No Man's Land (51 page)

‘Ping, ping' – we heard bullets hit the trees. We fixed our bayonets. It was nearly midday. No one had any idea where the Russians were or where we were going. Scrub and brambles scratched us. We came out of the forest; we crossed several stubble fields to a small hill. A few of us were moving ahead of the others. When we reached the top, a valley was spread below us. Suddenly there were explosions around us to the right and left. I was spattered with earth and rolled into some potato trenches. I pressed my face into the soil and breathed, breathed. Behind us the forest screeched and shook horribly under the showers of shrapnel. Someone beside me cried out and started singing. I raised my head. Behind his ear, his head was covered in blood, his mouth was full of blood and he was choking. He straightened and sat up, sang, and spoke of his wife and children, he called me by my name and looked at me, looked only at me. I thrust my head into the earth and said nothing. The sun was blazing. People were running and shouting around me. I fell asleep. Sleep always overwhelmed me, as soon as I lay down. I woke. Mist, evening mist was again falling onto us. Behind the forest two cars sped past. We got up quietly. We made our way down one by one back into the forest. And when darkness fell, we began to walk through the forest again. People smoked and laughed. My group was singing softly. I was used to that as well. We trudged on, and on, again. Beside the batteries, set up along the edge of the wet forests, the terrible, dark forests. It had been raining for three days. The Russian trench on the hill, completely sodden, gave no sign of life. They must have retreated somewhere – into underground trenches. The forests steamed, full of clouds. For three days now, we had been lying squeezed into a ditch, one on top of the other. That is where we had dug ourselves in under the worst of the fire.

I was shaken by fever. That day a teacher from Sombor had deserted, and people punched me in the chest and slapped me. I looked around me blearily, humming and whistling all day. And again you could hear men talking of celebrations and roasts, of fights in alehouses, of women, and reading ‘The Dream of the Holy Virgin'. Three Slovaks struggled all day to cook something over a candle. We spread tent fabric over the trench, but it leaked. We sat, and lay, in mud. No, it had been hard, marching through Srem and the burnt Posavina; it was horrible too near Rača in the water: all those slaps, curses; but this, this was madness in a sea of mud. Everything soaked, constant rain, destroyed houses, the water we drank was muddy, the bread was full of mud. He had lain in the mud in front of us all night, it was only now that we noticed him. We dragged him into the trench. He lay rigid, filthy, stinking. In his right-hand pocket he had some bread and in the left thirteen forints and twenty-six kreitzers. We would have to write a card. People knew where he was from. His name was Lalić. The majority proposed that the money should not be given to the officer, but kept and drunk. They said: that's what he'd have told us to do, if he could, he liked buying drinks for people.

In the afternoon, the mortars began again. The Russian trench disappeared in clouds of yellow earth and mud that shot into the air. We emerged slowly from the ditch and began running. Most went calmly, slowly, no one any longer had the strength to run. We walked calmly. There was a cry, all around us the earth boomed, spurted, men keeled over, shrieked. I went on, stumbling under my pack: racked by fever. I felt someone walking beside me. We were both exhausted. The earth burst open, shooting upwards. I saw the yellow cloaks of Russians leaping out of the trenches. The barbed wire and soil in front of their trench churned under the pounding of the mortars. I reached the wires. A man somersaulted in front of me, bent double and hopping. A shell had passed through him from head to foot. ‘Let's go,' said Radulović, standing up. Someone ran past us. I saw blood pouring from my nose onto my chest. Others ran past us holding spades in front of their heads. They leapt into the trench, yelling, running, with terrible cries, onto the bayonets. I did not lie down, I kept going slowly on. Any minute now I'll be killed, one of these big, yellow, fat Russians, jumping about in front of me like lunatics, is definitely going to kill me. The blood was coursing from my nose now. I lay down. The reserve rolled over me into the trench. People were lying everywhere, grimacing in the mud. I do not know why every wounded man was half-naked, but how they screamed, oh, how doggedly they screamed. I lay like that, with no strength.

I lay on a cart and saw only the hunched back of the man who was driving and kept encouraging the nags with clicking noises. The cart could hardly move through the mud. He looked round often, squinting under his fur hat. There was someone else lying beside me. We skirted deserted villages. Here and there we saw a few wretched, hideously poor, ragged Jews. Fine Russian churches, wet forests that steamed. Mud, a vast sea of mud. Dogs scampered through the villages. Dogs and pathetic, filthy, crushed Jewish women. Little girls of twelve or ten offered themselves. Everywhere were carts, mangy horses and interminable, muddy roads. Wounded men lay on the roads. In the afternoon cars came for us. And a weak sun, a good sun, poured over the houses and roads. I lay down on a blanket, racked by coughing, leaving red drops of blood on my dirty handkerchief. And I fell asleep right there. We stopped in a courtyard. There were lanterns swaying round us, as they lifted us, one by one, and carried us into a building. And in the morning, they took us, yellow and half-dead to the baths; we came out through another door full of laughter. I went over to a window and saw below me a small white village, full of streams and mills.

In a green coat and a cap with no brim, I dragged myself, like a strange shadow, smiling, along the streams where the watermills sang. Oh, they sang, they sang to me; they knew where I came from, and I had a smile on my face. How narrow the lanes were. Old women looked at us sadly and pityingly. And the sun? Oh that wan sun, I shall never forget it. Something warm and passionate trembled on my hands. Oh, it was life, young life, playing billiards so skilfully in an unknown café in that town, not I.

*

Who are you?Who are you, with your warm, yellow eyes in the evening mist? Am I not still too sick and frail to touch you? How blurred and gentle your Polish language is! Why are you so good to me, when that's not your trade. Why do you look at me so sweetly? The folds of your blouse brush my head, that burns and aches, fever shakes me. Who are you, wonderful, beautiful, passionate, among the mirrors and glasses in the twilight of the café? Ah, no, it is not here that I want you to be; I want to go outside, I want you to go outside. Look, have you seen these springs; ah, come and hear how charmingly they murmur, how tenderly they splash. I'm almost sorry I didn't die, but that's what autumn does to you. That weak sun pouring over the clean, white houses. What do those forests want of me; over there, behind the hills, they're calling to me, they're laughing cheerfully with me. Why do I touch the walls so tenderly? Where am I going? I have no one in this little town, I don't know the way. Who loves me? Why are these old people looking at me like that?

Look, a cake shop. Let's go in! Little girls sit, arranged with small-town elegance; my fingers fumble. Little knives, light, silver, are you ashamed of my hands? Ah, yes, they are caked with mud, which will not come off, and my crooked, cracked nails frighten you. And the slightly easy girls, the slightly bad girls giggled, and I smiled too. Oh, what do I know, what should I think about all of this. The earth danced – why don't we dance? Autumn has danced with me – come on, let's dance. I chose one. This one. Who's laughing at me? She was called Lusja. She laughed a lot, at everything, her gloves were slightly torn. And I began to beg her comically and good-naturedly. I forgot desire and just looked at those warm, I knew in advance, warm lips. Her companions, full of laughter, left us alone. We walked beside the mills. She was afraid that someone would see her. ‘If I hadn't seen from your badge that you're a student, I wouldn't have let you accompany me. Do you think I'm shameless?' Oh, what did I think? I was full of laughter. She was just sad that I was ill, she thought I'd been wounded. She didn't like the fact that I'm so wild. She said that with her more could be achieved by delicacy.

That evening, I recall, the sky was strange. Autumn skies are always strange. I found her in front of the hospital, waiting for me. With trembling hands she showed me her key, she could stay out until midnight. We set off through the streets, where russet leaves were swirling. She asked me whether Serbs had churches and pinched me passionately. She wanted to be driven somewhere; an old hackney carriage took us. She lay across my chest and loosened her hair, such lovely blond hair, with none of that heavy, intoxicating aroma of black hair in the darkness. Streetlights meandered around us. Under the yellow, gold woods on the hill, the carriage swayed and jolted. The sky was filled with stars. At that time, somewhere far away to the south, old women were praying for me. And somewhere far away to the north, my companions were lying dirty, louse-ridden and hungry in the mud, shivering with cold and waiting for a shell to destroy them.

‘Das Hundsregiment', as we were known.

We reached the wood and continued on foot. She pressed against me fearfully. Some time before, a girl had been murdered by soldiers. We entered a forest that was dark, with red treetops. Leaves fell onto us, and pink moonlight spilled over the trees, moving us to tears, to a painful tenderness; I kissed her, as though I had no one else in the whole world. Crazed, troubled, breathing heavily, she whispered bitterly about how horrible everything was, how everyone was after her, how men were all scoundrels. Her mother tormented her all day long, but she wanted to stay respectable. The little town was glowing below us in the pink moonlight and the Prussian frontier, with its white markers, encircled us. Her white undergarments were scented. That naïve attention, that foresight touched me and I told her so. She was offended. In the dark I could just make out her head, but her arms were infinitely sweet; her only fear was that I would think badly of her. In the distance the little town lay white, its small white houses like children's toys. Suddenly she gave a soft cry. A bird was startled and knocked into a tree. She wailed painfully and glanced behind her into the forest. In the moonlight she was terribly pale and beautiful. Down below in the little town military music was playing.

Miloš Crnjanski
was born in Csongrád, Hungary, in 1893. A controversial figure in Tito's Yugoslavia because of his perceived ‘bourgeois' views, Crnjanski served in the diplomatic service, ending his career in Berlin and Rome, from where he was evacuated to London in 1941, living there as an émigré until his return to Belgrade in 1965. At the outbreak of the First World War, Crnjanski, a Serb, was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army and sent to the Galician front, where he was wounded in 1915. He spent most of the war in hospital in Vienna. After the war, he stayed on to study art history and philosophy. Best known for his lyrical ‘diary' about the First World War,
Dnevnik o Čarnojeviću
(
Diary about Cˇarnojević
), published in 1921, and his novel
Migrations
(English translation, 1994), Crnjanski infuses his works with a sense of nostalgia and lost illusion. He interprets Serbian destiny as tragically influenced by foreign powers. Valued as a stylist and for the elegiac tone of his two most important works, Crnjanski remained outside the literary life of Belgrade during his years of exile. In 1971, he published
Roman o Londonu
(
A Novel about London
), a bitter account of the life of the émigré. He died in Belgrade in 1977.

VIKTOR SHKLOVSKY

THE DEMOCRATIC PRINCIPLE OF DISCUSSION

from
A Sentimental Journey

translated by Richard Sheldon

L
ATER ON, I REALIZED
that all these groups meant nothing in the army – neither the small-time ones nor the other kind. Moral authority was held by the Petersburg Soviet, not by any of the parties. Everyone recognized the Soviet, believed in it, followed it.