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?