... having been breathed out

My new therapist, doing intake: Have you ever had a period when you were in danger of harming yourself?
Me: Yes, that time we were just talking about during my first year of college.
Him: So that would have been 19? 18?
Me, GENUINELY MYSTIFIED: Are you... implying I graduated from high school the year of the Armistice with Germany?

The outbreak of war had also been a notable experience for Kresten [Andresen, a Danish-speaking conscript into the Austro-Hungarian army]. He had just put the finishing touches to a manuscript: “A Book about Spring and Youth.” It was a sort of long prose poem about folk-life, nature and young love (or rather, a longing for young love). The manuscript itself was a kind of act of love, with its pale blue cover, its elegantly coloured vignettes and illuminated capitals—all of which he had done himself. The lines with which he ended his work were these: “A bell falls silent, and then another, and another. The bells are falling silent more and more, their sounds becoming fainter and fainter, dying away until they are completely silent. Death, where are thy spoils? Hell, where is thy victory?” At the very moment he was writing these last words his father entered the room and told him that mobilisation had started. So, at the bottom of the very last clean page of the manuscript, Kresten added a few lines: “O God, have mercy on those of us going, and who knows when we shall return!”

—Peter Englund, The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War

OK, update: this book is fantastic. Reminder: Kresten Andresen was a real person, and this whole story is (Kresten claimed) absolutely true. It is at least true that Kresten wrote and illustrated “A Book about Spring and Youth” during the summer of 1914, even if his poetic and idealistic nature tends to make one question the exact timing of the way in which he learned about the mobilisation. For my purposes, though, stuff like this is absolutely perfect, because I care much less about macrocosmic causes and global truths, and much more about what the war was like for people living it, and the stories they told themselves about what was happening to them, as it happened. So Englund’s approach, of focusing on first-hand accounts from twenty different ordinary people, is pretty much solid gold as far as I’m concerned, especially since he back-fills his sources’ chaotic, in-the-moment accounts with some amount of historical context for his readers.

I also love that he’s covering more than just the Western Front, and that his stable of narrative sources includes many women, older people, younger people (12-year-old German schoolgirl Elfriede Kuhr is thus far fascinating), and people from ethnic and lingual minorities (such as 23-year-old Kresten, who hailed from Jutland, spoke Danish, and considered himself a Dane, but was technically a German citizen and so was conscripted into the army). I have, unsurprisingly, a particular soft spot for 49-year-old Scot Sarah MacNaughtan, field aid worker, who prior to the war “lives alone, unmarried and childless … has travelled a great deal, frequently in trying conditions, and … writes books.”

[Re-sharing to people's reading pages because five years later The Beauty and the Sorrow continues to be invaluable. As far as I'm concerned, if you read one book about WWI, read this one. Incidentally, Kresten later became one of several models for Daniel MacIntyre in A Hundred Hours, although by the time I was done rewriting & editing, the final version of the character doesn't bear him much of a resemblance.]

[Pollard] and others had queued for almost three hours. When the gates of the recruiting centre finally opened, he and another man—an acquaintance from the tennis club—pushed and elbowed their way through and then sprinted for all they were worth to the main building in order to be first. After all, what if the number of places was limited? And what if it was all over before they even got to the front? (His brother enlisted as a volunteer in the same unit at first, but then deserted in order to join a different unit under an assumed name simply because this second unit was expected to be one of the first sent into battle.)

Pollard loved the drill, found the long marches “rather fun” and could hardly control his excitement when he was given his rifle: “I was armed. It was a weapon designed to kill. I wanted to kill.” He often sat playing with his bayonet in secret, testing the edge: “The desire to get to the front had become an obsession.” They marched through London to the sounds of a military band. Weapons training consisted of firing fifteen shots.

—Peter Englund, The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War