The Great War

by Aleksandar Gatalica

  The Great War

  First published in 2014 by

  Istros Books

  London, United Kingdom

  www.istrosbooks.com

  © Aleksandar Gatalica, 2014

  The right of Aleksandar Gatalica to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  Translation © Will Firth, 2014

  Graphic design: Frontispis.hr

  Cover photograph courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London (Q 31930)

  Ebook conversion by leeds-ebooks.co.uk

  ISBN: 978-1-908236203

  This edition is supported by the National Library of Serbia and the Ministry of Culture and Information of the Republic of Serbia.

  This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

  Acknowledgements

  The author would first and foremost like to thank Petar Pijanović and Professor Dragoljub Živojinović, the first readers of this novel. He is also indebted to the hundreds of eyewitnesses who were his eyes and ears in the Great War: above all John Reed, Princess Cantacuzène and the journalists of wartime Politika, who proved that authors can also write about things they haven’t experienced first-hand as long as they are informed about events by good, reliable witnesses.

  ALEKSANDAR GATALICA

  THE GREAT WAR

  Translated from the Serbian by Will Firth

  Contents

  1914 – the Year of the Pathologist

  Prologue: Two Revolver Shots

  A Long Hot Summer

  War

  Letters of Life and Death

  First Wartime Christmas

  The Typhus Situation

  1915 – the Year of the Trader

  The Smell of Snow and Forebodings of Doom

  The Man who Did Everything Twice

  War and the Sexes

  The Father of all Gothic Doctors

  Best Wishes from Hell

  Defence and Ultimate Collapse

  1916 – the Year of the King

  The Valley of the Dead

  Far away, to the Ends of the Earth

  Miracle Cures and Other Elixirs

  Delusions as Broad as Russia

  Corporals, Chaplains and Helmsmen

  1917 – the Year of the Tsar

  Betrayal, Cowardice and Lies

  Their Time Has Passed

  Death Wears no Watch

  The Revolution Travels by Train

  1918 – the Year of the Criminologist

  The End – Kaput

  The Pandemic

  Silent Liberation

  I am now Dead

  Wishes for the New World

  Epilogue: Dreams Made of Dreams

  The Author

  The Translator

  The Heroes of this Novel

  (by warring countries)

  Serbia

  DJOKA VELKOVICH, manufacturer of Idealin

  GAVRA CRNO­GOR­CHE­VICH, manufacturer of counterfeit Idealin

  Major TIHOMIR MIYUSHKOVICH

  YANKO and DJURO TANKOSICH, conscripts from Voivodina

  Mrs LIR, a lady from Belgrade

  PERA STANISAVLEVICH BURA, journalist with Politika

  ZHIVKA D. SPASICH, seamstress

  Dr SVETISLAV SIMONOVICH, doctor to King Peter

  King PETER I

  Sergeant DIMITRIYE LEKICH, refugee

  VLADISLAV PETKOVICH DIS, accursed Serbian poet

  Major LYUBOMIR VULOVICH, sentenced to death

  Major RADOYICA TATICH, artillery

  Dr ARCHIBALD REISS, forensic scientist and writer

  ALEXANDER, Crown Prince and later regent

  Four heroic lieutenants with pocket watches

  Austria-Hungary

  MEHMED GRAHO, Sarajevo pathologist

  TIBOR VERES, reporter for the Pester Lloyd

  TIBOR NÉMETH, Hungarian soldier

  SVETOZAR BOROEVICH VON BOINA, field marshal

  HEINRICH AUFSCHNEIDER, psychoanalyst

  BÉLA DURÁNCI, Munich actor

  A VON B, spy

  MARKO MURK, Croatian volunteer

  CHARLES I, the last Austrian emperor

  FRANZ HARTMANN, occultist from Munich

  HUGO VOLLRATH, theosophist from Munich

  KARL BRANDLER-PRACHT, theosophist from Leipzig

  ANDOR PRAGER, young pianist

  France

  JEAN COCTEAU

  LUCIEN GUIRAND DE SCEVOLA, scene painter and stage designer

  GERMAIN D’ESPARBÈS, soldier

  STANISLAW WITKIEWICZ, Polish refugee

  GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE

  OLD LIBION, proprietor of the Café de la Rotonde

  OLD COMBES, proprietor of the Closerie des Lilas

  KIKI DE MONTPARNASSE, volunteer and model

  PIERRE ALBERT-BIROT, producer of postcards

  FERRY PISANO, war correspondent

  Fifty heroes of Verdun

  FRITZ JOUBERT DUQUESNE, spy

  MATA HARI, spy

  United Kingdom

  EDWIN MCDERMOTT, bass from Edinburgh

  FATHER DONOVAN, Scottish chaplain

  OSWALD RAYNER, assassin

  FLORRIE FORDE, music-hall singer

  SIDNEY REILLY, spy

  ANNABEL WALDEN, nurse

  Germany

  HANS-DIETER HUIS, opera singer

  FRITZ KRUPP, Zeppelin bombardier and later pilot

  STEFAN HOLM, soldier

  LILIAN SMITH (SCHMIDT), music-hall singer

  FRITZ HABER, chemist

  WALTHER SCHWIEGER, submarine commander

  HANS HENZE, right-handed pianist and left-handed poet

  PAUL WITTGENSTEIN, left-handed invalid pianist

  ALEXANDER WITTEK, architecture student

  MANFRED VON RICHTHOFEN, pilot

  Fifty heroes of Verdun

  ADOLF HITLER, lance corporal of the 16th Bavarian Infantry (List Regiment)

  Turkey

  MEHMED YILDIZ, Istanbul spice trader

  CAM ZULAD BEY, Istanbul policeman

  Russia

  SERGEI CHESTUKHIN, neurosurgeon

  LIZA CHESTUKHINA, Sergei’s wife

  GRAND DUKE NICHOLAS

  SERGEI VORONIN, Menshevik, soldier

  BORIS DMITRIEVICH RIZANOV, soldier

  VLADIMIR SUKHOMLINOV, Governor-General of Kiev

  YEKATERINA SUKHOMLINOVA, Vladimir’s wife

  COUNT VLADIMIR FREDERIKS, First Secretary of the Court

  ILYA EHRENBURG

  NICHOLAS II, the last Russian tsar

  Tsaritsa ALEXANDRA

  KARL RADEK, Bolshevik

  YURI YURIEV, acclaimed actor

  LEON TROTSKY, Bolshevik negotiator in Brest-Litovsk

  A fortune-teller travelling in the trains of the October Revolution

  Italy

  GIORGIO DE CHIRICO

  Note to readers: please be aware that in keeping with the standard practice of the period the novel is set, all Serbian names have been anglicised in order to allow easier pronunciation for the English reader. Major city names remain in the original.

  1914

  THE YEAR OF THE PATHOLOGIST

  Suspects arrested in Sarajevo following the assasination, 1914

  PROLOGUE: TWO REVOLVER SHOTS

  The Great War began for Dr Mehmed Graho when he was least expecting it, just when he was told that ‘two important bodies’ would be brought to the mortuary in that June heatwave. But for Dr Graho, hunched and ageing but still hale, with a bald head and prominent flat pate, no bodies were more
important than others. All the corpses which came under his knife were waxy pale, with cadaverously gaping mouths, often with eyes which no one had had time to close, or had not dared to, which now bulged and stared away into space, striving with their lifeless pupils to catch one last ray of sun.

  But that did not disturb him. Ever since 1874, he had placed his round glasses on his nose, donned his white coat, put on long gloves and begun his work at the Sarajevo mortuary, where he removed hearts from within chests, felt broken ribs for signs of police torture and searched the stomachs of the deceased for swallowed fish bones and the remains of the last meal.

  Now the ‘important bodies’ arrived, and the pathologist still hadn’t heard what had happened out in the streets. He didn’t know that the Archduke’s car had been backing out of Franz Joseph Street and that there, from out of the crowd on the corner near the Croatia Insurance building, a little fellow had fired two revolver shots at the heir to the Austrian throne and the Duchess of Hohenberg. At first, the bodyguards thought the royal couple was unharmed and it looked as if the Archduke had only turned and glanced away in the other direction, to the assembled crowd; the Duchess resembled a doll in a Vienna shop window, and a moment later blood gushed from her noble breast; Franz Ferdinand’s mouth also filled with blood, which trickled down the right-hand side of his orderly, black-dyed moustache. Only a little later was it established that the important persons had been hit, and within fifteen minutes the male of the couple had become an ‘important body’. Half an hour after that, the important female person hadn’t awoken from her state of unconsciousness, lying in the umbrage of the Governor’s residence, and she too was declared an ‘important body’.

  Now the two important bodies had arrived, and no one had told Dr Graho who they were. But one glance at the male corpse’s uniform with its breast full of medals and one look at the long, trailing, silk dress of the female body told him who had come under his scalpel. When he had undressed them and washed their wounds he was told not to extract the bullets from their bodies but just to mix a plaster slurry and make casts of their faces. That is probably why he didn’t notice that the Archduke had a small malignant tumour in the oral cavity and that something had been killed together with the lady which could have been a foetus in her womb.

  Just put the plaster on their faces and take their masks. And that he did, while shouts out the front of the mortuary mingled with the warm summer wind from the River Milyacka and the distant sound of sobbing. Just a little further away, in the street, a crowd set off to lynch the assassins. Discarded weapons were found beneath the Latin Bridge. In the panic, informants spread various rumours, mixed with copious perversion and lies, while Dr Graho stirred the plaster dust and water in his metal basin to make sure the mixture wouldn’t start to set before he applied it to the faces.

  First of all, he covered the noblewoman’s rounded forehead with the crease in the middle, then her slightly stubby nose with flaring nostrils. He filled the nasal cavity well, spread plaster between the eyelashes and carefully, like an artist, shaped the eyebrows, applying the paste almost lovingly to every hair. This was fitting preparation for the Archduke’s countenance and his black, handlebar moustache, which had to be faithfully preserved for posterity and the many bronze castings which — so he imagined — would grace every institution of the Dual Monarchy for decades to come. Was he afraid? Did his nerves show? Did he perhaps feel a little like a demiurge, crafting the post­humous image of what until just half an hour ago was Austria-Hungary’s most powerful to-be? Not at all. Dr Graho was one of those people with no loose thoughts buzzing around in their head. He didn’t daydream, nor was he plagued by nightmares. The souls of the dead from his day’s work didn’t haunt him when he closed his eyes at night. If it were otherwise, he wouldn’t have been able to become Sarajevo’s main pathologist in 1874 and receive deceased Turks and the dead of all three faiths day in, day out.

  Nor did his hand tremble now. He modelled the plaster beneath the heir apparent’s lower lip, painstakingly shaped the dimple in his clean-shaven chin, covered his eyelids and attentively devoted himself to the moustache. First of all, he removed the tallow which gave it body and then did his very best to ensure that every black moustache hair was given its coat of plaster. When he had finished, two limp, completely naked bodies with white face-masks lay side by side beneath his hands. Now he had only to wait; but then something strange happened.

  First one word, then another.

  Had someone perhaps come into the mortuary? One of his assist­ants, or a policeman? He turned around, but there was no one nearby, and the words were coalescing into a whisper. What language was it? At first, he thought it seemed a mixture of many languages: Turkish, Serbian, German and Hungarian, all of which he knew, but they were intermingled with others — Asian, he thought, African, and extinct ones like Aramaic or Hazaragi. But no, he must be fooling himself. This doctor, who never dreamed, sat down quietly on the chair; still unmoved by fright. He looked at the bodies to ensure they weren’t moving; yet even if by some chance they did, it wouldn’t have surprised him either. When the anima leaves, the body can go wild and twitch in a frenzy. He had seen this back in 1899, when one poor wretch kicked and shuddered almost a whole day after death, as if he had electricity running through him, and very nearly fell from the dissection table. Or take the woman, perhaps in 1904 or — that was it — 1905, who seemed to breathe all evening. Her beautiful, youthful breasts, which no child had suckled, rose and fell evenly before the eyes of Dr Graho, as if her dead mouth still drew breath; but it was all a trick of the eye and the doctor later documented the case in a well-received article for a Vienna medical journal.

  The Archduke and Duchess could even have embraced and it wouldn’t have surprised him. But they were speaking . . . the words wrested themselves from regional idioms and made their way to him articulately and clearly all in German. He tried to tell where the whisper was coming from and quickly established that it was the mouths beneath the plaster masks which were articulating them. Now he was alarmed. This was far from physiologically predictable and would hardly go towards a convincing lecture before the Imperial Society of Pathologists. Franz Ferdinand and his Duchess were speaking to each other. Dr Graho leaned his ear right up to Franz Ferdinand’s mouth, and from beneath the plaster mask he heard one muffled but still discernible word:

  ‘Darling?’

  ‘Yes, my dear?’ immediately came the reply from the Duchess.

  ‘Do you see these lands, this forest, whose leaves grow and fall as fast as if the years flew by like minutes?’

  In reply, there followed only the Duchess’s: ‘Are you in pain?’

  ‘A little,’ the important male body answered. ‘And you?’

  ‘No, darling, but there’s something firm over my mouth, and it’s not the clay of the grave.’

  Mehmed Graho recoiled. The plaster casts hadn’t yet set on the faces of the royal couple, but at hearing the Duchess’s words he set about removing them with trembling hands. He was fortunate that the plaster didn’t break because that would certainly have cost him the position he had quietly held ever since Ottoman times. With the two, mercifully intact death-masks in his hands, he looked at the splotchy faces of the wax-pale figures on his table. The lips were moving, he could swear to it now.

  ‘I’m naked,’ said the male body.

  ‘I’m ashamed. You know I’ve never ever been nude before you,‘ the woman replied.

  ‘But now we’re going.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Away.’

  ‘What will we leave behind?’

  ‘Grief, a void, our dreams and all our pitiable plans.’

  ‘What will happen?’

  ‘There will be war, the great war we’ve been preparing for.’

  ‘But without us?’

  ‘Actually, because of us . . . ’

  At that moment, a man dashed into the mortuary. He addressed Dr Graho in Turkish:

  ‘Doc
tor, have you finished? Just in time! The new uniforms are here.’ He continued in German: ‘My God, how terrible it is to see them naked, and their faces messy with plaster. Wash them quickly now. The court delegation will be arriving any minute. The bodies need to be embalmed and taken by express train to Metkovich harbour, from there to be shipped to Trieste. Come on, doctor, snap out of it! It’s not as if they’re the first dead bodies you’ve seen. Once they’ve stopped breathing, the Archduke and Duchess are just bodies like any others.’

  But the voices, and the war, the great war . . . Dr Graho was about to ask . . . but he didn’t say a word. Dead mouths don’t speak after all, he thought, as he handed the plaster casts to the stranger, without knowing if he was a policeman, secret agent, soldier, provocateur, or even one of the assassins. Afterwards everything went the usual mortuary way. The bodies were dressed, a new coat was quickly put on over the Archduke’s breast, new, imitation medals were attached in place of the old, bloodied and bent ones, a new gown almost identical to the silk one in pale apricot was slipped on over the Countess’s chest (no one thought of underwear now), and an evening came on just like any other, with that gentle breeze in the valley which cools Sarajevo even in summer.

  Dr Graho was on duty in the days that followed. None of the bodies on his table moved and none of them said a word, but 850 km to the north-west the entire Austrian press was firing verbal salvos at the Serbian government and Prime Minister Nikola Pashich, whom German-­speaking journalists had always despised. The reporter, Tibor Veres, worked for the Budapest daily Pester Lloyd, whose editorial office was housed in a dark, altogether diabolical building on the Pest side of the city, right by the Danube. Veres was an ethnic Hungarian from the border province of Bachka, and since he had a knowledge of Serbian he was entrusted with monitoring the Serbian newspapers. The Great War began for Veres when he read in one of papers: “Vienna, where diligent Serbian businessmen have invested for years, is becoming a bandits’ den, and the slander of Austro-Jewish journalists more and more resembles the baying of dogs.” Veres flew into a rage. He later admitted to a few colleagues that he was offended not so much as a Hungarian Jew (which he pretended to be) but as a journalist (an exaggeration, because he was an ordinary hack). And over a mug of black beer at the local tavern he snarled: ‘I’ll get them for this!’, and the drunken company took up his words in a boisterous chorus: ‘Hurrah, he’ll get them for this!’