Despite his notorious Poiret-designed uniform and continued attention-getting adventures, including a series of noncombat flights with the dashing Roland Garros, Cocteau had earned the right to be taken seriously, at least as a witness to war. Yet he still was regarded as a flashy lightweight by much of the Paris he sought to impress. His Le Dieu bleu had been a failure, and his 1915 attempt at a circus-inspired production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream never made it to opening night. What he needed was a major figure in his corner, such as Picasso, and so Cocteau set off on a complicated pursuit of the Cubist star, involving any number of friends and friends-of-friends, including the composer Edgard Varèse and Varèse’s current mistress, the artist Valentine Gross (or Valentine Hugo, as she would be known after marrying the artist Jean Hugo, Victor Hugo’s great-grandson).
With the help of these prominent members of Parisian bohemia, Cocteau finally pulled off his much-desired meeting with Picasso, which probably occurred in mid-1915 (although it may have taken place closer to the year’s end). Picasso rebuffed him, but Cocteau persisted, applying flattery and charm. During that year, Picasso was ill (possibly with an ulcer), and he unquestionably was depressed over Eva’s steady decline. Eva died in December, but Picasso had by this time taken another mistress, creating a plethora of complexities in his life. Although Cocteau was undeniably diverting, Picasso—for the moment—remained preoccupied and unattainable.
With the outbreak of war, Stravinsky had no need to return to Russia (having been exempted from military service), and so he holed up with his wife and children in Switzerland, eventually settling in Morges. There he composed, kept up his professional contacts (including meetings in London, Paris, and Italy), and corresponded with Paris friends, including Debussy, who at one point told him: “You are, I know, one of those who can fight and win against this kind of ‘gas’ [the destruction of our art], just as deadly as the other and against which we’ve had no ‘masks’ to protect us.”26
As for Diaghilev, the impresario headed for Italy along with his new protégé, Léonide Massine, who served as an all-around replacement for Nijinsky. There, Diaghilev continued to plan for a 1915 season, with another Stravinsky ballet as the focal point. Yet by autumn 1914, with Stravinsky behind schedule and the company characteristically in need of money, Diaghilev signed on another young Russian composer, Sergei Prokofiev, for a ballet. When this did not progress as well as expected, Diaghilev (despite his famed aversion to water crossings) agreed to a 1916 U.S. tour, anchored (with an attractive advance) by a stint at the Metropolitan Opera. As it turned out, the Americans were not interested in seeing Léonide Massine dance; they wanted Nijinsky—an awkward situation that at length forced Diaghilev to try to bring back the prodigal.
It had been a difficult time for the young dancer. Upon breaking with Diaghilev, he formed his own troop and arranged for a spring 1914 booking in London. Unfortunately, his dancers’ lack of preparation as well as Nijinsky’s own shortcomings as a manager led to a dismal showing (quite possibly exacerbated by well-placed sabotage from Diaghilev). Nijinsky and his wife promptly retreated to Austria, where in June 1914, his wife gave birth to a daughter. Unfortunately, once war broke out, the authorities promptly placed him under house arrest, as a Russian in enemy territory. It would take months of intervention from the American ambassador in Vienna and U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing before Nijinsky was free to travel to America. Yet once there, he was not about to cooperate; before agreeing to dance for Diaghilev, he wanted his back wages—a considerable sum.
For that reason, as well as others, the tour was not the financial success that Diaghilev had hoped for. Still, Americans all along the lengthy tour route loved the Ballets Russes—especially after Nijinsky appeared on stage. It was a promising beginning.
Isadora Duncan returned to dancing early in 1915, in New York. There her indignation at Americans’ apparent indifference to the war found few sympathizers, except for left-wing artists and intellectuals. Adding to her woes, younger competitors had by now entered the modern dance scene (among them, Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey, who trained with Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn). The emergence of these young and vibrant competitors, plus a new craze for jazz dancing (fox trot, turkey trot, and more), made Isadora’s evocations of classical Greece look tired and dated. Perhaps most devastating of all, Isadora had aged and put on weight; neither she nor her dancing was as attractive as they once had been.
Increasingly arbitrary and erratic, Isadora alternately wooed and insulted her would-be supporters. At length, out of money and out of patience with America, she decided to leave. Two days before she sailed, a German submarine torpedoed the British liner Lusitania, killing nearly twelve hundred passengers and crew, but Isadora was not deterred. Relying on a last-minute donation to pay her way, she had virtually no money when she left for Naples on May 9, 1915. At the dock, her dear friend Mary Desti Sturges impulsively joined her on board, dashing up the gangplank (with no baggage, passport, or money) after hastily telling her by now teenage son, Preston: “Do the best you can darling. Keep things going. I’ll send you some money as soon as I can!”27
By the time Isadora arrived in Naples, Italy had entered the war on the side of the Allies. By December 1915, after many adventures, she returned to Paris, where she partied continuously and gave a sold-out performance to cheering Parisians, capped by dancing to the Marseillaise. She had not danced in Paris since the death of her children, and it was a triumph.
Old age, the enemy of actors and dancers, is especially harsh on women, as Sarah Bernhardt could readily testify. She had managed to maintain the fiction of youth long past anyone’s expectations, but now, at the age of seventy, her bad knee threatened to do her in. When war broke out, she refused to leave Paris—in part because she feared to leave the surgeon she trusted. Finally, in response to the pleas of her old friend Georges Clemenceau, she at last capitulated and left in early 1915 for a tiny fishing village near Bordeaux. There, with her leg in a cast, she impatiently waited for the painful knee to heal.
When it did not, she wrote her Paris doctor in February, begging him to amputate her leg a little above the knee. “Do not protest,” she told him. “I have perhaps ten or fifteen years left. Why condemn me to constant suffering?” She added, “I cannot bear to be useless, confined to a chair as I have been for six months.” With her typical spirit, she concluded, “If you refuse me I’ll shoot a bullet into my knee and then it will have to be cut off.”28
Bernhardt got her way, although the surgeon who agreed to perform the operation was not her beloved doctor, but one of his former students. All went well, except that she had no patience with the wooden legs sent her, and instead ordered a sedan chair (decorated in sumptuous Louis XV style) in which she could be carried about. It was now, with the city apparently out of immediate danger, that she agreed to return to Paris. Immersing herself in war work, she appeared that October in a patriotic scenario during which she somehow managed to raise herself to her full height to deliver her final, ringing, lines: “Weep, weep Germany! The German Eagle has fallen into the Rhine.”29 And then, undaunted by her recent amputation, she set out to entertain the troops.
A group of young actors from the Comédie-Française accompanied her, skeptical that she would last more than a day. Soon they were left gasping in admiration at her stamina and pluck. At their first performance, Bernhardt’s dressing room was a small lean-to with an earthen floor. She was delighted with it. Their stage was a platform reached by a ten-rung ladder; Bernhardt made little fuss and simply directed her associates to hoist her up, depositing her in an old armchair. She faced an audience of three thousand young men who, for the most part, had never heard of her and were completely unimpressed by her presence. She proceeded to do what she had always done, win them over. “With a rhythm that surged like the sounding of the charge,” she evoked the glories of those throughout history who had died for France. And then, maintaining that sam
e driving cadence, she culminated in a final cry, “Aux Armes!,” which brought them, cheering, to their feet.30
Her courage, “which laughed at adversity,” and her triumph of the spirit over frail flesh “changed our pity into admiration,” one of her fellow actors later recalled. Of all Bernhardt’s many triumphs throughout a lifetime of achievements, it was this last act that stood out above all: this “old woman of genius, who clumped along on her poor leg and in her little sedan chair, to give her blazing heart and valiant smile to the men who were suffering for us.”31
Like Sarah Bernhardt, Marie Curie was ready to give her utmost for the soldiers of France. In addition to reading anatomical treatises and perfecting her ability to use the X-ray machinery, she learned to drive a car, received her driver’s license, and became adept at auto repairs—essential when driving over bad roads to remote destinations. She could change a tire, clean a dirty carburetor, or carry heavy apparatus, all without fuss. She could eat or sleep anywhere, and did. Only when a kidney attack laid her low did she allow herself to stay in bed. Otherwise, she was out and about, on the front or in one of the three or four hundred French and Belgian hospitals that she visited during the course of the war.
While Marie lived a nomad’s life, her daughters continued their studies—Irène receiving her degrees from the Sorbonne in math (1915), physics (1916), and chemistry (1917), all with distinction. While excelling at school, Irène managed to help her mother at the front and taught technicians-in-training to use the X-ray machinery. It was a schedule that rivaled that of her indefatigable mother.
While the Curies, mother and daughter, were serving their country by bringing X-rays to the wounded, the Boulanger sisters, Nadia and Lili, worked to help musicians and actors on active duty, whether by sending them letters, food, clothing, and news about one another, or by sending assistance to their families. Lili initiated the idea. Following her Prix de Rome victory (and after yet another bout of illness), she went to study and compose at the Villa Médicis in Rome, where she was living when war broke out. It was there that she began an extensive correspondence with fellow musicians that rapidly burgeoned into a support network for musicians serving in the war.
Nadia soon joined the effort, and after obtaining the backing of several American artists and diplomats, the two sisters formed a French-American support group (the Comité Franco-Américain du Conservatoire National de Musique et de Déclamation), enlisting a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts to raise funds in the United States. It was thanks to these American contacts made during the course of this war work that American students would play such a prominent role in Nadia Boulanger’s remarkable postwar teaching career.
Quite suddenly, after a long dry period following the outbreak of war, Debussy began to compose again—in what would prove to be one of the most productive periods of his career. As he told his friend, the composer and conductor D. E. Inghelbrecht: “The emotional satisfaction one gets from putting the right chord in the right place can’t be equaled in any of the other arts. Forgive me. I sound as if I’ve just discovered music. But, in all humility, that’s rather what I feel like.”32
Earlier in the year, Debussy had agreed to revise Chopin’s complete works, given the unavailability of the German editions after the war’s outbreak. Initially, he found this work “terrifying,”33 but eventually it would help him alleviate his war-inspired panic. By summer, Chopin’s work would inspire him to write his own Etudes, which in turn he dedicated to Chopin.
From July to October 1915, in a cozy vacation house by the sea, Debussy wrote a series of sonatas for different combinations of instruments. In addition, he composed those twelve astonishing piano Etudes, five of which are so difficult that, for years, even the most acclaimed pianists refused to record them (Debussy conceded that he, too, had difficulty playing passages of some). And yet Debussy viewed these studies with humor as well as with “passion and faith”: “There’s no need to make technical exercises over-sombre just to appear more serious,” he wrote his publisher; “a little charm never spoilt anything.” He supported this viewpoint with his description of the daunting Etude, For Sixths: “For a long time,” he told Durand, “the continuous use of sixths reminded me of pretentious young ladies sitting in a salon, sulkily doing their tapestry work and envying the scandalous laughter of the naughty ninths.” And so he wrote this study, “in which my concern for sixths goes to the lengths of using no other intervals to build up the harmonies.” “Not bad,” he added cheerfully.34
He had not forgotten the war, he told his friends. Yet he had come to believe in the necessity for recreating a little of the beauty that the Germans were destroying. He kept working “at full tilt,” but by December his illness became dramatically worse, requiring an operation. “As one never knows the outcome of even the simplest event,” he wrote his wife, “I want to tell you one last time how much I love you.”35
He survived the operation, but from then on, his creativity would ebb, along with his health and strength.
In mid-October 1914, Charles de Gaulle returned to the 33rd Infantry Regiment in Champagne, near Reims, where the opposing armies had been entrenched for several weeks. There, as commander of the regiment’s 7th Company, he had little patience with the prevailing attitude of “leave the enemy alone, and he will not bother us.” Instead, de Gaulle pressed his company to take aggressive action—an approach that seems to have dismayed his men but impressed his commanding officer, who offered him the post of adjutant. Ironically, this position offered de Gaulle substantially more safety, putting him well behind the trenches in regimental staff quarters.
Still, as de Gaulle wrote his mother, it was “something of a wrench to leave my 7th Company. I had only commanded it in the trenches but it had satisfied me entirely.” During the two months the company was under his command, it had lost twenty-seven killed or wounded—a number which, de Gaulle told his mother, “is in no way excessive.”36
By early 1915, however, Marie Curie’s nephew, Maurice Curie, was coming to a different conclusion. At the war’s outset he had been enthusiastically patriotic, eager to serve. After the Battle of the Marne, he walked north to join the front near Reims—“one hundred and thirty kilometers on foot, sack on back, rain and mud, hardly any food, across the mass graves of Epernay, Montmirail, etc. It is unbearable.” Yet at that point he still wanted to join the infantry, to “take a more active part.” He would spend a full year on the front lines, much of it near Verdun, but he soon became distressed by the mind-numbing destruction he saw everywhere around him. He witnessed the bombed remains of Reims cathedral, and wrote with despairing cynicism of a small village caught in the conflagration, a village that before the war was remarkable only for its insignificance. “I am going back down now into the trenches,” he wrote later, “in keeping with my custom of serving breakfast [mortar fire] daily to these Messieurs Boches [the Germans]; they are used to it and this morning they didn’t respond, which makes the job much easier—because it has become a job, this war which never ends.”37
Chapter Eighteen
“Ils ne passeront pas”
(1916)
The Battle of Verdun began in February 1916. By the time it ended in December, the French had held the Germans, but more than seven hundred thousand troops had been killed or wounded, and three-quarters of the entire French army on the western front had fought there.1 It became as close to hell as anything any of the troops had ever seen, and they referred to it as a furnace, or inferno. “As soon as I saw the battlefield,” one infantryman recalled, “even though I had already spent fourteen months at the front, I thought: ‘If you haven’t seen Verdun, you haven’t seen anything of war.’”2
Although the town of Verdun occupied a wedge that projected across the German front, it was a strongly fortified place that seemed impervious to attack—so much so that, by early February, the French high command had compounded its earlier neglect by actua
lly reducing its defenses. Still, the very fact that Verdun jutted into German territory made it vulnerable on three sides, and the Germans took due note. France’s high command, preparing for a huge offensive on the Somme and ignoring warnings from intelligence, was oblivious to the danger. When the ferocious German attack began, the relatively small number of defenders at Verdun managed to hold on until help arrived, in the form of Philippe Pétain (who by now was General Pétain). General Joffre may have loathed Pétain, but desperate times called for desperate measures, and Joffre now summoned Pétain to defend Verdun.
Memorial to the Lafayette Escadrille, Paris. © J. McAuliffe
Pétain demanded—and received—reinforcement troops and munitions, and he immediately put into practice his firm belief in artillery barrages. Rather than leave his infantrymen (the famed poilu) in the trenches for months on end, he rotated troops in and out of action. Key to Pétain’s demands for a continuous supply of fresh troops and materiel was a narrow road, dubbed the Voie sacrée, which was the only surviving access into Verdun. Soon an endless line of trucks barreled round-the-clock over this shell-pocked Sacred Way, which immediately became an essential lifeline in France’s desperate effort to hold the Germans at bay. At its peak, when twelve thousand vehicles were employed there, one passed every fourteen seconds, day and night. This meant shifts of up to seventy-five hours at the wheel for these drivers, who were judged either too old or insufficiently hardy to fight.
Twilight of the Belle Epoque Page 38