The Two-Headed Eagle

9 HOME FRONT

We arrived back at Fliegerfeld Caprovizza early next morning to find that we had been posted missing. Obser­vation posts on the ridge of Debeli Vrh had seen a Lloyd two-seater hit by anti-aircraft fire over Monfalcone and had watched it come down in no man’s land on the Svinjak. I also discovered to my fury that my commanding officer Hauptmann Kraliczek had gone a step further and reported us both dead in action, in consequence of which a telegram had already been sent to my wife in Vienna. So it was nec­essary for me to leap straight away on to a bicycle, still in my tattered flying overalls, bone-weary and covered in trench grime, and rush to Haidenschaft telegraph office to send a telegram telling her that I was all right. Then it was back to Caprovizza, muttering curses against my commanding officer, and to bed for a few hours’ much-needed sleep, my head still ringing from shellbursts and my lungs aching from the after-effects of gas.

I was woken up by my batman Petrescu a few hours later, still feel­ing rather seedy. A staff officer was waiting to see me outside my tent. I came out, unshaven and blinking in the sunlight, and had my hand warmly shaken by an Oberst, the Air Liaison Officer from 5th Army Headquarters, who had motored down from Marburg to meet me. He congratulated me on my extraordinary feat in bringing down the airship Citta di Piacenza the previous day, and requested that I should please to present myself with my pilot in Haidenschaft that afternoon to be intro­duced to the Heir-Apparent, the young Archduke Karl, who was visiting the troops in the area and had expressed the wish to meet us. I mentioned the missing wireless set, and obediently reported that we had managed to retrieve some parts of it the previous day even if we had lost an aeroplane and almost lost our own lives in doing so. He seemed surprised.

“Top-secret? Not to my knowledge. I’ll speak with the Corps Technical Officer, but so far as I’m aware those valve sets came off the secret list last month. There must have been a clerical slip-up somewhere. Anyway, don’t worry about it: your commanding officer was probably misinformed.”

So we washed and shaved and spruced ourselves up, Toth and I, and got into a staff car to be driven to the town square in Haidenschaft to meet our future Emperor as he reviewed a guard of honour. A sizeable crowd had gathered in the little square to greet the Archduke and his entourage. As he drew up in his grey-green Daimler I got my first good look at the man who must surely become our ruler before much longer. He was a slight young man with an amiable if rather weak face, wearing the tunic—the austere field-grey “Karlbluse”—which he had made his trademark and which had been widely adopted of late as a mark of loyalty by front-officers of the more Kaisertreu variety. I noticed however, once I had had the chance to inspect this garment close-up, that it was well cut and of noticeably finer material than the increasingly shoddy wartime cloth that the rest of us wore.

The young Archduke shook my hand: a curious palm-downwards handshake in which I had been schooled beforehand by an ADC and which involved me extending my own hand palm upwards as if solicit­ing a tip. He made the usual small talk—how long I had been an officer, where I came from etc. etc.? Then he questioned me on every detail of our attack on the Italian airship, and also on our exploit the previous day in landing behind enemy lines to retrieve the fragments of the wireless set. As to our experience in the front line, I must admit that I glossed over certain incidents: like that of our rummaging beneath a decomposing corpse in our desperate search for a gas mask. I suspected that members of the Imperial House were even more solicitously protected than the gen­eral public from the gruesome realities of life and death in the trenches, and I felt that he would find this story—like the murderous exploits of Oberleutnant Friml—too distressing to be borne. I took good care though to say a great deal about Toth’s courage and quick-wittedness in flinging a hand-grenade out of our shell hole—omitting only to mention that it was one of our side who had thrown it in the first place.

The Heir-Apparent enquired why I had left the submarine service to take up flying? And I, for my part, was preparing to give him the expected answers: looking for ever more dangerous ways of winning honour for the Noble House of Austria and so on and so forth. But then I thought, why should I? Perhaps it was the shaking-up administered to my brain by shell fire the previous day, but a sudden wild thought came into my head: why not tell him the truth for once? There are more than enough lies and half-lies in this venerable Monarchy of ours, I thought, and more than enough court flunkeys to filter reality; and anyway, who needs the truth more than this young man, who will soon be ruling over fifty-five million people? So I told him that in fact I had not volunteered for the Flying Service, but had been volunteered for it by my superiors to get them off the hook with the Germans over their sunken U-Boat; and that while I had no objection to risking my neck each day as an officer-observer in the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe, I felt that my talents might still be more profit­ably employed back in my own trade at sea. He listened sympathetically, nodding as he did so and intoning, “Yes, yes.” He seemed to have had a look of concern built into his face in his mother’s womb. He concluded the conversation by remarking that so far as he could see an injustice had been done, then shook my hand in farewell and moved on to speak with Zugsfuhrer Toth.

I knew now that I would henceforth be a marked man among the Habsburg officer corps for the rest of my days. In military life there are few offences against service propriety more heinous than that of going over the head of one’s immediate superior and complaining to his superi­ors. It is something which can occasionally be done, but only in the direst extremities and in the knowledge that one will be regarded with suspicion ever after. And now I, a junior naval officer, had committed the ultimate solecism by going to the man very near the top. Short of complaining to the Emperor himself I could scarcely have committed a greater outrage. And all for nothing: for I knew perfectly well from my experience of roy­alty that he would probably have forgotten about it already.

The Heir-Apparent made a great deal of talking with Toth in Magyar. I asked him afterwards in Latin what the Archduke had said to him. He replied that he had not the faintest idea: he thought that the man was try­ing to speak Magyar, but that he was by no means sure.

But at least there was some brightness in that dismal little square in Haidenschaft that afternoon. Our orders for the presentation had said that, if we wished, we might bring family members along to watch. Well, I had no family members nearer than Vienna. But not so Zugsfuhrer Toth: his Slovene girlfriend, the delightful Magdalena, had come along with him. And very fine she looked as well, wearing the gala version of the local costume: her best frock and bodice with the addition of a lace-trimmed headband and coloured ribbons in her hair. The written orders had said “Ladies: promenade toilette or national costume,” and as I looked at her I was profoundly glad that she had chosen the latter, making herself a glori­ous splash of gaiety and colour amid the field-grey wartime drabness of the square, like a kingfisher amid a flock of town-sparrows. She was presented to the Heir-Apparent afterwards, curtsied most prettily and answered his questions intelligently and confidently in German.

The Archduke passed on to someone else—and his place was imme­diately taken by a gangling and achingly aristocratic young ADC with a toothbrush moustache and a foolish grin: General stabshauptmann the Prince von and zu Steyer-Wurmischgarten and Rothenfels, or something like that. He completely ignored Toth, who as a ranker had to stand rigidly to attention before him. But he seemed very interested indeed in young Magdalena, even proposed taking her for a ride in his motor car, with perhaps a spot of supper afterwards at a hotel he knew in Marburg? I held my breath and watched Toth: assaulting an officer in wartime was a death- penalty offence. But I need not have worried; Magdalena smiled graciously and announced in her clear voice, “It is true, Your Serene Highness, that I am only a simple village girl and that you are a prince. But I’m afraid that Your Serene Highness has been watching too many operettas: we simple village girls aren’t anything like as simple as we used to be. However, if Your Serene Highness is desirous of the company of local young ladies I can supply him with the address of some very nice ones indeed.” The prince looked disappointed. But like a true soldier he seemed to recognise failure when he saw it and to be prepared to accept second-best. So the address was duly noted down in his pocket book before he bowed and left us. When he was out of earshot I asked her:

“Gnadiges Fraulein, what was the address you gave him, if I might ask?”

She giggled deliciously. “The back entrance of the Other Ranks’ knocking-shop on the Via Gorizia. There should be quite a stir among the townsfolk when his car draws up there. I hope he enjoys himself.”

She turned to Toth and took him by the arm, digging him in the ribs with her elbow. “Quod dices, O Zolli? Princeps maxime fatuus est, non verum?”

I must say that I was rather shocked by this, even if filled with a certain admiration. I would not have expected convent-educated Slovene village maidens to know that such things as military bordellos even existed, let alone their address.

After the presentation Toth and I went to see the Medical Officer in Haidenschaft. We were both suffering from chest pains and nausea. Our eyes were sore and red and Toth was developing a fine inflamed rash around his neck. The Medical Officer diagnosed the after-effects of poi­son gas and wrote us each out a note authorising us to go and take two weeks’ immediate leave somewhere with clear air. He said that we would soon get over it—he thought that it sounded like a phosgene derivative, and apparently one needed to inhale quite a lot of phosgene to be perma­nently injured by it—but he recommended us both to get well away from the Front for a while. “Nervous tension: all the fliers get it before long. Too much altitude and excitement and inhaling petrol fumes. Yes, yes, I know the poor devils in the trenches have a much worse time of it; but for them it’s largely a matter of endurance, and they’ve got their comrades around them all the time to support them. Up in the air you fellows are completely on your own and, believe me, the strain begins to show very quickly.”

So a telegram was sent to Elisabeth at her hospital in Vienna, and that evening I boarded the train at Divacca. She had been due for leave for quite some time now, and in any case she would soon be tendering her resignation on grounds of pregnancy. However, we wanted to be alone together and I doubted whether we would be allowed that in the capital, so I told her to pack her bags for a holiday in my home town of Hirschendorf in northern Moravia. She had never met my father, so here was a wonder­ful opportunity to combine convalescent leave with filial duty.

We met early the next morning on the platform at the Franz Josephs Bahnhof. It was not quite a month since I had last seen her, but still her beauty struck me as forcibly as it had the first time I had met her, in Budapest the previous year. Beauty in women, I have always found, is far more a matter of personality than of looks. True, Elisabeth was certainly well provided for in the latter department, as are many Hungarian women (though in her case she counted Romanians, Italians, Russians and even Scots among her ancestors). But her dark-green eyes and dark-brown, almost black hair and fine-boned oval face would have been nothing without the gaiety and intelligence and grace of manner that illuminated them from within. She rushed over to meet me as I climbed down from the fiacre which had carried me from the Sudbahnhof. She was wearing a summer frock and hat and carried a parasol, since military nurses were allowed to wear civilian clothes off-duty. She flung her arms around me and kissed me, then stood back to look at me.

“Well, still alive I see after all. Whose idea was it to send me that telegram? ”

“Yes, I know. They could have waited. It was only a minor accident and they might at least have contacted the unit holding the sector where we came down. It was my commanding officer I’m afraid. I’d have wrung his neck for him but he was out when I got back to the airfield. Did it upset you very much?”

She smiled faintly. “I can’t say that it gave me a very agreeable sen­sation in the pit of my stomach when I opened it—until I looked at the date. Luckily it seems to have been delayed and I’d opened yours first. But your commanding officer—Kralik or whatever his name is—he sounds a first-class rotter. ‘It is my sad but proud duty to announce to you that your husband has died a glorious flier’s death on the field of eternal honour . . .’ I mean, who in their right mind writes stuff like that two years into a world war? He sounded almost glad that you’d been killed—as if I ought to send a telegram back thanking the Army for making me a widow second time around.”

“Did you think that they had?”

“Not really: in my heart I knew that you’d be all right. I just knew— woman’s intuition I suppose.”

“Flying’s a dangerous business, you know? I never wrote to you about how many men and machines we’ve lost these past few weeks, or the scrapes I’ve had.”

“I knew that perfectly well. We’ve had a lot of burnt and smashed-up airmen coming into the hospital recently. But I still knew that you’d be all right. Don’t ask me why, I just knew. I’ve got a little picture of the Blessed Virgin on my bedside table next to your photograph and I pray to that each morning and evening to keep you safe.”

“I thought that you didn’t believe in all that sort of thing?”

“I don’t. But it’s like the man who went around Messina a few years ago after the earthquake selling anti-earthquake pills. When the police arrested him he asked them, ‘Well, what else do you suggest?’ I think that my prayers keep you up in the air and turn aside the bullets by force of will. I know it sounds crazy but I’m sure that it works. And anyway, there’s nothing else that I can do for you. I tried to talk you into desert­ing when we were up in the mountains in Transylvania—even arranged you somewhere to hide until the war was over—but you wouldn’t hear of it: the Honour of the House of Austria and your duty to your men and so on. So I’m afraid that whatever protection that I can give you now is only second-best.”

“And I’m sure that it’ll see me through.”

She smiled. “Well, let’s look on the bright side of things. You’ve got this far without a scratch, so I imagine you must be quite good at flying. And anyway, every day’s a day nearer the end of the war. Surely it can’t go on much longer. The papers say that the French have lost half a million men at Verdun; so you can be pretty sure the Germans have lost even more. At this rate there’s not going to be anyone left before long. The k.u.k.

Armee’s sending men back into the line now after their fourth or fifth wound, barely out of hospital. It can’t last much longer—and between us the Virgin Mary and I are going to make damned well sure that you see the end of it.”

I was silent for a while, pressing her warm body against me. I was thinking of the dying Italian soldier sobbing and moaning after Friml had tossed the stick-bomb into his shell crater. Doubtless his family and sweetheart had been praying for his safety and lighting candles even as he pumped his life blood out into that dismal hole. And a lot of good it had done him. Like most men who emerged from that war, such vestiges of religious faith as I had once possessed were finally blasted away by the barrages. The mind-numbing enormity of it all so outraged imagination, so transgressed normal experience, that all the comfortable little formu­lations of the bishops and theologians have sounded to me since like the empty jangling of the tin cans on the wire after an attack.

The train was crowded, shabby and slow, drawn by a locomotive with badly worn axle bearings and burning lignite, which gave about as much heat as damp newspaper. It took us most of the day to crawl miserably across the Moravian countryside, through Lindenberg and Prerau. The day was grey and close; not August weather at all. It had been a dismal sum­mer north of the Alps and one did not need to be a country-town boy like myself to see as we trundled along that the harvest this year would be a poor one. In fact the most obtuse of city dwellers would have noticed the ground visible between the stalks of rye in the fields, and the fact that the harvesters were mostly old people and women and children with the oc­casional soldier on leave and a few parties of Russian prisoners. Elisabeth and I talked little as we clanked along. The compartment was crowded, the corridor was packed with soldiers going on leave, we were both tired out and anyway, it was quite sufficient for us to be near one another: two insignificant specks of dust clinging together for a while as the whirlwind bowled us along.

We arrived at Hirschendorf Station early that evening—only to find to my utter dismay that the town band and a welcoming committee were waiting for us. There were cheers and speeches, and I was invited to ap­pear next day, 18 August, in the town square at the festivities to mark the Emperor’s eighty-sixth birthday. I groaned inside, but I could hardly refuse. Ever since anyone could remember the Kaisersgeburtstag had been one of the fixed points of the Austrian year, by now (it seemed) as immutable a date on the calendar as Christmas and All Souls’ Day. As the town of Hirschendorf’s most famous son—a Maria-Theresien Ritter no less—it would clearly be impossible for me to refuse my attendance. Already reporters from the Hirschendorfer Nachrichten were buttonholing me to arrange interviews, and someone was asking me something about opening a war exhibition. It was beginning to look as if we might as well have stayed in Vienna after all.

The town where I was born and grew up was not much of a place re- ally—little more than a scaled-up version of Haidenschaft: a typical small Austrian provincial town of the late nineteenth century with a cobbled square, a large baroque church with onion domes and a government of­fice block in that curious heavy neo-Italianate style—invariably painted a darkish yellow ochre—which distinguished all the public buildings of the Dual Monarchy. Like all such provincial towns, its life before the war had been inseparably bound up with the countryside around it. In my child­hood one always knew which way the wind was blowing by the smell: the warm sweet smell of malt when the south wind was blowing from the brewery; the sharp, clean tang of resin when the east wind was blowing from the sawmills; and that peculiar, sour, dungheap-and-treacle odour of beet when the west wind was blowing across the sugar factory. All that had changed now, as we approached the third year of the war. True, the sawmills were still at their old occupation—in fact working three shifts a day to convert the thousands of trees hacked wantonly from the Silesian forests into boards and timbers for dug-out roofs and ammunition wag­ons. As for the beet factory though, it had been turned over to the manu­facture of artillery shells, lathes screeching day and night like the souls of the damned to produce the cases which would then be taken to a rickety sprawl of huts a few kilometres outside the town to be filled with explosive. Most of the town’s remaining able-bodied population—that is to say, its women—were now working in the munitions factories and could readily be distinguished by the butter-yellow complexions which came from in­haling TNT fumes all day. The wages were good, they said, but they were paid in paper and steel money which brought less and less each week.

As for the brewery, it was still in business; more or less. But the once powerful and highly esteemed Hirschendorfer lager beer with its stag’s- head label had now become a sorry fluid for lack of barley: a pale straw colour with a froth like soap scum, and barely strong enough to crawl from the tap into the mug now that most of its remaining alcohol content was being extracted for the munitions industry. It made me wonder why on earth anyone bothered drinking the stuff any more. But then, I suppose that there was not a great deal else on offer either in the late summer of 1916. Rubber and copper were distant memories. The parish church of St Johann Nepomuk had voluntarily donated its bells to the war effort by government order the previous year. Even leather for shoes was becom­ing hard to find now, so that the women wore clacking canvas monstrosi­ties with wooden soles once their pre-war footwear had fallen to pieces. As for clothing, wool was reserved for military uniforms and cotton was unobtainable because of the blockade, so that left linen (which was now in increasing demand for covering aircraft) or, failing that, hemp, nettle fibre or spun paper, which had a disturbing way of coming to pieces in the rain.

Elisabeth told me that for some months past she and her fellow-nurses had been obliged to spend a large part of each day washing cotton ban­dages—except that the bandages were now dropping to pieces from con­stant reuse and were being replaced by crepe paper, or a substitute fibre made from the inner bark of the willow tree: “superior in every respect to cotton,” a journalist had written in the Reichspost. Elisabeth’s eyes had blazed up with fury when I showed her this cheerful little article, and she had uttered certain words in Magyar which, although I could not under­stand them, certainly sounded not to be the sort of expression that nice convent-educated girls ought to know.

Until now, I was told, food had not been too difficult out here in the countryside, even if groceries like coffee and tea and chocolate and soap had all long since carried the loathsome qualifications “ersatz” and “surrogat” and “kriegs.” But now butter and milk and meat were in short supply, and before long (it was said) even barley and potatoes might be scarce. I talked with old Josef Jindrich the forester, husband of my child­hood nurse Hanuska.

“Yes, young master Ottokar,” he said, rubbing his bony old chin as we sat in the parlour of their cottage, “it’s a bad business and no mistake, this war of theirs. I fought with the old 54th Regiment back in ’66, and that was bad enough; but at least we lost after six weeks and it was all over. Who’d have thought this war would go on so long? Mark my words, we’re in for a bad harvest this year. They say it’s the British blockade, but that’s eyewash if you ask me. It’s all the men and horses they’ve taken off the land, that’s what. And Vienna and their war prices. They’ve set them so low that the country-people aren’t growing to sell any more, just enough for themselves and some for the black market. Yes, my young sir, if you want my opinion that old fool at Schonbrunn’s declared one war too many this time . . .” he grinned, “. . . and if you like you can bring a gendarme along here to arrest me for saying so. I’ll just show him my old army pay- book and the wound I got at Trautenau.”

I found though that the changes wrought by the war in the material circumstances of life in that small town were as nothing compared to the alteration in its people, as if the human spirit was also in short sup­ply and being replaced by an ersatz version. I had not been home a great deal in recent years. I had gone to the Imperial and Royal Naval Academy in Fiume in 1900, my mother had died two years later and my brother Anton had entered the Army as an Aspirant in 1903. My father had re­mained in Hirschendorf, immersed in his duties as k.k. Deputy District Superintendent of Posts and Telegraphs and (after hours) in his activities as one of the leading luminaries of the local Pan-German Nationalist movement. I had been home to see him from time to time over the years, even though my home town—in so far as a sailor can ever have one—was now Pola. But this was largely a duty performed out of filial piety. My father had never been an easy man to get on with, so the visits had become less and less frequent with the years.

We had last met in Vienna back in July, when he was invited to my investiture as a Maria-Theresien Ritter, and also to my wedding two days later. In the event the wedding had been cancelled—or rather, much re­duced in scale and moved to a suburban registry office—and the old man had been cabled not to bother coming. Not that he had minded a great deal: he disapproved of the marriage on eugenic principle—mingling good Germanic blood with that of a Magyar-Romanian minor aristocrat from Transylvania, even though it was patently obvious that both he and I were solid square-faced Slav peasants. Remarks had been made about “the degenerate mongrel aristocracy of the Habsburg corpse-empire; the sweepings of Europe gathered up by Vienna and set to rule over the solid fair-haired peasants and burghers of the Germanic borderlands.” In fact he had not been too keen on the Cross of Maria Theresa either: “a piece of worthless Habsburg tinware manufactured in the Jew-shops of Vienna” was how he had chosen to characterise the Old Monarchy’s high­est military honour. I believe that he bore no particular animus against Elisabeth as a person—after all, being a degenerate mongrel aristocrat was not her fault—but there was no warmth either. Before he had turned to German Nationalism my father had once been a Czech liberal nation­alist, and he still retained a Czech democrat’s somewhat less than total admiration for countesses, even where (as in this case) the countess had renounced her title and was about as devoid of snobbery as it is possible for anyone to be.

In any case, the old boy had more important things on his mind at present than his son’s new wife: he had just become the local organiser of the recently formed Deutscher Volksbund in this part of Moravia. It was a mark, I suppose, of how far the Habsburg state had fallen into senile decay by the year 1916 that it could now look through its fingers when a quite high-ranking provincial civil servant became a part-time function­ary of an extreme German nationalist organisation which, if not exactly a political party, was not far off being one. In days gone by Vienna had been intensely mistrustful of any nationalist activity, German quite as much as any other sort, and would not have tolerated it for one moment in a civil servant. The old doctrine was that whoever entered the service of the House of Austria ceased to have a nationality. And to be fair to them, nearly everyone lived up to that high ideal. But now it seemed that after two years of war and a humiliating chain of defeats rectified only by German troops and German brains, the Dual Monarchy was fast be­coming a spiritual colony of the Greater German Reich, which already extended from Flanders to the marshes of the Tigris.

The Deutscher Volksbund claimed to be nothing more than a pa­triotic organisation of German-speakers within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But you would certainly have been hard put to it to see any sign of that in our house on the Olmutzergasse. It had been turned into a shrine to the Goddess Germania, with more than a hint of Wotan- worship. Portraits of Hindenburg and Ludendorff hung on the walls, draped in black-red-gold banners. A smaller portrait of the German Kaiser hung below them. Garlands in the black-white-red of Prussia bedecked a full-length portrait of Oberleutnant Brandys, the spike- helmeted hero who was supposed to have captured Fort Douanmont at Verdun virtually single-handed. Everywhere, posters for the German Flottenverein and the 7th War Loan and the German Women’s League; posters exhorting Gott to straff Engeland and for people to give their Gold in exchange for Eisen. A vast map of Europe covered the whole of one wall. On it the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires had been merged with most of Belgium and sizeable chunk of northern France into one dingy uniform expanse of field grey surrounded by barbed wire and with its borders bristling with bayonets. Beneath it was a legend in Gothic script: It has come at fast, never to perish—% reich °f ninety millions. In the alcove in the hallway, where once the family’s statue of the Madonna had stood, was now a wooden pedestal bearing a German steel helmet—the kind Oberleutnant Friml and his marauders had been wearing a few days before—with a slot cut in the top for coins. A plaque fixed to the pedestal proclaimed: The most sublime shape our century has yet produced: not the work of an artist's studio, but forged from the union of the German spirit with German steef. It was all intensely depressing.

Worse was to come that first evening as I took Elisabeth for a stroll around the town. The atmosphere of the place was oppressive in the ex­treme. It had never been a particularly friendly place as I remembered it: like many towns and cities in the Old Monarchy, it had been disputed ter­ritory between two nationalities, or in this case, between three of them— German, Czech and Polish—who each had their own name for the place and each claimed it as their own exclusive property. In the years before the war the heavy presence of official Austria, in the shape of its gendarmes and civil servants—and in extremis, its soldiers in the barracks on the Troppau road—had preserved an uneasy quiet in Hirschendorf, broken only by the occasional riot. But now that Austria-Hungary was at war in alliance with Imperial Germany, the German faction in Hirschendorf was letting it be known in no uncertain manner that they were on top and in­tended staying there. In pre-war Austria the Germans had felt themselves an increasingly threatened minority in a country that they had once re­garded as their rightful property. But now the tables had been turned: the Czechs and Poles and Slovenes and all the rest of the impudent riff-raff were now themselves minorities—and small ones at that—in a Greater German Reich of ninety million people.

Certainly no opportunity was being missed in Hirschendorf in the summer of 1916 to ram that message down the throats of the non- Germans. The town’s Czech newspaper had been closed down under emergency powers and a number of Czech nationalists had been arrested by the military and interned. The local Polish organisations had been for­bidden to hold meetings and were being watched by the police. Also the statue “The Spirit of Austria” had been removed from the public gardens in the middle of the town square.

The statue had never been much of a success. It had been put up at Vienna’s behest in 1908 to mark the Emperor’s sixtieth jubilee and to try and promote some nebulous concept described as “the Austrian Idea” among the Monarchy’s quarrelling subjects. Commissioned from the stu­dios of the sculptor Engelbrecht, it represented a willowy young female nude in characteristically flowing Wiener Sezession style, holding aloft a very clumsy-looking broadsword, hilt-uppermost, as if someone had absent-mindedly left it on a tram and she was calling after them to attract their attention. It was an innocent enough piece of statuary, in fact quite graceful and pleasing to look at, even if no one could ever quite work out what naked young women holding swords had to do with Old Austria. But somehow, far from promoting a spirit of unity and mutual tolerance, it had managed only to provoke the warring factions into an even more bilious passion. Each nationality became obsessed with the idea of claim­ing the statue for themselves, and the favoured method was to creep up in the dead of night with paint pots and adorn the young woman with a striped bathing costume: either black-red-gold if it was the Germans, or red-white-blue if it was the Czechs, or simple red and white if it was the Poles. The municipal cleansing department must have spent thousands of kronen over the years in paint removers and wire brushes.

But now “the Spirit of Austria” was no more. Both she and the square’s other statue, Imperial General Prince Lazarus von Regnitz—“noted in the wars against the Turk”—had been melted down to make driving- bands for artillery shells, and her place had been taken by a monstrous wooden “Denksaule”: a hideous commemorative column with a bust of Field Marshal von Hindenburg on top and with medallions of Ludendorff, the Kaiser, Frederick the Great, Bismarck, Wagner and other German heroes around the sides. It was studded with iron nails driven in by those who had donated money to the War Loan and other such patriotic funds. Stupid and dodderingly oppressive as it might have been, the Old Austrian Monarchy was a state conceived on a human scale, and had undeniably displayed a certain taste in artistic matters. Now it seemed that we were being engulfed by the very grossest sort of Greater German vulgarity: the bloated blood-and-iron bombast; the increasingly crazed gigantism; the total lack of any sense of proportion.

And around this idol to the Germanic war-god set up in Hirschendorf town square there limped its human votaries: the soldiers in shabby field grey enjoying what might be their last leave; the women in black whose husbands and sons had already had their last leave; the overworked house­wives and their ill-nourished children; and the men in the hideous blue uniforms of the wounded, some with empty sleeves, many with dark glasses and white sticks, some on crutches or (in one case) legless and pushing himself along on a little wheeled trolley. As Elisabeth and I sat on the terrace of the cafe-hotel “Zum Weissen Lowe” and drank our raspberry-leaf tea, we saw a proclamation being posted up on the side of the government offices on the other side of the square. It announced the hanging in Olmutz jail the previous day of five local men who had deserted to the Russians in 1915 and then been recaptured in Volhynia wearing the uniform of the Czech Legion. The proclamation was only what the law required, I suppose, and would have been pasted up even before the war. But now it was accompanied by five photographs in close- up, each showing a black-faced man dangling by his crooked neck from a gallows.

The proclamation was taken down the next day so as not to add a sour note to the celebrations of the Emperor’s birthday. I had to turn up of course, in best Flottenrock complete with sword-belt and the Cross of Maria Theresa prominently displayed on my chest.

It was a sultry, overcast afternoon with thunder in the air. The crowd, I saw, was much smaller than usual for the Emperor’s birthday. Because of the war the local garrison had been able to provide only a military band made up of pensioners—one of whom suffered a stroke while playing the “Prinz Eugen March” and had to be carried away on a stretcher. Likewise the usual gathering of local notables seemed to be very thin. In fact it was made up almost entirely of the town’s Jewish worthies: Dr Litzmann from the local hospital, Herr Birnbaum the notary and my old childhood friend Herr Zinower, the bookseller and secretary of the natural history society. As for the German nationalist bigwigs like my father, they had all absented themselves on one pretext or another.

All in all it was a pretty miserable and spiritless occasion. The congrat­ulatory addresses to our venerable monarch lacked conviction. Everyone present seemed listless and merely to be going through the motions of loyalty. At last the band struck up the Imperial anthem, Haydn’s beauti­ful old “Gott Erhalte.” As was customary on these occasions, a choir had been provided by the local schools to lead the singing. But after the first few bars I sensed that something had gone wrong. Dr Litzmann stand­ing next to me on the platform stopped singing and looked about the square in alarm. Choir and crowd were not singing “Gott erhalte unsern Kaiser, Gott beschutze unsern Land . . .” Instead several hundred throats were bellowing, “Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles, uber alles in der Welt . . .”

Dinner that evening was potatoes with some thin sauerkraut and slices of an evil-tasting sawdust briquette which my father’s housekeeper said was made from processed wood-mushrooms. After we had finished, Elisabeth and I left my father sticking little coloured flags into a map to mark the advance of the German armies in the Baltic provinces and went out for a walk along the Olmutz road to get some fresh air: one of the few com­modities which had not so far been replaced by a substitute version. We had things to discuss.

“When will you hand in your resignation at the hospital?” I asked her. “Next month, I think. By then my belly should be swelling to a point where I can’t hide it any more, even under those awful white overalls we have to wear. Here,” she placed my hand on her abdomen below her belt, “here, you can just feel it now. It hasn’t started sticking out yet but you can feel something hard in there.” She laughed, “I wonder what it’s going to be: a boy or a girl. I say though, isn’t it exciting?”

“It would be, I suppose, if it weren’t for the war. This isn’t much of a time for bringing children into the world. The poor kid may never see its father. What a mess.”

“Oh don’t be such an old misery, Otto. There never was a good time to bring children into the world ever since the world began. What bet­ter time could there be than now, when the human race is doing its best to wipe itself out? Having babies spits in the eye of the Ludendorffs and Kaiser Wilhelms and the Krupps and all the other deathmongers who’d kill the lot of us if they could.”

“Why, are you anxious to bear children to be more cannon fodder for the Front in the next war? ”

“No, to have children who’ll perhaps have more sense than we had, and pull the war lords down from their horses one day. I don’t care: long live motherhood—it’s the only hope we’ve got for a better world.”

“Do you want motherhood even if I’m killed?”

“Especially if you’re killed: at least some of you will live on to remind me of what you were like.”

“Well, that’s comforting to know I suppose. But what happens now to your career in medicine? Babies are said to be very time-consuming and nursemaids are not easy to find these days, what with all the women who are going into the munitions factories.”

“Oh, I’ll manage, once the war’s over. My foster-parents disinherited me when I married you, but I’m still not short of money. My father set up a trust fund in Zurich for me and my brother before he died, and now Ferencz is dead it all comes to me. We’ll manage, don’t worry. Anyway, perhaps after the war you’ll leave the Navy and take up an honest trade in engineering or something. You’re a clever man and your talents are be­ing wasted making a lot of Croat fishermen scrub their hammocks and polish brasswork. You can even sit at home and rock the cradle for me if you like.”

“Will you go back to the hospital after the baby’s born? My aunt says that you’re welcome to stay with her on the Josefsgasse, and Franzi’s said to be very good with children. The poor girl’s so soft in the head they’ve refused to employ her in a shell factory. And Professor Kirschbaum told me that he’d keep your job open for you.”

She was silent for a while, gazing out over the stubble fields.

“No. No, I’m not going back to the hospital: not as a nurse and not while the war’s on. I’ve had enough.”

“You always told me that your patients came first.”

“I’ve changed my mind since then.”

“Why? You were always so dedicated before.”

“A number of reasons, really. Above all because I’ve realised what we’re really doing there in a military hospital.” She turned to look at me, her deep-green eyes gazing into mine. “Don’t believe all that rot you read about us nurses in the papers: ‘the Angels in White’ and so on, nursing our wounded young heroes back to health. It’s not like that any more—if indeed it ever was. What we’re doing is cobbling them back together to a degree where they’re fit to be sent back to the trenches and blown up again, that’s all. I tell you, what we’re doing now isn’t medicine, it’s veterinary surgery. The only wonder is that we aren’t shooting the worst ones with a captive-bolt pistol yet—though according to Dr Navratil that’s what they’re doing in some of the field hospitals: giving the difficult cases a double injection of morphine and leaving them out all night.”

I was incredulous.

“Send them back into the trenches? Even the patients you have to look after? I don’t believe it.”

“It’s a fact: even the ones I have to look after. They’re all severe head- wounds—mostly facial reconstruction—and the authorities have realised that once they’ve been patched up to a degree where their brains no longer dribble out of their ears, they can still usually fire a rifle. In fact I think that the War Ministry is actually anxious to get the worst face-wound cases out of the way once they’re discharged. At least if they’re in the war zone they can’t go around alarming the public.” A tear began to glisten in the corner of her eye. “There was one boy on my ward in the spring, called Emil Breitenfeld. He’d been a Fahnrich with the Kaiserjagers in Poland and had half his lower jaw shot away. We spent the best part of a year rebuilding his face. Professor Kirschbaum and the dentists. They had to build in a metal bridge, but it never really took and gave him a great deal of pain. Anyway, in June the War Ministry Inspection Board people came around and told us not to waste any more time on him: that he was perfectly dienstauglich and wasn’t going to get any better and was taking up a bed; and anyway they were desperately short of officers at the Front. So out he went: recalled to active service on the Russian Front. We sent him off with a bottle of painkiller pills in his greatcoat pocket.”

“What happened to him?”

“He was killed a month later. He wrote me a letter just before and said that he couldn’t care any longer whether he lived or died—in fact he’d rather die if he had to go around after the war with half his jaw missing. His men looked after him as best they could—even mashed his food up for him like a baby so that he wouldn’t have to chew it—but he stopped a bullet in the end. His sergeant wrote to tell me. He was only twenty-two.

And just before I left there was a secret War Ministry directive came around. It seems that in future we are not to devote scarce resources to treating the really severe cases but instead concentrate our efforts on ‘those military personnel likely to be of further use to the war effort.’ May they all rot in hell for it. Another couple of years of this and we’ll have an army entirely made up of cripples and men half crazy with shell-shock.” She paused, thinking. “But then, I suppose that’s the best idea really; have your war fought for you by people who’ve got nothing left to lose.”

As we walked homewards, evening shadows streaming along the dusty white country road, a sudden thought struck me.

“I say, Liserl, did you ever have a fellow called Svetozar von Potocznik on your ward? He was wounded in the face when he was with the Germans in Flanders in 1914 and spent some time with Professor Kirschbaum in Vienna I believe.”

She stopped suddenly. “Potocznik? How did you know about him?” “When he was discharged he joined the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe and he’s now Chief Pilot with Flik 19F at Caprovizza. I haven’t spoken with him much, but he seems a decent enough sort, even if he has got Greater Germany on the brain. He’s very bright, and he would have been very good-looking too if he hadn’t lost one side of his face.”

She was silent for a while.

“Yes, yes. I knew him quite well. In fact before I met you last summer we might have got engaged. I liked him very much at first—but less and less as I got to know him better.”

“What’s the matter with him? ”

“I couldn’t really say. He’s very intelligent, as you say, and beautifully spoken, and very sweet and courteous when he wants to be. But there’s something off about him. In fact I came to the conclusion in the end that he was quite cracked. Perhaps it was the head-wound; perhaps he was like that before, I really don’t know.”

“Were you serious about each other?”

“Oh yes. At least, I was quite taken with him at first. Patients falling in love with you is an occupational hazard in my trade: I used to get at least three proposals a week before I married you and got this ring safely on my finger. But he was different for me. It’s just that he had reservations about me in the end, not the other way round.”

“How did you find that out?”

“It was one evening in the gardens. He was up and about by then, back in uniform instead of a dressing-gown. I’d just come off duty and we were sitting together talking about this and that. And after a while it got around to getting engaged. Not that I think we had any burning passion for each other; just that we rather liked one another, and if he was a little odd I put it down to what he’d been through and I thought that I might be able to spend my life with him. We got on to marriage, and what we wanted to do after the war, and I thought he was going to ask a certain question. Then he asked me . . . something else.” She stopped.

“What did he say? ”

“Oh, it was so stupid, it embarrasses me to tell you . . . don’t ask me, please.”

“What was it?”

“Really something so absurd that I don’t think even now . . . Oh there, you’ve made me get the giggles just thinking about it.” I was fascinated now, devoured with curiosity.

“Please tell me Liserl, what did he ask you? I’ll never rest now until I know. There shouldn’t be secrets between man and wife. I’ve told you about all my old affairs when you’ve asked.”

“Oh well then, if you have to know . . .” She was almost choking now as she tried to suppress her merriment. “. . . The silly idiot asked me what colour my nipples were. There, look, you’ve made me blush even now just with telling you about it.”

“For God’s sake, why did he ask you that?”

“I must say I was a bit puzzled myself at the time. In fact I couldn’t answer him for a while I was so embarrassed. ‘Silly boy,’ I said once I’d managed to stop giggling, ‘you really mustn’t ask nice well-brought-up girls questions like that. But why on earth do you want to know?’ I said, ‘Is it a hobby of yours ? And anyway, what do you mean by colour? Most women’s are more or less pink I believe, so I can’t see that the exact shade matters a lot.’ But he wouldn’t give up: sat there staring into my eyes, ever so solemn, and asked me, ‘Yes, but are they dark pink or light pink?’ ” “What on earth was he getting at? ”

“Yes, I wondered that as well. In fact I was about to call for help in case he went completely loopy and started attacking me. But once I’d got my breath back he asked me again, so I told him that although I’d never had a great deal of opportunity to make comparisons—at convent we had to bathe wearing linen gowns—if he really had to know I thought that mine were quite dark, what with being half-Romanian and fairly brown­skinned. And that did it: the silly fool just sat back and nodded to himself as if to say ‘Yes, just as I thought,’ then announced to me that we could never marry. ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘Because science has shown that dark nipples in a woman are a sign at least of Latin and possibly even of Jewish ancestry. No true German of pure racial stock can ever think of diluting the blood by miscegenation with those of other races. Women of pure Nordic race invariably have rose-pink nipples.’ ”

“I see what you mean. And what did you have to say to that?”

“I didn’t cry. Once I’d got over my surprise I just laughed and told him he was either joking or completely mad, and that either way I didn’t want anything to do with someone who sorts the human race into blood­lines like a racehorse breeder. In fact I told him that if he wanted a nice Germanic brood mare with a backside on her like the side of a house and blond plaits hanging down over her rose-pink nipples he’d better go putting advertisements in the local papers in the Salzkammergutt. The impertinent sod! And what’s wrong with Jewish ancestry anyway? I don’t know whether I’ve got any, but the de Bratianus have got a bit of just about everything else, so I’d be surprised if they didn’t have that as well.”

I considered all this for a while. “Yes, I suppose that it does sound a bit odd really, Liserl. But that isn’t conclusive proof of insanity. We’re all of us a little mad about something, and I’ve often seen that even the most reasonable people can have a potty opinion about something or other. When I was a cadet on my first voyage my old captain Slawetz von Lowenhausen was as fine a sailor as you could hope to meet—we’d all have followed him to the ends of the earth. But he had a thing about the crew shaving the hair off their legs: tried to make us do it each month because he believed it prevented malaria.”

“Yes, I know. But I still say he’s completely cracked. It’s just that there are so many cranks in Germany nowadays—weltpolitikers and macht- politikers and Wotanists and sun-worshippers and vegetarians and racial hygienists—that you don’t notice it any more. But believe me, if someone as bright as Svetozar von Potocznik can seriously believe that the worth of human beings is determined by the colour of their nipples, then there’s no hope for any of us. He’s mad I tell you: I’d suspected as much before then but ignored my instinct. It was a good thing I found out when I did—and that I met you the following week.” She turned to me. “You don’t care what colour my nipples are, do you Otto? And I’ll bet you’ve had more opportunity than most for making comparisons.”

“My dearest love, if they’re yours then for all I care they might as well be viridian or cobalt blue.”

She cuddled up to me as we walked. “You are sweet. I thought you’d say something like that.”

We set off to return to Vienna on the last day of August. We had agreed that Elisabeth would hand in her month’s notice when she got back to the hospital, and would then move to live with my Aunt Aleksia in her flat on the Josefsgasse. For my part I would return to my flying duties and hope that somehow, Zugsfuhrer Toth, Zoska and the Blessed Virgin between them would contrive to keep us airborne. So we bade my father farewell. He hardly noticed our departure since he was leaning over a world-map on the dining-room table, engrossed in a pamphlet concern­ing German plans for building a giant ship canal through the Caucasus and Hindu Kush to the head waters of the Ganges, so that ships would be able to steam overland from Rotterdam to Calcutta. He had asked my professional opinion upon the project as a naval officer, and had not been at all pleased when I had commented that it seemed an expensive way of avoiding seasickness. We took a fiacre to the station, and caught the local stopping train to get us to Oderberg junction so that we could board the Cracow—Vienna express.

We were only a couple of minutes out of the station at Grussbach when the train suddenly came to a shuddering, clanking halt in the middle of a pine forest. For some time there was no sound except the hissing of steam. Then there were shots in the wood, and the unmistakable crash of a stick-grenade. We waited uneasily. After a few minutes we heard the sound of voices and the crunch of boots on the trackside ballast. It was a party of five or six yellow-helmeted gendarmes with rifles slung at their shoulders, leading a captive. He was about nineteen or twenty I should think: tousle- haired, unshaven and with his face streaked with blood. He was wearing a tattered army greatcoat. His hands were tied behind his back and they were pulling him along by a halter around his neck, kicking him to his feet each time he stumbled and fell. They disappeared and the train started to move once more. The conductor came into our compartment.

“What on earth was all that about?” I asked him as he clipped my rail warrant.

“Nothing really, Herr Leutnant, just some trouble further up the line.”

“Trouble with whom?”

“With bandits, Herr Leutnant.” He lowered his voice. “At least, that’s what we’re supposed to say. Everyone knows it’s really deserters.”

“Deserters? Surely not around here, this far from the Front.”

“Deserters sure enough: men who came home on leave and didn’t bother reporting back. There’s a lot of them in these forests now. They live by robbing the farms—though from what I hear there’s more than enough of the villagers who’ll give them food and hide them in their barns. Dirty rotten Czechs—the Bohmes all want shooting if you ask me. There’s not one of them wouldn’t run away if you gave them the chance.”