The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War

by Alexander Waugh

  Paul and Ludwig were with their sisters and their mother at Hochreit, the family's mountain retreat, when news of war reached them. In a rapture of patriotism, they rushed back to Vienna to find the popular mood on the streets frenzied and excitable. Every butcher and cobbler, every doctor and teacher was experiencing what Stefan Zweig described as "an exaltation of his ego," imagining himself a hero. Women were urging their husbands into uniform, class barriers were falling, people spoke warmly to strangers in the shops and joked heartily over the imminent demise of the Serbs.

  Ludwig wanted to sail for Norway but, when he found his exit from Austria barred, volunteered for civilian duties instead. Unlike his brothers Paul and Kurt, Ludwig had managed to avoid military service. In 1868 the Austrian government had introduced a compulsory conscription of three years for every young male, but the costs had proved exorbitant. Instead of revoking the law, all kinds of formulations were devised (including the drawing of lots) whereby a man might wriggle out of this irksome duty. In the event only one in five eligible men ever made it into uniform and, of those, only a small proportion served the full three-year term demanded by the law. With no previous service record, Ludwig had no regiment to which he could report, and since he had suffered two hernias in his groin the previous year he was, in any case, deemed unsuitable for active service. Determined to play his part, he decided to enlist as a volunteer soldier, and on August 7 was called up as a private in a garrison artillery troop that was to form part of the Austro-Hungarian First Army, destined for the borders of Hapsburg Poland and Russia known as the Galician front.

  Like many of the young German men of 1914, Ludwig was spiritually exhausted and in need of theater. Early that year he had fallen out with Bertrand Russell and had written to him insisting that their friendship be terminated. "My life has been one nasty mess so far--but need that go on indefinitely?" He had also, by his frantic manner, lost the friendship of the Cambridge philosopher George Moore, and was uncertain even about the future of his relationship with his closest companion, David Pinsent. "I keep on hoping that things will come to an eruption once and for all so that I can turn into a different person," he wrote, and so the war, which on June 28 seemed little more than an inconvenience to Ludwig, was transformed, within a matter of days, into a welcome opportunity for challenge and personal liberation. "I knew very well," Hermine wrote, "that Ludwig was not only concerned with defending his fatherland, but that he felt an intense desire to burden himself with some difficult task, and to accomplish something other than purely intellectual work."

  If he was refreshed by the outbreak of hostilities, Ludwig nevertheless entertained little hope of the great Austro-Hungarian victory that the masses, on both sides of the conflict, were predicting with the oft-repeated phrase: "It'll all be over by Christmas." In a scribbled note written shortly after the war had begun, Ludwig admitted that the situation was "terribly sad." "It seems to me as good as certain that we cannot get the upper hand against England. The English--the best race in the world--cannot lose. We, however, can lose and shall lose, if not this year, then next year. The thought that our race is going to be beaten depresses me terribly."

  David Pinsent wrote in his diary of Ludwig's volunteering for the army: "I think it is magnificent of him to have enlisted--but extremely sad and tragic ... He writes praying we may meet again some day. Poor fellow--I hope to God we shall." They never did. Pinsent was killed in an airplane crash in France in May 1918.

  DISASTERS

  Paul went along with the majority of his Austrian compatriots in supporting the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, believing that his moral and civic duty was to defend the honor of the Hapsburgs for which he would, if necessary, lay down his life. But, like his younger brother, he was not so easily swept by the tide of national optimism. He too nursed a fatalistic view of Austria's prospects, and openly asserted what the Emperor had said in private to his Chief of Staff just days before signing his declaration of war, that "if the Monarchy must perish it should at least perish with decency." War for Paul offered no opportunity for self-improvement but was a question of personal and national honor. His sister Gretl, however, welcomed the international crisis on Paul's behalf. "Aid has come to us from an unexpected quarter," she wrote to Hermine on August 22. "If they come back in one piece, this war will have done many of those I know a lot of good--and that includes Paul and [my friend] Willi Zitkovsky"

  Paul had completed his military service five years before the declaration of hostilities, passing as a junior officer in the Reserves, attached to the same smart cavalry regiment as his brother Kurt. On the whole, his military reports had been creditable. In the winter of 1907 he was issued with four demerits and fined for "lack of attention in the riding school and laziness in theoretical instruction," but his final report of 1909 had concluded that, as a cadet officer--"single, finances in order, with a monthly allowance of 600 kronen"--he was of "most honourable, firm character, quiet, serious and good-natured."

  Four hectic days after Austria's declaration against Serbia, Paul found himself once again dressed in the colorful regimental garb of the 6th Dragoons. As a second lieutenant he was entitled to a black crested helmet, trimmed in brass, embossed on the front with the badge of the Imperial Eagle and, on either side, with images of a lion in violent disagreement with a serpent. His breeches were of madder red and his tunic pale blue but beaded in red, denoting his officer status. He wore a red cartridge belt (another sign that he was an officer), black leather thigh-length "butcher's boots" and a large, dark brown, double-breasted greatcoat. His weaponry, which like his uniform was indicative of rank, consisted of a Roth-Steyr pistol, a Mannlicher carbine rifle, a saber in a steel scabbard and a bayonet. Paul and his fellow officers may have looked splendid perched on their saddles, in all this colorful regalia, but the kit of both man and animal were relicts of a previous century, unsuitable for the exigencies of modern combat. Their shiny metal badges and bright colors were easily visible to the enemy; their rifles and sabers too heavy; their jackets and coats (in comparison to those of other armies) badly stitched; even their saddles were thoughtlessly constructed. Designed to give the cavalry a good seat on parade, they rubbed hard against the skin of the horses' backs, so that within the first week of engagement a large section of the Austrian cavalry was put out of action as hundreds of officers were forced to return from their sorties on foot, leading their horses by the reins.

  The Austro-Hungarian army of 1914 was ill equipped, incompetent, ill trained, undersized, unready and yet overenthusiastic for battle. The soldiers' contagious eagerness to start fighting right away led to many grave errors. In the first few days of engagement they managed to shoot down three of their own airplanes, so that the order had to be repeatedly given that no planes should be fired upon. At Jaroslawice on August 20, two Austrian cavalry divisions advancing in parallel lines wheeled around and started fighting each other. Too proud or too exhilarated to stop, the Austrians carried on with their battle till interrupted by the arrival of a Russian infantry unit that put them all to flight. Nothing, however, compares to the dithering of Conrad von Hotzendorf over where he should send his army in the first days of mobilization. His problem--hard to solve--is at least easy to explain. The Austrians had to fight a two-front war. In the northeast the Russians had fifty infantry divisions ranged against them. In the south, Serbia had eleven. The total strength on the Austro-Hungarian side was only forty-eight divisions. Thus Hotzendorf's army was too small for the war that he had elected it to fight--smaller even than it had been in 1866 at the time of its crushing defeat at the hands of the Prussians, and this, despite a total population increase of twenty million since that date. Hotzendorf needed therefore to decide whether first to smash up the Serbs with say twenty divisions, posting the rest of his army to Galicia to hold the Russians, or to send a greater force against the Russians, leaving a smaller defense force in the south to contain the Serbs. In the end he chose the latter course but not before changing his mi
nd more than once and, in so doing, throwing the whole railway system of the Austro-Hungarian Empire into disarray.

  Paul and Ludwig were both dispatched to the Galician front in the north, Paul with the Fourth Army, Ludwig with the First. But Hotzen-dorf's indecision meant that both of them reached their unloading stations (in Paul's case the wrong one) nearly a week after they were supposed to be there. Several trains shunted along at less than walking speed. Others broke down. One took forty hours to get from Vienna to the San, three times longer than normal; several stopped for six-hour lunch breaks despite having mobile kitchens on board. In the confusion at least one signalman shot himself, and one train, packed with soldiers, was returned to the very station from which, days earlier, it had departed amid the clamor of trumpets, bunting, waving hands and fond farewells.

  Ludwig reached his posting on August 19 and was immediately assigned to minor tasks aboard a captured Russian riverboat, the Gophtidj patrolling the Vistula. Paul was supposed to have arrived at Zolkiew, near Lwow (or Lemberg), on August 12, but owing to the confusion was not unloaded until August 20 some sixty miles west at Jaroslaw on the San. From there he proceeded on horseback in a northeasterly direction with the soldiers of the 5th Cavalry Brigade under the command of Major General Otto Schwer von Schwertenegg, reaching Lubaczow on the morning of August 20 and Zamosc two days later on the evening of the 22nd. Hotzendorf, aware that Wenzel von Plehve (a Russian commander of German descent) was mobilizing 350,000 soldiers of the Russian Fifth Army westward to stop them, continued blithely predicting a swift advance of Austro-Hungarian troops into Russian territory.

  On August 23, Paul's fourth day in Galicia, he and six men under his command were ordered north across undulating wooded terrain toward the village of Izbica. Their mission was to reconnoiter enemy positions and report back to the squadron commander, Captain Erwin Schaaf-gotsche, at a field camp located between Izbica and Krasnystaw. After a few miles Paul and his men turned east to Topola and then proceeded to move cautiously in the direction of the Russian border and the fast-assembling ranks of enemy troops.

  From the woods outside Topola the view extends for several miles eastward across the plain of Grabowiec. From here a vast number of Russian troops could be observed mobilizing rapidly in a southwesterly direction toward Zamosc. Paul and his men took careful note of their numbers, their armaments and the direction in which they were headed. The citation for the medals that Paul received for his role in this action indicates that they were awarded not only in consideration of the usefulness of the information he had gleaned, but for outstanding personal valor. He bravely rescued two of his men when they came under fire from a forward-placed Russian scout troop or sniper team and ordered a counterattack to delay the Russians while the positions of their army were being surveyed. "As regards my allegedly heroic deeds," he later wrote to his mother, "there was nothing of that about them. You won't believe it but I know it."

  During the encounter Paul was wounded--hit by a bullet that shattered the elbow of his right arm. Later he could recall nothing between the sensation of a sharp and excruciating pain and his waking up on a field-hospital camp bed, but his men had pulled him back to safety, retreating quickly through the woods until they were out of range of enemy fire. There they applied a makeshift tourniquet to Paul's upper arm to staunch the bleeding. The journey back to Izbica was several miles and they needed urgently to find an ambulance corps or a field hospital on the way. At some point either Paul or some of his men succeeded in passing to Captain Schaafgotsche the crucial military intelligence that they had gleaned at Topola--information that later proved vital to the Austrian defense of Zamosc.

  By the time he was brought into the field hospital, situated within the walls of the fortress town of Krasnystaw, six miles north of Izbica, Paul had already lost consciousness. Either that or the shock subsequently obliterated his memory of events and helped him to forget any medical consultation or warning that most of his right arm would have to come off. All that he remembered was that when he regained consciousness the shock of discovering the mutilation to his arm was compounded by another, perhaps equally disturbing, shock: that during the course of his operation, as the doctors were filling his lungs with anesthetic doses of morphine, scopolamine, nitrous oxide or ethyl chloride, as they were slicing a circular incision round the skin of his upper arm, as they rolled back the flesh to create a flap, as they sawed through the exposed bone, discarded the amputated limb, folded and stitched the loose flaps back over the end of the stump--as all these things were carrying on, the Russian Fifth Army in its first major incursion into Hapsburg-Polish territory was storming the walls of Krasnystaw, so that by the time Paul regained consciousness the enemy had taken the town and was swarming with loaded guns and harsh hysterical voices through the corridors and wards of his hospital. Paul, his fellow patients, the surgeons, doctors, orderlies and nurses were being held at gunpoint as prisoners of war, now in the power of a hostile government, and soon to be bustled across enemy lines, thousands of miles from their homes, to prison camps in Russia and Siberia.

  PRISONER OF THE RUSSIANS

  There were no train lines and few roads on the vast exposed lands stretching eastward out of Krasnystaw. Those captives deemed fit enough to march were forced to do so, sometimes up to fifteen miles a day, sometimes at the point of a Cossack saber, nourished only by one slice of bread and a bowl of cabbage soup, served in the morning of each day. For two or three weeks they marched until they reached a depot from which transport by rail could begin. In their first Galician offensive the Russians took 100,000 Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war. These, added to the large numbers of their own wounded and the straggling hoards of displaced Poles wandering hither and thither in search of food and shelter, created a vast, untidy migration of despairing people for whom the Russians were unprepared and ill equipped to cater.

  Surviving accounts of the long march to the interior attest to the kindness and consideration of the Russian doctors, to the help, also, of the Russian peasantry who often took pity, giving bread and clothing to bedraggled Austrian and German POWs as they passed through their villages, but many report as well on the cruelty, crookedness and avarice of the rank-and-file Russian soldier. Article 4 of the Hague Convention, to which all belligerent nations were bound, stipulated that prisoners of war were to be treated humanely. They were to be held in the power of the hostile government, not in that of the individuals or corps who had captured them. With the exception of arms, horses and military papers, all personal belongings were to remain the property of the captured soldier. In reality, soldiers of the Russian army, themselves underpaid, underfed and terrified, ransacked the pockets of their prisoners, removing money, letters, watches, notebooks, cutlery and anything else that took their fancy. At POW hospitals, Russian guards made away with any clothing that they could lay their hands on--coats, shirts, boots and even blankets disappeared from the patients' wards and, since hospitals received payments based on the number of patients coming in and going out, dishonest clerks saw to it that even the most severely sick prisoners were moved needlessly about from one hospital to another, crawling sometimes barefoot and at night (so that the Russian people might be spared the sight of them) to freezing railway and tram stations, shuttling for weeks between Russian cities, often only to be returned to the very hospital from which they had started out.

  In this way Paul found himself, in the long months after he was taken prisoner, shunted from Chelm to Minsk to Kiev, to Orel, to Moscow, to Petrograd and to Omsk in the cramped, overcrowded, foul-smelling and vermin-ridden conditions of the tjeploshki. These were the boxcars, wagons and cattle trucks, forty to fifty of which, linked together, formed a typical POW transport train. In the middle of each stood an iron stove and a bucket for a lavatory. Two rows of plank bunks were fixed to either side, and a separate space, with its own bunk, was provided for the armed guard. Typically each car held thirty-five to forty-five prisoners, sleeping often six to a bunk. As o
ne Austrian POW remembered it: "Everybody had to face either to the left or to the right side, squeezed tight to one another. Turning over had to be done all at once, for only by keeping our bodies in strictly parallel formation could we all fit the available space."

  There was little to cheer Paul as he lay on the bare board of a tjeploshka trundling across 7,000 miles of alien terrain. For days on end he lay, pressed against other prisoners, the wound festering on his arm, his eyes wide open, in a carriage filled with vermin. He remembered with particular repulsion the rats running over his body and confided years later to a close friend "how they still recurred as my sporadic nightmare and how grateful I am that my blood was immune from insect bites. Other prisoners had found bugs and lice intolerable but I could brush them away unstung."

  Harder to dispel were the physical and psychological traumas Paul suffered in the weeks and months after his operation--traumas that were amplified by the practical difficulties that he had to face in adapting his disability to everyday life. Suddenly he was unable to tie his shoelaces, to cut his food or dress himself in the morning. Geza Zichy, an acquaintance of Paul's who lost his right arm in a hunting accident at the age of fifteen, recalled his first attempts to dress himself: "It took three hours, but I did it. I used the door knob, the furniture, my feet and my teeth to achieve it. At meals I ate no food that I could not cut myself, and today I peel apples, clip my fingernails, ride, I am a good shot and have even learned to play the piano a little."