The Great War
Page 11
‘If only I had my helpers here, whom I love as my own sons,’ Mehmed Yıldız thought as he called out the prices of his wares by himself. A small boy, no more than eight years old, was by his side. His five strapping apprentices and young assistants had been called up into the Turkish army and each sent to a different part of the world, where his empire defended the rising and setting of the sun. The eldest — the red-headed one, who cheated so adroitly at the scales, just so much that his master was satisfied and the customers didn’t complain — had been posted to Thrace. His black-haired brother with the slight birthmark on his forehead, who would dispel their weariness with a song in the evenings, had been deployed to the Caucasus. The third apprentice, his dear beanpole with the infectious smile which dispersed all their worries, had been sent to Palestine. Yıldız Effendi also had two young assistants, and they had also been recruited because they were born in 1895 and 1897 respectively. The one was almost a man, but the other still very much a child. In that way he was deprived of the brightest young employee he had ever had, his newly-fledged bookkeeper, who had been sent to Mesopotamia. And even his youngest assistant, an urchin from the house next door, had been mobilized for the Turkish army in Arabia. That was a particularly hard blow for the old spice trader. Did the Sublime Porte really need children in this war?
And so Yıldız Effendi was left all by himself. True, the neighbour had loaned him his youngest son — the brother of the red-headed and the black-haired apprentices — so he would at least have someone to help out, but that was just to keep an old promise; the gesture in no way suited the circumstances because a boy of eight was unable to lift weights, take responsibility or yell out prices. After two days, he told the boy: ‘Off you go home, son,’ and stood behind the counter alone. The streets of Istanbul were now deserted. Occasionally a Muslim woman from a good home, with a violet veil, would call in, but that was a rare occurrence. ‘What silence, what silence,’ the trader muttered, with ample time to look around. Over in one of the traditional porched houses, looking in through the window, he could see a servant rolling out lengths of wallpaper. Through a gap between two other houses he glimpsed the Bosporus gleaming like a shed snakeskin.
Yıldız Effendi slept very, very little at night. He would wake up with a start and call one of his apprentices. One day one of them was gone, the next — a second, the third — a third, the fourth — a fourth, the fifth — a fifth, and on the sixth day all of them had disappeared together. At four in the morning he went down to the storeroom by the Golden Horn and fetched new stocks of red spices. Before dawn he went by tram to prayers at the Aya Sofya, so as to open the shop by himself before seven. He called out the prices, hardly got round to reading a few lines from the noble Koran, and saw himself as the last old-fashioned Turk. He didn’t play his little game with the spices any more. The red ones were outselling the browns and greens by such an overwhelming margin every day that the trader lost all hope that any hour would be good.
The great singer Hans-Dieter Huis, too, had completely given up hope. The concert he held in occupied Brussels now appeared to him as the last memento of a dying civilization. In the meantime he had seen hunger, retreat and death. They called on him to sing at the deathbed of two German princes who paid with their heads in Holland and France. That was the hardest thing the maestro had ever done. The Prince of Schaumburg-Lippe had already given up the ghost when they called him, so his singing at the catafalque was in fact a requiem, but the Prince of Meiningen still gave signs of life when they rushed the singer to him in an ambulance. The Prince requested hoarsely that he sing Bach’s arias, and he, without knowing why himself, started singing a Bach canon, which was ridiculous and almost impossible for one voice. He’d begin with the higher notes like a tenor and then lower his trembling voice to the deeper notes, while it seemed to him that someone was mutedly intoning the other voice in a cold tenor. No, that wasn’t the prince singing in the hour of his death because he scarcely had the strength to breathe. He heard, yes he clearly heard Death singing the upper register of a canon for two voices with him. And then the prince died. Be-medalled officers who had been waiting for the prince’s death now came in, saying to each other, ‘It’s over now’, and rudely shoved Huis out of the room. As he was leaving, he saw a doctor going in with a metal basin of plaster solution to make the prince’s death mask.
Some other be-medalled officers later sent him down to the cellar with a few polite words. There he sat at a table with two old men who only spoke French. He tried to exchange a few words with them and learnt that they were the owners of the house which had been turned into a German army headquarters, where the prince had breathed his last. The men told him defiantly that the house had been in their family for three hundred years up until 23 September 1914, and then they asked him if it had been him singing on the upper floor. He affirmed that it had, and told them his name, at which they jumped up and started kissing his hand. They had twice heard him in Paris, they said, but for maestro Huis this was so wretched and strange that he didn’t know whether to burst into tears or reprove the old men who were kissing him. Civilization had thus survived, he thought, but it had been driven underground, into cellars, and was so old that it would expire before the end of the Great War.
Such thoughts preoccupied him for the next two weeks as he was carted from venue to venue behind the lines and made to sing like a wind-up doll. But hadn’t he admitted to himself that he no longer felt anything and had no faith in his art any more? Was it not then irrelevant where he sang and who gave the orders? Therefore he reluctantly agreed to these battlefield assignments. They drove him around, introduced him to the superior officers, and he performed. His last scheduled event of 1914 was on Christmas Eve at the supreme command headquarters near Lens, where he was to sing for Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, heir to the German throne and titular commander of the German 5th Army. They told him that the great Theodora von Stade would be performing with him. The Crown prince welcomed the singers as if it was the seventeenth century, not the twentieth. He said he was glad they had come to his estate, and the generals clustered around him exchanged anxious glances. Then the door was closed behind the singers. The prince was their only listener. Theodora began to sing the upper part in a clear and unimpaired voice, but when the second voice was called for, Hans-Dieter Huis cleared his throat with that ‘front-line cough’ of a malnourished man of broken health. The prince raised an eyebrow, looked at them with tear-filled eyes, and the old man at the cembalo played the first chords of the Sanctus from Bach’s Mass in B minor again. Theodora finished the opening, and Huis replied beautifully. The prince gazed at them both with strange, voracious eyes. He smiled happily, but with a hint of desperation, as if he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. At the end of the short, a cappella concert, he too enthused about them having brought a little civilization into that terrible war, repeating almost word for word what his generals used to say when Huis finished a concert. That embittered the maestro. His thoughts were far from dinner. He took the opportunity of asking His Majesty to allow him to visit some units from Berlin at the front, which was just a few kilometres away. ‘Our soldiers need a song for Christmas too,’ he said, and the Crown prince immediately filled out a permit for him and arranged transport.
In the trenches near Avion, which smelt like graveyard loam, he was met by the members of the 93rd Division, each of whom was an opera buff. He recognized many staff from the Deutsche Oper among them. Now they were tired soldiers with lice in their hair, their cheeks ruddy from the cold and noses red from alcohol. ‘Sing für sie,’ the tenor from the Opera choir encouraged him, who had first called ‘hurrah’ when Huis appeared. But what could he sing when he no longer believed in song? Something German? Bach? In the end, it was the men who decided. ‘Don Giovanni, Don Giovanni!’ they shouted in unison, and he began to the sing the aria ‘Fin ch’han dal vino’. He began in Italian: ‘Fin ch’han dal vino / calda la testa / una gran festa / fa’ preparar’ [‘For a
carousal / Where all is madness, / Where all is gladness, / Do thou prepare’], and then continued in German: ‘Triffst du auf dem Platz / Einige Mädchen, / bemüh dich, auch sie / noch mitzubringen.’ [‘Maids that are pretty, / Dames that are witty, / All to my castle / Bid them repair.’] As he sang, he saw that something unusual was happening. The soldiers moved him. This was no longer the threatening audience with opera glasses before their eyes, and his voice began to come from the depths of his breast, where he had kept his artist’s soul locked away for so many years. He remembered Elsa from Mainz and finally let his unhappy soul come out on that Christmas Eve; and he drank in the starry night air and sang as he hadn’t sung in a decade and a half. He grabbed one of the Christmas trees and began to climb the steps in the side of the trench up to the open ground between the German, French and Scottish lines. They cautioned him that just that day it had been impossible to even fetch the wounded, who still lay there with snow-dusted cheeks and eyebrows and cried for help.
But in vain: Huis trod those steps and made it into no man’s land. His song was heard well into the enemy trenches, but one Scottish soldier from the Scottish 92nd Division realized better than the others that only the great Hans-Dieter Huis could sing Don Giovanni like that. It was Edwin McDermott, a bass from Edinburgh and Huis’s constant companion in the role of Leporello whenever Huis performed in Scotland. The Scottish soldier waited for the end of the aria, then he too leapt out of his trench and began to sing Leporello’s aria in reply: ‘Madamina, il catalogo è questo / delle belle che amò il padron mio, /un catalogo egli è che fatt’io, / osservate, leggete con me.’ [‘My dear lady, this is a list / Of the beauties my master has loved, / a list which I have compiled. / Observe, read along with me.’]
The two singers now started walking towards one another. At one hundred metres, Huis and McDermott saw and recognized each other. They both smiled and could see the radiance in each others’ eyes. For Huis, it was as if his beloved Elsa from Mainz was striding there hand in hand with him. All at once, everything took on meaning. Leporello sang ever more loudly: ’In Italia sei cento e quaranta, / in Almagna due cento etrent’una, / cento in Francia, in Turchia novant’una.’ [‘In Italy, six hundred and forty, / In Germany, two hundred and thirty-one, / a hundred in France, / In Turkey, ninety-one.’]
No sooner had the two old friends and associates embraced, when a cry resounded. From the French positions, someone started to sing like the Commendatore: ‘Don Giovanni, a cenar teco / m’invitarsi, e son venuto.’ [‘Don Giovanni, you invited me to dine with you, / And I have come.’] Immediately afterwards there was a burst of fire. Leporello had only just looked into smiling Don Giovanni’s face, when he began to stagger and fall. His burly body protected Huis from the bullets of the wrathful singer in the French trenches, whose shots had evidently been meant for the great German baritone, not for the Scottish singer.
Instead of Don Giovanni, it was his faithful servant Leporello who lost his life in that field of fire. The Great War thus began and ended for the celebrated Scottish bass when he decided to reply to maestro Huis’s song and join in the first wartime opera of 1914. As soon as the Scotsman fell, there was a shout. German soldiers raced out to haul Huis back to the trench, but he refused to be separated from McDermott. He cried, and how he cried: for Elsa, and now also for Edwin from Edinburgh. He almost choked from sobbing when they finally dragged him back to the German trenches.
The name of Leporello’s killer was never revealed, not least because the sad event set a chain of unexpectedly positive events in motion at the front near Avion. As if the Messiah had fallen, the death of the Scottish soldier led to the start of negotiations and then a Christmas-Eve truce between the companies of the German 93rd Division, the Scottish 92nd Division and the French 26th Brigade. A Scottish priest, Father Donovan, held a midnight Mass for a thousand men, and on Christmas Day they buried all the dead who had long lain uncollected between the trenches. The pipers played Flowers of the Forest at McDermott’s funeral and Huis sang at his friend’s shallow grave; he swore it was the last time he had sung Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
THE TYPHUS SITUATION
The infected feel a growing inner disquiet, which rapidly deepens into a draining sense of despair. At the same time, they are overwhelmed by mental exhaustion. This spreads to the muscles and tendons as well as to all internal organs, not least to the stomach, which rejects all food with revulsion. There is a strong need to sleep, but despite great fatigue, sleep is fitful and shallow, full of fear and not at all refreshing. The infected have severe headaches; their mind is dull and confused, as if wrapped in mists and pervaded with dizziness. They feel an ill-defined pain in all their limbs. There are periodic nosebleeds for no apparent reason. That is how the disease begins.
This introduction describes the state many Belgraders were in when a typhus epidemic broke out towards the end of December 1914. The Serbian papers wrote with undisguised, malicious joy about the mass outbreak of measles in Hungary and cholera in Austria; but the Serbian typhus was passed over in silence. The disease started at the banks of the Danube and the low-lying parts of the city, at the pools and by-channels which collected the water turbid with blood and human decay; the ailing Drina brought these with its waves and infected the already sickly Sava, which in turn passed on the illness to the irresolute and horrified Danube. Weary swamp herons and frogs in the shallows were the first to feel that something was way out of order, but they were unable to carry any warning to the people carousing in cafés and celebrating the second expulsion of the Krauts from Serbia with the same cheerful songs as at the beginning of the Great War.
The first typhus sufferers blamed the café owners and sour wine for their bad and restless sleep and the constant headaches, which didn’t subside from morning till late evening. Then fires were seen, over beyond Bara Venecia; people thought it was Gypsies who had returned to their dugouts and wooden hovels with the liberators and were burning off old rags. But in fact it was health officials silently incinerating the infected clothing of the first victims; they wanted to postpone declaring an epidemic so the enemy wouldn’t find out and exploit the outbreak to their advantage.
At that time, the first people to come down with typhus fell into bed. It was absurd the way they now blamed their wanton and dissolute company for the sad state they were in. Their teeth chattered; black pustules the size of lentils came out on their chests and abdomens. Dizziness became ever more pronounced, and their teeth and gums were covered in a blackish, resinous scum. Even when wails and invocations began to be heard from many houses, there was no official admission that an epidemic of typhus had broken out in Serbia.
So it was that typhus made its way to Belgrade and swept on to Shabac, Smederevo, Loznica, Valyevo, and all the way to Uzhice and the recently liberated territories in the south; it was like a horseman on a furious steed with steaming nostrils, but its pounding hoofs remained unheard even in the deepest silence. The disease spread like a weed in a neglected garden and soon the hospitals were full of typhus cases being tended by nurses of the Serbian Red Cross, who then fell ill themselves. They were treated by doctors of all ranks, who also fell ill. Doctors from Greece and Britain came to the aid of their Serbian colleagues, only to come down with typhus themselves. Disease thus carried off those whom the battles had forgotten.
One small shoe-polish dealer was among those infected with typhus. For Djoka Velkovich, the Great War ended when he inanely directed a last, watery gaze at the calendar for the New Year, on which he saw a Serbian soldier with ‘1915’ on his back crushing an Austrian soldier with ‘1914’ on his chest. The Serb had the resolute countenance of Saint George, victor in the Battles of Cer and Kolubara, while the Austrian gazed up from the ground, like a sordid snake ready to deliver one last desperate bite.
At the twelfth hour, the last breath left the chest of Djoka Velkovich as gently as a feather which drifts off from an empty pillow. It was the New Year 1915 by the Julian calendar.
On New Year’s Eve by the Julian calendar, Sergei Chestukhin and his wife Liza found themselves in Riga, on the north-easternmost stretch of the front. After the time of victory came a time of defeat, but Sergei had managed to buy some Königsberg amber for his Lizochka on the black market, a piece of incomparable beauty with an interned bee in the centre. She turned it in her hands. The Baltic gold gleamed like the honey of that petrified bee, like her copper-bearing hair bathed in the sun. ‘It would have been better if supreme command had given me Marusya for the New Year,’ the heroic nurse said and burst into tears, defiantly wiping those pearls from her cheeks as they rolled from her eyes the colour of sepia.