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

by Pete Ayrton

  Intoxicated by the magnificent event of the victory (when it had seemed as though the dice had fallen badly, and then everything had turned round so wonderfully), and lulled by the patriotic melody of the ladies ready to conceive for the sake of war and warfare, Count Maximilian Axelrode, Commander of the Maltese Order, stood and raised his glass, to toast the victory. He spoke exaltedly, about the victories of His Majesty, with the Maltese banner, undefeated and sovereign, at his side.

  ‘My ladies! Luogotenente Father Giovanni Battista Ceschi a Santa Croce, who experienced with his own eyes the Jacobin attack on this holy Maltese cross of ours, which I have the honour of representing here, that noble knight wrote in his chronicle, my ladies, that when the Holy Father comes to divide the good from the evil, above the extinguished sun, then black Maltese cloaks will stand guard in the divine shade…’

  Vidović heard the clink of glasses in the arbour and recognised the voice of the commander and remembered his mask that evening in the torch-lit procession.

  ‘I’ve gone mad! I was ready to pray! Oh! And, outside they’re singing! It’s true! Celebrating their victory! And that Maltese knight is talking…’

  ‘What’s up with number nine? He’s torn the cannula out of his throat! He’s bleeding! Nurse!’

  ‘Sshh! Sshh!’

  ‘But number nine is bleeding! Nurse!’

  ‘There’s no one anywhere! Where’s the nurse? Number nine…’

  Outside in the arbour, the other side of the whitewashed boards, glasses clinked, while, in his death throes, number nine had pulled out his cannula, and his blood was draining away. Number nine was breathing heavily, croaking, like a pig whose throat has been slit, and then ever more quietly…

  Vidović wanted to cry out, but he could not make a sound. It was clear that they ought to light a candle for number nine.

  ‘They should light a candle! For the peace of his soul!’ He just kept repeating that incessantly, his eyes fixed on the pool of black blood on bed nine. He wanted to howl, with all his might, but could only splutter, rasping.

  ‘Hush! For God’s sake!’

  ‘Az apád istennét! Csönd!’*

  ‘Hush!’

  ‘Number nine is dead! Number nine is dead! And those gentlemen out there are singing and clinking glasses! Father Giovanni Battista a Santa Croce! If I could just set eyes on him! Just see the Chevalier de Malte…’

  And in the exultation of his last effort, which was in fact the final spasm of death, Vidović raised himself up like a ghost and tore the gauze from above his head! Now there was a bright square and in the bright green illuminated spot among the leaves of the arbour he could see white ladies with red crosses, tipsy, smiling, loud, the future mothers of future butchers.

  ‘Aaagh,’ Vidovićwanted to yell, and a bright thought flashed through his mind, that he ought to hurl his porcelain pot of filth onto that white tablecloth and soil everything – soil it – so that a terrible great stain would be left on that white tablecloth, and they would all shout: a stain – a stain.

  To carry out that last pathetic wish, Vidović reached down for his pot, and felt, as he was falling, his hands sinking into that terrible slimy matter – and everything drowned in the blood that spurted from him in a torrent.

  Born in Zagreb, then Austro-Hungary, in 1893, Miroslav Krleža is regarded by many as the finest Croatian writer of the 20th century. A member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia from 1918, Krleža was a prominent figure in the cultural life of both Croatia and the whole of Yugoslavia, contributing decisively in the first years of communist Yugoslavia to the rejection of Socialist Realism in favour of freedom of artistic expression. In the First World War, he served in the Austro-Hungarian army on the Eastern Front. After the war he quickly established himself as a major modernist writer, with a series of striking expressionist plays and novels. His collection of short stories about the First World War, Hrvatski bog Mars (The Croatian God Mars), which includes Hut 5B, was published in 1922; it is a powerful condemnation of the treatment of Croatian soldiers sent to the battlefields. A recurring theme of many of his works is the abuse of power by the ruling elites in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, typifying what he saw as the hypocrisy and criminal origins of their wealth. Krleža established several influential literary and political reviews. In 1950 he founded the Yugoslav Institute for Lexicography, now the Miroslav Krleža Lexicographical Institute, holding the position as its head until his death in Zagreb in 1981.

  *‘Ah well, my God!’

  *‘Lord, Lord, Lord!’

  *‘I am good for nothing, if I love you so much.’

  †‘Wash your hands before all ingestion,/and wash after each bodily motion.’

  ‡‘Eat, drink, and always wash your hands before eating!’

  *‘Always wash your hands before eating/and wash after each emptying of the body.’

  †‘Ha! Ha! How stupid is that! How stupid is that “peri”! Hey you, what is that “peri”?’

  ‡‘Spitting on the ground is forbidden! Ha! Ha! You understand Romanian!’

  §‘Hey, what is “pain”? Always “pain”. What is “pain”?’

  *‘Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser’ (God Save Emperor Franz), originally written as an anthem to Franz II.

  †‘For God’s sake, that Russian! That Russki!’

  *St Stephen.

  *Dear Fatherland, be calm,/We all wish to be mothers –/The guard on the Rhine true and firm.

  *Hungarian oath: On your father’s god! Shut up!

  MILOŠ CRNJANSKI

  MY GOOD GALICIAN FORESTS

  from Diary about Čarnojević

  translated by Celia Hawkesworth

  ALL NIGHT LONG, the battalion dragged itself through wet fields and stubble. Cigarettes flickered in the darkness. We came slowly to a halt. We were aware, to right and left, of hordes dragging themselves through the night and the fields. The artillery clanged, clinked and swore. We passed through white, empty houses, trampled gardens, and found everywhere nothing but cucumbers, heaps of cucumbers in water. We slept on low hills piled on top of each other; men were joining us from all directions. The first dawn mists were forming; in the chill twilight we hauled ourselves to the foot of a hillock and began digging ourselves in. I did not. I needed sleep, weary of the whole thing.

  We dug ourselves into a wet potato field and finally a lovely August dawn broke. Behind us, from a little copse someone sang, all night, to an accordion, something sad, in Czech. Everything was quiet and subdued in the mist. Above us the pink clouds were playing hide-and-seek. The earth too was becoming slowly, steadily pink. Then something burst, flared like furious barking behind us. They were shooting a few yards over our heads. Someone swore and fell into the ditch. ‘Take cover!’ he shouted and everyone burrowed into the trench. Straw was dragged in, God alone knows from where, and after that there were chewing and sniggering sounds from the ditches, while the mortar fire criss-crossed alarmingly over our heads. It began deep and low. Beside me lay a shop assistant from Bela Crkva, Radulović, a good lad. He said there’d be a counter-attack. I said nothing and bowed my head. Behind me I could hear the guy who for months had been reciting ‘The Dream of the Holy Virgin’ every morning, and I bowed my head again and began to eat bread, sprinkling it with sugar. I could hear people behind us beside the mortars shouting orders and numbers and, softly, painfully, I coughed and I coughed. Somewhere to the left of us I saw people in a miserable village making their way out.

  Woo-oosh, the first sign of the Russians. ‘Behind us …’ I heard someone whisper. Then the earth high above us shook and horses began charging down the hill. Up there the clouds were still playing hide-and-seek and all that could be heard was a sound like heavy, overloaded trains clanking through the air. The Russians scattered shrapnel over the potato field. Then there was nothing again. Far behind the hill, machine guns crackled hideously. At around ten o’clock a soldier arrived. He read out our orders. He mentioned Königgraetz and Custozza. We buckled our
bags. ‘Don’t forget the sugar,’I heard my companion whisper. Bent double, we dragged ourselves through the trenches towards the village. The mortars went wild. Up on the hill men were running with sticks in their hands. Bullets raked them. One of them spun round. We ran slowly through the village. In front of the houses stood filthy women and many, many ragged, filthy children. One of them ran along beside us for a long time, begging me, wanting what – I’ve no idea. A handsome little Jew, swarthy. Beside the last houses, in a plum orchard, the leaves trembled under a hail of bullets. We entered ever more deeply into the trenches. The wounded were sitting, bloody, dirty, shivering, they were cold. A corpse lay face down in a pool of blood. He had been stripped naked. ‘See, didn’t I tell you to watch your back,’ said my friend. In the hollows, people sat, lay, fired guns. On another small hill, opposite, in a fog of smoke and soil spraying and spinning all around us, the Russian wires could be made out. Someone shouted something to me ironically in Hungarian from a hole, swearing dreadfully. To our right, men of the 33rd Batallion swarmed out of the trenches like ants and charged, with terrible cries, shouts and wails. We dragged ourselves through the barbed wire. Someone cursed our mothers in German and called us dogs. I leaped up.

  All the air around me shook as though it was full of bullets. I fell into some rye. The earth whirled and gushed upwards in front of me. I ran like a lunatic. We slithered down into a marsh. Someone fell beside me into the mud and I heard him whisper: ‘So, this is Zlota Lipa.’ In the grass in front of me lay some boots, and to my right I saw bodies, grimacing, with their legs comically twisted and with hard, strangely hard, knees. Up ahead of us bounded masses of Russians in yellow cloaks; they looked comical and fat. They ran into the forest. We lay down again. To our left a village was burning, its terrible smoke unable to rise from the earth. We started running again. There was horrific slaughter in the forest. Right in front of us. People ran up out of breath, terrified – trying to escape. We dug ourselves in right on the edge of the forest. I lay and breathed, breathed rapidly; blood was trickling slowly out of my nose. Wiii-iiish… a bullet whistled past my head and sank into the earth. It was all utter confusion. People were firing from the left and the right. I pressed my cheek into the soil and breathed, breathed. My breath shook my whole body.

  Afterwards, we got up again and pushed on into those dense forests. I slept everywhere, but the dawns woke me. The dawns, the dawns are wonderful. Young, golden forests, my good Galician forests. Through the forests we slowly approached Podkamien. In the Russian trenches there were foot rags and bloody shirts, shattered rifles, bodies – a hideous hotch-potch. My men, who two or three days earlier had been singing, lay in front of those trenches with smashed skulls. Lousy, unwashed, weak, yellow, stinking men; some still alive, expiring with crazed expressions. One of our men recognised his brother lying among them and started shaking and yelling horribly. The battalion trudged and staggered ever deeper into the forests…

  *

  In those days in Vienna people danced the tango, and we, lads from the Banat, wore silk socks. Yes, student life was no longer what it once was in Heidelberg; there were all sorts now. The days passed. I studied. I mostly sat where people talked about the movements of the poor, enthusiastic masses. I liked that. The red blood spilt in the streets. We used to sit, a few Poles and Jews and I, listening to the history of the Russian soul; it had reached us like a dense fog from the East. And I knew that some great storm had to come to sweep away that hidebound life without guts or pain. Books, whole hills of books lay scattered through the room; outside was the fateful spring about which no one yet knew what it was to bring. And we wore silk socks and spent whole days in the street and in cafés. We wanted to save the world – we, Slav students. Who knows? Perhaps one day there will be a very different art, an art that does not say either what it intends or what its statements might mean. Perhaps speech, and writing, and denotation – that this is death, this love, and this spring, this music – will disappear. Who knows? Ah, I remember: in those days I used to sign my letters ‘Poor Yorick’, and my mother ran round the neighbourhood all day asking what Yorick was. That’s how we lived before the war. Ah, I was young and I had such fine, slender, white shoulders and wings.

  *

  Radulović brought me rolls. We caressed some filthy women and bought chocolates everywhere. We brought bags full of food from Złoczew. There were several Ruthenians hanged in the square. We caught three heavy shells on the main road. There were quite a few casualties by then. We had got used to it.

  The forests were increasingly lovely; golden, red, young forests. An unnamed sorrow had settled on my heart. At night I was racked by fever, I kept coughing but carried on, bent double. No one beat me any more. And the young, red and faded forests, with their warm, sweet mist protected us, safeguarded us and that mist seeped into our souls for ever – for a whole lifetime.

  ‘Ping, ping’ – we heard bullets hit the trees. We fixed our bayonets. It was nearly midday. No one had any idea where the Russians were or where we were going. Scrub and brambles scratched us. We came out of the forest; we crossed several stubble fields to a small hill. A few of us were moving ahead of the others. When we reached the top, a valley was spread below us. Suddenly there were explosions around us to the right and left. I was spattered with earth and rolled into some potato trenches. I pressed my face into the soil and breathed, breathed. Behind us the forest screeched and shook horribly under the showers of shrapnel. Someone beside me cried out and started singing. I raised my head. Behind his ear, his head was covered in blood, his mouth was full of blood and he was choking. He straightened and sat up, sang, and spoke of his wife and children, he called me by my name and looked at me, looked only at me. I thrust my head into the earth and said nothing. The sun was blazing. People were running and shouting around me. I fell asleep. Sleep always overwhelmed me, as soon as I lay down. I woke. Mist, evening mist was again falling onto us. Behind the forest two cars sped past. We got up quietly. We made our way down one by one back into the forest. And when darkness fell, we began to walk through the forest again. People smoked and laughed. My group was singing softly. I was used to that as well. We trudged on, and on, again. Beside the batteries, set up along the edge of the wet forests, the terrible, dark forests. It had been raining for three days. The Russian trench on the hill, completely sodden, gave no sign of life. They must have retreated somewhere – into underground trenches. The forests steamed, full of clouds. For three days now, we had been lying squeezed into a ditch, one on top of the other. That is where we had dug ourselves in under the worst of the fire.

  I was shaken by fever. That day a teacher from Sombor had deserted, and people punched me in the chest and slapped me. I looked around me blearily, humming and whistling all day. And again you could hear men talking of celebrations and roasts, of fights in alehouses, of women, and reading ‘The Dream of the Holy Virgin’. Three Slovaks struggled all day to cook something over a candle. We spread tent fabric over the trench, but it leaked. We sat, and lay, in mud. No, it had been hard, marching through Srem and the burnt Posavina; it was horrible too near Rača in the water: all those slaps, curses; but this, this was madness in a sea of mud. Everything soaked, constant rain, destroyed houses, the water we drank was muddy, the bread was full of mud. He had lain in the mud in front of us all night, it was only now that we noticed him. We dragged him into the trench. He lay rigid, filthy, stinking. In his right-hand pocket he had some bread and in the left thirteen forints and twenty-six kreitzers. We would have to write a card. People knew where he was from. His name was Lalić. The majority proposed that the money should not be given to the officer, but kept and drunk. They said: that’s what he’d have told us to do, if he could, he liked buying drinks for people.

  In the afternoon, the mortars began again. The Russian trench disappeared in clouds of yellow earth and mud that shot into the air. We emerged slowly from the ditch and began running. Most went calmly, slowly, no one any longer had the
strength to run. We walked calmly. There was a cry, all around us the earth boomed, spurted, men keeled over, shrieked. I went on, stumbling under my pack: racked by fever. I felt someone walking beside me. We were both exhausted. The earth burst open, shooting upwards. I saw the yellow cloaks of Russians leaping out of the trenches. The barbed wire and soil in front of their trench churned under the pounding of the mortars. I reached the wires. A man somersaulted in front of me, bent double and hopping. A shell had passed through him from head to foot. ‘Let’s go,’ said Radulović, standing up. Someone ran past us. I saw blood pouring from my nose onto my chest. Others ran past us holding spades in front of their heads. They leapt into the trench, yelling, running, with terrible cries, onto the bayonets. I did not lie down, I kept going slowly on. Any minute now I’ll be killed, one of these big, yellow, fat Russians, jumping about in front of me like lunatics, is definitely going to kill me. The blood was coursing from my nose now. I lay down. The reserve rolled over me into the trench. People were lying everywhere, grimacing in the mud. I do not know why every wounded man was half-naked, but how they screamed, oh, how doggedly they screamed. I lay like that, with no strength.

  I lay on a cart and saw only the hunched back of the man who was driving and kept encouraging the nags with clicking noises. The cart could hardly move through the mud. He looked round often, squinting under his fur hat. There was someone else lying beside me. We skirted deserted villages. Here and there we saw a few wretched, hideously poor, ragged Jews. Fine Russian churches, wet forests that steamed. Mud, a vast sea of mud. Dogs scampered through the villages. Dogs and pathetic, filthy, crushed Jewish women. Little girls of twelve or ten offered themselves. Everywhere were carts, mangy horses and interminable, muddy roads. Wounded men lay on the roads. In the afternoon cars came for us. And a weak sun, a good sun, poured over the houses and roads. I lay down on a blanket, racked by coughing, leaving red drops of blood on my dirty handkerchief. And I fell asleep right there. We stopped in a courtyard. There were lanterns swaying round us, as they lifted us, one by one, and carried us into a building. And in the morning, they took us, yellow and half-dead to the baths; we came out through another door full of laughter. I went over to a window and saw below me a small white village, full of streams and mills.