‘Just a minute,’ I said nevertheless, ‘are you trying to say that Birot’s postcards wrote themselves?!’
‘I don’t know, Monsieur, I’m just a saddler and magic is beyond me, but this should definitely be a story for the French papers. Do you want the cards, perhaps? All of them written in Dimitriye’s hand after his death. Would you like someone to translate them for you?’
‘No need, thank you. I believe what you say, and you have a whole dozen of Birot’s postcards there — not just two.’
Having said what was pressing him, the fellow got up and took off with giant steps, swaying on his skinny, spidery legs. I was left alone, with more questions than answers. Salonika has definitely become a lively place, I thought, with fellows like that out and about.
MIRACLE CURES AND OTHER ELIXIRS
‘Dear bird from Benin’. Thus begins one of the letters written at the beginning of 1916 and addressed to Picasso by Lucien Guirand de Scevola, the former stage designer in avant-garde theatres, former radio-telegrapher, former magus who saw the French soldiers choking near Ypres, and former dramaturge of the first and last theatre piece in the trenches in 1914. First of all, we have to affirm that Scevola was alive. He didn’t write on Birot’s postcards which wrote themselves after the death of the soldier, but used two sheets of paper and filled them with his own handwriting. In this letter, Scevola boasted a little to Pablito (he was far from the only one to do so) and flattered him in the extreme on several accounts, before getting to the main point: he asked him if the bird from faraway Benin finally wanted to join in the Great War — as a cubist in the camouflage section!
Attempts at concealing heavy guns had begun immediately after the outbreak of the Great War. A decorator, whose name has not been recorded, came up with the idea of hiding a gun and its crew beneath a canvas painted with the colours of the surrounding underbrush and leaves of French trees in the autumn. A trial was carried out at positions near Toul. Headquarters ordered a plane to fly over and reconnoitre the area where the soldiers with the large-calibre gun were camouflaged. The pilot didn’t see anything except the undergrowth and lovely plane trees with their autumn leaves. But soon afterwards a storm blew up and carried the first camouflage canvas straight to the enemy trenches; fortunately for the French, no one realized what this colourfully painted covering full of holes was for.
Several months later, Scevola radioed a dispatch to the supreme command from his position in Pont-à-Mousson. On the strength of his stage-design experience and considerable imaginativeness, he proposed a revolution in camouflage: colouring the very guns and faces of the soldiers, and setting up wooden huts around them hung with colourfully painted surfaces of firm material which would not blow away to the enemy trenches so easily. That was the reason for de Scevola writing to Picasso at the beginning of 1916. It is not known if the ‘bird from Benin’ replied to the letter, but Scevola did well with or without Picasso.
In the spring of 1916, he founded the first camouflage unit in the history of warfare. The thirty volunteers donned light-blue uniforms with a golden-yellow chameleon on their sleeve, embroidered on a red field. Scevola also invited the other cubists, and they responded to his call. The thirty volunteers became thirty sergeants in a company of alcoholics, who still had klosterlikör on their minds but weren’t allowed to drink it any more because it was a nasty Boche drink. A company made up of artists and decorators — what a novelty for all the artistes of the Parisian bohème. These painters, who had been considered supporters of ‘Boche art’ and artists in the service of various Uhdes and Tannhäusers, were now all working for the good of the French Fatherland! And not only that. All of them, to a man, had sworn they were diehard cubists, and now they began to paint the first wartime surfaces in the formerly despised style of intersecting pentagons and squares. Paintings which before the Great War were most often accused of not resembling anything at all, now, in these times of immediate danger, turned out to be the only ones able to resemble everything. The camouflage started off being in motley colours. These ‘harlequin disguises’, as war hero Apollinaire called Scevola’s work, brought the first camouflage unit initial acclaim, but our pre-war stage designer felt he had not nearly attained his goal. Now was the moment to make a name for himself after having failed in Montmartre and Montparnasse. This was the time, he thought, when he would become the first artist to paint with life itself, or rather with death.
Just where the decision to make the first French camouflage efforts more ‘lively’ would take him, he was soon to find out. The harlequin disguises were just the beginning, and one idea of Commander Scevola’s overtook another. He called the next step ‘deployed camouflage’. The intention was simple: to continue camouflaging real units of the French army with harlequin colours and wooden screens in the hues of leaves and bushes, but to additionally set up dummy emplacements with dummy soldiers, which would compel the enemy to shell an image rather than its essence. ‘Original,’ some tired generals said. It could almost have been called philosophical, if that were not an exaggerated term for a gruesome idea soon to be abandoned.
But for the time being, deployed camouflage was the order of the day. For weeks, Commander Scevola trod the muddy roads behind the front lines; great blue-grey clouds accompanied him when he drove up to the Headquarters of the French army in his armoured car and explained his advanced ideas to the generals, who all wore dark circles under their eyes. Deployed camouflage was finally authorized. Now two thousand more of Old Libion’s regulars received work, which he definitely did not approve of. All of them were failed sculptors, recruited at short notice from the ranks of old-fashioned eternal students and new-fashioned candidates of the Salon des Indépendants. They looked like long-bearded, untidy, somewhat uncultured and self-indulgent Home Guard conscripts, but they all became men of character, figurative sculptors who now fashioned the heads of dummy soldiers at dummy emplacements.
Several kilometres of true-to-life trenches were dug at various locations near Bois des Loges, Toul and Pont-à-Mousson in the middle of clover fields with fleet-footed hares. The German artillery proceeded to pound them with ‘coal boxes’ and at first hit mainly the dummy soldiers and occasionally a poor hare. The troops came through it all safe and sound. Scevola was beside himself with joy, but the German artillerymen in the third year of the war were not nearly as orderly and precise. Shells soon began raining down on the real soldiers too. It was like that for one day, and a second. Scevola’s sculptors worked hard to make new dummy emplacements, but the commander of the first camouflage unit knew his superiors wouldn’t be satisfied. On 21 May 1916, a ceasefire was agreed. The stretcher-bearers went out into churned-up no man’s land like onto an Elizabethan stage, like Shakespearean heroes searching for their dead and dragging them back from the boards. This brief ceasefire gave Scevola the opportunity to inspect the positions and his dummy emplacements. He noticed the dead bodies and stopped.
No, death didn’t shock him: he had seen it in so many stark forms that he could have compiled a whole herbarium of death. It was something else which halted his step. Not distinguishing life from death, the stretcher-bearers gathered everything they came across. Together with his dismembered dummies made of plaster, there were also real, human heads, arms and shanks in army boots. Commander Scevola immediately wrote to his superior officers and phrased his letter in Spartan spirit: ‘This is the chance for our dead comrades to continue the fight against the enemy’, and he came up with the idea of manning the dummy emplacements not with plaster models but with the heads and other remains of real soldiers! He would preserve them, he claimed, so they didn’t smell and bother anyone. When they had fulfilled their fate and been killed a second time, he would return them to their relatives so they could be buried as heroes who gave their lives for France twice and earned two bravery medals!
That was unheard-of, but the soldiers and officers at the French positions in 1916 had had their fill of poison. If it was 1914 and the officers still
had some vestige of pre-war humanity, the idea would have been rejected with disgust. Scevola would have been disciplined and the unit of good-for-nothings disbanded. But now the idea — at least initially — was authorized with praise.
The French army’s new ‘metaphysical positions’ were gruesome indeed. Scevola calling them a ‘remarkable new means of defence’ didn’t help. Heads and body parts from Bois des Loges were transported to positions near Toul, and those from Toul to imitation trenches near Pont-à-Mousson so that the surviving soldiers would not have to look at the leering faces, jaws full of golden teeth and the broken arms of their former comrades who now, preserved, stood like the Lacedaemonians of yore and faced a second death. But the men were still aghast, despite being protected by rows of embalmed, new comrades. Involuntarily, they imagined their own death: being torn apart by a shell near Toul and their desiccated head then being sent to the dummy emplacements near Bois des Loges, and their arms and legs to Pont-à-Mousson. As distraught and despondent as they were, the living soldiers found no consolation in such concealment, while the junior officers were quick to ingratiate themselves with senior command by praising the work of the first camouflage unit and proudly playing down their own casualties in reports. Dissatisfaction was rife, but the end of the Gothic camouflage endeavours was ultimately brought about by the German artillery. It pounded the French positions at random for three or four days, like before. Hundreds gave their lives for the Republic for the first time, and hundreds for the second time, and soon no one saw any reason to continue the horrible practice of concealing the positions. The bodies of the last Spartans were reconnected as best as could be done and returned home. The conscripted sculptors and cubists were sent back to Paris, much to the joy of Old Libion and Old Combes, and Lucien Guirand de Scevola passed into complete anonymity, as if he himself had given his life not just once but twice for la patrie.
On the German side, however, it was still being demanded of a particular soldier that he serve his Fatherland. It was still being expected of Hans-Dieter Huis that he sing and that he join the noble German cause in the Great War as a soldier, in typical German fashion. But the celebrated singer still had no voice at the beginning of 1916. Perhaps it was because of Elsa, who took poison because of him in the distant nineteenth century. Or perhaps it wasn’t. Everything told him that he should not sing, but the maestro was a German and the Germanic in him drove him to try and not give up. He heard that his name was still being mentioned in military hospitals and that soldiers were dying to the story about the Christmas Eve singing between the trenches near Avion. Therefore he decided to find his wartime acquaintance Theodora von Stade, the great soprano from Leipzig, with whom he had sung for the Crown prince back in 1914.
Where they met is not important, how she comforted him does not concern us, and it would be best to pass over the grating screech of the maestro’s frayed vocal cords when they tried to sing together. All that is relevant about maestro Huis’s last attempt to sing is that Theodora recommended him a laryngologist, down south beyond Landwehr Canal, who ran a private practice and treated only a select clientele.
She had recommended him, so what was there for him to lose?
The next day, we see the great Huis on the outskirts of Berlin, taking the road which strikes out into the country behind the city’s last houses. Some birds were flying high in the sky as if trying to flee the Earth, but he didn’t see them. He stopped before a red-brick building and looked back as if he was the shady character, not the doctor he had come to see. He was holding a bundle under his arm, wrapped in wax paper.
Surrounded by the arms of the canal and concealed by the rustling reeds and water lilies of the marshy Berlin plain, worked Dr Straube, who charged for his services exclusively in geese and goose fat. What brought Huis to this enormous man, whose round face looked as if not even his moustache would cling to it, resembling as it did a pair of black butterflies about to take flight?
‘I no longer have faith in money,’ the doctor said. ‘This is 1916 and, let’s face it, we’re losing the war. Now I only believe in good Berlin goose. What have you got for me? Aha, a good half kilo of goose fat, two drumsticks — hm, they don’t smell the best — and some giblets. Heavens, that’s not much, it’s hardly anything, but I suppose this is 1916. Alright, I accept. Here’s your potion: take it three times a day. What? Come on, surely you don’t think I need to examine you. This is 1916, after all. I was told about your ailment in advance, and I’ve heard you singing so many times that, believe you me, I’ve already as good as examined you several times at the Deutsche Oper! There you go, three times a day. Mud in your eye, and good singing!’
Huis left with the potion and took it three times a day. It stank of tannis root. Nothing happened at first. The singer regretted having gone to such effort to buy the pieces of goose for the doctor, but then, one ordinary Tuesday, his voice returned all by itself. How happy Hans-Dieter Huis was, and how much he, treacherously indeed, felt himself a soldier again. Within a day, or two at the most, he was able to sing his whole repertoire once more, but then . . . the greatest lyric baritone of the German stage seemed to mutate. His voice became higher. Within a week or two it had risen to the next higher vocal register, that of the tenor baritones. That’s it then, he thought dumbfounded: that’s oblivion. What was left for him now was the opera, the unknown territory of tenor roles, and forgetting the root of his fame: Don Giovanni. He would never be able to sing it again with the new voice.
The soldier Huis withdrew from the street completely and shut himself away in his house. He shunned all contact, including his doctor and his superiors. He frantically began to learn new roles. How lovely it was to be a newly-fledged tenor, and he sang the role of Monteverdi’s Orpheus to himself, and then Samson and Florestan too. He thought he could start a new career as a dramatic tenor, but his voice continued to rise and became even squeakier. On the tenth day after him starting to sing again, it moved to an even higher register and became buffo tenor, and he took pleasure in that, too. He began singing things he previously never could. Mozart again, and the role of Don Basilio, and then Wagner’s Mime and much else besides, but not for long. Two weeks after he had begun to sing again, he arrived at the even higher register of lyric tenor, apt for the roles of André Chénier, Tamino in the Magic Flute and Faust. But he finally had the urge to perform and now put the music of Mozart’s Requiem on the piano. Astonishment gripped not only Berlin but the whole of Germany all the way to the trenches on the Western Front, when the former baritone Hans-Dieter Huis intoned ‘Tuba mirum’ from Mozart’s Requiem like a real German lyric tenor. The fluctuations in the maestro’s voice were put down to the war and the influence of stress of some kind, and his performance at the Deutsche Oper again drew storms of ovations, just like in peacetime. Only one listener didn’t clap. He was an enormous man, whose round face looked as if not even his moustache would cling to it, resembling as it did a pair of black butterflies. ‘Mr Lepidoptera’ only smiled and left the hall of the Deutsche Oper in Unter den Linden Street.
The same day as Huis finished his last performance before a human audience, King Peter Karadjordjevich felt the urge to write an entry in his diary. He took his pen and began, only to pause again after a few words and raise his pen from the paper. His hand hovered over the first, unfinished sentence: ‘We, the kings, tsars and emperors, bear the most blame.’ He thought that the monarchs ought to end the Great War and that 1916 could be the year of the kings if only rulers had the desire to look beyond their silk and ermine. In wounded Europe, almost all of them were related: uncles fought nephews, fathers warred with daughters married abroad, and grandfathers made their grandchildren mortal enemies. Where were the emissaries, those plump, suspicious fellows in thick fur coats, to deliver princely letters to the emperors of the opposite warring sides? He wanted to record all this in his diary, but he stopped. Did his heart not also harbour grave objections to one of his own relatives, Victor Emmanuel III, King of Italy;
did he not consider King Nicholas of Montenegro, his father-in-law, to be a Pharisee, swindler and buffoon? Was it not rather exaggerated to believe in 1916 as the year of the kings? And what was up with the great French Republic?
In that dumbfounded Republic, civilians continued to fight recklessly against the war. In June 1916, the ‘Salon d’Antin’ exhibition was held in the gallery next to fashion designer Paul Poiret’s atelier. It lay at the end of a beautiful avenue, which intersected gardens rather like those of Versailles. Here André Salmon brought together French and foreign artists and appealed to their sense of solidarity. This gathering represented the cream of the unrecruited and demobilized: at Picasso’s side Matisse, next to them Fernand Léger and the recently demobilized Italian soldier Giorgio de Chirico, and then Gino Severini, Moïse Kisling, Kees van Dongen and Max Jacob. Guillaume Apollinaire stood in a place of honour, his head in a turban.
André Salmon spoke and tried to out-yell the clamour. When the crowd finally calmed down, words in German began to be heard from somewhere. No one knew who was speaking them; they simply sounded like an echo of the French. Salmon tried to yell, but everyone kept turning around to look. The unrest grew into chaos, and the stampede of the assembled artists almost threatened to kill the surviving cream of French modern art. The Salon d’Antin ended in fiasco, and in the confusion no one is likely to have noticed that Picasso’s Demoiselles d‘Avignon was exhibited on one of the walls for the first time. When everyone else was outside, Pablo Ruiz returned alone to the space where the German words had rung. He took his picture off the wall and carried it away without a word. He hadn’t planned to put it on show anyway. As he was passing through the lovely park near Poiret’s atelier with the picture, he heard a voice say: ‘They’ve played a nasty game on us.’
The Great War Page 28
