The Beauty and the Sorrow (33 page)

oo
Had it been an ordinary high-explosive shell Dawkins would have escaped but his men would have been injured or killed. Shrapnel shells spread their bullets in a long cone directly ahead whereas high-explosive shells send out their fragments at almost ninety degrees. It is consequently possible to escape injury from a high-explosive shell even if it detonates just a few yards away as long as one is along the line of the shell’s trajectory. There is also the fact that metallurgy was still relatively undeveloped and high-explosive shells sometimes broke into just a few large fragments, which explains why people could sometimes survive even if they were very close to the detonation. One theory held that it was precisely experiences of this kind which were, purely physiologically, the cause of shell shock: the vacuum created by the detonation was thought to cause damage to the brain.

pp
There was a peculiar dialectic relationship between dirt and subordination in the east. Cleanliness was one of the virtues the German occupiers never tired of preaching and was something that they felt to be proof of their own superiority. As Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius has shown, there were circumstances in which the subordinates could play on this, and on the German fear of infection, in order to evade punishments and control.

qq
It was probably straightforward practicality rather than gender-political principle that drew Olive to this unit: the first medical unit she joined had been stopped almost immediately after it landed unannounced in Belgium, and Olive and two other women drivers had been arrested under suspicion of being spies. Mrs. Harley, however, one of the leaders of the Scottish Women’s Hospital and the woman accompanying Olive on the hunt for furniture, was the sister of Sir John French, commander-in-chief of the British Expeditionary Force: this, self-evidently, would have made it easier for the unit to gain permission to operate.

rr
After the war the road would lead to Lwów; today it leads to Lviv.

ss
Macnaughtan had heard of the scandalous shortage of shells and the problems it caused during the battles around Festubert (and elsewhere) which had ended a few days earlier.

tt
Men serving at the front received certain items—soap, for instance—free whereas those in hospital had to pay for them. Since their pay was low and the prices in the few and poorly stocked shops were sky-high, this soon became a problem. Consequently Andresen’s letters home during this month, as well as expressing his joy at being out of the firing line, contained many requests for material support.

uu
There was nothing new about this categorical command that there must be no retreat: the high command issued it time after time after the breakthrough of 2 May. It was, however, completely counter-productive in that it forced the hard-pressed Third Army to defend a number of indefensible positions, which simply served to increase its already substantial losses.

vv
The enemy did succeed in crossing the San at several points around the middle of May, doing so with the same self-confident, brutally crushing power as at Gorlice, but at this point it seems that these intrusions have been checked and held back.

ww
Florence Farmborough is uncertain as to whether the Cossacks are simply carrying out orders or whether this is a largely private bout of pillaging. Most of the evidence suggests the former. As the Russian army once again began retreating it fell back on its old speciality—what is usually called a scorched-earth policy. It made a systematic attempt to take as much as possible of the resources of the country—cattle, in particular—with it, at the same time as destroying whatever it had to leave behind, regardless of whether this condemned the civilian population to great hardship or, indeed, outright famine. At this point the Russians were occupying territory that belonged to Austria-Hungary, which explains why they also removed the men of military age; this had also been done earlier, during the invasion of German East Prussia in 1914, but not with the same degree of methodical planning. (On that occasion the retreating Russians had forcibly taken rather more than 10,000 German men, women and children.) This organised pillage and burning continued with undiminished force even after they had crossed the border back into Russia, resulting in extreme suffering even for their own civilian population. This, of course, did nothing to make the war any more popular among the latter.

xx
The description is Pollard’s own. Anyone who has heard artillery fire will know that this is not merely a silly approximation of the different sounds: the slightly drawn-out “Bang” represents the firing, the “Swisch” is the shell passing overhead, and the shorter, more compact “Crump” is the shell detonating not too far away.

yy
De Nogales uses the term “Nestorian” for “Syrian.”

zz
Laura had visited Stanislaw there in December, before the Germans had retaken Suwalki, and she would have moved to be with him, taking the family with her, but for the fact that there were regulations against taking children into the Russian-occupied zones.

aaa
The expectations raised by the Italian entry into the war had not been fulfilled. This was partly because the over-optimistic advance of the Italian army was stopped almost immediately in the rugged mountains that line the borders of Italy—the existence of the mountains seemed to come as a surprise to some of the more boneheaded of the Italian generals. And partly it was because the Italian attack led to an upsurge of commitment on the part of the Slav population of Austria-Hungary, for whom this attack—unlike the war against Russia and Serbia—provided a cause they were actually willing to die for.

bbb
“It is determined in God’s plan that one must part from those one loves most.”

ccc
Or possibly Thursday, 12 August.

ddd
There are several Tchaplis (now usually transliterated Chapli) in modern Ukraine; this one is in L’vivs’ka oblast.

eee
The scale of distances in Africa may be seen from the fact that when Buchanan’s unit left Plymouth by ship it took them five days to reach Africa, but they sailed a further twenty days along the African coast before they reached their destination, Mombasa in British East Africa.

fff
The small civil war that broke out among the Boers in South Africa in August 1914 shows the kind of thing the colonisers were afraid of: it was between those supporting the South African government, which sided with the British (even though the Boer War was only twelve years in the past), and a militant minority seeking revenge against Britain by forming an alliance with Germany. This internal conflict ended in February 1915 with the defeat and surrender of the last pro-German rebels.

ggg
Up in Artois the French lost more than 100,000 men and the British about 26,000: the gains were marginal—no more than a mile or so. The first British attack, at Neuve Chapelle on 9 May, was a total failure, which was quickly blamed on the worthless preliminary bombardment by the artillery—a barrage of no more than forty minutes with almost exclusively light guns, severely handicapped by a shortage of high-explosive shells. This marked the start of the “Shell Scandal” in Great Britain, which led both to demands for the resignation of the Asquith government and to a radical reorganisation of munitions production and, indeed, of the whole war economy. It was this crisis that really caused the British public for the first time to recognise what it was going to take to win the war.

hhh
However thorough their preparations, there was one factor the Allies could do nothing about, which was that the Germans held the ridges and higher ground along almost the whole of the front. This is because the Western Front became fixed wherever the Germans decided to break off their retreat (or their advance) and they had, of course, chosen to halt where the terrain was most advantageous to them. This gave the Germans the advantage of better visibility and, in places where the water table was high—particularly in Flanders—allowed them to dig in much more thoroughly and to a much greater depth than the Allies, who were stuck with the lower-lying ground. These factors were a major cause of concern to the Allies in virtually all their offensives.

iii
This illusion should be seen as a consequence of earlier experiences rather than of a complete lack of imagination. The most recent European war had been the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, and that had certainly been decided quickly. Which shows how deceptive historical parallels can be.

jjj
Early statistics indicated that just over 13 per cent of all battlefield injuries were head wounds and no less than 57 per cent of these were fatal. Head wounds were much more common than in earlier wars: the troops were now spending much of their time in trenches where, for obvious reasons, the head was the most exposed part of the body. The custom of cutting the hair short was introduced during the First World War, not (as is often assumed) as a way of dealing with lice but because it made the treatment of head wounds faster and simpler.

kkk
Most British battalions had a bombing platoon, its members specialists in the use of explosives. During the First World War this meant primarily Mills grenades and gun cotton.

lll
It was given its name during the fighting of October 1914 when fleeing British soldiers gathered there and a local commander gave them permission to stay there temporarily rather than return to the fighting. By this stage, however, the wood was anything but a sanctuary, but the name had stuck. It is perhaps worth mentioning that there is now a curious little café there, where, for a small fee, the fenced and preserved remnants of some trenches as well as a quite improbable collection of rusty bric-a-brac from the 1914–18 war may be viewed.

mmm
The Italian army suffered 68,000 casualties, 11,000 of them fatal. These figures were, of course, not made public until after the war.

nnn
As a result of these movements alone, 15 per cent of the Serbian population died before the end of the war. No other nation suffered to the same extent as the Serbians in the years 1914 to 1918.

ooo
Both the German and the Austro-Hungarian armies developed a hard-line culture for dealing with guerrillas, partisans,
komidatschi, francs-tireurs
or whatever they may have been called—that is, armed men, who shoot from ambush and fight without uniforms. Both colonial and historical experience played a part in forming the rather indeterminate mental image of such irregular fighters. They were viewed as a particularly uncivilised phenomenon since a civilised war should be fought only by uniformed men, without the involvement of civilians, and should the latter join in, they must be punished in the most severe way possible—with the death penalty. Taken in conjunction with seriously exaggerated rumours of atrocities committed
against
their troops, this hard line, which was theoretically laid down in the name of civilisation, led both armies to be guilty of the worst mass murders of civilians Europe had witnessed for more than a century. Things were at their worst during the opening phase of the war in 1914 when over a thousand civilians in Belgium—men, women and children—were killed by German troops as reprisals for imagined guerrilla actions. And Austro-Hungarian troops (particularly Hungarians) repeatedly ran amok in Serbia, killing everything and everyone they encountered. The hysteria of August 1914 had calmed down by this point but both armies continued to take an extremely severe stance against anyone who fought without being clothed in the external accoutrements of a regular soldier: guerrilla fighters should, quite simply, be hanged.

ppp
Stumpf’s reference is to the mutiny on the Russian battleship
Potemkin
in 1905. His memory, however, fails him on this: the
Potemkin
belonged to the Russian Black Sea fleet not to the Baltic fleet.

qqq
Towards the end of September news had come that Bulgaria was mobilising, a clear sign that the country—after much vacillation and even more duplicitous scheming—had finally decided to join the Central Powers. This put the wind up the Greeks who, in turn, placed their small army on a war footing and invited the Allies in, which is why Sarrail’s corps were sent to Salonica. The next day it emerged that the Bulgarians had fallen on their old enemy, Serbia, and invaded the southern parts of the country at the same time as Germans and Austrians were marching into the north. Sarrail’s corps received a chilly, even threatening, reception because Eleftherios Venizelos, the Greek prime minister who had invited the Allies in, was driven from office by the German-friendly King Constantine I, with the result that Greece changed its political stance and once again became neutral. (The landing at Salonica was, therefore, according to A. J. P. Taylor, an act that in its way was as ruthless as the German invasion of Belgium.) Next came the short-lived victorious fanfares announcing that Sarrail’s corps was pushing north along the Salonica–Belgrade railway—short-lived because they were immediately followed by the not very surprising news that the Serbs had finally crumbled under the overwhelming forces against them and that the scattered remains of their army were now somewhere up in the snow-covered Albanian mountains and hurrying south.