The Great War

by Aleksandar Gatalica

  At the beginning of the Great War, he had set up a small workshop to produce and market postcards. He printed them at his own expense and sold them to soldiers and their families to facilitate their correspondence. Outwardly, Birot’s postcards looked like any others. They had an idealized French soldier on the front, with flowers in his lapel and a loving Frenchwoman by his side. They were not particularly well printed, but their value lay elsewhere — they were far more talented than other cards. While ordinary wartime correspondence took weeks to arrive, sometimes months, Birot’s postcards went like express mail, evading censors and mail sorters and extracting themselves from the Red Cross depot in Geneva, where thousands of mail items from soldiers, POWs and their families lay waiting for someone to pigeon-hole, stamp and send them.

  The soldiers were quick to notice this, and their families even quicker. In time, it seems the postcards themselves realized they were special. Old Birot was probably the only one who didn’t notice anything. After all, he didn’t trace the delivery paths of mail. He lived in the conviction that this quaint graphic of the soldier with flowers in his lapel and sweetheart by his side had been done for him by bigoted Dadaists, although they disdained figurative art. He thought it was the face of that universal soldier — that perfectly insipid, righteous man on the front of the postcard — which made his cards sell so well, but he was mistaken. When soldiers weren’t busy being killed, they spent days on end sending and receiving mail. They wrote in the lulls between attacks, they wrote when they returned alive from parapet duty, and they wrote as soon as they took off their masks and the clappers gave the all-clear for gas. Since they wrote so much, they had plenty of opportunity to see that Birot’s postcards reached their destinations, while others didn’t. Why the otherwise diligent Guillaume Apollinaire didn’t notice and, as we recall, wrote to his mother on ordinary paper, is not known. But that is not important for the story.

  This is the tale of how Birot’s cards began to write a parallel history of the war by continuing where the initial writers left off. The postcards were sold in many places at the front and in the rear, but a considerable number of them disappeared from the shops. Poor old Birot, he thought they were being stolen by vagabonds, but he couldn’t have imagined that they left the shops all by themselves. This is what happened: while a soldier was alive and sending postcards himself, Birot’s cards were compliant and just relied on their extraordinary ability to be delivered; but if the soldier was killed, they would take the initiative and continue to write his history for months to come.

  ‘I’m well. A bit lice-ridden, but that doesn’t matter,’ they would begin, but the more time passed since the death of the signer, the more they became inclined to philosophise and agitate against the war. Their only limitation was space, but they were able to overcome it by using ever smaller letters and expressing their ideas more concisely. One group of Birot’s postcards was particularly talented. They were used by the machine-gunner, Second Lieutenant Henri Chapelant. While he was alive, he wrote to his mother: ‘Chère Maman, I think this last war has sullied even your maternal skirt.’ He continued in the course of 1914: ‘Don’t believe the rumours, dear brother — I wasn’t killed near Ypres, I pulled through with just a few scars because I bought a gas mask in good time.’ There were also trivial notes like, ‘I’m hungry, so wretchedly hungry. Some of my comrades have roasted rats. I watched but didn’t dare to eat’, and ‘The snow this morning, Maman, has dusted the whole hill like icing sugar. Everything seems unreal. The fine snow just keeps falling, and when a bullet is put in the barrel it starts to turn white like when you sprinkle icing sugar over one of your cakes.’

  Later Chapelant was shot — we saw it happen — but the postcards continued to send themselves. His mother in Le Havre received dozens of them, and she still thought for a long time that her son was alive. Only Chapelant’s younger brother suspected something. At first, only short messages came from the machine-gunner. ‘I’m alive, don’t worry’; ‘There was a big attack on our sector’, and then ‘I’m alive’ and ‘I’m alive’ again. Later, long-expected postcards with more extensive messages began to arrive; the devoted, seventeen-year-old brother was astute enough to notice that, although the handwriting was Chapelant’s, the language wasn’t. There were clumsy grammatical mistakes as well as strange stray words here and there, which the pre-war daydreamer had never used. But everyone was going through the Great War, and people changed in the course of it. That’s what the machine-gunner’s relatives thought, and the postcards continued to send themselves. What can be said of the last cards from the workshop of Pierre Albert-Birot? They were written with strangely bulbous, distorted letters, which no longer even had accents on them. One of them said: ‘The last god died on the cross and his resurrection was only to save his own skin, it seems. Yeshua Ha-Nozri took none of our sins upon himself, and if I could find those Gypsies who made the nails, I’d go into their smithy and reforge the fourth one that was lost before the crucifixion.’ the last postcard to arrive in Le Havre contained a final lament, in no way worthy of a daydreamer. It read: ‘Where is that inviolable God? You know, treaties are written by the great and powerful for amusement and to kill time. Paper is paper and you can write anything. God is a fictional figure invented by those with a vested interest, just as war, suffering and million-fold death are in their interest.’

  Here the correspondence died. Not a single auto-written postcard more came from Chapelant from the valley of the dead. His mother and brother sent a few more of Birot’s talented postcards to the Front, but there was no longer any reply. Many other French soldiers — alive or freshly dead — continued to write to their loved ones. The correspondence was only ended by those who, having departed this world, were so far away that not even magic postcards could imitate their life. But their places were taken by new soldiers who wrote and then wrote some more, so old Birot thought he had found the goose that laid the golden egg.

  To be sure, there were also men who didn’t write home but had so much freedom of movement that they imitated the talented postcards and extracted themselves from their units as if the war was a non-committal undertaking. One of the most talented fly-by-nights from the front to the rear was Jean Cocteau. He needed to return to civilization; he had used up his last tins of ‘Madagascar’ food and now had to find the girl Kiki again. He came to Paris in 1916 with sadness in his heart and nostalgia on his lips: ‘This isn’t the Paris of 1915, just as it wasn’t at all the Paris of 1914.’ And added: ‘That was a good vintage, 1914 . . . ’ but he didn’t permit himself to wallow in melancholy. He didn’t even think of looking for Picasso. Instead, he did his utmost to find his patron, the seedy little Kiki. He arrived in front of the factory in a motor taxi, once again in his dress uniform and wearing a crimson helmet, but there was a surprise in store for him.

  Kiki was no longer assigned to the food factory. He asked after her: Did anyone know ‘Kiki’? But no one knew her. Did she have a surname? He didn’t know that Kiki’s wartime record card called her by her real name of Alice Ernestine Prin, and therefore he didn’t find her. A peasant woman from Provence was working in her place: simple-minded, obstinate and unyielding. He tried to curry her favour, but it was no use. He tried to bribe her, but either she didn’t realize the value of wartime money or was obstinately incorruptible. In the end, he stole ten tins at the risk of being caught and court-martialled. He went to a private machinist’s to have prime-quality beef sealed in them. But when he opened one to test it, his meat smelt of motor oil, so he threw away all of the tins.

  Finally, while still in Paris, he heard that soldiers were fighting tooth and nail to get hold of a particular medicine for asthma. He asked around what was so special about the medicine, and they told him that Dr Wilcox’s elixir consisted of glycerine, atropine sulphate (irrelevant) and cocaine hydrochloride (the important ingredient) and was used in all the Allied armies. Cocteau immediately reported to a Paris medical commission. Just like he had struggled
to gain weight back in beautiful 1914 so he could join in that operatic war, now he did his best to fall ill, without it being serious. One of his last friends advised him to sleep with damp cloths on his chest — he’d get a chill and a shallow cough like an asthmatic. He did that, and for two nights he felt he had it worse than the soldiers out in the rainy trenches. On the third day, a salutary cough set in. The commission prescribed him the medicine.

  How lovely the war now looked to that returnee on cocaine! He was no longer hungry. His inspiration returned. He wrote about celestial hordes, subterranean demons and the beauty of heroes’ mothers in black. He didn’t think of little Kiki any more. He hadn’t found her because she had changed factories. She now worked on reconditioning and cobbling soldiers’ boots to be sent back to the Front. The battered boots had been taken off dead soldiers. Little Kiki disinfected them, softened them with oil and touched them up with a hammer. Her new wartime job was at first no better than the old one. And she still lived in abject poverty. For fifty centimes a week she had to fix up fifty pairs: one centime per pair of boots. Kiki was lonely. She dreamed of men, and she couldn’t imagine that straight after the Great War she would become the most famous model of Montparnasse and the bedmate of many celebrities. Now, in 1916, she was still no one’s, and she wanted to belong to a strong man. What about that gangly fellow with beige gloves, pilot’s uniform and crimson helmet? No, she no longer remembered Jean Cocteau.

  When she took new a pair of boots, she imagined who had worn them. She pretended not to know they’d been taken off the legs of dead soldiers. Before she started work on the boots, she put them on her own feet, and then she saw everything: who had worn them, where he had been in them, and how he had fallen. She stood in front of the mirror and grasped the little bumps like raspberries on her rounded white chest beneath her apron, and in the reflection, behind her, she caught a glimpse of her sweetheart, perhaps one of those men, from whom Birot’s illustrated postcards were still being sent. But she soon noticed that this only happened while the boots were untreated, when they came off the conveyor belt with the body odours and touch-marks of the former soldiers. Once she had worked on them — and they were washed, softened, put on a wooden last and reshaped with a heavy hammer — the boots lost all the attributes of their owners and could no longer tell her a single story. So she enjoyed them while they were shabby, but work had to go on, or else she would lose those paltry fifty sous a week, and she wasn’t such a whippersnapper as not to know that she would then soon die of hunger.

  Kiki therefore only chose the boots of her lovers. She liked fair-haired men the best. She didn’t fall for idealists and didn’t like louts. Attentive men were her favourite, ones who took care of her and her needs. Every day she had a new choice of freshly arrived boots and put aside those with the most endearing prehistory. The others were just soldiers’ boots: she battered them with the hammer like she was a bad policeman; she rubbed them with oil to make them supple like a good policeman. By the end of the working day she had finished her eight to nine pairs.

  Those she didn’t work on she kept in the tool cupboard, and as if they were dwarves who had strayed in from the valley of the dead, she called them Jules, Jean, Jacques, Joseph, Jacob, Joël. At any given moment, our short tomboy, with the round bottom, had five or six lovers. Some had been in the cupboard for days, while others had just arrived the day before. She taught them to get along with each other: Joël should stop being jealous of Jacques, and she told off Jean for scheming against Joseph. They were all there just to please her, and when she had had enough of them she returned them to the conveyor belt and treated them like any other boots. But while they were hers, her lover-boots were not allowed to belong to anyone else. Who would think of taking them from her, those ordinary old boots of dead soldiers? But for Kiki they were real: they had faces, hands, broad shoulders, and stiff members when they became excited. At the end of the working day, she would take off her shoes and, barefooted, carefully slide her white soles into the boots. Then, in the empty workshop, where she got naked at night, their copulation took place. She had nothing on except the boots on her legs. She would sit with her bare bottom on the dirty floor and start to pant, twist, to grab her breasts with the dark nipples and moan. Kiki spread her legs and received Joseph, Jean or Joël and twitched on the floor like an epileptic. Everything simply gushed out of her: she cried, belched, farted. Then she stood up, returned to this world all sweaty, and fondled the boots as if they were lovers she had been in bed with between crisp white sheets.

  New boots kept arriving, non-stop. She knew by the size of the consi­gn­ments if there had been a lull at the front or if a major offensive had got under way somewhere. A hundred boots was one thing, but a thousand boots removed from the legs of soldiers in one day was something else again. The ten thousand that arrived on the last day of February 1916 shocked even Kiki, who was disinclined to sentiment and hardened to surprise. The boots smelt of a quick, common death. Not one pair attracted her enough to set it aside in her cupboard, so she began to batter them with the hammer and rub them with oil immediately. She worked during the day. She also worked at night. Where were the boots coming from? She only asked herself that a week later. She found out that they were coming from the steel-blue north, where the Germans had attacked the weakly-manned defences near the proud city of Verdun, hoping that pride would tempt the French to move up new forces to die there in droves. Nowhere did as many men ever die for just five kilometres of ground.

  For Kiki, the story of this bloodiest battle in the history of warfare until 1916 would certainly have been called ‘the story of a hundred pairs of boots’. We might call it ‘the story of a hundred heroes’, and it could go like this: shortly after seven in the morning on 21 February 1916, following the German artillery preparation which was enough to make the strongest man cringe, and after a flame-thrower onslaught fit to make him shudder with revulsion, the Battle of Verdun began. The German infantry charged, and they had a clear objective: Fort Douaumont, three kilometres away. All the attacking men thought the battle would be determined by bravery, brilliant tactics and a swift advance, but instead it was determined by the dead.

  Karl Fritz (with a long face), Max Gonheim (a taciturn ferryman from the city of L.), Lieutenant Marius Burdhardt (a ferris-wheel machinist), Theodor Engelmann (with a Kaiser Wilhelm-style moustache), the cab driver Anton Kaspar Hesing (who saw horses as he lay dying), the gilder Ingelthorp F. Ruge (with gold dust under his fingernails), Felix Burkhart (a loner with no one to call his own), Sergeant Hans Mauser (a relic of better times), Theodor Val. Peter (forgetful Peter), the drunkard Johann Gruber, Otto Hoermann (with a low, creased Prussian forehead and mousey eyes), Otto Brix (a hatter who lined his standard-issue cap with red silk), Frederik Schwedler (with metal teeth, nicknamed Zigzag), Oswald Ottendorfer (a tailor with a needle and black thread in his pocket), the lace maker Jakob Uhl, the soda maker Eduard Schäffer and 12,110 other Germans from the 3rd, 7th and 18th Army Corps, were killed while attacking the French in the first kilometre.

  Gaston Maréchal (with thick-lensed glasses), Hugo Léon Alphonse (who dreamed of going to Capri), the confectioner Pierre Chausson, the pastry maker Pierre Rullier, Lieutenant Marin Guillaumont (the winner of three proper duels), Henri Barbusse (who enlisted so no one would discover he had killed his neighbour), Louis Auguste Ferrier (with a neat, black-dyed moustache), Henri Alfred Lecointe (who never raised his voice at anyone), Étienne Gaston (who had himself photographed before the war in a pinstriped suit with a white rose in his lapel), Meredith Caoussinat (a little-known cubist painter), Jean Louis Marie Entéric (with a suicidal look), Pierre Jean Raymond For (also known as Bivo), the quilt maker Robert Charles Gueudet, Léon Marie Flameng (who always had a plaster on his face), the cross-eyed Léon Henri Lacroix, Alfred Mulpas (who two weeks earlier had his picture taken in his dress uniform), Henri Brune Hippolyte (a good-natured, cross-eyed fellow), the best leather craftsman in all of Champagne, Robert Bivign
y, and 11,470 other soldiers of the French 30th Corps were killed in the first kilometre, defending a scrap of muddy ground around Verdun.

  Night fell, and military honour prevented anyone from retreating.

  The next day, it was time for the second kilometre of the Battle of Verdun.

  Charles Thebault (with the face of a musketeer), the photographer Albert François Raymondi, Émile Dozol (with the look of an ordinary villager), his brother Marius Dozol (of whom only a grainy photograph remained), Jean François Antoine Escudier (perpetually smiling), Jean Baptiste Paulin Cauvin (with a balding forehead, which seemed to pull his whole face upwards), Adolphe Célestin Pégoud (with dimples around his jolly cheeks), Lucien René Louis Rain (a man with six given names, only three of which are mentioned here), Joseph Antoine Richard (as handsome as a film star), Guillaume Christophe Nedellec (a father of six children), the grouch Charles Bettend, Marcel Léon Privat (with the look of a revolutionary), Jean Georget (disappointed in this world), Julien Maximilien Papin (an arrogant ruffian), Raoul Frédéric Eugène Faurin Vassas (who fell in the second kilometre wearing a small, round lorgnette — a statement of better times), Captain Rodolphe Guépin (a poser, who had his photograph taken before the Great War in a nineteenth-century military uniform), the expressionist poet Meredith Capigny and 6,818 other Frenchmen lost their lives in the unsuccessful defence of the second kilometre.