The newspapers said the Hungarian Soviet Republic's troops were fighting on three fronts simultaneously, which was the kind of sentence that looks manageable in a headline and reveals itself as a catastrophe when you are one of the men the sentence is about.
I read the papers when I could find them, which was not always, because paper had joined the long list of things that the inflation had made expensive relative to what people could pay for it. The papers said the fighting was going well in the north, less well in the east, and did not say much about the south that inspired confidence in the south. The papers had the specific quality of papers printed by a government that needs things to be going well — the headlines confident, the details sparse, the gaps between the confident headlines and the sparse details large enough to drive considerable anxiety through.
I was still in Budapest in the month after the speech in the square. Not because I had not committed to the thing I had committed to when I stepped forward into the crowd, but because the thing I had committed to had, in the practical way of things, not yet required me to go anywhere. The recruitment offices had my name. They had my military record, which was extensive and which they had examined with the attention of men who understood that experienced soldiers were a resource the Soviet Republic of Hungary had in diminishing supply as the fronts consumed them. They told me to wait. They told me they would call for me when they needed me. They gave me food vouchers, which was the specific currency they had promised and which I found, converting them at the distribution points, to be worth approximately what food vouchers are worth, which is the food on the voucher and nothing more.
I used the time to look for my family.
---
The looking was its own particular kind of work, the kind that produces exhaustion without producing results in any consistent ratio. I went to the neighbours who had known us before the war and asked what they knew, which was various and none of it specific enough to be useful. My wife had left sometime in the second year, one neighbour said. Sometime in the third, another said. With the children — there had been two by the time I left, my daughter who had been two and a son I had not seen, born after I shipped out, whose existence I had learned from a letter that arrived eight months late and smelled of the front by the time it reached me.
Gone where, I asked. The neighbours did not know where specifically. East, someone thought. To family, someone else thought. The furniture had gone first, sold piece by piece in the way that people sell things when the money is not keeping pace with the prices, and then eventually the people had gone too, in the way that people go when the place they are in has stopped being the place they need to be.
I walked the streets of Budapest looking for my wife's face in crowds that did not contain it, which is a particular kind of looking that uses the eyes and the legs without using the part of a person that makes looking sustainable, and after enough days of it I understood that the looking was not going to find her in Budapest and that finding her was going to require information I did not have and could not currently acquire, and I filed this under the category of things that would have to wait until the other things were resolved, which was the same category I had been filing things into since I came home.
---
The call came on a Tuesday in the second month, which by that point felt like the Tuesdays in this book had always felt — like a day with opinions about what was going to happen in it.
A runner came to the building where I had been sleeping on the floor of the empty apartment, which I had continued to occupy on the grounds that occupying it cost nothing and the floor had become familiar in the way that uncomfortable things become familiar when they are consistent. The runner had a paper with my name on it and an address and a time, and I read it and folded it and put it in my coat pocket and went to the address at the time.
The officer who processed me was a young man with the specific exhausted efficiency of someone who has been doing administrative work for an organisation that is consuming men faster than it can process them. He looked at my record. He looked at it again. He looked at me.
"Western front," he said.
"Didn't fight there," I said.
"Eastern front then?"
"There years."
He wrote something. He stamped something. He handed me a paper with a rank on it that I had not held before — First Lieutenant, in the Hungarian Soviet Republic's army, which was a rank that came with responsibilities I had not been briefed on and which I understood, reading the paper, was being given to me primarily because the men who had previously held it in the units currently fighting in the east had, at a rate that the paper did not specify but which the urgency of my promotion implied, stopped being available to hold it.
"You ship out tomorrow," he said. "There's a train at six."
I took the paper and I went back to the empty apartment and I lay on the floor and I looked at the ceiling and I thought about the eastern front, which was the thing I had been not thinking about since I came home, successfully enough that I had almost convinced myself I had filed it adequately.
I had not filed it adequately.
---
The train east was full of men who had the various qualities of soldiers at various stages of their relationship with what they were heading toward. Some were veterans, recognisable by the specific economy with which they arranged themselves and their equipment in the available space, the long-practice efficiency of men who have learned that comfort is a function of preparation rather than circumstance. Others were newer, carrying the energy of men who have not yet had sufficient contact with the thing they have committed to and are still operating on the version of it that exists in speeches and newspapers.
I sat among them and said very little, which had become my natural state since returning to Budapest. The city had not given me many reasons to talk and the train was not providing new ones.
We reached the front in the late afternoon of the following day, the train depositing us at a railhead that had the specific quality of places that exist only to move men from one situation to another and have no identity of their own beyond that function — a platform, some buildings, the sound of artillery close enough to be specific rather than general.
They took me to the unit I had been assigned to command, which was the third company of a regiment whose name I will not trouble with because the name is less important than the condition, which was the condition of a unit that has been in continuous contact with the enemy for longer than continuous contact can be sustained without cost. The men in it had the hollow-eyed, economical quality of men in that condition — not broken, not incapable, but running on the specific reduced fuel that extended combat produces when the replenishment of the fuel does not keep pace with the consumption.
The sergeant who briefed me was a man named Fekete, broad and deliberate, with the quality of a man who has been keeping a unit functional through the force of his own consistency and would continue to do so regardless of what the officers above him were doing, which was a quality I recognised and valued immediately.
"Romanian army," he said, spreading a rough map on a table made of boards across two ammunition crates. "Coming from the east. They've been pushing steadily for two weeks. We've been holding this line." He pointed. "For now."
"How long," I said, "is for now."
He looked at me with the expression of a man who has been asked a question he knows the answer to and is deciding how directly to deliver it. "Not long," he said.
---
The morning of the battle began the way mornings of battles begin — with the specific quality of air that is going to contain things shortly that it does not currently contain, and the specific quality of men who know this and are performing the various individual rituals of men waiting for something they cannot stop from arriving.
I stood at the forward position and looked east toward where the Romanian army was and listened to the artillery that had been going since before dawn and thought about the eastern front.
I had not intended to think about the eastern front. The eastern front was the thing I had been not thinking about since before I came home, successfully suppressed under the weight of the bread shop and the empty apartment and the inflation and the looking for my family and the recruitment office and the train. All of that weight had been sufficient to keep it down.
The artillery was not sufficient to keep it down. The specific sound of sustained artillery at close range, combined with the specific quality of the air and the specific quality of the men around me performing their pre-battle rituals, combined with the smell of the morning and the look of the eastern horizon — all of it together was the same combination of elements that had been present on a morning on the eastern front three years ago when I had stood in a similar position and watched similar men perform similar rituals and then watched what happened to the similar men when the similar artillery lifted and the advance began.
I put my hands over my head.
I want to describe this honestly because I have been honest about everything else. I put my hands over my head and I crouched against the wall of the forward position and I was not in Hungary in 1919. I was on the eastern front in 1916 in the specific moment I had been not thinking about, the moment that the eastern front had produced that was the one the rest of them had been arranged around — the morning when the artillery lifted and the men I had been standing with went forward and the men came back in the ratio that that particular morning had produced, which was a ratio I had been carrying since without examining it because examining it required going back to the moment and the moment was not somewhere I had been willing to go.
The men around me were fighting. I could hear it — the rifle fire starting, the specific sounds of an engagement beginning along the line, the commands and the responses to commands and the sounds that were not commands and not responses but simply the sounds of what was happening. I was crouched against the wall with my hands over my head and the eastern front was in the same space as Hungary 1919 and I could not currently distinguish between them.
Fekete's voice, from somewhere close, saying my name. Not demanding. Not the bark of a sergeant to an officer who is not functioning. Simply saying my name, in the way that you say a name when you want to call a person back from somewhere they have gone that is not the current location.
I heard my name.
I heard the rifle fire. The actual rifle fire, the current one, the one that was happening in Hungary in 1919 rather than on the eastern front in 1916.
I heard a man scream somewhere along the line, which was the sound of a man who had been hit and was still present enough to register it, which was the sound that the eastern front had also produced and which existed in both places simultaneously for a moment that I had to choose between.
I chose Hungary 1919.
I took my hands off my head and I stood up.
---
Fekete was two metres away, watching me with the expression of a man who has seen something and has decided that what he does next is more important than what he has seen.
"Forward," I said, and then I said the thing after forward which in Hungarian carries the weight of now and together and there is no alternative to this in a single word, and I went over the lip of the position and I did not look back to see if they were following because looking back was not something my old commander had done and my old commander was the last clear image the eastern front had given me of how a man went forward into this kind of morning.
They followed. I heard them following. Fekete first, then the others, the sound of boots on ground multiplying behind me as the company came over the lip and moved east toward the Romanian line that was visible now as muzzle flashes and the specific shapes of men behind cover.
The fire found us immediately. That was the nature of advances across open ground toward men who have been told you are coming, which the artillery had thoroughly communicated. The rounds came in and men went down.
Private Horvát, who had been to my left, took a round through the chest that sat him down in the stubble of the field with an expression of pure surprise — the round had hit him between strides and the surprise was the surprise of a man whose body has received information his mind has not yet processed, and he sat with that surprise on his face while the company moved past him and the information finished arriving.
Corporal Szabo went down three steps later — not a single round but a burst that caught him across the thighs, both legs going simultaneously, his body pitching forward and his hands catching him before his face reached the ground, and he stayed there on his hands with his legs behind him already dark and spreading, still trying to push himself forward by his arms alone in the specific refusal of a body that has not yet accepted its situation.
I kept moving. This was not callousness. This was the only available response to the situation, which was the thing my old commander had known and the thing the eastern front had taught me and the thing I was now teaching this field, which had not asked to be a classroom.
A shell landed twenty metres to my right and what had been three men became a question of distribution — the blast radius having resolved their presence into something that the field received without ceremony, the smoke clearing to show a crater and a radius of scattered material that had been men a fraction of a second before and was not men anymore in any meaningful sense of the word.
I kept moving.
The Romanian line was closer. Fifty metres. Forty. The fire intensified in the way that fire intensifies when the thing it is trying to stop is getting close enough that the stopping feels urgent, which is both the correct response from their perspective and an indication, from ours, that we were close enough for the intensification to matter.
Private Nemeth, young, from Debrecen, who had told me on the train that his father had a mill and that he was going to run the mill after the war, took a round through the throat at thirty metres from the Romanian line and went down in the specific way of throat wounds — the sound it produced not a scream but something wetter and more immediate, his hands going up to the wound by reflex while his legs continued one more stride before they understood what the throat already knew, and he went down in the stubble with his hands still at his neck and his eyes still open and the mill in Debrecen becoming, in that moment, the specific kind of inheritance that wars leave to fathers.
Twenty metres.
Ten.
---
We hit the Romanian line and it became the thing that happens when two groups of men arrive at the same space simultaneously with incompatible intentions about what should happen in that space.
I drove into the first Romanian soldier I reached with my shoulder, the way I would have driven into a door I needed to open quickly, and the impact drove him backward into the trench wall and the breath went out of him and I had my hands on his rifle before he had recovered the breath, and the rifle became mine in the specific way that things become yours when you take them from someone who can no longer hold them, and I used it.
Around me the hand-to-hand had the quality that hand-to-hand always has in a confined trench space — ugly, close, without the distance that weaponry provides between a man and the consequences of what he is doing. Fekete was somewhere to my right, operating with the efficient brutality of a man who has been in this situation before and has long since resolved the moral questions it raises in favour of continuing to be alive. Other men from the company were in the trench beside me, the advance having delivered enough of us to the Romanian line that the line was being contested rather than simply held.
A Romanian soldier — young, dark-haired, with the quality of someone who had been doing this about as long as I had and had developed similar instincts about it — came at me with a bayonet from the side, the angle using the trench's bend as concealment until he was close enough that concealment was no longer necessary.
The blade caught me in the left side, below the ribs.
I want to describe this precisely because I promised honesty and this is the part the honesty is for. The entry was not the dramatic wound of stories. It was a pressure at first — a sudden, forceful pressure against my left side, the bayonet finding the gap between ribs with the specific accuracy of a thrust delivered by someone who knew where he was aiming. Then the pressure became something else as the blade went deeper, past the initial resistance of muscle into the space behind it, and what the space behind it contained began to register the intrusion in the specific language of internal damage, which is not pain in the ordinary sense but something more total — a disruption of the fundamental arrangement of the interior that the body registers at every level simultaneously, a wrongness that is both localised and everywhere at once.
Then the pain arrived.
It arrived from the inside rather than the surface, which is the specific quality of deep wounds that superficial wounds do not have — not the sharp, defined pain of a cut but something that radiated outward from the point of entry in waves that included organs I had not previously been specifically aware of and was now very specifically aware of, each wave carrying the specific information of what the blade had passed through and what it was currently touching and what it was doing to both.
The Romanian soldier pulled the blade free, which was a second event entirely — the withdrawal reopening the disruption in reverse, the blade's exit path producing a sensation that I cannot describe more precisely than to say that it made the entry feel like the lesser of two moments.
I was against the trench wall. I did not remember putting myself against the trench wall but I was against it, my left hand pressed to my side in the reflex that all wounded men share regardless of military experience, the reflex of pressing on the wound as if pressure could undo what has been done. The blood came between my fingers in the warm and steady way of serious internal bleeding — not the fast arterial spray of certain wounds but the deep, patient flow of something that has found its way out and intends to continue finding its way out regardless of what the hands pressing against it have to say about it.
The fighting continued in the trench around me. I was aware of it in the diminishing way that a man becomes aware of things around him as the thing happening to him becomes the primary fact of his situation. Fekete's voice somewhere. The specific sounds of the hand-to-hand resolving — some of it toward our side, some of it toward theirs, the trench negotiating its ownership in the way trenches do.
I thought about the empty apartment. The pale rectangles on the floor where the rugs had been.
I thought about the bread I had not been able to buy.
I thought about my daughter, who was five now and would not remember me as anything except the photograph, and my son, who had not met me at all and would not have the photograph as even that.
I thought about the eastern front and the morning that had been the one all the others were arranged around, and I understood, with the clarity that sufficient blood loss eventually provides, that the thing I had been not thinking about since 1916 was not going to require not-thinking about anymore, because the thing that had been requiring the not-thinking was about to resolve itself into a different category entirely.
The trench floor was cold. Hungarian earth, which was the earth I had left three years ago and returned to find different from how I had left it, the way everything I had returned to find was different from how I had left it. I was lying on it now, which I had not been doing a moment ago, the transition from standing to lying having occurred without my having made a decision about it.
Fekete's face appeared above me. His expression was the expression of a man who is assessing a situation honestly and is finding the honest assessment difficult.
"Hold on," he said, which was what men say when they do not have anything else available to say that is both true and useful.
I did not tell him I was holding on. I was holding on in the specific way of a man who has run out of the thing you hold on with and is now simply present in the last moments of presence, the way a lamp is present in the last moments before the fuel is gone — still giving light, still recognisably itself, but the quality of the light changed in a way that anyone looking at it could see.
The Hungarian earth was cold against my face.
The trench around me was doing what trenches do when they are being contested — the sounds of it continuing, the men in it continuing, the situation continuing regardless of any individual's participation in or departure from it.
I thought, at the end, about bread. The specific dense dark rye bread of the bakery on Rákóczi út, still warm, smelling of yeast and the specific sweetness of recently baked things. I had not been able to buy it. I had come home from three years of war and walked to the bakery and found the last loaf and been unable to buy it, and that had been the first thing the peace had shown me about what the peace was.
It was a small thing to think about at the end. It seemed to me, thinking it, the right size of thing — not the lost lands or the inflation or the empty apartment or the eastern front morning or the blade in my left side, but just the bread, warm and dense and exactly as I had imagined it, sitting on the shelf behind the counter while the clerk watched me not be able to buy it with the patient resignation of a man who had watched this same thing happen to many people.
I would have liked the bread.
The trench was cold and the fighting continued and the Hungarian earth held me the way earth holds everything eventually, which is without preference and without ceremony, just the fundamental fact of the ground being there when there is nowhere else to go.