Budapest and Luanda, April 1897
“Three more Honvéd divisions cut off in Bosnia!” shouted the man on the platform. “The papers don’t dare say anything about it, but you know it’s true! Forty thousand more of our sons sacrificed for Franz Joseph’s dreams of glory!”
The crowd in the square responded in many voices, but in their anger, they were in unison.
“It’s always the Honvéd that suffers!” the speaker continued. “It’s been that way all through the war. Who is the first sent into danger? Who is the last to be relieved? Who is abandoned, like the three divisions, to save Franz Joseph’s precious Austrian lives? And who then are called cowards and blamed for Austria’s defeats?”
Now the crowd’s anger did have words. “The Honvéd! The Hungarians!” Many of them had read the Austrian newspaper articles questioning the loyalty and competence of the Hungarian troops, written by columnists who were safe in a Vienna café while their sons bled and died. And the ones who hadn’t read them knew of them.
“We have fought and died for Franz Joseph, we have suffered and starved for him, and yet they still call us cowards and traitors! And the worst – no, you haven’t heard the worst of it! The worst is still to come!”
There was a document in the speaker’s hands now, a large, rolled-up sheet of paper, and none of the audience was quite sure how or when it had got there.
“Yes, the worst is to come, because now the Austrians are ready to sacrifice us all! Franz Joseph has sent agents to the Turk, and he has offered to give Hungary to the Sultan to save Austria’s skin!”
And now the paper was unrolled to reveal a map: an Ottoman Empire as big as it was in the days of Suleiman the Magnificent, or even more so. Algeria and the Crimea were under the crescent, and all the Sudan, and the Balkans… and Hungary.
“This is the map! I didn’t believe it at first. You know that I have sources in the army and the government, and even
they couldn’t believe it. But I swear to you, it is true. Franz Joseph has sent this map to the Sultan, offered it to him if he makes peace. There’s a copy of it in the Porte now, and all the pashas are gloating over it.”
The man was fairly screaming now. “Do you see what Franz Joseph means to do to us? He will give our sons to the Turk’s sword and our daughters to the Turk’s harem, and he will buy his worthless life by surrendering us to the Turk’s lash! If we don’t act, we will be…”
The crowd in City Park could see the speaker’s mouth working, but they could no longer hear him over their own voices. “Down with Austria! Down with the Turk! Down with Franz Joseph!”
When he moved forward, they moved with him, and none had any more need to ask why.
“It’s nonsense!” said Count Khuen-Héderváry. “It’s more than nonsense, it’s preposterous! The Emperor selling us out to the Turks? I don’t know where that rabble-rouser got the idea, but it’s ridiculous!”
“I know that, and you know that,” Ferenc Szapáry answered. “But the rabble believe every word of it, and frankly, given the things we’ve been saying about the Habsburgs for the last thirty years, we shouldn’t be surprised.”
“But where would he have got his hands on a map…”
“It’s a map of the Ottoman Empire in 1529.” Szapáry laid a torn and bloodstained leaflet on the table, obviously captured during the rioting. “You’ll notice it doesn’t include Arabia or any of the Yemen. Someone got hold of it – fool or demagogue, I don’t know – and it was dry tinder. You know there’ve been strikes already, and protests over taxes…” The interior minister trailed off wearily and gestured out the window.
“Then all this is over…”
“Yes. But they won’t listen if we tell them. They all believe it’s the gospel truth, and they’ll tear us apart if we deny it. That’s what happens when people are losing a war and starving. There are deserters with them, armed. The troops are barely holding them at bay now, and even if we pull more soldiers from the front, it’ll be days before they can get here.”
“So, Ferenc,” and now Khuen-Héderváry’s voice was as tired as Szapáry’s, “what do we do then?”
“I’m afraid, count, that there’s only one thing we
can do.”
“Thalatta, thalatta!” cried András Weisz as he stood on the heights east of Luanda.
For a moment, he couldn’t believe that the journey was over. The last leg of it had passed like a dream; the Portuguese resident in Yeke had made them help put down a provincial rebellion in exchange for being allowed to cross the border, but after that, it had been a steady march through lands that had bore no scars of war. And now they had reached the sea.
The men started cheering as they came up behind in ones and twos, military discipline long gone. They jumped up and down, embraced, wept openly, and so did the camp-followers and the children when they arrived. Weisz was far too exhausted to stop them even if he’d wanted to do so, and after a moment, he realized that he didn’t.
“Find a couple of the captains, have them get the people into camp,” he told László Tóth. “You, Nagy and me will go into the city.”
An hour later, as the sun began to set, the two Hungarian officers and Nagy the Magyarab were in the harbormaster’s office. “We need to be on the next ship to Lisbon,” András said – from there, surely, they’d be able to cross Spain and France to rejoin the Habsburg army in southern Germany. “I don’t care if it’s a freighter or even a collier – we’ll sleep on the deck if we have to. When can you arrange it? My government will pay passage.”
The harbormaster didn’t answer for a long moment; he was already annoyed that these ragged men from the interior had caught him just as he was about to go home, and their preposterous demands made him even less willing to help.
“I doubt very much,” he said finally, “that your government would pay a single real for your passage.”
“They don’t know we’re here, yes, but if we could send a telegraph message to them, tell them where we are…”
“They still wouldn’t care.” The harbormaster pulled a sheet of paper from the day’s dispatches and slid it across the desk.
András was far from fluent in Portuguese, but he’d picked up enough to read the gist of the dispatch: Hungary had seceded from the Habsburg empire and was suing for an immediate cease-fire, the cabinet had constituted itself as a regency council, Hungarian soldiers were to pull out of line and not give battle unless attacked, no commands from Austrian officers were to be obeyed…
There was suddenly nothing for András to say. To have marched all this way for Franz Joseph, only for his country to turn its back on the emperor he’d sworn to serve – a punch in the gut would have been less.
“What do we do now?” he asked no one in particular.
“Franz Joseph has released you from your oath,” said Nagy, who was still reading the dispatch. “You can go home, I guess.”
Home? András suddenly wasn’t sure where that was. Home had been the Habsburg empire, but Hungary was no longer part of that; he doubted he’d like a Hungary ruled by narrow-minded nationalists, and he doubted
they’d have much use for a Jewish colonel or for soldiers with African wives…
He motioned his companions out of the office, and barely remembered to thank the harbormaster as they left.
“We’ll have to go back and tell them,” he said. The African soldiers, and even most of the Magyarabs, probably wouldn’t care, but the Hungarians would have a decision to make. “We have some money; maybe it will be enough to pay passage for the people who want to go back.”
“The people who want to go back, sir?” Tóth repeated, shocked into formality. “You mean we aren’t all going?”
András hadn’t yet asked himself the question straight out, but now that Tóth had, he knew the answer. He wasn’t married, he had no family, he was a man without a country – no country, at least, but the band of soldiers he’d come to lead.
“No, we’re not. At least I’m not. Whoever wants to go can go – if any of the Magyarabs want to see Hungary, I guess they can go too. I’ll stay here with the rest.”
“And go where?”
“That’s a good question.” Months ago, Nagy the Magyarab had urged him to hire on with Dietmar Köhler; maybe he’d do that after all. Or maybe the Portuguese had something for him to do, or the
Schutztruppe in Southwest Africa. Or there were the Great Lakes kingdoms – he’d missed them on the march down from the Sudan, and maybe there were things to see. He’d heard there were even some Jews in Buganda – would the king want another one, with a battalion of soldiers behind him?
“I’ll decide when I get there.”