by Unbreakable- The Woman Who Defied the Nazis in the World's Most Dangerous Horse Race (retail) (epub)
The lost soldiers were quickly replaced, just as they were in other combatant armies; but their replacements lacked experience. Mikuláš Brandis, also twenty-one and still fresh from his unfinished course at cadet school, was promoted to ensign in March 1915; by August he was a lieutenant. He, too, began the war in the east: like Norbert, he was in the Uhlan cavalry. But he was later transferred to fight with the 2nd Imperial Rifles on the Italian front – considered by many to be the deadliest arena of all.
Back in Bohemia, the most obvious symptom of war was hunger. Rationing, initially just for bread and flour, was introduced in April 1915. In Řitka, ‘auxiliary commissions’ were organised to work in fields whose owners were serving at the front. Nor was food the only thing that was scarce. Schoolchildren were encouraged to gather scrap metal for use in arms manufacture. The church in Líšnice would eventually lose all its bells and several organ pipes. Leopold, meanwhile, somehow managed to obtain a horse on the front: an old, blind mare called Luska that he sent back to Řitka. According to Lata, ‘Her sense of smell and touch were much more developed than with normal horses. I rode with her down the steepest slopes and never fell.’ It was probably just as well that Luska could make herself useful. A horse that contributed nothing might have attracted hungry looks.
By 1916, the village had introduced a ban on eating meat on Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays. Beer was prohibitively expensive; salt and coffee were unobtainable; sugar and kerosene were scarce. Yet morale in the Brandis household does not appear to have suffered. All that unsupervised outdoor activity in early childhood had made the sisters self-reliant, and no doubt they had absorbed some of their father’s military values, too. Lata’s strengths were self-discipline, decisive management, and apparently limitless supplies of energy, athleticism and toughness. Austerity was a challenge rather than an ordeal. So was living off the land. Shooting game in the woods became a valuable source of food. It is unlikely that Lata saw this as a chore.
Towards the end of the year, Mikuláš, fighting in northern Italy, had two brushes with death in quick succession. His ‘miraculous’ double escape – as he described it – inspired him to contribute 200 crowns towards improvements to Řitka’s small roadside chapel. Elsewhere, the winds of change were gathering strength. Tomás Masaryk, the exiled Czech nationalist leader, had published a manifesto the previous November proclaiming the independence of the ‘lands of the Bohemian Crown’ – that is, Bohemia, Moravia, Austrian Silesia and the regions of Hungary inhabited by Slovaks. In February 1916 he had established what became known as the Czechoslovak National Council – a kind of government in exile. Since then he had been drumming up international support for the independent nation he dreamed of, while also developing the Czechoslovak Legion – an army of Czechs and Slovaks drawn from expatriates, deserters and prisoners of war that had been fighting against Austria-Hungary with increasing success on the eastern front. The idea that the Habsburg status quo was the natural and immutable order of things was looking increasingly threadbare. Tomorrow could belong to anybody.
On 21 November 1916, the Emperor Franz Joseph died, aged eighty-six, after a reign of almost seven decades. His nephew Charles, Count Leopold’s former pupil, succeeded him; but the spell was broken. The empire’s collapse seemed suddenly far from unthinkable, and even the most charismatic ruler (which Charles was not) might struggle to do more than delay it.
In 1917, the increasingly desperate imperial army began to recruit tens of thousands of young women to a Women’s Auxiliary Labour Force, in non-combat roles such as telegraph operation. The initiative was controversial: some saw it as a threat to the traditional order of society. But this was the new reality. Old certainties, good and bad, counted for nothing.
Nor was it just the Habsburg world that was crumbling. In March 1917, news reached Bohemia that the Russians had overthrown their Tsar; fleeing members of the no-longer-ruling classes soon followed. It became easier than ever to believe that a similar cataclysm awaited what remained of the Habsburg status quo – especially after the entry of the US into the war on the Allied side that April. In the east, the Czechoslovak Legion threw in their lot with Russia’s provisional government. Supporters of Masaryk’s independence movement spoke with growing confidence about how an independent Czechoslovak nation might be governed – and one thing that was widely noted was that land reform was high on their agenda. Aristocrats with more than their fair share of land were about to get their comeuppance.
Perhaps this sense of an impending year zero is what prompted the Brandis family to start selling off parcels of land in the southern part of Řitka. Altogether Countess Brandisová (presumably Lata’s mother rather than Lata herself) sold about 150 hectares that year, in about fifty small parcels. The purchasers were villagers, many of whose families still live on those plots today. The proceeds were small, but the village appears to have welcomed the sales – and it was better than having the land confiscated.
But land is not the worst thing to lose in war. On 9 July, Mikuláš, still fighting in the Italian Alps with the 2nd Imperial Rifles, was killed at Zugna Torta in the battle of Rovereto. In the great scheme of things, it was just another death: one among 1.2 million men killed fighting for Austria-Hungary between 1914 and 1918. It wasn’t even unusual from the village’s point of view: eleven other Řitka families lost sons in the course of the war. Yet what consolation was that?
Lieutenant Brandis was honoured, two months after his death, with the Military Merit Cross, 3rd Class; so his parents and sisters knew he had died bravely. But that too offered scant consolation, and the slow, piecemeal return of his possessions from the front only added to the agony. He had been home a few months earlier, on leave, and had posed in his uniform for a photograph. His upper lip bears a few wisps of down rather than a moustache. He was just a boy. ‘Nobody can help me,’ wrote Johanna soon afterwards. ‘I cannot conceal it from myself that I will not be happy until I am reunited with [him] . . .’
The count, whenever news reached him, would probably have reflected that he now had no heir. There would be no more counts to carry the Brandis name. And Lata? Mikuláš was one of her closer siblings. He was only eighteen months older than his twin sisters, and since young Leopold’s death in 1902 there had been a natural division of the siblings into three age clusters: first Marie Therese and Gabriele; then a three and a half year gap to Mikuláš, Lata and Kristýna; and then another three-year gap before the young ones, Alžběta, Markěta and Johanna. In one family photograph, the middle three can be seen riding together. Lata’s taste and aptitude for pastimes traditionally considered boyish would have made Mikuláš a natural playmate. It is unlikely that many in the family will have felt his loss more keenly than she did. But she left no record of her feelings – only those prayers: ‘Oh Lord give them eternal rest, and let perpetual light shine upon them . . .’
By early 1918, the lines between life and death were blurring. Strikes and mutinies broke out across the Austro-Hungarian lands. The crisis in food production became desperate. The cost of living had increased tenfold since the outbreak of war, and daily per capita consumption of flour had fallen to half its pre-war average. In May, a bank clerk from Prague, Josef Pagan, was found starved to death on a Řitka roadside.
In June, a huge Austro-Hungarian offensive against the Italians on the Piave River was comprehensively repelled. The disaster marked the ignominious end of the campaign that had claimed Mikuláš’s life; and, to all intents and purposes, the end of the grand military tradition in which he and his father had served. The Italians celebrated their victory on Lata’s twenty-third birthday.
On 3 November, following one last military humiliation at Vittorio Veneto, Austria-Hungary concluded an armistice with the Allies. On 11 November the Emperor Charles renounced all participation in the administration of the state. For his Czech subjects, it barely mattered: they had already renounced him. The Western powers had by then officially recognised Masaryk’s Czechoslovak National Com
mittee as the government-in-exile of the Habsburg territories hitherto known as Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia and Carpathian Ruthenia, and on 28 October the new, independent state of Czechoslovakia had been founded.
The war was over, and so was the world that Lata and her siblings had been groomed to inhabit.
8.
A fresh start
As the last guns fell silent on 11 November, Europe’s decimated nations turned their faces to the future. Few did so with more optimism than Czechoslovakia, whose first president, sixty-eight-year-old Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, was elected by the interim National Assembly three days later.
Masaryk was one of history’s more appealing statesmen. The son of a poor Moravian couple – a coachman and cook – he was a philosopher and academic before turning to politics in the 1890s. His nationalism was preceded by what he called ‘democratism’, and although he was ruthlessly effective as champion of an independent Czechoslovak nation from 1914 onwards, he never lost sight of his core values. The use of force was justified ‘only in the most extreme case’, he insisted, while hate had no place in politics at all. The new nation he believed in had to be based on democracy, freedom, justice and fairness.
His spirit caught the mood of the post-war age, and Czechoslovakia embraced it. As the nation blossomed into what was arguably Europe’s most democratic state, Masaryk was repeatedly re-elected: in 1920, 1927 and 1934. His animated face – small, intense, bookish, bespectacled – replaced the old Emperor’s whiskery features as the ubiquitous personification of the nation’s aspirations. If not everyone shared his beliefs, most approved of his character. He preferred the company of ordinary people to that of the grand and wealthy. His lifestyle was famously modest, his marriage, to the American Charlotte Garrigue, famously happy. His personal motto was homely but catchy: ‘Don’t be afraid and don’t steal.’ His new countrymen quoted it with pride.
Mere decency was not enough to undo the devastation of war, but the sense of a fresh, fair beginning offered hope. If the new nation got it right, a better future awaited.
In Řitka, the Brandis family were mourning the ruined past. No fine words from Masaryk could bring back Mikuláš – or his still-missed older brother. They were not alone in their sorrow: bereavement and trauma clung to the village. But the family’s privileged status denied them the consolations of solidarity. As for the new regime, Count Leopold had devoted his life to the service of the old one. He could hardly be expected to celebrate.
The count and countess retreated into a bruised old age. Johanna’s health worsened; her own mother’s debts from Úmonín continued to plague her. Leopold had four years of fighting to recover from: in photographs taken soon after the war, he looks frail and haunted – although he was still capable of riding for up to three hours at a time. Meanwhile, for all Lata’s efforts, the estate was struggling. The scarcities that had crippled the rural economy in wartime would take years to ease.
Masaryk’s determination to right past wrongs must have exacerbated the family’s worries. Czechoslovakia was barely six weeks old when Law No. 61/1918 Sb. z. a. n. (10 December 1918) abolished aristocratic titles. Four months later, the Land Control Act of 16 April (1919) provided for the expropriation of estates from large landowners.
It was hard to dispute the fairness of these measures. On the eve of the First World War, more than a third of Bohemian land had been owned by 362 families; half of that was owned by a mere thirty-eight families. Almost without exception, these mega-landowners were aristocrats – whose wealth and status reflected their closeness to the imperial regime in Vienna. To have made no attempt to correct the imbalance would have made a nonsense of the idea that the First Republic (as Masaryk’s Czechoslovak nation is usually known) would be governed, in contrast to the past, for the benefit of all its citizens. Yet the common citizen’s gain would have to be someone else’s loss, and Lata’s family must have worried. Johanna, updating her will in 1918, urged her surviving children to’stick together’ and to do whatever they could to ensure that Řitka remained in the family’s hands. She was still fighting to defend the property in 1924, when the State Land Office formally conceded that – for the time being at least – Řitka would be exempt from confiscation.
It was reasonable for Leopold and Johanna to argue that they weren’t really the problem. Their already reduced land-holdings were minimal by aristocratic standards: well under 400 hectares, compared with 58,000 owned by their neighbours, the Colloredo-Mansfelds, or 176,000 owned by just one branch of the Schwarzenberg family, a little further to the south. But their relations the Kinskýs stood to lose tens of thousands of hectares, and most of their grander friends and acquaintances were also affected. In any case, they were – or had been – nobility, and Lata’s family were thus caught up in a general nationalist narrative of hostility to titled landowners. In this narrative, the Habsburg regime had been oppressing the Czechs for three centuries, and the super-rich nobility were the obscene symptom. A nation of Czechspeaking Protestants had, it was said, been conquered, plundered and exploited by an aristocracy of Germanspeaking Catholics, imposed from abroad. This was an oversimplification (and in some respects false); but there was enough truth in it for it to stick.
For aristocrats, the hostility could feel very personal. As an MP in the Bohemian diet, Leopold had represented the Conservative Landowners’ Party, and had sworn his oath of loyalty in German. Both he and his party had been swept from power in 1908, following a widening of the electoral franchise. But the taint of speaking German lingered, for all the family. The nationalist Alfred Maria Mayer complained that ‘not a single lady of aristocratic origin [can] be found in all Bohemia who speaks and writes correct Czech’. ‘Who are the large landowners?’ asked the radical newspaper Venkov. ‘They are almost entirely Germans, most of them . . . hating our nation.’ The MP Frantisek Modracek called for such nobles to be ‘expunged’ from the history of the nation. It would have been hard for Lata’s family to be completely unaware of, or unalarmed by, the public appetite for’settling accounts’ (as Mayer put it) with the nobility. They had heard about the ‘red terror’ instituted by the post-war Communist regime that had been established (briefly) in the former Habsburg land of Hungary. In the new Soviet Union, meanwhile, ‘enemies of the people’ were being executed at a rate of about 500 a week.
At the very least, the Brandis family would have felt isolated. In the census of 1921, citizens were required to record their mother tongue. In the village of Řitka (population: 362) the only German-speakers were the Brandises and their governess. Everyone else, apart from one Russian exile, spoke Czech.
There is no evidence of specific tensions between the Brandises and the villagers. Relations with those who depended on the family for a living remained cordial. That 1918 will of Johanna’s included a sizeable bequest to a long-time servant, Václav Širl, with the proviso that the Brandis family look after it for him ‘until Širl settles down and can no longer squander the money’. But Řitka clearly did not regret the passing of the old order. In 1920, villagers established their own branch of Sokol – a mass sport-and-nationalism movement, dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, that specialised in huge gymnastic displays in traditional costumes. The Habsburg regime had been suspicious of Sokol, whose Czech patriotism had given it a subversive edge, but the Brandises appear to have welcomed its emergence in Řitka. Some years later, Lata would give the local Sokol a substantial chunk of land for its activities.
Meanwhile, there was at least one respect in which the remaking of their nation represented a dramatic improvement for Lata, her mother and her sisters. Masaryk’s sense of fairness extended to gender politics. Democracy, he believed, was ‘first and foremost the equality of woman and man’. He had been campaigning for such equality for years, arguing that, in confining women to the home, ‘we lower their horizons, deaden their energy, and waste their talents’. In a well-ordered nation, he declared, ‘the woman would cease to be a slave (cook, housekeeper, wet
nurse and concubine) and the man would cease to be the lord over the woman’. His eloquence earned him the admiration of feminist campaigners: ‘The name of Masaryk has and will have in the Czech women’s movement a significance rarely accorded by women to men,’ wrote one activist.
There was every reason to believe that, in office, the philosopher-statesman would live up to this reputation. The Czechoslovak declaration of independence – written by Masaryk and published with Allied approval just before the end of the war – had specifically stated that women would be ‘placed on a level with men, politically, socially and culturally’. Eight women were included in the National Assembly that governed the new state for the eighteen months between independence and the first nationwide elections. So it was not exactly a surprise when equality between the sexes was enshrined in the Constitution that passed into law on 29 February 1920.
It was, none the less, a landmark in European history. Even Britain, which had enfranchised women over thirty in 1918, had yet to give all adult women the same voting rights as men. (That would happen in 1928.) Františka Plamínková, the most prominent Czech feminist of the age, rejoiced: ‘The position of women in the Czechoslovak Republic today with respect to political rights may be regarded as the realisation of the boldest hopes of those who have laboured for the civic rights of women.’
In practice, equality under the Constitution took a long time to translate into equality of opportunity – or even into equality under the legal code (especially family law). Many would argue that it never did so. Yet Article 106 of the Constitution could not have been more explicit: ‘Privileges of sex, birth and occupation will no longer be recognised.’
Lata Brandisová was no longer a countess, but nor was she a second-class citizen.