The Great War. Aleksandar Gatalica

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