The Beauty and the Sorrow (12 page)

The man tells him a story from his months as a staff officer. There was a woman who refused to be separated from her husband, a captain, and who followed him on his journey to the front. In Compiègne they were supposed to go their separate ways since it was time for him to go to the front line, but his wife still refused. And she stood her ground stubbornly. The ban on civilians visiting the war zone is, of course, also applicable to women whose husbands are there, indeed, it is particularly applicable to them. Their presence is considered a distraction. (The only exceptions are prostitutes, who are issued with special passes to practise their profession—it is said that some particularly desperate women take advantage of this to stay in contact with their husbands.) Those in command said that there was nothing they could do in a case like this other than to declare the captain’s service at the front at an end and to send him back to the mobilisation centre. What did the man do when faced with this threat? He murdered his wife.

SATURDAY
, 26
DECEMBER
1914
William Henry Dawkins is sitting by the pyramids, writing to his mother

From anticipation to disgust to disappointment and back to anticipation. The feelings among the Australian troops in the great convoy on its way to Europe—or to what they thought was going to be Europe, anyway—followed that trajectory. Over a month at sea dampened much of their initial enthusiasm, and homesickness was growing apace among these young soldiers, many of whom had never been away from their families for so long. (The postal service was—for reasons that are understandable—both irregular and unreliable.) The gloom on board increased more and more, the water had begun to run out in the ever more intense heat, and when it was announced that they were not even to be allowed ashore in Aden the dissatisfaction became general. Nor did the disappointment diminish when they were told a few days later that the journey to Europe was being cut short and the whole force would instead go ashore in Egypt. Many of them, like Dawkins, had set their hearts on celebrating Christmas in England.

The main reason for the change of plan was the entry of the Ottoman Empire into the war. The Allies were already fearful that this new opponent would attack the strategically important Suez Canal. By landing the Australian and New Zealand troops in Egypt a significant reserve force was in place and ready for use if the worst should happen. The government in London was also planning to take advantage of the war to turn the nominally Ottoman Egypt into a British protectorate
^rr
and the presence of these 28,000 troops would be useful if this should lead to uproar, turmoil and protests by the Egyptians.
^ss

William Henry Dawkins also found the news that they were to disembark in Egypt rather disappointing but he soon got over it and saw the advantages of the turn of events. Their big, tented encampment lies quite literally at the foot of the pyramids; it is well organised, has plenty
of food and its own water supplies, shops, cinema and theatre. The climate is surprisingly pleasant for the time of year and Dawkins thinks it reminds him of spring in South Australia but with less rain and wind. There is, moreover, a local train into the frenetic city of Cairo, which is only ten miles away. The train is usually packed with soldiers searching for recreation and there are frequently passengers even on the roofs of the carriages. In the evenings the streets of the great city are full of Australian, New Zealand, British and Indian soldiers.

Dawkins shares a large tent with four other junior officers. They have covered the sand with colourful rugs and there are beds, chairs and a table with a cloth. Each of them has his own wardrobe and bookshelf, and there is a bathtub right outside. During the hot evenings the tent is lit by a candle and a hissing acetylene lamp. At this point Dawkins is sitting in his tent and once again writing to his mother:

Yesterday was Christmas Day and our thoughts were in Australia. Some of my section had the most gorgeous dinner—about six courses. They said that they only had to shut their eyes and they could imagine they were home again. Here we have many bands and at daybreak yesterday we had our carols played. Mother—whoever dreamt of having Christmas under the pyramids—very strange, when one comes to think of it!

No one knows what is in store for them next. The time is filled with education and training, training and education. At present Dawkins and his engineers are practising digging trenches and excavating tunnels to lay mines—not particularly easy in the unstable desert sand. He often rides round on his horse which, although it lost some of its mane and coat during the long voyage, is otherwise in good shape. Dawkins ends his letter:

Well, Mother, I must close now and I hope you had a very happy Christmas and got my cable. I remain your loving son, Willie xxxxxxxxxxxx for the girls.

*
Which was quite true: before the end of the month there were two Russian armies on German territory.

†
“Dear fatherland, put your mind at rest, / Fast stands, and true, the Watch, the Watch on the Rhine!” “Die Wacht am Rhein” had the status of a kind of unofficial German national anthem from the middle of the nineteenth century.

‡
“… at home, at home—that’s where we’ll meet again.”

§
Tsingtao, transcribed as Quingdao nowadays, lies on a peninsula on the coast of the province of Shangdong and was ceded to Germany at the end of the nineteenth century in compensation for the murder of a number of German missionaries. (The German influence is still evident in that by far the best beer in China is brewed here.) Japan’s unlimited imperialist ambitions on the Asian mainland had already led to wars with both Russia and China and this demand marked a further step in Japanese expansionist plans—under the pretence of fulfilling the duties inherent in the 1902 alliance with Great Britain. Japanese forces had been in a state of readiness to attack Tsingtao since the middle of August—that is one week before Japan delivered the ultimatum referred to above.

‖
Seine Majestäts Schiff—His Majesty’s Ship.

a
Launched in Kiel in 1909, the
Helgoland
was an incarnation of the pre-war naval race in that she was built as a direct response to the British HMS
Dreadnought
, the largest and most powerful battleship in the world at the time. HMS
Dreadnought
, with her steam turbines, armour and heavy armament, was epoch-making: overnight she made all earlier armoured ships out of date and made the naval strategists of the world forget all budgetary restraints. SMS
Helgoland
’s armament was of a class with
Dreadnought
’s and her armour was, in fact, slightly heavier. (This was because German battleships were not intended to have the same range of operation as British ships and consequently some of the weight saved in terms of coal-carrying capacity could be used for extra protection.) With her twelve 30.5cm guns she was the most modern ship in the German High Seas Fleet and she and her sister vessels
Ostfriesland, Thüringen
and
Oldenburg
, raised expectations very high—among the public, the admirals, her own crew and with Kaiser Wilhelm. Everyone knew that the expensive (and foolish) High Seas Fleet project was one of the Kaiser’s favourites and the implementation of it in the years before the war is what set Germany on a collision course with Great Britain.

b
“Every shot a Russian, every bayonet stab a Frenchman, every kick a Briton.” A further line was also added to the jingle: “Jeder Klaps ein Japs,” that is, “Every slap a Jap.” Numerous silly rhymes of this kind were composed.

c
“O my Germany, how strong you must be, / how healthy right to the core, / since no one dared alone / but sought the help of six others. // Germany, how upright your heart must be, / O how brilliantly pure your rightness, / for you to make the most powerful hypocrite hate you / and the Briton to go pale with rage.”

d
“Kill the devil and grasp from the heights of heaven / the seven victory wreaths of mankind, / seven suns of immortal honour.”

e
The various fronts on which the Russian army fought were, in practical terms, independent zones with their own reserves, own trains, own supplies and own goals, making a sudden transfer of resources practically impossible, at least as long as Russian generals jealously and petulantly stood guard over the territories they had staked out for themselves.

f
The muddled and unproven reasoning was that the fire had been started to signal to the Germans that there were Russian troops present.

g
The reason is logistic. All armies move according to minutely worked-out and unbelievably complicated timetables in which one of the preconditions for the endlessly complex calculation of hundreds of thousands of departures and meetings is that the speed is constant in principle and low out of necessity. Some people claim it was often possible to pick flowers at the side of the track during the journey, though that may be an exaggeration. We can, however, be pretty sure that some people tried.

h
As part of a major programme of military modernisation Russia had by this stage started upgrading its railway network, and it was the extension of railways in Russian Poland that really put the wind up the German general staff. The faster an army could be brought together and brought into action, the bigger its chances of victory—that was axiomatic. The German Schlieffen Plan—which was not a plan in the accepted sense but rather a simple memo based on the situation that existed after Russia’s overwhelming defeat by Japan in 1905—was based on the premise that the French could be knocked out before Russia would be ready for action. The railways were an important factor in this: as late as 1910 the Russian army would not have been able to use more than 250 trains for the mobilisation of its forces. (As a comparison it is worth mentioning that regional traffic in the Cologne area alone at this time was served by 700 trains.) But the Russian modernisation programme meant that far more trains were available and, moreover, they were able to unload closer to the German border. Without it, Lobanov-Rostovsky’s journey would have been even slower.

i
The spellings are Macnaughtan’s.

j
“At music halls and revues, girls, dressed as admirals and colonels, saluted with alarming sharpness all the time.” A year or so later she writes: “Women were, I think, exceptionally military those days.”

k
There was an embryonic women’s volunteer organisation, the semi-official VADs (Voluntary Aid Detachments), which had a place in army planning but no place in its budget and was entirely financed by private funds. The British army was still very doubtful about it.

l
Sharon Ouditt has analysed the thinking underlying this attitude: “To have conscripted women would have been to accord them equivalent status in the emergency and to have broken the stereotypical presentation of women as war’s ‘other’ on which so much of the ‘home fires’ mythology depended.”

m
Her father, a Scottish JP with shipping interests, left her very well provided for.

n
It is worth noting that certain national minorities welcomed the war since a demonstration of loyalty and service was perceived as a way of winning increased respect. This was the strategy chosen by many Jews, particularly those who were well assimilated, in countries such as Germany and Russia; they met with greater success in the former than in the latter simply because German anti-Semitism was so much weaker than Russian (or French). German newspapers contain accounts of German Jews who left Palestine at the outbreak of war and made their way home, often with some difficulty, in order to become volunteers.

o
The Duchies of Schleswig, Holstein and Lauenburg became part of Prussia after the Dano-German War of 1864. They had a significant German-speaking population even at that time.

p
Like so much of the early hysteria about potential spies and traitors, this faded with time, especially once it became clear that Danish-speaking recruits like Andresen served under the German flag without any problems arising. The majority of those arrested, including his father, were released. An entertaining and perspicacious account—drawn from her own experience—of the excitement and spy hysteria in Germany in August 1914 may be found in Klara Johanson’s essay “Prisoner of War.”

q
Using the railways, Messrs. Hindenburg, Ludendorff and Co. had managed once again to pull off a strategic move of the kind the Russian high command could only dream of: the Germans rapidly transferred forces from a sector that had been made secure (East Prussia) to a sector under threat (southern Poland). It did not, however, amount to another Tannenberg. Both sides had been marching hither and thither in a fairly aimless manner, either without locating the enemy or passing each other unnoticed. The two sides quite simply bumped into each other outside Opatov, with the Germans playing the part of eager attackers and the Russians adopting a tenacious but retreating role. The battle had no real significance either for the campaign or for the war, and both sides later claimed victory.