He closed the window and removed the net from his smoothed black moustache. The tips were curled up to form the fine ornamental shape of a large shiny letter “W”, like the German Emperor’s monogram. He drank a cup of coffee, rolled a cigarette and glanced at the alarm clock. There was still time; he still had several minutes to himself before he needed to appear before anybody. Actually, he was hardly ever really alone. For many years, his deity had always accompanied him everywhere. It always crept after him, invisible, stalking him like a tiresome informer, spying on every thought, every word, every step. It even slunk into his dreams. From this deity he took refuge every Sunday in alcohol, hoping he would be out of its reach. No chance! It caught up with him in his drunken hallucinations, torturing him with remorse. It was as though his soul had been mangled by a mad dog; in this state Bachmatiuk returned to his cell. For years and years he wrestled with the deity; in the end, he surrendered meekly, dissolved himself in it and was lost. These days he was enslaved by Discipline; he was in love with it.
He spent hours enthralled by the fact that he was quite alone with the holy spirit of military service. He celebrated silent holy mass with the Regulations, and like any mystic found the greatest bliss in direct communion with the Mystery. Often, after midnight, when the entire barracks was asleep and the officers’ mess was long since deserted and even Baron Hammerling’s violin had fallen silent, the light was still on in the RSM’s lonely cell. He lay in bed, reading. Not newspapers or comic strips like the other NCOs, but D.1 and D.2, those Old and New Testaments. Like a Talmudist, he leafed through the same old pages, for the hundredth and thousandth time, pondering over the same old statements, and sometimes he managed to get to the bottom of them. He was mainly attracted to difficult and intricate matters, inaccessible to average minds, but what gave him the most pleasure was the contemplation of elementary things. Such beauty was hidden in such seemingly simple commands as “Attention!”, “Stand at ease!”, “About turn!”, “Company, quick march!”, “Quick march!”, “Slow march!”, “At the double!”, “Halt!” Any child can understand them, yet they are a mystery. How passionately Bachmatiuk immersed himself in the cavernous depths of “Attention!” The command to stand to attention transforms a man; it transforms a phalanx of men into a single dead vessel of obedience. “Attention!” means intense alertness, from which everything military, that is to say everything human, can be derived. When a man is standing to attention, you can fling him to the ground, you can tell him to run, kneel, throw himself into the water, to shoot, to stab, to trample! “Attention!” This is the golden key to understanding the history of nations!
For many years the Regulations were Bachmatiuk’s only, and his favourite, reading matter. He was cultivating a pure army as some cultivate pure poetry. The army for its own sake. And although he knew by heart the primeval books of soldiery and understood their infallible, unfathomable content as no one else in the barracks did, he constantly read and re-read them, and each time he discovered some new truth, new revelations.
Knew them and understood them? Does that not sound like blasphemy? What mortals really know and understand D.1 and D.2? Not even generals or senior staff officers could make that claim. Nor officers in the War Ministry or the Ministry of National Defence! Not even Captain Knauss! And who knows whether the authors of the Regulations themselves, those fathers of the militant Imperial and Royal church, were capable of understanding everything written by their pens so endowed with grace? Certainly they were not, much less so a humble NCO in the regular army…
And even if he could grasp something or other with his feeble intellect, would it end there? Does understanding and fathoming the Regulations not mean living strictly according to them, carrying them out to the letter, blindly following every paragraph, every item? Day and night, in peacetime and in times of war, on land, on water and in the air? Oh perfection, you would be Rudolf Bachmatiuk’s dream! You meant more to him than promotions and decorations. He dreamt of perfection as someone who was still far from achieving it. He did not know that he had gained it long since. For how else, if not by perfection, could he inspire such fear? He paralysed not only the soldiers, but the officers as well, and especially the officers of the reserve. They took great care lest they—God forbid—commit some blunder in his presence. He was dangerous, yet he was the one who before now had rescued many a second lieutenant from an embarrassing situation, as he knew everything and was never at fault. It was indeed a rare case in the history of discipline when a subordinate did not fear his superiors, but instead they feared him. The officers feared him—that’s right, they feared him, because in their eyes he was the embodiment of all virtues, and nothing terrifies people so much as virtue.
He was proficient in everything to do with the infantry, as capable of handling the toughest combat missions as an old staff officer. His intelligence and powers of observation were alarming. He was an excellent marksman, bugler and drummer, and he could dismantle and reassemble a machine-gun in a few minutes. Crouching, squatting, side-stepping, adopting a firing position, holding the rifle butt when on parade—all this ought to be done as demonstrated by Bachmatiuk. Correctness personified, he was a living model, photographed for textbooks.
And his style, his fairness! He never wronged soldiers or favoured them; he had no prejudices and made no compromises. He never struck anyone or swore at them, never humiliated them or stooped to using foul language. On the other hand, his three hours of disciplinary exercises meant three full hours, not two hours and forty minutes! When he checked the fitting of the irons, not even the most lenient of corporals would dare, in his presence, to make them looser than the regulations prescribed. The recruits preferred to get a slap in the face and to hear the worst words of abuse rather than endure the cruel torture of his derision. When angered, he would invariably address the victim as “Your Grace”, “Sir” or “Your Excellency”. There was terrible power in his words. When he exclaimed: “I will make a man of you!” the poor creature thus addressed felt he had before him a veritable creator; he anticipated that dreadful things were about to happen, the ultimate events of the book of Genesis, that the Creation was about to begin. God the Father no longer came into it, because the RSM’s small, swarthy, hairy finger emitted an electrical current capable of killing anything living and bringing it back to life. And when in a moment of great anger he approached the offender and—blanching—whispered in a hushed voice, virtually in his face: “My son, I will banish your soul!”, that “son”, the son of the earth, the son of a woman, knew for sure that he possessed a soul, for any moment he would lose it.
Such was the power Regimental Sergeant-Major Bachmatiuk seemed to possess. What was the source of this supernatural power, if it was not the Regulations? He made nothing up in his own imagination. Not even an enemy could accuse him of any arbitrary act. His every gesture, his every action, adhered strictly to one of the paragraphs D.1, D.2, or D.3. Everything had been devised, designed and calculated with such wise foresight! It was only thanks to the Regulations that the world took on some semblance of meaning, and life ceased to be a concatenation of blind fortune and fatal misunderstandings. These are not dead formulas without any practical application, but a rigorous, precise plan of existence, covering everything, absolutely everything from buttons and belts to death itself. Military death, Imperial and Royal death, as distinct from civilian death, was not considered a catastrophe even in peacetime. Thanks to paragraphs 702, 703, 717 and 718 D.1 any soldier could die calmly, neatly and safely, just as he had lived. All aspects of mortality in the army were accounted for as follows: