The Great War. Aleksandar Gatalica

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