A Story to Tell: Part 3

When we arrived at our destination we found that the resident troops had not moved out, because they did not want to spoil their weekend! So we had to do another 5 miles of marching to a farm. We were directed into an enormous stable build for 150 horses. It was the summer quarters of the Hungarian National horse breeding center. During the winter time the horses were stabled in heated winter stables! We boys put lots of hay on the earthen floor for comfort and warmth, and being tired and hungry we soon fell asleep. But after a few hours' sleep, nobody could bear the terrible cold. We lit the hay and warmed ourselves around the fire. However we were not careful enough and somehow a large stack of hay caught fire. Soon it became quite a large fire and as no one had any means of putting it out and in spite of the threat of air attack, we huddled around it and kept warm for the rest of the night. Because of this incident the troops moved out immediately. Finally we got some accommodation. The next day we were issued with pick axes and spades and began to work, digging trenches for the infantry.

A week or so later we got another order. We were sent to the worst place I had ever been to so far in my life. I still do not know: were we lucky when we went there by train or were we not? The journey lasted five miserable days in spite of being only 50 miles away. Already on the first day we were nearly frozen to death. There were some 50 or 60 of us huddled close together in the by now familiar cattle trucks. The large steel coach bolt heads iced up from our breath inside the truck, shining like huge white buttons even in the darkness. We lit a fire in the middle of the truck , with splinters of wood we tore off from the inside of the truck with our pen knives. Next morning we found a large hole in place of the fire. For food we were given one small hard crusted, regulation aged-loaf (of about three months vintage) at any odd time of the day with some weak soup of indeterminable vegetable base not even lukewarm by the time it reached us. We got nothing warm throughout the five days, not even a cup of tea or coffee in that hard winter of January 1945. Finally we left the trucks and we marched the rest of the way to the village we were assigned to. Oh, how this place looked!-with its 60 odd smallholders’ houses and two battalions of labour force.

We were billeted out into stables, given a pick axe and a spade again and ordered out to the Austro-Hungarian border, at the foot-hills of the Alps. Our orders were to dig tank traps in the frozen ground, under four feet of snow.

One morning when I was at the open field kitchen for my morning ration soup, one of the officers, a lieutenant from the first world war and a bank manager since, called me to him and ordered me to be his batman. From then on I was his servant . Although I (and the whole of my troop too) hated him, I stayed with him because I could stay in his quarters. This was in the school teacher's house. I slept in the kitchen after every one else went to bed. In the evenings I could listen to the teacher's family and the officers in discussions. It was, of course, a cushy job compared with digging trenches and tank traps with the rest of my troop. I considered myself very fortunate indeed while it lasted - cleaning, making his bed, washing his underclothes, ensuring his dinner table was O.K. But when he ordered me to examine his piles, I refused. I might have been a doctor's son but I was only an apprentice motor mechanic and I was not going to peer at his backside. He still ordered me to take the mirror off the wall and place it on the floor for his own examination but even this was too much for me and made me sick. He kicked me out straight away. So my well-being had run out in three weeks, and I was ordered back into the stables.

We - the company of 16 year olds, being the last to arrive at the village - had the worst stables, as all the places under any roof were already occupied by other troops. I joined the stable with the 14 lads I was originally billeted with. But as I was now the last to arrive (or to pay for my previous luxury) I had to be at the end of the row, next to and at right angle to the cows not more than two feet from the nearest rear! We had one storm-paraffin lamp to light up the long dark winter evening for a couple of hours during which time we tried to make inroads into reducing the number of lice we were infested with. Some of us felt that we would freeze solid in our sleep if the darned things had not kept us moving to scratch throughout the night! I personally also had a self-preserving occupation in endeavoring to train my neighbouring cow to do her private business as far away from me as her leash would allow. As I found out every morning, I wasn't very successful. My blanket just become part of the stable floor. On our off Sunday we played chess! One of my "stable mates" was a very good county chess player and he used to play simultaneous mental chess with all 14 of us on our makeshift paper board and he without a board. I have read about him since; he has played chess in international tournaments for the United States. I wonder if he has ever wondered if that practice in the stable kept him in training for future success.
There was another, not too edifying "activity" through the long, cold, dark nights in the stable. This was the card-less "wind" poker fuelled by our marathon diet of beans. The cows also took part in the game involuntarily and it was not infrequent that one of them won, though it was more difficult to decipher which one. We lived in this stable for two months in the company of the three cows. Each of us could wash and do our washing twice a month - except the three cows , they were cleaned every morning! - in a carpenter's wooden trough that was circulated about the other billets. The beans-course went on for six weeks without a break. Thin bean soup for lunch and thick for dinner cooked with a little sun flower oil ensured that we had permanent diarrhea. When it happened that one of us found a piece of meat or gristle, the gravy was washed from it in the brilliant white snow and the piece consumed with great appreciation. For breakfast we got a dish of hot water with the previous evening's leftovers. That, plus a loaf of the month old regulation Hungarian Army bread weighing about one pound was all we ate in a day. Almost always the mice had had their share of the bread before us but luckily for us they did not eat the crust! With that sustenance each one of us was targeted to dig 3 cubic meters of tank traps, shaped 3 meters deep by 2 meters in the bottom and 5 meters on the top, through 1 meter of snow and 1.5 meter thick of frozen soil with our pick axe and spade from dusk to dawn. Our gloves had been in shreds for some time, and our socks we complemented by stuffing straw from the stable into our boots. No wonder we had frozen feet, hands and ears. There were no effective medical orderlies about, only a self appointed old soldier with some paper bandages and what he called cod liver oil that was worse than any illness, and only ensured the continuation of diarrhea for another six weeks. The discomfort in those freezing conditions was difficult to bear. At our digging place we just slid away to answer nature's call and did it in the snow. We also used snow as there was, of course, no paper. Back at our "billet" we had to dig our own latrine trench at the end of the yard. We fixed a long pole alongside and above it to sit on. At night when the temperature dropped to -18degree Centigrade it was a traumatic experience even to make the decision, diarrhea or not, frostbite or not.

Even under these circumstances one of the officers arranged a birthday party for himself. For those who had reached a level of power or affluence the pleasures of life were not denied! For a few days we saw his large birthday cake in one of the windows. We longed for it even though there was a meter deep by 3 meters snow between us and the window. We hatched a plan. We dismounted the 10 meter beam from the beam well, "borrowed" a wooden sawhorse from the farmer, placed it on the well trodden path opposite the window, swung the beam across the wooden horse so that it just reached the window. Four of us sat on the beam at the path end and the one with most experience in getting through locked doors, climbed to the window and within minutes he had the window open and he was balancing the cake on his stomach climbing under and backwards on the pole towards us. The whole operation did not take more than 10 minutes. The distribution and digestion of the cake took even less! And as luck would have it, a heavy fall of snow by the morning covered any trace we might have left.

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Finally spring came. The snow melted and the frozen earth became a foot of deep mud. The trenches collapsed and the tank traps were half full of mud. It was quagmire everywhere. The days became longer and we had to dig longer, still from daylight to dusk.

One day the gossip went around that the company kitchen had a treat for us. We were to have pasta for the evening meal. The pasta was made by rolling the dough into a three feet diameter to one sixteenth of an inch thick. It was to be cut into little slices of two inches by a quarter inch. Before our master chefs cut the slices they stacked the rolled pastry into a pile of about 18 inches high. When they came to cut the slices they could not separate the rolled out pastry so they put big lumps of dough in the boiling water and dished out the lumps. A third of us, me included, had nothing that evening. We had an extra half a loaf the following day and the cooks were demoted back to the digging squad. We wondered if they learnt their lessons and will sprinkle flour between the rolled out dough in future.

With the longer days by the end of February, we had a chance to improve our hygiene. We were even marched off with all our belongings to a de-liceing place. This was a small purpose-built red-brick house with an entrance at one end into a room for some thirty persons. We had to completely strip off and put our meagre possessions into a steel basket that disappeared through a hole in the wall and passed over a very hot oven. The furnace was fuelled with wood below ground level. Then we had to pass over the heat ourselves and through a steam bath and shower and were shaved from tip to toe. For this we had to suffer during our marches later on as the stubble grew into prickly needles to attack a certain part of our anatomy. This was the first time in almost three months or so that we were really clean and it was a bit of a shock to our system.

Within days of our clean up we were given army caps, a choice of secondhand army boots and enlisted to be small-arms soldier trained with rifles and anti-tank bazookas one afternoon a week. This went on for two weeks till the 15th March, which is the greatest Hungarian national remembrance day in memory of the Hungarian uprising of 1848, against the Austrian dominated monarchy of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

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As a schoolboy scout, back in 1939, I think, I had recited that day's special poem by one of Hungary's greatest poet's, "Talpra Magyar Hiv a Haza It Az Ido Most Vagy Soha..." (Stand Up Magyar Your Country Is Calling The Time Is Now Or Never...) who was lost at that historic uprising at the 1st World War Heroes Memorial ceremony on the 15th March. So I well remember the day and that date. In fact I repeated this poem again in 1947 at the same place in a Rover Scout uniform that was the first to be seen after the war.

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But on that 15th March 1945 all that was just a distant memory crammed in under the greater desire to survive.
So at last our wish to get away from that village came true and we left. We started on our march, for 50km. in the same direction, east, from which we had come, so we nearly reached one of our former quarters.

There we were attached to a regular army group with a field kitchen. What luxury! For the first time we had a full bodied Hungarian goulash, meat, potatoes, onions, tomatoes and paprika in it! And seconds! We could not believe that there was so much food so near our labour camp. The warm spring sun on the Transdanubian dawns rekindled our spirit somewhat in spite of our hopeless situation. The delicate light pink flowers on the almond trees manifested the contrast between the balanced, peaceful beauty of nature and the raggle-taggle frightened humans like us, roaming on the roads. The old veteran sergeant roared at us to sing marching songs, and if he was not satisfied he demanded faster marching! The marching and the training lasted all of some eight days but it was at least organized with regular meals that tasted like food and we had night quarters in empty stables with straw on the earthen floor. We even kept the first Sunday since we left home. It was a day that only a few weeks ago would have been unimaginable to us. Also, at last it cured our diarrhea!

Then one morning before sunrise there was an all mighty roar at the stable door by the duty NCO ordering us to get ready to move on with our full gear. Then our dreaded sergeant arrived and really got us going. At the H.Q. we realized that this was not a practice. We were issued with rifles and bazookas and sent to the end of the street. It was the front line! One gunner company was already there to which we were to be the "foot" company until a more senior platoon arrived. I was ordered, with my bazooka, to dig out and sit in a fox hole near a bush and to make myself inconspicuous to the approaching tanks. I saw some Russian T34 tanks a mile or so away. That is when I found out that "blood is not always red" and could be rather messy! Luckily they did not move any nearer to me. Our relief platoon arrived, very tired, in mid morning so we could withdraw without incident. Just after noon, the platoon we left in the line, reached us and told us that the line was lost. We found ourselves in a great panic - official withdrawal they called it. We used to hear about this before but now we were experiencing it at first hand. So this was an "official withdrawal", when everybody lost their heads, ran away and all sorts of people were mixed up, loose soldiers, labour force gangs, Russia prisoners of war, cars with civilians, cars with Nazis, cars with Germans, lorries full of loot, animals, horse drawn carts, man- drawn carts, there was no end to the variety of transport and people on the move.

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