The Radetzky March (48 page)

Evening had set in, and since it was Friday, the candles were burning in the small Jewish cottages, illuminating the sidewalks. Each cottage was like a small tomb. Death himself had lit the candles. Louder than on other holy days, the chanting emerged from the Jewish prayer houses. They were ushering in an extraordinary, a bloody Sabbath. The Jews streamed from the houses in black, hasty throngs, gathering on the crossroads, and soon their laments arose for the soldiers among them, who had to march off the next day. They clasped hands, they kissed one another on the cheeks, and whenever two of them embraced, their red beards tangled in a special farewell and they had to untangle their beards with their fingers. The bells tolled over their heads. Between their tolling and the shouts of the Jews came the cutting voices of the bugles in the barracks. They were sounding taps, the final lights-out. Night had come. No star could be seen. The sky hung low, flat, and dreary over the little town.

Trotta turned around. He tried to find a carriage—there was none. He walked to Chojnicki’s home with long, swift strides. The door was open, and all the rooms were illuminated as they were for the grand parties. In the antechamber Chojnicki came toward him, wearing a uniform with a helmet and cartridge pouches. He ordered a carriage. His garrison was twelve miles away, and he wanted to travel that night.

“Wait a moment!” he said. This was the first time he used the familiar form with Trotta, perhaps out of carelessness, perhaps because he was already in uniform. “I’ll drive you home and then back to town.”

They pull up at Stepaniuk’s lodge. Chojnicki sits down. He watches Trotta doffing his civvies and donning his uniform, piece by piece. Several weeks ago—why, how long ago that was!—in Brodnitzer’s hotel, he watched Trotta taking off his uniform. Trotta is returning to his military garb, to his homeland. He takes the saber from its case. He straps on his officer’s sash, the gigantic black-and-yellow tassels gently caress the shimmering metal of the sword. Now Trotta shuts the trunk.

They have very little time for farewells. They pull up at the riflemen’s barracks.

“Adieu!” says Trotta. Their handshake is a long one. Time passes almost audibly behind the coachman’s broad, motionless back. A handshake seems inadequate. They feel they ought to do more.

“We usually kiss,” says Chojnicki.

So they embrace and exchange a rapid kiss. Trotta gets out. The sentry at the barracks presents arms. The horses tug at the reins. The barracks gate falls shut behind Trotta. He stands for an instant, listening to Chojnicki’s carriage drive away.

T
HAT SAME NIGHT
the rifle battalion headed northeast toward the border area of Woloczyska. It began drizzling gently, then raining harder and harder, and the white dust on the road turned into silvery–gray slime. The mire slapped against the boots of the soldiers and splattered the impeccable uniforms of the officers, who were marching to their death in regulation regalia. The long sabers got in their way, and the splendid long–fringed tassels of their black-and-gold sashes dropped on their hips, soaked, snarled, and spotted with a thousand tiny clots of mud. By dawn, the battalion reached its destination, joining with two other infantry regiments and forming skirmish lines.

They waited there for two days, with no sign of the war. At times they heard stray firing from far away, to their right. It came from minor border scrimmages between mounted squads. Sometimes they saw wounded customs officials and occasionally a dead border constable. Ambulance men whisked both the wounded and the dead past the waiting soldiers. The war refused to start. It wavered, just as a storm may brew for days before erupting.

The third day brought orders to retreat, and the battalion formed to march off. Both officers and men were disappointed. It was rumored that an entire dragoon regiment had been wiped out nine miles to the east. Supposedly Cossacks had invaded the country. Silent and grumpy, the Austrians marched west. They soon realized that no one had prepared the retreat, for they came upon a confused donnybrook of the most disparate military branches at highway crossings and in villages and small towns. Innumerable and conflicting directives poured in from army headquarters.

Most of these orders pertained to the evacuation of villages and towns and the treatment of pro-Russian Ukrainians, clerics, and spies. Hasty court-martials in villages passed hasty sentences. Secret informers delivered unverifiable reports on peasants, Orthodox priests, teachers, photographers, officials. There was no time. The army had to retreat swiftly but also punish the traitors swiftly. And while ambulances, baggage columns, field artillery, dragoons, riflemen, and infantrists formed abrupt and helpless clusters on the sodden roads, while couriers galloped to and fro, while inhabitants of small towns fled westward in endless throngs, surrounded by white terror, loaded down with red-and-white featherbeds, gray sacks, brown furniture, and blue kerosene lamps, the shots of hasty executioners carrying out hasty sentences rang from the church squares of hamlets and villages, and the somber rolls of drums accompanied the monotonous decisions of judges, and the wives of victims lay shrieking for mercy before the mud–caked boots of officers, and red and silver flames burst from huts and barns, stables and hayricks. The Austrian army’s war had begun with court-martials. For days on end genuine and supposed traitors hung from the trees on church squares to terrify the living.

The living, however, had fled far and wide. Fires surrounded the corpses dangling from trees, and the leaves were already crackling, and the fire was more powerful than the steady, widespread gray drizzle heralding the bloody autumn. The old bark of ancient trees slowly charred, tiny, silvery, swelling sparks crept up along the fissures like fiery worms, reaching the foliage, and the green leaves curled, turned red, then black, then gray; the ropes broke, and the corpses plunged to the ground, their faces black, their bodies unscathed.

One day the soldiers halted in the village of Krutyny. They arrived in the afternoon, they were supposed to continue westward in the morning, before sunrise. By now the steady widespread rain had paused and the late–September sun wove a benevolent silvery light across the vast fields, which were still filled with grain, the living bread that would never be eaten. Gossamer drifted very slowly through the air. Even the crows
and ravens kept still, inveigled by the fleeting peace of this day and with no hope of finding the expected carrion.

The officers hadn’t taken off their clothes for a week. Their boots were waterlogged, their feet swollen, their knees stiff, their calves sore, their backs couldn’t bend. They were billeted in huts. They tried to fish dry clothes out of the trunks and wash at the meager wells. In the clear, still night, with the abandoned and forgotten dogs in scattered farmyards howling in fear and hunger, the lieutenant couldn’t sleep, and he left the hut where he was quartered. He walked down the long village street toward the church spire, which loomed against the stars with its twofold Greek cross. The church with its shingle roof stood in the middle of the small churchyard, surrounded by slanting wooden crosses that seemed to caper in the nocturnal light. Outside the huge gray wide–open gates of the graveyard three corpses were dangling: a bearded priest flanked by two young peasants in sandy-yellow smocks, with coarse–plaited raffia shoes on their unstirring feet. The black cassock of the priest hung down to his shoes. And sometimes the night wind nudged his feet so that they struck the circle of his priestly garment like dumb clappers in a deaf-and-dumb bell; they seemed to be tolling without evoking a sound.

Lieutenant Trotta approached the hanged men. He peered at their bloated faces. And he thought he recognized some of his own soldiers in these three victims. These were the faces of the peasants he had drilled with every day. The priest’s black, fanning beard reminded him of Onufrij’s beard. That was his parting image of Onufrij. And who could say? Perhaps Onufrij was the brother of this hanged priest. Lieutenant Trotta looked around. He listened. No human sound was to be heard. The bats rustled in the belfry of the church. Abandoned dogs howled in abandoned farms. The lieutenant drew his sword and cut down the three hanged men, one by one. Then he slung the corpses, one by one, over his shoulder and carried all of them, one by one, to the graveyard. Then, with his bare sword, he began loosening the soil on the paths between graves until he felt he had room enough for three corpses. Then he put all three of them in, shoveled the soil over them with sword and scabbard,
and trampled on the ground till it was solid. Then he made the sign of the cross. He hadn’t crossed himself since the final mass at the military academy in Hranice. He wanted to recite the Lord’s Prayer, but his lips moved without producing a sound. Some nocturnal bird shrieked. The bats rustled. The dogs howled.

The next day, before sunrise, they marched on. The silvery mists of the autumn morning shrouded the world. But soon the sun climbed out of them, glowing as at the height of summer. They were thirsty. They marched through a desolate sandy area. At times they thought they heard water gurgling somewhere. A few soldiers ran toward where the gurgling seemed to come from, but then they instantly doubled back. No brook, no pond, no well. They marched through a couple of villages, but the wells were stuffed with corpses of people who had been shot or strung up. The corpses, some crumpled over in the middle, dangled from the wooden rims of the well. The soldiers didn’t look into the depths. They rejoined the others. They marched on.

Their thirst grew fiercer. Noon came. They heard shots and lay flat on the ground. The enemy must have overtaken them. They now wormed their way along the ground. Soon they noticed that the road was widening. A deserted railroad station shone nearby. That was where the tracks began. The battalion ran to the station—they were safe here; for a few miles they would be covered on either side by the embankments. The enemy, perhaps a sotnia of galloping Cossacks, must be across from them on the other side. Silent and dejected, they marched between the embankments.

All at once someone shouted, “Water!” And a second later they had all spotted the well next to a signal booth on the ridge of the slope.

“Stay here!” Major Zoglauer commanded.

“Stay here!” the officers repeated.

But the parched men couldn’t be stopped. Several individuals, then whole groups, scrambled up the slope. Shots rang out and the men dropped. Enemy horsemen on the other side of the embankment were firing at the parched soldiers, and more and
more thirsty men were running toward the deadly well. By the time the second platoon of the second company approached the well, a dozen corpses were sprawling on the green slope.

“Platoon—halt!” Lieutenant Trotta commanded. Stepping out, he said, “I’ll get you water! No one move! Wait here! Hand me a pail!”

They brought him two watertight canvas pails from the machine–gun section. He took a pail in each hand. And he climbed up the slope, toward the well. Bullets whistled around him, struck the soil at his feet, whizzed past his ears and his legs and above his head. He leaned over the well. Beyond the slope, on the other side, he saw the two lines of aiming Cossacks. He was not afraid. It never occurred to him that he could be hit like the others. He heard the shots before they were fired and also the opening drumbeats of “The Radetzky March.” He was standing on the balcony of his father’s house. The army band was playing down below. Now Nechwal raised the black ebony baton with the silver knob. Now Trotta lowered the second pail into the well. Now the cymbals clashed. Now he lifted the pail high. With an overflowing pail in each hand, amid whizzing bullets, he put down his left foot in order to descend. Now he took two steps. Now his head just barely loomed over the edge of the slope.

Now a bullet hit his skull. He took one more step and collapsed. The brimming pails shook, plunged, and poured water on him. Warm blood ran from his head to the cool soil of the slope. From below the Ukrainian peasants in his platoon chorused, “Praised be Jesus Christ!”

Forever. Amen! he wanted to say. Those were the only Ruthenian words he knew. But his lips didn’t stir. His mouth gaped. His white teeth shone against the blue autumn sky. His tongue slowly turned blue; he felt his body grow cold. Then he died.

That was the end of Lieutenant Carl Joseph, Baron von Trotta.

The end of the grandson of the Hero of Solferino was a commonplace end, not suitable for textbooks in the elementary schools and high schools of Imperial and Royal Austria. Lieutenant Trotta died holding not a weapon but two pails.

Major Zoglauer wrote to the district captain. Old Trotta read the letter several times; then his hands sank. The letter dropped, fluttering down to the reddish carpet. Herr von Trotta did not remove his pince-nez. His head trembled, and the wobbly pince-nez with its oval lenses fluttered on the old man’s nose like a glass butterfly. Two heavy crystal drops dripped simultaneously, dimmed the lenses, and ran down into the whiskers. Herr von Trotta’s entire body remained calm, only his head waggled from back to front and from left to right, while the glass wings of the pince-nez kept fluttering.

For an hour or more the district captain remained at his desk. Then he stood up and walked home at his usual pace. He took the black suit out from his closet, and the black tie and the black crepe bands he had worn on his hat and his arm after his father’s death. He changed clothes. He didn’t look into the mirror while changing. His head was still waggling. He tried to steady his unruly skull. But the greater his effort, the more his head shook. The pince-nez was still fluttering on his nose. Finally the district captain gave up trying and let his skull waggle.

In his black suit, with the black band around his arm, he went to Fräulein Hirschwitz’s room, halted at the door, and told her, “My son is dead, madam!”

He quickly shut the door, went to his headquarters, walked from office to office, stuck his waggling head through the door, and announced everywhere, “My son is dead, Herr So-and-so! My son is dead, Herr So-and-so!”