The Beauty and the Sorrow (43 page)

The march back from the front line goes remarkably quickly. It is as if their weariness has been washed away. Nobody wants to take a long rest break, preferring to get as far as possible from the firing before the sun rises. The route back passes Fort de Froidterre and they stop in its
shelter long enough to meet a troop coming from the other direction and going up into battle. It is a mirror image of themselves ten days earlier: “their coats are bright blue, their tanned leather equipment still yellow, their cooking pots still gleaming silver.” Arnaud is wearing a coat covered in mud, binoculars round his neck, crumpled puttees, ten days’ stubble and a damaged helmet—the crest was shot away during fighting at close quarters on 8 June. Most of his soldiers have neither rucksacks nor belts. Some of them no longer even have a rifle.

While Arnaud and his men are contemplating these impeccably kitted-out newcomers they see a shell land in their midst. Not one of Arnaud’s men reacts; instead they continue on their way, following a muddy road. They can see dead men and dead horses along the roadside banks, and even a deserted ambulance. The men plod on as quickly as they can, in a “fearful and disordered way as if they were fleeing from a battle.” Their eyes are fevered, their faces muddy. They do not look round except to cast repeated glances over their shoulders and swear at the observation balloon hanging over the German lines in the dawn light—it could call down artillery fire on them at any time. The estimate Arnaud heard on their way to Verdun has proved right, almost exactly: of the hundred men he led to the front only thirty are returning.

They reach the crossroads they passed ten days before. Arnaud sees Verdun shining red, white and silent in the morning sun and thinks: “War is beautiful—to the eyes of generals, journalists and scholars.”

They cross the river and slowly put the dangers of the battlefield behind them. They take a break on the fringes of a wood and Arnaud sees a reservist sergeant reading a news sheet. Arnaud asks him what has been happening and the sergeant snorts, “Just the same old thing.” He gives Arnaud the paper and Arnaud reads it before exclaiming: “It’s us! It’s us!” His men gather round him and he reads the press communiqué aloud:

8 June, 23:00 … On the right bank, after massive bombardment, the enemy made several assaults on our positions east and west of the Thiaumont farm. All the attacks were repulsed by our defensive fire and our machine guns.

9 June, 15:00 … On the right bank the Germans continued to mount fierce attacks along an almost two kilometre front east
and west of the Thiaumont farm. All of the assaults to the west failed and the enemy suffered severe losses …
ⁿⁿ

One of the men interjects that the communiqué has carefully refrained from mentioning their own losses, but all of the rest are strangely gratified and repeat time after time—like a comforting mantra—“It’s talking about us.” And these brief notices about their battle perhaps offer one reason for it being fought at all; perhaps this event was intended to become text right from the start; perhaps the company suffered its ten days of martyrdom so that someone would be able to say that Hill 321 (not in itself of any great military importance) was held.

Indeed, from the French point of view, the defence of Verdun is mostly symbolic, so that the generals, the politicians, the journalists and the public can say to one another, “Oh yes, the town has been held, is being held and will be held.” But has anyone properly considered what that little transitive verb
tenir
, “to hold,” actually stands for? “To hold” means one thing to the top generals, another to the megaphones of the nationalistic press in Paris, yet another to the commanders in the field, and something entirely different to foot soldiers like Arnaud and his thirty surviving men. The cruel and tragic forms the battle has taken are, therefore, not just the sum of the collective forces of destruction among those doing the fighting, they are also the sum of the rhetorical and semantic confusion among those at whose behest the battle is being fought.

But they have now come through one of the very worst and most climactic points of the battle. Over the course of little more than a week, the Germans have mounted some of their most concentrated assaults since February along the whole of the front, achieving significant successes. Among several other places, the important French strong point, Fort de Vaux, has fallen after quite exceptionally severe fighting.
^oo

Later, Arnaud hears the whistle of the narrow-gauge railway that
winds its way between Verdun and Bar-le-Duc. He realises that he really has survived:

I had climbed down from the scaffold of suffering and returned to the world of peace and life. I thought I was the same person I had been before spending ten days face to face with death. I was wrong. I had lost my youth.

Florence Farmborough writes in her diary that day:

It was a hot, rather sultry day. In the morning Alexander Alexandrovich, one of our Transport Heads, offered to drive us to see the deserted Austrian trenches; we gladly consented. One excelled all others in luxury and cosiness: we decided it must have been the “blindage” of an artillery officer. It contained chairs, tables, pictures on the armoured walls and books; there was even an English grammar.

SUNDAY
, 25
JUNE
1916
Edward Mousley steals a tropical helmet from a dead man in Nusaybin

The march continues. It is almost two months since the encircled British garrison in Kut al-Amara capitulated to the Ottoman army and just over 13,000 men were taken prisoner.
^pp
In spite of promises to the contrary, the prisoners were plundered and the officers were separated from the men. While the officers were put on riverboats for transport to Baghdad, the other ranks were forced to march the whole way in spite of the fact that many of them were already in a bad way and the hottest period of the year had just started—temperatures could reach 50° C in the shade.

Mousley was ill at the time of the capitulation and consequently had
to wait for special boat transport to Baghdad. Ironically, the vessel they eventually boarded was the
Julnar
, the steamer used in the last desperate attempt to relieve them back at the end of April. As he was being carried on board he noted that there were bullet holes everywhere. During the interminably slow journey the boat stopped at intervals to unload the bodies of prisoners who had died.

In Baghdad Mousley recovered enough strength for the next stage. With Russian troops less than 125 miles north of the city, the Ottoman authorities were anxious to get the British prisoners away from the area as quickly as possible to prevent them being liberated if the Russians advanced. They were taken by train to Samarra and from there they had to march under guard, first up the Tigris to Mosul and then west out across the desert.

The column of captured officers is permitted to transport its baggage on mules and camels, and the weakest men are allowed to ride. The march has been terrible despite that and they are leaving a trail of sick and dying men, collapsed mules and discarded equipment along the way. Corpses, dried and shrivelled by the burning sun, mark out the trail of those who preceded them. Meanwhile, their progress is also being shadowed by armed Arabs, waiting to plunder and kill those who fall by the wayside. They have been tormented by sandstorms, heat, hunger and, worst of all, thirst. They have survived on figs, black bread, tea and, in particular, raisins—all bought at excessive prices in the places they have passed through. Like everyone else, Mousley has more or less lost all sense of time. “I knew two seasons only,” he writes in his diary, “when we walked and when we did not.” He is weak and feverish. He has lost almost two stone in weight, has severe stomach problems, and his eyes are painful.
^qq

They have now reached the small town of Nusaybin, in which they are to spend a night or two before continuing the march to Ras al-’Ayn, where there is supposed to be railway transport waiting for them. They set up camp in the shade of an old Roman bridge. The sky above them is a cloudless and scorching vault and Mousley is weaker than ever. He has just recovered from a bad attack of heatstroke, having lost his topee in an unusually strong sandstorm yesterday, and the handkerchief he put on instead provided little protection.

He happens to hear that there is a collection point for sick prisoners somewhere in the town and that a British lieutenant has just died there. Mousley intends to go and try to get the dead man’s topee—he is, after all, not going to need it anymore. He spends a long time working his way “through tiny streets and dark quarters and backyards” before eventually locating the place. Passing through a wall via a small gateway hidden by a hanging carpet, he enters an open courtyard.

Along the inner sides of the walls rows of emaciated men are lying under improvised sunshades of grass and leafy branches. Most of the skeletal figures are completely naked apart from a piece of cloth around their loins. Their faces are hollow and covered with week-old bristle. They are the British troops from Kut al-Amara and, apart from some black biscuits, they have virtually no food at all. They have to fetch their own water from a watercourse some 200 yards away and the long scrape marks in the dust and sand show where the prisoners have crawled there and back to get a drink.

Some are dead, many are dying.
^rr
He sees a man with his jaw fallen open and his face covered in flies; at first Mousley takes him for dead, but the man is alive and when he makes a weak movement great swarms of disturbed flies pour out of his open mouth. Mousley has seen this before, the mouths of dying men filling and emptying with hosts of flies in time with their feeble movements: he calls it “the beehive phenomenon.”

Mousley searches for the dead lieutenant, finds his tropical helmet and takes it. Then he returns to his column and alerts the other officers to what he has seen. They go to the town commandant in order to
protest. All the soldiers still capable of moving now join the officers, who collect what money they can to leave with the men who are too feeble to march. The sixty pounds they collect is given to these unfortunates so that they can at least pay for some food and care.

Mousley returns to the Roman bridge, where he writes in his journal:

At night, when the remorseless sun is gone, we wander up and down our tiny front between the sentries, smoking what Arab tobacco we can get and casting many an anxious glance towards the western horizon over which, far, far away lies Ras-al-Ain, the railway terminus. Between this and that there are many marches throughout long nights and days. Shall we reach it?

TUESDAY
, 27
JUNE
1916
Florence Farmborough nurses the wounded in Buchach

As of today the Brusilov offensive is entering its fourth week and good news—indeed, surprisingly good news—is still coming in. The army to which Farmborough’s unit is now attached (the Ninth) has achieved the best results of all, having driven its Austro-Hungarian opponents back in something resembling a frantic retreat or, more accurately perhaps, a retreat in utter panic.
^ss
Florence and her colleagues are very pleased—the high expectations they had for the new year and the much discussed great offensive have truly been fulfilled. The weather is hot.

Florence has now seen crowds of prisoners of war (something that was unusual earlier),
^tt
and she has seen and been reluctantly impressed by the enemy’s well-constructed though now shell-shattered trenches. She has also seen the aspects of success that are less often mentioned: the
freshly filled mass graves, beside which the survivors are sitting sorting through the heaps of boots, belts and other equipment that had belonged to their fallen comrades. And she has seen the victors staggering around after drinking themselves stupid on captured or looted alcohol.

Her medical unit is stationed in Buchach at present, a pretty little town straddling the Strypa river. The town has been badly scarred by the fighting and many of its inhabitants have left, but it is still vividly colourful thanks to the masses of acacias in flower. Florence’s unit has taken over a house that used to belong to the Austrian superintendent of schools, who left Buchach along with the Austrian troops. The building has already been looted by the time Florence and her companions arrive and books, pictures, geological samples and dried flowers lie scattered all over the floors. Those Austrians who still remain in the town have been ordered out of their houses and will be sent east. Florence has witnessed a repetition of the scenes of last summer, except that it is now mainly German speakers who are fleeing, and she has seen thousands of them on the move, people of all ages driving their animals before them and with their possessions piled up on overloaded carts.

But good news is not the only news to reach them. Good news has a price and it is people like Florence who have to try to save what can be saved from the flood of crushed and broken fragments of humanity that continues to pour into the field hospital.

Yesterday evening she assisted when two men with stomach wounds were operated on. The prognosis for this kind of injury is extremely poor, mainly because it is difficult to avoid fatal infection when the gut contents have been spilled into the stomach cavity. She was impressed by the skill of the surgeon in cutting away the torn pieces of the gut and then patching together the parts that were still functioning. Men with stomach wounds make difficult patients, not only because they usually die but because, dehydrated from blood loss, they are always calling for water, which they cannot be allowed to have because of the danger of complications. Once the procedures were finished Florence remained in the improvised operating theatre because she had heard that more wounded men were expected. She fell asleep on a chair there and did not wake up until around midnight.