One War, Two Sides

Diaries kept by soldiers in wartime are often most interesting for their inconsequential details, the scraps of normalcy their authors observe or remember and have chosen to record. As a lifelong civilian with no experience of combat, I can only speculate that anything unrelated to imminent violence and death must appear worth cherishing regardless of how mundane it might seem on the home front. What follows are passages from diaries kept by two soldiers on opposing sides in World War I.

First is Edward Thomas, born of Welsh parents in London in 1878. He worked as a freelance writer before the war, and all the poetry we know him for was written in little more than two years, most of it after he had enlisted in the artillery. Thomas was killed in France during the Arras offensive, in April 1917. This diary entry is dated March 14, 1917, less than a month before his death:

“Ronville O.P. Looking out towards No Man’s Land what I thought first was a piece of burnt paper or something turned out to be a bat shaken at last by shells from one of the last sheds in Ronville. A dull cold morning, with some shelling of Arras and St. Sauveur and just 3 of us. Talking to Birt and Randall about Glostershire and Wiltshire, particularly Painswick and Marlborough. A still evening – blackbirds singing far off – a spatter of our machine guns – the spit of one enemy bullet – a little rain – no wind – only far-off artillery.”

Robert Musil was born in 1880 in Klagenfurt, Austria. He served as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army throughout the war, but already had a reputation as a fiction writer by the time he enlisted, having published Young Törless in 1906. The diary of the future author of The Man without Qualities is a more finished, ironical, “literary” document than Edward Thomas’, but no less filled with homely detail. This is from Oct. 23, 1915:

“Patrol combat action. The dead man’s few possessions lie wrapped in a shred of newspaper on our dining-table. A purse, the rose from his cap, a short, small pipe, two oval tin boxes containing ready-cut Toscani – cigar-like cigarettes – a small, round pocket mirror. From these objects streams a heavy sadness…

“Italian picture postcards, taken from the prisoners. Not probable that this nation’s desire for war is already exhausted. The cards show their soldiers in the favourite heroic poses; they are still nothing but a soldier’s game. Particularly fetching is a card subtitled `The Destruction of Austria’s Frontiers.’ An officer stands – quite small, his men behind him – on an upturned black and yellow frontier post. Approximately in the `sortie’ position. In his left hand the flag, in his right hand his spadone [a sword], lowered. He is shouting. Shouting into the void…Another sign of how much they still love war is reflected in the fact that the cards depict la patria and d’Italia in very erotic fashion: always as a young, tender, rather forlorn looking girl, who does not really look very Italian. Here a feeling previously unknown breaks through to the surface.”