The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [23]
At first, we were assigned, along with all the others who mustered in Eperjes, to General Kray’s command. Kray was a Napoleonic Hungarian who led a brigade made up of Slovak march batallions, which meant that we’d be fighting with men who shared not only a common language but the experience of daily life, ritual, and labor. Kray’s soldiers were known for being good fighters because they worked the land and weren’t soft, and I had a deep sense of having done the right thing, feeling as though I had been called somehow to take leave of my father and Pastvina and to prove myself in the world.
Then, at the end of our basic training, Zlee and I were pulled from the ranks without explanation and led into a tent where a captain sat behind a desk made up of two trunks with a board laid across the top. He was Austrian, which was evident by his uniform, and spoke to us in a bookish-sounding Hungarian. He wore black boots that had a soft, worn gloss to them, and he fiddled with a riding crop.
“So, you are from one of Kray’s regiments,” he said, and began to pace behind his station and question us about our village, our parents, how it was we had learned to shoot so well. He seemed intrigued by Zlee’s insistence that he was an orphan adopted by my father and that we were brothers not of blood but of labor and the land.
“Labor,” he said. “You sound like a Communist. Don’t all mothers labor to bear their sons in blood?”
Zlee said that he had never met a Communist and so couldn’t say what one sounded like. What he meant was that he and I were as close as brothers because of the life my father had given us both. “Sir, I have seen him work on the land, and so I know what this Soldat will do in battle,” Zlee said, staring straight ahead as he spoke of me as a Soldat, which I was, all the while maintaining the soldier’s respect for his superior and never once making eye contact with that captain, who cursed and spat and said, “You know nothing of battle.”
Then he turned to me. “Und Sie,” he said. “Was haben Sie über diese Bruderschaft zu sagen?”
I don’t know why he switched to his native language then, but I knew enough German to understand that he wanted to know what I thought of this brotherhood Zlee spoke of. The summer before I signed up, I had studied the standard commands of the army so that I wouldn’t be turned away if they questioned me, and the language came easily. Could he have known this? Could he have known, too, that Zlee’s German didn’t go beyond twenty or so words because he had no head for anything that required study, from a book, that is? No, this captain was testing my loyalty—it was plain to me—wanting to see how I would respond if I was given a chance to speak privately. And so, thinking not in German but in a foreign language I knew, I replied in English, “Sir, there is nothing my father taught me that he didn’t teach him also.”
The captain looked surprised, smiled, and asked Zlee, “How is your English, Private Pes?”
Zlee, still staring doggedly at some point on the wall, said, “Sir, better than you might expect.”
A few days later, just before the entire battalion was supposed to move out, we were released from our regiment, given lance corporal stars to attach to our uniform collars, and boarded a train with a company of other soldiers going in the same direction, but not the same place.
That night, we arrived at a camp on the Duna outside of Pozsony. A sergeant barked orders at us there in the dark, where we stood at attention for what seemed like hours, until two officers showed up, and the sergeant snapped to attention himself and then receded. One, another Austrian captain, did all the talking, while the other, whose uniform was German but whose overcoat looked more like some Bavarian hunter’s, stood by, listening and surveying us there in the harsh light.
Nineteen sixteen