The Beauty and the Sorrow (67 page)

We arrive at the castle in Salzburg on 20 December—a grim fortress with steep, thick walls on top of an inaccessible hill; no sun and we tremble with the cold in the empty rooms. In this northern winter, surrounded by fog and snow, the thought of traditional Christmas festivities is a torment. In this rhythm of misery, rendered even more bitter by hunger, there is no element of sweetness or delight to knock on the doors of a soul wrapped up in its own hatred.

MONDAY
, 31
DECEMBER
1917
Alfred Pollard plays a joke on some Americans in Le Touquet

Perhaps it is his childish side showing through, perhaps it is his growing irritation with the Americans, probably it is a bit of both.

It is late in the evening as Pollard creeps cautiously into the long and narrow barrack room occupied by the American officers. He is accompanied by three friends. All the lights are out, but the light of the moon is filtering into the room through the windows. The only thing to be heard is the sound of men sleeping soundly, tucked up well in their sleeping bags and blankets.

Americans. Pollard, like most other people, knows that they are certainly needed. The French army has scarcely recovered from the colossal losses of recent years and from the mutinies in the spring; the British army is still drained of blood after the long, costly and failed offensive at Ypres; the Italian army is still reeling and weak after the sudden collapse at Caporetto in late autumn. And on the Eastern Front everything points to Russia being on her way out of the war. The Bolsheviks have come to power in Petrograd, voicing slogans about peace and concluding
an armistice with the Germans—an armistice that is now two weeks old. All the German divisions formerly occupied in the east will now doubtless be moved west. So the Americans are certainly needed—their soldiers, their money, their industries.

If only they were not so, so … self-confident.

Pollard had expected the Americans to welcome advice, to be glad to share the dearly bought experience of the British army. But no. Many of the American officers he meets are either notably naive or unexpectedly arrogant and do not think they have anything to learn from their allies. They have, after all, been at war themselves for over a year. (Well, a war of sorts, if that is the right name for the skirmishes they have been having with Mexican bandits.
^mm
) The newcomers are clearly competent when it comes to exercises on the barrack square and their ordinary soldiers are keen, well built and well nourished. Even Pollard has to admit that. But the Americans think that the British methods of attack—which by this stage have become advanced, imaginative and increasingly successful but which demand close liaison between the various arms of the service, with creeping barrages accompanied by mobile and well-armed small units—are unnecessarily artificial and over-complicated.

When the British hear the Americans talk, they sometimes get the impression that the latter intend to turn the clock back to August 1914
and advance in closed ranks with fixed bayonets. Pollard can only shake his head. The time will come when the Americans will learn their lesson but the price they pay will be in blood.

And there is another thing. The party animal in Pollard is irritated by the ban on alcohol in the American army and the hypocrisy it leads to. In private, virtually every American officer is quick to produce the bottle he keeps hidden in his kit. This evening, however—New Year’s Eve, for Heaven’s sake—all nineteen Americans on the course turned down the chance to celebrate and went to bed at ten o’clock. Pollard thinks that the placid Americans are more like bank clerks than real soldiers.

He is in Le Touquet at the moment, where he and officers of various nationalities are learning to handle the Lewis light machine gun. Pollard’s summer has been a quiet one, his autumn likewise. He has had a number of postings behind the front, one after another. Among its other duties, his battalion has been guarding the Expeditionary Corps headquarters in Montreuil and in September it took part in suppressing the only minor revolt that this year of revolutions spawned among the British forces.
ⁿⁿ
But Pollard’s feelings are split. On the one hand, the lack of combat is getting to him, making him restless and bored. On the other hand, he has finally recognised the truth of what others have said in the past but he dismissed as rubbish—that “fellows who had a girl at home thinking of them were less keen on taking risks than the totally unattached.” He can live with all these postings behind the lines. As long as he can be there at the end of the war, he will be satisfied.

The four Englishmen tiptoe up to the nearest bed, two men to a bed.

On the word of command, they lift their allotted bed and tip out the cocoon with its snoozing contents before rushing on to the next bed and doing the same … and then the next … and the next. Muffled screams
and loud protests echo round the walls. Some of the half-awake Americans start throwing wild punches but connect only with their fellow victims who, of course, hit back. A confused brawl begins in the darkness. Before anyone has managed to switch on a light, Pollard and his companions slip unseen and delighted out of the barrack room and into the night.

Nineteen-eighteen has arrived.

*
Another eyewitness account says it is a tamarind tree.

†
Bethmann-Hollweg’s proposals, one of the wasted opportunities of the war, arose partly from his recognition that Germany’s chances of achieving an unconditional victory had diminished even though, following the defeat of Romania and the failure of the British offensive on the Somme, Germany’s position was apparently stronger than before. The proposals were also a rather desperate attempt to resist the favourite idea of the German hawks and militarists—their desire to wage an unrestricted U-boat war. The German chancellor, and many with him, correctly feared that this would drag the United States into the conflict. His proposals were, however, rather vague: he did not formulate any conditions or offer any promises—least of all a commitment to allow Belgium to emerge from the war unscathed. These were not the first German peace proposals. Feelers had been put out in the direction of Russia in 1915 but, since Paris and London had a lot more to offer (Constantinople, for instance) than Berlin, Petrograd responded with little more than silence.

‡
A vocal and influential body of opinion in Germany also rejected all compromise and considered it self-evident, for instance, that Belgium would in some way remain German. The same people also regarded German colonial expansion as a given.

§
Around 70 per cent of the other ranks taken prisoner after the capitulation at Kut al-Amara will die. That mortality rate is on the same level as that in the worst Nazi and Soviet labour camps.

‖
A historical curiosity: when used on land these rejected 88mm cannon proved excellent as anti-aircraft guns. Also, one of the most feared guns of the Second World War, the German 88mm cannon, was ultimately developed from them.

a
In itself the murder changed nothing, but it does seem to have led to all the hatred and bitter criticism previously aimed at the Tsarina’s bizarre favourite being directly targeted at the royal family.

b
Widespread discontent lay behind the protests but the reason they broke out when they did was at least partly due to the weather. A period of extreme cold eased around 8 March and it became much warmer, which meant that many more people were prepared to join in the demonstrations.

c
Orlando Figes has shown that the idea that the March revolution was peaceful is largely a myth. In reality more people were killed in these disturbances than during the more famous and momentous coup by the Bolsheviks in October of the same year.

d
A dried-up river bed.

e
One contemporary estimate reveals that forty trains a month could supply a division of 16,000 infantrymen whereas it took four times as many trains to supply the same number of cavalry. A further disadvantage was that the long, broad columns of cavalry could easily block vital approach roads.

f
The Hindenburg Line was a heavily fortified and well-prepared defensive line between Arras and Reims. It was built to shorten the German front by thirty miles and thus free up some ten divisions. The Germans made a strategic withdrawal to behind the line in March 1917.

g
This aircraft was a proven workhorse, used by a number of different air forces in a variety of roles and in many theatres of war—everywhere from the Western and Eastern Fronts to the Balkans, Italy and Mesopotamia. Its strange name derived, according to Kenneth Munson, from “the short inner wing-struts, sloping outwards and rising diagonally on each side from the upper part of the fuselage.” It was the first British aircraft that could shoot through its propeller, its makers utilising a synchronisation mechanism copied from a German aircraft which had veered off course in dense fog and landed on the wrong side of the front line. The 1½ Strutter had been a decisive factor in the Allies’ gaining superiority in the air during the summer of 1916.

h
Because of the losses suffered and the disappointment caused by the lack of success, this would soon lead to a wave of mutinies in the French army. For the moment, however, both battles were, so to speak, pausing for breath, in a way typical of battles of that kind. The attackers were replenishing their supplies of ammunition and materiel and replacing the exhausted and diminished units in the front line with fresh, rested forces. The defenders, of course, were doing the same, and thus the whole process of attrition would soon start again more or less from square one. Often, this pattern was repeated ad nauseam.

i
Even when suitable parachutes became available most air forces forbade their use since they were considered likely to encourage pilots to ditch their aircraft unnecessarily. Nor were life jackets provided. Some pilots tried to make their own by pumping up old car-tyre inner tubes and wearing them round their waists.

j
In numerical terms, the situation looked good. At the start of the fighting the British had 385 fighter planes to the Germans’ 114. But statistics are not everything.

k
The nickname of one of the other prisoners. Presumably a reference to his appearance.

l
The convoy system had not yet been fully introduced.

m
Of the 20,000 South African troops sent to East Africa, half were transported home suffering from serious illnesses.

n
The chances of a first or second lieutenant surviving the war were considerably less than those of an ordinary soldier. Estimates suggest that junior officers proportionally suffered six times the losses of other categories of servicemen.

o
This figure is grossly exaggerated. The courts martial set up after the mutinies sentenced around 23,000 men to punishment, slightly over 500 being sentenced to death. The aim, however, was to set an example and in the end fewer than fifty were actually shot—usually in front of their fellow soldiers. The stories that whole units were driven out into no-man’s-land and then slaughtered by their own artillery are myths.

p
See asterisked footnote at 16 September 1916,
this page
.

q
In the German army they refer to “blue points.” Enemy trench lines are designated with blue figures on their maps.

r
The technology for effective battlefield communication simply did not exist. The new wireless radio sets were too big, heavy and unreliable to be practical. Wired telephony worked well for permanent networks or when the shelling was not too heavy, but under concentrated fire cables were easily damaged. By this stage cables were being buried metres deep and, if possible, encased in pipework, but that kind of thoroughness was available only when the front was static and relatively calm. All the armies employed various methods of optical signalling (flares, heliographs, lamps, semaphore and flags), but those required good visibility—something that was in short supply when the fighting became heavy. A further possibility was to transport orders and reports physically. All sides experimented with dogs as runners but that method proved ineffective under heavy bombardment: dogs, like horses, tend to become crazed in heavy artillery fire. And all sides used carrier pigeons—the German army alone got through 300,000—which were sometimes the most reliable form of communication. According to one estimate, nine out of ten pigeons reached their destination. Carrier pigeons were even awarded military decorations and other honours, one of the best known being the last bird to be dispatched from the encircled Fort de Vaux at Verdun during the fighting in June 1916. It got through but died of its wounds and is now commemorated by a plaque at the fort. There is also the famous Cher Ami, a pigeon that, in spite of being wounded in the breast and having a leg shot off, managed to reach its destination with a message from a surrounded American unit during the fighting in the Argonne in October 1918: it was awarded the Croix de Guerre and its stuffed body is on show in the Smithsonian in Washington. If there was no alternative, human runners were used, usually dispatched in pairs in the hope that one at least would survive. This was obviously a mission fraught with great danger. (Adolf Hitler frequently acted as a runner during the First World War and was twice decorated for doing so. It provided him with the concrete if somewhat limited knowledge of military matters that he later used to trump various generals whose experience had been moulded more by the theoretical world of the operations room.)