The Beauty and the Sorrow (21 page)

The German nurse is still shouting and the Russian prisoner is still digging. Then he finds something. Laura sees what it is—a filthy crust of bread, which the prisoner holds up triumphantly to his fellows before starting to eat it. The German nurse is upset. How can he eat something like that? Doesn’t he realise the piece of bread will make him ill, possibly fatally ill? The man carries on chewing.

Laura is upset too and she turns to the German nurse. Can she not give the man something proper to eat? The nurse hesitates and is not sure whether she dare. One of the uniformed German hospital assistants hears the discussion and intervenes—she goes away and returns with a big bowl of thick, steaming soup in which pieces of real meat are floating about. The Russian prisoner gulps down the food.

Three hours later he is dead.

His stomach clearly could not handle the sudden abundance.

FRIDAY
, 14
MAY
1915
Olive King is scrubbing floors in Troyes

It is a cold and windy day. For a change, it has to be said, since the weather has been pleasantly warm recently. They have even been able to sleep in the open air in a nearby pine wood, lying on the as yet unused stretchers. It is not, however, the warmth that has made sleeping outdoors attractive but the fact that the small manor house, the Château de Chanteloup, that has been requisitioned for their use has no furniture and is pretty filthy. In addition to which, most of their equipment has gone astray. With no tents and without a functioning kitchen they cannot take any wounded men. But the manor is pleasantly situated: it may be right by the road but
it has a fine orchard and kitchen garden and there is an attractive wood close by.

Olive King is up early as usual. By a quarter past eight she is sitting behind the wheel of her ambulance, ready to set off to find benches and tables to furnish the place. She is accompanied by one of her superiors, Mrs. Harley, head of transport. Olive May King is a twenty-nine-year-old Australian, born in Sydney, the daughter of a successful businessman. (She is her father’s girl in many ways, especially since her mother died when Olive was only fifteen.)

Her upbringing and education have been conventional, finishing off in Dresden where classes in music and painting porcelain were part of the syllabus, but her life since has been anything but conventional. There is a tension within her between, on one hand, an upright and naive longing for a husband and children, and on the other, an energetic and restless nature. She travelled a great deal in the years before the war, in Asia, America and Europe—though always accompanied by a chaperone. She was the third woman to climb the 17,887-foot volcano Popocatépetl, south-east of Mexico City—and the first to risk descending into its smoking crater. But there is something missing. She prays to God in a poem written in 1913: “Send me a sorrow […] To wake my soul from its engulfing sleep.” She is yet another of these people for whom the gospel of the war is change.

It is thus hardly surprising that, motivated both by her adventurous spirit and by her intense patriotism, King found a way of becoming a participant rather than an observer very soon after the war broke out. She took the only course open to women in 1914, the medical service. It is, perhaps, telling that King did not train as a nurse but enrolled instead in the much more unconventional role of driver, at the wheel of a large Alda ambulance she had bought personally with her father’s money. The ability to drive a motor vehicle is still a very exclusive skill, particularly for a woman.

The organisation King is now working for is the Scottish Women’s Hospital, one of many private medical units started in the enthusiasm of the autumn of 1914, but this one is rather unusual in that it was founded by radical suffragettes and is staffed exclusively by women.
^qq

King is driving her own ambulance this morning—its number is 9862 but she always calls it Ella, which is short for The Elephant. And it is big, virtually a small bus, with space for as many as sixteen seated passengers. The specially built load area at the back is heavy and King is rarely able to push Ella up to speeds higher than twenty-eight miles an hour.

They return at about half past ten. Helped by Mrs. Wilkinson, another of the drivers, King unloads the benches and tables they have acquired and stands them out in the garden, then King and Mrs. Wilkinson change their clothes and begin scrubbing out the outhouse where the drivers are to be quartered. The two of them wield scrubbing brushes and sponges, use several changes of water and keep on scrubbing vigorously until the floor is completely clean. They have also thought about re-papering the room but that will have to wait.

Dinner consists of asparagus, which tastes good, is cheap, and is in season. As usual they have an audience as they eat. The dining-room window looks out onto the road and inquisitive passers-by look in to catch a glimpse of these strange women, who have not only volunteered to come and help with the war effort but who are also managing without men. Then she and a number of the others go to their rooms to write letters because the post goes early tomorrow. King tells her sister:

I don’t believe it will be many months now before the war is over. The failure, thank God, of that damnable gas will be a great blow to Germany, I believe. Isn’t it magnificent that the new respirators are such a success? Thank God for it. I wish He would make all their brutal gas-shells explode among themselves and kill 500,000 Bosches [
sic
]. It would be a gorgeous revenge for our poor slaughtered soldiers and I wish He would send fires or floods to blow up or wreck all the German ammunition factories.

King writes this in her freshly scrubbed room, half-lying on a rickety stretcher that is presently serving as her bed. The room is empty
otherwise, apart from a chair and a wind-up gramophone. There is an open fireplace with a marble mantelpiece, which is where they throw their cigarette ends, matchsticks and other rubbish. The walls are covered with a wallpaper she is very fond of—it shows brown parrots sitting in rose bushes and eating nuts. She is cold and she is sleepy. When is her real war going to start?

WEDNESDAY
, 26
MAY
1915
Pál Kelemen buys four loaves of white bread in Glebovka

The Russians are really in retreat now. That has become clear to him during the last few days while riding through one badly damaged place after another and seeing everything the retreating enemy is leaving behind—from scrap and rubbish along the roads, to dead and dying soldiers, as well as newly erected road signs with incomprehensible names in the Cyrillic alphabet. (A year ago this road led to Lemberg, now it leads to Lvov, and soon it will be Lemberg again.
^rr
)

Kelemen has nothing against being on the march again and certainly nothing against the Russian invasion forces being driven out. The news of the great breakthrough at Gorlice, however, was greeted with much less jubilation by the troops than might have been expected. “Everyone here has become indifferent,” he writes in his journal, “worn down by the everlasting tension.”

They have been in the small town of Glebovka since yesterday. When he and the other hussars rode in there were two things that gave him a shock: the first was a house with its windows intact, behind which he caught a glimpse of white lace curtains; the second was a young Polish woman—he always has his eye open for young women—moving among a crowd of soldiers and Russian prisoners. She was wearing white gloves. It will be a long time before he forgets those white gloves and lace curtains, forgets that immaculate whiteness in a world of filth and mud.

Today he has heard that there is white bread for sale and since he is sick of the standard-issue bread, which is either doughy or dried out, he has gone to buy some. He buys four large loaves and notes in his journal:

I cut into one. It was not yet cold. Its thick strong smell filled my nostrils. Slowly, almost with awe, I took the first bite and tried to savor the taste clearly, thinking that this is the same white loaf I was used to once, before the war.

I ate and I concentrated. But my palate would not recognise anything at all, and I ate the white loaf as if it had been some new food, the fame and the taste of which I had never known before.

Afterwards I realised that the bread was just the same as at home. It was I who had changed; the war had given such a foreign flavor to the good old white bread I used to take for granted.

THURSDAY
, 27
MAY
1915
Sarah Macnaughtan’s time in De Panne is coming to an end

Enough is enough. She is going back to England in a week’s time. Probably for good. Macnaughtan is one of those people who were swept along in the first rejoicing wave of enthusiasm and who then, as reverses and disappointments mounted, has seen her energies draining away. She is tired. Tired in body and tired in soul. Tired of suffering. Tired of danger. Tired of the constant bickering. Tired of pettiness and incomprehensible rules. Tired.

She has carried on working in the soup kitchen at the station, dutifully but without any joy. She does the same things every day: ladles out soup, coffee, bread and jam, and shares out the sugar. At least the cold, dark, lonely winter is over but the return of the sun has its disadvantages because it can get very hot standing out there on the platform at the station, and the smells are much worse. Some helpful people have sent her a motor car, but it has already broken down.

It is still a Fight Against Evil, of course. That is not something she has any doubt about. (That feeling has, in fact, only grown stronger in the course of the spring since she heard of the sinking of the passenger liner and since she saw the victims of German poison gas for the first time.) And she still feels strongly that the war is about Duty and Principles and The Honour of the Name of Britain. But for how long can it actually continue?

Surely the expense of the thing will one day put a stop to war. We are spending two million sterling per day, the French certainly as much, the Germans probably more, and Austria and Russia much more, in order to keep men most uncomfortably in unroofed graves, and to send high explosives into the air, most of which don’t hit anything.

Macnaughtan is struggling to solve the equation in her head. At the start of the month a volunteer soldier told her in confidence that he was longing to be wounded “so that he might go home honourably.” When she considers her own role, she has come to the conclusion that she could be far more useful on the home front, as a propagandist. She is working on a little book about her experiences. (Somewhat adapted, admittedly, with a candid but mildly humorous tone and with the text carefully purged of all doubts and disagreeable elements. A publisher has already been found for the project.) She is also thinking of realising her plan to travel round giving talks to workers at a number of munitions factories.
^ss

She is struggling to find a solution to the conundrum of whether a sacrifice can be magnificent even if it is meaningless—indeed, whether the very fact that it is meaningless can make it even more magnificent. She has heard a story about some artillerymen who were sent back to fetch a gun and their NCO is supposed to have said: “We shall be killed, but it doesn’t matter.” Their captain responded “heavily”: “No, it doesn’t matter.” The story has affected her deeply. She writes in her diary:

“It doesn’t matter”—nothing matters. I rather dread going back to London, because there things may begin to seem important and one will be in bondage again. Here our men are going to their death laughing because it doesn’t matter. There is a proud humility about my countrymen which few people have yet realised. It is the outcome of nursery days and public schools. No one is allowed to think much of himself in either place, so when he dies, “It doesn’t matter.” God help the boys! If they only knew how much it mattered to us! Life is over for them. We don’t even know for certain that they will live again. But their spirit, as I know it,
can never die. I am not sure about the survival of personality. I care, but I do not know. But I do know that by these simple, glorious, uncomplaining deaths, some higher, purer, more splendid place is reached, some release is found from the heavy weight of foolish, sticky, burdensome, contemptible things. These heroes do “rise,” and we “rise” with them.

Spring has been late in coming but now it has arrived at last in its full force, “a marvel of green,” but the lilacs and the warm sea breeze only make her even more homesick. One week to go.

SUNDAY
, 6
JUNE
1915
Kresten Andresen is evacuated from the hospital in Noyon

Perhaps it is luck, just a quirk of fate, that will save him. One dark night at the beginning of May Andresen fell into a narrow sap trench and fractured his right leg immediately above the ankle. Since then he has spent most of the time in hospital, lying in a large ward that used to be a theatre and being cared for by kindly French nuns. He is bored because he has little to read and he is fed up with the poor food—the sick are not considered to need as much as soldiers at the front
^tt
—but he is nevertheless quite content. At least six weeks, the doctor has told him. With a little luck he can stay out of the front line until July even, and perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, the war will be over by then.

While lying in bed Andresen has, as usual, done a lot of fantasising about the war and what might happen soon, and about peace and what might happen then. Italy declared war on the Central Powers in May; the British attacked up in Flanders and the French attacked with great tenacity at Arras; exceptionally severe fighting has surged across the crater-covered Loretto Heights; and the rumour going round is that the United States and several Balkan countries will soon join Germany’s
opponents. Andresen is amazed at how self-confidently many Germans have reacted to the growing threats: they say that it will probably lengthen the war but that Germany will nevertheless be victorious in the end. For his own part he hopes that the great political developments—real or imaginary—will lead to peace. He knows what he intends to do in that case. Before August 1914 he worked as a teacher in Vinding for a full six months and he wants to return to that after the war, to continue working in popular education and with young people. And he dreams of building himself a small house, a house no bigger than “Aunt Dorothea’s hen-house but very romantic both inside and outside.”