The Great War

by Aleksandar Gatalica

  He and his men were interested in the mail which the soldiers and officers wrote to troops in Serbia. These cards were confiscated by the Mail Sorting Group and passed on to the Imitation Group. ‘The Serbian soldier is extremely exact,’ a von B claimed. ‘He always writes his location.’ the Imitation Group took the soldiers’ postcards which interested them most. On the basis of the real cards, they wrote imitation ones with the same Cyrillic handwriting. At the end, they usually added a few lines like: ‘I sent you twenty crowns in a letter, but the letter came back. Please write and tell me where you are,’ or ‘I’ve had no word from you, cuz. Where are you and your unit?’ or ‘Where are you? I’ve already sent twenty postcards, but there’s never a reply’. The fake cards were then soiled, stained and even drawn through the overcoats of Serbian soldiers to make them smell and look genuine. And then off they were sent to Serbia. The net was cast and the fish just needed to swim into it.

  As early as the summer of 1915, the operation was proving to be an unexpected success. More than three hundred postcards had prompted replies from Serbia, and the soldiers there always wrote their exact position: Nikola Dragutinovich of the 1st Company, 1st Battalion, 14th Regiment, currently in reserve in Ub; Mile Milenkovich of the 1st Company, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Regiment of the 3rd Call-up, now deployed in the Rudnik mountain range; Ranko Pavlovich, searchlight squad, stationed at the old fortress of Smederevo; Miliya Peshich of the 4th Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Regiment of the Timok Division, currently based in Mladenovac; and so forth. The Serbian army censors in Nish and Belgrade worked sloppily, and by September 1915 a von B was able to trace a whole network of Serbian positions derived from the postcards. Hundreds of soldiers gave away their units’ positions, so it would be wrong to just accuse Nikola, Mile, Ranko and Miliya of carelessness, especially seeing as all of them would soon be deceased defenders of their country.

  And then the offensive began in the autumn of 1915.

  It rained when Belgrade was evacuated on 8 October, when the 2nd Bulgarian Army reached the River Vardar and entered the strategic Kachanik Gorge on 26 October and when the last officer of the Serbian 4th Regiment, Major Radoyica Tatich, left mud-bound Knyazhevac. It rained when General Zhivkovich reported that the Germans had taken Kralyevo, when the Morava Division set off like a company of phantoms from Macedonia to defend a piece of Kosovo and when the remnants of the victorious Serbian army of 1914 huddled in the valley near Priština in the vain hope of linking up with the Allies from Salonika when they reached Kosovo Polye. It rained when the royal family dined with its generals in the Fatherland for the last time and when, from Prizren, the exodus began.

  It was raining, too, when a von B arrived in Belgrade on the first train. He stepped from the platform straight into a muddy puddle. He didn’t even bother to wipe his boots.

  First of all, he went to the mail-sorting department of the Postal Centre by the Sava and impounded ten sacks of soldiers’ letters and postcards. Black Belgrade ravens shrieked from a windowsill. The sacks stood like a last defence, turned north to face the enemy. The birds flew away. The mailbags offered no resistance. Over the following days, all three sections of the Kundschaftergruppe were reassembled in the former café Casino. The talented translators, psychologists and experts on Serbian Cyrillic arrived in Belgrade one after another on military trains. One operation was over, but another even larger one was about to begin. A von B had been awarded the Iron Cross, 2nd Class for Operation Überläufer, but he did not intend to stop there. The new operation was given the code name Hochverräter (Double-Crosser).

  The efforts of a von B’s group were now directed towards Serbian POWs in Russia — mainly Serbs from the Austro-Hungarian province of Voivodina who had fought in the Austro-Hungarian army and been taken prisoner by the Russians. A whole alternative history was created for those ‘double-crossers’ and written on fake Serbian-army postcards.

  It began with lying. No, it wasn’t raining; it was a splendid Indian summer after the battles of 1914. The Serbian defence of Belgrade had given way, admittedly after three days’ heavy fighting, and the defenders had withdrawn southwards to positions near Aleksandrovac so as to reinforce the Serbian right flank, which was clashing with the Bulgarians. The forces had then dug in along the line Loznica–Valyevo–Lyig–Lapovo on the northern front and Knyazhevac–Bela Palanka–Surdulica–Kumanovo–Prilep on the Eastern Front. After three weeks of bitter fighting, the cities in eastern Serbia had to be abandoned, but it was always a strategic retreat in order to allow the rallying of troops from Macedonia and Kosovo, who had now linked up with the Allied armies near Bitola. That huge, composite army had wintered in Kosovo Polye, like the Christian host 527 years earlier, and now awaited the enemy before the decisive battle of 1916.

  This entire fake history was jotted out on soldiers’ cards in simple language: ‘My friend, I’m retreating from Knyazhevac with my unit and our batteries’, ‘Uncle Svetozar, Nish now looks as big as Belgrade and is full of our troops. The enemy doesn’t dare to attack us, and we are preparing for a strategic retreat to a line along the River Ibar’, ‘Oh Drakulich, old boy, we all cried and kissed each other like women when we linked up with the French and Greek armies from Salonika and won our first victories over the Bulgarians near Kachanik’, ‘Brother Stanoyko, what are you all waiting for? We’re sitting out the winter here, hoping you’ll come from Russia’, ‘Kosovo is waiting for us, Milutin — surely you fellows in Russia won’t stay there high and dry like those turncoats, the Brankovichs. Come on, run away from prison camp or ask our Russian brothers to let you go!’

  These cards were sent to Nizhni Novgorod, Tokorent, Odessa, Kazan and Rostov-on-Don. Any of the Serbs in Russian captivity who had studied at an academy or university in Serbia or been members of a Serbian party, had relatives south of the River Sava, a foster father in Shabac or absolutely any connection with Serbia proper, received at least a few cards from a von B’s workshop. And what joy they evoked in faraway Russia. The Serbian prisoners’ newspaper Glas juga (Voice of the South) enlisted new soldiers throughout the winter of 1916. Three battalions were formed in Odessa, and Russian counter-intelligence officers saw no reason to dishearten the men whom a von B had so successfully excited. But then the true aims of Operation Hochverräter came to light.

  The Serbs became like a swarm of flies. Discipline in the camps deteriorated, and the prisoners demanded weapons from the amicably inclined Russians and claimed they would down tools and raise a revolution if they were not armed soon. They all wanted to go to Serbia, to Kosovo! These hot-headed, nationalist Serbs threatened those Serbs still faithful to the Austro-Hungarian crown who did not want to join the volunteer brigades, and also made the Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenians and Germans among the Austro-Hungarian POWs uneasy. Croatians converted to Orthodoxy and enlisted in the phantom new units. To top things off, there came a brief but stupefying summer, which settled on the Russian steppes like a poisonous cloud. When the capsules of red poppy drooped and the first swathes fell to the scythes, strange things started to happen to the prisoners wielding them. The harvested poppies gave off a sweet smell which caused dizziness and only amplified the yearning and nervousness of the POWs. Everyone in the Russian army knew that Serbia no longer existed, that the badly mauled Serbian army had not linked up with the Allies and that the remnants had retreated to the small Ionian island of Corfu — everyone except the POWs who kept receiving fresh word from a von B about the Serbian army rearming, restocking and expecting recruits from Russia for a new Battle of Kosovo.

  How to tell them? Who could tell them? If the prisoners’ heady correspondence with long-dead Serbs from the Fatherland was denied them, there would be an insurrection in the labour camps; if a whole company of well-armed soldiers went into the camps and started speaking the truth, the prisoners would hardly be likely to believe them and the troops would be lucky to get out of that seething hotbed alive. A counter-attack was therefore launched from where the attack had begun: in the real
m of cards and letters. The operation was code-named Sumashedshy (Madman). One lie had to be displaced by another. Russian counter-intelligence officers hunted down all of a von B’s postcards and formed their own counterfeiting departments. Prominent psychologists and church calligraphers from Petrograd and Yekaterinburg worked on the texts. The POWs, like real patients, could not be told the truth immediately. The new fake postcards — really copies of a von B’s faked cards from Belgrade — therefore also had a bogus Battle of Kosovo as their starting point.

  At that time, the conceited Serbian volunteer brigades were promised weapons which would never arrive. Russian intelligence officers dis­guised as railway staff were sent among the zealots; they met with the self-proclaimed commanders and discussed plans for imaginary transports through Romania along protected corridors to eastern Serbia and all the way to Kosovo. At the same time, postcards written in Odessa and Yekaterinburg progressively conveyed ever grimmer news: the battle had already joined, and the volunteers would not make it in time. Mighty army was pitted against mighty army — man against man, horse against horse, steel against steel — and it became the greatest battle the history of warfare had ever seen. Five mythical days it lasted, the August Battle of Kosovo, in the most scorching heat the year 1916 had seen. Tens of thousands laid down their lives amidst Kosovo’s mythical, blood-red peonies, and all three Austro-Hungarian generals fell, as well as one German and two Bulgarian commanders, but the joint Allied army had to retreat through the valley of the Vardar towards Greece.

  As the well-crafted lie gradually took on the contours of truth, the would-be Kosovo warriors lapsed into apathy and became suicidal. They traipsed through the camps in Odessa, Rostov-on-Don and Nizhni Novgorod with the eyes of ruined and broken men, but the silent discipline so desirable in prison camps was re-established and all the nationalities in Russian captivity calmed down again. The weight of the blame fell on Romania for ‘refusing’ the volunteer convoys passage through to Kosovo Polye, and every disenchanted Serb thought he could have changed the course of history if only he had been able to take a rifle in hand.

  When several of the Russian copies of the fake postcards from Belgrade were intercepted, a von B realized that all the writing of fake letters was over. The Austro-Hungarian command assessed Operation Hoch­verräter as semi-successful; a von B was not awarded the Maria-Theresia Cross.

  The Russian command considered Operation Sumashedshy semi-successful because the fake postcards had ‘helped’ the defeated Serbian army struggle through to Corfu, but the truth about the double lie would remain obscure until 1917, as would the reaction of a hundred thousand Serbs in Russian captivity who had wanted to save Serbia. Order was re-established in the camps, and that was the most important thing, but two audacious murders suggested that the fever of the POWs had not subsided. Several weeks after the modern Battle of Kosovo was ‘lost’, and while the heavy steppe summer still oppressed the captive souls, the body of the prisoner Marko Nikolin, who had refused to enlist in the Serbian volunteer units, was found in Odessa. A Russian by the name of Boris Dmitrievich Rizanov was also found dead there. Rizanov was a war hero who had survived the winter Battle of the Masurian Lakes and escaped from a prison camp in northern Germany in early 1916 in a hand-made boat; back in Russia, he trained the Serbian volunteers and was their liaison officer. Who killed him and why, did not come to light. For Boris Dmitrievich, the Great War ended in a side street in Odessa’s port, at the back entrance of the bistro Tsaritsa. Three sailors, who were rather drunk and didn’t realize he had been killed, noticed him there. They thought he was just dead-drunk like themselves.

  On those summer days in 1916, the command of the POWs also had more pleasant events to report. One of the prisoners, a pre-war German pianist, was to hold a concert at the Odessa Conservatory. The name of that virtuoso was Paul Wittgenstein. His right arm had been amputated, but he did not lose heart. As soon as he recovered and learnt enough Russian to be able to find music lovers among the guards, he received better treatment and was allowed to begin practicing at the Conservatory. So maestro Wittgenstein once again rolled up his sleeve. First he played all his favourite pieces as if he was performing them with two hands, except that his left hand and fingers played real notes, while his right moved only at the shoulder and played notes audible to him alone. When he saw that his unaccompanied left was scarcely musical and realized there was no point, Wittgenstein adapted several pieces for the left hand with the help of teachers at the Conservatory, who turned their heads away and cried while they listened to him playing. He practiced with a cigarette in his mouth, smoking it like a Greek., without taking it out. He bashed away at the keys for days on end, and finally he agreed to give a concert in the Small Hall of the Conservatory on 1 August 1916.

  Many tried to persuade Wittgenstein to play in the Great Hall, where there was a far better Petrof grand piano, but he declined. ‘For a one-handed pianist, even the Small Hall is too big,’ he said. The concert began courteously, with the music of Tchaikovsky, and continued with the German classics Brahms and Beethoven. German POWs and their Russian guards were seated in the hall, as were many citizens of Odessa, who had read the announcement for the concert in the newspaper. The teachers of the Conservatory each stood on stage for a while, turning the pages for Wittgenstein and wiping the remaining tears from the corners of their eyes with white handkerchiefs. Everyone cried ‘bravo’ and ‘encore’ at the end, but the pianist stood before the audience and silenced it with a broad swing of his left arm. As an encore, he said, he wished to play just the part for the left hand of a waltz and the Berceuse by Frédéric Chopin in honour of his amputated right arm. He apologized to the audience that the music would not be as beauti­ful as it should because they would be hearing only the harmonic accomp­animent, not the melody. What Wittgenstein didn’t know is that an amateur, who had achieved considerable local fame, sat down at the piano in the Alte Oper in Frankfurt at exactly the same time and announced to the audience that his right hand would be playing in honour of a left hand in Russian captivity — that of the pianist Paul Wittgenstein.

  The moment the German POW Wittgenstein began to play with his left hand, Hans Henze started to play with his right: one of Chopin’s waltzes and the Berceuse. Some pre-war critics in Frankfurt recognized the work of Wittgenstein’s fingers and wanted to tell Hans’s mother after the concert, but she had rushed to the backstage rooms of the Alte Oper, where she found her son dead. Beside his lifeless body lay a farewell message: ‘Mother, I’ve decided to return God these hands, which are not mine.’

  Death thus made a most terrible scene in the Alte Oper in Frankfurt, but the range of its horror was quite limited. Home Guard conscripts strolled aimlessly along the cobblestone streets around the building together with limping cripples discharged from the front, and none of them knew what had just happened inside the concert hall. If we step back a little, we encounter a different life. A little further, and the sound of laughter and the cheerful clinking of glasses can surmount any of life’s tragedies.

  In Geneva, Germans, Russians, British and French dined together, danced together, rubbed shoulders in spa parlours and at gambling tables, and afterwards rushed to watch the latest libertine Paris fashion review of a collection for the New Year 1916. At night, the lights shone like fireflies along the lake, humming that peace would never fail in that part of Europe. Red-jacketed musicians played the merriest of melodies for the promenaders, but the music was drowned out by the laughter and chatter of women in extravagant dresses. Tail-coated men called out to them: ‘Careful where you walk, you’ll muddy the stripes on my trousers.’ Beneath the gas lanterns, which cast the esplanade in a yellow light, loose girls from the Parisian boulevards of love shifted from one leg to the other. They offered themselves for a handful of sous, only slightly more than a glass of absinthe, but clients were none too many. No one had much money, but the empty pockets were amply compensated for by an excess of bonhomie and hysterical laughter, as if
every joke and jest was the last.

  Here, any mention of the greatest clash in human history was considered a sign of bad upbringing and an unwarranted crudity in the presence of the fairer sex. Only a handful of sombre Ivans spoiled the atmosphere and harped on about a revolution. They were socialists, deserters and poltroons who felt at home among other cowards. They compensated for their lack of heroism with an excess of conspiratoriality. They sat at tables, ordered pastis, sambuca and klosterlikör (thus demonstrating they did not take sides in the war), gesticulated vigorously, and viewed anyone who approached them, even the waiter, as a stranger to be met with hostile looks as if to say: ‘If you give away anything you’ve heard here, you’re dead!’

  The other guests did not like them until they got drunk. They thought them Russian savages and gave them a wide berth, but when they had a bit to drink a queer change came over them. Their furrowed brows relaxed, pouting mouths spread into smiles, and one cigar was lit after another. That company then became the loudest, jolliest and most frivolous. Those unpatriotic Russians cried, laughed and embraced everyone who entered the café, even those they had sent murderous looks to; they repeated ‘nyet, nyet’, as if they had only been joking and had never thought of harming anyone. The sober socialists spoke of doom, gloom and upheaval, while the drunken ones talked of a cheerful revolution and everything they would achieve in the new, classless society. That Janus-faced company, both joyful and grim, consisted of Vladimir Ilich Lenin, who had moved from Paris to Geneva and greatly missed his comfortable apartment in Rue Marie-Rose, Julius Martov, Ilya Ehrenburg, who worked as a translator for wealthy Russian émigrés, and Leon Trotsky, a correspondent for the newspaper Kievskaya Mysl.