looking men I had ever seen: in his early twenties, of medium height, gracefully formed, with fine light brown hair and gentle, rather melancholy blue eyes such as a poet or composer might possess. He gazed at me sideways, smiled politely in greeting and saluted. Then he turned his head slightly—and I saw that most of the left side of his face had gone, cheekbone and temple replaced by a tortured confusion of lumps and puckered scar tissue surrounding an eyeball which looked to be in danger of tumbling out on to his cheek. Despite myself I winced slightly and tried not to look. My wife Elisabeth had worked for the past two years in a specialist facial-injuries unit at the Vienna Medical School, and she had shown me a good many spine-crawling photographs of “before.” Well, this was clearly one of the “after” cases: one of those less severely damaged casualties whose face the surgeons had managed to rebuild sufficiently for an army medical board to class him once more as “dienstauglich.” He shook my hand—no doubt noticing that, like everyone else he met, I was trying not to look at his face—and introduced himself as Oberleutnant-Feldpilot Svetozar von Potocznik.
I got to talk with Potocznik that evening and over the next few days, and I must say that I found him at first to be one of the more engaging people I had so far encountered: tactful, humorous, modest and endowed with great precision and sensitivity of expression. He was also quite remarkably intelligent. Little by little I learnt his story. He had been born in 1894 in the small town of Pravnitz on the southern edge of Carinthia, where his father was chemistry master of the local grammar school. And of course, the gymnasium at Pravnitz in the 1900s had become a cause celebre throughout the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy because of a bitter dispute over the language of instruction in the school, now that the local Slovene population were demanding equality with German-speakers. This wretched dispute had dragged on for years, with the school closed down for long periods because of riots and boycotts and blockades, punctuated by outbreaks of pandemonium in the Vienna Reichsrat as the German and Slovene deputies from Carinthia hurled inkpots at one another. At least three k.k. Ministers for Education had resigned because of the Pravnitz gymnasium affair. At last, in 1908, to the inexpressible disgust of German Nationalists throughout the entire Monarchy, Vienna had given in and made the school officially bilingual.
But while this nonsense had been going on, events had been moving for the Potocznik family in another direction. Always an ingenious man, Herr Doktor von Potocznik had used his long spells of enforced leave to perfect a revolutionary new process for synthesis of ammonia. In the end he had managed to patent it and sell it to the CIVAG syndicate, who made it a condition of purchase that he should move to Germany to supervise the setting-up of the first process line. So in 1909 the family had sold up and moved to Mannheim, bidding a not very affectionate farewell to the decrepit old Austrian Monarchy which had given in so easily to the insolent demands of its lower races.
Thus young Potocznik had grown up in Germany. An outstanding pupil and talented poet, he had excelled at music, though his interests had turned towards theology and moral philosophy. He had also, about 1910, become involved with the Wandervogel, the curious movement among the idealistic German young which rejected the horsechair-stuffed values of the Wilhelmine Reich and instead set out in search of the authentic and the natural: birdsong in the forest, church bells in the Alpine valleys, rucksacks and lederhosen and guitars around campfires, running barefoot in the morning dew and all the rest of the nonsense which (I must confess) made me thankful for a youth spent playing billiards in the smoke-filled ambience of Austrian provincial coffee-houses.
Potocznik had been due to enter Gottingen University in 1914 to study philosophy. But the war had got there first. Like millions of other German adolescents, he had rushed to the colours filled with a burning desire for self- sacrifice in this war, which (they believed) was not about territory or dynastic claims but about power and youth and the force of the spirit; a near-religious crusade to give Germany her rightful place in the world and break the shackles forged for her by the old nations. There had been official reservations about his nationality of course: he was still technically an Austrian subject. But he was eventually given permission to join the German Army, “pending an administrative decision.” He enlisted in the Academic Legion and was flung almost immediately, after the sketchiest of training, into the fighting at Ypres, given the task of storming the village of Langemarck. Eighteen thousand of them had set out across the water meadows that morning, singing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” as they advanced. Less than two thousand were to come back. “The Massacre of the Innocents,” they called it. A patrol had found Potocznik next day among the stacks of corpses, the left side of his face smashed by a rifle bullet.
He had spent the next six months in hospital in Germany, and had then been transferred to the specialist facial-injuries unit being set up by Professor Kirschbaum and his colleagues at Vienna University. My wife Elisabeth had been one of the sisters on his ward. They had patched him up after a fashion, rebuilding his cheekbone with bone-grafts and creating a metal bridge for his upper jaw. But plastic surgery was a primitive business in those still-experimental days before antibiotics, and the surgeons had in the end only been able to restore function, not appearance. But another unpleasant surprise awaited him in mid-1915: the Imperial German Minister for War— having probably concluded that someone with a name like Svetozar von Potocznik was not an acceptable soldier of the Reich—had not been pleased to grant his application to serve in the German armed forces. To my surprise, though, I found him not to be too upset about this.
“Of course,” he had said to me in the mess tent after supper, “it was a let-down not to be able to serve in the German Army, especially after I started getting interested in flying. Their air force is about five years ahead of ours in every respect. But quite frankly it doesn’t make a lot of difference to me now. We’re all fighting for the Greater German Reich, and wearing an Austrian cap badge signifies as little for me as wearing that of Bavaria or Saxony. Germany and Austria are being welded together now into a single billet of steel under the blows of the enemy, tempered in the forge of war into a weapon such as the world has not yet seen. True, I’d have more fun flying on the Western Front against the Britishers and the French. But there: I think we’ll have sport enough here on the South-West Front before long, once the Americans come into this war. And anyway, I’m glad in a way to be defending this region.”
“What, the Kustenland?”
“No, Carinthia, my home province: defending the southern marches of Germany against the Latins and Slavs. That was something I could never convince them of in north Germany: that we Germans who live on the frontiers of the Reich have a far keener awareness of what it means to be German than those who sit comfortably in Darmstadt and Mannheim and never look into the eyes of the wolf-packs that surround us.”
“You seem to have a very clear idea of what you are fighting for,” I remarked.
“I certainly have. But what are you fighting for, Prohaska, if I might ask?”
“Me? I can’t say that I’ve ever thought much about it. I just fight for the House of Austria because that’s my job and it’s what I swore on oath to do. Anyway, my time’s been so taken up thinking about how to do it these past two years that I’ve never wondered a great deal about why. I’m just a career naval officer; things like that are for the politicians to decide.”
“Precisely. That’s the trouble, if you’ll excuse my saying so: you professional officers always fight bravely, but sadly you lack any very deep appreciation of what this war is about. Probably I’d have been the same if I had grown up in this corpse-empire of ours and been through a cadet school. But as it was I saw the future in Germany—the factories, the cities, the laboratories. And I also had time to read a great deal when I was laid up in hospital: Nietzsche, Darwin, Treitschke, Bernhardi, the lot. It was then that I first fully understood why I was lying in bed with half my face missing; and I swore to dedicate my life to Greater Germany. Our German revolution is being created in this war. Nothing can stop it now—not even defeat—and it’ll turn the world upside-down before it’s finished.”
“You sound like a socialist to me.” He smiled, his mouth twisted to one side by his rebuilt jaw. I could see how sweet his smile would have been before his face was wrecked. His eyes were not those of a crazed fanatic but of a seer; a dreamer of dreams.
“Perhaps I am, my dear Prohaska. But a German socialist second and a German warrior first.” It may have been ill-natured of me, but I could not help interjecting at this point that some might consider “Svetozar von Potocznik” a pretty odd sort of name for a warrior of the Greater German Reich. But he had obviously been asked that question before. He laughed, and answered me with his usual calm earnestness. “We all have to have a name, Prohaska, and names are handed down in the male line except, I believe, in a few odd little countries in Africa. The ‘Svetozar’ bit is rather awful, I agree: my mother was greatly addicted to romantic novels when I was born and she thought that it went better with ‘Potocznik’ than ‘Willibald’ or ‘Englebert,’ which were my father’s choices. As to the ‘Potocznik,’ it doesn’t argue for any but the tiniest element of Slav blood. Tell me Prohaska, how long do you think people in Europe have been using surnames?”
“I really couldn’t say. Since the fifteenth century perhaps? Up in the Tyrol I believe they still give people names according to their occupation.”
