The Beauty and the Sorrow (4 page)

Between the posted guards I climbed over the hedge gate and across the ditches of the embankment. My platoon awaited me, saddled up, and we stood ready for further orders.

When morning dawned, the population was pouring out of the city in long files. On carts, on foot, on horseback. Everyone making shift to save himself. All of them carrying away what they can. And exhaustion, dust, sweat, panic on every face, terrible dejection, pain, and suffering. Their eyes are frightened, their movements craven: ghastly terror oppresses them. As if the dust cloud they stirred up had fastened itself to them and could not float away.

I lie sleepless at the side of the road and watch the infernal kaleidoscope. There are even military wagons muddled into it, and on the fields retreating military, routed infantry, lost cavalry. Not a man of them still has his full equipment. The exhausted throng pours through the valley. They are running back to Stanislau.

What Kelemen is witnessing as he lies at the roadside is the result of one of the first bloody and confused clashes with the invading Russians. Like everyone else involved, he has only a very hazy picture of what has actually happened and it will be years before anyone pulls together all the various impressions into a narrative called the Battle of Lemberg. But it does not require a fully worked-out account from the general staff for anyone to understand that this has turned out to be a defeat for the Austro-Hungarian army on a scale that is as colossal as it is unexpected.

FRIDAY
, 28
AUGUST
1914
Laura de Turczynowicz meets a German prisoner of war in Suwalki

Laura has never understood this war, let alone welcomed it. She is one of the many people for whom what has happened is like a natural catastrophe, a dark and ultimately incomprehensible tragedy that has suddenly swept down on them from nowhere.

But she has also noticed how the initial terror has quickly changed into a strange euphoria, which has affected even her. The ancient quarrels between Poles and Russians seem to have vanished completely. It says a great deal about the current mood that when a rumour went round one evening at the beginning of August suggesting that the war was perhaps not going to happen, it was the cause of some disappointment. (Great Britain was apparently hesitating about going to war, and
that
was setting off alarm bells among the rulers in St. Petersburg.)

Today is Laura de Turczynowicz’s thirty-sixth birthday and until now her life has had all the elements of a fin de siècle dream. Born in Canada, she grew up in New York and was a gifted opera singer who had performed at the Metropolitan and elsewhere. She moved to Europe to “study and sing … and play,” achieved success at Bayreuth and Munich—her German is good—and found a husband in the shape of a charming Polish aristocrat with an upturned moustache, a professorial title and a considerable fortune. His name is Stanislaw de Turczynowicz, Count of Gozdawa, and they married in Krakow in Austria-Hungary, where she also gave birth to their three children. By birth, then, the little ones are subjects of the Austro-Hungarian emperor, her husband is a subject of the tsar, and she is a subject of the British king. Few people thought of such categories before August; there are many people who can hardly think of anything else now.

The war has become rather more noticeable.

A week after its outbreak they were wakened in the grey light of dawn by a muffled roar, like the sound of a waterfall. It was the sound of thousand upon thousand of Russian infantrymen on the march, part of the II Corps of Rennenkampf’s army on their way to invade neighbouring East Prussia. In spite of the early hour the whole of the little town turned
out to welcome the weary troops with food, drink and other gifts. Many of the upper-class Russian families that Laura and her husband mix with have left and gone home. The first wounded men from the front have been seen. Suwalki has been bombed—a solitary German aircraft flew over a few days ago and dropped a couple of small bombs at random, while the excited men of the town shot at it unsuccessfully with their hunting rifles. The loot plundered from German homes can sometimes be seen on the wagons returning from the front.

In spite of all this, the war has remained something of an abstraction, something happening far away. At least for Laura. The family is back in Suwalki, in the big manor house near the high road, and she herself is still living the pleasant life of a landed lady, surrounded by beautiful family treasures, well-filled larders and a staff of obedient servants. She has been helping to organise a small private hospital and her husband has not yet been called up.

A nurse from a mobile field hospital comes to call on her today. They have just arrived from the front, their stores exhausted and their staff weary. Their normal capacity is 150 beds, which is more than enough for three doctors and four nurses to cope with, but the recent hard fighting in East Prussia has meant that they are overwhelmed by the numbers of wounded men—the nurse estimates there to be 700. Can Laura help? Yes, of course she can.

Laura goes to the barracks where the field hospital is located. As she enters she can hear the anxious murmur of hundreds of voices. She walks round, goes into room after room packed with wounded men, men who have not received any treatment. Everything has run out, from bandages to disinfectant.

Since she can speak German she is asked to take a look at a group of wounded German prisoners of war who have all been gathered in one corner. One of them is rocking violently backwards and forwards the whole time, simultaneously praying and asking for water. Laura talks to him and he asks her to write to his wife:

He told me that he had been a bookkeeper, that he was twenty-six years old, and had a wife and children, a little house of his own, had never harmed anyone in his life, took no interest in anything outside his work and family, until with three hours’ notice he was ordered to join his regiment, and leave it all. “The great lords
have quarrelled, and we must pay for it with our blood, our wives and children.”

Laura returns later with large quantities of medical supplies she has brought from their own small private hospital. The joy shown by the nurses at the military hospital when they receive these gifts seems to her almost “pitiful.”

Laura walks around the military hospital. She sees something she does not recognise at first. It is an “object” in a bed and all that can be seen where the head should be is “a ball of cotton and bandages with three black holes, just as if a child had drawn mouth and nose and eyes.” A voice suddenly emerges from this “thing,” a voice that, far from being unearthly, speaks in educated Polish. That alone comes as a shock. It is as if Laura in her naivety has not been expecting anything like this to afflict people of her own sort. The voice pleads with whoever it is not to go away but to give him some water, water. Laura goes up to the bed. Then she gets her next shock. Swarms of flies rise from the bundle on the bed. The man’s hands have been completely burnt away and a heavy stench of pus and gangrene comes from the bandages.

Laura recoils, sickened and horrified. She comes close to fainting. She has to get away from it.

Later she plucks up courage and returns to the thing on the bed. She helps to erect an insect net around his bed and assists a nurse who is changing his bandages. The man tells her he was wounded by a shell that exploded close to him and that he lay out on the battlefield for four days. He asks if his eyes are gone. The answer is “Yes, quite gone.” He then asks if he is going to live or die. The answer is “Die.” He asks for water.

Laura learns later that the German prisoner she had talked to, the twenty-six-year-old bookkeeper, was due to be transported onwards but died on the way to the railway station.

WEDNESDAY
, 2
SEPTEMBER
1914
Andrei Lobanov-Rostovsky sees the sun go dark in Mokotov

Now it is their turn to be sent in. The reports are contradictory. Something seems to have gone seriously wrong with the Russian invasion up
in East Prussia: Rennenkampf’s army seems to be in retreat and Samsonov’s in flight. That surely cannot be true? The Russian invaders seem to be having more success down in Galicia, and Lemberg is likely to fall any day now. Although there is a much greater need of reinforcements against the Germans in the north rather than against the Austrians in Galicia, Lobanov-Rostovsky’s rifle brigade is destined for the southern front where it is to join in the hammering of the already yielding Austro-Hungarian divisions on the Polish frontier.
^e

At the moment they are being held in reserve in Warsaw, camped on a large field in Mokotov. Andrei Lobanov-Rostovsky is a sapper in the Russian army and a lieutenant in the Guards—the latter being a rank more dependent on birth than on aptitude. He is actually a sensitive and bookish twenty-two-year-old who reads ceaselessly, preferably French novels but also history. Lobanov-Rostovsky is well educated (he has just read law in Petrograd but has also studied in Nice and Paris), a little anxious by disposition and physically not particularly robust. His father is a diplomat.

The outbreak of war has been a remarkable experience. He has spent every spare moment rushing round the city along with all the other excited people who crowd round the newspaper offices to read the placards and telegrams. The excitement reached its height when news came that Belgrade was under fire: spontaneous demonstrations in support of the war took place on the same streets that witnessed spontaneous marches by strikers just a few days earlier. He watched as the crowds held up trams in order to take out any officers in them and hoist them up on their shoulders to the sound of cheering. He remembers in particular how, to the amusement of the onlookers, a drunken worker embraced and kissed a passing officer. August has been a month of dust and unusual heat and although, as a lieutenant, he has been on horseback throughout the long marches, he has come close to collapsing with sunstroke.

He has not yet seen action. The worst thing he has witnessed was when they were quartered in a small Polish town some time ago and a serious fire broke out: the newly mobilised soldiers, whipped up by excitement and fear of spies, killed eight Jews who, they claimed, were
trying to prevent the fire being put out.
^f
The atmosphere in general has been nervous.

At two o’clock the whole brigade forms up in front of the host of small tents in the field. It is time for Mass. Something strange occurs halfway through the service—the bright hazy sun begins to grow dark. A partial eclipse is taking place. Most of the soldiers find this a bit uncanny and the phenomenon makes “a tremendous impression” on the more superstitious among them.

Immediately after the service they break camp and all the units in the brigade begin to board waiting trains. As usual the whole business takes longer than reckoned and it is already night by the time it is the turn of Lobanov-Rostovsky’s unit. And things do not go much faster once they are under way. The train trundles south through the darkness with an extraordinary lack of urgency. Slowness is the default speed of trains in 1914: these wagonloads of soldiers sometimes move no faster than a man on a bicycle.
^g
The fact is that the lines are jammed with trains, trains which during this period of the war are all headed in the same direction with the same purpose: Forward! To the front!
^h

A DAY IN SEPTEMBER
1914
Florence Farmborough in Moscow sees death for the first time

“I wanted to see him; I wanted to see Death,” is how she tells it herself. She had never seen a dead person before and, indeed, until very recently she had not even seen someone sick in bed, which is perhaps a little strange since she was, after all, twenty-seven years old. The explanation, of course, is that up until August 1914 she had led a fairly sheltered life. Florence Farmborough was born and brought up in rural Buckinghamshire, but she has lived in Russia since 1908. She has been working as governess to the daughters of a well-known Russian heart surgeon in Moscow.

The international crisis that developed during the hot and beautiful late summer of 1914 largely passed her by since she spent it with her employers at the family dacha outside Moscow. Once back in the capital she had been gripped by the same “youthful enthusiasm” as so many others. Her old and her new homelands were united in a struggle against the common enemy Germany and this energetic and enterprising young woman immediately began considering how she could contribute to the war effort. The answer came more or less immediately—by becoming a nurse. Her employer, the well-known heart surgeon, succeeded in convincing those in charge of one of the private military hospitals then being set up in Moscow to take on Florence and his two daughters as volunteers. “We are elated beyond words. We, too, in our small way are to help the country’s cause.”

They have been wonderful days. After a while the wounded began to arrive, two or three at a time. Much of the work was unpleasant in the beginning and she sometimes recoiled when faced with an unusually nasty and gaping wound. With time, however, she got used to it, and then the atmosphere was so good. There was a new sense of solidarity and unity, not least among the soldiers:

There is always a remarkable camaraderie among them: White Russian mingles in a most friendly fashion with Ukrainian; Caucasians with soldiers from the Urals; Tatars with Cossacks. They are mostly patient, long-suffering men, grateful for what care
and attention they receive; seldom, if ever, does a grumble pass their lips.

Quite a few of the wounded are impatient to get back to the front as soon as possible. Optimism is high, among both the soldiers and the hospital staff. The wounds will soon heal, the soldiers will soon be back in service, the war will soon be won. The hospital usually receives only milder cases, which might explain why, after working for three weeks, she is yet to see a dead body.