‘Is he ours or theirs?’ a soldier sitting by the stretcher asked.
‘Nobody knows,’ said the orderly after a moment’s quiet.
‘He’s his mother’s,’ a soldier standing nearby said.
‘He’s God’s now,’ added another after a pause. He took off his cap and hung it on the barrel of the rifle.
The casualty shivered, and his muscles pulsed under his glossy yellowish skin.
‘Life is so strong,’ a soldier leaning on his rifle said in astonishment. ‘It’s still there, still there.’
Everyone was absorbed, silent, concentrating on the sight of the wounded man. He was drawing breath more slowly now, and his head had tilted back. The soldiers sitting near him grasped their hands around their knees and hunched up, as if the fire was burning low and the cold creeping in. In the end — it was a while yet — somebody said: ‘He’s gone. All he was is gone.’
They stayed there for some time, looking fearfully at the dead man and afterwards, when they saw that nothing else would happen, they began walking away.
We drove on. The road snaked through forested mountains, past the village of San Francisco. A series of curves began, one after another, and suddenly around one curve we ran into the maw of the war. Soldiers were running and firing, bullets whizzed overhead, long bursts of machine-gun fire ripped along both sides of the road. The driver braked suddenly and at that instant a shell exploded in front of us. Sweet Jesus, I thought, this is it. What felt like the wing of a typhoon swept through the truck. Everybody dived for it, one on top of another, just to make it to the ground, to hit the ditch, to vanish. Out of the corner of my eye, on the run, I could see the fat French TV cameraman scrambling along the road looking for his equipment. Somebody shouted, ‘Take cover!’ and when he heard that order — grenades going off and the bark of automatic rifles hadn’t fazed him — he hugged the road like a dead man.
I lunged in the direction that seemed to be the most quiet, threw myself into the bushes, down, down, as far as I could get from the curve where the shell had hit us, downhill, along bare ground, skating across slick clay, and then into the bush, deep into the bush, but I didn’t run far because suddenly there was shooting right in front of me — bullets flying around, branches fluttering, a machine-gun roaring. I fell and crouched on the ground.
When I opened my eyes I saw a piece of soil and ants crawling over it.
They were walking along their paths, one after another, in various directions. It wasn’t the time for observing ants, but the very sight of them marching along, the sight of another world, another reality, brought me back to consciousness. An idea came into my head: if I could control my fear enough to stop my ears for a moment and look only at these insects, I could begin to think with some sort of sense. I lay among the thick bushes plugging my ears with all my might, nose in the dirt and I watched the ants.
I don’t know how long this went on. When I raised my head, I was looking into the eyes of a soldier.
I froze. Falling into the hands of the Salvadorans was what I feared most, because then the only thing to look forward to was certain death. They were a brutal army, blind with fury, shooting whomever they got hold of in the madness of the war. In any case, this was what I thought, having been fed Honduran propaganda. An American or an Englishman might have a chance, although not necessarily. In Nacaome the day before we had been shown an American missionary killed by the Salvadorans. And El Salvador did not even maintain diplomatic relations with Poland, so I would count for nothing.
The soldier was taken by surprise, too. Crawling through the bush, he hadn’t noticed me until the last moment. He adjusted his helmet, which was adorned with grass and leaves. He had a dark, skinny, furrowed face. In his hands there was an old Mauser.
‘Who are you?’ he asked.
‘And what army are you from?’
‘Honduras,’ he said, because he could tell right off that I was a foreigner, neither his nor theirs.
‘Honduras! Dear brother!’ I rejoiced and pulled the piece of paper out of my pocket. It was the document from the Honduran high command, from Colonel Ramirez Ortega, to the units at the front permitting me to enter the region of military activity. Each of us had been given the same document in Tegucigalpa before leaving for the front.
I told the soldier that I had to get to Santa Rosa and then to Tegucigalpa so that I could send a dispatch to Warsaw. The soldier was happy because he was already calculating that with an order from the general staff (the documents commanded all subordinates to assist me) he could withdraw to the rear along with me.
‘We will go together, señor,’ the soldier said. ‘Señor will say that he has commanded me to accompany him.’
He was a recruit, a dirt farmer; he had been called up a week ago, he didn’t know the army; the war meant nothing to him. He was trying to figure out how to survive it.
Shells were slamming around us. Far, far away we could hear shooting. Cannons were firing. The smell of powder and smoke was in the air. There were machine-guns behind us and on both sides.
His company had been crawling forward among the bushes, up this hill, when our truck came around the corner and drove into the turmoil of war and was abandoned. From where we lay pressing against the ground we could see the thick-ribbed gum soles of his company, only their soles, as the men crawled through the grass. Then the soles of their boots stopped, then they moved ahead, one-two, one-two, a few metres forward, and then they stopped again.
The soldier nudged me: ‘Señor, mire cuantos zapatos!’ (‘Look at all those shoes!’)
He kept looking at the shoes of the other members of his company as they crawled forward. He blinked, weighed something in his mind and at last said hopelessly, ‘Toda mi familia anda descalzada.’ (‘My whole family goes barefoot.’)
We started crawling through the forest.
The shooting let up for a moment and the soldier, fatigued, stopped. In a hushed voice he told me to wait where I was because he was going back to where his company had been fighting. He said that the living had certainly moved forward — their orders were to pursue the enemy to the very border — but the dead would remain on the battlefield and, for them, their boots were now superfluous. He would strip a few of the dead of their boots, hide them under a bush and mark the place. When the war was over, he would return and have enough boots for his whole family. He had already calculated that he could trade one pair of army boots for three pairs of children’s shoes, and there were nine little ones back home.
It crossed my mind that he was going mad, so I told him that I was putting him under my orders and that we should keep crawling. But the soldier did not want to listen. He was driven by thoughts of footwear and he would throw himself into the front line in order to secure the property lying there in the grass, rather than let it be buried with the dead. Now the war had meaning for him, a point of reference and a goal. He knew what he wanted and what he had to do. I was certain that if he left me we would be separated and never meet again. The last thing I wanted was to be left alone in that forest: I did not know who controlled it or which army was where or which direction I should set off in. There is nothing worse than finding yourself alone in somebody else’s country during somebody else’s war. So I crawled after the soldier towards the battlefield. We crept to where the forest stopped and a new scene of combat could be observed through the stumps and bushes. The front had moved off laterally now: shells were bursting behind an elevation that rose up to the left of us, and somewhere to the right — underground, it seemed, but it must have been in a ravine — machine-guns were muttering. An abandoned mortar stood in front of us, and in the grass lay dead soldiers.