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
