The Great War. Aleksandar Gatalica

if it got blood on it. The train stood at the platform in the town of Bologoyev for some time before moving off with a jolt. It was headed for Likhoslav, and then on for the border with accursed East Prussia! With that jolt, all the doctors and nurses in the train knew that the war had begun for them even before the first bursts of fire.

      Sarajevo was also quiet as night fell on the eve of war. Mehmed Graho thought about all sorts of things: about regicide, about his Orthodox Christian ancestry, although he kept that to himself, and about the genera­tion of his great-great-grandfather who, for him now long ago, had converted to Islam. He had his own explanation for the war: the dead had risen up to fight the dead. The end of the last century had revealed something troubled and rotten, it had consumed people, and now one batch of humankind was to be purged and replaced with another. Wars had served that purpose since time immemorial. He went home that evening after work, undressed and went to bed. He didn’t dream anything, but many others did.

      They dreamed beneath Europe’s starry, starry summer sky in those nights: stable boys and gunners, batmen and their officers, and generals and their chiefs of staff. That night when the armoured hospital train V.M. Purishkevich headed off from the main platform of Bologoyev station towards the war zone, the commander-in-chief of Russian forces on the Eastern Front also dreamed. For Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, the generalissimo of the Russian army, the Great War began when he drifted off into a most unusual dream; he entered a large hall, like a huge underground dance floor, where couples were spinning with wild abandon.

      He found it strange that he saw no windows or daylight; the ball in his dream was taking place in some kind of bunker and no one except him seemed to mind. Then all of a sudden, as these things go in dreams, he too felt a desire to dance. He looked around for his wife, the Montenegrin princess Anastasia Petrovich, but she wasn’t to be seen. So he decided to take to the dance floor by himself. He discovered that the couples were just men, in the uniforms of the tsar’s army. Not a single woman was dancing with the officers, but mostly batmen with their lieutenants, artillery captains with gunners, colonels with orderlies, supply-office chiefs with their grooms.

      Now that’s what I call a real officer’s ball, Grand Duke Nicholas thought and called out for his chief of staff, General Yanushkevich. Who would a commander-in-chief dance with if not with his faithful chief of staff? He just yelled once and there he was, right behind him. They couldn’t agree which of them would lead, but then the ‘male role’ in that dance of men was naturally given to the commander, who now swirled with his partner over the polished parquet of the hall as if bewitched. At first, the steps of his chief of staff were as light and nimble as those of a bar-room dancer, but after a while his response to the long steps and lively turns became ever more sluggish. Yanushkevich was melting away, Nicholas noticed, the smile had disappeared from his face, and soon he could neither dance nor move. The music stopped and the commander-in-chief now saw to his astonishment that he was in a hall with hundreds of clay figures and that he had been dancing with one of them. Every bust had a face, and all of them were dressed in uniforms of stiffened fabric. Then the last stage of his dream began: he was running between the ranks — there were thousands of them in that dance hall now — and he saw that a stream of blood trickled from the clay chest of every one of them. Some seemed to have been pricked with a sewing needle, as there was only a tiny trickle of blood between the buttons of their coats, while others seemed to have a blooming scarlet lily on their breast . . . and none of them fell. He stood at the parapet of the dance front and it seemed they were all waiting for the music to start again and a danse macabre to begin, but at that moment the generalissimo woke up. And he muttered to himself with parched lips: ‘A mighty carnage is going to come.’

      He called his orderly and asked for a glass of cold water and a compress for his head. It took him half an hour to recover, and then the commander’s Spartan mind once again began to think about lines of battle, strategic heights, natural obstacles and weather conditions, as if there had never been people on earth, beneath the sky. He asked that he be brought ordinary soldier’s fare from the canteen that day and that his tea in the afternoon be sweetened with saccharin. He didn’t allow himself to turn in for the night on the metal camp bed until late. Shortly before morning, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, dubbed ‘the Iron Duke’, realized that this war would be won by the horses, which lugged the machinery of war and the heavy guns. How mighty a power would be which could transport its wartime arsenal by train or even by plane, he thought; he realized this would be impossible for Russia.

      But one soldier-to-be did set off to the front by aeroplane. That soldier, however, would never take a gun in hand because he was told in Berlin before he left that Germany had sufficient soldiers to satisfy the Sphinx of war; one needed to think about how to preserve the country’s most talented people for the period after the conflict, so there would still be a civilization to speak of when the world war and its tribulations finally ended in German victory. The name of the passenger in that plane leaving for the German-Belgian border was Hans-Dieter Huis. Maestro Huis had been assigned to the staff of General Kluck to organize concerts for the senior officers. Before boarding the plane he was given a pair of leather overalls with a hood, flying goggles and a red scarf — the trademark of German pilots. The plane was captained by flying ace Dietrich Ellerich, who had recently amazed the old, civilized world by flying his plane to an altitude of eitht thousand metres. That day, the squadron included seven other German-manufactured biplanes. Pilots and Zeppelin crews on the ground saw them off with defiant cries of ‘To Paris!’, and Hans-Dieter Huis, not doubting German victory for a moment, wondered how his pre-war Parisian audience would greet him when he came onto the stage as an invader and sang Mephistopheles from Gounod’s Faust in German. Yet now, at the beginning of the war, Huis didn’t dare to think about what would be after the war. They landed in a strong wind on the grassy strip of the small aerodrome in Evere, north of Brussels. It was a rough landing. He was glad to reach terra firma again, but he didn’t want to show his fear. His pale face gave him away. While he was being introduced to several generals from Kluck’s staff, he thought that music would reconcile the nations, but he couldn‘t have imagined that he’d be putting that idea to the test that very same year, at an unexpected moment.

      That day, four hundred kilometres to the south, the soldier Jean Cocteau set off to join an aviation unit at the aerodrome in the town of Bussigny. He was assessed at recruitment to be ‘malnourished’ but was enlisted all the same. He had a very, very nasty time that evening and the next, expelling the undigested buckshot, but he was glad to be still alive and to have become a French soldier. And now he was going to war. But who cared about the war? a uniform and unconfirmed martial glory were much more important. He started daydreaming. He’d return to Paris in the uniform of the victors, enter Café de la Rotonde, wave to Old Libion, and sit down at a table with Picasso.

      WAR

      There’s going to be a big war. The less-than-loquacious owner of the café Casino in Shabac remembered Major Tihomir Miyush­kovich for these very words, uttered on the decisive day of his life, Tuesday, 29 July 1914, by the old calendar. Proprietor Kosta and his plump wife Hristina reacted to the insistence that they say something more about the major with the same enthusiasm as if the tax collectors had just knocked on their door: ‘Look, that’s all we remember about him. Lots of people come here, all different ranks, all sorts of weird and wonderful folk . . . and we’re good people and upright publicans, you know. When we had to pay the tax for street lighting, we were the first in Shabac; when they introduced a duty on music, we took it straight from the street musicians’ pay so we could give the government its due.’ And the major? They seemed not to remember him, as if they had only passed him in the street, as if he was an apparition or a human shell which didn’t have emotions of its own and didn’t notice its own suffering or that of others.

      There’s going to be war again, a great war, Major Tihomir Miyush­kovich is said to have muttered on that fateful 29 July 1914, after he’d come from café Casino to the Nine Posts. The owner of that café, a certain Zeyich, a man without children or a woman at the hearth, remembered the major much more clearly and filled his strawy exterior with substance, some of which shone through. ‘I hardly remember the major. My memory doesn’t serve me all that well, I must admit. But I’m a decent man and orderly in every other regard. When it was time to