‘I can’t, Father, you’re talking to a dead man.’
‘Oh yes you can, by all that’s holy. Yes you can! The Spartans at Thermopylae were also “dead”, and look how many dead Persians there were at the end of the day. I’ll sing a hymn to the Lord, and you dig your nails into the ground. Remember the motto of the Montgomerys: Garde bien! The night is dark. Crawl straight ahead, not to the left or right. Come on, my son, that’s it: That’s your blood, I can smell it, but you still have enough to live, and you’re young: That’s it. O Scottish centre forward, the enemy can’t see you, and you’re netting us a goal. Come on . . . great is our Eaglais na h-Alba, great is our church, and great is our God. Push, my son . . . grab the pole. That’s it. Now hold on, I’m pulling you. Forget about the bloody trail you’re leaving. All your blood will come back. You’ll be prized and praised for every drop of it. Pipers awake! Medics, to me! We’ve got a wounded man here. You’re alive, my son. You’ll shoot goals against German teams when this terrible war is over!’
Suffice to say that only this ‘Pipers awake! Medics, to me!’ went down in history. The whole preceding conversation remained between Father Donovan and his distant relative John Hamilton; but one wounded man was saved. Many others didn’t survive the night between 5 and 6 February 1915, but the generals in the rear seemed not to care about the casualties. The commanders-in-chief leaned over their topographic maps of the fronts, and they showed only elevations, lines and little crosses which didn’t multiply the lives of the soldiers on the ground, but took them away. Twenty-six soldiers were killed near Avion that night. Nineteen were mortally wounded and died where they fell. Seven died of their wounds fifty ells and more from the Scottish trenches. Only one wounded man ten ells away was saved, but Hans-Dieter Huis knew nothing about that.
Huis returned to Berlin, a city now filled with the intoxicating aroma of disinfectant mixed with the persistent smell of coagulated blood. His favourite street, Unter den Linden, was deserted, just as the soul of the great singer lay forsaken, now forever. He was determined never to sing again, regardless of the pressure on him and despite all expectations. Some knew what had happened to him in northern France, others didn’t. But no one was prepared to excuse his weakness, because that was the easiest way of concealing one’s own. They tolerated his silence for two days, no longer, and then he was ordered to the Ministry of War. He was received by an aged general with a monumental, silver Kaiser Wilhelm moustache, who had most probably fought in the Franco-Prussian War.
‘Perhaps you do not appreciate that our country is experiencing a tragic lack of the saltpetre needed for producing gunpowder,’ the tall, aged officer began his speech, which remained unintelligible to Huis. ‘We used to import saltpetre from Scandinavia, in case you didn’t know, but the enemy has now closed the marine supply route. You are also perhaps unaware that this country lacks sufficient supplies of copper, lead, zinc and foodstuffs. You have probably heard of the order to economize on rubber and only to use cars in cases of emergency. But that is no concern of yours. You, maestro, are withholding from this country what it needs as much as copper and saltpetre. You refuse to give it song. Why did you reject the planned tour of Poland?’
Only towards the end of this speech did Huis realize what the man was getting at, although the connection between saltpetre and his voice seemed tenuous. He thought of lying and using his sick throat and weak health as a pretext, but then he remembered the two old Frenchmen penned up in the cellar and it became clear to him once more that civilization would be forever lost after the Great War, and that in the end even his audiences would be gone. Why then lie?
‘Mr . . . General, sir, I can’t sing any more. I had an experience, something not worth relating, which took the voice from my throat and the breath from my lungs. I am an artist.’
‘An artist? You’re not an artist — ,’ shouted the nervous mouth beneath the silver moustache, ‘you’re a soldier, Huis!’
It annoyed the maestro to be addressed only by his surname, as if he was being interrogated, but he had no intention of giving in.
‘I’ve told you, General sir, and I’ll say it again: my throat no longer obeys me. I try to sing, but only a wheeze comes out. When I can sing again, you and my audiences will be the first to know.’
Night was falling. The evening star stood out in the clear winter sky above the Berlin plain when the great pre-war baritone Hans-Dieter Huis came out onto Friedrichstrasse. There he was surprised by a sight he hadn’t attached any importance to before: all around him were women. Women worked on the trams and drove cars, women wheeled carts and swept the streets, and women smiled as they stood at the entrances of empty pubs. He was in an unfamiliar female world, he thought, like the last man who couldn’t fight, because his only weapon — his fine voice — had failed him.
The Great War was over for him. He would withdraw into the provinces in the north, to his parents’ city of L. on the Baltic coast, like he did when he was a child. He could start all over again and teach young people to sing and prepare them for the new world, if there was going to be one.
‘There will be no more wartime performances,’ he said to himself as he put his hat on, but he was mistaken.
THE MAN WHO DID EVERYTHING TWICE
His name was Wilhelm Albert Wlodzimierz Apolinary de Kostrowicki and he had eyelashes the shape of commas. He was the enfant terrible of the Paris art scene; no one could drink as much at Old Libion’s Rotonde or knock back as many glasses at Old Combes’s Closerie des Lilas. Or perhaps only Amedeo Modigliani. From this wealth of experience, he wrote the poetry collection Alcools. But now Wilhelm Albert Wlodzimierz Apolinary de Kostrowicki wanted to go to war.
As a Polish Italian, he intended to enlist in the Foreign Legion. He set off for Rue Saint-Dominique with a heavy step. It was late afternoon one Tuesday when he got there, , and he was not alone. A crush of sweaty foreigners was besieging the Foreign Legion recruitment office. For Guillaume Apollinaire, the Great War began when he was told that the Legion was already at full strength. What? Didn’t the war need every King Ubu who wanted to lose his head for France? But no, the Foreign Legion only took in the number of recruits it required. Afterwards, he went to the army supply office in Temple, for doubting Wlodzimierz wanted to buy a uniform after all. And a gas mask. Everyone’s money was good, and they sold him an overcoat, trousers, tunic and a peaked army cap, which he would later turn into a wartime adornment.
He was angry at not being allowed to enlist straight away, and railed against Romain Rolland for ‘becoming German’. He went out into the street yelling ‘Bloody Boches!’ and claimed that the Germans had printed his poems but not paid him a single mark. At the Closerie des Lilas, he no longer drank as much. The price of a glass of pastis rose to six sous. When he left the café he saw young men cursing and swearing at those who they said just ‘guzzled for the glorious war’. He wanted to shout to them that he wanted to go to war too, but he swallowed his words. He thought they wouldn’t understand him, but certainly not because his French was poor.
A month later he wanted to clarify a few things and went down to the district offices. He claimed he loved France. The bureaucracy saw that differently. He was born in Rome and his mother was of Polish extraction. Why such an awkwardly long name? Wlodzimierz might be a fine name, but who had a name like that in Poland? Did he know a single other Wlodzimierz? He didn’t. Perhaps he had invented it. But Albert was just fine. After all, the courageous Belgian king was called Albert. Apolinary, in turn, sounded more like the name of a dog to them. But his first name Wilhelm aroused the greatest suspicion. Wasn’t that the name of the German kaiser? The circumstances required that everything be given careful consideration.
Apolinary therefore went to Nice. The Mediterranean sun shone there and knew nothing of the war in the north. And the traitorous sun would warm his treacherous evasion of the war. In those days, the poet forgot his pre-war muse, Marie Laurencin. She had left for Spain without a word, negl
ecting even to return her ring. Talk about faithless! It transpired that she had actually eloped with a so-called painter, Otto von Wätjen, and married him six weeks later. So now the poet sought a new sweetheart. Desperately. On the train from Marseille he saw a candidate — a beauty with long eyelashes which cast shadows on her rainbow-coloured eyes. But at the station their paths diverged, and they separated.
The choice then fell on Louise de Coligny-Châtillon. She asked him to call her Lou. He asked her to call him Gui. Lou pretended to be a nurse, he a volunteer in the Great War. She was really just an ordinary floozie: her every gaze exuded lust, like a bayonet glinting atop every rifle, and he was already her ‘life-long servant’. He wanted a relationship to the limit. He demanded nine days of wild copulation. She wanted something more distanced. More platonic. For nine days they went to ‘Chinese’ opium dens together, run by refugees who tried desperately to play the part of orientals, since Chinese people were in short supply. The opium pipe was lit and they were laid down on the couch. They blew out puffs of smoke. Artificial paradises, like cemeteries of broken hopes, descended on their eyes. Then on their limbs; and finally penetrated to the bone.
Lou and Gui. They smoked opium. They made love. With abandon. Nine days and nine nights.
A few weeks later, the recruitment office called for the would-be soldier Wilhelm Albert Wlodzimierz Apolinary de Kostrowicki. They sent him to Nîmes for training although the origins of his names had still not been unravelled. 1914 had gnawed away a whole generation, and in 1915 the Foreign Legion needed even those called Wilhelm. Apolinary quickly became accustomed to barrack life. He learnt to ride, and his arse ached from the saddle. He suffered from diarrhoea. Being penniless was difficult, but he didn’t complain about becoming a candidate for non-commissioned officer. All he really missed, more and more, were those nine days. And nine nights. He wanted Lou. He wrote her shameless letters, reminding her that they had made love in the 69 position from the Kama Sutra. He asked her to be bawdy in her letters too and demanded that she pluck out a few of her pubic hairs and send them to him. At first she refused. He insisted again. When the letter with the hairs finally arrived, Gui froze. The hairs lay in the folds of the paper. He had imagined them in a chaotic mound like the mons pubis; instead, they stuck to a blot of blue ink in the middle of the paper, and right at the words ‘I only want you’ they had formed themselves into a cross. They were undoubtedly Lou’s pubic hairs: they smelt of those nine days. And nine nights. But they were flattened and clung together to form a cross. Like on a tombstone. There was nothing for it — the poet broke up with Lou. He didn’t want her to be his grave-digger. Now Guillaume Apollinaire was looking for a new sweetheart.
On the other side of the front, amongst the German soldiers, many also dreamed of their sweethearts. Stefan Holm’s unit was transferred in livestock wagons to the Eastern Front to fill the gaps in the thinned ranks of the relatively new German 9th Army. As soon as they arrived near the army positions in East Prussia, they were met by the northern-European winter. The mercury fell to more than thirty below zero, and many soldiers got rid of their lice and bedbugs simply by shivering for two hours in the icy air. Then they would comb out their scurf and pick the frozen vermin out of their pants. In the town of Braunsberg, where Stefan’s unit rested in the building of the local lyceum, he found a button in his pocket which had belonged to Stanislaw Witkiewicz, the unfortunate Pole whom he had had to tie up and drive out in front of him, exposing him to the ‘friendly fire’ of the French in a futile attack in 1914. He burst into tears when he saw it, remembering vividly the moment when it had fallen off. He also recalled that he had promised to sew it on for him as soon as he found a piece of thread and a needle. But he found neither thread nor needle. The whistle blew. The order came, and any recalcitrance was punished by firing squad.
Holm was later decorated with the Iron Cross, 2nd Class. Oh, what an irony that he now wore it, with ostensible pride, on the left breast of his coat. Yet the problem of the button remained, and he decided to keep it for a few more days. Then they were transferred to positions east of the Masurian Lakes. They weren’t told anything, but the soldiers knew a great battle was brewing because several days of complete silence ensued and stocks of food kept arriving for them. Like the others, Stefan had nothing to do while they waited for the fighting to begin. And so he thought about what to do with the button. Then he had an idea: he would sew it on exactly where the Iron Cross was pinned, but from the inside. The button would thus be the metaphysical basis for the cross, the foundation for the medal to stand forth — the medal they had both received when they were tied together like Plato’s two halves of one being. And so he began to ask up and down the trench, for a needle and thread but his rather rough-hewn comrades laughed in his face, coughing between two drags of a cigarette. One soldier from Frankfurt finally produced a little sewing set, which his mother had packed for him and now he gave Stefan a threaded needle as if he was secretly handing him a loaded gun. Stefan then found himself a quiet spot and, in the same place as the cross, but on the inside, sewed on Witkiewicz’s brass button with the emblem of the French Republic. It chafed him at first, but he got used to it. Now his dear Polish friend was with him again. But he didn’t have long to ponder the button and the cross being reunited because on 8 February 1915 the second, winter Battle of the Masurian Lakes began.
Biale Lake, long Augustów Lake and hundreds of smaller ones would soon witness something their waters had never seen. Despite the extreme cold, the German 8th Army under the command of Otto von Below began a surprise attack in the middle of a snowstorm on 8 February. The offensive headed towards the gorges of Wylkowyszki and Elk. The Russians suffered heavy casualties and retreated one hundred and twenty kilometres, with the greatest losses being sustained by the Russian 20th Corps. In the forests near Augustów Lake, the German 10th Army encircled almost one hundred thousand Russian soldiers who were under the command of General Bulgakov.
Although the thermometer read minus thirty-eight, the Russians’ defence did not flag. But soon the only road from Sierpc to Plock was cut off and hunger visited itself upon the Russian 20th Corps. First they ate up the stocks of food, then they caught all the little animals they could find in the forest, and in the end they searched for moles’ burrows opened up by shelling; they pulled out the little critters, skinned them and ate them alive before they went cold and stiff. On the tenth day of the encirclement, the soldiers peeled bark off trees for want of food. The ground was all churned up but there was no more food to be found. The steely sky brought no salvation; a distant, hazy sun topped with a cap of blue seemed to be laughing at the Russian troops caught in this pocket . None of them knew that their impending defeat was being covered up; they didn’t hear the Prime Minister, Ivan Goremykin, who declared in the Duma to shouts of ‘hurrah’ three days after the encirclement: ‘Now that the favourable outcome of the war is becoming ever clearer, nothing more can shake the Russian people’s deep faith in final victory. Our heroic army is stronger than ever before, in spite of its losses.’ If anyone had bothered to ask the heroic 20th Corps out in the Polish forests to verify the Prime Minister’s last sentence, the men would only have agreed that the losses were greater than ever before. It became colder by the day, and in the second week of the siege many a soldier began to think seriously about cannibalism. And maybe the men really would have begun eating their dead comrades if they hadn’t been beaten to the frozen corpses by half-savage dogs from the thickets of the forest, which echoed at night to terrible, endless concerts of barking and howling.
Several days before the final collapse, one common soldier decided to arrange a feast with his comrades of 12th Platoon, despite the adverse conditions. The Great War had begun for Boris Dmitrievich Rizanov when he left home with his kitbag and took along his favourite book, Satyricon, by the liberated Roman slave Petronius Arbiter. It was no coincidence that Rizanov had this particular book with him. In his life before the Great War, when he
himself had felt the fear mixed with determination of the masses on Nevsky Prospekt, Boris had studied classics. He could quote Sophocles and knew by heart the closing words spoken by Socrates at his trial, an hour before he drank the black milk of hemlock in front of his students. Shortly before the beginning of the Great War, Boris read ‘Trimalchio’s Banquet’ from Satyricon in Latin and decided he would translate it. That is why he took it along with him, hoping for free time between occasional marches and taking pot-shots at a distant enemy. But he didn’t have any free time, for there was plenty of marching, shooting and slaughtering of the enemy. Soon he told himself he had become a butcher and stopped being a philologist.
He would use both his philological inclinations and his aptitude as a butcher to put on a real Trimalchio’s feast in northern Europe, just one day before the final collapse of the Russian pocket by the Masurian Lakes. Before he launched into the role of rich Trimalchio, Rizanov, like a proper patrician, invited his starving comrades and their officers to be his guests. To introduce them to the idea, he hurriedly translated and read out aloud a part of Petronius’ work: “‘A brilliant feast,’ we all cheered and cried, and servants came and draped our couches with special covers, each embroidered from end to end with hunting scenes — nets, and beaters with spears lying in ambush. Then came servants with a tray, on which we saw a wild sow of enormous size, and from her tusks hung two baskets woven from palm leaves: one filled with sweet Syrian dates, the other holding dry Egyptian dates. The slave who stepped up to carve was a huge fellow with a big beard. He took out his hunting knife and made a savage slash at the sow’s flanks. She brought forth roast sucking-pigs, and when in turn the giant slashed open these, dozens of thrushes came fluttering out!”
The Great War Page 14
