The Beauty and the Sorrow (11 page)

After lunch Corday is rather distressed by how much his old idol Sembat enjoys his new role as minister, how much he
loves
the title. Corday notes in his journal:

Exceptional circumstances have enabled him to enjoy a position of power that he previously rejected as a matter of principle; but
it is sad to see these men now, to see them riding around in their cars, see them climbing into their special trains, see how gladly and openly they bask in their power.

FRIDAY
, 11
DECEMBER
1914
Kresten Andresen witnesses the looting of Cuy

When they left Flensburg the town was wrapped in a blanket of wet, new snow. The ritual was the usual one. Women from the Red Cross showered him and the other soldiers with chocolate, cakes, nuts and cigars, as well as putting flowers in the muzzles of their rifles. He had accepted the gifts but said a determined “no” to flowers in his gun: “I’m not ready for my funeral yet.” The train journey took ninety-six hours. He did not sleep for many of them, partly from nervousness, partly from curiosity. Most of the time he had just sat there at the carriage window (they had been lucky enough not to travel in cattle trucks as many others did) and greedily taken in everything he saw: the battlefields around Liège where virtually every house seemed burnt or demolished after the severe fighting in August (the very first major battle in the west); the dramatic landscape and many tunnels of the valley of the Meuse; the beautiful winter-green plains of north-west Belgium; the line of the horizon made jagged by muzzle flashes and the light of shell-bursts; villages and towns quite untouched by the war and resting in deep, deep peace; villages and towns badly scarred by the war and filled with its ghosts. They detrained finally in Noyon in north-west France and marched south in the moonlight along a road on which artillery pieces and carriages and motor cars rattled past them, while the sound of distant explosions grew ever sharper.

The regiment has now taken up position along a railway embankment immediately outside the small town of Lassigny in Picardy. To his relief Andresen realises that, apart from some unpleasant but on the whole ineffective artillery bombardment,
^ll
this is a quiet section. Their
duties are not too taxing: four days in the muddy trenches followed by four rest days. It is all about watching and waiting, with the occasional night on duty at a listening post between the lines. The French are dug in about 300 yards away. The two sides are separated by some simple barbed-wire entanglements
^mm
and a flat field on which there are still drooping sheaves of rotting rye—the harvest for 1914. Otherwise there is not much to see. But there is plenty to hear: the
tsji
and
tsju
of rifle bullets, the
dadera-dadera
of machine guns and the
pum-tsiu-u-i-u-u-pum
of shells.
ⁿⁿ
The food is excellent. They get two hot meals a day.

Some of it is better than he had feared, some worse than he had expected. Christmas is approaching and Andresen is homesick, which is
made all the worse by the acute shortage of letters from home. The little town in which they are quartered between their spells in the forward line is under almost constant shellfire, with the result that it has slowly been emptied of its population. The word went round today that the last of the French had deserted their homes. The civilians had scarcely left their houses before German soldiers began looting them.

The rule is that you take what you want from empty, deserted buildings. Both the camps behind the line and the shelters in the trenches are cheaply and gaudily furnished with loot from French homes—everything from woodstoves and soft beds to household equipment and beautiful sofas and chairs.
^oo
(The bunkers are often decorated with ironic mottos. One popular one is: “We Germans are afraid of nothing but God and our own artillery.”) Now that it is clear that the last houses are being deserted things proceed in the usual order—officers can take what they want first, then it is the men’s turn.

Andresen goes along with ten or so others, all under the command of a sergeant major. Lassigny is a more and more depressing sight: where there had once been tall white houses with shutters on their windows, nothing remains but spiky, rain-blackened heaps of rubble, bricks and splintered wood. The projectiles from shrapnel shells and shell fragments lie scattered all over the streets. The little town is slowly being ground down into the earth. The church has been shot to pieces and is just an empty shell. Inside it the old bell is balanced on a couple of collapsed beams and will soon drop and hit the ground with a final, cracked peal. A large crucifix, blown apart by a shell, hangs on the facade of the church. Andresen is deeply moved:

How brutal and ruthless war is! The finest values are trampled underfoot—Christianity, morality, home and hearth. And yet, in
our time, there is so much talk about Civilisation. One is inclined to lose faith in civilisation and [other] values when they are not shown more respect than this.

They approach the recently deserted houses. The sergeant major, who is a teacher in civilian life, leads the way. He rummages eagerly through cupboards and crannies, but there is not much to take. Most of it has already been looted. The chaos is indescribable. Andresen stands back a little, his hands in his pockets, feeling more and more sickened but saying nothing.

In a door that leads to a recently stripped shop they are met by a well-dressed but hatless woman, wearing a coat with a fur collar. She turns to the soldiers and asks where her husband is. Andresen says that he does not know. He meets her eyes and her gaze is dark: he finds it hard to tell whether her expression is one of despair or of scorn, but he feels ashamed, so ashamed that he just wishes that he “could run far away” and hide.

TUESDAY
, 15
DECEMBER
1914
Elfriede Kuhr helps to feed the troops at the station in
Schneidemühl

Frost haze, white snow, biting cold. Many of the smaller children are so cold that they no longer want to play soldiers. Elfriede, however, the oldest of them, argues in favour of the pretend exercise. It is all about learning to endure: “After all, the troops at the front are suffering much worse cold than we are.” Little Fritz Wegner is, however, really frozen. She is forced to wipe his running nose time after time, which she does not really think is appropriate to her dignity as the unit’s officer.

Later she goes to the railway station. Her grandmother works there almost every day as a Red Cross volunteer. Elfriede’s usual job is to help feed the soldiers who stop there. The transport trains continue to run night and day: carriages full of healthy, singing men going east to the battles that are still raging there and carriages full of silent, bleeding men coming back. On this particular day several hospital trains will be arriving so there will undoubtedly be plenty to do.

Elfriede helps out when, in spite of being forbidden to do so, they feed 300 civilian workers who come in on a train from East Prussia, where they have been constructing trenches and other fortifications. She watches the hungry men eat, silent and afraid of being caught: soup, bread and coffee. They quickly devour 700 sandwiches before slinking back into the waiting train. She helps to make new sandwiches in a hurry. The sliced sausage is all gone so they spread drippings on the bread instead, and the pea soup has to be watered down, but when the train with the wounded arrives they do not hear any complaints.

Towards evening she is sent to buy more sausage. She has to go to two butchers before getting everything she needs. On the way back she meets Gretel, one of her friends:

For protection against the cold she is so wrapped in clothes that only her nose and blue eyes are peeking out. I hung a whole string of onion sausages around her neck and said, “Give me a hand so you don’t get called a lazy-bones.”

The two of them help at the railway station, lugging big churns of coffee back and forth. Just before ten o’clock they get their reward—a sausage sandwich and pea soup—then they go home, completely exhausted but very contented. Outside it has started to snow heavily. “It was beautiful to see the way the snowflakes whirled past in the light of the gas-lamps.”

SATURDAY
, 19
DECEMBER
1914
Sarah Macnaughtan is serving soup in Veurne

Rain. Rain again. Rain and darkness. The days have begun to run together, one following another, each the same as the last. The work does not change, the sights remain the same. The news from the front no longer offers any variety: a bit of territory lost here, a symbolic bit of ground won there. It is as if the war has stalled, is not getting anywhere, is trapped in itself, while still mechanically continuing to demand its daily tribute of
lives and bodies. And the waste flushes past Sarah every day as she stands there in her soup kitchen at the station.
^pp

The only thing that is new is a baffling ailment which is afflicting soldiers who have spent a long time in waterlogged trenches: their feet become cold, swollen, numb and blueish—sometimes affecting them so badly that amputation is the only solution. For those who have not reached that stage, dry footwear helps and Macnaughtan has sacks of socks to hand out to those in need of them. (All the socks are home-knitted and have been collected in Great Britain; some of them are darned, some knitted from different sorts of wool, and some of them contain little gifts of chocolate and cigarettes.) Some of the soldiers come in barefoot even though the end of December is approaching. She can see that what she is doing is appreciated but she is still prey to doubt: “I can make none of them really better. I feed them, and they pass on.”

Macnaughtan is still living in the damp attic of the little house. The owners have returned and the woman of the house spent a week cleaning up after the earlier lodgers. Sarah eats a modest breakfast in the kitchen with the family at half past eight and goes to the station around ten o’clock.

The first transports with wounded men usually start coming in about half past ten. Sarah’s soup kitchen is no more than a space in an archway, curtained off with the help of some nailed-up sacking. She has all her equipment and pots and pans in there, in a space about eight feet by eight. The object she is most familiar with is a small coffee grinder with a picture of a blue windmill on it. The grinder is often on the go all day and she has “conceived an earnest hatred” of it. She sometimes loads coffee, hot soup and bread onto a little red cart and takes it out to feed the troops on waiting trains.

She eats lunch at the field hospital and then goes back to the house for a short rest. She is not really feeling too well. Life back at the little house is characterised by monotony. The family sits around a stove in one of the rooms and the father occasionally plays the pianola while
the girls cut out scraps from old papers. Macnaughtan is amazed that none of them read. She feels lonely. The streets are wet and muddy and a harsh, cold wind blows in from the sea.

Macnaughtan has noticed that care of the wounded has begun to improve more and more and there is much less to complain about than before. At the same time, however, people are becoming more quarrelsome than they were. She writes in her diary:

No one is affable here, except those who have just come out from home, and it is quite common to hear a request made and refused, or granted with, “Please do not ask again.” Newcomers are looked upon as aliens, and there is queer sort of jealousy about all the work. Oddly enough, few persons seem to show at their best at a time when the best should be apparent. No doubt, it is a form of nerves, which is quite pardonable. Nurses and surgeons do not suffer from it. They are accustomed to work and to seeing suffering, but amateur workers are a bit headlong at times. I think the expectation of excitement (which is often frustrated) has a good deal to do with it. Those who “come out for thrills” often have a long waiting time, and energies unexpended in one direction often show themselves unexpectedly and a little unpleasantly in another.

The evening is long and dark and she is feeling unwell with a severe headache. She thinks that the drumming of the rain on the windowpanes is a melancholy sound.

TUESDAY
, 22
DECEMBER
1914
Michel Corday witnesses the opening session of the Chamber of Deputies in Paris

The government and the ministries have returned to the capital and the Chamber of Deputies is reopening. As a senior civil servant in one of the ministries he is able to follow all the proceedings from a balcony. Organising the session has not been entirely without problems: one of the
questions that has been debated—with great animation—right up to government level is whether deputies should be permitted to appear in uniform or whether they must all dress in civilian clothes. All those in a position to do so would like to turn up in military uniform. They have finally decided to make the frock-coat obligatory.
^qq

Corday is frightened by the speeches and the effect they have on the listeners: “Alas, how words cast a spell on these people!” He finds that the more a soapbox orator insists on his resolve to hold out “to the bitter end,” the more exaggerated his voice and gestures become.

Afterwards, out in the corridor, he meets a man who is now the adjutant to a high-ranking general but whom Corday knows from civilian life as director of the Opéra Comique. He tells Corday that 1,500 or so theatregoers have to be turned away every evening, such is the public demand. And the boxes are mainly occupied by women in mourning: “They have come to weep. Only music can subdue and ease their sorrow.”