The Beauty and the Sorrow

The Beauty and the Sorrow combines a bit of All Quiet on the Western Front with For Whom the Bell Tolls, provides a different perspective on the events witnessed and/or instigated by Lawrence of Arabia, and includes a dash of Downton Abbey for good measure (the phrase “bow and scrape to their masters” even makes an appearance on page 361). It is a truly all-encompassing look at World War I. This book is very often raw and brutally vivid; initially I found it difficult to read more than a couple of dozen pages at a time but, like the population of Europe, the further along the war progressed, the more I became desensitized to the horrors of the war. That said, a more apt name for Peter Englund’s tome on World War I might have been The Sorrow and the Sorrow, for it is hard to see the beauty amongst the blood and slaughter of The Great War.

As I have noted previously, the Lawrence of Arabia biography, Hero, is one of my best and most favorite books from 2011, so I was eager to read a book devoted entirely to World War I. This is not a book about the history of the war, its causes or ramifications, but rather it seeks to allow the reader to feel what it was like to live the war, using first-hand accounts from individuals who experienced it in any number of ways. These include a German schoolgirl, an American neurosurgeon, a Belgian flying ace, a French diplomat, and any number of foot soldiers from the armies of Russia, France, England, Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Australia. 

Very early in the book, the senselessness of the entire affair is articulated by a German prisoner of war who writes, “The great lords have quarreled, and we must pay for it with our blood, our wives and children” (p. 18-19). Indeed, much of the population seems to be asking itself how this could have happened.  A Scottish aid worker, who will die during – though not of – the war and be buried in England with the guns in France audible across the Channel, likewise wondered, “Can one man be responsible for all this? Is it for one man’s lunatic vanity that men are putting lumps of lead into each other’s hearts and lungs…” (p.37). I felt some measure of justice that Gavrilo Princip, who wrought such hell with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, died not by the hangman but by tuberculosis, one of the most dreadful-sounding diseases I can imagine. Naturally, however, he was still a fanatic when he died, and felt no remorse for the war he began. (Yes, the tensions in Europe had been at a simmer for some years and if the assassination of the Archduke didn’t start the war something else likely would have, but still.)

Having studied European history at various points in school, I was aware that World War I wasn’t “The War to End All Wars” for no reason; yet, I was still unprepared to encounter in black and white the sheer scale of the bloodshed. Russia, the reader learns, lost four million men in the first 18 or so months of the war. Yet, these aren’t just words on a page. Englund does a masterful job of pulling the reader into the war, incorporating not just anecdotes but individual comments and quotes that put war into its starkest terms. For example, on page 116, he quotes Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa Kemal (later Ataturk) as shouting to his soldiers “I am not giving you an order to attack, I am ordering you to die.” In so many armies this practice was so routine that it is unconscionable. A French officer reflects before slogging  to the front that he will be relieved of his command once three-quarters of his men are dead or wounded – or he will die before he can be relieved. And, of course, I can’t leave out disease. For example, we learn that in early 1918 the Army of the Orient can nominally count 600,000 men among its ranks, but “once malaria, dengue fever, and other afflictions have done their bit” (p. 434), only 100,000 of the men are fit for service. Is it any wonder that before the war was over France would be drafting 17-year-olds and England would be “freeing” convicted murderers to go and fight the Hun?

“Endurance is far harder than bravery.” This phrase appears less than half-way through the book (p. 239) and is beautiful for its concise and painful truth. The grind that every man, woman and child faces – the burned out villages, famished children, refugees on the move – is almost unimaginable today. If It is difficult for me to reconcile these scenes with the Europe I have visited, picturesque, quaint, and above all, civilized, it is nearly impossible for me to remember that this devastation happened less than 100 years ago. Toward the end of his book, Englund notes that the world of 1918 is “a little thinner, a little less solid, and a little less substantial” (p. 470) than the world before the war. And, of course, these same countries will fight the same battles just one generation later.It all seems such a waste.