“Impossible.… We’ve had no information,” he mumbled confusedly. “Whyever should they especially pitch on to-night?”
“Bologa, it is a certainty,” began the captain plaintively. “Believe me, a patrol brought me news last evening that over there they are making hasty preparations. You’ll see, Bologa. It’s always like that.”
For another ten minutes Cervenco kept on his lamentations, so that Apostol left him thoroughly upset, cursing the impulse that had caused him to call on the Ruthenian maniac. Outside, however, in the silence broken only by the wind and in the enveloping darkness, he became himself again and thought Cervenco must really be beginning to show signs of insanity if he dreamt of nothing but hand-to-hand fights and attacks.
The second-lieutenant was shivering at the observation post, and he saluted Bologa as he would a saviour.
“The infantry will have it that the Russians intend to attack us this very night,” whispered Bologa. “Did you notice anything?”
“Not a thing! Just silence and cold,” scoffed the second-lieutenant. “That’s always the infantry way, they are scared by every shadow. The Russians are not fools to attack us to-night like that, without preparations, when the change begins only the day after to-morrow!”
Bologa pressed his hand, well pleased, and wished him a good rest. He had never liked that second-lieutenant better than to-night. He seemed to have taken the very words out of his own mouth: “The Russians are no fools …”
When his eyes had become accustomed to the darkness, he looked uneasily across at the lines over there. Was there any movement to be seen or heard? A few minutes later a rifle shot rang out deafeningly somewhere near by. Though he knew by the sound of it that it was no Russian shot, his heart jumped. Other startled shots broke out immediately, then others on the right and left, but always farther away. Bologa grew calmer. They had probably come from startled sentinels.
Towards three o’clock, in order to reassure himself entirely, he ordered a rocket to be sent up so that he should see and convince himself. In the greenish light the ground between the trenches showed no signs of life. On the right, between the barbed wire, lay the body of a dead man. He had been killed two days ago on his way back from patrol, as likely as not by his own comrades—by mistake or through fright. Apostol’s eyes travelled over him as if he had been a mushroom, eager only to see the road which he had chosen on the map—a disused trench which began about twenty yards away and almost reached the Russian trenches. The observation post was surrounded by bushes, left there on purpose as camouflage. If he crawled from there through the two shell-holes he might manage to reach the disused trench unobserved, for the listening posts were a good way off. At the other end of the trench he would call out. He knew enough Russian for that.… Then …
The light of the rocket went out and Bologa was satisfied. At five o’clock exactly, when the darkness began to lift, he would start. Which meant he had another two hours to wait. His mind was so thoroughly made up that he felt neither emotion nor impatience. He waited with his eyes fixed ahead on his goal, his thoughts free. Time flowed over him as a cool and soothing water.
Presently the thought flashed through his mind that perhaps the Russians would receive him with contempt for being a deserter—he, an officer. At that very moment a prolonged and hoarse detonation rent the air. Apostol became rigid and remained tensely waiting. After a few seconds, which seemed to him unending, there came a terrible crash, as if the earth had been split asunder. This was followed by furious and more rapid firing. The seething darkness was furrowed by luminous trails.
“What can this be?” thought Bologa, looking at his watch and seeing that it was barely four o’clock. “The attack? So they were right after all! Which means that I …”
Apostol recognized that the Russian guns had concentrated a converging fire on their artillery, which now began to answer, but rather timidly, obviously dazed by the suddenness and fury of the attack.
“What shall I do now?” he asked himself with the telephone receiver at his ear, listening to the duel of the two artilleries.
All at once he heard on his right, about ten metres or so away, a whizz which ended in a quick bang. He turned his eyes in that direction, and it seemed to him that he saw an earth funnel being flung up into the darkness.
“They’ve started to blow up the infantry,” he mumbled desperately, his brain feeling like a dry sponge.
Some time passed. All around the shells fell more and more thickly. Then a long, sinister whizzing almost deafened him. His heart clutched, and the thought flashed through his mind: “That’s for me!”
In front of him, a few paces away, the sky opened and a shell carried off the roof of the observation post. Apostol felt a sharp stabbing pain in his breast and a blow on the helmet. He seized the theodolite with both hands to prevent himself from falling. Then it seemed to him he was lifted right up into the air and almost immediately he found himself again on the hard ground with a sharp pain in the thigh.
“Am I wounded, or …?”
His thought snapped like a thread.
BOOK II
I
AMISTY patch of light lay at the foot of the two iron bedsteads on the white-tiled floor of the little spare ward.
Through the only window the dark branches of an old pear-tree, now shivering in the frost of the last days of February, peered in. The walls, imbued with groans and pains, mingled their exhalation with the sickly smell of a hospital ward and with the heat of the terra-cotta stove behind the door.
On the clean beds the two officers, in the regulation grey dressing-gowns, lay stretched, their eyes fixed on the high ceiling. On the wall at the head of each bed, on two little black plates, their names stood out in white lettering: “Lieutenant Bologa”, “Lieutenant Varga”. On the little night-tables the temperature charts, almost hidden by the medicine bottles, bore witness to the great physical sufferings they had endured.
In the air, laden with the memories of pain endured, floated an oppressive silence which Varga broke suddenly, raising himself up in bed and speaking with a voice as scared as if he had seen a ghost:
“Why are you silent, comrade? Say something, for God’s sake! This silence is harder to bear than a shrapnel wound!”
Bologa turned his white face, drawn with suffering, towards him but did not open his lips. Varga hung a minute expectantly, then fell back on the bed, speaking more to himself:
“Four months now that we’ve been sick, sent on from hospital to hospital, each time nearer to the front. I am sick to death of doctors, bandages, and sisters of charity! If only they would hurry up with that sick-leave!”
Apostol remained silent. For three months he had been forbidden to talk because he had had his right lung pierced by a piece of shrapnel, and now he had come to love silence. During that interval his thoughts had got into the habit of falling into line quietly, without violent struggles, and especially without anguish. Besides, at the beginning his mind had been serene, as if some unseen master-hand had wiped all memories off his brain. When he came to, that first time, at the dressing-station of the division, his eyes had alighted on Doctor Meyer and on Petre. He did not know them, but his joy had been so violent that he had immediately lost consciousness again. The second time he opened his eyes in a Red Cross train, with the same gladness in his heart, and again for only a few minutes. Finally, the third time, he came back to life to find himself in a white ward in the hospital. His bed was surrounded by doctors.
“Well done, dead one!” one of them, who had white side-whiskers and a black moustache, had said, smiling. “About time you were resuscitated! Six days you’ve been like this!”
A wave of inexpressible joy at being alive had swept over Apostol’s whole being, and with fever-cracked lips he had whispered, scarcely audibly:
“I’ve no pain, no pain at all!”
For another seven weeks after that he remained more dead than alive. Besides the wound in his chest, he had a broken bone in the lef
t foot and a deep gash in the thigh.
“Your recovery is a miracle,” the doctor with the white whiskers and the black moustache had told him at a later date. “Your vitality is extraordinary, otherwise you would long since be promenading in the world of the righteous!”
When his foot and thigh were healed, they sent him farther on—nearer to his own unit—to the hospital in which he was now, because over there they had begun to bring in daily large numbers of wounded from the new encounters. For nearly a month he had lain alone in the little spare ward at the end of the corridor on the first floor. Petre had sat by his bed all day, trying to guess his thoughts and anticipate his wants. In the mornings, and also after the doctor’s visit, he had read to him The Dream of the Mother of God in a voice shaky with religious fervour, and Bologa listened without understanding the words but with a warm contented feeling in his heart.
Then one day the orderly had told him what was supposed to have happened on that night. From his tale Apostol did not gather much information; all he could make out was that he had been buried on the edge of a shell-hole, under the débris of the observation post, and that Petre had found him towards noon after they had, with the help of the division that had come to relieve them, driven back the Russians to their original position. But the soldier’s tale recalled the hopes of that night and started again all the thoughts he had had then. He experienced a few moments of uneasiness, as at the sight of a rebuking apparition. Then for three days his thoughts, roused from their long torpor, tortured him and rent his soul. He said to himself that all his efforts to avoid his fate had been frustrated, and that henceforth nothing but death could save him. But now death seemed more terrifying even than the prospect of having to go to the Rumanian front. He tried in vain to whip up his ambition and accused himself of cowardice, but the new love of life, growing daily more and more intense, prevented him from making any headway, and whispered continually in his heart:
“First myself and then the others!”
At last, one night when he couldn’t sleep, he found peace. After all, Fate had done the right thing. Why should he desert to the Russians just when the chance was being offered to him to cross over to the Rumanians? For the Russians he would simply have been a contemptible deserter, whereas the Rumanians would receive him as a brother. Over there desertion would have meant a dishonouring crime followed by a shameful captivity, here he would go in the guise of a real hero, with head erect, and he would be able to start fighting at once against the real enemies. How stupid had been his dread of the Rumanian front! It was lucky that Fate had intervened. His obvious duty was to live and to triumph. To want to die when one had an ideal was a sign of cowardice.
The next day his mind was less perturbed, and his thoughts became more settled and again obedient to his will. But he found that the hatred in his heart for all the foreigners that surrounded him had grown in intensity. He now hated the doctors who tended him, the sisters of charity, the convalescent officers, and was glad that on account of his wounded lung he was not allowed to talk. On the day when an old general, accompanied by a drove of very dapper boy-officers, had come to pin on his breast the gold medal awarded for the destruction of the searchlight, Bologa had pretended to feel ill so that he need not have to seem enchanted.
Later, one day, about a month ago now, Varga was brought into the ward. He had been badly wounded in the left hip on that same night and had been sent on from one hospital to another until he had finally reached the one in which Bologa was. At first Bologa had been glad to see him, and, as he had just been given permission to talk, they swapped adventures. Varga explained to him in detail what had happened during the Russian attack, how the Austrians had advanced almost to the artillery lines and had then been driven back by a swift counter-attack. Nevertheless, in that encounter two infantry regiments had been almost entirely wiped out and his own Hussars had suffered severely, particularly during the counterattack; that was when he had received this wound of his, which had almost been the cause of making a cripple of him, for he had fallen into the hands of a maniac doctor, who had fought tooth and nail to have his leg off. The Hussar officer was fearfully indignant that this battle, in which nearly two thousand men had perished and in which he himself had so nearly gone west, had not even been officially recorded. The only thing that cheered him was the hope of a long sick-leave.
While Varga talked and exploded, Bologa brooded. Both Varga’s eyes and words seemed to him hostile, and he wondered how he could ever have felt friendly towards this man.
In order to avoid talking, Bologa got in a number of books and began to hunt in them for explanations and proofs. He searched for a fortnight and exhausted himself. Nowhere could he find a logical explanation why right was not right everywhere and always. From all his books he received the impression that man was cut off from real life, was solitary and abstruse as a mathematical formula. Some person sits himself down at a table, full of faith in his own knowledge and experience of life, and decrees that men should be so and so, that to do this and this is right, but to do that and the other is wrong. And that somebody would do his best to force living souls into his scheme, to chain them to it, as if life could be moulded in accordance with the desires and conclusions of any one person. Life flowed on indifferently, destroying not only learned men’s systems but even men’s minds, inventing new situations at every moment, new ideas which the Lilliputian imagination of human beings would never be able to understand and much less to foresee. A caprice of life had set face to face millions of men branded with the mark of death on their forehead, forcing them by this means to discover in their souls unsuspected mysteries and to make unexpected decisions. In the vortex of life books became a conglomeration of words without sense. All a man had to do was to take care not to go against his conscience.
About that time he received a very friendly letter from Klapka, telling him a lot of unimportant things, all the gossip about life at the front, etc. He added right at the last, quite casually: “Over here I have so far come across Russians only, all Russians …” Bologa immediately said to himself, without anxiety or hesitation:
“It doesn’t matter, I’ll wait.”
Varga had done his best to loosen Bologa’s tongue, and could not make out why he had become such a bear. Silence weighed on him and depressed him. So he had been overjoyed when the doctors had allowed him to go farther than his own ward. He had now become friendly with men in other wards and spent more time with them than with Bologa.
Now, whilst awaiting the doctor’s afternoon visit, the hussar was squirming like a fish out of water, more especially as he had been unable, in spite of all his efforts, to drag a single word out of Bologa.
“What’s the matter with you, Bologa?” he burst out at last, annoyed. “You exasperate me with your dumbness! Don’t you want to talk to me because you hate me? We were friends and …”
“Nothing, nothing,” murmured Apostol without moving his eyes.
Varga had to stay his further questioning, for the doctor arrived, accompanied by a quaint little sister of charity.
“This is the ward of divine miracles!” exclaimed the doctor, who was short and fair, rubbing his hands and speaking brightly and cheerily. “From what I see I’ll be giving you your passports very soon, gentlemen! At all events, it would be well if you began to take a little more exercise, anyway in the conservatory, if it is not possible in the park. It is true the weather is still wintry, but you will have to stretch your bones a little, gentlemen! It would be a very good thing, a very good thing indeed!”
“We’ll stretch them well enough again at the front!” answered Varga, cheering up. “I hope you’re going to give us sick-leave, doctor? You can’t possibly send us back to the trenches with our wounds barely healed?”
“Surely … of course …” answered the doctor, his smile less bright. “So far as it depends on me, of course! All I can do is to propose, the decision lies in other hands; and to tell you the truth, for you are
men, the authorities all keep on telling us that officers are wanted very, very badly everywhere.”
“I understand,” concluded Varga gloomily. “You intend to send us back direct to the front.”
The doctor growled a few more words and hastened off with the ever serene and smiling sister of charity.
In a few minutes the room was quite dark. Only the windows remained grey, like sick and lifeless eyes. Varga, with hands behind his back, walked nervously backwards and forwards, but the sound of his footsteps was not so loud as the metallic ticking of the alarm-clock on the night-table. Presently Apostol, sitting on his bed with eyes fixed on the frozen branches outside, which were describing black arabesques on the misty windows, began to hum a gay tune.
“Bologa! What the hell! You feel like humming?” Varga stopped and stared at him helplessly. “Perhaps you are rejoicing that our chances of sick-leave have been knocked on the head?”
“I am rejoicing with my whole heart, old fellow!” Apostol answered, singing and gesticulating like an actor in Italian opera. “War, war, war, forward to the war!”
The Hussar lieutenant was speechless, and, convinced that Apostol was making fun of him, he left the room, banging the door violently behind him. Bologa stopped his singing abruptly, as if he only just realized what he had been doing. He felt sorry he had provoked Varga, and stretched himself on his bed, feeling strangely sad. A few minutes later Petre came in, made a light, and held out a letter, asking:
“Is it from home, sir?”
Bologa snatched the letter quickly, but, seeing it was from Klapka, did not hasten to open it. He guessed what it contained, and indeed, when he read it, he came across what he had expected in three elaborately obscured lines, from which he gathered that about a week ago the Rumanians had taken the place of the Russians. He stared thoughtfully at Petre for a while, and then said:
“It is not from home. It is from the front, from the captain. It’s from there, not from home.”
Forest of the Hanged Page 10
