The Great War

by Aleksandar Gatalica

  Just like that, at a table. He hadn’t had much to eat and hadn’t drunk to excess, Old Libion later claimed. Nor could the proprietor recall him having done anything out of the ordinary. He had been sitting alone. He hadn’t started a quarrel with anyone, peed at the table, raved or waited for the opportunity to read out a manifesto. Nor had he spoken with a strange accent when he ordered, although it would later be established that the dead man had been impersonating a poet from Belgium. That wasn’t important for the coroner’s inquest. He had been exempted from military service, so at first no one suspected the murder could be connected with military espionage. But the deadly-boring fellow was dead, that much was clear, and a murder investigation had to be carried out, war or no war. Therefore the wretch was sent to the mortuary to have the contents of his stomach examined. When the pathologists cut him open, a fountain of coagulated plonk and remnants of undigested food shot out of him like from a wineskin. Wine is wine, they thought at first, but then they discovered traces of hydrochloric acid, and some other less-than-nutritious additives were also present.

  That was a good lead for the inquest. Where did Old Libion get the wine from? From Touraine. From whom? From cheerful Madame Marion, whose husband had twice been decorated for bravery in the battles of the Marne and the Aisne. Good, her husband was an innocent hero, but she herself? The winery was immediately closed and Old Libion banned from opening for a week. No one was happier now than Old Combes! That stupid brood of painters and poets, those self-certified geniuses, immediately switched to his Closerie des Lilas, and it seemed clear who was going to come out on top in the war of the café owners. But misfortune is seldom selective: one ordinary day, when Old Combes was just about getting used to the throng, a guest was found dead at a table in his café too. The man hadn’t eaten or drunk much, nor was he strange in any way; unsurprisingly, he was an errant genius from Lithuania, actually a Jew by the name of Abraham Safin. The fact of him being a Jew was unimportant for the inquest. He had been exempted from military service, so no link with military matters was seen in his case either. This second man was now taken to the same morgue to be a still life on the neighbouring dissection table. He also received a toe-tag. When they cut him open, bad wine shot out of this poor wretch too. The wine was not taken to be just wine now, since the sample was shown to contain formic acid.

  Once again, the trail led to Touraine, namely to a small winery run by Madame Lilly, another very independent woman and wife of war hero, although her husband had been killed in the border battles in the Ardennes. This second winery was closed, too, and Old Combes was also ordered to close his café for a week. You should have seen Old Libion’s face now! It had taken two days for a guest to die at the Closerie des Lilas as well, and the upshot was that Old Libion could open his place two days before his rival. He just needed to find another winery. But that wasn’t quite so simple because the café owners’ war had spread to Touraine, too. Amazonian Madame Marion up and took a bus to Paris to tell Old Libion ‘in a friendly way’ that she would immediately claim all the money he had been owing her for years if he dared to change wineries. What could the café owner do but give credence to what she said: that her wine was ‘as pure as a tear’. They went to the police station together; Marion dressed as a femme fatale with a hat topped with feathers, a floor-length black dress with a deep slit, and seductive fishnet stockings. She crossed her legs and then burst into tears. She said that her wine matured in oaken barrels for thirty months, and that she only added as much sugar as the regulations of the Third Republic permitted. They tested the wine on location in Touraine and found nothing suspicious, so business could return to usual at the Rotonde.

  It was almost exactly the same with the Closerie des Lilas, except that Old Combes was in the role of Old Libion, of course, and Madame Lily in the role of Madame Marion. They too went to the police station, but in this sketch complete with crying and posing she played the distressed widow, not the femme fatale. Nothing unusual was found in her cellars either, so the Closerie des Lilas was reopened. But the two old publicans were cunning and wanted to hedge their bets. Take Old Libion: for all he knew, a guest could go to his rival’s café, drink a glass of poisoned wine there, and then call in at his place before the harmful substances began to take effect; he would order a glass and then collapse at the table. Old Combes thought the same, so both café owners introduced subscription cards. Whoever subscribed at Old Libion’s could no longer go to Old Combes’s. There were, of course, people who tried to get cards for both places, but in vain. There are many times you can go to the left and to the right, but there comes a day when you must choose to go either left or right. That day came, and one thing was clear: whoever now died at Old Libion’s would die from his wine only, and anyone who collapsed at Old Combes’s would kick the bucket due to his wine alone. Things were tense in Touraine, too. The two amazonic wine merchants almost got into a scuff in the street and accused each other of being ‘poisoners’. Each of them continued to deliver wine to Paris, but now they personally accompanied the demijohns and casks all the way from the winery to the capital.

  Despite the universal caution, an unpleasant air of suspense prevailed. Which of the two café owners would the next guest die on? As it happened, it was neither. The police exposed a pro-German fanatic who had killed the poet de Gros and the painter Abraham Safin. He had no criminal record and was not known to the police. He said he had poisoned the wine on the way from Touraine to Paris. He held no grudge against the men he had killed, but he wasn’t sorry for the two wretches and saw no harm done to art because both of them had been arrogant upstarts. Although a Frenchman, the poisoner was incensed about the French attitude towards the Germans and the Café du Dôme, their former meeting-place, which now gaped empty. He was angry about the disgraceful sale of pictures from the galleries of German collectors and the headlines in the magazine Paris-Midi. Irate about all these things, he had intended to carry out poisonings in other cafés too, but fortunately he was caught shortly before all the café owners in Paris introduced passes for their locals and the ‘local conflict’ of the two café owners grew into a Paris-wide war.

  The poisoner was arrested. Our two proprietors tore up their passes. One day, Old Libion visited Old Combes and they clinked glasses with his wine, and the next day Combes returned the visit and tried Libion’s vino. They both agreed that their wine was sour and could make for a nasty hangover in the morning but was nothing to die from. The situation simmered down in Touraine too, and no one was happier in the end than the boozers.

  And so drink was able to claim many more lives — even that of Jean Cocteau, who at the time was on another spell of leave in Paris. He too had a bite to eat and a glass of wine or two at Old Libion’s, but luckily there were none of the ‘added acids’ in his glass. That was rather unlikely, to tell the truth, because ‘the poet of war’ did not hang around at the Rotonde all day this time, having been informed that he wouldn’t see Picasso there. Besides, this member of the medical corps under the command of Étienne de Beaumont had come to attend to a different matter. Food at the front was poor — that was almost an understatement — and, being his unit’s former quartermaster, he was in Paris to go to the canning factory which supplied French troops with the ‘Madagascar’ cured meat famed among soldiers at the front. He had also heard stories about the cans containing monkey meat instead of beef, but that didn’t concern him. He wanted to have something else put in the tins, so he found a way of befriending a seedy girl who was a kind of local orphan-girl of pre-war Montparnasse.

  They called her Kiki de Montparnasse, and she was a girl of a woman. She was no stranger to love, even before the Great War, but the three or four freckles on either side of her nose, her cropped black hair and plump, prickly legs made her look like a lustful, virgin schoolgirl holding out for her first man. Kiki wore a men’s hat, a patched coat and shoes a few sizes too big for her. Since 1914 she had worked at a factory canning food for soldiers at the front.
She had got to know Cocteau before the war in the circles of the painter Chaim Soutine. Now the cavalier with the crimson helmet called on her and reminded her of that cheerful company. Together they recalled the pre-war jokes of the many artists, and the cavalier claimed every single one of them had been his. Did Cocteau like Kiki and therefore woo her? Not at all. Crafty little tarts weren’t his sort. He just wanted to use her; and she him.

  She was short of money, and he needed better meals because he had begun to feel his ribs again — even through his overcoat. So Cocteau procured Provençal goose-liver pâté, red caviar (he thought it was Russian, but in fact it was Baltic), pinkish crabs (without shell) and other luxury food, which he asked Kiki to conceal and conserve in the familiar ‘Madagascar’ tins at his expense. It was not a difficult task for her; Kiki operated a canning machine and just needed a few days to sneak in his food and then hand the tins of special rations to the gratified soldier. Cocteau couldn’t go back to the front flaunting upper-class titbits, could he? This way it was better camouflaged than any mortar position. Cocteau returned to the war with a whole bundle of tins, and for a long while he secretly relished his stocks of ‘monkey meat’. ‘Look, that could hardly be beef, could it?’ he’d say to his comrades and show them the rosy lobster meat. ‘Huh, that’s monkey business,’ they’d reply, while others would shout: ‘No, magpie business!’

  Cocteau never found out what magpies had to do with it, but it is a known fact that magpies like to steal shiny objects, and bands of Belgian magpies made off with the shaving mirrors of many soldiers on the Western Front. One ‘thieving magpie’ got up to similar antics in London. That ‘bird’ was a stunningly beautiful woman, the vaudeville singer Lilian ‘Lilly’ Smith. On more than one occasion, she had roused a whole senior officers’ mess to sing ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ with her in unison. Refined and affable, Lilly had polished cheeks like a porcelain doll and sleek, well-groomed black hair gathered up into a bun. Two large eyes with lacquered pupils stood out on her face, but the most captivating thing about her was her self-confident and authoritative mezzo-soprano.

  Lilly was rich in wartime terms. The vaudeville shows she performed in earned her a substantial income. She had a soft spot for soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force leaving to be killed on the Continent, so for a slightly reduced fee she gladly accepted invitations to sing at their send-offs, even if part of the agreement was to give one hundred soldiers a ‘goodbye kiss’ at the end.

  Despite being invited to every social event, Lilly led a secluded life in a house in the country with ‘Uncle’. This was a bony man, folded in two at the middle like a waiter, with crooked yellow teeth and a monocle on a silver chain. No one knew what Uncle did. No one knew what Lilly actually did. No one knew that her mother was a German and that her real name was Lilian Schmidt, and that Uncle wasn’t her uncle but relayed the intelligence collected by Lilly in Britain from Dover to Calais, from where it was forwarded to Germany. No one found out because Lilly was circumspect. She didn’t giggle loudly in the company of senior officers; she didn’t throw herself at the next best senile general, perhaps a hero of the French-Prussian war, who kissed her hand; she didn’t sing ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ just like that. Like a proper magpie, she sought a man who really shone and found him in Major Lanoe George Hawker, the first commander of the Royal Flying Corps.

  In retrospect, everything looked like a real wartime romance. The major went on dangerous missions off the eastern coasts of England and to France, and returned with a whole clutch of information for his sweetheart. Lilian relayed figures, locations, sorties, routes, gross tonnages and the composition of convoys. She worked long hours and had already earned the German Iron Cross, 1st Class, when everything went wrong. The equilateral triangle between her, the major and Uncle was skewed by the appearance of a lover called Scarlet Rose in the major’s life. When she discovered this, Magpie couldn’t believe she had been supplanted by an ordinary rose, even if this Rose was herself a singer. How could the lass’s rustic soprano with uncultivated coloratura compare with the dignified, even patriotic mezzo-soprano of Lilly Smith, she asked herself. There was nothing for it but for Lilly to take revenge and get the major back for at least two reasons: because of her wounded pride as a woman, and because of the professional pride of a spy.

  And Lilly probably would have made that first injudicious move of her career, had not members of the British intelligence service knocked on her door. They told her that Scarlet Rose was a German spy whom they had had under observation for a long time. They offered Magpie the opportunity to co-operate and promised her a knighthood if she helped them. Lilly froze, but then quickly composed herself and thought two things: how nice it was that they had found another spy instead of her, and how splendid it would be to be called Dame Lilian Smith. So she readily agreed to become a double agent. And the others at a meeting of the small ‘wartime staff’ (Uncle, Lilly, the gardener and the maid) gave their approval that evening.

  Major Lanoe George Hawker now had two wartime sweethearts, two houses and two pairs of attentive ears listening, but with Lilly he seemed to be increasingly perturbed. He was no longer in the mood to talk about battles and didn’t tell her about any military plans. They went out like two stuffed owls to the Scott’s Arms, and every evening, when he was tanked up, she had to sing ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ for him. Afterwards the two owls went to bed, but even in his sleep the male bird wouldn’t hoot anything.

  What conclusion did the seasoned operative Lilian Schmidt come to about this new state of affairs? She knew that real information was not flowing across Scarlet Rose’s bed because she knew she wasn’t a German spy, obviously, but she seems to have been convinced that real male fluids were nevertheless being spilled there. Therefore she resolved to stand in her way. That was presumably what the British intelligence service expected of her. She told the SIS officers that she was close to getting the major to reveal to her the role of Scarlet Rose, but she already had a plan of her own. This time she didn’t share it with her little staff, although she should have. Lilian Schmidt decided to make Scarlet Rose a spy. But how? Persuasion? Recruitment? No, simply by framing her. One evening she went to the Savoy, where Scarlet Rose was singing, and planted her own German code book on her.

  Then she made sure that Uncle immediately changed the codes. She informed the SIS men that they would find absolute proof of Scarlet Rose’s spying in her possession. All she then had to do was wait. Less than one day later, several high-roofed black automobiles drew up in front of an ordinary country house. The rain poured down on the flat British landscape, and the nervous wipers could hardly clear the water from the glass. Several men in wet bowler hats got out of the cars, but there was no royal envoy between them bringing word of Lilly’s knighthood. The first to enter was Major Lanoe George Hawker in his damp dress uniform, which didn’t surprise her. After him came the two men from British military intelligence, wet to the skin, and that didn’t unsettle her either, but a real surprise was in store for her when behind them — dry, as if there was no deluge outside — the counter-intelligence officer Scarlet Rose strode triumphantly into the sitting room, holding her German code book. Lightning flashed low on the horizon on the way to Hayes, the major’s medals gleamed, the code book glinted, Uncle’s monocle fell out and cast a gleam on the side of the car — and the career of the ‘thieving magpie’ was over.

  The end of Lilian Smith’s successful singing career did not go unnoticed. The management of the Empire Music Hall’s variety show first instructed that ‘Cancelled’ tape be stuck over her posters, followed by ‘Singer ill’; finally, without much ado, they just wrote ‘“Long Way to Tipperary” show dropped from the repertory’. Some English families in their cramped flats on Fulham Road near Edith Grove remembered Lilly Smith with her resonant voice for a while, but she was soon forgotten because people don’t remember heroes, let alone singer-spies.

  On 11 April 1915, Lilian Schmidt was
exchanged for three British spies. On 12 April, Lilly was awarded her Iron Cross.

  THE FATHER OF ALL GOTHIC DOCTORS

  ’Herr Doktor?’

  ‘I was just on the phone to my wife . . . ’

  ‘Herr Doktor, you’ll appreciate this is an urgent matter.’

  The man who entered the large room where three generals were waiting was Fritz Haber. Dr Fritz Haber. He glanced around and back as if trying to follow the invisible footsteps of someone who had already walked the long way from the tall door to the solid wooden table by the window. Fritz Haber was a small, bald-headed man: his stooped, rheumatic body was crowned by a large head with a skull which would definitely have been of interest to lobotomists. He wore a small, framed lorgnette fastened by a spring to his short, stubby nose. Two broad, tearful eyes looked out from beneath the glasses, concealing a far from delicate gaze.

  Fritz Haber was a leading chemist and founder of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry. Haber had once been a Jew, but that is of no significance for this story, although quite a tale could be written about his conversion to Christianity. His place of birth was Wroclaw — or Breslau, as the Germans called it — in Poland. He was born into the family of that city’s most prominent textile merchant. His mother died when he was still young, but none of that would be important for this story had Haber not been predestined to be a chemist. Even as a boy, he set up a small laboratory at home. Later he duxed his degree in Heidelberg, topped his postgraduate class at the University of Berlin and became the youngest lecturer at the University of Karlsruhe, only to move back to Berlin in 1911 to found the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Chemistry in the capital.