The Beauty and the Sorrow (51 page)

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Hill 321 is the point of an elevated section that starts from the ridge where the Ossuary is now located. The actual spot can be found by going about 400 metres north-west from the parking area, along what is called Le Chemin de l’Étoile. Those visiting should wear stout shoes and avoid blind alleys.

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And would continue to be. During the war more Belgian pilots died in crashes than in battle.

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Maurice Farman and Henri Farman were two very similar types of aeroplane, both having the engine and propeller behind the pilot.

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Lili Evrard was, however, killed in another accident that summer.

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There were even pilots who went without goggles: eyes get used to the wind after a while and the tears stop flowing. And the speed was not that great. In some aeroplanes with the propeller behind the pilot (such as the Farman just referred to), it was perfectly possible to take to the air wearing a uniform cap without it flying off in the wind.

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Although Buchanan might be thought guilty of exaggeration here, since a regiment commonly comprised 3,000–5,000 men, the claim of some historians that for every man lost in battle during this campaign a further thirty were killed or incapacitated by disease lends credence to his assertion.

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Swahili
mgunga
:
Acacia polyacantha
ssp.
polyacantha
—the falcon’s claw acacia or white thorn tree.

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The word Arnaud uses in ironic quotation marks is
descendu
.

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Not all were killed by the enemy—both sides at Verdun lost men to their own misdirected shells. The mistakes were partly the result of human error—inaccurate aiming and the like—and partly because of mechanical failure caused by excessive use. The usual firing life of a field artillery piece was about 8,000 rounds.

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It is worth noting that the material provided by these official communiqués, which was relied on and used constantly at the time (
The Battle of Verdun
by the pseudonymous Henry Dugard was, for instance, published as early as 1916), still holds historians in its clutches. For all its merits, the huge French work
Les 300 Jours de Verdun
, which appeared for the ninetieth anniversary of the battle in 2006, relies heavily on precisely such communiqués.

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The German assaults were renewed immediately after Arnaud’s decimated battalion was pulled out of the battle. And Hill 321 did fall in the end.

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Only 3,000 of these men were white and British, the rest were Indian. Any civilians in Kut al-Amara thought to have collaborated with the British (by acting as interpreters, for instance) were hanged, in some cases after being tortured.

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Higher-ranking British officers, however, with General Townshend at their head, were being treated extraordinarily well. (Mousley writes sarcastically that Townshend travelled like a prince.) At about this time the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin was present at a remarkable dinner laid on by Halil Pasha. The guest of honour was none other than Townshend, whom Hedin had met during one of his pre-war journeys. Hedin tells us that the Englishman “was taking his fate with equanimity. The atmosphere was happy, even. It really was an occasion for forging fraternal links. Halil filled his glass, made a speech to his guest of honour, wishing him good fortune in the future. And the English general clinked glasses and thanked him for the hospitality he had received in Baghdad. Then the celebration was over and Townshend travelled home in Halil Pasha’s motor car.”

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During the Second World War the Japanese army used the following rule of thumb to decide how long a starving man had left: “Anyone who can stand up—30 days left to live. Anyone who can sit up—20 days. Anyone who has to urinate lying down—3 days. Anyone who can no longer speak—2 days. Anyone who can no longer blink—dead by dawn.”

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A first attempt to stop the rolling advance of the Russian divisions was made at the Dniester river and, when that failed, at the Prut river. The Russians had broken through the Austro-Hungarian positions on the Prut ten days before and the Ninth Army was able to take Czernowitz and push forward into Austrian Bukovina.

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Since the start of the Brusilov offensive on 4 June the Russians had taken almost 200,000 prisoners of war and about 700 artillery pieces. The Austro-Hungarian defence in Galicia had effectively imploded and the Austro-Hungarian army never recovered from this catastrophic defeat.

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“Little Sister,” a term commonly used by Russians when addressing a nurse.

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Max Immelmann, Germany’s second most successful air ace at the time with seventeen victories (to Oswald Boelcke’s eighteen). He was the first airman to receive the Pour le Mérite, then Germany’s highest military honour, which subsequently became known as the “Blue Max” among German pilots. It remains uncertain whether he was downed by British bullets or mechanical failure.

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Many Arabs were conscripted to uniformed but unarmed labour battalions, used, for instance, in the maintenance of roads and for digging trenches.

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For the first attempt see 6 February 1915 (
this page
). The Pasha Expedition was equally unsuccessful.

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In answer to a question as to what the Army of the Orient was actually doing, the French ex-Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau is supposed to have snarled: “Digging! Let them be known in France and in Europe as ‘the Salonica gardeners.’ ” It might also be mentioned that Sarrail expended more energy poking his nose into Greek politics than in fighting against the Central Powers on the other side of the border, and that Clemenceau returned to office in 1917.

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One of Corday’s fellow diners, Georges Feydeau, would die from syphilis before the war ended.

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In the Austro-Hungarian army soldiers who became infected with an STD were punished. Attempts were made to reduce the prevalence of such diseases by the old approach—control at source. (One of the first measures the Germans introduced after taking Warsaw in August 1915 required all women involved in “professional fornication” to register and undergo medical checks.) Even so, 22 per cent of the Canadian troops in France suffered from venereal disease of some kind during 1915 and 20 per cent of the Allied soldiers who visited the French capital in the summer of 1917 became infected.

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The same reasoning motivated a similarly disgusting trade in the coughed-up phlegm of tuberculosis sufferers.

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The British field marshal Lord Roberts, for instance, thought that a war was the only antidote to “the great human rottenness that is rife in our industrial cities.” Remember, too, Thomas Mann’s fine hopes in 1914 that the war would make German culture both “freer and better.” For more examples of the war as hope, promise and liberation, see
Känslornas krig
by Jens Ljunggren.

ddd
Interestingly enough, this might be compared with the fact that soldiers who had a breakdown as a result of their experiences at the front were frequently considered to be “hysterical,” for which reason their behaviour could be interpreted as a form of “feminisation.”

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In June 1915 a German magazine published the story of a cinema proprietor who stood up in front of the audience during the interval and warned them that a man in uniform had just entered the establishment intending to catch his wife and her lover, whom he knew were in there somewhere. To avoid the scandal the cinema proprietor pointed out that there was a small, discreet emergency exit on the right-hand side: 320 couples immediately left the cinema in the semi-darkness.

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To quote Frederic Manning: “In the shuddering revulsion from death one turns instinctively to love as an act which seems to affirm the completeness of being.”

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The words used in her journal are “mit von der Partie.”

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This drabness in terms of colour is another point at which the conflict failed to correspond to the pre-war expectations of various overly romantic aesthetes: the war actually turned out to be dreary in colour as well as in its everyday routines.

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The British decision to mount an offensive on the Somme had nothing to do with the strategic importance of the region (it had none); it was launched there quite simply because this was where the British and French front lines met and the offensive was intended to be an exercise in cooperation. The main German defensive line lay where the British Guillemont Road Cemetery is now located, that is immediately outside the rebuilt village.

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This was not at all unusual since connecting trenches, unlike the main trenches, were not designed for fighting but to facilitate movement.

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The infantry carried with them an array of devices to help the artillery observers further back see the forward position of the advancing attackers. On this day, for instance, British infantrymen had small flashes of polished metal stitched on their backs—these were supposed to gleam in the sun and show where the men were. The problem was that the day was overcast and, in addition to that, the swirling clouds of smoke and dust caused by exploding shells meant that there was very little chance of actually seeing what was happening during the attack.

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German artillery fire was, generally speaking, more lethal than that of the British and French because the Germans did not attempt the rather futile task of blasting enemy fortifications out of existence but concentrated instead on bombarding the troops as they prepared to attack and then, once an attack was under way, laying down curtains of exploding shells in no-man’s-land. In one section of his famous book
Le feu
Henri Barbusse has described what it is like to move through a wall of explosions of this kind.

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The paths of one of the forgotten and one of the most famous participants in the war almost crossed at Guillemont. On 24 August Lieutenant Ernst Jünger and his 73rd Regiment of Fusiliers were sent into action there. Jünger has described it in his superb war memoir
In Stahlgewittern
(The Storm of Steel). By the time of Jünger’s arrival the village had been completely obliterated: “only a whitish mark on the field of craters still showed the spot where the chalky stone of the houses had been ground to dust.” There was an all-pervasive stench of putrefaction and millions of fat blowflies filled the air. Even Jünger, normally so cool, was shaken by what he saw. “The ploughed-up battlefield was a scene of horror. The dead lay there among the living defenders. When we dug bunkers we saw how the dead lay in layers one above the other. One company after another had been mown down as they made a stand shoulder to shoulder under the drum fire; then their corpses had been buried under the tons of earth hurled up by the projectiles and new men had taken the place of the fallen.”

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Four days earlier the Italian army—after enormous efforts and equally enormous losses—had finally taken the Austrian town of Görz on the Isonzo and changed its name to Gorizia, the name it still bears today.

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This Sykes should not be confused with the British politician (and ex-soldier) Sir Mark Sykes who, together with the French diplomat François Georges-Picot, had come to a top-secret agreement (the Sykes–Picot Accord) earlier in the year. Under the accord their respective governments agreed that after the war the Ottoman Empire should be divided up and a large part of its territory would be placed under the direct control of Russia, France and Great Britain. Among other decisions, Mesopotamia would go to Britain, Lebanon to France and Armenia to Russia. A War to End All Wars, indeed. The result of all this—as we all know to our cost—has been (to borrow the title of a book by David Fromkin)
A Peace to End All Peace
.

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It was not good news. Romania’s entry into the war proved to be a burden for the Allies, particularly for Russia, which was eventually forced to send significant forces south in a costly and vain effort to help the new ally. The strength of the Romanian army was impressive—on paper—and it had undoubtedly won a degree of prestige in the two Balkan wars of 1912–13, but that turned out to be essentially unmerited. Its equipment was in short supply or antiquated; many of its soldiers were dressed in the handsome, colourful uniforms of the nineteenth century; its officer corps was weak, inexperienced and usually preoccupied with the wrong things. One of the first measures taken by the Romanian army after mobilisation was to issue an order stipulating that only officers above the rank of major had the right to wear eye-shadow in the field. The entry of Portugal into the war, which happened in March of this year, similarly failed to provide the Allies with any noticeable or measurable benefit.