by Ivo Andrić
In fact, the foreigners in Omer Pasha’s army did not constitute a separate unit because they were predominantly officers who commanded divisions and battalions of Asian, Roumelian or Albanian troops. Most served in the headquarters. A few noncommissioned officers, experts in particular fields and craftsmen, were also scattered through various units. Nevertheless, they were connected through their history and way of life and considered one body. And that is how they behaved, despite all their differences and disagreements. The largest number were Hungarian, refugees following the collapse of the 1848 revolution. There was a smaller group of Poles. They were higher in rank, enjoyed greater trust and got on better with the Turks and Turkish ways because they had been in the Turkish army for a long time, having come as refugees after failed uprisings against the Russians. But all, on joining the Turkish army, after hesitating for a short or longer time, converted to Islam, at least ostensibly.
In addition, Omer Pasha’s army included some Germans, Italians, Greeks and Armenians, for the most part doctors or technicians with various skills.
The combined number of these foreigners was not great—a hundred and fifty to two hundred men, perhaps not that many, thirty to forty of whom were officers. But, with their colorful composition, their strange ways, their often striking and odd behavior, they attracted general attention, and in the eyes of the embittered Bosnian Muslims they seemed like a legion, an infernal legion, whose number was unknown and whose wickedness and shame knew no bounds. Nowhere in Bosnia were they met with sympathy or understanding. The rayas saw them as turncoats and adventurers, with not the slightest understanding of their past or tragic destiny, while for the Muslims they were deceitful Christian spies who, under the disguise of Islam and in imperial uniforms, had come to destroy from within the peace and stable life of true believers and genuine Muslims.
The men from the traitors’ unit tried to establish connections with the foreigners, Germans and Hungarians, who had lived in Sarajevo for some time and worked in various imperial offices and as craftsmen or entrepreneurs. But even these Sarajevo citizens of foreign extraction failed to take any pleasure in the new arrivals, as they themselves had been trying for years to adapt to the Sarajevo milieu, and by the law of salutary mimicry to establish themselves on an equal footing at least with the Bosnian Christians, if not with the Bosnian Turks. And now these unwanted people from the traitors’ unit, so resented by the Turks, had reminded them of their origin and put them in an awkward position. And so they avoided them as far as they could. Nevertheless, it seemed to the Muslim population that Sarajevo and Bosnia were filling up steadily with secret enemies, connected among themselves and plotting jointly.
But the fact that at the head of the entire army that had come to punish and subdue Bosnia was a commander who was himself a deserter and a convert, “the chief and greatest turncoat,” was what they found most difficult. And most astonishing of all, he bore the title of seraskier and had come with the sultan’s decree and unlimited powers. As the Muslim people often bitterly said, he carried in his pocket the title deeds of their heads and it was only his will and whim that would decide what would become of them, of their honor and property.
So this traitors’ unit, neither particularly large nor strong in number or influence, grew in the imagination of the local Muslims, taking on the infernal aspect and fantastic dimensions of a whole enemy army, sneaking, in disguise, into these unfortunate and neglected imperial lands. And as bad luck would have it, they were paid by the empire to act, with the sultan’s knowledge and agreement, against the most loyal and steadfast Turks in the empire.
The local Christians and Jews, cautious by habit and frightened from birth, avoided now as always any dealings with the imperial army. For the most part, they pretended not to notice the great and unusual struggle between the sultan’s army and their co-citizens of Muslim faith, until recently “the sultan’s sons,” because they knew full well that it could in any case bring them nothing but damage and misery. And they particularly avoided the traitors’ unit and anything associated with it.
Nor did the men from that notorious unit always meet with understanding or full protection from Omer Pasha himself. Relations between them and the supreme commander were full of duplicity and contradiction, vague, veiled emotions that, even concealed, had an effect. He valued many of them as officers and men but had no real understanding or compassion for them. Himself once a refugee and “turncoat,” he was unable to feel sincere, straightforward affection for the refugees and converts. He saw them clearly and knew exactly what they were like. Most were despairing vagrants who had lost one homeland and not found another, damaged by life among strangers, with burned bridges behind them and no clear or open path before them, excluded from every group, condemned to being loyal soldiers because they had nowhere to go. And he knew that such people were welcome and necessary to him, as they represented the brains and advance force of his small army. On the other hand, they were constantly before his eyes as living examples of unfortunate and failed renegades, such as he would too have been had he not exceptional abilities and particularly good fortune, and had he not become what he was. Looking closely at some of these officers, he could not at times avoid thinking to himself: “I could have been like that.” Then he immediately corrected himself: “No, I could never have been or looked like that, for I am different.” This vacillation and his need to convince himself troubled him. He was even more troubled by the fear that people might associate him with these unfortunate men and see in him a kind of head of the traitors’ unit, the first and chief renegade. The dormant soul of the turncoat, suppressed by success, fame and the passing years, would wake again and occasionally surface with these men whose destiny was so like his and yet so different. And he endeavored at every opportunity and in every way to maintain the greatest possible distance from them and to be seen by the people, especially the Muslims, to have no connection to them or be identified with them in any way.
However, if ever left alone with one of these officers, he would converse with him cordially and warmly, with a consideration in which there was unease as well as a deeply buried sense of obligation. But only à deux. Once there were two or more of them, his behavior changed. Knowing that to be a true Turk meant being naturally hard, haughty, basically cold and unyielding, he made an effort to talk like a true Istanbul grandee, calmly, nonchalantly, ironically, yet forcefully, drily and distantly. And he succeeded absolutely. But the perceptive officers from the traitors’ unit exploited this behavior: if one of them wished to ask the seraskier a favor or forgiveness, he would wait for an opportunity to see him alone. Equally, they knew they must on no account mention or boast about the favor granted them, for the seraskier would never forgive them. And he was annoyed by this weakness he had to conceal, which he did not want to admit to himself, and which he endeavored to hide by his conspicuous severity and contemptuous words whenever the topic of the foreigners came up. He transferred that annoyance by trying not to see them too often and by speaking of them as little as possible, even if he could not stop thinking of them.
It is clear that the traitors’ unit had no friend or protector, rather it would be true to say that everyone hated it or at least shunned it. Nor was it a friend to itself. In the general uncertainty and misfortune of the times, it did indeed stand out as a particular misfortune. There were reasons for this, in addition to the prevailing fear, prejudice and ignorance.
In this milieu of intertwined interests and beliefs, in which the value and meaning of life were for the most part closely connected with its forms and customs, the men from the traitors’ unit appeared destructive, provocative. If not openly, in words, then by example, they bore with them unease, disorder and contempt of established forms and customs. All the differences between the Turkish and Western ways of life clashed in them and emerged from them and their actions, distorted, in their worst aspects. Having lost country and family, property and position, at the mercy of chance and the insec
urity of a refugee’s life and obliged to serve alien interests in an alien land, they carried their misfortune, like an infection, from one region of Turkey to another. Having established apparent and provisional order by brute force, in the sultan’s name, they laid waste in those regions to what others sought to destroy in their own countries: belief in the possibility of a just and at least partially stable order and in the endurance of everything people possess, believe and respect. Victims of despotism and violence in their own countries, they became the sultan’s tool for crushing unrest in Turkey, regardless of its aims, aspirations and motives. And they served and perished in enterprises that only accelerated the inevitable process of decay of a doomed and exhausted empire, for which there was no cure, for both the cure and the sickness were equally fatal.
Their ill fortune made them insensitive to the miseries that they saw every day in various parts of the empire and that they often provoked or at least exacerbated. It freed them from consideration and remorse, so most of them had become hardened, abandoning themselves to sensual pleasures, disorder and violence. Only a few had retained something of the humanity and moral strength with which in their own countries they had once risen to the defense of their rights and what they held sacred. The temptations to which these fugitives were exposed were numerous and the vices to which some of them had succumbed various. But, with a few exceptions, they had all fallen prey to one vice. Drinking.
Their life, or rather their compensation for a lost life, their main task and final uncertain refuge, their love and hatred, hopeless love and impotent hatred, their medicine, their sickness and death—was drink. Drink and its powerful, deceptive, short-lived effect. Almost all of them drank, copiously and furiously, with no order or measure. And whoever did not drink was regularly grim and sullen, poisoned more by his own black thoughts than by the strongest drink.
Liked by no one, blamed by everyone, a burden to themselves, they chose drink as their friend. It was for drink that they worked, lived and died. They thought, dreamed and talked about it, they fed on it, breathed it. They marched and set up camp, left and returned, conversed and stayed silent, sang and wept with drink, in it they found curses and prayers, tenderness and bitterness. They drank in the garrisons and winter quarters from Aleppo and Baghdad to Bihać in Bosnia, they drank as they prepared every campaign, in the course of the battle and after it, resting or treating their wounds; they drank on an empty stomach, with food and after it, before sleep and during brief spells of wakefulness when roused by bad dreams and tormented by indigestion.
They drank anything that intoxicates, fuddles the mind, anything that silences memories, clouds the present and conjures a better future, anything that can at least for a moment alter the image of the real world, which was for them insupportable. They drank brandy of every kind and strength, from healthy plum brandy to a nameless light, insipid spirit of no specific origin; double-distilled, yellow with age, and pale raw spirits which they snatched still lukewarm from the sheds, impatient because of the slow drip of the still pipe; mastic-flavored liquor and poisonous ethyl alcohol, as well as good Dalmatian grappa; beer, young as well as mature; noble wines from the Greek islands and country brews; foreign drinks brought by consuls and seamen; champagne, cognac, rum, arak, vodka, whiskey, liqueurs, real and imitation, grogs and punches. And when everything ran out, they drank diluted, barely diluted, pure alcohol or stinking hastily filtered spirits.
They drank everything that could and could not be drunk but which intoxicates, they drank mercilessly, unstintingly, greedily, downing it in one or savoring it slowly, in company, in wild sprees, or each on his own, secretly and silently. They got into debt and disgrace, lied and quarreled because of drink, they stole it and hid it, and then at night, furtively and soundlessly, poured it into themselves; but, equally, they would share the last drop with a good friend, because a passion is sweeter when shared.
Drink made them capable of anything, of theft and violence, deceit and vileness, as well as valor in war or generous acts in everyday life; it buoyed and supported them, but it also poisoned and corroded them, and from day to day it changed them, in the way that drink always changes people: never for the better.
That was the traitors’ unit.
•
It was not long before everything that people knew or thought they knew about the army turned out to be inaccurate or insignificant. The soldiers rested for three weeks, organizing themselves and settling into their quarters. Then all at once the malicious and naive gossip dispersed, and the army began to show its true face. That was the end of games, parades and idle chatter. As that throng of men were gathered into planned units, with specific tasks, so individual soldiers disappeared, along with the little groups that had roamed the streets and hamlets, damaging their image or at least frightening people with their mere appearance. Now the individual soldiers and small groups of them began increasingly to merge into one single monstrous body, immense and unpredictable in its movements and behavior but terrible and threatening for the country through which it moved.
Time, Turkish time that stands still, suddenly speeded up, showing its true face. Regardless of innovations in dress, armaments and the quality of the commanders, regardless of centuries of imperial decline, this was now an Ottoman army, just as it had been from time immemorial, as it had been when it entered this country four centuries earlier, as it had remained in its essence, and as it would remain as long as there was a sultan in Istanbul, with his vizier in Bosnia. An army that united all the living forces of the country, that sought conflict and destroyed everything before it, not caring whom it struck, and defending itself as best it could and as far as it could, and when it did receive a blow, because the great game of life and death consists of blows inflicted and received, it endured it stoically for it belonged to a simple and ancient way of understanding the world.
At the same time, this army was different, worse and more of a burden than traditional Turkish armies, because it had neither their former sense of vocation and greatness, nor their morality, restraint and good order. Now it moved like a fluid, like dark, red-hot lava that rolls, swirls, crackles and erupts, stopped by nothing so long as its heat and weight endure.
The army moved about, requisitioning animals and food just like those earlier imperial armies with no uniforms or proper drilling. The only difference was that this one handed out receipts for requisitioned goods, which those deprived of their possessions usually could not read, and in which no one had any faith; they handed them out until they grew tired and bored, then they gave that up as well. In every district the army moved into, at the beginning, there may have been occasional uninformed peasants from the mountains who came down with a horse, not suspecting trouble, only to find themselves suddenly facing a dozen soldiers in dark uniforms, like a terrible court from which it was impossible to escape. And the same or similar scenes were enacted on the main highway and on smaller roads.
The soldiers wave their arms and rifles and yell, while the stunned peasant does not know what to do first. He casts his eyes around, pretending not to understand. And when instead of explanation they start tugging the halter rope from his hands, he plants his feet firmly on the ground, resisting with all his strength, spreads his arms wide, straining, doing whatever he can to hold onto the animal they are taking from him with incomprehensible shouts but clear gestures. He holds the animal by the halter right by its muzzle, then bit by bit, centimeter by centimeter, the taut rope slips through his desperately clenched hands, yet he feels the horse is still his, though less and less so. Finally, they snatch the rope away, and he is left there, legs splayed, arms outstretched. In this unnatural posture, a true image of impotence, a speck of human dust, stirred up in the unequal struggle with mischance and a deadly whirlwind called the imperial army. Then he looks around to see how to get off the road and, empty-handed as he is, disappear as fast as possible into the undergrowth. The soldiers hold him back and force him to accept the receipt the juni
or officer, sitting by the side of the road, is writing on his knee. The peasant waits patiently, adding this to the enormous loss he has suffered, then takes the piece of paper, shoving it into his belt, his gaze fixed on the little horse they are leading away from him.
At the beginning, the roads in the area emptied as the news reached the most remote village. Then the army, seeking what it needed, traveled further afield, through the houses and shops in the neighboring villages and hamlets.
But the lands the army moved through did not suffer only from official requisitions. The imperial army needed a great deal, seeking with its thousands of eyes and taking with its thousands of hands everything it required or destroying without rhyme or reason. An army does not need only bread and lard, meat and salt, packhorses, yoked beasts and animal feed but also drink, entertainment and women. For an army consists for the most part of young men with little to do, with hungry senses, desiring everything. Its exceptional exertion, military discipline, the constant proximity of disease, injury and death only sharpen that hunger and that desire. In a strange country and far from home, a soldier becomes hardened, and feeling that no one spares him, in turn spares no one and nothing. Poorly equipped and paid and irregularly fed, he helps himself as best he can, mercilessly requisitioning, frequently stealing and sometimes taking by force.
The army marched in two directions, to the north and the northwest, to the regions of Krajina, the western border with Austria, and to the valley of the Sava River, its movements elusive and unpredictable. It was everywhere. It flowed through valleys and spread over slopes. It sought out rebels and their defiant blood, and along the way its soldiers struck fear into the hearts of those who were in any case always frightened, taking their last possessions, ruining their material goods, exhausting their horses, slaughtering cattle and other stock, capturing and exploiting laborers. They ate whatever they could find and buy, and whatever they could take and steal, even stale or unripe. They drank any kind of brew. They were never sated nor quenched. Even if an advance party went two days’ march ahead to destroy or spill every barrel of brandy they found, it was useless: most officers drank too, and this ruined discipline and increased disorder. The soldiers were infected with diarrhea, jaundice and venereal disease and spread their infections around.