The Great War

by Aleksandar Gatalica

  ‘The war must have had a part in that, sir. On the fated day, the major first went to café Casino. I’m surprised that Kosta, the owner, doesn’t remember, because I know that Ruzha went there the first time and asked the major for his ring. “Your fingers have got thicker, Tiho,” she said to him, “the ring is galling you. Let me have it widened so it doesn’t rub and hurt when war comes again.” I’m surprised Kosta didn’t hear that, but I know the major was already quite drunk and sent her away without giving her the ring. Later in the afternoon, when he was well under the influence, he went to the Nine Posts. Soon after he’d gone in, Ruzha turned up at the door there too. She didn’t berate her husband for drinking or insist on taking him home. She knew as well as he did that war would come the next day and flatten anything that was less than sturdy. It was just the ring she wanted. She wanted to have it widened here at a craftsman’s, who was a Vlach. She just needed the ring for an hour or two. No longer. The major didn’t give her the ring or take it off his finger, but he hugged his Ruzha. He gave her the tenderest of kisses, even though behind those lips stood the sharp teeth and the voice which the army feared like the plague. And as he fondled her flaxen hair she just repeated: the ring, the ring.

  ‘He had her thrown out. Soon the musicians dashed in and wanted to sing a little more so that people would get teary. They claimed they were from the famous Cicvarich family of performers, which of course was a lie. They started to sing, and the major sang with them. He sang “Shabac Girl”, “When the Nightingale Calls” and “I Sold My Horse Blackie”, and he drank and drank like the parched earth, and still he hadn’t had enough. He paid for the music and went out into the street, his shirt half open and his hair ruffled. He staggered but didn’t fall — he took care not to dirty his uniform because it was sacred to him. As he lurched along, he cursed and swore. He was angry, sir, but at whom? a white-hot fury flashed from his eyes but couldn’t burn anyone now except himself. He came into my café, ordered more blood-red wine. He asked where the music was. The door opened, but it wasn’t a band pretending to be descendants of the Cicvarichs, but Ruzha again. She didn’t ask for the ring now but took it off her drunken husband herself. She said she’d bring it back after he’d had another drink or two. To take it to the Vlach, an excellent craftsman, just to have it widened a little. And she repeated: “The Vlach, an excellent craftsman, just to have it widened a little . . . have it widened . . . widened . . . ”.

  ‘And so she went, like a harbinger of doom. Afterwards we learnt that a fickle-minded young officer was passing through Shabac, a child of rich parents. He wore an elegant, grey-blue reserve officer’s uniform; one to be worn every day, not one to die in. He was driving to the front in his father’s open car and I don’t know how he noticed Ruzha, the major’s wife. One glance beyond the limousine’s footboard was enough. He invited her to get in and took her for a drive around Shabac. They went into a wood by the River Sava and tossed a friendly salute to every guard, while he kept saying that forests always reminded him of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, which beautifully imitates the chirping of birds! What birds, you may ask? War was drawing close, and that rake wanted a woman for one afternoon. Ruzha, like a moth drawn to a fatal flame, probably wanted to kiss one last time. After returning from “Beethoven’s forest” he promised her his estate, a title and money; he told her stories about leaving Serbia and escaping the war. He promised her a flight to freedom . . . but she wasn’t free; she was still someone’s wife. The cavalier in the ironed coat persisted, and the last bastion of the major’s wife’s repute soon crumbled. Finally she saw the pledge of fidelity — her entire former life — as being embodied in her wedding ring, which she now took off and flung into the Sava as they spoke. Now there was only the major’s ring left, that anchor and her last fetter.’

  ‘The adulteress had been to café Casino, but the major had had her thrown out. Then she went to the Nine Posts, but still she didn’t get the pledge of her fidelity. They say that she and her new flame — the seducer and the moth — drove along behind the major quietly, in second gear so he wouldn’t hear them, to see which café he’d go into next. So when he came in here, like I said, Ruzha came in after him. She no longer begged him now. She took the ring. I went after her and saw her get into a big car. She giggled and tossed back her open, sandy-blond hair. Later I heard she also threw the major’s ring into the river before driving away to the south. When some guys came running into the café and said “The major’s wife threw the ring in the river!”, the major sobered up in the blink of an eye. Not a trace of wine remained on his face. Like an orderly soldier, he looked first of all at his uniform. He smoothed it out with his hands, tightened his belt and tucked his trouser legs into the top of his boots. He called the servant boy to bring some shoe polish, and while the boy was shining his boots he rested his fingers together. He didn’t look at anyone and didn’t ask anything. The boy finished. “How much do I owe you, Munya?” he asked and paid the bill. “July is almost over, and in August we’ll be going to war,” he said and went out through the café’s garden. You know the rest.’

  History knows the rest, too. The second last day of July came. It was a hot day. The wheat had been harvested, but the corn stood horseman-high in the fields. On Wednesday, 30 July by the old calendar and 12 August by the new, Austria-Hungary’s Balkan army was set in motion across the choppy River Drina and through the tall corn which almost overarched it that year.

  The Great War had begun.

  The Austro-Hungarian 5th Army under the command of General Frank attacked across the Drina along the line of Bijeljina–Zvornik–Priboj–Brčko. The 6th Army, under General Potiorek, moved from the Vlasenica–Rogatica–Kalinovik–Sarajevo area, while the 2nd Army, under General von Böhm-Ermolli, entered Serbian territory from the north, from Syrmia and Banat. The Austro-Hungarian command concentrated the bulk of its forces on the Drina and decided on a strategic thrust here, at Serbia’s north-west. This somewhat surprised the Serbian Supreme Command, which reacted by turning its forces ninety degrees and rushing from the north to defend the western border. The chief battle took place in the Cer mountain range, but to finish the story about the major without his wedding ring it is more important to describe his brief, brave showing on the field of battle.

  The 2nd Battalion of the Drina Division went into combat three times in those two fateful days, and each time Major Tihomir Miyush­kovich was pale, clean, washed and resolute. He plunged into battle the first time near Tekerish when the Austro-Hungarian 21 Landwehr Division attacked the Combined Serbian Division, including the 2nd Battalion under his command. Then in the engagement near Beli Kamen, which ended at Begluk. A third time then sufficed to cut short a life which, to tell the truth, had already ended in café Amerika in Shabac on 29 July 1914 by the old calendar. The decree decorating Major Tihomir Miyush­kovich and posthumously promoting him to lieutenant colonel was announced in Politika once it resumed publication immediately after the Battle of Cer. The decree was read by everyone in Shabac except one woman, who no one ever heard of again — whether she was alive or dead, happy or unhappy. Her name was Ruzha, and that’s all that was known about her.

  Were the survivors the lucky ones, or did the wounded envy the dead? Perhaps the corpse-strewn hills of the Cer mountain range and the blood-red River Yadar had an answer. Many of the wounded fell back across the Drina, which became a roaring grave for both armies. Doctors at the field hospitals removed bullets from the wounded in the hope of saving their legs, and sawed legs in the pitiful hope of saving heads.

  There was just such an Austro-Hungarian hospital in narrow, river-bound Zvornik, and one of its surgeons was a certain Mehmed Graho. Everyone skilled with the scalpel was needed for the war, so our pathologist, who since 1874 had mixed with the dead, donned the uniform of a Bosnian infantry regiment, stuck a crimson fez on his head and set about saving the living. But his hands, it seemed, were made only for the mortuary. The grievously wounded soldiers brought back
from the River Yadar strangely melted away and died beneath his knife. He did the same work as other surgeons. The operation would go well, but when everything was done Graho would feel a chill behind his back, as if death had come to visit him, and he watched as he lost the soldier. He tried with all his strength to bring the wounded man back from death’s door, but most often in vain.

  So much killing and dying was going on in those days that hardly anyone noticed that a doctor of death was at work in the hospital in Zvornik. But Mehmed Graho was certain it was him. He tried once again, then a second time, ten times, and still all the men died on him. ‘It seems I was made not to heal, but to kill,’ he said to himself and, if it was his lot to kill, he set about selecting the most severely maimed soldiers and those he least liked the look of in order to finish them off. His rationale was that if he took the wounded who were beyond all hope, it would be harder for anyone to notice that almost every patient died on his operating table. And so he chose them, one after another. He repented, prayed and begged Allah, but in vain. He wanted to give up, but he knew he’d be court-martialled if he refused to work. Men screamed like a monstrous choir all day in the chaos of the army hospital in Zvornik, and there was no one he could complain to or ask to be relieved of his duties as the doctor of death.

  He had no choice but to kill the soldiers, so he almost reconciled himself to his hideous role. He read a selection of verses from the Koran and told himself that desperate certainty was better than uncertain hope. He walked among the stretchers lying in front of the hospital in files and rows like the graves of a military cemetery and said: ‘Him, him, and him here — to me.’ Then he strove and struggled to help them, but they all died. He’d go out into the courtyard again and speak in an indifferent voice: ‘Him, him, and him there — to me.’

  What Dr Graho didn’t know was that there, on the banks of the Drina, death was claiming what it left alive elsewhere. As if by some enigmatic geometry of death, one and a half thousand kilometres to the east, in the hospital train V.M. Purishkevich, the neurosurgeon Sergei Vasilyevich Chestukhin witnessed the wondrous recovery of his soldiers after the initial battles in East Prussia. Young men were brought in with their heads split open, with bullets in parts of their brain which ought to make them vegetables, or corpses, but that was mostly avoided. The other doctors noticed that miracles were occurring in the third wagon and each of them, as soon as he had rested a little after his shift, came in to watch Dr Chestukhin operate. The healing hands of the doctor adeptly extracted bullets from the heads of soldiers, reconnected shattered pieces of skull and sewed wounds which had bled so badly that there seemed to be no stitch able to hold them. The men lay on his table for ten minutes longer, and then life returned to their eyes even in the most hopeless of cases; after several such remarkable operations the assembled Russian doctors broke into applause.

  Yet there was just one strange thing about these patients. The soldiers brought to the hospital train had been peasants before the war, or menials on the estates of the gentry, who had never seen anything of the world beyond their willow groves and little rivers. A large number of those who miraculously survived now began speaking German while still unconscious. First they would whisper ‘Hilfe, hilfe!’, then some of them would launch into whole monologues in that language they had never learnt and would talk about things they simply could not know about, uneducated as they were. Dr Chestukhin’s wife, the red-haired nurse Liza Nikolaevna Chestukhina, heard many of these monologues in German while bandaging the wounded men’s heads after the operations and could find no answer to this mystery. But since she knew German she understood the erudite talk of the muzhiks.

  She didn’t want to bother her husband with what she heard, but since he kept sending her miraculously saved men and future experts in German from the third wagon, she started to listen attentively to these ‘wonder wounded’. One boy, whose medical card stated that he was a farmhand from Yasnaya Polyana, the former estate of Count Leo Tolstoy, talked about Goethe for an entire afternoon. It was a kind of trance and he couldn’t open his eyes under the bandages, but he said: ‘Als Goethe im August 1831 mit dem noch fehlenden vierten Akt den zweiten Teil seines Faust abgeschlossen hat, sagt er zu Eckermann: “Mein ferneres Leben, kann ich nunmehr als reines Geschenk ansehen, und es ist jetzt im Grunde ganz einerlei, ob und was ich noch etwa tue.”’ [When Goethe finished the fourth act of Faust in August 1831, thus completing the second part of the work, he said to Eckermann: ‘What remains to me of life I may now regard as a free gift, and it really matters little what I do, or whether I do anything.’] Two beds further along, a badly mangled soldier recited poems by Schiller, which Liza had learnt as a girl. Then he spoke loudly, as if on stage, and it turned out to be part of the poem ‘The Ideal and Life’: “Wenn, das Tote bildend zu beseelen / Mit dem Stoff sich zu vermählen / Tatenvoll der Genius entbrennt, / Da, da spanne sich des Fleisses Nerve, / Und beharrlich ringend unterwerfe / Der Gedanke sich das Element.” [“When, through dead stone to breathe a soul of light / With the dull matter to unite / the kindling genius, some great sculptor glows; / Behold him straining, every nerve intent / Behold how, o’er the subject element.”]

  Liza thought there might have been a mix-up with the wou­nded: a battlefield is chaotic, and perhaps the Russian stretcher-bearers had brought back educated German soldiers as well. She waited for them to wake up, whereupon the ‘German speakers’ successively died: some after one, others after two days of tirelessly mouthing German verse, or simply individual German words. A few of them did wake up out of their coma, however, and when she asked them who they were, she realized they really were ignorant Russian peasants and semi-skilled artisans. Liza asked them if they had ever learnt German, but they didn’t know what to say and just kept repeating how much they hated ‘the Krauts’.

  And so time passed, but Sergei’s wounded didn’t speak German for long. It only happened for the first few days after the Battle of Cer in far­away Serbia, when students and poets were dying under the hand of the pathologist Mehmed Graho and their souls migrated east for a brief while along some imponderable transversal, in the invisible barques of the dead, into the split heads of Russian farmworkers. Already towards the end of August 1914, esteemed ‘Dr Sergei’ no longer managed to save as many soldiers after the victorious battles of Stallupönen and Gumbinnen. The heroes who survived the operation and were moved to the care of his wife Liza no longer spoke at all, in Russian or German; they groaned in the language known and shared by all woun­ded soldiers in Europe.

  Men groaned in the same language and died in the same lan­gu­age — ­in east and west. In the region of Alsace-Lorraine on the Western Front many young Frenchmen had cheerfully plunged into the first border battles, convinced that one shot, one shout and one charge would resolve everything. Waiters rushed into battle together with the artists they served, who had just recently ‘avoided alcohol so as to better prepare for war’. Light-headed as they were, they thought it wouldn’t take much, not much at all, for everything to be over and done with, and what a shame it was that their sweethearts weren’t there to watch them after seeing them off in Paris with unforgettable cheers and sticking flowers in the barrels of their rifles; flowers which each of the men now wore under his shirt like a shrivelled rosebud.

  Everything was different to how the soldiers had imagined it. The recklessness of senior and mid-level commanders in the border battles in north-western France saw that the flower of young French manhood and their officers perished in the last days of August 1914. Death trawled and netted big fish, not stopping even when the catch was so heavy that it could hardly be dragged from the field of death. For the junior officer Germain D’Esparbès, the Great War began when he wrote a letter to his superior commander after the great slaughter in Alsace-Lorraine:

  I think the work of the French Red Cross is simply disgraceful. I woke up near the town of Lunéville to find myself in a sea of dead soldiers and spent three whole days with them. Nothing unusu
al, I hear you say. But I wish to describe to you those three terrible days, which passed before one of our Red Cross crews finally found me. I commit these lines to paper in the deepest conviction that I am about to lose my mind, so I need to write quickly, however illegible that makes my handwriting even for me.