No Man's Land (47 page)

‘What kind of death are you preparing for me, Marek?'

‘Don't rush me, please, sergeant-major. It doesn't go as quickly as all that.'

The volunteer thought for a moment: ‘You're from Kralupy, aren't you? Then write home to Kralupy that you are going to be missing without a trace, but write cautiously. Or would you prefer to be seriously wounded and remain lying beyond the barbed-wire entanglements? You could lie beautifully like that with a broken leg the whole day. In the night the enemy lights up our positions with his searchlights and notices you; he thinks you're spying and begins to riddle you with shells and shrapnel. You have performed a tremendous service for the army, because the enemy has had to expend on you as large a quantity of munitions as would have been needed for a whole battalion. After all these explosions your bits float freely in the air over you and, penetrating it with their rotations, sing a paean of glorious victory. In short everybody will have his turn, everyone of our battalion will distinguish himself so that the glorious pages of our history will overflow with victories – although I really would much prefer them not to overflow, but I can't help it. Everything must be carried out thoroughly so that some memory of us will remain until, say, in the month of September there will be really nothing left whatsoever of our battalion, except these glorious pages of history which will carry a message to the hearts of all Austrians, making it plain to them that all those who will never see their homes again fought equally valiantly. And I've already written the end, you know, Mr Vaněk – the obituary notice. Honour to the memory of the fallen! Their love for the Monarchy is the most sacred love of all, for death was its climax. Let their names be pronounced with honour, as for instance the name of Vaněk. Those who felt deepest of all the loss of their breadwinners may proudly wipe away their tears. Those who fell were the heroes of our battalion.'

Chodounský and Jurajda were listening with great interest to the volunteer's exposition of the forthcoming history of the battalion.

‘Come closer, gentlemen,' said the volunteer, turning the pages of his notes. ‘Here is page 15. “The telephonist, Chodounský, fell 3 September together with the battalion cook, Jurajda.” Now listen further to my notes: “Exemplary heroism. The former, at the sacrifice of his life, protects the telephone wires in his cover when left at his telephone for three days without relief. The latter, observing the danger threatening from an enemy encirclement of our flank, throws himself at the foe with a cauldron of boiling soup, scattering terror and scaldings in his ranks.” That's a splendid death for both of them, isn't it? One torn to pieces by a mine, the other asphyxiated by poison gas which they put under his nose, when he had nothing to defend himself with. Both perish with the cry: “Long live our battalion commander!” The High Command can do nothing else but daily express its gratitude in the form of the order that all other units of our army should know of the courage of our battalion and follow our example. I can read you an extract from the army order which will be read out in all units of the army and which is very like the order of the Archduke Karl, when he stood with his army in 1805 before Padua and got a frightful drubbing the day after. Listen to what people will read about our battalion as a heroic unit, which is a glowing example for all armies. “… I hope that the whole army will follow the example of the above-named battalion, and in particular adopt its spirit of self-confidence and self-reliance, its unshakeable invincibility in danger and its qualities of heroism, love and confidence in its superior officers. These virtues, in which the battalion excels, will lead it on to glorious deeds for the victory and blest happiness of our Empire. May all follow its example!”'

From the place where Švejk lay a yawn resounded and he could be heard talking in his sleep: ‘Yes, you're right, Mrs Muller, people are all alike. In Kralupy there lived a Mr Jaros who manufactured pumps and he was like the watchmaker Lejhanz from Pardubice, as like as pins. And Lejhanz again was strikingly like Piskora of Jičín, and four together resembled an unknown suicide whom they found hanged and completely decomposed in a lake near Jindřich
v Hradec, just underneath the railway line, where he probably threw himself under the train.' There resounded another yawn and it was followed by: ‘And then they sentenced all the others to a huge fine, and tomorrow, Mrs Muller, please make me some noodles with poppy-seed.' Švejk turned over on the other side and went on snoring, while between Jurajda and the volunteer a debate started about what would happen in the future.

Jaroslav Hašek
was born in Prague (then within Austria-Hungary) in 1883. His life was even more eventful than that of Å vejk, the hero of the darkly funny
The Good Soldier Å vejk
. Hašek was a lifelong anarchist who fought in the war, was captured by the Russians in 1915, sent to a prisoner-of-war camp and in 1916 was recruited into the Czechoslovak Brigade to fight the Austro-Hungarian army. Hašek disagreed with the decision of the brigade to go to the Western front and in October 1918 he joined the Soviet Red Army. He returned to Prague in 1920 and had completed the first three volumes of
The Good Soldier Å vejk
by the time of his death in 1923 in Lipnice, Czechoslovakia. With a life like that he could have written many more volumes! Widely translated, the book appeals to audiences the world over because of the character of Švejk, who undermines the authority of the powerful with subtle irony and apparent obedience: the dialogue is a festival of surreal non-sequiturs. The drawings that are an essential part of the book's appeal are by Hašek's friend Josef Lada. In all Lada made over 900 drawings for the illustrated edition of the book, which was published in 1924 in the Czech daily
České Slovo
.

MIROSLAV KRLEŽA

HUT 5B

from
The Croatian God Mars

translated by Celia Hawkesworth

C
OUNT MAXIMILIAN AXELRODE
, Commander of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, had become a Johannieter Chevalier de Justice, in gala uniform with a silver cross, in his fourteenth year. Instead of having the sixteen noble and chivalrous forebears in the line of his respected father, and his respected mother, a noblewoman of high birth, required for the rank of high dignitary of the high Order of Malta, Count Maximilian Axelrode numbered in his lineage twenty-eight plumes and helmets, beneath which blue blood pulsed, so when the Great Priorate of the Sovereign Order of Malta sent to His Majesty's office priceless letters patent sealed with gold for the supreme ‘Imprimatur', it was a great occasion, such as rarely occur on this earth.

Throughout his entire life, Count Maximilian Axelrode had only one idea: to draw his sword for his proud Maltese motto ‘Pro Fide', wrap himself in his black cape that fell in heavy folds and hasten to his death, head held high and proud. So, when he travelled to Jerusalem for the first time he had wept bitterly with grief onto the marble of Santa Maria Latina, because he had not been granted the immense good fortune of scattering his noble bones here, eight hundred years previously, with the great Godfrey of Bouillon, or if not that, then at least of being born three hundred years later, when the cannons thundered on Rhodes and Malta. But no! He had fallen onto the globe in a cowardly, stupid age, when the noble Villiers de l'Isle-Adam family had become socialist agitators of some kind, inciting the rabble on the First of May, and when the greatest military event was reduced to a manoeuvre where there was blind firing, but limited, because some Minister of Finance and some ‘crass' parliamentarians had brayed that the army was too costly. ‘Ugh, this idiotic age of steam locomotives, when everything is hamstrung by rails and so-called democracy, and when the noble Knights of Malta met in hotels, wearing burghers' bowler hats, and duels were banned by law!'

Count Maximilian Axelrode had grieved in this sterile way for a whole sixty-three years when he awoke one morning and thought he must be dreaming. His lackey handed him a dispatch from the Priorate of the High Order, informing him that mobilisation had been declared and that, following its high tradition, the Order of Malta would at last raise its banner in the name of its great motto ‘Pro Fide' and somewhere on the imperial military stage erect tents and organise a hospital. And so Count Maximilian Axelrode became the head of a big Maltese hospital, consisting of forty-two large wooden huts, with its own electricity generator, whole companies of Red Cross nurses, and so on and so forth. The armies shifted a hundred kilometres east, and then two hundred kilometres west, and then again east, from one season of war to the next, as war decrees, and so Count Axelrode travelled with his Maltese circus from east to west, from Stanislavov to Krakow and back for three whole years, and now it was August 1916, the sun was blazing at forty-nine Celsius and the situation was serious and tense.

The hospital, with fifteen hundred patients, was full and there was every chance that the Russians were going to cut the railway line to left and right, and that the noble count, the Maltese Grand Master, would be in Moscow in two weeks' time. At noon a dispatch arrived, stating that the Russians had indeed moved the front line northwards, between two stations, but the hospital should stay where it was, because a counteroffensive was underway. That, the fact that the Russians had cut the line in the north, meant that all the transports began to move south and that resulted, naturally enough, in a crash (seventy-two dead, many injured), and all the convoys were left without provisions, so the wounded were crying out, for the fifth day now, with no water and they were being fed (oh, don't laugh, it's true!) with peppermint drops for the prevention of intestinal worms and people all along the line were out of their minds, and so Count Axelrode had to take in, on top of his full complement, another five hundred patients. That day happened to be the hottest day of the whole summer, when the sun was formally crushing the earth with its fiery mass, and it seemed as though someone had thrown a burning millstone onto the white wooden huts and everything had caught fire. The boards bent and cracked with the drought, and the whitewash from the walls peeled like old men's skin and the green bindweed and flowers in the decorative round beds had all withered, everything was rotten, decayed, trampled.

The new group of five hundred wounded soldiers included Vidović, a student whose lungs had been shot through and he was bleeding. Although there is nowhere a man can get as filthy as at the front, when they placed Vidović in the large steam bath, appallingly grimy, like all patients carried in transports of wounded soldiers in cattle trucks in the month of August, he was still capable of being disgusted.

And if you were to take such a pathetic, nervous figure as Vidović out of a certain relatively European way of life and put him into that steam bath, it is very likely that such a man would develop cramps and start to vomit. But, after everything that had happened to him that day and the day before, after the fire the previous night at the station, when petrol cans had exploded one after the other, and after those peppermint drops for the prevention of intestinal worms, when twelve hundred throats were crying out for water, and there was none, and after that pig wagon, Vidović did not vomit in the steam of the bathroom, but everything revolted him.