Lazlo’s Revenge

The earth trembled ominously. Nervous whorls shivered through knee-deep water under ferocious waves of cannonade piercing the air, crushing the breath from his chest and shaking the blood in his heart---one, then another, and another, and still another. An unyielding rain of destruction whistled overhead and cruelly pounded the earth, drowning out all natural humanity. The death he had come to expect lay all around him. He was not afraid---under the collapse of his world, death was his hoped for escape. He fell painfully back against the muddy wall of the freshly dug trench. Death would be a welcomed escape from the hell that gripped him. Welcome death. Save me from this grip of hell. Gasping frantically for air while splashing desperately in the putrid, muddy water, odorous and red-brown from the blood of the previous days’ slaughter his feet slipped from under him. Struggling to his knees he saw the horror-struck face of a comrade, a boyish lad he did not know, perhaps sixteen years old, mouth contorted into a scream he could not hear in the deafening din. The boy flew awkwardly through the rain, splashing face first into the muck below. His child-like eyes, so innocent, foretold the freakish story of his death---they would haunt Miklos. Eerily, a strange sensation gripped him---this lad had escaped the mindless madness---the devilish fury. Surreal . . . to wish the lifeless form now lying at ease, quiet and still . . . was his. The shelling ceased as suddenly as it began---an unexpected calm, broken only by screams of the dying and severely wounded, muffled by the incessant, driving rain. Struggling to stand, he reached down into the fetid water to turn the limp and lifeless body lying at his feet, as if perhaps he might still save him, but turning the lad revealed a fist-sized hole in his chest where his heart once happily beat. As blood drained life into the murky water, Miklos screamed! The shelling ceased as suddenly as it began---an unexpected calm, broken only by screams of the dying and severely wounded, muffled by the incessant, driving rain. Struggling to stand, he reached down into the fetid water to turn the limp and lifeless body lying at his feet, as if perhaps he might still save him, but turning the lad revealed a fist-sized hole in his chest where his heart once happily beat. As blood drained life into the murky water, Miklos screamed! He wouldn’t remember what he thought at that moment---he wouldn’t remember thinking at all. He only remembered climbing out of the trench, slipping, grabbing roots protruding from the steep sides until his foot struck something solid on which to push himself out. Glancing down he saw his own boot planted firmly on top of the head of a dead soldier whose swollen form leaned grotesquely against the earthen wall. A surge of fear and repulsion propelled him onto the rain-soaked ground above. Vaguely, he remembered running---running for his life---afraid to look back, in fear of who, or what, might be catching him. Run, run, don’t look back! Run for your life, before the cannons fire again! He slogged desperately through the muck and around deep, mud-filled potholes left by the shelling, and dodged past dead bodies, his mind hopelessly glazed. Only days before, the Armies of Hungary and Austria sent thousands of brave and ambitious young men to save the city, expecting to be heroes. They dug trenches and strung barbed wire a mere few kilometers outside the City of Czernovitz, the largest in Bukovina, but a frail barrier against the impending onslaught of the Russian Cossacks they knew would come. Hopelessly, the Mayor and Burghers of Czernovitz could only watch from a hill outside the city they loved, set precariously along the eastern slope of the Carpathian Mountains---offering no protection from an attack from the east. For so long, so many times, their ill-fated city, once the crown jewel of the Principality of Moldavia, was being over-run by evil, power-seeking madmen bent on the expansion of empires for their own enrichment. But . . . let me allow Miklos to tell his own story.