What did it all mean, and what was her role in this behind-the-scenes game? She kept hearing the words on the lips of that horribly furrowed face, ‘Just you sing your “Tipperary”, that will be for the best,’ and in the hall where she was performing so much kept happening — all the things which she, lit up by the lights on stage, hadn’t seen before. In particular, she noticed two young men (she got the impression they weren’t British) who were avidly whispering in the third row as if her performance didn’t interest them at all. She had a good two hours to study them, although the spotlights were focussed on her. They came the next evening, and the one after that too. They were always dressed differently, and first one sat on the left, and then the other.
After a week, she was convinced that the unknown man and those two lads were trying to drag her into a conspiracy. How could she save all her Englishness? She didn’t have the strength to start unmasking the conspiracy all by herself. Perhaps she should have approached Scotland Yard that very first evening, not continued to sing. After thinking things over, she made the only real ‘English’ decision. It was an exceptionally cold day and London’s birds were darting about the sky in the last stingy sunlight. Florrie Forde went out onto the stage on 17 December 1916 and told the audience she would no longer be singing ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’. She didn’t say why and didn’t lie that she was tired, but the audience reacted loudly to her announcement. Some called out ‘Just this one more evening!’ and others yelled ‘We’ve paid admission!’, but Florrie was preoccupied with those two young men. Did they jeer, perhaps, or leave the hall in a hurry? Not at all. They just sat and waited blank-faced for the song she had decided she was no longer going to sing.
That’s how it was that evening, and the next as well. It was another cold London day without fog, but there were no birds any more. Florrie Forde kept her promise, and the song ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ claimed its victim in 1916 too. The first victim of that wicked song had almost been forgotten, and neither would this one be popular for much longer, to be honest. Lilian Smith, actually Lilian Schmidt, was handed over to Germany. The exchange of spies seemed a happy end to her, and the medal and her substantial fame as a spy quickly saw her back on Berlin’s stages and earned her many articles in the press, including one very fiery piece in the journal Reiter in deutscher Nacht by the war reporter Max Osborn, written shortly before he was near killed near Dead Swine on the northern-French battlefield.
Frau Schmidt therefore found it relatively easy to rebuild a career as a variety singer. She still sang ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ to herself for a little while, but quietly so no one would hear, while on stage she naturally shone with the ‘Song of Hate against England’. It wasn’t a bad song. The Germans loved it as much as the English did ‘Tipperary’, and Schmidt knew now to rouse the deepest Prussian patriotic emotions with her now somewhat richer, velvety voice. But she loved other wartime hits too — ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’, ‘O Strasbourg, o Strasbourg’, ‘Gott, Kaiser, Vaterland’ — and sang them gladly up until one evening, when an unknown admirer unexpectedly opened the door of her dressing room. The door was not locked, as it usually was. The corridor was empty, which was also unusual. Lit up by the light bulbs around her mirror, Schmidt could only see his enormous silhouette, which almost took up the whole doorway, his black moustache and a furrowed face. The unknown man was a senior officer. Having no mind to stay, he simply said: ‘You will just sing the “Song of Hate against England” from now on, madam. Do you understand? That will be for the best.’ Then he left, without speaking to anyone else.
In the programme for the joint variety show with several other German singers the following evening, Frau Schmidt only saw her name next to the ‘Song of Hate against England’. She had no choice in the matter. Since her return, she was gradually realizing that people didn’t consider her a proper German; as if she had become infected with Englishness during the years she had spent in England — a blemish she couldn’t wash off. What about the perilous work she had done? And the medal she had been given? All around her was war. Services were easily forgotten, but duties were still taken very seriously in the Vaterland.
‘You will just sing the “Song of Hate against England” from now on, madam. Do you understand?’
She did. She almost saluted. Night after night, she sang the ‘Song of Hate against England’. It began to grate on her, but she was locked into performing and the show had to go on. She wrote letters to the command and requested that she be allowed to devise a patriotic show with alternating programmes. The proposal was rejected. Then she requested permission for a small pot-pourri of the seven most popular songs, which she would sing to soldiers at the front and in hospitals where moribund cases were treated. That was not approved either. Lastly, she begged to be allowed to sing ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ at least occasionally — once a month, perhaps. When that too was refused, she finally realized that she hadn’t been handed over and repatriated to Germany at all; she had actually ended up in hell, where constant repetition of one and the same song was her sole punishment.
As befitted a performer, Lilian Smith died on the stage, at the end of her last show. She sang the ‘Song of Hate against England’, crossed her legs like a ballerina and descended in a low bow, from which she never rose. The last thing she heard was frenetic applause from the audience, who she could not see because of the spotlights shining in her face.
Many deaths concurred at that time, towards the end of 1916. It was not only Liza Chestukhina and Rasputin who went to meet their maker at the same time; thousands took flight for heaven all at once, and so it was that the music-hall singer Lilian Smith and Father Donovan of the 3rd Company, 2nd Battalion of the Scottish 92nd Division died at the same minute and the same second. But the chaplain’s death was not before an audience, in the lap of glory, although the lack of interest in both bodies after death was virtually the same. Lilian Schmidt was taken to a Berlin mortuary that same evening, where she was not even properly examined. The body of Father Donovan was taken to a military hospital, where the pathologists didn’t conduct a proper examination either. But it was wartime, and we can’t blame them for that. The dead were dead, and they were simply struck off the list. After the death of Lilian Schmidt, no other German singer was ordered to sing just the ‘Song of Hate against England’. Why that had applied to her was never explained. People spoke about her velvety voice and her heroism in London for a little longer, but then the total of 10,263 people who had seen and heard her perform after her return to Germany began to forget her. After the death of Father Donovan, a young Scottish chaplain took his place, but he sent the dead soldiers off to the other world in silence and never hauled back anyone with the six-ell pole for pulling wounded men from no-man’s-land. Exactly 3,211 Scottish soldiers had recalled the Christmas Eve of 1914 when Father Donovan celebrated Mass for officers of all three armies at a farm near Avion. But it was wartime. Of those 3,211 soldiers, a total of 2,750 saw in the New Year 1915, and at New Year’s Eve one year later, after the bitter Battle of the Somme, only 911 were left alive. Those nine hundred-odd wretches would occasionally remember Father Donovan, but soon after his death half of them began to get his name wrong and call him ‘Father Duncan’ or ‘Father Donnerty’. Half of the 10,263 visitors from the variety shows in Berlin began to mix up Lilian Schmidt’s name too, calling her ‘Lilian Straube’ and even ‘Lilian Strauss’. Then time continued to flow. When the Great War ended, there would only be two Scottish soldiers left who could clearly remember Father Donovan and all he had done, and only three families who would still speak of the authoritative alto voice of the war heroine and not confuse her name with the names of others — because that’s what happens to heroes in the end.
Cowards have it easier: at least they don’t reckon on anyone’s memory. This is the story of the biggest poltroon of the Great War. His name, Marko Murk, had a morbid ring to it. It is not easy for us to describe this young man who now, towards the e
nd of 1916, held an Austro-Hungarian helmet on his head and counted down the last hours of his life. In the first years of the twentieth century, he was a little bit of everything, just as the time he lived in was a little bit of everything. He had a headstrong father who expected him to be an upstanding Croatian home guardsman. He also had a humming in his head, which called on him to become a revolutionary. Fear dwelt in his heart, and his inclination to bolt found its home in his flat-footedness. Between his vulnerable heels and his dreamy head, Marko Murk’s body was connected by brittle bones, rubbery muscles and slender sinews.
But Marko Murk, who was rickety and built like a slightly padded skeleton from an osteology cabinet, would hardly have been an unusual phenomenon if he had not been split into two halves already as a young man: the madly brave, helmsmanly half baited the coward. It was a clear case of schizophrenia, advanced and incurable because of the malady of the entire age around him, and it was to take on tragic historical dimensions. It all began in 1897, when young Marko burned a Hungarian flag. He didn’t know why he did it: he hated Hungary, but he would never have done anything of the kind if he had not heard a voice inside him ordering, ‘Burn the banner’. The voice was his own, and the fear was also his. Deathly frightened, and yet as deliberate as could be, he tore down the green-and-red standard and incinerated it, for which he was sentenced to six months of harsh imprisonment at Lepoglava Prison.
He swore later that he had unsuccessfully tried to restrain himself, without success, while his influential father, a two-time candidate for deputy Ban, Viceroy of Croatia, treated his son’s disease in the only way possible: he took him out of Lepoglava and enrolled him in Hungarian military college. The years Murk spent at the Hungarian Defence School in Pécs and the Ludoviceum Military Academy in Budapest were outwardly uninteresting for this story, but the atmosphere at the Hungarian military schools left a lasting mark and helped form the political and literary predilections of this second-rater. During that time, his helmsmanly (see note above) and his cowardly half were both far from dormant. Marko tried to get rid of one or the other: we can see this in the way he was alternately punished and praised at the Defence School; but at least no calamity occurred in those years, right up until 1912. Then the young Hungarian cadet was given leave — and promptly travelled to Serbia, whose relations with Austria-Hungary were explosive.
Marko Murk would later write: “I took that trip to Belgrade without identity papers, at a young age and without any of the normal bureaucratic formalities, with the aim of offering my services to Serbia. What services, Jesus Christ? Me, a cadet from a Hungarian military academy, the son of a two-time candidate for deputy Ban, and therefore with a dead-end heritage and future!” Without a doubt, his helmsmanly half had prevailed over the cowardly half again. The wretched half of Marko Murk begged his other, mighty half to leave him alone, but without success. His stay in rebellious Serbia ended up in debacle because he was treated with suspicion at every step. He was watched, shadowed, arrested, interrogated and finally deported back to Hungary. He returned to the Ludoviceum and voluntarily presented evidence of his Serbian jaunt, without hesitation or remorse. Needless to say, an internal inquiry was conducted. The result was a six-day period of strict detention and many other punishments. It was probably that very excursion which ultimately led the academy’s board of directors to approve cadet Murk’s application for official leave in March 1913.
In this period, Marko had his second experience with Serbia. His helmsmanly half demanded that he travel via Salonika to Skopje, recently liberated from the Ottomans, where he offered his services to the Serbian army once more. But this time, too, he was accused of spying and escorted under guard to Belgrade. For three days the cowardly half of him implored not to be released from the old Turkish jail in Topchider and to be allowed to stay in Serbia; for three days he begged and grovelled like a dog, but then they sent him by barge to the border town of Zemun and, on the basis of a wanted circular, handed him over to the Austro-Hungarian border police as a deserter.
So it was that Marko Murk’s youthful idealizing of Serbia as a ‘Piedmont of liberation and unification’ finally collapsed after his twofold saga of adversity, and he returned to Zagreb. But now he was all alone. He no longer had a family, since his father had disowned him via the newspapers. None of the denizens of the day would accept him as one of them. None of the creatures of the night would enrol him either. Confronted with a loss of ideals, he was also overtaken by hunger. And that is how the story would have ended if the time in which he lived had not also had its helmsmanly and its cowardly half. Marko hadn’t been able to put a Serbian Shaykacha on his head and become a private in the Morava Division, but he would have to go to war just as he was.
For Marko Murk, the Great War began in a café in Zagreb’s Tushkanac neighbourhood when he saw hundreds of glasses being smashed against a wall. He fell into the embrace of the hysterical mob and passionately hated Serbia with it the whole evening. Him, of all people! On the way back, he smashed the windows of two shops, which he mistook as belonging to Serbs. The next day, he bitterly regretted it all and swore to himself that he would become as silent as a thief and tread in his own footsteps, trying to leave as little trace as possible in 1914 which could reveal him and commend him to the sirens of war. But Murk, with the morbid ring to his name, was mistaken.
This former Hungarian cadet was not mobilized immediately at the beginning of the war, and he managed to stay in civvies for all of 1915. Only in July 1916 was he drafted into the Reserve Officers School in Zagreb, so as to be transferred to a Croatian Home Guard regiment as of 1 August; military education ran its course here, and he was allocated to one of the lower command positions and tasked with training the recruits who would soon be ‘taking their final test’ before the enemy. Him, the former pyromaniac, Lepoglava inmate, ‘Serbian spy’ and POW! But the cowardly wartime half was satisfied that Marko saw neither gas, bayonet nor bullet and thus won a short-lived victory over the helmsmanly half. Was this other force in the body and mind of Marko Murk dormant? Not at all, it was just biding its time. The coward Murk was able to avoid being sent to the battlefield almost until the end of 1916 thanks to being diagnosed with tuberculosis (whether real or fictitious is secondary at this point). He was hospitalized in the picturesque town of Lovran on the Adriatic, and as soon as the doctors noticed his fever subside a little he was sent to the Eastern Front, to Galicia. Brusilov’s Russian offensive was under way and the Dual Monarchy needed every pair of hands it could muster, even Murk’s.
He travelled by overloaded troop train. The soldiers around him stood, smoked, took turns sitting on one another’s laps, bumped each other at the slightest attempt to move and apologized to one another like old-fashioned greenhorns. Murk already felt strange in the compartment. The dark half of him was rising from the bitter dregs and Marko slowly entered the phase of heroism. Whatever he had thought or been waiting for before — he heard himself say, and it sounded foreign — this now was his hour for fame! Leaving the train, he was almost carried on the hands of the new recruits he had prepared for their ‘final test’ before the enemy. He had changed beyond recognition. He had his own ‘class’ of cadets who looked up to him like a god. Did he tell them anything about his sprees to Serbia? No, he dared not. He pretended to be a leader and reassured himself he was. He was waiting and just itching for the first day of combat, but the bothersome rains of Galicia would prolong his life for twenty more unnecessary days. During that time, he strove unsuccessfully to calm his helmsmanly half.
He prayed. Whined. Pined. Begged.
No one noticed. In the severe cold at Christmas 1916, an attack was ordered. ‘Class leader‘ Murk was the first to leap out of the trench. He screamed, as if at a loss what to do with himself. Several black birds descended towards him as if they were coming to perch on his head. He traversed some ten metres of no-man’s-land, flailing with his arms like a mad thing. Then he suddenly stopped. He was hit by a single bullet, w
hich put an end to everything. He crossed his legs like a ballerina and fell in a low bow, from which he would never rise. He died in a sitting position, not lying like most others. The last thing he saw around him were the ravens; wheeling above the frozen Galician earth and cawing, as if to sing the praises of a hero.
One thousand five hundred kilometres to the south-west, the deceased Emperor Franz Joseph was now succeeded by the last Austro-Hungarian monarch: Charles I. The new helmsman of the dynasty destined to rule for a thousand years was handed all the insignia of the crown . . . and a war. One he was expected to win.
Nothing terrible. Just a war.
Each new ruler always inherits a war. But Charles was frightened. He too had his helmsmanly and his cowardly half. And his people, he suspected, were the same. He smiled. He made an effort to appear composed at the emperor’s funeral and later at his own coronation. He stepped through the streets of Vienna with Empress Zita and little Archduke Otto, but he didn’t look into the crowd. His gaze wandered across the grey Vienna facades. He saw the faces of his subjects pressed up against the windows, and he felt their heads resembled pale pumpkins. His thoughts were blank. The horses with black tassels, black coaches and escorts with black-plumed helmets all resembled rain-soaked ravens to him, just like the ones from Galicia. Afterwards he stood in front of the chapel at the foot of an enormous hill of wreaths and flowers brought by the populace. He left the funeral escorted by men who smelt of the damp. He received the crown and the sceptre, but he refused to use the old emperor’s chambers in the Hofburg and Belvedere palaces. Instead, he moved into the apartments once used by the first secretaries of the court. There was certainly no lack of luxury here either, but he was sleepy. He felt terribly tired and had to lie down.
The Great War Page 33