Salt of the Earth

by Józef Wittlin

  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.

  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 virtu
es, 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:

  The procedure in cases 4, 5, 6, 7 was established by the War Ministry under a special regulation of 29th October 1910, Clause 14, no. 1416, appendix 39.

  How could one fail to admire the Regulations, that Bible of Order, the only order in this vale of chaos leased out to civilians? Regimental Sergeant-Major Bachmatiuk could not understand why there were so many blind people in the world, so many befuddled people, whose eyes had to be opened by force. But those whose cataracts had been removed found themselves dazzled and sometimes they were admitted to the fount of light; they became candidates for promotion to the non-commissioned ranks. They learnt by heart the commandments and dogmas, and attempted to emulate their master. No one had yet managed it, however. If a saint is someone who obeys to the letter all the commandments and observes the letter of the canon, then Regimental Sergeant-Major Bachmatiuk was a saint. And like a true saint he regarded himself as a great sinner. He remembered his own sins, which people had long since forgiven and forgotten; he remembered them very clearly. He remembered all his lapses along the only path leading to perfection, the path of military duty. Several times during such a long service career he had been in detention, and his punishment had always been deserved. To this day, the detentions were a blot on his pristine copy-book. And how could he regard himself as perfect, when every Sunday he got roaring drunk and behaved in a manner inconsistent with the Regulations?

  He glanced at the alarm clock: it was nearly six o’clock and in a moment he would have to go to meet the men. There down below, the early-morning hubbub of voices and the shrill whistling were growing louder, as the companies lined up by the barracks, ready to march out into the fields. From the dawdling stragglers now hurriedly joining the ranks came a rattle of iron. Again the day promised to be fine and hot. The bellowing from the Andrásfalva municipal abattoir was becoming continually more intrusive and more trenchant.

  Bachmatiuk hurriedly finished his grooming. As every other morning, today he had managed to dye his old age. Banished from his face, it settled in his bones and his knees. But no one inspected his bones or his knees. He went to reach for his dark blue tunic, which had spent the night on a hanger. In the morning sunlight all its glory came to life. It sparkled with false and real silver, the sewn-on badges, gold medals and stars glittering. Bachmatiuk reached for the daytime caparison of his corporeal ego and the row of medals and crosses pinned to the breast of his cloth tunic chimed to announce all Bachmatiuk’s glory, all the toils of his life congealed in the metal of his decorations.

  For a moment, he stood gazing at his decorations. He rarely studied them closely, but he never parted with those medals. Today he was charmed by the flickering crosses on the triangular coloured ribbons. This cross, a medal on a red-and-white silk ribbon, featuring a bust of His Majesty, looked very fine, but it was unimportant. Every soldier who was serving in 1908 received this memento from the monarch on the occasion of the latter’s jubilee. Similarly, there was the medal for the pointless mobilization against Serbia in 1912—it was of no importance. Nor was the cross with a yellow ribbon with black edging and Roman numerals on its face, announcing to the world that Regimental Sergeant-Major Bachmatiuk had served the Emperor faithfully for XXIV years, actually a medal in the proper sense of the word. It was just a “military service badge”, first class. As to how Bachmatiuk had actually served the Emperor for twenty-four years—well or badly—on that score the cross was silent. Only the fourth decoration, pinned in the place of honour, right over his heart, celebrated Bachmatiuk’s personal merit. This was the silver Cross of Merit, with a crown. This was the prize for Bachmatiuk’s turning sixteen annual cohorts of recruits into men. That was what his life’s work looked like in effigy. A small cross made of silver, coated with red enamel. In the middle was a silver shield with some Latin inscription and Franz Joseph’s initials, the whole surmounted by the silver Austrian Habsburg crown.

  Oh, arduous was the path Bachmatiuk had to follow before he won that cross. A true Via Crucis. Frequently he had fallen along the way; often he had been weighed down by the burden of the actions that were counted among his merits. But what of it? Crosses like these were also awarded to civilians in peacetime. Every postmaster, every tax-collector, every clerk, every veterinarian was eligible to receive the Silver Cross of Merit with a crown. And not only the silver one, but even the gold one.

  Regimental Sergeant-Major Bachmatiuk was, without a doubt, on his way to the gold cross. No, he did not set great store by decorations. But when he stood face to face with his awards something tugged at his heart. The regimental tailor had left plenty of room on the breast of the RSM’s tunic, and if it were to be occupied in the future by both of the crosses that it was possible to acquire—the small gold one and the large gold one (with a crown)—then how pale and false their glitter would be by comparison with the most modest of medals awarded for gallantry! Any of Bachmatiuk’s louts, any of his illiterate recruits, the lowest of the low, could acquire the small silver medal, the large silver medal or the gold meda
l for gallantry! For a wound, for bravery in the face of the enemy, for bringing in a prisoner. But Bachmatiuk himself never could! A man who dedicated his life to the craft of war would never be able to see the face of the enemy! Why was it that he had to forego this honour? Was he physically handicapped? Mentally? Perhaps he was cowardly, and through some proposition made to his superiors he had gained entry to a category releasing him from front-line service? For sixteen years the regimental sergeant-major had held the office of regimental religious instructor. He conscientiously prepared young and old, Christians and Jews, for their baptism of fire. But religious instructors of other faiths must themselves be baptized. Otherwise they would not gain the trust of the catechumens and their fervour could arouse suspicion. Bachmatiuk had not been baptized. He knew about war only from hearsay and from the Regulations. He had smelt gunpowder only at the shooting range; he had never seen with his own eyes that death in the name of the Emperor for which he so skilfully trained thousands of his fellow men. He never would, even though he was as fit as an ox and assessed as “A1”. He never would face it as long as Lieutenant-Colonel Alois Leithuber was commanding officer. He never would face it.

  Bachmatiuk was not afraid of death. He was afraid of nothing that was provided for in the Regulations. To suggest that he was shirking from front-line duty would be despicable slander. He did not go to the front, but his conscience was clear. And not only in his own eyes—everyone at the barracks, from the lieutenant-colonel to the last recruit, considered it to be in order. Well, were pedigree bulls slaughtered in the Andrásfalva municipal abattoir? Did they slaughter stud stallions in the abattoirs? The regimental sergeant-major was also kept for purposes of insemination, for the breeding of new battalions. This was his historic mission. What would the Emperor have to gain from the death of the best instructor of recruits to King N’s Imperial and Royal Infantry Regiment? It would be madness to lose such a powerful asset! It would be madness to give Bachmatiuk his marching orders, placing him in command of a platoon! Lieutenant-Colonel Leithuber was not crazy. Bachmatiuk was not only the most senior NCO and the best in the regiment. He was the only trusted man—indeed the only man at the barracks—Leithuber had known for a considerable length of time. The officers, the adjutant included, were all new people, reservists or regulars, transfers from other regiments or cadets fresh out of military college. Leithuber could not rely on anyone as he could on Bachmatiuk. That was why Bachmatiuk was not sent to the front line.