No Man's Land (48 page)

Ugh! How disgusting and frightful it was! The concrete bath swirled with stinking yellow water and grey-green foaming soap, with bloody bandages and cotton wool floating in it. Suppurating, nauseating cotton wool. The water steamed and stank of mud and clay, the steam showers hissed, and in the thick steam, black shadows could be made out running to and fro in the mist, and all their faces were swollen and bloody, and a generator throbbed somewhere, and it was midday in August. Here a man was dying under a shower on a glass table, there another was wailing, ventilators hummed like invisible insects, while Russians in khaki kerchiefs carried in new wounded material like sacks, and the nurses and wounded men and doctors all shouted and ran around, demented.

They washed Vidović in that dirty, bloody hell and took him into Hut 5B, which looked inside like the guts of a great barge. With cruel protestant pedantry, it contained sixty precisely arranged beds, one body on each, with a label above each body, with information about that body's state. The barge was divided into three groups. The first were the broken bones. (Bones protruded like splinters. The men lay silent by day. It was only at night that their cries were heard, as from Golgotha.) The second were amputees. (Arm or leg, or leg and arm. The wounds were not bandaged, but left to dry under gauze like cured meat.) The third group, to the left of the door, were the ‘transients'. Those transients were only passing through Hut 5B. They travelled from the bathroom to the morgue. And when someone was placed in the third group, Hut 5B knew the state of play.

When they brought the injured Vidović into the hut and laid him on bed number eight, a Hungarian, a great hulk of a man from the first group (broken bones) spat contemptuously and traced a cross in the air with his finger:

‘
No hát, Istenem
!
^*
This one could have gone straight to the morgue.'

‘There's a new number eight! Hey!'

‘Number eight! Number eight!'

The news spread through the hut and many heads were raised, to see this new number eight. It was true! They had all been fundamentally mangled and bloodied by life! But, even if a man had lost a leg, it wasn't as though he was number eight! He was number twenty-one! Or fifteen!

‘I've lost an arm! Yes! And my bones are broken! Yes! But I'm alive! Dear God! I'm still alive! And when the Russians come in with a black coffin and shove the new number eight into it, I'll fill my pipe, watch the insects sticking to the fly-paper and drink milk! That's some kind of life, after all! That's not what's in store for number eight!'

For four days now number eight had kept changing. It was only that morning that the Russian prisoners had taken out one of theirs, a Russian colleague. His intestines had been ripped open and he had yelled for two days and nights. Before the Russian there had been a kindly Viennese man and now there was Vidović
.

On bed number seven, to the left of Vidović, there was a Mongol, a Siberian with a bullet in his head, who had been screaming in his death throes for three days now. He kept shouting something, all sharp consonants, but no one understood anything, and they all kept thinking he was done for, but then he would start tossing and writhing, so that a ribbon of burning red blood seeped through the bandage on his head. In bed number nine, to the right, a young Slovak was dying, his throat shot through. His windpipe had been severed and he breathed through a glass cannula, so that foaming saliva, pus and lymph could be clearly heard gurgling in the little tube.

And so Hut 5B began to bet on Vidović's head, that he wouldn't make it through the night.

‘I know our doctor. If he doesn't get a man under the knife at once, then it's curtains!'

‘That's not true! He wouldn't have left him till tomorrow, if that was true! He's still young!'

‘That Viennese “blade” was eating rice and laughing! But we went straight to the cutting table.'

‘So what? Is it worth a bottle of red? Dead before morning?'

‘Done! A bottle of red!'

*

And so the August night fell.

Big stars appeared, huge and brilliant, while the great blue firmament, like a crystal dish, enclosed the whole valley with Axelrode's Maltese hospital, and thousands upon thousands of tons of incandescent gases pressed down on Hut 5B, and there was not a breath of wind, not the slightest quiver. The flies in the hut had now fallen asleep and were no longer buzzing, and somewhere in the middle of that perverse ship, crammed with human flesh, a green lamp was burning and everything was floating in the half dark. Dark, dark, half-dark and pain, inexpressible pain, hidden during the day, now breathed out through every pore and throbbed with every heartbeat. Now every slightest splinter of even the tiniest shattered bone could be felt, convulsions shook the nerves, spewing sounds out of the depths of a man, like lava from a volcano. Men clenched their teeth, shivering in sweat, foaming and biting their tongues and lips, and suddenly their whole lower jaw stretched away, their faces were distorted in a bestial grimace and their voices cried from the depths of their innards, as from the mouth of a well.

‘
Mamma mia, mamma mia
,' pleaded someone at the end of the room in Italian.

‘
Gospodi, Gospodi, Gospodi
,'
^*
groaned a Russian with a bullet in his intestines, then quiet again, green quiet, half-darkness.

Worn out from loss of blood, Vidović had slept the whole afternoon, but now he woke, and did not know where he was or what had happened, or how he had ended up here. He heard human voices, groaning, but his raging wounds had eased and the fever seemed to have been extinguished, and, with great effort, the tormented Vidović found a slightly cooler spot on his pillow. His burning lids closed again, and a dense, weighty silence poured over them, while his thirst had somehow evaporated, and the hut was already beginning to dissolve and fade into an agreeable blackness, when it was rent once again by an animal cry of pure pain, which suddenly shattered the whole edifice of sleep built with such difficulty somewhere on the cooler edge of the pillow, and the whole thing collapsed in a single instant.

And so it went on, the whole night, over and over again.

‘Oh! Just five minutes! Just five minutes' sleep!'

It must have been towards dawn, for clear light was penetrating through the green gauze. Outside guards were shouting, while the bindweed climbing up the ropes seemed to tremble in a morning breeze. Moths circled round the lamp, their wings fluttering.

‘What time is it?'

There's no time! There's nothing! Only pain.

‘
Mamma mia! mamma mia! Gospodi! Gospodi!
'

‘Ah, if I could only sleep for a minute! A second!'

‘
Gospodi!
'

*

On the second morning the situation began to change ominously. In the early dawn, the Russians had broken through in the south and so cut off the last remaining imperial and royal railway link, and the trains had begun to turn back, and the order was given to the engineers, and locomotives started exploding into pieces, like toys. Everything was stranded. Artillery, the wounded, magazines, the great divisional stoves with their sooty chimneys, pontoons, horses, the whole lot; all that could be heard was the dull thunder of wrecked engines being blown up. And the whole morning troops marched, so the patients of the Maltese hospital from A, C and D huts (the lightly injured, who did not travel on stretchers, but could just about hobble) looked happily out through the barbed wire at the horror of the retreat, to where later in the day men would collapse onto the roads with sunstroke, and, believe it or not, in spite of everything, they felt good. They were there, under the Red Cross, and no one was chasing them anywhere, and if the Russians came, they would carry them off again somewhere far away, into Russian hospitals and camps where there would be no war, and they would survive and so for them, in all probability, the war would end this very morning. And that was the only thought the wounded men had in their heads.

Count Maximilian Axelrode, Chief of the Maltese Hospital, dispatched the fashionable female personnel (two or three baronesses and a general's wife) in cars, while he himself decided to stay with his Maltese flag here, in harm's way, to the bitter end. The bell on the morgue rang, and Count Axelrode walked, in his black uniform with its Maltese cross, through the huts, as he did every morning, looking at the naked yellow corpses that the Russians carried in their coffins; the Russians carried the corpses and saluted the Count, doffing their caps and bowing to the ground.

‘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.