Had he fallen asleep or not? He couldn’t remember. He got up as if he was strong and well rested. He sat on the edge of the bed in his nightshirt and didn’t reach for the bell or get out the chamber pot from under the bed. He looked and saw that someone was coming to visit. At first, he recognized Crown prince Rudolf, who had killed himself back in the nineteenth century, even though it had been a nicer century than this. After him came the late Empress Elisabeth of Austria, also known as Sisi; and behind her the heir presumptive Franz Ferdinand and the Duchess of Hohenberg with their bullet wounds. Were the visitors crying? Moaning? No, it was more of a rustling like the sound of sheets in the wind. They wanted to tell him something, but their voices failed them. They moved in circles around his bed, deathly white, naked, wretchedly built, with coats of fat which looked as if they had been pinned onto the bone like formless sacks — but he was not afraid. He tried to read from their lips what they wanted to say to him. But what was it? Empress Elisabeth of Austria had the smallest mouth but spoke the most clearly. He tried to halt her, but she tore herself from his grasp and continued to circle his bed with the others. He would have to wait for her to pass and catch the movements of her lips in flight as they now danced in a bacchanalian frenzy, flinging their heads back and turning them so he couldn’t read their lips at all. Now they were tirelessly repeating one and the same refrain like satyrs. Empress Elisabeth turned, and her mouth was pointing right towards him. She said . . . what did she say? It was a date she spoke: ‘11 November 1918!’ Now he saw the other mouths too. Yes, Franz Ferdinand was saying the same, and the Duchess of Hohenberg and Crown prince Rudolf too. Charles thought that was the day when an attempt would be made on his life. Nothing else. All the deceased aristocrats were warning him about the same thing.
He woke up, or perhaps he hadn’t been asleep at all. There was no one near him now. Without thinking, he grabbed the bell. He asked for a stargazer to be brought to him. The best were in Bavaria, where there seemed to be thousands of them. They could almost have set up shop in the high streets and predicted the future for soldiers and their mothers: the date of the young man’s death or his happy homecoming. Charles asked for the best, while the staff of the late Emperor Franz Joseph looked at each other in astonishment. Nevertheless, two of them travelled all the way to the dubious quarters of Munich and came back with a magus who had been recommended to them by several knowledgeable people. His name was Franz Hartmann and he had a far better opinion of himself than the people around him, who called him ‘Dirty Franz’. Hartmann claimed to have learnt the ropes of the occult in Madras and to have returned to Germany in 1907, after which he ensured himself a place in theosophist societies through his skill and powers alone, whatever evil tongues might say. He called himself Franz of Bavaria, as if he was a duke. Now he was brought before the emperor and listened carefully to what the emperor told him in confidence. Afterwards the stargazer withdrew into a chamber with his astral maps and other aids. Seven hours later he emerged triumphantly. ‘Your Majesty,’ he exclaimed, ‘that is the day when an attempt will be made on your life, but you will survive that attack on 11 November 1918. Nothing else need worry you. By then, our countries will already have won the Great War. There is no reason to be concerned, I assure you.’
Several days later it was the New Year. Charles I waited in white Belvedere palace. His gaze wandered off down the green avenue and further, into the city. He was surrounded by subjects who drank and ate at his table as if it was their last meal. Even the generals were wolfing down mouthfuls of cold turkey before they had finished the previous ones. But Charles wasn’t concerned. He didn’t realize that even the most senior government officials and army commanders were hungry. Shortly before the New Year 1917 he was even a little cheerful, groundlessly so. That is how the last Austrian emperor saw in the New Year 1917.
Old Libion and Old Combes saw in the New Year 1917 with raids. Dozens of uniformed gendarmes on bicycles arrived in front of their respective cafés and started arresting the tipsy artists, who had just been drinking to the freedom of the French people and were now mortally insulted. Neither Old Libion nor Old Combes felt sorry for those freakish, so-called artists. Those who were released from custody first would be back the very next day, and the others would come as soon as they got a first whiff of freedom themselves. Both publicans wondered if the raid had been only on their own café. Each of them immediately sent their errand boy, and the two almost collided in the middle on the way to check whether the rival had also been blitzed. The café owners breathed a sigh of relief when they heard that the gendarmes on wheels had ‘visited’ both places simultaneously. Everything was alright then. It was just part and parcel of seeing in the New Year 1917, they said to themselves, and about three hours after midnight each of them closed his café for the evening.
For the actor Béla Duránci, the Great War ended at New Year’s Eve 1917 when Emperor Franz Joseph visited him for the last time. The emperor had his familiar face from 1879, with a combed, silky moustache, and called from the door of the room loudly enough for him to hear but quietly enough so as not to wake the other patients: ‘Minden jó’. To which Duránci replied ‘Minden szép’, and then fell into a sleep, from which he would never wake up.
To usher in the New Year 1917, Guillaume Apollinaire threw one of his legendary parties in his flat in Boulevard Saint-Germain. He sat in the middle of the merry gathering, with a turban on his head like a sultan and telling anecdotes. In keeping with the fashion of the third year of the war, everyone present was smoking a clay pipe. He was surrounded by folk less significant than him who he called ‘young’ and ‘intelligent’. Among them was Giorgio de Chirico. He laughed at Apollinaire’s jokes and worried when the ‘sultan’ retired before midnight due to feeling so run-down.
Jean Cocteau, the former member of an aviation unit near Bussigny, and then of the Paris army-supply office and medical corps under Étienne de Beaumont, saw in the New Year 1917 in groundless good cheer. He swore to make it a custom for the years to come that he would welcome each New Year with merrymaking, even if the Great War lasted a decade. A promise he went on to fulfil.
The girl of a woman Kiki was promiscuous on New Year’s Eve. She made love on the workshop floor with three pairs of boots. In the end she was left simply exhausted and drained.
Fritz Haber slept through New Year’s Eve 1917. He thought of nothing and dreamed of nothing.
Svetozar Boroevich von Boina also spent New Year’s Eve sleeping. He was in pyjamas. Both uniforms stayed in the wardrobe and had a whale of a time seeing in the New Year 1917 without their wearer.
After the fiasco of his gruesome camouflage positions, Lucien Guirand de Scevola ceased to be real, so how he saw in 1917 was utterly unimportant.
Hans-Dieter Huis saw in the New Year 1917 alone. He didn’t speak with anyone because he had lost his voice. To be precise, he hadn’t quite lost his voice, but his throat continued to sound squeaky and ever squeakier, and soon it went beyond the range of human hearing. That was the end of his career. Or maybe it wasn’t.
Walther Schwieger was quite the opposite: he didn’t lose his voice. And the fact that he had lost a second submarine didn’t worry him. His U-20, the shark which had sunk the Lusitania, ran aground on 4 November 1916 just off the Danish coast. Commander Schwieger disembarked the crew, mined the vessel, surveyed the sea and blew up the U-20. In the port of L. he was immediately given a new submarine, the U-88, which would later become his tomb, and he continued his previous mission. For the New Year 1917, too, he locked himself into his cabin and bellowed at the top of his voice. He had quite a bit to drink, contrary to the rules of the naval service and the dignity of a decorated officer, and wouldn’t let anyone in to see him. He yelled and shouted with the shadowy sea floor through until morning, when he nodded off and saw in 1917 — his last year — in his sleep.
A von B welcomed in the New Year in Vienna. As a senior official of the ‘k and k’ monarchy, he also took part in th
e funeral procession of beloved Emperor Franz Joseph. He saw the new Emperor Charles I somewhere at the side and thought him unworthy of the imperial crown.
The Red Baron saw in 1917 with his sweetheart in his embrace. From Christmas Eve 1916 until the first days of the New Year 1917 there were no sorties on either side, so on New Year’s Eve he was finally able to kiss his sweetheart in many different ways, without it having any bearing on operational plans.
The courier of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment, Adolf Hitler, saw in the New Year wounded in Beelitz Hospital near Berlin. He was indebted to a dog for being alive at all. The dog was a mongrel, disobedient and stupid; the soldiers laughed at courier Hitler, and he in turn beat the dog. At the very moment when a trench-howitzer shell was whistling in an arc towards the German trenches, courier Hitler ran out to grab that disobedient whelp. The shell exploded with a mighty blast, killing all of Hitler’s comrades. The stupid mutt was dead too. Now Hitler lied to the other patients and told them tales about a dog which dashed out in front of him, shielding him with its body and thus saving him from certain death. The men laughed at him and jeered: ‘Be that as it may, Adi, your hero-dog will still have ended up in the stew!’ Hitler didn’t want to listen. Instead of quarrelling, he turned to Max Osborn’s notebook and wrote: ‘The German soldiers in the trenches, who saw in the New Year 1917 wet to the skin in their hooded raincoats, with faithful Alsatians at their side, seem to me like Flying Dutchmen singing “Through storm and gale we sail the open sea”.’
The singer Florrie Forde did not sing ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ for the New Year 1917, although many begged her to. For a moment she was tempted to sing that ominous song, but then a stranger, one of the many guests gathered at the Scott’s Arms for the New Year’s Eve party, gave her a wink, and that completely threw her off balance. She left the party before midnight and was thus one of those who saw in the New Year 1917 in bed.
Thirteen days later, Vladimir Alexandrovich Sukhomlinov saw in the New Year 1917 by the Julian calendar in his sleep, but Yekaterina Sukhomlinova was awake. She made a list of all the socks owned by her husband, the former governor-general of Kiev. She wrote: ‘Twelve pairs of black socks, only twelve pairs! Of those, four of silk and five pairs of worn-out ones. I stress: twelve pairs!’
Zhivka the seamstress celebrated her first ‘Kraut New Year’, and the later Serbian New Year, in her shop in 26 Prince Eugene Street. There is nothing to say about her ‘Kraut New Year’. There is almost nothing to tell about how she spent the Serbian New Year either. And on 1 January by the Julian calendar she was alone. She was violently sick. In the morning, she thought for the first time that she might be pregnant. Only one person could be the father: the officer with the hole in his pocket.
On New Year’s Eve, Sergei Chestukhin showered his small daughter Marusya with kisses. He hugged her so long and warmly that she soon fell asleep in his arms.
Grand Duke Nicholas received a visit on New Year’s Eve from his wife Anastasia, who had had to travel for seven whole days to see the ‘Viceroy of Russia’ in the Caucasus. Anastasia was accompanied by her sister Milica, as if she had come not to see in the New Year but to fight a duel. But she was unable to start a family feud because Nicholas silenced her each time with an abrupt movement of his hand and the words: ‘Milica, it’s New Year’s Eve. We’re celebrating!’
At some time around the infidel New Year, Mehmed Yıldız resolved to leave the silence of his dimly lit shop, which now was almost always closed and had begun to resemble some kind of hideout with the spices of different colours strewn like treasures in the dust. Coming out of the woodwork like this seemed to him a bit like jumping over his own shadow. He was entering his last year of trading, his sixtieth, so he could afford to lean back. He decided to go out into the world and become a good, sociable Turk. He began his search for new friends in a café, over a cup of jasmine tea. Here he met two other old men much like himself. The one was invariably silent, the other spoke incessantly. The talker called himself Hayyim the Merry. He had an incredibly sonorous voice and a loud, clucking tongue, and the words left his mouth with a twang like bolts from a crossbow. He told Yıldız that he could hardly wait for victory or defeat in the Great War. Victory, because Istanbul would greet it with an incredible celebration in all three parts of the city, with flags, horses, silken sheets to be lowered from the minarets like giant pantaloons, and lotus flowers to be strewn over the waters of the Golden Horn. But why defeat? Because then it would all be put on for the occupation troops, Hayyim replied elatedly, so the pomp and Oriental feeling would be even more pronounced. ‘And a celebration is a celebration,’ Hayyim added, ‘no matter whether victory or defeat’. ‘Hm,’ the spice trader replied to these words of his new friend and went out into the street again. There he was met by a rain which seemed to beat down wrathfully from the heavens. He pulled up the collar of his woollen coat and pushed his fez down further over his forehead. Now he had two friends from the tearoom: the silent one, whose name he didn’t know, and Hayyim the Merry. In the street he collected two more chance companions, so now his tally had reached four. He aligned them in his straight-and-narrow consciousness so they would stand one behind the other like profiles cut out of cardboard. Four new friends, but he was unhappy nonetheless.
King Peter saw in the New Year 1917 by the Julian calendar in Salonika once again. He had returned, fearing that southern Greece could be cut off in what was looking like civil war. The night in the rebellious city was calm. When he summed up the year 1916, he could only recall ordinary things: he had dismissed his doctor, quarrelled with the cook, been unable to get a good chauffeur, and he hadn’t seen his son Alexander for almost a whole year. In the end he had become a refugee again, this time within Greece, and had had to be evacuated on board a French torpedo boat. Was that worthy of a king who had thought that 1916 could be the year of the kings, and that they might use their consanguine connections to end the Great War? Before retiring for the night, he still had to look at the replies to the New Year telegrams. The next day, 14 January by the new calendar, emissary Balugdzhich was to despatch telegrams to the British king George V, the Dutch queen Wilhelmina, the Belgian king Albert and the Italian sovereign Victor Emmanuel III, all of whom had sent New Year’s greetings for 1917 to the Serbian king. He would open the telegrams and write the messages himself. Perhaps one single word: ‘Enough’. No, he couldn’t do that. The replies had to be courteous. After all, kings were just crowned marionettes on the strings of an evil puppeteer, he thought, put on his nightshirt and went to bed. The telegrams remained on the table without being looked at: So ended the year of one king without a kingdom.
The first day of the New Year dawned in Salonika with the murmur of palm trees. Someone had opened the venetian blinds while the king slept. The sun shone forth, and the sea in the bay seemed as transparent and crystalline as ice. But King Peter was not in the mood. His beard was ever longer and his eyes ever more sunken, like embers burning deeper and deeper into his face, so his new doctor tried to find his predecessor in order to seek his advice. His search was unsuccessful, and that further concerned him.
1917
THE YEAR OF THE TSAR
The dancer Mata Hari in costume for a performance, 1917
BETRAYAL, COWARDICE AND LIES
That night, the hoar frost came down on the capped and bare heads of people like harsh sugar crystals, and a cold crust also formed on people’s souls. The detectives of the Petrograd Okhrana saw in the New Year of 1917 with big pots of black tea. The malcontents they kept tabs on and arrested were firing salvos of tense joy that night and swearing to one another that they were prepared to believe any slander and insults in the New Year 1917. The temperature fell to minus twenty degrees everywhere. Dirty little mongrels moseyed around in the streets like foxes, weasels or badgers looking for a warren. People seeking shelter hurried by between the dogs: walking, falling and then crawling on all fours as if they were foxes, weasels or badgers.
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Grand Duke Alexander was writing to the tsar, stringing together awkward, tortured letters. ‘The masses are not revolutionary,’ he wrote, weighing every word, ‘but every ill-considered edict and ban pushes them towards the leftist camp. In circumstances such as this, why is it so hard to imagine that a few words from the tsar could change everything?’ Then he folded the letter twice, screwed it up and threw it in the bin.
Why was it so hard to imagine that a word from the tsar could change everything? On the first day of the New Year 1917, Tsar Nicholas woke up in his bed in Tsarskoye Selo alone. The hoar frost had ornamented the window overnight as it used to do when he was child. A stony sun began to shine on the snow-covered hills, a harsh light without warmth, but it also put some life into people. It was very loud at court in the first days of the New Year, with a flux of delegations, people loyal to the cause, as well as brothers and uncles of the tsar. And all of them demanded that Nicholas address the masses with just a few words which might change the situation. And yet how hard it was to imagine Nicholas saying them.
After Rasputin’s death, from the day that holy man was drawn dishevelled, blue and bloated from the Malaya Nevka, the tsar fell into a strange and worrying state of lethargy. Life had left him behind and was heading off, like a long train he had just missed, and now he watched the days glide past like windows and compartments: each of them lit up and with unknown travellers inside. One word would change everything; but he was not on board, the windows of the moving train were closed, and if the tsar had called from the platform he would just have strained his voice in vain and no one would have heard him. That is what made it so hard to conceive of Nicholas speaking to the masses. And on top of that, there were so many strange things which took away his thoughts. Early 1917 in Tsarskoye Selo was marked by the visits of peace brokers. They came before the tsar like wind-up toys, or evil warlocks from Russian fairy tales. January of the fourth year of the war marked the beginning of the peace-agreement season. Each side had a knife at its throat in this war and everyone was offering everyone else special conditions so as to end the Great War on their fronts. Germany then made four attempts. Four human toys were sent to the tsar to offer him a separate peace agreement and the salvation of the empire. They came before him like heroes in a play, who introduce themselves to the audience and proceed to talk with them.
The Great War Page 34
