The Great War

by Aleksandar Gatalica

  Boris, it must be said, did not translate Petronius all that faithfully, but it was what came next which most interested his comrades. At the risk of being picked off by a Kraut sniper, Boris Rizanov and two other men had dragged up a huge carcass of a horse from a nearby copse. It had probably died a fortnight earlier, but it was warmed up and then stuffed there in the wood. The roasting of the animal lasted until late at night, and the soldiers broke trees and brought up armfuls and armfuls of black wood for the great fire with a song on their lips. No one knew how that poor draught horse could have survived the soldiers’ frenzy for food, but it seemed that Rizanov had kept it buried in the ground, so the raw meat smelt of the Polish earth; not that anyone turned up their nose at it. When the hours of turning and roasting the stuffed beast were over, Boris-Trimalchio stuck something he called a ‘liberty cap’ on the poor gee-gee’s head (although none of his comrades knew what that was) and chose a Russian giant to make a slash at its flanks. The meat smelled a little, but the guests were armed with the best seasoning known — ravenous hunger.

  Great was their surprise when out of the horse’s belly, as stuffing, there came two scrawny tykes, whose ribs stood out even when they were roasted, and a bitch with limp and wrinkled teats — but that was not all. Relishing the role of Trimalchio, Rizanov had the dogs cut open too. Finely minced meat came out of them, like a mixture made of pluck. In different circumstances and at a different time, everyone would have gazed in wonder, but there by the Masurian Lakes in the early hours of the day when the Russian enclave was about to fall, each man cheered and fell upon the roast. A crowd formed, a crush, and neither Boris nor his giant who cut open the meal were able to share it out in a way worthy of Trimalchio’s banquet. The horse stuffed with dogs, which in turn were stuffed with a fine ragout, was seized in a jiffy. Only its large ribs, one bulging eye and the odd bloody stain were left beside the extinguished fire, like the aftermath of a bacchanalia, when someone finally had the courage to ask the great chef what the exquisite pluck had been inside the sinewy bitch and her two mates.

  Rizanov dithered for a long time and made excuses, eventually passing it off as a secret recipe. He changed the topic and tried to make everyone laugh. But his friends, who like real Romans had all vomited after the feast from eating so much meat on a empty stomach, did not give up. ‘Come on, Boris Dmitrievich,’ one of them badgered him, ‘tell us what that super-tender meat was in the bitch’s belly. Didn’t you secretly mince up some moles or polecats, perhaps?’ the Russian Trimalchio refused to answer until noon, and just when he felt he was cornered and had to come clean, a German artillery barrage began and ushered in the collapse of the Russian 20th Corps. Bullets whistled like thrushes, and several of the large shells dubbed ’coal boxes’ exploded above the improvized patrician court, where the famished Russians had devoured the stuffed horse. It was all over that afternoon. One hundred thousand Russian soldiers surrendered to the Germans, and Boris didn’t have to reveal his secret.

  In the wooden shed near Königsberg, where the Russian prisoners were first held by the Germans, Boris Dmitrievich thought once or twice more of telling his fellow POWs that they had feasted on their dead comrades, but all the survivors had more pressing things to worry about, and the men who had been at ‘Trimalchio’s Banquet’ cherished its memory so much that the philologist cum butcher saw no reason to spoil their reminiscences, which, after all, are the only things one lives on in captivity.

  The sad but heroic fate of the Russian 20th Corps was immediately reported to the commander-in-chief of Russian forces, Grand Duke Nicholas. The duke’s tents lay somewhere in the coniferous forests between Grodno and Bialystok, where, rather than quartering in a cosy requisitioned house, he forced himself, his favourite chief of staff General Yanushkevich and most of the senior officers to bivouac even though is was minus thirty degrees. It was here that the generali­ssimo of the Russian army received daily reports and issued orders to the commanders of the army; he ate in his tent and drank his black tea sweetened with saccharin. He was horribly cold himself, but he didn’t want to show his subordinates so much as a single twitch of cold on his face. Instead, he tried to imagine he was in his log-cabin dacha, or rather in the attached Russian bathhouse, pouring a thin stream of water over burning fir logs so that it vaporized to form a pleasant steam to make him sweat. He left his tent every morning, enormous as he was, naked to the waist, and rubbed himself with snow. Then he would sit on a tree stump and stare into the distance. It didn’t bother him that it had been minus twenty-five and grew a degree colder every day, going down to minus thirty-eight on 25 February 1915. Only those standing closest could see that he was holding something indiscernible in his hand, gripping it by the handle. The duke tipped it as if he was pouring it drop by drop onto the enamelled, almost dry snow; but what it was remained a mystery even for his closest staff. Then he would smile a vague smile in the direction of the forests where one hundred thousand of his soldiers were trapped, or turn his head and direct his gaze to the north-east as if, from his enormous height as a colossus, his eagle eyes could glimpse the capital far in the distance with the ice-bound delta of the River Neva, the Hermitage, the court and the grand balcony, from which Tsar Nicholas had called out ‘hurraaah’ six times and roused his people for the Great War.

  Then he stood up and went with a heavy sigh to put on his uniform. Something had to be done. One hundred thousand men were trapped, but the Russian armies regrouped and began a counter-offensive in the Osowiec area and on the roads to Przemysl and Plonsk. Every morning, the duke took a ‘steam bath’ in front of his tent. He sweated at thirty below zero and came out wrapped in a towel. He felt the ritual helped the Russian troops. One day they reported to him that attacks along the left bank of the Vistula had been repulsed, the next, that troops were advancing near Witkowice and south of the River Rawka, and the third, that a major offensive had been stopped in its tracks near Bolinek. Finally, it was reported that the hard nut of the Przemysl fortress had been cracked after withstanding a siege of almost a year, like ancient Troy. Only then did the duke stop bathing out in the gleaming snow, and the harsh winter finally loosened its grip.

  This mild change in the weather did not please one general on the opposite warring-side. It annoyed him that the Battle of the Masurian Lakes hadn’t been turned into a resounding success for his army, and he was distressed that the ironclad city of Przemysl had fallen. That general’s name was Svetozar Boroevich von Boina. Everything about this officer said he was interested solely in war. Neither his bearing nor his look were suggestive of a spirited man but only an extremely disciplined one. His small, dogged eyes could focus on one spot on his counterpart’s face with such icy persistence that all generals and even the emperor himself lowered their gaze before him. Svetozar Boroevich was a descendant of Serbs from the borderlands between Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, a child of the Banovina Border Regiment, in which his father Adam Boroevich had served. He had been brought up by the army more than by his mother Stana, with the simple and resolute frontiersmen giving him milk from their canteens, and this was bound to make a soldier of him; how could it have been otherwise. He had had a lightning career. In 1905, Boroevich was raised to the Hungarian nobility and bestowed the title ‘von Boina’. He had already become a general in the Austro-Hungarian army back in the brilliant nineteenth century. After ‘defeating’ the units of German Kaiser Wilhelm in joint manoeuvres in Bosnia before the Great War, he was raised to the rank of field marshal.

  Svetozar von Boina mixed with many, but few really knew him because he believed that, in the end, a commander must be a loner. Therefore hardly anyone realized that Boina did everything twice. This was perhaps not so strange because two men were joined inside him: an Orthodox heart beat in time with that of an Austrian soldier devoted exclusively to the imperial crown. One Serbian word overpowered the German one in his mind, and a few distant images of his parents’ modest house in the border province were incompatible w
ith the sights of the royal court where he usually stayed. Therefore the field marshal had everything in duplicate. He had two orderlies. His staff was never just in one city — he divided his staff officers between two places. So it was that in the Battle of the Masurian Lakes he commanded from two different positions. Boina had two horses, two uniforms, two rows of medals (all imitations, because he always kept the real ones at home) and two pairs of army boots, which he polished in the evenings himself.

  What was so strange about this was that Svetozar Boroevich never wore one pair of boots and then the other, never rode both horses, and never wore both uniforms with the same rows of imitation medals. One pair of boots, one horse and one coat were for the other Svetozar who dwelt in the depths of his bitter soul, who could not die and therefore had to live. One horse, one pair of boots and one field marshal’s uniform were reserved for him. That other Svetozar, who was actually the first and original Boroevich, was only a phantasm — without frame, feet or the desire to ride — but still had to have everything at his disposal.

  He was like that in war, too. It verged on a miracle — as only he knew — that no one had noticed his schizophrenic streak and that it hadn’t hindered him in his great career in the service of his country. Boina thought he had simply been lucky. On manoeuvres, he would always have two goals and had to choose between them; he always sent the army in one of two equally good directions at the last minute. It worked like that year after year. His dividedness had been put to the severest test in the previous year of the war when, as commander of the 6th Corps, he was ordered to liberate the besieged fortress of Przemysl.

  Why was Przemysl so important? That little town was a symbol of German tenacity and bravery. During the Russian offensive in Galicia, the Russians were victorious in the Battle of Galicia fought near Lviv; they pushed the front back one hundred and sixty kilometres all the way to the Carpathians. Przemysl fortress held out like an island in a Russian sea until 28 September 1914. The defence of the town, which was shaped like an eagle’s nest and manned by a hundred thousand penned-up German soldiers, thus became of great importance for the Central Powers. What was more, this ‘German Troy’ was on the lips of every Austrian and German soldier, and the commander charged with the defence of the city, Hermann Kusmanek, was proudly referred to as ‘the German Priam’. That’s why it was so important to hold Przemysl and bring up all the forces needed to support the defenders. A people so enamoured of the Classics couldn’t afford to allow its Troy to fall.

  The enemy was of a different mind. The commander of the Russian 3rd Army, Radko Dimitriev, began the siege of Przemysl on 24 September 1914. Dimitriev did not have enough siege artillery but ordered an attack on the citadel nevertheless, before the Austrians had a chance to relieve Przemysl. For three days, the Russians incessantly attacked that German Troy, like the allied Greek crews of yore, and gained nothing. Forty thousand human lives were sacrificed on the altar.

  Then Field Marshal Boroevich was ordered to break through and liberate Przemysl with his Austrian 6th Corps, on the wave of Hindenburg’s offensive. The order came from commander-in-chief Hindenburg and, as an orderly soldier, Boroevich took his two sets of staff officers, two horses, two pairs of boots and two coats with him into battle. He didn’t now go in two different directions and in two columns because all German roads led to Przemysl. Even so, Boina hesitated. It seemed to him that there were two Przemysls in the same place: the real one and a false one. If he liberated the real one, everything would end triumphantly; but if he liberated the false one the fortunes of war would be a chimera lasting only a week or two. Which route should he take? Naturally, he chose the road from Kraków towards Lviv.

  He delivered a savage blow to the enemy, and General Dimitriev withdrew across the River San on 11 October 1914. Boroevich rode into the city like a sultan returning from a triumphant campaign to India. There were neither women nor children in the city, so soldiers took on their roles instead. The streets of Przemysl were strewn with rose petals, and officers threw confetti made of shredded enemy-leaflets from the windows. A large flag was draped from the church steeple to the ringing of all the bells. The horse he rode and the other he led by the reins didn’t shy but stepped gracefully like Arab thoroughbreds devoted to the padishah, and Boina smiled. But he thought it was all too beautiful to be true, and soon doubt began to gnaw at him that he had perhaps liberated the wrong Przemysl. The crowds and smiling faces were just figments of his vanity as a general.

  And the real Przemysl? It was like an invisible metaphysical essence somewhere beneath the dizzily ebullient, headlessly euphoric city; it suffered and groaned in its transcendence and, all alone, continued to fire away at the real, remorseless enemy. If that was true, the liberation of Przemysl wouldn’t last long . . .

  And, to his sorrow, he was right.

  Hindenburg was defeated in the Battle of the Vistula River and broke off his thrust towards Warsaw on 31 October 1914. Boroevich therefore withdrew from the River San. The Russian 11th Army under the command of Andrei Selivanov now undertook a second siege of Przemysl. Selivanov did not order frontal attacks on the stubborn, besieged garrison but decided to starve the defenders into submission instead. All the German soldiers sang the glory of that Troy, to no avail, and like Cassandras predicted its repeated liberation.

  Boina alone knew that all this was happening because of him. He had liberated the wrong Przemysl, which is why in February 1915, after the indecisive Battle of the Masurian Lakes, he desperately sought permission from superior command to be allowed to liberate the real Przemysl. He emphasized that he knew the difference now and would be able to find the way to the real besieged city, but it was too late. The order to launch a new attack didn’t come. Vienna had been warned in a confidential dispatch that the field marshal was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and so Svetozar Boroevich von Boina, the descendant of the Serbian frontiersmen, was sent on R&R to Bad Gleichenberg, the same spa which the Serbian Field Marshal Radomir Putnik had set off from at the beginning of the Great War. Putnik had left the spa with only one uniform and coat. They allowed Boina to bring along everything of his: two adjutants, two horses, two coats and two pairs of shiny, spick-and-span high boots. Omnia mea mecum porto, the field marshal said to himself when he saw he had everything together, and still he set off for the spa reluctantly.

  Omnia mea mecum porto, Sergei Chestukhin also repeated to himself when he took his Liza from the terrible winter of eastern Silesia to the slightly milder but still sub-zero Petrograd. During the Battle of the Masurian Lakes, Lizochka had been hit in the head by shrapnel. She was immediately brought to his wagon and his knife. There was no time to wait for anyone else, and no one could operate on her better than the celebrated Dr Chestukhin. So Sergei shaved his wife’s copper hair around the wound, opened the top of the skull and removed the pieces of shrapnel from the soft grey-tissue. He staunched the bleeding, returned the piece of skull as if he was putting back the lid on a child’s wooden toy box, and sat down by his wife’s bed. When she opened her eyes the colour of sepia and looked at him, there was no man gladder than him; when she spoke, there was no man sadder. None of Liza’s vital functions were impaired, but her prattle and choice of words now made her strangely similar to their small daughter Marusya.

  The entire staff of the hospital train V.M. Purishkevich gathered to see them off when they left for home. In the house on Runovsky Embankment there was no child happier than Marusya when she saw her mother again, alive. Liza hugged her and completely immersed her in her flowing copper hair. Then she showed Marusya all the presents she had brought from the Front as promised, and the two of them sat in the corner and played like two little sisters. The maid Nastia, aunt Margarita and Sergei regarded them god-like from above, while mother and daughter, now strangely similar, were devoted to each other down to the last little puerile secret.

  In his thoughts, Sergei returned to the operation. He opened the top of the skull, staunched the bleeding, removed
the fragments of shrapnel, checked all the vital functions of Lizochka’s brain, closed the top of the skull, and she woke up like one of his miraculously saved wounded. And then all over again: he opened the roof of Liza’s skull etc. Where had he gone wrong? With these thoughts he returned to the front, but without Liza at his side Sergei would never be the same again.

  WAR AND THE SEXES

  Yekaterina Viktorovna Goshkevich looked like Hera: with her ox-eyes, her enormous ‘opera singer’ breasts and bulging nipples which stood out even through her blouse and vest, she was hot stuff. Although she had graduated from engineering school, she showed her ‘civic spirit’ by taking on a job in a Kiev solicitor’s office even back in the nineteenth century. Here she was noticed by the placid landowner Butovich, who promptly wedded her. In order for Yekaterina Viktorovna to become his ‘Katenka’, he had to agree to a number of conditions: that she continue working, stay living in Kiev, and not to have to move to his estates. They therefore lived separately and only saw each other on weekends and went to the occasional performance at the Solovtsov Theatre, and this gave Hera sufficient time to search for her Zeus in the city.

  At the Solovtsov Theatre, during a performance of Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk, she was espied in the second gallery by the Governor-General of Kiev, Vladimir Alexandrovich Sukhomlinov. He was allowing his opera glasses to wander — out of boredom, of course — and when he bent his neck enough he caught sight of her. He noticed her breasts first of all (‘Good God!’), then the nipples (again: ‘Good God!’), and ultimately the ox-eyed gaze of her blue eyes (once more a drawn-out, whispered ‘Good God!’). That was in 1904, or the year after. The governor-general was almost sixty at the time and the solicitor’s assistant still in the flower of her youth at thirty, but that didn’t stop them from swiftly agreeing. She worked? No problem. Married? Even less. The governor-general cut an imposing figure: his face was bloated like a balloon with a thin, twirled moustache attached, and he had thick reddish eyebrows, which he combed upwards every morning. His deep voice and the smell of black tobacco in his mouth rounded off the picture. He skilfully concealed his hair of the same reddish colour, which now only sprouted around his ears, beneath his hat. All in all, he emanated a sense of danger. Hera had thus found her Kievan Zeus, but just like in Greek mythology the rest of the story didn’t go smoothly.