Читать книгу The Great War - Aleksandar Gatalica - Страница 11

LETTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH

Dear parents, if only you knew how much I miss our Heidelberg, wrote the German soldier Stefan Holm, for whom the Great War began with an unexpected friendship, in fact a real, bashful, male love at the front. The whistle of shells and even death itself in all its repulsiveness are not the worst thing in the trenches, but the lack of sleep. We sleep little, always with one eye open, forever on our guard. But whenever Morpheus takes me away down the intoxicating river in his barque and offers me a shred of deceptive sleep, I dream of our crimson River Neckar and the castle on the hill, of our university and the long-bearded professors, who in my younger days still hadn’t heard of the inhumanity of the most civilized nations of Europe.

I don’t know if this letter will make it past the censors, but I feel an urge to tell you about the most terrible experience of my life. You will have read in the papers about us starting triumphantly, gripping Paris itself in a vice, but then Joffre repaid us pushing us back from the Marne, even as far north as the accursed River Aisne. Here both we and the French fought and tried to surround the enemy by curling around their flanks. We became preoccupied with our right flank, and they with their left. And none of that — neither the retreating nor the attacking — was any different to the usual battlefield operations until the moment we ended up with a large number of prisoners on our hands. They were mostly French, but there were also some recruits from the Foreign Legion. No one knew what to do with them, as we still didn’t have prisoner-of-war camps, and we were slightly surprised by the order that each of us be given one POW to ’look after’ there at our positions. My comrades, simple soldiers already steeped in blood and with hardly any education, immediately began treating their prisoners as servants, and worse: as dogs. The mature men of forty from the Landwehr reserve weren’t much better, nor were the officers of the Uhlan cavalry unit a little further along from us.

Not only did the French have to wash their underwear, darn their socks and fit bullets into their cartridge belts, but they had to put up with insults and beatings, as well as address their masters with pretentious titles such as ’Your Countship’ or ’Your Excellence’. That was, of course, ridiculous and sad at the same time, and, seeing as I couldn’t help the others, I decided to at least relate to my prisoner as a human being. You know me, dear parents — I don’t have the heart to hate. I took a liking to a Pole by the name of Stanislaw Witkiewicz. It turned out that he spoke German and was familiar with our great minds, Goethe and Schiller, because he had studied in Paris before the war.

You can imagine what good friends we became. I’d sometimes yell at him, too, and make him clean my boots, but he knew I was only doing it so we wouldn’t look suspicious. When things were quiet, we’d talk at length, recite poetry to each other and pledge that our camaraderie would continue after the war. But those vows of post-war friendship were easily made. We had only that one week of autumn on French soil to spend together. I told him about you, about home and Heidelberg, and about German science, which will entwine with that of Oxford and the Sorbonne one day to end this terrible war. He confided in me that he had betrothed and married a beautiful young woman in Paris during the blackout and siege. He spoke of her as a nymph: with pure, pearl-like skin, long flaxen hair and eyes as blue as the lagoons of warm seas. His description of her was so vivid that I fell in love with Mrs Witkiewicz on the spot and was greatly saddened when he told me a few days before we parted forever that his beloved was no more — she now slept among the stars and he was a widower.

I mourned with him but also hoped that his solitude would strengthen our friendship; the two of us could become a symbol of a new and different Europe, a Europe of friends, not of enemies. I imagined our first meeting after the war: I arrive by coach at the far end of Lazienki Park in Warsaw. I get out, pay the coachman, and Stanislaw runs towards me elated yet relaxed, his hair tossed by the afternoon breeze. I too spread my arms to embrace him, a dear friend I haven’t seen for so long, much too long; and all at once the senseless charging and killing and dying are gone, and the German and Polish and French. All that remains is friendship — a friendship I thought would last forever. But how could I have known, dear parents, that it would end just a few days later?

I found out on 15 September that the end was nigh, but I didn’t tell my dear Polish friend until the last moment. There was to be a heavy artillery barrage and aerial bombing to destroy the enemy positions, to be followed by an irrepressible assault of our massed cavalry and infantry. When the hour came for the charge, each German soldier was to push his prisoner out in front of him as a human shield and expose him to ’friendly fire’ from the French lines. I couldn’t believe it. My comrades-in-arms, those rude ’uhlans’, now simply went wild at the news. Bruises and black eyes were harmless compared to the injuries which the masters now inflicted on those poor wretches in the last few days. They only made sure not to maim them so badly that they’d be unable to walk in front of them when the whistle blew.

When the whistle blew . . . the prospect of that day haunted me with a mixture of horror and revulsion which war raises to the throat of every civilized man. My good Pole noticed that something was going on at our positions and asked me anxiously what it was about, and I, like a good doctor of death who spares his patient the news of his impending demise, didn’t tell him the truth. On the last day of our friendship I looked at him tenderly, but I realized I couldn’t help him. On the afternoon of 17 September, the artillery fell silent. The order came to tie ourselves to our prisoners with rope and stand them in front of us, facing away. At that, a screaming and shrieking began. My Pole burst into tears too, and I used the occasion to hug and kiss him for the last time.

Then dozens of sergeant’s whistles sounded all at once. We jumped out over the breastwork. The French tied in front of us screamed inhumanly, almost squealing like swine, in fact. My comrades prodded them with their bayonets, swore at them and drove them like cattle. Some of the French called out and tried to warn their compatriots not to shoot, others persistently shouted things in French so the other side would see that a line of Frenchmen was moving towards them. But salvos resounded from a range of about one hundred metres and began cutting swathes through the line of prisoners. We were under orders to run with them as far as we could, to cut the rope connecting us as soon as they were hit, and to stay lying there. I had spent the whole night pondering what would be best for me and my Pole: for us to hang back and try to save his neck through hesitation, or to charge out ahead of the others and get him killed before he suffered too much. I decided on the latter.

I caressed him one last time before the charge, and at the sound of the whistle I started running as fast as my legs, or rather our legs, would carry us. I thought for one last time that we were tied together and ready to die together, the way it should be, like in Plato’s Feast. I planned to cut the rope as ordered when he was hit, but instead of falling to the ground I’d continue the charge and collect some French bullets myself. But it didn’t turn out that way. For Stanislaw Witkiewicz, the Great War ended fifty metres across no man’s land when the first friendly French bullet struck him just above the heart. For me, the war is still going on. I admit that I only briefly considered uttering a cry for both of us and continuing the advance. How far? Another twenty or thirty metres maybe, in a futile attempt to reach the French lines. But I didn’t do it. Coward that I was, I hit the ground, having got the furthest of all my comrades. I managed to look and saw the field littered with dead Frenchmen like discarded old sacks. The faces of my comrades were panic-stricken, and mine probably was too. The sergeants screamed: ’Look at Stefan, you stupid rabble, look how far he’s got!’ And they made the others advance to reach me.

It was all over in the evening. We achieved a small breakthrough in our section of the front (I’m not allowed to tell you where it is). Instead of a meal of Dutch cheeses, which our army supply office had been constantly feeding us, we now found tins of French meat called ‘Madagascar’ along with garlic left behind by the enemy. We ate that meat with zest, like the greatest delicacy, until someone told us it had been rumoured among the French that the tins contained not beef but monkey meat. We were disgusted and threw away the remainders, leaving the ’Madagascar’ monkey meals for the French, since we knew they’d be taking back the trenches the next day. They quietly and hurriedly collected the dead they themselves had riddled with bullets. Our commanders swore they’d take the positions again, and yesterday I was awarded the Iron Cross. Me — the biggest coward, who was afraid to die even when his friend was cut down by a hail of lead! My only consolation is that Stanislaw Witkiewicz earned the medal. In my eyes, he is the only Pole from the French Foreign Legion to be decorated with the German Iron Cross, 2nd Class.

I’m ashamed to write to you about my weaknesses, but the shame would be much greater if anyone could look into my heart, where he would see only ice. Esteemed Father and Mother, my dearest parents, I beg you to pardon my weaknesses and commend my soul to God, who saw all of this but did nothing to stop the carnage . . .

Farewell. Your son Stefan (still alive, for the time being).

* * *

Our positions,

I know where they are but won’t write it because the censor will black it out anyway.

Dear Father and Mother,

This war is hilarious one moment and tragic the next. I didn’t tell you in my earlier letters that we’ve invented a new form of warfare. We and the Boches now consolidate our positions by digging deep holes which we crawl into like moles. It all began when we suffered terrible losses from just one machine-gun fired by a single dug-in uhlan machine-gunner. Each little entrenched position like that was able to halt our advance north of the Aisne for several days.

It seems both we and they got the idea that you can hold a position with trenches for much longer, so for a day or two both we and they threw aside our rifles and took up spades and shovels. At first, we dug holes for a short stay, shallow like soldiers’ graves, which we were convinced we’d soon fill with our own bodies. Then we started joining those holes into trenches, passages and redoubts, and in the end we made a whole little city four metres down. All the moles in France must have envied us. In places we had aisles ten metres wide and almost fifty metres long. In the narrow parts we’d excavate a few steps and observe the enemy through trench binoculars, but we saw nothing except occasional shovelfuls of earth flying up out of their trenches and making little mounds on the surface.

At first, the men complained at having to dig in. The sickly started to cough from the damp which crept from the ground, but soon we made friends with the rats in the trenches and even had little houses where friendly smoke rose from chimneys. That little degree of comfort and civilization quickly inclined the soldiers to laugh and joke. As a pre-war entertainer, I was given the honour of naming the broader tracts of the trenches and decided to name them after our greatest hotels. We therefore had a Hotel Ritz, Hotel Lutetia and Hotel Cécil. The opening of the Ritz was a wonderful, festive affair until its abrupt end. I must admit I set the tone of that travesty. Our first guests had to be our most corpulent comrade and ‘his sweetheart’. The sweetheart was played by a short lance corporal who I’d got to know before the war when he was involved in my production of Jarry’s ribald stage play Ubu Cuckolded. We dressed up that little comedian to be the woman and the huge soldier to be the gentle­man. He even found a lorgnette which he stuck on his nose, and ‘her’ underpants were padded up with French newspapers to such an extent that the men just whooped and whistled at her. We organized waiter’s livery for the two of us and waited on the first guests.

‘It’s so hot today, sweetie, although the summer is long past,’ the hulking fellow began, acting the gentleman who enters the hotel with his lady. ‘It’s so hot, darling, a glass of champagne would be just spiffing,’ the lance corporal said in a squeaky voice like a woman, to the cheers and hoots of laughter of all the assembled soldiers. ‘Please take a seat, madam, sir,’ I replied and sat them at an ordinary wooden table in our Ritz, but they had to pretend it was the most luxurious hotel salon, and I must admit they played their roles most convincingly through until the end. We had organized a bottle of real champagne. The gentleman inquired who was playing at the ‘Hotel Ritz’ today, and his eyes lit up when I told him it was the Parisian Garrison Officers’ Band. ‘May I?’ I asked, once the bottle had been opened. ‘Oh yes, yes,’ he replied and added: ‘I’m democratic, you know. However much champagne you pour me, my wife is to get the same. Two fingers for me and two fingers for her.’ (He showed two vertical fingers for his glass, meaning it would be filled to the top, and two horizontal fingers for hers, so only the bottom would be covered.) ‘Don’t you be condescending with me,’ she hissed, and just at that moment a ‘coal box’ — a shell from a long-range howitzer — came down and exploded right on top of the Hotel Ritz, in other words our trench. When the black smoke had dispersed and we spat the dirt out of our mouths, we saw that our lady and gentleman, the first guests of the Hotel Ritz, were dead. The glasses had remained intact and the champagne, which they hadn’t managed to sip, wasn’t even spilt. Only they were no more. For the two first actors in the French trenches, the Great War began and ended with the shortest flash drama in the broad trench named ‘Hotel Ritz’.

That’s how things are in this war. I’ve all but forgotten my first guests now. I have no more tears, and there’s no one more for me to mourn. I’m sick of myself already and almost regret not having taken the role of the gentleman instead of playing the waiter. Sometimes I can just remember that little lance-corporal actor of mine, who played his last role in our trench. Then I sigh and say to myself: this world is a botched job, slapped together in an off moment when the Creator either didn’t know what he was doing or wasn’t in control of himself.

Best wishes,

Your son Lucien Guirand de Scevola (still alive, for the time being)

* * *

Cannes, 28 October 1914

Dear Zoë, love of my life,

By the benevolence of our righteous Republic I’ve been given one month’s rest and recuperation in the south after spending over two months in Hôpital Vaugirard in Montparnasse, which was bombed like crazy by German Zeppelins every second or third night, contrary to the Geneva Convention and any sane logic. Since I didn’t have any injuries of the body but, after three days spent with the dead in Lunéville only wounds of the soul, manifested in a constant twitching of my right eye, I practically became an assistant to the hospital staff.

In the evenings, when the sirens sounded, I’d join them and help haul the moribund patients down into the cellar. No one looked to see who was taking whom, we just grabbed the first ones we were ordered to. That gave me the chance to play God a little. You’ll be amazed at my words, but you should realize that I’m no longer the man you knew and loved. May the true God grant that you still love me after this letter and after the Great War, whose end cannot be glimpsed. Let me return to Hôpital Vaugirard. I’m not sure if I should be writing you this, but I hold that even in these changed circumstances, where I don’t know if I’m still in control of myself, I should continue to be sincere with you; what is left of my sanity tells me that true love can only be based on openness. The painful truth must therefore come out.

The hospital took the most serious cases from the battles on the Marne and Aisne, and many of them didn’t look much different to butterfly cocoons in their cobwebby beds. They weren’t alive, but neither had they taken up oars in the galley of the dead, and the doctors were forbidden from practicing euthanasia. But I overheard the hospital staff complaining that the moribunds were using up iodine and morphine which could help a wounded man who still had a spark of hope in his eye . . . at that moment I decided to help them. With a clean conscience, my dear Zoë, and without a trace of spite. Every evening, when the sirens sounded and those accursed Zeppelins bore down on our hospital, I chose a patient who I’d decided to relieve of his suffering. I made that choice like a God come down to Earth: without mercy and hesitation. But since I was only a man I swallowed my shame and abhorrence and hid them inside me, consoling myself that not even my victims’ faces were visible beneath all the layers of turban on their heads. And so, freed of any pangs of conscience, I’d choose one of them and start dragging him towards the cellar. En route I’d twist his neck, yank him so roughly that he’d expire by himself, or let him go crashing down the stairs like a decrepit Egyptian mummy. All that went unnoticed in the rush and confusion, and it’s not that I wasn’t circumspect. To start with, I killed one a week, then two. But when I realized that I not only wouldn’t be discovered but also had the tacit consent of the doctors, I decided to relieve one incurable invalid of his life every evening when the siren sounded. After all, the dead must be spoken to in the language of the dead. Cum mortuis in lingua mortua.

So I stayed on at Hôpital Vaugirard for two months longer. My medical card said I was in a stable but critical condition, but in reality the doctors only kept me because they saw me as a sad tool for doing what they weren’t allowed to do. They wrote that I first had nervous and then digestive problems, and that I had eventually begun to sleepwalk. They thought up all sorts of things just to keep me on for as long as possible. Finally they saw me off with tears in their eyes, and I felt I’d been saved because in my final days there I felt I’d become a prisoner in the hospital and feared that the role of executioner was mine forever. I left by train for Marseille and changed there for Nice. The southern sun bathed me and purged me with its warmth, and for a day or two I even thought I’d overcome my torment, but now I feel I’m in its grip again.

My dear Zoë, the faces of those I righteously killed don’t come back to me because I never saw them through those dead butterfly cocoons, like I say. I still think I carried out the task, which was intended for me. But am I deluding myself? I don’t know what is good and what is bad any more, but I don’t think any living creature will need rationalizations like that after this war. You are all I still love. I send you my tenderest greetings and beg you to ask Nana to come to the coast again and join me in my sorrow.

Your Germain D’Esparbès.