The Great War

by Aleksandar Gatalica

  He was also the loudest at the recruitment office. He almost got into a fight there with some smooth-faced striplings from Bátaszék, just for the sake of it — he wanted to show everyone that he was bursting with vigour. But he was much more at home in his skin when they allocated him to a unit behind the lines where his job was to read the letters of prisoners of war. Our old operative’s knowledge of Serbian was decisive once again, so Veres left the recruitment office with his travel papers in hand and a pretend tear in the corner of his eye; he set off for the banks of the Danube, to the border town of Zemun.

  One very different recruit, his namesake but with the surname Németh, a Hungarian on both sides of the family, was happy that day to be allocated to a reconnaissance detachment. For Tibor Németh, the Great War began when he left the recruitment office with his travel papers in hand and tears of joy in his eyes, exultant that he’d be conti­nuing the heroic Hungarian warrior tradition of both his father’s and his mother’s side of the family.

  Many trains were heading for the front in those few days, carrying cheerful recruits who waved little flags out the windows of their compartments. Tibor Veres set off on the morning troop train to Zemun. The small-time journalist took along one change of civilian clothes, so his colleagues in the censorship unit wouldn’t mock him, and one small suitcase. This travelling bag contained a supply of black ink for three months, which is how long he thought the war would last, a certain amount of paper, and two fountain pens: the disobedient one with the blue ink and the new, obedient one filled with black ink, which produced such lovely German expletives. Tibor Veres thought he looked good in the freshly ironed bluish-grey uniform coat, which he tightened with the belt bearing the inscription ‘Königlich ungarisch’ on the buckle. He cocked the peaked cap with the badge of Franz Joseph on top and winked to himself. He didn’t take a helmet. Tibor Németh also set off to Zemun, but on the evening troop train. He thought he looked good in his freshly ironed bluish-grey uniform coat, which he tightened with the strap with ‘Königlich ungarisch’ embossed on the buckle. He cocked the peaked cap with the badge of Franz Joseph at the top and smiled at himself. He took a helmet as well. His father had managed to find the money for a gas mask, but he thought it best to save some money so, like Scevola in Paris, he didn’t buy a mask. Nor did Németh take any ‘civvies’ along with him.

  The two trains arrived at their destination. Dozens more would set off the next day, and hundreds more throughout Europe. If each of them had drawn a red woollen thread behind them, the blood-red trails would have formed a net covering the Old Continent. Ninety trains alone would leave from Petrograd and Moscow in those few days. The nurse Yelizaveta ‘Liza’ Chestukhina and her husband, the surgeon Sergei Vasilye­vich Chestukhin, would be sitting in one of them. For Liza and Sergei Chestukhin, the Great War began when they took their little daughter Marusya from Moscow to Petrograd to stay with aunt Margarita Nikolaevna because both of them were being sent to the front. Mama and Papa had both been assigned to the hospital train V.M. Purishkevich, and for little Marusya everything seemed like a dream. What was ‘the front’? What did a hospital on rails look like, and how did it treat the wounded? How could a person be injured if she wasn’t even allowed to fall and hurt her knee? And where was their maid Nastia? Had she gone to the front too?

  Questions abounded in the little girl’s head, but there was so little time for their farewell in the house on Runovsky Embankment. Marusya remembers her father standing at the end of the room and smoking. He threw restless glances at her and her mother and repeated what sounded like: ‘Lizochka dear, don’t make her cry now.’ But Liza bent over and her thick, copper-coloured hair tumbled down as she whispered to her daughter that she’d bring her back the loveliest Punch puppet, as if she was going on a shopping spree to Paris rather than to war. In the end, her father kissed her goodbye too. His moustache was prickly and he smelt of fine tobacco. Then they left; sooner than they needed to, but not showing any signs of distress.

  It was those who remained behind, in Petrograd, Antwerp or Belgrade, who were disturbed. Djoka Velkovich, the loser of the Belgrade duel, lay in the old Vrachar hospital in Belgrade in a bed for the seriously ill. The doctors removed the bandages and gave him a mirror. He saw that his right eye was bulging bizarrely, without the upper eyelid, lashes and brows. All the surrounding skin was as red as a pomegranate. In fact, the whole right half of the trader’s face was red; and the doctors worried that something nasty might happen when they told the patient he’d stay that way forever. Finally they told him the truth, but nothing did happen. It was as if Velkovich had come to terms with his appearance the very moment the barrel of his Browning burst at the racecourse. And until the end of that day, he didn’t think of leaping out of bed and flinging himself headfirst through the open window of the hospital. Before going to sleep, he thought he ought to have a shave, and he almost smiled at his half-burnt lips. No stubble would grow again on the right-hand side, and he’d easily be able to shave the left-hand side with half the amount of soap. He wanted to call someone before he dozed off, but in the end he didn’t. He fell asleep and didn’t dream anything.

  Neither did Jean Cocteau dream that night. At the twelfth hour, when it was time to go to the recruitment office, he looked in the mirror and saw his protruding ribs and sunken stomach. All the rich and fatty food, the slabs of bread thickly spread with goose-liver pâté and garlic, the whole flocks of partridges and ducks he had eaten, seemed to have done nothing to change his physical appearance. He therefore resolved to take a desperate step that afternoon: he sat down to an abundant meal with an admixture they said wouldn’t harm his bowels: ordinary buckshot. Cocteau stirred it into the minced meat on his plate and ate like a man who hadn’t eaten in a long time. He set off for the recruitment office with a full stomach. He was a little pale and visibly anxious, but definitely at least two kilos heavier. If only he didn’t vomit a minute before stepping on the scales . . . he left his flat and cut through the Tuileries Gardens, taking care to choose a route with as little chall­enging food outlets as possible along the way, which might cause his stomach to heave. The park was safe: the trees and flowers didn’t have smells which could remind him of food. Then he turned the other way. Between Place de l’Observatoire and Rue de Vaugirard he saw a few emaciated people out walking, who, like him, were avoiding all danger from smells, since there were no restaurants there. Afterwards he took Rue Férou to Saint-Sulpice, and then went down to the River Seine. Paris around him was quiet.

  Belgrade was also far too quiet at the hour Djoka Velkovich fell asleep. That evening, Liza and Sergei Chestukhin arrived by train at the eerily quiet Eastern Front. There they went aboard the armoured hospital train V.M. Purishkevich. Sergei took charge of the operating theatre in the third wagon, while Liza changed into a Russian Red Cross nurse’s uniform and put on a starched apron so white that she thought it would be a shame if it got blood on it. The train stood at the platform in the town of Bologoyev for some time before moving off with a jolt. It was headed for Likhoslav, and then on for the border with accursed East Prussia! With that jolt, all the doctors and nurses in the train knew that the war had begun for them even before the first bursts of fire.

  Sarajevo was also quiet as night fell on the eve of war. Mehmed Graho thought about all sorts of things: about regicide, about his Orthodox Christian ancestry, although he kept that to himself, and about the genera­tion of his great-great-grandfather who, for him now long ago, had converted to Islam. He had his own explanation for the war: the dead had risen up to fight the dead. The end of the last century had revealed something troubled and rotten, it had consumed people, and now one batch of humankind was to be purged and replaced with another. Wars had served that purpose since time immemorial. He went home that evening after work, undressed and went to bed. He didn’t dream anything, but many others did.

  They dreamed beneath Europe’s starry, starry summer sky in those nights: stable boys and gunners, batmen and
their officers, and generals and their chiefs of staff. That night when the armoured hospital train V.M. Purishkevich headed off from the main platform of Bologoyev station towards the war zone, the commander-in-chief of Russian forces on the Eastern Front also dreamed. For Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, the generalissimo of the Russian army, the Great War began when he drifted off into a most unusual dream; he entered a large hall, like a huge underground dance floor, where couples were spinning with wild abandon.

  He found it strange that he saw no windows or daylight; the ball in his dream was taking place in some kind of bunker and no one except him seemed to mind. Then all of a sudden, as these things go in dreams, he too felt a desire to dance. He looked around for his wife, the Montenegrin princess Anastasia Petrovich, but she wasn’t to be seen. So he decided to take to the dance floor by himself. He discovered that the couples were just men, in the uniforms of the tsar’s army. Not a single woman was dancing with the officers, but mostly batmen with their lieutenants, artillery captains with gunners, colonels with orderlies, supply-office chiefs with their grooms.

  Now that’s what I call a real officer’s ball, Grand Duke Nicholas thought and called out for his chief of staff, General Yanushkevich. Who would a commander-in-chief dance with if not with his faithful chief of staff? He just yelled once and there he was, right behind him. They couldn’t agree which of them would lead, but then the ‘male role’ in that dance of men was naturally given to the commander, who now swirled with his partner over the polished parquet of the hall as if bewitched. At first, the steps of his chief of staff were as light and nimble as those of a bar-room dancer, but after a while his response to the long steps and lively turns became ever more sluggish. Yanushkevich was melting away, Nicholas noticed, the smile had disappeared from his face, and soon he could neither dance nor move. The music stopped and the commander-in-chief now saw to his astonishment that he was in a hall with hundreds of clay figures and that he had been dancing with one of them. Every bust had a face, and all of them were dressed in uniforms of stiffened fabric. Then the last stage of his dream began: he was running between the ranks — there were thousands of them in that dance hall now — and he saw that a stream of blood trickled from the clay chest of every one of them. Some seemed to have been pricked with a sewing needle, as there was only a tiny trickle of blood between the buttons of their coats, while others seemed to have a blooming scarlet lily on their breast . . . and none of them fell. He stood at the parapet of the dance front and it seemed they were all waiting for the music to start again and a danse macabre to begin, but at that moment the generalissimo woke up. And he muttered to himself with parched lips: ‘A mighty carnage is going to come.’

  He called his orderly and asked for a glass of cold water and a compress for his head. It took him half an hour to recover, and then the commander’s Spartan mind once again began to think about lines of battle, strategic heights, natural obstacles and weather conditions, as if there had never been people on earth, beneath the sky. He asked that he be brought ordinary soldier’s fare from the canteen that day and that his tea in the afternoon be sweetened with saccharin. He didn’t allow himself to turn in for the night on the metal camp bed until late. Shortly before morning, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, dubbed ‘the Iron Duke’, realized that this war would be won by the horses, which lugged the machinery of war and the heavy guns. How mighty a power would be which could transport its wartime arsenal by train or even by plane, he thought; he realized this would be impossible for Russia.

  But one soldier-to-be did set off to the front by aeroplane. That soldier, however, would never take a gun in hand because he was told in Berlin before he left that Germany had sufficient soldiers to satisfy the Sphinx of war; one needed to think about how to preserve the country’s most talented people for the period after the conflict, so there would still be a civilization to speak of when the world war and its tribulations finally ended in German victory. The name of the passenger in that plane leaving for the German-Belgian border was Hans-Dieter Huis. Maestro Huis had been assigned to the staff of General Kluck to organize concerts for the senior officers. Before boarding the plane he was given a pair of leather overalls with a hood, flying goggles and a red scarf — the trademark of German pilots. The plane was captained by flying ace Dietrich Ellerich, who had recently amazed the old, civilized world by flying his plane to an altitude of eitht thousand metres. That day, the squadron included seven other German-manufactured biplanes. Pilots and Zeppelin crews on the ground saw them off with defiant cries of ‘To Paris!’, and Hans-Dieter Huis, not doubting German victory for a moment, wondered how his pre-war Parisian audience would greet him when he came onto the stage as an invader and sang Mephistopheles from Gounod’s Faust in German. Yet now, at the beginning of the war, Huis didn’t dare to think about what would be after the war. They landed in a strong wind on the grassy strip of the small aerodrome in Evere, north of Brussels. It was a rough landing. He was glad to reach terra firma again, but he didn’t want to show his fear. His pale face gave him away. While he was being introduced to several generals from Kluck’s staff, he thought that music would reconcile the nations, but he couldn‘t have imagined that he’d be putting that idea to the test that very same year, at an unexpected moment.

  That day, four hundred kilometres to the south, the soldier Jean Cocteau set off to join an aviation unit at the aerodrome in the town of Bussigny. He was assessed at recruitment to be ‘malnourished’ but was enlisted all the same. He had a very, very nasty time that evening and the next, expelling the undigested buckshot, but he was glad to be still alive and to have become a French soldier. And now he was going to war. But who cared about the war? a uniform and unconfirmed martial glory were much more important. He started daydreaming. He’d return to Paris in the uniform of the victors, enter Café de la Rotonde, wave to Old Libion, and sit down at a table with Picasso.

  WAR

  There’s going to be a big war. The less-than-loquacious owner of the café Casino in Shabac remembered Major Tihomir Miyush­kovich for these very words, uttered on the decisive day of his life, Tuesday, 29 July 1914, by the old calendar. Proprietor Kosta and his plump wife Hristina reacted to the insistence that they say something more about the major with the same enthusiasm as if the tax collectors had just knocked on their door: ‘Look, that’s all we remember about him. Lots of people come here, all different ranks, all sorts of weird and wonderful folk . . . and we’re good people and upright publicans, you know. When we had to pay the tax for street lighting, we were the first in Shabac; when they introduced a duty on music, we took it straight from the street musicians’ pay so we could give the government its due.’ And the major? They seemed not to remember him, as if they had only passed him in the street, as if he was an apparition or a human shell which didn’t have emotions of its own and didn’t notice its own suffering or that of others.

  There’s going to be war again, a great war, Major Tihomir Miyush­kovich is said to have muttered on that fateful 29 July 1914, after he’d come from café Casino to the Nine Posts. The owner of that café, a certain Zeyich, a man without children or a woman at the hearth, remembered the major much more clearly and filled his strawy exterior with substance, some of which shone through. ‘I hardly remember the major. My memory doesn’t serve me all that well, I must admit. But I’m a decent man and orderly in every other regard. When it was time to give the government its due, I never asked questions and haggled. No, my good sir, I demanded that they tax me the most — for the thirty electric light bulbs in the garden. Yes, me . . . I didn’t let anyone leave my place for the unlit streets without a guiding light, be he tipsy or dead-drunk. Now, if you’re asking about the major, I’d say he was a nasty fellow: the wars had made him coarse, he was blind with the desire for promotion and had turned his back on his native land, but not before his endless frenzy had cast a pall on his neighbours. The army was his morning and his evening. He drilled his soldiers hard and drove the draught anima
ls to their limits: he whipped horses until they foamed at the mouth, and muscle-bound bulls would tremble when he harnessed them into a team and made them haul a battery to the River Drina. The army was dead scared of him. Granted, he was even-handed, but talk about a hothead, talk about a brute. He broke a soldier’s arm or leg every week with his blows. I don’t know any more than that. Yes, he dropped in here on that last day of peace in July before the accursed Austrians attacked us. What did he do? He drank, sir, and we don’t know anything more than that. After all, I’m a respectable man and publican. When they introduced the tax on music, I said: I’ll pay in person for a big band and won’t take a penny off the street musicians’ baksheesh. That’s the kind of man I am.’

  There’s going to be war again. A great war. These words of the major’s were well known to the owner of Shabac’s café Amerika, whom some call Munya. And now Munya, a perpetually overtired man with a puffy face and dark circles under his eyes, finally told the whole story about Major Tihomir Miyushkovich. He took what little is known from café Casino, added the strawy substance with a shine from the Nine Posts, daubed the straw with soil and breathed life into it after what he heard in his café, Amerika. ‘Yes, I remember the major and that decisive day in his life. It was Tuesday, 29 July 1914 by our calendar. It was the last day of peace for many: for us publicans, for our guests, for Shabac and for Serbia. You know, there are some people who sail through the decades and arrive, crying or laughing, at end of their life — and then founder on that last, quiet day. The major’s whole life passed in front of him in one day, in one afternoon, even. That’s what happened to him, from what I’ve heard and what I personally saw. You say he was hot-headed? That he thrashed the draught animals and belted the men? Maybe he did. They say that the army was his morning and the troops were his evening. For sure, there are officers like that. But between the morning and the evening the sun comes out and God draws it across the sky. The major’s sun was his wife Ruzha. She washed him, she ironed him. She moved with him time and time again, from headquarters to command post, from hilltop to outpost, until they finally settled down in Shabac two years before the wars began. He was promoted to major and became commanding officer of the 2 Battalion of the Combined Drina Reserve Division, and she became the major’s wife. Everything was easier in town, and when the washing, sewing and shopping was done the major’s wife had a lot more time. But she didn’t use it for herself. She didn’t go out or dress showily. She didn’t make eyes at anyone — until that last day.