OPTIMIST I see you’re still sticking to your habit of denigrating everything, even with heroic examplars of our military epoch before your eyes. Here it is in Die Woche, Count Berchtold in combat uniform. This image—
GRUMBLER —is the cause of the war.
OPTIMIST How could that be? The photograph was taken later than the ultimatum—
GRUMBLER Certainly. “One face before the deed is done, but after — a very different one”; yet in Austria, if not Schiller’s Messina, they are identical. The Serbs rejected the ultimatum because they had a sense of this fatuous photograph. Austria’s fear that they might accept it after all was completely groundless. Nor was there any prospect of “localizing” the war as Austria wished, so it could give Serbia a thrashing undisturbed by the rest of the world, for the world was haunted by this face.
OPTIMIST Again, I don’t follow you.
GRUMBLER You’re right in your own terms. But the battle of the Doberdo plateau, where 100,000 men have perished, was planned on the playing fields of Freudenau, Berchtold’s favourite race course.
OPTIMIST I still don’t get it. You mean, this photograph tells you—
GRUMBLER —that a betting man drove the world to its doom!
OPTIMIST Now I’m beginning get your drift. But he surely wasn’t fully aware of what he did!
GRUMBLER No, otherwise he would have hedged his bets and not done it. The staggering thing is that he wasn’t fully aware of what he was doing. And that this argument is an extenuating factor for statesmen, and for heads of state who in any case cannot be held legally responsible for their actions. They knew not what they did, none of them. Austria can’t help it! It merely allowed itself to be encouraged by Germany to drag Germany into the war. And Germany drove Austria into a war which it did not want. The Germans are the innocent instigators, the Austrians the fleecy lambs. Neither can help it.
OPTIMIST This face is the image of conscience without guilt.
GRUMBLER One that could serve as a feather quilt, if staff quarters didn’t already supply them. But at the sight of this simple uniform, one is convinced he would be equally at home in the trenches. A plain though courageous platoon sergeant, a swaggering Viennese braggart, winking, hands on hips, at the sworn enemy, as if to say “Look me straight in the eye, and come and get me, if you dare!” The simple statesman at the front, a wristwatch but no earrings, a swagger stick perhaps replacing the sabre, not smoking the imperial Virginia but sporting the Order of the Golden Fleece — derived as we know from fleecy lambs. Don’t take him too seriously, but he’ll stand his ground if necessary, and as we know his own decision of August 1914 makes it necessary. All in all, far removed from being high-handed or fainthearted, and even further from the front; man about town, not malingerer.
OPTIMIST This photograph—
GRUMBLER —is taken from the rogues’ gallery of world history and at the Final Judgment will help to identify those responsible for causing the war. The original, of course, will be acquitted on the basis of diminished responsibility or nonresponsibility.
OPTIMIST How can that be proved?
GRUMBLER Among other things it shall be established that a harmless racehorse owner took Grey’s offer to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, namely to meet its alleged desire for satisfaction by occupying Belgrade and some other Serb localities, and stuck it between the pages of his racecard. For England really did want the “localization” that Austria hoped to achieve in a different way. That’s why they called the only man of honour in this war “that liar, Grey.” The photograph will help clear the actual culprit, but convict all of his compatriots. In its total shamelessness it justifies the aggressive intentions of our enemies in the eventuality that we really were waging a sacred defensive war, as claimed. For even if it were shown that we were justified in attacking Serbia because the Hungarian pig breeders had closed the market to Serbian pigs, this document would still stand up and bear witness against us.
OPTIMIST But I ask you — a photograph! A random snapshot! To think of all the other photos we got to see during the war, quite different ones.
GRUMBLER You mean all the others of people smiling during the World War. The soothing smile of the army commanders standing with their wounded troops. Alas, such smiles in war were more profoundly disturbing than the tears. The photographer didn’t even need to ask them to smile for the camera, they already believed all was right with the world. Archduke Friedrich, innocent as a child unable to count — one gallows, two gallows, three gallows; Karl Franz Josef, the front-line smiler, unable to feel grief for those killed in action, while the glorious days fly past like some dreamy operetta waltz; the beloved German Crown Prince, known far and wide as the “Smiling Mosquito”, and all the other smilers. My tables — meet it is that I should set it down that one may smile, and smile, and be a general! Then there are the ladies at this masked field ball! For instance, the Archduchess Augusta, Mother to the Troops, who, after their Father has used machine guns to galvanize his sons’ advance, puts in a brief appearance before their heroic death as — in their mind’s eye — a symbol of sacrificial patriotism. There is no defence against this aggravation of the duty to die for the Hungarian cause, and it is a spectacle from which the genius of mankind, if such a one still exists, certainly turns away, but from which the postcard industry profits.
OPTIMIST The self-sacrificing work of the Red Cross nurses is surely first and foremost, when one of the seriously wounded is about to undergo an operation—
GRUMBLER —to have their picture taken with him.
OPTIMIST Those photographs have been staged!
GRUMBLER The contempt comes across even better that way. Even Berchtold’s photograph is merely posed, in order to bring out the unfathomable void of his visage — the void into which we have all plunged and which has swallowed us up.
OPTIMIST You exaggerate. I admit this photograph may not flatter us—
GRUMBLER Set against the fields of corpses, a background provided by our congenial subject in person, it catches us with deadly accuracy. I think of it as the only luminous image amid unspeakable darkness, and am consoled by the conviction that an Austrian face with such features will be seen no more. Should we not confront this image with that of those untold martyrs held in Siberia or slaving in French munitions factories, incarcerated on Asinara or rotting by the roadside after the death march from a Serbian to an Italian prison camp. One of those photographed is already a skeleton, standing upright, mouth agape like a starving bird. It’s an image seen by some human eye that captures my eye. Should we not present it to the smiling Berchtold, along with all the horrors of an evacuation, all those buried alive and burnt alive, the rape of half-massacred women, whom the more tenderhearted of the murderers finish off by shooting! Was none of that photographed for consumption at home or abroad? Yet here someone took a snapshot of Berchtold, smiling, just as he was about to take a shot at the enemy!
OPTIMIST But surely he is not responsible—
GRUMBLER No, only we are, we who made it possible for such rogues to play a game for which they are not held responsible. We are, for we were prepared to live and breathe in a world which wages wars for which it can make no one responsible. Responsible for the only thing that absolutely calls for responsibility, namely control over life, over health, freedom, honour, property, and the happiness of one’s fellow men. Greater cretins than our statesmen—