The Great War

by Aleksandar Gatalica

  When he finally found out that Orhan was dead, there was nothing which could really comfort him. The body of his beloved apprentice was supposed to be brought home the following week. Now at least there were earthly remains to bury. But how could he wait those three long days until Orhan was finally wrapped in green cloth? He would withdraw deep into himself, far away from people, and quench another part of the embers which smouldered and maintained his elderly life. Now only the youngest of the Fişkeçi brothers remained, the eight-year-old boy who was sent to his shop as a gesture and only stayed one day. What would that eight-year-old-old think? Both his older brothers had given their life for the Padishah. Why yes, he should be proud; that eight-year-old boy should go out into the streets of Istanbul and sing. Yıldız knew that he should take him in his old arms and proudly head to the Padishah’s new palace. Yet he knew he was no longer capable of that. He could only die. But he wouldn’t, no, because he had three more apprentices on distant frontiers, watching and waiting to defend Turkey from the infidels who were pressing the country from land and sea, invading his two-dimensional world along evil old routes. ‘To the dogs with them,’ he muttered to himself and then began to shout: ’Filthy dogs! Curs!’

  He had to keep living for his three young apprentices. He had to pray to Allah, and once again he read the verses with the words hazen and huzn.

  BEST WISHES FROM HELL

  I’m sorry, sir, but you don’t know the man you’re talking about, so it’s easy for you to just call him ‘the butcher of Kinsale’. Unlike you, I knew Captain-Lieutenant Walther Schwieger quite well. It’s strange that all of what you say is true, but the way you say it is unacceptable because you never met that great submarine captain and unhappy man. You don’t seem to know, for example, that all seafarers who come from the coast resemble one another, while each mariner from the mainland has only himself as a model. Walther Schwieger came from a Berlin-Frankfurt ‘landlubber’ family. I spent most of my childhood with him. We went to school together; he was top of the class, and I . . . wasn’t exactly second.

  We went on board the submarine U-14 together on the day the war began. We were the last to swim to the surface of the mercurial sea when we lost that first vessel at dawn on 15 December 1914, immediately after leaving the Baltic. After a brief questioning, the captain was given a new underwater shark, the U-20, which would later sink the RMS Lusitania. That’s right, I remember that day as clearly as if it was yesterday: people screaming for help as they drowned — and were cruelly ground — in the mad vortex of the sinking ship out at sea. It was twenty kilometres west of the Irish coast, off the Old Head of Kinsale.

  Yes, sir, for all your astuteness you overlook or don’t wish to see that the sinking of the Lusitania was a terrible tragedy, in which they all had their part: Dock 54 in New York, from where the ship started on its fatal voyage on 1 May 1915; Captain Daniel Dow, who steered the ship towards Liverpool; and all of the 1,255 passengers on board. Don’t tell me they didn’t know she was a dual-purpose vessel: on the outside the RMS Lusitania, a merchant ship, but on the inside the AMC Lusitania — a warship in disguise. Naturally you know, and don’t deny, that in 1913 the British Admiralty ordered that the section of large passenger ships beneath the main deck, which usually remained empty and served as a buoyancy chamber in the event of water penetrating the lower decks, be unsealed and equipped with a rotating cannon. This could ‘magically appear’ on the main deck within just a few minutes, right next to the first-class passengers wrapped in blankets and watching the last rays of the sun drowning in the ocean. And of course you known that all of the 120 Canadians who drowned were actually soldiers in mufti, but you have a new argument already.

  Yes, I know what your reply will be, and you’ll even be right in the interpretation of that intrigue. The catastrophe of the Lusitania was caused by forces on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s true that the illuminati had their fingers in it. Captain Daniel Dow was one of them, there were quite a few illuminati in the Admiralty, just like on Capitol Hill, and my unfortunate friend Captain-Lieutenant Schwieger was one of them too — how’s that for an admission? They were all in collusion in some way and it was in their joint interest to draw America into the war. And it’s even true that a torpedo was consciously fired at that target, and the ship was lumbering straight into our ambush, as vulnerable as a fat lady swimming — but how wrong you are when you claim that the illuminati plot my poor friend was involved in was the decisive factor, and you go so far as to speculate about a meeting in the lovely Indian summer of 1913 between Captain Dow, Captain-Lieutenant Schwieger and the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill!

  Would it surprise you to learn that the Lusitania was actually sunk by sea serpents two kilometres long and abominable giant octopuses from the depths of the sea? a ludicrous idea? Never mind. But remember this: I am a reliable eyewitness who spent fifteen years together with Walther Schwieger, four of them deep under the sea. It all began back when we were cadets at naval academy in the Free City of Lübeck. Hallucinations? The cramped conditions in which the first submariners lived and waged war? The near nervous breakdowns of the top of the class? All this together probably caused Captain-Lieutenant Schwieger to begin having visions as real as life itself. Even our first submarine, the U-14, was trailed by enormous serpents, megalodons with huge maws, and legendary giant octopuses, the captain said. I, too, felt I was beginning to hear their sneaking, their knocking and scraping against the hull of our submarine and their faraway shrieking and tittering like the giggle of old women — but you’re right, I never saw a single one of those monsters. Schwieger did.

  He claimed they were our cruel, infernal allies — that they were on our side and we dared not anger them. And when our U-20 calmly sailed out to sea on 30 April 1915 and submerged off the westernmost German port of Emden, the captain claimed that the beasts set off behind us. Don’t laugh, sir. They were there, I swear to you. Ask any of the other crew members from the U-20, and they’ll confirm that the shuddering sobs, eerie singing and dreadful cries from the salty depths told of their proximity, even though they were invisible to us. But we couldn’t summon them, or assuage them. Only the captain could do that. I have to tell you that the captain, the one you call ‘the butcher of Kinsale’, couldn’t reconcile himself to having to contact them, but he did it in the end because it would have been mad to ignore the alliance with such mighty creatures. ‘We are now heading to embrace our fate, and we have to do what is expected of us above the water and under the water,’ he told me, and I realized we were heading for some spectacular sinking.

  And so we were. We travelled the North Sea for half a day. Then we rounded the northern coast of Scotland, and three days after setting out we arrived at our destination: Twenty kilometres from the Old Head of Kinsale. There we stopped. I confirm what you say — we were waiting solely for the Lusitania. But you don’t know what happened in those four days during which we waited for the ‘innocent’ merchant ship to arrive at the place where we had set the ambush. For safety reasons, we only surfaced briefly to replenish our supplies of oxygen. And while we were under water, the captain was engaged in a veritable war with those aquatic beasts. He was on the verge of giving up, cheating the ‘landlubbers’ and not sinking the Lusitania after all, but that displeased the sea creatures. No one apart from me was allowed to enter the captain’s cabin, and whenever I brought him a meal he would suddenly fall silent and then tell me, as if I was au fait with the ‘negotiations’: ‘It’s no good, the sea serpents have decided: the ship has to be sunk.’ One day, and then the next. I swear to you, their screams were becoming ever louder, and the captain’s replies ever shriller and more embittered, so you’ll understand why all the crew members of the U-20 were terrified and longing for the day when it would be over.

  Then the day came. It was Friday, 7 May. Shortly after noon, we spotted a floating mountain of metal approaching from the west. One torpedo launched from seven hundred metres meant the end of
the Lusitania. Five minutes after the hit, the ammunition stored under deck exploded, so I can say with some certainty that that detonation didn’t derive from our second torpedo. For seven minutes after that, the passengers screamed. They tried to lower the lifeboats for four more minutes.. Eighteen minutes after the encounter with the U-20, the Lusitania plunged into the infernal depths and took more than a thousand lives down with it into the silence, to feed that colony of colossal sea denizens. When the ship reached the bed and became prey to the monsters, only the screams for help and the cries of the few survivors remained on the surface. ‘Now the people above and the sea serpents below are satisfied,’ Captain-Lieutenant Walther Schwieger said coldly, pale as if he had been wrestling for days with an unseen enemy.

  The scene on the surface was terrible, by any account. The propeller blades, still turning, were chopping bodies in half; they smashed lifeboats and flung people ten metres through the air as if they were spitting out cherry stones; a severed human head was riding on a life jacket; but we retracted the periscope and returned to our home port. In Berlin, the ‘landlubber’ Walther Schwieger was decorated with the Iron Cross, 1st Class and promoted to the rank of Captain-Lieutenant. And now, my good sir, you are the first to have learnt the full truth about the sinking of the Lusitania.

  * * *

  Ferrara, 23 May 1915

  Dear Mother,

  The fierce heat has come on early this year in Ferrara. The hemp harvest is drawing to a close in the fields surrounded by the old arms of the river and the swamps full of fetid water, so I’m writing to you as I hide from people who simply go wild at this time and display their lustful nature. I’m hurrying to send you these lines because I know you’ll hear the rumour that my nerves have given way and I’ve become mentally ill. Please don’t worry — I feigned a nervous breakdown and met a friendly army doctor, a major, who had me moved to a sanatorium near Ferrara. The convalescent home was once a Benedictine abbey with a small cloistered atrium and a host of passageways and secluded chambers, which has given me the opportunity to return to colours and produce a few large paintings with metaphysical passages and abandoned dummies caught up in long shadows ascending the walls like spiders.

  But imagine what happened here. An audacious, uneducated man barged into my life. His manner was just like his name: Karlo Rota. The rotter proclaimed himself a painter and, without asking me — even my epigone. Wherever I went, he followed at my heels and painted the same things as me, and did all this with mind-boggling impudence and sans gêne. He was a man without moderation in his actions or scruples in his intentions, and all his work was barer and bleaker than my paintings. His dummies were ragged and inside out, as if an evil demiurge had cruelly ripped out their hemp stuffing, springs and threads, and on some canvases they eventually even began to bleed. When I asked him why he did that, he said the devil had told him to do it. What a cheap excuse for an untalented dauber! And I wouldn’t have given a damn about such nonsense, had he not claimed that his paintings announced that war was coming to Italy too and that he was in collusion with the future victims of the war, whom he represented as butchered dummies. I didn’t take that seriously either, until I heard today that our country has entered the Great War.

  What is to come, I don’t know. I do know that Karlo Rota spared me his presence and so-called friendship this very evening. He ran away, taking his paintings with him, and is being hunted as a deserter. Please write, and don’t buy a ticket to Ferrara just now. Maybe things won’t all turn out like on the canvases of that painfully untalented painter.

  Your devoted son,

  Giorgio de Chirico

  * * *

  Mogilev

  Stavka – Tsarist General Staff

  1 September 1915

  Monsieur l’Ambassadeur,

  As you know, I am no longer a young man. At seventy-six, I have seen both the last century and this, and things both fair and foul; I have tasted both the sweet and the bitter, have touched soft flesh and stuck my hands in the nettles. I therefore ask you to please not take what I am going to write to you lightly, and to let it remain just between us: c’est pour nous deux. You have lived in my country for long enough to realize that Russia is awash with the occult and mystical, that our church is an island of Christian Orthodoxy in a sea of raging unbelievers, that the people here are violently excessive, and that the black forces from hell can find their way straight to the heart of even the most steadfast and justice-loving man. Unrest is therefore our ally, hysterical visionariness our future, and dull-witted brutalities are the roadside monuments of our history.

  I am writing this to you as a confirmed believer and patriot who cannot allow anyone to beat his breast and claim to have obligated the tsar’s family more than me. It is precisely concerning the future of the Romanovs that I am writing to you, a Westerner, and please do hesitate to warn me if you find I am exaggerating. You are sure to have been informed that the emperor dismissed the Generalissimo, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, on 25 August / 8 September (New Style) and, despite the opposition of almost everyone devoted to the throne, made himself commander of all his armies on land and sea. I am sure you know that our ’Iron Duke’ took the news as only a Christian can. If I may cite him, he said to the new Minister of War, General Polivanov: ‘Thank God that the emperor has relieved me of a task which has completely consumed me.’ But that was not the opinion of his wife Anastasia and her fury-like sister Milica, the wife of Nicholas’s brother, Grand Duke Peter Nikolaevich.

  You probably know about those two Montenegrin princesses, or witches. Forgive me for using such undiplomatic language. No one dares to look those two ‘black pearls’ in the eyes: newts’ eyes and frogs’ toes fall out of their pockets, and the air around them smells of magical, ethereal oils. The two bitter sisters were galled by the news that the duke had been relieved of his post and sent to the Caucasus with his faithful chief of staff, General Yanushkevich. ‘And this after such suffering?’ they are said to have hissed. ‘After sleeping in a tent by the Masurian Lakes at minus thirty?’ As furious as Medeas, they demanded to be allowed to see their husbands, but neither Nicholas nor Peter were in a position to receive them because Peter was still in Moscow, while Nicholas left without delay for Tbilisi. And that is why I am so bold as to believe they have begun a “great war” of their own from their residence in Kiev, like two Baba Yagas. Why do I claim this? The sequence of strange events which unfolded here leads me to think this, but the little town of Mogilev is not to blame, nor the fact that so many important people were all here in one place — practically in just a few houses on two main streets intersecting at a sharp angle.

  First of all, something strange happened to the court major-domo, Voyeyko, who began to stammer and became eccentric. You know him, I’m sure: he is the devoted, taciturn old fellow who only speaks when he must, or when he is asked. He, of all people, now began to spew forth love quatrains and terza rima, loud and garbled. After him, strange perturbations were manifested by the ever restrained Admiral Konstantin Nilov, who started reciting Shakespeare’s sonnets, which he knew by heart, instead of going about his usual duties. He walked about the stately house, muttering Sonnet 18 to himself in Russian: ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer‘s day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate: / Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, / And summer‘s lease hath all too short a date.’

  The Germans had taken all of Lithuania and cut the railway line connecting Vilnius with Daugavpils and Pskov with Petrograd, and it was not long before a right love-struckness took hold of Mogilev like in one of Shakespeare’s comedies. The climax came when Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich arrived at the Stavka together with his stunningly beautiful friend Matilda Kshesinskaya, the prima ballerina of the Mariinsky Theatre of St Petersburg. A narrow face, pronounced eastern cheekbones, piercing sapphire eyes and a beauty mark on her face . . . It was as if everyone’s heart had suddenly been shot through. Admiral Nilov went swimming in Lake Pechora every day so Ma
tilda might see he was still strong, like a strapping lad. I’ve heard that Voyeyko, without warning, went up to ask the ballerina’s hand and knelt before her naked, though I’m not sure I want to believe it.

  But the worst thing was that the brothers, the Grand Dukes Georgi and Sergei Mikhailovich, fell out over Miss Kshesinskaya. The artillery thus struck a blow at the cavalry (Georgi was in charge of the artillery, Sergei of the cavalry). Then the aviation got involved too, when the third brother, Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, also declared his love for that femme fatale, and a world war of lovers was set to begin. Matilda didn’t know what to do. She requested an audience with the tsar, with whom she had also once been in a sentimental relationship. But ask as she might, she was not allowed to see him. It was the tsar’s custom to take tea at five in the afternoon, and no one dared utter a word about love-struckness, at least until the brothers armed themselves and even vied with Shakespeare in the cruelty of the letters they wrote to each other. Rumours spread about duels and about the beautiful prima ballerina having disappeared from Mogilev — and just when the tension was almost palpable it suddenly stopped.

  Voyeyko, the court major-domo, doesn’t remember falling to his knees, naked, and offering to marry Matilda; Nilov no longer recites Shakespeare and bathes in the cold waters of the lake in a striped bathing suit; Georgi Mikhailovich has returned to artillery matters; Alexander Mikhailovich now ignores the ballerina; Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich has retained his sweetheart after leading her through the eye of that storm, and everything has returned to wartime reality. The Russian army is no longer retreating. Our forces have even gone on the counter-offensive on the right bank of the River Styr, along the line Derazhnya–Olit–Nizhne. May God grant that the tsar’s command be triumphant. But was that week of amorous pandemonium enough to satisfy Anastasia and Milica, those two servants of hell? Or will they unleash more chaos? Please write, chide me if you must, and counsel me.