by ANDRZEJ STASIUK
This is the route taken by the Russians in the winter of 1914 as they tried to gain control of the Carpathian passes. If they had succeeded, the Hungarian Plain, Budapest and Vienna would have been within their range, and who knows what the world would have looked like nowadays? Fortunately, matters took a different turn, and now I can imagine the Russian infantry in their grey greatcoats wading through the snow towards the lowland passes at Radocyna or Konieczna. They’re carrying rolled-up blankets on their backs, and the bayonets fixed to their rifle barrels look like long skewers – no good for anything but stabbing. You couldn’t use them to slice bread or open tins, as you could with the Austrian or the Prussian ones. The village buildings have burned down and there’s no shelter. They have to wade through deep snow under bombardment from highland artillery, under fire from Schwarzlose and Maxim machine guns. The world has three colours: the white of the snow, the muddy brown of the earth torn open by shells, and the red of blood. As I look at old black-and-white photographs, only the red is missing. Everything else makes sense – it’s all monochrome, greyish-brown, leafless and steeped in mud. The soldiers live in dug-outs, huts and torn tents; their way of life is like a gypsy encampment or a refugee camp, the only difference being that they are under constant threat of death.
I found the old photographs in a museum in my county town. It’s a small museum, designed to display the long, rich and complicated history of the entire region. But half its exhibition space is occupied by the First World War; compared with those few dozen months of war the rest of the long and complicated history emerges like a brief episode. Apart from all this, there’s construction work going on in the basement, and when I asked what’s going to be there, the head of the museum replied: “A waxworks display.” Apparently it will include figures of Emperor Franz Joseph, the Good Soldier Schweik and the top commanders of the campaign from the Austro-Hungarian, Prussian and Russian sides, and one Pole who commanded an Austro-Hungarian infantry regiment.
So it emerges that the First World War, or rather one of its episodes, is the most important thing to have happened in my area. You could say it is the only event of world significance to have befallen the south-eastern corner of Poland. In fact, Poland did not even exist on the maps at the time, because it was partitioned between three empires, but it did in some way take part in the European and the world game. Ultimately, in a way the First World War was a cosmopolitan war, at least from the Austro-Hungarian perspective. Who knows if sentimental feelings about those days, or even special memory of that war do not arise out of nostalgia for an era when a person’s own regional national identity was part of a larger, universal reality in a natural way. Quite possibly, as time goes by, we tend to perceive the “prison of nations”, as the Austro-Hungarian Empire was called in those days, as something like a prototype, albeit an imperfect one, for a united Europe. This conviction is naïve and sentimental, of course. Nevertheless, right here in the south of Poland, in Galicia, in the former Austro-Hungarian partition, the conviction that the First World War was also “our” war runs quite deep, as does the belief that Emperor Franz Joseph was very much “our” Emperor. Not in his wildest dreams could Kaiser Wilhelm have expected anything like that, not to mention Tsar Nikolai.
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