No Man's Land

by Pete Ayrton

  ‘Who would have thought that things in the whole hospital could have slipped so far in just twelve hours!

  ‘Yes! It’s true! Yesterday was an exceptionally nerve-racking day. The damned sun shrivelled everyone’s brains, and what with the alarming news, and the dispatches, and the blown-up locomotives, all of that affected the “ambiance”! Then this new transport, it has completely ruined the domestic order of the hospital, both the kitchens and the nursing stations. Yes! This transport too! But today, when the troops are passing by outside, and when it can all be seen as on a chess board, when you can see the figures falling, it’s all increasingly clear and it all looks increasingly destructive. Would that medical corporal have dared, even yesterday at this time, to drink brandy from a large bottle in front of His Excellency. Today, he had seen the Count coming, but he had gone on calmly drinking, as though none of it had anything to do with him. And why are many of the patients pulling such mocking faces? And why are the Russians singing?’ (That was the Russian prisoners holding a service in their hut, because that day was an Orthodox holy day.) ‘See! No one is watering the flowerbeds today, although that is particularly stressed in the hospital rules! And there’s no one anywhere!’

  The Count was completely isolated in that rabble. He stood alone, like a shadow, himself shaken, and could not find the energy to put things back in order, and he did not know what to do. He was unable to contact Headquarters, he did not know the orders, and the general’s staff had hurtled past here in their cars, a few minutes previously, and had not stopped! So the Count called the divisional chiefs into his hut for a consultation, to reach a decision as to what was to be done.

  Some favoured the idea that fifty per cent of the personnel should remain and the other fifty per cent should leave; others did not agree, while still others were not in favour of either idea, but some third option, and this wrangling went on so long that in the end nothing was decided, ‘until further notice’.

  That ‘further notice’ arrived, however, at around five pm, when it became unequivocally clear that the hospital would find itself, that very night, between the lines; for it seemed that on this section of the front the Russians were not engaging in battle with our troops. And if the planned large-scale counter-offensive, announced forty-eight hours previously, did not succeed (which was highly likely), then on the following day at the same hour the future of the Maltese Hospital would in all probability be decided by the Medical Officer of some Russian division.

  It was therefore resolved that Count Axelrode, with the surgeons and most valuable materials, and fifty per cent of the personnel, should retreat this very night to a farmstead, some fifteen kilometres to the west, that he should make contact from there with a larger group, and send a written complaint that he and his hospital had been forgotten; as though he were a needle, when he was not a needle, but a Maltese hospital with fifteen hundred wounded patients.

  The last substantial infantry formations had passed by, and heavy gunfire could be heard drawing near. By then patients had torn out the barbed wire fence, and were sitting by the ditches on the road, talking to people who had come from the battle about ‘Him’. And ‘He’ was Brusilov. ‘He’ was Russian.

  ‘Where is “He”?’

  ‘Is “He” here?’

  ‘What is “He” doing?’

  ‘When is “He” coming?’

  ‘“He’s” on his way.’

  ‘“He” won’t stop till Vienna.’

  ‘“He’s” coming.’

  But the troops were tired and thirsty, and everyone said something different, no one knew anything, but ‘He’ was definitely coming.

  Evening fell and searchlights began to weave over the sky, and heavy guns thundered in the distance, and the last companies of soldiers had passed. But there was no sign of ‘Him’. ‘He’ had stopped for some unknown reason and, strangely, he had stopped like an interrupted breath. Three kilometres in front of the hospital muddy water spilled through a grove of willows, under clearly visible, burning bridges. And over on the other side, there was calm, no one was there. In that mysterious time, when no one knew anything, not where ‘He’ was or what ‘He’ was doing, the whole Maltese hospital felt as though it was hanging in the air between Vienna and Moscow, and it was very likely that it was closer to Moscow than Vienna – that was when someone had the bright idea of stealing the first bottle of brandy from the store, because who knew what the next day would bring?

  There was brandy and red burgundy and Hungarian Villány wines and champagne in the store room, and an hour later the whole Maltese hospital was blind drunk, and wine was flowing through the huts, and full bottles of beer were being broken, because who wants to drink beer! Intoxicated by the shining illusion that they would be leaving the very next day for their countryside in the Urals, on the Volga, the Russian prisoners began to dance through the huts, and when a Hungarian doctor fired a revolver in an attempt to control the alcohol with gunpowder, a whole small battle and exchange of fire ensued, and the Hungarian doctor gave up and retreated, disappearing somewhere with the nurses in the darkness. Two German nurses, sister Frieda and sister Marianna (whose fiancé had fallen at Verdun and who was forever reading Ullstein), were discovered in their rooms and raped and after that everything fell apart, and the crowd began to drink freedom, increasingly intensely and deeply, becoming drunk on that illusion to the point of madness, and everything became like a drunken dream. Each rocket that shot up, minute by minute, from the forest opposite, was greeted by these drunken wounded soldiers, in their shirtsleeves, with bottles in their hands, with wild whoops and whistles, and everyone lost control, as at a country fair.

  They carried wine in buckets into Hut 5B, to those poor wounded folk, and the ones with broken bones and those with their legs sawn off, the stumps drying under gauze like cured meat, they all got drunk as lords, and some Hungarians started playing Twenty-One on Vidović’s bed.

  ‘Dealer, hit!’ ‘Hit, dealer!’ came their cries, and the cards were shuffled, and they drank, and all their faces looked like the masks of Chinese pirates, grimacing and contorted, bristling with hollow teeth, and grinning: ‘Hit, one!’ One fool climbed onto the roof of the hut and began dancing and the plaster started to crack and it looked as though the ceiling would come down and everything collapse. And from Hut C came the sound of a harmonica, a ocarina and gusle – that was where the men from the Srem district were, and singing rang out, with a lot of ‘mama and papa’ too, and the wanton, wild scherzo vibrated, clearly audible over there in Hut 5B, where Vidović lay, bullet-riddled and in despair, with just one thought in his head: ‘Are they going to operate? If they had only taken this all out of me today, I would not be bleeding! Where are they? Why don’t they operate? What’s going on?’

  ‘Hit! One! Hit! Dealer!’

  ‘Mert arról én nem tehetek, hogy nagyon nagyon szeretlek,* taralala lalalala.’ One of the amputees sang the Budapest couplet, putting the organza cover for his amputated leg on his head like a hat and bowing coquettishly to left and right. And an Italian sang the Irredenta, his tenor voice sobbing with emotion – amor, amor, amor! People sang, drank, spilled brandy, and the scabby patients began to throw brooms through the huts, yelling, and everything howled like a menagerie, and it seemed as though all those huts, like wounded, grimy, blind hens, would start jumping up and down on their one amputated, bandaged leg, to and fro, to the rhythm of the heavy gun music, that was thundering from the railway station increasingly powerful, increasingly loud.

  Hände waschen vor dem Essen,

  Nach dem Stuhlgang nicht vergessen.†

  The Tyroleans began yodeling in chorus, from the sign that hung in Austrian hospitals in the three so-called state languages. Not to be outdone, the Hungarians sang their own Hungarian verse after that:

  Egyél igyál de mindig elóbb mosdjál!‡

  And the third verse:

  Peri ruke svagda prije jela,

  Peri poslije ispražnjenja tijela.*


  But no one sang that third verse in the Croatian of the home-guardsmen, they simply mocked it, as though it were something African. One short-sighted Styrian infantryman (whose spectacle lenses enlarged his eyes, so that they bulged green like glass marbles) was ready to explode with laughter. He had a cough that sputtered and rasped, he went purple in the face, choking, while he twisted his tongue in order to read that famous Croatian song: ‘Peri ruke svagda prije jela, peri poslije ispražnjenja tijela’.

  ‘Haha! Ist das aber wirklich dumm! Ist das dumm, dieses “peri”! Was ist das, du – dieses – peri?’†

  ‘“Vazistas!” “Vazistas!” Stupid dolt. Nichts! Nichts! You tell him, Štef, what he’s asking! You’ve been to Graz! Hey, there! Schnapps!’

  And they drank, and grinned, squabbled, sang, yelled: Babylon! Someone had learned in a camp for Italian prisoners: ‘Porca Madonna, io parlo italiano!’ so they shouted this to the Italians, waving to them, ‘Porca Madonna, porca, porca, porca’, while someone mocked the Romanians with a quote from the infectious diseases hospital for typhoid patients: ‘Nueste permis ascipi per podele! Haha! Sci rumunjesci!’‡

  ‘Dear brothers! Please! Be quiet! I’m in pain! I’m in terrible pain,’ shouted Vidović, but his voice was faint, and he just croaked, and blood gushed through his teeth.

  ‘Te! Mi az? Pain? Mindig ez a pain? Mi az pain?’§

  ‘That’s like, when you feel pain, my friend,’ a bullet-ridden man explained to the Hungarian. ‘You know, when you’re wounded, then you feel pain! Or you bump into something! And you feel pain!’

  ‘Woonded? Bumb? Pain? Haha, pain! Pain!’

  ‘And mama and papa…’

  And the heavy gunfire was coming closer, as though someone was chopping wood underneath the hut.

  *

  The major counter-offensive, announced forty-eight hours earlier, was a success and at dawn the Russians were repulsed at a stroke, in an attack from two directions. Some fifteen infantry battalions and several batteries were captured, and at half-past nine in the morning Count Maximilian Axelrode returned to the hospital, accompanied by Baroness Liechtenstein.

  First there was an investigation into the rape of the German nurses (sexually abused by some Hungarians), around half-past twelve seven Russians were shot, before which they had dug their own graves, and some three hundred and fifty malingerers (men with trachoma, scabies, venereal disease, light grazing and bruising, and all inmates of Huts A 2, 3, 4 and 5, apart from those with a temperature over 38˚C) were thrown into the battle, and by half-past ten a sober Johanniter Maltese order prevailed once again over the hospital.

  In order to establish the authority of the imperial flag and discipline, which appeared to have been so compromised the previous night, Count Axelrode ordered that the great victory should be celebrated in the hospital with a torch-lit rally and procession. All patients (without exception) would march past the black and yellow flag, and those who were bed-ridden would be carried by the Russians on stretchers, but all would process. And that is how it was.

  All the huts were arranged into companies and each soldier was handed a burning torch, and the procession was led by a mess-officer, who had never sat on a horse in his life, but he clinked his spurs and organised the crowd like a theatre director. A procession of several hundred people in bloody grey kerchiefs gathered, each holding a green or red torch, and against the ash-blue moisture of the dusk, all the strong colours stood out and it looked like a ghostly vision.

  The procession moved off.

  The grandsons of the long dead, fallen at the Viennese barricades in forty-eight, the sons of Garibaldi’s flag-bearers, Hussites, God’s warriors, Jelačić’s frontiersmen, Hungarian supporters of Kossuth, all crippled, lame, mutilated, bandaged, amputees, on crutches, in wheel-chairs, on stretchers, pushed and shoved, while up there flew the large black and yellow flag, with Count Alexrode beneath it in his black uniform with the Maltese cross, and behind him the nurses with their red crosses and the doctors, and they all sang in unison: Gott erhalte!* The men walked quietly, their heads bowed, as though ashamed, still bleary from the previous night, carrying their yellow torches like candles at a funeral, while a horn-player climbed onto the roof of a hut, droning the trumpet call for the arrival of a general. When they brought Vidović back from that shameful march-past to Hut 5B, he was racked by a raging fever.

  Everything had turned bad the previous night, and now everyone in the whole hut, animated by alcohol, felt their wounds to an extreme degree. The Siberian in bed seven had been drunk that night and in the morning he was dead, but it was only in the afternoon that he was carried out of the hut, and everything smelled terrible, because of the great quantity of blood. The Slovak with the cannula in number nine was still suffering and his rasping breath could still be heard. And a Russian was shouting horribly down there, among the Hungarians. The night before he had wanted to dance, and now he was yelling like a lunatic.

  ‘As atya úr istennét, ennek a Ruszkinak! Ruszki!’†

  ‘Shut it! You, Russian! Why are you shouting?’

  ‘I’m in pain, and I’m not shouting!’

  ‘I want to sleep! Damn your bloody mother!’

  ‘Shut it, Russian!’

  ‘Shh! Quiet! Sshh! Sshh!’

  Vidović lay listening to the hut quarrelling and felt the end coming.

  ‘So why in fact was I born, and what purpose did it have? To be born into such an absurd “café-concert” civilization, where there is no pity and where everything is an operetta! And what a shameful death! How deeply shameful! I wanted to experience life, I wanted to live! And what happened? Hospitals, nothing but hospitals! Could anyone in the wide world make sense of this hospital? Nothing but hospitals! For two years now I’ve done nothing but travel through hospitals. Decorative city hospitals with high-class courtesans! Monasteries, where consumptives die! They inject them with serum, which no one believes in. And huts! Filthy, smelly, lousy wooden huts like this! Ah, how disgusting it all is! Ugh!’

  And, in need of some kind of action, to rouse himself, jump up, run, to shout at the top of his voice, Vidović tried to sit up, but he could not. He was pinioned. Pain overwhelmed the rebellion of his nerves and he was lost in mists and began to groan loudly.

  ‘Ssshh! Ssshh!’ complained the hut, hissing in the darkness.

  And pain began ever more tightly to grip the countless bloody, shattered limbs scattered through the whole of Hut 5B. Pain began to take on supernatural forms and people started calling on their god. The Good Lord was summoned as the last resort, as appeals are addressed to the Court Chancellery when all else has failed.

  A Hungarian called on his Isten* to help him! For his Isten to come in his wide horseman’s breeches and down two or three bottles of red Bull’s Blood, and play a tune on a gusle, and to let him die once and for all or be resurrected. Carrying on like this was unbearable!

  ‘Gospodi! Gospodi! Gospodi!!’ cried a Russian, pale, translucent as a Byzantine icon, praying to the Russian Lord God in a boyar’s fur coat, sitting on a golden throne in the Kremlin, and the Russian shouted, shouted so that his voice was heard as far as Mother Moscow, shouted, put his palms together and cried like a baby! Gospodi! Gospodi!

  And Vidović shuddered and it seemed to him that Isten had come to the Hungarian and sat down on his bed and poured wine for him from a flask, and the Hungarian was drinking ever more eagerly and the gusle scraped, ah, how good it was to drink wine offered to one, to the sound of a gusle! It was good! It helped one sleep! And the Russian Lord God, He too was walking through the hut, with His rich entourage, and icons flared and the bells of the Holy Mother pealed and that old gentleman with a white beard and silken fur coat, He rummaged in the Russian’s innards and removed that bloody bullet from the Russian and it felt better, ah, it was better, thank you, Lord, it is better!

  ‘Hey! They all have their gods! They each have a god! The man from Fiume as well (“Mamma mia! Mamma mia!”), he too has
his cardinals and popes and Roman flags, and the Russian and the Hungarian, they all have their gods, but who do I have? I’m in pain too! I’ve been shot just like them! But I have no one!’

  And Vidović was hurting so badly that he raised his arms and stretched them out to someone, but his hands hung in the air, and he felt a terrible emptiness, and his throat caught and he sobbed out loud.

  ‘Oh yes! I’ve seen Christ hanging outside our inns! The true Croatian Christ, all his thirty-three ribs broken, his chest pierced, and bleeding from innumerable wounds! But I never believed in him! A wooden Christ like that on a muddy road, awash with manure; where not a single drunkard passes without cursing him; that kind of wooden Croatian god, naked, pitiful, whose left leg is missing, oh, a god with a soldier’s cap, he, he – and I’m supposed to pray to him, to ask him to help me…’

  Lieb’ Vaterland, magst ruhig sein,

  Wir wollen alle Mütter sein –

  Treu steht und fest die Wacht am Rhein.*

  ‘What’s this? Have I gone mad? Who am I praying to? It’s hurting! I’m praying! What are those voices?’

  From outside, through the green gauze above Vidović’s head, a yellow light was seeping in and women’s voices in a minor key could be heard, softly chanting lines of verse. And the clinking of crystal glasses could be heard! Soft tinkling, soft voices, but clear: ‘Lieb’ Vaterland, magst ruhig sein…’

  Right beside Hut 5B was an arbour, where the doctors and ladies from the Red Cross often dined. And this evening, the formal dinner was attended, exceptionally, also by Count Axelrode, to celebrate the victory with his staff.

  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.