The Beauty and the Sorrow (53 page)

Buchanan and his men carry on past the fallen and the wounded, on towards Beho Beho. They take up position on a small open ridge just outside the village and a prolonged exchange of fire with the black troops in the village ensues. The sun is bakingly hot.

The hours that follow are difficult.

The low ridge on which they are lying is covered with gleaming white pebbles that reflect the sun’s rays in a way that would be beautiful from a distance but which make the heat almost unbearable for men forced to lie down pressed to the ground. They all get painful blisters, even those with the advantage of the brown, leathery skin caused by years in the African sun. The enemy troops in the village, on the other hand, are in the shade and also have the advantage of being able to station themselves in the trees and snipe accurately at the men lying out on the roasting pebbles of the ridge.

The firing continues and losses begin to mount among the men of the 25th. One of those hit is Buchanan, who takes a bullet through his left arm. After a little while a shout runs along the line—Captain Selous, their company commander, is dead. He had moved forward fifteen yards or so in an attempt to pinpoint the position of some particularly troublesome snipers and scarcely had he raised his field glasses to his eyes before a bullet struck him in the side. He was turning round with the obvious intention of trying to return to his own line when another bullet hit him in the head and killed him. They react with horror to the news since they all “loved him in an uncommon manner, as their officer and as their grand old fearless man.” No one is affected more than Ramazani, Selous’s African servant, who had accompanied him as his gun-bearer on his many big-game safaris before the war. Out of his mind with sorrow and a desire for revenge, Ramazani hurls himself into the firefight with
no regard for the well-aimed bullets coming from the concealed riflemen in the village.

Towards four o’clock the enemy slips away and disappears into the bush yet again. Buchanan and the rest of the British troops are able to enter the empty village.

That evening they bury Frederick Courteney Selous and the other dead men in the shade of a baobab tree.
^*

TUESDAY
, 16
JANUARY
1917
Michel Corday wonders how posterity will view the war

Something is happening. There is a change of mood, partly revealed by a declining interest in the war or, perhaps more accurately, by a greater tendency towards escapism: the romanticised tales of soldiers and heroism that filled most magazines during the first years of the war are disappearing and being replaced by whodunnits, crime fiction and other kinds of typically escapist literature. And it also shows in an openly stated antipathy to the war, even though articles and speeches by chauvinists and nationalists, opportunists and bombasts still set the tone of what passes for public debate.

Faithful echoes of the latter kind of thinking can still be heard among “ordinary” people and it has long been taboo to advocate peace or, indeed, even speak of it. “Peace” has become a dirty word, giving off a vague odour of defeatism, pro-Germanism and a spineless propensity to compromise. The word alone is enough to make people object, swear, roll their eyes and so on, and it has even been censored. Victory—absolute, unconditional, total victory—has been the only acceptable idea. Just as in the other warring states, the sufferings and losses have not promoted a desire for compromise but have made attitudes more rigid, even more disinclined to accept anything short of “victory.” Anything else would mean that all the sufferings and losses have been in vain, wouldn’t it? And why compromise, anyway, when there is no chance of being defeated?

But something is happening. Something has changed in the language being used, though so far it is only on the street, person to person.

It is no longer impossible to hear people talking about their desire for—yes—“peace.” A couple of days ago Corday was standing in the cold waiting for a tram when he overheard a conversation between a woman and an army padre who had just come back from the Somme and Verdun. The padre said to her, “There are already more than enough mothers in mourning. Let’s hope that the whole business will soon be over.” More recently, on the same tram, he heard an upper-class woman, well wrapped up in her fur coat, say loudly to a soldier, “You wouldn’t have had to put up with thirty months of this if it weren’t for the thousands of scoundrels and idiots who voted for the war parties.” Many of her fellow passengers grinned and squirmed in embarrassment, but a working-class woman sitting near Corday muttered: “She’s absolutely right.”

It is not only weariness and exhaustion that are beginning to make their voices heard. This change of mood is also a reaction to last month’s peace initiatives, one from the German chancellor Theobold von Bethmann-Hollweg
^†
and the other, a few days later, from the American president Woodrow Wilson. The rulers of the Allied countries immediately rejected the first out of hand, and they responded to the second with such a series of objections, demands and hazy claims that it is obvious to everyone that there is no immediate hope of peace.

But the Word itself has nevertheless resurfaced. “Peace.”

The publication of a letter from the Kaiser to his chancellor is one element in the propaganda for the German peace proposal. Among much
else, Kaiser Wilhelm writes, “To put forward a peace proposal is to perform a moral act that is necessary to free the world—including neutral countries—from the burden that is now in the process of crushing it.”
Every
French newspaper has attacked this letter, usually by questioning its authenticity, and they have also given the American proposal a chilly, even scornful, reception: “Pure imagination! Illusions! Delusions of grandeur!” Corday has actually heard a man snort and accuse the American president of being “more German than the Germans.”

How can anyone hope to offer a fair picture of the possibility of peace when the press, the only real medium for the masses, is both strictly censored and in the hands of propagandists, warmongers and ideologues? Corday finds no great comfort in the thought that a succeeding generation will be able to make sense of the tangle of emotional storms,
idées fixes
, exaggerations, half-truths, illusions, linguistic games, lies and deceptions which this war has produced. He frequently tries to recall what it was that happened,
really happened
, when this great landslide began to move in the late summer two and a half years ago; he eagerly gathers the small splinters of fact that he can find here and there, scattered like the forgotten clues left at the scene of a crime that has long since gone cold. The question, however, is what information will it really be possible to obtain after it is all over.

He has known for a long time that the image of the war and of public opinion presented by the press is biased to the point of mendacity. He wrote in his journal in April 1915: “Fear of the censor and the need to flatter the basest instincts [of the public] lead [the press] to publish nothing but hate and abuse.” The politicians and generals who were involved in whipping up public opinion in favour of the war in 1914 have become prisoners of their own hate-fuelled rhetoric. It has made the very idea of a compromise peace unthinkable, and it has even made certain tactically motivated withdrawals impossible because withdrawal would immediately be converted into symbolic defeat in the eyes of the press and the man on the street: this was what happened with Verdun.
^‡
But now, perhaps, something has at last begun to move.

So it goes without saying that the newspapers will be anything but reliable as a source for future historians. What about private letters? Corday has his doubts even there: “Letters from the front give a false feeling about the war. The writer knows that his letters might be opened. And his main aim will be to impress future readers.” Photographs, then? Perhaps people will be able to turn to them to discover what things were really like, on the home front, for instance. Corday thinks not, and he writes in his journal:

Either vanity or shame prevents certain aspects of life from being reflected in our illustrated magazines. So posterity will find that the photographic documentation of the war is full of very big gaps. For example: it will not show the almost total darkness that exists indoors because of the restrictions on lighting, or the gloomy, dim streets where the fruit merchants are illuminated by candles, or the dustbins that remain unemptied on the pavement until three in the afternoon because of a shortage of manpower, or the queues of anything up to three thousand people waiting outside the large grocery stores to get their sugar ration. Nor—to look at the other side of the coin—will it show the huge numbers filling the restaurants, tea rooms, theatres, variety shows and cinemas to bursting point.

A DAY IN JANUARY
1917
Paolo Monelli learns how to deter nosy visitors

Both the winter weather and the gunfire have eased and the winding mule tracks have begun to be well trampled. It is in conditions like these that visitors tend to show up, curious about these notorious mountain peaks and keen to be able to say “I was there.”

They are not welcome.

If they are of lower status the soldiers simply bombard them with snowballs and pieces of ice from a distance and then, when they arrive confused, breathless and covered in snow, pretend to know nothing about it. More subtle methods are needed for those of higher rank. The
men have laid a number of explosive charges a short distance away from their defensive position and the moment they receive a telephone warning that some bigwig down below has started to put on his snow kit they detonate some of these charges. This causes a cascade of snow and stones and, unfailingly, the Austro-Hungarian position on the mountain top opposite responds by firing off half a dozen shells. (
Zeem choom zeem shoom!
)

The battalion commander will then say dolefully that he does not know what is going on: “Everything’s been so quiet up there until now.” At which the high-ranking visitor down below “is immediately smitten by a nostalgic longing for the valley” and vanishes.

THURSDAY
, 1
FEBRUARY
1917
Edward Mousley sees snow falling on Kastamonu

He survived the march and reached the railhead at Ras al-’Ayn. He and the rest of the men who finished the two-month desert march from Baghdad were then transported north-westwards in cattle trucks. And the places rolled past. The Euphrates. Osmaniye. The Anti-Taurus Mountains and the Mediterranean as a silver sliver in the distance. Gülek Boğazi. The Taurus Mountains. Pozanti. Afyonkarahisar. Eskişehir. Ankara. From Ankara they were on foot again, northwards and upwards, over mountains covered in conifers, growing colder all the time, all the way to Kastamonu, about forty-five miles from the Black Sea. There the prisoners were quartered in a couple of large houses on the edge of the town, in Christian districts that were half-empty after the attacks on the Armenians.

Conditions are good in Kastamonu, very good when compared with those they endured in the months following their capitulation. They are treated well, and Mousley and the others begin to suspect that the horrors of the march were not so much planned as a result of the usual Ottoman combination of harsh indifference and incompetence. There is also the fact that the men at Kastamonu have the advantage of being officers: the conditions for the non-commissioned ranks and ordinary soldiers are extremely harsh. Whereas Mousley and the officers have to combat boredom, nightmares and the aftermath of the march and illness, the
other ranks who survived transportation have been put to hard labour in various places.
^§
In Kastamonu Mousley is allowed to visit the shops and the bathhouse once a week, accompanied by a not excessively zealous guard. The prisoners are also allowed to attend church and to send and receive post, including parcels from home. They play chess, bridge and rugby and are sometimes allowed to go for long walks among the high hills that surround them. They are planning to start a small orchestra. Mousley has had a recurrence of his malaria and been forced to go to a Greek dentist to get his teeth fixed—they were badly affected by the monotonous diet during the siege. He has even put on some weight. Most of them try to stick to certain routines, such as changing for dinner, even if it only involves taking off one ragged shirt and putting on another equally ragged one. The Ottomans enforce a strict ban on fraternising with the inhabitants of the town, though they may occasionally get drunk.

He has been very cold since the start of winter. There is a shortage of wood and what little he can get hold of tends to be damp. When he puts it in the small stove there is more smoke than fire. Boredom and monotony are the worst things, however, and Mousley spends much of his time smoking and sleeping in the room he shares with another officer. It is a long time since he wrote anything in his journal.

When he looks out of his window this morning the light is colder and paler. Snow. The whole world has changed. The jumble of reddish brown roofs he is used to seeing are white and the town has suddenly become picturesque, almost as pretty as a picture. The streets are empty and the only signs of life are the sing-song voices of the muezzins in the minarets. The sight of this sudden transformation, the result of snow—“this pure and godly element, silent and secretive”—does something for him, filling him with remarkable energy that displaces his apathy. It makes him start hoping again, makes him want to remember again.

He takes out his journal and makes the first entry since the beginning of October: “February 1st, 1917.—Four months have gone. As I write the earth is white with feet of snow.” Later he and some other British officers go to a hill about a mile away, where they do some sledging “and
pretend that we are schoolboys again.” They have a snowball fight on the way home.