The Great War. Aleksandar Gatalica

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