The Beauty and the Sorrow (75 page)

The two Americans keep trying to come up with a counter-argument and suggest that they themselves represent one such: the American army in France is steadily growing in strength. Cushing has heard that it now has fifty or more divisions, 750,000 men, in France and with the help of reinforcements on this scale it should surely be possible to halt the German assault. And then there is the lethal influenza that has just started spreading up in Flanders—rumour has it that it has already affected the enemy armies severely. But it is difficult to make any impression on the Frenchman’s despair. Then Estaunié becomes philosophical: in the struggle between justice and barbarism throughout history, barbarism has always triumphed.

With pessimistic Gallic prophecies ringing in their ears Cushing and Cummings go sorrowfully out into the blazing summer sun. Finding themselves within walking distance of the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe and other famous buildings, they spend the whole afternoon walking around Paris, eager to see as much as possible, eager to imprint it all on their memories. Both of them have a feeling that they might be looking at all this for the last time.

A SUMMER’S DAY
, 1918
Paolo Monelli on life behind the wire in Hart

He has tried to escape twice, the first time only ten days after arriving at the castle in Salzburg. And twice he has been recaptured.

Some people have settled into captivity, determined to remain there
until the end of the war. Monelli, however, is withering away in this grey and melancholy world of pettiness. He feels he is locked into an eternal, unchangeable, hateful present. Monelli is twenty-six years old and it is as if he is being robbed of his youth. Perhaps it is already lost. He daydreams a great deal, remembers a great deal, pines a great deal and conjures up pictures of his life in peacetime, images of simple everyday things that are now impossible, unthinkable even, like walking along a pavement wearing newly polished shoes, or drinking tea in a café with female acquaintances. He thinks about women a lot. There is a high level of sexual frustration among the prisoners. The food is bad and there is little of it, so hunger lurks dangerously close all the time.
^p
He is in Hart now, which is his third camp. They live in long barracks, stifling and fly-ridden in the hot summer sun. Over beyond the barbed-wire fence they can glimpse a rural idyll with the scent of new-mown hay, and somewhere beyond the blue-green mountains on the horizon lies Italy. Monelli finds boredom one of the hardest things to cope with:

And today is like yesterday. Nothing changes. Today like yesterday like tomorrow. Reveille in the gloomy dormitories, evening inspection to make sure it is all dark and, bracketed between those two points, a meaningless existence in which people have stopped thinking of the future because they no longer dare to consider it, an existence that hangs there monotonously on the hooks of a few unchanging and frustrating memories.

The stamping and tramping in the endless corridors of the linked barrack-block, where the only light comes from skylights in the roof and one is sometimes attacked by a nightmare that says that we are already dead and buried, that we are nothing but restless corpses that leave their graves for a short conversation with other dead men in the exercise yard. Hatred of the comrades whom the Austrians have forced you to become close friends with, the miasma of humanity, the dreadful stench of five hundred inmates, a hungry and egotistical herd, twenty-year-old bodies condemned to masturbation and inactivity. And it is not
that I think I am any better than them even though I can produce the odd grain of wisdom now and then and even though a lively conversation with friends about past battles can still enliven and comfort me through the humiliations of the day.

Even I have learned to play chess; even I will sometimes press myself against the diamond patterns of the barbed-wire fence as an expression of my desire for passing women; even I will reluctantly hand over my kilo of rice to the communal pool as if it was an obligatory contribution. And who knows, even I might stoop to borrowing that pornographic book from a fellow-inmate.

TUESDAY
, 16
JULY
1918
Edward Mousley writes a sonnet on a hill above Bursa

It is as if there are two people competing for space in his mind. Or perhaps it is no more than the usual old conflict between reason and emotion.

One part of him senses that the war has reached a turning point. It seems that the Germans will not get any further in France, and Germany’s allies (the Austro-Hungarians, the Bulgarians and, not least, the Ottomans) are showing every sign of war weariness. Mousley himself is doing fairly well. He has convinced the Ottoman military court to find him not guilty of attempted escape! He was helped by his own background as a law student specialising in international law and by his tactic of mounting an aggressive counter-attack when in a tight corner. He is now back among the captured senior officers in the spa town of Bursa where, under close supervision, he is permitted to go fishing and watch football.

One part of him is filled with despair as he sombrely watches the best years of his life trickle away in captivity.

Today Mousley is once again on his way to take the waters and, as usual, he is accompanied by an armed guard. It is a hot day and Mousley feels unwell and tired. They walk up one of the hills that surround Bursa. The view is magnificent, particularly of the high mountain, Kesis. After a while Mousley realises that he is not going to reach the bath before it closes and so he sits down by the roadside. There he writes a sonnet:

        
One day I sought a tree beside the road

        
Sad, dusty road, well known of captive feet—

        
My mind obedient but my heart with heat

        
Rebelled pulsating ’gainst the captor’s goad
.

        
So my tired eyes closed on the “foreign field”

        
That reached around me to the starlight’s verge
,

        
One brief respite from weary years to urge

        
Me to forget—and see some good concealed
.

        
But skyward then scarred deep with ages long

        
I saw Olympus
^q
and his shoulders strong

        
Rise o’er the patterned destinies of all the years

        
Marked with God’s finger by the will of Heaven—

        
Tracks men shall tread, with only Time for leaven—

        
That we might see with eyes keen after tears
.

“But,” he admits when he ponders on this lyrical outburst later, “these moments were few.” He then adds in the slightly pidgin language he has adopted during his years in captivity: “And the pressure of existence and shikar [hunt] for food and money, and general bandobast [organisation] of plots and plans and pots and pans engrossed much attention.”

FRIDAY
, 26
JULY
1918
Michel Corday looks at the women on a windy street in Paris

Corday is sitting on the train to Paris in the morning. Following his usual habit he is eavesdropping on the other passengers in the compartment. Someone says, “We are advancing everywhere!” A French lieutenant holds up that morning’s paper in front of an American soldier, whom he does not know and who probably does not understand French, points to the bold headlines and says, “Excellent!”

A civilian gentleman is bubbling over with delight at the latest military successes. In the middle of the month the Germans began yet
another offensive on the Marne but it has been stopped in its tracks by determined Allied counter-attacks. And now the enemy has ceased attacking and withdrawn back across that infamous river. The wild German bid to win the war with one knock-out blow has come to nothing. The failure is obvious to everyone, especially to all the armchair strategists in civilian suits. The result of the German gamble has been to make a number of dents in the Allied front line—dents that look impressive on the map but are vulnerable in practice. Corday hears an enthusiastic gentleman explaining the new and unexpected situation at the front to a somewhat doubtful captain:

“I’m telling you, there are 800,000 men on their way there at the moment.” The captain demurred uncertainly: “Are you sure of that?” The other man replied: “800,000, I promise you. Not a man less. And we’re going to capture the whole bloody lot of them!” He leaned back and let his finger follow the operation on the map printed on the front page of the paper: “Look! There … and there … and there!” The captain was convinced. He said: “They really are thoroughly beaten! How they must hate it! Put yourself in their shoes …”

That same day Michel Corday hears about the death of a woman who ended up stranded behind the German lines in Lille at the beginning of the war. She succeeded in later rejoining her husband, who, when he heard her “praising the chivalrous behaviour of the German officers,” murdered her with a cut-throat razor. Now he has been acquitted.

Later that day Corday and a friend are walking on a street in Paris. There is a strong wind. His friend is in an excellent mood, having received good news that morning from his son, who is an ensign in the army. And his friend’s mood is further improved by seeing the wind pulling at the skirts of the women out walking. The war has changed everything, including women’s fashions. Over the years, for reasons that are more practical than ideological, colours have become more muted, the material simpler, the designs more suited to work and an active life. And the changes have been thoroughgoing, affecting what is not seen as well as what is seen: the complicated and lavishly decorated undergarments that existed before the war have disappeared and been replaced by smaller items with less artifice, again designed for an active life. The
almost obsessive curviness, inherited from the nineteenth century and requiring stiff corsets that restricted movement, has fallen out of fashion. Lines have become straighter and skirts have never been so short—and never have they been made of such thin and light material. The women on the street are having to struggle to preserve their modesty in the strong wind. There is a young woman walking in front of Corday and his friend. A sudden gust lifts her skirt to her waist and Corday’s friend smiles contentedly.

SUNDAY
, 28
JULY
1918
Elfriede Kuhr is working at the children’s hospital in Schneidemühl

They do what they can. When the babies cannot get any milk they give them boiled rice or porridge or just tea. When there are not enough real nappies, as is frequently the case, they use a new sort made of paper. They are not very good—the paper sticks to the babies’ skin and it hurts when the carers take them off.

Ersatz, everywhere ersatz. Substitute coffee, fake aluminium, imitation rubber, paper bandages, wooden buttons. The inventiveness may be impressive but the same cannot be said for the resulting products: cloth made from nettle fibres and cellulose; bread made from flour mixed with potatoes, beans, peas, buckwheat and horse chestnuts (which only becomes palatable a few days after being baked); cocoa made from roasted peas and rye with the addition of some chemical flavouring; meat made of pressed rice boiled in mutton fat (and finished off with a fake bone made of wood); tobacco made of dried roots and dried potato peel; shoes soled with wood. There are 837 registered meat substitutes permissible in the production of sausages, 511 registered coffee substitutes. Coins made of nickel have replaced coins made of iron, tin saucepans have replaced iron pans, copper roofs have been replaced by tin roofs and the world of 1914 has been replaced by that of 1918, in which everything is a little thinner, a little less solid, a little less substantial. Ersatz: pretend products for a pretend world.

Elfriede Kuhr is working in the children’s hospital in Schneidemühl. It took her some time to get used to the work there, to suppress her feelings of nausea at the sight of blood or pus or bedsores or of heads covered
in scurf. Almost all the children are suffering from malnutrition or have a disease that is in some way attributable to it. (Their inadequate diet a result partly of the successful British blockade of Germany and partly of the fact that the German agricultural and transport systems are being ground down by the almost superhuman war effort. Even when food is available there are no trains to transport it.) There is a sense in which these children are just as much war victims as the men killed at the front. Or the children who went down with the
Lusitania
. Child mortality in Germany has doubled in the last few years.
^r
Many of the little ones have been handed in by their mothers, young soldiers’ wives who have reached the end of their tether: