Csardas (18 page)

“Sight and fire... carefully!”

It was easy to pick them off when they were this close. Moreover the Russians had no protection, no gun carriage to shelter behind. Six more went down; another was wounded and turned, holding to the neck of his horse. Three of them finally came round the end of the carriage, right on top of the men. The watcher, the one who had been told to look to the far side of the track, was hacked to bits by a sabre before Karoly was able to shoot the horseman. The remaining two slithered forward in the mud and were shot at point-blank range by the hysterical artillery men. The rest of the Russian troop vanished back into the trees.

Karoly worked his way back to Adam. The farmer, unruffled, was lying quite alone, sighting and firing.

“I don’t think they’ll come back,” he said. “They will wait in the woods until we grow tired, or they will circle round and pick us off from the rear. I think we must move now.”

Karoly stared at the deserted end of the gun carriage.

“Where are the Moravians?”

“Ran back into the woods. Most of them were shot, I think.”

Adam crawled forward and began to release the horses from the carriage. One was lying in the mud whimpering with pain. High up on the beast’s front leg a splinter of bone stood out through the flesh and Adam stared down, then softly placed his good hand on the creature’s neck. “Poor old fellow,” he whispered. “Poor, poor old fellow.” He gentled the muzzle for a second, placed his bandaged hand over its seeing eye. The horse quietened. Small snorts of pain came from the nostrils, but the touch of the farmer appeared to give reassurance. Adam’s face was drawn, no longer impassive or logical. Beneath his sodden hair and cap he looked old, the way he would look when he was seventy. “Poor old fellow,” he said again, and then fired his revolver into the back of the beast’s neck. Instantly he stood, turning away from the dead animal back to his men.

“Who is wounded?” he asked.

One of the troopers had been shot in the thigh. Adam nodded deferentially to Karoly, waiting for him to organize the escape.

“Can you ride, Kovacs?”

“Yes, Lieutenant.”

“Lukacs! Take Kovacs up before you. You two go first; we will cover you for a few moments. Back through the woods behind, then skirt down as you can to the river.”

“Sir!” Behind the shelter of the gun carriage the wounded man was assisted onto one of the remaining mounts. His face was white but he said nothing, only gripping tightly to the neck of the horse. Lukacs climbed up behind and the two men bent low over the horse as it pulled its way through the mud. Behind them a sloping incline formed by the boles of a huge oak tree gave a rough kind of ramp for the horse. Spurred, it went as fast as it could. Rifle shots cracked but the men were unharmed and disappeared into the forest.

“Anyone whose horse is lame, start leading.”

One by one the walking cavalry, pulling at the reins of their sick beasts, hurried up the ramp, missing rifle fire as best they could and plunging thankfully into the dripping trees.

“Three horses left,” said Karoly. “Everyone else must go on foot—now! Three of us will remain to draw their fire for a little while, keep them from pursuing the walking men.”

“I think, once they have the gun, they will not follow too far.”

“I shall remain,” continued Karoly, ignoring Adam’s logic again. “We need two more.”

“I am a better shot than most of you,” Adam said contemplatively.

‘“But your hand is injured.”

“I am still a better shot than most of you.”

“Very well. One other.” He was waiting for one of his dismounted hussars to come forward. It was a chance for the cavalry, the outdated, useless, wasteful cavalry, to show they were still the elite corps of the Imperial army, to prove there was still something they could offer in a modern war—courage—the cold drawn-out courage that could stand against a troop of Cossacks for an hour while the walking soldiers made their escape. He stared at the surly faces of his troopers, reflecting that even after all this time he didn’t really know any of them. Several of them were Polish, a few Slavs, some but not many Hungarians. They didn’t move.

“I will stay, sir. I can ride a horse and shoot.”

A middle-aged man, Hungarian, and talking to Adam, not him. One of the artillery team, a swarthy, middle-aged peasant with big square hands and a heavy face.

“Thank you, Marton.” Adam nodded at the peasant; they were not unlike each other, Karoly thought briefly. Adam, a Kaldy, younger son of an ancient family, and Marton, the peasant-bred gunner—how strange they should be so similar. He was ashamed of his troopers, humiliated before these two stocky fellows who now, phlegmatically, put their rifles to their shoulders and stared into the wood.

“Very well. Unless anyone else wishes to stay and give cover to his comrades, you may now retreat into the woods. Make your way to the river. We shall re-form on the other side.”

They didn’t look at him, but they did look at the horses, covetously and with calculation. Karoly placed his hand on his revolver. “Go!” he shouted. They ran up the incline. Shots were fired but no one was hit, and the wood was filled with rustlings and the noise of feet thrashing through wet leaves. The noise receded and they were alone, three of them, scanning the forest to see from which direction the attack would come.

‘“Shall we fire? Just to let them know we are still here, that the gun has not been abandoned?”

Adam screwed up his eyes and stared into the gloom. It was only midafternoon but the leaden sky and dark trees made vision poor. “No,” he answered. “Let them grow careless. Perhaps we can frighten them a little.”

They waited: five, ten minutes. “Over there,” Karoly said softly. There was a glimpse of movement between two trees. Adam fired and a figure toppled forward from behind a beech trunk. A sensed tension: the wood growing quiet again; water, rustlings, the stirrings of the three horses loosely tethered behind them.

“Now!”

They came galloping through the trees. Sabres had been abandoned and each rider was shooting from a revolver in the right hand. The steep slope—no convenient incline on that side, thank God—had been churned by their previous attacks into a treacherous precipice. As they slithered down, the first ones were easily picked off by the three in the shelter of the gun carriage. The riders behind tried to turn and get up again, stumbled, fell. More fire came from the Cossacks hidden in the trees. Bullets whistled close to the gun carriage, the horses whimpered, and Adam, sighting and firing, systematically picked off another two riders. A gasp, a stifled scream, came from close beside them, but there was no time to turn. The last Cossack scrambled up the muddy bank and spurred back to the advancing gloom. Silence.

“My gunner is wounded,” said Adam quietly.

Karoly turned from his tense scrutiny of the forest. Marton lay beside him, a bubble of blood welling from a hole in his throat, another from between fingers clasped tightly over his belly. He was alive, and his eyes were brilliant. A sick noise of phlegm and gurgling blood came from his throat.

“Oh, God!” said Karoly. Adam leaned forward and prized the man’s hands away from his stomach. He stared, then released them and let them spring back. The bubble of blood from the throat welled out into a thick red mess, and Marton gurgled and heaved. From his mouth issued a spume of yet more blood.

“Take the horses into the forest,” Adam said quietly. “Take them now.”

“I shall not leave you here! To face the Russians alone with a dy—wounded man for company.”

“Take the horses.”

“No! We will get him over a horse and leave together. You and he leave and I will cover you!”

The body of the gunner was rigid, like a piece of bowed steel. His hands over his stomach were wet and red; not even the rain could wash the blood away quicker than it seeped from his body. His eyes had now lost their first agonized brilliance and were oblivious of everything except pain as he choked, vomiting blood and bile.

“Please, Karoly Vilaghy, do not argue any longer. This man is one of my peasants, from my land. He is dying. Please leave us. It is my wish.”

“Oh, my God!”

He scrambled to his feet, moved crouching to where the horses were standing, and gathered the reins in his hands. “Let me charge them. Draw the fire from you; perhaps one of the men will come back from the wood to help you.” His own frustration was making him talk wildly, foolishly. He was helpless, furious, and he felt it could only be relieved by charging into the Russian guns.

Adam’s green eyes gazed at him without expression. “Please,” he said quietly. “He suffers. Go now.”

Sobbing, raging, he ran up the muddy incline, pulling the horses with him. They slipped, fell, righted themselves, but curiously there were no shots from the forest on the other side of the track. He urged the tired horses deeper into the trees, then mounted one of them and waited.

A single shot, a pause, a sound of feet trudging through mud. Adam was stumbling towards him, his face screwed into a mask of misery. In his hand he held his revolver and down the front of his trench cape a stain of blood was rapidly being washed away by the rain.

“Adam?”

Adam walked past him. Some little distance away he stopped immediately before the trunk of a young beech, wrapped his arms round it, and pressed his head against the bark. A violent paroxysm shook his square frame, a shuddering that spread to the tree and made the wet leaves fall to the forest floor. Karoly, all frustration and anger now dispersed by the fear that Adam had become deranged, moved forward with the horses.

“Adam?”

He watched the stocky figure rocking, saw his filthy hands gripping the trunk as though he wanted to make the tree part of him. From the branches overhead rain dripped on both of them. It was gloomy, endless, and, apart from the noise of water, silent. Finally, some alchemy of the forest seemed to quieten Adam; the sheer size and infinity of it pervaded his distress and he rested motionless against the trunk.

“Adam, old friend. It is dangerous to stay here—they will come at any moment. We must try and get down to the river.”

“Yes.” He turned and climbed awkwardly up onto one of the mounts. As though at a given signal, a burst of firing came from the track they had left behind them.

“Ride!” screamed Karoly. Adam, galvanized into action, bent low over the horse and kicked it into a gallop between the trees. For a few moments they rode together; then the encroaching gloom and the difficulty of finding a clear path made them draw apart. Rifle shots were still coming from behind, and the last glimpse Karoly had of Adam was of him systematically winding over to the left, where the River San was supposed to be.

He did not see Adam again during the retreat. It was impossible to stop and search, to ask and be answered, to examine every haunted face trudging through the mud.

Back to the Wisloka, back to the Dunajec: 350,000 men and Galicia lost, the army broken, the fortress of Przemysl besieged. In November, behind the River Dunajec, they tried to re-form and support the German attack on exultant Russian lines. Forward a little, with the dead littering the field like careless confetti, then back to the Dunajec again. The mud had frozen now and a thin layer of snow hid some of the ravages of 140 miles of battle and retreat. Victor and vanquished, tired, frightened, cold, settled into winter lines, waiting for the spring when the gods who led them would order once more the charges and countercharges across the Polish landscape.

Stefan Tilsky returned, trudged into the abandoned farmhouse they were using as headquarters. He had lost his horse early in the retreat and had walked most of the way back to the Dunajec. They greeted each other with an affection bordering on hysteria. To recognize an old face, to be able to meet up in their right and proper unit after the destruction of the army—surely it boded well for the future, surely it was an indication that the authorities were still capable of organizing and directing the war?

A few days after Stefan returned, Karoly found himself thinking more and more of Adam. His anxiety was out of all proportion to the length of his acquaintanceship with the younger son of the Kaldys. They had met only briefly during the golden summer of the Ferenc sisters, and Adam had inspired little rapport or remembrance. Karoly mostly recalled him wandering round his fields, giving orders to his peasants and playing with a host of modern but inefficient-looking machines. In company, at parties and picnics, he spoke little. He had been an agreeable background figure, nothing more.

But he kept remembering Adam, the bandaged hand, the unruffled sighting and firing, the painstaking logic, the shooting of the horse, the wounded man, Marton. In the cold, lengthening nights, sleeping in the upstairs room of the farmhouse with Stefan and two brother officers, he lay staring at the ceiling, picturing Adam rocking in misery against the narrow trunk of the beech tree. He tried to imagine if he could have done what Adam had done. If Stefan Tilsky, now, were wounded as Marton had been wounded, could he have done it? But then that was not a fair comparison. Tilsky was a fellow officer, an aristocrat, while Marton had been a peasant. Pondering, reflecting, many things became clear. Marton: why did he look so like Adam Kaldy? The resemblance was very noticeable. “This man is one of my peasants.” Yes, of course, the man, older than Adam, could have been a bastard son of the old Kaldy grandfather; perhaps he was even Adam’s own brother. That might explain why he had done what he had, feeling responsibility towards a peasant with Kaldy blood. But even so, even with that explained away, could he, Karoly, have done it?

As the men froze into their winter positions, both sides content with a little spasmodic firing from time to time, the necessity to find out if Adam Kaldy had escaped to the Dunajec became an obsession. Finally he inquired at battalion headquarters for the whereabouts of Adam’s artillery unit. He was sent to company headquarters and there learned that Adam Kaldy was still alive, and from there he tracked down their new position along the river. The following day he rode across to where Adam must surely be. On a slight rise overlooking the river he found him camping with his men—his peasants—in a snow-bound gun emplacement. His pinched face lit into a swift, cheery smile.