Csardas (21 page)

“Oh, yes, but look here; they are all naughty at that age. Remember how we—”

He stopped suddenly as he realized that whatever youthful indulgences he had been employed in at nineteen, Zsigmond Ferenc, driven by ambition, would already have been involved in a programme of austerity and work. He felt a shaft of pity—unusual in Alfred—for this man who had never had time to play.

“Leave it, old friend,” he said quietly. “The war has made everything different. We can only wait; things will change.”

Zsigmond Ferenc did not answer. Too many things had happened in the space of the past hour. Alfred studied his brother-in-law’s controlled, silent form and wondered, with some fear, what turmoil of emotion seethed beneath the disciplined face. Suddenly he could take no more. He wanted to get out of the study as quickly as possible and return to the café in the square for another glass of brandy.

“I must go. If Gizi and I can do anything.... You know how close our families are. Great unity. Good-bye, Zsigmond.” He grasped his gloves and hat, waved in an affable, casual way, and moved towards the door. Zsigmond Ferenc nodded but did not speak and, thankfully, Alfred left the room, rushed down the stairs to the courtyard, and was out in the damp, cold air.

When the letter came from Malie telling him that henceforth he was to write directly to her, it seemed unimportant. Everything connected with Zsigmond Ferenc—the humiliation of their first meeting, the terror and secrecy with which his courtship had been pursued—all seemed trivial, as though it had happened long ago to a young boy. His need for Malie was still strong, stronger than ever. But it had changed. The remembrance of the bright shining girl was the only illusion he had left, the only escape in a landscape of horror.

In spite of repeated efforts to suppress bad news from drifting down through the armies, a trickle of depressing items—rumours, counter-rumours, atrocity stories—filtered through to the troops. Przemysl, besieged for so long, had fallen to the Russians. Horrifying tales were told of its surrender, of men so starved that as the victors moved in their horses had been torn to pieces and eaten raw. The Russians were at the foot of the Carpathian passes, then over the passes—it could not be true! Soon they would swarm over the great Hungarian plain, and the granary of the Empire would be lost. The 28th Prague regiment had deserted, run away during the battle of the Dukla Pass, and the King and Emperor had dissolved them in a manifesto to their disgrace. The Serbs were winning in the south—surely not! And so it went on, fear piled on fear, hopelessness upon hopelessness.

When the spring campaign began, everything should have been better. Led by the Germans, the shattered, humiliated Austro-Hungarian armies began to advance, forward across Galicia, across the ground they had lost in the autumn. Fighting forward, winning against the enemy, it should have been better. At least now there was hope, but the hope was accompanied by bitter, savage fighting.

Karoly’s regiment had been transferred down to the southern, more hilly stretches of Galicia. It should have looked different, but in some strange way it was the same, only worse. Small, cannon-bleached stumps of trees stood unbudding in the new spring. Round one or two of the burnt-out villages a few trees still survived and, almost invariably, from their branches hung the bodies of Ruthenian peasants. Karoly thought the Russians had done it until he came upon his own men stringing up a farmer who refused to tell them where his grain was hidden. He had ordered the man to be cut down, but he knew that the next time, when they came to another village and needed food, his men would do it again.

He was deaf for four days—from the German guns, not the Russians—and when the time came for him and Stefan Tilsky to lead a charge onto a Russian machine-gun post he was thankful he could not hear the screams of his men being mowed down. They took the post, but his hatred for the enemy was now so intense that he ignored the ragged surrender and began to cut at them with his sabre. After, when he looked at Stefan, he found his friend’s hand, face, and clothes were covered in Russian blood, the same as his own.

Night was when he needed Malie. From his memory he took her—quiet, serene, smiling—a girl who made the world about her composed and tranquil, a girl who could still the battle if only she chose, who would hold him and soothe him and wash the blood from his hands. When he had a chance to sleep he managed to do it only by imagining Malie wrapping her arms around him and soothing death from his head.

Forward, forward to Lemberg. The fighting was harder and he killed more. He wondered why he was not killed himself, because the cavalry—as he had told the old general that night in Cousin Alfred’s house—was outdated and archaic. Often he found himself on foot, fighting with sabre and rifle alongside a platoon of infantrymen. In a dispassionate way he pondered on the incongruity of himself and the war. When the hatred was upon him he could kill and slash and smash, faces, arms, legs, torsos, cut them all to pieces. But once he came upon a near-mad emaciated dog gnawing at the rotting skull of a child and he had to turn away and vomit onto the earth.

Everything looked the same: shell craters, trenches, burnt-out villages, pieces of bodies, broken carts bearing the remains of homes as the refugees fled, either one way or the other. In most cases whichever way they ran they were killed for being traitors to one side or the other.

In May, through a haze of blood and killing, they heard that the Empire had another enemy. Italy had declared war and was now preparing to wage a battle, different from theirs, an alpine battle but similar in that it was really just a matter of killing.

Przemysl was relieved, but the fortress had been obliterated by German guns and there was nothing worth having or fighting for any more. Lemberg was taken. Karoly’s troop, two days behind the advance force, entered the city and for the first time in ten months found themselves in a city of buildings, trees, cafés, hospitals, and homes. Everything was a little battered, a little frayed and sordid, but it was a city still, a city with gardens and flowers, with leaves on the trees. There were civilians, not many but some, who looked normal and walked about instead of hanging from the branches of trees. There was filthy ersatz coffee to be drunk in the cafés, and girls to be bought, if one had any money, and beds to be slept in, if there was time to commandeer billeting quarters.

The collision with civilization turned him once more into a human being, a tired, horrified, disillusioned human being who hated himself, the Russians, the Germans. Malie... Malie. Can I be the same again? Can I enjoy a summer in the mountains ever again?

They were finally riding out of the town, still advancing, when a colonel from military headquarters shouted at them to stop.

“You! And you!” He pointed to Karoly and Stefan. “You are to leave your troop here and follow me. I am requisitioning you for urgent and secret military duty. Officers only.”

He turned. Karoly shouted emergency orders to his men and spurred his horse after the colonel, who led them out of the town, through narrow thoroughfares, to an area of warehouses and stockyards on the outskirts of the city.

“May I ask our duty, sir?”

The colonel didn’t answer. In spite of the sordid part of town they were in, quite a few people were walking, hurrying, in one particular direction. Horse-drawn ambulances pushed past them, all of them tightly closed and driven by men with frightened faces.

“Is it an ambulance train, sir?”

“You will not speak of what you see, do you understand?”

“Sir.” A sick depression settled in his stomach. He began to suspect what duty awaited him, something to do with Russian prisoners or possibly deserters from their own army. He hoped, desperately, that he was not being ordered to assist in a mass execution.

They came to a high brick wall set at intervals with gates, some of which were blown off their hinges by recent shellfire. They rode along the side of the wall until they came to a pair of solid metal doors. One or two civilians were drifting through into the yard beyond and were being pushed back by a harassed lieutenant with a rifle. But, strangely, most of the people whom Karoly had seen hurrying in this direction were just standing silent by the wall. They were waiting in the aimless manner of people who sense something is wrong and are drawn to find out what it is: curious, afraid, unable to move away.

“Get back, scum!” The colonel scowled, hitting out with his reins. “Get away, back to your homes! You’ll see nothing here!”

Like a large dumb animal the crowd moved back a few feet and then, as the colonel rode through the gates, they closed in again, going no farther than before.

In the yard was a smell. Karoly, used to the smell of battle, blood, and rotting corpses, found himself gagging. It was vile and abominable, more than the smell of death. It was the smell of corruption and sewers and pus. His chest and stomach heaved, writhed, his throat choked and closed. The colonel glared at him.

“If you have no stomach for this, get out. We can’t afford women or weaklings in the army.”

“Sorry, sir. It was the smell.”

The colonel’s face was disdainful. “You’ll get used to the smell. And please note, this is a tannery. Any questions from the rabble outside, and that is what is causing the smell—the rotting leather and uncured hides. You understand?”

“Sir!”

“The railway line is at the back.”

They rode across the yard and then round the factory building. Karoly glanced at Stefan. His friend’s face was wrinkled into a grimace of disgust but there seemed to be no fear, no dread of what they were about to do.

They came round the end of the leather factory, and he saw it—he saw, but he didn’t believe. It was so horrible that control slipped away from him and, startled, he found he was laughing, a meaningless, uncontrollable, futile laugh. He forced himself to stop and look away, down at the ground, at the line of ambulances, at the soldiers—no, not soldiers—they were all officers who were standing at the openings along the factory walls, trying to block the exits and entrances caused by shell damage.

“Join those officers at the alley there. Don’t let anyone through except the ambulances and the medical corps. You”—he pointed to Stefan—“you had better return to the entrance, prevent them from getting in that way.”

“Sir.” Tilsky was white now, his face no longer unconcerned.

The rail track stretched away into the distance, a little domestic siding that had once been used for bringing the skins straight into the factory yard. Along it, for several hundred metres, stretched out like beads hanging from a black necklace, were lines of bodies, all twisted into hideous grotesque shapes. Just here and there a hand could be seen moving, clawing up into the air, grasping for help. The bodies were so closely packed together they were in some cases piled on one another. A doctor—one doctor—moved along the lines, two orderlies behind him. He moved quite fast, and once in a while he would stop and point. The orderlies would step forward and separate a body from the heap, beckon one of the ambulances forward, and lift it in. Karoly watched them raise a body, pause, then throw it back on the heap.

“Cholera,” said the colonel briefly. “Broken out at the front. Carefully isolated. Orders to conceal it from everyone until the sick are in hospital—otherwise panic and mass desertions. It’s gone wrong. Something’s gone wrong: no medical orderlies on the train, no water, no sanitation. Mustn’t let anyone know.”

There was a stir from one of the openings in the factory wall, and Karoly spurred his horse over to the officer guarding it. An old woman was trying to force her way past. “It is my son, my son!” she kept shouting. “You have a train of wounded men there! I know it is my son. You have my son.”

“Get back, old mother! We have no one’s son here, only Russians.”

“Russians!” she screamed. “Russians! Why are Russians wearing Austrian uniforms? I can see; there are wounded there. Let me through. I must find my son!”

The colonel, near madness, galloped over and began to crowd the old woman back up the alleyway. “Out, out, old cow! Out!” She began to scream at him and he raised his whip and hit her across the shoulders. “Back, bitch of a woman!” he bellowed, and finally the old woman began to run in the other direction. The colonel was sweating; large wet patches spread put from his armpits. “How am I supposed to keep the rabble out with no men?” he shouted. “They give me a platoon of medical orderlies and tell me to handle the situation with secrecy. I don’t have enough men. I don’t have enough orderlies!”

From the distance came a rumbling. It drove the colonel into a greater frenzy. He raced up and down the sides of the track, swearing and shouting, raising his fists and shaking them in the air.

“God help us!” he cried. “God help us!”

A train was moving slowly towards them, one engine with a small head of steam and twelve closed cattle cars. Like a madman the colonel began to run back and forth, screaming instructions. “Start moving the dead away! Get the dead away before the train comes in!”

It was like moving boulders with a table knife. Medical orderlies drifted in and out of the piles of knotted, twisted shapes, lifting a body here, placing one there. They made no gap at all in the avenue of dead and finally, numbed and apathetic, they stood and watched the train coming in from the east.

The driver and the stoker were at the engine and as the train shuddered to a halt they leaned out, mesmerized at the sight awaiting them. The colonel jumped up onto the running board. “Where are the orderlies, the medical orderlies?”

“No orderlies,” the driver said slowly.

“How long? From the front, how long?”

“Two and a half days. The track was shelled. We had to go back and make a diversion. We had new orders. They knew it was a hospital train but they said we must go round the long way.”

“Have you opened the doors?’”

The driver was terrified. He could not take his eyes from the rows of corpses, and although he did not know what had gone wrong he was sure he was going to be blamed for it.