The Great War. Aleksandar Gatalica

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.

      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