I volunteered on a Tuesday in September of 1915, which I mention only because Tuesday was the day I'd always done the things in my life that mattered. I was baptised on a Tuesday. My father died on a Tuesday, which was the day I first understood that the world doesn't arrange itself according to what you deserve. I signed my name at the recruitment office in Thessaloniki on a Tuesday, and the sergeant behind the desk stamped my papers with the flat efficiency of a man who had been doing this since breakfast and expected to be doing it until dark, and I walked out into the September heat feeling, for the first time in longer than I could easily account for, that I was pointed in the right direction.
I am Konstantin Papadopoulos. Twenty-four years old, the son of a fisherman from the Thessaloniki waterfront, educated past what my neighbourhood generally produced by a combination of a scholarship and a stubbornness that my teachers had called a virtue and my father had called something considerably less flattering. I had read history the way other young men read adventure stories — voraciously, and with a personal investment in the outcome that the authors of the histories had never intended but couldn't prevent. I knew what Macedonia was. I knew what it had been, what it had become, and what it was supposed to be, and the distance between those three things had been living in my chest like a splinter for as long as I could remember.
The Bulgarians were in Macedonia. They were there now, in the northern territories, in positions they held the way a man holds something he's stolen and knows he can't keep but intends to make you pay to take back. I had decided, sitting in my small rented room above a chandler's shop the evening before that Tuesday, that I was going to be part of the paying-back. My mother said I was a fool. She said it the way Greek mothers say things they know won't change anything — loudly, with her hands involved, and with a sorrow underneath the anger that I chose, at the time, not to look at too directly. My friend Nikos, a carpenter with more practical sense than anyone I'd ever known, called me an idealist in the tone of a man delivering a diagnosis.
I took it as a compliment. That probably told you everything about the difference between us that needed telling.
---
The march toward Bitola began in the summer of 1916, and I want to describe it honestly because the honest version is considerably less like the thing I'd imagined in that rented room and considerably more like what actually happens when you take several thousand men and ask them to cover fifty kilometres of Macedonian terrain in the middle of the worst heat anyone could remember.
The heat was the thing nobody had warned us about adequately. Not the ordinary Mediterranean summer heat that I'd grown up inside and understood — that heat had a logic to it, a rhythm, it broke at night and gave you back your breath. This was different. This was a heat wave in the genuine, oppressive sense of the word, the kind the old men in Thessaloniki described as something the land itself was doing deliberately, and it had arrived in Macedonia in late June and simply refused to leave. By the time our column formed up and began moving north, the temperature was doing things to the air that made the horizon shimmer and the rocks along the roadside radiate warmth hours after the sun had been on them.
The sky was a white, merciless blue from edge to edge. Not a cloud. Not the suggestion of a cloud. Just light, continuous and absolute, pressing down on everything below it with a weight that had nothing to do with shade or shadow because there wasn't any.
I marched with a man named Alexis, a former schoolteacher from Athens who had volunteered two weeks before me for reasons he described as philosophical and which I privately suspected were considerably more personal, since he had the particular tight-jawed quality of a man with a specific score to settle that he didn't feel like discussing. He was good company in the way quiet men with strong convictions often are — steady, dry when he spoke, reliable in the ways that mattered most when the going was physical rather than intellectual.
On the first day the heat announced its intentions clearly. Within an hour of setting out, the column had shed every item of kit that wasn't strictly required — blankets rolled and abandoned, spare ammunition distributed to lighten individual loads, anything that added weight without adding survival. Men poured water from their canteens over their own heads rather than drinking it, which was the wrong choice and which I watched the veterans observe without comment, understanding, as I eventually came to understand, that correcting a man's water decisions in that heat required more energy than the correction was worth.
The road surface itself was a problem. The summer had baked the earth into something between stone and powder, and every step raised a fine pale dust that coated the inside of your mouth and the back of your throat and settled on the sweat running down your face in a thin grey paste that dried and cracked and made the skin feel several sizes too small for the skull underneath it. You couldn't spit it out because there wasn't enough moisture to generate a proper spit. You simply swallowed it along with everything else the march asked you to swallow.
"Tell me again why you volunteered," Alexis said at the end of the first day, both of us sitting against the wheel of a supply wagon that had broken an axle and been abandoned at the roadside, sharing the last of his water.
"Macedonia," I said.
"Right." A pause while he stared at the shimmering middle distance. "Macedonia seems very far away right now."
It did. In the specific physical way that ideas always seem far away when the body is suffering enough to redirect all available attention toward its own immediate concerns, Macedonia and what it was supposed to be felt considerably more abstract than it had in September. I believed it still. I just couldn't feel it the way I'd felt it signing my name, because feeling things beyond the fundamental animal desire to be somewhere cooler required a luxury of attention the heat wasn't currently permitting.
---
The second day was worse.
The heat wave had not broken overnight as everyone had privately hoped it would. If anything it had intensified, the air by midmorning carrying a thick, furnace quality that made breathing feel like a task requiring conscious effort. Men began going down before we'd covered the first five kilometres — not from the enemy, not from anything that could be shot back at or complained to any authority about, simply from the heat itself, which had decided that several thousand soldiers moving across Macedonia in full kit was an affront it intended to address.
The first man went down in the third hour — sat down at the side of the road as if he'd decided to rest and couldn't get back up, face the colour of old wax, eyes rolling up in a way that made several of us who saw it immediately pull him into what passed for shade behind a rock and pour the last of someone's canteen over his neck. He survived that particular hour. I don't know about the hours that followed.
More went down over the course of the morning. A private ahead of me simply fell in the road mid-stride, not dramatically, just folding to his knees and then to his side, his pack pulling him sideways, and by the time the men behind him stopped and rolled him over his face was already deeply flushed and his breathing had the shallow, rapid quality of someone whose body had stopped coping quietly and started broadcasting the problem. Two men were dispatched to carry him to the rear. They were both, I noticed, among the stronger men in the column, and losing their strength from the march to move a casualty who had been defeated by the weather felt like a particular kind of waste that the official record would probably not capture honestly.
Water was the thing. It always came back to water. We had started the march with full canteens and the theoretical assurance that resupply points had been positioned along the route, but theory and a summer heat wave in Macedonia had met each other somewhere in the planning stages and failed to reach a satisfying agreement, and the resupply points, when we reached them, had quantities of water that made sense for a march in normal weather and bore no relationship whatsoever to what we actually needed in this one. Men were rationing before the end of the first day and struggling before the end of the second, lips cracking, urine — for those who managed any — going dark in a way that everyone understood the significance of without needing it explained.
Even at night the heat barely gave ground. We made camp in the thin scrub along the roadside and the air released perhaps a third of the day's warmth into the darkness, holding the rest in the rocks and the pale dry soil in a stored heat that made the ground itself feel like a hearth hours after sunset. Sleep came badly if it came at all, men shifting and waking, mouths dry, the mountains above us holding the day's light long after it had technically become night.
"I've been in Greek summers my whole life," Alexis told me on the second night, lying flat on his back staring at the sky with the unfocused expression of a man too tired to sleep. "This is not a Greek summer. This is something that has no business being this hot."
I agreed with him. It didn't help.
---
The Bulgarian positions announced themselves first through sound, two days before we saw them properly. Artillery, distant and irregular — ranging shots, harassment fire, the guns reminding us at intervals that the approach had been observed and the reception would not be warm. The shells had a different quality in the heat, arriving through air so dense it seemed to slow sound itself, the reports reaching us with a slight delay that made it briefly and confusingly difficult to locate their origin.
The first shell landed close on the fourth day, a ranging round that found a section of column on a ridge and distributed itself across twenty metres of path with a thoroughness that demonstrated, clearly and immediately, that the Bulgarian guns knew their ground. Three men from the company ahead of ours went down — one killed outright in the blast, his body thrown sideways off the path in pieces that the slope below received without ceremony; another losing a hand at the wrist, sitting down in the path and staring at the stump with a bewildered patience while the blood came; the third taking shrapnel across the back and thighs, still standing, still moving, though the way he moved told everyone with enough experience to read it that he would not be moving under his own power much longer.
We closed the gaps and kept moving, because the path was too narrow to stop on and stopping on a path the Bulgarian artillery had already found was simply a different way of dying.
The heat made the dead worse than they should have been. A man killed in cool weather retains something almost peaceful in the immediate aftermath. In this heat, the process began almost immediately and was visible almost immediately, and the flies that had plagued the march from the first day found the casualties with the same indiscriminate efficiency they'd shown all along, the buzzing rising and falling as we moved past in a sound I have never since been able to hear without my body understanding, independently of my mind, exactly what it means.
Alexis said nothing. I said nothing. We walked.
---
The Bulgarian trench line came into view properly on the fifth day, across a wide sloping valley that funnelled toward Bitola by the valley's own inevitable geometry, no meaningful way around it. The trenches were well-sited along the high ground in a long dark line that had the settled, deliberate look of positions prepared carefully rather than dug in haste. Wire in front. Sandbags above. Machine-gun emplacements spaced at intervals that told me, even from this distance, that whoever had built these positions had understood the ground and used it.
Across the valley, in the Bulgarian positions, I could see, even at this distance, that they were suffering the same heat we were. Small dark shapes of men seeking whatever shade the trench walls and dugout overhangs could provide. The artillery had slackened during the hottest part of the afternoon, which I understood, on reflection, as simply both sides independently concluding that operating guns in this heat cost more than the harassment fire was worth. The war had reached a temporary, unofficial, and entirely unacknowledged ceasefire with the weather that neither side had arranged and neither side would admit to.
It did not last past dusk.
Our officers gathered us in whatever cover the forward slope offered — shallow scrapes in the baked earth, the lee sides of boulders, a burnt-out farmhouse that provided concealment if not protection — and the orders came down in the flat, practical language of men who had learned that unnecessary elaboration before a contact costs time nobody has to spare.
Advance at dusk. Use the cover the slope offers. First objective, the wire. Second objective, the trench line itself.
I checked my rifle and my bayonet and looked at the trench line across the valley. The sun was going down somewhere behind us, the sky finally beginning to give up its impossible white and turn the deep orange-red of a Macedonian summer evening, and the air temperature, for the first time in five days, was dropping to something that could be described as merely uncomfortable rather than genuinely dangerous.
I tried to feel the thing I'd felt in September outside the recruitment office — the sense of direction, the pointed-at-something-that-matters. It was there, still, under everything the march had laid on top of it. The heat, the dust, the water rationing, the men who'd gone down before a shot was fired. It was dimmer than it had been. More specifically aware of what it was asking me to walk toward. But there.
Alexis checked his rifle beside me and said, in his driest possible register: "Macedonia."
"Macedonia," I said back.
---
Dusk fell fast in the mountains. We moved in extended order across the hillside, spread in loose groups, using what the broken ground offered, which wasn't much but was better than nothing. The light was failing evenly, rocks and scrub and men all darkening together into the same general grey-brown that made the Bulgarian gunners' job harder.
They opened up when we were two hundred metres from the wire.
At two hundred metres in open ground, machine-gun fire was a physical presence in the air rather than an abstract sound — rounds cracking past close enough that the air itself had an opinion about them, a sharp immediate sound nothing like the distant chatter from cover. Men went down around me, some with sounds and some without, the silent ones registering only as absences where a person had been a half-second earlier and wasn't now.
The heat that had plagued us all week had not fully broken, even at this hour. I was sweating freely in my uniform, dry-mouthed despite the small amount of water I'd managed to find at the last resupply point, the inside of my throat still carrying that fine pale dust. My body, which had spent five days being punished by the sun, was now being asked to run toward machine-gun fire, and it complied with the particular exhausted compliance I recognised from Alexis's description of my men — not enthusiasm, not courage in any clean sense, just the bone-deep, heat-worn stubbornness of someone who has come too far to turn around.
The wire was old and rusted and anchored deep in ground that the summer had baked to the consistency of packed stone. The men with the cutters worked in short bursts, cutting and going flat, cutting and going flat, while the guns searched for the sound of metal on metal. Two of the cutters went down before the gap was wide enough to push a man through.
I went through crouched low, the wire tearing a long ragged strip from my sleeve, and then I was through and running the last fifty metres with the Bulgarian rifles adding their own fire to the machine guns, muzzle flashes bright in the near-dark, the air singing with rounds that had my name on them and hadn't found it yet.
I was ten metres from the trench lip when the impact came.
Right side, low, a sudden hot concussive force against my thigh that sat me down in the baked earth before I'd understood what had happened. My leg simply stopped receiving instructions from the rest of me and I went down, one hand going to the wound by reflex, finding the wet heat of it, feeling the blood coming fast and steady in a way that told me the round had gone deep without yet telling me how deep or whether deep was going to carry the consequence it sometimes did.
Around me the assault kept moving without me, men running past in the falling dark, one of them putting a hand briefly on my shoulder without stopping — a gesture that meant only I see you, nothing more, because more would have cost a second nobody had.
I pressed both hands to my thigh and looked up at the darkening Macedonian sky, the stars beginning to come through above the valley, the air finally, finally cool enough to breathe without effort, and I thought about what Alexis had asked me on the second day of the march.
I still believed it. I want to record that honestly, lying in the dirt with my blood coming warm between my fingers above Bitola, still smelling of five days of heat and dust. I still believed Macedonia was worth the cost of what I was currently paying.
I just understood, for the first time, the difference between believing something is worth a cost and actually being the one paying it. I had thought, in the chandler's shop, that those two things were the same. They were not. They were, I now understood with the particular clarity available only to men currently in the process of finding out, entirely separate questions, with entirely separate answers, and a man could be right about the first one and still be lying on the ground bleeding into the Macedonian soil with no honest answer ready for the second.
I kept my hands on the wound. I stayed down. The battle moved away from me into the dark and the Bulgarian trench, and the night cooled around me in the slow, belated, entirely inadequate way that Macedonian summer nights eventually cooled, and I waited for whoever was going to find me first and hoped, in the simple unideological way that wounded men hope things, that it would be one of ours.