The Beauty and the Sorrow (80 page)

i
By using a very long barrel the “Paris Guns” fired shells up into the stratosphere, where the lower air resistance meant that the projectiles could travel further. The stresses created by firing the 21cm shells were so extreme that the calibre of the barrel widened slightly with every round fired, which meant that successive shells needed successively larger driving bands. Similarly, firing-chamber expansion meant that the explosive charge continually needed to be increased. Only sixty or seventy rounds could be fired before the barrel had to be rebored to 24cm. These guns were enormously expensive and time-consuming to manufacture, and, considering the outlay, achieved very little.

j
The punishment for this and similar offences was far harsher for those in uniform, whose crimes were subject to military jurisdiction.

k
Such a high casualty figure was rare. Accurate aiming from such a distance was impossible and the random landings of these giant projectiles usually resulted in far fewer victims than this. Indeed, many of them exploded harmlessly. Part of the explanation was that, in order to keep the weight of the shell down, the German constructors used a fairly small charge. Experienced soldiers hearing the explosions thought that it sounded like a much smaller 7.7cm shell. All in all, Paris came under bombardment forty-four times between 23 March and 9 August, during which 367 shells landed on the city and 250 people were killed.

l
A cousin of the former First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill.

m
Constant and confusing movements by train, backwards and forwards along the front line, were the lot of many German soldiers a few months later. By that stage it was their turn to be shunted back and forth in attempts to stem enemy pushes. It has been estimated that there were times when anything up to a third of the German army was sitting in slow-moving trains scattered across the French and Belgian countryside.

n
This joy was enhanced by the fact that the officer corps in the cavalry was a kind of special reserve for the unpopular French aristocracy.

o
In so far as Estaunié is remembered today, it is for his coining of the word
télécommunication
in 1904. He was a qualified engineer and worked for the French post and telegraph office.

p
This was also true for the camp guards. There were food shortages all over Austria-Hungary by this point, largely because of chaotic conditions and a lack of transport.

q
The Greek name for Kesis is Olympus. The sonnet was written at a time when there was still a large Greek minority living in this part of Turkey. The war that would end in their expulsion still lay some years in the future.

r
Mortality among women also rose. It increased by 11.5 per cent in 1916 and by 30.4 per cent in 1917 compared with pre-war figures. Mortality among the elderly was 33 per cent higher in 1918 than in 1914. It has been estimated that 762,000 German civilians died from malnutrition and associated diseases during the war. The average weight of a nine-year-old in Vienna dropped from 30kg to 22.8kg; in the same city only 70,000 litres of milk were being consumed daily compared with 900,000 litres before the war. Numerous institutions for the mentally ill and for the elderly closed down simply because many of the inmates had died of hunger. On top of all this, the number of births fell by almost a half.

s
The exact phrase he uses is: “Es kracht im Gebälk.”

t
After being saved by German intervention on numerous occasions since 1915 on the Eastern Front, in the Balkans and in Italy.

u
Their mother’s pet-names for her children.

v
The pitting of aircraft against balloons was a case of nineteenth-century technology facing that of the twentieth. Unsurprisingly, modernity prevailed and a balloon of this type had an average lifespan of about fifteen days. The life expectancy of the observers was, however, improved by the fact that, since 1916, balloon crews had been equipped with parachutes (in contrast to pilots; see footnote, 1 May 1917,
this page
), although these could not be deployed at altitudes below sixty metres.

w
The maximum altitude for this type of balloon is about 1,500 metres.

x
The pandemic eventually killed at least 20 million people, more than died in the war itself. (Some estimates say 40 million died, others even claim 100 million.) The first outbreak came during summer 1918 and affected the German army worst. At a critical stage, when it needed all of its troops for the push on Paris, large numbers of men were knocked out by the illness. What made this pandemic so spectacular (apart from the unusually high rate of mortality—in most influenza epidemics the death rate was 0.1 per cent of sufferers, whereas this one claimed 2.5 per cent) was that young adults, usually the most resilient age group, were hit hardest. The reasons for this are still not clear. The symptoms were also unusually severe: those infected suffered a dreadful headache, an extremely high temperature and a painful phlegmy cough. They either died or recovered within three days. Although originating in Africa, Spanish flu was so called because the uncensored Spanish press was the first to report the outbreak upon its arrival in Spain. By then, however, it had already affected several of the warring nations.

y
Hardly surprisingly, Sergy (today no more than a large village near the E50 west of Reims) is only about a mile and a half from the second biggest American war cemetery (6,012 dead) of the First World War. The cemetery is set beautifully amid greenery and situated almost exactly where the front line ran in July and August 1918. The “river” is still no more than a brook.

z
They had been exposed to mustard gas, which can easily penetrate clothing, the soles of the shoes and the skin. (Even brushing against an object that has been lying on soil polluted with mustard gas can result in injury, and inhaling the vapour from someone else’s gas-infected clothes is enough to cause illness.) Nothing is noticed at first but after about two hours the skin at the affected place begins to go red and after eight to nine hours it starts to swell. After about twenty-four hours masses of small blisters form on the swelling and these blisters then coalesce into a single large zone of injury. The wounds do not heal easily and the worst effects of gas are on the eyes, nose and mouth. In the worst cases the wounds can lead to blood poisoning and death, but as a rule recovery is achieved after six weeks of hospital care.

aa
The regiment holding the sector to his right.

bb
The proposed operation was effectively tantamount to a colossal suicide mission, hatched independently by various naval officers of limited intelligence, keen to save the “honour” of their service at the eleventh hour. Their idiotic plan caused a riot among the sailors, which was the beginning of the German revolution—an irony of history if ever there was one.

cc
At the start of the year it was still possible to find Germans who expected the war to end with the virtual extinction of Belgium and with large areas of France and Russia being handed over to Germany.

dd
To quote Frederic Manning.

ee
For instance, a seaman addressing an officer would now only have to use the officer’s title of rank once, at the start of the conversation, instead of at the end of every sentence, as had been the case earlier.

THE END

So it finally came to an end, for Pál Kelemen and for them all.

Laura de Turczynowicz’s war came to an end when she disembarked from the transatlantic liner that had carried her and her three children from Rotterdam to New York. Even though the days at sea had given her time to start adapting to a peacetime existence, she found her meeting with the great city overwhelming. The dense crowds of people filling the busy pavements exhausted her and the high, wide New York buildings filled her with a vague sense of threat—whenever she put her head back to look up she could not avoid the thought that an aircraft might appear and that the aircraft might drop a bomb. But what upset her most was that so few of the people she met were really concerned about what was going on in Europe: “their indifference was almost more than I can bear.” She could not know it at the time but she would never return to Poland and she would never see her husband, Stanislaw, again.

Elfriede Kuhr was in the same place as she had been at the start of the war four years earlier—Schneidemühl. At least one scene was exactly as it had been then: there were crowds outside the newspaper office and, just as in 1914, the situation was changing so rapidly that the latest news was announced by means of handwritten billboards, written in blue pencil on newspaper stock. But unlike four years earlier the confusion was
much greater and the unity far less. Elfriede saw a boy weeping inconsolably after someone in the crowd had hit him for making an offensive remark. There were fewer cheers, too, and many more arguments, and loud ones. Some soldiers came walking down the street arm in arm and singing. A lieutenant who started yelling at them had his uniform cap knocked off and, pale in the face, he had to pick it up from the gutter. Some civilians called the soldiers traitors. Elfriede ran home. Soon afterwards the doorbell rang: it was Androwski, her brother’s friend, and he threw himself down in a chair, exclaiming, “The war is dead! Long live the war!” Almost immediately her brother arrived, too. His cap and belt were missing, the tunic of his uniform was torn, his buttons ripped off, his shoulder straps likewise and his lapel flashes were hanging loose. His face expressed shock and confusion. Androwski began to laugh at the sight of him and, after some hesitation, her brother also started to smile.

After her death Sarah Macnaughtan was taken from London to Chart Sutton in Kent. At the end of July 1916, she was buried in the village churchyard on the hill, in the family grave, in the shade of fruit trees.
^*
As the coffin was lowered into the ground the mourners could hear the faint rumble of artillery, borne on a south wind from the battlefield on the Somme. It was afternoon and the sun was shining.

Richard Stumpf was still in Wilhelmshaven. What had started as madness ended in hysteria. The rumour spread that they had been betrayed and that troops loyal to the old regime were on their way: “The streets were like a madhouse. Armed men ran back and forth in all directions—you could even see women dragging ammunition boxes around. What madness! Is this how it’s going to end? After five years of brutal warfare are we now going to turn our guns on our own countrymen?” He was sitting writing later when he suddenly heard the sound of cheering, shouting and running, hooters blowing and shots being fired from small arms and even from cannon. Signal rockets burst in endless streams of
red, green and white up in the evening sky. He thought: “A little more dignity would have done no harm.”

Andrei Lobanov-Rostovsky found himself in a training camp in Sables d’Olonne near the Atlantic coast. He and his rebellious company had never been sent to the front and had ended up spending a dull and demoralising time as reserves behind the lines, a period that was then followed by an outbreak of Spanish influenza. He himself lay seriously ill and hallucinating in a fevered state. He recovered, only to be informed that he had been removed from his post as company commander, for which in his heart of hearts he was thoroughly relieved. At the same time he was unlucky in his love for a young Russian woman living in Nice. During this time of general inactivity he continued to devour history books and his studies reinforced his conviction that the Bolsheviks would not be in power for long. Even though he, like many others, sensed that the war was coming to an end, he found it hard to imagine a life without the war and out of uniform. “My own personality had become submerged in the conception of the whole. I think that this was a normal result of war mentality and probably the experience of millions of fighting men.” There was talk among his Russian fellow officers about whether they should join the Whites and take part in the civil war that Russia was about to face. Lobanov-Rostovsky was undecided what to do.
^†
They were carrying on with grenade-throwing practice as usual when a French officer appeared and announced with great excitement: “Stop all exercises. The armistice is signed.” There was “a wild carnival” going on in the town, with people embracing one another and dancing in the streets. The celebrations continued far into the night.

Florence Farmborough’s war came to an end the moment the ship carrying her and the other refugees steamed out of the harbour in
Vladivostock. The ship seemed like a floating palace to her. They went aboard to the sounds of music and when she entered her cabin she suddenly found herself standing in a dream of white sheets, white towels and white curtains at the porthole.
^‡
Then she stood on deck and watched this land called Russia, “which I had loved so truly and which I had served so gladly,” disappear very slowly until all that was left was a pale, grey shadow on the horizon. And then a thick bluish fog drifted in over the sea and made it impossible for her to see any more. She went down to her cabin and stayed there, making an excuse to the others that she was feeling seasick.

Kresten Andresen’s family lived for a long time in the hope that he was a prisoner of war held by the British, interned perhaps in some distant camp, in Africa, for example. They never heard anything more of him and all of their enquiries came to nothing.
^§