“Sadly, this was inevitable. It’s natural when the passing of time brings no decisive results. This is, in fact, ‘total’ war, which directly affects ever greater masses of people.
“I think the longer it lasts, the worse it’ll be for us. We’ll be more and more shut in, and we won’t be able to take it economically. And all this is nothing compared with what still awaits us.
“Let’s not sigh yet. It’ll make no difference anyway. Let’s look at the sea and think about how we’d paint it.”
It was time for Ervin to leave for home. I had decided to stay on until Easter, which was approaching. After that, I would return home and spend the time that remained until I had to report for duty there.
I saw Ervin off to the steamer; we parted on the understanding that there would be no goodbyes. We had had enough of those. Life—in whatever manner—would go on. We were young, and we wanted to live. To surrender to lethargy was to be lost. One senses one’s destiny, but one can influence it by one’s will. So we parted cheerfully: “Until the next time! It’s been fun. We’ll do it again as soon as we can.”
I attended Easter mass with the Mauser girls at the little church, an intimate chapel in the Italian style. The locals sang as only Italians can. There was a festive lunch of every imaginable delicacy. I slipped away afterwards to my beloved abandoned old park, and caught myself paying it a farewell visit. I stroked the sappy, moist trunks of the cedars and cypresses, I gazed at the panoramic view, and as I ambled homeward I began to turn my mind to thoughts of packing. I would be leaving the day after tomorrow. How these three weeks of happiness had flown by!
It was time to say goodbye—or rather, to part. I thanked them sincerely for all they had done to lift me up from my fallen state. Mama Mauser was moved to tears. So, a little, was I.
“Auf Wiedersehen am nächsten Winter. Im Weihnachten ist hier auch sehr schön.”[20]
I promised that I would.
I had to rise early, as my train left Fiume in the morning. But the whole family had beaten me to it. I left the drawings I had done of the girls as a memento, and I had ordered two huge bouquets of roses, one for each day that I had spent with them: red ones for Elsa, white ones for Miri. They put them in their windows, from where they waved to me as long as they could still see anything of my departing cab.
Auf Wiedersehen.
I stood by the window all the way up to Lič. From here, a thousand meters up, I caught one last glimpse of the panorama of islands lost in cobalt blue and violet, and the endless sea.
Auf Wiedersehen.
The train raced down the northern slopes of the Karst, hammering down through long curves, between stone walls, and among dense forest, thickets of fern, ravines, and rushing mountain streams. The landscape became bleaker, and it got colder. Snow still lay in the depressions of the burnt sienna, russet, and ochre moorland. In the deep course of a stream, the water ran between banks covered in snow and ice, pale green and scummy. Here and there, among the great bluish-gray trunks of beech trees, flashed the occasional vivid green, mossy trunk of a Turkey oak.
Apart from the rushing of the train, there was silence. The few passengers spread themselves out, taking their pick of window seats facing in the direction of travel. No one spoke.
At Cameral-Moravice, the giant Karst engine was replaced with a fast big-wheeled engine. There was time to get out and have a cup of coffee. It was chilly; I’d got used to the spring. I decided to travel the remainder of the journey in the restaurant car.
We tore along through flat country now. A cheerless landscape: gray mud in the sloping road that ran alongside the tracks, the ruts in it half a meter deep. Poor horses! Not a human being to be seen anywhere. What could they do out there in the mud?
Zagreb: another change of engine. Bolhás, Kaposvár, Dombovár, Simontornya, Rétszilas . . . names that meant nothing, whose magic came only from their association with the sea.
I bought a newspaper. I had not read one for weeks. Bellicose guff about final victory. The big German offensive towards Paris had “stopped” at the Marne.[21] No decisive developments anywhere.
Slow dusk.
Budapest.
EPILOGUE
DRÁFI, the gypsy drummer, was a short, bandy-legged little chap. Whenever he saw me, he would salute and grin at the same time—contrary to regulations, but radiating goodwill.
Once or twice I called him over.
“Look, you’re not supposed to grin when you salute.”
A look of uncertainty and fear flickered in his eyes; then, seeing that I was smiling too, he once more beamed from ear to ear.
“All right. Don’t forget now!”
While we were waiting at Komárom,[1] on our way to the front, he asked permission to get off the train. I asked him what for.
“Wish to report, sir, my family’s here.”
A horde of gypsy children raced towards him with wide open arms. All had bare potbellies and all were barefoot. Their skin was a magnificent reddish brown. After them came a gypsy woman in a headscarf and brightly colored skirts, her gnarled hands pressed to her mouth. Then they fell upon each other, and their tears flowed without words.
Afterwards, back on the train, he trotted up and down amongst us during the endless days and endless nights as we headed north-east.
After we left Rava Ruska, we rested at the edge of the Dabrovka forest, beside a freshly ploughed potato field. A few paces from me, Dráfi was scrabbling about in the grass. He had a mate with him, one of the reservists. I stepped over.
“What are you up to, Dráfi?”
He was about to jump to his feet to report, when the mate spoke up.
“Sir, he’s found a potato. He wants to plant it in the ground.”
“It’s got such good shoots. It wants to live. I’m going to plant it. It might live longer than me.”
Poor Dráfi.
The potato did indeed outlive Drummer János Dráfi of the Royal Hungarian Army.
Béla Zombory-Moldován, The Wave, Lovrana, 1929. Watercolor.
The subject and composition correspond with the drawing described in Chapter 12, but this is a later work, evidently re-creating the (presumably, lost) drawing of 1915 on a post-war return visit to Lovrana.
Opposite: Central Europe in 1914, showing the principal places referred to in the text and main military engagements on the eastern front to mid-September 1914. Present-day national borders and states are indicated with pale lines and type.
Rava Ruska and its vicinity, showing railway lines in 1914
Fiume (Rijeka) and the head of the Kvarner Bay in 1914
NOTES
NOVI
1. An ancient Croatian hill town a few kilometers inland from Novi.
2. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia at midday on Tuesday, July 28, 1914. Public news of this probably reached Novi on July 29, with notices calling up reservists as part of mobilization against Serbia posted the same day. BZM had six days to report for duty in Veszprém, in western Hungary, with a recently formed infantry regiment of the Royal Hungarian Army (Magyar Királyi Honvédség, literally “Hungarian Royal Homeland Defense Force”—abbreviated to Honvéd).
3. Hungary had risen in revolt against Austrian rule in 1848—“the year of revolutions.” Although the rebellion was crushed, it signaled the revival of Hungarian nationhood.
4. Zsigmond Sebők (1861–1916), Hungarian journalist and writer of children’s literature. He edited the children’s magazine called Jó Pajtás (Good Pal), produced by the Franklin publishing house, for which BZM drew illustrations.
5. 1882–1932; Hungarian painter and graphic artist and friend and colleague of BZM at the Budapest School of Applied Arts, where he taught costume design.
6. Novi Vinodolski is one of several picturesque towns on the section of northern Adriatic coastline belonging to pre-1919 Croatia. With the connection of Fiume (Rijeka) to the railway network in 1873, this area attracted genteel summer visitors from all over Austria-Hungary.
Croatia-Slavonia, though part of the Kingdom of Hungary, enjoyed a degree of self-government. Trieste, Istria, and Dalmatia were provinces of Austria.
7. The sailors are, presumably, Croats, on their way to Austria-Hungary’s naval base at Pola. Their song satirizes the Hungarians.
8. 1859–1929; Hungarian journalist and writer. He co-edited Jó Pajtás with Zsigmond Sebők.
9. Cherso (Cres), Veglia (Krk), Arbe (Rab), and Lussino (Lošinj) are islands off the Istrian coast, famous as beauty spots. It is presumably one of these that Gustav Aschenbach, at the beginning of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, finds uncongenial and abandons for Venice.
10. The Eight (A Nyolcak) was a group of avant-garde Hungarian painters, formed in 1909 and influenced by fauvism, cubism, and expressionism. Its members were Róbert Berény (1887–1953), Dezső Czigány (1883–1937), Béla Czóbel (1883–1976), Károly Kernstok (1873–1940), Ödön Márffy (1878–1959), Dezső (Desiderius) Orbán (1884–1986), Bertalan Pór (1880–1964), and Lajos Tihanyi (1885–1938). The group’s 1911 exhibition in Budapest created a sensation and sharply divided critical opinion.
11. Kraljevica, Croatia.
12. Now the Croatian city of Rijeka, Fiume was Hungary’s seaport until 1918 and the maritime outlet for the eastern part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
13. A strong winter wind in the eastern Adriatic.
BUDAPEST AT WAR
1. The express service covered the 502 kilometers between the two cities in under twelve hours.
2. BZM had served as a “one-year volunteer” in 1909 (instead of doing the normal two or—in the common army—three years of compulsory military service) after completion of his studies at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts. One-year volunteers had to meet an educational requirement and pay for their own clothing, food, and equipment. At the end of their year, they passed into the reserve. Those like BZM who subsequently passed a qualifying examination received an officer’s commission with the rank of ensign in the reserve.
3. The chorus of a jingoistic song of this title (“Megállj, megállj, kutya Szerbia!”), which enjoyed great popularity in the first weeks of the war.
4. “Toreador, love awaits you!” From the “Toreador’s Song” in Bizet’s Carmen.
5. In fact, his stepmother. BZM’s mother died in 1895.
6. From a ribald folk song.
7. 1885–1954; Hungarian painter and graphic artist.
8. 1872–?; Hungarian painter.
9. 1885–1924; Hungarian painter.
10. 1870–1911; Hungarian painter.
11. The Nagykörút (Great Ring Road), built in 1896, is a grand semicircular boulevard around the center of Pest, modelled on the famous Ringstrasse in Vienna.
12. This is probably Friday, July 31, 1914, when both Russia and Austria-Hungary declared general mobilization; a state of readiness for imminent war (Kriegsgefahrzustand) was proclaimed in Germany; and a German ultimatum was sent to Russia. The risk that Austria-Hungary’s war on Serbia might trigger a continental war thus became a virtual certainty. The newspaper in front of whose offices—next door to the famous New York Café—the scene takes place was probably Az Est (Evening).
13. 1882–?; Hungarian painter.
14. 1884–1949; Hungarian painter.
15. The Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, where BZM studied from 1903 to 1908. He refers to it by a student nickname of the day, a Tökéria (the Perfectery)—a play on the institution’s founding mission “to contribute to the perfecting of every branch of the nation’s fine arts.”
16. Fészek means “nest.” This was one of the coffeehouses frequented by artists and critics; from about 1916, it became a haunt of radicals and the literary avant-garde. Not to be confused with the artists’ club of the same name, of which BZM was a leading member.
17. Probably the Hungarian painter Sándor Teplánszky (1886–1944).
18. 1860–1931; Hungarian painter.
VESZPRÉM
1. A historic city in western Hungary, close to the eastern end of Lake Balaton.
2. The Ausgleich (Compromise) of 1867 established the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary as a union between the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary under a head of state who was both emperor of Austria and king of Hungary. Accordingly, at a ceremony in St. Matthias Church, Budapest, on June 8, 1867, Emperor Franz Joseph I was crowned king of Hungary by the Hungarian prime minister, Count Andrássy, and Archbishop Simor of Esztergom. Franz Joseph’s consort, the Empress Elisabeth of Bohemia, was crowned queen by Bishop Ranolder.
3. An early indication, perhaps, of the resort to the printing presses to meet the enormous costs of the war. The amount of paper money in circulation doubled between July 1914 and December 1915, fueling inflation.
4. Istvan Medgyaszay (1877–1959) was a Hungarian architect, noted for his use of motifs from Hungarian folk art on buildings in the idiom of the Vienna Sezession.
5. 1845–1914. A leading and prolific exponent of the Sezession style of architecture in Hungary. Many of his designs incorporate brightly colored tiling inspired by folk art.
6. A traditional Hungarian spirit, typically distilled from apricot, plum, or pear. Its alcohol content can be up to seventy-five percent by volume.
7. A high-security prison in an old fortress in northern Slovakia, notorious for the harshness of its regime.
8. Hungarian was the language of command in the Royal Hungarian Army. The other junior officers, including BZM, had presumably done their military service in the “common” army of the monarchy—the kaiserliches und königliches (“k.u.k.”) Heer, or Imperial and Royal Army—in which the language of command was German.
9. An order of chivalry founded during the First Crusade.
10. “It is a comfort to the wretched to have companions in misery.” The Latin proverb’s probable origin in the History of the Peloponnesian War of Thucydides (book VII, chapter 75) makes it seem particularly apt.
11. Ferenc Pogány (1888–1946); member of the Royal Hungarian opera company 1912–1926. He was taken prisoner by the Russians and held in captivity until 1920. He was, in fact, a baritone.
12. József (Joseph) Diskay (1889–1960); member of the Royal Hungarian opera company. He emigrated to the USA in 1919 and pursued a career in Hollywood.
13. A town at the western end of Lake Balaton.
THE MARCH
1. The first verse of a traditional Hungarian folk song.
DEPLOYMENT
1. 1848, i.e., the Hungarian revolt against Austrian rule.
2. An Austrian possession from 1772, Galicia extended north and east from the Carpathian Mountains to the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s long border with Russia. This strategically important territory, with Lemberg (L’viv) as provincial capital and a major military stronghold at Przemysl, saw a succession of titanic clashes between four Austro-Hungarian and five Russian armies from the opening days of the war until 1916. After a tentative initial advance into Russian territory, Austro-Hungarian troops fell back but won the Battle of Zamosc-Komarów (August 26 to September 2, 1914). However, the decisive engagement of this first phase of the Galician campaign was the Battle of Rava Ruska, which began on September 6, 1914. BZM’s regiment, the Veszprém 31st Honvéd Infantry (of the 41st Honvéd Infantry Division of the Third Army), was in the thick of the battle; having already suffered heavy losses, it now needed urgent replenishment.
INTO THE FIRE
1. The German and Polish spelling is Rawa Ruska (sometimes Rawa-Russka); now Rava-Rus’ka, Ukraine, close to the border with Poland. In 1914 the town was twenty-four kilometers from the Russian border. BZM’s unit probably arrived there on September 7, 1914, the second day of the battle, in which some 300,000 troops were engaged along a ten-kilometer sector of the front.
2. Dabrovka (Dubrivka) is about five kilometers south of Rava Ruska.
3. Once it had acquired range, a battery of field artillery would lay down concentrated fire to “sweep” a given target area. The other side’s reserv
e troops would be held what was considered a safe distance outside that area until required in the front line, but remained vulnerable to “nuisance fire.”
4. Austro-Hungarian military doctrine required infantry to advance line abreast in “firing lines” (Schwarmlinien).
5. The Steyr-Mannlicher M1895 rifle was the standard infantry weapon of the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I.
6. The distinctive standard knapsack (Tornister) issued to Austro-Hungarian troops had a pony-skin or cowhide front flap.
7. Legislation to increase military expenditure and enlarge and re-equip the army introduced in the Hungarian parliament in 1910 was held up for two years by the nationalist opposition, who demanded the introduction of Magyar as the language of command in Hungarian units of the common army and equality of Hungarian with Austrian flags and insignia.
8. From the aria “E lucevan le stelle” in Puccini’s Tosca, sung by Cavaradossi as he awaits execution.
9. Kassa (Košice), the second largest city in Slovakia. The lower ranks of the 34th “common army” infantry regiment, which was based there, were preponderantly Slovaks.
10. Artillery shells packed with steel or lead balls, which are projected forward when a small charge at the base of the shell explodes near the end of the shell’s trajectory.
11. A type of artillery shell first used in World War I. Unlike a shrapnel shell, it contains a powerful explosive, bursting the entire shell into fragments propelled in all directions with great force.
12. The villages of Magierov (Maheriv) and Dobrosin (Dobrosyn) are about ten kilometers apart and roughly fifteen kilometers to the south and southeast, respectively, of Rava Ruska. The main front during the battle had run roughly north-south through this area.
13. A general retreat of the Austro-Hungarian First, Second, Third, and Fourth Armies from Galicia to the Carpathian Mountains—a distance of over a hundred kilometers—was ordered late on September 11, 1914, when the Russians threatened to encircle the Second, Third, and Fourth Armies from the north and the Germans declined to come to their aid.
The Burning of the World Page 16