The Beauty and the Sorrow (64 page)

Words and thoughts go back and forth across the warm, sheltered room as the hours pass. Soon twilight begins to fall. A great moon rises and colours the autumnal scene in silver and white.

SATURDAY
, 13 O
CTOBER 1917
Harvey Cushing lists the day’s cases

The bad weather is continuing. It is raining most of the time and there is a strong, almost gale-force wind. Cushing has once again spent the day at the operating table. At 5:25 on Friday yet another attack was launched at Ypres—in spite of the awful weather, rising water levels, bottomless mud and poor visibility. From the survivors he is treating, Cushing has heard of wounded men drowning in shell holes.

He starts the morning by running through the cases waiting for him:

Winter, E.
860594. 7th Borderers, 17th Div.—penetrating cerebellar. Sitting down. Helmet on. Blown into the air. Unconscious for a time, does not know how long. Later crept back to a trench—legs wobbly—dizzy etc
.

Robinson, H.
14295. 1st S. African Inf., 9th Div.—penetrating rt temporal. Wounded yesterday c. 6 p.m. Knocked down but not unconscious. Helmet penetrated. Walked 20 yards—dizzy—vomited—numbness left arm, etc. No transport until this morning owing to mud
.

Matthew, R.
202037. 8th Black Watch—penetrating right parietal; hernia cerebri. Thinks he was wounded three days ago, etc. A fine, big Jock
.

Hartley, J.
26th M.G.C., 8th Div. Wounded at 11 last night, not unconscious. Walked to dressing station. Thinks they had reached their objective, etc
.

Bogus,
3rd N.Z. Rifle Brigade, 1st Anzac. Frontal gutter wound. In line for two nights before show began—awful conditions. Had gone 1000 yards when wounded etc
.

Beattie,
7th Seaforths, 9th Div. Stretcher-bearer, wounded while bringing out his third man
—
4 to a stretcher
—
300 yards from advanced line. Occipital penetrating (?)

Medgurck,
11th Royal Scots, 9th Div. Multiple wounds, including head etc
.

Dobbie,
Household Batt’n, 4th Div. Wounded near Poelcapelle some time yesterday afternoon. Adm. here 7 p.m. In “resus” since. Severe. For X-ray, etc
.

Towards the end of the day Cushing feels reasonably satisfied. The operations have gone well and he has also successfully used the special magnet system to extract splinters from three of these men’s brains.

Cushing realises that the attack has not gone particularly well and the wounded continue to pour in. But no one has seen any recent newspapers or official communiqués and it is impossible to know what has actually happened.

Two days later it is quiet again at Ypres. The weather is clearing up. There is a rumour that three British divisions have been so badly mauled that they are having to be pulled out of the fighting and reinforcements from the Second Army are on their way in. In the afternoon Cushing sees thousands upon thousands of birds gathering in swirling flocks close to a little copse near the field hospital. Someone tells him they are starlings.

WEDNESDAY
, 24 O
CTOBER
1917
Michel Corday comments on the street talk in Paris

A fourth winter of war is just round the corner and the mood in Paris is wearier than it was a year ago. In spite of the fact that shortages are less severe than before. Anyone with money can get hold of anything. Black marketeers are becoming more and more common, more affluent and more shameless in their behaviour. Many of the best restaurants have employed highly decorated veterans and war invalids as doormen and Corday wonders what they must think as they stand there holding the door for people who are no more than “voluminously embodied appetites rushing to their troughs.” He notes in his journal:

One hears people in the street making their small plans. People often say, “After the war I shall …” in the same calm tone of voice as they say, “After having a shower I shall …” They classify this world-shattering event in the same category as natural catastrophes. They never suspect for a moment that they themselves would be able to stop it, that its parasitic life is dependent on their acquiescence.

SUNDAY
, 28
OCTOBER
1917
Harvey Cushing sees the Canadian build-up at Zonnebeke

A light mist. Hazy sunshine. Thin clouds. A chill in the air. There is absolutely no part of him that affirms this war. Quite the opposite. The wrecks it creates pour in waves into his hospital and his daily business is to try to patch them back together. Experience has made him acutely conscious of the cost. Hardly a day passes without him washing blood and brain matter from his hands. And coming as he does from a sheltered upper-class life in Boston, he finds many aspects of his present life distinctly uncomfortable: the perpetual wet, the monotonous food, the cold that makes it difficult to sleep in the thin tent. He has brought his own collapsible bathtub with him.

And the costs—Cushing is horrified by the almost limitless waste of materials. There are bunkers in which the floor is insulated by layer upon layer of unopened tins of food. In one place they found 250 pairs of new waist-waders, intended for use in the most flooded trenches: they had simply been discarded by some unit after being used only once. The soldiers throw away everything that is heavy or not immediately necessary before they go into combat, in the certain knowledge that if they survive they will be able to report it as lost in battle and they will then be issued new equipment without further question. Discarded rifles can be seen everywhere, being used as signposts or props in the trenches or just rusting away. Five minutes’ bombardment of a small piece of ground can consume ammunition costing £80,000.

He has seen and heard too much not to be critical of the British army’s methods of waging war at Ypres. Take, for instance, the story he heard the day before yesterday from one of his patients, a non-commissioned officer from the 50th Division. The young man was lying trembling in his bed, pretending to smoke a cigarette. His battalion had gone astray in the rain and darkness and had tried to dig in. Since there was nothing but mud everywhere the best they could do was to throw up small heaps of sodden earth and lie down in the wet puddles behind them. After twice being ordered to advance in the darkness they were finally given the order to attack. They tried to follow the creeping barrage—tried, but it was moving too quickly. And suddenly they found themselves
standing in front of a row of concrete German bunkers. “Well, there was practically nobody left.”

Cushing cannot for his life understand why an attack cannot be called off if, for instance, the weather is quite atrocious. He put that question once to a senior British officer and was told that, unfortunately, it was quite simply impossible. Not at such short notice. There is much too much organisation involved, and the planning is too complicated for it to be possible. Too much, too complicated—in a sense, beyond human control. That is an image of the war as a whole.

This particular Sunday is fairly quiet and only the odd wounded man is brought in. But the battle is not over. New attacks are being prepared. One of Cushing’s contacts in the Second Army has earlier promised to take him up to the front and today seems to be a good opportunity for such a visit. The two men sign in at one of the many control points, exchange their car for an ambulance and drive towards Ypres via Poperinghe. The closer they get to the town, the denser the traffic becomes. They zig-zag across the muddy road, between marching soldiers and motorcycle dispatch riders, convoys of lorries and horse-drawn artillery. They drive through a grey confusion of rubble and ruins. After passing the pockmarked Menin Gate they drive as far as Potijze, where they park their vehicle and continue on foot. For the sake of safety, since the forward line is only a mile or so away.

Cushing is astonished. Not just by all the rubbish lying everywhere in the sticky morass of mud—“dead horses, smashed tanks, crashed and crumpled aircraft, cordite buckets, shells, mortars, bombs, broken or discarded wagons, barbed wire”—but by the fact that the place corresponds in some way to his expectations. In fact, it looks just as it looks in the photographs.

On the road up towards Zonnebeke Canadian troops, caked in mud, jostle with lorries, cannon and mules laden with ammunition. At the side of the road there are troops waiting their turn to move on. The air is filled with the noise of innumerable artillery pieces: the noise rises and falls, rises and falls but never falls silent. Aircraft circle up in the hazy sunlight, surrounded by the brief watercolour puffs of smoke from anti-aircraft fire. He sees a German shell land hardly more than 200 yards away and watches the black earth spurt up “like a geyser.” Then he sees another shell land, closer still. He is surprised by his own reaction:

And the savage in you makes you adore it with its squalor and wastefulness and danger and strife and glorious noise. You feel that, after all, this is what men were intended for rather than to sit in easy chairs with a cigarette and whiskey, the evening paper or the best-seller, and to pretend that such a veneer means civilization and that there is no barbarian behind your starched and studded shirt front.

In a moment of dizziness as he stands there on the edge of the abyss, this man—who knows only too well the sorrows and misery caused by war—suddenly and almost reluctantly thinks he can also perceive its greatness and its beauty or, anyway, the dark and devastating energies that shape the tragedy. But enough is enough. They return to Ypres. He watches the sun go down behind the ragged ruins of the medieval Cloth Hall and sees its last glowing rays caught by an observation balloon being winched down for the night.

Florence Farmborough notes in her journal for that day:

In the early morning a man was led in who had been wounded by a German bullet. He soon came to know that he was the only soldier in that ward who had received a wound from an enemy. He strutted up and down feeling quite a hero among the many who had self-inflicted or accidental wounds.

TUESDAY
, 30
OCTOBER
1917
Paolo Monelli is drinking brandy and waiting for news

Something big has been happening over on the Isonzo in the last week. With a single attack the enemy has succeeded in doing what the Italian army has failed to do with eleven offensives—that is, to achieve a breakthrough. And they are advancing. Monelli and the rest of the men on the northern front do not know exactly what has happened or what is happening. They are holding a good, strong position and until a few days
ago were ready to sit out the winter in their newly constructed huts. They are at high altitude and there is already plenty of snow.

No, they know nothing. Neither newspapers nor communiqués are reaching them and they exist up here in the clouds of unknowing, fed on nothing but rumours, which are—as usual—confusing, contradictory and full of fantasy. Such as that the Germans have taken Udine. Such as that 200,000 Italians surrendered as prisoners. Or was it 300,000? The mood is gloomy. There is total silence in the officers’ mess and Monelli is drinking brandy to take the edge off his feeling of hopelessness.

He writes in his journal:

Tragic news is reaching us from the front in the east. Our enemy is trampling the soil of our fatherland and our soldiers are throwing down their weapons. Here, nothing. Our waiting made worse by bureaucratic stupidities, by signatures and circulars, by the pedantry of nervous commanders and jokes from superiors we don’t respect.

THURSDAY
, 1
NOVEMBER
1917
Pál Kelemen sees an infantry battalion coming out of the front line on the Isonzo

A steady, silent rain is falling from a grey sky above a grey mountain. It is early evening and an Austro-Hungarian infantry battalion is pulling back after a period in the front line. Pál Kelemen is there and watches them stagger down the path from their positions up on the mountain plateau.

The Caporetto offensive
^dd
was actually only intended to give the hard-pressed Austro-Hungarian units on the Isonzo a small breathing space in the face of the threat of yet another major Italian push. But something—
mist, gas, surprise, the idiotic Italian dispositions, the experienced German units trained in new and mobile tactics
^ee
—produced a breakthrough far bigger and far deeper than anyone had dared hope. And then one thing led to another. Threatened with being outflanked, the whole of the Italian army on the Isonzo began a panic-stricken retreat towards the River Tagliamento. It was a huge triumph for the double monarchy.
^ff
The battalion that Kelemen meets on its way down has not actually taken part in the attack but it shows the marks anyway. He notes in his journal:

As they start forward or stand still, blocked by those ahead, or lie down at the roadside, it seems impossible that these are the fighting troops with which the statesmen and the generals are defending the Monarchy. That this tattered ravaged band with their shaggy beards, their crumpled, soaked, and dirty uniforms, their dilapidated footgear, and the exhaustion in their faces constitutes “our brave infantry.”