The Beauty and the Sorrow (56 page)

First of all de Nogales is ordered to lead the baggage train and all its camels, packhorses and wagons back to a safe position. The only things left behind are the white tents, which they hope will disguise their regrouping. He then comes back to join the rest of the Turkish cavalry, which has been positioned to cover an important section of the large wadi. This is a point at which the British will certainly launch an attack since it marks the left flank of the Ottoman line of defence, which virtually hangs in the air just there. If the British break through at that point they will be within easy reach of the Ottoman rear and will also be a threat to the headquarters at Tel el-Sharia.

This major British attack is another sign that the tide of war is turning in the Middle East. Ever since the second Ottoman attempt to cut the Suez Canal failed last summer, the British have been mounting a counter-offensive and their efforts have been characterised by the kind of systematic approach that comes only from bitter experience. They have breached Palestine’s final and in some ways most effective line of defence—the desert—by constructing a narrow-gauge railway, as well as that impressive freshwater pipeline that de Nogales could neither find nor blow up.

It is a cold and foggy night.

At dawn the sound of heavy artillery can be heard from the direction of Gaza. The noise gradually intensifies as the rattle and crack of machine guns and rifles join in. An attack has been launched.

A first report comes in: the British have thrown up bridges and crossed the wadi with unexpected speed. Tanks accompanied by infantry have begun to shoot their way into Gaza at the same time as cavalry have advanced around the town and are threatening to cut it off from the rear. A German officer to whom de Nogales speaks is pessimistic: the position of the city is pretty hopeless and it may have already fallen. As it grows lighter they can see the clouds of smoke in the distance, billowing up from the explosions and fires that encircle Gaza.

The Ottoman cavalry regiments continue to wait for the British assault but nothing happens. Instead they are ordered to mount and advance along the wadi towards Gaza. De Nogales is given the job of leading the ammunition carts to safety but he leaves that task in order to search for a unit that has gone astray. Having found the unit, he eagerly accompanies it into battle as it fights its way towards Gaza against the British forces encircling the town. De Nogales says that, despite his weariness,
he is spurred on by the mixture of enthusiasm and nervous rapture that “is inevitably inspired in even the dullest heart by the howl of the first shells and the dry cracks of shrapnel-shells exploding overhead.”

British warplanes fly overhead and drop bombs. Soon he is able to survey a “magnificent panorama” of the battlefield around Gaza which, in a swathe twenty miles wide, is wreathed in thick smoke from which red flames and shell-bursts continuously spit forth.

It is not until later that de Nogales remembers his original mission. He leaves the battle and he and his batman ride back to sort out the column of ammunition wagons. Their horses are tired and running with sweat. The two men find the convoy just in time to see it being accidentally bombarded “with an enviable rate of fire and precision” by one of the German artillery batteries which are in Palestine to help the Ottoman army. After suffering considerable losses, particularly among the draught animals, they are saved from further bombardment by a German pilot who notices what is happening and manages to signal to the battery to cease fire.

As the evening light fades de Nogales leads the column to the headquarters at Tel el-Sharia, where he meets Colonel Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein, the commander of the Gaza front. The German is nervous and sending telegrams right and left since he is convinced the battle is lost. The same thought has occurred to de Nogales, too, the whole situation being marked by confusion. Consequently he is more than a little surprised to hear—just as he is about to mount his horse and ride to the battlefield—that the British have for some inexplicable reason begun to withdraw.

The battle is over. Both sides have conceded defeat but the British were simply the first to retire.

In the evening de Nogales rides into a moonlit and devastated Gaza:

The silence of death ruled everywhere. In the middle of the streets, piled up among soot-blackened rafters and smashed carriages, lay hundreds of bodies, the burnt and shattered remains of people and animals. On the blackened walls of buildings that were still smoking and tottering on the point of collapse could be seen big purple patches that resembled red carnations, carnations of blood marking where the wounded and dying had rested
their chests or heads before drawing their last breath. When the last streaks of the red and gold sunset had died away into the deep darkness of the sky, the wailing calls of the muezzins rose from the minarets to announce to the faithful followers of the prophet that the Angel of Death has spread his wings over a desert where thousands of Christian soldiers are now sleeping a glorious and eternal sleep under the starry sky of Palestine.

He rides back to the camp, where his horse almost collapses from exhaustion. De Nogales wraps himself in a blanket and lies down, his head resting on the horse’s flank. He falls asleep almost at once.

A DAY IN APRIL
1917
Pál Kelemen practises with a machine gun outside Kolozsvár

The modern age has even caught up with the Austro-Hungarian army. The cavalry, the pride of that army, the jewel in its military crown, the men with the finest uniforms, is to be wound up. It no longer has any meaningful function and can hardly ever be sent into action. They have tried, and whole regiments have been mown down by a couple of machine guns. On the whole, the cavalry have done little more than herd prisoners of war, patrol behind the lines and put on splendidly colourful parades. Their horses, moreover, demand huge quantities of fodder which, like everything else nowadays, is in short supply.
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The fact that the Austro-Hungarian cavalry is considered to have by far the most beautiful uniforms on the continent is of no help to them. No longer mounted, they are having to say good-bye forever to their fur-edged blue tunics, embroidered red trousers, leather helmets with a comb, their plumes and their buckles, their braiding and gold buttons, their galloons and high boots of polished light-tan leather and from now on they will be wearing the same drab, practical, cheap and anonymous
hechtgrau
(pike grey) as the infantry. One more piece of the old Europe is disappearing. Kelemen’s regiment, too, is being disbanded and the men retrained as foot soldiers, which he detests, probably not just because infantry service is more dangerous and more strenuous but because the aesthete and the snobbish side of him recoils from it. When he turned up for the machine-gun course that was to turn him into an infantry officer, the captain who greeted him—a man of more than middle age, unshaven and wearing a creased uniform jacket—immediately came down on the fact that Kelemen was still wearing the gold epaulettes typical of the cavalry. He said abruptly: “This has to come off.” Kelemen is having his own little rebellion and is still wearing them.

The course is unbearably tedious, as are the other men on the course and the town they are staying in. Tedium is the order of the day. This afternoon they are in horse-drawn wagons and on their way out to an isolated firing range to practise with live ammunition. They pass through a village. The empty, flat Hungarian plain stretches out to the horizon. It has recently been raining and the sun is covered by thick clouds. They arrive and Kelemen notes in his journal:

The spire of the village is far behind us. At our right is a thatched-roof shelter that serves now as the shooting range of the machine gun detachment. The target figures stand like bizarre scarecrows in the loamy soil, and in a freshly dug trench two machine guns are placed ready for practice.

They begin to speak. The bullets whizz with frantic speed toward the target dummies. After the vast silence, the ceaseless rattling makes the ears ache. I walk about as far as possible from the machine gun stand and turn away toward the darkening firmament until westward sooty stripes announce the falling evening. Toward the south tinted clouds still float and the white walls of a remote farmhouse shine dimly in the sun’s last rays. The immense field reverberates with the shrilling of bullets.

I thought that only soldiers were witness to the practice of those grisly instruments of murder. But from the direction of one of the draw wells, with quick flapping wings, a swarm of wild duck flies up and eddies, irresolute in the air. One of the guns is turned on them. A line of birds drops to the earth.—Tomorrow, a good dinner.

FRIDAY
, 20
APRIL
1917
Rafael de Nogales and the final phase of the Second Battle of Gaza

They are a good distance behind the lines and convinced that the worst is over. The battle had reached its peak the day before and de Nogales rode in two cavalry charges. The first time they were ordered to attack it felt like receiving “a sentence of execution”—the Ottoman cavalry were to charge British machine guns. By some miracle it had turned out all right, though he had been wounded in the thigh. His bodyguard, Tasim, stopped the flow of blood with a plug of chewing tobacco, “which stung a little but was very efficacious.”

It is hardly a month since the First Battle of Gaza, a confused affair with heavy losses. Both sides initially thought they had lost the battle, but it finally ended in an Ottoman victory since the British, partly because of a shortage of water, withdrew from the ground they had gained. The Second Battle of Gaza is mainly a result of the over-optimistic (thoroughly inaccurate, in fact) reports sent to London by the British commander in the region afterwards. They stirred the government into hoping—yet again—that a great breakthrough was imminent: all that was needed was a few more men, a few more artillery pieces, another attack, and so on.

Strengthened by rapidly shipped-in reinforcements (including eight tanks and 4,000 gas shells) and by the promise of more if they managed to open the road to Jerusalem, the British launched a major assault yesterday. The whole thing degenerated into a sun-baked copy of the failures on the Western Front, with air attacks, massive but pointless artillery bombardment, broken-down tanks and infantry attacks that were smashed to pulp while running into a well-constructed system of trenches.

The cavalry division de Nogales belongs to has contributed to the success by harassing the British flank. He and the other officers are visited at dawn by a messenger from the commander in Gaza, Colonel von Kressenstein, who sends his congratulations and thanks them for their efforts. The Second Battle of Gaza is now practically over and the British have not broken through.

A quarter of an hour later, in the light of dawn, the whole division is on its way towards Abu Hureira, a marshy area further back, where there
will be water for their horses and rest for themselves. As the air warms up, the great host of riders stirs up an enormous cloud of dust that hangs in the air behind them like a giant tail. De Nogales is worried—the British will undoubtedly be able to see the cloud and realise that a major force is on the march. The divisional commander, however, brushes aside his concern with a smile and when they arrive at the marshy zone they halt in serried columns, regiment by regiment.

They have hardly had time to dismount before it starts.

At first they just hear the buzz of engines. Immediately afterwards six or seven British biplanes appear. Bomb after bomb explodes among the tightly packed rectangles of men and horses, bombs that within half a minute have inflicted greater losses than they suffered the whole of the previous day:

Almost two hundred horses lay on the ground in their death throes, or fled in all possible directions, maddened by pain and with blood spurting from their dangling guts. Any riders whose feet had been caught in the stirrups were dragged with them and any soldiers foolish enough to try to stop them were trampled under their hooves.

Rafael de Nogales is impressed by the pilots and thinks they have carried out a “particularly brilliant attack.”

A nearby German anti-aircraft battery manages to hit two of the planes, one of which flies unsteadily away towards the horizon, the other nosedives straight down. De Nogales watches the plane and sees it hit the ground in a plume of smoke. He immediately remounts and, accompanied by a patrol of lancers, rides as fast as he can towards the distant column of smoke, which is about three miles away.

His thought is to save the pilot’s life. Or at least his body.

He knows that the Arab irregulars currently fighting for the Ottoman army will kill, butcher and loot any wounded enemies they find. During the night he has repeatedly come across the naked and mutilated bodies of British soldiers. He also met a guide who was leading a horse laden down with rifles, bloody uniforms, boots, belts and so on, all of which he had looted from dead troops. The man had even held out a long, pale object, which in the light of a torch proved to be a man’s arm hacked off above the elbow—hacked off for the sake of the fine tattoos
that decorated it. Feeling slightly nauseous, de Nogales had bought the arm and made sure it was buried.

They reach the shot-down plane, but it is already too late.

The pilot is lying dead under the wreckage. His body is naked and his feet have been chopped off, probably because the looters didn’t want to waste time unlacing his boots:

The dead officer was blonde, his hair somewhere between tawny and red, and he was still very young. The only apparent wound on his body was in the chest, where a piece of shrapnel had entered and penetrated the lung. Because of the tremendous impact caused by a fall of more than a thousand metres his blue or hazel eyes had been pushed out of their sockets.