The Beauty and the Sorrow (54 page)

FRIDAY
, 2
FEBRUARY
1917
Richard Stumpf regains hope in Wilhelmshaven

The barometer is continuing to rise and in the morning those who have come off watch are allowed to go on a march or, perhaps more accurately, to make a short excursion to Mariensiel. The ship’s band marches in the lead, playing its instruments, the formalities are kept simple and they are all full of high spirits. The ice is gleaming and is still thick. Stumpf is impressed by its strength and beauty, but he thinks it will soon break up and disappear without trace. On the way home they march through Wilhelmshaven.

SMS
Helgoland
is once again being refitted, repaired and modified. This time it is the ship’s 88mm rapid-fire cannon that are being removed. The Battle of Jutland revealed their range to be insufficient and the guns have been deemed ineffective—“a view,” as Stumpf writes in his journal, that two years earlier would have caused anyone voicing it “to be shot as a traitor.” These guns have not fired a single shot and those manning them (including Stumpf) have been wasting their time. He tries to comfort himself with the fact that the guns are more needed ashore.
^‖
Stumpf also believes that great things are brewing. He has regained his faith in the future: “The whole world is holding its breath as Germany gathers herself to deliver one final, devastating, knock-out blow.”

Once back on the ship they have lunch and then the duty officer arrives with a piece of paper—“wonderful news.” “Listen to this, men, a telegram from Berlin. ‘As of today we shall be waging unrestricted U-boat war.’ ” The announcement makes all of them “extremely happy” and soon nothing else is being talked about on board. Most of them seem to be of the opinion that it is only a matter of time before Great Britain is forced to her knees. This is a “sentence of death for England.”
This is the German version—put into action—of the fight “to the bitter end” French politicians have proclaimed for so long.

Stumpf is one of the doubters, though he is willing to give the whole business four months, after which the situation should have become clearer. He does, however, see this as a way of responding to the British blockade, which is what caused this cold and miserable “turnip winter” in Germany. That is what they have to eat most of the time, turnips of various kinds prepared in various ways. (The basic ingredient does not change but the variety of recipes is endless: they eat turnip pudding and turnip balls, mashed turnip and turnip jam, turnip soup and turnip salad. Some people refer to turnips as Prussian pineapples.) The turnips are often cooked with a meagre addition of slightly rancid lard, the faint odour of which is masked by adding apples and onions to the pot. The shortage of fat has led to an increase in intestinal ailments and the monotonous diet has caused many people to suffer from oedema. On average, Germans, both military and civilian, have lost about 20 per cent of their body weight and the majority of the sailors on the ship are a good deal thinner than they were. Stumpf has lost only five kilos, but he receives food parcels from his parents in Bavaria.

Unrestricted U-boat warfare? Why not? Let the British have a taste of their own medicine: “I hope they suffer the same acute hunger as our people in Saxony or Westphalia.”

WEDNESDAY
, 7
FEBRUARY
1917
Alfred Pollard finds a trench full of corpses outside Grandcourt

For once he is hesitant about a mission. In the first place, he has only just come back from one—in fact, he is hardly back. Pollard has not even had time to climb down into the trench when he meets the colonel waiting there impatiently for him, and the Old Man says he will have to go out again. It is about one o’clock in the morning and his orders are to lead a patrol into the village of Grandcourt “at all costs.” The colonel repeats that ominous phrase “at all costs” twice, so Pollard understands that it is important. The air force has reported that the Germans have pulled back and the colonel wants their regiment to be the first to move into the empty village. (As a matter of prestige.) Pollard’s second concern is that
he does not know how they can reach the village, given that the open River Ancre runs between their position and Grandcourt. He asks the colonel how they are supposed to cross the river and the colonel’s answer is a brief one: “I must leave that to you, Pollard.”

There is a full moon and the ground is covered with snow. Pollard and his four-man patrol work their way down a hill and reach a deserted trench. Deserted, yes; empty, no. It turns out to be full of the bodies of British soldiers from another division. When he sees the stiff bodies of his countrymen lying there powdered with snow, he recalls that someone told him about a platoon in a forward position that had been attacked in a German night raid—and finished off with bayonets. To the last man. He had heard the story but forgotten it. There are so many stories of units being wiped out and platoons disappearing.

As they move on and continue down to the river, Pollard remembers the first time he saw a trench full of dead men. It was during his very first attack, on that hot day at Hooge in June of 1915:

I was a mere boy looking on life with hopeful optimism, and on war as an interesting adventure. When I saw the Hun corpses killed by our shell-fire I was full of pity for the men so suddenly cut off in their prime. Now I was a man with no hope of the War ending for years. I looked at a trench full of corpses without any sensation whatever. Neither pity nor fear that I might soon be one myself, nor anger against their killers. Nothing stirred me. I was just a machine carrying out my appointed work to the best of my ability.

In the white snow Pollard finds the tracks of the German unit that attacked the men in the trench. It proves to be a piece of luck because they lead him across a frozen bog and down to the river, where he finds a small and rickety bridge. He slips across it with his revolver drawn, going first as usual. Everything is quiet. He waves to the others to come over. Step by step they creep into the snowy village. Everything is quiet. The reports were correct—the Germans have left the village.

Although neither Pollard nor anyone else on the Allied side knows it yet, this is part of a series of planned German withdrawals aimed at straightening
out the front line. New, well-fortified positions are ready and waiting for them further back.

FRIDAY
, 9
FEBRUARY
1917
Olive King is repairing her ambulance in Salonica

A raw February wind. The smell of snow in the air. Another winter in Salonica, another winter in this overcrowded, over-fortified army camp of a town with its seriously underemployed army. The streets are like a fancy-dress parade of uniforms: the blue-grey of the French, the khaki of the British, the brown of the Serbs, the brownish green of the Russians and the green-grey of the Italians. In addition to this polyglot conglomeration there are colonial troops from India, Indo-China and North Africa. A number of attempts were made last autumn to push the Bulgarians back in the north, but the front has hardly moved. Now everything is at a standstill again. The weather, as usual, is changeable: hot and sunny at one moment, cold and windy the next. It has been snowing for two days but the snow has failed to take the chill out of the air. Lying under her ambulance, Olive King is freezing.

King had planned to spend the morning at one of the hot bathhouses down by the harbour but her ambulance had other ideas. It is in need of repairs, which is why she is lying on the floor in a freezing garage working on it. Her fingers are blue with cold and she fumbles everything. There is a strong wind blowing outside.

Olive King is now a part of the Serbian army—Olive and her two vehicles. (In addition to old Ella she has also bought a faster, lighter Ford ambulance, which is the one she is repairing at the moment.) And since the Serbs lost almost all their vehicles during the great retreat, she has more than enough to do. There is no more endless patrolling from lamp to lamp for her, no more lugging around sacks of ragged clothes: instead, she is dispatched on long, difficult trips on narrow, dangerous mountain roads, roads that would scarcely have been graced with the name in western Europe—bridle paths, perhaps, or mud tracks. Just now, conditions are at their worst. If the temperature is above zero, everything turns to sludge; if the temperature dips below zero, she can expect an ice rink.

King has come much closer to the war and the war has come closer to her. Mrs. Harley, whom she has worked with ever since their days hunting for furniture in France and who—“at an age when most old ladies are content to sit at home knitting socks”—has endured hardships enough to break women half her age, was killed a month ago. She was struck by bullets from a shrapnel shell fired by enemy artillery—Bulgarian? Austrian?—while working with refugees up in Monastir. From her own journeys to the front up in the north King has not only brought back two Bulgarian rucksacks full of battlefield souvenirs—cartridge cases, shell splinters—she has also returned with memories of a battlefield decked with half-buried corpses. She has also, for the very first time, actually seen the “loathsome enemy” (in the form of Bulgarian prisoners of war).

And she has fallen in love, which is hardly strange—there is something in the atmosphere, in the situation, in being forced to live in uncertainty, that breaks down the everyday fears and conventions which would otherwise put barriers in the way. To judge from the evidence, this love means more to her than anything else at the moment. More than the war, which has become a mere backcloth, figures in a landscape, monotonous routine, sometimes absurd or bizarre, sometimes dangerous or downright nasty, and frequently simply irritating. Like now, when dreams of a hot bath are suddenly put paid to by a faulty footbrake.

The object of her love is a charming Serbian liaison officer, Captain Milan Joviĉić, known as Jovi, a man of her own age and happy, bright and droll. The whole thing blossomed through dinners and simple parties—one can imagine the scratchy tones of “La Paloma” played time after time—but also under the stress of shared danger. When she was confined to bed with her first bout of malaria last September he visited her at least twice a day and often stayed for hours. Her love seems to be reciprocated. They have to be secretive about it, but there is still a good deal of gossip about them. Which she finds annoying.

This is not just an affair. She has had affairs before, but this is something far more.

King is aware that something has happened to her during these years and it frightens her. Or, perhaps, she is most frightened by how others will react to it. In a letter to her father, written after she had enlisted in the Serbian army, she wrote as follows:

Bless you, darling Daddy, I love you so much, you’ll never have any idea how much. I often wonder if you’ll find me very changed. I think I’ve got pretty selfish in the war, & I know I’ve got more horribly independent than ever.

She does not mention a single word about being in love. Jovi is just referred to as “a pal,” which itself is radical enough compared with what would have been acceptable before the war. But not many people think any longer about supervision, chaperones and the proper forms of social intercourse between unmarried men and women. Not here, not now.

At lunchtime Olive King takes a break from her work in the chilly garage and walks through the snow back to the small flat she shares with two other woman drivers. As soon as she gets in she lights the little paraffin stove, which is the only heating in the room and has to be kept alight whenever they are in the house at this time of year. She is worried about the price of paraffin, which seems to be going up all the time—a can costs nineteen francs and lasts only a couple of days. “If America comes in, she ought to let us have it at reduced rates.”

King decides to stay in her room for now. She has done her bit for the day and the other mechanic will have to finish the job. She starts thinking about those wonderful Tasmanian apples and wonders if they are still in season at home in Australia. She wonders whether her father might be able to send her a box.

A DAY IN FEBRUARY
1917
Florence Farmborough reflects on the winter in Trostyanitse

It has been a bad winter both in big ways and in small. In December she received news that her father had died at the age of eighty-four, and last month the famous heart surgeon, the father in her Russian host family, also died. And the front has once again come to a standstill. In the snow and low temperatures on this part of the Eastern Front all major military operations have stopped and Florence’s hospital unit is receiving patients only in dribs and drabs. A couple of wounded one day, perhaps, a couple of sick the next, but they have nothing to do most of the time.

Food shortages have, as usual, worsened during the cold months and this year they have been worse than ever. There have been bread riots in both Moscow and Petrograd, war weariness has become more and more acute and the growing dissatisfaction is being aired with surprising openness. Rumours of disorder, sabotage and strikes abound. Before 1914 a string of economic experts had stated that any war would have to be short since a long war would bring economic catastrophe. They have now been proved right. Money—real money—in all the warring countries has run out and the war on both sides is being financed either with credits or by printing banknotes. So the food crisis in Russia is not just about the cold, not just about immediate shortages, it is also a result of spiralling inflation. Moreover, joy about all the many victories of last summer soon turned to disappointment and disaffection when it became clear that the sacrifices had not led to a final turning point or decisive solution.