The Great War

by Aleksandar Gatalica

  For the conspirator Lyuba Vulovich, the Great War ended when he looked for the last time at his astonished countenance in the magic mirror of his friend from cadet school. No medals are given for that sort of bravery, except in the thoughts of friends. Major Radoyica Tatich asked his acquaintances how Lyuba Vulovich had behaved that day. When he heard that the executioners praised him (‘You have our word as officers that he died like a Herculean hero. We bound his eyes as if we were putting a satin scarf on him.’), he left satisfied. Without a word, he lit up a cigarette and blew out thick puffs of smoke; he no longer expected anything of his return to the Fatherland, nor of his military career. He bent down, picked up a small handful of bronze, Greek dust and felt as if he was in no-man’s-land.

  Manfred von Richthofen also found himself in no-man’s-land. In June 1917, the kaiser finally awarded him the highest German medal, Pour le Mérite. He had had to bring down sixteen enemy planes to receive the ‘Blue Max’, but finally the telegram arrived with this most joyful piece of news. Soon the slender cross with the sky-blue points came, which the Red Baron always wore on his coat. But this decoration seemed not to bring him luck. He shot down seven more French planes, but after twenty-three kills his red triplane was shot down for the first time. A machine-gun burst from a British plane hit the motor of Richthofen’s plane and gasoline gushed into the cockpit up to his ankles. The aircraft could have caught fire at any moment, but the Red Baron managed to land it, and then destroy it. His heavy pilot’s coat was singed and blackened all over with oil, so he did not give the impression of a great ace. Worse still, he found himself far behind British lines, some thirty kilometres from the Hindenburg Line. The first thing he encountered were the rifles of frightened Scottish soldiers. One of them knew some German and struck up a gentlemanly conversation as they were escorting him to the Royal Flying Corps command.

  ‘What’s your name, sir?’

  ‘Manfred von Richthofen.’

  ‘I didn’t quite catch that, but never mind. How many of our planes have you shot down? Two or three?’

  ‘Twenty-three!’

  ‘You must be joking,’ the guard said in his cumbersome German. ‘Is that the truth?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘I don’t believe it. No one has downed as many of our planes as the Red Baron. Do you know him?’

  ‘Quite well, in fact. I’d say we’re on first-name terms.’

  ‘What sort of fellow is he?’ the inquisitive Scotsman asked again. ‘A brutal cad, I bet.’

  ‘He’s actually a tender-hearted fellow and loves to kiss his sweetheart. By the way she kisses him, he knows how you Tommies are going to attack.’

  ‘So he’s that kind of ace. Superstitious. He might be your comrade but, believe me, I’d bash in his noggin if I met him!’

  ‘Why not straight away?’ Richthofen challenged him and took off his grimy leather coat. Beneath it, the Scotsman saw an immaculately ironed, light-blue jacket with the ‘Blue Max’, which gleamed with every movement. ‘I am Manfred von Richthofen. Do you get my name now?’

  The Scotsman was dumbfounded. Still, he clenched his fists, and Richthofen raised his guard in response. They exchanged several classy hooks and uppercuts before being separated by the other men. Later, in the British pilots’ canteen, Richthofen was treated to coffee and ciga­rettes. He even began to sing a few songs with the Scotsman, who now apologized for his quick temper and the exchange of blows. Two days later, Richthofen was taken to the Hindenburg Line and exchanged for a British pilot. That was a sign that chivalry still existed in the air and on the ground. And the Red Baron thought that the ‘Blue Max’ maybe did bring him good luck after all.

  Whether this medal, coveted by every German officer, would have brought good luck to the submarine commander Walther Schwieger, is hard to say. A telegramme arrived for Schwieger, too, at his base in L., with notification that the kaiser had awarded him the ‘Blue Max’. It was 30 July 1917, but Captain-Lieutenant Schwieger — a mariner born inland — was not on shore. His medal came by mail two weeks later, but he was not at base in August either. The valuable medal was safe in a glass-case, and everyone thought submarine U-88 and its crew would soon return to its home port, but things turned out differently. All of August passed, the beginning of September came, and Schwieger still wasn’t back in L. Then 5 September came, the last day of Schwieger’s life. His submarine was on a routine patrol, had rounded the northern coast of Scotland and was not far from the Old Head of Kinsale where it had sunk the RMS Lusitania in 1915, when there was a mighty explosion. The submarine had entered an underwater minefield, for the officer on watch hadn’t noticed the balls floating like lanterns at a depth of twenty metres. The blast practically tore the U-88 in half. Water began to rush in, and the crew members who had survived the explosion soon drowned in their cabins, unable to get out. Strangely thrown free, as if by some great force, Schwieger’s body began to sink. For a brief moment, it seemed there was still life in him. But then he stopped moving. He didn’t struggle for air. His loose blond hair waved in a gentle undersea breeze. When he had sunk to the border between light and the dark depths of the sea, large shadows began to glide close by his body, as if to sniff at him. These were most probably the sea monsters, and they took him in and sheltered him like a baby. For Schwieger, the Great War ended when the megalodons carried him away forever in a strange funeral procession, accompanied by sea serpents, to their kingdom on the sea floor.

  Thus ended the life of the highly decorated officer, Walther Schwieger. For Zhivka D. Spasich, the seamstress who moved her tailor shop from strange Dunavska Street to safe and tranquil Prince Eugene Street, an unexpected new life began. The same day as the death of submarine commander Schwieger, whom she had never heard of, the seamstress gave birth in her shop. She confided in no one that she was carrying the baby. Corpulent as she was, she claimed to the last day not to be pregnant. It was a warm day on 5 September in Belgrade, with the shadows of officers chasing each other on the sidewalks and someone wailing in the distance like an abandoned cat, when Zhivka lay down on the floor and, with the help of her two assistants, gave birth to a healthy son. Only one person could have been the father: the Austrian officer with the perpetual hole in his pocket. She swaddled her son and named him Eugene. She was neither ashamed nor proud. The boy realized that he had to be very quiet in this world, and within just a few days Zhivka was back at the sewing machine. Quiet gentlemen came to her shop once again and left their uniforms to be mended. She met many new officers — tall, with large moustaches, heavy-set, red-faced, bloated or rickety — but never again did she see the officer with the hole in his pocket.

  There was a professional spy who thought in those days that he too had a hole in his pocket. One thread came loose and he pulled at it, and as soon as he tore it off it seemed that a new one appeared, which he could pull at without end. The owner of that recalcitrant pocket was Frederick ‘Fritz’ Joubert Duquesne. This writer, soldier and adventurer had a narrow face, a pronounced nose, and the boyish smirk of a man who didn’t know the meaning of fear. They called him ‘the Cat’, and he himself was convinced that he had at least seven lives. In his first, as a young man in South Africa, Duquesne fought against the British Empire in the First Boer War. He was on the verge of being captured several times, but he always saved himself by fleeing unexpectedly at the last minute. Before the Second Boer War, there in distant diamond Africa, he decided to start a second life. He audaciously enlisted to serve in the British Army — him, Duquesne, a Boer soldier and commando! How could they not have remembered him from the beginning of the century, when he wore a farmer’s hat and two cartridge belts over his shoulders, and sowed fear like a guerrilla hero? Had he changed, maybe? Not at all. Duquesne, now a British officer, continued to work against the Empire. He planned acts of sabotage in Cape Town, that city which smelt of goat fat, with twenty fellow traitors in the army. They almost succeeded in blowing up several strategic British installations, but some
one blew a whistle. In just a few more minutes Duquesne would have been caught, but that afternoon, while the bells of the distant Catholic mission rang and reverberated unusually long, he Houdini’ed out of that second life, too.

  Before the Great War, he took up residence in New York. Now he was a news correspondent. He had reported faithfully on the Russian-Japanese War. Later he sent brilliant dispatches from blue Morocco, which brought him into the circles of US President, Theodore Roosevelt. He gained American citizenship in 1913. His diplomatic passport would take him to South America, but before leaving he had to drop in at the New York hotel Astor. As an old enemy of the British crown, he now began his third life as a German spy. All the doors in east and west were open to him. Under personal protection of the US president, Duquesne passed himself off as an engineer and spied in the rubber plantations of Brazil. Later, under the name Frederick Frederickson, he became involved in the ‘gold affair’ in Bolivia and emerged from it with a personal fortune. In the second year of the Great War, he took back his name Duquesne again, and President Roosevelt posted him as second attaché to the American embassy in Managua, Nicaragua.

  His spying career was at its height. Just when he felt he was living perhaps the fourth of his seven lives, his pockets began to tear. First one, then the other. Thread after thread came loose and he didn’t understand how his expensive suits could be so badly made. He blamed the humidity of the Central American torrid belt, where Nicaragua is nestled, and then a warrant for his arrest suddenly arrived in November 1917. It appeared that the president could no longer save this former brave boy who went around during the First Boer War with two cartridge belts over his shoulders like an insurrectionary leader. He was reaching the twilight of his career in the Great War, and it all seems to have happened because of a loose thread which he pulled and pulled at, and which must have unravelled his destiny.

  The twilight of another spy, too, began in 1917 with the pulling of a thread. Sidney Reilly’s pockets also began to tear without reason. One loose thread, then another. Was it best to pull them out or tear them off? At the end of the nineteenth century, Sidney Reilly realized that his manifold spying activities were an opportunity to make his mark. By the beginning of the twentieth century — as soon as he entered that blasphemous era — he was working for so many intelligence services that he often had trouble seeing through the thick web of double-agentry. But he was a master of disguise and the owner of the largest number of forged passports as soon as they were introduced in the distrustful twentieth-century.

  Many a lady got to know that mousy face with its seductive, dark, button eyes, its long aristocratic nose, and fine lips, which invariably held cigars of vanilla-flavoured black tobacco. Reilly was known for his cheerful character and short-lived romances which usually ended in the betrayal of a state secret through tears of joy or guilt. In the Great War, he was the key agent of the British secret service, the SIS. That did not prevent him, however, from having a firm in New York which sold munitions to both the Russians and the Germans on the Eastern Front. A man had to live from something, after all, and life as a spy was only good for costly wardrobe and hotels at the expense of the British crown.

  When business died down in October 1917 due to Russian’s with-drawal from the Great War, he returned to Britain. Once or twice he met the assassin Oswald Rayner and, as a handler, gave him assignments which had to be accomplished with just one bullet. He was able to give orders — and more than that: to blackmail and be blackmailed. He thus acquired the reputation in upper circles of a man who could be relied upon. He was therefore sent to Petrograd towards the end of October 1917, shortly before the Bolshevik Revolution. Coming from a Russian-speaking background, Reilly had connections with the tsarist secret service, the Okhrana. His group had the task of killing several corrupt ministers of the transitional government so as to boost Lenin’s coup, as strange as that seemed, for reasons known only to the SIS. Once again, everything looked simple for our ‘Mr Rybenko’ (the name he went under in Russia). Russian women had always appealed to him more than British or American ones, and his nervous, mousey eyes very soon made him the darling of Petrograd’s spinsters. They smiled at him, flirted, and confided in him: ‘You speak Russian like a Tatar, but your English is very professional.’ Everything therefore went smoothly until his pockets began to tear. First one, then the other. He too pulled on thread after thread, and he too was baffled as to how such expensive suits could be so poorly made. He blamed the Russian October, the worst month in Petrograd, when the rain changes to sharp needles of frost and snow. In that hoary month, he was unmasked. He too seems to have unravelled his destiny by pulling at threads. His associates were arrested and summarily shot, but Reilly managed to escape by assuming the identity of a German and fleeing to Finland via Petrograd’s Warsaw Railway Station, where Lenin had arrived several months earlier. He saved his skin, but the Great War was over for this master spy.

  Career threads were also becoming entangled for a third spy that winter. Known commonly as Mata Hari, she was an unparalleled oriental dancer. She even had her own show, in which she played a devotee of the Javanese gods. She had round cheeks, a marble face and the look of a cold and ruthless seductress. The skimpy skirts she wore on stage emphasized her thighs and calf muscles. This winsome exterior concealed a ruthlessly ambitious and fame-hungry manipulator. Everyone had to see Mata Hari’s show — it was a must — and everyone believed that the Javanese gods spoke in the same way that Mata Hari danced to their music.

  The stage lights, make-up and powder concealed the sorry life of the Dutchwoman, Margaretha Geertruida Zelle. When she was eight, her father went bankrupt, by the age of fifteen she was supporting herself, and at nineteen she entered a marriage of convenience with a Dutch colonial official and went with him to Java. At twenty-four she lost her son to scurvy. At twenty-six she returned to Paris to try her luck as a dancer. Plagued by money troubles in the ‘City of Light’, she scraped by as a stripper, circus assistant and occasionally as a photographer’s model. In desperation, and used to taking revenge and suffering the vengeance of others, she decided to reinvent her past: as of early 1910, she presented herself as a Javanese princess who had been given to a temple at a tender age to become a vestal virgin devoted to divinity and dance.

  That was a biography repugnant and touching at the same time; one of those popular myths which everyone believes because they’re so clearly a lie. But when the lights went up on stage and Mata Hari appeared with her ivory skin, and when she began to snake to the sounds of oriental music, as skinny as a rake and as supple as an eel, male eyes forgot all propriety, and almost every story became credible.

  Mata Hari was a libertine. Inclined to dubious affairs, she, like Kiki, was not at all frightened by the spectre of syphilis haunting Europe, and she was given to using her fatal charm. A host of lovers would consolidate her fame. One of them would bring about the end of her life. Immediately before the Great War, she got to know Friedrich Wilhelm of Hohenzollern, the Crown prince of the German Empire, who showered her with affection and gifts, as well as visiting her performances throughout Europe indecently often. Everything else is legend. With her Dutch passport, Mata Hari travelled widely during the Great War. She was shadowed as a suspected German spy, while she herself claimed to be working for the French intelligence service. In February 1916, the skimpy dresses she performed in began to tear. Before performances, she would notice a loose silken thread which she tried in vain to pluck off or wrap into the lining. She would change her dress before the next performance, but then the new one would begin to tear too.

  She was arrested on 13 February 1917 at the Hotel Plaza Athénée and accused of betrayal by passing British tank designs to the Germans. As evidence, they showed her intercepted messages of a German military attaché code-named H21. She said she had never heard of him and repeated that she was a spy for the French. Afterwards, some rough-hewn men with black moustaches down to their shoulders, hideous scars and sunken
red-eyes came in. Her admirers certainly didn’t look like that . . . they interrogated her for several days, and she fluttered around the indictment like a moth trying not to plunge and become entrapped. In the end, her strength gave way. The men with raw skin on their cheeks and foreheads explained to her that she had never worked for the French intelligence service but only for the Germans. She was sentenced to death.

  It was 15 October 1917 when she walked her last path, accompanied by the sighs of all of Paris. She, the Javanese princess, was wearing a long fur-coat and high-heeled shoes. A cold wind whistled through the branches as they took her to the Bois de Vincennes. The firing squad consisted of twelve young recruits, just boys, who had never seen her dance; the officers were afraid that older men could take leave of their senses and try to help her at the last moment, instead of shooting her. And so they chose smooth-faced striplings from other parts of France to be her executors. A doctor also stood near the condemned woman — he was to confirm her death — and Mata Hari’s solicitor was present too.

  When they arrived at the place where the dancer was to be shot, Geertruida said goodbye to the solicitor and gave the doctor some money because he was to examine her after the execution. When asked what her last wish was, she unbuttoned her fur coat and let it fall to the ground. The firing squad saw her naked body, which shone in the morning sun like mother-of-pearl: rounded girlish shoulders, small breasts like silver fleece fastened to her ribs and a crotch freshly shaved and perfumed that morning. The soldier boys froze and could barely raise their rifles. The salvo rang out like a stammering atonement for the guilt of those who cast the Javanese princess to her death. Covered with blood, Mata Hari collapsed like Ingres’s Odalisque. She crossed her legs, threw her left arm out over her plaited hair, and grasped convulsively for the grass with her right. Very soon, the doctor confirmed her death — a death which was the talk of all Paris.