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square or poof! disperse like sparrows when you shoot at them and then come back together cheek by jowl on command, the officers had to know what he meant when he raised his saber to the sky because a general can’t go shouting to sixteen companies, an orchestra conductor doesn’t shout at his musicians, Hey, you there, didn’t you see that hold? no, he’s got a baton, and it’s not for whipping, it’s for conducting, giving signals, though of course a general has to think about winning a battle and losing as few men as possible, they tried to promote me to corporal, but I refused, they keep putting you on guard duty or sending you out on patrols, you have to go to classes at the edge of the woods, where they draw all over blackboards and the lieutenants shout, NCO front and center! and you’ve even got to ask permission to do number one, and when you get to the front you start seeing all these unmistakable signs, the ammunition, the grenades, the wounded, one soldier got the trots, also known as diarrhea, from the water, some memory I’ve got, eh, young ladies? there he was crouching in a trench with his belt round his neck, and who should swing down from his horse but General Zelikowski shouting what a shit-house regiment they’d given him, shithead sons of bitches all of them! and he took his sword and gave the soldier a good whack on the back, I got to know the front like the back of my hand, the pandemonium, the men stabbing one another blindly, by mistake, too weak to stop, anything to keep the enemy from digging in, the officers on pins and needles, whole platoons wallowing in blood, horses and all, everything burning, trees flying through the air, orderlies piling the wounded on horses to take them off to the woods, and not a woman in sight, they weren’t allowed at the front, they stayed behind in the brothels of Przemyśl and Cracow, there were windows in the brothel doors and I’d peek in, one young lady once opened the door and said, Do anything for you, soldier boy? some of them did it for a loaf of bread, but Lieutenant Hovorka told us we’d be better off with nonprofessionals, it took a few chocolates, but then it was true love, I found a schoolmaster’s daughter who would do it for a nice white roll, but all I had was our army bread, so she kissed my hand and in exchange I told her about the time I spent in Split guarding an old freight car filled to the brim with ecrasite, which they used to blow up bridges and which looked like flypaper or a powder you buy at the pharmacy, and then I read her excerpts from the dream book, chatting with a young lady means a rash business venture, frolicking with a hussy at night means beware of beguiling words, and then I told the schoolmaster’s daughter in my best Polish that the young miss was pleasing to the eye and she told me that the young master was too and she hoped the shooting would soon cease, I was always the gentleman, which is why I was in correspondence with Europe’s finest beauties, in Ziegenhals I won the heart of an industrialist’s daughter, she wore a blue dress and a yellow veil and once, when I was rowing her across a lake in the woods and singing Mein Herz, das ist ein Bienenhaus, the boat started sinking, but I saved her because the lake was shallow, Anna Hering her name was and she wrote me pink love notes, our whole town was abuzz with who I was writing to, once she sent me a bottle of May Magic perfume that smelled like lily of the valley, I was trying to get out of the army by smoking cigars dipped in saffron, you had to be very careful not to let your fingers turn yellow so I’d bite them till they bled, which is in the same category as beguiling a beautiful woman, charming her with words, but as our late mayor used to say when he came into the bar to see whether the beauties there had beautiful calves, Anyone can get it for money, it takes a real virtuoso like you to pull it