The Great War. Aleksandar Gatalica

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.

      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,