This was in 1913. It was the first conversation that showed me it was our duty not to confront the possibility of a European war passively and unprepared. When the crucial moment came, nothing gave Rolland such great moral superiority over everyone else as the way he had already, and painfully, strengthened his mind to face it in advance. Perhaps the rest of our circle had done something too. I had translated many works, I had promoted the best writers in the countries that were our neighbours, I had accompanied Verhaeren on a lecture tour all over Germany in 1912, and the tour had turned out to be a symbolic demonstration of Franco-German fraternity. In Hamburg Verhaeren and Dehmel, respectively the greatest poets of their time writing in French and German, had embraced in public. I had interested Reinhardt in Verhaeren’s new play; our collaboration on both sides had never been warmer, more intense or more unconstrained, and in many hours of enthusiasm we entertained the illusion that we had shown the world the way that would save it. The world, however, took little notice of such literary manifestations, but went its own way to ruin. There was a kind of electrical crackling in the structural woodwork as if of invisible friction. Now and then a spark would fly up—the Zabern Affair,[6] the crises in Albania, the occasional unfortunate interview. Never more than a spark, but each one could have caused the accumulation of explosive material to blow up. We in Austria were keenly aware that we were at the heart of the area of unrest. In 1910 Emperor Franz Joseph passed the age of eighty. The old man, an icon in his own lifetime, could not last much longer, and a mystical belief began to spread among the public at large that after his death there would be no way to prevent the dissolution of the thousand-year-old monarchy. At home, the pressure of opposing nationalities grew; abroad Italy, Serbia, Romania and to some extent even Germany were waiting to divide up the Austrian empire. The war in the Balkans, where Krupp and Schneider-Creusot competed in trying out their artillery on ‘human material’, just as later the Germans and Italians tried out their aeroplanes during the Spanish Civil War, drew us further and further into the raging torrent. We kept waking with a start, but to breathe again and again, with a sigh of relief, “Not this time. Not yet, and let us hope never!”
As everyone knows, it is a thousand times easier to reconstruct the facts of what happened at a certain time than its intellectual atmosphere. That atmosphere is reflected not in official events but, most conspicuously, in small, personal episodes of the kind that I am going to recount here. To be honest, I did not believe that war was coming at the time. But I twice had what might be called a waking dream of it, and woke with my mind in great turmoil. The first time was over the ‘Redl Affair’, which like many of those episodes that form a backdrop to history is not widely known.
Personally I knew Colonel Redl, the central character in one of the most complex of espionage dramas, only slightly. He lived a street away from me in the same district of Vienna, and once, in the café where this comfortable-looking gentleman, who appreciated the pleasures of the senses, was smoking his cigar, I was introduced to him by my friend Public Prosecutor T. After that we greeted each other when we met. But it was only later that I discovered how much secrecy surrounds us in the midst of our daily lives, and how little we really know about those who are close to us. This colonel, who looked very much the usual capable Austrian officer, was in the confidence of the heir to the throne. It was his important responsibility to head the army’s secret service and thwart the activities of their opposing counterparts. It came out that during the crisis of the war in the Balkans in 1912, when Russia and Austria were mobilising to move against each other, the most important secret item in the hands of the Austrian army, the ‘marching plan’, had been sold to Russia. If war had come, this would have been nothing short of disastrous, for the Russians now knew in advance, move by move, every tactical manoeuvre for attack planned by the Austrian army. The panic set off among the General Staff of the army by this act of treachery was terrible. It was up to Colonel Redl, as the man in charge, to apprehend the traitor, who must be somewhere in the very highest places. The Foreign Ministry, not entirely trusting the competence of the military authorities, also let it be known without first informing the General Staff—a typical example of the jealous rivalry of those organisations—that they were going to follow the matter up independently, and to this end gave the police the job of taking various measures, including the opening of letters from abroad sent poste restante, regardless of the principle that such correspondence was strictly private.
One day, then, a post office received a letter from the Russian border station at Podvolokzyska to a poste-restante address code-named ‘Opera Ball’. On being opened, it proved to contain no letter, but six or eight new Austrian thousand-crown notes. This suspicious find was reported at once to the chief of police, who issued instructions for a detective to be stationed at the post-office counter to arrest the person who came to claim the suspect letter on the spot.
For a moment it looked as if the tragedy was about to turn into Viennese farce. A gentleman turned up at midday, asking for the letter addressed to ‘Opera Ball’. The clerk at the counter instantly gave a concealed signal to alert the detective. But the detective had just gone out for a snack, and when he came back all that anyone could say for certain was that the unknown gentleman had taken a horse-drawn cab and driven off in no-one-knew-what direction. However, the second act of this Viennese comedy soon began. In the time of those fashionable, elegant cabs, each of them a carriage and pair, the driver of the cab considered himself far too good to clean his cab with his own hands. So at every cab rank there was a man whose job it was to feed the horses and wash the carriage. This man, fortunately, had noticed the number of the cab that had just driven off. In quarter-of-an-hour all police offices had been alerted and the cab had been found. Its driver described the gentleman who had taken the vehicle to the Café Kaiserhof, where I often met Colonel Redl, and moreover, by pure good luck, the pocketknife that the cabby’s unknown fare had used to open the envelope was found still in the cab. Detectives hurried straight off to the Café Kaiserhof. By then the gentleman described by the cabby had left, but the waiters explained, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, that he could only be their regular customer Colonel Redl, and he had just gone back to the Hotel Klomser.
6
Also known as the Saverne Affair, from Saverne (in German Zabern) in Alsace, where incidents illustrating Prussian militarism foreshadowed the Great War.