Achingly eloquent voices of experience
The Great War of 1914-1918 was Europe’s self-inflicted cataclysm. Its horrors led only two decades later to a new war, necessitating the numbering of these descents into barbarism. The slaughter was numbing, the individual eclipsed by the collective, with one French diplomat famously admitting, “One man’s death affects me; fifteen thousand deaths are only a statistic.”
Swedish historian and journalist Peter Englund adopts this injunction for The Beauty and the Sorrow, a book derived from the memoirs of 20 people, 17 from all over Europe, three from America, none of them famous. The cumulative effect of their experiences is profoundly moving. Here are some examples.
Sarah Macnaughtan, May 1915: “I am not sure about the survival of personality. I care, but I do not know. But I do know that by these simple, glorious, uncomplaining deaths, some higher, purer, more splendid place is reached, some release is found from the heavy weight of foolish, sticky, burdensome, contemptible things. These heroes do ‘rise,’ and we ‘rise’ with them.”
Macnaughtan was a Scottish woman who tended the wounded in Belgium and died in July 1916. The epitaph on her grave reads, “In the Great War, by Word and Deed, at Home and Abroad, She served her country even unto Death.”
Florence Famborough, June 1915: “When we saw them we knew that the worst had happened; they were dazed and their faces were lined with an anxiety which dominated the keenness of their pain and there was that something in their eyes that checked all questioning”; August 1916: “Those ‘heaps’ were once human beings: men who were young, strong and vigorous; now they lay lifeless and inert; shapeless forms of what had been living flesh and bone. What a frail and fragile thing is human life.”
Famborough was an English nurse who was in Russia at the outbreak of the war and remained to care for Russian soldiers, allies of Great Britain.
Elfriede Kuhr, September 1915: “When a soldier is buried here he will rest on my flowers”; June 1917: “This war is a ghost in grey rags, a skull with maggots crawling out of it.” Kuhr was a German girl twelve years old in 1914.
Paolo Monelli, May 1916: “It is not the risk of dying, not the red firework display of a bursting shell that blinds us as it comes whizzing down … but the feeling of being a puppet in the hands of an unknown puppeteer — and that feeling sometimes chills the heart as if death itself had taken hold of it.”
Monelli was an Italian Alpine trooper.
René Arnaud, May 1916: “The worst mental suffering in wartime is when one’s thoughts rush off and anticipate what one has not yet done or experienced, when the imagination is given ample opportunity to consider the dangers that await—and to multiply them a hundred times over”; June 1916: “War is beautiful — to the eyes of generals, journalists and scholars. … I thought I was the same person I had been before spending ten days face to face with death. I was wrong.”
Arnaud was a French infantry officer who survived multiple battles, including Verdun, where his unit took 70 percent casualties.
Olive King, Feb. 1918: “O, Daddy, I often wonder what you’ll think of me when we meet after these five long years. I’m sure I must have got awfully rough & coarse, always being with men, & I’m not a bit pretty or dainty or attractive.”
King was an Australian woman who joined the Serbian army as a driver.
Upon hearing of the Armistice in November 1918, the Alpine soldier Monelli, who carried a copy of Dante’s Inferno with him into battle, predicted of these passages through Hell: “This is going to be our evil inheritance, or our good inheritance, in any case our irrevocable inheritance — and we are going to be fettered by our memories for ever.”
Benjamin Franklin Martin reached the rank of Captain in the U. S. Army Reserve.