Junior Sergeant August Willich, Joseph A. Hemann (a banker who thought he could pawn his life and pay off both the interest and the principal), Emil Klauprecht (an expert on the magic dealing of tarot cards which predicted death), pedantic Stephan Molitor, Heinrich Rödter (a pre-war manufacturer of ladies’ corsets and above all a patriot), the stutterer Karl Resch, Karl Friedrich (a small manufacturer of vinegar), Heinrich Victor Blumer (the son of a strict father, a clerk in a huge insurance company), the naively ambitious Karl Bach, the disenchanted Reuben Guth, Adolph Sage (the deflowerer of several young ladies), Johann Jung (captive to the lovely nineteenth century), fat Jacob Weygandt, skinny Cornelius Schumacher, Jacob Christian (with a boyish look but the teeth of a killer), Samuel Hütter (with a little mirror in his pocket), Siegfried Hobs and 5,927 other Germans did not live to see the taking of the second kilometre.
An opaque night fell and everyone felt they had started out on a great journey, not the capturing of three kilometres of bullet-swept wasteland; but that third kilometre to Fort Douaumont took its toll of heroes nonetheless.
Marie Germain Louis Émile Cahuzac (who died worrying he would never be able to prove his aristocratic ancestry), Désiré Ildefonse Lannoye (who believed the war could be explained by logic), Georges Caron (a pre-war rodent controller, now an expert on trench rats), Irénée Antonin Contard (with the name of girl and the eyes of a dove), the pre-war actor Louis Gui, his younger brother Raymond Gui (who wrote a few words on Birot’s illustrated postcards), the miller Pierre Julien Alexandre Letellier (whose last thought was a culinary dream), the brewer Élisée Félix Belle (with the look of a reveller), the match manufacturer and small-time cheat Auguste Robin, Émile Charles Tavignot (a gentleman in every respect, who died in style without a whimper), Georges Marie Ludovic Jules Guynemer (strayed into the twentieth century without any friends or family), Joseph Georges Marie Guérin (whose grandfather changed their surname to Guérrin after the French victory over the Prussians in 1871), Henri Fermin Reynaud (a South African miner who travelled half the world only to be killed in the third kilometre of the Battle of Verdun), René Hardy (who had sailed across the equator three times, but died on land), Arsène Ferrand (a pre-war café owner) and the short soda maker Pierre Germine fell in the last kilometre of that journey.
Albrecht Jacob (with a picture of his sweetheart in his inside pocket), Wilhelm Lahn (also known as ‘machine-gun’ because of his pervasive snoring), Junior Sergeant Richard Stiemer (‘Sailor Stiemer’, the darling of all of Hamburg’s whores), the spiv Jacob Schnee, Jacob Stöver (a hypochondriac, whom the war cured of the fear of death), the church philanthropist Conrad Zentler, Siegfried Wollenweber, Melchior Steiner (who immediately before the war discovered the beauty of the sport of handball), the descendant of Prussian grenadiers K.J.R. Arndt, Josef Forster (a pre-war fighter against the dogmas of bourgeois society), the tailor Johannus Böhm (who supported every fad of bourgeois society), the comedian Heinrich Müller, the accountant Siegmund Jungmann, Carl Andreas (a birdwatcher and small poultry farmer), Johann Gruber, Ambrosius Henkel (a circus clown before the war, and a clown during the war), and the hundredth hero of this story, Sergeant Nepomuk Schneider, did not live to see the taking of the first fortification in the Battle of Verdun.
So fell one hundred heroes of Verdun. The fortified city of Douaumont was taken, and the German soldiers with keen eyes who hoisted the imperial German standard atop the mighty walls could make out the positions they had started from, away in the misty distance. It had been a great idea: to lure the French into a deadly trap. It was two kilometres more to Verdun, and another half a million dead.
It took the German units until the end of April 1916 to take the full five kilometres to Fort Souville. The French would win back each of those five kilometres by the end of the year. Persistent bombardment turned the battlefield into a sea of mud. Flame-throwers later scorched and burned the mud into an absurd earthenware landscape. Both armies ultimately returned to where they had started. The five thousand metres of the Verdun basin between Fort Douaumont, Vaux and Souville claimed the lives of 700,000 soldiers, including those one hundred pairs of boots, or our one hundred heroes. It had been a great idea — a grand plan meant to put an end to the Great War in the West.
But it didn’t turn out that way.
At this time, Svetozar Boroevich von Boina and the pale spectre he cherished in his breast were being pampered by the southern sun. Based in Trieste, the field marshal was the same old Austro-Hungarian commander again, with his mousey eyes which demanded absolute discipline. With nine Austro-Hungarian divisions, he defeated over twenty Italian divisions in the Fifth Battle of the Isonzo. War became almost boring for him on that apathetic front, with its half-hearted attacks and lethargic defence. Dug into the snowy flanks of the Alps, with well-organized supply by cart through the hilly terrain, it seemed his troops would be able to hold on forever. Boroevich viewed every new Italian offensive as an uncured disease, which kept coming back in bouts but was soon gone again. He therefore began to look on the nicer side of things. In the late winter of 1916, Canal Rosso shone in unexpected nuances, as if it was made of oil. He opened the window and watched the curtains stir and billow in the wind like ghosts. From his apartment on the third storey of Gopchevich Palace he could see the magic colours of the canal, and his gaze began to wander rather often from the topographic maps and out through the window, on from the canal and further out to sea. A sirocco was blowing and brought the smell of summer. He breathed deeply of that breeze. He had never been a sailor; he had grown and toughened on the dry, dark soil of the borderlands between Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. He was surprised at himself that he was drawn to the aquamarine depths, and even that city in the valley of the wind-rose called him to don his dress uniform and go out.
No, he wasn’t worried that Trieste could fall. There had been five offensives in 1916 and there would be a sixth, but Boroevich already considered himself a wicked puppet-master who played the Italian marionettes and he saw no chance of those harlequins and buffoons beating him. He woke up every morning and saw the Austrian ships densely dotting the Gulf of Trieste like steel sentries. Seamen called out to each other from surfaced submarines to ships and swapped descriptions of their favourite prostitutes. From the backdrop of hills, over from the direction of Gorizia, there came a constant, muffled thunder, replaced at night by the blood-curdling, wolf-like voices of unsettled animals, but the city was lively. Whenever he passed Miramare Castle in the train on the way back from the front, he hurried to see the yellow lights along the waterfront promenade, which looked as if they were filled with olive oil, and the crowds strolling in Stadion Street.
He almost fell in love but didn’t know with whom. One evening he said to himself: ‘Come on now, get dressed.’ He washed himself with water from the white porcelain basin. It smelt of lavender, and the coat he donned suited him well. He put on the shiny metal helmet with black feathers and decked his chest with his most important medals. He chose them in the same way as a woman chooses a handbag and a fan to match her dress. First of all, he pinned on his oldest decorations: the Order of the Romanian Star, the Persian Order of the Sun and Lion, and the Order of the Iron Crown. (Medals in the lovely nineteenth century were larger than in this threadbare twentieth . . . he mused.) Then he attached his newer decorations: the Knight’s Cross of Leopold from 1909, the Great Cross of the Iron Crown with wartime ribbons, the Great Cross of the Order of Leopold with wartime ribbons earned at the beginning of the Great War, and the Cross for Service in War 1st Class, which he was awarded after recovering at the tedious sanatorium.
Spruced up like this, Boroevich set off into town, but already in the closed coach taking him to the Piazza della Borsa something began to itch where his medals were, so he unbuttoned his tunic and scratched at the discomfort. He did up the buttons again, but then the medals began to prick him some more. He got out on Piazza della Borsa and saw many other coaches in front of him. Where wa
s he going? Who had he fallen in love with? He stood there absent-mindedly and alone in the square as if he was someone other than the commander-in-chief of the army and as if no one knew him. Beads of sweat started to run down his forehead and onto his cheeks and chin, but he didn’t dare to wipe off the sweat or scratch at the itch again.
He didn’t greet anyone, and no one spoke to him. In haste, he hailed another closed coach. ‘To Gopchevich Palace!’ he ordered, almost shouting. Only when he reached his apartment did he settle down. He said no word to his batman and immediately got changed for bed. He fastened his medals to the dress uniform of the other Svetozar Boroevich and swore he would never wear them again. For months afterwards he was seen in an ordinary soldier’s uniform, and only the epaulettes showed that he was commander-in-chief of the Austro-Hungarian forces along the River Isonzo, which the Slovenians call the Socha. The junior commanders and troops loved him for it. It was 17 March 1916 when the field marshal thought he had worn his medals for the last time.
And it was four o’clock in the afternoon of 17 March 1916 when Apollinaire immersed himself in reading the Mercure de France, with salvos all around him. Bullets snarled past. He thought they sounded like the miaows of savage tomcats which had come late to February mating. He turned several pages of the magazine. Boom, dang, a rap against his helmet. A slight blow on the right, over his temple. Apollinaire ran his fingers over his head. There was a gaping hole in his helmet. Something warm ran down his cheek. Blood — his blood. He was evacuated to a collection point for the wounded. He had been hit by a piece of a 150mm shell. The chief doctor of the 246th Regiment bandaged his head. They took him to the canteen and put him to sleep. The next day, they extracted a jagged piece of shrapnel. Second Lieutenant Apollinaire spent seven hours with a foreign body in his head. Seven hours which would later cost him his life.
After the operation, he was transferred to the hospital in the Tuileries Palace. Already the next day he was awake. He wrote again. To his friends Yves Blanc and Max Jacob. He was fine, he wrote, just a little tired. Three days later they took radiographs. His head was pressed up against a large, cold photographic plate. He had an unbearable pain in his temple. They told him to keep still. He wasn’t told the results, but was sent to Val-de-Grâce hospital. There his friends Blanc and Jacob visited him. He was well, he said, but his left arm felt heavy. He lost consciousness from time to time and couldn’t remember the last few days. Or years. He had another operation in the annexe of Val-de-Grâce hospital, in the ‘Molière’ villa. They performed a trepanation and drained the swelling beneath the bone. Now he had a hole in his head and in the top of his skull as well. On 11 April 1916, he sent a telegram to his new sweetheart: Jacqueline.
The irritable artilleryman now needed a neurotic sweetheart who knew what neurosis was — her own and others’. Second Lieutenant Apollinaire returned to Paris. He liked to say he had a ‘fateful, star-shaped hole’ in his right temple. He moved back into his flat in Boulevard Saint-Germain. All his pre-war friends noticed he wasn’t the same any more. He had been irritable before, too, and inclined to get into fights for France, but this was altogether very different. He had been able to drink almost as much as Modigliani before, but now he drank like the parched earth. Demobilized Apollinaire was restless, moody and disenchanted, but that didn’t prevent him from regularly turning up in his impeccably ironed uniform with his Cross of Honour attached. He went out dressed like that to Café de Flore and attended the banquets of cowards and the galas of traitors. He went out but did not enjoy himself. And he was like that for the next twenty-seven months.
That’s how much Wilhelm Albert Wlodzimierz Apolinary de Kostrowicki, now known as Guillaume Apollinaire, had left of life: twenty-seven months.
FAR AWAY, TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH
My name is Ferry Pisano. I am a war correspondent. I would like to inform my readers about the terrible tragedy of an entire people, a calamity which began on the River Drim and ended among the orange and fig groves of the Mediterranean, as if an army had marched all the way to paradise. The Serbian nation is the only one to have lost its homeland in this Great War and to have embarked on such a trek. Much has been written in our press about the unprecedented Calvary of this roaming people which loves France and has turned its eyes to our battlefields in the West as if it had no trials and tribulations of its own. Our inglorious role in the exodus of the Serbs, the greatest after that of the Jews, can be considered common knowledge among the French and the other guilty Allies. We hesitated and mulled over the caprices of the Greek king and his Germanophile ministers, while a whole people was starving, fighting like a ghost given a semblance of life, and waiting for the succour of their great ally, France. For thousands it arrived too late. When it seemed their Calvary was over, it continued; when it seemed they were dead, they woke up alive; when it seemed they were alive, they were found buried in the snowdrifts with a smile on their lips and a blue eye fixed on the turquoise sky above the peaks of the Prokletiye range.
The story of one ordinary Serbian artillery officer can best illustrate this extraordinary path, which is almost beyond the imagination of us civilized peoples. Half way to the village of Castrades on the outskirts of Corfu city, heading along Empress Elisabeth’s cobbled boulevard, I found the camp I was looking for. There by the crystal Greek sea, in a lemon grove, the remaining Serbian Shumadiya artillerymen had pitched their tents. There was nothing there in the fragrant shade to show that they were artillerymen — neither guns nor horses. Only the cannons tattooed on the odd forearm told that these living skeletons in new British uniforms had once been gunners. Friends had advised me to seek out their officer, and he seemed to have heard I was coming. When he saw me he jumped to his feet.
‘Vive la France!’ he shouted, and then added: ‘I think we met four months ago by the Danube, when there was still a Serbia. We were together that night when German shells rained down on the Serbian positions. Together, in the hour of retreat, we cast one last glance down at the city of Belgrade from Osovac Heights. Are you Ferry?’
‘Yes, I am. Ferry Pisano, French newspaper reporter,’ I said. ‘And now I hear you have an unforgettable story for my readers.’
‘Yes, unfortunately. I’d rather forget it if only I could, but I can’t get it out of my mind,’ the artilleryman answered and continued: ‘You must be thinking of . . . how I got through with my men?
I nodded, and he continued:
‘I’m ashamed to say it, Monsieur, but I saved all the men you see here with lies. Oh, and how I lied!’
Before us, gleaming in the lovable sun of the south, stretched a warm lagoon reaching down to the sea and girt by papyrus, olive trees and palms — the same lagoon, where the shipwrecked Ulysses once came upon Nausicaa, the Phaecian princess, bathing and washing her blond hair.
‘If only you knew, Monsieur, how I lied to them. But what are lies? The truth is that I lied to deceive death. I saw it happen way back at our positions by the Danube. A wounded man with a sharp piece of shrapnel in his stomach, his mouth aflower with blood, was consigning himself to death. His gaze fixed on the heavens and death was upon him. But when the doctors moved him a little, we saw he was still alive; he just had no strength to lift his eyelids, and death had netted him and was dragging him away. I stayed beside that moribund soldier and said to him: “My son, you’re not dead!” Just like that, without any charm or black magic. I spoke firmly and loudly so the wounded man would hear me. Then I saw life return to his eyes, and I took heart and immediately lied again: “You have to live because we’re still going to trounce the Germans at the River Morava.” They carried the wounded man away, and all that day on the sandy river banks we tried to fight back the strange, terrible attackers who emerged from the mud, firing, and we fired back at them like at a swarm of locusts. I all but forgot the wounded man I had revived by lying. Then, Monsieur, soon after you and I cast that last glance at our white city, I saw my “dead” fellow again. He was alive and I was greatly enc
ouraged. I realized that my lies must have had some special effect, but I still had to assure myself.
‘Now I began to lie to my own men. Not all were to be saved by lying, but there were some where death had only a tooth-hold on them and I was still able to outwit it. Oh, how often I would need that skill! When we withdrew further south, to the Morava, and when we also had to quit those positions after less than a week, in a terrible rainstorm, I continued to go up to many of my half-dead soldiers and say to them “Arise, ye dead, we’re going to trounce the enemy in Kosovo.” And they arose, Monsieur. The wounded recovered from horrific bullet wounds; our surgeons even saved those with open heads — it was miraculous. Only the completely mutilated men, those from whom I was unable to entice one last glance, were lost forever and unable to be saved with lies. All the others returned to formation and went on, and such a hard road lay ahead of us.
‘On the banks of the Black Drim, the river into which we cast our cannons, strength left all of us. The hardest thing for an artilleryman is to be separated from his gun, and when the steel sank with a thud to the bed of the roaring river, my whole company cried. They all lost hope and began to lag behind. But as soon as one man fell, Monsieur, I was at his side and shouted: “On your feet, my lad! There are new guns waiting for us in Shkodër. On your feet, or the Hun will run you over for sure!” Not all of them jumped up straight away, and I fought many a tug-of-war with death, but I had become skilled and discovered many ways to deceive the grim reaper who was creeping over them. One time I countered it with an oath, another with a curse, and a third time with a rebuke. And my troops rose again. They were dead men while we were crossing through Albania, life was fast fading from them. As soon as one of them fell down from hunger, I dashed up to him and lied: “There is food for us ahead at the coast — food and drink in plenty. The Albanians are even making Serbian rakia there just for us. On your feet, laddy! Surely you want to try our good slivovitz there. Our rakiya makers have gone on ahead to set up stills.”
The Great War Page 25
