Now the end had come, he felt. Paris was deserted and he no longer knew anyone. Rue de la Paix, where before the war you could see all the peoples of the world, was empty the next day. Silence reigned, an eerie silence: no creaking omnibuses, no cars blowing their horns, no clatter of horse’s hooves. Most of the restaurants were closed, and in the streets the wind played with the remains of clothing, crumpled-up greasy paper which failed to interest even the stray dogs, and newspapers still touting the great successes of General Joffre‘s forces in Alsace-Lorraine. And then he felt hunger overcome him. A nourished man chooses one of the masks from the arsenal we call life, he said to himself, but a hungry man has only the face of hunger. He had to do something. The metal shutters on all the shops were drawn down and it was hard to force them in the daytime, so he decided to use the curfew. He set off on forays to the ghostly, deserted apartment buildings at nine in the evening when the curfew sirens sounded. He would cut through the side streets to avoid the patrols. At Place de l’Opéra he would break through the gate of one of the buildings and quickly ascend the stairs. Night by night he learnt to judge by the size of apartments’ front doors, or by the value of their brass door handles, which of them would have the most food left in its pantry.
Then he would eat from others’ plates, as he had done recently at the Rotonde. He entered the apartments of prominent Parisians and found what the fugitives had left behind. The taste of mould and sour red wine didn’t bother him. He needed to eat and drink, and as a man of good manners Stanislaw would set the table in the new apartment every night, don the owner’s housecoat with initials monogrammed on the breast pocket, light his candles in the candelabra and sit beneath his portrait. Then he’d eat the crumbs from his hosts’ table. The goose-liver pâté and crab which the poet Jean Cocteau had once gorged himself with were no longer edible, but the cured meats, preserves and hard cheeses were by all means palatable in the days when Paris darkened its streets and the entrances of its metro stations.
One night, Stanislaw set his sights on a splendid apartment occupying the whole first floor of a proud building adjoining the Tuileries Gardens, but he had no idea that he would find not only food, clothing, copper candlesticks and his own little romantic supper ritual — but also the woman of his life. Just as he was sitting down at the table, he heard something rustle. He thought it might be the rats, which, like him, had also remained in Paris, but he was mistaken. No sooner had he put the first bite in his mouth than the barrel of a pistol emerged from the bedroom, followed by two frightened eyes belonging to a young woman in a nightie.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.
‘Having dinner,’ Stanislaw answered simply and continued to eat ravenously.
‘Why are you eating here?’
‘Because I found food here, and now I’ve found you,’ Stanislaw added between mouthfuls and proffered her a seat at the table.
The girl sat down next to him. She told him she was sick, which is why she couldn’t leave Paris, and that she would starve if he ate up the food the apartment’s owners had left, for whom she had worked as a maid. First Stanislaw calmed her, then he took her in his arms. To begin with, they ate up all the food left behind by the girl’s employers; then our thief, like a real man, decided to go in search of food for himself and his companion. Every evening after midnight, he came back to the apartment at the end of the Tuileries Gardens with whatever he had found that evening. First they would eat; afterwards they told each other about their trivial lives; and in the end they kissed. Her breath had the taste of sour fruit which puckers the mouth. That love could not resemble the Parisian romances from the stage of the Comédie-Française. She smelt of penury and had just one seasoning: the smell of disease.
The girl was melting away, had a hacking cough and was constantly changing dark red handkerchiefs. But she longed for life. After their meal, she would undress before Stanislaw, and he in his passion was soon naked before her. His lover had dark circles under her eyes, two dangling things which hung from her diseased chest in place of breasts, and long, thin legs, whose muscles barely covered the bones. But it was war, the Great War, and it seemed to Stanislaw that he and she were the last people in the world.
And they made love like those last people. They rolled, groaned, coughed and exchanged the smells of sweat and their less than pleasant bodily secretions, but they were in seventh heaven. Their relationship lasted a whole week and they both knew it wouldn’t be longer, but ceremony had to be upheld. At nine, when the sirens wailed, Stanislaw ran out of the little Hotel Scribe and off into the night and the curfew. He broke into apartments like a righteous thief, bagged food and rushed to the Tuileries Gardens. At midnight his beloved would be waiting for him in 47 Rue de Rivoli, in an open silken dress, with ribs that stood out beneath her breasts, as seductive as a dried haddock. When they sat down at the table to eat, everything smelt of blood. After satisfying their hunger with their one and only meal of the day, they’d shift to the batiste sheets, from which they no longer bothered to wipe the traces of blood.
On the fourth day, after several frenzied copulations, Stanislaw told the girl that no one had ever satisfied him like her. On the fifth day, he told her he would never leave her. On the sixth day, Stanislaw Witkiewicz promised he would make her Mrs Witkiewicz when that terrible war was over, but even as he spoke those two words, ‘Mrs Witkiewicz’, he knew he was lying. Mrs Witkiewicz said she knew she would be cured of tuberculosis as soon as the war ended and they found better care and a little warm, kindly sun from the south, which she expected that coming winter. And as she spoke those two words, ‘coming winter’, she knew she was lying.
That love came to an end on 13 September 1914, the day the newspaper boys began selling papers on the streets of Paris again and shouting: “Great Battle of the Marne. Gallieni transfers Parisian garrison to the front and strikes the enemy. Kluck’s army on the retreat.” That was the first major Allied victory on the Western Front. Exploiting the large gap between Kluck’s and Bülow’s armies, General Joffre made a risky manoeuvre and divided the allied forces into three parts. The left and right flanks were composed of French forces, and in the middle, south of the bloody River Marne, along a line between Lagny and Signy-Signets, was the British Expeditionary Force. Pouring into the gap, the British failed to engage the enemy, but the pincers managed to seize the Germans and the battle was won. With that victory, life began to return to the city.
Patrols soon made the rounds of the Paris apartments to which the home comers would return. One of these found Mr and Mrs Witkiewicz in bed, both splashed with blood. At first glance it looked like just another of the ritual suicides of married couples, but then they saw that the shamelessly naked woman was dead and the shockingly nude man was alive. When he regained his senses, Stanislaw learnt that he had become a ‘widower’ and was accused of murdering ‘Mrs Witkiewicz’. They gave him a choice: either to be mobilized into the Foreign Legion at once, or to be shot. He chose the former. No one asked him now if he had a heart murmur and he was sent directly to help bring the newly formed French 9th Army up to strength.
The prominent Parisians returned to their apartments. Many of them didn’t notice the missing food and decorations which Stanislaw had stolen for his beloved. The owners of the apartment in Rue de Rivoli were horrified to hear that ‘the girl’ who had cleaned for them had died in their bed. They didn’t know that the cleaning girl had found the love of her life and had even become ‘Mrs Witkiewicz’ on that last night in evacuated Paris, but they hurried to purchase a new bed and scrub down the walls. Others cleaned their apartments and buildings too, but Paris on the streets looked completely different to Paris from the air. That was the Paris which one German Zeppelin crew member was painstakingly watching on an almost nightly basis. After the Battle of the Marne, the Germans withdrew to a line behind Reims and the soon-bloody River Aisne, but their Zeppelins continued to blitz the French capital.
Those first bomber pi
lots, among them the one-time artist Fritz Krupp, were bold and adventurous airmen. The bombs in the Zeppelin were stacked one on top of another. The crew consisted of a pilot, a machine-gunner and a bombardier. The latter, unprotected, climbed down into a gondola suspended beneath the giant craft as it flew over Paris. The winds over the Seine would ruffle his hair as he withdrew the priming pins and heaved thirty-kilo bombs over the side of the gondola to plummet down onto the roofs of the city. Each time he dropped a bomb, the Zeppelin would lurch, the pilot would step on the gas, and the flames far below and the column of black smoke would mark where the Zeppelin had been. Anti-aircraft shells whined erratically around the crew, but there were only occasional puffs of smoke from explosions because the artillery still couldn’t raise their guns’ barrels at a steep enough angle, so the lumbering balloon filled with thirty two thousand cubic metres of helium now looked like a robust creature ruling the heights.
For the Zeppelin bombardier Fritz Krupp, the Great War began when he realized he had always hated Paris, even before the war while he still thought he loved it. He had studied painting in France under the great Gustave Moreau back in the nineteenth century, a century he intended to stay in as a painter. Krupp didn’t approve of anything that happened in the art scene after 1900. He even took up residence in Paris, but his canvases — so he thought — emanated the harmony of the young Ingres. Krupp’s classmates André Derain and Paul Cézanne were not of the same mind, however, and as of 1903 they painted with pure colours like ‘wild animals’. Then there was that Picasso and a whole crowd of hungry and impertinent blue-collar artists.
Fritz himself had painted several works ‘à la Cipriano Ruiz de Picasso’ in 1908 and also created a few like Cézanne, and he felt that — if he only wanted to — he would be able to outstrip both of them in their daubings, which were devoid of composition, proportion and harmony. How impertinent they were, in spite of that, and how they ignored him. They started to bother him wherever he went: at the gallery in Rue La Fayette, in Boulevard Voltaire, and when he was using the same prostitutes and worried about catching syphilis. But, despite all this, he didn’t leave Paris. In time, he became their walking shadow and was always somewhere in the same galleries, in the same cafés, but never at the same tables. When Picasso and the poet Max Jacob moved into a little, lice-infested flat in Boulevard de Clichy, he found a similar one (with bedbugs instead of lice) not far from there, in one of the steep streets leading down from the Basilica of the Sacré Coeur; when Picasso moved to Rue Ravignan, to the famous ‘Bateau-Lavoir’ building, Fritz was again close by, having suddenly felt the need to move a little further up Montmartre himself; when Picasso crossed the Seine and moved to Montparnasse, Fritz also decided discreetly to change his address so as be closer to the ateliers near the abattoir in Rue de Vaugirard.
And he saw it all, there in Montparnasse. The once proud pavilions of the 1900 Exposition Universelle had been turned into dismal dwellings for hundreds of ‘ingenious painters’ from the east. These shacks now housed aspiring Italians with guitars and a song on their lips, reclusive Jews from the east, Poles with a weakness for alcohol and tears when they were drunk, Belgians with incorrigibly provincial views — all this was little short of loathsome to Fritz. Why he had found himself a flat near Hôpital Vaugirard he couldn’t say, because he didn’t dare to admit to himself that he was following Picasso.
Then the Great War began. He was mobilized into the Luftwaffe and trained as a Zeppelin bombardier. Finally the day came which he had longed for: he was sent to bomb Paris. But Sergeant Fritz perplexed his crew. They went on raids every third night, and since the bombardier had the best view of the targets and ground fire because he was the one putting his life on the line, the crew had to follow his directions and go along with his choice of targets. The Zeppelin’s orders were to follow the course of the Seine and strike at district offices, government buildings and Les Invalides. In exceptional circumstances — if they encountered heavy enemy fire and contrary winds — the payload could be dropped in other places.
Fritz exploited this loophole and directed his airship LZ-37 to tactically dubious destinations. First he had the vessel make for Montmartre, and there, night after night, he took aim at Boulevard de Clichy, the steep cobblestone streets around Sacré Coeur, and Rue La Fayette, where there were no targets of military significance. But there were targets here of importance for the would-be painter Fritz Krupp. Picasso’s compatriot Mañach had let him stay in a room on Boulevard de Clichy in 1901. Then, in 1903, the painter of the smutty Les Demoiselles d‘Avignon (that was Krupp’s opinion of the canvas, which he dubbed ’The Brothel’) moved to Boulevard Voltaire, and finally in 1904 to the most noted address in Rue Ravignan, the ‘Bateau-Lavoir’. That building was completely insignificant for German High Command, but not for the history of modern painting, so the Zeppelin bombardier endeavoured to find it and destroy it by his own hand.
Now, in 1914, it seemed the hour of reckoning had finally come: the chance for him to get back at the colours on the pictures of his classmates Cézanne and Derain, at the indecent figures on Picasso’s canvasses, and at the uncouth repute of the hobo hack painters from the east. Paris was his! The whole night belonged to him! He just needed to take good aim at the ‘Bateau-Lavoir’ . . . but it wasn’t easy to locate and destroy an ordinary, two-storey thatched cabin on the steep terrain of Montmartre, especially since strong winds were always blowing above that hill. Therefore he often reluctantly agreed for the Zeppelin to turn south. The target? Montparnasse, of course. En route, Fritz threw the odd bomb at the government buildings by the Seine, just so he’d have something to report to his superiors, and then he demanded that the LZ-37 continue south. ‘To Montmartre!’ he shouted from the gondola. Here Fritz mercilessly rained bombs down on the painters’ colony La Ruche in Rue du Maine, where the ateliers of the itinerant professors of painting were, and on the colony Falguière where Modigliani worked.
What he actually ended up hitting is a different story. The bombs mostly fell into the brambles and weeds between the buildings, but up in the sky it all looked otherwise to Fritz. Every night he felt he had put a spanner in the works of modern painting and levelled its rakish habitats, so he always returned to base in La Fère satisfied and wrote a report on the sortie in the operations log, describing the great damage inflicted on the enemy although there was virtually none. That was one painter-bombardier’s idea of fighting the war. But he wasn’t the only one who badly assessed the impact of his dangerous actions. The Russian generals on the Eastern Front also thought that their armies were now very well positioned after their initial victories in East Prussia and that the hour had come to re-ignite old disputes from the beginning of the century. The Germans took advantage of this. After the first defeats, General Prittwitz was replaced by the experienced Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg at the side of the young General Ludendorff. These two generals, who would turn the tide of German fortunes on the Eastern Front, met for the first time at Hanover railway station. From there they immediately set off for the Front. They could hardly wait for an opportunity to mount a military response, and they were given it.
The German offensive was made possible by the personal antipathy between the Russian generals. Several years earlier, the commander of the 2nd Russian Army, Alexander Samsonov, had openly criticized General Rennenkampf, the commander of the 1st Army, and a quarrel ensued between them. When a gap developed between the two Russian armies in 1914, Rennenkampf was in no hurry to fill it and man the unoccupied hills and fields of East Prussia. By the time he realized the Germans’ true intentions, it was too late and he could no longer come to the aid of Samsonov’s 2nd Army. He set his army in motion, but on 30 August 1914 he was still seventy kilometres from Tannenberg, bogged down near Königsberg, where Immanuel Kant rested peacefully in his grave. It was hard to counter the Germans. The Russians transported their weaponry using draught animals, while the German army was already making full use of the rail network.
Like in a game of chess, the debacle at Tannenberg had its logical consequence in the Battle of the Masurian Lakes and the near collapse of the Russian forces in 1914, causing more wounded to arrive at the hospital train V.M. Purishkevich than could be taken in and operated on. There were times when the train stood out on the track, defended only by the escorting armoured train, which had two open anti-aircraft wagons. Already in the second half of September, the Germans began using their frighteningly fast two-seat Aviatik B.I planes in East Prussia. There was one such attack which Liza would never forget. When the alarm sounded in the train, she and the walking wounded dashed to huddle on the track beneath the train, but in the middle of the attack she heard that one of the wounded was calling for help under a nearby tree. She didn’t think of Marusya, who she had left behind in Petrograd, when she ran out towards that young man. Her flowing, coppery-red hair got showered with dirt. She shot angry glances with her eyes the colour of sepia, and she cursed and shook her fists at the enemy planes. ‘Damn Huns! Damn, bloody Huns!’ she screamed at the top of her voice as she crawled, to give herself courage. She hauled the wounded man back, dragging him with her hands and teeth. One of the planes fired large-calibre cannon rounds commonly known as ‘suitcases’, but the ‘luggage’ missed them that time. Liza’s mouth was full of soil and her clothes were torn and rent when she reached the life-saving shelter between the wheels of the train.
Two days later, she was decorated by General Samsonov with the Cross of St George. For the occasion, Lizochka put on the cleanest uniform she could find: a grey skirt with a white blouse and an apron with a large red cross. The medal seemed to match her beauty and copper hair; her husband and the other doctors smiled, and the wounded gave her souvenirs for little Marusya: iron spoons shaped from fragments of the ’suitcases’ while they were still hot. Only one thing didn’t fit the occasion: Liza couldn’t find a single white apron without bloodstains on it.
The Great War Page 7
