“Yes, young master Ottokar,” he said, rubbing his bony old chin as we sat in the parlour of their cottage, “it’s a bad business and no mistake, this war of theirs. I fought with the old 54th Regiment back in ’66, and that was bad enough; but at least we lost after six weeks and it was all over. Who’d have thought this war would go on so long? Mark my words, we’re in for a bad harvest this year. They say it’s the British blockade, but that’s eyewash if you ask me. It’s all the men and horses they’ve taken off the land, that’s what. And Vienna and their war prices. They’ve set them so low that the country-people aren’t growing to sell any more, just enough for themselves and some for the black market. Yes, my young sir, if you want my opinion that old fool at Schonbrunn’s declared one war too many this time . . .” he grinned, “. . . and if you like you can bring a gendarme along here to arrest me for saying so. I’ll just show him my old army pay- book and the wound I got at Trautenau.”
I found though that the changes wrought by the war in the material circumstances of life in that small town were as nothing compared to the alteration in its people, as if the human spirit was also in short supply and being replaced by an ersatz version. I had not been home a great deal in recent years. I had gone to the Imperial and Royal Naval Academy in Fiume in 1900, my mother had died two years later and my brother Anton had entered the Army as an Aspirant in 1903. My father had remained in Hirschendorf, immersed in his duties as k.k. Deputy District Superintendent of Posts and Telegraphs and (after hours) in his activities as one of the leading luminaries of the local Pan-German Nationalist movement. I had been home to see him from time to time over the years, even though my home town—in so far as a sailor can ever have one—was now Pola. But this was largely a duty performed out of filial piety. My father had never been an easy man to get on with, so the visits had become less and less frequent with the years.
We had last met in Vienna back in July, when he was invited to my investiture as a Maria-Theresien Ritter, and also to my wedding two days later. In the event the wedding had been cancelled—or rather, much reduced in scale and moved to a suburban registry office—and the old man had been cabled not to bother coming. Not that he had minded a great deaclass="underline" he disapproved of the marriage on eugenic principle—mingling good Germanic blood with that of a Magyar-Romanian minor aristocrat from Transylvania, even though it was patently obvious that both he and I were solid square-faced Slav peasants. Remarks had been made about “the degenerate mongrel aristocracy of the Habsburg corpse-empire; the sweepings of Europe gathered up by Vienna and set to rule over the solid fair-haired peasants and burghers of the Germanic borderlands.” In fact he had not been too keen on the Cross of Maria Theresa either: “a piece of worthless Habsburg tinware manufactured in the Jew-shops of Vienna” was how he had chosen to characterise the Old Monarchy’s highest military honour. I believe that he bore no particular animus against Elisabeth as a person—after all, being a degenerate mongrel aristocrat was not her fault—but there was no warmth either. Before he had turned to German Nationalism my father had once been a Czech liberal nationalist, and he still retained a Czech democrat’s somewhat less than total admiration for countesses, even where (as in this case) the countess had renounced her title and was about as devoid of snobbery as it is possible for anyone to be.
In any case, the old boy had more important things on his mind at present than his son’s new wife: he had just become the local organiser of the recently formed Deutscher Volksbund in this part of Moravia. It was a mark, I suppose, of how far the Habsburg state had fallen into senile decay by the year 1916 that it could now look through its fingers when a quite high-ranking provincial civil servant became a part-time functionary of an extreme German nationalist organisation which, if not exactly a political party, was not far off being one. In days gone by Vienna had been intensely mistrustful of any nationalist activity, German quite as much as any other sort, and would not have tolerated it for one moment in a civil servant. The old doctrine was that whoever entered the service of the House of Austria ceased to have a nationality. And to be fair to them, nearly everyone lived up to that high ideal. But now it seemed that after two years of war and a humiliating chain of defeats rectified only by German troops and German brains, the Dual Monarchy was fast becoming a spiritual colony of the Greater German Reich, which already extended from Flanders to the marshes of the Tigris.
The Deutscher Volksbund claimed to be nothing more than a patriotic organisation of German-speakers within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But you would certainly have been hard put to it to see any sign of that in our house on the Olmutzergasse. It had been turned into a shrine to the Goddess Germania, with more than a hint of Wotan- worship. Portraits of Hindenburg and Ludendorff hung on the walls, draped in black-red-gold banners. A smaller portrait of the German Kaiser hung below them. Garlands in the black-white-red of Prussia bedecked a full-length portrait of Oberleutnant Brandys, the spike- helmeted hero who was supposed to have captured Fort Douanmont at Verdun virtually single-handed. Everywhere, posters for the German Flottenverein and the 7th War Loan and the German Women’s League; posters exhorting Gott to straff Engeland and for people to give their Gold in exchange for Eisen. A vast map of Europe covered the whole of one wall. On it the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires had been merged with most of Belgium and sizeable chunk of northern France into one dingy uniform expanse of field grey surrounded by barbed wire and with its borders bristling with bayonets. Beneath it was a legend in Gothic script: It has come at fast, never to perish—% reich °f ninety millions. In the alcove in the hallway, where once the family’s statue of the Madonna had stood, was now a wooden pedestal bearing a German steel helmet—the kind Oberleutnant Friml and his marauders had been wearing a few days before—with a slot cut in the top for coins. A plaque fixed to the pedestal proclaimed: The most sublime shape our century has yet produced: not the work of an artist's studio, but forged from the union of the German spirit with German steef. It was all intensely depressing.
Worse was to come that first evening as I took Elisabeth for a stroll around the town. The atmosphere of the place was oppressive in the extreme. It had never been a particularly friendly place as I remembered it: like many towns and cities in the Old Monarchy, it had been disputed territory between two nationalities, or in this case, between three of them— German, Czech and Polish—who each had their own name for the place and each claimed it as their own exclusive property. In the years before the war the heavy presence of official Austria, in the shape of its gendarmes and civil servants—and in extremis, its soldiers in the barracks on the Troppau road—had preserved an uneasy quiet in Hirschendorf, broken only by the occasional riot. But now that Austria-Hungary was at war in alliance with Imperial Germany, the German faction in Hirschendorf was letting it be known in no uncertain manner that they were on top and intended staying there. In pre-war Austria the Germans had felt themselves an increasingly threatened minority in a country that they had once regarded as their rightful property. But now the tables had been turned: the Czechs and Poles and Slovenes and all the rest of the impudent riff-raff were now themselves minorities—and small ones at that—in a Greater German Reich of ninety million people.
Certainly no opportunity was being missed in Hirschendorf in the summer of 1916 to ram that message down the throats of the non- Germans. The town’s Czech newspaper had been closed down under emergency powers and a number of Czech nationalists had been arrested by the military and interned. The local Polish organisations had been forbidden to hold meetings and were being watched by the police. Also the statue “The Spirit of Austria” had been removed from the public gardens in the middle of the town square.