Читать книгу The Great War - Aleksandar Gatalica - Страница 12

THE FIRST WARTIME CHRISTMAS

Thus wrote one French doctor of death, while Mehmed Graho, once the Austrian doctor of death, was promoted. He became head of death and also received the rank of colonel of the Medical Corps. He didn’t earn this senior position through success as an army surgeon but by using his connections in Sarajevo; he arranged that an order be sent to the hospital in Zvornik stipulating that the doctor of death was to be appointed head of death. With Graho now out of the operating theatre, the many wounded men lying in files and rows in the courtyard of Zvornik’s Imperial Lyceum like discarded piles of overripe pomegranates and melons, could heave a sigh of relief.

Mehmed Graho continued to go out into the courtyard, but his words ‘Him, him, and him — to me’ no longer had the same ominous ring as after the Austrian defeat at the Battle of Cer. At first, things on the Balkan Front had gone much better militarily. The army of the Dual Monarchy had seized Serbia in a pincer movement and the capitulation of the recalcitrant neighbour had been in sight. But heavy fighting had developed at the River Drina, which had accepted and carried downstream all the fruits of strife; like the Styx and Cocytus, it took lives away to the insulted River Sava and also to the Danube, that freshwater monarch which heaped a human cargo without name and origin on its deep bed.

There were those who survived this time, too. Head physician Graho again faced a growing mass of wounded, and he passed them on to his surgeons, who pruned them like saplings. And still no one noticed that the hospital in Zvornik had a far higher death rate on the operating table than the collection points in Tuzla, Mostar and Trebinye. But it was war, the Great War, in which a human life was worth less than one word from a general, so no one remarked the poor record of the hospital in Zvornik.

Nor did anyone take any notice when the Istanbul spice trader Mehmed Yıldız realized his beloved Turkey was going to enter the war. Effendi had no family and thought of the young assistants and apprentices in his spice shop as his own sons, but he didn’t tell them when he learnt that Turkey would be going to war. That day too, 28 October 1914, he got into the tram at the railway station below Topkapı Palace, which took him up the hill to the Aya Sofya, where, as a good Muslim, he prayed at dawn every morning surrounded by a hundred other, mainly, elderly men. He noticed there were no more young men at all in the rows of bowing, shoeless believers because the army had been mobilized and many Rumelian Turks were now ‘under arms’, waiting with clenched teeth somewhere in the Caucasus, but at morning prayer he still hoped for peace and progress in the Padishah’s righteous land. After prayer, he thought of going down to the shop on foot, but fine snow from the Bosporus made him catch the tram again. It seemed very early for snow. As the aged vehicle descended the slope by the Golden Horn, creaking and ringing, and circuited the mighty walls of the Sultan’s domain, the effendi thought about the snow and how surprised the Sultan’s nightingales would be when he let them out of their aviaries to fly in his celestial garden that morning after first prayer.

Mehmed Yıldız had been brought up on Nizami’s epic Khosrow and Shirin. He was a defender of the true Turkish miniature, which never departed from the canon of two-dimensionality. Now he arrived at his shop. It was slightly after seven. He looked to see if his assistants had prayed and then gave a sign for the calling out of the day’s prices to begin. He opened the newspaper. Sitting in front of his shop, surroun­ded by the spices which smelt as pungent that morning as ever, he read on the front page of Tanin that the Turkish government was in crisis. The Minister of Public Works, General Mahmud Pasha, had tendered his resignation, as had the Minister of Commerce and Agriculture, Suleyman Effendi, and the Minister of Postal and Telegraph Services, Oskan Effendi. The Minister of the Navy, Djemal Pasha, and the Minister of Education, Djenan Pasha, temporarily took charge of the portfolios without ministers. It didn’t sadden him to read that Suleyman, a Syrian Catholic, had withdrawn from the government (he’d never trusted him), nor that Oskan, a damned Armenian, had resigned (he was an intruder here), but when he read that his childhood friend, the righteous Mahmud Pasha, had also left the government, he muttered to himself: ‘This looks mighty bad.’ Still, he continued to hope without foundation that the trumpets of war would bypass the Golden Horn and his righteous and stern Padishah.

But then he raised his eyes from the newspaper, and what he saw numbed him. No one knew that Yıldız Effendi played a little game every day, just for himself, like when Westerners open a game of patience. That day too, the orange and red spices were competing on sale against the yellowish, green and brown ones. A victory of the former was a bad sign and a victory of the latter a good one for that day, but the battle was always closely fought and only the experienced eye of the trader could tell which spices carried the day and how he, following those signs, would act until evening prayer. Now he folded Tanin together and his jaw dropped. He wasn’t even able to utter his ‘This looks mighty bad’, because he saw the signs of impending misfortune in all their blatancy. For the trader in oriental spices Mehmed Yıldız, the Great War began when he realized that the red and vermillion spices were outselling the others by such an overwhelming margin on 28 October 1914 that his boys were already glancing his way, mutely calling on their master to replenish the stocks from the large storeroom beneath the bridge, to which he alone had a key.

The next day, 29 October, Turkey entered the Great War. Those half medieval, half modern people celebrated in the streets on the opposite side of the Golden Horn. The coachmen took passengers to all three parts of the city for free. No toll was charged on the bridge that day. One beardless lad even jumped off Galata Tower with improvised, wax-coated wings and tried to fly like a moth over the windy Bosporus, but he crashed into the ground and died of his injuries the same evening.

Just one week after the red spices had won a crushing victory over the browns in Istanbul, another beardless lad by the name of Tibor Németh was to be the first Austro-Hungarian soldier to enter evacuated Belgrade. After the Serbian defeats on the Rivers Drina and Sava, an acute shortage of ammunition had forced the Serbian command to order the army’s withdrawal to reserve positions along the line Varovnica–Kosmay–Rudnik–Gornyi Milanovac–Ovchar–Kablar Gorge. So the army withdrew from cities like Shabac, Valyevo, Uzhice and even Belgrade. The last train to set off south for Nish with refugees, who had returned to the capital for their winter clothing, left from the main platform of the station with a whistle on 26 October by the old calendar, or 8 November by the new.

‘It’s not my fault!’ General Zhivoyin Mishich thundered into the receiver of the field telephone. ‘What can I do if my men are exhausted and the capital is located on the border where there should only be a customs post?’

And so Belgrade was evacuated. The first Austro-Hungarian scouts crossed the Danube into the city in silence. When this advance party set off cautiously towards the low-lying quarters of the city, they were met only by starving bitches with protruding ribs and shrivelled teats hanging between their legs. The reconnaissance battalion had the task of going from house to house and checking if any defenders remained in the deserted flats; if so, they were to be killed immediately. Németh’s comrades shouted ‘All clear’. And he thought it was too, at first. But when he entered a commercial building in Dubrovnik Street, someone fired a shot at him. Private Németh couldn’t tell who it was. He thought he saw a man with long sideburns and a kippah in the reception room of that building, but it wasn’t really a man but a phantasm, half real and half transparent, through which he could see the bergère from where the shot was fired.

The bullet was certainly real enough. It whistled past his ear and made a hole in the wall above his head, but when Németh thrust his bayonet at the illusion of the Jewish trader he only impaled the empty bergère, which spilt its hemp stuffing at his feet like bowels and threw out springs like bones. The proud soldier didn’t know what to think, but he wasn’t afraid. He continued to comb the streets of Belgrade, while all around him more and more ghosts were abroad. They flitted across the streets like shadows, and many were watching him, pressed up against the small Turkish windows. In Yovanova Street two small boys, their bodies transparent like the Jew’s had been, ran past him and hit him without warning, one on each side. He felt a pain and fired a few shots, but the bullets passed right through the boys, and he started running after them. He didn’t know why. He should just have shouted ‘All clear’ and let them bolt off like mountain goats, but his perseverance was to be the end of him — his fatal error. The boys passed from courtyard to courtyard, jumping fences and ditches. From Yovanova Street they crossed to Yevremova Street, and then suddenly turned and ran through the park and on towards King Peter Street. He looked into that deserted, grand avenue: tall buildings loomed on both sides of the street and seemed to be leaning inwards, towards him, as if conspiring to collapse on top of him. But the proud Hungarian soldier wasn’t afraid now either. Where had those little brats got to? Finally he spotted them again, just before they disappeared into a strange building, its facade tiled with green majolica.

He dashed after them into the entrance. He smelt the odour of sticky sweat and thought he’d never catch up with them, encumbered as he was with all his equipment and carrying his rifle with bayonet affixed, but they knew he was slow and never got so far ahead that he’d lose sight of their fleeting heels. So it was that they lured him into an apartment. Tibor followed them in, panting, and set foot in a large drawing room. He didn’t manage to turn around and almost didn’t realize that he was killed — the apparition of a huge, semi-transparent woman fired a bullet from a hunting rifle. She was evidently the mother of the two small boys. Now she had killed a Hungarian soldier without a twinge of conscience. She caressed her two sons and all three of them vanished. The Great War ended for Tibor Németh when he was shot by one of the dead women of Belgrade, one of those who died in 1914, taking her own life after both her sons drowned in the Danube.

So ended the military career of a soldier who betrayed the family line by not entering the pantheon of the brave. But Belgrade took no notice of its ghosts, just as Paris was unaware of its spectres near the Tuileries Gardens; and did Istanbul did not save the young fellow who launched off Galata Tower like a bird with waxed paper wings and bars for flapping them.

The wings of the new planes were not much more robust than the flimsy ones of the unfortunate young Turk because the first aircraft were completely unarmoured, with a fuselage made of wooden ribs like a boat. The former Zeppelin bombardier Fritz Krupp was familiarized with the functioning of a plane in just three days. He was instructed how to move the flaps, operate the tail rudder and fire the machine-gun in flight. After those three November days, he was transferred from the Zeppelin unit to an aircraft squadron, and his new superior praised the planes as deadly new fighting machines which would win the war. That made the former Zeppelin bombardier feel good. In fact, he was full of himself. The same day as Tibor Németh, whom he never met, was killed, Krupp was already enjoying delusions of grandeur: he imagined himself with a red scarf around his neck, shooting at French planes and being decorated as an air-ace. He ate well that evening and even went out after dinner with a Belgian woman who swore she wasn’t a prostitute. The town of La Fère, where he was stationed, was empty. The streets were deserted in La Fère just as they were in Belgrade, even several days after Austrian troops had entered the city.

Then civilians began to arrive in occupied Belgrade. Half human and half animal, they had hidden from the war, and as troublemakers they didn’t conceal their moral depravity. Now they hoped for fun, quick gain or simply adventure. One such renegade was Gavra Crno­gor­che­vich, the hot-tempered victor of the last duel in Belgrade before the Great War, a ruffian who evaded mobilization and disappeared into the blue with the words ‘This looks mighty bad’. Now he came back from wherever he had been and really hit the town. In deserted Belgrade, the November trees shed whatever last leaves they still had, while Gavra shed what few moral scruples he still had from before the war.

Relieved of any great contemplation, he swiftly found himself an occupation. He didn’t think of selling his Idealin shoe polish to the occupiers but quickly gathered a team of ‘his women’, who were actually prostitutes — the only people not to have left the city. He killed two interlopers for deluding his ’good women’, thus demonstrating to his reluctantly smiling harem what would happen to them if they tried to leave him or do business on their own. Then he began offering them out for hire, but he encountered an unexpected problem. The military command which was soon established in the city didn’t ban prostitution, but the Austrian and Hungarian officers were reluctant at first to get into bed with whores. The war had just begun, and many of those who abstained in those chilly November days had brought with them not only their kit but also a ballast of morality, although they would soon cast it off. Those who became rapists later that year now still saw themselves as family men, and the pimp Gavra Crno­gor­che­vich realized that his public houses in Yevremova and Strahinyicha Bana Streets had to be wrapped in a new guise.

A family one, of course.

He found respectable clothes for his ladies and dressed himself in the best pre-war suit lifted from Prime Minister Pashich’s house in Theatre Street. He brought in a few tables and cast clean white sheets of silk damask over some of them and green felt from a gambling hall over others. The older prostitutes began to play the role of mothers, and he, of course, was the father. The young ones — there were seven or eight of them, one more dissolute than the other — became their daughters, and the two public houses were dubbed ‘open Serbian homes’. Now business really began to flourish. The house in Strahinyicha Bana Street was mostly frequented by junior officers, so Gavra sent the uglier prostitutes there, while Yevremova Street drew the cream of the occupiers, headed by the commander of the city, Colonel Schwarz, and including Baron Stork and Lieutenant Colonel Otto Gelinek, who was not only a customer of Gavra’s houses but also purveyed them with luxury victuals. ‘The family’ took care of everything in the houses. Both of them had a mother (who also prostituted herself when it got busy), an aunt and several daughters, but Gavra Crno­gor­che­vich was the father of both.

Like a real bigamist, he went to and fro between the establishments, collecting the takings and checking the health of his protégées, who had to service up to ten johns a day. Almost playfully, he embellished the charade with a different suit for each house, different silken dressing gowns and even a false beard which he added to his black-dyed moustache, but only when introducing himself as father of the more elegant ‘open Serbian house’ in Yevremova Street.

And the money ‘came in shitloads’ (Gavra’s expression) during the thirteen days of the occupation. All this time, the other unfortunate from the last Belgrade duel hung around in the old hospital in Vrachar. Not that Djoka Velkovich couldn’t have fled from Belgrade along with so many others, nor was he left behind like some of the incurably ill. Djoka decided to stay on at the hospital, which he had got to know well and now hid in, waiting for new doctors to come and heal him of his freakishness. When Colonel Graho and his Austro-Hungarian medical corps entered the hospital in Vrachar, Djoka prudently emerged from the cellar. He thought he’d be caught immediately, but no one noticed him because there were so many patients and so few doctors. He nudged a moaning, wounded man aside and shared the bed with him. His bedmate didn’t complain; after all, it was nothing unusual for two soldiers to share the same bed, so no one paid any attention to the Serbian patient. Djoka was slightly annoyed by the bustle as well as the smell of carbolic acid and congealed blood; nor did he understand German or Hungarian. But in time he got used to everything. No one treated the red-and-white patient, but he was given a little food like all the others. He didn’t think of going into town, so running into Gavra the pimp and challenging him to another duel could be ruled out. He was happy with his situation, which was a rare blessing, considering that virtually no one was satisfied with their circumstances.

For Sergei Voronin, the Great War began and ended when he thou­ght he could introduce rank-and-file democracy into his platoon, which was manning the defences of Warsaw. This came at a time when the pendulum of war on the Eastern Front had again swung the Russians’ way. The Russian army had defeated the Germans in the Battle of Galicia near Lviv and broken the enemy offensive. The Russians pushed the front forwards by over a hundred kilometres, all the way to the wolfish peaks of the Carpathian Mountains. The Polish city of Przemysl was under siege by the Russian 8th Army far behind the front line, but the German defenders held on valiantly like the Ilians of legend. Przemysl became a name on the lips of every Austrian and German soldier. This was why the Germans tried to shift the Front back to the east and take Warsaw. But the Russians gained the upper hand in the battle on the gleaming River Vistula. After this victory, quarrels re-emerged in the Russian general staff. Their supreme command could not agree how to capitalize on the most recent successes. The ‘Iron Duke’ was in favour of an offensive on the open ground of East Prussia, while Chief of Staff Mikhail Alexeyev proposed an offensive in the wool-carding region of Silesia. Either icy plains or woollen yarn.

At that time, the Germans intercepted Russian encoded messages about the proposed invasion of Silesia. Hindenburg hoped to repeat the success of the Battle of Tannenberg by striking the Russians in the flank as they moved on Silesia. And so the Battle of Lódz began, and with it the harsh Transcarpathian winter. The troops of General Pavel Plekhava’s Russian 5th Army were force-marched from southern Silesia towards Lódz — students of Petrograd University and peasants from the estates near Staraya Rusa covered a Herculean one hundred and twenty kilometres in two days in temperatures of minus ten. And after those terrible two days they still had the strength to mount a surprise attack on the right flank of General August von Mackensen’s German 9th Army. The Germans retreated, but they continued to threaten Lódz up until December 1914.

The sky above Lódz was red in those days, and the night seemed never to come due to the constant blaze of heavy guns, but things were different in Warsaw, where General Nikolai Ruzsky commanded the army group charged with the defence of the city. While Russians were dying, like fish caught in a net, near Lódz, Warsaw was behind the lines for several weeks. And it was at this time that one sergeant tried to introduce rank-and-file democracy into his platoon. Sergei Voronin was a socialist. He had a small sterling-silver locket holding Plekhanov’s picture on the left and Lenin’s on the right. The left-hand side was the reason for him being in uniform, because Plekhanov had called on all Mensheviks to respond to the call-up and join the fight against the ‘accursed Krauts’. The right-hand side of the medallion was responsible for the idea which Voronin tried to institute in icy Warsaw in the first days of December — one he claimed would decide the Great War.

He resolved to break the chain of command. The goal of this minor military reform was for his platoon of forty men to issue its own commands and reach decisions in the style of an ideal grass-roots council. But this state, which Sergei termed ‘consummate soldierly conscience’, could not be attained overnight. The transition from the ‘imperialist-hierarchical’ form of command to a ‘collectivist’ one (Sergei’s expressions) lasted a week. That week saw both the rise and the shameful fall of that idea, but it was far from the mind of the socialist sergeant that everything would take place so quickly. First of all, he spoke of his intentions with his deputy platoon commander. Once he had won him over, he tried hard to persuade the group commanders. On the third day, he set up the original rotating-system of command in which it fell to each soldier to be the platoon’s commanding officer for one hour. He didn’t reserve any privileges for himself: in forty-two hours he was sergeant for one hour, and not one minute longer. Everything went smoothly at first, but then Sergei noticed that his forty or so Russians included a few blockheads who shouldn’t be entrusted with command for even one hour, so he developed a two-tiered, and afterwards an even more complicated three-tiered rotating system of command.

In Warsaw, where there was no fighting, all this remained a game and went unnoticed for surprisingly long — six whole days. But then soldiers of the other platoons started to pick up on a strange thing: Sergei’s men not only strutted around their sector like peacocks but also soon came to enjoy commanding and kept giving each other orders which there was no one to carry out. Ultimately they upgraded the three-tiered system and instituted ‘order exchanges’: I order you to do this and you carry it out; you order me to do that and I carry it out in return. Commanding thus became a kind of swap; Sergei vehemently opposed this at party meetings of the platoon on the second-last day of his reform, but to no avail. The most enterprising soldiers found a way of imposing their will amidst that chaos. They began remembering each other’s orders, and in the end they were trading them like shares. A lop-eared mathematics student came off best: he swiftly converted these fluctuations to figures and soon became the proprietor of the greatest number of orders owed to him by the others. On the last day he thus became the informal leader of the detachment of forty-two presumptious commanders.

Who knows where all this would have led had Sergei not been arrested, brought before a court-martial, summarily sentenced and shot. His soldiers escaped the firing squad, but they were now given the most inveterate old sergeant as platoon commander, a man of fifty-four, steeled back in the Russian-Turkish War of 1878. He alone gave orders, and everyone else had to obey. Half the men received bruises from his blows, and three of the most persistent had their arms broken by the old sergeant. Thus the necessary ‘imperialist discipline’ was restored in the 2nd Platoon, 3rd Company, 5th Battalion of the army group defending Warsaw just before the fighting began, and everyone soon forgot Sergei.

But unforgettable events occurred at the railway station in Nish, Serbia, and were publicized in Politika on 18 November by the Julian calendar. This news, delivered to the paper’s offices in Belgrade by special mail, was from a lady fondly known as Mrs Danica, the founder of the ‘Serbian Blue Cross’, an organization for the welfare of draught animals at the front, and the first woman from Shabac to learn English. Mrs Danica wrote:

I found the little railway station in Nish full to overflowing with troops, villagers and women. They had all been sitting on the ground for hours and waiting for the hospital train. Then the whistle of an engine was heard and everyone headed to the main platform. To our surprise, smart and tidy-looking prisoners-of-war started to emerge from the train, and we lost heart. They were Austrian soldiers, and everyone would have looked at them with contempt if one of them had not suddenly leaned out the window and shouted excitedly: ’Djuro, Djuro!’ a Serbian soldier on the platform wheeled around, ran up to the soldier in the blue Austrian uniform, who had now hopped out of the train, and embraced him. They were Yanko and Djuro Tankosich, brothers from the same village in Syrmia, where the Great War had begun with both the Austrian and Serbian armies mobilizing able-bodied men. Brother Djuro was able to escape the Austrian’s mobilizers in August 1914 but they caught Yanko, and consequently the brothers fought against one another up until the moment when the ’Austrian’ seized the opportunity to surrender. Now he was willing to change into a Serbian uniform and wear our Shaykacha cap.

The meeting of the brothers was a touching event. They both cried and hugged each other as if they were two bodies with the same soul. Those standing closest to them heard them promise each other that they’d never be separated again, in life or death. We applauded them as they embraced, and an elderly man with a long, grey beard instructed that the brothers’ wish be respected. The gentleman spoke with such authority that those around him immediately obeyed. When I took a second glance, I realized he was none other than the Prime Minister, Mr Pashich, who was waiting for the train along with everyone else.

The train for the Prime Minister didn’t arrive, and Yanko and Djuro soon went off into town, arm in arm. Their song resounded through the streets and was picked up first of all by gypsy brass bands, then successively by merry fellows in the cafés and debauchees of every variety, finally to be sung by the whole town, and the Tankosich brothers from Syrmia were its luminaries.

Thus wrote the first member of the Serbian Blue Cross. The same lady was also a correspondent for the first issue of Politika to come out after the victory in the Battle of Kolubara on 8 December by the old calendar. If the previous story had been penned to song and celebration, this one was awash with tears. It read:

I recently reported in Politika on the meeting of two brothers. Now I owe readers the end of the story. I concluded my previous letter about Yanko and Djuro Tankosich with the song which all of Nish was soon singing. But a new sun rose — a bleak, winter sun — and Sunday 19 November was a very different day. The two brothers went to army headquarters to request that they both be enlisted in the 1st Company, 4th Battalion of the 7th Reserve Regiment of the Serbian army, which was Djuro’s unit. This time, too, they set off arm in arm, with a smile on their lips and convinced that their sufferings were over. But things turned out differently.

The recruitment service viewed Yanko with suspicion.

’Why didn’t you desert straight away, like Djuro did? Instead, you fought at the Drina and killed who knows how many Serbs, and now you want to wash your hands clean,’ they challenged him.

Young Yanko swore in vain that he had been in the medical corps, served under a certain Dr Mehmed Graho in Zvornik, and never fired a shot at his Serb compatriots. They detained him at the army supply office, and his brother Djuro fell into despondency. The officers responsible said to Djuro:

’It’s only for a few days, and he’s not under arrest. We’re just detaining him because there are all sorts of Czech and Slovak riff-raff around who speak our language and claim to be Serbs, when in fact they’re Austrian spies.’

’But . . . but that’s my little brother Yanko. I’ve known him since he was just this big. Why a security check when you have my word?’

Djuro pleaded and swore by his wounds received at the River Yadar, but the officers were bureaucratically intransigent.

’No, no, he’s to stay in for a little longer. But we need every man who can hold a rifle, now that the decisive battle is brewing, so you can rest assured that we’ll release him when the twelfth hour comes.’

And the twelfth hour arrived. Djuro’s 7th Reserve Regiment had rested and now received orders to set off from Nish for the decisive battle on the slopes of Mount Suvobor. Djuro requested permission to leave the unit for an hour and went back to the army supply office’s lock-up.

’The twelfth hour has come! We’re going to the battle on Mount Suvobor. Please let my brother free so we can fight and die for Serbia together,’ he begged, but the officers remained hard-hearted.

’The information on Yanko still hasn’t arrived,’ they said. Then Djuro requested to see his brother one more time before they were separated. His wish was granted. Downcast and gloomy, he entered the cell. It stank of his brother’s urine because there was no toilet. He felt sick, and he saw red. Hugging his brother, he turned him the other way and took out a hand grenade: ’The documents on Yanko have now arrived . . . release my brother!’

When they saw the grenade, everyone took cover. Djuro and Yanko now set off for the station, where the troop trains were leaving for the front, along the same streets where they had sung with the assembled populace two weeks earlier. Our tireless Prime Minister was no longer on the platform, and if he had been I’m sure he would have resolved the whole matter immediately. Yanko and Djuro arrived at the station with an armed squad of military police hot on their heels and just itching to kill them as deserters.They would have been executed right there and then, had not Major Djuro Sharac and his Chetniks happened to be on the same platform; and they sided with the brothers. Impetuous as they always were, these staunch fighters had heard of the two brothers from Syrmia, immediately recognized them and formed a ring around them. ’If you want the Tankosichs, you’ll have to kill us first!’ they shouted at the military police. Armed though they were, the MPs realized they’d have to make a ruckus in the middle of the station, and in view of all the civilians standing nearby they decided to back off.

The brothers got into a wagon, sullen-faced. Djuro’s trembling hands only just managed to replace the pin of his grenade. His captain of the 1st Company told him that they were going into battle now, but when they returned he was going to have them both tried. The brothers glanced at each other, determined not to go before any court martial. As soon as the first evening came, and with it the first battle in the vale on 3 December, both Djuro and Yanko fell in a frantic charge beneath Mount Suvobor, running and holding each other’s hand like little girls. And that is how the Great War ended for them.

Now, I don’t know what to say about this story, which I was told just the way it happened, but I do know that I have a moral duty to propose to the High Command, through this article, that the Tankosich brothers be posthumously decorated — not put on trial. May Serbian medals for bravery be sent to their poor mother in Syrmia when the Great War ends.

But the Tankosichs were never decorated because of the enthusiasm which engulfed people’s souls, and everyone slept just an hour or two so as not to miss the days of victory celebrations after the Battle of Kolubara. Old King Peter hurried to Belgrade to enter the capital together with the first troops. Jubilant crowds tried to stop the royal car, but he didn’t mind. He passed the damaged royal court, and the car drove over the flag of the Dual Monarchy, the first symbolic trophy of the war, as it lay in the mud. Many a strange thing was found in the recaptured city, but the soldiers of the 13th ‘Hayduk Velko’ Regiment were particularly stunned by what they discovered in one elegant house. The Austrians had been preparing to celebrate Christmas by their calendar, and two houses in Strahinyicha Bana and Yevremova Streets were found to have substantial stores of luxury goods: huge quantities of roasted coffee, chocolate, liqueurs, sweets, biscuits, sardines, sultanas and various delicacies which ordinary soldiers had never heard of and the commanders ordered them not to try. But soldiers being soldiers, they started helping themselves to the sweets, until they noticed that frightened eyes were watching them from hiding.

They found a group of strange women in the house, embracing and intertwined like denizens of a snake-pit, with dishevelled hair, pale thighs and smudged make-up around swollen eyelids. All of them claimed to have been raped several times a day and said they had been driven to whoredom by a certain Gavra Crno­gor­che­vich. He had put on a charade of being their father but in reality he was a cruel brothel boss. When asked where Gavra was now and if he had fled with the Austrian army, the women only said they didn’t know but thought he was probably still in Belgrade.

That saw the start of a wholesale search for Gavra in lower Dorchol. Houses and deserted flats were peered into, but the ghosts of dead Belgraders could now rest peacefully in their graves and none of them fired on the liberators. In any case, Gavra was caught after just a few houses had been searched.

At his trial, which was brief because there was neither time nor desire for more, he claimed to have been ‘forced’ and ‘blackmailed by a certain Otto Gelinek’ and to have ‘had no choice’. The High Military Court condemned him to death nevertheless. As the sentence was being pronounced, his dry lips beneath the still well-groomed, black-dyed moustache just murmured, ‘Looks like this is it’. On his last night, he couldn’t sleep. He got up, called the guards and asked for a cigarette. They just gave him a butt, from which he took three passionate drags. As he took the first, he remembered his victory in the duel; as he took the second, the boonful days during the brief occupation of Belgrade appeared before his eyes. As he took the third, he decided to flee to America. He tried to bribe the guards with a pile of the occupier’s banknotes extracted from the lining of his frock coat, which they had been sewn into, but it didn’t work. He fell asleep and didn’t dream anything until morning. They woke him at five o’clock and offered him the last sacrament. He was shot that day together with three other unscrupulous traders imprisoned in the environs of Belgrade and in Smederevo. For Gavra Crno­gor­che­vich, the Great War ended before the firing squad on the sandy river bank below Vishnyica, with thousands of German marks still sewn into the lining of his coat; they became soaked after his body splashed dully into the shallow water of the Sava. ‘If only I had Idealin here to polish my messy shoes,’ was the last thing Gavra Crno­gor­che­vich thought.

‘If only I had my helpers here, whom I love as my own sons,’ Mehmed Yıldız thought as he called out the prices of his wares by himself. A small boy, no more than eight years old, was by his side. His five strapping apprentices and young assistants had been called up into the Turkish army and each sent to a different part of the world, where his empire defended the rising and setting of the sun. The eldest — the red-headed one, who cheated so adroitly at the scales, just so much that his master was satisfied and the customers didn’t complain — had been posted to Thrace. His black-haired brother with the slight birthmark on his forehead, who would dispel their weariness with a song in the evenings, had been deployed to the Caucasus. The third apprentice, his dear beanpole with the infectious smile which dispersed all their worries, had been sent to Palestine. Yıldız Effendi also had two young assistants, and they had also been recruited because they were born in 1895 and 1897 respectively. The one was almost a man, but the other still very much a child. In that way he was deprived of the brightest young employee he had ever had, his newly-fledged bookkeeper, who had been sent to Mesopotamia. And even his youngest assistant, an urchin from the house next door, had been mobilized for the Turkish army in Arabia. That was a particularly hard blow for the old spice trader. Did the Sublime Porte really need children in this war?

And so Yıldız Effendi was left all by himself. True, the neighbour had loaned him his youngest son — the brother of the red-headed and the black-haired apprentices — so he would at least have someone to help out, but that was just to keep an old promise; the gesture in no way suited the circumstances because a boy of eight was unable to lift weights, take responsibility or yell out prices. After two days, he told the boy: ‘Off you go home, son,’ and stood behind the counter alone. The streets of Istanbul were now deserted. Occasionally a Muslim woman from a good home, with a violet veil, would call in, but that was a rare occurrence. ‘What silence, what silence,’ the trader muttered, with ample time to look around. Over in one of the traditional porched houses, looking in through the window, he could see a servant rolling out lengths of wallpaper. Through a gap between two other houses he glimpsed the Bosporus gleaming like a shed snakeskin.

Yıldız Effendi slept very, very little at night. He would wake up with a start and call one of his apprentices. One day one of them was gone, the next — a second, the third — a third, the fourth — a fourth, the fifth — a fifth, and on the sixth day all of them had disappeared together. At four in the morning he went down to the storeroom by the Golden Horn and fetched new stocks of red spices. Before dawn he went by tram to prayers at the Aya Sofya, so as to open the shop by himself before seven. He called out the prices, hardly got round to reading a few lines from the noble Koran, and saw himself as the last old-fashioned Turk. He didn’t play his little game with the spices any more. The red ones were outselling the browns and greens by such an overwhelming margin every day that the trader lost all hope that any hour would be good.

The great singer Hans-Dieter Huis, too, had completely given up hope. The concert he held in occupied Brussels now appeared to him as the last memento of a dying civilization. In the meantime he had seen hunger, retreat and death. They called on him to sing at the deathbed of two German princes who paid with their heads in Holland and France. That was the hardest thing the maestro had ever done. The Prince of Schaumburg-Lippe had already given up the ghost when they called him, so his singing at the catafalque was in fact a requiem, but the Prince of Meiningen still gave signs of life when they rushed the singer to him in an ambulance. The Prince requested hoarsely that he sing Bach’s arias, and he, without knowing why himself, started singing a Bach canon, which was ridiculous and almost impossible for one voice. He’d begin with the higher notes like a tenor and then lower his trembling voice to the deeper notes, while it seemed to him that someone was mutedly intoning the other voice in a cold tenor. No, that wasn’t the prince singing in the hour of his death because he scarcely had the strength to breathe. He heard, yes he clearly heard Death singing the upper register of a canon for two voices with him. And then the prince died. Be-medalled officers who had been waiting for the prince’s death now came in, saying to each other, ‘It’s over now’, and rudely shoved Huis out of the room. As he was leaving, he saw a doctor going in with a metal basin of plaster solution to make the prince’s death mask.

Some other be-medalled officers later sent him down to the cellar with a few polite words. There he sat at a table with two old men who only spoke French. He tried to exchange a few words with them and learnt that they were the owners of the house which had been turned into a German army headquarters, where the prince had breathed his last. The men told him defiantly that the house had been in their family for three hundred years up until 23 September 1914, and then they asked him if it had been him singing on the upper floor. He affirmed that it had, and told them his name, at which they jumped up and started kissing his hand. They had twice heard him in Paris, they said, but for maestro Huis this was so wretched and strange that he didn’t know whether to burst into tears or reprove the old men who were kissing him. Civilization had thus survived, he thought, but it had been driven underground, into cellars, and was so old that it would expire before the end of the Great War.

Such thoughts preoccupied him for the next two weeks as he was carted from venue to venue behind the lines and made to sing like a wind-up doll. But hadn’t he admitted to himself that he no longer felt anything and had no faith in his art any more? Was it not then irrelevant where he sang and who gave the orders? Therefore he reluctantly agreed to these battlefield assignments. They drove him around, introduced him to the superior officers, and he performed. His last scheduled event of 1914 was on Christmas Eve at the supreme command headquarters near Lens, where he was to sing for Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, heir to the German throne and titular commander of the German 5th Army. They told him that the great Theodora von Stade would be performing with him. The Crown prince welcomed the singers as if it was the seventeenth century, not the twentieth. He said he was glad they had come to his estate, and the generals clustered around him exchanged anxious glances. Then the door was closed behind the singers. The prince was their only listener. Theodora began to sing the upper part in a clear and unimpaired voice, but when the second voice was called for, Hans-Dieter Huis cleared his throat with that ‘front-line cough’ of a malnourished man of broken health. The prince raised an eyebrow, looked at them with tear-filled eyes, and the old man at the cembalo played the first chords of the Sanctus from Bach’s Mass in B minor again. Theodora finished the opening, and Huis replied beautifully. The prince gazed at them both with strange, voracious eyes. He smiled happily, but with a hint of desperation, as if he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. At the end of the short, a cappella concert, he too enthused about them having brought a little civilization into that terrible war, repeating almost word for word what his generals used to say when Huis finished a concert. That embittered the maestro. His thoughts were far from dinner. He took the opportunity of asking His Majesty to allow him to visit some units from Berlin at the front, which was just a few kilometres away. ‘Our soldiers need a song for Christmas too,’ he said, and the Crown prince immediately filled out a permit for him and arranged transport.

In the trenches near Avion, which smelt like graveyard loam, he was met by the members of the 93rd Division, each of whom was an opera buff. He recognized many staff from the Deutsche Oper among them. Now they were tired soldiers with lice in their hair, their cheeks ruddy from the cold and noses red from alcohol. ‘Sing für sie,’ the tenor from the Opera choir encouraged him, who had first called ‘hurrah’ when Huis appeared. But what could he sing when he no longer believed in song? Something German? Bach? In the end, it was the men who decided. ‘Don Giovanni, Don Giovanni!’ they shouted in unison, and he began to the sing the aria ‘Fin ch’han dal vino’. He began in Italian: ‘Fin ch’han dal vino / calda la testa / una gran festa / fa’ preparar’ [‘For a carousal / Where all is madness, / Where all is gladness, / Do thou prepare’], and then continued in German: ‘Triffst du auf dem Platz / Einige Mädchen, / bemüh dich, auch sie / noch mitzubringen.’ [‘Maids that are pretty, / Dames that are witty, / All to my castle / Bid them repair.’] As he sang, he saw that something unusual was happening. The soldiers moved him. This was no longer the threatening audience with opera glasses before their eyes, and his voice began to come from the depths of his breast, where he had kept his artist’s soul locked away for so many years. He remembered Elsa from Mainz and finally let his unhappy soul come out on that Christmas Eve; and he drank in the starry night air and sang as he hadn’t sung in a decade and a half. He grabbed one of the Christmas trees and began to climb the steps in the side of the trench up to the open ground between the German, French and Scottish lines. They cautioned him that just that day it had been impossible to even fetch the wounded, who still lay there with snow-dusted cheeks and eyebrows and cried for help.

But in vain: Huis trod those steps and made it into no man’s land. His song was heard well into the enemy trenches, but one Scottish soldier from the Scottish 92nd Division realized better than the others that only the great Hans-Dieter Huis could sing Don Giovanni like that. It was Edwin McDermott, a bass from Edinburgh and Huis’s constant companion in the role of Leporello whenever Huis performed in Scotland. The Scottish soldier waited for the end of the aria, then he too leapt out of his trench and began to sing Leporello’s aria in reply: ‘Madamina, il catalogo è questo / delle belle che amò il padron mio, /un catalogo egli è che fatt’io, / osservate, leggete con me.’ [‘My dear lady, this is a list / Of the beauties my master has loved, / a list which I have compiled. / Observe, read along with me.’]

The two singers now started walking towards one another. At one hundred metres, Huis and McDermott saw and recognized each other. They both smiled and could see the radiance in each others’ eyes. For Huis, it was as if his beloved Elsa from Mainz was striding there hand in hand with him. All at once, everything took on meaning. Leporello sang ever more loudly: ’In Italia sei cento e quaranta, / in Almagna due cento etrent’una, / cento in Francia, in Turchia novant’una.’ [‘In Italy, six hundred and forty, / In Germany, two hundred and thirty-one, / a hundred in France, / In Turkey, ninety-one.’]

No sooner had the two old friends and associates embraced, when a cry resounded. From the French positions, someone started to sing like the Commendatore: ‘Don Giovanni, a cenar teco / m’invitarsi, e son venuto.’ [‘Don Giovanni, you invited me to dine with you, / And I have come.’] Immediately afterwards there was a burst of fire. Leporello had only just looked into smiling Don Giovanni’s face, when he began to stagger and fall. His burly body protected Huis from the bullets of the wrathful singer in the French trenches, whose shots had evidently been meant for the great German baritone, not for the Scottish singer.

Instead of Don Giovanni, it was his faithful servant Leporello who lost his life in that field of fire. The Great War thus began and ended for the celebrated Scottish bass when he decided to reply to maestro Huis’s song and join in the first wartime opera of 1914. As soon as the Scotsman fell, there was a shout. German soldiers raced out to haul Huis back to the trench, but he refused to be separated from McDermott. He cried, and how he cried: for Elsa, and now also for Edwin from Edinburgh. He almost choked from sobbing when they finally dragged him back to the German trenches.

The name of Leporello’s killer was never revealed, not least because the sad event set a chain of unexpectedly positive events in motion at the front near Avion. As if the Messiah had fallen, the death of the Scottish soldier led to the start of negotiations and then a Christmas-Eve truce between the companies of the German 93rd Division, the Scottish 92nd Division and the French 26th Brigade. A Scottish priest, Father Donovan, held a midnight Mass for a thousand men, and on Christmas Day they buried all the dead who had long lain uncollected between the trenches. The pipers played Flowers of the Forest at McDermott’s funeral and Huis sang at his friend’s shallow grave; he swore it was the last time he had sung Mozart’s Don Giovanni.