The New Hungarian Quarterly, 1967 (8. évfolyam, 28. szám)
Hungarian Writers ont he October Revolution - Gyula Krúdy: Ten Days' Vacation
8 THE NEW HUNGARIAN QUARTERLY “Come on, take it,” said Jóska Samu in a friendly tone. “There’s no bloody dynamite in it. You know darn well what it is!” And the Russian took it. The two fathers looked at each other and then quickly turned away. To hide their tears on the battlefield. (1918) GYULA KRÚDY TEN DAYS’ VACATION Do you know the old hills echoing to the songs? The old, peeling walls of houses, the sombre-sullen towers, the railway stations with lime-pits, the cages-on-wheels and the sad camps which have heard the songs, laments and desperation of soldiers for three full years? Do you know the trenches with their rats and the sentries crumbled to ashes and seeping away in the mud? The dearly bought marshes, the heights that cost millions, the villages and holes signifying countries, for which so much blood has been spilt that the winds must blow for years to dry the soaked lands? Do you know the hand-grenades, the gasmasks, the wirecutters, the identification strips sewn into the coat sleeves, the eyes of men saying good-bye, the splinters, the rag-wrapped feet storming forward by themselves after the shell has blown the body off, the hell-hit wounds deep as the past, the bullet-riddled bodies, the cries of the wounded forsaken in the moonless night, the gathering flocks of ravens which are the armies of Death appearing and disappearing on the horizon, the blood-sucking corporals and Nikolaievich and his companions? Do you know the fatherless children wandering in the streets, the gaunt war-widows, the soldiers on leave broken in body and soul, humanity degraded out of recognition, the sharp-eyed businessmen, the millionaires smelling of prison, the nurses on the run, the culture withered to nothingness and the conscience battered to death? Do you know the deserters, the arrogant shoemaker, the brazen oil magnate, the swollen cheese retail dealer bursting in his pants, the war banknotes smelling of sewage pits and of prison camps and the silent poverty biting like a fox cub? If there be a man happy enough to have seen nothing of the war during