The Great War

by Aleksandar Gatalica

He stroked her straw-coloured hair and encircled her two blue ‘buttons’ with gentle caresses. Annabel switched to English. She spoke, and he listened to her as if he understood.

  ‘I had a husband back in Scotland,’ she told him. ‘He died in my arms. That’s why I came to Serbia at the beginning of 1915. I was alone and wanted to help. I came down with typhus but was cured. Surprisingly, it left no trace on my sensitive skin. I took a liking to you Serbs, although God is my witness how many of your bad traits I’ve seen. However brave you were in 1914, you became cowards the following year. Weakness, disease, loss of confidence — whatever. You were so frightened and small in the autumn of 1915 when the enemy invasion began. And with it came the rain. It rained when I left Kraguyevac with Hannah Hardy and headed south. It rained when we arrived in Kosovska Mitrovica with dishevelled hair, like Hecuba and her daughters. As we trudged along the potholed roads we saw bristly pigs fleeing with us, and the columns of refugees were looking not ahead but backwards, at their homeland. Somewhere in the middle of that trek, automobiles blew their horns at the refugees and what luxurious limousines they were. In them sat capricious majors and colonels who had crammed in everything they could: their wives and children, mistresses and family riches, and ridiculous home furnishings: a Turkish narghile, icons, a wall clock with broken glass and family portraits from happier times. Now I’m here, and I desperately need a man in this Greek night because I’ll die if I don’t touch a man again. But I’m English and ashamed to show my feelings. I’m also afraid because so many men have died beneath my hand already — first my husband, then all those other poor wretches. I fear that anyone who touches me dies. Do you want to be an exception?’

  Now everything had been said. Or nothing at all. Now everything was understood, although nothing had been understood. She said nothing more. He caressed her again. He ran his heavy soldier’s fingers through her velvety hair. He touched her slowly, slowly, like when the wind plucks the last autumn leaf from a tree. She closed her eyes: gently, gently, like when a little, nameless star goes out in a distant part of the universe. What happened afterwards was privy to the night. The stars in the black Salonika firmament whispered to each other about the love of Major Radoyica Tatich and the English nurse Annabel Walden. But for the streets of Salonika it remained a secret. Nor did the hallway on the second floor find out about their love. In fact, no one from no. 24 suspected anything, and Ermou Street could have sworn that nothing dishonourable happened there that night. Salonika would join the surrounding hills in hiding that forbidden love. Only the Front, which the artillery would shower with a rain of shells the very next day, had no sense of humour and no time for pretexts.

  The morning of 13 September 1918 came; the major had to return to the Front and he never saw his Annabel Walden again. But perhaps he didn’t need to because her short, fair hair, round English face and big blue eyes settled deep into the most intimate part of his memory, never to re-emerge and never to reveal themselves to anyone.

  In the evening of that day he was a soldier again. He joined his unit on the slopes of Mount Floka. He ate little and smoked a lot, fitting cheap cigarettes into his cigarette holder like a Greek. The night was no good for sleeping, nor did the day bring peace. An ominous silence crept under the soldiers’ helmets and into their uniforms, and some were already starting to say that the whole army on the Salonika Front was cursed. But then the silence broke into a roar from an armada of artillery pieces. At five o’clock on the morning of 14 September, Regent Alexander came out of his log cabin on Mount Yelak. Thick fog lay all around, but as the day progressed the fog lifted in the Dobro Selo area. At eight in the morning, the order was given to the Serbian artillery, and two thousand heavy guns opened fire at the Bulgarian positions opposite. The wailing of missiles, crying of guns and the shrieks of migratory birds went on for two whole days, and then the infantry went over the top.

  One of the Serbian units which brought about the breakthrough on the Salonika Front near Vetrenik was the 2nd Battalion of the Combined Drina Reserve Division led by Major Radoyica Tatich. He had a thousand soldiers and four young lieutenants under his command. The thousand soldiers were barely literate and saw themselves as blades of grass for the grim reaper; no one cared about them and no one would raise a monument to them when they died. They relied on spells and charms, oaths and curses, amulets and a rustic keeping of time. Only the four lieutenants of the 2nd Battalion and their commander had pocket watches. Those lieutenants were young and educated; it was their destiny to live until 1964 or even longer. Or was it?

  To begin with, none of the four thought they needed to keep the time. When the order to attack was given, the allied Serbian and French soldiers soon intermingled; split into groups of ten or twelve, they started to scale the rocky slope. Their uniforms were soon ragged, and almost every man was losing blood from cuts and wounds. In this way, they took metre after metre of ground. The air was full of machine-gun fire at first; then there were short bursts of rifle fire; in the end, everything died down and bayonets began to do their work, punctuating the silence with futile screams. Who would think of his watch amidst such confusion?

  One of the major’s lieutenants was Ivan Filipovich from Ub. His watch stopped on the very first day of the breakthrough on the Salonika Front. The mechanism simply failed. There had been no blow to the watch and there was not even a scratch on the glass. The hands came to rest on the morning of 16 September in cheery alignment at ten-past-ten, but the lieutenant didn’t consider it a bad omen. He hadn’t looked at his watch for half a day, and when he saw it had stopped he didn’t have time to take it off its chain. ‘Forward boys, war isn’t a picnic!’ he called out to his men that day and plunged ahead. Twice Lieutenant Filipovich was in a strangling, stabbing melee with the Bulgarians and twice he saw his own and others’ blood on him and didn’t have time to wipe it off. It seemed he was a darling of fortune whom death couldn’t touch, like the major when he had had the magic little mirror with him. But in the evening, when the fighting ebbed away and the men settled down on the rocky slopes of Sivo Brdo Hill and gave themselves up to counting stars and killing snakes, Ivan Filipovich was found dead. No one heard a shot, not even those close at hand heard him moan, and there was no sign of a snake bite on his skin, so something supernatural had to be blamed for the lieutenant’s death. Then they found the ‘culprit’ — an ordinary pocket watch, with its hands halted in that optimistic symmetry of ten-past-ten.

  Major Tatich was told about the death of his lieutenant straight away. He sprang to his feet and ran to the lad, who was scarcely more than a boy. He grabbed him by the collar of his coat and started to shake him.

  ‘On your feet, lad,’ the soldiers heard him yell. ‘Get up. You mustn’t die. You don’t have a single wound that could have killed you!’

  ‘The dickory, major,’ one man called to him.

  ‘What “dickory”, damn it?’ Major Tatich screamed.

  ‘It was the dickory that killed ‘im, major sir. It stopped and didn’t tick. We think the lieutenant’s life stopped with it. ‘E was still alive until this evening and throttled them two Bulgarians, and then he simply stopped, like this ‘ere dickory. See, he died at ten-past-ten in the evening.’

  ‘But that’s . . . that’s just fantasy. Miliya, come over here,’ the major called out to his second lieutenant. ‘Men, you’re to bury our hero even if it takes all night in this rocky ground. And you, Miliya my lad, take the watch off Lieutenant Filipovich and give it to me for safe keeping.’

  ‘Let me take it, major sir,’ the lieutenant said. ‘I’ve got my good one and Ivan’s dud one. Please let me have it as a keepsake to remember him by.’

  ‘You wear it then, blast it. But look after your own.’

  ‘I will, major sir.’

  So the second lieutenant, Miliya Yovovich from Oplenac, looked after the watch. He yelled at his soldiers at times like men, at times like livestock, and the men still had their amulets and kept time by the sun and
the stars. They said the death of an artilleryman went down in the annals of a regiment, and the death of a horseman was reason enough for a monument, but the death of a footslogger only sufficed for a shallow grave. The 2nd Battalion of the Combined Drina Reserve Division set off in victorious pursuit of the enemy. French planes showered the Bulgarians now with bombs, now with leaflets calling on them to surrender. The Bulgarians fled, but their Austrian and German allies regrouped. Major Tatich’s men ran into the Austro-Hungarian army near Preshevo. The city fell after three days of fighting, and on the third day, just before the city was taken, Lieutenant Yovovich was killed. Again, a watch seemed to be the cause of death. The glass of Miliya’s watch was smashed; the watch stopped on 29 September at five-past-six in the morning, and early in the evening he was dead. Unlike the first lieutenant, the second one noticed immediately that his watch had stopped, but he didn’t want to tell anyone so his men wouldn’t take it as cowardice. He charged out in front the others, rushing into mortal combat, and when the enemy started to surrender he thought he had come through it alive. He died at exactly five-past-six in the evening. It was clear that Tatich’s second young lieutenant had been cut down by a stray bullet; the shot was fired in desperation just at the moment when a ceasefire agreement for the Preshevo area was reached. Lieutenant Yovovich was giving some last orders when he was hit. He stopped in mid-movement, turned on one leg as if dancing with death, shrieked like a girl, and crashed to the ground. There were no traces of blood on his coat, as if he had been hit by a needle rather than a bullet.

  Again, Major Tatich came running as if his very own son — the son he never had — had fallen there on the outskirts of Preshevo.

  ‘Miliya, lad,’ he yelled with a rough voice, as if he was speaking in the name of the whole army, ‘I told you, but you didn’t listen: guard that watch like the apple of your eye. I warned you, Miliya, but you didn’t look after it.’

  ‘Major sir,’ the third lieutenant offered. Please let me take the two broken watches. Two bad ones is like one good one. I’ll guard my own like the eyes of my fiancée, and I’ll put these two in the left inside pocket of my coat.’

  And so Milentiye Djorich from Loznica put the watches deep inside his pocket, right at the bottom. He cherished his own watch like the eyes of his beloved, but alas, the glass of this watch also broke, and that inevitably meant the end of the war for this third lieutenant. On 12 October, the Serbian forces halted near Nish, but the third lieutenant never saw that city. The major ordered that Lieutenant Djorich be buried at the Nish cemetery with full military honours, as befitted a hero, and took all three killer-watches. He wanted to take the good one off his fourth lieutenant, he insisted, but then he relented. As much as he regretted not having taken the broken watches off his three dead lieutenants straight away, and as much as he would regret not taking the good watch off his last lieutenant, it had to be said that Lieutenant Ranko Boyovich from Smederevo looked after his watch as diligently as humanly possible. He cleaned it, guarded it and wound it. In fact, he was so frightened it could stop that he overwound it during the final battle for Belgrade and broke the spring. The watch stopped, the back lid burst open, and cogs, spindles and tiny wheels spilt out like entrails in front of the petrified lieutenant. Lieutenant Boyovich therefore did not live to see the capital.

  Major Radoyica Tatich marched into Belgrade as a victor. His watch, which never failed him, was in the left-hand outer pocket of his uniform, and in his right-hand pocket there lay four broken ones: one which had stopped at ten-past-ten and looked as if it was still good; a second, with a broken glass, which had frozen at five-past-six; a third, completely smashed, with hands showing exactly three o’clock; and a fourth, with its entrails protruding, which had stopped at one minute to twelve.

  The Great War ended for Major Radoyica Tatich on 1 November 1918 on Slaviya Square; to the surprise of onlookers, he took out the four watches on their chains and said, as if addressing those timepieces: ‘My lieutenants, we liberated Belgrade together.’

  Regent Alexander entered the city that same day, but how very different his arrival was to that of the Drina Division’s advance guard. He came in through the outlying Zvezdara neighbourhood. It was early evening and the autumn sky over the capital was the colour of rust. The Mayor of Belgrade, Kosta Glavinich, wanted to welcome there him in Zvezdara by the observatory. He stood on the gravel path beneath the dome, where people gazed into the sky, and spread his arms as if to embrace Alexander. But then he stopped, moved a little to the side, bowed, and decided to make a speech. Lots of big words came to Glavinich’s mouth, but each and every one of them stuck to his tongue or the back of his mouth and couldn’t get out. The future king was patient as the speaker struggled. Finally, the mayor managed to force a loud wheeze out of his throat: ‘Long live the young king! Long live our free Fatherland!’ Alexander found all of this rather strange, but he didn’t have time to think about it. A car was now waiting to take him to Slaviya Square, he was told, and they requested that he then walk along King Milan Street, Teraziye Boulevard and Knez Mihailova Street to St Michael’s Cathedral on foot, so that the people would be able to see and touch him.

  Alexander agreed, but when he finally got out of the car on Slaviya Square he saw a strange sight. No, the people who thronged and reached out like crazy to touch him were not weird, and it was not unusual that they were ragged, with yellow skin and bulging eyes, with pupils that looked like they were floating in oil. What surprised him was that no sound rose up to meet him and his escorts, not even the most restrained of cries. The people rustled around him like spectres, touching him, smiling strange smiles and showing dark teeth. The regent raised his head and looked into the crowd, into those tight rows of little heads which seemed to rest on bodies of straw wrapped in dirty rags and tatters. The people were cheerful; children gave Alexander bunches of autumn flowers, which brought tears to his eyes, but there was no end to his astonishment. No one was yelling and there was none of the usual hubbub produced by crowds, even when everyone in the throng thinks they are being quiet. The king and liberator went on, and this hushed procession followed after him like an army of ghosts. At the beginning of King Milan Street the crowd numbered thousands, and when he entered the broad square of Teraziye Boulevard it seemed the entire city was flocking after the future king — and everyone was silent.

  Here on Teraziye Boulevard was finally someone who still had a voice. A mischievous fellow, a Belgrade noise-maker swept along by the crowd like a piece of flotsam, suddenly appeared before the regent. The man turned around in panic, drove away invisible enemies with his arms and stopped. Alexander saw that he was a wretched fellow, his face devoured by deep folds, while his bony arms hung from his pigeon-chest like two broken poles. Still, this ugly drunkard had what the multitude behind him did not. He yelled at the top of his voice, as if he was the only person who had one: ‘Long live the king and liberator! Long live our Fatherland, much tormented but now free!’ the people closest wanted to silence him and sluice him back into the liquid mass of the crowd like a foreign body, but Alexander ordered them to stop. He spoke out clearly, which showed him he still had vocal chords, and said that everyone had a right to make merry and celebrate in honour of the Fatherland, even if they shouted drunken slogans. The crowd mutely agreed, nodding like wind-up dolls, but the regent couldn’t find the strength to ask why everyone was so quiet. He had to go on. Knez Mihailova Street was too narrow to receive all those silent spectres, like a procession of the living and the dead, who were now joined by all the mothers with sons who perished back in 1914.

  There, in front of the Russian Tsar coffee house, Alexander gave a speech. He alone had a voice. He yelled so that as many as possible would hear him, but only the first few rows could make out his words: ‘Today you have welcomed my army, which has come from the distant mountains and brings you freedom. This great joy is the reward for your great suffering.’ What joy? What reward? Who was rejoicing? And where was that noise
-maker — the only one to have met him with some semblance of joy on his disfigured face? Alexander now felt ill at ease. What was waiting for him around the next corner? What would happen when he arrived at St Michael’s?

  The Cathedral looked as if the building was gone and only its essence remained. Alexander saw there was no light, and candles alone illuminated the nave, and silence was all around that deep, divine, cathedral once more. Not even the Serbian archbishops who kissed his hand in front if the church could speak a word. They opened their mouths, but instead of words he heard only a murmur like the rustle of flower petals or the dying breath of an infirm patient. Where was Patriarch Dimitriye? And where were the army chaplains with whom he had returned to Serbia? He entered the churchyard, which was strewn with straw, and then St Michael’s itself. He was ushered — almost pushed — with theatrical movements to a special line of wooden chairs for deserving citizens, and then a truly mute and solemn service began. The provost of the cathedral and his servers opened their mouths, and the three candles in one hand and two in the other crossed. The process­ion of ecclesiastics moved through the congregation, waving the censer of frankincense, but there was not a word of prayer, and not a single sound came from the gallery where a choir of weary citizens opened their mouths as if to accompany the priests with a pastoral song. The church was filled with people to the end of the nave and the doors could no longer be closed. The young king turned his head and looked at all those tired, glazed eyes in the candlelight and was still astonished by the deathly silence. Everyone seemed to have merged into the unlikely silhouette of a single organism unable to express its joy at liberation.

  The end of the service also meant the end of his strange march to the capital. Only in the house of the merchant Krsmanovich, where it was decided to spend that first night in Belgrade, did Alexander repeatedly hear voices, as well as clamour in other rooms which long kept him awake. Try as he might, he simply could not get to sleep, and he sat at the edge of the bed barefooted and in his nightshirt. He bared his chest and looked at the embarrassing tattoo of the Austro-Hungarian two-headed eagle, which even his father didn’t know about. He had had that heraldic beast etched into his skin as a young man. Back then, he had carelessly thought the Dual Monarchy would be Serbia’s eternal ally. He looked now at that tattoo and said softly to himself: ‘The war is over.’ Peace would follow, and the unification of three neighbouring Slavic peoples, and then possibly the renewal of Serbia. But what kind of Serbia would it be if the first day of freedom was like this? For a long while still, he asked himself where all the voices and sounds of the liberated city had fled to, and, sure enough, they had run down to Sava Quay.