The Great War

by Aleksandar Gatalica

  I woke up at dawn in a wood beside a road. At first I was unable to move, so I tensely felt myself all over with my right hand: first my left arm, then one leg and the other. On realizing that I hadn’t been blown apart by a shell, I passed my hands over my belly and shoulders and licked my forefinger and thumb. By the taste of dust on my fingers I realized I had no blood on my coat, so I probably hadn’t picked up a Hun bullet. Oh, how I rejoiced at that moment, but I shouldn’t have! I lay there until afternoon on top of something soft, only hard and uneven in a few places, so I thought it a mound covered with grass. I was unable to move much or swing my arms; if I had been, I would have realized that the mound was not one of earth and grass but of the dead bodies of my poor comrades.

  It wasn’t until the next day that I realized where I was and what I had been lying on; that was to be my second day spent among the dead. I jumped up fresh and almost healthy that morning — I think it was the last day of August — when, oh my God, I saw the carnage. There were dead as far as my eyes could see. In many places they lay one on top of another, entwined and entangled, and completely covered the ground like human humus which monstrous plants of war were to germinate from. I found some of the soldiers in a sitting position, with their eyes open, seeming to me to be still alive. I rushed to one and then to another in the hope that they would answer, but in vain. The grim reaper must have cut them down so abruptly that the life hadn’t managed to flee from their eyes, and so they sat, and the occasional one almost defied gravity by still leaning against a tree or a worn-out old nag. Two comrades, with their arms around each other, had crawled into death in a patch of wild strawberries. The blood on their faces mingled with the juice of the strawberries they seemed to have eaten with their last strength before they expired.

  I started shouting and calling for help, but no one from the Red Cross came that second day either. What a poor wretch I was, whom an evil demiurge had condemned to life. I wanted to run away and escape, but where could I have gone when there was an endless tangle of corpses all around, and it seemed to me that not even a whole day’s running in the summer sun would have led me to anything new — except to the next trench full of dead soldiers. That’s why I stayed where I was. Straining my senses, I summoned all my presence of mind. I thought it would be much harder for them to come to my aid if I wandered about rather than staying put. I still don’t know if it was the right decision.

  On that second day among the dead, I identified a plot of bodies I’d be able to put in some kind of order. I set about disentangling the bodies of these comrades and cleaning their wounds as best I could. I sat them up or at least had them reclining, like in a Roman theatre. It must have been about a hundred corpses I repositioned in this way, maybe more. Towards evening, I wanted to see who they were, so I took out each one’s identity card and read their particulars. Jacques Tali, student; Michel Moriac, wholesaler; Zbigniew Zborowski, member of the Foreign Legion. I was still perhaps the man I had been before the war until I got to know them and looked each one in the face. At that instant, they ceased to be unknown heroes. I thought about what they would have gone on to do if they had survived the attack near Lunéville. Tali would have become a famous curator of the Autumn Salon; Moriac would have made a fortune dealing in vinegar; Zborowski would have become Polish ambassador to France. But like this? Like this they were simply dead, but certainly not silent.

  Before the day was over, my reason definitely began to leave me. That’s right, I heard them talking. I answered them and even began to argue with them, although I was still aware that everything was coming from my mouth — their voices and mine. I took a real liking to some of the comrades, to others not so much, and when I woke up on the third day I pulled the ones up to me who I’d become especially close with. On that third day we had a kind of group session, but the conversation didn’t hold us for long. I discovered a deck of cards in the pocket of one of my best friends, the wholesaler Moriac. Decency restrained me for a while, but the terrible loneliness drove me to do what I’m about to describe with a shudder of shame.

  I sat my comrades in a circle and started playing Lorum with them. I shuffled the cards and dealt them first to one fellow, then to a second, a third, a fourth and lastly, myself. I moved their hands and fingers, which by now were stiff, so they could hold their cards, and then the game began. I’d play my card and set off around the circle. There was no cheating; I didn’t abuse my role. Everyone would play a card, and whoever had the best hand would win the round. Then I’d deal again and start off around the circle once more. Another game for my comrades and me.

  The Red Cross found me in the middle of a round I was set to win and sent me to Metz for a regimen of therapy, and then on to Paris. Please treat all that I’ve written as the complete truth and take whatever steps necessary so that our medics make it to the survivors faster and don’t consider it futile to search among hundreds of bodies to find one who still has breath in his lungs. If they had noticed me on the first day I would have remained who I was, but now I’ve become someone else, a different person who I’m frightened of and who will forever be foreign to me.

  Thus wrote Germain D’Esparbès, though hardly anyone was likely to have read the young officer’s letter at the time. At the beginning of the Great War, the Germans concentrated the bulk of their army in the west, on their borders with France and Belgium, based on the strategic plan of first defeating France and then transferring their forces to the east to reckon with Russia. Since the defences along France’s eastern border from Belfort to Verdun were considered impregnable, the German Supreme Command deployed the larger part of its forces on the right flank along the Aachen-Metz line, in the spirit of the old Schlieffen Plan from the nineteenth century. At first, war seemed some way away because Germany only requested ‘free passage’ through Belgium. Since Belgium declined, and since Britain sided with the brave Belgian King Albert and his people, Germany set General Kluck’s and Bülow’s armies in motion. They advanced through Belgium like a mower through a wheatfield, and as early as 24 August 1914, the German cavalry entered Brussels — the first city on the wartime tour of Hans-Dieter Huis, the great German baritone.

  Fêted Huis arrived in Brussels together with the staff of Kluck’s 1st Army. Cheerful cavalrymen stood by their animals’ sweat-glistening necks and sang ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ and ‘Deutschland über Alles’, and for Huis this was all a little absurd. But he didn’t think of laughing out loud. The next day he was to hold a concert, and he alone knew how much effort it had taken to find an accompanist among the Belgian POWs, and afterwards to locate a badly scratched Bechstein grand in the deserted city. Then there was no one far and wide to tune it, and the instrument with its open lid bared its strings at him like a shameless nude. An old fellow finally arrived in Brussels to tune the piano, a full three days later, so the concert for the senior officers in the City Hall couldn’t take place until the end of the week. Maestro Huis chose the repertoire himself. He didn’t think of singing arias by composers from enemy peoples; he didn’t dare to sing the aria from Gounod’s Faust or from Boris Godunov, which he liked so much, because the former was in French and the latter in Russian. He thought it best to stick to Mozart, with the occasional aria by Rossini or Verdi (the Italians were still neutral). The concert began at exactly five minutes past eight. Only for a moment did he waver and think he should perhaps have changed from his uniform into a concert tailcoat. He decided to remain a soldier because he thought he’d be performing to ordinary soldiers, but he was surprised when he saw many officers with ladies in the audience. The generals of the 1st and 2nd Armies, Kluck and Bülow, were unable to attend due to the victorious campaign, he was told, which had seen the Belgians thrown back to the North Sea coast and the French to the very outskirts of Paris. Instead, this first concert in ‘liberated Brussels’ was attended by their chiefs of staff, who were great admirers of Huis’s art. Perhaps he was a little affronted that no top generals were present, but he went out onto th
e stage and sang. Two or three times he had to stop and clear his throat, but for the German officers who missed opera so much the performance was of great satisfaction. The generals came up to him after the concert with tears in their eyes and told him he had brought a piece of civilization to that terrible war. Just then, he realized who the ladies were. They were Belgian and Dutch prostitutes, women who never leave a sinking ship and are satisfied as long as their clients are happy. They too congratulated him and giggled loudly, praising him in bad German, and Huis felt very awkward. Not so much due to those ladies in their worn dresses as because of his singing. ‘I was well out of tune. God, how long has it been since I’ve performed? That concert at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin was the last!’ With these thoughts he departed Brussels and set off after Kluck’s army as if he was a quartermaster supplying them not with beans and chewing tobacco but with stocks of opera songs. That’s why the German generals were so grateful and looked so happy each time.

  Not all generals were so lucky as to have such moments of serenity. The Austrian general Oskar Potiorek had to regroup his routed forces after the disastrous Battle of Cer. The pandemonium on the Serbian Front lasted several days. Wrathful Serbs crossed the turbid River Sava and occupied the territory between the Sava and the Danube in southern Syrmia for several days, burning the stubble-fields and empty lands along the Danube. The unbearable stench could be smelt in Zemun, and soldiers and civilians went about with handkerchiefs over their faces. Those several days saw the rise and fall of Tibor Veres, the Budapest journalist who specialized in offensive letters.

  Veres had come to Zemun full of his own importance, and now he could hardly bridle his anger.

  Veres’s disobedient fountain pen with the blue ink arrived in Zemun too, hardly able to bridle its rage that the censor was no longer writing with it, while the obedient one, with black ink in its chamber, was full of its own importance now that Veres was writing with it exclusively.

  From the very first day, however, Veres performed the mind-numbing work of censorship, so it wasn’t clear why the fountain pen with the black ink was so proud. Like a gold prospector, he had to read a hundred letters to come across just one where he found something significant. One soldier wrote to his mother about how cold he was and that he missed her corn-bread (how trivial!). Another complained that he hadn’t had a proper night’s sleep for a fortnight and that the worst thing about war wasn’t the bullets or the hand-to-hand combat but the lack of sleep (not completely irrelevant but a fact already known to the upper echelons). A third wrote to his beloved that when men killed each other they didn’t make human sounds but grunted and groaned like cattle who know nothing of humanity (an example of the declining morale of the Serbian forces!).

  On the second day in Zemun, Tibor’s blue pen was already bored. And although it was writing all day, his black pen quickly became bored too.

  Tibor’s life in Zemun, however, became interesting in those five days. He was billeted to an elderly Serb woman who had formerly run a guest house by the Danube together with her daughter. A large flag of the Dual Monarchy now fluttered in front of the house in the lower Gardosh neighbourhood, and mother and daughter took pride in having sewn it themselves. Tibor had it good in the former guest house. Small and beardless though he was, he felt that the daughter took an interest in him from the first morning when she served him the meagre breakfast and started a conversation in her broken Hungarian. Just when he thought the Great War would turn out to be a boon for him, and that he’d perhaps even marry in Zemun, his own small private war began, one which would end fatally for him. And everything started as a miniscule problem, like when you feel the first stab of pain in a tooth, which is white and healthy looking but full of caries inside.

  On the third day in Zemun, Veres’s black fountain pen became increasingly disobedient. Again he wrote with the one, and left the other lying on the paper. He wanted to report that he had read a soldier’s letter home about the poor prospects of the Serbian army recovering after the Battle of Cer, but it turned out that he had written — with his own hand and in the black ink which had been obedient until then — that the prospects of the Serbian army soon returning to battle-readiness were very good! He had already encountered this problem at the Pester Lloyd editorial office, so this time, too, he waged war with the pens and paper as if they were his only enemies. He decided to punish the recalcitrant new pen with the black ink, which he had glorified until just recently, and return to the old one (which he had rejected in Pest for the better one with black ink). And all seemed well at first. The disobedient Pest pen became the obedient Zemun one; but the once obedient black fountain pen from Pest had no intention of backing down and, with thoughts as black as the ink which were its lifeblood, began to plot its revenge.

  Veres didn’t notice anything at first. For the whole fourth day of his brave censorial war-making he wrote precisely what he wanted — in blue ink; but the pen with black ink revealed its vengeful nature for the first time by furtively discharging its entire fill of ink into Veres’s bag. The censor cursed it and decided to no longer take it with him to the City Hall building where he worked. He left the gutted pen with its stained nib on his bedside table. His fifth and last day in Zemun dawned.

  Veres worked arduously on the fifth day, too.

  His black fountain pen thirsted for vengeance all day long.

  That night, what had been festering had to come out. When the assiduous censor returned from work after nine in the evening and was good-nighted without any supper by the devoted but mystified Serb ladies, the fountain pen was ready and waiting for him on the bedside table. Tibor had a wash at the porcelain basin and fell into bed, groaning with fatigue. He didn’t dream anything that fifth night in Zemun, and only at first light did he suddenly turn over, like a person who wheels round after having been caught unawares from behind. He grasped his chest for a moment, gurgled and went limp. No one was there to witness his death.

  The Great War ended for Tibor Veres when the attentive mother and daughter found him with the fountain pen sticking in his chest. The perfidious stylus had somehow risen up and, like an abandoned mistress, taken revenge on Tibor Veres, killing him with a last stab, although it broke its own spine, or rather its nib, in the process. No one at the coroner’s office thought that the censor — such a modest and retiring fellow — could have killed himself, especially in such a theatrical way. The mother and daughter were therefore in hot water, but they were saved by their Hungarian bloodline on the maternal side and the connections in Pest which they immediately used to avoid any adverse consequences for the killing of a Hungarian non-commissioned officer. After five days and five nights of warring, Veres was buried in chaotic circumstancess behind the guest house, in the Zemun cemetery beneath John Hunyadi Tower, with the briefest of military honours. There was no time for a longer service because Zemun fell the very next day, after the three-day Syrmian offensive by Serbian forces. The new army immediately began questioning Serbian residents in their houses, and Veres’s death even turned out to be of benefit for the mother and daughter from the Gardosh neighbourhood, who could now claim that they had begrudgingly put up with a Hungarian spy in their guest house for five days and then liquidated him. The Serbs honoured them in word alone because there was no time for anything more in the scant four days of Serbian-controlled Zemun in 1914.

  There was no time for congratulatory speeches and the awarding of medals on the outskirts of Paris either. After the fall of Brussels and Antwerp, Kluck’s 1st and Bülow’s 2nd German Army crossed into the north of France without difficulty. The kaiser’s army took Sedan and St Quentin and advanced swiftly towards Paris. A blackout was ordered in the streets of the City of Light. One morning, proclamations appeared in the squares. General Gallieni, the military commander of Paris, alerted Parisians to the danger of the city being besieged and appealed to them to evacuate, but Paris was already empty. All who had got wind of war and didn’t want to smell gunpowder had already l
eft: for America like Georges Braque and the cubist painters, for the Côte d’Azur like the former petty gentry and disinherited counts, for Latin America, Spain or London like many foreigners who had considered Paris their home until 1 September 1914. The declaration of a possible siege turned the ongoing flow from the city into an exodus.

  The police issued new orders: all public places had to be closed by nine. The city no longer resembled that merry metropolis of bohemians and spivs. One September morning, the student Stanislaw Witkiewicz was woken by a terrible racket. He jumped out of bed and ran out onto the terrace of the small Hotel Scribe to see what was causing it. The sounds of powerful motors were coming from Boulevard Haussmann, where an endless line of cars was taking troops to the north. In that monstrous column were classy models adorned with French flags, sports cars hastily converted into armoured cars and the requisitioned camionettes of various wineries — and all of them were hurrying north. Horrified by what he saw, the young Pole groaned. For Stanislaw Witkiewicz, the Great War began when he thought the Parisian garrison was fleeing and General Gallieni was surrendering the city to the Prussians. What was the young fellow doing on the terrace of the shabby hotel anyway? Why wasn’t he with the troops in the north or with the conceited, cowardly artists in the south of the country? He wasn’t in the north because he had been turned down by the Foreign Legion recruitment office for having a heart murmur; he hadn’t skipped off to the south because he was a waverer like every Pole and still wished to help his new fatherland, France. He imagined himself as a doctor performing an operation; he imagined driving an ambulance with only one hand because the other had been amputated in a heroic battle, and he lived on those illusions for all of August 1914 while he eked out an existence by helping at the Rotonde and eating the leftovers from the plates he was brought to wash up.