He did not even look round. With an experienced eye, he glanced in the mirror, quickly scanning the shiny surface of his shoes to establish that they had the correct appearance. He did not acknowledge the creator of this shine with a single word. In general, he rarely conversed with him. He had only had him since the outbreak of war and he did not want them to be on too familiar terms. He issued all commands in an official tone. Fatso generally carried them out conscientiously. His name was Hawryło (Gabriel) Kistoczok and he came from Bukovina, Bachmatiuk’s homeland. It was probably to this circumstance that he owed the privilege of his position. Bachmatiuk seemed to like him. Once, in a fit of good humour, he made a joking allusion to the fact that the shoe-shiner had an archangel’s name. In the presence of several soldiers, he called out:
“Hey, Hawryło, Michajło, Rafajło, go to the orderly room and fetch the orders!”
After that, wherever infantryman Gabriel Kistoczok appeared, he was met with calls of “Hawryło, Michajło, Rafajło!”
The battalion’s soldiers taunted him, but instinctively they showed him respect. In any case he roamed at will in the lion’s den, sweeping it out every day, and he dwelt at the very source of fear; he was steeped in the intimate aroma of power. Someone like this must know a thing or two. So they bombarded him with questions—such as when would there be a weapons inspection, when was the general’s inspection to take place, when would they be entering the battlefield, when would the war be over. They sucked up to Hawryło and even tried bribing him with vodka, sausages and tobacco. Hawryło acted as though he really did know something. He intimated that he was a confidant of the RSM, and his smile was as moronic as it was enigmatic. But his answers were mostly vague and ambiguous. In the end, the soldiers decided that Hawryło, Michajło, Rafajło knew about as much as they did. Nevertheless, they still looked up to him, so that every day his self-esteem grew and grew. Alongside Bachmatiuk, however, he felt increasingly insignificant.
Now he blurted out, with some difficulty:
“Regimental Sergeant-Major! Reporting, the straw has arrived, sir!”
“Dis—miss!”
Hawryło clicked his heels, silently put down the coffee and the shoes, silently took away the basin of dirty water and silently departed. He would return to the tidying up once the RSM was no longer in the room.
The RSM had a small room to himself on the second floor of the regimental headquarters. The other “professional” NCOs were quartered two or three to a room. Mostly they were married, with children. In the Stanisławów garrison they had apartments, with sideboards, gramophones with huge loudspeakers, chamber-pots, rubber-plants, rhododendrons, little dogs and canaries. The war and the evacuation had suddenly driven them out of their cosy nests. Deprived of their creature comforts, they found it difficult to adapt to the new conditions at their Hungarian barracks. Bachmatiuk was in his element here. For almost thirty years he had lived with the regiment and it was all the same to him where the regiment was stationed. He never had his own furniture, he did not even possess his own bed-linen, and as for the family—the military was his family. It was hard to imagine him ever having had parents. Regulations seemed to be his father and Discipline his mother. While Bachmatiuk was on military service, he sometimes spent his holidays at “home”. He used to visit his father, the mayor of a prosperous municipality near the river Sereth, and his younger siblings. But after transferring to the regular army, he broke off relations with the whole family and he was seen in the affluent municipality by the Sereth only once—at his father’s funeral. “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me,” said the Lord to the apostles. Like a nun, married to the Lord in her innocence, Bachmatiuk lived for years away from his family, loving the deity more than himself.
The earthy parents he chanced to have, as if foreseeing that their first-born son would one day become a source of support for the military might of the Habsburgs, christened him with the archducal name of Rudolf. Throughout his life, Bachmatiuk sought to prove himself worthy of that name. He was Ukrainian by birth, but in the course of many years in the army his nationality dissolved without a trace in the black-and-yellow substance. Today he was simply an Austrian. It would also be naive to mention his religious affiliation as indicated in the register of baptisms and likewise in the regimental records, according to which he was a Greek Catholic, since the only faith that he ardently professed and nurtured was the army. He attained the rank of RSM by honest means; he was as strict with himself as with his subordinates, selfless and pure as a vestal virgin. His vows of purity were addressed to his own conscience, but it was the late legendary Captain Knauss who ordained him a priest of Discipline.
Bachmatiuk knew he had no chance of further promotion. The rank of RSM was the apogee of his career. He did not care about promotion, as he was not a careerist. He served his deity disinterestedly, maintaining his celibacy. He treated his task of turning men into men as that of a missionary. He not only created foot soldiers fit for parade and for combat, but above all he turned out Austrians. The duty of a priest, especially his missionary work, makes exclusive demands on a man. That was why Bachmatiuk was not married. Those unable to understand the meaning of true faith had their own explanations for Bachmatiuk’s avoidance of women. Some considered him to be impotent from birth. The fools! In any case, we have scant knowledge of the RSM’s private life. He did not keep the company of anyone in the barracks when off duty. Apparently, he had acquaintances in the town at Stanisławów. As the sole RSM, he occupied a totally isolated position in the regiment. He treated the sergeants as beneath him, but on the other hand he was modest and considerate enough not to approach the cadets and the junior officers, the subalterns.
His little room at the Farkas and Gjörmeky brewery resembled a monk’s cell, indeed that of a monk belonging to some strict order. A camp-bed, a shelf above the bed, and on the shelf—bread, salt, butter, tobacco and an old parade helmet. Everywhere in the room—on the window, on the table, on the walls and on the floor—everything you saw had some connection with the army. Dummy ammunition, magazines with blank rounds in colourful boxes and odd spent shells. Everywhere there were piles of paperwork, old typewritten orders of the day already carried out, service notes, report books, forms, maps and service reports. On the floor, leaning against the walls, were faulty range-finders which he was repairing, rifle-practice targets, a large wooden box with live ammunition and two heavy, padlocked trunks. It could be that in one of these trunks he kept the civilian clothes about which the wildest rumours circulated. On one wall hung a brass trumpet. The following sacrosanct books lay on the table:
Service Regulations, Part I, i.e. D.1
Service Regulations, Part II (Field Service), D.2
Service Regulations, Part III, D.3
Exercise Regulations for Infantry, I.
Rifle Training
and a small manual for NCOs—the Handbuch für Unteroffiziere by H. Schmidt, with a portrait of the Emperor in colour on the cover. There was no trace of his private life anywhere. The wall above the bed was adorned with picturesque ornaments—a sabre, a belt and a pistol in a brown leather case. Nearby was the only picture in the cell—a large photograph in a black frame, under glass. It contained the figure of a handsome middle-aged officer in field uniform with field-glasses on his chest and a bunch of flowers. This was Captain Knauss. Captain Siegfried Knauss, setting off into the field, had offered Bachmatiuk only a small amateur photograph. He perished in the first days of the war on the Russian front. Bachmatiuk idolized Captain Knauss. Everything he knew about the army, that is to say about life, he had learnt thanks to him. None other than Captain Knauss had turned Bachmatiuk into a “man”. At the news of the captain’s death, the regimental sergeant-major—the man of iron—reportedly wept like a baby. After that, he lost interest in the fortunes of the regiment at the front. If the entire regiment were wiped out to the last man, it would be less of a loss than that single death. With that death, the regiment had already lost the war. Bachmatiuk took the likeness of the dead man to the best photographer in Stanisławów and ordered an enlargement, to be set in a beautiful black frame. Nobody would have been surprised to see an olive lamp burning underneath this photograph one day.