OPTIMIST But the Austrian face is surely different from the Prussian face.
GRUMBLER The Austrian face comes in all varieties. It looks out slyly from the ticket counter of life’s railway. It smiles, or it grumbles, depending on the weather. Yet this Gorgon’s head had the power to transform what it saw into blood or excrement. Is there anywhere it didn’t pop up? Was this not the face you saw if you went into an office for advice — and instead got an earful of abuse? I could track it down, if you insist, to the toilets of Vienna’s police stations, the lice-infested, germ-ridden cells of Vienna’s garrison prisons, the squalid hospital beds where military police graduates and their medically qualified henchmen put soldiers with shattered nerves through electric shock treatment, to clear themselves of trying to avoid front-line service by shifting suspicion of being shirkers on to their victims. Was it not the face of every humiliating, loathsome act of officialdom, above all the summary justice of those drumhead courts, one of which, over and above judicial murder, immorally demanded that the attitude of Austrian citizens towards the authorities — those selfsame authorities — should be “reverential and loving”?! The harshness is aggravated by the certainty that we’re not dealing with naivety here, but with that villainous shrug, signifying “so long as it suits us”, and the diabolical glee of testing our patience one last time. The Italian government has long banned that tourist attraction of exposing dogs to natural gas in a grotto, but the Austrian government has imposed the same experiment on millions of its citizens daily, and the Austrian face winks at this great joke, breaking into a blissful beam when people start to suffocate. The Austrian face, its left eye twinkling, has been seen so often in shop windows these last four years, shoulder to shoulder with its more martial partner, that it will take all of 40 years of peace to expunge the memory. No, it is not like the Prussian face, although it has a multitude of other traits — with the exception of that golden heart which the feature writers sing and write about. Above all, it is the face of the hangman. The Viennese hangman, on a picture postcard of the dead Battisti, holding his paws over the head of the man he has just executed, standing there like a stuffed dummy in smug triumph and “just look at us” geniality. Grinning faces, both civilians and officers proud of their honour, crowding around the corpse to make sure they all get their picture on the postcard.
OPTIMIST What? Is there really such a picture postcard?
GRUMBLER It was produced on official instructions, circulated at the scene of the crime, “those in a position of trust” showed it to their confidants, and now it’s on display in the shop windows of all enemy cities as a group portrait of Austro-Hungarian humanity, a monument to our executioners’ black humour, transformed into the scalp of Austrian culture. It was perhaps the first time since the world began that if you cried “the Devil take you!”—the Devil would refuse!
OPTIMIST But those who witnessed the execution surely didn’t volunteer to have their photographs taken?
GRUMBLER They all wanted to be part of the action. Not only to be present at one of the most bestial executions, but to stay there afterwards; and they all wore a happy smile on their face. This Austrian face is on another picture postcard, too, one deserving no less cultural-historical significance among many more of the same, the faces of numerous soldiers craning their necks, shoulder to shoulder, between two Ukrainian women strung up between them, to be immortalized in the picture at all costs. God knows what puffed-up devil of a general, crying blue murder at the interruption of some swinish regimental feast, signed the order for “summary execution” that cost the two unfortunate women their lives.
OPTIMIST You don’t give up, do you! No wonder you’ll be denounced one day as a bird fouling its own nest—
GRUMBLER —and tearing it to bits instead of building a new one, I know. That accusation would certainly kill one bird with two stones. How unjust when he’s actually fulfilling the moral precept of cleaning his own backyard. This dirty world accuses whoever clears away its dirt of being the one who brought it. My patriotism — unlike that of the patriots — could not bear to leave the job to an enemy satirist. That is what determined my position during the war. I would advise any English satirist who rightly found us impossible to turn his satirical attention to the affairs of his own country. Though of course there is no English satirist.
OPTIMIST Bernard Shaw.
GRUMBLER That proves my point. Yet even he practises the genuine patriotism that prefers to censure his fellow countrymen rather than deceive them. But whoever puts universal interests above those of his country must use the examples nearest at hand to demonstrate the vileness of the situation and the abominations of a world at war. The testimony of someone who has breathed the same air as those he satirizes cannot be refuted.
OPTIMIST But as counsel for the prosecution, you are truly implacable.
GRUMBLER Against such countries as these, yes.
OPTIMIST If you had your way, Austria would have been condemned to death long ago.
GRUMBLER Unfortunately that will only happen after it has condemned the Austrians to death. I’m thinking here of those surviving Austrians who, by virtue of their sense of belonging to the monarchy, face a fate which, as a people, they didn’t deserve. Austria itself carried out the death sentence on the others while they were still alive, those who resisted this sense of belonging or in most cases did not even resist.
OPTIMIST And do you believe similar things didn’t happen among the enemy? The English also executed their traitors. Think of Casement.
GRUMBLER I possess no picture postcard about that case. Apart from the fact that Casement was condemned to death by a court of law and then executed, while not much time was wasted on Battisti, who was captured and simply strung up, though the death sentence was indeed aggravated by making him first stand and listen to the Habsburg national anthem — it is unlikely that official photographs were taken of Casement’s execution, which England did not celebrate as if it were some country fair. Pictures that record for posterity not only the gallows procedure but also the bestial participants — as if it were a triumph! Even in the homeland of coloured Englishmen you would be hard put to find pictures of a beaming hangman encircled by officers, some in high spirits, others with an ecstatic look on their face. But I would like to offer a special prize to whoever identifies the wretched oaf of an Austro-Hungarian lieutenant who has positioned himself directly in front of the suspended corpse and presented his fatuous visage to the photographer; also those loathsome dandies, gathering as if for a cheery stroll on the Ringstrasse or hurrying with their Kodaks to get into the picture — not only as spectators but as photographers — a picture that would not be complete without a so-called saviour of souls, surrounded by a hundred expectant participants. For while some were being hanged, others were posing for the camera; and photos were taken not only of executions, but also of the spectators, and even of the photographers. The consequence of our bestiality is that enemy propaganda has no need to photograph our deeds, since instead of lying it now simply reproduces our truths, having to its surprise discovered our own photos of our deeds at the scene of the crime. Thus it has a comprehensive picture of us, utterly lacking in self-awareness. For we failed to recognize that no crime could expose us to the world more starkly than our triumphant confession, the pride of the criminal who even has himself photographed, smiling, at his deed, because he’s tickled to death to be caught in the act. For it is not the fact that he is a killer, nor that he photographed his crime, but that he photographed himself as well, and that he photographed himself photographing it — that’s what makes this type an imperishable snapshot of our civilization. As if what we have done did not speak for itself! The infernal military judges, whose exploits have exempted them from the need to die a hero’s death — an exemption comparable only to that of the war poets — have truly done a good job. But after the hangman, it was the photographer’s turn next! The group photos taken for the Imperial and Royal Military Archives are a mark of national disgrace for Habsburg Austria that will not be erased for centuries!