The Beauty and the Sorrow (69 page)

Above us the big Caproni is seriously engaged with our little fighting monoplane. Our anti-air batteries send heavy charges against the sky without avail. The white smoke-clusters from the detonations spread and evaporate slowly on the sharply brilliant blue.

Our flyer gets nearer all the time to the clumsily manoeuvring biplane, and the frequent cough of their machine guns can be distinctly heard on the earth. All of a sudden the Italian machine settles downward. Ours wheels above it for a brief moment, then flies off northward while at ever-increasing rate
the Caproni speeds toward the ground, its motor stopped, the wings wavering, and plunges to earth.

By the time I get there the body of the Italian flying captain, killed by a machine-gun bullet, is laid out on the turf beside the plane. One wing of the gigantic bird of war, bent and broken, has pierced into the earth and oil is filtering out of the riddled motor.

The Italian officer is clad in a full leather suit, his faultless elegance disturbed only by the angle at which his cap is crushed over his clean-shaven face. A fine-worked silver wrist-watch ticks on unshaken and the whole body stretched out at ease seems to be only sleeping.

We search his pockets; his portfolio is handed to me. Besides letters, banknotes, slips of paper, there is a double-folded card in a hard black binding: “Season ticket to the circus, Verona.”

Here on this barren shell-plowed field the circus is just a printed name on a piece of cardboard. The glittering lamps at the base of the box rows, the grubbed-up carpet of the sawdust, the snapping whip of the ringmaster, the bareback rider with her tulle skirt and flashing jewels, and all the other endless delights of youth have been left behind forever by one young life. The other slender rakish officers in the box will wait tonight in vain for this comrade. But the music of the circus band will still blare and the floury-faced clown will turn somersaults with paid good humour on a velvet cover on the sand. And the ladies will flirt from afar, just as if he were there, as he was perhaps even yesterday.

I should like to slide the card back under the bloodstained shirt so that, as in pagan times when everything that served the hero followed him into the tomb, this property of his also should disappear from the face of the earth and there should be at least one place left empty in his memory, in the circus in Verona.

Willy Coppens writes the following in his journal that day:

During a patrol over the southern part of our sector, in the direction of Ypres, I flew into a snowstorm and got completely lost. Our aircraft have poor compasses, located on the floor where they aren’t much use. I don’t recognise anything until I have the
Kemmelberg in front and then I get to Dunkirk, from where I have no difficulty in finding my way back to my unit.

MONDAY
, 7
JANUARY
1918
Florence Farmborough arrives in Moscow

The train sways and clunks, sways and clunks its way through a white winter landscape illuminated by the weak morning sun. The settlements begin gradually to grow denser and at half past twelve they roll into the station in Moscow. The journey from Odessa has taken her a whole week, such is the confusion in Russia just now. The journey has not only been long, it has been extremely uncomfortable, and she has feared for her safety on a number of occasions.

The train has been full to overflowing with soldiers of all kinds in all kinds of moods: happy, aggressive, drunk, helpful, inconsiderate, euphoric, angry. During some stages of the journey there have even been people travelling on the roof, and sometimes people boarded the train by simply smashing the windows and wriggling through. They, like Florence, had left the front and the war behind them and wanted to get home as quickly as possible. The original idea had been that the whole of her disbanded hospital unit would travel together, but this soon proved impossible as they became separated in the crowds and confusion. She lost her precious seat when she went to help a pregnant woman who had been taken ill, so she has spent a large part of the journey standing with her aching head pressed against the cold window in the corridor. When she changed trains in Kiev and finally secured another seat, she did not dare move from it for two and a half days for fear of losing it—in spite of the fact that she had nothing to eat and very little to drink and was surrounded by the noise and smell of smoking, drinking and shouting soldiers. All of her luggage had been stolen by this point.

Florence is depressed and confused as she gets off the train in her worn, dirty uniform:

I had returned like a vagrant, bereft of all I had held dear. My Red Cross work was over; my wartime wanderings had ceased. There was an emptiness in heart and mind which was deeply distressing.
Life seemed suddenly to have come to a full-stop. What the future held in store, it was impossible to predict; it all looked too dark and void.

It is less than two months since she was last in Moscow but the city has changed enormously. The darkened streets are patrolled by all-powerful and trigger-happy soldiers wearing red armbands. (Many of the people she knows intentionally dress in shabby clothes so as not to bring themselves to the attention of these patrols.) Gunfire can often be heard at night and her host family sleeps fully dressed so that they might leave the house quickly if necessary. Food shortages have grown much more severe and have reached famine proportions. The guaranteed daily ration consists of three and a half ounces of bread or two potatoes. It is now impossible to obtain even a simple basic like salt. There are still restaurants open but their prices are astronomical and the meat is usually horse flesh. The atmosphere is one of fear and uncertainty.

SUNDAY
, 27
JANUARY
1918
Michel Corday contemplates the future

The bitter cold has begun to ease—just a couple of weeks ago the temperature was down to minus 18° C. The authorities have banned the sale of absinthe and forbidden the wearing of scarves by soldiers.
^†
Cakes have been abolished (the tea rooms sell only pastries now), and the bread ration is soon to be reduced further—to ten ounces per person per day. There are rumours of imminent disorder in working-class districts, of imminent enemy bombing raids on Paris, and of an imminent German offensive on the Western Front. It is also said that an exclusively female circle of spies has been uncovered in the Parisian theatre world.

Corday writes in his journal:

The shipyard workers on the Clyde are intending to strike on 31 January “if peace negotiations have not begun before that date.” This really does reveal a new challenge in the struggle between
the people and their rulers—the people are demanding to know why their rulers are forcing them to fight. It has taken four years for this legitimate desire to come to the surface. It has already achieved its aim in Russia. Now it is raising its voice in England. It is beginning to break out in Austria. We do not know how strong it is in Germany and France. But the war has entered a new phase: a conflict between the shepherds and their flocks.

TUESDAY
, 29
JANUARY
1918
Richard Stumpf reads a call for a general strike

For the last two months SMS
Helgoland
has been in dry dock again. The major work being carried out means that the ship is filthy: “You can hardly touch anything without getting dirt on your hands.” Stumpf has resigned himself to the situation. Discontent is simmering among ordinary people, but, although politics is the subject of much talk on board, sailors as a group are, in Stumpf’s view, much too disunited, much too easily fooled, much too lazy and much too stupid to be able to do anything about the current state of affairs.

Stumpf has fallen back on his own resources instead and has found a new outlet for his energy: he plaits a kind of coarse, hempen shoe which he then sells to his fellow sailors. The business is going well and he has set up an improvised cobbler’s shop in the ship’s bakery, away from the prying eyes of the officers. The calendar says it is winter, the weather says it is spring.

On this particular morning, however, something happens that seems likely to go some way towards countering Stumpf’s misanthropic pessimism. There is a rumour that socialist leaflets have been found on board and within a few minutes the whole crew knows what has happened. The sailors huddle in groups and the flyers are passed from hand to hand. He reads one of them himself and notes that it is unsigned and does not reveal where it was printed; he also notes that some of what it states is true but some of it is just “stupid platitudes and phrases.” The main slogan is: “If Germany is not to be ruled by the sabre then you must prepare yourselves for a general strike.”

The tremors that are just reaching the port of Wilhelmshaven have
their epicentre in Vienna, hundreds of miles away. Around the middle of the month a wave of strikes broke out in the Austrian capital’s armaments factories in protest at the reduction of the bread ration and the continuation of the war. The situation soon became so threatening that the Habsburg royal family fled the capital with an armed escort. The wave of strikes spread rapidly, including to Budapest and to the naval base at Cattaro, where the sailors arrested their officers and raised red flags. The unrest in Austria-Hungary is over for the moment but yesterday major strikes started among the munitions and metal workers in Berlin. The discontent in Germany is also about food shortages and the fact that the military men now in control are simply allowing the war to continue. The truth is that Germany is being ground down in a purely economic sense. The spark that set things alight was the news that the peace negotiations with Russia at Brest-Litovsk had broken down.
^‡
The strikers are demanding peace—a peace in which neither side will suffer annexations or reparations, a peace based on the right of peoples to self-determination.

The strike has spread right across Germany today and over a million people in Munich, Breslau, Cologne, Leipzig and Hamburg have withdrawn their labour.

Before lunch the crew is ordered to muster on deck, section by section. The officers address their men. On the one hand, they express their gratitude that the rabble-rousing leaflets were brought to the captain’s attention so promptly and they exhort the sailors to do the same on any future occasion. On the other hand, the crew is given a strict warning against participating in strikes or other political activities.

Stumpf finds it difficult to know what is going to happen. He is well aware that there is widespread discontent: “If there was anyone capable
of channelling this discontent, a major eruption would be virtually inevitable.” There is plenty of grumbling among the sailors and the workers but the protests lack both focus and staying power. In his experience, the energy released simply becomes hot air after a short time. And when he looks at the dockyard workers on board the ship everything seems normal: they show no signs of wanting to lay down their tools, nor do they seem to be simply pretending to work.

But when Stumpf goes up close to one of the workers he hears him say, “Starting from tomorrow, we’ll put a stop to all this hammering.” By “hammering,” Stumpf takes him to mean the war.

The following day there is an announcement that all shore leave has been suspended because of the unrest in Wilhelmshaven. At lunchtime almost all the shipyard workers lay down their tools and quickly leave the battleship. The sailors shout words of encouragement to them as they leave, advising them “never to come back.” The sun is shining and the air is warm and spring-like.

On that day Harvey Cushing is in Wimereux, a small resort just north of Boulogne-sur-Mer. He is there to attend the funeral of his Canadian medical colleague John McCrae. McCrae’s fame rests on a poem rather than on the fact that he was in charge of No. 3 Canadian General Hospital. The poem is called “In Flanders Fields” and there are few people who have not read its famous opening lines:
^§

        
In Flanders fields the poppies blow

        
Between the crosses, row on row
,

        
That mark our place; and in the sky

        
The larks, still bravely singing, fly

        
Scarce heard amid the guns below
.

Since its publication in
Punch
in December 1915 it has become one of the Allied side’s most often quoted and widely reproduced verses. And with its uncompromising message about the continuance of the struggle,
it was used in particular during the campaign to draw the United States into the war.

        
We are the Dead. Short days ago

        
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow
,