Piotr Niewiadomski could think of nothing else all day until evening came with the sweet black coffee. Arrests, solitary confinement, dark cells, fasting and the irons. Enough of this in the service of the Emperor, enough! And the worst of it is that comrades face each other with loaded weapons, like Corporal Durek and the bandit Matviy, known as The Bull. Except that a gendarme was a gendarme all his life, a thief was a thief, but under the Emperor you are a gendarme today and tomorrow you’re a thief…
He could not come to terms with this new order of things. He had been around in this world for forty-one years and still he was rediscovering it, and always from different perspectives that kept getting worse and worse.
“All right,” he told himself, “it’s war. We know that. But why has the Emperor visited so much fear, so much anger, so much punishment on his own people? Would it not be better to save all his anger for the Muscovites? After all, it’s them he is at war with, not us. Why spill good, Catholic Austrian blood?”
Piotr Niewiadomski was a friend of Emperor Franz Joseph’s. He considered the whole Imperial and Royal Army to be friends of the Emperor’s. With the exception of traitors, of course. “My beloved peoples, my beloved army,” wrote His Majesty in his proclamations. Perhaps he did not write this? But writing, the devil’s signs, is one thing, and the truth is something else. “My beloved peoples…” A fine sort of love that is.
After the coffee he relaxed. Military caffeine had exactly the opposite effect from the civilian variety; it soothed troubled hearts. Nevertheless, many hearts were now beating rapidly on the square, by the huts, and the cause of this was not the heat, it was fear. Nightfall was approaching, and no one knew whether they would have to sleep under the stars. Among the civilians there were those who had never slept on the bare ground. Somehow it seemed unlikely that they would be given accommodation for the night. People who were now afraid of the night, the starry sky and the bare earth were descended from an old tribe of shepherds. Centuries ago, their fathers spent many a night in the dew and many a night sleeping in the desert, with burnt grass, hot sand or hair of live camels as their only bedding. When storms raged in the sky, they sheltered in canvas tents. In the darkness of the night they feared only God and jackals. Oh, how long ago it was that the tents of Israel had crumbled to dust! The descendants of ancient shepherds, pursued by sneering, evil fate, now wander the deserts of brick cities and towns, afraid of the land, afraid of the sky, and afraid of the rain.
Since the beginning of the war, almost four weeks ago now, there had been no rain. It was as if the sky had renounced the privilege of watering the soil, waiving it in favour of human blood. But human blood, however profusely it flowed, brought no benefit to the land.
Around seven o’clock clouds began to gather on the horizon to the west. The clear blue sky darkened in many places. The sun had not yet reached its final position beyond the town of Andrásfalva; it had only just left the garrison boundaries. It floated down towards the clouds. And the clouds swelled, growing dark. People who in other circumstances would welcome the relief of a storm now anxiously watched this mobilization up above. Where could you shelter from the downpour, which could last all night? No one was allowed to enter the huts without express permission. Only a command could release them from their oppression, but no one gave such an order.
By eight o’clock, it was clear that it was not going to rain. When the sun collided with the cloud bank, the clouds parted. Then, as if blushing with embarrassment, the clouds separated into numerous flocks of fleeing dirty sheep, chased by the fiery dog into an abyss. The sun’s victory was something wonderful, like the victory at Kraśnik. Jews and town-dwellers breathed a sigh of relief.
The night beneath the Hungarian sky held no terrors. Stars flashed on the clear firmament, one after another, glorious, mature, brilliant. It was nights like these that gave birth to astronomy. The close atmosphere which had been so oppressive during the daytime seemed to have relented in the face of people’s anxiety before the storm. The sky set in motion its hushed, invisible fans. A pleasant coolness wafted from the north. A northerly breeze gently caressed the faces of the new arrivals. The moon had not yet appeared.
In distant huts they were singing, in chorus, each verse beginning with “Oi!” It was a sigh developed into a melody, sheer Ukrainian nostalgia condensed into sound. Homesickness, longing for the steppe, the mountains, for love, for a lost paradise. Our men lay on their trunks and their bundles. They were waiting for their dreams to come true, they were waiting for the war to end.
The summer night slowly slid down on them. It rendered their features gentler, erasing their dullness and roughness. The night covered the commonest of faces with a patina of holiness. It closed mouths, but opened hearts. But no one here had anything to confess. They had not yet experienced the kind of shared misery that robs souls of their pride and their shame. Everyone kept their secrets to themselves. There would come a day when no one could keep them in any longer. In the absence of a priest they would confess to one another.
Nobody could sleep. The first night in the army held some secrets. Everyone was waiting for something.
As a cloud drifted in front of the moon, from the depths of the brewery came a long-drawn-out bugle call. The Emperor’s lullaby for well-behaved children. The communal singing in the barracks died down. Nine o’clock. Soldiers throughout the monarchy go to bed at nine. With the exception of those on the front line. A few moments later, from the mysterious depths of the brewery, from where the prisoner had been led that afternoon, and from where the notes of the lights-out bugle call were now drifting, a small detachment of armed men emerged. Bayonets glinted on the rifle barrels. They marched in double file. They came to a halt in front of the command headquarters. An officer or a sergeant gave a lengthy explanation to the soldiers. The light from the windows of the headquarters building was reflected in his sabre. He spoke in a hushed voice. Then they set off towards the square. They paused here and there to leave one soldier behind. The stars on the NCOs’ collars glinted. The garrison was posting the night sentries. The duty sergeant was positioning them at the boundary fences, at each barracks hut, by the barbed wire and at the main gate, embellished with fir branches and banners in honour of the victory at Kraśnik—an armed soldier now paced to and fro.
They did not trust us. We were surrounded on all sides as in a prison camp.
Piotr Niewiadomski could not swear to it, but he imagined that one of the sentries was Dmytro Tryhubiak from Czernielica.
The prisoners fell silent, although no one had forbidden them to speak. They spoke to each other in whispers. In the army, night-time of itself ordered silence. Nervously, they lent each other matches and seemed to be smoking furtively, even though no one had banned it. Eyes wandered round at night, clinging to the walls of the brewery, red in the daytime and now white as chalk, clinging to the huts, and plunging into the dark mass of linden trees lining the road. Neither the walls nor the linden trees could restore their lost freedom.