A MAGYAR PALADIN—A RITTMEISTER OF THE HUSSARS
Along the Road from Poland to Budapest
Told by Franz Molnar, Celebrated Hungarian Dramatist
The character sketch is from the pen of Franz Molnar, the celebrated Hungarian dramatist and correspondent in the field of the Budapest Az Est and the Vienna Neue Freie Presse. This war has been a war of anonymity. Its vastness has submerged individuals and individualities. It is the more interesting, therefore, to catch now and then some impression of personality and to find some figure standing out clearly and picturesquely from the mass. In Rittmeister Farkas, Molnar has drawn from life a character which epitomizes the romance of the war. This story is translated, and the introduction prepared by William L. McPherson in the New York Tribune.
I—STORY OF THE GUERILLA WARRIOR
One evening I notice in front of the General Staff Headquarters some General Staff officers in conversation with a little officer, two heads shorter than any of them. The little officer wears a dark hussar's jacket; his breast is covered with decorations, conspicuous among them being the Iron Cross. The diminutive but well set-up hussar is continually being embraced and patted affectionately on the back. He talks loudly and merrily. I hear that he has visited headquarters in the interest of one of his fellow hussars.
"You must stay here for supper!"
He stays. I sit opposite him and take a good look at him, for I have already heard much about him. The Army Corps Hoffmann is very proud of him; he is our guerilla leader, a legendary hussar type—Clemer Farkas de Also-Takach. Formerly he was Rittmeister of the 14th Hussars. Now he is commandant of the cavalry detachment of the army corps, the "Detachment Farkas." He has as many cavalrymen as an Oberst has in peace time. Therefore, his hussars call him "Herr Oberst Rittmeister." He has hussars, uhlans, dragoons, Ukranian volunteers—altogether a most daring collection of riders and fighters. Nearly all the cavalry regiments of the monarchy are represented in it. The organization is a good counterpart of the Hoffmann Army Corps, which has been constructed in a somewhat similar fashion.
The Rittmeister has a marked resemblance to a peppercorn. He is very small, very hard and very strong. A handshake with him is an athletic exercise. His glance is clear and open, like that of a ten-year-old boy. You can hear him laughing over the next hill. He cannot tell stories; nor will he. All that he told me was that his veterinary had saved the life of a little girl, taking twenty-three splinters of a Russian shell out of her body, and that thirty-six members of his family were in the field.
Rittmeister Farkas won his fame in Galicia. A Cossack sergeant rushed at him and tried to spit him with a lance. Farkas broke the lance under his armpit and then crushed the sergeant's head with the butt of a revolver. He gave the lance to the Heir Apparent. That was his first exploit. Then came his first "action." He is posted one day in Russian Poland with his hussars as support behind the artillery. A heavy Russian shell explodes in his neighborhood, and as it throws up the earth it uncovers a telephone wire. Farkas notices the wire, takes hold of it and follows it. The hussars dig up the ground over it and find that it leads to a farmhouse. They dig no further and conceal themselves.
Near the farmhouse is a well. Every few minutes a Russian peasant comes to the well, works the draw pump and calls something down into the depths. They seize the peasant and he turns out to be a Russian soldier in disguise. Farkas takes his favorite sergeant, Galambos, and three hussars, gets a long, stout rope and slides, with his four men, down into the well.
A yard above the surface of the water he finds a stone shelving and under the shelving an opening, which leads into a dark tunnel. Now everything is cleared up. This region was once an artillery practice field; no wonder that it is so nicely fitted out. They push into the tunnel and come to a telephone cell, in which three Russians sit by candlelight before a modern field telephone. From there the Russian field artillery is directed according to the information shouted down the well.
Farkas throws his revolver away. One of the Russians, knife in hand, hurls himself upon him. Farkas seizes the wrist of the Russian and breaks it, for he is a master of jiu jitsu; he instructs his men constantly in Japanese ring methods. Two Russians are killed. The one with his wrist broken confesses that the telephone cell is a signal station and that the little detachment is a signal patrol. He also delivers to Farkas a textbook containing the A B C of more than 300 light signals. Light signals are given with lamp groups, which consist of two, five or eight lamps. They can send almost any kind of news.
Farkas clambers up out of the well and makes good use of the book. With his hussars he goes every night on the hunt for light signals. Whenever at night the combination of two, five or eight lamps is in use signal patrols are killed or captured. It is plain that the Russians, before the war, must have instructed 30,000 to 40,000 people for this service. Many of these people worked in peasant clothes behind our lines in Russian territory. Farkas hunted down these signal devices in farm houses, windmills, in the midst of swamps and in the tops of trees. With ten to fifteen hussars he soon made 140 of them useless. In this region the Russians lost all interest in signal giving. Farkas had many times done his work on horseback; oftener he had crawled on his stomach. To his comrades he said that he had at last got some profit out of the many pictures of daring adventure which he had seen in the kino shows.
II—TALES OF FARKAS—THE HUSSAR
The Herr Rittmeister has taken a pledge; while the war lasts he will not drink, gamble or hunt. Of these three hunting is his only real passion. He would hate to be a bad shot. In the wall of the Nyiregyhazy barracks he shot his monogram with a pistol: thus, C. F. They made him pay for the damage to the wall. Rittmeister Farkas is therefore the only man in the country who has ever, out of his own pocket, built part of a barracks.
Once from a local train, which was running through the hunting preserve of a friend, he saw a deer. He pulled the emergency signal, shot the deer and then said: "Now go ahead!" For that he was put under arrest in the barracks for thirty days. Now, however, every one of his bullets belongs to the Fatherland, and his iron will, his daring, his mobile spirit, his technical skill, his great, romantic heart, encased in his small steeled body, belong, all, all to the Fatherland.
The Rittmeister wept when he heard that the Russians stood before the Bereczke Pass. He did everything in his power to get to that threatened point. So he became attached to the Group Hofmann, which in the fall of 1914 drove the Russians out of Berog and Marmaros.
About Christmas time in 1914 he is fighting in the Carpathians. On December 19 he climbs, with his hussars, the Vehikzi Brh Mountain, 1,600 metres high, and at night descends with them, in snow up to the arm-pits, to Firelopfalva, on the other side. He leads the march and kills the Russian outposts. The Russians are driven out of the village, losing 150. He cannot bring away the Russian weapons, so he collects them in a pile and burns them.
The Russians, who know him well, send three battalions of infantry and four companies of Cossacks against him. Three days long, until December 22, he stands off, with a few hundred cavalrymen, all their attacks. Then he sends his people back, remaining the last one on the spot. He keeps a uhlan sergeant with him to hold off the Russians until his troop has crossed the mountains. The two hide behind a rock. Farkas takes up his Mannlicher, with a telescopic sight. Suddenly the sergeant receives a bullet in his calf. Farkas would gladly retire, but he cannot carry the sergeant with him and will not leave him in the lurch.
About 10 a.m. the Russians begin to climb in skirmish line up toward him. At 10 o'clock Farkas, from behind his rock, shoots down his first Russian; at 4 o'clock in the afternoon his sixty-seventh. Up to the neck in snow, without a bite to eat, he keeps all assailants at bay. At 5 o'clock it is pitch dark. Farkas goes away, returns in a sled and carries off the wounded sergeant.
The Germans he likes very well, and they like him. A German general said to him: "Explain to me, please, what the rôle of Hungary is in this war."
Rittmeister Farkas showed his outstretched hand.
"Excellency," he said, "if this war is a box on the ear which we are giving the enemy, then in this five-fingered box on the ear Hungary is not the least important finger."
He is assigned for six weeks to the German Guard and receives into his detachment some Prussian cavalry. Between Uzok and Bereczke he climbs with them over the mountains and holds for six days, with 500 cavalrymen, a line southeast of Turka against 5,000 Russians, with seven cannon and ten machine guns. His cavalry troops form on the hill surrounding the Russian position. Farkas stands in a church tower from which he can see the enemy. He has three small flags—a green one, a yellow one and a red one. When the Russians develop to the left he puts the green flag out of the tower window. Then the cavalrymen on the hills to the left fire. He waves the right wing flag and other troopers fire from the right. The Russians turn about and then the yellow flag is hoisted and the fire comes from a third direction. Thereupon the Russians intrench themselves in a half circle at the entrance of a narrow pass; for they believe the enemy menaces them from three directions. While Farkas plays his tricks with the Russians the Prussian Guard accomplishes its work.
Farkas may now retire. On the way he meets a German sergeant major with fifteen or twenty infantrymen. He halts them.
"Listen," says Farkas, "I have been here for six days covering the Prussians so that they could march quietly. Reciprocate, please, and cover my troops."
"Glad to do it," answers the German.
So he develops a line with his twenty men in order to hold the Russians back, while Farkas withdraws his troopers.
For this Turka exploit the latter gets the Iron Cross.
The commandant of the Prussian Guard, General Baron Marschall, says goodby to him in a personally written letter and calls him a "brilliant Hungarian hussar officer."
He has already three slight bullet wounds, the tuft has been shot away from his shako, his pistol holster has three bullet holes (I am almost embarrassed to write this down, for it sounds like a copy of a romance of Dumas), his Attila is pierced in three places. There are two holes in his breeches, his shako is split from the top by a sabre stroke and one of his spurs has been shot away. Otherwise, God be thanked, he is unharmed. I am not confident that the reader will believe all of this. But it is sufficient that several thousand men here know that it is true and that I also know that it is.
III—THE KNIGHT OF THE ARMORED TRAIN
Rittmeister Farkas is a little wonder of the war; he is so unique, original and incredible in his way that I had to examine many documents and official reports before I was absolutely convinced of the truth of the stories about him. In November, 1914, he receives from Peter Hoffmann, who loves him like his own son, a gift especially suited to his adventurous character—two armored trains. Then he is happy. Naturally he steams with both behind the enemy's front, lets one run through a tunnel and stop near its exit, so that nobody can attack it, and starts back with the other to a certain factory building in which a Russian regiment is quietly enjoying a midday meal. With his single cannon he shoots off the factory chimney, which falls into the crowd of diners below. The regiment is panic-stricken. Then the armored train fires with four machine guns into the regiment, plants seven shells in the officers' quarters and creates such a confusion among the Russians that they arrive at Bereczke a week later than they had planned to arrive. Then he returns the armored trains to His Excellency with thanks. A little sadly he looks after them; for they were "as if made for him."
Meanwhile he constructs machine guns and creates a machine gun section and a section of mounted pioneers. Now his detachment has machine guns and pioneers. He looks out for all technical details and understands them all.
"In geography I know nothing," he says; "I know only thirty kilometres in front of my nose, but I know those kilometres well."
His pride is that he has never eaten before his men have. Once, however, he ate nothing after his men had eaten. On the crest of the Carpathians the Russians shot one of his horses. He let the cook make goulash out of it for the men, but he ate none of it. "Not because I couldn't stomach it, but because I loved the horse when he was alive." He preferred to remain hungry.
I talked with his troopers. They never speak his name without standing at attention. Out of curiosity I ask:
"Why are you so fond of him?"
They look at me and smile embarrassedly—old Landsturm men, with big mustaches, fathers with many children.
"We are everlastingly fond of him."
At last one of them gives this explanation:
"He leads the fight well."
So I learn that once in the Carpathians, when everything came to a standstill because the Russians delivered a terrible fire and there was no cover, he lay on the ground before them and cried:
"Here I am—as cover for you. Lie on your stomachs and fire from behind me!"
Complaints, which I sometimes hear, are directed not against him, but against his business management. At the first he paid twenty-nine kronen for each Cossack captured and five kronen for each Russian infantryman. The troopers, whom he has led in almost 200 fights and skirmishes, brought the Russians in so eagerly that prices fell—and fell very sharply. A Cossack went down to four kronen and an infantryman down to one kronen. Not because the Cossack is worth four times as much, but because he has a horse.
To-day, at noon, Rittmeister Farkas left us. God knows when I shall see him again. Tiny, clever, good-hearted, brave Rittmeister Farkas, mathematician, marksman, bridge builder, locomotive driver in one person, doctor, chaplain, letter writer and brilliant commandant of lonely, middle-aged soldiers, daring Herr Oberst-Rittmeister Farkas—a little red hussar's cap which becomes smaller and smaller in the dust of the road—you give me so many things to think about that at night I can hardly go to sleep.
Who is able to explain these men to those for whom they have been fighting for more than a year?