Enter a certain Joseph Kolishko. His tweed suit fastened with the slender belt of his jacket, his nervous shifting from one leg to the other and his vagabond appearance made him the very caricature of a Russian abroad. Kolishko’s hair was as yellow as straw, his lips raspberry red, pouted and much too full for a man, and his eyes moved erratically as if the optic nerve was not completely in control. When he faced the tsar, his eyes widened, his gaze fled, and he minced and mumbled his words. This exhausted neurotic introduced himself to the tsar as a journalist, a correspondent of the Russian émigré papers Grazhdanin and Russkoye Slovo. He claimed to maintain close ties with Swedish bankers. And, not to be forgotten, there were also his special contacts with German industrial magnates. He had come in the name of Hugo Stinnes, the most powerful of them all, to offer peace and a German renewal of Russia. The tsar replied, or he didn’t; that wasn’t important because the magnate Stinnes, all the Swedish bankers and the peace offer itself were made of paper and hemp, glued together with a paste of foreign desires.
He sent Kolishko away without even having him stay for lunch, but several days later another intermediary came before the tsar. This time it was a lady by the name of Maria Vasilchikova. She was built like a pear: the pointy crown of her head spread down into full, chubby cheeks; her thick neck continued into huge, flabby breasts, which drooped down to her belly; and this was connected to her sagging behind. She turned around in front of the tsar so he would see she was dressed in skirts and wrapped in scarves like a traditional Russian woman, and her fat buttocks stood out from under her skirt just like the bulging bottom of an enormous red pear. Vasilchikova then took the scarf off her head and, yes, burst into tears. She reminded Nicholas that she had been a maid-of-honour to both the tsaritsa and Duchess Yelizaveta before the Great War, before departing for her estate in Klein Wartenstein. She begged the tsar, despite his countless laurels, to add the wreath of immortality to them, and then came out with the proposition: she was offering him the Dardanelles in the name of the German crown, and she opened up the vision of Russia acquiring them without the aid of Britain and France.
Nicholas, however, didn’t have time to think about her because a new character had taken the stage in that theatre of intermediaries: the Dane, Hans Nils Andersen. He stood there before the tsar proudly, as straight as a ramrod, with blue eyes and the look of a stuffed bird. He was a man who possessed reading glasses, glasses for special occasions, glasses for the winter, and he now came before the emperor, wiping those specially reserved for his journey through the Russian provinces. ‘This winter is terrible,’ he said, ‘my glasses have completely fogged up.’ He put away the travelling glasses and placed the round spectacles reserved for special occasions on his nose, only to take them off again as soon as he wanted to read something to the tsar. He wore that third pair for as long as he was reading but changed to a fourth as soon as the servants brought tea. Four pairs of spectacles, the tsar thought: one for the train and the muzhiks, one for the audience, one for reading and one for drinking black tea! Was there a fifth and a sixth pair hiding in his inside pocket? Hans Nils Andersen was the director of the East Asia Company, a privy counsellor and, in his own assessment, a prudent politician of the neutral Kingdom of Denmark. He claimed to be a trusted old acquaintance of Nicholas’s mother, the dowager tsaritsa, who was Danish by extraction, and therefore he was bearing a fraternal letter from the Danish king Christian X to the Russian tsar. Andersen proudly produced the letter, broke the seals, and changed his glasses for drinking tea for his reading glasses. The letter was cordial, and Nicholas replied warmly, knowing this wasn’t the end.
The fourth intermediary was the Hamburg banker Mark Wartburg. This German of Swedish ancestry had cheeks like inflated silk balloons covered with tiny red veins. He breathed with difficulty and had high blood pressure. It seemed winter didn’t agree with him: the Russian winter in particular. He came before the tsar wearing a leather coat, on top of which he had donned two long fur coats reaching down to the soles of his boots. These pelts of polar fox and sable on top of his portly body made him look like some kind of strange bear. He shed his layers before the tsar: first the sable, then the fox, and finally, with a little hesitation, his leather coat. ‘It is warm in the palace, Your Majesty,’ he said in German, which the tsar understood well, and proceeded to present the situation like a minister rather than a banker: ‘The Great War was provoked by Britain, and it alone is to blame. In the same way, the Russian victories of 1878 came to nought when the British fleet turned up in the Sea of Marmara. Territorial issues will easily be resolved between the German and Russian empires. Poland will remain a distinct country, Russia will control the south and east all the way to the Serbian border, and Germany will have Baltic Courland.’ ‘What about the Latvians?’ the tsar asked, and Wartburg replied: ‘The Latvians are not worth talking about — a mere trifle!’ ‘The Latvians are not worth worrying about,’ the tsar repeated to himself in Russian and sent away the fourth peace broker, but he lived in fear that things were far from over and that 1917 was fated to be the year of the tsar and his emissaries.
He was mistaken, as were many others involved in the Great War. Any illusions of the might of the Danube empire were shattered in that fourth year of the war. The bread ration dwindled every month, and only a lucky few had sugar. In these conditions, the monarchy became a paradise for theosophists and charlatans of every ilk. Even the court was occupied by them since the reading of the new emperor’s dream in November of the previous year, when a dubious fortune-teller from Bavaria prophesied that the new emperor of millions would survive an assassination attempt on 11 November 1918. Yes, that’s what he foretold, and it was impossible that the theosophist could be wrong.
Now he and his unkempt comrades were needed once more. A crucial dispatch was penned in the capital of the Dual Empire, and it had to be protected by all means canny and uncanny. The dispatch was an ordinary piece of correspondence, in no way different to any other, yet it was to decide the fate of millions. Empress Zita was far more energetic than her drowsy husband Charles I and drafted the dispatch to her brother, Prince Sixt of Bourbon-Parma, a Belgian officer serving in the French army. The dispatch would propose an end to the Great War, even if it be under circumstances shameful for the ‘k and k’ monarchy, because that was the only way to save the court and the crown. Absent-minded Charles, with the ardent intercession of his wife, even offered Alsace-Lorraine and various other lands, like a reckless medieval lord. The dispatch was to be conveyed by Maria Antonia, the empress’s trustworthy mother; but what if the letter with the humiliating peace offer fell into enemy hands? What if Sixt, whom Zita had not seen for more than a decade, passed it on to the French premier, as every loyal officer should?
The dispatch therefore had to be protected, but how could it be written in code if that meant that the coder had to go on the mission together with the empress’s mother — she in one coach, he in another? They would surely be intercepted. So the dispatch had to be secured by different means. The solution was typically German, and two loyal men of the crown were again sent to the north in search of occultists: to masked Munich and obscure Prince Regent Street, where fortune-tellers and soothsayers had shops and put up signs advertising their mystical ‘services’. Motley folk with dark rings under their eyes and a stone in their stomachs loitered in those streets, searching for their destiny like a lost coin. Among them were two envoys of the Austro-Hungarian court. They immediately set about finding an old acquaintance from 1916, Franz Hartmann, ‘Duke Franz of Bavaria’, but they soon learnt that he had been killed in mysterious circumstances. After his illustrious auguring in Vienna, things seemed to have gone amiss for the duke. Unfortunately, he hadn’t managed to foresee his own demise. He was found dead in a dilapidated, grey building and his corpse was so filthy that he posthumously confirmed his nickname of ‘Dirty Franz’.
So the court envoys had to find someone else. ‘Dirty Franz’ was said to have had an apprentice
. After some effort, they found a cross-eyed young man by the name of Hugo Vollrath. He was a proud member of the theosophist sects, the Universal Brotherhood, Brothers of Light and the Mazdaznan Movement. He had even founded the Astrologische Rundschau magazine, whose first issue was number twelve, thereby skipping the first eleven issues! Vollrath claimed to be a trained occultist and said his teacher had been about to issue him his certificate of apprenticeship when he was killed. He immediately accepted the assignment.
Vollrath was silent during the journey to Vienna and did not reveal his intentions to anyone. Only at the court did he come out with his brilliant plan. He offered the empress a special kind of ‘invisible ink’, whose writing would be erased if touched by French hands. What the dickens? How could ink recognize the skin of Frenchmen? Quite easily, replied this introverted, strangely occluded man: the palm of every hand sweats in a different way. Magic writing was able to recognize the sweat of French hands and immediately erase itself as soon as it was touched. But what about Sixt: what if his hands were sweaty? Sixt was different. Vollrath would take a sample of the sweat of Empress Zita and use it to take account of the sweat of her brother, the Belgian officer in the French army. It was simple: the letters would not erase themselves if they came in contact with his sweat!
An offer like this was too good to refuse. The trained theosophist, who had been just a few days short of receiving his ‘certificate of apprenticeship’, withdrew into a special chamber with the ready-written dispatch. For three days he took neither food nor water, which they left for him at the door like for a leper. Howls and moans were periodically heard from the room, and occasionally a tremendous racket. On the second day, a strange yellow wisp of smoke crept through the slit under the door, like the poison gas bertholite, but it wasn’t lethal, because Vollrath came out several hours later and asked Empress Zita to hold out her right hand. He took a sample of sweat from her palm, and a little later he emerged triumphantly with the dispatch. It was safe, he said. Having accomplished the task, he collected the agreed payment and immediately set off back north, to dark Bavaria, but the empress was not convinced. She demanded another protective spell.
So a second theosophist came, this time from the fiendish city of Leipzig in crazy Saxony. He claimed to have learned the arts at Faust’s tavern. His name was Karl Brandler-Pracht and his only condition for helping was that the court never approach the charlatan Hugo Vollrath, who had stolen from him the publishing rights to most of the books of the famous Alan Leo. Although no one knew who Leo was and why the rights to his works were so important, the people loyal to the throne immediately agreed that the dispatch had nothing to do with Vollrath and naturally remained calm when Brandler-Pracht said: ‘I’ll be able to tell straight away if you’re lying, and then the deal will be off.’ He didn’t notice that the dispatch had been in Vollrath’s hands, of course, so the touchy autodidact from the inn recommended his good services: after he had applied his magic, all the letters would turn into unintelligible squiggles if anyone with evil thoughts as much as came near the dispatch. No one asked how letters written on paper could sense such thoughts. The empress was in a bad mood, and the spineless court attendants knew it was a time when they had best show unconditional obedience. Like his predecessor, this theosophist stewed and screamed over the dispatch for two days. Unlike his arch-enemy Vollrath, this one ate everything they left for him at the door and often greedily asked for more. He finished the work, visibly fattened, one week later. He too said at the end that the dispatch was now safe. Taking an immodest sum of money, he immediately headed back to obscure Saxony and the diabolical cellars of Leipzig.
Were the two protective spells enough? No, the dispatch was also presented to sober-headed subjects of the empire, and they realized it had to be upgraded in some way; it didn’t matter how, just so that the hysterical empress would be satisfied. The dispatch therefore lay around at the supreme headquarters of the army for another week. Since no one there was superstitiously inclined, it was simply left lying on the desk of a general with a silver moustache. After a considerable number of days, the army confirmed that the dispatch was safe from a military point of view.
Immediately afterwards it was taken to a von B, who had to add a little counter-espionage magic. What could this diligent subject of the empire do, after having played to a draw in a major contest with Russian counter-intelligence the previous year? As with the silver-moustached general, the dispatch was left to lie on his desk for several days and then returned to the empress with a note: ‘Approved by the Kundschaftergruppe’.
After all this to-do, the dispatch so crucial for the Danube Empire was ready to be sent, and at first everything went smoothly. On 24 March 1917, the empress embraced her mother and whispered something to her; she got straight into the coach without a word in reply. Two days later, she saw Sixt. The dispatch was delivered and read. Lieutenant Sixt shed a single tear. Or he didn’t. But then the dispatch fell into the wrong hands. When Sixt, as a loyal soldier, passed it on to the French, not a single letter erased itself as it was touched by evil French hands. When the dispatch finally reached Georges Clemenceau, not a single word turned into unintelligible squiggles, even though you can be sure that this influential Frenchman had evil thoughts when wondering what to do with this absolute proof of high treason. Imagine urging France to secretly seek an armistice! The new French premier’s response to the Viennese court’s diplomatic offensive was to publish the dispatch, and the Ministry of War’s protective measure proved ineffective. When Le Figaro came out with Emperor Charles’s dispatch on the front page, the protection from the Kundschaftergruppe also failed. Germany accused the Viennese court of undermining their alliance, and the emperor had to make many concessions to assuage his pugnacious northern neighbours. In the end, it was all quite an embarrassment, although for some more than others.
Several days after it became known that the French press had printed the emperor’s dispatch, a von B went to work as usual. He didn’t confide in anyone. It looked like it would be just another day for him and his spy ring. But a von B decided to spoil his subordinates’ calm. He took out his pistol and placed it next to a sheet of white paper. For the Austrian spymaster, the Great War ended when he began his farewell letter: ‘Given my responsibility towards myself and the monarchy . . . ,’ he wrote, and then stopped. He quickly raised his gun and, without hesitation, fired a single round into his heart. The drops of his blood provided the last argument for the suicide of this loyal servant of the Empire. Three deep-red drops fell right beside the words ‘myself and the monarchy’.
All the plans for an armistice therefore failed. Nothing on earth or anything supernatural could bring about peace; with people wavering, war now took the initiative and raged like a sudden storm out of the clear, western sky. A merciless submarine war began in the Atlantic. Britain ordered that all her ships sail in convoys, and new underwater mines were laid to sink shallow-diving German submarines: shredded metal and dismembered crewmen were blown sky-high. On several occasions early in that year, mines exploded close to the U-88 of highly decorated submarine commander Walther Schwieger, but his vessel was saved once again by the huge serpents, megalodons with huge maws, and legendary giant octopuses. None of the crew saw the monsters this time either, but Schwieger manoeuvred like mad, and many times the submarine truly seemed have been seized by a huge paw and briskly moved sideways or into the deep seconds before a depth charge blasted an air pocket the size of a whale. ‘What did I tell you–,’ roared the captain, now almost constantly drunk, ‘we have the aid of all the serpents!’ To which the crew replied in a rather bewildered chorus: ‘Yes sir, we have the aid of all the sea serpents.’
It was magic — magic which produced good results under water rather than on dry land. But on the Western Front in the spring of 1918, the Germans unexpectedly withdrew to the long-prepared Hindenburg Line without a fight. There was nothing magic in that, but what was about to happen in deserted Bapaume would call
for the aid of the supernatural once more. That retreat was probably the cause of it all. ‘Old Fritz’, as the British called the Germans, moved back quite abruptly, and, like receding water, left behind a lot of human sludge. It was a strange feeling for the Englishmen and Scotsmen to walk through those devastated cities. They read the German names of the towns Gommecourt and Miraumont: Cursed Cabin, Oven and Dead Swine. The enemy was holding out near Achiet-le-Petit and Bucquoy. The trenches ran between the towns Pys and Petit-Miraumont, and everything else was left to the Allies. The soldiers saw all manner of things in those dead towns: discarded mattresses, emptied bottles of French red wine, and even doggerels daubed with oil paint by slovenly soldiers: ‘Schnell und gut ist unser Schuss, deutscher Artilleristen Gruss’ (You’ll soon be six feet under from the German gunners’ thunder!). But nothing could compare with what the Scotsmen came across in a house in Bapaume.
The Great War Page 35
