Under the Frog by Tibor Fischer

Author:Tibor Fischer [Fischer, Tibor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: prose_contemporary

August 1952

It had only been a month but if he never achieved anything else in his life, that month would be achievement enough.

The camp had been at Böhönye but they had been met at Pécs rail way station by the sergeant-major who had been specially selected to shape up the university students during the four weeks he had charge of them, to mould them into lusty officers. The sergeant-major was in no way perturbed by the centuries-old tradition of sergeant-majors being sadistic, aggressive and very loud. From the start, he was out to prove he could be far worse than anything they might have imagined.

‘We’re going to be fighting World War Three soon,’ was his opening gambit. Like all soldiers he wasn’t too enamoured of peace – it didn’t give the military the respect and resources it considered it so richly deserved. But a peace which was simply a build-up to a world conflict was something the sergeant-major could stomach.

‘You are turds. Unspeakable turds… whom I am obliged to transmogrify into barely useful turds. My philosophy: my philosophy is to make life for you so unpleasant you will find war an agreeable recreation, a bit of light relief, and that you will die in a manner that will not disgrace the fine traditions of the Hungarian Army.’ (Which is about all Hungarian armies have ever managed to do, Gyuri thought.)

‘I expect some of you will be committing suicide. Indeed I will consider my work a failure if some of you turds don’t try a bit of wrist-slashing. And if you don’t do the job properly, we’re willing to help; attempted suicide is punishable by death.’ To be fair to the sergeant-major, he at least looked as if he knew something about soldiering: large, vigorous, confident, gnarled, the sort of person you were glad was on your side. A bastard but a competent bastard. ‘It’s all right, having a shaky officer when you’re in barracks,’ Tamás had told Gyuri at Ganz. ‘It’s not important there if it takes him two hours to find out which way up the map should be, but when you get to the front, you need someone good, or you get jacked. We had one officer called Kocsis. The funny thing was he had always wanted to be an officer, he came from a military family but even after going through the Ludovika, he couldn’t direct piss into a bucket, let alone direct a military operation. Within an hour of getting us to the front, he got us pinned down, and he was killed straight away by some Soviet who got through our defences, infiltrating brilliantly in a Hungarian uniform, speaking fluent Hungarian and having lived in Budapest for thirty years.’

The sergeant-major’s first threat: ‘When we get to our base, you will become acquainted with the parade ground. You will become so well-acquainted that if by some unheard-of miracle you survive, you’ll remember every crack when you’re ninety.’ Here, the sergeant who had been delegated as assistant,

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