by Джон Биггинс
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 b
etter 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, y
ou’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? ”