Clerk Coloman was no longer with me. The Délibab had come to grief. I now edited the Vasárnapi Ujság, in the place of the publicly advertised and responsible editor Albert Pakh, who was lying ill at Graefenberg. My new name was "Kakas Mártin."[101] Eh, what a popular man I was then! There were Kakas Mártin meerschaum pipes and Kakas Mártin clays, with bowls in the shape of cock-headed men. I really was in the mouth of the nation in those days. O tempi passati!
[101] Martin Cock.
"Ah! 'tis you, brother, eh?" said I.
"So you still recognise me, then?"
I must admit that his physiognomy had considerably changed. During the campaign the officers were permitted to grow absolutely counter-regulationary beard-pieces. Wenceslaus was now bearded à la Haynau, that is to say, the beard was shaved so as to run into the moustache, till the two seemed one, which contributed not a little to the formidability of the whole face. But a still more notable correction of the features was due to his nose, which had grown quite red,—a piece of ruby.
He began by laying his index finger on the bridge of his nose.
"Do you see that? My sole booty from the Russo-Turkish war is this red nose. Last winter, while we were encamping on the Galician frontier, I happened to be out in the open field the whole of one night, and got in the way of a villainous Russian blast. The wind drove the powdered snow into my face, and each flake stung me like a red-hot needle-point. I was not even able to turn my back upon it. In the morning my nose was just as you see it now. That same week twenty of my men were frozen to death in their saddles, half of my regiment was down in the hospital with inflammation of the lungs, scurvy, and hunger-typhus. Of my whole squadron I only brought forty men home—and this blood-red nose as a trophy."
At this I did not know whether to condole with or congratulate him.
"I shouldn't have minded so much if only we had been able to fight with some one; but to go through a six-months' campaign without having anything else to do with one's sword than lay the flat of the blade about the shoulders of stubborn peasants during our requisitions for hay, that I do call hard. Sometimes our foreposts were so close to the enemy that we could see each other's breath, and yet we were not allowed to attack. At one time we were face to face with the Turks, at another time with the Muscovites. It would have been all one to me whom I pitched into, so long as I could pitch into some one. No such luck! Just when I was fancying that now we really were going to begin the battle, the order came again, 'Sheathe your swords!' and we marched somewhere else. I would have preferred storming trenches with cavalry to this sort of thing. And then that cursed maize-bread! Nothing but maize-bread, and not always enough of that. Half-roasted horse-flesh, too! Thank you for nothing!"
"But, thank Heaven, it is all over now!" said I encouragingly.