The Beauty and the Sorrow (46 page)

(Biplanes, both those that have crashed and those that have had to make an emergency landing, are not an unusual sight in the area, even in the centre of the town. And Elfriede knows that fatal accidents are not unusual: every week she sees funeral processions making their way either to the war cemetery in the forest or to the railway station, where the coffins are put aboard trains.)

Up until now Elfriede has watched all this from a distance—curious, confused and watchful. A thirteen-year-old girl at her school has been expelled after being made pregnant by an ensign. And during a visit home from the music school she runs in Berlin, Elfriede’s mother was amazed to see that “the levels of elegance here are not far behind what you can see on the Kurfürstendamm.” Elfriede thinks she knows why:

It’s because of all the officers from away who are in the 134th Reserve Battalion or in the 1st and 2nd Reserve Air Squadrons. Because of these men, our women and girls spend a lot of time doing themselves up.

The older girls can often be seen hanging round with soldiers, as indeed can some adult women, ultimately perhaps “out of sympathy” because the soldiers “are on their way to the front where they will be killed or wounded anyway.” It is obvious that the proximity of death and the sheer volume of deaths have helped to break down what would otherwise be strict moral codes.
^fff
Elfriede has not yet let herself be tempted but she has noticed that soldiers have begun talking to her in a new way. She believes it is because she is now wearing a proper skirt and has her hair pinned up like a grown-up.

The big sister of one of her classmates often organises small parties for the young pilots. Coffee and cakes are on offer, couples chat and, indeed, even kiss a little while Elfriede plays the piano. So far the whole business has just been a titillating game for Elfriede. On these occasions she has pretended to be “Lieutenant von Yellenic” (the persona she often resorts to when playing war games), playing background music in the officers’ mess for friends, “just like in a novel by Tolstoy.”

As she arrives at today’s party she meets a young, blond and blue-eyed pilot officer on the stairs:

He stopped, greeted me and wondered whether I was also “one of the people who had been invited.”
^ggg
I said no, I was just the one who played the piano. He pulled a face and answered: “I see. That’s a pity.” “Why is it a pity?” I asked. He just laughed and disappeared into the room.

TUESDAY
, 8
AUGUST
1916
Kresten Andresen disappears on the Somme

No more sun, just mist and haze. The front line has not moved much since the middle of July but the battles continue to rage. The landscape is strangely colourless. All the colours, particularly the greens, are long gone. The storm of shells having kneaded everything to the same drab,
grey-brown shade.
^hhh
There are dense ranks of artillery pieces on both sides; in some places they are wheel to wheel and they are firing day and night. Today British foot soldiers are attacking the village of Guillemont—though it is a village in name only, since weeks of bombardment have reduced the place to tangled heaps of stones, beams and debris. Nor is it really a village on the maps used by the British high command: there it is marked as
an important position
that must be taken, not because it would break the German line but because it would provide room for manoeuvre. (There are several reasons for the British attack, not least that King George V is presently visiting his troops in France and General Douglas Haig, the British commander-in-chief, would like to be able to welcome His Majesty with some small victory.)
ⁱⁱⁱ

The British attack has been well prepared. They have dug new connecting trenches from the closest point in the shell-shattered wood at Trônes so that the infantrymen can launch their attack as close as possible to the German lines. An experienced and battle-hardened division, the 55th, has been chosen to carry out the attack and the preparatory bombardment has been both lengthy and merciless.

One of the German soldiers who will have to face the attack is Kresten Andresen.

His regiment has been sent in to reinforce one of the most exposed sectors on the Somme. To one side of Guillemont there is Longueval, then Delville Wood, then Martinpuich, Pozières, Thiepval, Beaucourt and Beaumont Hamel—all places well known from the army communiqués of the past month and now shrouded in a dark aura of stinking corpses and shattered hopes. Two days ago he wrote to his parents:

I hope I have now done my bit here, for the present anyway. One can never know what will happen in the future. But even if we
are sent somewhere in the very depths of the sea, we could not go anywhere worse than this place.

The losses have been great, not least among his Danish friends. Most of them have fallen victim to the constant artillery barrage:

My good, dear friend Peter Østergaard—I can’t understand why he should fall. How many sacrifices are being demanded of us. Rasmus Nissen is badly wounded in his legs. Jans Skau has lost both his legs and is wounded in the chest. Jens Christensen from Lundgaardsmark is wounded. Johannes Hansen from Lintrup is badly wounded. Jørgen Lenger from Smedeby—wounded. Asmus Jessen from Aarslev—wounded. There is no one left now: Iskov, Laursen, Nørregaard, Karl Hansen—they are all gone and I am almost the only one remaining.

The drum fire has been dreadful. Shells of every possible calibre have rained down on them, particularly those of the heaviest calibres, 18cm, 28cm, and 38cm. When a brute of the latter variety explodes, Andresen writes, it is like meeting “a monster from the sagas.” Suddenly everything is silent and dark. Then, after a few seconds, the dust and smoke clear enough to see for a few metres before another shell comes screaming in. On one occasion they came under heavy fire in a connecting trench without any bunkers.
^jjj
He and the others could do nothing but press themselves against the side of the trench, press their helmeted heads down on their knees and clutch their rucksacks in a pathetic attempt to protect their chests and bellies. In one of his most recent letters home he wrote: “At the beginning of the war, in spite of all the terrible things, there was a sense of something poetic. That has now gone.”

Kresten Andresen now finds himself in the forward line. He has tried to come up with anything good that can be said about his situation and actually thinks he has found something. Chatting to a Dane in a different company a few days earlier he said, “we might easily be taken prisoner.” Perhaps that is what he is hoping for when the enemy firestorm lifts and the British soldiers of the 55th Division climb out of their trenches a couple of hundred metres away.

The clumsiness of the attack on the place the British troops call “Gillymong” is reminiscent of many other British attacks on the Somme.

The British artillery is, of course, laying down a so-called creeping barrage, which in theory means that the foot soldiers are advancing behind a curtain of fire intended to keep the German defenders down in their bunkers right until the last minute. In practice and as usual, the artillerymen follow their own timetables, which means that the fire moves forward a certain number of metres at given intervals irrespective of whether the British infantrymen are keeping up or not.
^kkk
Soon the barrage disappears into the distance leaving the lines of advancing infantry behind, and then these lines run straight into the German curtain of fire
^lll
—and even into each other: in all the smoke and confusion two British battalions end up fighting one another. The men who manage to push forward in spite of this soon come under cross-fire from German machine guns hidden in a sunken road immediately before the village.

A number of isolated groups do reach the German trenches on the edge of what was once Guillemont and chaotic close-quarters combat breaks out there.

Kresten Andresen is still alive around the middle of the day on 8 August.

During the afternoon German units carry out a counter-attack. They are very familiar with the terrain and have soon recaptured the lost stretches of trench and overcome the British attackers. (Ten officers and 374 soldiers are taken prisoner.) In one trench they find a wounded man from Andresen’s company: when he was wounded he hid in a bunker because he had heard that the British bayoneted the wounded to death.
He had, however, seen the British taking German prisoners back to their own lines with them.

When the 1st Company is mustered it is discovered that there are twenty-nine men who cannot be accounted for among either the living or the dead. Kresten Andresen is one of them.

There has been no word of him since.

His fate is unknown.
^mmm

SUNDAY
, 13
AUGUST
1916
Florence Farmborough views a battlefield on the River Dniester

The countryside spread out before their eyes is breathtakingly beautiful. On both sides run long, winding hills, covered with trees; in front is an undulating plain, framed by the high, dramatic peaks of the Carpathians in the distance. But as the column approaches and then reaches yesterday’s battlefield, the idyll is shattered. They pass the recently deserted sites of gun positions; they roll through villages so smashed by shells and dissected by a web of trenches that all that remain are piles of stone and wood; they drive past blackened crater fields full of deep, spiky hollows. The size of a crater depends on the calibre of the shell: an ordinary field artillery shell of 7cm or 8cm makes a crater less than a metre across; the real monsters of 42cm make a hole twelve times that size, or more.

They come to a halt on a small hill. Yesterday this was one of the best fortified positions in the Austro-Hungarian line of defences. Today it is
just a mess of crumpled barbed wire and partially collapsed trenches. The enemy dead are still lying on the ground. They died so recently that even in the summer heat they show no signs of putrefaction—indeed, they seem as if they might almost be alive. She sees three bodies pressed together and it is only the contortion of their limbs that convinces her that these people really are dead. At another spot she looks at an enemy soldier lying outstretched in a shattered trench: the man’s face is completely unmarked, his skin still has the light of life. Just as so many others have done when faced with death in its less dramatic manifestations, Florence thinks: “He might have been resting.”

They climb back into their cars and continue their journey. They soon begin to understand the scale of this battle, which led to yesterday’s great breakthrough. From being a single battlefield it becomes multiple fields and they come to places where there has not yet been time to remove the Russian dead:

The dead were still lying around, in strange, unnatural postures—remaining where they had fallen: crouching, doubled up, stretched out, prostrate, prone … Austrians and Russians lying side by side. And there were lacerated crushed bodies lying on darkly stained patches of earth. There was one Austrian without a leg and with blackened, swollen face; another with a smashed face, terrible to look at; a Russian soldier with legs doubled under him, leaning against the barbed wire. And on more than one open wound flies were crawling and there were other moving, threadlike things. I was glad Anna and Ekaterina were with me; they, too, were silent; they, too, were sorely shaken. Those “heaps” were once human beings: men who were young, strong and vigorous; now they lay lifeless and inert; shapeless forms of what had been living flesh and bone. What a frail and fragile thing is human life!

These maimed and torn bodies are a reality in themselves but also a picture of what war does to man’s conceptions and hopes, indeed, to the old world as a whole. As much as anything else, the war began as an attempt to preserve Europe exactly as it was, to uphold the status quo, but it is now changing the continent in a more sweeping way than anyone could have imagined in their worst nightmares. An ancient truth is making itself manifest yet again—the truth that sooner or later wars become uncontrollable and counter-productive because men and
societies will tend to sacrifice everything in their blind drive to be victorious. That has rarely been more true than it is at present, when those in power, unintentionally and without any plan, have unleashed uniquely uncontrollable forces: extreme nationalism, social revolution, religious hatred. (Not to mention a grotesque level of debt that is undermining the economic health of all the states involved.) Farmborough, shaken by what she has seen, finds refuge in her faith: “Oh! One must believe and trust in God’s mercy, otherwise these frightful sights would work havoc in one’s brain; and one’s heart would faint with the depths of its despair.”

Later, when they stop and set up camp, they still find themselves surrounded by dead bodies but now, after the passage of more hours, the inevitable processes of putrefaction have begun to set in. They can smell the unpleasant sweetness in the air and hear the buzzing of the gorged flies. The men in the unit are unconcerned by the corpses—or pretend to be—other than as problems of hygiene. But Florence and the other nurses feel very ill at ease when it is time to eat. There is a corpse immediately behind her tent, half buried by the earth thrown up by an exploding shell, but his head is clearly visible. One of the nurses goes and places a piece of cloth over the dead man’s face. A little later Florence regains her courage and takes out her camera to photograph the many dead Austrians. She has taken only two photographs when she is overwhelmed by a sense of shame: what right does she have to intrude on these lifeless beings? It was not that long ago that she went out of her way to see her first cadaver, not that long ago that she “wanted to see Death.”