It was only 23.13.
“Everybody out! Get your luggage!” called the escort. Everyone rushed to collect their belongings and jumped down from the wagons. “Follow me! Follow me!” called the authority-conscious members of the escort. “Mind you don’t get lost! Keep together!”
So finally they had reached the garrison. Piotr’s countrymen staggered like drunks, making their way among the crowd of strangers—soldiers, officers, civilians and women. Such a commotion, such a row had erupted here, regardless of the night-time hour! This was not night-time; the war had abolished night-time—it was broad daylight. From all sides the Hutsuls were inundated with torrid Hungarian speech.
It was not the barracks, but the railway station in Budapest. Like a flock of frightened sheep, they shuffled along after their guides, awkward, bemused, at their mercy. They dashed down the steps, through dimly lit underground labyrinths and again up the steps to reach the brightly lit, noisy platforms, from platform to platform—when would they finally escape the railway’s vicious circle?
Again they were told to get in the wagons, but this time they were passenger carriages. Thank goodness, there are benches; they would travel as human beings. As they had not had a hot meal for ages, they were overcome with delight when benevolent ladies came along the carriages, distributing coffee, tea and even sausages and cigarettes. They were very polite, very refined, and they smiled, but they prattled away in Hungarian. They kept saying “Teszek, teszek”—“Here you are… Here you are.”
The eagerness of the patriotic women was so great that it extended beyond the uniformed heroes. Their kindness was lavished even on those who were only just on their way to join the army. They anticipated their heroism, committing to it with coffee, tea, sausages and cigarettes.
Fed, watered and delighted by the kindness of the Hungarian women, they travelled on in high spirits. They contemplated their earlier impressions, reviewing their premature judgements. Gradually, they began to show conciliatory tendencies.
“You know,” explained Semen Baran, “they are Royal and we are Imperial, but only in civilian life. In the army it’s all the same. The military is Imperial and Royal. Only the Honvéds, the Hungarian Landwehr, is Royal, not Imperial. I tell you, lads, don’t ever have anything to do with the Honvéds!”
Piotr was already dozing off. He was aware only of snatches of what Semen Baran was on about: “Imperial and Royal…”
He was sitting on a bench by the window, nodding and sleeping. He began to have visions of honking geese, then the geese were followed by heavy Hungarian oxen with metrelong horns and wonderful, wonderful pigs. Suddenly, the geese started gabbling in Hungarian, German and Slovak. Even the oxen were talking in Hungarian. Even the pigs spoke Hungarian. Then all the languages mingled in their beaks, snouts and muzzles, merging into a single dense mass of sounds, that proto-language spoken by the human race once upon a time, before the construction of the Tower of Babel. Piotr Niewiadomski understood every word, every single word of that proto-language.
Suddenly he was dazzled by a massive glare of electric light. Piotr entered the focus of that glare, and what was revealed to him? The interior of the church in Czernielica. Hungarian ladies were singing the wedding song ‘Long Life to You’ in Ukrainian. The parish priest, Father Makarucha, wearing a floral robe embroidered in gold, leads him to the altar. He is wearing a cap with cock’s feathers. At that moment, a gorgeous young bride blooms forth at his side. Father Makarucha anoints Piotr’s forehead with some oily, viscous liquid. (He recalls the moment when Father Makarucha brought holy oil to his dying mother, Wasylina.) Unexpectedly, the priest takes a gleaming golden crown from the altar and places it on Piotr’s head. Piotr groans. This crown is too heavy to carry; it weighs perhaps fifty kilos. No one can wear fifty kilos on his head. Piotr collapses under the weight of the crown. The Crown of St Stephen.
It was dawn when they reached the military post.
Chapter Eight
They arrived at the garrison and sat on their trunks, waiting for the war to end. But the war was not about to end. It had not even been unleashed in earnest, although many fortresses, particularly in Belgium, lay in ruins and numerous Gothic cathedrals had lost their spires, many Ruthenian villages had been consumed by fire, and lead had rent hundreds of thousands of souls from human flesh.
Newspapers throughout the monarchy were publishing enthusiastic reports from the “theatres of war”, which differ from other theatres in that the actors are also the audience and the audience are the actors. Every day, images of the directors and prima donnas of the war looked out at you from the newsprint, profiles of old men in uniform, avidly seeking applause, flaunting their own immortality gained at the expense of the deaths of others. As to the spectacle itself, the newspapers illustrated their enthusiasm not so much in photographs, which often speak with the grim and distorted mouth of truth, as in fanciful drawings of crowd scenes in which the artist’s ingenuity, adapted to the requirements of propaganda, triumphed no less gloriously than military victories. In such drawings it was only enemies who perished, their mutilated corpses trampled by the splendid regiments of our cavalry, galloping in perfect calm and in perfect formation. If sometimes, to set a good example, it was appropriate to depict wounded Austrians or Germans, there would be at most one soldier, slightly wounded in the leg. And if for the sake of decency it was necessary to include in the composition several dead on our side as well, these trivial losses never caused a breach in the ranks of the victorious and they never spoilt the harmony; on the contrary, they added a certain piquancy to it.
However, the lists of casualties published in the same newspapers told a different story, growing longer and longer every day. Few families could congratulate themselves that their names were not among those endless litanies of people killed, people wounded, missing and captured. Fortunately, not all families in the monarchy were able to enjoy the benefits of the written word and the art of printing. Hutsul families, for example. So our people did not know why the flags were out all over the town of Andrásfalva, through which they walked from the station to the garrison. Huge red, white and green as well as black-and-yellow bunting hung triumphantly from turrets, balconies and windows, fluttering above the passers-by, responding obediently to gusts of warm breeze, which playfully blew them onto the roofs or wrapped them round the flagpoles. How could Piotr’s comrades know that this fairy-tale display of bunting in the Hungarian town was to mark the battle of Kraśnik and the victories of the Imperial and Royal Army under Cavalry General Viktor Dankl? They did not even know the fate of the regiment whose losses they would be adding to with their own bodies. This regiment belonged to another army, as famous as the Imperial, but not for its victories. For that reason it should remain nameless. The lists of casualties were saturated with names of the fallen in that army, which would probably have ceased to exist in a few days if their decimated ranks had not been continually replenished with fresh recruits.
No town in the monarchy raised black flags to mourn General B—’s routed army. They sat in the courtyard at the garrison in the scorching heat of the midday sun, waiting for the end of the war.