The Beauty and the Sorrow (3 page)

She watches the soldiers march past and a little boy alongside her sticks his hand pleadingly through the cold bars of the iron railings: “Soldier, soldier, goodbye!” One of the grey-uniformed men reaches out and shakes the hand: “Farewell, little brother!” Everyone laughs, the band plays “Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles” and some of the crowd sing along with it. A long train, decorated with flowers, puffs into Platform 1. At a call on the bugle the soldiers immediately begin to climb aboard to the sounds of oaths, jokes and commands. A soldier hurrying to catch up with the rest passes Elfriede as she stands there behind the railings. She plucks up courage and stretches out her hand to him, shyly mumbling, “Good luck!” He looks at her, smiles and takes her hand as he passes: “Until we meet again, little girl!”

Elfriede’s eyes follow him and watch him climb into one of the goods wagons. She sees him turn round and look at her. Then the train jerks into motion, slowly at first and then faster.

The cheering rose to a roar, the soldiers’ faces crowded in the open doors, flowers flew through the air and all at once many of the people in the square began to weep.

“Until we meet again! We’ll be home with you soon!”

“Don’t be afraid! We’ll soon be back!”

“We’ll be back to celebrate Christmas with Mum!”

“Yes, yes, yes—come back in one piece!”

And from the moving train comes the sound of a powerful song. She can catch only part of the refrain: “… in der Heimat, in der Heimat, da gibt’s ein Wiedersehen!”
^*
Then the wagons disappear into the night and are gone. Into the darkness and warm air of summer.

Elfriede is deeply moved. She walks home, choking back tears. As she walks she holds the hand the soldier touched out in front of her as if it contains something very valuable and very fragile. As she climbs the badly lit steps to the porch of Alte Bahnhofstrasse 17 she kisses her hand, quickly.

Sarah Macnaughtan returns to London today, 4 August, after a long and enjoyable stay in the country. The summer this year has been unusually hot and sunny and there has been nothing to disturb the profound peace that she and her friends have enjoyed. (The news of the double murder in the Balkans, which reached them at haymaking time, was quickly forgotten, or repressed, or simply filed away as yet another of those regrettable but distant events that unfortunately occur from time to time.) She writes:

Hardly anyone believed in the possibility of war until they came back from their August Bank Holiday visits and found soldiers saying good-bye to their families at the stations. And even then there was an air of unreality about everything, which rendered realisation difficult. We saw women waving handkerchiefs to the men who went away, and holding up their babies to railway carriage
windows to be kissed […] We were breathless, not with fear, but with astonishment.

THURSDAY
, 20
AUGUST
1914
Richard Stumpf is copying a poem aboard SMS
Helgoland

Richard Stumpf is deeply upset. Yet another declaration of war, yet another country allying itself with Germany’s enemies. This time, Japan. The rulers in Tokyo are among the first of a growing band of war opportunists who, in this uncertain and fluid situation, have seized the chance to grab something for themselves, usually territory. Japan has delivered an ultimatum to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin demanding the withdrawal of all German warships from Asia and the handing over to Japan of the German colony of Tsingtao.
^*

Stumpf’s anger overflows and out pours the racist invective: “Only these yellow, slant-eyed Asiatics would think of making such a shameless demand.” He is, however, convinced that the German troops in Asia will give these “thieving yellow apes” a thorough thrashing.

Richard Stumpf is a twenty-two-year-old seaman in the German High Seas Fleet. His background is working class—he worked as an iron plateworker for two years before enlisting—but he is also a practising Catholic, member of a Christian trades union and an avowed nationalist. Like so many others he is overjoyed when war breaks out, not least because it means that Germany can finally settle accounts with the perfidious English: he thinks that the “real reason” Britain has taken sides in the conflict is “envy of our economic progress.” “May God punish
England” is a standard greeting by some members of the forces on entering a room; the obligatory answer is, “He will punish them.”

Stumpf is intelligent, chauvinistic, inquisitive and prejudiced. He is musical and reads a great deal. His photograph shows us a dark, serious young man with an oval face, eyes close together and a small but determined mouth. On this particular day Stumpf is at sea, at the mouth of the River Elbe, on board the great battleship SMS
^*
Helgoland
, the vessel he has served on ever since enlisting.
^a
That is where he was on the day war broke out.

Richard remembers that the atmosphere was subdued when their ship came into harbour because no exciting news had reached them while they had been at sea—people could be heard complaining about “all this fuss over nothing.” But no one had been allowed ashore and instead they had spent their time loading ammunition and unloading “inessentials.” At half past five in the evening the signal “All men on deck” had been given and they had all formed up. Then one of the ship’s officers, holding a sheet of paper in his hand, had grimly announced that both the army and the navy were to mobilise that night: “You know what that means—war.” The ship’s band had struck up a patriotic tune and everyone had sung along with it “enthusiastically.” “Our joy and excitement was boundless and lasted well into the night.”

In the midst of all the cheering it is already possible to detect a notably asymmetrical aspect. Colossal energies have been released and seem
to be dragging everyone with them. Stumpf, for instance, notes with some satisfaction that many radical authors who have made a name for themselves as sharp and persistent critics of the Wilhelmine age have now produced works of extreme and inflated patriotism. What has been swept away in this flood tide of high emotion is the question
why
they are at war. Like Stumpf, many people think that they know what it is “really” about, believe they have discovered the “true cause,” but this “really” and “true cause” have already disappeared behind the fact that they are at war. The war already shows signs of becoming an end in itself and few people are still talking about Sarajevo.

Stumpf himself thinks that some of the propaganda against the growing band of Germany’s opponents goes too far. Such as a vulgar postcard he has just seen in a shop: it depicts a German soldier putting an enemy soldier over his knee in order to smack his bottom, and he is saying to his waiting comrades, “Don’t push! You’ll all get your turn.” And then there is the very popular jingle made up by street boys and scribbled in chalk on railway carriages carrying mobilised soldiers: “Jeder Schuss ein Russ, Jeder Stoss ein Franzos, Jeder Tritt ein Britt.”
^b
But other things move him deeply, like the poem by the popular writer Otto Ernst, published in the nationalistic paper
Der Tag
, which comments on the fact that Germany is now at war with seven countries. Stumpf is so taken by the poem that he copies it word for word in his diary. Two of the verses are as follows:

        
O mein Deutschland, wie musst du stark sein
,

        
Wie gesund bis ins innerste Mark sein
,

        
Dass sich’s keiner allein getraut

        
Und nach Sechsen um Hilfe schaut
.

        
Deutschland, wie musst du vom Herzen echt sein
,

        
O wie strahlend hell muss dein Recht sein
,

        
Dass der mächtigste Heuchler dich hasst

        
Dass der Brite von Wut erblasst
.
^c

And the conclusion:

        
Morde den Teufel und hol dir vom Himmel

        
Sieben Kränze des Menschentums
,

        
Sieben Sonnen unsterblichen Ruhms
.
^d

The inflammatory rhetoric and excessively strident tone of the propaganda do not really signify a great deal. Quite the opposite. While there are undoubtedly conflicting interests involved, none of the problems is so insoluble as to make war necessary, and they are certainly not sufficiently acute as to make war unavoidable. This war became unavoidable at the point only when people considered it unavoidable. When causes are vague and goals uncertain, however, it becomes necessary to fall back on the bloated and honeyed words of propaganda.

Richard Stumpf laps them up and staggers around, intoxicated by the words, while SMS
Helgoland
, bulky and enormous in her grey warpaint, sways on the water and bides her time. The enemy has not even been seen yet and one can sense some impatience on board.

TUESDAY
, 25
AUGUST
1914
Pál Kelemen reaches the front at Halicz

In the beginning he had difficulty shaking off the feeling that this was just another exercise. It had all started in Budapest. Pál remembers how people looked as he loaded his luggage into a cab and how, dressed in his hussar’s uniform of red trousers, blue tunic, pale-blue embroidered
attila
and high leather boots, he had to force his way through the dense crowds at the east station and elbow his way up onto the train to find standing room in the corridor. He remembers the weeping women, one of whom would have collapsed if a stranger had not caught her. Among the last things he saw as the train slowly moved off was an older man running after it, trying to get a last glimpse of his son.

After a hot but not too uncomfortable journey he had reported to his hussar regiment in Szeben—as usual. The man who received him there had not even looked at him, merely told him where he should go. Later the same afternoon, in bright August sunshine, he had gone to the mobilisation centre in Erfalu and then been billeted with a farmer—as usual.

After that there had been a series of routine activities: drawing his kit, including horse and saddle, payment of wages and a long—unbearably long—run-through of practical issues in a room that was so hot that people fainted as the stream of words just went on and on.

Then the picture began to change.

First there was a night march to the train that was waiting for them. Then a slow journey during which they were greeted at every station by crowds of enthusiastic people, “music, torches, wine, deputations, flags, cheering—Hurrah for the Army! Hurrah! Hurrah!” Then unloading and their first march. But there was still no real hint of war, no distant growl of guns and the like; it
could
still have been an exercise. Warm, blue skies, the smell of horse dung, sweat and hay.

Pál Kelemen is twenty years old, born in Budapest, where he went to the Latin School and played the violin under the conductor Fritz Reiner, who was later to become famous. In many ways Kelemen is a typical product of urban central Europe in the early twentieth century: well travelled, well read, aristocratic, ironic, refined, distant, with a weakness for women. He has studied at the universities of Budapest, Munich and Paris, and has even managed to fit in a short period at Oxford. When they rode into Stanislau, the main town in Austrian Galicia—he as a young, elegant lieutenant in the hussars (is there anything more elegant than a Hungarian lieutenant of hussars?)—women rather than war were foremost in his mind. He thinks that you can tell from looking at the women that this is a provincial town: “White-skinned, very pale they are and their eyes have brilliant fire.” (This, he thinks he can tell, is in contrast to city women, whose gaze is more weary, more veiled.)

It is only when the division reaches Halicz that the illusion that this might merely be a manoeuvre is finally smashed.

On the way there they meet fleeing peasants and Jews. The mood in the town is apprehensive and confused and the Russians are said to be not far away. Kelemen notes in his journal:

We sleep in tents. At half-past twelve at night: Alarm! The Russian is before the town. I think everyone is a little frightened. I fling on my clothes and run out to join my platoon. On the road the infantry is standing in ranks. Cannon growls. Rifles are rattling some five hundred yards ahead. Motor cars dash down the middle of the highway. The lights of their carbide lamps stream in long rows toward Halicz on the road from Stanislau.