But in fact he was plundering hen coops somewhere in the base.
The war changed the relationship between the batman and his master and made him the creature who was most hated by the rank and file.
The batman always got a whole tin of meat, where otherwise it would be divided among five.
His field-flask was always full of rum or cognac.
The whole day this type of creature munched chocolate and devoured sweet biscuits reserved for officers, smoked his master's cigarettes, cooked for hours on end and wore an extra tunic.
The batman was on the closest terms with the company orderly and gave him fat pickings from his table and from all those privileges which he enjoyed.
He allowed into the triumvirate the quartermaster sergeant-major.
This trio lived in direct contact with the officer and knew all the operations and war plans.
The unit whose corporal was friendly with the batman was always best informed about when things would start.
When he said:
'At 2.35 we shall start hopping it,' then at 2.35 exactly the Austrian soldiers began to disengage from the enemy.
The batman was on the most intimate terms with the field-kitchen and always liked to hang around the cauldron and give orders as though he were in a restaurant and had the menu before him.
'I'd like a rib,' he would say to the cook. 'Yesterday you gave me the tail.
And add a piece of liver to my soup. You know I don't eat milt.'
But the batman was always in best form when starting a panic.
When the trenches were being bombed his heart ran down into his pants.
In such times he was always in the most secure cover together with his luggage and that of his master. He covered his head with a rug, in case a shell)hould find him, and he had no other wish than that his master should be wounded and that he could go with him to the base as far as possible behind the front line.
He cultivated panic systematically by the use of a certain measure of secrecy.
'I've got a hunch that they're packing the telephone up,' he would say confidentially to the units. And he was happy when he was able to say:
'Now they've packed it up.'
No one loved a retreat as much as he did.
In such moments he forgot that shell and shrapnel were flying over his head and pushed on indefatigably with the luggage to staff headquarters, where the baggage train was standing.
He loved the Austrian baggage train and was very happy when he could travel on it.
In emergencies he would use the ambulance two-wheelers.
When he had to go on foot he gave the impression of being a completely broken man.
In that case he abandoned his master's luggage in the trenches and took only his own property with him.
Should it happen that the officer escaped capture by running away and the batman was caught, he never forgot under any circumstances to take his master's luggage with him into captivity. It then passed into his ownership and he clung to it with might and main.
I once saw a captured batman who had gone on foot with others from Dubno to Darnica beyond Kiev.
Besides his own haversack he had with him the haversack of his superior officer who had escaped capture, five handcases of different shape and size, two blankets and a pillow, apart from another piece of luggage which he carried on his head.
He complained that the Cossacks had stolen two of his cases.
I shall never forget that man who dragged himself in this way across the whole of the Ukraine.
He was a walking removal van, and I can never understand how he was able to carry off this luggage and drag it for so many hundreds of kilometres and then go with it as far as Tashkent, look after it and die of spotted typhus on it in a prison camp.
Today batmen are scattered over the whole of our republic and they tell of their heroic deeds.
It was they who stormed Sakal, Dubno, Nis and the Piave.
Every one of them is a Napoleon:
'I told our colonel to ring staff headquarters and say it can start.'
Most of them were reactionaries and the rank and file hated them.
Some of them were informers and it was their special delight to watch someone being seized and bound.
They developed into a special caste.
Their selfishness knew no bounds. III
Lieutenant Lukas was a typical regular officer of the ramshackle Austrian monarchy.
The cadet school had turned him into a kind of amphibian. He spoke German in society, wrote German, read Czech books, and when he taught in the course for one-year volunteers, all of whom were Czechs, he told them in confidence:
'Let's be Czechs, but no one need know about it.
I'm a Czech too.'
He equated being a Czech with membership of some sort of secret organization, to which it was wiser to give a wide berth.
Otherwise he was a decent man, who was not afraid of his superiors and looked after his company at manoeuvres, as was seemly and proper. He always found them comfortable quarters in barns and often let the soldiers roll out a barrel of beer at the expense of his own modest salary.
He liked it when his men sang songs on the march.
They had to sing even when they went to and from drill.
And walking by the side of his company he sang with them:
'And when it was midnight black The oats jumped out of the sack, Tantantara! Zing! Bum!'