The Beauty and the Sorrow (66 page)

The hearse moves on through the open gates of the goods section of the railway station and Elfriede follows it. The body will travel as registered freight. A reddish-brown goods wagon is waiting there on the track. The coffin is lifted from the hearse and there, among the stacked crates of goods, the padre recites something from a little black book. The men remove their helmets and recite the Lord’s Prayer in unison. The men in the guard of honour raise their rifles and fire three rounds in quick succession. Silence follows. Elfriede can smell the cordite. The coffin and the wreath are lifted into the waiting wagon and two railwaymen in sooty working clothes close the doors with a bang.

She goes back out into the street and sees her rose lying there. She picks it up—the bloom is undamaged. She holds it under her nose and runs away, bent low. She can hear the military band playing behind her.

TUESDAY
, 4
DECEMBER
1917
Andrei Lobanov-Rostovsky is alone on a mountain top on the Pisoderi Pass

It starts off rather well. They leave the camp at the foot of the mountain at dawn and begin the long journey upwards. The road is narrow but well constructed, snaking up to the pass in sharp loops. The weather is good and the view is magnificent—wherever the eye looks it sees the high, dramatic peaks of the Albanian mountains. After a march of no more than six miles, however, the difficulties begin.

Andrei Lobanov-Rostovsky is in the Balkans, far from home and far from his own country. He is here as a volunteer in a unit sent to reinforce the Russian contingent in Salonica. His decision to volunteer has nothing to do with any thirst for adventure: rather the reverse, it is a carefully
considered plan to get away from Russia, where a political revolution is turning into a social revolution. “Much blood is likely to be spilled and we can perhaps even expect terror.”

He has tried, as always, to read his way towards understanding. He has been ploughing through historical literature for the last six months, books about revolutions (the French, of course, but also those of 1848) and about the struggle for power between Marius and Sulla in ancient Rome, for instance. He has sat pen in hand, taking notes and pondering, while Russia was beginning to fall to pieces around him. He thinks he has found an obvious parallel in the phases of the French Revolution. What would a sensible person have done in France at that time? He would have left the country in good time before the Terror and then returned after the fall of Robespierre. In that way he would have managed to leap over the destructive period and re-emerged when everything was getting back to normal again. That is what he hopes to do. That is why he volunteered to serve on this front. The uniform is his asylum.

Salonica, however, has come as an unpleasant surprise. It is partly the sight of the burnt-out city: “I had never seen desolation on such a vast scale as Salonica.” Mile after mile of burnt houses. The civilians—Greeks, Turks, Jews, Albanians—living “wretchedly in tents or wooden shacks amidst the ruins of their burnt homes.” And then there is the mood among the Allied units: it soon became clear to him that morale is at rock bottom and that they “all hated this front.” Battles are infrequent but disease, above all malaria, is taking thousands of lives. In the better restaurants it is quite usual for bowls of quinine tablets to be put on the tables along with the salt and pepper pots. Off-duty soldiers frequently cause riots, and even in the officers’ messes there are fights between men from the different armies. Lobanov-Rostovsky finds the latter particularly shocking, never having seen anything like it before. As a rule it is the same nationalities that gang together against others: the British, Russians and Serbs fight the French, the Italians and the Greeks. Somewhere up in the mountains a half-mad French colonel has proclaimed a little independent republic of his own, printed his own currency and issued his own stamps.
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Lobanov-Rostovsky’s own plans are not working out as he predicted.
The tremors of revolution are being felt even down here in the Balkans. Unrest in his battalion has increased, especially since they received news that the Bolsheviks have seized power and started—yesterday, in fact—to negotiate an armistice with the Germans at Brest-Litovsk. The soldiers and the non-commissioned officers are grumbling, growling, contradicting and slow to follow orders, or they turn up late on parade. Sentries sleep at their posts. Officers are reluctant to issue ammunition to their men. And Lobanov-Rostovsky has actually been shot at, after which he was transferred and put in command of a signals company.

This is the company he is now leading over the mountains to join the Russian division stationed up at Lake Prespa, to which the only road crosses the Pisoderi Pass at 1
,800
metres. The going is easy at the start but higher up snow is still lying and the narrow, winding road is covered in ice. Lobanov-Rostovsky hears shouting behind him and when he turns round he sees that one of the horse-drawn wagons is sliding over the edge and falling. When they reach the wreckage one of the horses is already dead and he is forced to put the other one down. A little further on, the gradient is so steep that the exhausted horses can no longer get a grip and the soldiers have to push the wagon metre by metre up to the pass. The seventy mules that are carrying the telegraph equipment manage rather better, but they are not properly trained for the job and two of them hurtle down into the abyss. The hours pass and the company is stretched out in a long, ragged line of men, wagons and animals, all dragging themselves uphill extremely slowly.

It starts to snow during the afternoon and they have still not crossed the pass. Lobanov-Rostovsky is patrolling on horseback backwards and forwards along the ever more extended column. Around six o’clock they reach the top, by which time dusk is falling. On a snowy field beside the road he sees a soldier trying to get a single mule to move on but in spite of his efforts the stubborn beast refuses to budge. Lobanov-Rostovsky says he will wait by the mule while the man goes to fetch help.

Lobanov-Rostovsky waits and waits. No one comes. What is going on? Have they decided to forget about him? Or are they simply unable to find him in the dark and snow? What to do? It has been a year of disappointment and reverses for him but now he has hit bottom:

I seldom felt so miserable during the entire war. A biting wind was blowing; fog was rolling in and covering the hills from view;
night was coming on rapidly, and there I was alone on the top of a mountain, holding a mule.

Finally, he hears some voices in the darkness and he shouts. It is a couple of latecomers with their wagon and horses. They help him with the mule. It is two o’clock in the morning before the last wagon crosses the pass.

WEDNESDAY
, 5
DECEMBER
1917
Paolo Monelli is taken prisoner on Castelgomberto

As early as yesterday he began to suspect that the end was approaching. The end—in the singular, and with the definite article? This battle might well have more than one outcome but the probability of its’ having a happy ending is shrinking by the hour. After an intense bombardment, after being attacked with poison gas, after the threat of encirclement, after failed counter-attacks, after confused close combat—after all that, Monelli and his fellow soldiers have retreated and taken up position a little lower down, in a wood on Castelgomberto. But once the sun rises the Austrian storm troops are going to attack this position too.

This is the hour. The hour I have foreseen, however reluctantly, ever since my first day in the war. It is as though some enormous force has concentrated all the fighting and all the torment and toil of the past into one single decisive, tragic moment.

It is cold, snowy and dark. Monelli and his men are freezing, as well as hungry and thirsty. Yesterday’s retreat was so hasty that there was no time to eat the meal that had already been served, no time even to take it with them. Their fear and their uncertainty are great. They do not know where the enemy is. Monelli sends out a patrol to make contact with their own troops—who are or might be or ought to be somewhere to their left—but the patrol does not return. They get very little sleep. They have a grenade launcher and they fire it blindly out into the darkness. They have ten boxes of grenades and would prefer to get rid of them
before the next attack comes. And anyway, why should the enemy enjoy the peaceful slumber they themselves are denied?

Dawn. As soon as there is enough light the Austrian machine guns begin to play on their position. And then the artillery. Smoke fills the earthworks, stinging their eyes and noses. The situation is becoming hopeless—the situation
is
hopeless. The company is shrinking, hungry and almost out of ammunition.

They surrender. Austrian soldiers surround them.

Monelli takes out his revolver, throws it away and watches it spin down a steep slope. He is filled with bitterness at that moment: thirty months of war and now this. He sees several of his old soldiers weeping. He hears one man exclaim, “But what will Mama say?”

FRIDAY
, 7
DECEMBER
1917
Willy Coppens enjoys himself in De Panne

It is after lunch and they are already sitting in the cars ready to set off when a telephone message comes. A German aircraft is attacking some of the forward trenches. Can they send up a couple of fighter planes to drive him off? The German pilot has defied the awful flying weather that has kept the whole squadron grounded for two days and which has encouraged them to take a break from the tedium of hanging round the airfield by driving to De Panne for some entertainment.

Libeau
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and his famous concert party are performing there in the hospital theatre. Libeau and his troop put on theatrical and musical productions behind the front and they often attract audiences of a thousand or more, most of them French or Belgian troops, many of them convalescents and all of them hungry for recreation and distraction. Two of the men climb out of the cars and hurry to change their clothes. The rest carry on to the theatre in De Panne, along the birch-lined road they now know so well. They do, however, see the first plane lift off into the grey skies. It is Verhoustraeten—Coppens recognises him by the special way he test-fires his machine guns. On this occasion it sounds almost like a greeting, and perhaps it is.

Later in the evening, during a pause in the entertainments, a brief telephone message reaches them: Verhoustraeten is dead, hit by a machine-gun bullet fired from the ground. His plane has crashed behind their own lines. There is a moment’s silence among the young men in uniform but then the conversation continues “as if nothing has happened.” Death is so normal, hovers so close to them that they simply cannot dwell upon it. Not if they want to continue doing what they are doing, anyway.
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But denial has its limits:

Later, after leaving the mess with a cheerful “Good night, gentlemen!,” I walked past Verhoustraeten’s room, which was next door to my own. It was now cloaked in darkness and there, in the doorway of his unlit room, I stopped, deeply moved because the whole drama of his disappearance suddenly became clear to me. Up to this point I hadn’t understood the scale of the tragedy. I began to ask myself whether a sacrifice like this was really necessary, and I began to have my doubts.

THURSDAY
, 20
DECEMBER
1917
Pál Kelemen is impressed by a battalion of Bosniaks in Paderno

The great offensive at Caporetto is over. Winter has come and the tough German divisions have gone off to practise their infiltration tactics on other victims,
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while French and British reinforcements have arrived to support the reeling Italians. The front has firmed up along the River Piave.

Today Pál Kelemen meets a battalion of Muslim Bosniaks. Just like the Muslim colonial troops in the service of the French, they have come to be seen as elite units. And they are often sent into action where the situation is unusually dangerous. Kelemen, urbane and refined as he is, is rather baffled by these men, alien to him in many ways. He is frightened by their inexplicably warlike spirit. What can they hope to achieve from this war? Bosnia was annexed by Austria-Hungary as recently as 1908. Kelemen thinks that at least some of the older Bosniaks there must have “resisted the power whose reliable and diligent soldiers they have become.” But he still cannot avoid being impressed by them:

Tall, lean, mighty fighting men, like the species of rare cedar now dying out. They stoop a little, as if embarrassed at having grown and developed so stalwart. When walking, they draw their heads down between their shoulders and their deep-set small eyes flash everywhere with piercing gaze. Seated, they cross their bowed legs beneath them, push the fez back to the crown of their heads, and smoke their long-stemmed wooden pipes with as much tranquillity as if they were at home in the fabled land of slim, lovely minarets. Almost all of them are in full manhood. Pointed beards frame the sunburned faces. They are resting now and eating. The shabby tin cans of Army rations look strange between their crooked bony fingers.

On the same date Paolo Monelli reaches his destination, an old castle in Salzburg, now converted into a prison camp. He has been marching for almost two weeks in a column of weary, demoralised prisoners of war, wearing ragged uniforms from which the medals and badges of rank have been torn. Some of them have fought over food, and trouble has broken out here and there, when some of the troops have exploited the inevitable breakdown of organisation caused by being prisoners to rebel against the strict discipline of the past and to attack their officers. Many of them are happy that their war is now over—and they do not hesitate to show it. Monelli has also noticed that, even though triumphant, their enemy has his own significant problems: many of the Austro-Hungarian soldiers standing at the roadside watching the column of prisoners have
looked undernourished and thin. (The enemy is clearly also suffering a desperate shortage of men since Monelli has noted several hunchbacks and even a dwarf among their number.) For Monelli and his companions life in the camp will begin today, but he has already recognised that his existence for the foreseeable future will pendulum ceaselessly between two states—boredom and hunger. He writes in his journal: