The garrison was located in an old disused brewery belonging to Farkas, Gjörmeky & Co., with wooden sheds added. The planks these sheds were made of still gave off an aroma of the pine forest. Their inner life had not yet died out. Here and there drops of sticky resin oozed from the planed walls. The recent hot weather had prevented them from setting and they dripped onto the soldiers’ straw mattresses like fragrant tears.
The huge complex of buildings comprising the garrison was four kilometres away from the town of Andrásfalva, reached by a fine, smooth asphalt road. On both sides there were extensive ploughed fields. The rich black furrows gleamed in the sunlight. Dense vegetable gardens, already wilting, bore witness to the fertility of the soil. Tall, sweetly scented linden trees, their foliage covered in grey dust, lined the road to the nearest village, obscuring the view. The towers and chimneys of the town could be seen only from the second floor of the main building, where the officers and the one-year volunteers were quartered.
One set of regulations, one timetable, was in force here, and a different one in the town. Over there, the factory sirens announced noon at twelve o’clock, whereas at the garrison it was an hour earlier. The town’s nightfall was in accordance with the seasons and the duration of sunlight; the military nightfall disregarded the revolutions of the heavenly bodies; in winter and in summer lights-out was sounded at the guardhouse at nine o’clock. Then the lights were extinguished throughout the garrison (with the exception of the officers’ and NCOs’ quarters, the canteens and the sick-bay) and the bodies of the privates, uniforms removed and stretched out on straw mattresses, obediently awaited the blessing of prescribed sleep. Sometimes sleep lingered, came late, unwilling to interrupt the stories whispered in the darkness from pallet to pallet, but in general it complied with the regulations. It arrived from its distant nurseries a few minutes after nine, removed weary souls from the weary bodies and released them for a few hours of freedom.
The garrison remained aloof from the town. It lived a life of its own, creating a small town apart, a world apart—men only. They were divided from the world of women and Hungarians by high fences, barbed wire and—speech… However, town life found its way in. It crept onto the parade ground, into the huts and into the brewery as distant voices and muffled rumbling; it made its way inside by way of howling factory sirens and the ringing of bells. It was disturbing and provocative, and tempting, even though it seemed to be such an alien, hostile intrusion—indeed, perhaps for that very reason. It should not be forgotten that most of the inmates of the garrison were country people.
At first they were allowed to walk into town during off-duty hours. After all, the battalion was made up of men who had served in peacetime and were used to discipline. However, after the regimental doctor Dr Badian began to be approached by increasing numbers of victims of the Hungarian Venus needing to be referred to specialist hospitals instead of being sent to the front line, this liberal regime came to an end. From then on, you could go into town only with a pass, and a pass was not easy to obtain when you were serving at a garrison of His Imperial and Royal Highness. Under these conditions, the soldiers took risks and went out without a pass. Sometimes they got away with it, but military police patrols, always Hungarians, often rounded up these risk-takers in the town, in the taverns and brothels, depriving them of their dignity, that is to say their bayonets, and escorted them to their own guardroom. Men seduced by the siren song of the town had to appear the next day before their company commander, and persistent offenders came before the regimental commander himself. Punishment ranged from ten days’ confinement to barracks to twenty days’ solitary confinement. On two occasions, the regiment marched into town in full complement: once to church and once for rifle practice. The rifle range lay far beyond Andrásfalva, on the other side of the railway in the north. These official marches went down the middle of the road, preventing soldiers from making individual contact with the civilian population. A man in the ranks is only one of the strokes or spots on the move making up the geometric figure called a “column on the march”. But even the smallest speck among the ranks has eyes and a mouth, which can send a smile to a woman in a window or on the pavement.
Sometimes the town itself came close to the garrison. It virtually rubbed up against it, passing by just below the fences and barbed wire. But it brought with it no life, only death. Before dawn, before the souls of the soldiers returned from their nightly holiday called to awareness by bugles sounding the reveille, herds of cattle, calves, rams and pigs passed by. Soon afterwards, when the entire garrison was already on its feet, the frightful squeals of the animals being slaughtered were heard in close proximity. And in the afternoons, at least once a week, funeral processions passed slowly by along the road—hearses preceded by Catholic or Calvinist clergy, sometimes even with music and banners, but usually ordinary black boxes on trolleys, without ornamentation or wreaths and without the presence of priests. Only a cross carried by a boy with his head bared testified to the fact that a poor dweller of the town of Andrásfalva also had a soul worthy of heavenly grace.
So the closest neighbours of the garrison were two public institutions, the municipal abattoir and a cemetery. It might seem that people going to their death were deliberately accommodated near shrines of death so that they got accustomed to it in good time. But people having to go to their death had no time to think about it. The proximity of the abattoir—well, it was even enjoyable. At any rate it was a reminder of food, and therefore… of life.
Our people were hungry now. For hours they had been sitting on the vast square between the brewery and the huts, surrounded by barbed wire, beset by uncertainty and growing fear. They had already finished off the last of the bread grown on their stony home ground, and when they had swallowed the last morsel they were overcome by misery. Everyone had the feeling that only now they were truly parting company with their homeland.
From now on the Emperor was supposed to feed them. The Emperor was supposed to provide seven hundred grams of bread and three hundred grams of meat per head, per day. They had not yet rendered him any service, but already His Majesty deigned to cook a whole ox for them in in the regimental kitchen. Not personally, of course, but through Lance Corporal Mayer and his assistants, the so-called “spud-bashers”.
At home, the Hutsuls rarely ate meat. Once or at most twice a year, usually at Easter. Unless a calf happened to die on them. But now, under the Emperor, every day would be Easter. Every day (except Fridays, because on Fridays even the army had to fast) they were to get fresh beef, sometimes pork, not something that had just happened to die. Those were the days!
At eleven o’clock barracks the world over are filled with the smell of broth. This pleasant aroma reached the nostrils of Piotr and his companions long before the duty corporals announced dinner. The general rejoicing was marred only by technical difficulties; what were they to serve the meat on, what was the soup to be eaten out of? It was a Sunday, and the demigods of war, that is to say the NCOs, were unwilling to issue the mess kits. Mess kits are issued together with the entire kit only after a roll-call, when it is confirmed who is to be “incorporated” and “drafted to a unit”, and who is to be sent on—to hospital, to a different unit, or to hell. It was a Sunday. No self-respecting garrison holds a roll-call on a Sunday. God himself, after creating the world, rested on the Sabbath. So even demigods, who are more susceptible to exhaustion than the Creator, ought to rest. God created the world in six days and then he rested, whereas NCOs have to spend weeks on end turning people into soldiers, that is to say into real men. For man as created by God is—you have to admit it—merely material for making a man, the raw material.