The 2nd Battalion of the Drina Division went into combat three times in those two fateful days, and each time Major Tihomir Miyushkovich was pale, clean, washed and resolute. He plunged into battle the first time near Tekerish when the Austro-Hungarian 21 Landwehr Division attacked the Combined Serbian Division, including the 2nd Battalion under his command. Then in the engagement near Beli Kamen, which ended at Begluk. A third time then sufficed to cut short a life which, to tell the truth, had already ended in café Amerika in Shabac on 29 July 1914 by the old calendar. The decree decorating Major Tihomir Miyushkovich and posthumously promoting him to lieutenant colonel was announced in Politika once it resumed publication immediately after the Battle of Cer. The decree was read by everyone in Shabac except one woman, who no one ever heard of again — whether she was alive or dead, happy or unhappy. Her name was Ruzha, and that’s all that was known about her.
Were the survivors the lucky ones, or did the wounded envy the dead? Perhaps the corpse-strewn hills of the Cer mountain range and the blood-red River Yadar had an answer. Many of the wounded fell back across the Drina, which became a roaring grave for both armies. Doctors at the field hospitals removed bullets from the wounded in the hope of saving their legs, and sawed legs in the pitiful hope of saving heads.
There was just such an Austro-Hungarian hospital in narrow, river-bound Zvornik, and one of its surgeons was a certain Mehmed Graho. Everyone skilled with the scalpel was needed for the war, so our pathologist, who since 1874 had mixed with the dead, donned the uniform of a Bosnian infantry regiment, stuck a crimson fez on his head and set about saving the living. But his hands, it seemed, were made only for the mortuary. The grievously wounded soldiers brought back from the River Yadar strangely melted away and died beneath his knife. He did the same work as other surgeons. The operation would go well, but when everything was done Graho would feel a chill behind his back, as if death had come to visit him, and he watched as he lost the soldier. He tried with all his strength to bring the wounded man back from death’s door, but most often in vain.
So much killing and dying was going on in those days that hardly anyone noticed that a doctor of death was at work in the hospital in Zvornik. But Mehmed Graho was certain it was him. He tried once again, then a second time, ten times, and still all the men died on him. ‘It seems I was made not to heal, but to kill,’ he said to himself and, if it was his lot to kill, he set about selecting the most severely maimed soldiers and those he least liked the look of in order to finish them off. His rationale was that if he took the wounded who were beyond all hope, it would be harder for anyone to notice that almost every patient died on his operating table. And so he chose them, one after another. He repented, prayed and begged Allah, but in vain. He wanted to give up, but he knew he’d be court-martialled if he refused to work. Men screamed like a monstrous choir all day in the chaos of the army hospital in Zvornik, and there was no one he could complain to or ask to be relieved of his duties as the doctor of death.
He had no choice but to kill the soldiers, so he almost reconciled himself to his hideous role. He read a selection of verses from the Koran and told himself that desperate certainty was better than uncertain hope. He walked among the stretchers lying in front of the hospital in files and rows like the graves of a military cemetery and said: ‘Him, him, and him here — to me.’ Then he strove and struggled to help them, but they all died. He’d go out into the courtyard again and speak in an indifferent voice: ‘Him, him, and him there — to me.’
What Dr Graho didn’t know was that there, on the banks of the Drina, death was claiming what it left alive elsewhere. As if by some enigmatic geometry of death, one and a half thousand kilometres to the east, in the hospital train V.M. Purishkevich, the neurosurgeon Sergei Vasilyevich Chestukhin witnessed the wondrous recovery of his soldiers after the initial battles in East Prussia. Young men were brought in with their heads split open, with bullets in parts of their brain which ought to make them vegetables, or corpses, but that was mostly avoided. The other doctors noticed that miracles were occurring in the third wagon and each of them, as soon as he had rested a little after his shift, came in to watch Dr Chestukhin operate. The healing hands of the doctor adeptly extracted bullets from the heads of soldiers, reconnected shattered pieces of skull and sewed wounds which had bled so badly that there seemed to be no stitch able to hold them. The men lay on his table for ten minutes longer, and then life returned to their eyes even in the most hopeless of cases; after several such remarkable operations the assembled Russian doctors broke into applause.
Yet there was just one strange thing about these patients. The soldiers brought to the hospital train had been peasants before the war, or menials on the estates of the gentry, who had never seen anything of the world beyond their willow groves and little rivers. A large number of those who miraculously survived now began speaking German while still unconscious. First they would whisper ‘Hilfe, hilfe!’, then some of them would launch into whole monologues in that language they had never learnt and would talk about things they simply could not know about, uneducated as they were. Dr Chestukhin’s wife, the red-haired nurse Liza Nikolaevna Chestukhina, heard many of these monologues in German while bandaging the wounded men’s heads after the operations and could find no answer to this mystery. But since she knew German she understood the erudite talk of the muzhiks.
She didn’t want to bother her husband with what she heard, but since he kept sending her miraculously saved men and future experts in German from the third wagon, she started to listen attentively to these ‘wonder wounded’. One boy, whose medical card stated that he was a farmhand from Yasnaya Polyana, the former estate of Count Leo Tolstoy, talked about Goethe for an entire afternoon. It was a kind of trance and he couldn’t open his eyes under the bandages, but he said: ‘Als Goethe im August 1831 mit dem noch fehlenden vierten Akt den zweiten Teil seines Faust abgeschlossen hat, sagt er zu Eckermann: “Mein ferneres Leben, kann ich nunmehr als reines Geschenk ansehen, und es ist jetzt im Grunde ganz einerlei, ob und was ich noch etwa tue.”’ [When Goethe finished the fourth act of Faust in August 1831, thus completing the second part of the work, he said to Eckermann: ‘What remains to me of life I may now regard as a free gift, and it really matters little what I do, or whether I do anything.’] Two beds further along, a badly mangled soldier recited poems by Schiller, which Liza had learnt as a girl. Then he spoke loudly, as if on stage, and it turned out to be part of the poem ‘The Ideal and Life’: “Wenn, das Tote bildend zu beseelen / Mit dem Stoff sich zu vermählen / Tatenvoll der Genius entbrennt, / Da, da spanne sich des Fleisses Nerve, / Und beharrlich ringend unterwerfe / Der Gedanke sich das Element.” [“When, through dead stone to breathe a soul of light / With the dull matter to unite / the kindling genius, some great sculptor glows; / Behold him straining, every nerve intent / Behold how, o’er the subject element.”]
Liza thought there might have been a mix-up with the wounded: a battlefield is chaotic, and perhaps the Russian stretcher-bearers had brought back educated German soldiers as well. She waited for them to wake up, whereupon the ‘German speakers’ successively died: some after one, others after two days of tirelessly mouthing German verse, or simply individual German words. A few of them did wake up out of their coma, however, and when she asked them who they were, she realized they really were ignorant Russian peasants and semi-skilled artisans. Liza asked them if they had ever learnt German, but they didn’t know what to say and just kept repeating how much they hated ‘the Krauts’.
And so time passed, but Sergei’s wounded didn’t speak German for long. It only happened for the first few days after the Battle of Cer in faraway Serbia, when students and poets were dying under the hand of the pathologist Mehmed Graho and their souls migrated east for a brief while along some imponderable transversal, in the invisible barques of the dead, into the split heads of Russian farmworkers. Already towards the end of