One shouldn’t blame an old Turk, a man of the nineteenth century, for all that was amiss. He knew that his Sultan became ruler after being released from captivity where he had been held for being mentally unstable and that all decisions were made by the Young Turk committee; he knew that he probably didn’t live in Topkapı, which the sultans had left long ago for fear of tuberculosis and moved to Dolmabahçe Palace, but whenever he said ‘Padishah’ he would imagine the paradisical garden of the palace not far from his shop; he would see the nightingales and the golden aviaries, feel the defiance and the righteous rage of the believers, and easily fill in the full picture — two-dimensional, of course — which appeared before his eyes as the sole and unverifiable truth. Besides, a motherly sun shone over Istanbul and everything looked different from Budapest, where mobilization was carried out in the first days of August amidst a spell of violent stormy weather: the wind battered the trees in the avenues and the windows of the National Theatre burst, but the glorious Hungarian soldiers-to-be weren’t to be frightened by a rainstorm with thunder and hail. The journalist and budding lampoonist Tibor Veres wanted to go to war too, or to be honest he didn’t. He said he wanted to, but deep inside he was afraid. He knew that if even a whiff of his fear was detected he’d instantly be pronounced a bad Hungarian, so first of all he boasted to his editor, with whom he had made friends after all those letters sent to the Serbian court, that he was just dying to join the artillery and dreamed at night of firing a machine-gun and hurling out ‘a hundred rounds a minute’.
He was also the loudest at the recruitment office. He almost got into a fight there with some smooth-faced striplings from Bátaszék, just for the sake of it — he wanted to show everyone that he was bursting with vigour. But he was much more at home in his skin when they allocated him to a unit behind the lines where his job was to read the letters of prisoners of war. Our old operative’s knowledge of Serbian was decisive once again, so Veres left the recruitment office with his travel papers in hand and a pretend tear in the corner of his eye; he set off for the banks of the Danube, to the border town of Zemun.
One very different recruit, his namesake but with the surname Németh, a Hungarian on both sides of the family, was happy that day to be allocated to a reconnaissance detachment. For Tibor Németh, the Great War began when he left the recruitment office with his travel papers in hand and tears of joy in his eyes, exultant that he’d be continuing the heroic Hungarian warrior tradition of both his father’s and his mother’s side of the family.
Many trains were heading for the front in those few days, carrying cheerful recruits who waved little flags out the windows of their compartments. Tibor Veres set off on the morning troop train to Zemun. The small-time journalist took along one change of civilian clothes, so his colleagues in the censorship unit wouldn’t mock him, and one small suitcase. This travelling bag contained a supply of black ink for three months, which is how long he thought the war would last, a certain amount of paper, and two fountain pens: the disobedient one with the blue ink and the new, obedient one filled with black ink, which produced such lovely German expletives. Tibor Veres thought he looked good in the freshly ironed bluish-grey uniform coat, which he tightened with the belt bearing the inscription ‘Königlich ungarisch’ on the buckle. He cocked the peaked cap with the badge of Franz Joseph on top and winked to himself. He didn’t take a helmet. Tibor Németh also set off to Zemun, but on the evening troop train. He thought he looked good in his freshly ironed bluish-grey uniform coat, which he tightened with the strap with ‘Königlich ungarisch’ embossed on the buckle. He cocked the peaked cap with the badge of Franz Joseph at the top and smiled at himself. He took a helmet as well. His father had managed to find the money for a gas mask, but he thought it best to save some money so, like Scevola in Paris, he didn’t buy a mask. Nor did Németh take any ‘civvies’ along with him.
The two trains arrived at their destination. Dozens more would set off the next day, and hundreds more throughout Europe. If each of them had drawn a red woollen thread behind them, the blood-red trails would have formed a net covering the Old Continent. Ninety trains alone would leave from Petrograd and Moscow in those few days. The nurse Yelizaveta ‘Liza’ Chestukhina and her husband, the surgeon Sergei Vasilyevich Chestukhin, would be sitting in one of them. For Liza and Sergei Chestukhin, the Great War began when they took their little daughter Marusya from Moscow to Petrograd to stay with aunt Margarita Nikolaevna because both of them were being sent to the front. Mama and Papa had both been assigned to the hospital train V.M. Purishkevich, and for little Marusya everything seemed like a dream. What was ‘the front’? What did a hospital on rails look like, and how did it treat the wounded? How could a person be injured if she wasn’t even allowed to fall and hurt her knee? And where was their maid Nastia? Had she gone to the front too?
Questions abounded in the little girl’s head, but there was so little time for their farewell in the house on Runovsky Embankment. Marusya remembers her father standing at the end of the room and smoking. He threw restless glances at her and her mother and repeated what sounded like: ‘Lizochka dear, don’t make her cry now.’ But Liza bent over and her thick, copper-coloured hair tumbled down as she whispered to her daughter that she’d bring her back the loveliest Punch puppet, as if she was going on a shopping spree to Paris rather than to war. In the end, her father kissed her goodbye too. His moustache was prickly and he smelt of fine tobacco. Then they left; sooner than they needed to, but not showing any signs of distress.
It was those who remained behind, in Petrograd, Antwerp or Belgrade, who were disturbed. Djoka Velkovich, the loser of the Belgrade duel, lay in the old Vrachar hospital in Belgrade in a bed for the seriously ill. The doctors removed the bandages and gave him a mirror. He saw that his right eye was bulging bizarrely, without the upper eyelid, lashes and brows. All the surrounding skin was as red as a pomegranate. In fact, the whole right half of the trader’s face was red; and the doctors worried that something nasty might happen when they told the patient he’d stay that way forever. Finally they told him the truth, but nothing did happen. It was as if Velkovich had come to terms with his appearance the very moment the barrel of his Browning burst at the racecourse. And until the end of that day, he didn’t think of leaping out of bed and flinging himself headfirst through the open window of the hospital. Before going to sleep, he thought he ought to have a shave, and he almost smiled at his half-burnt lips. No stubble would grow again on the right-hand side, and he’d easily be able to shave the left-hand side with half the amount of soap. He wanted to call someone before he dozed off, but in the end he didn’t. He fell asleep and didn’t dream anything.
Neither did Jean Cocteau dream that night. At the twelfth hour, when it was time to go to the recruitment office, he looked in the mirror and saw his protruding ribs and sunken stomach. All the rich and fatty food, the slabs of bread thickly spread with goose-liver pâté and garlic, the whole flocks of partridges and ducks he had eaten, seemed to have done nothing to change his physical appearance. He therefore resolved to take a desperate step that afternoon: he sat down to an abundant meal with an admixture they said wouldn’t harm his bowels: ordinary buckshot. Cocteau stirred it into the minced meat on his plate and ate like a man who hadn’t eaten in a long time. He set off for the recruitment office with a full stomach. He was a little pale and visibly anxious, but definitely at least two kilos heavier. If only he didn’t vomit a minute before stepping on the scales . . . he left his flat and cut through the Tuileries Gardens, taking care to choose a route with as little challenging food outlets as possible along the way, which might cause his stomach to heave. The park was safe: the trees and flowers didn’t have smells which could remind him of food. Then he turned the other way. Between Place de l’Observatoire and Rue de Vaugirard he saw a few emaciated people out walking, who, like him, were avoiding all danger from smells, since there were no restaurants there. Afterwards he took Rue Férou to Saint-Sulpice, and then went down to the River Seine. Paris around him was quiet.
Belgrade was also far too quiet at the hour Djoka Velkovich fell asleep. That evening, Liza and Sergei Chestukhin arrived by train at the eerily quiet Eastern Front. There they went aboard the armoured hospital train V.M. Purishkevich. Sergei took charge of the operating theatre in the third wagon, while Liza changed into a Russian