The Great War

by Aleksandar Gatalica

  Zhivka D. Spasich, the Belgrade seamstress, was glad that she had been able to move her tailor shop out of Dunavska Street. Strange things had been happening there. Everything was in good order at the new address. In fact, she liked it so much at 26 Prince Eugene Street that she hardly left the premises, even now when her clientele was limited to men in Austro-Hungarian army uniforms, and business flourished the next year and in the years that followed — and no one, no one at all, disappeared when they drew the curtain behind them in the changing room.

  Dr Svetislav Simonovich saw in the New Year at the side of his king on board the torpedo boat Mameluk on the way from Brindisi to Salonika. He massaged King Peter with the old balms he knew, and then the king had him stay for the beggarly supper in the first-class cabin, which, with one of his witty remarks, he called ’dinner at the Ritz’.

  Mehmed Yıldız did not mark the new-fangled, infidel New Year in any special way, except perhaps with astonishment. No, this old Turk was not disconcerted by the whiff of terror in the streets and the fact that the jails were full of prisoners who had uttered a single word of criticism against the Young Turk Committee of Union and Progress. It had risen and now ruled Turkey with terror and prisons, and that squared with the trader’s expectations in the straight-and-narrow world of the righteous. But how could it be that German families were arriving at the railway station below Topkapı Palace from Bulgaria every day and then travelling on to places in Asia Minor, from where the Armenians had been expelled? Were they to settle there? To become new Anatolians? How could Germans, those Westerners with their breadth and depth, possibly help the Turks — a people without prospects?

  Perhaps it was all part of that year of the trader, 1915, which he saw out with two deep scars on his soul. Why did he still believe that trade and commerce would save young lives on all sides? Had horrible 1915 not made him change his mind? Why had it not shaken his optimism? It was one thing to climb the Camondo Stairs and run a shop in swish Galata, mixing with the Jewish, Coptic and Syrian traders and lying to yourself and others that dreams and status are sold together with the goods; it was a different matter to fight so that this great war would end all future wars. But maybe he was old and gradually exiting the trading world on the downslope of life. He was seventy-six and had begun his fifty-ninth year of trading by the Bosporus. He had just one year to go before he reached the tally of three score years and fulfilled the life of a trader according to the old Turkish saying. ‘You have to trade with both death and life,’ the effendi muttered to himself, and with that thought he fell asleep. Thus ended the year for one trader.

  His alarm clock rang in the morning of the first day of the New Year 1916. But he didn’t open the shop that morning although a splendid, if scarcely warming sun rose over the Bosporus on the first day of the third year of the war.

  [1] After a dramatic retreat from Prizren (Kosovo) to the Adriatic coast through the hostile Albanian highlands, during which over 100,000 Serbs died of cold and hunger, the remnants of the army were ferried to Corfu by the Allies in early 1916.

  1916

  THE YEAR OF THE KING

  Grigory Rasputin, Major-General Putyatin and Colonel Lotman, 1916

  THE VALLEY OF THE DEAD

  It was the morning of 1 January 1916 by the new calendar. The deep-blue dawn turned a paler shade of blue and finally went milky, like a child’s undershirt, cast over the tearful Salonika sky. King Peter woke up early and stared out into the gulf. He swallowed the taste of defeat so he would not feel it in his mouth like a bad tooth. Now his gaze simply wandered. Old as he was, with muscles shrivelled and taut and with swollen veins, he had to give himself a nudge to start all over again. The Allied General Staff was in Salonika. The broad Macedonian port looked like a humming beehive. The blue gulf resembled a huge factory where the funnels of two hundred ships belched smoke. The streets were choked with soldiers of various nations: indifferent French, confused British, and Greeks, who for reasons unknown were exceedingly irritated.

  Field trains and supply units followed one another in an endless line: lazily from the sea up into the hills, and then straight back down to the sea, seemingly willy-nilly, as if to just create the impression that something was happening. The surrounding heights were studded with white tents. Anxiety lingered over Salonika like a stupor, strong enough to sedate and distract from another drama — the tragic plight of the Serbian army away on the shores of the Ionian Sea. Now the king gazed down into the street. The whole Greek people seemed to be in uniform; they had taken possession of the cafés, were jostling in front of the cinemas, and bought oranges and figs from the fruit ladies. Some Frenchmen were chatting beneath his balcony, and King Peter heard and understood them. ‘Do you know that the Serbs are dying behind those Albanian hills?’ one of them said, and another answered: ‘But we can’t help them. Things here aren’t going well, you know. The Greeks are against us, and we disembarked against the will of the Greek king. The Allies have been on their guard and bristling for three nights now. No, it’s impossible to withdraw even just one battalion to send to the front in Macedonia. A Bartholomew’s Night could be in store for us here.’

  The king stopped listening. His Bartholomew’s Night had already been; it had come like a frenzied, wailing banshee and was gone again, leaving him to suffer, still alive like a tragic hero. Now he was living a grotesque new life-unlife which he had blundered into like a blind man. He went to the other end of the room and closed the window, and then the noises of the street were gone. He should be king again; he should ring the bell and receive the Serbian envoy and arrange to leave the hotel. After all, he had only disembarked to stay in it for one night. He had to give himself a nudge and ring that bell. So many kings were in exile. Had he not grown up and come of age in exile himself? Had he not first been fed with the milk of foreign lands, countries safe but cold? So what was new about the situation? The new element was that an entire kingdom was in exile! Oh, it would be better not to think any more and just ring.

  As he reached for the bell and his fingers clenched the handle, his hand shook by itself. The porcelain clapper rang the bell and the day began. King Peter decided not to attend the reception in Salonika prepared by representatives of the Greek and Allied authorities. Instead, he ordered that he be taken by motor launch, which now came to the quay for him, straight to the Serbian consulate further along the bay. They were to approach it as circumspectly as possible — as if the launch was carrying a conspirator or a disowned princeling rather than a king. The king had decided in advance not to remain at the hotel but to move to the consulate. He didn’t want any pomp, and the guard of honour he now saw waiting in front of the consulate bothered him. ‘Greece goes and rejects its 1913 agreement with us, it makes us take to the ravines of Albania where we lost so many people in that Calvary, and now it wants to show us a tad of honour and respect?’ the old man muttered to himself, while at the shore in front of the consulate Colonel Todorovich tried to persuade the short, moustachioed commander of the guard of honour to move aside. ‘The king is tired and doesn’t want any pomp,’ the colonel repeated, as the black boat of the motor-launch company glided away behind him, and a few Greek soldiers stood at attention even without being ordered to.

  The king went in nevertheless, without looking at anyone. ‘The Serbian monarch gives his thanks and excuses himself,’ he heard behind his back, while the crowd which had gathered in front of the Serbian consulate slowly dispersed. In the days that followed, the king and his entourage returned to their pressing affairs. This afterlife showed astonishing vitality in presenting its real substance: the Belgian emissary certainly looked palpable when he came up to shake the king’s hand; Edward Boyle, the philanthropist, was offering what seemed to be real assistance for the Serbs; and the Christmas greetings which King Peter received several days later from the British king, the Duke of Orleans and the Serbian Prime Minister Nikola Pashich arrived on very convincing telegraph paper. But King Peter still didn’t trust
life in that abyssal year of 1916, just as one Turk didn’t believe in that year either.

  Let us call him Non-Bey, although he called himself Cam Zulad Bey, and his real name was Vartkes Noradungian. The tale of this harsh and relentless Turkish policeman begins with him changing his religion and extinguishing the last Armenian ember in himself. That Bey thought he was doing it solely for the sake of promotion, higher rank and stars on his lapel next to the word ‘Kanun’ (Law); he thought he would never have to examine what small trace of Armenianness remained in him, but things turned out differently. Cam Zulad Bey did not hesitate at all when, back in 1914 at the beginning of the Great War, ethnic Armenians were to be accused of the defeats in the Turkish army’s Caucasus campaign and the subsequent disaster at the Battle of Sarikamish. He looked deep inside himself and could no longer see anything Armenian there, or in his appearance. He bought a newspaper and sat by the Bosporus like every other Turk; he read and smoked a chibouk like a Turk, and with mute movements of his lips approved of Enver Pasha’s words in the paper: “The Armenians are to blame for the Turkish defeat and the sixty thousand righteous men left lying face-down in the muddy snow. The Armenian recruits must therefore be disarmed. They are a foreign body in our army.” Hear, hear!, the policeman repeated inside, blew out smoke and saw that everything in his appearance, as well as inside, was in good order. And so he went on without looking back.

  Non-Bey saw nothing strange in being the first Istanbul policeman entrusted with censoring Armenian mail. Not a single Bakelite button on his coat was Armenian. He didn’t shrink from boycotting Armenian shops and stores, and he didn’t see anything bad in the liquidation of five Armenian leaders in April 1915. He saw no justification for the Armenian rebellion in the city of Van and cursed the day the Russians aided the insurgents to withstand the siege. Pogroms spread throughout Turkey and took on a particular dread in the cobblestone streets of the capital. But Non-Bey felt quite at ease. He didn’t find it strange that he, of all people, had been entrusted with shadowing Armenian intellectuals in all three parts of Istanbul and later placing them under house arrest. He peered into the black dregs of his soul and didn’t see a single Armenian word warning him to stop. Therefore he didn’t find it at all unusual that he sent all his previous Armenian neighbours into exile that year, in 1915. It wasn’t his job to sympathise with them. He didn’t shed a tear when he heard that hundreds and thousands of Armenians had died on their way to Syria and Mesopotamia.

  When Talaat Pasha declared, towards the end of 1915: ‘I have accomplished more towards solving the Armenian problem in three months than Sultan Abdul Hamid accomplished in thirty years,’ Non-Bey felt himself to be a Turk, above all else. He was praised for his devoted service, received a promotion and was assisted in buying a splendid wooden house in the Hisar neighbourhood. He didn’t find anything unusual when he entered his new home because he had thrown out everything which belonged to the old owners, down to the last towel and sheet, so nothing would smell of Christians. Then, from good Turkish homes, he had bought up divans, wicker chairs, mirrors in wooden frames and even creepers for the second-floor porch. Now he was the supervisor of the entire vilayet — him, a former Armenian policeman on the banks of the Bosporus! What had his name been back when he was Armenian? He couldn’t remember. He had no time. Now he was sent to Trabzon to ‘smooth things over’ after the ‘solution of the Armenian problem’ there.

  When he set off on the trip at the beginning of 1916, he thought about how he didn’t trust the New Year 1916. The previous year had been the greatest for Turkdom, he felt, because they had got rid of the wretched Armenians once and for all. He entered the city of Trabzon, and before him lay a valley of the dead. He literally had to walk over bodies, there were so many of them. But Cam Zulad Bey didn’t look back. Sometimes his legs would sink into pits of putrid flesh with a crunch of bones, but Non-Bey was cool and unruffled. Holes teeming with grey maggots opened up here and there beneath his feet. Most of the corpses of his fellow Armenians were covered with only a thin layer of soil, which had been washed away in places by the rain. Heaps of dead rebels lay where they had fallen in the three-day revolution in Trabzon: still half in motion, as if rising up against Turkey and the Young Turk committee again, but Cam Zulad Bey didn’t feel the slightest despondency. In one place he saw the rat-gnawed skeletons of Turks and Armenians still grasping each others’ throats, their arms and legs entwined in a crush they couldn’t loosen even after death. Cam Zulad Bey seemed to feel nothing. But then he turned around. He, who had not hesitated at all when there was a call to accuse Armenian soldiers of the defeat at Sarikamish, who didn’t shrink from boycotting Armenian shops and stores, who placed Armenian intellectuals from all three parts of Istanbul under house arrest, who sent all his neighbours into exile and who couldn’t even remember his Armenian name — now stopped in his tracks.

  He turned around as if he had forgotten something, just some trivial little thing like his snuffbox or the rolling paper he should have put in his pocket before leaving Istanbul. Then a single trickle of perspiration ran down his forehead as if he had broken into a sweat from walking over the corpses, although he had not hesitated when there was a call to accuse Armenian soldiers of the defeat at Sarikamish, had not shrunk from boycotting Armenian shops and stores, had placed Armenian intellectuals from all three parts of Istanbul under house arrest, had sent all his neighbours into exile, and couldn’t even remember his Armenian name. Now his mouth suddenly filled with foam. He grasped for his throat, his eyes began to roll wildly as if they were about to pop out, and then he collapsed. He could bear it no longer.

  Cam Zulad Bey fell: the last victim of the Armenian carnage.

  The Great War ended for Non-Bey in that last hour when he remembered his Armenian name: Vartkes Noradungian. But whether he embraced it and flew up to heaven as an Armenian, or remained an Ottoman and ordinary Istanbul policeman until the end, is privy only to God, also known as Allah or Jehovah, among other names. The year 1916 remained indifferent: it neither blamed 1915 for its crimes nor thought of being any different itself.

  In the French trenches on the Western Front, Guillaume Apollinaire realized what war really was. There were no more letters from the rear. Nor new girlfriends. Nor opium dens and imitation Chinese offering pipes of opium. The artilleryman was now in the grips of a ‘great melancholy’. Not so much because of the weather. He got used to the awful rain. And the mud. He got used to those trench comrades, the rats. But he couldn’t get used to the stupidity of headquarters. Military councils were constantly in session. Courts martial were introduced. Every soldier who was wounded in the hand and had black marks around the wound risked being shot, because the black could be gunpowder soot, which would indicate self-mutilation.

  At the beginning of 1916, near Souain, the 2nd Company of the 336th Infantry Division refused an order to attack the enemy trenches. The men were exhausted. Attack. Counter-attack. Attack. Counter-attack. A new assault meant death. The Germans had just replaced the barbed wire in no man’s land. An advance under such circumstances was nothing short of suicide. Faced with such disobedience, the French general in charge of the 336th Infantry Division thought of laying down an artillery barrage on his own trenches. At the intervention of his faithful colonel, he changed his mind. Instead, he ordered that six corporals and eighteen privates be picked from among the youngest soldiers. These ‘hostages’ were taken before the military council, and the court martial summarily sentenced them to death.

  It transpired that the non-commissioned officers near Apollinaire didn’t pick any men at all. Sometimes dice were rolled, and those with the least luck were taken and shot. Second Lieutenant Apollinaire was particularly upset by the fate of Second Lieutenant Chapelant, a twenty-year-old machine-gunner in the 98th Infantry Regiment. Second Lieutenant Chapelant was brave. He had blue eyes. And the gaze of a daydreamer. The same gaze as Apollinaire. By the time the poet met him, the dreams had already begun to fade from Chapelant’s e
yes. The next day, Chapelant’s sector of the Front was attacked. The machine-gunner and his crew were surrounded but refused to surrender. The cut-off men would fire a burst every fifteen minutes to make the Germans think they still had enough ammunition. They were left there between dark and death, amongst all the barbed wire. When French stretcher-bearers were finally able to rescue the wounded men, Chapelant, as their officer, was taken to be court-martialled on the stretcher. They had been found behind enemy lines. The sentence was spoken: execution. The stretcher was set upright. They tied Chapelant so he wouldn’t fall off and fired three bullets into his chest. ‘Things like that demoralize the men,’ Apollinaire wrote to his mother on an ordinary soldier’s postcard. He waited for a reply from her. Nothing came, and he came to the conclusion that this was probably because the card was not one of Birot’s wondrous wartime postcards.

  Before the Great War, Pierre Albert-Birot had been a poet and sculptor. A self-styled poet, and unrecognized as a sculptor. But he persistently claimed that he had the face of a poet and the body of sculptor. As a matter of fact he was rickety, had a pigeon chest, and always stooped so that his shadow invariably went in front of his steps, whichever direction the sun was shining from. He launched several avant-garde magazines in the course of the Great War, but he saw they were eating away at his savings. The magazine SIC (Son, Idées, Couleurs, Formes) was the one he believed in longest, but he didn’t want to admit to himself that both it and Elan, a magazine he launched together with the Dadaists, were really just a screen for publishing his poems. Finally, he realized it was too much for him. After all, he was a man with increasing pain in his crooked frame and with the pocket of a small manufacturer.