on the wrong side in this war. At least in the east:

I often despair over [Russia], and if the Russians were not our Allies I should feel inclined to say that nothing would do them so much good as a year or two of German conquest. No one, after the first six months, has been enthusiastic over the war, and the soldiers want to get home.

There is very little in Russia that she can find anything good to say about: the climate is harsh, the towns are filthy, the people unmannerly, the officials corrupt, the morals low, the social gatherings poor, the food monotonous and their homes ugly. One of the few bright moments occurred on Christmas Day, when she was invited to dine with Grand Duke Nicholas in Tblisi: she was utterly delighted, partly by Nicholas himself—“an adorably handsome man, quite extraordinarily and obviously a Grand Duke”
^j
—and partly because he proposed a toast to her! But then everything returned to the grey reality of waiting, inactivity and contradictory information. Macnaughtan is not in the best of health.

At three o’clock in the afternoon they reach the top of the snow-covered pass, where they meet some Russian officers and eat lunch together. Then they get into the car and begin the slow journey down. She sees birds. She sees wolves. She sees hares. She sees a jackal. She sees abandoned vehicles. She sees a regiment of Cossacks. She sees transport
wagons. She sees horse-drawn guns. There really is a war going on somewhere in the distance and that thought serves to liven her up. Not much is happening at the front at this stage but General Baratov’s division will soon be resuming its slow advance on Teheran and then she and her companions will be needed to tend the wounded.
^k
That is the intention, anyway.

It is beginning to get dark. Hares caught in the car’s headlights remain sitting in the road as if bewitched. Once the sun has gone it suddenly becomes even colder. She sees the surrounding hills disappear in an icy mist.

They reach Hamadan at ten o’clock—“a clay-built, flat Persian town.” The car gets stuck on the awful road into the town and Macnaughtan continues on foot while some of the party remain with the car. Two Russian officers escort her to the hospital where she is to work. She notes that one of them is drunk. She becomes even more annoyed when they arrive, only to be met by “an unpleasant Jew doctor” and two young nurses and to find that no preparations have been made for her arrival. (To make things worse, the officers have started flirting with the nurses.)

After a great deal of confusion and a long wait in the cold she gives up. It is now about midnight and she goes to a house occupied by an American missionary couple. They are helpful, give her a cup of tea and a bed for the night in an unheated room, where she goes to sleep rolled up in her “faithful plaid.”

THURSDAY
, 2
MARCH
1916
Pál Kelemen observes a woman at the railway station in Bosna Brod

The fevers and the weariness he has been suffering from recently have at last been diagnosed—malaria. Not the worst kind, but he still needs
nursing. He is, of course, very pleased that the bed waiting for him is in a Hungarian hospital. Kelemen said farewell to his men and to his brother officers in the light, mild spring rain, and it was an emotional farewell—his sergeant actually wept. Then he left the camp on that marshy field outside Cattaro and sailed on a military transport ship to Fiume.
^l

They sailed along the Dalmatian coast with the ship’s lanterns doused, through the ice-cold Bora wind and past the most dangerous part of the Adriatic Sea: the sea is a cul-de-sac, secured by an enormous Italian mine-barrage down by Otranto. He could not understand the ill-concealed excitement of the crew: he “couldn’t comprehend that somebody’s eyes could still gleam at the sense of danger, or that such living, defiant energy still exists.” While all the rest of them were out on the freezing deck nervously keeping a lookout for Italian mines, Kelemen sat alone in the ship’s mess getting drunk on red Vöslauer Goldeck wine.

Today he is in Bosna Brod, sitting waiting for a train. It is a railway junction and swarming with soldiers.
^m
Lorries tear back and forth along the streets, and at the station he can see engines and carriages of every variety and age. There are great stacks of tinned food and ammunition everywhere. The loading and unloading is being done by elderly, bearded militia in dirty uniforms. The station restaurant is packed with military men and government officials of all kinds, but sitting at one table is a young woman and all Kelemen’s attention is focused on her:

She has on a plain worn dress with some kind of a fur about her neck. I keep looking at the frail, weary figure, the traveling cushion, the shawl and handbag, the boxes on the chairs, and the coat on the peg.

For one moment she turns an apathetic face towards me,
but then, with total indifference, is occupied again with her own affairs. There is a field postcard before her on the table;
ⁿ
a pencil has lain in her hand for a long time but she has not written a single word. Perhaps because I am watching her, perhaps because she is roused from her musing by the clatter of a fresh company departing for the front, she makes up her mind at last, and with long strokes writes down the address. Then her head droops to her hand and she sits motionless again with fixed gaze.

The train with the field company is just pulling out. Whooping, shouting, and singing echoes into the restaurant. She raises her head a bit but does not look outside. Watching from behind the broad pages of an opened newspaper, I see tears well into her eyes. For a while she will not take her handkerchief; then she touches her cheeks with it. She picks up the pencil and writes a few words more.

The conductor comes in from the platform, clangs a bell, and in stentorian voice shouts the arrival of the homebound train. The girl pays, and, with the fuss and helplessness of a woman traveling alone, puts on her coat and gathers up her many little things. Suddenly she catches sight of the unfinished postcard on the table, takes it and tears it up, her gloved hands trembling, and throws it on the tablecloth. The busboy carries her suitcase out after her.

SATURDAY
, 4
MARCH
1916
Richard Stumpf sees SMS
Möwe
returning in triumph to Wilhelmshaven

A clear spring night. The whole German High Seas Fleet is lying just off the mouth of the Elbe, rocking gently on the watered-glass surface of the sea. Perhaps something is going to happen at last! Everything has been made fast for battle and even the officers’ luxuriously furnished cabins
have been emptied of everything unnecessary. The officers are wearing their pistols in order “to be able to enforce their orders with arms”—this is a novelty and ultimately has to do with the growing sense of frustration among the crew.

The ships weigh anchor in the middle of the night. Richard Stumpf hears the familiar sounds, above all the tremors emanating from the three steam engines. They are transmitted through the metal of the hull like a vibrating pulse. He does not, however, know in which direction they are headed. Instead of their usual northerly course leading out into the empty North Sea, the great mass of grey-painted vessels, silent and blacked-out, steers north-west past the East Frisian Islands and then on along the coast. Strange.

The morning turns out clear, warm and sunny. Stumpf is acting as lookout on the ship’s bridge and for once he is genuinely pleased—with the weather, with the mission and with life (well, almost). The reason is not just that the weather is good and the fleet is at last going to
do
something but that this morning a copy of a telegram was posted on the notice board outside the radio cabin: addressed to SMS
Möwe
and from the commander of the High Seas Fleet, the message consisted of just two words: “Welcome home!”