The Quartier naturally stirred things up a good deal in Nagybiesce. There was one week when we could not go into the street without being surrounded by little girls with pencils and cards asking for our "autogram." The candy shop kept by two girl wives whose husbands were at the front did a vast business, and the young women had somebody to talk to all day long. The evening the news came that Warsaw had fallen, candles were lighted in all the windows on the square, and the band with the villagers behind it came to serenade us as we were at dinner. The commandant bowed from the window, but a young Hungarian journalist leaned out and without a moment's hesitation poured forth a torrent for fully fifteen minutes with scarce a pause for breath. I told him that such impromptu oratory seemed marvellous, but he dismissed it as nothing. "I'm politiker!" he explained, with a wave of his hand.
One day a man came into lunch with the news that he was off on the best trip he'd had yet—he was going back to Vienna for his skis, to go down into the Tyrol and work along the glaciers to the battery positions. Another man, a Budapest painter, started off for an indefinite stay with an army corps in Bessarabia. He was to be, indeed, part of the army for the time being, and all his work belonged to the army first. As this is being written a number of painters sent out on similar expeditions have been giving an exhibition in Vienna—portraits and pencil sketches much like those Frederic Remington used to make. Foreigners not intending to remain in Austria-Hungary could not expect such privileges, naturally; but if they were admitted to the Quartier at all they were sent on the ordinary group excursions like the home correspondents themselves. Indeed, the wonder was—in view of the comparative ease with which neutral correspondents drifted about Europe: the naivete, to put it mildly, with which the wildest romances had been printed in American newspapers, that we were permitted to see as much as we did.
When a group started for the front, it left Nagybiesce in its own car, which, except when the itinerary included some large city—Lemberg, for instance—served as a little hotel until they came back again. The car was a clean, second-class coach, of the usual European compartment kind, two men to a compartment, and at night they bunked on the long transverse seats comfortably enough. We took one long trip of a thousand miles or so in this way, taking our own motor, on a separate flat car, and even an orderly servant for each man. Each of these groups was, of course, accompanied by an officer guide—several were detailed at the Quartier for this special duty—whose complex and nerve-racking task it was to answer all questions, make all arrangements, report to each local commandant, pass sentries, and comfortably waft his flock of civilians through the maze of barriers which cover every foot, so to speak, of the region near the front.
The things correspondents were permitted to see differed from those seen on the other fronts less in kind than in quantity. More trips were made, but there is and can be little place for a civilian on a "front," any spot in which, over a strip several miles wide, from the heavy artillery positions of one side to the heavy artillery of the other, may be in absolute quiet one minute and the next the centre of fire. There is no time to bother with civilians during an offensive, and, if a retreat is likely, no commander wishes to have country described which may presently be in the hands of the enemy. Hidden batteries in action, reserves moving up, wounded coming back, fliers, trenches quiet for the moment—this is about as close to actual fighting as the outsider, under ordinary circumstances, can expect to get on any front. The difference in Austria-Hungary was that correspondents saw these things, and the battle-fields and captured cities, not as mere outsiders, picked up from a hotel and presently to be dropped there again, but as, in a sense, a part of the army itself. They had their commandant to report to, their "camp" and "uniform"—the gold-and-black Presse-Quartier arm band—and when they had finished one excursion they returned to headquarters with the reasonable certainty that in another ten days or so they would start out again.
Chapter XIV
Cannon Fodder
At the head of each iron bed hung the nurse's chart and a few words of "history." These histories had been taken down as the wounded came in, after their muddy uniforms had been removed, they had been bathed, and could sink, at last, into the blessed peace and cleanness of the hospital bed. And through them, as through the large end of a telescope, one looked across the hot summer and the Hungarian fields, now dusty and yellow, to the winter fighting and freezing in the Carpathians.
"Possibly," the doctor said, "you would like to see one of these cases." The young fellow was scarce twenty, a strapping boy with fine teeth and intelligent eyes. He looked quite well; you could imagine him pitching hay or dancing the czardas, with his hands on his girl's waist and her hands on his, as these Hungarian peasants dance, round and round, for hours together. But he would not dance again, as both his feet had been amputated at the ankle and it was from the stumps that the doctor was unwrapping the bandages. The history read: While doing sentry duty on the mountains on March 28, we were left twenty-four hours without being relieved and during that time my feet were frozen.
The doctor spoke with professional briskness. He himself would not have tried to save any of the foot—better amputate at once at the line of demarcation, get a good flap of healthy tissue and make a proper stump. "That scar tissue'll never heal—it'll always be tender and break when he tries to use it; he has been here four months now, and you can see how tender it is."
The boy scowled and grinned as the doctor touched the scar. For our English and those things under the sheet he seemed to have much the same feeling of strangeness: both were something foreign, rather uncomfortable. He looked relieved when the bandages were on again and the white sheet drawn up. "We had dozens of them during the winter—one hundred and sixty-three frozen feet and one hundred frozen hands in this hospital alone. They had to be driven back from the front in carts, for days sometimes. When they got here their feet were black—literally rotting away. Nothing to do but let the flesh slough off and then amputate."