by Daša Drndic
The castle is surrounded by a spacious, well-tended rose garden visited by guests and horticulture experts. When they see the roses, each of them sighs, aaah. Among the roses stand many Renaissance sculptures.
Thirty-five years later the castle at Konopičte caught the eye of high-ranking S.S. officials, who turned it into an S.S. vacation centre. Hitler had most of Ferdinand’s collection transferred to the Wehrmacht Museum in Prague. He also saw to it that the remaining 72,712 exhibits were shipped off to Vienna so that “after the war” he could have them brought to his private museum in Linz, which had not yet been built. Before they moved into Konopičte, the Nazis ordered that the castle be painted black inside and out.
So Franz Ferdinand leaves the Konopičte hunting grounds for Vienna where he boards the Woheiner Bahn (the Venice-Trieste line) and stops at the railway bridge in the town of Solkan/Salcano. Actually, he stops in a ravine through which the Soča/Isonzo river runs, not far from Gorizia (Nova Gorica today) on the Slovenian-Italian border, which has nearly disappeared in the new, certainly historical, birth of yet another empire—Europe. A brass band is playing, the banners and flags of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy are flying, the black and yellow flag, by then somewhat outdated, the Ausgleich flag—the flag of the Compromise of 1867—and the merchant marine, red-white-green flag with its two crowns, the banner for war—the Kriegsflagge—which would vanish not even eight years later, in 1915.
It is Thursday. The sky is clear. Now and then a small blackbird wings by, quickly, like a restless eye. From the cool shade under the bridge wafts a breeze with the fragrance of wilting linden blossoms, fresh pine shoots on the branches, the moss and cold water. On flows the Soča, serene and pure, its breathing even and deep.
Most of the people in the crowd are children, because school is out for the summer. The children wave because they are children, they have no feel for history. Precisely ten years later, on this very spot, these same children dig into their trenches, crawl across the mud, then disappear in the Soča, and images of that ceremonial summer day break through the raging rapids of the emerald “holy waters” like fireflies, like a lullaby, like an echo, and slip in under their eyelids whispering “Farewell” in at least five languages. With their dying breath, they call out to their mothers Mutti, mama! Mamma mia, oh mamma! Majko! Anyuka, anyuka! Mamusiu! Maminka! The birds won’t fly. The birds will drop. A black rain of birds will become the Soča death shroud.
Escorted by members of his family, Franz Ferdinand disembarks, shakes hands with the builders, waves to the assembled crowd, smiles, then goes over to the railing of the marvellous white bridge carved from 4,533 stone blocks of Karst limestone and looks at the gleaming river. Rudolf Jaussner, the architect, and Leopold Orley, the engineer, do not hide their pride and exhilaration. Franz Ferdinand looks into the River Soča/Isonzo and has no notion of the number of pledges of love and passionate promises that have been flung into its waters while it rose, angrily overflowing its banks, powerless to prevent incursions into its sky. It took Jaussner and Orley nearly two years to make the miracle happen: the largest arched railway bridge ever raised over a river. Five thousand tons of stone were built into the bridge; the central arch, completed in only eighteen days, has a span of eighty-five metres, unheard of until then.
And so it is that the famed Transalpina railway line is inaugurated: a route that would connect the coastline, actually Trieste, to Austria. The Monarchy needed a direct link to its southernmost provinces. The Monarchy had no wish to travel through alien territory, such as Udine. The Monarchy felt complete until the territories it possessed began to seem inadequate so it wanted more; until it lost what it had already had. Today the old Meridionale line passes through the main Gorizia railway station, built in the second half of the nineteenth century. The trains which stop in Gorizia are half-empty. As if Gorizia is still healing from the wounds of the war. Nova Gorica is left with the Transalpina line. At the border between Nova Gorica and Gorizia there is a museum in which they preserve small, nameless histories. On what used to be a “solid border” slicing Gorizia, cake-like, into two unequal parts, on that “solid border” today there is a square around which everyone is permitted to walk. Beyond the square, in both halves of the sliced city, there still rises a wall of air.
His Highness Franz Ferdinand and the Duchess of Hohenberg, Sophie Chotek, cross Solkan Bridge for the last time on the evening of Tuesday, 23 June, 1914. The husband and wife have boarded the Transalpina in Vienna, bound for Trieste. The windows of their compartment are open. It is June, so the perfume of the linden trees is in the air. Sophie hums the Blue Danube waltz, and Franz says to her, Perhaps one day they will write a song for this little river, too. Sophie says, I don’t think so. This is a small river, unimportant and unknown. Franz says, That may not always be so. Sophie and Franz toast each other’s health with a glass of first-rate, chilled Tokay. They do not know it, but their hearts beat the way the Soča is flowing, just then, at Solkan Bridge.
On Wednesday, 24 June, Franz boards the warship Viribus Unitis. Despite a shiver of fear, he wants to believe that the “united forces” will truly protect his empire. But the nerve of European history has already been flayed. Italy and Austria are ever closer in an embrace of mutual loathing. A new ethics of misunderstanding is born. The “legacy of bitterness” between Austria and Italy mushrooms into one of the most acute instances of European nationalistic intolerance, a sort of negative folie à deux, a hatred embraced by both sides, and its web snares Germany and France, Greece and Turkey, America and Russia, Vietnam and Cambodia, Croatia and Serbia . . . The white stain of reason.
On a smaller vessel František then sails up the River Neretva to the town of Metković, continues by train to Mostar, and briefly to Ilidža, where Sophie is waiting for him. On Friday and Saturday, 26 and 27 June, the Archduke takes part in a mountain exercise, near Sarajevo, of the 15th and 16th Military Corps, but it is already becoming clear that every attempt to create a new beginning, even Ferdinand’s, will lead to an end, just as every end holds a beginning. As the story goes, after he was hit, the Archduke whispered with relief to his adjutant, God brooks no challenges. A higher power has once again imposed the order I was no longer able to sustain. In July 1914, Franz Ferdinand and Sophie travel aboard the Viribus Unitis, the same Austro-Hungarian warship on which they arrived, but this time in coffins. In September 1914, the Russian Chief of Staff publishes a Map of the Future Europe, which is remarkably like the one drawn up later, in 1945. The bullet with which Princip shot Ferdinand is preserved at Konopičte.
It is 25 May, 1915. The last passenger train crosses Solkan Bridge on its way from Vienna to Trieste. Solkan Bridge is battered, bombed, repaired and then hit again by a barrage of fire, and over it roll batteries, columns of soldiers of opposing armies march over it until 1918—the Austro-Germans and the Italians. Bruno Baar marches, too.
In the bloodiest of all eleven or twelve battles waged along the Soča, the Sixth, fought from 5 August to 17 August, 1916, Italy opens the way through to Trieste. In the embrace of its lavish gardens and palaces, shielded by mountain ranges, with the Vipava and the Soča as a diamond necklace on its bosom, Gorizia, a little Homburg, a treacherous copy of Baden-Baden, would for many years to come fail to draw the Austrian aristocracy as it had once drawn them during the hot summer months.
General Cadorna lines up twenty-two Italian divisions along the Soča on 5 August, 1916. On the other shore, nine divisions of weary and dispirited Austro-Hungarian troops await the order to attack, most of them too young and too old for warfare.
Bruno Baar is forty-nine. He has a pot belly, three children and a wife who bakes cakes for the Austrian soldiers. He has a winery in which he no longer makes wine. He has a collection of the latest seventy-eights, to which he is not able, just then, to listen, so he dreams of them as he marches along the flooding banks of the Soča, humming “La donna è mobile”, because he adores Caruso. Meanwhile, his Marisa, swaying on dented high heels,
carries walnut crescents to the brothel for the Austro-Hungarian officers, and imagines that she is Bice Adami bringing the audience in Milan to their feet with her rendition of “Voi lo sapete”, accompanied by the piano. Marisa Baar, née Brasic, does her best to sing soprano, but without success, her voice is coarsened by harsh tobacco. A droplet of summer rain falls on her eyelash, where it lingers, making a miniature crystal ball which reflects her future. Marisa Baar sings “Voi lo sapete” without an inkling that Bice Adami will long outlive her.
Cadorna begins the battle with a diversionary artillery volley on 6 August, 1916. He places two infantry units to the south on the Monfalcone side with two corps each as decoys. Cadorna’s ruse does not work. The Austrian units do not budge. As it was, Count Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf had already cut back the number of troops along the Soĉa front in order to bolster his offensive near Trentino. Hence Cadorna swiftly deploys his troops from Trentino by train (on the Transalpina line) to the Soča. Fierce fighting, dangerously out of control, begins two days later in Oslavia and on Podgora Mountain, when Cadorna captures the peak of Mount Sabatino. Units of the 12 th Italian Division march into Gorizia on 8 August. The Italian Army crosses the Soča the next day under a barrage of fire. Holding their guns high over their heads as if they were carrying children, as if they were greeting the sky, the soldiers plunge into the river singing the Garibaldi hymn:
Si scopron le tombe, si levano i morti
i martiri nostri son tutti risorti!
Le spade nel pugno, gli allori alle chiome,
la fiamma ed il nome d’Italia nel cor:
corriamo, corriamo! Sù, giovani schiere,
sù al vento per tutte le nostre bandiere.
Sù tutti col ferro, sù tutti col foco,
sù tutti col nome d’Italia nel cor.
Va’ fu ori d’Italia,
va’ fu ori chè l’ora!
Va’ fuori d’Italia,
va’ fu ori o stranier!
Later people will sing other songs. Mostly women will sing, and mostly they will sing a song with the refrain, “O, Gorizia, tu sei maledetta”.
Austrian shrapnel whistles, churning the drunken Soča into a pool of green-blue foam. Then a terrible silence settles in, pierced by the sun’s sharp rays, and a vast crimson veil dances on the Soča, wet and sticky and thick. The army bugles sound the signal to charge and the grey uniforms line up in a protective firewall. This living wall, resembling insects with their wings plucked, howls Avanti Savoia! The stone bridge over the Soča has been hit the day before. Engineers ready the railway bridge over which the railway line runs from Milan and Udine to Gorizia and Trieste. The Italian fighting batteries, now in tatters and gashes, gallop over to the other side, firing at the Austrians, who fall back. Following the soldiers under a forest of spears are the Carabinieri, the Alpini, the Bersaglieri, the infantry and the cavalry. As far as one side is concerned, Gorizia is taken. For the others, Gorizia has fallen.
Bruno Baar scrambles up a hill and watches the battle, hidden behind the scratchy trunk of a hundred-year-old pine tree on which someone has carved a heart. They seem to him like idle children who have chosen to split into two camps separated by a slender thread. As if on both sides of the thread these children are lying flat on their stomachs, puffing, and the thread rises into the air, twists into a snake and falls like a waft to the ground. That thread is the border, Bruno Baar says. It will always twist and turn. Then he says, I’ll go and turn myself in.
Twenty thousand Italian soldiers are killed at the Sixth Battle of the Soča and 31,000 of them disappear or are captured. The Italians take 19,000 soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian Army prisoner. They capture sixty-seven pieces of artillery weaponry and a heap of mines and machine guns. The Austrian losses come to 71,000 men, some of whom are killed, some missing in action and some taken prisoner. The tally of casualties for all twelve battles along the Soča for the Italians is 1,205,000, and for the Austrians, 1,291,000.
The losses of the Kingdom of Italy on the Austro-Hungarian front in World War One are: 650,000 killed, 947,000 wounded, 600,000 taken prisoner or missing in action; 2,197,000 victims in total.
The losses for the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy on the Italian front are: 1,200,000 killed, 3,620,000 wounded and 2,200,000 taken prisoner or missing in action; a total of 7,200,000 people are casualties one way or another.
Later, a medal was designed to commemorate the taking of Gorizia. It was awarded to the bravest, both those who survived and those who were killed. The ones who went missing in action were unable to receive the medal. These men missing in action are a big problem, one cannot simply go missing. Turn into nothing. The missing are a problem because they turn up sooner or later. They come back. No matter when, no matter in what shape, they return, whether in someone else’s body, in someone’s voice, they always leave a trace. When they come back they are a nuisance, because the medals have already been doled out. The medal for valour at the Sixth Battle of the Soča is an important medal. It is a testament to the battle over the only corridor that led out of Italy into Austro-Hungary. The largest number of Italian medals was given to fighters of the 45th Infantry Division, because the most fighters were killed in the 45th Infantry Division. At the Soča. In the Soča. A local Gorizia resident, Castellucci, “designed” the medal. Today there are few such medals on the market. They are rare, so their value is rising. Collectors pay €50 and more for one. Precisely as much as a forgotten life is worth. Along with the medals, there are souvenirs and mementos of the battles along the Soča. Genuine souvenirs and those of more recent vintage. For instance, a twenty-centimetre-high, nickel-plated vase made from an eighty-millimetre shell, with etchings on it of towers and a gateway, describes the march into Gorizia. These vases are inscribed with the words Ricordo im Gorizia and Ricordo di Gorizia, and Bruno Baar keeps his in a display case as if they were trophies. Here:
This is for the sake of remembrance. Medals and souvenirs in general. For those who have the time to remember. Remembering is best done in old age. Life is calmer then. Because fresh memories are not, in fact, memories at all, they are happenings. Except in old age memories become deceptive, distorted, and it is difficult to determine whether these (old-age) memories have ever been real.
Bruno Baar does not write home from the front. He has no time to write. He returns soon after he leaves. He says: One should adapt. He says this in Italian, because now he is speaking Italian more often and forgetting his German.
Many write. Many never return. Many go missing. That is why their letters have been preserved. Today some letters are sold at auctions, like the medals and the souvenirs.
I did not go missing. I am a journalist. I report from the theatre of war. I arrived in Gorizia in 1916, accompanied by Sig. Ugo Ojetti,* well-known Florentine fine arts and literary critic. Ojetti was assigned the task of protecting historical monuments and art works in the war zones.
Yes, for we live in a country of contemporaries who have no ancestors or heirs, because they have no memory. When we die, everything dies with us.
Here is Brother Giorgio, the regiment chaplain, a handsome man. Tall, broad-shouldered, with a warm smile and unusually temperamental, down-to-earth views. I am almost certain he joined the fray. I happen to know thousands of priests and monks who fought in the Italian Army; many were killed. That is as it should be, no matter what the Pope says and the faith preaches. So it is, too, in journalism. If you do not intend to lie, the truth is never relative.
It poured with rain during my stay in Gorizia. The largest city hotel was closed, so we dined at a more modest spot, La Posta. They served us our food in the kitchen because an Austrian shell had fallen on the dining room just before we got there. We had a fine meal: minestrone, mutton with vegetables, pudding and fruit. We drank excellent vintage Austrian wine. There aren’t wines like those any more. And finally, coffee the likes of which hadn’t been had in Europe since the beginning of the war. While we were eating, Italian and Austrian bat
teries exchanged salutations over the city.
We crossed the Isonzo and arrived at the Friuli heights. The sun broke through the leaden grey clouds and lit the blazing bastion of the Karst. Beyond it lay Trieste, the Italian city of longing. But before the longing of the Italians can be fulfilled, the Karst will bleed for years and years to come.
Much later Bruno Baar tells his grandchildren, he tells Ada Baar, Tedeschi by marriage, what it was like on the Soča, because his grandchildren are always pestering him, What did you do in the war, Grandfather? And because his children, too, ask, What did you do in the war, Father?
There was fighting for a second mountain, for Sabatino, Bruno Baar tells them. We were living then at Via Romagna 8. We had a beautiful view of the Isonzo. There were gardens and trees all around the house, lush greenery. Gorizia had been captured with caution, so it wouldn’t be damaged, because everyone was counting on the town, the Italians and the Austrians, as they meant to come back once the war was over. So Gorizia was only bombed a little, for tactical reasons. People went on living in Gorizia. There were hospitals here and cafés, and the artillery was in the streets at the edge of town, and there were two brothels, one for soldiers and the other for officers. The nights got chilly in late summer. There was fighting going on in the mountains, on the other side of town. The metal railway bridge was battered by shells, the tunnel running along the Isonzo caved in. The avenue of trees on Corso Italia was unscathed. There were girls in town waiting for their soldiers. After the fighting there wasn’t a single oak tree left standing on the mountain, no pine forest, nothing but tree stumps, trees split apart and the land torn up. I started making my Picolit and my Asti wines again.