REVIEW: BOOKS: HISTORY: THE GATHERING OF GREAT WAR GHOSTS
by Ian Thomson
The Observer
November 13, 2011
England
By following 20 ordinary people through the horrors of the first world
war, Peter Englund has created a work of unconventional brilliance,
writes Ian Thomson: The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History
of the First World War, Peter Englund, Profile £ 25, pp544
The long summer that led up to the last days of peace in Europe in
1914 gave little hint of the storm to come. After the assassination
of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo on 28 June, however, and the
ensuing mobilisation of German troops, Kaiser Wilhelm II engulfed
defenceless Belgium, and the world was set to witness one of the
deadliest conflicts in human history. Through poison gas, starvation,
shell fire and machine-gun, the first world war killed and wounded
more than 35 million people, both military and civilian. The figure
is so unimaginable, so monstrous, that it numbs. Few had reckoned on
such a long, drawn-out saga of futility and wasted human lives.
By the conflict’s end in November 1918, from the eastern border
of France all the way through Asia to the Sea of Japan, not a
single pre-war government remained in power. The once great German,
Habsburg, Ottoman and Russian empires had fallen. Amid the moral and
material ruins of postwar Europe, many hoped to see a heroic prelude
to healing and renewal. Friends and family hurried to embrace the
troops returning home; yet within days the exhilaration of their
homecoming had evaporated. Paradoxically, some demobbed servicemen
began to fear death in a way they had not encountered at the front. “I
ought to have felt great joy, but it was as if a cold hand took me by
the throat,” records a Belgian fighter pilot. Was this the collapse
that follows on from a “great relief”? The pilot’s insight into his
psychological state was rare among surviving combatants. Few were
aware of the disturbance that lay ahead so soon after the armistice
had been declared on 11 November.
In The Beauty and the Sorrow, an extraordinary new history of the
first world war, we follow the lives of 20 people caught up in the
conflict. Among them are an American ambulance driver, an English
nurse in the Russian army, a South American adventurer fighting for
the Turks, a 12-year-old German girl and several other civilians. In
the course of 227 short chapters (some of them no more than a page
long), they take turns to tell us what they saw or felt on a given
day. Interspersed with authorial commentary, their testimonies make
up a haunting chronicle, and a convocation of ghosts.
This is by no means a conventional history. Peter Englund, a Swedish
academic historian and former war reporter, has created a sort of
collective diary in which the unknown (or now largely forgotten) lives
intertwine minutely and often poignantly. Throughout, effective use is
made of diary accounts, letters, memoirs and other first-hand material.
For Laura de Turczynowicz, the American-born wife of a Polish
aristocrat, the war is less an event to be followed than a condition
to be endured. She has found herself stranded on the wrong side of
the frontline in German-occupied Poland. Having commandeered her
husband’s estate, German troops begin to use starving Russian PoWs
as slave labour. Laura reports her deep shock at the sight of men
transformed into “animals, or even things”. However, once people have
been deprived of their humanity, it is much easier to kill them. All
future dictatorships were to understand this. (The Jews in Hitler’s
cattle trucks were so degraded by their journey to Auschwitz that they
were no longer Menschen – human beings – but animals to the slaughter.)
The book is thick with other forebodings of the second world
war. A dapper Ottoman official, on orders from his paymasters in
Constantinople, stands calmly by as Kurds bestially slaughter Armenian
Christians in present-day Turkey. “He represents a new species
in the bestiary of the young century,” says Englund – that of the
well-dressed, articulate mass murderer who condemns thousands to death
at the mere stroke of a pen. In Nazi Germany such bureaucrats would
become known as Schreibtischtater – “desk-murderers”. Apprenticeship in
Ottoman obedience in April 1915 required a stunted moral imagination;
lack of imagination (not sadism) had made the official cruel.
According to the author, the 1914-18 conflict heralded a new age of
atrocity and diminished individual responsibility for it. Politicians,
ideologues and army generals, by delegating unpleasantness down a
chain of command, were able to ignore the moral consequences of their
work. In a village deep in the Austro-Hungarian empire, an English red
cross nurse called Florence Farmborough witnesses a “new and terrifying
sound”. Austrian artillery have begun to open fire simultaneously,
again and again, to create maximum terror and destruction. “This is
something new – artillery fire as a science,” Englund comments.
Throughout the war, sympathy for victims was increasingly diminished by
physical distance. The Austrian artillerymen were only dimly aware of
the civilians and soldiers they targeted. If they could have seen the
human devastation, how might they have reacted? In one extraordinary
episode, an Allied airman is devastated to see a German pilot spiral
fatally to the ground after his plane has been hit.
Finally the airman has come to see “the human being” instead of
“some kind of gigantic insect”.
Many of the young men who joined up so eagerly in 1914 were quickly
disillusioned. The “plodding drudgery” of trench warfare in Flanders
and on the Somme took its toll. Day after day, the dead remained
unburied; horses were slaughtered for food; amputees crowded the field
hospitals. The nouveaux riches of Europe, meanwhile, grew fat on the
munitions industry. In France and pre-fascist Italy the so-called
pescecani (sharks) flaunted their war wealth in fancy clothes and
conspicuous restaurant dining. The idea of a war without end suited
them well: only the men at the front were pacifists now. Most of
them would do anything to go home (even purposely contract venereal
disease).
Michel Corday, a French civil servant, watches in disgust as
black-marketeers in Paris fleece the unsuspecting war-wounded. To him,
the glorious “war to end all wars” is now nothing but a “bitter and
disillusioning defeat”.
Inevitably, The Beauty and the Sorrow is a chronicle of human loss,
atrocity and famine. What happened at the Marne, in the Ottoman
province of Armenia, on the Gallipoli peninsula, at Ypres, in the Piave
and on the Asiago plateau was tragic, inhuman. (“I have seen and done
things I want to forget”, PJ Harvey sings on her dark, Somme-haunted
album Let England Shake.) Yet the horror is recorded here in plain,
everyday speech. Amid the symbolic poppies and wreath-laying,
Peter Englund’s book stands out as a work of magnificent, elegiac
seriousness.
Ian Thomson’s biography of Primo Levi is published by Vintage. To
buy The Beauty and the Sorrow for £ 20 with free UK p&p call 0330
333 6847 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk
Captions:
The destroyed cathedral of Peronne, Somme circa 1918. Photograph:
Ullstein Bild
Laura de Turczynowicz, the American-born wife of a Polish aristocrat,
reports her shock at the sight of men transformed into ‘animals,
or even things’.