The Great War

by Aleksandar Gatalica

  It was the evening of 6 January by the new calendar and Christmas Eve by the old when Rayner returned to his house in Royal Hospital Road. There he opened the wicker suitcase and took out his change of winter clothes, an empty tube of toothpaste, what was left of the bar of shaving cream, a brush, the Webley .455 revolver, and the photograph of a young woman in a small, silver oval. He kissed the photograph, prepared the winter clothes for washing, cleaned the gun and went to sleep. All was quiet in the house in Royal Hospital Road, and after his sixteen-day journey undertaken because of one single bullet, Oswald Rayner slept like a stone until morning.

  Five days earlier, Rasputin’s body had been found in Petrograd. Three uniformed men drew it from under the ice beneath the bridge to Petrovsky Island, and one of them asked himself as he laboured: ‘Who’s going to tell the tsaritsa?’ No one cried or as much as sighed. The three men concentrated on the massive, bloated corpse they were dragging; they hurried to get it off the ice, which could easily break and send them all to the bottom. When they reached the embankment, some boys rushed off to fetch a doctor. It so happened that they found Sergei Vasilyevich Chestukhin, the wartime neurosurgeon. While he was examining the dead body, back at his house on Runovsky Embankment little Marusya got up and went to aunt Margarita Nikolaevna. ‘Mama has fallen asleep and I can’t wake her up,’ she said. Aunt Margarita ran to the corner of the room and found the lifeless body of Liza Chestukhina. She screamed and then, as if she didn’t already share the house with a noted surgeon, shouted: ‘Get a doctor!’ Sergei Chestukhin confirmed the death of the tsaritsa’s once mighty friend very quickly, and then a man in a sable fur coat with a big fur hat came up and whispered in his ear: ‘Doctor, you are needed in your own house. You can use my coach.’ the coachman didn’t need long to drive his two horses and reach Runovsky Embankment, but Lizochka was beyond all help, and Sergei confirmed a second death that day — that of his copper-haired wife, the war hero Yelizaveta ‘Liza’ Chestukhina. He closed her eyes the colour of sepia for the last time. He didn’t cry when he recorded the cause of death. He didn’t sob when he told Marusya that Mama would be having a long sleep. And he didn’t burst into tears when he said he’d go up and have a little rest in his room. Only when he had closed the door behind him did Sergei start sobbing and pounding the bed with his fists so no one would hear the blows. Then he fell to his knees by the bed and prayed for Lizochka. In the end, he also spoke the name of Grigori Rasputin in his prayers.

  After all, he thought that the two of them — Rasputin and Liza — had gone before God at the same time, like one of so many chance meetings, and so it seemed appropriate that he should mention them both in his prayers.

  CORPORALS, CHAPLAINS AND HELMSMEN

  In the winter of 1916, Manfred von Richthofen became the Red Baron. After the death of his instructor Oswald Boelke, which was a heavy blow for him, Richthofen formed his own fighter group, an outfit known to German soldiers as the ‘Flying Circus’. The discipline implemented by the Red Baron among his pilots stood in stark contrast to the vivid assortment of colours the new German single-seaters were painted with. Richthofen demanded complete devotion, intensive planning and unconditional loyalty. The pilots were known to stand over maps for hours debating the best course of action. They knew every French and British opponent by name, including their predispositions and weaknesses. Operative intelligence was taken into account, and the meteorological conditions were not left to chance, yet . . .

  After all that, the Flying Circus went out onto the field to their planes, where their sweethearts were waiting for them, lined up like proper Prussian women. Every pilot had a wartime love, and airmen without a girl to kiss them before the flight could not belong to Manfred von Richthofen’s group. It was almost a ritual. The pilots would go up to their planes like jockeys to their horses before a race, and the sweetheart of each of them would be standing by the right wing. In concert, like a real unit, the pilots embraced their girls, who kissed them long and passionately. There was loud smooching, interrupted by shrieks and laughter here and there. The kisses were known to last several minutes; then the obedient Prussian lasses stepped back from the planes, laughing to each other and starting to chatter about whose darling had the coldest lips, and only then, depending on how their sweethearts had kissed them, did the pilots make the final decision on strategy for that day.

  The history of these kisses seems to have begun when the Red Baron, flying at great height, encountered Lanoe George Hawker, leader of the British 24th Squadron and one-time lover of ‘Magpie’ Lilian Smith. These two aces of their time fought a running battle with each other for five whole hours. Hawker fired a machine-gun and the pistol he always took with him on flights; Richthofen replied with his rapid-fire machine-gun. Brushing the tops of trees with his wheels in a low-altitude manoeuvre, the Red Baron finally managed to bring down the Briton, and after returning to base in Ostend he swore to his comrades and brother that the whole dogfight had been prefigured by his sweetheart and her kisses.

  From then on, the pilots ritually kissed their sweethearts, but no one beyond the squadron was allowed to find out about their superstition, not even their superior officers. How happy the German infantry were to see them over Verdun or the Somme, flying in their bright colours through rents in the sky and puffs of anti-aircraft fire, and no one knew that the Prussians’ loop-the-loops and evasive zigzags were determined by their faithful Prussian girls.

  One gloomy afternoon in December 1916 on the northern French front near Fumay, Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler, one of three surviving couriers of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment (named the ‘List’ Regiment after its first commander), also happened to see the Flying Circus overhead and gave them the military salute. Then the lance corporal immersed himself in reading the first book he had purchased during the Great War. It was a literary guide to Berlin by Max Osborn, a presumptuous war reporter, amateur Satanist and intellectual general practitioner from the capital. Just before the war, with the evident authority of the ignorant, Osborn demanded that his Berlin publisher put out ‘his’ view of the German capital, where the classical Greek austerity of the Prussians was being made to cohabit with the flagrant decadence of the city’s newcomers. Osborn’s Berlin now occupied the young lance corporal to such an extent that he immediately decided to find out more about the author. That he was an intellectual who combined the incompatible instantly attracted him; that he was a Satanist didn’t bother him; and when Hitler learnt he was a war reporter, he promptly made efforts to get hold of the paper which Osborn wrote for.

  When Hitler procured a copy of the journal with the somewhat pompous title Reiter in deutscher Nacht (Rider in German Night), he was stuck for the first time by a wave of wartime images as real as if they were made of trench clay and chunks of human flesh. “German soldiers in their spiked helmets, with their bayonets turned skywards, seem to me a latter-day incarnation of the pikemen from sixteenth-century frescoes,” wrote Osborn in one issue of Reiter in deutscher Nacht, and the lance corporal simply couldn’t wait for the next issue to be delivered to him at the front in northern France. The long-expected journal finally arrived. Osborn wrote: “The flame-throwers spouting fire through clouds of smoke remind me of the blazes laid by our venerable seventeenth-century dukes to purge the land of heathens and savages, and the herald rushing here and there about the field through that suffocating, dim dawn on his black charger — man and proud beast both in gas masks — could be straight from a scene etched by Hieronymus Bosch.”

  Thanks to pieces such as these, fighting and dying became imbued with meaning, and Hitler began to think that Osborn was somewhere nearby, observing him too, and would write something equally intoxi­cating about him. From then on, he had a constant companion, a god watching over him, and he felt he had to be worthy of Osborn’s patriotic columns for the Berlin press at all times. When he was offered a promotion, Hitler declined in the hope that Osborn would find out and report on it. One issue of the journal a
rrived after another, but there was no write-up on his heroic gesture. So Hitler imagined what Osborn would have written: ‘The young lance corporal, who was to be promoted after heroically delivering a vital message but declined the higher rank with the words “I was only doing my duty”, resembles a knight of Barbarossa’s in Syria, who, entering Damascus, declines the offerings of the subject people and with his right hand blesses them as new Christians.’ Oh, how dizzying this was for one ordinary Meldegänger (courier). The imaginary Osborn was far better than the real one. Hitler stopped subscribing to the journal and began penning a panegyric of himself in his little notebook. He wrote ‘Wartime Memoirs’ on the title page, and signed it ‘Max Osborn’.

  Everything looked finer and nobler now. Knights and their squires took to the battlefield, accompanied by armourers and swordsmiths. When he had to deliver even the least important message, marked with only one ‘X’, Hitler would mount his horse and search with his eyes for the omnipresent front-line reporter. Since he didn’t find him, he would deliver the message and then note in his ‘Wartime Memoirs’: the figure of the rearing steed, its open mouth and the clenched, white teeth of horse and rider relaying the message could be from a scene in one of Wagner’s operas I saw recently in Bayreuth.’ But his tasks became ever more boring and absurd. When heavy rains brought everything to a halt at the front in the last weeks of 1916, Hitler and another courier were sent to search the nearby villages for new mattresses for the troops. The villages behind the front line were deserted, and the German soldiers had renamed them, giving free rein to their debased battlefield fancies: Cursed Cabin, Oven, Dead Swine. The couriers Hans Lippert and Adolf Hitler started off towards Oven. The hunt was successful: in a manor house, they found two mattresses in the cellar with hardly any traces of mould and without bedbugs.

  On the way back, this scene took place: courier Hitler was carrying both mattresses because his comrade Lippert had a higher rank — exactly the one Hitler declined in the hope of being noticed by the battlefield correspondent Max Osborn. Hitler sweated beneath the mattresses, but Lippert had the leisure to stroll and talk about whatever entered his head. He spoke about a prostitute from Hamburg, who the whole port city took leave of when she died. Hitler tried to think how he would describe this undignified, humiliating work of mattress lugging in his notebook, where he recorded Osborn’s words. Lippert then whistled as they went along. When the two couriers were passing through Oven and making for the trenches, Lippert said offhandedly: ‘Oh Adi, you mightn’t have heard: that war correspondent Max Osborn was killed. Not that he couldn’t write, but it pissed me off that he was always shadowing me and comparing me with some old knights and venerable dukes.’ Hitler held his tongue. Lippert kept blabbing on as they walked. Finally the mattresses were delivered. Still bathed in sweat, courier Hitler took up his notebook. Was he stunned? Did he mourn for his god Osborn? No. He wrote a splendid entry about two couriers heroically supplying the whole of the List Regiment for months.

  Florid was the German which Lance Corporal Hitler set down in his album as Osborn’s notes. To write and speak German like that was the dream of Zhivka the seamstress in occupied Belgrade, but she had never been good at languages. Business had now taken a definite turn for the better. Zhivka was still attractive, and as a broad-shouldered blonde she even resembled a German woman from the north. The war had left no trace on her, and she light-heartedly considered the occupation of Belgrade a stroke of luck and a chance for something positive to happen to her. Her shop in Prince Eugene Street was frequented exclusively by men in uniform, and ever since Dr Schwarz, the Administrator of Belgrade, had given it the official stamp of approval, her clientele was expanding. And every single one of them seemed to Zhivka a gentleman: more like lost, well-mannered children than soldiers prepared to kill. Many came to her shop with unrepented crimes preying on their minds, which they didn’t dare to tell Zhivka about. Some even cried while she sewed their uniform or changed the lining of a winter coat. She was particularly fond of one hussar who kept coming in with a torn pocket. No sooner had she stitched up one than he would tear a hole in the other, and there he was again at the door of her shop. He rang the bell, the smile on his lips revealing his buck-teeth, and pointed to his pocket. It was for the sake of that hussar that she learnt her first German word, Tasche (pocket), and later her whole life would change because of him. The hussar’s name was . . . but perhaps that’s not so important here.

  People remember only the names of the great — like those who are lit up by the limelight on stage. One such figure was Florrie Forde, a music-hall singer in London. She thought fate had smiled at her when her only real rival, Lilian Smith, had to leave the city in a hurry. That ‘stuffed magpie’ with the beady blue eyes no longer stood in the way of Florrie’s success, and overnight she became the most popular singer of ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’. It was an opportunity for her to consolidate her position in the London theatre scene of 1916 and to finally bring out all the Englishness she could muster.

  That would not have been anything out of the ordinary if Mrs Forde had not been Australian. She was born Flora May Augusta Flannagan in 1875 in Fitzroy, Victoria, a place renowned for its quality horses and horse handlers. Her father and brothers knew all about horses and wanted to marry her to someone in their circle, but Florrie had higher plans for her future. When she set off for London in 1897, a little golden dust from the Australian outback travelled with her. Some would have been proud of that, but not her: when she found that dust at the bottom of her suitcase, she immediately had someone in to clean it away.

  In England, Florrie Forde went to elocution lessons to change her accent, and as the twentieth century dawned, she felt she had shed her last residual Australian identity. Now she considered herself an Englishwoman above all else. During the Great War, Florrie Forde had a nice flat on the second floor of a house in Royal Hospital Road. She never met the agent Oswald Rayner, who lived in the same street, but she was acquainted with all the musical refugees in London. She was constantly inviting Eugène Ysaÿe and the young Arthur Rubinstein to tea. ‘Oh, What a Lovely War’ and ‘Daisy Bell’ were the songs she performed most often, but ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ was the wartime hit she thought she sang the best. Only here she was up against a great rival who was evidently more successful.

  When Lilian Smith was caught in 1915 and disgraced for actually being a German — a stroke of good luck for Florrie Forde — this ‘real Englishwoman’ started giving one charity concert after another. She seized this opportunity to distinguish herself and stated for the press like a true star that she didn’t understand how anyone could bring such shame on their homeland, which she loved above all else.

  So it was that she became the first among the patriotesses. ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ was forever on her lips up until one evening, when an unknown admirer unexpectedly opened the door of her dressing room. Unusually, the door was not locked. The corridor was empty, which was also unusual. No one would later be able to say how that stranger got into the theatre. Blinded by the glare of the light bulbs around her large mirror, Florrie could see only his enormous silhouette, which took up almost the entire doorway, his black moustache and a furrowed face. The unknown man said enigmatically: ‘You just sing this song tonight, madam. You just sing your “Tipperary”, that will be for the best.’ Then he left. He didn’t speak to anyone else, and no one saw him leave. Florrie Forde became frightened. She had noticed straight away that the unknown man didn’t speak English properly.

  Florrie didn’t realize that the intruder was actually just a drunk, and that he didn’t express himself in English terribly well because his native language was Gaelic. The unmasking of Lilly Smith was still fresh in her mind, so it is not surprising that she thought someone might be trying to drag her into a spy affair too. That evening, she sang the well-known patriotic hit, but as she stood in the spotlight beams she was preoccupied with happenings in the hall. A man in the seventh row g
ot up inexplicably and made half the row stand up so he could get out. A little girl kept crying and screaming ‘Mummy’, while others tried to quieten both the mother and her pampered child. A man in the gallery kept his opera glasses conspicuously trained on Florrie the whole time.