No Man's Land: Writings From a World at War

by Pete Ayrton

  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 Jindřichv 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 Švejk, the hero of the darkly funny The Good Soldier Švejk. 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 Švejk 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

  COUNT 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 decorat
ive 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.

  Ugh! How disgusting and frightful it was! The concrete bath swirled with stinking yellow water and grey-green foaming soap, with bloody bandages and cotton wool floating in it. Suppurating, nauseating cotton wool. The water steamed and stank of mud and clay, the steam showers hissed, and in the thick steam, black shadows could be made out running to and fro in the mist, and all their faces were swollen and bloody, and a generator throbbed somewhere, and it was midday in August. Here a man was dying under a shower on a glass table, there another was wailing, ventilators hummed like invisible insects, while Russians in khaki kerchiefs carried in new wounded material like sacks, and the nurses and wounded men and doctors all shouted and ran around, demented.

  They washed Vidović in that dirty, bloody hell and took him into Hut 5B, which looked inside like the guts of a great barge. With cruel protestant pedantry, it contained sixty precisely arranged beds, one body on each, with a label above each body, with information about that body’s state. The barge was divided into three groups. The first were the broken bones. (Bones protruded like splinters. The men lay silent by day. It was only at night that their cries were heard, as from Golgotha.) The second were amputees. (Arm or leg, or leg and arm. The wounds were not bandaged, but left to dry under gauze like cured meat.) The third group, to the left of the door, were the ‘transients’. Those transients were only passing through Hut 5B. They travelled from the bathroom to the morgue. And when someone was placed in the third group, Hut 5B knew the state of play.

  When they brought the injured Vidović into the hut and laid him on bed number eight, a Hungarian, a great hulk of a man from the first group (broken bones) spat contemptuously and traced a cross in the air with his finger:

  ‘No hát, Istenem!* This one could have gone straight to the morgue.’

  ‘There’s a new number eight! Hey!’

  ‘Number eight! Number eight!’

  The news spread through the hut and many heads were raised, to see this new number eight. It was true! They had all been fundamentally mangled and bloodied by life! But, even if a man had lost a leg, it wasn’t as though he was number eight! He was number twenty-one! Or fifteen!

  ‘I’ve lost an arm! Yes! And my bones are broken! Yes! But I’m alive! Dear God! I’m still alive! And when the Russians come in with a black coffin and shove the new number eight into it, I’ll fill my pipe, watch the insects sticking to the fly-paper and drink milk! That’s some kind of life, after all! That’s not what’s in store for number eight!’

  For four days now number eight had kept changing. It was only that morning that the Russian prisoners had taken out one of theirs, a Russian colleague. His intestines had been ripped open and he had yelled for two days and nights. Before the Russian there had been a kindly Viennese man and now there was Vidović.

  On bed number seven, to the left of Vidović, there was a Mongol, a Siberian with a bullet in his head, who had been screaming in his death throes for three days now. He kept shouting something, all sharp consonants, but no one understood anything, and they all kept thinking he was done for, but then he would start tossing and writhing, so that a ribbon of burning red blood seeped through the bandage on his head. In bed number nine, to the right, a young Slovak was dying, his throat shot through. His windpipe had been severed and he breathed through a glass cannula, so that foaming saliva, pus and lymph could be clearly heard gurgling in the little tube.

  And so Hut 5B began to bet on Vidović’s head, that he wouldn’t make it through the night.

  ‘I know our doctor. If he doesn’t get a man under the knife at once, then it’s curtains!’

  ‘That’s not true! He wouldn’t have left him till tomorrow, if that was true! He’s still young!’

  ‘That Viennese “blade” was eating rice and laughing! But we went straight to the cutting table.’

  ‘So what? Is it worth a bottle of red? Dead before morning?’

  ‘Done! A bottle of red!’

  *

  And so the August night fell.

  Big stars appeared, huge and brilliant, while the great blue firmament, like a crystal dish, enclosed the whole valley with Axelrode’s Maltese hospital, and thousands upon thousands of tons of incandescent gases pressed down on Hut 5B, and there was not a breath of wind, not the slightest quiver. The flies in the hut had now fallen asleep and were no longer buzzing, and somewhere in the middle of that perverse ship, crammed with human flesh, a green lamp was burning and everything was floating in the half dark. Dark, dark, half-dark and pain, inexpressible pain, hidden during the day, now breathed out through every pore and throbbed with every heartbeat. Now every slightest splinter of even the tiniest shattered bone could be felt, convulsions shook the nerves, spewing sounds out of the depths of a man, like lava from a volcano. Men clenched their teeth, shivering in sweat, foaming and biting their tongues and lips, and suddenly their whole lower jaw stretched away, their faces were distorted in a bestial grimace and their voices cried from the depths of their innards, as from the mouth of a well.

  ‘Mamma mia, mamma mia,’ pleaded someone at the end of the room in Italian.

  ‘Gospodi, Gospodi, Gospodi,’* groaned a Russian with a bullet in his intestines, then quiet again, green quiet, half-darkness.

  Worn out from loss of blood, Vidović had slept the whole afternoon, but now he woke, and did not know where he was or what had happened, or how he had ended up here. He heard human voices, groaning, but his raging wounds had eased and the fever seemed to have been extinguished, and, with great effort, the tormented Vidović found a slightly cooler spot on his pillow. His burning lids closed again, and a dense, weighty silence poured over them, while his thirst had somehow evaporated, and the hut was already beginning to dissolve and fade into an agreeable blackness, when it was rent once again by an animal cry of pure pain, which suddenly shattered the whole edifice of sleep built with such difficulty somewhere on the cooler edge of the pillow, and the whole thing collapsed in a single instant.

  And so it went on, the whole night, over and over again.

  ‘Oh! Just five minutes! Just five minutes’ sleep!’

  It must have been towards dawn, for clear light was penetrating through the green gauze. Outside guards were shouting, while the bindweed climbing up the ropes seemed to tremble in a morning breeze. Moths circled round the lamp, their wings fluttering.

  ‘What time is it?’

  There’s no time! There’s nothing! Only pain.

  ‘Mamma mia! mamma mia! Gospodi! Gospodi!’

  ‘Ah, if I could only sleep for a minute! A second!’

  ‘Gospodi!’

  *

  On the second morning the situation began to change ominously. In the early dawn, the Russians had broken through in the south and so cut off the last remaining imperial and royal railway link, and the trains had begun to turn back, and the order was given to the engineers, and locomotives started exploding into pieces, like toys. Everything was s
tranded. Artillery, the wounded, magazines, the great divisional stoves with their sooty chimneys, pontoons, horses, the whole lot; all that could be heard was the dull thunder of wrecked engines being blown up. And the whole morning troops marched, so the patients of the Maltese hospital from A, C and D huts (the lightly injured, who did not travel on stretchers, but could just about hobble) looked happily out through the barbed wire at the horror of the retreat, to where later in the day men would collapse onto the roads with sunstroke, and, believe it or not, in spite of everything, they felt good. They were there, under the Red Cross, and no one was chasing them anywhere, and if the Russians came, they would carry them off again somewhere far away, into Russian hospitals and camps where there would be no war, and they would survive and so for them, in all probability, the war would end this very morning. And that was the only thought the wounded men had in their heads.