The next day, the Parisian press published an erroneous piece of news by a novice journalist stating that the Salon of the famous fashion designer Poiret had been cancelled and the artists had got into a punch-up instead of affirming their solidarity! Only a few lines were written about it, nothing more. The same papers devoted far more space that day to the discovery of a miraculous elixir. The renowned French surgeon Alexis Carrel and the chemist Henry Dakin had developed a new antiseptic solution which, in spite of its rapid effectiveness as a germicide, was at the same time completely safe for living tissue. Tests had been carried out at a hospital in Compiègne and the results, the propaganda said, were quite incredible. The antiseptic solution consisted of water, a chlorine compound whose formula was kept secret, soda and boric acid. It was used on soldiers with great success. What the press didn’t report remained a military secret: those tested with the solution were healed of their physical wounds, but other wounds opened in their place.
Whether it was coincidence or the fruit of espionage, the Hungarian surgeons Székely and Kis also came up with a remarkable new antiseptic for the treatment of wounds — one of very similar composition. The Hungarian press duly publicized this breakthrough, but it hushed up the fact that soldiers of the Dual Monarchy had also begun manifesting strange behaviours: the wounds of these men from the Austro-Hungarian trenches were also healed, but unexpected mental disorders developed.
The actor Béla Duránci, a native of Subotica serving with a Hunga-rian hussar regiment, spoke better German than he did Hungarian. He played Hamlet in 1897 in Munich and his ‘To be, or not to be’ soliloquy was the talk of the town. When the war came, he began to see it as a grand theatrical production, with him going from role to role. While he sat in the trench awaiting the enemy offensive, he played Macbeth expecting Birnam Wood to rise; when he killed a young Frenchman for the first time in hand-to-hand combat, he was playing Richard III; whenever he charged out of the trenches with a bayonet on his rifle, he was playing Hamlet, as you can imagine; and when he was taken to hospital all bloody with a bad wound in his side, he played Julius Caesar.
What is significant for this story, however, is that Béla Duránci’s wound was treated with Professor Székely’s and Kis’s wonder drug. The stab wound from a bayonet really did heal in three days, but then Duránci started to feel a mellow mood. There was no name for this condition, and at first everything was amusing, for him included. Béla felt that faces were familiar to him, but when he approached them he would see he was mistaken. At first, he thought he saw commanders out reconnoitring; later it was generals who hadn’t set a foot outside their headquarters a hundred kilometres from the front. And so it went on from day to day. When he was sent to deliver a message and would be going down the trenches, he would think he could see someone from his native Subotica from ten metres away. He would shout, but when the man turned round he realized it wasn’t his childhood friend and would apologize and continue on his way. But at the very next broader section of the trench, in some ‘hotel’, he would think he saw his long-dead brothers and playmates from the sunflower fields. He went up to them — he couldn’t restrain himself from checking if it was them — but each time it would turn out he was mistaken. This too could be considered a harmless quirk, but after a while he began to have visions of well-known personalities in the Hungarian trenches and he could no longer tell he was mistaken, even from up close.
He would stop an ordinary soldier and say, ‘You’ve just got to be Heinrich Landau, the famous Peer Gynt from the German Theatre in Hamburg,’ and tell another: ‘You just have to be Karl Wittek, the most noted leather craftsman in the whole of Voivodina’. The doctors who had given him the miracle cure and helped him recover therefore came to examine him. Taciturn Dr Kis arrived with his young associates. He didn’t notice how beautifully the paradisiacal birds were singing that morning. He immediately went to see the smiling patient. The doctors saw that something wasn’t quite right, but they found nothing in the medical records to indicate that there was anything wrong with Béla Duránci, not least because they wanted to enhance the reputation of their drug and secure the medal they thought they deserved. For that reason they kept Duránci in the trenches. ‘Let him even imagine that Franz Joseph comes along — he still has two good hands to use a rifle!’ they thought, and left again. But what they wished him soon actually came true.
A short while later, in the Hungarian trenches, Duránci saw the emperor himself. He remembered having seen him when he was a child, in flooded Szeged in 1879. Franz Joseph was punted past the flood victims, who sat huddled together on the roofs of their houses. The water was a muddy yellow and reeked of carcasses and contagion. The corpulent emperor sat on the prow of the fishing boat wrapped in a fur and repeated the only words of Hungarian he knew: ‘Minden jó, minden szép’ (‘Everything is good, everything is fine’). Now every face Duránci saw struck him as being the emperor’s from 1879: he halted and turned around one man after another, sergeants and full-bearded soldiers alike, and yelled ‘Minden jó, minden szép’. In the end, he was relieved of his duties and sent to a sanatorium near Marburg. Béla spent the rest of the Great War here in outright opulence because he was attended to by nothing but princes and famous actors of European theatres. Even the emperor called by to pay his regards, with his face of 1879.
At the same time as this, submarine commander Walther Schwieger also mistook sunken ships for various other phenomena, although he had never been treated with Professor Kis’s wonder drug. The submarine dived at daybreak, like every day off the Danish coast, and already at 10:02 hours Schwieger spotted smoke on the horizon. He sped to that point out at sea, but when the submarine drew close he saw that the thick, black smoke was not from the coal-fired boilers of a ship but was rising directly from the surface. He cursed, thinking that another German submarine had made it there before him and sunk the ship. Beneath the surface, however, he could not see the huge hull of a sinking ship. Only smoke on the surface. There were no funnels anywhere. But he didn’t let that disconcert him. He continued, and at 12:49 he thought that he saw something on the North Sea horizon once more, but it wasn’t a ship; maybe one of his monsters was dabbling heedlessly on the surface and admiring its reflection in the smooth surface of the sea. Later in the afternoon the same thing happened. At 17:54, he again shouted ‘Ship ahoy!’ but it was nothing targetable, nor were the sightings at 19:22 and 20:46. In the end, he reluctantly noted in the U-20’s log for that day that there had been no combat. He ordered that the vessel submerge just a little at night so as not to disturb the sea serpents, and then went to join the crew in the galley.
So in Marburg and in the Atlantic, in spite of everything, spirits were still high; in Istanbul they weren’t. Sure enough, Mehmed Yıldız’s third apprentice had been killed, the brightest he had ever had — his newly-fledged bookkeeper. He had been recruited and sent to Mesopotamia, from where he wrote soldiers’ cards from a certain Nurezin’s stationery shop until the last day: ‘Dear Master, today we reached the red city of Shaib. We besieged it, but resistance was stiff and many a righteous man perished on the iron-red earth, while others fell into captivity. My closest comrades and I remain unscathed, Allah be praised’; ‘My dear Master, my good father, after the defeats near Shaib and by the River Hamisia, our commander Askerî Bey took his own life at the hospital in Baghdad, which was a terrible shock to us all’; ’Dear father, we are pulling back towards the Tigris. Our new commanding officer Nureddin — may Allah and His Prophet be praised — inspires trust in us all’; ‘My loving Master, today a fresh Turkish army under Mehmed Fazil Pasha arrived to aid in the defence of Baghdad. We gave them a warm welcome and kissed like brothers’; ‘Esteemed father, the fortunes of war have turned in our favour and we have driven the British into the city of Kerbala. The infidels have to make do without food and water.’
And then the cards stopped coming. If Yıldız’s apprentice had used Birot’s wartime cards instead of Nurezin’s, he defin
itely would have kept writing ‘I’m alive!’, ‘I’m alive!’, even after his death, but these postcards were not as talented. The apprentice, that bookkeeper who would never be, actually did write one more card by his own hand, but it was withheld by the censor. And then he fell, at the walls of Kerbala. No one now needed to tell Yıldız, neither a human nor a Pheme, because the apprentice had done his best to inform his master himself: if he stopped writing, that would be his end. And it was. The end. The trader extinguished one more light in the shop of his soul. Now only two of his helpers were left, whom he loved like his children: his dear beanpole, who used to refresh them all with song and laughter, was now in Palestine; and the youngest, born in 1897 and still a boy, had been sent to Arabia. They didn’t write. They weren’t even literate. How would he find out about their end? Someone would tell him. His door would be open. There was no point barring it when the news could jump three walls and pass through three locks. But maybe they would pull though? Yes, he hoped now they would return and he could open the shop again, which had been closed for some time; things would be as they were before, except that the red spices, which stood for the infidels, would never again sell better than the green ones that played the role of the believers. Or was it perhaps all in vain? The year 1917 was drawing close, and he awaited it with deep anxiety: the sixtieth year of trading of that righteous man. Why did he have to be a slave of that saying? The next day, he would stop thinking about it.
The next day was 1 July 1916 by the new calendar. At exactly 07:20 hours, a mine containing eighteen thousand kilograms of trinitrotoluol detonated. That explosion was the signal for the second biggest battle on the Western Front in that year to begin: the Battle of the Somme. As with the Battle of Verdun, the generals thought that this battle, too, would bring about the end of the Great War and warfare in general, but the opposite was the case. The old Roman road from Albert to Bapaume was littered with the corpses of soldiers from both sides, and the French and British generals again underestimated the staying power of the Germans and the strength of their trenches and the new defensive constructions — bunkers. The defences were only breached along a small section of the front, on the southern part of the Roman road. The towns of Herbécourt, Buscourt and Assevillers fell, and a dozen German bunkers and their crews were stuck in no-man’s-land. The French judged that capturing the bunkers would be a pointless waste of life, so they left them there, isolated amidst the quagmire, and tried instead to break through towards the cities to the north. Each bunker was surrounded by two dozen French soldiers, who dug in and provoked the defenders to use up their ammunition, while also relying on the fact that their food and water would run out, and sooner or later they would surrender.
One of the soldiers in a bunker which was still firing at the enemy happened to be Alexander Wittek, son of Karl Wittek, the most famous leather craftsman in the whole region of Voivodina. When he saw that he and the crew of the bunker were surrounded and death was inevitable, Wittek decided to make his will.
“I, Alexander Wittek from Subotica, being in full possession of my wits, hereby dispose of all my possessions, although at the moment I have none,” he began. “I am the son of the renowned leather craftsman Karl Wittek, but since the old man has not yet made the shop over to me I cannot bequeath it to anyone. I have two years of architectural studies in Zürich, which I leave to my bearded professors who never took any notice of me. I have three brothers and two sisters whom I cannot give anything but the slaps and iniquities which I, as elder brother, dealt out so liberally. On second thoughts, my only earthly possession is a dappled horse; but more about that later. Apart from that gee-gee, I only have the future. I intend to dispose of it with this last will. Today my three comrades and I ate the last of our food and we have begun to drink our own urine, so I think it is high time for me to dispose of my future.
“And now to what I bequeath: I have something of a poetic gift and intended to write poetry, but I haven’t started a single poem, let alone finished it. I leave all my unwritten poems to a certain Milena from Lipica, whom I met in Zürich. I also dedicate to her the unwritten poems ’The Sentry’, ’A Soldier in War Doesn’t Cry’ and ’At Dawn I Became Evening’. When this terrible war ends, I thought of completing my architecture studies — now, in advance, I leave them to my friend Frantishek to finish. I had even greater plans: as an architect, I imagined leaving my mark in many cities. I donate the unrealized tropical glasshouse to my native Subotica. I bequeath the Church of Francis of Assisi with the clock tower to the city of Szeged and the district administration building to Belgrade. And to Paris, where fame ought to have taken me, I leave the new hotel by the Seine, the glass pavilion for the next world exposition and the arch of the reconstructed Gare du Nord.
“Enough about buildings. Now on to youth and old age. I wanted to spend my youth in Nice, my mature years in Paris and my old age in New York, but now I see it was all a pipe dream. Therefore I leave my youth to the southern sun, my mature years to the metal latticework of the towers and Guimard’s entrances to the Paris metro, and my old age to the skyscrapers of the New World, where my spirit will dwell. I also thought of getting married. I leave all my children — three lovely sons in sailor suits and two gentle, pale girls — to a woman I never met. No, no, not Milena, to whom I bequeath my poetry; this is an accommodating, intelligent, patient woman, whom I never met and so was unable to ask her hand. Fate decided that I was to have children with her, and it is to her that I now leave my unborn children.
“Now I am prepared for death. I was not fated to die in 1916 in this pillbox smelling of mould and, what is still worse, us soldiers. I ought to have lived until 1968 to see the progress of science, the application of new materials for the construction of large buildings and the prosperity of the human race, which will come when this Great War puts an end to all of humanity’s wars. I give away the year when I should die of old age, surrounded by my grandchildren and admirers, to the young and the students, and I would wish for them to spend it rebelliously, as befits them.
“And now just for a few little things. I wanted to own a Louis Vuitton suitcase and I leave it now to my youngest brother to travel the world with. I had hoped to buy a pigeon-blue top hat and a walking stick at Lock & Co. in London, and now I bequeath them to my middle brother so he can become a real gentleman. I also wanted a snuffbox with Indian snuff in it; I leave it to my father. I think that is all. Oh yes — the dappled horse, my only material property. The horse bolted on me shortly before I was enlisted; if it does not turn up, I leave it to the church, and if it does, may it belong to my dear nephew Stanislav.”
Perhaps that soldier of the Dual Monarchy who bequeathed his future still had other things he wanted to leave, but now it was his turn to relieve the machine-gunner. One accurate shot from outside, straight through the slit of the bunker, struck him as soon as he gripped the handle of the gun, so the will of Alexander Wittek came into force. At the sound of the shot, mocking birds took off and flew low over the ground, mimicking a child’s crying with their screeches. Enormous clouds ploughed silently across the sky as if they were plodding and touching the ground. Heavy drops of rain fell. The same moment as Wittek fell, a plane flew over the bunker which would soon surrender.
The pilot, Manfred von Richthofen, did not see what had just happened below. There was nothing he could do to help the isolated German bunkers, so his orders were to watch out for enemy in the sky. This young pilot, already of somewhat conceited demeanour, had until recently been a cavalry officer in the 1st ‘Kaiser Alexander III’ Uhlan Regiment. He had taken part in the battles on the Eastern Front as a scout in the first years of the Great War, but cavalry lost its usefulness as early as the second year of the war. After a long spell doing mind-numbing tasks, he applied to be allowed to join the newly formed German air force. He wrote to his superior officer: ‘Sir, I have not gone to war in order to collect eggs in farmyards. Please authorize my request to be transferred to aviation.’ His request w
as granted, and towards the end of May 1915 he was transferred to a unit stationed at the airbase in Mont on the Western Front. Now he flew over the combat zone at the Somme and spotted a French plane between the clouds. He opened fire from a range of two hundred metres and shot down his first enemy over the Somme. He returned his Albatros B 2 to base, and his sweetheart was the first to be waiting for him by the grassy runway. As soon as he climbed out of the plane, she rewarded him with a kiss. When her warm mouth descended on his cold, blue lips, the superstitious pilot knew everything was alright.
DELUSIONS AS BROAD AS RUSSIA
A von B — that was his code name. He was head of the Kundschaftergruppe, the chief censor of the mail of Serbian POWs. He was considered to have the best understanding of the psychology of Serbs. ‘Of all South Slavs, the Serbs have the most developed cult of family life,’ he said. He therefore launched a campaign called ‘Good old Cyrillic’ to encourage the POWs to write home in their own alphabet. Later he established: ‘Serbs take captivity and separation from their families hardest, so they yearn to correspond as often as possible.’
A von B had hatched the plan as early as 1915. He presented his superior command a letter from a certain Captain Milan Stoyilkovich from the prison camp in Radafalva, in which he wrote that he had traced over the same words with his pencil for two whole weeks so as to write the letter as many times as possible before sending it. In the winter of 1915, prisoners’ mail would enable a von B to work out the exact positions of the Serbian army. The operation began in January 1915 under the code name Überläufer (Defecter). A good organizer, a von B put together teams of translators, calligraphers and psychologists. Everything began with the ‘Good old Cyrillic’ leaflets handed out to the Serbs in the camps. The POWs used them to roll their cigarettes with. They were afraid of censorship and wrote with caution at first, so they tried to convey their situation in a round-about way: ‘I feel like Saliya Yasharevich from Nish’, one of them wrote. ‘Here it’s like at Uncle Bogosav’s, or even worse’, another told his folks. ‘I’m in clover — but the paddock’s tiny’, a third quipped on his card. But none of that interested the censor a von B.
The Great War Page 29