The Great War

by Aleksandar Gatalica

  The overture was over and the opera began. Donna Anna, Donna Elvira and the peasant girl Zerlina soon fell victim to Don Giovanni’s licentiousness, and Hans-Dieter Huis opened his mouth as if he was in the recording studio and singing into the big horn. He didn’t feel anything inside — neither joy, nor sadness, nor excitement. When he managed to look into the faces in the first few rows, he noticed that almost all of them were holding opera glasses to their eyes. The opera lovers looked unearthly to him, and he knew they were watching for the slightest twinge on his face, but he didn’t remember Elsa from Mainz and didn’t know what to think about her suicide because he no longer had any feelings or thoughts about the two of them. He sang like a wind-up toy — by all means brilliantly, but also coldly — and made it through to the end of the opera in that tone. The spirit of the Commendatore enters with an earth-shattering boom (a long-prepared spectacle). Don Giovanni doesn’t listen to Leporello’s warnings and stays firm when the Commendatore’s spirit begins to sing ‘Don Giovanni, a cenar teco /m’invitarsi, e son venuto’ [You invited me to dine with you, / and I have come’] and drags him away to hell. The closing notes, a satisfied swing of the conductor’s baton, and the end of Mozart’s opera. A claqueur from the third gallery shouted ‘Bravo!’ and the audience sprang to their feet. Thirteen bows. Thirteen! That was unseen at the Deutsche Oper, but although the audience clapped loudly maestro Huis knew they were making a din without any real enthusiasm. The greatest German baritone may just have performed, but the petite teacher Elsa from Mainz hadn’t gone onto the stage with him, and it was as if everyone had been expecting her. The audience would have applauded a little more and then got up to go home, had not an officer now come onto the stage. He was short and his uniform didn’t go with the costumes of the opera, although it matched the costumes of the day. The military man took out a proclamation from the kaiser and read it out with pathos. And yet his voice trembled a little: ‘These are dark times for our country. We have been surrounded and are forced to use the sword. God give us strength to wield it as needed and wear it with dignity. To war!’

  While the proclamation was being read on stage, Don Giovanni and his cheated lovers, with their smudged make-up, were standing at the side. Someone burst into tears backstage. One man after another rose from his seat in the audience, and on the second gallery it seemed they were trying to sing the national anthem in unison, but the great baritone didn’t believe in war and only thought what the reviews would say the next day.

  And sure enough, the next day dawned with favourable reviews, but it was a new day for Berlin, a new day for Sarajevo, a new day for Belgrade and a new day for Paris. In Berlin, a performance of the famous Berlin Varieté was broken off. Another officer, long and lanky, took the stage and read out the kaiser’s proclamation. And then a third, and a fourth — on all the stages in Germany. In Paris there had already been rumours about mobilization for weeks. People spoke about war not with fear, but with an explosive mixture of romantic and patriotic feelings. Soldiers-to-be imagined themselves as republican grenadiers who were given new uniforms and helmets, and instead of bayonets they stuck irises into their rifles and charged before the eyes of girls seated along the trenches like medieval maidens watching a joust. It seemed that everyone wanted to ready himself for that ‘decisive battle’.

  At the Café de la Rotonde, a gathering place for artists and aesthetes run by Old Libion, many of the guests had started training and so had stopped drinking. They claimed to be in training, to be sure, but they poured themselves drinks under the table. No one asked for the old cocktails which the painters once used to order for their models; pastis and absinthe weren’t in demand, and even Old Libion’s sour wine, which had the reputation for giving a bad hangover, was consumed in greatly reduced quantities. Anti-German slogans were to be heard left, right and centre. One voice yelled that ‘eau de Cologne’ ought to be called ‘eau de Louvain’. The fellow at the bar hated everything which came from the Boches and, refusing a new round of drinks ‘because it was time to prepare for war’, called out loudly, so that Pablo Ruiz Picasso would also hear him, that all the cubists should be stuck on a bayonet because it was a ’filthy Boche art movement’.

  But one little man with a sparse moustache sat in the corner of the café and didn’t shout anything. He wanted to go to war too. He imagined it as being like one of his poems where verse fought against free poetry on a field of paper and where one rushed at the other with spears raised, but not so violently as to prevent the lyrical battle bringing forth a beautiful poem. That titch’s surname was Cocteau. For Jean Cocteau, the Great War began with the serious worry that he could be turned down at the recruitment office for being too thin. Therefore, instead of drinking, he constantly ordered rich and fatty food. Pâté, raisins, fried crab . . . etc.

  When he got home he was sick from so much food, of course. He ran for the toilet and vomited a little on the black-and-white tiles in his haste before reaching the toilet bowl; where, with an immense sense of relief, he ejected what he had consumed. He could identify the remains of the purple crab and the black raisins which stank of the acid of a distressed stomach. But what could he do? Like a Roman patrician who had come back from some great orgy, he realized that his stomach was now empty again and he wouldn’t gain a single gramme from what he had eaten at Old Libion’s. He went out into the street once more, where Paris’s rust-red dust swirled low on his patent-leather shoes and long shadows danced on the walls. He made his way to the neighbouring Café du Dôme and called the waiter, playing the same game as at Old Libion’s:

  ‘What would you like, sir?’ the waiter asked.

  ‘Please bring me a piece of Gruyère,’ the guest said.

  ‘So you’d like dessert?’

  ‘Yes, for starters. Afterwards I’d like half a chicken.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Yes, I’ll have the macaroni.’

  ‘Would you like a steak as well?’

  ‘Yes, but “à l’anglais”.’

  ‘All at once?’

  ‘In the order I said.’

  The Dôme was significantly quieter than the Rotonde. A former haunt of German artists, it was now empty. No one played billiards at the green felt. The undersized writer wasn’t sure of the date — perhaps it was the last day of July 1914, but he smelt war in the air. He called the waiter again and said he had just been joking. He decided to have a light meal because he was coming to realize that it was better to eat five times a day like a frail invalid. After every meal he’d rush home and lie on the bed, on his back, so as to digest the food without vomiting.

  Such problems were unknown to most. Although they were artists and hunger had been their constant companion for decades, they had been born strong, with broad shoulders and massive haunches, so they could hardly wait to head to the army supply office in Temple with their recruitment papers to buy all their kit and new steel helmets. For Lucien Guirand de Scevola, a scene painter and stage designer who had recently been praised by the illustrious Apollinaire, the Great War began at the counters in Temple, when he bought himself a complete uniform and then decided to reward himself with a mask against poison gas. They told him it was a supplement to the uniform, a kind of ‘war accessory’, and that he probably wouldn’t need the strange rubber contrap­tion with threateningly protruding little glass cups for eyes, but you never knew. Scevola decided to try on both the uniform and the mask. Even at the counters in Temple everything had to be a bit chic. He went into one of the special cubicles there (at a recruitment office, imagine!), tried on the tunic and tightened the trousers with the belt. He looked at himself in the mirror and was satisfied — he cut a good figure. Then he put on the helmet and foppishly cocked it.

  He also decided to try on the mask with the duck-like metal beak for protection against hypothetical poison gases he didn’t even know the names of. He took off the helmet, slipped the elastic straps over his head and put the helmet back on, as he was told he’d have to
do in the event of a poison-gas attack. He turned to face the mirror and was shocked by how he looked. The first thing he felt was that it was very hard to breathe, and then he suddenly saw stars and visions — so real that he couldn’t believe they were just in the dressing-room mirror at the recruitment office. In the depths of the mirror he saw the town of Ypres, although he didn’t know it was Ypres. He saw the morning, with swallows flying low over the ground, and he saw a yellowish-green smoke billowing towards a trench. It looked like harmless smoke blown by the wind from a campfire where someone was burning old tyres, and now it enveloped the soldiers like a poisonous cloud. He saw the young men who had no masks; all they could use were white handkerchiefs. Before his eyes the first of them began to fall into the mud of the trenches and writhe in spasms. The others then ran from the trenches, where they were met by enemy fire. The chests of the soldiers heaved in vain and their tongues were covered by a white film; they crawled as if their throats had been cut, while the gaze from their pupils, which floated on bloodshot whites, vanished as if scattered by the savage breath of Aeolus. He, the painter Lucien Guirand de Scevola, wanted to help them but didn’t know how.

  The next instant he ripped off the mask with the threatening eyeholes. He was back in the yellowish light of the dressing-room lamp in Temple. An impatient soldier knocked on the door of the cubicle and demanded that he finish as he wanted to see himself in uniform too. The soldier swore at Scevola as he went out, but received no reply. To hide the tell-tale tremble of his hands, he put the helmet back on, cocked it like a dandy once again and, now well and truly equipped for war, went to the table where the uniforms were sold. He told the quartermaster he had given up the idea of buying a mask. Besides, he added, his father had pulled a few strings to make sure he’d be a telephonist in the war. The uproar and derision from the assembled new soldiers — those whose faces he had seen when he put on the mask — ­ saw him out into the street and, embarrassed, he rushed to the Rotonde in the hope that his gentle-minded, raggedy painter friends there would smooth his ruffled feathers.

  In Belgrade, another man hurried into a café that day. He had a thick moustache and dark eyes beneath drooping eyelids and he cast sharp glances all around. He felt that all of Belgrade knew him, and he wasn’t wrong. The victor of the duel at the Belgrade racecourse, the one whose bullet had jammed in the barrel of the unreliable Browning, was now the hero of Dorchol and the other lower-town neighbourhoods all the way to Savamala and Bara Venecia on the banks of the River Sava. The greengrocer’s assistants chatted about him while they were carrying their wares and the porters mentioned his name while they waited for late passengers at the railway station, as did all horse-racing aficionados. For Gavra Crno­gor­che­vich, the Great War began in the moment he thought he had finished his personal battle and his counterfeit Idealin had vanquished all Krauts.

  A merry din rose to meet him at café Moruna. ‘To Vienna!’ someone called out from the corner, and the crowd cheered: ‘To Vienna, to topple Franz Joseph!’ Later there came a shout from the back: ‘Count Giesl has left, and he’ll be followed by the head of every Kraut I find on Teraziye Boulevard’, upon which a bunch of young men borrowed the melody of a popular ballad and improvised a ditty: ‘Fol-lowed by the head of ev’ry Kraut from Te-ra-ziye.’ These shouts made Gavra feel awkward, not because they were roaring a song against Austria — he had already dealt a mortal blow with his Idealin, he thought — but because he didn’t know what was going on around him, nor had he ever heard of Count Giesl.

  If he had caroused less in the previous few days and sold more of his counterfeit Idealin, he probably would have thought of lodging an ad in the paper, like every small manufacturer, and then he would have learnt that Austria-Hungary had sent Serbia an ultimatum through its minister Count Wladimir Giesl, demanding that the Serbian government accept and promulgate a pro-Austrian declaration, immediately dissolve the nationalist organization ‘Narodna Odbrana’ (People’s Defence Force), delete all propaganda against Austria-Hungary from school textbooks and public documents, allow the Austrian ‘k and k’ judiciary to conduct investigations in Serbia, and mete out severe punishment to Major Voya Tankosich and the civil servant Milan Ciganovich, who were involved in the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, as well as to the negligent border officials in Shabac and Loznica.

  On 25 July, by the new Gregorian calendar, when the Serbian govern­ment rejected the ultimatum, Gavra left café Moruna, drunk, at around six in the afternoon. Just a few hundred metres from the door, Regent Alexander Karadjordjevich and his secretary Yankovich, from the Ministry of War, set off for the royal court. At the entrance, they met several ministers who were pained and silent, anxious about what was going to happen. Absorbed in thought himself, Regent Alexander finally broke the silence in the style of Alexander the Great after cutting the Gordian knot, with a terse and abrupt: ‘To war then.’

  But Gavra Crno­gor­che­vich didn’t hear that. He didn’t read the papers, so he didn’t find out either that mobilization had begun in Serbia. The reserve had been called up and his 1881 year-group was among those ordered to the mobilization offices, the janitor had told him, but, hot-tempered as he was, he pretended not to have heard and just took a loud sip of his strong, black coffee. For a few more days, our duel-winning hero was convinced that his fake Idealin would make him rich. He got into a row with several traders who were marketing the real product; and then all of a sudden he disappeared into the blue. No one missed him, and his escapades were soon forgotten because all available ships started to arrive in Belgrade in the first few days after mobilization, and a mass of recruits was flocking to the very same racecourse where the duel had taken place to get their travel papers and set off to their different headquarters and units. Late in the evening on the last day of July by the new calendar, the day Gavra Crno­gor­che­vich disappeared, Field Marshal Radomir Putnik, commander-in-chief of Serbian forces, returned to Serbia on the evening train from the spa in Bad Gleichenberg. The first thing Putnik said when he arrived was: ‘At the service of the Fatherland, in health or sickness’; the last thing Gavra Crno­gor­che­vich said when he crossed into Austria and glanced back at Belgrade from the border town of Zemun was: ‘This looks mighty bad.’

  The same words, this looks mighty bad, were also uttered by the Istanbul spice-trader Mehmed Yıldız, but it was 29 July by the new calendar. His elderly lips whispered those words as he sat perched on his red-felt-covered stool in front of his shop, where he had habitually sat for decades. The sounds of the street ebbed and flowed around him — traders calling out their offers, the squeak of wheels and the barking of stray dogs. Yıldız traded in oriental and European spices and his shop was in a beautiful location: right on the waterfront of the Golden Horn, not far from the thick walls of the old palace of His Majesty the Padishah. Sitting in front of the tubs and panniers, surrounded by the intoxicating smell of his spices in all hues of ochre, brown, green and red, the trader read on the front page of the newspaper Tanin that Austria had declared war on Serbia the previous day, 28 July 1914; Russia and France were preparing to declare war on Germany and Austria, and a declaration of war was expected from Great Britain as well. The trader tilted back his fez and blew out a long cloud of smoke. His sole consolation was that his country Turkey was neutral for the time being; even so, he feared the worst and whispered, ‘This looks mighty bad’. But he didn’t think a trader needed to worry too much about the fate of his country.

  Brought up on Nizami’s epic romance Khosrow and Shirin, while also being a supporter of the true Turkish miniature which rejects the shameful Western laws of perspective, Yıldız Effendi was a true Turk who saw the world not the way it was but the way he wanted to see it. He didn’t notice that the Ottoman Empire, still enthralled by the tales of its history and power, was lurching and sinking in the turbulent waters of the twentieth century. He didn’t want to acknowledge the signs of decline and the pitiful withering of government. Talaat Bey, the Grand Vizier
Haki Pasha, the military commanders Mahmud Şevket Pasha and Mahmud Muhtar Pasha, the ministers Halaciyan Effendi and Noradungian Effendi, and senator Nail Bey — all these personages of Turkish public office were like mythological figures: half medieval, half modern. But since they resembled Yıldız Effendi, he naturally couldn’t perceive anything unusual about them. Istanbul itself was decrepit and crumbling, and Byzantine Constantinople was showing ever more often through the debris; but the trader sat down on his stool every morning, gave one of his assistants the sign to start calling out the prices and praising the wares, and opened the noble Koran to read a few lines for the day; he thought what good fortune it was that Sultan Mehmet sat on the throne, a powerful, wise and stern ruler who, just a few streets along from his shop, behind the high walls of old Topkapı Palace, listened to the song of the nightingales which he let out of their golden aviaries into his blossoming courtyard every morning.

  One shouldn’t blame an old Turk, a man of the nineteenth century, for all that was amiss. He knew that his Sultan became ruler after being released from captivity where he had been held for being mentally unstable and that all decisions were made by the Young Turk committee; he knew that he probably didn’t live in Topkapı, which the sultans had left long ago for fear of tuberculosis and moved to Dolmabahçe Palace, but whenever he said ‘Padishah’ he would imagine the paradisical garden of the palace not far from his shop; he would see the nightin­gales and the golden aviaries, feel the defiance and the righteous rage of the believers, and easily fill in the full picture — two-dimensional, of course — which appeared before his eyes as the sole and unverifiable truth. Besides, a motherly sun shone over Istanbul and everything looked different from Budapest, where mobilization was carried out in the first days of August amidst a spell of violent stormy weather: the wind battered the trees in the avenues and the windows of the Natio­nal Theatre burst, but the glorious Hungarian soldiers-to-be weren’t to be frightened by a rainstorm with thunder and hail. The journalist and budding lampoonist Tibor Veres wanted to go to war too, or to be honest he didn’t. He said he wanted to, but deep inside he was afraid. He knew that if even a whiff of his fear was detected he’d instantly be pronounced a bad Hungarian, so first of all he boasted to his editor, with whom he had made friends after all those letters sent to the Serbian court, that he was just dying to join the arti­llery and dreamed at night of firing a machine-gun and hurling out ‘a hundred rounds a minute’.