The Great War. Aleksandar Gatalica

to face the mirror and was shocked by how he looked. The first thing he felt was that it was very hard to breathe, and then he suddenly saw stars and visions — so real that he couldn’t believe they were just in the dressing-room mirror at the recruitment office. In the depths of the mirror he saw the town of Ypres, although he didn’t know it was Ypres. He saw the morning, with swallows flying low over the ground, and he saw a yellowish-green smoke billowing towards a trench. It looked like harmless smoke blown by the wind from a campfire where someone was burning old tyres, and now it enveloped the soldiers like a poisonous cloud. He saw the young men who had no masks; all they could use were white handkerchiefs. Before his eyes the first of them began to fall into the mud of the trenches and writhe in spasms. The others then ran from the trenches, where they were met by enemy fire. The chests of the soldiers heaved in vain and their tongues were covered by a white film; they crawled as if their throats had been cut, while the gaze from their pupils, which floated on bloodshot whites, vanished as if scattered by the savage breath of Aeolus. He, the painter Lucien Guirand de Scevola, wanted to help them but didn’t know how.

      The next instant he ripped off the mask with the threatening eyeholes. He was back in the yellowish light of the dressing-room lamp in Temple. An impatient soldier knocked on the door of the cubicle and demanded that he finish as he wanted to see himself in uniform too. The soldier swore at Scevola as he went out, but received no reply. To hide the tell-tale tremble of his hands, he put the helmet back on, cocked it like a dandy once again and, now well and truly equipped for war, went to the table where the uniforms were sold. He told the quartermaster he had given up the idea of buying a mask. Besides, he added, his father had pulled a few strings to make sure he’d be a telephonist in the war. The uproar and derision from the assembled new soldiers — those whose faces he had seen when he put on the mask — ­ saw him out into the street and, embarrassed, he rushed to the Rotonde in the hope that his gentle-minded, raggedy painter friends there would smooth his ruffled feathers.

      In Belgrade, another man hurried into a café that day. He had a thick moustache and dark eyes beneath drooping eyelids and he cast sharp glances all around. He felt that all of Belgrade knew him, and he wasn’t wrong. The victor of the duel at the Belgrade racecourse, the one whose bullet had jammed in the barrel of the unreliable Browning, was now the hero of Dorchol and the other lower-town neighbourhoods all the way to Savamala and Bara Venecia on the banks of the River Sava. The greengrocer’s assistants chatted about him while they were carrying their wares and the porters mentioned his name while they waited for late passengers at the railway station, as did all horse-racing aficionados. For Gavra Crno­gor­che­vich, the Great War began in the moment he thought he had finished his personal battle and his counterfeit Idealin had vanquished all Krauts.

      A merry din rose to meet him at café Moruna. ‘To Vienna!’ someone called out from the corner, and the crowd cheered: ‘To Vienna, to topple Franz Joseph!’ Later there came a shout from the back: ‘Count Giesl has left, and he’ll be followed by the head of every Kraut I find on Teraziye Boulevard’, upon which a bunch of young men borrowed the melody of a popular ballad and improvised a ditty: ‘Fol-lowed by the head of ev’ry Kraut from Te-ra-ziye.’ These shouts made Gavra feel awkward, not because they were roaring a song against Austria — he had already dealt a mortal blow with his Idealin, he thought — but because he didn’t know what was going on around him, nor had he ever heard of Count Giesl.

      If he had caroused less in the previous few days and sold more of his counterfeit Idealin, he probably would have thought of lodging an ad in the paper, like every small manufacturer, and then he would have learnt that Austria-Hungary had sent Serbia an ultimatum through its minister Count Wladimir Giesl, demanding that the Serbian government accept and promulgate a pro-Austrian declaration, immediately dissolve the nationalist organization ‘Narodna Odbrana’ (People’s Defence Force), delete all propaganda against Austria-Hungary from school textbooks and public documents, allow the Austrian ‘k and k’ judiciary to conduct investigations in Serbia, and mete out severe punishment to Major Voya Tankosich and the civil servant Milan Ciganovich, who were involved in the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, as well as to the negligent border officials in Shabac and Loznica.

      On 25 July, by the new Gregorian calendar, when the Serbian govern­ment rejected the ultimatum, Gavra left café Moruna, drunk, at around six in the afternoon. Just a few hundred metres from the door, Regent Alexander Karadjordjevich and his secretary Yankovich, from the Ministry of War, set off for the royal court. At the entrance, they met several ministers who were pained and silent, anxious about what was going to happen. Absorbed in thought himself, Regent Alexander finally broke the silence in the style of Alexander the Great after cutting the Gordian knot, with a terse and abrupt: ‘To war then.’

      But Gavra Crno­gor­che­vich didn’t hear that. He didn’t read the papers, so he didn’t find out either that mobilization had begun in Serbia. The reserve had been called up and his 1881 year-group was among those ordered to the mobilization offices, the janitor had told him, but, hot-tempered as he was, he pretended not to have heard and just took a loud sip of his strong, black coffee. For a few more days, our duel-winning hero was convinced that his fake Idealin would make him rich. He got into a row with several traders who were marketing the real product; and then all of a sudden he disappeared into the blue. No one missed him, and his escapades were soon forgotten because all available ships started to arrive in Belgrade in the first few days after mobilization, and a mass of recruits was flocking to the very same racecourse where the duel had taken place to get their travel papers and set off to their different headquarters and units. Late in the evening on the last day of July by the new calendar, the day Gavra Crno­gor­che­vich disappeared, Field Marshal Radomir Putnik, commander-in-chief of Serbian forces, returned to Serbia on the evening train from the spa in Bad Gleichenberg. The first thing Putnik said when he arrived was: ‘At the service of the Fatherland, in health or sickness’; the last thing Gavra Crno­gor­che­vich said when he crossed into Austria and glanced back at Belgrade from the border town of Zemun was: ‘This looks mighty bad.’

      The same words, this looks mighty bad, were also uttered by the Istanbul spice-trader Mehmed Yıldız, but it was 29 July by the new calendar. His elderly lips whispered those words as he sat perched on his red-felt-covered stool in front of his shop, where he had habitually sat for decades. The sounds of the street ebbed and flowed around him — traders calling out their offers, the squeak of wheels and the barking of stray dogs. Yıldız traded in oriental and European spices and his shop was in a beautiful location: right on the waterfront of the Golden Horn, not far from the thick walls of the old palace of His Majesty the Padishah. Sitting in front of the tubs and panniers, surrounded by the intoxicating smell of his spices in all hues of ochre, brown, green and red, the trader read on the front page of the newspaper Tanin that Austria had declared war on Serbia the previous day, 28 July 1914; Russia and France were preparing to declare war on Germany and Austria, and a declaration of war was expected from Great Britain as well. The trader tilted back his fez and blew out a long cloud of smoke. His sole consolation was that his country Turkey was neutral for the time being; even so, he feared the worst and whispered, ‘This looks mighty bad’. But he didn’t think a trader needed to worry too much about the fate of his country.

      Brought up on Nizami’s epic romance Khosrow and Shirin, while also being a supporter of the true Turkish miniature which rejects the shameful Western laws of perspective, Yıldız Effendi was a true Turk who saw the world not the way it was but the way he wanted to see it. He didn’t notice that the Ottoman Empire, still enthralled by the tales of its history and power, was lurching and sinking in the turbulent waters of the twentieth century. He didn’t want to acknowledge the signs of decline and the pitiful withering of government. Talaat Bey, the Grand Vizier Haki Pasha, the military commanders Mahmud Şevket Pasha and Mahmud Muhtar Pasha, the ministers Halaciyan Effendi and Noradungian Effendi, and senator Nail Bey — all these personages of Turkish public office were like mythological figures: half medieval, half modern. But since they resembled Yıldız Effendi, he naturally couldn’t perceive anything unusual about them. Istanbul itself was decrepit and crumbling, and Byzantine Constantinople was showing ever more often through the debris; but the trader sat down on his stool every morning, gave one of his assistants the sign to start calling out the prices and praising the wares, and opened the noble Koran to read a few lines for the