Читать книгу The Great War - Aleksandar Gatalica - Страница 10

WAR

There’s going to be a big war. The less-than-loquacious owner of the café Casino in Shabac remembered Major Tihomir Miyush­kovich for these very words, uttered on the decisive day of his life, Tuesday, 29 July 1914, by the old calendar. Proprietor Kosta and his plump wife Hristina reacted to the insistence that they say something more about the major with the same enthusiasm as if the tax collectors had just knocked on their door: ‘Look, that’s all we remember about him. Lots of people come here, all different ranks, all sorts of weird and wonderful folk . . . and we’re good people and upright publicans, you know. When we had to pay the tax for street lighting, we were the first in Shabac; when they introduced a duty on music, we took it straight from the street musicians’ pay so we could give the government its due.’ And the major? They seemed not to remember him, as if they had only passed him in the street, as if he was an apparition or a human shell which didn’t have emotions of its own and didn’t notice its own suffering or that of others.

There’s going to be war again, a great war, Major Tihomir Miyush­kovich is said to have muttered on that fateful 29 July 1914, after he’d come from café Casino to the Nine Posts. The owner of that café, a certain Zeyich, a man without children or a woman at the hearth, remembered the major much more clearly and filled his strawy exterior with substance, some of which shone through. ‘I hardly remember the major. My memory doesn’t serve me all that well, I must admit. But I’m a decent man and orderly in every other regard. When it was time to give the government its due, I never asked questions and haggled. No, my good sir, I demanded that they tax me the most — for the thirty electric light bulbs in the garden. Yes, me . . . I didn’t let anyone leave my place for the unlit streets without a guiding light, be he tipsy or dead-drunk. Now, if you’re asking about the major, I’d say he was a nasty fellow: the wars had made him coarse, he was blind with the desire for promotion and had turned his back on his native land, but not before his endless frenzy had cast a pall on his neighbours. The army was his morning and his evening. He drilled his soldiers hard and drove the draught animals to their limits: he whipped horses until they foamed at the mouth, and muscle-bound bulls would tremble when he harnessed them into a team and made them haul a battery to the River Drina. The army was dead scared of him. Granted, he was even-handed, but talk about a hothead, talk about a brute. He broke a soldier’s arm or leg every week with his blows. I don’t know any more than that. Yes, he dropped in here on that last day of peace in July before the accursed Austrians attacked us. What did he do? He drank, sir, and we don’t know anything more than that. After all, I’m a respectable man and publican. When they introduced the tax on music, I said: I’ll pay in person for a big band and won’t take a penny off the street musicians’ baksheesh. That’s the kind of man I am.’

There’s going to be war again. A great war. These words of the major’s were well known to the owner of Shabac’s café Amerika, whom some call Munya. And now Munya, a perpetually overtired man with a puffy face and dark circles under his eyes, finally told the whole story about Major Tihomir Miyushkovich. He took what little is known from café Casino, added the strawy substance with a shine from the Nine Posts, daubed the straw with soil and breathed life into it after what he heard in his café, Amerika. ‘Yes, I remember the major and that decisive day in his life. It was Tuesday, 29 July 1914 by our calendar. It was the last day of peace for many: for us publicans, for our guests, for Shabac and for Serbia. You know, there are some people who sail through the decades and arrive, crying or laughing, at end of their life — and then founder on that last, quiet day. The major’s whole life passed in front of him in one day, in one afternoon, even. That’s what happened to him, from what I’ve heard and what I personally saw. You say he was hot-headed? That he thrashed the draught animals and belted the men? Maybe he did. They say that the army was his morning and the troops were his evening. For sure, there are officers like that. But between the morning and the evening the sun comes out and God draws it across the sky. The major’s sun was his wife Ruzha. She washed him, she ironed him. She moved with him time and time again, from headquarters to command post, from hilltop to outpost, until they finally settled down in Shabac two years before the wars began. He was promoted to major and became commanding officer of the 2 Battalion of the Combined Drina Reserve Division, and she became the major’s wife. Everything was easier in town, and when the washing, sewing and shopping was done the major’s wife had a lot more time. But she didn’t use it for herself. She didn’t go out or dress showily. She didn’t make eyes at anyone — until that last day.

‘The war must have had a part in that, sir. On the fated day, the major first went to café Casino. I’m surprised that Kosta, the owner, doesn’t remember, because I know that Ruzha went there the first time and asked the major for his ring. “Your fingers have got thicker, Tiho,” she said to him, “the ring is galling you. Let me have it widened so it doesn’t rub and hurt when war comes again.” I’m surprised Kosta didn’t hear that, but I know the major was already quite drunk and sent her away without giving her the ring. Later in the afternoon, when he was well under the influence, he went to the Nine Posts. Soon after he’d gone in, Ruzha turned up at the door there too. She didn’t berate her husband for drinking or insist on taking him home. She knew as well as he did that war would come the next day and flatten anything that was less than sturdy. It was just the ring she wanted. She wanted to have it widened here at a craftsman’s, who was a Vlach. She just needed the ring for an hour or two. No longer. The major didn’t give her the ring or take it off his finger, but he hugged his Ruzha. He gave her the tenderest of kisses, even though behind those lips stood the sharp teeth and the voice which the army feared like the plague. And as he fondled her flaxen hair she just repeated: the ring, the ring.

‘He had her thrown out. Soon the musicians dashed in and wanted to sing a little more so that people would get teary. They claimed they were from the famous Cicvarich family of performers, which of course was a lie. They started to sing, and the major sang with them. He sang “Shabac Girl”, “When the Nightingale Calls” and “I Sold My Horse Blackie”, and he drank and drank like the parched earth, and still he hadn’t had enough. He paid for the music and went out into the street, his shirt half open and his hair ruffled. He staggered but didn’t fall — he took care not to dirty his uniform because it was sacred to him. As he lurched along, he cursed and swore. He was angry, sir, but at whom? a white-hot fury flashed from his eyes but couldn’t burn anyone now except himself. He came into my café, ordered more blood-red wine. He asked where the music was. The door opened, but it wasn’t a band pretending to be descendants of the Cicvarichs, but Ruzha again. She didn’t ask for the ring now but took it off her drunken husband herself. She said she’d bring it back after he’d had another drink or two. To take it to the Vlach, an excellent craftsman, just to have it widened a little. And she repeated: “The Vlach, an excellent craftsman, just to have it widened a little . . . have it widened . . . widened . . . ”.

‘And so she went, like a harbinger of doom. Afterwards we learnt that a fickle-minded young officer was passing through Shabac, a child of rich parents. He wore an elegant, grey-blue reserve officer’s uniform; one to be worn every day, not one to die in. He was driving to the front in his father’s open car and I don’t know how he noticed Ruzha, the major’s wife. One glance beyond the limousine’s footboard was enough. He invited her to get in and took her for a drive around Shabac. They went into a wood by the River Sava and tossed a friendly salute to every guard, while he kept saying that forests always reminded him of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, which beautifully imitates the chirping of birds! What birds, you may ask? War was drawing close, and that rake wanted a woman for one afternoon. Ruzha, like a moth drawn to a fatal flame, probably wanted to kiss one last time. After returning from “Beethoven’s forest” he promised her his estate, a title and money; he told her stories about leaving Serbia and escaping the war. He promised her a flight to freedom . . . but she wasn’t free; she was still someone’s wife. The cavalier in the ironed coat persisted, and the last bastion of the major’s wife’s repute soon crumbled. Finally she saw the pledge of fidelity — her entire former life — as being embodied in her wedding ring, which she now took off and flung into the Sava as they spoke. Now there was only the major’s ring left, that anchor and her last fetter.’

‘The adulteress had been to café Casino, but the major had had her thrown out. Then she went to the Nine Posts, but still she didn’t get the pledge of her fidelity. They say that she and her new flame — the seducer and the moth — drove along behind the major quietly, in second gear so he wouldn’t hear them, to see which café he’d go into next. So when he came in here, like I said, Ruzha came in after him. She no longer begged him now. She took the ring. I went after her and saw her get into a big car. She giggled and tossed back her open, sandy-blond hair. Later I heard she also threw the major’s ring into the river before driving away to the south. When some guys came running into the café and said “The major’s wife threw the ring in the river!”, the major sobered up in the blink of an eye. Not a trace of wine remained on his face. Like an orderly soldier, he looked first of all at his uniform. He smoothed it out with his hands, tightened his belt and tucked his trouser legs into the top of his boots. He called the servant boy to bring some shoe polish, and while the boy was shining his boots he rested his fingers together. He didn’t look at anyone and didn’t ask anything. The boy finished. “How much do I owe you, Munya?” he asked and paid the bill. “July is almost over, and in August we’ll be going to war,” he said and went out through the café’s garden. You know the rest.’

History knows the rest, too. The second last day of July came. It was a hot day. The wheat had been harvested, but the corn stood horseman-high in the fields. On Wednesday, 30 July by the old calendar and 12 August by the new, Austria-Hungary’s Balkan army was set in motion across the choppy River Drina and through the tall corn which almost overarched it that year.

The Great War had begun.

The Austro-Hungarian 5th Army under the command of General Frank attacked across the Drina along the line of Bijeljina–Zvornik–Priboj–Brčko. The 6th Army, under General Potiorek, moved from the Vlasenica–Rogatica–Kalinovik–Sarajevo area, while the 2nd Army, under General von Böhm-Ermolli, entered Serbian territory from the north, from Syrmia and Banat. The Austro-Hungarian command concentrated the bulk of its forces on the Drina and decided on a strategic thrust here, at Serbia’s north-west. This somewhat surprised the Serbian Supreme Command, which reacted by turning its forces ninety degrees and rushing from the north to defend the western border. The chief battle took place in the Cer mountain range, but to finish the story about the major without his wedding ring it is more important to describe his brief, brave showing on the field of battle.

The 2nd Battalion of the Drina Division went into combat three times in those two fateful days, and each time Major Tihomir Miyush­kovich was pale, clean, washed and resolute. He plunged into battle the first time near Tekerish when the Austro-Hungarian 21 Landwehr Division attacked the Combined Serbian Division, including the 2nd Battalion under his command. Then in the engagement near Beli Kamen, which ended at Begluk. A third time then sufficed to cut short a life which, to tell the truth, had already ended in café Amerika in Shabac on 29 July 1914 by the old calendar. The decree decorating Major Tihomir Miyush­kovich and posthumously promoting him to lieutenant colonel was announced in Politika once it resumed publication immediately after the Battle of Cer. The decree was read by everyone in Shabac except one woman, who no one ever heard of again — whether she was alive or dead, happy or unhappy. Her name was Ruzha, and that’s all that was known about her.

Were the survivors the lucky ones, or did the wounded envy the dead? Perhaps the corpse-strewn hills of the Cer mountain range and the blood-red River Yadar had an answer. Many of the wounded fell back across the Drina, which became a roaring grave for both armies. Doctors at the field hospitals removed bullets from the wounded in the hope of saving their legs, and sawed legs in the pitiful hope of saving heads.

There was just such an Austro-Hungarian hospital in narrow, river-bound Zvornik, and one of its surgeons was a certain Mehmed Graho. Everyone skilled with the scalpel was needed for the war, so our pathologist, who since 1874 had mixed with the dead, donned the uniform of a Bosnian infantry regiment, stuck a crimson fez on his head and set about saving the living. But his hands, it seemed, were made only for the mortuary. The grievously wounded soldiers brought back from the River Yadar strangely melted away and died beneath his knife. He did the same work as other surgeons. The operation would go well, but when everything was done Graho would feel a chill behind his back, as if death had come to visit him, and he watched as he lost the soldier. He tried with all his strength to bring the wounded man back from death’s door, but most often in vain.

So much killing and dying was going on in those days that hardly anyone noticed that a doctor of death was at work in the hospital in Zvornik. But Mehmed Graho was certain it was him. He tried once again, then a second time, ten times, and still all the men died on him. ‘It seems I was made not to heal, but to kill,’ he said to himself and, if it was his lot to kill, he set about selecting the most severely maimed soldiers and those he least liked the look of in order to finish them off. His rationale was that if he took the wounded who were beyond all hope, it would be harder for anyone to notice that almost every patient died on his operating table. And so he chose them, one after another. He repented, prayed and begged Allah, but in vain. He wanted to give up, but he knew he’d be court-martialled if he refused to work. Men screamed like a monstrous choir all day in the chaos of the army hospital in Zvornik, and there was no one he could complain to or ask to be relieved of his duties as the doctor of death.

He had no choice but to kill the soldiers, so he almost reconciled himself to his hideous role. He read a selection of verses from the Koran and told himself that desperate certainty was better than uncertain hope. He walked among the stretchers lying in front of the hospital in files and rows like the graves of a military cemetery and said: ‘Him, him, and him here — to me.’ Then he strove and struggled to help them, but they all died. He’d go out into the courtyard again and speak in an indifferent voice: ‘Him, him, and him there — to me.’

What Dr Graho didn’t know was that there, on the banks of the Drina, death was claiming what it left alive elsewhere. As if by some enigmatic geometry of death, one and a half thousand kilometres to the east, in the hospital train V.M. Purishkevich, the neurosurgeon Sergei Vasilyevich Chestukhin witnessed the wondrous recovery of his soldiers after the initial battles in East Prussia. Young men were brought in with their heads split open, with bullets in parts of their brain which ought to make them vegetables, or corpses, but that was mostly avoided. The other doctors noticed that miracles were occurring in the third wagon and each of them, as soon as he had rested a little after his shift, came in to watch Dr Chestukhin operate. The healing hands of the doctor adeptly extracted bullets from the heads of soldiers, reconnected shattered pieces of skull and sewed wounds which had bled so badly that there seemed to be no stitch able to hold them. The men lay on his table for ten minutes longer, and then life returned to their eyes even in the most hopeless of cases; after several such remarkable operations the assembled Russian doctors broke into applause.

Yet there was just one strange thing about these patients. The soldiers brought to the hospital train had been peasants before the war, or menials on the estates of the gentry, who had never seen anything of the world beyond their willow groves and little rivers. A large number of those who miraculously survived now began speaking German while still unconscious. First they would whisper ‘Hilfe, hilfe!’, then some of them would launch into whole monologues in that language they had never learnt and would talk about things they simply could not know about, uneducated as they were. Dr Chestukhin’s wife, the red-haired nurse Liza Nikolaevna Chestukhina, heard many of these monologues in German while bandaging the wounded men’s heads after the operations and could find no answer to this mystery. But since she knew German she understood the erudite talk of the muzhiks.

She didn’t want to bother her husband with what she heard, but since he kept sending her miraculously saved men and future experts in German from the third wagon, she started to listen attentively to these ‘wonder wounded’. One boy, whose medical card stated that he was a farmhand from Yasnaya Polyana, the former estate of Count Leo Tolstoy, talked about Goethe for an entire afternoon. It was a kind of trance and he couldn’t open his eyes under the bandages, but he said: ‘Als Goethe im August 1831 mit dem noch fehlenden vierten Akt den zweiten Teil seines Faust abgeschlossen hat, sagt er zu Eckermann: “Mein ferneres Leben, kann ich nunmehr als reines Geschenk ansehen, und es ist jetzt im Grunde ganz einerlei, ob und was ich noch etwa tue.”’ [When Goethe finished the fourth act of Faust in August 1831, thus completing the second part of the work, he said to Eckermann: ‘What remains to me of life I may now regard as a free gift, and it really matters little what I do, or whether I do anything.’] Two beds further along, a badly mangled soldier recited poems by Schiller, which Liza had learnt as a girl. Then he spoke loudly, as if on stage, and it turned out to be part of the poem ‘The Ideal and Life’: “Wenn, das Tote bildend zu beseelen / Mit dem Stoff sich zu vermählen / Tatenvoll der Genius entbrennt, / Da, da spanne sich des Fleisses Nerve, / Und beharrlich ringend unterwerfe / Der Gedanke sich das Element.” [“When, through dead stone to breathe a soul of light / With the dull matter to unite / the kindling genius, some great sculptor glows; / Behold him straining, every nerve intent / Behold how, o’er the subject element.”]

Liza thought there might have been a mix-up with the wou­nded: a battlefield is chaotic, and perhaps the Russian stretcher-bearers had brought back educated German soldiers as well. She waited for them to wake up, whereupon the ‘German speakers’ successively died: some after one, others after two days of tirelessly mouthing German verse, or simply individual German words. A few of them did wake up out of their coma, however, and when she asked them who they were, she realized they really were ignorant Russian peasants and semi-skilled artisans. Liza asked them if they had ever learnt German, but they didn’t know what to say and just kept repeating how much they hated ‘the Krauts’.

And so time passed, but Sergei’s wounded didn’t speak German for long. It only happened for the first few days after the Battle of Cer in far­away Serbia, when students and poets were dying under the hand of the pathologist Mehmed Graho and their souls migrated east for a brief while along some imponderable transversal, in the invisible barques of the dead, into the split heads of Russian farmworkers. Already towards the end of August 1914, esteemed ‘Dr Sergei’ no longer managed to save as many soldiers after the victorious battles of Stallupönen and Gumbinnen. The heroes who survived the operation and were moved to the care of his wife Liza no longer spoke at all, in Russian or German; they groaned in the language known and shared by all woun­ded soldiers in Europe.

Men groaned in the same language and died in the same lan­gu­age — ­in east and west. In the region of Alsace-Lorraine on the Western Front many young Frenchmen had cheerfully plunged into the first border battles, convinced that one shot, one shout and one charge would resolve everything. Waiters rushed into battle together with the artists they served, who had just recently ‘avoided alcohol so as to better prepare for war’. Light-headed as they were, they thought it wouldn’t take much, not much at all, for everything to be over and done with, and what a shame it was that their sweethearts weren’t there to watch them after seeing them off in Paris with unforgettable cheers and sticking flowers in the barrels of their rifles; flowers which each of the men now wore under his shirt like a shrivelled rosebud.

Everything was different to how the soldiers had imagined it. The recklessness of senior and mid-level commanders in the border battles in north-western France saw that the flower of young French manhood and their officers perished in the last days of August 1914. Death trawled and netted big fish, not stopping even when the catch was so heavy that it could hardly be dragged from the field of death. For the junior officer Germain D’Esparbès, the Great War began when he wrote a letter to his superior commander after the great slaughter in Alsace-Lorraine:

I think the work of the French Red Cross is simply disgraceful. I woke up near the town of Lunéville to find myself in a sea of dead soldiers and spent three whole days with them. Nothing unusual, I hear you say. But I wish to describe to you those three terrible days, which passed before one of our Red Cross crews finally found me. I commit these lines to paper in the deepest conviction that I am about to lose my mind, so I need to write quickly, however illegible that makes my handwriting even for me.

I woke up at dawn in a wood beside a road. At first I was unable to move, so I tensely felt myself all over with my right hand: first my left arm, then one leg and the other. On realizing that I hadn’t been blown apart by a shell, I passed my hands over my belly and shoulders and licked my forefinger and thumb. By the taste of dust on my fingers I realized I had no blood on my coat, so I probably hadn’t picked up a Hun bullet. Oh, how I rejoiced at that moment, but I shouldn’t have! I lay there until afternoon on top of something soft, only hard and uneven in a few places, so I thought it a mound covered with grass. I was unable to move much or swing my arms; if I had been, I would have realized that the mound was not one of earth and grass but of the dead bodies of my poor comrades.

It wasn’t until the next day that I realized where I was and what I had been lying on; that was to be my second day spent among the dead. I jumped up fresh and almost healthy that morning — I think it was the last day of August — when, oh my God, I saw the carnage. There were dead as far as my eyes could see. In many places they lay one on top of another, entwined and entangled, and completely covered the ground like human humus which monstrous plants of war were to germinate from. I found some of the soldiers in a sitting position, with their eyes open, seeming to me to be still alive. I rushed to one and then to another in the hope that they would answer, but in vain. The grim reaper must have cut them down so abruptly that the life hadn’t managed to flee from their eyes, and so they sat, and the occasional one almost defied gravity by still leaning against a tree or a worn-out old nag. Two comrades, with their arms around each other, had crawled into death in a patch of wild strawberries. The blood on their faces mingled with the juice of the strawberries they seemed to have eaten with their last strength before they expired.

I started shouting and calling for help, but no one from the Red Cross came that second day either. What a poor wretch I was, whom an evil demiurge had condemned to life. I wanted to run away and escape, but where could I have gone when there was an endless tangle of corpses all around, and it seemed to me that not even a whole day’s running in the summer sun would have led me to anything new — except to the next trench full of dead soldiers. That’s why I stayed where I was. Straining my senses, I summoned all my presence of mind. I thought it would be much harder for them to come to my aid if I wandered about rather than staying put. I still don’t know if it was the right decision.

On that second day among the dead, I identified a plot of bodies I’d be able to put in some kind of order. I set about disentangling the bodies of these comrades and cleaning their wounds as best I could. I sat them up or at least had them reclining, like in a Roman theatre. It must have been about a hundred corpses I repositioned in this way, maybe more. Towards evening, I wanted to see who they were, so I took out each one’s identity card and read their particulars. Jacques Tali, student; Michel Moriac, wholesaler; Zbigniew Zborowski, member of the Foreign Legion. I was still perhaps the man I had been before the war until I got to know them and looked each one in the face. At that instant, they ceased to be unknown heroes. I thought about what they would have gone on to do if they had survived the attack near Lunéville. Tali would have become a famous curator of the Autumn Salon; Moriac would have made a fortune dealing in vinegar; Zborowski would have become Polish ambassador to France. But like this? Like this they were simply dead, but certainly not silent.

Before the day was over, my reason definitely began to leave me. That’s right, I heard them talking. I answered them and even began to argue with them, although I was still aware that everything was coming from my mouth — their voices and mine. I took a real liking to some of the comrades, to others not so much, and when I woke up on the third day I pulled the ones up to me who I’d become especially close with. On that third day we had a kind of group session, but the conversation didn’t hold us for long. I discovered a deck of cards in the pocket of one of my best friends, the wholesaler Moriac. Decency restrained me for a while, but the terrible loneliness drove me to do what I’m about to describe with a shudder of shame.

I sat my comrades in a circle and started playing Lorum with them. I shuffled the cards and dealt them first to one fellow, then to a second, a third, a fourth and lastly, myself. I moved their hands and fingers, which by now were stiff, so they could hold their cards, and then the game began. I’d play my card and set off around the circle. There was no cheating; I didn’t abuse my role. Everyone would play a card, and whoever had the best hand would win the round. Then I’d deal again and start off around the circle once more. Another game for my comrades and me.

The Red Cross found me in the middle of a round I was set to win and sent me to Metz for a regimen of therapy, and then on to Paris. Please treat all that I’ve written as the complete truth and take whatever steps necessary so that our medics make it to the survivors faster and don’t consider it futile to search among hundreds of bodies to find one who still has breath in his lungs. If they had noticed me on the first day I would have remained who I was, but now I’ve become someone else, a different person who I’m frightened of and who will forever be foreign to me.

Thus wrote Germain D’Esparbès, though hardly anyone was likely to have read the young officer’s letter at the time. At the beginning of the Great War, the Germans concentrated the bulk of their army in the west, on their borders with France and Belgium, based on the strategic plan of first defeating France and then transferring their forces to the east to reckon with Russia. Since the defences along France’s eastern border from Belfort to Verdun were considered impregnable, the German Supreme Command deployed the larger part of its forces on the right flank along the Aachen-Metz line, in the spirit of the old Schlieffen Plan from the nineteenth century. At first, war seemed some way away because Germany only requested ‘free passage’ through Belgium. Since Belgium declined, and since Britain sided with the brave Belgian King Albert and his people, Germany set General Kluck’s and Bülow’s armies in motion. They advanced through Belgium like a mower through a wheatfield, and as early as 24 August 1914, the German cavalry entered Brussels — the first city on the wartime tour of Hans-Dieter Huis, the great German baritone.

Fêted Huis arrived in Brussels together with the staff of Kluck’s 1st Army. Cheerful cavalrymen stood by their animals’ sweat-glistening necks and sang ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ and ‘Deutschland über Alles’, and for Huis this was all a little absurd. But he didn’t think of laughing out loud. The next day he was to hold a concert, and he alone knew how much effort it had taken to find an accompanist among the Belgian POWs, and afterwards to locate a badly scratched Bechstein grand in the deserted city. Then there was no one far and wide to tune it, and the instrument with its open lid bared its strings at him like a shameless nude. An old fellow finally arrived in Brussels to tune the piano, a full three days later, so the concert for the senior officers in the City Hall couldn’t take place until the end of the week. Maestro Huis chose the repertoire himself. He didn’t think of singing arias by composers from enemy peoples; he didn’t dare to sing the aria from Gounod’s Faust or from Boris Godunov, which he liked so much, because the former was in French and the latter in Russian. He thought it best to stick to Mozart, with the occasional aria by Rossini or Verdi (the Italians were still neutral). The concert began at exactly five minutes past eight. Only for a moment did he waver and think he should perhaps have changed from his uniform into a concert tailcoat. He decided to remain a soldier because he thought he’d be performing to ordinary soldiers, but he was surprised when he saw many officers with ladies in the audience. The generals of the 1st and 2nd Armies, Kluck and Bülow, were unable to attend due to the victorious campaign, he was told, which had seen the Belgians thrown back to the North Sea coast and the French to the very outskirts of Paris. Instead, this first concert in ‘liberated Brussels’ was attended by their chiefs of staff, who were great admirers of Huis’s art. Perhaps he was a little affronted that no top generals were present, but he went out onto the stage and sang. Two or three times he had to stop and clear his throat, but for the German officers who missed opera so much the performance was of great satisfaction. The generals came up to him after the concert with tears in their eyes and told him he had brought a piece of civilization to that terrible war. Just then, he realized who the ladies were. They were Belgian and Dutch prostitutes, women who never leave a sinking ship and are satisfied as long as their clients are happy. They too congratulated him and giggled loudly, praising him in bad German, and Huis felt very awkward. Not so much due to those ladies in their worn dresses as because of his singing. ‘I was well out of tune. God, how long has it been since I’ve performed? That concert at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin was the last!’ With these thoughts he departed Brussels and set off after Kluck’s army as if he was a quartermaster supplying them not with beans and chewing tobacco but with stocks of opera songs. That’s why the German generals were so grateful and looked so happy each time.

Not all generals were so lucky as to have such moments of serenity. The Austrian general Oskar Potiorek had to regroup his routed forces after the disastrous Battle of Cer. The pandemonium on the Serbian Front lasted several days. Wrathful Serbs crossed the turbid River Sava and occupied the territory between the Sava and the Danube in southern Syrmia for several days, burning the stubble-fields and empty lands along the Danube. The unbearable stench could be smelt in Zemun, and soldiers and civilians went about with handkerchiefs over their faces. Those several days saw the rise and fall of Tibor Veres, the Budapest journalist who specialized in offensive letters.

Veres had come to Zemun full of his own importance, and now he could hardly bridle his anger.

Veres’s disobedient fountain pen with the blue ink arrived in Zemun too, hardly able to bridle its rage that the censor was no longer writing with it, while the obedient one, with black ink in its chamber, was full of its own importance now that Veres was writing with it exclusively.

From the very first day, however, Veres performed the mind-numbing work of censorship, so it wasn’t clear why the fountain pen with the black ink was so proud. Like a gold prospector, he had to read a hundred letters to come across just one where he found something significant. One soldier wrote to his mother about how cold he was and that he missed her corn-bread (how trivial!). Another complained that he hadn’t had a proper night’s sleep for a fortnight and that the worst thing about war wasn’t the bullets or the hand-to-hand combat but the lack of sleep (not completely irrelevant but a fact already known to the upper echelons). A third wrote to his beloved that when men killed each other they didn’t make human sounds but grunted and groaned like cattle who know nothing of humanity (an example of the declining morale of the Serbian forces!).

On the second day in Zemun, Tibor’s blue pen was already bored. And although it was writing all day, his black pen quickly became bored too.

Tibor’s life in Zemun, however, became interesting in those five days. He was billeted to an elderly Serb woman who had formerly run a guest house by the Danube together with her daughter. A large flag of the Dual Monarchy now fluttered in front of the house in the lower Gardosh neighbourhood, and mother and daughter took pride in having sewn it themselves. Tibor had it good in the former guest house. Small and beardless though he was, he felt that the daughter took an interest in him from the first morning when she served him the meagre breakfast and started a conversation in her broken Hungarian. Just when he thought the Great War would turn out to be a boon for him, and that he’d perhaps even marry in Zemun, his own small private war began, one which would end fatally for him. And everything started as a miniscule problem, like when you feel the first stab of pain in a tooth, which is white and healthy looking but full of caries inside.

On the third day in Zemun, Veres’s black fountain pen became increasingly disobedient. Again he wrote with the one, and left the other lying on the paper. He wanted to report that he had read a soldier’s letter home about the poor prospects of the Serbian army recovering after the Battle of Cer, but it turned out that he had written — with his own hand and in the black ink which had been obedient until then — that the prospects of the Serbian army soon returning to battle-readiness were very good! He had already encountered this problem at the Pester Lloyd editorial office, so this time, too, he waged war with the pens and paper as if they were his only enemies. He decided to punish the recalcitrant new pen with the black ink, which he had glorified until just recently, and return to the old one (which he had rejected in Pest for the better one with black ink). And all seemed well at first. The disobedient Pest pen became the obedient Zemun one; but the once obedient black fountain pen from Pest had no intention of backing down and, with thoughts as black as the ink which were its lifeblood, began to plot its revenge.

Veres didn’t notice anything at first. For the whole fourth day of his brave censorial war-making he wrote precisely what he wanted — in blue ink; but the pen with black ink revealed its vengeful nature for the first time by furtively discharging its entire fill of ink into Veres’s bag. The censor cursed it and decided to no longer take it with him to the City Hall building where he worked. He left the gutted pen with its stained nib on his bedside table. His fifth and last day in Zemun dawned.

Veres worked arduously on the fifth day, too.

His black fountain pen thirsted for vengeance all day long.

That night, what had been festering had to come out. When the assiduous censor returned from work after nine in the evening and was good-nighted without any supper by the devoted but mystified Serb ladies, the fountain pen was ready and waiting for him on the bedside table. Tibor had a wash at the porcelain basin and fell into bed, groaning with fatigue. He didn’t dream anything that fifth night in Zemun, and only at first light did he suddenly turn over, like a person who wheels round after having been caught unawares from behind. He grasped his chest for a moment, gurgled and went limp. No one was there to witness his death.

The Great War ended for Tibor Veres when the attentive mother and daughter found him with the fountain pen sticking in his chest. The perfidious stylus had somehow risen up and, like an abandoned mistress, taken revenge on Tibor Veres, killing him with a last stab, although it broke its own spine, or rather its nib, in the process. No one at the coroner’s office thought that the censor — such a modest and retiring fellow — could have killed himself, especially in such a theatrical way. The mother and daughter were therefore in hot water, but they were saved by their Hungarian bloodline on the maternal side and the connections in Pest which they immediately used to avoid any adverse consequences for the killing of a Hungarian non-commissioned officer. After five days and five nights of warring, Veres was buried in chaotic circumstancess behind the guest house, in the Zemun cemetery beneath John Hunyadi Tower, with the briefest of military honours. There was no time for a longer service because Zemun fell the very next day, after the three-day Syrmian offensive by Serbian forces. The new army immediately began questioning Serbian residents in their houses, and Veres’s death even turned out to be of benefit for the mother and daughter from the Gardosh neighbourhood, who could now claim that they had begrudgingly put up with a Hungarian spy in their guest house for five days and then liquidated him. The Serbs honoured them in word alone because there was no time for anything more in the scant four days of Serbian-controlled Zemun in 1914.

There was no time for congratulatory speeches and the awarding of medals on the outskirts of Paris either. After the fall of Brussels and Antwerp, Kluck’s 1st and Bülow’s 2nd German Army crossed into the north of France without difficulty. The kaiser’s army took Sedan and St Quentin and advanced swiftly towards Paris. A blackout was ordered in the streets of the City of Light. One morning, proclamations appeared in the squares. General Gallieni, the military commander of Paris, alerted Parisians to the danger of the city being besieged and appealed to them to evacuate, but Paris was already empty. All who had got wind of war and didn’t want to smell gunpowder had already left: for America like Georges Braque and the cubist painters, for the Côte d’Azur like the former petty gentry and disinherited counts, for Latin America, Spain or London like many foreigners who had considered Paris their home until 1 September 1914. The declaration of a possible siege turned the ongoing flow from the city into an exodus.

The police issued new orders: all public places had to be closed by nine. The city no longer resembled that merry metropolis of bohemians and spivs. One September morning, the student Stanislaw Witkiewicz was woken by a terrible racket. He jumped out of bed and ran out onto the terrace of the small Hotel Scribe to see what was causing it. The sounds of powerful motors were coming from Boulevard Haussmann, where an endless line of cars was taking troops to the north. In that monstrous column were classy models adorned with French flags, sports cars hastily converted into armoured cars and the requisitioned camionettes of various wineries — and all of them were hurrying north. Horrified by what he saw, the young Pole groaned. For Stanislaw Witkiewicz, the Great War began when he thought the Parisian garrison was fleeing and General Gallieni was surrendering the city to the Prussians. What was the young fellow doing on the terrace of the shabby hotel anyway? Why wasn’t he with the troops in the north or with the conceited, cowardly artists in the south of the country? He wasn’t in the north because he had been turned down by the Foreign Legion recruitment office for having a heart murmur; he hadn’t skipped off to the south because he was a waverer like every Pole and still wished to help his new fatherland, France. He imagined himself as a doctor performing an operation; he imagined driving an ambulance with only one hand because the other had been amputated in a heroic battle, and he lived on those illusions for all of August 1914 while he eked out an existence by helping at the Rotonde and eating the leftovers from the plates he was brought to wash up.

Now the end had come, he felt. Paris was deserted and he no longer knew anyone. Rue de la Paix, where before the war you could see all the peoples of the world, was empty the next day. Silence reigned, an eerie silence: no creaking omnibuses, no cars blowing their horns, no clatter of horse’s hooves. Most of the restaurants were closed, and in the streets the wind played with the remains of clothing, crumpled-up greasy paper which failed to interest even the stray dogs, and newspapers still touting the great successes of General Joffre‘s forces in Alsace-Lorraine. And then he felt hunger overcome him. A nourished man chooses one of the masks from the arsenal we call life, he said to himself, but a hungry man has only the face of hunger. He had to do something. The metal shutters on all the shops were drawn down and it was hard to force them in the daytime, so he decided to use the curfew. He set off on forays to the ghostly, deserted apartment buildings at nine in the evening when the curfew sirens sounded. He would cut through the side streets to avoid the patrols. At Place de l’Opéra he would break through the gate of one of the buildings and quickly ascend the stairs. Night by night he learnt to judge by the size of apartments’ front doors, or by the value of their brass door handles, which of them would have the most food left in its pantry.

Then he would eat from others’ plates, as he had done recently at the Rotonde. He entered the apartments of prominent Parisians and found what the fugitives had left behind. The taste of mould and sour red wine didn’t bother him. He needed to eat and drink, and as a man of good manners Stanislaw would set the table in the new apartment every night, don the owner’s housecoat with initials monogrammed on the breast pocket, light his candles in the candelabra and sit beneath his portrait. Then he’d eat the crumbs from his hosts’ table. The goose-liver pâté and crab which the poet Jean Cocteau had once gorged himself with were no longer edible, but the cured meats, preserves and hard cheeses were by all means palatable in the days when Paris darkened its streets and the entrances of its metro stations.

One night, Stanislaw set his sights on a splendid apartment occupying the whole first floor of a proud building adjoining the Tuileries Gardens, but he had no idea that he would find not only food, clothing, copper candlesticks and his own little romantic supper ritual — but also the woman of his life. Just as he was sitting down at the table, he heard something rustle. He thought it might be the rats, which, like him, had also remained in Paris, but he was mistaken. No sooner had he put the first bite in his mouth than the barrel of a pistol emerged from the bedroom, followed by two frightened eyes belonging to a young woman in a nightie.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.

‘Having dinner,’ Stanislaw answered simply and continued to eat ravenously.

‘Why are you eating here?’

‘Because I found food here, and now I’ve found you,’ Stanislaw added between mouthfuls and proffered her a seat at the table.

The girl sat down next to him. She told him she was sick, which is why she couldn’t leave Paris, and that she would starve if he ate up the food the apartment’s owners had left, for whom she had worked as a maid. First Stanislaw calmed her, then he took her in his arms. To begin with, they ate up all the food left behind by the girl’s employers; then our thief, like a real man, decided to go in search of food for himself and his companion. Every evening after midnight, he came back to the apartment at the end of the Tuileries Gardens with whatever he had found that evening. First they would eat; afterwards they told each other about their trivial lives; and in the end they kissed. Her breath had the taste of sour fruit which puckers the mouth. That love could not resemble the Parisian romances from the stage of the Comédie-Française. She smelt of penury and had just one seasoning: the smell of disease.

The girl was melting away, had a hacking cough and was constantly changing dark red handkerchiefs. But she longed for life. After their meal, she would undress before Stanislaw, and he in his passion was soon naked before her. His lover had dark circles under her eyes, two dangling things which hung from her diseased chest in place of breasts, and long, thin legs, whose muscles barely covered the bones. But it was war, the Great War, and it seemed to Stanislaw that he and she were the last people in the world.

And they made love like those last people. They rolled, groaned, coughed and exchanged the smells of sweat and their less than pleasant bodily secretions, but they were in seventh heaven. Their relationship lasted a whole week and they both knew it wouldn’t be longer, but ceremony had to be upheld. At nine, when the sirens wailed, Stanislaw ran out of the little Hotel Scribe and off into the night and the curfew. He broke into apartments like a righteous thief, bagged food and rushed to the Tuileries Gardens. At midnight his beloved would be waiting for him in 47 Rue de Rivoli, in an open silken dress, with ribs that stood out beneath her breasts, as seductive as a dried haddock. When they sat down at the table to eat, everything smelt of blood. After satisfying their hunger with their one and only meal of the day, they’d shift to the batiste sheets, from which they no longer bothered to wipe the traces of blood.

On the fourth day, after several frenzied copulations, Stanislaw told the girl that no one had ever satisfied him like her. On the fifth day, he told her he would never leave her. On the sixth day, Stanislaw Witkiewicz promised he would make her Mrs Witkiewicz when that terr­ible war was over, but even as he spoke those two words, ‘Mrs Wit­kie­wicz’, he knew he was lying. Mrs Witkiewicz said she knew she would be cured of tuberculosis as soon as the war ended and they found better care and a little warm, kindly sun from the south, which she expected that coming winter. And as she spoke those two words, ‘coming winter’, she knew she was lying.

That love came to an end on 13 September 1914, the day the news­paper boys began selling papers on the streets of Paris again and shouting: “Great Battle of the Marne. Gallieni transfers Parisian garri­son to the front and strikes the enemy. Kluck’s army on the retreat.” That was the first major Allied victory on the Western Front. Exploiting the large gap between Kluck’s and Bülow’s armies, General Joffre made a risky manoeuvre and divided the allied forces into three parts. The left and right flanks were composed of French forces, and in the middle, south of the bloody River Marne, along a line between Lagny and Signy-Signets, was the British Expeditionary Force. Pouring into the gap, the British failed to engage the enemy, but the pincers managed to seize the Germans and the battle was won. With that victory, life began to return to the city.

Patrols soon made the rounds of the Paris apartments to which the home comers would return. One of these found Mr and Mrs Witkiewicz in bed, both splashed with blood. At first glance it looked like just another of the ritual suicides of married couples, but then they saw that the shamelessly naked woman was dead and the shockingly nude man was alive. When he regained his senses, Stanislaw learnt that he had become a ‘widower’ and was accused of murdering ‘Mrs Witkiewicz’. They gave him a choice: either to be mobilized into the Foreign Legion at once, or to be shot. He chose the former. No one asked him now if he had a heart murmur and he was sent directly to help bring the newly formed French 9th Army up to strength.

The prominent Parisians returned to their apartments. Many of them didn’t notice the missing food and decorations which Stanislaw had stolen for his beloved. The owners of the apartment in Rue de Rivoli were horrified to hear that ‘the girl’ who had cleaned for them had died in their bed. They didn’t know that the cleaning girl had found the love of her life and had even become ‘Mrs Witkiewicz’ on that last night in evacuated Paris, but they hurried to purchase a new bed and scrub down the walls. Others cleaned their apartments and buildings too, but Paris on the streets looked completely different to Paris from the air. That was the Paris which one German Zeppelin crew member was painstakingly watching on an almost nightly basis. After the Battle of the Marne, the Germans withdrew to a line behind Reims and the soon-bloody River Aisne, but their Zeppelins continued to blitz the French capital.

Those first bomber pilots, among them the one-time artist Fritz Krupp, were bold and adventurous airmen. The bombs in the Zeppelin were stacked one on top of another. The crew consisted of a pilot, a machine-gunner and a bombardier. The latter, unprotected, climbed down into a gondola suspended beneath the giant craft as it flew over Paris. The winds over the Seine would ruffle his hair as he withdrew the priming pins and heaved thirty-kilo bombs over the side of the gondola to plummet down onto the roofs of the city. Each time he dropped a bomb, the Zeppelin would lurch, the pilot would step on the gas, and the flames far below and the column of black smoke would mark where the Zeppelin had been. Anti-aircraft shells whined erratically around the crew, but there were only occasional puffs of smoke from explosions because the artillery still couldn’t raise their guns’ barrels at a steep enough angle, so the lumbering balloon filled with thirty two thousand cubic metres of helium now looked like a robust creature ruling the heights.

For the Zeppelin bombardier Fritz Krupp, the Great War began when he realized he had always hated Paris, even before the war while he still thought he loved it. He had studied painting in France under the great Gustave Moreau back in the nineteenth century, a century he intended to stay in as a painter. Krupp didn’t approve of anything that happened in the art scene after 1900. He even took up residence in Paris, but his canvases — so he thought — emanated the harmony of the young Ingres. Krupp’s classmates André Derain and Paul Cézanne were not of the same mind, however, and as of 1903 they painted with pure colours like ‘wild animals’. Then there was that Picasso and a whole crowd of hungry and impertinent blue-collar artists.

Fritz himself had painted several works ‘à la Cipriano Ruiz de Picasso’ in 1908 and also created a few like Cézanne, and he felt that — if he only wanted to — he would be able to outstrip both of them in their daubings, which were devoid of composition, proportion and harmony. How impertinent they were, in spite of that, and how they ignored him. They started to bother him wherever he went: at the gallery in Rue La Fayette, in Boulevard Voltaire, and when he was using the same prostitutes and worried about catching syphilis. But, despite all this, he didn’t leave Paris. In time, he became their walking shadow and was always somewhere in the same galleries, in the same cafés, but never at the same tables. When Picasso and the poet Max Jacob moved into a little, lice-infested flat in Boulevard de Clichy, he found a similar one (with bedbugs instead of lice) not far from there, in one of the steep streets leading down from the Basilica of the Sacré Coeur; when Picasso moved to Rue Ravignan, to the famous ‘Bateau-Lavoir’ building, Fritz was again close by, having suddenly felt the need to move a little further up Montmartre himself; when Picasso crossed the Seine and moved to Montparnasse, Fritz also decided discreetly to change his address so as be closer to the ateliers near the abattoir in Rue de Vaugirard.

And he saw it all, there in Montparnasse. The once proud pavilions of the 1900 Exposition Universelle had been turned into dismal dwellings for hundreds of ‘ingenious painters’ from the east. These shacks now housed aspiring Italians with guitars and a song on their lips, reclusive Jews from the east, Poles with a weakness for alcohol and tears when they were drunk, Belgians with incorrigibly provincial views — all this was little short of loathsome to Fritz. Why he had found himself a flat near Hôpital Vaugirard he couldn’t say, because he didn’t dare to admit to himself that he was following Picasso.

Then the Great War began. He was mobilized into the Luftwaffe and trained as a Zeppelin bombardier. Finally the day came which he had longed for: he was sent to bomb Paris. But Sergeant Fritz perplexed his crew. They went on raids every third night, and since the bombardier had the best view of the targets and ground fire because he was the one putting his life on the line, the crew had to follow his directions and go along with his choice of targets. The Zeppelin’s orders were to follow the course of the Seine and strike at district offices, government buildings and Les Invalides. In exceptional circumstances — if they encountered heavy enemy fire and contrary winds — the payload could be dropped in other places.

Fritz exploited this loophole and directed his airship LZ-37 to tactically dubious destinations. First he had the vessel make for Montmartre, and there, night after night, he took aim at Boulevard de Clichy, the steep cobblestone streets around Sacré Coeur, and Rue La Fayette, where there were no targets of military significance. But there were targets here of importance for the would-be painter Fritz Krupp. Picasso’s compatriot Mañach had let him stay in a room on Boulevard de Clichy in 1901. Then, in 1903, the painter of the smutty Les Demoiselles d‘Avignon (that was Krupp’s opinion of the canvas, which he dubbed ’The Brothel’) moved to Boulevard Voltaire, and finally in 1904 to the most noted address in Rue Ravignan, the ‘Bateau-Lavoir’. That building was completely insignificant for German High Command, but not for the history of modern painting, so the Zeppelin bombar­dier endeavoured to find it and destroy it by his own hand.

Now, in 1914, it seemed the hour of reckoning had finally come: the chance for him to get back at the colours on the pictures of his classmates Cézanne and Derain, at the indecent figures on Picasso’s canvasses, and at the uncouth repute of the hobo hack painters from the east. Paris was his! The whole night belonged to him! He just needed to take good aim at the ‘Bateau-Lavoir’ . . . but it wasn’t easy to locate and destroy an ordinary, two-storey thatched cabin on the steep terrain of Montmartre, especially since strong winds were always blowing above that hill. Therefore he often reluctantly agreed for the Zeppelin to turn south. The target? Montparnasse, of course. En route, Fritz threw the odd bomb at the government buildings by the Seine, just so he’d have something to report to his superiors, and then he demanded that the LZ-37 continue south. ‘To Montmartre!’ he shouted from the gondola. Here Fritz mercilessly rained bombs down on the painters’ colony La Ruche in Rue du Maine, where the ateliers of the itinerant professors of painting were, and on the colony Falguière where Modigliani worked.

What he actually ended up hitting is a different story. The bombs mostly fell into the brambles and weeds between the buildings, but up in the sky it all looked otherwise to Fritz. Every night he felt he had put a spanner in the works of modern painting and levelled its rakish habitats, so he always returned to base in La Fère satisfied and wrote a report on the sortie in the operations log, describing the great damage inflicted on the enemy although there was virtually none. That was one painter-bombardier’s idea of fighting the war. But he wasn’t the only one who badly assessed the impact of his dangerous actions. The Russian generals on the Eastern Front also thought that their armies were now very well positioned after their initial victories in East Prussia and that the hour had come to re-ignite old disputes from the beginning of the century. The Germans took advantage of this. After the first defeats, General Prittwitz was replaced by the experienced Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg at the side of the young General Ludendorff. These two generals, who would turn the tide of German fortunes on the Eastern Front, met for the first time at Hanover railway station. From there they immediately set off for the Front. They could hardly wait for an opportunity to mount a military response, and they were given it.

The German offensive was made possible by the personal antipathy between the Russian generals. Several years earlier, the commander of the 2nd Russian Army, Alexander Samsonov, had openly criticized General Rennenkampf, the commander of the 1st Army, and a quarrel ensued between them. When a gap developed between the two Russian armies in 1914, Rennenkampf was in no hurry to fill it and man the unoccupied hills and fields of East Prussia. By the time he realized the Germans’ true intentions, it was too late and he could no longer come to the aid of Samsonov’s 2nd Army. He set his army in motion, but on 30 August 1914 he was still seventy kilometres from Tannenberg, bogged down near Königsberg, where Immanuel Kant rested peacefully in his grave. It was hard to counter the Germans. The Russians transported their weaponry using draught animals, while the German army was already making full use of the rail network.

Like in a game of chess, the debacle at Tannenberg had its logical consequence in the Battle of the Masurian Lakes and the near collapse of the Russian forces in 1914, causing more wounded to arrive at the hospital train V.M. Purishkevich than could be taken in and operated on. There were times when the train stood out on the track, defended only by the escorting armoured train, which had two open anti-aircraft wagons. Already in the second half of September, the Germans began using their frighteningly fast two-seat Aviatik B.I planes in East Prussia. There was one such attack which Liza would never forget. When the alarm sounded in the train, she and the walking wounded dashed to huddle on the track beneath the train, but in the middle of the attack she heard that one of the wounded was calling for help under a nearby tree. She didn’t think of Marusya, who she had left behind in Petrograd, when she ran out towards that young man. Her flowing, coppery-red hair got showered with dirt. She shot angry glances with her eyes the colour of sepia, and she cursed and shook her fists at the enemy planes. ‘Damn Huns! Damn, bloody Huns!’ she screamed at the top of her voice as she crawled, to give herself courage. She hauled the wounded man back, dragging him with her hands and teeth. One of the planes fired large-calibre cannon rounds commonly known as ‘suitcases’, but the ‘luggage’ missed them that time. Liza’s mouth was full of soil and her clothes were torn and rent when she reached the life-saving shelter between the wheels of the train.

Two days later, she was decorated by General Samsonov with the Cross of St George. For the occasion, Lizochka put on the cleanest uniform she could find: a grey skirt with a white blouse and an apron with a large red cross. The medal seemed to match her beauty and copper hair; her husband and the other doctors smiled, and the wounded gave her souvenirs for little Marusya: iron spoons shaped from fragments of the ’suitcases’ while they were still hot. Only one thing didn’t fit the occasion: Liza couldn’t find a single white apron without bloodstains on it.

Not everyone immediately encountered blood close-up, like Lizochka. Things were particularly festive in Belgium in those October days. The kaiser’s birthday was celebrated on 20 October. Every building was decked with flags, and Zeppelins plied the sky like big cumuli when the kaiser arrived in Antwerp, accompanied by the Crown prince and the oldest general. Young Prince Friedrich Wilhelm III still looked the dandy. He drove up in an open car, on the seat next to the driver, with a cocked hat. It seemed he didn’t yet know what war was, and he chattered away at dinner.

Neither had Jean Cocteau, that scrawny fellow who needed to gorge himself with buckshot so as to be enlisted, found out yet what war was about. In fact, his involvement in the Great War ended up being very much as he had hoped. To begin with, they sent him to an aviation unit near Bussigny. After a surprise enemy breakthrough, he was sent back to the Parisian army supply office, ultimately to be transferred to the medical corps under the command of Étienne de Beaumont. The war looked like a lark to him. He was posted in the vicinity of Bussigny again, which made him happy because he had come to love that little town during his first posting of the war. He didn’t mind being woken in the mornings by the thunder of guns. That Monday he had time to write. No landscape is more magnificent than the azure sky with shrapnel bursting around the aircraft, he thought. He noted down this image and wondered a little about whether to replace ‘aircraft’ (it sounded like a dated, Blériot-ish contraption) with the more modern ‘plane’ or the romantic ‘Zeppelin’. He left the word ‘aircraft’ and decided to trim his nails. If only he had a sweetheart to send a poignant farewell letter to, he thought, together with the ten nail-clippings. Should he send them to Picasso? No, that would be too theatrical and he would take it the wrong way. And besides, to what address? Picasso wasn’t in Montparnasse any more. Some said he was in Spain, others claimed he was searching for his roots — in the middle of the Great War, of all times! — in the little town of Sori by the Ligurian Sea, where his mother supposedly hailed from. Others again swore he was passing the time in Cannes on the sunny coast of the Mediterranean, which smelt of rosemary and laurel, not of war.

Djoka Velkovich also trimmed his nails that day. No one had told him that he would be discharged from hospital, but he was already dreaming of joining the Serbian armed forces, who were awaiting a new enemy offensive like a locust plague they couldn’t escape. The doctors, however, didn’t let him go. He was still running a high temperature, and the skin on the right side of his face looked raw and weepy, covered by a web of taut capillaries. Soldiering in the dusty fields would be fatal for him, given his unhealed wounds, so the Front would have to wait. But there were some for whom the Front didn’t wait. After being mobilized into the Foreign Legion, Stanislaw Witkiewicz was given brief, basic military training in the rear. He learnt to crawl, shoot and withdraw. He bayoneted several sacks of potatoes mixed with cherries. The potatoes were supposed to be like the bowels of enemy soldiers, and the cherries their blood: Quite enough for any newly-fledged soldier, or was it?

The following letter from a German soldier ought to be a warning to every military command. He wrote home to Heidelberg, and due to the negligence of the censor the letter made it through to his family as if it was any other piece of mail.