One day in late July last year, three people embarked on journeys with destiny, writes Kevin Myers
Two widowed sisters, Alice Wardle, aged 67, and Mildred Bowman, 61, of Gateshead in England, flew to Benidorm for a two-week holiday. Almost simultaneously, Lieut Martin Farkas of the army of Slovakia was flying to Kosovo on peacekeeping duties. The sisters and the soldier arrived safely at their destinations, and while Martin began a six-month tour, Alice and Mildred checked into their double-bedded room in the Levante Club apartments.
Martin and his men were serving with Echo company in the Trebisov battalion, alongside members of our own Defence Forces and US national guardsmen from Indiana, which happily has close ties with Martin's homeland: many Slovakians emigrated to Indiana a century ago. Moreover, Slovakia is not merely a distinguished peacekeeper with the UN, but also a fervent ally of the US in the war on terror. No doubt Martin was pleased to be with the nice Americans in Kosovo: otherwise, he might have been with some nice Americans in Iraq.
Alice and Mildred always did everything together. Why, even their late husbands had both been called Ronnie. They spent their first night in their apartment, sharing the same bed, and rose the next day. With them on holiday, but in a different apartment, was Alice's daughter Alison and her family. They all met at the poolside. Later, all having arranged to meet up the next day, the two sisters retired for a nap. They didn't even undress, but simply lowered the fold-up double bed from the wall, and then lay on it.
But they had neglected to lower the legs at the end of the bed. It seems that the torque created by the bed being at the wrong angle to the wall, and the fact that the wooden wall-frame that enclosed the bed when it was upright hadn't been properly screwed to the wall, caused what happened next: the frame fell off the wall, onto the bed, trapping, but not injuring, the two sisters.
In Kosovo, Martin and his fellow Slovak soldiers found that their duties consisted largely of protecting Serbs from Albanian attack around the villages of Plementina and Obilic, where they also distributed aid.
There were many minor incidents, but no serious ones, and finally last week their six-month tour ended.
The day after the wooden bed-frame had fallen from its wall, enclosing the sisters, Alison Gibbons and her children waited for her mother and her aunt to show up for the planned meeting. They didn't arrive. She was puzzled, but not alarmed. Meanwhile, the two sisters were still alive under the bed-frame, enclosed as if an open wardrobe had fallen on them.
On Thursday, some 28 men from Echo company - no doubt excited at the imminent prospect of home - boarded the Antonov AN-24 transport aircraft, along with eight crew and seven military co-ordinators, bound for Kosice in Slovakia. Air traffic controllers tracked the Antonov's flight progress through a narrow valley of the Hernad river in Hungary. The AN-24 strayed off course, and before air traffic controllers could warn the pilot, at 19.30 GMT, the plane vanished off the radar screen. It had flown, at full speed, into the side of a mountain, detonating into a fireball. It was simply impossible for anyone aboard to survive such an impact.
But impossible or not, Martin Farkas was alive. He had survived the 300kph impact into solid rock which shattered the bodies of his fellow soldiers. He had also survived the inferno which had then consumed the fuselage. Surrounded by simply unimaginable scenes of carnage, he was even able to phone his wife on his mobile phone and tell her what had happened. Then the batteries failed. So he was in the middle of a forest in the steep foothills of the Carpathian Mountains in knee-deep snow, with no communications, with no torch in the pitch dark, without an overcoat, and without a chance of anyone finding him before first light. The temperature was minus 18° C, and falling.
He had survived the crash; he could not survive the night.
He survived the night. Hours later, not knowing where he was or where he was going, he blundered into the path of the very first search party tentatively setting out to look for the site of the disaster. Had he chanced to go in any other direction, he would certainly have died of the cold.
In Benidorm, Mildred and Alice were strangers to cold, lying on their bed, with the wooden case enclosing them, as July became August. No doubt they shouted for help and tried to push the box off them, consoling themselves with the thought that either Alison, Alice's daughter, or the daily maid would surely raise the alarm. But the door was locked from inside, and neither did.
On August 4th, however, an increasingly worried Alison persuaded the apartment managers to force the door open. Initially, there was no sign of the two women, because the bed was completely enclosed in the fallen wall-frame. But the rescue party finally lifted the frame and found their dead bodies. After days of being trapped, the inseparable sisters had inseparably suffocated.
Martin Farkas was in a plane which crashed at full speed into a frozen mountainside, instantly killing all his companions, but leaving him wholly uninjured. Two sisters went briefly to bed, and spent the last days of their lives trapped there. Thus a reminder that death is lord of all, undisputed master in both its manner and its hour.