The Lost Prince

by Selden Edwards

  At some point in the early days of the binder, his Random Notes, he typed the first page that remained at the front of the collection for the remainder of its life, and remains today. The page is yellowed and worn because it is the only one that was never revised and replaced. It says simply, “To my son.”

  Similarly, the back page was placed in the early days and never removed. It was the photograph of the debonair lover given to Arnauld by his cousin Miggo. Will produced it one morning and held it up to Arnauld. “Do you recognize this?” Will said, and his friend only stared blankly, perhaps showing the most minute hint of a smile. “I believe this is your alter ego, and it belongs in your Random Notes.” Will took the hole punch and made three holes, the photo then took the binder and put the photo in place, where it too would stay permanently. Some days when Will arrived in the hospital room, he found his friend sitting silently with the binder open to that last page, simply staring at it and showing that hint of a smile. “Inside every shy man,” Will would say as he took up his position in the nearby chair preparing for his daily readings. Even in the early days in the Burghölzli, it appeared that the photograph brought great pleasure.

  During those early days also, at Will’s request, the doctors found at the university a graduate scholar of ancient Greek, and she came every day and read for an hour, mostly from the Odyssey. It was during one of these hours of Greek two weeks into the routine that Will Honeycutt noticed something that the ever-realistic Dr. Jung agreed was a more than slightly significant sign of hope. On that special afternoon, after seemingly endless days of nothing even close to progress, Will Honeycutt saw an almost imperceptible change as the young woman from the university read a passage near the end of the Greek Odyssey. Will called Jung and had him sit in on the next afternoon, and the two men watched and listened. Arnauld Esterhazy’s lips were moving as he listened. He was reciting from memory the words of Homer.

  “Now,” Dr. Jung said as he and Will left the hospital room, “we have something.” And that evening the Swiss doctor wrote his friend Eleanor in Boston, “There is life in there. Our friend Mr. Honeycutt has indeed gone in deep and found his Eurydice.”

  The next day, Will Honeycutt had changed his strategy. When he arrived in the morning, the hour before they left for the boathouse, Will handed Arnauld the Chapman translation of the Odyssey and said, “Here, you read.”

  At first Arnauld only stared at the open book in his lap, the familiar blank look on his face, then when Will Honeycutt tapped a place on the page and said with firmness, “Here, begin here,” slowly the miracle happened. Arnauld Esterhazy began to read. Will smiled but showed no surprise. “Keep going,” he said, “we have the better part of an hour.” The passage Will Honeycutt selected for Arnauld was chosen not by accident. It was, it turned out, one of great significance.

  The selected passage described how the gods had captured the winds in a bag and left them on deck so that Odysseus could sail home to Ithaca directly and without incident, and then how his men, suspecting that their leader was keeping treasure from them, opened the bag, released the winds that blew their ship way off course and away for ten long years of adventure from which only Odysseus would return.

  Later that morning when the single shell glided away from the dock of the boathouse on the Zürichsee, Will Honeycutt did not move from where he stood watching. He remained there for the full forty-five minutes, watching the boat glide away until it was a tiny speck in the distance and then waiting with total confidence until it reappeared, again as a tiny speck, rowing home.

  65

  TO TELL STORIES

  By design, the readings had shifted to the Iliad, in both the Chapman translation and the graduate student’s Greek. “We will talk about the war,” Will had said to the patient one morning when there was a break in Arnauld’s reading. Will’s tone was gentle and respectful, but firm. “Very scientific,” one of the doctors said in his first report, “surprising from one untrained.”

  “We will talk about the shelling and the mangled bodies and the rats and the lice and the blood.” Arnauld looked at him blankly and blinked, giving in the subtlest of facial expressions his permission. At first Will was guessing, reconstructing from reports he had read, and he admitted later from a good deal of imagination. He knew nothing of war firsthand, but he had read voraciously. He knew of the appalling conditions of a military whose strategies had become hopelessly outdated with the advent of heavy artillery, barbed wire, and machine guns. And he knew from Eleanor the descriptions from her companion Jodl, who had interviewed countless Italian prisoners and knew as much as most survivors about the grueling and pointless campaigns and the horrifying conditions.

  “My goal,” Will told Jung in one of their frequent meetings, “is to keep Arnauld supplied with his own horrific images from his own notebook. Details that he can attach his own specific memories to, and I need to keep them coming, to bombard his denial system with the brutal truths.”

  Interspersed with passages from the Iliad, Will had his patient read to him from his own war notebook. The entries in his notes begun in 1914 were candid and painfully vivid in their description of the horrors of the war his country had embraced with such zeal. Arnauld would read through it, and then Will would command coldly, “Read it again.”

  And in between the readings Will Honeycutt would take on the role of interrogator, forcing his listener to confront and to listen and to respond. In that role, he was relentlessly direct, even heartless in his questioning, but ever patient, he never lost the attention of his obedient if not willing subject.

  “It has been thought that men in Arnauld’s condition need to forget,” Will Honeycutt said with his patented directness in his afternoon summary to Dr. Jung, “that they need to be soothed into some kind of forgetful serenity.”

  “And you do not believe this to be the proper treatment?” Jung responded, not entirely comfortable with the American’s abrasive assertion and its implied criticism.

  “It is quite the opposite,” Will Honeycutt said, oblivious to any skepticism from his Swiss host. “They need to remember, not forget. Until he speaks of the horrors, he is going to carry them inside forever.” But the horrors were as yet unspeakable, and through relentless, sometimes heartless interrogation, Will intended to get his patient to describe them. As was so often the case in this “talking cure” that Dr. Freud had developed, once the unspeakable became spoken, it left the troubled mind of the patient forever, or so the theory went.

  “From what I have been able to deduce,” he often began when talking to Jung, and the Swiss doctor listened with his own patented forbearance, “the mind organizes the random impressions it comes upon in daily life into what one might call meaningful clusters, and it uses these clusters to tell of the impressions. A chaotic experience with a hurricane or an earthquake becomes in its aftermath a logical series of events, a hunting accident is explained as a reasonable combination of circumstances, an investment in the stock market is told later as a series of planned and intelligent guesses.”

  “That is very interesting,” Jung said, “and certainly aligned with my thinking.”

  “These clusters are what make meaning of life,” Will Honeycutt continued. “At first, I could not understand why people at Harvard, intelligent people, took such interest in football, and told such grand stories about those who played it. A football game is a chaos of collisions and strategies and counter strategies, that the observers tell about in a cluster of details in such a way as to give it all order and meaning, creating along the way heroes and villains, martyrs and sacrificial lambs, winners and losers.”

  “I am following this,” Jung said, his skepticism and irritation, he admitted later, beginning to fall away.

  “And in war, think of the horror and the chaos, and yet the people engaged in it, those fortunate enough to survive, find themselves making meaning of it all.”

  “Hence the Iliad,” Jung said.

  “Exactly. Hence the Ilia
d. The human mind tells stories to bring order and meaning to what otherwise would be terrifying randomness,” Will said, now obviously wound up. “Without stories, don’t you see, we stare out into the vastness of the universe and lose all sense of order and connectedness.”

  “This is very good, Mr. Honeycutt,” Jung said, now genuinely impressed. “Where do your ideas come from?”

  “I took William James’s course at Harvard College, and I’ve been thinking ever since.”

  “These clusters of yours, these stories, give meaning to life,” Jung said.

  “Yes,” Will said. “That is my conclusion. They structure randomness and chaos to create meaning.” Then he thought for a moment. “The human mind cannot stand randomness, don’t you see? Randomness makes one distraught. It means that anything can happen.” It did not occur to him at this moment that he, neophyte in this arena of the unconscious mind, was lecturing the world-famous Swiss doctor. “Randomness is insanity,” he concluded with a flourish.

  Jung listened with interest and now not in any way irritated or demeaning. “The stories, small, such as a game at Harvard, or grand, such as in the battles of the Isonzo River or Homer’s Odyssey, they are then your definition of sanity.”

  “Yes,” said Will, delighted that he was being taken seriously. “Stories give meaning to life,” he repeated, now with urgency, “They bring life-saving, life-affirming order.” Then he added almost as an afterthought, “As you say.”

  “Then,” the great Swiss doctor said, as if questioning not so much a graduate student as a respected colleague, “how does this relate to our friend Herr Esterhazy?”

  Will paused to collect himself, to calm his racing mind, Eleanor might say. “It relates totally,” he said, gesturing with his hands, “don’t you see? War destroys the process. Prolonged exposure to terror and savagery ruins the ability to create meaningful clusters, overpowers it, the way that exposure to electrical shock ruins the body’s flow of energy. Randomness remains randomness.”

  “And for our patient?” Jung asked calmly.

  “Arnauld has become lost in randomness.”

  “And therefore?”

  “He has lost his ability to tell stories,” Will said simply.

  66

  AN EXQUISITE FRIENDSHIP

  Will had pieced together what he could of the details, mostly from Arnauld’s war notebook, but also from his extensive research, and from what he knew through Eleanor of Franz Jodl. The war had been one of attrition on many levels—manpower, resources, national unity, the credibility of governments, and the individual sanity of its most sensitive participants.

  One can read in Arnauld’s war notebook the thoughts that must have been on the mind of every halfway-intelligent observer of the fray: Going to war was a disastrous idea and a horrific mistake.

  “Here,” he wrote, “we encourage young men, many little more than children, to match the enemy, to indulge in behavior and to live in conditions abhorrent to the civilized mind. To give in to all sorts of previously forbidden and hidden impulses, cruel, sadistic, murderous ones. Impulses which had been subdued before by means of what Dr. Freud called repression are now reinforced as normal, and the young men are compelled to employ them now under the totally different code of behavior.”

  And he began to see the effects on the officers, the well-educated civilized former denizens of the coffeehouses of Vienna, Budapest, and Prague. “For those not killed,” he wrote, “the shock and strain, their hidden stammering, disconnected talk, their old, scared faces, their haunted nights, their subjection to the ghosts of friends who died, often torn apart in front of them, their dreams that drip with murder, broken and mad.”

  In time, Arnauld was put in charge of an attachment of young Czechs, like him, recently recruited and new to both army life and battle, some of them no older than fifteen. “I have become fond of them,” he recorded, “and distressed by how the fatigue has worn them down in numbers. It is all I can do,” he continued, “to hide the trembling of my hands and the hollowness that sleeplessness has brought to my eyes. They, these young recruits, of course, are no better off, the tension of waiting having taken its toll on them as well.”

  There was simply no relief, and the frequent shellings and the deadly raining down of shrapnel make for the most perilous of surroundings. In the beginning months, all soldiers were issued traditional soft caps, and it wasn’t until more than one year into the grim stalemate that those caps were replaced with steel helmets to protect from the deadly assaults of exploding artillery shells.

  “We are all certain that an attack is coming on our position,” he wrote, “and if it does not come here, we will be moved to the location on this river where it does come.” One way or another every soldier on the Isonzo front was guaranteed to be in the thick of the slaughter, much of which was hand-to-hand combat of the worst sort, killing and being killed with bayonets, knives. One Slavic division was famous for its use of war clubs. “It is the waiting and the daily not-knowing that weighs so heavily on the men, and their officers. Theirs is not the only commanding officer whose hands shake. It is awful business.”

  It was not uncommon to have to work around the dead and parts of the dead, never knowing from which side of the battle lines they came. “One has to be disciplined not to think of what that remnant of human life had been before this or that a shell took life away. An unfortunate soul, one has to think, certainly not a friend or a loved one. One has to try not to think.” And the lice and vermin were everywhere. The food, what there was of it, was rotten, and the shellings incessant, often the percussion rendering those below temporarily or permanently deaf.

  “One can see just from simple observation,” Arnauld wrote, “that life for the enemy is the same. On those occasions when we have advanced and overrun their trenches, we find the identical conditions, or even worse. It is for them as it is for us, a terrible way to live. The most distant of memories, now nearly extinguished, is the opportunity to sit beside a quiet river with a dear friend and talk of things sublime, far away from this horrible mistake that has become endless and meaningless slaughter.”

  And the last entries, short, choppy, only a few scattered words, contain what were probably the final sane moments. Arnauld’s Czechs had been moved north up to the town of Caporetto, where a huge force was amassing. Then came an October day of the heaviest bombardment yet, and Arnauld noticed shells being loaded with a new material.

  “Gas,” came the dreaded word. “All we are awaiting is for the winds to be right.”

  And then the word came to charge, and he urged his men forward, across the river, into the heart of the suddenly ineffectual enemy who had begun a disorganized retreat.

  With bayonets fixed, we rushed into the void of the retreating enemy. We came to trenches where the gas had drifted. There were dead Italians everywhere, their faces drawn into the most horrifying grimaces, mouths frothing. Some dead reaching for the masks—some crawling over one another trying to escape.

  My Czechs stood on the edge of trenches horrified, and we, the officers, had to scream for them to carry on. The Italians retreating—total disarray—some reversing their direction and coming toward us, hands raised, calling out praise for our side.

  At a moment of quiet, with the enemy in disorganized retreat before them, Arnauld had been assigned the group of Italian prisoners, ordered to escort them to the trains, where they would be shipped to the prisoner camps near Vienna. For the task, he wrote that he had recruited as his assistant a sensitive young officer who had frequented the Prague coffeehouses. “We have formed an exquisite friendship,” Arnauld wrote, “of the sort possible only in war. He was a philosophy student at the university in Prague, with an especial affection for the music of Mahler, who he insisted was really a Czech. A poet of unusual sensitivity. We have spent long hours together in the quiet before battle. We have become very close.” The next morning the two officers would go about, as was their assignment, rounding up the Italian of
ficers and directing them toward the trains. That was the last entry.

  The last details Will Honeycutt obtained not from Arnauld’s war journal, but from Jodl’s original report to Eleanor, the observations of witnesses. “While they were organizing Italian prisoners in a rail yard, an enemy shell exploded nearly on top of them, and the whole group was obliterated, pieces of bone and flesh everywhere. It was, by all accounts, a horrifying mess from which for certain no one survived. It is clear from the reports that one body, identified as Arnauld Esterhazy, had been decapitated by a large piece of shrapnel.”

  67

  A FEW MORE DAYS

  Describe for me the trench life,” Will Honeycutt would say, accepting even the smallest detail, but asking the question over and over, expecting more and more painful details with each asking, so different from the approach that tried to make the patient feel comfortable.

  Later, when asked how he knew how to proceed, the American said simply, “I am a scientist. I know how systems work. I have read with some thoroughness about the extraordinary lengths the human system employs to protect itself and to avoid.”

  “The Czech officer,” Will Honeycutt said, homing in now. “What was his name?”

  Arnauld looked back with the blank stare his unconscious had been using as a shield. “Pietr,” he said quietly.

  “He was your friend?”

  “Yes. Yes, he was.”

  “And when you began to regain consciousness, he was beside you. You saw him. He was beside you.” There was a calm insistence to the question, one Arnauld could not dodge.

  “Yes,” he said quietly.

  “And his head was gone?”

  Again the stare and the silence, but a memory began forcing itself to the surface. “Yes. And his—” The dread returned and stopped him.