The statue had never been much of a success. It had been put up at Vienna’s behest in 1908 to mark the Emperor’s sixtieth jubilee and to try and promote some nebulous concept described as “the Austrian Idea” among the Monarchy’s quarrelling subjects. Commissioned from the studios of the sculptor Engelbrecht, it represented a willowy young female nude in characteristically flowing Wiener Sezession style, holding aloft a very clumsy-looking broadsword, hilt-uppermost, as if someone had absent-mindedly left it on a tram and she was calling after them to attract their attention. It was an innocent enough piece of statuary, in fact quite graceful and pleasing to look at, even if no one could ever quite work out what naked young women holding swords had to do with Old Austria. But somehow, far from promoting a spirit of unity and mutual tolerance, it had managed only to provoke the warring factions into an even more bilious passion. Each nationality became obsessed with the idea of claiming the statue for themselves, and the favoured method was to creep up in the dead of night with paint pots and adorn the young woman with a striped bathing costume: either black-red-gold if it was the Germans, or red-white-blue if it was the Czechs, or simple red and white if it was the Poles. The municipal cleansing department must have spent thousands of kronen over the years in paint removers and wire brushes.
But now “the Spirit of Austria” was no more. Both she and the square’s other statue, Imperial General Prince Lazarus von Regnitz—“noted in the wars against the Turk”—had been melted down to make driving- bands for artillery shells, and her place had been taken by a monstrous wooden “Denksaule”: a hideous commemorative column with a bust of Field Marshal von Hindenburg on top and with medallions of Ludendorff, the Kaiser, Frederick the Great, Bismarck, Wagner and other German heroes around the sides. It was studded with iron nails driven in by those who had donated money to the War Loan and other such patriotic funds. Stupid and dodderingly oppressive as it might have been, the Old Austrian Monarchy was a state conceived on a human scale, and had undeniably displayed a certain taste in artistic matters. Now it seemed that we were being engulfed by the very grossest sort of Greater German vulgarity: the bloated blood-and-iron bombast; the increasingly crazed gigantism; the total lack of any sense of proportion.
And around this idol to the Germanic war-god set up in Hirschendorf town square there limped its human votaries: the soldiers in shabby field grey enjoying what might be their last leave; the women in black whose husbands and sons had already had their last leave; the overworked housewives and their ill-nourished children; and the men in the hideous blue uniforms of the wounded, some with empty sleeves, many with dark glasses and white sticks, some on crutches or (in one case) legless and pushing himself along on a little wheeled trolley. As Elisabeth and I sat on the terrace of the cafe-hotel “Zum Weissen Lowe” and drank our raspberry-leaf tea, we saw a proclamation being posted up on the side of the government offices on the other side of the square. It announced the hanging in Olmutz jail the previous day of five local men who had deserted to the Russians in 1915 and then been recaptured in Volhynia wearing the uniform of the Czech Legion. The proclamation was only what the law required, I suppose, and would have been pasted up even before the war. But now it was accompanied by five photographs in close- up, each showing a black-faced man dangling by his crooked neck from a gallows.
The proclamation was taken down the next day so as not to add a sour note to the celebrations of the Emperor’s birthday. I had to turn up of course, in best Flottenrock complete with sword-belt and the Cross of Maria Theresa prominently displayed on my chest.
It was a sultry, overcast afternoon with thunder in the air. The crowd, I saw, was much smaller than usual for the Emperor’s birthday. Because of the war the local garrison had been able to provide only a military band made up of pensioners—one of whom suffered a stroke while playing the “Prinz Eugen March” and had to be carried away on a stretcher. Likewise the usual gathering of local notables seemed to be very thin. In fact it was made up almost entirely of the town’s Jewish worthies: Dr Litzmann from the local hospital, Herr Birnbaum the notary and my old childhood friend Herr Zinower, the bookseller and secretary of the natural history society. As for the German nationalist bigwigs like my father, they had all absented themselves on one pretext or another.
All in all it was a pretty miserable and spiritless occasion. The congratulatory addresses to our venerable monarch lacked conviction. Everyone present seemed listless and merely to be going through the motions of loyalty. At last the band struck up the Imperial anthem, Haydn’s beautiful old “Gott Erhalte.” As was customary on these occasions, a choir had been provided by the local schools to lead the singing. But after the first few bars I sensed that something had gone wrong. Dr Litzmann standing next to me on the platform stopped singing and looked about the square in alarm. Choir and crowd were not singing “Gott erhalte unsern Kaiser, Gott beschutze unsern Land . . .” Instead several hundred throats were bellowing, “Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles, uber alles in der Welt . . .”
Dinner that evening was potatoes with some thin sauerkraut and slices of an evil-tasting sawdust briquette which my father’s housekeeper said was made from processed wood-mushrooms. After we had finished, Elisabeth and I left my father sticking little coloured flags into a map to mark the advance of the German armies in the Baltic provinces and went out for a walk along the Olmutz road to get some fresh air: one of the few commodities which had not so far been replaced by a substitute version. We had things to discuss.
“When will you hand in your resignation at the hospital?” I asked her. “Next month, I think. By then my belly should be swelling to a point where I can’t hide it any more, even under those awful white overalls we have to wear. Here,” she placed my hand on her abdomen below her belt, “here, you can just feel it now. It hasn’t started sticking out yet but you can feel something hard in there.” She laughed, “I wonder what it’s going to be: a boy or a girl. I say though, isn’t it exciting?”
“It would be, I suppose, if it weren’t for the war. This isn’t much of a time for bringing children into the world. The poor kid may never see its father. What a mess.”
“Oh don’t be such an old misery, Otto. There never was a good time to bring children into the world ever since the world began. What better time could there be than now, when the human race is doing its best to wipe itself out? Having babies spits in the eye of the Ludendorffs and Kaiser Wilhelms and the Krupps and all the other deathmongers who’d kill the lot of us if they could.”
“Why, are you anxious to bear children to be more cannon fodder for the Front in the next war? ”
“No, to have children who’ll perhaps have more sense than we had, and pull the war lords down from their horses one day. I don’t care: long live motherhood—it’s the only hope we’ve got for a better world.”
“Do you want motherhood even if I’m killed?”
“Especially if you’re killed: at least some of you will live on to remind me of what you were like.”
“Well, that’s comforting to know I suppose. But what happens now to your career in medicine? Babies are said to be very time-consuming and nursemaids are not easy to find these days, what with all the women who are going into the munitions factories.”
“Oh, I’ll manage, once the war’s over. My foster-parents disinherited me when I married you, but I’m still not short of money. My father set up a trust fund in Zurich for me and my brother before he died, and now Ferencz is dead it all comes to me. We’ll manage, don’t worry. Anyway, perhaps after the war you’ll leave the Navy and take up an honest trade in engineering or something. You’re a clever man and your talents are being wasted making a lot of Croat fishermen scrub their hammocks and polish brasswork. You can even sit at home and rock the cradle for me if you like.”