The Great War. Aleksandar Gatalica

it would be something special, he knew it; he felt the crowd had come to see if his voice would tremble and whether he’d get stuck in the middle of his lines, unable to continue. ‘Like an old lion tamer who has to stick his head in the mouth of the beast again,’ he muttered to himself and set off for the stage through the side corridors.

      The overture was over and the opera began. Donna Anna, Donna Elvira and the peasant girl Zerlina soon fell victim to Don Giovanni’s licentiousness, and Hans-Dieter Huis opened his mouth as if he was in the recording studio and singing into the big horn. He didn’t feel anything inside — neither joy, nor sadness, nor excitement. When he managed to look into the faces in the first few rows, he noticed that almost all of them were holding opera glasses to their eyes. The opera lovers looked unearthly to him, and he knew they were watching for the slightest twinge on his face, but he didn’t remember Elsa from Mainz and didn’t know what to think about her suicide because he no longer had any feelings or thoughts about the two of them. He sang like a wind-up toy — by all means brilliantly, but also coldly — and made it through to the end of the opera in that tone. The spirit of the Commendatore enters with an earth-shattering boom (a long-prepared spectacle). Don Giovanni doesn’t listen to Leporello’s warnings and stays firm when the Commendatore’s spirit begins to sing ‘Don Giovanni, a cenar teco /m’invitarsi, e son venuto’ [You invited me to dine with you, / and I have come’] and drags him away to hell. The closing notes, a satisfied swing of the conductor’s baton, and the end of Mozart’s opera. A claqueur from the third gallery shouted ‘Bravo!’ and the audience sprang to their feet. Thirteen bows. Thirteen! That was unseen at the Deutsche Oper, but although the audience clapped loudly maestro Huis knew they were making a din without any real enthusiasm. The greatest German baritone may just have performed, but the petite teacher Elsa from Mainz hadn’t gone onto the stage with him, and it was as if everyone had been expecting her. The audience would have applauded a little more and then got up to go home, had not an officer now come onto the stage. He was short and his uniform didn’t go with the costumes of the opera, although it matched the costumes of the day. The military man took out a proclamation from the kaiser and read it out with pathos. And yet his voice trembled a little: ‘These are dark times for our country. We have been surrounded and are forced to use the sword. God give us strength to wield it as needed and wear it with dignity. To war!’

      While the proclamation was being read on stage, Don Giovanni and his cheated lovers, with their smudged make-up, were standing at the side. Someone burst into tears backstage. One man after another rose from his seat in the audience, and on the second gallery it seemed they were trying to sing the national anthem in unison, but the great baritone didn’t believe in war and only thought what the reviews would say the next day.

      And sure enough, the next day dawned with favourable reviews, but it was a new day for Berlin, a new day for Sarajevo, a new day for Belgrade and a new day for Paris. In Berlin, a performance of the famous Berlin Varieté was broken off. Another officer, long and lanky, took the stage and read out the kaiser’s proclamation. And then a third, and a fourth — on all the stages in Germany. In Paris there had already been rumours about mobilization for weeks. People spoke about war not with fear, but with an explosive mixture of romantic and patriotic feelings. Soldiers-to-be imagined themselves as republican grenadiers who were given new uniforms and helmets, and instead of bayonets they stuck irises into their rifles and charged before the eyes of girls seated along the trenches like medieval maidens watching a joust. It seemed that everyone wanted to ready himself for that ‘decisive battle’.

      At the Café de la Rotonde, a gathering place for artists and aesthetes run by Old Libion, many of the guests had started training and so had stopped drinking. They claimed to be in training, to be sure, but they poured themselves drinks under the table. No one asked for the old cocktails which the painters once used to order for their models; pastis and absinthe weren’t in demand, and even Old Libion’s sour wine, which had the reputation for giving a bad hangover, was consumed in greatly reduced quantities. Anti-German slogans were to be heard left, right and centre. One voice yelled that ‘eau de Cologne’ ought to be called ‘eau de Louvain’. The fellow at the bar hated everything which came from the Boches and, refusing a new round of drinks ‘because it was time to prepare for war’, called out loudly, so that Pablo Ruiz Picasso would also hear him, that all the cubists should be stuck on a bayonet because it was a ’filthy Boche art movement’.

      But one little man with a sparse moustache sat in the corner of the café and didn’t shout anything. He wanted to go to war too. He imagined it as being like one of his poems where verse fought against free poetry on a field of paper and where one rushed at the other with spears raised, but not so violently as to prevent the lyrical battle bringing forth a beautiful poem. That titch’s surname was Cocteau. For Jean Cocteau, the Great War began with the serious worry that he could be turned down at the recruitment office for being too thin. Therefore, instead of drinking, he constantly ordered rich and fatty food. Pâté, raisins, fried crab . . . etc.

      When he got home he was sick from so much food, of course. He ran for the toilet and vomited a little on the black-and-white tiles in his haste before reaching the toilet bowl; where, with an immense sense of relief, he ejected what he had consumed. He could identify the remains of the purple crab and the black raisins which stank of the acid of a distressed stomach. But what could he do? Like a Roman patrician who had come back from some great orgy, he realized that his stomach was now empty again and he wouldn’t gain a single gramme from what he had eaten at Old Libion’s. He went out into the street once more, where Paris’s rust-red dust swirled low on his patent-leather shoes and long shadows danced on the walls. He made his way to the neighbouring Café du Dôme and called the waiter, playing the same game as at Old Libion’s:

      ‘What would you like, sir?’ the waiter asked.

      ‘Please bring me a piece of Gruyère,’ the guest said.

      ‘So you’d like dessert?’

      ‘Yes, for starters. Afterwards I’d like half a chicken.’

      ‘Anything else?’

      ‘Yes, I’ll have the macaroni.’

      ‘Would you like a steak as well?’

      ‘Yes, but “à l’anglais”.’

      ‘All at once?’

      ‘In the order I said.’

      The Dôme was significantly quieter than the Rotonde. A former haunt of German artists, it was now empty. No one played billiards at the green felt. The undersized writer wasn’t sure of the date — perhaps it was the last day of July 1914, but he smelt war in the air. He called the waiter again and said he had just been joking. He decided to have a light meal because he was coming to realize that it was better to eat five times a day like a frail invalid. After every meal he’d rush home and lie on the bed, on his back, so as to digest the food without vomiting.

      Such problems were unknown to most. Although they were artists and hunger had been their constant companion for decades, they had been born strong, with broad shoulders and massive haunches, so they could hardly wait to head to the army supply office in Temple with their recruitment papers to buy all their kit and new steel helmets. For Lucien Guirand de Scevola, a scene painter and stage designer who had recently been praised by the illustrious Apollinaire, the Great War began at the counters in Temple, when he bought himself a complete uniform and then decided to reward himself with a mask against poison gas. They told him it was a supplement to the uniform, a kind of ‘war accessory’, and that he probably wouldn’t need the strange rubber contrap­tion with threateningly protruding little glass cups for eyes, but you never knew. Scevola decided to try on both the uniform and the mask. Even at the counters in Temple everything had to be a bit chic. He went into one of the special cubicles there (at a recruitment office, imagine!), tried on the tunic and tightened the trousers with the belt. He looked at himself in the mirror and was satisfied — he cut a good figure. Then he put on the helmet and foppishly cocked it.

      He also decided to try on the mask with the duck-like metal beak for protection against hypothetical poison gases he didn’t even know the names of. He took off the helmet, slipped the elastic straps over