No Man's Land (28 page)

The Karst world was treacherous. When the men thought they were within a breath of reaching the expected plateau, where the Front's fire was spewing forth, a new depression showed up in front of them, into which they had to disappear. Whereas before they had been marching along in solitary desolation, now they suddenly stumbled upon people. The pathway led through an open camp. The basin provided excellent shelter, at least from the side that bordered on the East. In the semidarkness it was possible to make out columns of carts, the horses for the most part harnessed, some laying down beneath their wooden swivels, while others calmly chewed from their nose-bags. It seemed they didn't hear the artillery fire that ra-ta-tat-tatted right above the edge of the basin, or they were so used to it that it didn't bother them anymore.

Soldier-like figures also loomed up out of the dark, but none of them so much as looked at the marching ‘hundred'. The soldiers clearly had their own chores to attend to. Something snagged up at the front and the line couldn't carry on. Barfuss took advantage of the situation and turned to the dark figure standing to his right:

‘And where might we be now?'

‘Where – at Doberdob!'The soldier's voice was both astonished and derisive.

Barfuss was expecting to hear something entirely different. When he could see that he wouldn't get anywhere like this, he began to think:

‘You're safe here from the barrage.'

‘Safe, until the shit starts hitting the basin.'

The soldier disappeared into the dark. Meanwhile they started moving again up front and Rode's voice could be heard: ‘Left!' and no sooner had he said that, than they had to march on. Now they found it much easier to progress. It seemed they had turned directly towards the fiery plateau. Even so their feet did not protest. They'd had enough of this wandering around in the Karst labyrinth! But instead of reaching the plateau, the line descended into another, even deeper and darker basin. This presumably was even safer than the first one, since from somewhere out of the darkness at the bottom there were some small lights shimmering. They went past a steep wall and saw two brightly-lit entrances that were only half-covered. A soldier was on watch from one of them. Palir quickly asked him:

‘Have you got water?'

The soldier was a Croat and luckily could understand.

‘Water? You must be joking!'

Strange and somewhat corpse-like was the sound of these words in the night. Again something had stuck, up at the front. Half the soldiers slumped down on the stony ground. The figure of one crawled up from out of the dark background. When he came right up to the line, it became apparent that his head was bandaged in white. A wounded man…

‘Have you seen the hospital carts?' he asked in a barely audible, exhausted voice. He was German.

‘What hospital carts?' three, four voices asked in surprise.

‘But you're coming from the back-country, aren't you?'

Oh, yes, now they understood the question.

‘No, we haven't seen them…'

A pause. Beside the wounded German other figures soon appeared. They were all bandaged.

‘You waiting for transport?'

‘Yes.'

‘Are there many of you?' a voice from somewhere up ahead asked. It seemed to be Segal's.

‘Many. But even more are still there at the front…'

The questioners fell silent as if on command. Their throats were tongue-tied. Only then did they notice the stench of bandaging, iodine, Lizol and something else that they hadn't smelt before and that had a deep, unpleasant odour. Like clotted blood, like rotting flesh… In the meantime their eyes became accustomed to the dark and slowly they realized that they were at the edge of the scattered stalls of the field hospital. The wounded lay in front, in the open air, even though it was drizzling. Most likely those lightly wounded who were waiting to be transported. Out at the back were some tents and through the cracks lights shimmered, and through the blurry reflection, moving figures of the hospital corps could be seen. Yes, there a canvas cover with the red cross was fluttering as well… Didn't they hear some kind of groaning too? But it was impossible to make that out clearly, since the artillery went on with its constant bombardment.

Rode's command got them on their feet again. As they were going round the depression, they could hear a commanding voice behind their backs:

‘The carts won't be coming yet. Whoever's able, should go back on foot!'

The moans and cursing the command provoked soon gave way to the sound of boots clattering against the stone ground. To the right someone stepped out of the dark, vertical wall with a pocket torch. Turning to the nearby tent, he shouted:

‘Major Farkaš just croaked it.'

At that a warning voice came back:

‘Switch the light off, for god's sake!'

When the torch had been turned off, the same voice said:

‘Right you are! Then throw him out, so there'll be space for others.'

And the bandaging quarters disappeared behind the line of soldiers. Silently each one, lost in his own thoughts, marched on. In fact nobody was thinking any more. A blunt, suffocating feeling prevailed. The soldiers only felt their exhaustion and how much they craved rest. Is there no end to the slog? Where are we pushing towards anyway? Along the path sink-holes came one after another, here and there the edges overgrown with low bushes. Who knows if these were gorge-slits made by the shells or if it was the work of nature. They stumbled across a line of mules. The animals were marching slowly but for all that very sure-footedly. One animal snorted down its nostrils and Demark's face was spattered by wet saliva. He felt it as a warm, mute greeting and didn't even bother to wipe it off… From some sink-hole came the smell of coffee with rum. That was hard to take as it aggravated the already unbearable thirst. Everyone was relieved when the intoxicating smell disappeared.

It was starting to get lighter up ahead and the racket was becoming more discernible with each step taken. Because of the downpour of artillery fire it was hard to make out each and every explosion, but it all pointed towards the fact that they were approaching the fiery belt. Exactly at the moment when everyone started instinctively to crouch down, the head of the line changed direction; and they turned first right and then left, and then began to descend again until, against all expectation, they heard Rode's voice saying:

‘We have arrived?!'

At that moment they saw an elongated, dark shadow against the face of the hill. It was an ordinary, make-shift shelter, cut at an angle into the hill-face and covered with a short roof, from which wet tarpaulins hung down to the ground. The first ones to get there drew the canvas aside and from under their feet wet hay greeted them. Bed & rest? Yes, bed…

Their first impressions made them anxious. This can't be a reliable shelter! But no sooner had they thought that, than they were overcome by another thought: no cannon can be fired at this place! And then finally: high-command must know where they are putting their soldiers.

‘Lie down and sleep!'

Exhausted bodies fell on the rotten hay and soon the shelter was as quiet as if it were empty. And straight after that, day started to shimmer in the East.

Prežihov Voranc
*
was born, son of a tenant farmer, in 1893 in the village of Podgora in the Carinthian uplands of Slovenia close to the present-day Austrian border, at the time of his birth deep within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His writing life was framed by the First World War, where he fought on the Italo-Slovenian front line, notably the Isonzo at Doberdò; and by the rise of Slovene nationalism with the post-war collapse of the empire. His writing is marked by a rigorous but rich linguistic intensity, most clearly in his prose depictions of the poverty and class violence of the rural, farming life he was part of, and the effects of this on individual fate. Between the wars he was actively involved in the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and was imprisoned on a number of occasions. In 1944 he was arrested and interned in Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen. His best work was written in the mid to late 1930s, and it was then that his work began to be more widely known. First published in Slovenian in 1941, the novel
Doberdob
– from which the extract here is taken – is a vivid description of the savagery of war. Voranc died in 1950.

*
Place names are given as they feature in their respective languages – so, for instance, Doberdob and Doberdò are the same place in different languages. How to name a place was after all part of what the war was about. (Ed.)

*
He was born Lovro Kuhar, Prežihov Voranc being the nom de plume he later adopted.

WYNDHAM LEWIS

THE ROMANCE OF WAR

from
Blasting and Bombardiering

A
RRIVAL AT ‘THE FRONT'
for us was not unlike arrival at a big Boxing Match, or at a Blackshirt Rally at Olympia. The same sinister expectancy, but more sinister and more electric, the same restless taciturnity of stern-faced persons assembling for a sensational and bloody event, their hearts set on a knock-out. Somebody else's, of course.

We arrived at railhead at night and a battle was in progress. For a long time, as we moved slowly forward in our darkened coaches, the sound of guns had been getting louder and nearer. There was no moon or stars – all lights had been turned down for the performance. Only the unseen orchestra thundered away, before an unseen stage. We had to imagine the actors which we knew were there, crouching in their sticky labyrinths.

From the crowded carriage-windows, at last, sudden bursts of dull light could be discerned, and last of all an authentic flash had been visible, but still far away – angry and red, like a match struck and blown out again immediately.

We left the train, and finally we reached, I forget how, the fringes of this battle. We reached it unexpectedly. We were collected upon a road, I seem to think. Perhaps we were waiting for lorries to take us to billets – for we of course were not going into action then. We were not for this battle. We had no guns either. They could not be made quickly enough. We were just the
personnel
of a battery, with no guns, who had come to stand-by, or be parcelled out as reinforcements.

With great suddenness – as we stood, very impressed as newcomers in the midst of this pandemonium – in a neighbouring field a battery of large howitzers began firing. After this particular picture I can remember nothing at all. It is so distinct everything in its neighbourhood is obliterated. I can only remember that in the air full of violent sound, very suddenly there was a flash near at hand, followed by further flashes, and I could see the gunners moving about as they loaded again. They appeared to be 11-inch guns – very big. Out of their throats had sprung a dramatic flame, they had roared, they had moved back. You could see them, lighted from their mouths, as they hurled into the air their great projectile, and sank back as they did it. In the middle of the monotonous percussion, which had never slackened for a moment, the tom-toming of interminable artillery, for miles round, going on in the darkness, it was as if someone had exclaimed in your ear, or something you had supposed inanimate had come to life, when the battery whose presence we had not suspected went into action.

So we plunged immediately into the romance of battle. But all henceforth was romance. All this culminated of course in the scenery of the battlefields, like desolate lunar panoramas. That matched the first glimpses of the Pacific, as seen by the earliest circumnavigators.

Need I say that there is nothing so romantic as war? If you are ‘a romantic', you have not lived if you have not been present at a battle, of that I can assure you.

I am very sorry to have to say this. Only a care for truth compels me to avow it. I am not a romantic – though I perfectly understand romance. And I do not like war. It is under compulsion that I stress the exceedingly romantic character of all the scenes I am about to describe.