The Beauty and the Sorrow (74 page)

Cushing enters the ward where his friend is being treated. Micky was injured not in combat but while he was practising aerobatics. He had looped the loop several times and executed a number of rolls when one of the wings suddenly broke and the plane spiralled down from about 5,000 feet. By some miracle, he survived, though seriously injured. One of his legs was so badly smashed that the surgeons had no alternative but to amputate it.

Micky is sitting up in bed clutching his stump with his hands. He is having appalling phantom pains in the amputated limb and is heavily drugged, but he greets his visitor with his usual friendliness and charm. So it takes a while for the American to realise that the drugged man in the bed has no idea who his visitor is. Cushing finds this distressing and writes in his journal later that Micky is “now a suffering wreck—death would have been less bad.”

THURSDAY
, 30
MAY
1918
René Arnaud makes his way back to his regiment at Villers-Cotterêts

Arnaud’s leave finished four days ago and he left Paris to rejoin his regiment and the company he now commands as a recently promoted captain. Rejoining them proves to be easier said than done as the regiment has been moved east, in the direction of the new German breakthrough. A couple of days ago the third phase of the German spring offensive opened, this time with massive attacks on the devastated old battlefields around Le Chemin des Dames. And, once again, the Germans have had considerable success: they have taken almost 50,000 prisoners and 800 artillery pieces and are moving with worrying speed towards the Marne, only sixty miles from Paris.

Arnaud has been following the same procedure for three days in succession. In the morning he leaves Paris by train for wherever the regiment was last located, only to find that it has moved on, so he is back in Paris by the afternoon, his mission unsuccessful. It is clear to him that the army high command does not really know what is going on and is trying by means of repeated chess-style moves to gather enough reserves for a counter-attack.
^m
When he arrives at his destination today he hears that his regiment is still there, at Villers-Cotterêts. He hitches a lift in a butcher’s van for the last section. Arnaud does not fail to see the irony in this.

MONDAY
, 3
JUNE
1918
René Arnaud leads an assault on Mosloy

He wakes with a jerk. There are trees around him and beside him is Robin, his lieutenant. “They are bombarding us.” German 7.7cm shells
are landing around them. Short, loud cracks. He and the rest of the company hurriedly leave the copse in which they have spent the night and run for some buildings less than a hundred metres away. Fortunately for them many of the enemy projectiles turn out to be duds that fail to explode, a phenomenon that is becoming more and more common.

Down in a cellar they find the officer in command of the battalion holding this sector. Arnaud and his men have actually been sent to relieve a company in a different battalion, indeed, in a different division, but they got lost during the night and are not really sure what to do now. Once again, it is defensive combat that awaits them.

He thinks he can see signs in the French army of “a strange mixture of being on the way to losing control and on the way to regaining it.” There are many indicators of crisis. Soldiers who have “lost contact with their regiments” are a common sight on the roads—he has heard the expression so often he is sick of it. An acute shortage of foot soldiers has meant that cavalry units have been hurriedly converted into infantry, something the ordinary soldiers view with malicious and ill-concealed joy since the men in the mounted units have been enjoying a comfortable life behind the lines up to now, waiting serenely for the promised but never realised French breakthrough.
ⁿ
The mood of shock and surprise that reigned a week ago has, nevertheless, begun to ease and the French army is gathering itself for a counter-attack. But panic is still lying just below the surface.

Arnaud explains the situation to the major down in the cellar, telling him they are lost and that he is therefore putting the company at his disposal. The major thanks him. The conversation is then interrupted by a fat sergeant major coming rushing down the steps:

“Major, the Germans are attacking with tanks.”

“Bloody hell,” the major exclaimed. “We’d better get out fast.”

And with a quick movement, quite natural if hardly heroic, he grabbed his belt and his revolver, which were lying thrown on the table—but then he remembered me:

“Well, captain, since you’re here, mount a counter-attack!”

“But … in which direction, mon commandant?”

“Counter-attack, straight ahead!”

“Yes, mon commandant.”

Within a few minutes Arnaud’s company is formed up in two lines with twenty metres between them. And off they go. He has been drilling his unit the whole winter. It has not been easy because many of the men are older, timid, inexperienced and untrained, men who have spent the greater part of the war in safe positions far behind the front line and who would have been permitted to remain there if it were not for the acute shortage of conscripts. Arnaud sees the lines advancing in excellent order and he feels pleased—it is almost as though they are on the training ground.

The company rushes forward, all of them take cover, wait, move on, throw themselves down again. At the third rush he sees that two men out to the left remain prostrate and do not accompany the rest—they are under fire. “Down, all men down!” They all stop. Arnaud scans the ground ahead. They are lying on the crest of a long slope and can see all the way down to the river. There are no enemy soldiers in sight. But yes, further away, under a tree, he sees the square shape of a German tank. It shows no sign of moving. Arnaud decides that enough is enough:

An inexperienced officer newly arrived at the front with his head full of prescribed theories would probably have assumed he should continue advancing, which would have led to the majority of his men being killed for nothing. But by 1918 we had enough experience of the realities of the battlefield to stop ourselves in time. The Americans, who had just left the front line close-by, at Château-Thierry, did not have this experience for obvious reasons and we all know the enormous losses they suffered during the few months they were active.

Arnaud hands over command to one of his warrant officers (Lieutenant Robin has been wounded in the arm) and goes back to make a report. He has carried out his orders.

As evening approaches they are relieved and sent to rejoin their regiment.

Arnaud hears later that there is a new duty waiting for him: he is to
take command of the battalion since the major who had been in charge earlier has been wounded. The account of this, as given by the man bearing the message, is as follows: “That bloody heap of shit got a tiny bit of shrapnel in his hand and pushed off straightaway. The cunt—the wound wouldn’t even have stopped my son going to school.”

SUNDAY
, 23
JUNE
1918
Olive King is awarded a medal in Salonica

It is a hot day and full of disappointments. Olive King knows that she is to be decorated again, this time with the Serbian Gold Medal for exemplary conduct, and that the ceremony is to take place at about ten o’clock. Making a reasonable estimate that she will be in time if she gets up at nine, she stayed up until 3 a.m. writing a report. (She is working hard on setting up a canteen for the underpaid and sometimes undernourished Serbian drivers she works with.) But she is woken up at six o’clock by someone pounding on her door and by a small face peeping in through her window and telling her she is expected at the garage. She takes a quick bath to wake herself up and sets off.

The ceremony does indeed take place at ten o’clock. A colonel makes a long speech in which he praises her contributions, after which he pins the round, gleaming gold medal on her chest. King notices a little box lying on the table alongside and thinks for a moment that yet another distinction is in the offing. But no—that is disappointment number one. At about half past eleven the next disappointment occurs. Artsa, one of the Serbian drivers, has promised to help her explain the sketches of the planned canteen to the Serbian engineering troops who are going to build it. But no—he fails to turn up as agreed. Having had no time for breakfast because of the morning rush, she is hungry and decides to have lunch. But no—the woman who services her cabin arrives unexpectedly to do the weekly cleaning and King has to stay there. Things improve somewhat in the afternoon and when the post arrives she is hoping for a letter from her father. But no …

Disappointments large and small. Apart from a few minor battles nothing has yet happened on the Salonica front. Breaking the deadlock is out of the question, especially now that 20,000 French and British
troops have been shipped off to France to counter the renewed German offensive there. (Rumour has it that the Bulgarians, not the Allies, are planning an offensive down here—that is what some deserters from the enemy camp have said, anyway.)

Olive King is worn out, cross and irritable. She is longing to go home. She has been working here for thirty-three months without a break and without leave, but it is not just the monotony of Salonica and the trivial everyday setbacks that are wearing her down. Another love affair has come to nothing. Grief-stricken after the break with Jovi, she rebounded to another of the Serbs she works with, the said Artsa. Their romance became serious and he proposed to her, but her father forbade her to marry the young man. She obeyed him—apparently with no great resentment.

Something within her has come to an end. Thus, in an earlier letter, when she suddenly became ideological—contrary to her usual custom—and started preaching geopolitics and the aims of the war with a tremor in her voice, it is not too difficult to sense that the sermon is ultimately directed at herself. An attempt to plug the haemorrhage in her soul with words:

Apparently there are still millions of people who have no notion of why Germany went to war. They have a vague notion that she wanted an outlet to the sea, & so walked over Belgium. She does want Belgium, & Holland too, but not in the same way that she wants Serbia, to join up with Turkey. The only way to save the British Empire is to support the Jugo-Slav dream of unity, to put a strong, friendly state where it will be a perpetual barrier to the “Eastern Push.”

It is now evening and Olive King is sitting in her little wooden cabin with all the doors and windows open. It is hot and close. The cooling wind of the last two days has suddenly died down and she is “fed-up & weary of everything tonight.” She drips eau de cologne on her feet and blows on it, feeling how the moisture evaporates with a short, cool caress.

SUNDAY
, 30
JUNE
1918
Harvey Cushing discusses the future in Paris

Outside—a wonderfully warm and beautiful summer’s day. Inside—gloomy. It is the man in front of them who is spreading all this darkness. His name is Édouard Estaunié and he is a fifty-six-year-old author who won some success with his psychological, social-moralising novels just before the war. (He belongs to the same generation as Marcel Proust and is sometimes named in the same breath as Anatole France and Louis Bertrand.)
^o
The house is silent and empty. Estaunié has sent his family away, away from the almost nightly raids by German bombers and away from those long-range guns.

Cushing, too, has become thoroughly familiar with the bombing raids. When he and a colleague were coming here a few days ago, their journey on the Métro was disrupted by an air-raid warning. A little later they were able to watch the attack from a balcony at the Hôtel Continental, which had a view out over the Tuileries: “Gothas—lights—shrapnel—the explosion and flame of an occasional bomb—a small fire—a pitch-black Paris.” And they crossed the Place Vendôme, where the pavements were covered in slivers of glass and the facades of the building pockmarked by shrapnel. But it is not these attacks, which have been going on for months, that have made Estaunié so depressed as he sits at his desk. They may have contributed, but what really depresses him is the overall state of the war.

The third German offensive since the end of March, north-east of Paris this time, began little more than a month ago. The Germans demonstrated yet again that they can break through the Allied line wherever they please and this time they surged forward faster than ever. Just two weeks ago the Germans came to a halt and they are now no more than forty or fifty miles from Paris. Everyone is expecting them to start moving forward again and the capital of France will be their next objective.

Cushing is taken to visit Estaunié by a colleague by the name of Cummings. The three men talk about nothing but the war. Estaunié is
horrified and depressed by the destruction of several big and beautiful French towns during recent months: “First Reims, then Amiens, now Soissons, soon Paris.” Estaunié genuinely believes that Paris is about to fall, and he is convinced that the only thing left for them to do is to fight one final, heroic battle: “Better to go out against the enemy and lose 40,000 men than to lose them in a retreat like the last one.” Cushing and Cummings try to argue against that—the army must be preserved at all costs, so that it can continue to fight. No, replies Estaunié, look at the Belgian army or the Serbian: they have been preserved but their countries no longer exist. France will also go down but she will go down fighting to the last man.
C’est effroyable
.