The Beauty and the Sorrow (42 page)

The first smash Coppens saw with his own eyes occurred on 1 February. He and a couple of others were lying wrapped in their fur-lined flying coats sunning themselves in the weak winter sun and waiting for their turn. The air was alive with the rising and falling buzz of flying machines circling the aerodrome when he suddenly heard one of the nicely ticking engines begin to race and someone shouted, “My God, he’s going to kill himself!”

At the very moment I raised my eyes I saw a Farman machine on its way down in an inexplicable and almost vertical dive, at a speed that was far too fast, which is why it broke apart in the air. The body of the aeroplane literally burst apart and the wings, stays and other parts flew in all directions. I could pick out the tail, the engine and the pilot. Everything fell straight down and crashed right in front of us in a field some 400 metres away.

Some of the onlookers rushed there immediately. Coppens was not one of them. He did not want to look. And the accidents had simply continued:

    On 8 February we buried the French pilot Chalhoup.

    On 6 March Le Boulanger performed a turn that was much too tight, lost speed and spun to the ground. He was severely injured when we dragged him from the wreckage.

    On 14 March we buried Clement, a French pilot.

    On 26 April Piret was doing a turn in a Blériot machine, lost speed and glided down sideways to the ground from a height of 90 metres. Once again he escaped with minor injuries.

    On 27 April Biéran de Catillon turned a Henri Farman
^gg
upside down in a truly terrifying way but escaped without serious injuries.

    On 16 May François Vergult crashed a Maurice Farman without any harm to himself.

    On 17 May Adrien Richard crashed another Maurice Farman on landing and they built us a new aeroplane from the wreckage of the two machines.

    On 20 May De Meulemeester, an excellent pilot, went into a spin after performing a pretty risky manoeuvre. Even though he fell from a greater height than Le Boulanger he was not injured as badly and was back on his feet after a day or two.

    On 27 May Evrard
^hh
ripped the undercarriage off a B.E. 2.

Today, 31 May, there is yet another smash. This time it is a pilot by the name of Kreyn, who lands his Maurice Farman so clumsily that there is a screeching crash. He is saved by something that is a recent introduction—a flying helmet. Not everyone wears one.
ⁱⁱ
Some of them think it is just too ugly and too reminiscent of the padded caps that worried Flemish mothers put on their children when they are learning to walk.

Coppens cannot wait to take his test. He will then get golden wings on his uniform, the rank of sergeant and five extra Louis d’or in his pay every month.

Richard Stumpf writes in his journal on the same day:

At last, at last—finally it’s happening, the great event that has been the object of our desires, thoughts and feelings for the last twenty-two months. This is what we have been hoping for, working for and training for with such passion for years.

What he is describing is the Battle of Jutland, the great naval battle in which 274 German and British warships clash off the Danish coast during the afternoon and evening. By nightfall fourteen British and eleven German warships have gone to the bottom and over 8,000 seamen have lost their lives. Stumpf’s ship, SMS
Helgoland
, fired sixty-three shells during the battle and was hit only by one. The crew came through unharmed. There is another entry in his journal for that day:

I am convinced that it is actually impossible for a man to describe the thoughts and feelings that go through his mind during his baptism of fire. If I said I was afraid I would be telling a lie. No, it was an indescribable mixture of pleasure, fear, curiosity, apathy and … the joy of battle.

Quite soon, and with some justification, the confused battle is being described as a minor German victory. It had no impact on the war.

THURSDAY
, 8
JUNE
1916
Angus Buchanan goes hunting for food on the Pangani river

He would actually rather not get up, he would like to stay here, lying wrapped in his warm blankets. Angus Buchanan can see the thin pinpricks of light from the stars above him but he can sense the coming sunrise. “Just five minutes more.”

“Come on!” A hushed voice stirs him and he sits up in the early morning light. Under a bush alongside him Gilham, the other lieutenant, is lacing his boots and the two men grin at one another, sharing their secret. In spite of the fact that hunting is forbidden, as is leaving the camp, the two of them are intending to do just that. They are sick of the endless stew made of unappetising tinned meat and, anyway, rations have been cut because supplies are running low. Both of them are hungry, and how are they supposed to manage without food?

Many of the soldiers are on the verge of malnutrition, as a result of which the number of cases of sickness in this heat is rising steeply. The sick then have to be sent back for nursing care and that takes up a significant part of their already limited transport resources. And the sick still need feeding: the men being sent back eat just as much food as those moving forward to join the fighting units, so the rations for the latter have to be cut even further. It is a vicious circle. Units that started as regiments have shrunk to 170–200 men, more the size of companies.
^jj

The German forces they are chasing through bush, jungle and swamp, across rivers, mountains and savannahs, are apparently untroubled by the climate and disease, which is hardly surprising given that their troops are native and consequently used to the former and stoical about the latter. They are often familiar with the terrain, can move through it with impressive ease and know what can be foraged. And thanks to good treatment and good pay they have developed a high degree of loyalty to their German masters.

The British have been forced to reconsider their reluctance to arm Africans and use them in the fighting. Part of the point of the operation Buchanan has been involved in since the end of the rainy season has been to push the Germans out of Tabora, the region where they recruit their best
askaris
. Von Lettow-Vorbeck has also proved to be a master of improvisation: supplies are no longer reaching him from Germany so he has started manufacturing his own ammunition, taught his troops to make their own boots and acquired heavy artillery by salvaging the guns of the cruiser
Königsberg
after the British navy chased her into the Rufugi delta.

Buchanan and Gilham take their army rifles and creep out of the camp past rows of sleeping men. They take Buchanan’s African servant Hamisi with them. At first they have to fight their way through dense, dry bush. The worst parts are the thickets of thorny shrubs and trees, and the worst of the lot are those the Africans call
“mgoonga,”
^kk
which have thorns that are inordinately long, sharp and prolific. They avoid these small trees if at all possible and Buchanan says: “I will carry memories of Mgoonga as long as I live.” Their hands, arms and legs are soon bloody.

After an hour the landscape begins to open up and they are now far from the camp for their shots not to give them away. Buchanan and Gilham load their rifles and creep forward silently. Hamisi falls back a little and follows them at a distance.

They have gone little more than half a mile when a kudu jumps out, but the graceful antelope bounds off and disappears into the bushes before they manage to get a shot at it. Buchanan swears. After a mile and a half they have come across nothing but animal tracks—those of impala and warthog—and have set up a couple of flocks of guineafowl.
It is time to turn back. The sun has begun its voyage across a clear blue sky and within an hour it is going to be almost unbearably hot. Their morning’s hunt for these quick and elusive animals has been as fruitless as the division’s hunt for the quick and elusive companies of German Schutztruppen.

Buchanan, Gilham and Hamisi take a different route back and it turns out to be a lucky choice. First of all they run into a gerenuk, which both men fire at and both miss. When they move on, the bush becomes denser again and Buchanan can no longer see Gilham, but he does hear a sudden shot followed by a triumphant shout: Gilham has spotted another gerenuk and brought it down. The two men yell with glee. Meat! Antelope meat, no less! Buchanan looks tenderly at the animal lying there dying at their feet. He has never seen the species until today:

slender and delightfully delicate of build with a coat of close, short, glossy hair, dark chocolate brown, above the central sides, where a distinctive horizontal line clearly separated the dark upper part from those a shade or two lighter below.

The three men butcher the animal. Hamisi carries most of the bloody pieces and Buchanan and Gilham carry what he cannot manage. Scared of being discovered, they creep very cautiously back into camp.

They will be able to eat their fill today.

That same day René Arnaud and his men on Hill 321 at Verdun come under attack from the German infantry. The artillery fire eases off and then grey-clad figures appear in the cratered landscape in front of them:

The sound of the shooting and the garlicky smell of the powder-smoke soon led to a kind of intoxication. “Shoot the swine! Shoot them!” Suddenly I saw a big man moving in front of me and to the right; I aimed and had that intuitive feeling that comes from a shot that is going to find its target; I pulled the trigger and as the recoil hit my shoulder the large body disappeared. I wondered later on whether it was my bullet or someone else’s that hit him, or whether he had just thrown himself to the ground because of the fierce rifle fire. Anyway, he is the only German I think I have
“downed”
^ll
during three and a half years of war, and I’m not even sure in his case.

The attack is eventually beaten back with the help of hand grenades.

SATURDAY
, 10
JUNE
1916
René Arnaud leaves Hill 321 on the front line at Verdun

By the time the news comes Arnaud has lost count of time. He does not know how long they have been up here on this broad ridge. (He will later calculate that it was ten days.) So much time has passed and so much has happened that Arnaud has given up hope of being relieved; indeed, given up hope of anything. It is as if he has been numbed by days and nights of bombardment and by the two attacks they pushed back. Danger hardly affects him, nor does the sight of yet another dead man:

This indifference is perhaps the best condition for a man to be in in the midst of battle: to function instinctively, from habit, without either hope or fear. The long period of overwhelmingly powerful emotions has finally ended with emotion itself dying.

For a moment or two he cannot understand why the men sent to fetch their food rations should have returned empty-handed in the twilight. But they are quick to explain: “We’re going back tonight.” They all start jumping with joy. “We’re going back tonight!”

There is still one thing to be done, however. Their captain, who has been drunk on cognac most of the time, turns up and tells them that they cannot leave the position until all the dead have been picked up and gathered in a half-finished trench immediately behind them. They cannot leave their own dead lying around when a new company takes over. The men grumble but Arnaud convinces them it must be done.

The unpleasant task is performed by the light of signal rockets and exploding shells. One body after another is lifted onto the piece of tarpaulin they are using as a stretcher and they trudge off with it to the
improvised grave. Even though the dead are already “far gone and falling to pieces” they can recognise every one of them: Bérard (killed, like so many others, by the German machine gun over by Le Ravin des Dames—it could sweep their position from end to end); Bonheur (the runner who was so fond of wine); Mafieu (the cook who had been made a foot soldier as punishment for being drunk on duty); Sergeant Vidal (with his black beard and mournful eyes, killed by a bullet in the middle of his forehead when they were driving back a German assault the day before yesterday); Mallard (the man from the Vendée with his black hair and blue eyes—his foot was accidentally blown off by his own hand grenade and he bled to death); Jaud (Arnaud’s old corporal, dark and suntanned, with the gentle eyes of a child and an awful beard); Ollivier (courageous, loyal little Ollivier with his straight fair hair); Sergeant Cartelier (tall, slim and recognisable anywhere by the special low boots he wore in spite of regulations); etc., etc., etc.
^mm

The days have been hot and the stink of putrefaction comes in waves as the bodies are lifted and carried away. The men have to take regular breaks to breathe fresh air before returning to their task.

They do not finish until almost two o’clock in the morning and Arnaud feels “a bitter sense of satisfaction to have done what has to be done.” He watches the unit that is coming to relieve them—heavily laden men who leave a smell of sweat hanging behind them. The lieutenant taking over the position is a whiner. All that is left of the barbed-wire barriers are some bent and twisted spirals, and the command post is just a hole between two piles of sandbags. Arnaud is furious about the complaints at first: “Have we really been through all this suffering just so that an idiot can come along and pretend that we haven’t been doing our job?” But he calms down and thinks that the surly lieutenant will soon find out what it means to hold Hill 321 for ten days and ten nights.