The Great War

by Aleksandar Gatalica

  ‘Why they believed me and kept on going, I don’t know. It seemed as if their feet walked by themselves into the jagged Albanian mountains, crossed rickety little bridges and hid in the thickets when hostile Albanians sniped at us. When we finally arrived on the coast there was no food, of course, nor our double-distilled plum brandy, but not one of my men accused me of lying. No, Monsieur, I lied to deceive death in them, and it screamed and shrieked and did its diabolical best to rob me of at least one man at the coast. But they still trusted me and weren’t angry at me. The men virtually demanded new lies because it was clear to them that a slow death was now climbing from their empty bellies to their throats.

  ‘And so I lied. I said to them: “The ships of our great ally France are already in the Strait of Otranto. Their white decks are waiting, staffed by nurses and Sisters of Mercy ready to allay your every suffering. On your feet my lads, my brave falcons!” My wretched children from Shumadiya and Rudnik jumped up, Monsieur, and, as if they had just received sustenance, continued to endure that seven-day starvation and terrible weariness, which was enough to fell a bull, let alone a man.

  ‘The ships finally arrived, and so it was that I got the men here, deceiving death in them all the time. Look at them: they are hardly more alive than they are dead. No one sings, and it seems they’ve forgotten how to laugh, but they’re alive. There are hundreds of them here, but there would only be a dozen if I hadn’t lied to deceive death in each of them at least several times. That is my story, Monsieur, so please convey it to our French friends.’

  A bell from a Greek convent on the tiny island in the middle of the lagoon rang through the calm, fragrant air, calling to evening prayer. On the horizon, the dark blue sky fused with the violet sea. My artilleryman got up and walked away towards his soldiers. Two or three of them were waiting for him at the edge of the lemon grove; it was almost as if they had been watching over him — it seemed strangely unsoldierly. He saluted them in passing and called out these last words to me through the shade of the heavy fruit:

  ‘Do you see that? My men are keeping tabs on me. Corfu city is only thirty minutes from here. Once I wanted to go, but my men stopped me. “I will come back,” I told them, and they said: “No, we don’t believe you any more.” I had lied to them so much that now they were afraid of me leaving them . . . Farewell, Monsieur Pisano.’

  And with that he went back to his camp.

  But I still owe my dear French readers the end of the story. I am writing these lines two weeks later. I have to tell you that that good officer who lied to deceive death in his men is no more. That last, fateful evening, his comrades did let him go for a little recreation in Corfu city. They didn’t send anyone with him. He drank just one ouzo in a tavern on the Corfu esplanade, they say, before collapsing onto the table and falling from his chair. His heart of gold couldn’t hold out. I wasn’t there with him. I could only find out a little about his story from a Greek in the town; they speak poor French, and I don’t speak Greek at all. I know almost nothing definite about the death of the artilleryman. Therefore I think: perhaps he opened his eyes in that last moment, but there was no one at his side to lie and deceive death in him.

  * * *

  Dear French readers, I am writing again from Hellas, a land at once happy and unhappy. Greece is happy because of its gods, the aquamarine depths of the Aegean and Ionian Sea, the generous sun and the clear rivers which moisten the ever-thirsty, gnarled earth of the southernmost Balkans; it is also unhappy because its people, maddened by the conduct of an unaccountable, self-willed monarch and his craven retinue, see enemies in friends, and trust enemies to be saviours of the Greek cause and crown.

  This atmosphere can be felt on the streets of Salonika; this thick, infected blood chugs through the Peloponnesian mainland; this by all means sickly condition can even be felt in the ordered olive groves fringing Mount Athos, which ought to be a source of clear and pious thought, like white sand silently pouring from an open hand.

  In this blighted land, a refugee people has found a safe haven. Many Serbs perished on the hard road to gentle Greece. That’s nothing new, some may say: the Israelites also remained in the sand of their memories when they left on their eternal exodus after the destruction of the Temple. And now an entire people leaves with its soldiers and is gone: the old and the young, barren women and mothers with babes in arms . . . but that’s not new either, someone will say: gypsy tents — families and whole tribes — left the red earth of India like that too, never to return to their native soil. But, dear French readers, I would like to tell you something truly unprecedented: the old monarch King Peter Karadjordjevich set off on that trek with his entire people and the last kernel of the vanquished army. He did not demand a train, let alone an aeroplane; rather, he left on that journey like one of his soldiers, plodding with his elderly step from town to town, over the Prokletiye range into Albania.

  That venerable old man has today found temporary and deceptive peace on the island of Euboea. He has made a small and exceedingly modest royal court for himself at the spa in Chalcis, where he received me. I almost didn’t recognize him: he was visibly thinner and wore a uniform, which looked as if it had been borrowed from a happier king far fuller than him. He grew a thick beard over his parched face and told me he was not going to shave it off, out of grief for his Fatherland. We spoke courteously for thirty minutes in French as if we were two Frenchmen, and then the king handed me over to his staff, who would explain me the workings of the world’s smallest court.

  I spoke with many of the trusted people close to the King and learnt how hard it is for them living in this ‘afterlife’, as the King calls it, but what ultimately surprised me most was the story of the King’s doctor. I came across this strange gentleman packing his suitcases on the sunlit veranda and preparing to leave.

  ‘I have to go, Monsieur, because I no longer enjoy the King’s grace,’ he told me. ‘As much as it irks me to say, I myself am probably to blame for my dismissal.’

  Three Greek priests came walking past the terrace; they continued along the sinuous road up the hill, counting their rosaries and silently mouthing prayers as they went. The comforting smell of cinnamon and vanilla wafted to us from afar, as if a girl was baking a cake for her beloved, while clouds straight from the early evening were gathering on the horizon.

  ‘Probably I wandered off into one of my dreams,’ Dr Simonovich said to me.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘You can trust me.’

  ‘I know, Monsieur. You are the war correspondent Ferry Pisano. You wrote so well about our war-torn, tormented homeland.’

  I nodded in confirmation, and he continued as if he was coming from far away and there would be no end to the story.

  ‘You see, the King is an extremely light sleeper. He is lost in space, and he no longer believes in the time at his disposal. That means he can wake up in the middle of the night and shout: “Hey, is there any living soul in this house?!” All of us who happened to be nearby would reply together: “We’re here, Your Majesty.” Then he would strike up an insignificant night-time conversation: “What have we got on tomorrow?” he would ask. “We have to tell the royal treasurer in Athens to wire 6,000 dinars to Geneva for Dobra Ruzhich,” his adjutant Djukanovich would reply. “Uh-huh. Go and get some shut-eye,” the old king would say and fall asleep again.

  ‘It was like that one night after another, and every night it got worse. At first, all of us woke up with a start and ran to our beloved king, but then the nightly commotion began to drain us so much that we agreed that the one in whom His Majesty had the most trust should sit on watch by the king’s chamber. That was naturally adjutant Djukanovich to begin with, but as the nights passed, this trustworthy man could no longer make do with so little sleep, so his place was taken by the emissary Zhivoyin Balugdzhich. When diplomatic duties prevented him too from sitting on watch near the king at night, he was replaced by the orderly, Colonel Todorovich, and ultimately by me.

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sp; ‘As the king’s doctor, I considered that I should stay at his side much longer, and since I’ve always been a light sleeper myself I didn’t think that being on watch near His Majesty would be particularly onerous, but I was mistaken, Monsieur. The king woke up first of all twice a night, then three times, and in the end so often that I couldn’t keep count. “Hey who’s there?” he would yell, and I would reply: “Dr Simonovich, Your Majesty, at your service.” “Uh-huh, good. Go and get some sleep.” And then again: “Hey, is there anyone here near me?” and me again: ”It’s me — Dr Simonovich,” and him, “Uh-huh, good. To bed then,” and so on, without end. After seven nights, the king wanted to replace me, but I refused categorically because I saw that his condition was ever more taking on the symptoms of an illness, which his doctor should be the first to notice.

  ‘I stayed on that dormant death-watch, but gradually I ceased to be any different to my patient. Since the king woke me up night after night, I learnt the ancient skill of the Roman patricians: I didn’t wake up completely but remained in a shallow doze, like I was dreaming, and answered his questions in a routine way. “What else have we lined up for tomorrow?” the king asked, and I replied haphazardly, combining real names with fictitious tasks. “We have to write to Vesnich in Paris that he subscribe to a French war loan of 30,000 francs,” I spoke as if in a delirium.’

  ‘And what happened then?’ I asked, becoming impatient now.

  ‘Ah, I was just about to get to that, Monsieur,’ this quiet and devoted man replied. ‘When the king had tormented me for so long that I could no longer connect real people, imitation tasks and vain hopes, one of my obsessions, which originated on our Calvary through Albania, began to tell. I had noticed something strange about my luggage. When I closed it, it contained all the usual medicines, ointments and remedies of our age. But when I opened it again at each of our destinations there were strange new medicines inside — tiny phials of different colours, strange powders smelling of mould, and syringes of an unbreakable, transparent glass I had never seen before. Please believe me, Monsieur, and don’t think I lost my mind back there in the ravines of Albania. To prove that I haven’t taken leave of my senses, I should say that I never stopped examining those new medicines, but I refused to treat anyone with them on principle. I closed and opened my wondrous luggage until one day I saw that it contained only my normal medicines again; and that strange game played by my luggage ended, thank God, when we set foot on Greek soil.

  ‘Let me briefly return to those nights, Monsieur. The king wore me out to such an extent that, like I say, I was no longer able to give him any kind of realistic reply. My technique of shallow waking made me more of a medical case than the king, and I began to reply to ordinary court questions with medical vocabulary, prescribing him medicines which I in no way wanted to use. Finally I heard myself say: “Your Majesty, your chest pains can be treated with broad-spectrum antibiotics.” Even today, I don’t know what “antibiotics” are and what kind of “spectrum” that is. The king kept waking up, and I kept prescribing him strange remedies. “My King,” I went, “your inflammation of the costal muscles is best treated with dichlophene, but it can affect the optic nerve if it is used for too long.” I didn’t know what “dichlophene” was, but the king noticed I was under strain and yesterday he ordered Colonel Todorovich to relieve me of my duties. “He doesn’t need a faith healer but a reliable doctor able to practice with the medicine of the day”. That is what he said, word for word, and that is why I am packing and leaving.’

  The Greek god Aeolus raised a wind from the west. A storm blew up suddenly and dispersed the smell of cinnamon and vanilla. Clouds of dust could be seen swirling over the land and they disturbed the small fish in the shallows, as if the doctor and I were two Prometheuses at the rock in the Caucasus and Zeus raised a tempest to frighten us.

  ‘The worst thing of all, Monsieur, is that I think those medicines are real and could definitely have helped my beloved king. But now I have to go. And where to — I don’t know. Whom should I serve, when I have no country? Whither should I wander, when my homeland is in my heart? Farewell, Mr Pisano.’

  And with that, the good doctor left. The story goes that he turned to drink and spent all he had earned in the king’s service on women and alcohol in Salonika, and there every trace of him vanished. Some say he risked his neck by crossing the squally Strait of Otranto, infested by German submarines, and made it to Italy on board the ship Laura; others tell of him taking refuge in the town of Aidipsos and trying to treat himself with those strange medicines, which he found again, and dying in the attempt. I’m afraid I don’t know what is true; people tell all sorts of stories. Now the smallest court in the world has a new doctor: a young man with blue eyes and such a soft voice that not even those near him can hear what he says.

  * * *

  Le Petit Parisien (based on agency reports from the Eastern Front)

  Germany has carried out poison-gas attacks from the air on the faraway Eastern Front. The invisible soldier chlorine, brainchild of Dr Fritz Haber, has shown that he loves to fly, loves to fall, and is even better at asphyxiating from the air than on the ground when he was released at our lines near Ypres from earthenware cylinders. Russian troops have perished en masse, and for that terrible chemist of death everything went successfully. Until one night. Soldiers from his gas unit, who were taken prisoner by the Russians, tell a strange story. Dr Haber had a dream. He saw a yellow-green cloud of chlorine which smelt like a mixture of pepper and pineapple. It separated from the big cumulus near Ypres, which had suffocated regiments of our soldiers and colonial troops in 1915. That cloud, which Dr Haber is said to have dreamed of, travelled from Ypres to Lille, from Lille to Mons, from Mons to Charleroi, from Charleroi to St Quentin, from St Quentin to Sedan, and then on towards Metz. The poisonous cumulus in the doctor’s dream entered Germany at Saarbrücken and continued on through the Palatinate Forest straight towards Karlsruhe. Driven by the high air-currents along the Rhine, it sank towards the ground and flitted past Bad Bergzabern and Oberhausen. When it passed Lake Knielingen and was near Karlsruhe, it only needed a few minutes to find the house of the chemist of death, Fritz Haber, at the very moment when the doctor’s wife Clara went out into the garden.

  The German POWs say that the chemist of death uttered all these place names in his sleep. He started screaming when he dreamed of his beautiful wife going out into the garden with the eyes of a captured beast and a pistol in her hand. He caught a glimpse of her, they say, pointing the barrel at her heart, but she never managed to fire. The yellow cumulus dissipated above her head. And everything immediately became clear to him. The eyewitnesses say that the dry lips of the chemist of death yelled ’Clara, Clara,’ when he woke up. We were unable to find out what Haber’s wife really died from, but if such a death befell her then both he and she certainly deserved it because only callous beasts could come up with such a terrible killer as chlorine, known to some as bertholite.

  * * *

  I am Ferry Pisano, the war correspondent. I would like to describe Greece and the Greeks for you, dear French readers. This land beneath the generous sun of the Aegean is home to a strange, sullen, introverted people. The Hellenes live in back courtyards, and their children spend too long behind the skirts of matrons and grandmothers, even when they grow up, and the old folk are eternally silent and absorbed in thought with a fag of chaffy tobacco between their teeth. One is like that, thousands are like that, so it is no wonder that the Greeks are confused in times such as these, and that some will come and give you a friendly pat on the back, while others come up and punch you. King Constantine, Queen Sophia of Hohenzollern, the dismissed Prime Minister Venizelos, the Germanophile Colonel Palis and the fickle chief of staff of the Greek army, Ioannis Metaxas: those are the faces of today’s Greece. The country would prefer to be on the Allied side, and to remain neutral in all matters with Turkey and Austria. That’s why everything is alive in Greece in 1916, and at the same time so dead.
Waking up here is more like being wrenched out of your sleep and brought to your feet than really getting up. From the very first, you are overcome by astonishment at being alive.

  When you go out into the street, you find yourself in the midst of that ‘treacherous bustle’ again, as the Serbian king once called it in an interview for French readers: Jews rushing to open their shops, and Bulgarians and Greeks also hurrying about, because Salonika has to play the role of a city at the crossroads every day: constantly hustling and haggling, and yet on good terms with the whole world in the evening. This practical spirit rubs off on the islands, too, so the islanders are ever looking to see what is good for them, and what not.

  On Corfu, that island of suffering and death, the emaciated Serbs were given shelter, although their number doubled the population of that green hill in the Ionian Sea. The locals’ way of thinking was basically like this: the French and British are helping the poor wretches, supplying them with new uniforms, and they will also order that they be provided with food and other essentials, which cannot be done anywhere but here on the island. But along with this primarily practical stance, the Hellenes of Corfu also became fond of the open-hearted Serbian skeletons, bewailed their fate and even set aside one quadrant of the peaceful sea near the little island of Vido to be their watery; so many had succumbed to exhaustion and disease that their lifeless bodies had to be consigned to that silent blue tomb. It seemed to the local Greeks that none of the Serbs would survive and every last one of them would die, but then that plucky peasant people got to its feet once more because it had finally learnt how to lie in order to deceive death itself, and now a little insular government began to reconstitute itself and call itself Serbia. The units of the three armies were reinforced, the pre-war government came together again, and all the ministries moved to the island and Corfu city in order to create the illusion of a capital, an administration and the whole life they left far behind, which they sing about in one of their most beautiful songs, Tamo Daleko.