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and went out for a walk along the Olmutz road to get some fresh air: one of the few commodities which had not so far been replaced by a substitute version.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
