The Great War

by Aleksandar Gatalica

  It was always the same boy at the stations in Karlsruhe, Mannheim, Frankfurt and Berlin-Friedrichstrasse, only in a different role each time. He watched idly like a pickpocket, cried as if lost, pulled a luggage cart again, or was all black and blue. Radek was relieved when the train finally reached the north German coast and the revolutionaries left the country. He didn’t see any boys in Sweden or snowy Finland, but a boy with the same face was waiting for him at the station in Petrograd. That German boy again! With freckles, that same look in his blue eyes, and his premature earnest. This new-old boy now introduced himself as a Russian.

  ‘Hello, Comrade Radek, I recognize you,’ he said and held out his hand seriously like an adult.

  ‘Where do you know me from?’ the Austrian Bolshevik replied in broken Russian and shook the boy’s small hand like he would a grown man’s.

  ‘They told me to meet you at the station and see to your needs until you settle in.’

  ‘So you have nothing to do with the German boys in Rottweil, Karlsruhe, Stuttgart and all the other cities in Germany?’

  ‘I don’t understand, Comrade Radek. I hate the Germans. What did you see there in Germany?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing,’ Karl Radek replied, thinking that his time may well have passed. He embraced this Russian boy like he was hugging all those German ones and realized that nothing would be the same any more. Three years after the World War, Karl Radek would be a refugee once again. He would thunder against Lenin and the Party, calling them “the Bolshevist bacillus of Russia” in an American newspaper, and he wouldn’t tell anyone that the first crack in his revolutionary views appeared when he felt that every city in Germany and Russia had one identical, fair-haired boy who was visible only to him.

  At least Radek had someone waiting for him. When the train with the two sealed wagons passed through Karlsruhe, the chemist Fritz Haber, the father of all Gothic doctors, was sitting in his house alone. He was a widower, and he had sent his son to military school. He had been given several days of leave so he could sell the old family house, which still smelled of his Clara Immerwahr. The chemist of death, too, now felt the time of his successes had passed. He was still the same, and he still thought that a scientist belonged to the whole world in peacetime, but in wartime only to his nation. Yet he had already considered himself a dead man for some time. He reflected like a scientist: what percentage of him was already dead?

  When his wife died, part of him also died — thirty-two per cent, to be precise. When he saw how devastating the effects of chlorine were, he was not greatly shocked, but another six percent of him died all the same. When they didn’t promote him from captain to the rank of medical corps major, this terrible insult caused another two percent of him to die; all together, in 1917, that made a total of forty percent of Haber dead!

  And the prospects? The savage, poorly armed enemy on the Russian Front, who was beneath the dignity of the German soldier, was melting away. The sixty-per cent part of him perked up at that news, but then things were not going well in the west, as Captain Haber knew too well. The retreat to the Hindenburg Line, along with the abandonment of the towns of Bapaume, Ypres and Péronne, was leading to Germany’s defeat in the Great War, as inevitable as it was incomprehensible. That blow killed at least another seven per cent of the life in him. The misfortune and apathy of people behind the lines also did their bit. Wounded soldiers who were happy to lounge in hospital for six months or more also exasperated him. Those unworthy, unpatriotic Germans together killed another five per cent of him, so Fritz Haber, the chemist of his body, could only say that forty-eight per cent of him was still alive in 1917. That’s right, less than half of him. His time was up, he thought, but he was wrong . . . significant parts of the living Fritz Haber were still to die in 1918!

  DEATH WEARS NO WATCH

  Bare earth all around. The coppery, dusty Greek earth once trod by the sandalled feet of ancient Greek heroes, now plodded on by the boots of Greek conscripts almost treading on each other’s toes. The occasi­onal gnarled tree behind the lines, and wind raising clouds of dust. No people anywhere — those merry, carousing ones. In 1917, King Peter felt he had ultimately been left alone. Abandoned and at the mercy of his ailments, he had a vivid image of life entering a train and of him standing alone on the platform, trying to make out the silhouettes in the moving carriages, just as the last Russian tsar felt. The old king had not made war in 1914 either; he had trusted people loyal to the throne in 1915; in 1916, he had left the war completely to his son; and still he could not have believed that people would turn their backs on him, here and now in 1917. Yes, now even the king thought his time was up. Who could he tell, who could he confide in? He fled and changed his abode: Euboea, Salonika, Edessa, and back to Athens again. Now they told him that Greece had finally and wholeheartedly come down on the side of the Allies, and King Constantine was far away in some pleasant but obtuse foreign land.

  What had become of 1916, the year of the kings? The outcome was more than disappointing. Constantine was a case in point. Nicholas II, too. Who would be next? Surely it would be him. ‘I am entering my last year,’ King Peter noted in his diary. The old king was no longer waiting for anyone human, but only for sickness and death. He looked on illness and decay as malicious enemies, and death for him was the great bell in the dome of his church on Oplenac Hill. If only he could live to see Serbia again; but even if he didn’t, it was all over anyway. How strange to be putting an end to everything, willy-nilly, before his life was over, and finishing things he had only just begun. Things he hadn’t even begun were well and truly over. He felt interrupted and his life cut short half way through. Death, it seemed, wore no watch. The king spoke like this to his new doctor, who listened to him and, like others, tried not to get into an argument. This caused nothing but rage in the fiery, youthful ember buried deep in the soul of the old king — a fury he couldn’t find the strength to express.

  So no one asked him about anything any more. He watched his infrequent guests listening to him and glancing furtively at their watches. Prime Minister Nikola Pashich and the President of the Yugoslav Com­m­ittee, Dragoslav Yankovich, were visiting. Pashich informed King Peter about the Allies’ attitude towards Serbia, and Yankovich spoke about the idea of unifying the South Slavs, and his cheeks flushed as he pronounced ‘Yugoslavia, Yugoslavia’: It all looked like a visit with meaning and substance. But then the king saw off his guests and, for no particular reason, went out for a walk around Athens. He thought the visitors would already have left and would be getting on with their business, when he saw them both down at the port. They were waiting for their boat and moving around with nervous steps, each by himself. The king walked past just one step away from one of them and then almost brushed the back of the other, and neither of them noticed him. They were so close that they could have reached out and touched him, but now he was out of sight and out of mind for them. Yankovich was staring into the distance as if he wanted to spot the boat first, and Pashich was muttering to himself. Soon the boat arrived and they left, but the impression steadily grew on the king that he only existed for visitors when he was standing right in front of them.

  A week later, the Minister of War, General Bozhidar Terzich, came to see him. He looked at the king with his warm but shifty eyes and evidently lied to him about something. At the end of the visit, he took leave of the king in the upper chambers of the house in Athens and went down to the ground floor. There he waited for his coach, twirled his black moustache and cursed under his breath. The king went down the same stairs and walked up to Terzich from behind, but the minister neither heard nor sensed him and just kept on muttering to himself. The king therefore turned, went out the back door and walked round past the bougainvillea, by the house to the gravel path at the front so the nefarious visitor would easily see him. Terzich’s coach arrived and he got in; the king waved to him from the side, but the general no longer noticed him.

  Yes, the king thought after that: they only se
e me when I’m in front of their very noses. Then they hurry off, stare at their pocket watches and debate with invisible others before finally leaving. He tested it once or twice more with new visitors, and it was always the same.

  ‘They ought to just write me postcards — that’s how much I mean to them,’ the king wrote in his diary, without realizing that hard times had come, there in the foreign country: the time of the first victories in the Battle of Kaymakchalan, but also of the first suspicions and conspiracies. The spectres who had once slogged through Albania now regained strength, and the fresh blood flowing through their veins now began to become tainted with self-interest, revanchism and vengefulness. It was the same with junior and senior officers, members of the government, and the Regent himself. Many old wounds were reopened in Salonika in 1917, a host of old disputes from the nineteenth century simmered up again, and many ideas were left unfinished; so the ambitious and the frustrated now conspired to implement them then and there, on the dry earth of Greece.

  One who had long been a nuisance, wielded greater influence over the army than the officer corps, and had founded the secret society, Black Hand, was Colonel Dragutin Dimitriyevich, code-named Apis. Regent Alexander had long considered removing him. He mentioned Apis in a conversation with Prime Minister Pashich, and he almost gave him a dressing-down in front of the supreme command when discussing future plans. After surviving an assassination attempt near Salonika, Alexander returned to the city in anger, and spoke out in his own characteristic way, as if breaking a branch: ‘Let’s get rid of this nuisance!’

  Apis and one hundred and twenty-four other officers were charged in connection with the shots fired at the regent. The trial took place in restless Salonika accompanied by protests from the commanders of all the other foreign armies, and it raised the temperature of the city, whose fever had only just subsided. The proceedings were opened on 28 May 1917 at the barracks of the Serbian 3rd Army and presided over by General Mirko Milosavlyevich, but this is not the story of that harsh, loyalist officer. Many non-commissioned officers and their superiors were summoned before the tribunal, and all of them corroborated the charges which had been laid, but nor is this the tale of those frightened witnesses with only their own careers in mind. Initially nine men were sentenced to death, some of them officers and others civilians; by the end, it was only three. The story which follows is about just one of those men, Major of the Artillery Lyubomir ‘Lyuba’ Vulovich. It is similar to a Hungarian story from the nineteenth century which has come down to us by strange paths: the tale of a mother who wished to strengthen her son’s courage before his execution. She told him she would wear a sumptuous dress with white flounces on the day of the execution if a pardon came and was read out before the executioner at the last minute. A pardon did not come, the mother was wearing those immaculate white satin lilies, and her son died hoping until the last, courageous like a heroic Hungarian nobleman.

  In this new tale, which was passed from mouth to mouth among soldiers in a faithless and seditious century, in Salonika in 1917, the role of the mother in white was played by another artillery major by the name of Radoyica Tatich, a hero of the engagements at Tekerish, Begluk, Beli Kamen and the Battle of Kaymakchalan. He didn’t wear white and was dressed no differently to the condemned man. He felt it was his soldierly duty (‘It was his moral duty, mate,’ the troops used to say) to prevent his bosom friend from cadet school from losing his soldierly dignity in front of the firing squad. Therefore he went to Vulovich’s cell and spoke to his friend in French so the rather rustic guard wouldn’t understand.

  ‘I’m prepared to die,’ Vulovich in turn replied in French, which both of them had learnt well at military school in Paris.

  ‘Mon ami, reprenez courage!’ Tatich reprimanded him sternly. Then he led him to the far part of the cell and switched to a more friendly tone, and to Serbian. He then spoke to his friend in confidence:

  ‘Tomorrow I’m taking the overnight express train to Athens. I’ll throw myself at old King Peter’s feet and beg him to pardon you, but if I don’t succeed I have something else to protect you when you’re in front of the firing squad. Don’t laugh, Vulovich, when I’m pledging my honour as an officer and risking my career because of you! You know I was the greatest hero at the Battle of Cer, and in all the battles since. Why should I adorn myself with false modesty? You‘ve heard what the army says about me: “He’s reckless, as if nothing can harm him: There’s no man faster in a charge”. The reason for my mad bravery was a little mirror. A strange little mirror. I discovered its special powers back during the Balkan wars, and I continued to rely on it right up to the Battle of Kaymakchalan, and even today. I have that little mirror with me now. What kind of contrivance it is, you ask? The mirror contains an aged and ugly me. Once we were the same: me and the face in that mirror, but then I realized that my reflection behind the line of the mirror was abruptly beginning to change, age, and become worn out. Whenever I looked at myself in fear, my astonished reflection seemed to age a year or two. I was often frightened and looked in the mirror rather often, before each battle: in Macedonia and Kosovo, in Bulgaria, and now in the Great War. Don’t smirk, Vulovich, you know old Tatich doesn’t lie and isn’t a poetic daydreamer like some officers! I carried the little mirror with me all the time. Looking at my ever more haggard image made me realize that I was transferring my fears to it, ever more and more; soon I also realized that neither bullet nor bayonet nor bomb could harm me if I was freed of shame in this way. And I’m alive, as you can see, without a single scratch. Was that possible for anyone else but me, Vulovich? No, because only I had the little mirror with me, and now I want to give it to you. Look at yourself in it (“That was the hardest part of the lie, my good fellow”). Can’t you see your aged and frightened self? Careful now, don’t turn around. Don’t let the guard see I’m giving you this miraculous little thing. Hide it now, quickly, so they don’t take it off you. Now I’m going. Remember, my friend: you can’t die with that little mirror in your pocket. The rifles will jam, the commanding officer of the firing squad will get a lump in his throat when he’s about to shout ‘Fire!’, or a pardon will arrive from Athens at the last moment. Just you look in it, and whenever you look you will pass one more fear to your image. It can’t fail. Goodbye now, farewell. Let us embrace like brothers, my dear Vulovich.’

  Thus Major Radoyica Tatich left his friend. Evening came, and still he did not go to Salonika railway station. One train after another left for Athens. (‘He didn’t even think of going, cuz; it was all a lie, but the mirror began to do its work.’) Major Lyuba Vulovich looked at himself in the little mirror every morning and there, behind the reflection, just as his friend Tatich had said, he saw his frightened and aged self. He maintained that countenance for several days, and then his mouth twisted into a sad grimace. He thought that was his reflection suffering after being given all his fears, but he was wrong. Vulovich didn’t see that the same thing was happening to his own face, since he had none other than Tatich’s ‘miraculous’ little mirror. And he began to hope, madly expecting that the firing squad’s bullet would miss him too. (‘Tatich, who owned the miraculous little mirror until just before, never had as much as a scratch, I can vouch for that.’)

  Day after day passed, then week after week; for there was reluctance to carry out the three officers’ sentence. This only strengthened Vulovich’s certainty that there was nothing to fear. But then 26 June 1917 by the new calendar arrived, and the condemned men were driven to the Salonika military cemetery, where graves had already been dug for them. No one, not even Apis, chatted on the way with the officers who escorted them; they were calm and apologized for what they must do in the line of duty. No one looked at the Salonika landscape, its harsh rocks jarring with the aquamarine coast with such serenity, for the last time. No one inhaled the Mediterranean air with its soothing aromas of almond, laurel and pine with so much confidence. Even the stern soldier Apis started to tremble when they were taken out of the
truck like tied sacks, but not Vulovich. (‘He smiled — I swear he did — because I was in the firing squad. He smiled like a girl.’)

  The rolling of the drums scarcely moved the bravest of the three condemned men. That sound brought home an image which stood like stone in his hopes like the jagged Salonika rockscape they were leaving behind and which now, strangely animated, came up to within a metre or two of where they stood. Vulovich saw rifles with bayonets on, soldiers who didn’t want to kill them, and a small, very nervous commander of the firing squad, who was shifting from one leg to the other. But it couldn’t be, he thought, they couldn’t all be here because of him; he had Tatich’s mirror on him, after all. Look, a senior officer was racing along the path to the cemetery. With a pardon, surely, or maybe not . . . This officer now stood in front of the three condemned men and, as if to torment them, read out the full text of the indictment and sentence; it lasted two hours. There was no pardon, but Vulovich was still hoping. (‘You know, even a small animal in a trap hopes it will be able to pull and tug its way out.’) the other men asked for a last cigarette before death, and Vulovich wanted to look in his mirror. In it, he saw a frightened, deathly pale and broken man. It was he himself whom he saw, but once again he thought he had given all his fear to the image in Tatich’s miraculous little mirror. Now he stood in front of the squad, the drums rolled, the rifles were raised. Where was that pardon? a month earlier Tatich had gone to kneel before old King Peter - the shots echoed in the quarry like a monstrous profanity to the wrongfully condemned men, in a strange metallic language. The men fell straight into their graves: all three of them, including the bravest, artillery Major Lyuba Vulovich.