After the Somali waiter had been summoned and a fresh round of drinks ordered Baron Foldvar inquired suavely, “Do you go to Addis Ababa, or have you just come down the line?”
“We only arrived in Jibuti this morning,” Christopher told him, “and we’re hoping to be able to transact our business here so that it won’t be necessary for us to go up into the interior.”
“Indeed!” The older man raised his eyebrows. “Your case is unusual. Nine out of every ten white people in Jibuti are either coming or going from Addis in these days. The tenth only remains here because he cannot beg, borrow, or steal enough money for his ticket.”
“Are you just back or on your way up?” Valerie asked.
“I go up on to-morrow’s train. An abominable trip; so I’m informed. Insolent native officials from whose persecution there is no escape except by bribery; the most disgusting food; and even the water offered in the buffets of the wayside stations quite undrinkable so that one must go with a private supply of Vichy if one would escape enteric. I have travelled much but I confess that I find the prospects of this journey particularly unalluring.”
Christopher sipped the orange juice that the waiter had just set down before him. “It sounds beastly. Thank goodness we’ll be travelling by plane if we do have to go. Have you heard anything fresh about the war?”
“The vanguard of the Italian columns are reported to have entered Dessye, the Emperor’s battle headquarters.”
“Is that so? If it’s true, they’re moving mighty rapidly. D’you think they can keep it up?”
Baron Foldvar shrugged. “It is impossible to say. Anything might happen in such a crazy war as this. When the Italians opened their campaign I am quite certain they never dreamed of achieving the swift progress they have made in the last fortnight. Now that they have initiated this lightning thrust who shall predict how far it may penetrate?”
“The Italians have changed their policy then.” Valerie leaned forward. “We know practically nothing about the actual war but you seem very well informed. Do tell us what’s been going on.”
“I know very little,” their new friend replied gravely, “but at one time I was an officer on the Imperial Austrian General Staff. Before the Great War I was for some time Assistant Military Attaché to the Austrian Embassy in London. That is why, pardon me if I seem to boast, many people have been kind enough to say that I speak very good English.”
“You do indeed,” Valerie agreed. “But you were saying …”
“That as a Staff Officer it was my duty to study all problems which might give rise to future wars. Particularly with reference to Italy because, in those days, although they were both members of the Triple Alliance, the interests of Austria-Hungary and Italy differed upon so many points.”
“The last twenty years have altered all that,” Christopher remarked.
“Yes, Mussolini has changed the Italian mentality a great deal. Under Fascism the national self-confidence has increased out of all recognition but his influence has not been sufficient to eradicate the Italian army’s memory of their defeat at Adowa in 1896. That defeat has been much exaggerated. It was largely due to the parsimonious attitude of the Government in Rome who refused to grant even one tenth of the money for the Italian expedition against Menelik that the British had voted for their General Napier when he marched against the Emperor Theodore and penetrated as far as Magdala in the previous decade.
“In actual fact, they lost less than a thousand white troops and between three and four thousand Askaris; while both performed prodigies of valour during that disastrous retreat fighting against overwhelming odds. Yet they’ve never been able to get rid of the idea that they were badly beaten. Perhaps that is not altogether surprising as, almost unsuspected by them, Menelik gathered together over a hundred thousand warriors secretly in the mountains and fell upon them when they were still in the initial stages of their retirement.
“In any case, that memory still dominated De Bono’s policy at the opening of the present campaign. He was terrified of pushing his outposts forward even another mile unless he could support them with masses of troops. Yet he could not advance his main forces until roads were made behind them at every step to ensure the delivery to them of adequate ammunition and supplies. Hence the extraordinary slowness of the Italians’ initial operations. The war opened on October 3rd; by the 6th they had already avenged Adowa and a few days later they took the sacred city of Aksum, both less than twenty-five miles from the Eritrean frontier. Then they stuck. It took them over a month to advance another sixty miles to Makale because they were proceeding with such extreme caution.
“Even when Marshal Badoglio took over at the end of November he failed at first to draw the best results from his General Staff’s appreciation of the situation, and the policy of a creeping advance in mass was continued. But the Abyssinians played into his hands. Instead of waiting, as they should have done, to ambush his columns in the precipitous gorges of the Tigre, they massed to attack him in the open.
“It was child’s-play, with his modern armaments, to defeat and scatter them. Once the main bodies of the enemy had been met and routed he had little to fear in the way of hordes of fanatical warriors suddenly appearing from nowhere. Being a first-class soldier he altered his policy completely and began to push his flying columns forward.
“They are still advancing. His aeroplanes spray the heights on either side of his columns, as they thrust their way onward, with mustard gas. Not to kill the miserable natives, but to make the heights untenable. A humane form of warfare if one regards it soberly since it prevents continued skirmishes which would otherwise entail death and many casualties on both sides.
“The Italians still have a long way to go and every dusty mile they cover carries them farther from their bases. If the Emperor will succeed in checking them with the masses of new troops he is still assembling, or the Italians will achieve their main objective, Addis Ababa, before the rains come, remains to be seen.”
“That’s the most interesting résumé of the campaign I’ve heard so far,” Christopher acknowledged handsomely. “I take it you were through the European war, Baron?”
“Yes. I fought in it, of course,” the older man sighed. “A hideous tragedy which few of my generation can ever forget.”
“Did you fight against the Russians or the Italians?” Valerie asked.
“The Russians, in the early days; then I was taken prisoner. On that account I was also compelled to witness many of the horrors of the Russian Revolution.”
“But how interesting,” Valerie exclaimed, “actually to have lived through history in the making. Won’t you tell us what it was really like?”
Baron Foldvar spread out his thin, elegant hands. “It is a long story and a sad one. For many people, the profiteers and so on, the war was a glorious opportunity. Even for some young men who fought it was only a marvellous adventure, but for me, it was the end of everything. If you wish I will tell … but no. The private tragedy of a stranger would only bore you.”
“No, please?” Valerie insisted. “I was only a baby at the time of the Great War but it affected all my generation tremendously and so few of us really know anything about it. Please tell us, unless speaking of your memories pains you too much.”
The Austrian smiled for the first time. “How I envy you both your youth and eagerness to hear even of terrible things if it may serve to increase your knowledge. Ah well, my own youth, at least, was unimpaired by tragedy. Twenty-two years ago I was a Captain of Huzzars in Vienna.
“What a city it was in those days! It is still beautiful although only the empty shell remains now that it is no longer the capital of an Empire but only of a Province. Then, it was the gayest, the most romantic city in the world; a perfect paradise for lovers. To drive up the hill to Grinzing in the evening and dine there, with a pretty girl, in one of the wine-gardens while the musicians played Strauss beside your table and the fairy lamps twinkled in the trees above. For poo
r and rich alike what more had life to offer? I suppose I should be grateful that my early years were set in pleasant places and that I lived them during a peaceful well-ordered epoch. How right the British statesman, Sir Edward Grey, was when on the eve of the Great War he said: ‘One by one the lights of Europe are going out.’ There is no nation where youth has been privileged to have its fling with the same carefree happiness and security since.
“But I digress. In the autumn of 1913 I met the lady who was afterwards to be my wife. All through the winter I wooed her. Love-affairs did not reach their climaxes so swiftly then because young girls of good family were very carefully chaperoned. It was at first an affair of hesitant greetings and shy confidences when we met at big gatherings in the houses of our mutual friends. Then of smuggled notes; apparently chance but, actually, carefully arranged meetings when we were riding in the Prater and stolen half-hours at dusk when I clambered over the high wall of her garden.
“The Viennese women are notoriously the most beautiful in the world, perhaps through the admixture of races in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire since the upper classes of them all frequented the capital; but among all those superbly beautiful women the lady of my heart was surely the most beautiful. At least I thought so and, although you may find it difficult to believe now, I was considered a very handsome young man in those days; also as a Cavalry Officer in one of the crack regiments who had been transferred to the General Staff I was naturally much sought after, so I had ample opportunity to meet all the loveliest girls in Vienna.
“Fortunately our families were much of the same standing so the obstacles to be overcome before we could marry were mostly the products of our own imaginations. In the spring of 1914, when I screwed up my courage to ask her father for an interview, he listened to my proposals with the utmost kindness and a few days later our engagement was announced.
“In June we were married; having received the blessings of both our families and the good wishes of a host of friends. I had obtained long leave from my military duties for the honeymoon and we settled down to enjoy two utterly carefree months in the country on an estate which formed part of my patrimony.
“Five weeks later I was recalled by telegram. We had been shocked and distressed by the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand but, in our bliss, we had not bothered our heads about the quarrel with Servia which followed. Indeed, we had hardly seen a paper. We were utterly absorbed in the supreme joy of possessing each other. That I should wake each morning beside my beautiful young wife seemed a miracle. The new way in which she dressed her hair seemed infinitely more important than the threatening note drafted by some elderly diplomat in our foreign office.
“I left at once for Vienna. Few of us had the power to realise it then, but one by one the lights of Europe were going out, a civilisation and free intercourse between free people which it had taken centuries to build was to be destroyed in one mad hour, and it does not look as if it will ever come again in our lifetime. Ten million men, at least, were earmarked for death within the next few years, although they could not know it; most of them young, healthy, happy people like myself, and not a fraction of them had the least interest in the quarrel for which they died.
“I resigned my Staff appointment in order to be with my regiment. Any young man would have done the same. But my resignation was not accepted. Instead, I was sent to a Divisional Headquarters not far from the Russian frontier. The Division was composed of Czechish soldiers. The Czechs were a subject people who had always hated Austrian rule, much as the Irish have always been resentful of English domination. Perhaps we should have been wiser to have given them some form of home rule when their Deputies pressed for it before the war. Of course, they have their own republic now, but when the war broke out they were in a ferment of discontent, and they welcomed it as a chance to gain their liberty.
“Instead of fighting for us, whole battalions of them, led by their own officers, marched over to the Russians, with all their equipment and their bands playing. We did what we could to stem the tide of desertion, but in a few hours Austrian machine-guns and Austrian bullets were being used to massacre the handfuls of loyal troops with which we attempted to hold the frontier. Within three days of the opening of the war I was taken prisoner by the Russians.”
The Baron paused to drink from his glass of lager, in which the ice had long since melted. Valerie eased her position a little; even now the sultry night had come her garments were still sticking to her. After a moment the Austrian went on:
“It was not so bad at first. Some sense of chivalry still existed between the officers on both sides. The normal feelings of decency and humanity inherent in most men of every nation had not then been destroyed by the hideous hate propaganda which later turned honourable opponents into savages.
“The Russians sent me under escort with a number of other prisoners to Kiev. There I endeavoured to get news of my young wife. I could learn nothing definite, but from prisoners who were captured later I heard rumours that, in the national emergency, she had become a nurse and was tending the wounded on the Polish front.
“During those awful empty weeks of dull prison routine the one overwhelming craving which obsessed me was to get back to her. The war had not settled down sufficiently for a regular service of prisoners’ letters and parcels to be established. She wrote to me, I don’t doubt, but I never received any of her letters. In those early days of the war everything was chaotic. Our only news was hearsay; rumours that the German drive on Paris had been checked, but that the Russian steamroller was lumbering down towards Berlin; rumours of our friends fighting on many fronts and that this or that relation had taken up some kind of national work. I could not stand the uncertainty and inaction, so I determined to escape.
“I will not weary you with details of those feverish days of preparation for the attempt, or the excitement of the actual dash for liberty, which I made with two other officers. We got away, but we were caught again two days later.
“As a punishment we were separated and each of us transferred to a harsher form of captivity. I was sent to Omsk in Siberia; a little ugly town that, although it was the centre of a Government controlling thousands of square miles of territory, seemed to be composed only of many hundred shoddy, wooden buildings scattered over a great area.
“It always seemed to be raining there, except when it was snowing, and in winter the cold was intense. To appreciate the torture that cold can be you must not think of winter in Switzerland, where you are well fed and wrapped in warm furs, but of a bleak plain where the wind cuts like a knife, through garments worn paper-thin, to an ill-nourished body.
“Month after month dragged by. There was hardly a soul in the prison who could speak more than a few words of my language. I learnt Russian, but my spirit grew numb from continuous physical discomfort and the knowledge that I was many thousands of miles from home. In that remote place no post ever reached me, and news of the war itself was of the vaguest. All one could do was to cling to life and hope on that the war would soon be over. I could learn nothing of my wife, but all through those dark days the thought of her warm loveliness and our eventual reunion was the one thing which sustained me.
“The revolution in St. Petersburg, when it came, had no effect upon us prisoners. We heard tell of it, of course, but the Whites, who represented the old regime, dominated an area as big as Austria-Hungary, of which Omsk was nearly in the centre. The Ural Mountains and vast tracts of unmapped forest lay between it and the cities where the Reds had their first successes. The dreary round of prison life went on much as before.
“When the news of the peace of Brest-Litovsk filtered through we appealed to be sent home; but in the meantime spasmodic outbreaks had been taking place from one end of Russia to the other. The Red virus was spreading. Every town and village had its secret committee. The White officers were wholly occupied with their attempts to check the Revolution; they had no time to spare for the repatriation of prisoners or the means
to send them home even if they had wished to do so.
“Within six months we had half a dozen different Governors. They could do nothing but tell us that, for the time being, we must stay where we were. There was a revolt among the prisoners, engineered in secret by the Bolsheviks, who were out to make any sort of trouble for the Whites. Realising the root from which the mutiny sprang, the authorities acted with the utmost brutality. Scores of the prisoners were shot down and the rest of us were herded into kennels so that a handful of troops could keep us covered with machine-guns and prevent a repetition of the outbreak.
“Shortly afterwards fighting began in the streets of Omsk itself. For several days it was indecisive, but in the end the Reds gained the upper hand. All my fellow prisoners were then released except the officers. As representatives of the old order we were condemned to die.
“Those ruffians shot down my friends in batches. I dropped before they fired and feigned death. I allowed myself to be carted off and buried alive in a hastily dug trench with the bodies of the others. I nearly died of suffocation, but, when the murderers had gone, I clawed my way out through the thin layer of earth they had shovelled on top of us. Then I started to walk home.
“I found the whole country in a ferment. The hand of every man was raised against his brother. I dared not go near a town of any size, because, by that time, the Reds were in possession of all the railways.
“I took to the forests, living on berries and roots and the occasional charity of solitary peasants that I encountered who seemed as utterly bewildered as myself. No one knew what was happening outside his immediate area. Everyone was terrified of strangers. The accepted policy was to shoot first and ask questions afterwards. Reds and Whites were hated with equal intensity, and both were murdered by the country people on every possible occasion when they thought they would be able to escape reprisals. I lived in a nightmare from which it seemed that I should never waken as, week after week, I progressed a few miles farther south.
The Secret War Page 15