“I kill him my ownself, with bayonet.” Captain Pak sounded sulky, as if he hadn’t expected Curtis to be so soft. But, shrugging at the inscrutability of the Occidental, he threw the head back toward the enemy line. The thump it made hitting the mud sounded dreadfully final.
–
Istvan Szolovits crouched in a shell hole, using his left hand to jam his helmet down onto his head as hard as he could. The Americans were throwing artillery at his unit with positively Soviet abandon. Mortars, 105s, 155s, rockets…Everything but the kitchen sink seemed to be coming down on the Hungarians’ heads. If some clever Yankee worked out how to fit a charge in the basin and a rocket motor instead of a drainpipe, they’d probably start firing sinks, too.
Fragments whined and snarled and screamed hatefully, not far enough overhead. Blast slammed Istvan around. The nearer near misses made him have trouble breathing. A shell didn’t have to land on you to do you in. Close enough could be good enough.
In between the shell bursts, he heard people screaming. Some were wounded, more just frightened out of their minds. Half deafened and more than half stunned, he needed a little while to realize that one of those terrified voices belonged to him. He’d been through some hell since the Hungarian People’s Army went into combat, but never anything like this. The atom bomb had scared him, too, but it didn’t go on and on the way this bombardment did.
His father and a couple of uncles had fought for Franz Joseph during the First World War. They would have understood what he was going through. But they probably would have enjoyed better protection than he did.
He’d already dug a foxhole in the shell hole. He didn’t have a proper dugout, though. You needed time in one place to dig those into the walls of your trenches and shore them up with whatever timber you could find.
“Watch out, you whistleass peckerheads!” No one but Sergeant Gergely would bellow a profane warning through the thunder of the shells. “When the Americans let up, that’s when you better be ready, on account of that’s when they’ll come.”
He made good sense. The enemy was trying to kill as many Magyars as they could (and even the occasional Jew who found himself in the same uniform), and to paralyze the ones they didn’t kill. Then their advance would be a walkover.
But the Americans didn’t let up, and didn’t let up, and didn’t let up some more. They sifted this field like a baker sifting cake flour. They didn’t want any big lumps left in it before they stuck it in the oven.
At last, after a couple of hours that seemed like a couple of thousand years, the barrage moved past the Hungarians’ position. That would make retreating hard for them and keep anybody else on their side from moving forward to give them a hand. Istvan stuck up his head to see what kind of prophet the sergeant made.
He wasn’t surprised when Gergely could have matched himself against Elijah or Jeremiah. However big a bastard Gergely was, he knew his onions. Here came the Yankees. Their tanks were bedizened with white stars. Foot soldiers in olive drab loped along between them.
A Magyar popped out of his hole like a marmot-only marmots didn’t carry rocket-propelled grenades. One of them took out a tank. All the ammo inside the Pershing went off at once. The turret flew through the air and squashed an infantryman ten meters away. Like a beetle under a boot, he died before he knew what hit him.
There were worse ways to go. Too many of them seemed to loom large across Istvan’s future. The surviving American tanks pounded that Magyar with cannons and machine guns. The guy who’d fired would likely wind up too dead to try it again.
Rifle bullets cracked past Istvan. By the sound, some of them came from beside his hole, not in front of it. If he didn’t fall back, he’d get cut off and surrounded and…Killed, he thought bleakly. Of course, he might also get killed trying to fall back. But the odds looked worse if he stayed where he was.
He scrambled out of the hole he’d worked so hard to improve and dashed eastward. He wasn’t the only Hungarian doing the same thing. As his eyes darted this way and that, one of his countrymen let his rifle fall, threw his arms wide, and crumpled bonelessly to the shell-pocked turf.
A bullet kicked up dirt at Istvan’s feet. “Rukhi verkh, Russki!” somebody yelled.
Istvan knew that meant Hands up, Russian! He’d heard Germans and Magyars shout it during the grim street fighting in Budapest at the end of the last war. But he needed an almost fatal second to realize that soldier was yelling it at him.
I’m no Russian! he thought with absurd indignation as he dropped his Mosin-Nagant and raised his hands. His captor was a pink-cheeked kid in an American uniform. He kept his own M-1 on Istvan. “You speak English?” he demanded, so he was a Yank and not a German.
Regretfully, Istvan shook his head. He’d never had the chance to learn it. “Ich spreche Deutsch,” he said. That was the one language they might share.
They didn’t. For all the American could tell, he was using Russian. The kid gestured with his rifle-go back that way. Keeping his hands high, Istvan went back that way.
He’d often thought about giving himself up to the Americans. It wasn’t as if this were his war, or Hungary’s. But surrendering turned out not to be so simple. And he’d seen that the few minutes after you did surrender told the story of whether you’d live or die. If the guy who captured you was in a hurry or just feeling mean, he’d plug you and go on about his business instead of getting you back to where you might stay safe. To the soldiers who took them, prisoners were a damn nuisance.
Istvan tried not to tense as he walked west. If the American shot him in the back, he hoped it would all end in a hurry.
But the American didn’t. Another Yank came up to him. They went back and forth in the language Istvan couldn’t follow. He did hear the word Russian several times, though.
“Nicht russisch,” he said, using one hand to point at himself. “Ich bin ungarisch.”
More English. The soldier who was talking with his captor also pointed at him and said, “You’re Hungarian?”
That was close enough to ungarisch for Istvan to get it. He nodded. “Ja!”
The Yanks held another palaver. The newcomer used his machine pistol to point down a muddy track. The man who’d captured Istvan trotted off to fight some more.
Along the track Istvan went. At last, under some trees the artillery had drastically abridged, he found half a dozen other Hungarians sitting and smoking. A couple of them were wounded, but the Americans had bandaged them and given them food and water. One of the Yanks guarding them spoke in German: “Use this language only. I need to be able to understand what you say.”
“Zu Befehl, mein Herr!” Istvan said as he sagged to the ground with his fellow POWs. All his bones seemed to turn to water. He was going to live! You didn’t usually shoot a bunch of prisoners behind the lines. If you were going to dispose of them, you did it right away.
“Hey!” one of the Magyars said in his own tongue. “How’s it going?”
“Auf Deutsch, Scheissekopf!” the American barked. The other captive repeated the question in German. He had a country accent in Magyar, one that said he came from the southwest.
“Es geht ganz gut,” Istvan said. “Ich lebe noch.” It’s fine-I’m still alive. What could be better than that?
Food could. The American guard tossed him a ration can. He opened it with his bayonet, which no one had bothered taking yet. Then he shoveled stew into his mouth with his fingers. It tasted richer, greasier, than Hungarian or Soviet supplies. He licked the can clean. He’d got lucky. He was out of the war.