The Beauty and the Sorrow (47 page)

And so the day continues, with death ever present.

Later again, while waiting to be given things to do or orders to move on, she overcomes her feelings and goes off exploring. She walks past a village that has been completely razed by Russian artillery fire (“God help the inhabitants”), past a stinking and still uncovered mass grave and arrives at last at the logical end point of this whole business—a small and rather pretty war cemetery that is probably a few years old. She already knows that the Austro-Hungarian army takes its war cemeteries very seriously and that it also treats its fallen enemies with great respect. The small plot is carefully fenced and the way in passes through a beautifully carved gateway, over which is a wooden cross and an inscription in German: “Here rest the heroes fallen for their Fatherland.” And “heroes” refers to the dead of all nationalities, since Russians and Germans lie buried here alongside Austro-Hungarian soldiers. A fallen
Jewish warrior has not been made to lie under a cross: his grave has been marked instead with the Star of David.

At suppertime they receive nothing but good reports. They already know that operations in the north are coming up against great difficulty but they have seen today with their own eyes that the great offensive in the south is continuing and, to their joy, they hear that as a result of this new breakthrough the Austro-Hungarian armies are retreating at such a speed that the Russians have lost contact with them. The enemy appears to be at the point of complete collapse. This breathes new life into their hopes. Germany will find it hard to continue without Austria-Hungary and the Italian army will have room to manoeuvre and be able to complete its invasion of the double-monarchy without any resistance.
ⁿⁿⁿ

Florence also hears another little piece of news that makes her personally happy. One of the states that has been dragged into the war is Persia, which was invaded by British and Russian troops less than a year ago. Fighting has been going on since then. This evening Florence is told that one of the men who has done most to re-establish so-called order in Persia is a Briton, Brigadier General Sir Percy Sykes.
^ooo
Being British, Florence cannot fail to be proud of this.

So in spite of everything the day ends with smiles. The sun goes down and the night wind wafts the ever stronger smell of thousands of putrefying heroes into the tents.

On that day Angus Buchanan and the column he is part of are at a watercourse. They have been racing south-west in pursuit of a rapidly retreating enemy force that is destroying all the bridges behind it. He writes:

We have now descended into low, unhealthy marsh country, where the atmosphere is close and damp, and fly-ridden. For the remainder of the day and the next two days, swarms of us, like busy ants, laboured to and fro on the construction of the large timber-buttressed bridge being thrown across the high-banked river. At the end of the latter day fever laid hold of me, and left me with just enough energy doggedly to carry on.

TUESDAY
, 29
AUGUST
1916
Andrei Lobanov-Rostovsky almost takes part in the Brusilov offensive

The incident that put his life at stake and gave him what was perhaps his worst experience during all his years at the front began as a silly joke. The news reached them some time on Monday that Romania, after a year of devious vacillation, had joined the Allies and declared war on the Central Powers. It seemed to be good news
^ppp
and some of the men in the company Lobanov-Rostovsky had been sent to support could not resist the temptation to rub the Germans’ noses in it: they put up a large sign, in German, informing their opponents in the trenches opposite of the Romanian decision.

At first the Germans do not seem to react at all. Everything is still quiet when Lobanov-Rostovsky returns to his post in the forward line at nightfall. It is actually quieter than usual. No rattling of machine guns
and for once the night sky is not lit up by the cascades of green, red and white sparks from signal rockets.

In spite of the calm, or perhaps because of it, he feels nervous. He reaches for the field telephone, rings the command post and asks what the time is. The answer is “23:55.”

Five minutes later it starts. German punctuality.

The prevailing calm has not actually been an illusion. He and the rest of the Guards division are stationed on the Stokhod river, where the front line stabilised after the Russian army’s notably successful summer offensive—an offensive which has been named after the man who planned and led it, the intelligent and unorthodox Alexei Brusilov. The offensive started at the beginning of June and has been going on in stages throughout the whole summer. The results have been amazing. The Russian forces have not only taken territory on a scale unequalled since the autumn of 1914 (some units are now back in the Carpathians and posing a direct threat to Hungary) but they have also inflicted such losses on the Austro-Hungarian army that it is on the point of collapse.

What Brusilov and his southern army group have achieved should not really have been possible: without any great superiority in terms of numbers or firepower they have successfully carried out a rapid offensive against an enemy who was well entrenched.
^qqq

Two paradoxes explain why most offensives end in failure and why the fronts so often become static. The first is this: in order to succeed, offensives need both thorough preparation and the element of surprise. But one excludes the other. An attacker who makes all the preparations considered necessary will inevitably be discovered and the surprise element comes to nothing. If surprise is prioritised, however, it is necessary to forget about careful preparation. The second paradox is this: in order to succeed, offensives need both weight and mobility. Weight—above all in the form of thousands of artillery pieces, many of them heavy, some
extremely heavy—is needed to blast a way through the enemy’s defensive lines. Mobility is needed to be able to exploit the gap thus created before the defender has time to react and plug it with reserves or new, hastily excavated lines of defence.

But in this case, too, it is only possible to have the one at the expense of the other. If an army has as many cannon, howitzers, mortars and so on as are necessary to achieve a breakthrough, it will become so slow that it is unable to convert the breakthrough into anything more than a salient filled with corpses and shell craters. And then the enemy reserves are brought up and everything can start from the beginning again. If, however, an army is sufficiently mobile to exploit a breakthrough quickly, it is unlikely to have the weight to break through in the first place. These (rather than any particular imbecility on the part of generals) are the main reasons for this drawn-out war of position.
^rrr

Brusilov’s model was brilliant in its simplicity. It relied primarily on surprise, but that was to be achieved without the massive assemblage of men and materiel; nor did he need that kind of preparation since—the second point—he was not aiming for huge superiority in just one small sector (as had recently been the case with Evert’s earlier Russian offensive in March) but was attacking at a series of points along the whole of the southern front. This meant that the German and Austro-Hungarian generals did not know where to send their reserves and the result was that the attacking forces for once came out on top.
^sss

The place on the Stokhod river where Lobanov-Rostovsky is currently located is precisely the point at which the Brusilov offensive ran out of steam and chugged to a halt because of massive German reinforcements and equally overwhelming Russian losses. There were also logistical problems in that the Russian attackers were moving ever further from their railway network whereas the defenders were being pushed ever closer to their own. There was a long series of attacks and counterattacks in the region but things have now been quiet around the Stokhod for some time. Neither side has the strength to do much: the summer of 1916 in the east, just as in the west, has seen more blood spilled than anyone could have imagined.

The last few months have been relatively peaceful for Lobanov-Rostovsky. We can perhaps see evidence of his not notably soldierly disposition in the fact that he has been transferred from the sappers to a posting that involves even less combat: he is in command of a column of bridge-builders, which consists of eighty men, sixty horses and a number of unwieldy pontoons, and they have marched in the rear of the army the whole time, along with the artillery. But even from that position he has noticed two things. Firstly, the ability of the Russian army has really improved, particularly in Brusilov’s army group; thus, for example, Russian trenches are much better built now than they were in Poland just a year ago, and camouflage skills are outstanding. Secondly, many of the Russian units are in very good shape: he has seen them march past “singing and in good order.” He has also observed that the units are at full strength, though the officers are boyishly young, the fresh products of the cadet schools. Most of the veterans of 1914 are gone—dead, missing, in hospital or invalided home.

Lobanov-Rostovsky has, for once, been sent up to the front, where he has been put in temporary command of a couple of searchlights, the usual officer in command having had a nervous breakdown after six weeks in the forward line. Along with their generators, these searchlights have been dug in as far forward as possible and the idea is that they will be switched on if the Germans try to make a surprise attack by night. The infantrymen under his command think this is a stupid idea and they tell him openly that they do not want him and his searchlights there. Searchlights attract fire. But orders are orders.

The searchlights, however, have not been put to use and Lobanov-Rostovsky, true to his character, has been able to spend most of his time
with his books. In the slightly touching way of bookish people, who always try to read their way to an understanding of the great and incomprehensible events that are affecting them, he has been spending a good many hours studying various German military theorists and war historians such as Theodor von Bernhardi and Colmar von der Goltz, as well as Carl von Clausewitz, the dark master himself.

Well, now. That rather childish sign triumphantly announcing Romania’s entry into the war on the side of the Allies—a direct result, by the way, of the great and unexpected successes of the Brusilov offensive—sparks off an equally petulant reaction on the part of the Germans. On the stroke of midnight a raging firestorm is unleashed on the trench where the sign was put up and the German artillery plays every instrument in its orchestra in unison with the unpleasant accuracy it alone is capable of: the shrieking falsetto of the light field guns, the bass of the howitzers and the baritone of the mortars.

Andrei Lobanov-Rostovsky finds himself right in the middle of this whirling storm of steel, dust and explosive gases. He and some of his men squeeze into an improvised bunker and, as if afflicted by cramp, he still has the field telephone jammed against his ear. There is a short break between explosions and he hears fragments of a conversation: “Ninth Company reporting. Fifteen dead so far. Otherwise all right.” Then a fresh salvo crashes down, this time very close. Everything shakes. Dust. Noise. The telephone falls silent. Light filters in through a newly blown hole in the roof. To be caught under drum fire is a new experience for him.

It is impossible to convey the sensation in words, but anyone who has been through such an experience knows what I mean. Perhaps the nearest description would be a continuous and violent earthquake together with thunder and lightning while some foolish giant amused himself by taking hundreds of flash-lights. I lay in my hole amidst the thundering and roaring, trying painfully to think and to do the right thing.

He endures the same experience that has already been suffered by millions of soldiers when they make their real debut in the trenches: the visible world shrinks and very little can be seen, but the senses of smell
and hearing are drastically amplified. The noise, in particular, becomes overwhelming and deafening. Two thoughts shine through the dark confusion of his mind. “The one: If anything happens to me, what a pity I didn’t have time to finish that book of Clausewitz! The other: I am being watched by my soldiers, so I must conceal my fear.”

After a while in this cauldron of chaos Lobanov-Rostovsky loses all sense of time. At one point he feels—not hears, not sees—feels that
something
is coming, and before his senses manage to register any more than that, a salvo of 15cm shells lands in a circle around him. When he comes to, unhurt but covered in earth, one of the NCOs lying alongside him says that the searchlight has been hit and smashed to pieces. The shells continue to fall from the dark sky in an unbroken stream.

Suddenly everything is dark and still.

And then silence: “The change was so sudden that the transition was physically painful.”

It is three o’clock on the dot. German punctuality.

Now that the attack is over Lobanov-Rostovsky starts to tremble violently. He shakes so much that his whole body is covered in sweat.

Nothing more happens that night.

SATURDAY
, 16
SEPTEMBER
1916
Michel Corday is working late at the ministry in Paris

Early autumn, with high, clear skies. As usual, the newspapers are annoying him. The front page is dominated by bold headlines announcing new Allied victories and it is only on the third page that he encounters a negative item: there is a three-line reference to the continued retreat of the Romanian army.