The Great War

by Aleksandar Gatalica

  The greatest German baritone, Hans-Dieter Huis, couldn’t remember how he saw in the New Year 1915. But that was nothing unusual, because many soldiers later couldn’t say where they had been during the celebrations and New Year’s break.

  The writer Jean Cocteau returned to Paris on leave. He arrived in the City of Light like a real wartime popinjay: in an ironed and scented uniform with a crimson helmet. Everyone at the Rotonde and the Dôme was meant to see how he had ‘gone to war in style’ in 1914. He couldn’t find Picasso.

  Lucien Guirand de Scevola spent New Year’s Eve beside a radio-telegraph. He had read in Le Parisien the same day that wireless telegraphers had specific occupational illnesses like a straining of the right forefinger, which they used to type Morse code with; after all the horrific wounds he had seen, he could only laugh about this one as he saw in the first night of the New Year.

  Germain D’Esparbès spent New Year’s Eve writing yet another despondent letter which began with ‘Dearest Zoë’ and ended with ‘Tell Nana I’m not a monster. I’m still waiting for you, but with a loaded pistol at my side.’

  Fritz Krupp spent New Year’s Eve sitting in a prototype of a plane, the Aviatik B.I. He fell in love with it as if it were a woman, and could hardly wait to fly and attack Paris with it in 1915. He fondled the machine-gun and said to himself: ‘I’ll kill you, Picasso, I’m telling you.’

  Like maestro Huis, Private Stefan Holm also couldn’t remember where and with whom he saw in the New Year 1915.

  Yıldız Effendi couldn’t help but be amazed that the streets of Istanbul were so deserted. Shoppers were few and far between, starving dogs wandered the streets, and on the opposite side of the Golden Horn someone was always lighting fires, whose acrid smoke crept across the water to enter his nostrils, even here on his side of the estuary. On the day of the infidel New Year he didn’t even think it was a special date.

  On 1 January by the new Gregorian calendar, a wave of cold des­cended on the whole of Europe. On 1 January by the Julian calendar, an oily sun rose and fought against the low, waxen clouds on the horizon. On the Eastern Front, the German, Austrian and Russian armies fortified their positions from Riga to Chernivtsi; on the West­ern Front, the French, British and German armies dug in from Ostend to Mulhouse; on the Southern Front, Austria readied itself for a new attack on Serbia — and everyone thought this was the beginning of the last year of a war which was to end all wars.

  Mehmed Graho the pathologist, on whose table the Great War had begun, was perhaps the only one who thought otherwise. He scratched the little patch of grey hair on the back of his head and counted on his thick fingers like a child: thirty days, no, forty-two days in Zvornik, multiplied by at least nine moribunds a day, and then at least a hundred more in Belgrade, minus the one or two every day who pulled through. He had been responsible for five hundred deaths at the very least, and then there were all the other doctors of death, generalissimos of death and chemists of death. ‘No, the great calamity is still to come,’ he muttered, without much of a guilty conscience.

  Graho spent the New Year of the boisterous Catholics, and later that of the quiet Orthodox, at home in Sarajevo, and neither of them meant much to him. What was much more important to him was that he managed to find a pair of shoes his size which didn’t pinch his swollen feet on either side. ‘Bravo,’ he said to himself, and thus ended the year of one pathologist.

  1915

  THE YEAR OF THE TRADER

  The pianist Paul Wittgenstein before one of his concerts for the left hand, 1919

  THE SMELL OF SNOW AND FOREBODINGS OF DOOM

  In Istanbul you need to stay for six days if you’re a traveller, six weeks if you’re a Westerner wanting to see only the good face of Turkey, six years if you’re an infidel trader from Beirut or Alexandria and want to make a quick and easy fortune, six decades if you’re a trader and believer who intends to stay on in Istanbul, six centuries for you and your descendants if you wish to merge with the cobblestones, wood, waters and lifeblood of this city on the water, and six millenniums if you’re the Padishah, ruler of the righteous.

  Thus went a popular saying which Mehmed Yıldız, the trader in oriental spices, often repeated in tearooms and in the company of idle coachmen. He himself had almost reached the tally of six decades on the streets of the great city. That’s right, he calculated, unfolding his thick fingers to count the decades on them like a child. In 1917, it would be sixty years since he took his father’s place. His father Husrev Yıldız, a manufacturer and trader in fur apparel, moved from Izmir to the capital in the golden times following the reforms of Mahmud II and opened a furrier’s workshop with an attached boutique, which would become famous among the Jewish traders in Galata. At that time Mehmed was attending rushdi — Islamic middle school — and his mother lay dying, but that didn’t prevent his father from staying at work from dawn until dusk. He offered his wares like a prophet, not a trader. He had a separate stand for every kind of fur. With his body inclined like the Sultan’s wine taster, his head slightly bowed, he would pronounce ‘bison’ with relish as he showed a customer the fine bovine fur; now, bent at the waist like a Western flunkey, he spoke the word ‘sable’ with a ring of importance as if he was saying ‘sailed the seven seas’ and held up his produce, always emphasising its quality; and later, bent almost double in deference, he would mincingly pronounce ‘ermine’ and invite his clients to the back room of the workshop to bargain over a glass of well-stewed mint tea.

  Business flourished, yet Husrev Yıldız was ever more alone, and never himself but someone else. When his wife died of tuberculosis, leaving his son Mehmed crippled with grief, the father didn’t shed a tear but withdrew into his storeroom in the Haseki area and the very next day was offering sable again just like a Jewish merchant. That is how Mehmed Yıldız learnt early in life that there are Turks who find their place and know themselves, and others who wrench themselves out of their culture. The former stay put and wait for the tides of time to either break against them or crush them. The latter go away to study Western medicine, only to realize it is the enemy of humanity; they go away to become Westerners beneath the street lights of Rome and Paris, and learn to understand that Europe is the enemy of Islam; they fall in love with revolution and then see that the more radical its promises are, the further their fulfilment is postponed into the distant future, and the promises thus grotesquely dwindle. The ‘Westerners’ become disillusioned and return, but alas, they cannot go back to their beds because the mould which was made for them has long since shattered.

  That is what the trader Mehmed Yıldız most feared: becoming like those others, resembling his father who presented everything in a false light and said it was good for business because furriers sold not goods, he claimed, but dreams and status. The son therefore sold his father’s fur business without regret as soon as Husrev Yıldız had his first stroke a few years later and in 1857, without reconsidering, left the Jewish quarter; he descended the icy marble of the Camondo Stairs for the last time and put Galata behind him. He set up a spice shop below Topkapı Palace using the money gained from liquidating the fur business, but still he felt threatened by his father’s business lies and falsehoods — as if they could be passed on to him through the air or by blood. For that reason, he wanted only to be a Turk and only to love his helpers. Finally, it seemed to him that he had everything and that he had fused with his matrix, but then the Great War came on the threshold of his seventy-sixth year and sixth decade of trading in Istanbul and threatened to make him one of those others who have to leave the Bosporus after so long and start a homeless life without form and identity. Still, he hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Each of his assistants was now in the army but the fronts were all still quiet. If only that winter of his ill temper would pass, which here too, at the gate to Asia, held the threat of snow and low temperatures. The forecast said it would be minus five even by the water, and the wind from Anatolia brought the smell of snow mixed with forebodings of
doom.

  The Serbian press did not report whether the temperature in Istanbul fell below zero. But in Belgrade, to be sure, everything froze: iron be­came sheathed in ice, the mighty walls of Kalemegdan fortress congealed to icy rock, and the ground was frozen too solid to even to dig a grave for a dead cat. It was January 1915, the peaceful lull after the slaughter of a whole generation at the River Drina and Mount Suvobor. The impetuous bands of carousing ruffians who had celebrated libera­tion in December 1914 had long since come down with typhus and been decimated, and the winter wind from the Danube and Sava had stolen the mirth from their lips and turned it to morbid moans. Those who were still healthy — neither happy nor sad — went outdoors wrapped in rags. And the smoke from charities’ portable stoves seemed to turn waxen and freeze above the heads of the volunteers who offered passers-by weak, but mercifully hot tea.

  ‘What a terrible winter,’ Politika reporter Pera Stanisavlevich Bura would announce from the door as he tossed his foppish, battered bowler hat onto the hall stand, cast off his frozen-stiff coat and laid aside the decrepit black umbrella he used as defence against the fine snow, which in such cold weather was hardly able to fall.

  ‘Hey Bura, did that plucked chicken of an umbrella shield you from the snow?’ the brash journalists called out, and Bura replied with a good-natured smile. He was one of those people who were happy all day long. He himself didn’t know why. For him, even the Great War began on a day he found especially beautiful. It is a fact that some people are born happy and always look on the bright side of things. This minor journalist of the Belgrade paper was one such person.

  Maybe it was precisely because of Bura’s merry disposition that the editor let him write a column called “While They Were Here: Notes from Thirteen Days’ Occupation”. The aim of this amusing but cynical column was to present a range of anecdotes from the shifty, shady side of Serbia during the almost two weeks of Austrian occupation of Belgrade in 1914, and Bura took the task very seriously. He went into grocery shops, chatted with tough little Dorchol ladies with black-haired warts on their faces, and listened to the gossip of the leisurely world. His colleagues claimed he even spoke with the animals and knew how the occupation had been for every cart-pulling ox in front of the railway station. But these slights couldn’t dent his spirit, and Bura became a household name. People read and enjoyed his stories: about the shrewd young clerk from the Palilula neighbourhood who found a way of getting back at the Austrians; about the superstitious Croatian in the uniform of the empire who was bucked by his horse at the corner of King Alexander and King Milutin Streets; and about the incredible bravery of a wounded Serb soldier who hid in different houses and then had the courage to steal an Austrian uniform and stroll the streets and drink wine with the occupiers as if he was one of them.

  The editor concealed from Bura how popular he had become so he wouldn’t ‘get a swollen head’, but the cheerful journalist returned to his little house in Savamala, content with life. Bura was not what you call handsome: he had just a little hair around the ears, his face was tipped forwards as if someone had pulled his nose and twisted it out of shape while he was still inside his mother, and his forehead was a sea of wrinkles. Not to mention the creases around his eyebrows and eyes. But Bura was happy despite his less-than-attractive appearance. Besides, he was a ‘peaceful journalist’, not a rabble-rouser or a noise-maker. He lived with his elderly mother and his wife, Stana, with whom he had no children. It seemed nothing could disturb the harmony of that home, to which Bura brought everyday cheer. Contrary to Serbian customs, his mother didn’t quarrel with her daughter-in-law, and both of them loved Bura. But then typhus moved into the journalist’s house. First his mother came down with the disease and very soon died. She was buried the same day as Bura’s column fielded the pieces “The Nightmares of Herr Schwarz, Administrator of Belgrade” and “Arbod the Clerk Protects Skadarska Street”. Bura didn’t descend into sadness because of his mother. ‘She was old — as long as she had a good death,’ he said to himself, still cheerful in spite of the loss.

  But two weeks later, Bura’s wife also fell ill. She had a raging fever and her once pearl-like teeth were covered in a black scum. She suffered greatly and in the end just sank into the pillow and directed her last glance towards her husband. She was buried the same day as the popular journalist’s pieces “With Russia Behind Us” and “The Waiter From Café Macedonia” went to press. Bura stood by the shallow grave, which the undertakers had scarcely managed to scrape, and burst into tears. He wept bitterly as if he had been abandoned — as if he was his wife’s son, not her husband. He returned home and thought that his innate cheer would see him through, but the empty house where every step echoed made something in Bura snap.

  His colleagues didn’t perceive any change at first. He skilfully hid his intentions and outwardly remained the ‘cheerful Bura’ they knew, and he edited the “While They Were Here” column for a little longer. But after a while the people around him began to notice he was changing from the good-natured shrimp of a man into a rude and ambitious journalist quite unlike his former self.

  He soon demanded of the editor-in-chief that he be promoted, and he laid claim to the editorial column. He said he had made a name for himself through his regular column and now wanted to follow the adversities of the enemy: hunger, contagions and fiscal ruin. The editor had no objections. Moreover, he took to the idea immediately: an embittered journalist was just the right person to chart the enemy’s woes. That is how Bura was promoted to editorial writer. From that day on, he went to the quay on the River Sava every morning and was given the imperial and royal press of the ‘k and k’ monarchy from lads who reeked of coal dust from the holds of barges. They only ever exchanged a few quick words, but not because it was still so cold in Belgrade. A mild change had come from the south and wet snow now fell on the bare heads of the couriers. Bura and his informants were in haste: the boys because they were risking their lives by delivering him newspapers in German and Hungarian, and Bura because he found no time to be affable towards them. He paid them and took the papers without a single word and without the slightest sign of mirth on his once jolly face.

  Afterwards, he wrote about things he hadn’t read in the enemy’s papers: that Germany was on the verge of bankruptcy, that famine was ravaging the villages in northern Hungary, and that desertion from the Austrian army in the east had reached such proportions that Russia would soon be sending trainloads of Serbs to Serbia. The editor became very fond of Bura and considered that life’s adversities had steeled him into being a great journalist. But he misjudged his jolly editorialist.

  Bura was in fact greatly upset and despondent to the point of despair that not one Serbian newspaper was saying a word about the typhus epidemic which had cut down his family. He devised a little intrigue and executed it audaciously in his front-page editorial in Politika. He heard that cholera had broken out in Austria-Hungary and proposed to report on it regularly. Needless to say, the proposal was accepted without opposition, just as the counter-proposals about reporting on typhus in Serbia had been rejected out of hand. ‘Cholera’ thus became the most common word on the front page of Politika in early January 1915, but in Bura’s pieces it was really just another name for typhus. And so the once merry Bura, who used to speak in confidence with the oxen at the railway station, devised his own plan. He had constant access to the secret figures about typhus in Serbia and devised a way of publishing them.

  He looked at the list of counties in Croatia, which was part of the Dual Monarchy, and paired up each of them with a Serbian district. The county of Syrmia in Croatia played the role of the Morava district in Serbia, the county of Pozhega was actually the Levach district, Karlovac county corresponded to Machva district, Sisak county to Shumadiya, and so on. Zagreb, of course, represented the Serbian capital Belgrade. The main city of each county was then given a ‘twin city’ in Serbia, and in this way Bura was able to begin publishing the number of cases and fatalities f
rom the Serbian typhus epidemic on the front page of Politika — under the guise of diligently tallying the number of cholera cases in Croatia. Now he just needed to make his ‘code book’ public. He was preoccupied with the idea of producing an anonymous leaflet, but he abandoned the idea because he knew he would quickly be caught, and there was no need for that. Several of his most vocal colleagues spread the story by word of mouth, and now all readers could easily inform themselves about the ‘illicit’ typhus situation in Serbia.

  People from the Morava district followed the ‘cholera situation’ in the Croatian county of Syrmia. If they had relatives in Chachak, they looked to see how many ‘cholera cases’ there were in the Croatian regional centre of Tovarnik, and if they were interested in Ivanjica, they kept an eye on the figures which Politika published for the town of Shid in eastern Croatia. Belgraders were well informed thanks to the details on the “development of cholera in Zagreb”, so it is easy to see how this trickery managed to go undiscovered for months. Neither politicians nor journalists had an ear for the people who bought Politika and repeated ‘God bless you, Bura’. Secret agents were dispatched but failed to find a lead, so ‘Bura’s bulletin’ was able to come out for another ten days, up until the moment when the journalist himself started to feel the first signs of typhus. First he felt exhausted, then he lost his appetite. That didn’t worry him in the beginning because, small and thin as he was, he hardly ate anyway. But then Bura began to get drowsy. He came in with puffy cheeks and dark circles under his eyes and published his bulletin for the day, which he considered a crucial task. The editor suggested he take a few days off, but Bura declined. He started to feel a pain in his limbs and then, just as he was finishing the list for the next day with his last strength, the number of “cholera victims in Zagreb” rose from 1,512 to 1,513.