Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [4]
The Hungarians had won the first round of the revolution. The departing Russian troops looked even shabbier than the Hungarian civilians, at least by the spit-and-polish traditions of the British armed services. But what the Russians lacked in spit and polish they made up for in numbers and sheer ferocity. The first time I tried to photograph a column of tanks, an officer shouted a warning at me from the open cupola of his tank’s turret, and when I didn’t put the camera away fast enough, his machine gunner pointed his weapon straight at my head for emphasis. The expression on his face—he had the thickest, blackest eyebrows I had ever seen on a man, and was a dead ringer for Leonid Brezhnev—made it plain that nothing would give him more pleasure than putting a burst right into my chest. I decided then and there that SIS would have to do without any photographs from me.
The few days after the Hungarian insurgents appeared to have fought the Red Army to a standstill were at once euphoric and unsettling. We felt we were living in the calm before the storm, as the new Hungarian government struggled for international diplomatic and military support, neither of which was forthcoming. There were ominous rumors that the Russians were gathering reinforcements from the Ukraine to retake the city. In the meantime, the bodies in the streets were being picked up at last. They lay there, Russian and Hungarian, sprinkled with lime to mask the odor of death, faces covered with brown wrapping paper or old newspapers, sometimes with a few fading flowers at their feet. Many of the dead Russian soldiers lay on their backs, their hands frozen in positions of supplication or anger, their heavy greatcoats spread around them on the pavement; most of the Hungarian corpses were laid out with more care, the arms folded neatly across the chest, one hand over the other. Not a few had a piece of shirt cardboard tucked under the hands with a name written on it in big block capitals.
The Russians announced their return in force early on November 4, with a massive artillery barrage that began at three in the morning, lighting up the sky all around the city. There had been plenty of signs that they were coming, but nobody had wanted to believe them. Longdistance calls produced no reply or were answered in Russian, while radio stations all over the country closed down one by one, and trains that left Budapest failed to return. In the streets, the feeling was one of fatalism, a Hungarian national character trait even under the best of circumstances. The only optimism to be found was among the American correspondents lined up at the bars of the major hotels.
My own spirits were not exactly buoyed by the sight of barricades of cars, street-lamp poles, trams, and tram rails going up in the streets. I did not think they would hold back the Russians for very long, which shortly proved to be the case. The constant rolling thunder of the big guns, the scream of incoming shells, and the deafening crash as they hit some apartment building or monument seemed exciting at first but soon began to oppress. The cold, gray, cheerless sky of Mitteleuropa in late autumn was obscured by a low-hanging pall of greasy black smoke from fires and explosions, and the air smelled of cordite, burning gasoline, diesel fumes, clogged drains, and death. Clouds of gritty plaster and cement dust rose from each hit. Shards of broken glass, chunks of masonry, and pieces of white-hot shrapnel hissed and whizzed past my ears. All too soon, however, noises began that made the artillery barrage seem comforting by comparison: the sharp hammering of machine guns, the high-pitched