The Beauty and the Sorrow (76 page)

Oh, these babies! Just skin and bone. Little starving bodies. And how big their eyes are! When they cry it is no louder than a weak little whimper. There is a little boy who is bound to die soon. He has a face like a dried-up mummy. The doctor is giving him injections of cooking salt. When I bend over his bed the little one looks at me with those big eyes that remind me of the eyes of a wise old man, but he is only six months old. There is clearly a question in those eyes, a reproach really.

Whenever she can, she steals real nappies so that the little boy does not have to have those dreadful paper things.

Elfriede gets up at six o’clock in the morning, starts work an hour later and then works until six in the evening. Her brother Willi has been called up and is a private in the air force. At the moment he is still undergoing training. When she met him after he had joined up she thought he looked dreadful in his uniform and wearing a peculiar lacquered hat. Worst of all was seeing him standing at attention, rigid, absolutely still,
hands pressed against the seams of his trousers, his eyes fixed on some point in the far distance. It was just like when she had played at pretending to be Lieutenant von Yellenic, but this is for real and much better—and much, much worse. The last time Elfriede met Willi was on his birthday, a fortnight ago. On that occasion he said to her twice: “Everything’s going to rack and ruin.”
^s

TUESDAY
, 6
AUGUST
1918
Pál Kelemen meets some American prisoners of war in Arlon

He is living comfortably in a two-storey building with his own bedroom, his own living room and his own entrance. It seems to be an apartment built to be rented out, but who would take their holiday in this part of Belgium? As a symbolic gesture of cooperation and gratitude
^t
the Austro-Hungarian army has sent four divisions and a number of their famous 30.5cm mortars to the Western Front. Pál Kelemen belongs to one of these divisions. The train journey from Friulia took eight days, across the dreadful, empty battlefields on the Isonzo, up into Austria (“cities, cultures, women, but everywhere the thousandfold symptoms of the fatigue of war”), through Germany (where he saw the heavily bombed and panic-stricken city of Metz), past Luxembourg and across the Belgian border to the little town of Arlon. The place was under heavy artillery fire when the train rolled into the station. He was afraid.

Arlon has been occupied for four years and the German occupiers have done their best to impose a kind of normality on the town, but without success. Shops, hotels and restaurants are open as before but anyone can see that life is far from normal—even if you ignore the most obvious signs, such as the bombs dropped during air raids and the shells from long-range guns that continually plummet down, killing Germans and Belgians alike. In the first place, the town dies at exactly eight o’clock every evening, the curfew being upheld with Prussian precision and the
blackout being absolute. This is as different as it is possible to be from the carefree Austrian approach with its charm and its inefficiency: here strict discipline is the rule. In the second place, there are virtually no men here apart from the very old and the very young and the omnipresent Russian prisoners of war who make up the labour force. The men of Arlon either are away in the Belgian army or have been sent to Germany or elsewhere as forced labour. The Germans try to make full economic use of this and other occupied regions. There are women to be seen everywhere.

This ought to suit Kelemen, who has a great love of women, but he has quickly recognised that there is an unsurmountable barrier between him and the Belgians. The civilian population shows no respect for the occupiers and as far as possible even avoids looking at them. And if for any reason they are spoken to or faced with questions the locals simply pretend not to understand, and they do so with eyes and gestures full of scorn and defiance. In the hope of ingratiating himself a little with the woman who owns the house he is living in, Kelemen has tried to explain that he is a
Hungarian
, not a German, and that the Hungarians have frequently fought against the Germans throughout history. But the woman simply pretends not to understand. In Arlon itself he has already noticed “a charming young girl” and when he saw her standing in an open window a few days ago he immediately rode up and began conversing with her in French. He had hardly started his flirtation before an older woman appeared and drew the girl inside. It turned out she was the daughter of Arlon’s chief of police—and he had been imprisoned by the Germans.

The fourth German offensive since March opened in the middle of last month, this time on the Marne, but it seems to have gone the way of all the others: initial major and rapid successes and significant Allied losses, which German propaganda blared out in bold headlines and in the triumphal tones of church bells, followed by a gradual slowing down of the advance as a result of supply problems and the tougher resistance put up by swiftly assembled Allied reserves. The involvement of American units is also becoming increasingly apparent. These new arrivals are fighting with a thoughtlessness bordering on nonchalance, utterly contrary to the new insights into military tactics gained in recent years, and they have consequently—and quite unnecessarily—suffered huge losses. But their sheer numbers are tipping the scales, all the more so
since the aim of the German offensives was to achieve a decisive result
before
the Americans became seriously involved. Since three days ago, the German units have been roughly back where they started.

Arlon lies close to the sector of the front where the latest offensive took place and the Austro-Hungarian units are intended to be reinforcements for the German front line. Today, for the first time, Kelemen sees a small group of American prisoners of war being led past. He finds the sight more than a little demoralising and notes in his journal:

Their amazingly good physical condition, the excellent quality of their uniforms, the heavy leather in their boots, belts and such, the confident look in their eyes even as prisoners, made me realise what four years of fighting had done to our troops.

On the same day Harvey Cushing writes in his journal:

After three days in bed with a N.Y.D. [not yet diagnosed] malady which I regarded as the Spanish flu—three days grippe—or what you will. This came on top of two rackety days around Château-Thierry, getting back home supperless, cold and wet, in an open Dodge at 1 a.m. I had suddenly aged and our driver had to help me upstairs—teeth chattering and done in …

SATURDAY
, 17
AUGUST
1918
Elfriede Kuhr looks at a dead baby in Schneidemühl

A summer’s night. Warmth. He is dead now, that little boy of six months who had been Elfriede’s favourite. The emaciated child died in her arms yesterday: “He simply laid his head, which seemed much too big for his skeletal body, on my arm and died without as much as a rattle or a sigh.”

It is now three o’clock in the morning and Elfriede is going to look at his body once more. It is still lying in a bed covered with a net, a bed that has been rolled out into the corridor where it is a little cooler. She has put freshly picked wild flowers around the thin little corpse but the effect is not particularly successful. “Unfortunately, lying there surrounded by
the flowers he looked like an ancient dwarf who had been dead for hundreds of years.”

As she stands there looking at the body, a faint sound suddenly rises from the bed. It is weak, a dull, muffled buzzing, sometimes louder, sometimes softer, sometimes not there at all. Puzzled by the noise, Elfriede bends forward. Yes, it is coming from the bed. Surely not … She looks and listens and realises to her horror that it
is
coming from the dead boy. But there is no way he could have come to life, is there? Yet the sound could be from his little lungs. She bends further forward—yes, it is coming from his half-open mouth. He must be trying to breathe.

She plucks up all her courage, takes hold and forces the boy’s jaw open to give him more air.

And she immediately recoils as a large blowfly crawls out of the boy’s mouth.

Feeling sick, Elfriede chases it away.

Then she ties the net back round the bed—tight, really tight.

SATURDAY
, 24
AUGUST
1918
Harvey Cushing studies frozen hands in Salins-les-Bains

It has been raining almost all day. The journey up the hill is long and hard but is worth the effort. The view is breathtaking, as is the landscape, which is completely untouched by the war. Cushing is part of a small delegation visiting Station Neurologique No. 42, which is housed in the old hill fortress in Salins-les-Bains, south of Besançon.

Cushing is here for purely professional reasons. The army has many neurological hospitals and No. 42 specialises in a particular kind of brain disorder—the sort that results in frozen hands and lame feet. The first of these is of particular interest to Cushing. All the army doctors are familiar with the phenomenon: men whose hands are locked in a kind of permanent cramp, frequently twisted back towards the forearm in impossible-looking positions. A kind of origami of the muscles, yet rarely is there any physical damage to the extremities affected. They have, so to speak, simply frozen solid. Cushing is amazed at the variations and the French doctors have even developed a typology:
main d’accoucheur, main en bénitier, main en coup de poing
and so on.

The affliction often develops after a long period in bandages or in traction, but a different background is also well recognised. The defect frequently affects men who have received a small—indeed, often trivial—wound on the battlefield but who are afraid of being sent back to the front. Their brains, consciously or unconsciously, appear to be overriding the wound’s insignificance, worsening its effects.

The treatment consists exclusively of psychotherapy and it is being led by a captain called Boisseau. He is very skilful and Cushing watches in amazement as Boisseau treats a newly arrived “self-deformed” soldier and carefully coaxes the man out of his deformity using words alone. In one room there is a small display of sticks and crutches and corsets and calipers that were used by ex-patients.

The treatment is not guaranteed to succeed. In the village at the bottom of the hill is a barracks to which the patients are sent on discharge. There they are divided into three groups: (a) fully recovered and fit for service at the front, (b) uncertain cases, (c) permanently ill. Cushing and the rest of the delegation watch the first group march past in full battle kit. One of the French neurologists notices one among them who is suffering a relapse and the man is immediately pulled out of the ranks to be sent back to Station Neurologique No. 42, where, after three days in isolation, the therapy will be tried again: “One mind struggling to get control of another that has good reason to resist.”

They drive back to Besançon in the pouring rain. Later one of their guides invites them to supper.

SUNDAY
, 1
SEPTEMBER
1918
Willy Coppens is confined to bed with a cold

The heat of August is past. It has been an eventful month. Willy Coppens has added to his list of kills by shooting down six more German observation balloons, his speciality. (He has made twenty-seven kills since the start of the year.) He knows the dangers, having returned home several times with holes punched through his aircraft by bullets and shell splinters. The rips are mended with white patches that stand out against the garish light-blue of his Hanriot machine. Just over a week ago he came close to being shot down by a German plane that had sneaked up on him.

Coppens is in a slightly strange frame of mind for all that. On the morning of 10 August he shot down three balloons in the space of an hour and a half, and

while the flight lasted, all this success, allied with the sense of having escaped from danger, was exhilarating but as soon as I landed and was back in the company of the squadron, the combat which had filled me with such excitement a moment before lost much of its meaning. The joy died away and weariness and tedium took its place.

When they are not flying, their lives are characterised by the restlessness of youth. He and the other pilots are always on the lookout for fun—arranging parties, going to restaurants and to the theatre, playing tennis on the court they have built for themselves at the airfield and devising an endless string of practical jokes. The most recent of these involved telephoning another squadron and tricking the man who answered into believing that King Albert was coming to visit.

Today Coppens is confined to bed with a cold. This is unusual since all the time they spend out in the fresh air and at a high altitude seems to give them a resistance to minor ailments. He is reading a letter from his father, who is still in occupied Brussels. Coppens writes:

The letter was phrased in the usual highly inventive language we used for this purpose but, reading between the lines, I could tell that he had heard of my latest successes against our hated enemy. But in one sentence, in which he advised me to be careful, I sensed his fear that I would push my luck too far and see it turn against me. Was that a somewhat prophetic apprehension as well as a natural one?

TUESDAY
, 10
SEPTEMBER
1918
Elfriede Kuhr is reading a letter from her mother

Autumn has arrived. Most of the street lights are turned off because of the shortage of gas. They have run out of potatoes. Elfriede’s grandmother
has caught the flu that is going round and spends most of the time lying on the sofa. The brother of one of their neighbours has just had a leg amputated. Elfriede’s brother has been given a job as an army clerk. And Elfriede has killed off her pretend alter ego, Lieutenant von Yellenic, because she thinks she is now too big for games of that kind. (She and Gretel gave him a proper funeral. Lieutenant von Yellenic lay in state wearing a cardboard Iron Cross, the ceremony being accompanied by the tones of Chopin’s Funeral March and concluded with a final salute from three paper bags that Elfriede blew up and burst. Gretel wept inconsolably.)