The sweaty, breathless, drunken numbers of heads, arms, legs and torsos flow like lava towards the east and the south, from east to west, from south to north, to satisfy someone’s ambitions, to someone’s greater glory. Healthy, strong lungs, hearts and stomachs set off in their thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, to all corners of the earth to a tournament of their own suffering, hunger and fever.
From all airfields, from all hangars, propellers buzzing, two-winged and four-winged moths and dragonflies soar up and away as though leaving their chrysalis.
They are advancing on land, at sea and in the air. Gunners on torpedo ships and battle-cruisers are keeping their powder dry. Submarines are preparing to dive; their periscopes scour the deep, seeking their prey. The equipment sings the praises of its inventors. Glory to the men on high, on land and under water!
A swarm of swarthy, moustachioed Serbs from the Drina, Sava and Timok is on its way to face the blue host under their black-and-yellow flag. They smoke pipes and march to the rhythm of their singing. They steal through the rushes and wade across the swamps in their own country—and wait.
Waves of Russians, urged on by blessings from their icons, roll on to face the Imperial host. Cossacks from the Amur, from Kazan and the Don ride their swift little horses. Slant-eyed Mongols bob along on their diminutive mounts. Graceful Circassians, slender-waisted like young girls, gallop with daggers in their belts on the banks of the Vistula, the Bug and the Niemen. Long, endless columns of Siberian infantry in fur hats and Caucasian front-line regiments in sand-coloured tunics head towards Poland at a rapid pace. Get the Kraut! Get the Kraut!
Balalaikas, shepherds’ pipes and Jews’ harps are heard. During extended rest stops, harmonicas play a Styrian waltz.
The 30th Lwów Regiment, the Iron Brigade, sings: “From Warsaw to Petersburg! Get the Muscovites, march on, march on!” “Na zdar!”[3] call out the Czechs, their throats lubricated with vodka and rum, as they pass by wagons full of Hungarians. “Eljen!” echo the Hungarian shepherds-turned-Honvéds. With responding cries of Živio! Hoch! Ewiva! and Harazd! the battalions of the polyglot monarchy greet one another as they pass. The trains race on like gigantic tin cans packed with human flesh, not yet drained of its blood.
In distant Hutsul country, young yokels stand waving their hats, their shirts hanging loose, gaping at the troop trains rushing past.
The man who is temporarily acting as signalman at signal box no. 86, on the Lwów–Czerniowce–Ickany line, cannot sleep. This signalman was called up the day before and he has joined his unit. Now he, a mere porter, has to look after the level-crossing barrier by day and by night, seeing to it that the movement of troops can proceed in orderly fashion, taking particular care to prevent “Muscovite sympathizer elements” placing blocks of wood on the track. He is amused by the graffiti chalked on the sides of the wagons, patriotic drawings of Tsar Nicholas and King Peter on the gallows. On one occasion, he was so distracted that he failed to hear an approaching locomotive and did not close the barrier. He nearly caused the death of a milkman who was driving across the track just as the train sped over the points. The nag took fright and could not be reined in; the shaft snapped. Virtually at the last moment, the “signalman” ran onto the track and just in time stopped the train, full of boisterous, singing Romanians. The racket the soldiers were making filled the entire Pokuttya plain. The stench of straw, human sweat and horses’ urine mingled with the sharp aroma of the new-mown hay beyond the embankment. A major in command of the transport operation leapt down from a passenger carriage and asked, in an unknown language, about the cause of the delay. The man with the flag gabbled something in Ukrainian, then in Polish, even a few words in broken Yiddish, then he pointed out the pool of milk on the track and the Jewish milkman, who had by now managed to get across to the other side with his horse and cart.
“Schweinerei!” yelled the major. “—Ja czi bende anzeigen, ti oferma!—I’ll show you, you idiot!”
Then he shook his riding crop at the Jew, gave a sign to the engine driver and returned to the carriage. The train got moving again, leaving the man with the flag alone in his shame.
“Idiot,” he repeated.
Now he knew he would be joining the reservists. As a matter of fact, he didn’t care. If it was war, then it was war, wasn’t it? War had already broken out.
On 1st August 1914 a gunner on the Temes, an armoured cruiser on the Danube, aimed his cannon and fired on Belgrade. The Danube fleet began bombarding the city. On 2nd August, the German naval guns began to roar off the coast of Kurland, near Libau. On 3rd August, the French Alpine Chasseurs were deployed among the summits of the Vosges. That same day French pilots attempted to blow up bridges on the Rhine. German cavalry crossed the Golden Gate of Burgundy and advanced into the woods around Delle to reconnoitre. The first encounter between Austria and Russia took place on the frontier between Bessarabia and Bukovina, near Novoselytsia.
Unknown is the man who was the first to give his life in this war.
Unknown is the man who killed him. Unknown is the last man to fall in this war.
My word will raise him from the earth in which he lies; he will forgive me this exhumation.
Unknown is the Unknown Soldier.
Chapter One
Into distant, forgotten corners of the Hutsul country—filled with the aroma of mint on summer evenings, sleepy villages nestling in quiet pastures where shepherds play their long wooden horns—comes the intruding railway. It is the only connection these godforsaken parts have with the outside world. It pierces the night’s darkness with the coloured lights of its signals, violating the silence, violating the immaculacy of the profound night-time peacefulness. The din of its illuminated carriages rends the membrane of darkness. A long-drawn-out whistle blast awakens hares from their slumber and arouses people’s drowsy curiosity. Like a great iron ladder nailed down onto the stony ground, shiny black rails on wooden sleepers stretch from one infinity towards another. Little white station buildings surrounded by hedges, vegetable plots, gazebos and flower-beds with coloured glass orbs on white-painted sticks, numerous little iron bridges crossing streams and countless small signal boxes give the lie to any impression that this part of the country was totally God-forsaken.
At the small Topory-Czernielica railway station, a man who had emerged from the darkness had been dealing for some twenty years in grain, timber, potatoes and casks of locally brewed moonshine. Darkness was his home and his element, no less than water is that of the fish and earth is that of the mole. Like a mole, Piotr burrowed his way through the darkness, digging out underground passages essential to his existence. In the fresh air he desperately gasped for breath, like a fish out of water.
He polished the station lamps, filled them with paraffin and swept the so-called waiting-room. When the need arose, he helped with repairs to the track, removing rotten sleepers, spreading gravel and occasionally riding the hand trolley with the inspection engineer. The fast trains did not even deign to do Topory-Czernielica station the honour of slowing down. They sped irreverently by, contemptuously puffing a cloud of smoke in its face. In summer, however, some townspeople would alight here. Schoolboys arrived with trunks they couldn’t lift on their own. The train stopped at Topory for only three minutes, and the young gentlemen, in order to conceal their helplessness, would call out “Porter!” in a commanding tone, like seasoned travellers. Thereupon Piotr, although he was no porter, had no railwayman’s cap, and did not even wear a brass porter’s badge on his chest, would dash into the carriage, seize the luggage and carry it to the horses waiting behind the station building. Sometimes the Greek Catholic priest travelled to town and he had to be helped onto the train. Sometimes there was hunting in the extensive forests, and certain gentry preferred to travel by train so as not to tire their horses. This used to earn him a little something, and a few cigarettes some count gave him could be hidden under his cap. Those were the days!