“‘No!’ growled the recruiting sergeant roughly. ‘We have heard all about you and your trickiness. Come along now before we make you.’
“Then Racoszky became like a madman. He tried to break away from them and run back to his suffering wife. All in vain. They clubbed him insensible with their pistol butts, handcuffed him and took him away to Koloszvar, where the regiments were forming. For whole weeks thereafter he remained like one distraught. It was then that I first met him and learned the story. Finally a sort of dreadful calm came over him. He no longer raved nor wept nor tried to escape. His face lost all expression and he went methodically about his work like a person in a trance.
“Word had come that his old enemy, the count, had gone for his daughter and taken her away with him down the Danube to Vienna. All of the idle rich fled there when they saw there was really danger that the invading foe might overrun all Hungary.
“Poor Racoszky never has heard from his girl-wife since then. He never spoke of her to any of us until the delirium of this fever began to rack him. He became a terrible fighter. His ferocity in hand-to-hand combats with the Russians was appalling even to us who fought shoulder to shoulder with him. He was that way at Slovno, on the blood-soaked field of Lemberg, at Doukle in Galicia, where our great retreat first began.
“Then we came here to Przemysl, and Racoszky was among the first to volunteer to be one of the garrison which everybody agreed was doomed to certain death. I said to him at that time:
“‘Racoszky, my friend, why do you not go on with the main army? They are falling back upon Vienna, and there maybe you might see your cherished wife again.’
“He gave me so terrible a look that I never have dared mention the subject to him again.
“After that the army marched away and left us to our fate. Then came the Russian hordes, until the whole plain was black with them. They assaulted, they bombarded, they dug mines, and blood ran as freely as water. We beat them back. So then they camped all around us here like so many of their own Siberian wolves, waiting until the poor dog dropped from hunger and they could rend him limb from limb.
“We of the garrison all suffered cheerfully together. There was very little grumbling. The commandant’s hair turned white when we served up the roast flesh of his favorite charger as a delicacy on his birthday.
“Two weeks ago it seemed as if we all were about to starve at last. Only our spirits remained strong. Racoszky came forward and volunteered to lead a sortie out into the enemy’s camp if twenty men would follow him. He promised to bring back food, and did, but he came back with his legs riddled with bullets. All but two of them who accompanied him fell somewhere outside there.