Hierarchies of Desirable Demise: Cholera and (In)Glorious Death in Romania’s Bloodless Balkan War, 1913

Abstract What happens when war fails to offer the opportunity for a glorious death? And what if the enemy you set out to fight fails to show up, only for you to do battle with another, more insidious foe—disease? What then of the gendered roles of martial masculinity; can heroism ever be reconciled with the perceived indignity of a sickbed? The present article aims to elucidate such questions of general significance by focusing on a specific case-study, in order to bring empirical evidence together in support of coining a conceptual category. The tension between ideals of martial death and the likelihood of death by disease in wartime, a hitherto underexplored yet far-reaching topic, is analysed with reference to the 1913 Romanian invasion of Bulgaria, a conflict in which, in the absence of armed combat, cholera became virtually the only, and therefore a particularly anxiogenic, likely cause of death. The article first offers a close reading of an ‘autosomatographic’ first-person account by a survivor of cholera, then continues with a broader corpus of narratives describing collective anxieties over contagion, showing how war narratives may also be read as plague narratives. Finally, it charts the wider post-war attempts at renegotiating the categories of ‘heroism’ and ‘sacrifice’ against this backdrop, not least through the contested inclusion of civilians across gender lines. This intervention therefore argues for a need to historicise ‘hierarchies of desirable demise’ according to which the normative ideal of glorious death in combat was placed above the perceived emasculating indignity of death from disease.