But at least the building had a well, as they saw from a little closer up.
All this happened in the afternoon of the previous day. Fervega only motioned to them; they knew what to do in order to gain the well.
Letting out an enormous roar, Fervega kicked in the building’s arched, hewn and carved oak door, which was barely closed anyway; Bizsók, with his weapon at the ready, stood to the right of the sergeant, while the others surrounded the building on all sides. The building had no other opening from which someone could attack them. A man trying to quench his thirst was defenseless. Except maybe high up, from the windows with their broken panes. The building must have burned from the inside for a while, but the flames had not reached the windowpanes. If they wanted to drink, they first had to take over the place. Bizsók and Fervega each fired a round and heard the impact of the bullets. At first they could see nothing beyond the swinging door. They saw their own dread in the darkness and felt an ominous heat that commanded them to halt. Inside, there was only the light that came in through rips and cracks in the seriously damaged roof.
It was getting dark.
A terrible stench hit them unexpectedly, assailing their noses with warmth, but they comprehended only much later with their minds what they felt and saw then. Which was accompanied by many terrible independent little sounds. Rattling in the throat, frenzied laments that sounded not like crying but like some sort of lullaby, a persistent whimpering farther off and shouting at the border of consciousness.
In this long split second, they became truly defenseless; anyone could have killed them.
They were standing in the buzzing beehive of a singing traumatic fever.
They did not go in, but they could see that these wrecks were Germans. A single glance was enough. On the bare brick floor lay the most seriously wounded evacuees of a field hospital, left to their fate. Some lay on stretchers among the dead, just where their escaping carriers had freed themselves of their burdens.
The water in the well tasted of carrion.
He personally would shoot anyone who dared to drink of it, the sergeant whispered menacingly, planting himself by the bucket of bad water.
They didn’t have much time for discussion because they discovered that behind the building and not very far off was a road. And on it now appeared enemy tanks; the road could not have been more than five hundred meters away. So the building could serve them only as a temporary hiding place; under cover of night they might be able to move on. While they stood by the well talking about this, at the same time keeping an eye on the moving enemy tanks, through the oak door left wide open slid a human clump, blackened by mud and excrement. Both his legs had been amputated at the knees and the bandages were soaked bloody or black. He kept turning on his stomach and then on his back, the only way he could inch forward, like a caterpillar.
They stood there, with thirst and unfinished sentences in their mouths, watching him. When his trunk flipped onto its back, it remained motionless. As if he wanted to sit up; he was alive.
Beyond the distant artillery fire twilight was reddening the sky darkened by clouds, but the muzzle fire of the guns no longer sounded. Seagulls were screeching above. Anticipating the eating of live human flesh. The men wanted to turn away but didn’t know where to look. The sergeant gave a resounding order; they must dredge the well.
The sense of this not even the passively distant sky could see. Ever since they had set out in search of an escape route, starving, thirsty, drenched, and weeping, the sergeant had let not one minute pass without issuing a command.
Then with long strides he started toward the wounded man and, while somebody finally, reluctantly, began to carry out that last command which made so little sense, he reached under the German’s shoulders and dragged him back to the wall of the building. The wounded man kept shouting in pain; his head flopped back; his blind features stared into the sergeant’s face. Still, Fervega saw that the man expected something from him that no one else did. Maybe he wanted water, maybe he was begging for death in the foreign language that could still struggle up from his dried throat to his sore-ridden lips.
They were all from the Alföld, they did not understand a single word in any foreign language.
Someone near Bizsók growled, then mumbled, if you’re not going to do it, I’ll shoot him, Fervega.
But Fervega did not reply; with his eyes on the tanks on the road, he said, those can’t be anybody but either the British or the Americans.
Give the order, said the former hoarsely.
This made those soldiers stop who until now had been checking the well with a long rod for a possible corpse or carrion.
The well was not very deep, and they told Fervega they weren’t finding anything with this kind of search.
The wounded man leaning against the wall was silent but alive.
By the time it was dark, one of the men could be lowered into the well to dig out the muddy bottom with his combat shovel under the beam of a flashlight. Nobody asked how long it would be before fresh water would bubble up.
By the time it was dark, another three soldiers and the sergeant had carried the dead bodies out from among the dying in the building.
The sergeant spared Bizsók this job. Before the darkness became too deep he sent Bizsók with two men on a scouting mission. These men had not parted company in the last few days; they slept in the warmth of one another’s bodies.
In the reflected light of the distant heavy guns, the barren terrain appeared to them in quick successive flashes. Which filled the darkness with the illusion of a mute landscape.
Now this one, now another one tripped on solitary clumps of grass.
Bizsók was in front. He was bothered by the thought that they might never find their way back to the others. And if they did, what possible news would they have but that they hadn’t seen anything in the dark. The wind hurled sharp grains of sand and fine mist in their faces. Pauses in the squalls were filled with the booming of distant armies on the move. But no matter how close they came, the moving troops were not visible. Fighting units have to move slowly, with dim lights; tanks were rumbling. Panting, the three men groped their way forward in the noise but could not reach those dimmed lights.
Then Bizsók realized he would never see a road or any dimmed lights because what lay ahead was the sea.
In the dim flash of the muzzle fire he could see only another infinite stretch of barren terrain, no matter how fiercely he stared ahead. Or was it fog. By now the wind was whipping at them from all directions, and as it blew through their clothes, water dripped down their faces. He bent low because he felt a change under his feet; water was seeping from the wet sand in his hand. It threw froth on his face and body. What they could not see was raging right before them.
He smeared wet sand over his face. His mates could not see his weakness.
Small noises could be heard from the other trailer that morning, followed by muffled words, hitherto unheard-of thumping sounds, stamping of feet and the din of hurried activity.
A tension-filled silence ensued.
He did not eavesdrop but simply listened to the quality of the silence. He put the chamois back in the drawer and with ceremonious fussiness placed his glasses on his nose.
They decided that one of them would stay at the spot where they reached the sea. If he sensed no danger, every few minutes he would give two dim signals with his flashlight. They called the flashlight cat’s-eyes because it had no batteries; it worked with a hand-pressure-operated dynamo until its fine little carbon brushes wore out. That is how the other two reassured themselves that they could find their way back to their comrade. And they proceeded northward along the shore in the direction of where they assumed the town of Husum to be. The wind was blowing in their eyes from that quarter. Bizsók learned much later, in the Hamburg POW camp, that they should have gone in the opposite direction.