After the orderly had left, he looked out through the closed window. Hundreds of people were milling around down below. On the main route leading from the brewery to the highway a convoy of wagons fully loaded with straw was drawn up. The horses were impatiently stamping their hooves. Bachmatiuk opened the window and leant out over the window sill. The hubbub from the people on the square seemed to calm down slightly. The regimental sergeant-major’s torso made an impression even in his vest. Civilians were washing at the wells. The soldiers were fetching coffee. From the east, from the direction of the abattoir, came muffled bellowing.
“Reszytyło!” yelled Bachmatiuk at the NCO standing by the wagons. “What are you waiting for? Move on to the fourth barracks building! And see to it that nobody smokes! If fire breaks out you will be in for it, not me! Get a move on!”
The wagons started moving. Bachmatiuk remained standing by the window for a while. This window and two storeys separated him from the anonymous masses which he had to knock into shape. He was supposed to infuse spirit into these ostensibly living beings who were ignorant of discipline. This work had aged him. Before the war, he had trained sixteen intakes. But what had previously been achieved calmly over a period of years now had to be done while you wait, in the stifling heat, in the space of a few weeks. Besides that, up till now the raw material had been young men of similar ages and types, whereas these days nothing but old clapped-out recruits were being rushed in from all over the place.
The migration of Imperial and Royal peoples was already under way. Throughout the monarchy, reserve militia recruits were being transported from the mountains down to the plains, from the Carpathians to the Alps, from Dalmatia to Tyrol, from Galicia to Bosnia, to Bohemia and to Hungary. Some Hutsul transports had already proceeded from Andrásfalva to Styria. To replace the Hutsuls, about seventy Styrians had arrived. Mostly miners from the Knittelfeld region. The one-year volunteers, those “lawyers”, as Bachmatiuk contemptuously referred to them, were despatched to their special training centres, and the sick and the malingerers were taken to hospital. Hundreds of healthy bodies, mostly peasants, were waiting down below for the privilege of being enrolled and given uniforms trimmed with the regimental colour, a beautiful orange. In peacetime, the “owner”, that is to say the regimental commander, was a certain Balkan sovereign with whom the Imperial and Royal Monarchy was at war today. Despite this the regiment’s name was unchanged. It could still afford the luxury of this courtesy. It continued to be the 10th Infantry Regiment of King N.
At the mention of King N, Bachmatiuk smiled. He had seen him during the great Imperial manoeuvres in 1904. King N had visited “his own” regiment at the time, along with His Majesty. Until the carriage stopped in front of the first company, who were the colour-bearers, it was difficult to identify who was the guest and who was the Emperor. Franz Joseph sat dressed in Balkan uniform with broad silver epaulettes, wearing a white fur hat with a red plume, while the Balkan ruler wore a shako and the full-dress tunic of an Imperial and Royal infantry colonel (with orange lapels and cuffs). Such masquerades used to be common before the war. They were part of the official routine of royal visits. Many foreign uniforms hung in the wardrobes at the Burgtheater and at Schönbrunn Palace. Intoxicated by the mothballs, they dreamt of bygone days of friendship between the crowned heads.
“What will they do now with all those enemy uniforms?” wondered Regimental Sergeant-Major Bachmatiuk when war broke out. “Will they return them or take them prisoner? It is uniforms, after all, that are taken prisoner, isn’t it? It is of no consequence what bodies are wearing them. An Austrian in Serbian uniform is a Serb.”
When war broke out, Bachmatiuk got drunk, although it was not a Sunday, but a Tuesday. At one point he thought he could see his Emperor, strolling in Balkan regalia on the streets of the Austrian garrison of Stanisławów. He was frightened, and began to shout so the whole tavern could hear: “Turn back, Your Majesty, take cover!” He very nearly got arrested by the gendarmerie.
Now he was sober. He was looking out on the world through the window of his cell. He made a rough estimate of the quality of the material from which he was obliged to produce a new battalion for the Emperor in the shortest possible time. The Emperor! Well what concern of his was the Emperor, actually? The army can exist and fight without the Emperor! Franz Joseph was the supreme leader, of course, a supreme god like Zeus on Olympus, but the RSM served a greater deity, invisible as Moira, the goddess of destiny before whom Olympus, with all its military might, trembled.
On the days of the migration of peoples it was very hot. As the War Ministry commanded, the most variegated species and the most multifarious kinds of human beings were cast into the melting-pot, elements whose fidelity had been tested along with elements of betrayal. The Ministry entrusted this difficult task to the respective units. Commanding officers were to decide for themselves which of the thousands of names stored for years in paper archives deserved to be trusted, and which should be transplanted to foreign, more reliable, lands. No commander got involved personally. This was what his adjutant was for.
However, predictably, our adjutant, Lieutenant Baron Hammerling, could not cope. He could not even pronounce the names of those whose fate he was supposed to determine. How, then, could he tell which of them sounded loyal and which sounded suspicious? In such cases, an honest adjutant does not rely on his own instincts but seeks the assistance of an experienced NCO. And that is what he did. Regimental Sergeant-Major Bachmatiuk requested alphabetical lists from the orderly room. Under each letter of the alphabet he selected at random a few names and marked them with a little red cross. Those marked with a cross answered “present” and left for Styria. What motivated Bachmatiuk’s choices, and why he despatched Semen Baran and Telesfor Zwarycz, while he kept Izrael Glanz and Piotr Niewiadomski behind—that remains his personal secret.
Although they worked from morning until late evening in the orderly room (a few recruits with some education were requisitioned to fill in the regimental record books) Bachmatiuk was not satisfied. Registration dragged its feet as though there was no war on at all. It was difficult, of course, to sort matters out with this uncouth lot. Many of them arrived without their birth certificates and could not remember their parents’ first names. One had to take their word for it that they really were who they said they were. But still, Bachmatiuk believed that registration and enlistment could have been completed two days earlier. Baron Hammerling cost the recruits two whole days. No surprise there, since he played the violin in the evenings instead of sitting in the orderly room working. He should have been made leader of a string orchestra, not a regimental adjutant. Out of all the new arrivals they only managed to enlist one company. As for the rest, they were spending their fifth day lazing about without taking a bath or getting de-loused, still in mufti. Living like that was bad for morale. There had even been reports of theft. If Captain Knauss had been alive, if he hadn’t gone to the front, everything would have been different at the barracks. Captain Knauss’s watchword was “tempo”. He remained faithful to it until his death. And even the haste with which he died for the Emperor seemed to be merely a confirmation of this principle. Tempo, tempo! No sooner had he turned up at the front than he fell. Now Bachmatiuk had inherited all his principles.