In the evenings, when the sirens sounded, I’d join them and help haul the moribund patients down into the cellar. No one looked to see who was taking whom, we just grabbed the first ones we were ordered to. That gave me the chance to play God a little. You’ll be amazed at my words, but you should realize that I’m no longer the man you knew and loved. May the true God grant that you still love me after this letter and after the Great War, whose end cannot be glimpsed. Let me return to Hôpital Vaugirard. I’m not sure if I should be writing you this, but I hold that even in these changed circumstances, where I don’t know if I’m still in control of myself, I should continue to be sincere with you; what is left of my sanity tells me that true love can only be based on openness. The painful truth must therefore come out.
The hospital took the most serious cases from the battles on the Marne and Aisne, and many of them didn’t look much different to butterfly cocoons in their cobwebby beds. They weren’t alive, but neither had they taken up oars in the galley of the dead, and the doctors were forbidden from practicing euthanasia. But I overheard the hospital staff complaining that the moribunds were using up iodine and morphine which could help a wounded man who still had a spark of hope in his eye . . . at that moment I decided to help them. With a clean conscience, my dear Zoë, and without a trace of spite. Every evening, when the sirens sounded and those accursed Zeppelins bore down on our hospital, I chose a patient who I’d decided to relieve of his suffering. I made that choice like a God come down to Earth: without mercy and hesitation. But since I was only a man I swallowed my shame and abhorrence and hid them inside me, consoling myself that not even my victims’ faces were visible beneath all the layers of turban on their heads. And so, freed of any pangs of conscience, I’d choose one of them and start dragging him towards the cellar. En route I’d twist his neck, yank him so roughly that he’d expire by himself, or let him go crashing down the stairs like a decrepit Egyptian mummy. All that went unnoticed in the rush and confusion, and it’s not that I wasn’t circumspect. To start with, I killed one a week, then two. But when I realized that I not only wouldn’t be discovered but also had the tacit consent of the doctors, I decided to relieve one incurable invalid of his life every evening when the siren sounded. After all, the dead must be spoken to in the language of the dead. Cum mortuis in lingua mortua.
So I stayed on at Hôpital Vaugirard for two months longer. My medical card said I was in a stable but critical condition, but in reality the doctors only kept me because they saw me as a sad tool for doing what they weren’t allowed to do. They wrote that I first had nervous and then digestive problems, and that I had eventually begun to sleepwalk. They thought up all sorts of things just to keep me on for as long as possible. Finally they saw me off with tears in their eyes, and I felt I’d been saved because in my final days there I felt I’d become a prisoner in the hospital and feared that the role of executioner was mine forever. I left by train for Marseille and changed there for Nice. The southern sun bathed me and purged me with its warmth, and for a day or two I even thought I’d overcome my torment, but now I feel I’m in its grip again.
My dear Zoë, the faces of those I righteously killed don’t come back to me because I never saw them through those dead butterfly cocoons, like I say. I still think I carried out the task, which was intended for me. But am I deluding myself? I don’t know what is good and what is bad any more, but I don’t think any living creature will need rationalizations like that after this war. You are all I still love. I send you my tenderest greetings and beg you to ask Nana to come to the coast again and join me in my sorrow.
Your Germain D’Esparbès.
THE FIRST WARTIME CHRISTMAS
Thus wrote one French doctor of death, while Mehmed Graho, once the Austrian doctor of death, was promoted. He became head of death and also received the rank of colonel of the Medical Corps. He didn’t earn this senior position through success as an army surgeon but by using his connections in Sarajevo; he arranged that an order be sent to the hospital in Zvornik stipulating that the doctor of death was to be appointed head of death. With Graho now out of the operating theatre, the many wounded men lying in files and rows in the courtyard of Zvornik’s Imperial Lyceum like discarded piles of overripe pomegranates and melons, could heave a sigh of relief.
Mehmed Graho continued to go out into the courtyard, but his words ‘Him, him, and him — to me’ no longer had the same ominous ring as after the Austrian defeat at the Battle of Cer. At first, things on the Balkan Front had gone much better militarily. The army of the Dual Monarchy had seized Serbia in a pincer movement and the capitulation of the recalcitrant neighbour had been in sight. But heavy fighting had developed at the River Drina, which had accepted and carried downstream all the fruits of strife; like the Styx and Cocytus, it took lives away to the insulted River Sava and also to the Danube, that freshwater monarch which heaped a human cargo without name and origin on its deep bed.
There were those who survived this time, too. Head physician Graho again faced a growing mass of wounded, and he passed them on to his surgeons, who pruned them like saplings. And still no one noticed that the hospital in Zvornik had a far higher death rate on the operating table than the collection points in Tuzla, Mostar and Trebinye. But it was war, the Great War, in which a human life was worth less than one word from a general, so no one remarked the poor record of the hospital in Zvornik.
Nor did anyone take any notice when the Istanbul spice trader Mehmed Yıldız realized his beloved Turkey was going to enter the war. Effendi had no family and thought of the young assistants and apprentices in his spice shop as his own sons, but he didn’t tell them when he learnt that Turkey would be going to war. That day too, 28 October 1914, he got into the tram at the railway station below Topkapı Palace, which took him up the hill to the Aya Sofya, where, as a good Muslim, he prayed at dawn every morning surrounded by a hundred other, mainly, elderly men. He noticed there were no more young men at all in the rows of bowing, shoeless believers because the army had been mobilized and many Rumelian Turks were now ‘under arms’, waiting with clenched teeth somewhere in the Caucasus, but at morning prayer he still hoped for peace and progress in the Padishah’s righteous land. After prayer, he thought of going down to the shop on foot, but fine snow from the Bosporus made him catch the tram again. It seemed very early for snow. As the aged vehicle descended the slope by the Golden Horn, creaking and ringing, and circuited the mighty walls of the Sultan’s domain, the effendi thought about the snow and how surprised the Sultan’s nightingales would be when he let them out of their aviaries to fly in his celestial garden that morning after first prayer.
Mehmed Yıldız had been brought up on Nizami’s epic Khosrow and Shirin. He was a defender of the true Turkish miniature, which never departed from the canon of two-dimensionality. Now he arrived at his shop. It was slightly after seven. He looked to see if his assistants had prayed and then gave a sign for the calling out of the day’s prices to begin. He opened the newspaper. Sitting in front of his shop, surrounded by the spices which smelt as pungent that morning as ever, he read on the front page of Tanin that the Turkish government was in crisis. The Minister of Public Works, General Mahmud Pasha, had tendered his resignation, as had the Minister of Commerce and Agriculture, Suleyman Effendi, and the Minister of Postal and Telegraph Services, Oskan Effendi. The Minister of the Navy, Djemal Pasha, and the Minister of Education, Djenan Pasha, temporarily took charge of the portfolios without ministers. It didn’t sadden him to read that Suleyman, a Syrian Catholic, had withdrawn from the government (he’d never trusted him), nor that Oskan, a damned Armenian, had resigned (he was an intruder here), but when he read that his childhood friend, the righteous Mahmud Pasha, had also left the government, he muttered to himself: ‘This looks mighty bad.’ Still, he continued to hope without foundation that the trumpets of war would bypass the Golden Horn and his righteous and stern Padishah.
But then he raised his eyes from the newspaper, and what he
saw numbed him. No one knew that Yıldız Effendi played a little game every day, just for himself, like when Westerners open a game of patience. That day too, the orange and red spices were competing on sale against the yellowish, green and brown ones. A victory of the former was a bad sign and a victory of the latter a good one for that day, but the battle was always closely fought and only the experienced eye of the trader could tell which spices carried the day and how he, following those signs, would act until evening prayer. Now he folded Tanin together and his jaw dropped. He wasn’t even able to utter his ‘This looks mighty bad’, because he saw the signs of impending misfortune in all their blatancy. For the trader in oriental spices Mehmed Yıldız, the Great War began when he realized that the red and vermillion spices were outselling the others by such an overwhelming margin on 28 October 1914 that his boys were already glancing his way, mutely calling on their master to replenish the stocks from the large storeroom beneath the bridge, to which he alone had a key.
The next day, 29 October, Turkey entered the Great War. Those half medieval, half modern people celebrated in the streets on the opposite side of the Golden Horn. The coachmen took passengers to all three parts of the city for free. No toll was charged on the bridge that day. One beardless lad even jumped off Galata Tower with improvised, wax-coated wings and tried to fly like a moth over the windy Bosporus, but he crashed into the ground and died of his injuries the same evening.
Just one week after the red spices had won a crushing victory over the browns in Istanbul, another beardless lad by the name of Tibor Németh was to be the first Austro-Hungarian soldier to enter evacuated Belgrade. After the Serbian defeats on the Rivers Drina and Sava, an acute shortage of ammunition had forced the Serbian command to order the army’s withdrawal to reserve positions along the line Varovnica–Kosmay–Rudnik–Gornyi Milanovac–Ovchar–Kablar Gorge. So the army withdrew from cities like Shabac, Valyevo, Uzhice and even Belgrade. The last train to set off south for Nish with refugees, who had returned to the capital for their winter clothing, left from the main platform of the station with a whistle on 26 October by the old calendar, or 8 November by the new.
‘It’s not my fault!’ General Zhivoyin Mishich thundered into the receiver of the field telephone. ‘What can I do if my men are exhausted and the capital is located on the border where there should only be a customs post?’
And so Belgrade was evacuated. The first Austro-Hungarian scouts crossed the Danube into the city in silence. When this advance party set off cautiously towards the low-lying quarters of the city, they were met only by starving bitches with protruding ribs and shrivelled teats hanging between their legs. The reconnaissance battalion had the task of going from house to house and checking if any defenders remained in the deserted flats; if so, they were to be killed immediately. Németh’s comrades shouted ‘All clear’. And he thought it was too, at first. But when he entered a commercial building in Dubrovnik Street, someone fired a shot at him. Private Németh couldn’t tell who it was. He thought he saw a man with long sideburns and a kippah in the reception room of that building, but it wasn’t really a man but a phantasm, half real and half transparent, through which he could see the bergère from where the shot was fired.
The bullet was certainly real enough. It whistled past his ear and made a hole in the wall above his head, but when Németh thrust his bayonet at the illusion of the Jewish trader he only impaled the empty bergère, which spilt its hemp stuffing at his feet like bowels and threw out springs like bones. The proud soldier didn’t know what to think, but he wasn’t afraid. He continued to comb the streets of Belgrade, while all around him more and more ghosts were abroad. They flitted across the streets like shadows, and many were watching him, pressed up against the small Turkish windows. In Yovanova Street two small boys, their bodies transparent like the Jew’s had been, ran past him and hit him without warning, one on each side. He felt a pain and fired a few shots, but the bullets passed right through the boys, and he started running after them. He didn’t know why. He should just have shouted ‘All clear’ and let them bolt off like mountain goats, but his perseverance was to be the end of him — his fatal error. The boys passed from courtyard to courtyard, jumping fences and ditches. From Yovanova Street they crossed to Yevremova Street, and then suddenly turned and ran through the park and on towards King Peter Street. He looked into that deserted, grand avenue: tall buildings loomed on both sides of the street and seemed to be leaning inwards, towards him, as if conspiring to collapse on top of him. But the proud Hungarian soldier wasn’t afraid now either. Where had those little brats got to? Finally he spotted them again, just before they disappeared into a strange building, its facade tiled with green majolica.
He dashed after them into the entrance. He smelt the odour of sticky sweat and thought he’d never catch up with them, encumbered as he was with all his equipment and carrying his rifle with bayonet affixed, but they knew he was slow and never got so far ahead that he’d lose sight of their fleeting heels. So it was that they lured him into an apartment. Tibor followed them in, panting, and set foot in a large drawing room. He didn’t manage to turn around and almost didn’t realize that he was killed — the apparition of a huge, semi-transparent woman fired a bullet from a hunting rifle. She was evidently the mother of the two small boys. Now she had killed a Hungarian soldier without a twinge of conscience. She caressed her two sons and all three of them vanished. The Great War ended for Tibor Németh when he was shot by one of the dead women of Belgrade, one of those who died in 1914, taking her own life after both her sons drowned in the Danube.
So ended the military career of a soldier who betrayed the family line by not entering the pantheon of the brave. But Belgrade took no notice of its ghosts, just as Paris was unaware of its spectres near the Tuileries Gardens; and did Istanbul did not save the young fellow who launched off Galata Tower like a bird with waxed paper wings and bars for flapping them.
The wings of the new planes were not much more robust than the flimsy ones of the unfortunate young Turk because the first aircraft were completely unarmoured, with a fuselage made of wooden ribs like a boat. The former Zeppelin bombardier Fritz Krupp was familiarized with the functioning of a plane in just three days. He was instructed how to move the flaps, operate the tail rudder and fire the machine-gun in flight. After those three November days, he was transferred from the Zeppelin unit to an aircraft squadron, and his new superior praised the planes as deadly new fighting machines which would win the war. That made the former Zeppelin bombardier feel good. In fact, he was full of himself. The same day as Tibor Németh, whom he never met, was killed, Krupp was already enjoying delusions of grandeur: he imagined himself with a red scarf around his neck, shooting at French planes and being decorated as an air-ace. He ate well that evening and even went out after dinner with a Belgian woman who swore she wasn’t a prostitute. The town of La Fère, where he was stationed, was empty. The streets were deserted in La Fère just as they were in Belgrade, even several days after Austrian troops had entered the city.
Then civilians began to arrive in occupied Belgrade. Half human and half animal, they had hidden from the war, and as troublemakers they didn’t conceal their moral depravity. Now they hoped for fun, quick gain or simply adventure. One such renegade was Gavra Crnogorchevich, the hot-tempered victor of the last duel in Belgrade before the Great War, a ruffian who evaded mobilization and disappeared into the blue with the words ‘This looks mighty bad’. Now he came back from wherever he had been and really hit the town. In deserted Belgrade, the November trees shed whatever last leaves they still had, while Gavra shed what few moral scruples he still had from before the war.
Relieved of any great contemplation, he swiftly found himself an occupation. He didn’t think of selling his Idealin shoe polish to the occupiers but quickly gathered a team of ‘his women’, who were actually prostitutes — the only people not to have left the city. He killed two interlopers for deluding his ’good women’, thus de
monstrating to his reluctantly smiling harem what would happen to them if they tried to leave him or do business on their own. Then he began offering them out for hire, but he encountered an unexpected problem. The military command which was soon established in the city didn’t ban prostitution, but the Austrian and Hungarian officers were reluctant at first to get into bed with whores. The war had just begun, and many of those who abstained in those chilly November days had brought with them not only their kit but also a ballast of morality, although they would soon cast it off. Those who became rapists later that year now still saw themselves as family men, and the pimp Gavra Crnogorchevich realized that his public houses in Yevremova and Strahinyicha Bana Streets had to be wrapped in a new guise.
A family one, of course.
He found respectable clothes for his ladies and dressed himself in the best pre-war suit lifted from Prime Minister Pashich’s house in Theatre Street. He brought in a few tables and cast clean white sheets of silk damask over some of them and green felt from a gambling hall over others. The older prostitutes began to play the role of mothers, and he, of course, was the father. The young ones — there were seven or eight of them, one more dissolute than the other — became their daughters, and the two public houses were dubbed ‘open Serbian homes’. Now business really began to flourish. The house in Strahinyicha Bana Street was mostly frequented by junior officers, so Gavra sent the uglier prostitutes there, while Yevremova Street drew the cream of the occupiers, headed by the commander of the city, Colonel Schwarz, and including Baron Stork and Lieutenant Colonel Otto Gelinek, who was not only a customer of Gavra’s houses but also purveyed them with luxury victuals. ‘The family’ took care of everything in the houses. Both of them had a mother (who also prostituted herself when it got busy), an aunt and several daughters, but Gavra Crnogorchevich was the father of both.
The Great War Page 9