A Broken World: Letters, Diaries and Memories of the Great War

by Sebastian Faulks

  I was at the Temple on Christmas Eve for Bach’s music. The shimmering double church was full of old and elderly men, of women of all ages, with a sprinkling of soldier-lads, brought along, on what may be their last Christmas in this world, by their mothers and sisters and sweethearts. Everyone – but it was perhaps that my own eyes and heart were opened – everyone seemed so altered from other perfunctory times, grave, sincere, aware of all it meant.

  With the first rasping notes of the organ, tearing the veil of silent prayer, there came before my mind, as when a cloud-rent suddenly shows depths of solemn moonlit sky, the fact that There also, There beyond the sea and the war chasm, in hundreds of churches of Bach’s own country (I can see the Thomas-Kirche at Leipzig, where he was Cantor, and the church of his birthplace, Eisenach), There, at this very moment, were crowds like this one at the Temple, listening to this self-same Christmas Music. There also elderly men, stay-behinds, and many, many women, old and young, and a sprinkling of soldier-lads brought for that, maybe, last Christmas at home and on Earth. Praying like these silently kneeling around me, and praying for the same mercies: Give us, O God, strength to live through these evil times, or, if so be, die to some purpose; suffer not, O Lord, who seest our hearts, that we be crushed in this war not of our making; teach us to forgive the cruel folk who hate us; give us such peace as will never be broken. Forgive us, deliver us; remember, O Father, the peace and good-will which were promised with Thy Son.

  Something like that, articulate or not, is welling up with unshed tears and silent sobs in those kneeling crowds, behind those screening hands, both on this side and on yonder, of the shallow seas and the unfathomable ocean of horror and hatred. They are united, these English and those German crowds, in the same hopes and fears and prayers, even as, unsuspecting, they are united in the same sequences of melody, the same woofs of harmonies wherewith, across two hundred years, that long dead but undying organist of Leipzig enmeshes, draws together, nooses and nets our souls to lift them, clarified, close embraced, nay consubstantial, into the presence of the new born, the eternally reborn, Hope of the World.

  They are thinking and feeling the same, those German and these English crowds. They are played into unanimity not only by Bach with his tunes and counterpoints, but by the ruthless hands of our common calamity. The same heroic, or resigned, or despairing modes; saddest of all, perhaps, the brief snatches of would-be cheerfulness, and beneath all individual, all articulate differences, the unanalysable harmonies of collective sorrow.

  They have come, those German women like these English ones, to seek rest in this church and this music after their day in hospitals and relief offices and committee rooms. They also have brought along with them their soldiers, their boys or their lovers, home perhaps for the last time; brought them from old peaceful habit, or because one can feel nearer together, without the unnerving fear of words and glances, here in this church, side by side, embracing in the music and in God. And, the service over, they will many of them, German women like English, go back to their homes, light up the Christmas tree, pull the paper caps and the favours out of the crackers, and laugh and play, so that the children at least may forget the war, and remember only that the Christ Child has been born once more. German and English, the same burdens have been brought to the church, been laid down in the prayer and the music; the same burdens have been shouldered again. Never have we and they been closer together, more alike and akin, than at this moment when War’s cruelties and recriminations, War’s monstrous iron curtain, cut us off so utterly from one another.

  United, moreover, in the common feeling of Christmas. For a symbol turns the simple fact we can singly know into the myriad applications we can together feel. And the Child Christ, whom, orthodox or unorthodox, we are all celebrating, was not born once, but is born always, over and over again. He lies in every cradle, the incarnate, unblemished hope of every land and every generation. And He is the Redeemer because every new life, like every new day after the winter solstice, like the wheat quickening in the winter furrow, is the redemption of our Present by our Future, the deliverance by our Hope from our Despair. Enmity dies and is forgotten, being accidental, changeable, sterile, and against the grain of life. But peace and goodwill on earth is born for ever anew, because it is born of the undying needs of our common humanity.

  That is the message of Bach’s Christmas music, his cosmic thunders hushed into pastoral flutings; the message of the long-deceased German organist to us English who listen; the message to us listening English back to Bach’s fellow-countrymen united with us in listening and in sorrowing and hoping.

  JOHN REED (1887–1920) was a left-wing journalist, born in Portland, Oregon. He died in Russia, and is buried at the Kremlin Wall. In 1912 he began writing for The Masses, a radical magazine. From 1913–14 he reported on the Mexican Revolution. Upon the outbreak of the First World War he travelled to Europe and published journalism based on his observations and encounters with eyewitnesses. The following passages are from his 1916 book The War in Eastern Europe.

  Late one night we walked through the deserted quarter of docks and warehouses, so filled with shouting movement by day. From a faintly lighted window came the sound of pounding and singing, and we peered through the grimy pane. It was a water-front saloon, a low-vaulted room with a floor of hard-packed earth, rough table and stools, piles of black bottles, barrel-ends and one smoking lamp hung crazily from the ceiling. At the table sat eight men, whining a wavering Oriental song, and beating time with their glasses. Suddenly one caught sight of our faces at the window; they halted, leaped to their feet. The door flew open – hands reached out and pulled us in.

  ‘Entrez! Pasen Ustedes! Herein! Herein!’ shouted the company, crowding eagerly about as we entered the room. A short, bald-headed man with a wart on his nose pumped our hands up and down, babbling in a mixture of languages: ‘To drink! To drink! What will you have, friends?’

  ‘But we invite you—’ I began.

  ‘This is my shop! Never shall a stranger pay in my shop! Wine? Beer? Mastica?’

  ‘Who are you?’ asked the others. ‘French? English? Ah – Americans! I have a cousin – his name Georgopoulos – he live in California. You know him?’

  One spoke English, another harsh maritime French, a third Neapolitan, a fourth Levantine Spanish, and still another pidgin-German; all knew Greek, and the strange patois of the Mediterranean sailor. The fortunes of war had swept them from the four corners of the Middle World into this obscure back-water on the Salonika docks.

  ‘It is strange,’ said the man who spoke English. ‘We met here by chance – not one of us has ever known the other before. And we are all seven carpenters. I am a Greek from Kili on the Black Sea, and he is a Greek, and he, and he – from Ephesus, and Erzeroum, and Scutari. This man is an Italian – he lives in Aleppo, in Syria – and this one a Frenchman from Smyrna. Last night we were sitting here just like now, and he looked in at the window like you did.’

  The seventh carpenter, who had not spoken, said something that sounded like a German dialect. The proprietor translated:

  ‘This man is Armenian. He says all his family is killed by the Turks. He tries to tell you in the German he learned working on the Bagdad Railway!’

  ‘Back there,’ cried the Frenchman, ‘I leave my wife and two kids! I go away hiding on a fisherboat—’

  ‘God knows where is my brother.’ The Italian shook his head. ‘The soldiers took him. We could not both escape.’

  Now the master of the house brought liquor, and we raised our glasses to his beaming countenance.

  ‘He is like that,’ the Italian explained with gestures. ‘We have no money. He gives us food and drink, and we sleep here on the floor, poor refugees. God will certainly reward his charity!’

  ‘Yes. Yes. God will reward him,’ assented the others, drinking. The proprietor crossed himself elaborately, after the complicated fashion of the Orthodox Church.

  ‘God knows I am fond of compan
y,’ he said. ‘And one cannot turn away destitute men in times like these, especially men of pleasing talents. Besides, a carpenter gains good wages when he works, and then I shall be repaid.’

  ‘Do you want Greece to go to war?’ we asked.

  ‘No!’ cried some; others moodily shook their heads.

  ‘It is like this,’ the English-speaking Greek said slowly: ‘This war has driven us from our homes and our work. Now there is no work for a carpenter. War is a tearing down and not a building up. A carpenter is for building up—’ He translated to the silent audience, and they growled applause.

  ‘But how about Constantinople?’

  ‘Constantinople for Greece! Greek Constantinople!’ shouted two of the carpenters. But the others broke into a violent argument.

  The Italian rose and lifted his glass. ‘Eviva Constantinople Internazionale!’ he cried. With a cheer everybody rose. ‘Constantinople Internazionale!’

  ‘Come,’ said the proprietor, ‘a song for the strangers!’

  ‘What was that you were singing when we came?’ demanded Robinson.

  ‘That was an Arab song. Now let us sing a real Turkish song!’ And throwing back their heads, the company opened their noses in a whining wail, tapping with stiff fingers on the table while the glasses leaped and jingled.

  ‘More to drink!’ cried the excited innkeeper. ‘What is song without drink?’

  ‘God will reward him!’ murmured the seven carpenters in voices husky with emotion.

  The Italian had a powerful tenor voice; he sang ‘La donna è mobile,’ in which the others joined with Oriental improvisations. An American song was called for, and Robinson and I obliged with ‘John Brown’s Body’ – which was encored four times.

  Later dancing displaced music. In the flickering light of the fast-expiring lamp the proprietor led a stamping trio in the kolo, racial dance of all the Balkan peoples. Great boots, clumped stiffly down, arms waved, fingers snapped, ragged clothes fluttered in brown shadow and yellow radiance… Followed an Arab measure, all swaying bodies and syncopated gliding steps, and slow twirlings with closed eyes. At an early hour of the morning we were giving the company lessons in the ‘boston,’ and the turkey trot… And so ended the adventure of the Seven Carpenters of Salonika.

  […]

  The handsome great sleeping-cars bore brass inscriptions in svelte Turkish letters and in French, ‘Orient Express’ – that most famous train in the world, which used to run from Paris direct to the Golden Horn in the prehistoric days before the war. A sign in Bulgarian said ‘Tsarigrad’ – literally ‘City of Emperors’ – also the Russian name for the eastern capital that all Slavs consider theirs by right. And a German placard proclaimed pompously, ‘Berlin-Constantinopel’ – an arrogant prophecy in those days, when the Constantinople train went no farther west than Sofia, and the drive on Serbia had not begun.

  We were an international company: three English officers in mufti bound for Dedeagatch; a French engineer on business to Philoppopolis; a Bulgar military commission going to discuss the terms of the treaty with Turkey; a Russian school-teacher returning to his home in Burgas; an American tobacco man on a buying tour around the Turkish Black Sea ports; a black eunuch in fez, his frock coat flaring over wide hips and knock knees; a Viennese music-hall dancer and her man headed for the café concerts of Pera; two Hungarian Red Crescent delegates, and assorted Germans to the number of about a hundred. There was a special car full of bullet-headed Krupp workmen for the Turkish munition factories, and two compartments reserved for an Unterseeboot crew going down to relieve the men of U-54 – boys seventeen or eighteen years old. And in the next compartment to mine a party of seven upper-class Prussians played incessant ‘bridge’: government officials, business men, and intellectuals on their way to Constantinople to take posts in the embassy, the Regie, the Ottoman Debt, and the Turkish universities. Each was a highly efficient cog, trained to fit exactly his place in the marvellous German machine that ground already for the Teutonic Empire of the East.

  The biting irony of life in neutral countries went with us. It was curious to watch the ancient habit of cosmopolitan existence take possession of that train-load. Some ticket agents with a sense of humour had paired two Englishmen with a couple of German embassy attachés in the same compartment – they were scrupulously polite to each other. The Frenchman and the other Britisher gravitated naturally to the side of the fair Austrian, where they all laughed and chattered about youthful student days in Vienna. Late at night I caught one of the German diplomats out in the corridor gossiping about Moscow with the Russian teacher. All these men were active on the firing-line, so to speak, except the Russian – and he, of course, was a Slav, and without prejudices…

  But in the morning the English, the Frenchman, and the Russian were gone – the breathing-place between borders of hate was past – and we fled through the grim marches of the Turkish Empire.

  ELEANOR BARTON (1872-1960) was President of the Women’s Co-operative Guild. On 4 August 1914 there was an international meeting of women and demonstration against the war in London. At 11p.m. that day hostilities were declared between Britain and Germany. The following story was told by Barton at that meeting and was included in an article in Votes for Women.

  She [Barton] told how, coming up from Sheffield, an old sailor, fifty years of age, was put into the carriage by his friends, and afterwards two young Germans got in. On the platform was the eldest son of the old salt in such a terrible state of grief that he had to be supported, as he came to see his old father off to war. Strong men and women wept together. As the train passed out of the station one of the Germans, a young married man, stood up and put out his hand to the old man, and said, ‘By God, we are enemies; give me your hand – it is not my fault.’ They shook hands, and the old salt replied, ‘It is hell, my lad. Why could not it have been settled by arbitration? I have travelled all over the world, have given thirty years’ service to the navy in China and Japan, and have never made an enemy of a foreigner, but plenty of friends.’

  OPEN LETTERS FROM THE WOMEN OF ENGLAND, GERMANY AND AUSTRIA A few months after the demonstration described above, Jus Suffragii published this ‘Open Christmas Letter’, addressed ‘TO THE WOMEN OF GERMANY AND AUSTRIA’. It was entitled, ‘On Earth Peace, Goodwill towards Men’; which was of course intended to include ‘Women’ as well. In March 1915 the reply was published in the journal. Each letter concluded with a long list of names.

  TO THE WOMEN OF GERMANY AND AUSTRIA

  Open Christmas Letter

  SISTERS, –

  Some of us wish to send you a word at this sad Christmastide, though we can but speak through the Press. The Christmas message sounds like mockery to a world at war, but those of us who wished and still wish for peace may surely offer a solemn greeting to such of you who feel as we do. Do not let us forget that our very anguish unites us, that we are passing together through the same experiences of pain and grief.

  Caught in the grip of terrible Circumstance, what can we do? Tossed on this turbulent sea of human conflict, we can but moor ourselves to those calm shores whereon stand, like rocks, the eternal verities – Love, Peace, Brotherhood.

  We pray you to believe that come what may we hold to our faith in Peace and Goodwill between nations; while technically at enmity in obedience to our rulers, we own allegiance to that higher law which bids us live at peace with all men.

  Though our sons are sent to slay each other, and our hearts are torn by the cruelty of this fate, yet through pain supreme we will be true to our common womanhood. We will let no bitterness enter in this tragedy, made sacred by the life-blood of our best, nor mar with hate the heroism of their sacrifice. Though much has been done on all sides you will, as deeply as ourselves, deplore, shall we not steadily refuse to give credence to those false tales so freely told us, each of the other?

  We hope it may lessen your anxiety to learn we are doing our utmost to soften the lot of your civilians and war prisoners within our
shores, even as we rely on your goodness of heart to do the same for ours in Germany and Austria.

  Do you not feel with us that the vast slaughter in our opposing armies is a stain on civilisation and Christianity, and that still deeper horror is aroused at the thought of those innocent victims, the countless women, children, babes, old and sick, pursued by famine, disease, and death in the devastated areas, both East and West?

  As we saw in South Africa and the Balkan States, the brunt of modern war falls upon non-combatants, and the conscience of the world cannot bear the sight.

  Is it not our mission to preserve life? Do not humanity and commonsense alike prompt us to join hands with the women of neutral countries, and urge our rulers to stay further bloodshed?

  Relief, however colossal, can reach but few: Can we sit still and let the helpless die in their thousands, as die they must – unless we rouse ourselves in the name of Humanity to save them? There is but one way to do this. We must all urge that peace be made with appeal to Wisdom and Reason. Since in the last resort it is these which must decide the issues, can they begin too soon, if it is to save the womanhood and childhood as well as the manhood of Europe?

  Even through the clash of arms we treasure our poet’s vision, and already seem to hear

  ‘A hundred nations swear that there shall be

  Pity and Peace and Love among the good and free.’

  May Christmas hasten that day. Peace on Earth is gone, but by renewal of our faith that it still reigns at the heart of things, Christmas should strengthen both you and us and all womanhood to strive for its return.

  We are yours in this sisterhood of sorrow.

  OPEN LETTER IN REPLY TO THE OPEN CHRISTMAS LETTER FROM ENGLISHWOMEN TO GERMAN AND AUSTRIAN WOMEN

  To our English sisters, sisters of the same race, we express in the name of many German women our warm and heartfelt thanks for their Christmas greetings, which we only heard of lately.