Salt of the Earth

by Józef Wittlin

  In the presence of people who were to go to war, he felt like a healthy man at a patient’s bedside. He considered himself fit despite the arm. He had volunteered for the front line. A regiment in the field can be commanded with your left arm. And anyway, who today commands with his arms? What colonel rushes into the fray with bared sabre? That’s what it was like in the days of old Radetzky. Today you command with your head. He had a sound head. A much sounder one than that of Colonel Martin, who was wasting a regiment at the front… And if the medical commission ruled that he was not fit for front-line service, why did they not bury him in some office, for example in the War Ministry, where he would not have to come into direct contact with people destined for the fire? …Why are you staring at me like that, you foul brutes? I was a volunteer, wanting to go to the front…

  Lieutenant-Colonel Leithuber was now making two speeches at once, one out loud and the other unspoken.

  “The honour of the uniform,” he shouted across the square, “is a great thing! Take care not to sully it. …Blood alone will not sully it… Do not get the impression that I am a shirker. I am an invalid, but in spite of that I volunteered for front-line service.”

  But none of those men he addressed in both speeches accused him of shirking. It did not occur to anyone. Everyone listened religiously, with the exception of the Styrians, who did not understand Ukrainian. Everyone wanted this formal ceremony to be over as soon as possible. They were hungry. Piotr Niewiadomski kept looking at his tunic; it was still unsullied, thank goodness. And when the commanding officer had finished his speech Piotr breathed a sigh of relief, as if he had received absolution for sins he was yet to commit.

  The lieutenant-colonel approached the battalion. Accompanied by the officers, he began inspecting the ranks. It was an age-old ritual, followed ever since armies existed. Commanders judge the worth of a soldier by his appearance, drawing encouragement from his sprightly bearing. When a man stands firmly on his feet he offers a pledge of victory. The bearing of our men was not good. Everything was now up to Bachmatiuk.

  No, the regiment Leithuber had the responsibility of bringing up to scratch was no élite force. As far back as anyone could remember, this regiment had always had a poor reputation. And no one knew why. In the Imperial and Royal Army there were good regiments and bad regiments, likeable ones and unpopular ones, regiments that were fortunate and regiments that were unfortunate. Regiments are like men. Some are forgiven everything for their charm or their smart bearing, or because they have a good band. They are spoilt and fussed over like women. Then there are others who are never permitted the slightest mistake and who, even when they perform miracles, win over no hearts and gain nobody’s trust. Nothing could damage the reputation of the Deutschmeister, for example, and you didn’t have to search that far. The 11th Corps also had its favoured regiments, such as the 30th Lemberg. On the other hand, the entire army assailed our regiment with the bitterest jibes, and the alleged stupidity of the Hutsuls was legendary. Officers of other units would say to their recruits who failed to understand or made mistakes that “even a dull Hutsul of the 10th Regiment of King N could understand that!”

  Lieutenant-Colonel Leithuber became despondent when inspecting truly awful parades. From time to time he would stop in front of one of the recruits to enquire about the year and place of his birth. He did not stop in front of Piotr and he did not ask him anything. The officers followed the commandant; Bachmatiuk came last, walking with his head bowed, tenaciously following the line of boots. On reaching the first platoon of the third company, Leithuber became tired and turned back. He thumbed through the first pages of that empty notebook and on losing interest he abruptly closed it. All hopes were focused on Bachmatiuk. Casting him a meaningful glance, the commander and his retinue left the square. The soldiers immediately broke ranks.

  “As you were! As you were! Who said you were dismissed?” yelled the NCOs. Whistling at them, they chased the scattered flock of sheep back into their ranks. Regimental Sergeant-Major Bachmatiuk waited until they had re-formed, re-dressed and settled down. And when they had re-formed, re-dressed and settled down, he shouted:

  “I will make men of you!”

  The uniformed men’s skin crawled. They wondered what he was going to do with them now. What had they been until now, exactly? What physical or mental torture did this threat entail? Everyone had the feeling that this man in long trousers, with medals on his chest, was wiping out and revoking their entire previous life. They were grey, bald-headed moustachioed infants that the great mother Subordination would teach to suck from her breast. Their life had only just begun, on the day they first wore uniform.

  In the beginning was the Word. The Word that calmed the waves, a Word whose sound was followed by a deathly silence. Bachmatiuk screwed up his eyes like a zealot at the most important moment during mass, or like a music-lover at a symphony concert. He drew himself up like a crowing cockerel and gave the long-drawn-out command:

  “A—t—t—e—e—n—shun!”

  For some time he kept his eyes closed for fear of seeing something that would be a total abortion. And indeed, not everyone understood the command. The corporals facing them showed the dullards how to stand erect. Regimental Sergeant-Major Bachmatiuk opened his eyes, adjusted his cap, and reached into his pocket. He pulled out a slim pamphlet—the thirty-seven articles of war, the articles of faith. He calmly deluged the recruits with the list of crimes and offences which carried the risk of death or long prison terms. The recruits hurried to plumb the depths of their souls to test their resilience. After this confrontation, very few of them felt any self-confidence. Piotr Niewiadomski feared cowardice most of all. Not to show cowardice in the face of the enemy was no insignificant matter. The Emperor demanded courage from every man, as if everyone was born brave. Perhaps the RSM could teach them courage.

  When the RSM had finished reading the articles of war, the spectres of the thirty-seven deadly sins of the Imperial and Royal soldier hung over the recruits.

  “At this point you should say the Lord’s Prayer,” thought Piotr. “Or at least cross yourself.” He wanted to raise a hand, but he could not do so. It lay dead on the seam of the Imperial trousers, as if paralysed by Bachmatiuk’s words.

  Bachmatiuk gazed, as though in a trance, at the expressionless faces, the uniforms and the boots. The perfect silence engendered by his words filled his ears. He inhaled the sweet fragrance of obedience and fear. And he was happy. On this first day of the Creation, as he took possession of the souls of the oldest reserve militia intakes, he could already see his work completed. And he saw that it was good.

  HEALTHY DEATH

  (A Fragment)

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  I would like to remind readers who have not read (or do not remember) The Salt of the Earth, first published in 1935 as the first part of a trilogy entitled The Saga of the Patient Foot Soldier, that it is set at the time of the outbreak of the First World War, initially at the railway station of Topory-Czernielica in the Galicia-Bukovina borderlands, and later at the garrison of an Imperial and Royal Infantry regiment transferred after the Russian invasion to the town of Andrásfalva, deep inside Hungarian territory. Both Topory-Czernielica and Andrásfalva are figments of the author’s imagination, not to be found on any map. The chief protagonist of The Salt of the Earth, met in the first part of Healthy Death, is Piotr Niewiadomski, whose mother was a Hutsul, his father Polish. In the beginning he was a porter, later a signalman, at the said railway station of Topory-Czernielica. On his recruitment under the general mobilization he is transported with others for training at the Andrásfalva garrison. The next most important character of The Salt of the Earth, and to some extent also of Healthy Death, is Regimental Sergeant-Major Bachmatiuk, the fanatical expert and high priest of Military Discipline. He considers it his mission in life to turn human beings into real people—soldiers, that is. The character Łeś N
edochodiuk, whose “soul is let out” by Bachmatiuk, appears in Healthy Death for the first and last time. “Healthy death” is Bachmatiuk’s term for the death of a soldier at the front line.

  In the entire garrison there was not a single louse, not even for medicinal purposes, for Łeś Nedochodiuk, who lay in the sick-bay dying for the Emperor. They had been so thoroughly exterminated by the great de-louser Izydor Parawan, a man with a grey goatee and a yellow “intelligence stripe” on his sleeve, an unarmed reserve militiaman, category “C”. All the lice had left for the front line with King N’s Imperial and Royal 10th Infantry Regiment band and standard. A pity, that! They would have come in useful now at Andrásfalva, oh, so useful! But opinion was divided in the garrison as to whether reserve infantryman Łeś Nedochodiuk was really dying for the Emperor. Some claimed that you could only die for the Emperor on the battlefield, in the open air—where the lice were, actually—and not on a bed in the sick-bay. Others admitted that while you could die for His Illustrious Majesty only from an enemy bullet, bayonet or piece of shrapnel, it was—for goodness sake—of no consequence whether it occurred on the spot, on the bare earth of the battlefield or a little later in hospital. The main thing was that it was death in battle and not from some illness that you could equally well suffer in civilian life. But most of the countrymen were of the opinion that it made no difference. Every soldier who dropped dead in the Emperor’s tunic, even if he had not smelt gunpowder, died for the Emperor.

  “You’ll see,” said reserve infantryman Bryczyński, a count’s valet in civilian life, a man of the world. “They will arrange his funeral with a parade and military honours, which means he croaked for the Emperor.”

  “Croaked! He hasn’t croaked yet!” protested Piotr Niewiadomski, Bryczyński’s comrade-in-arms. “The man you’re talking about is still alive!” But he was fascinated by those military honours and he wanted to see them with his own eyes.

  For the Emperor or not for the Emperor, Łeś Nedochodiuk gasped his last, although Regimental Doctor Badian did everything in his power to save him. But then, what did Dr Badian actually have at his disposal? Drips? Injections? Digitalis, coramine, camphor? Medicine like that was just a joke. It might do for officers, Jews, lawyers, but not for Hutsuls. Now Łeś Nedochodiuk was a true Hutsul, a farmer from Dzembronia by the river Dzembronia, not a hybrid, not someone from a village in some neighbouring territory, like that Piotr Niewiadomski, his comrade from the 3rd Company of the 2nd Battalion. Łeś Nedochodiuk had sixteen head of cattle in his shippen, sixteen head of cattle grazing on the Carpathian mountain pastures. And those sheep! A rudbeckia would have helped him, that magic herb! Just give him some hooch with toad, befuddle him with smoke from a burnt broom used to sweep a Greek Catholic church. Or with smoke from the dried testicles of a stallion! Nothing would have helped him so much now, nothing would have saved him from perishing in a foreign land, in a Hungarian brewery, as surely as the ancient tried-and-tested drug—half a dozen or a dozen lice downed in a gulp of vodka! But what can doctors know about this?

  And why was it that Łeś Nedochodiuk had to die so young, without being granted his baptism of fire? What had struck down such a tough lad, leaving him lying there like a log, gasping like the bellows in Kłym Kuczirka’s forge at Żabie-Słupejka? Had some Hungarian devils overpowered him? Had some Hungarian seductresses beguiled him? They said Łeś was impervious to such inducements. He prayed regularly to St Nicholas, the favourite of the gods, to look after him and protect him from all dangers, and from evil fate, on the hills and on the water. The Lord’s Prayer had evidently been of no use, because Nedochodiuk did not even live until the Feast of the Veil of our Lady. What had happened to him?

  The cattle were already returning from the mountain pastures in the distant Hutsul land, the beloved cattle, the Christian cattle. The lights had been extinguished in the shepherds’ cottages, where apparitions, the souls of people who had been killed, were settling back in for the winter (this year there were more apparitions than cottages, although it was only the third month of the war, the beginning of October). The land in the mountains was drying up, the herbs were dying, the larch trees, or rather dwarf pines, were turning black. The mullein, leaves drooping, protruded dismally and rigidly, like extinguished candles in the church. All the grasses dried up, losing the juices that nourished the cattle on the mountain pastures from St George’s Day until the feast of the Veil of Our Lady. So the cattle that did not go to the winter hay barns descended from the mountain pastures. Day and night, the valleys and ravines were echoing with lowing and bleating, the complaints of the driven beasts, drowning out the roar of the sacred Hutsul rivers, in full flood at this time of year—the White Czeremosz, the Black Czeremosz and the Prut. The whole Hutsul land vibrated with the pounding of hooves, cloven and uncloven. Thousands of bells, large and small, jingled on the fattened necks of cows, calves and rams on the march. The heavy stench of bovine excrement mingled with the smell of steaming hide and wool, the scents of trampled meadows, mown hay and milk yet to be collected. Only rarely were the shepherds’ long wooden horns to be heard.

  Already the cattle were returning from the mountain pastures, and our men in the garrison were not yet real men. They could go to the front line now in the event of dire necessity, but only in the event of dire necessity. The garrison commander Lieutenant-Colonel Leithuber would have sent them, but he was not the one who decided whether the men were now real men. This decision belonged exclusively to Regimental Sergeant-Major Bachmatiuk.

  Rafting on the Czeremosz rivers had ceased. The sluices had been closed and the rafts had been immobilized, probably because the best helmsmen had been called up anyway and were rafting Serbs and Muscovites into the other world for the Emperor. The winter was coming, and our men at Andrásfalva were not yet real men. The Muscovites had now occupied Pokuttya, running affairs among the Greek Catholic people as they did back home, installing bearded Orthodox priests in the parishes, hanging images of Tsar Nicholas in offices, while our men in Hungary who were supposed to drive the Muscovites out of Galicia were not yet real men.

  They were not real men, although Regimental Sergeant-Major Bachmatiuk had been pounding the Hungarian ground with them, hurling them into the stubble and the potato fields, soaking them in swamps and bemiring them in mud. For the rainy season had already begun, although the war was not over despite the universal expectation that it would end with the first rainstorms. Throughout the dry month of September, the comrades had inhaled Hungarian dust mingled with their own sweat; their hands were scarred by long hours of exercises by day and by night, their feet were sore from forced marches with full kit, their bodies were covered in bruises from falling and getting up again, falling and getting up again, from the digging of deep trenches, from lugging boxes of ammunition, from firing in erect, prostrate and kneeling positions, from crawling on their bellies with dozens of kilograms on their backs.

  But they were not real men.

  For is a creature like reserve militiaman Piotr Niewiadomski a real man if, at the most important moments in his life, such as when taking part in battalion drill or when on guard duty, he forgets which is his left hand and which is his right? Is anybody a real man who does not know what “line of fire” means? Anyone who does not know that according to the sacred firing instructions for the Imperial and Royal infantry it is an imaginary line extending from the eye of the rifleman through the rear and front sights on the barrel to the target itself? And even if he knows what “line of fire” means, is he a real man if he cannot focus on moving objects in simple, level terrain like this whole Hungarian lowland? And can you call a uniformed being a real man if he does not know what to do when his Schwarzlose machine gun barrel overheats and there is no water?

  No, they were not real men, though Regimental Sergeant-Major Rudolf Bachmatiuk had let out the souls of many of them. But the souls let out by Bachmatiuk’s words eventually returned to their bodies a
nd returned to their uniforms like birds to the nest, or they were no longer the same souls as before. They had already been transformed by that great deity of the Imperial and Royal hosts—Discipline.

  Anyway, you can live without a soul. You are even a better soldier. For often the soul prevents you from carrying out the orders of higher powers. You can live without a soul.

  In the 2nd Battalion there was a reserve militia private called Stepan Basarab, a native of Podolia, very close to the Russian border. As a young boy, he had acted as a guide to a poor blind minstrel. He heard oh so many tales and songs that were older than the Emperor Franz Joseph. These tales knew no borders, freely crossing it in both directions, unafraid of Russian and Austrian guards alike. Stepan Basarab told his comrades in the barracks of one Orthodox man who lived without a soul. His body was in one place and his soul was somewhere else, and this Orthodox man did not even know where it was. But he really needed his soul. Because in church, over and over again, he had been promised immortality, like everyone else, whether they were Orthodox or Greek Catholic.

  “Well, what does it mean to be immortal?” asked reserve militiaman Stepan Basarab, squinting. Is your nose supposed to be immortal? Are your innards supposed to be immortal? Perhaps your belly, eh? Or what’s down below it? It’s better if all that you have sinned with in your life rots in the ground, but your soul lives forever. And this Orthodox man, said Stepan Basarab, was looking everywhere for his soul into his old age. He kept looking for it but he couldn’t find it anywhere. The devil knows what became of it. It was now close by, now far away, somewhere near Kyiv, but he knew nothing about it. It was not until he was dying that his soul returned to his body, just for a moment, eins, zwei, drei, just to leave it again, according to the rules. For good now. For ever and ever, amen. Thereupon this man died.