And now he was no more. The presence that had shaped the entire lives of all but a few of his subjects and held together his ethnic dustbin of an empire by sheer personal prestige; all that was gone. Something changed for ever that November morning. Until now, behind the battle- fronts, a curious unreality had hung over Austria-Hungary’s war. The casualties had been immense, but the fighting was far away in other people’s countries for the most part, and cafe society had tended to swallow the cheerfully jaunty headlines in the newspapers without demur: “Przemysl Captured”; “Przemysl Recaptured”; “Przemysl Recaptured Again”; or (a couple of days before the rout of Pfanzer-Balltin’s 4th Army) “Our Defences in Volhynia in a State of Moderate Readiness.” Now there could no longer be any ignoring the Monarchy’s disastrous plight. People suddenly woke up to the fact that they were cold and hungry, and that still no end to the war was in sight.
The dead Emperor’s withered old body even lay between us in bed that evening. We would normally have fallen into one another’s arms with joy. I had been away for two months now and I had been scrupulously faithful to my wedding vows. But when we held one another it was not the embrace of lovers reunited so much as the clinging together of two children lost in a dark wood.
“Oh Otto,” she said at last, “is it my lump? There, let me move over if it gets in the way.”
“No dearest, it’s not that.”
“Why, don’t you like pregnant ladies then?”
“It’s not that either: you know you’re more beautiful to me now than ever. No, I don’t know why . . .”
She gazed into my eyes. “Oh surely not. You don’t mean you’re upset over the Old Man? Really, I don’t believe it: not in the twentieth century, surely.”
“It’s not that, Liserl, not really. But try to understand: I’ve been a servant of the House of Austria for sixteen years now, and I’ve hardly ever met anyone who could remember when the old boy wasn’t Emperor. I don’t know why, but it just makes me feel odd inside. Perhaps it’s the war and all I’ve seen these past four months. But I’m still bound by oath to the House of Habsburg.”
“And you’re bound by oath to me, and to the child you’ve planted inside me.” She took my hand and placed it on her satin-smooth belly. “There, feel. It’s life in there: a living child who’ll be breathing in a few months and walking not long after that. Why grieve for the dead? There’s simply too many of them: the whole of Europe turned into one vast bone- yard by Franz Joseph and his like. Let all the kings and generals rot, like the millions of young men they’ve sent to moulder into the earth. Come my Maria-Theresien Ritter, forget about Maria Theresa and Franz Joseph and all the dead emperors and dying empires. Long live life! Let’s make love and create a dozen children: it’s the only way people like us can get back at the rotten sods.”
“Liserl, are you quite mad? Have you no respect for the departed, to talk like that? ”
She laughed. “Yes, I think perhaps I am a little crazy now. After what I’ve had to look at these past two years I’m not surprised: all the maimed bodies and damaged minds. Respect for the departed? If we could I’d take you now to Schonbrunn and make love on top of his coffin.”
In the years since, I must have read or listened to several dozen eye-witness accounts of the funeral of the Emperor Franz Joseph. I am sure that you too will be familiar with the solemn pageantry of that grey November day; the muffled hoofs of the horses; the nodding black plumes on the catafalque; the thirty-four reigning monarchs following bare-headed behind the hearse as the cortege wound its way along streets lined with stunned, grieving people; and of course the traditional exchange at the door of the Capuchin Crypt:
“Who seeks to enter? ”
The Court Chamberlain reeling off the Emperor’s name and his fifty or sixty titles. Then the reply:
“We know of none such here. I ask again, who seeks to enter?” “Franz Joseph, a poor servant of God seeking burial.”
“Enter then,” and the doors slowly swinging open to admit the coffin. No, I shall not bother you yet again by giving a detailed account of what happened. I have found that the aforementioned eye-witness accounts usually come either from people who were not there at all, or who were tiny children at the time, or who could not possibly have seen more than a small part of the ceremony if they were indeed present. The reports generally disagree on certain major details, while in other particulars they often show unmistakable signs of having been cribbed one from another. In any case, they almost always compress the two funeral processions into one: the cortege along the Mariahilferstrasse from Schonbrunn on 27 November, and the shorter journey three days later through the Karntnerstrasse to the Capuchin Crypt after the lying in state in St Stephen’s Cathedral.
As to the famous traditional exchange outside the crypt, by the way, while I hate to cast doubt upon a cherished legend, I once discussed this in detail with a Polish general, the very soul of veracity, while we were sitting in a shelter near Victoria Station during a prolonged and noisy air-raid one night in 1941. He had actually been within earshot of the crypt door that day, as a young Rittmeister in an Uhlan regiment, and he assured me upon his honour that no such ritual ever took place. He thought that it might once have done, perhaps back in the eighteenth century; but certainly by 1916 it had long since fallen into disuse. As to the thirty-four crowned heads, neither of us had the slightest idea how that total had been calculated. True, the usual mob of small-time German royalty had turned up—probably more for a free meal than anything else—but Kaiser Wilhelm had pleaded other engagements and there was a war on, so in the end only Ferdinand of Bulgaria had appeared for the non-German monarchies.
The other reason for my not wishing to bore you with yet another account of the funeral of the Emperor Franz Joseph is the simple fact that I was not actually present at either part of the ceremony. I had been due to walk in the cortege from Schonbrunn on the 27th, representing the Knights of the Military Order of Maria Theresa; but at the very last moment I had received a telephone call instructing me to report immediately to Aspern flying field. It appeared that the Italian poet-aviator and daredevil Gabriele d’Annunzio had given a newspaper interview in which he had announced his intention of flying to Vienna on the day and bombing the catafalque as it passed through the streets, hoping thus to distribute the Emperor’s embalmed remains among his grieving subjects. As an airman I found the whole idea quite preposterous: if d’Annunzio was prepared to fly a six-hour round trip across the Alps and back in winter then in my opinion he was even more intrepid than the Italian press made him out to be. But the local military command had taken alarm and a scratch air-defence squadron had been assembled at Aspern from aircraft out of the workshops and a collection of test-pilots and convalescents. So that is how I spent the afternoon of 27 November, sitting on the field at Aspern in the cockpit of a Brandenburger waiting for the telephone to ring. We were not finally stood down until dusk, so I missed it all.
As to the interment itself, it was the last day of my leave and my presence had not been requested either in the procession or as a pilot. The weather was fine for Vienna in late November, so Elisabeth and I decided to take advantage of the fact that the trams were running and spend the day walking in the Wienerwald: not far, because her waist was beginning to get cumbersome, but enough to get some fresh air and just be together alone before I returned to duty. We kicked up the autumn leaves as we walked arm in arm along the woodland paths, talking of this and that and just luxuriating in one another’s nearness. We drank tea in a little cafe near Grinzing, then climbed up on to the wooded Kahlenberg to look out over the distant city. Despite the anaemic sunshine a light November mist filled the bowl in which Vienna lies, so that only the needle spire of the cathedral and a couple of the higher buildings protruded from the golden haze. Then it began, drifting up to us where we sat: the tolling of all the city’s remaining church bells. And above them all rang the sonorous booming of the Pummerin, the great bell of the cathedral cast from Turkish cannon captured in 1683. We both tried hard not to be affected by it all, but it would have taken a heart of granite not to be moved by the sound of a venerable and once-great empire pulling its own passing-bell. We did not speak to one another: there was no need. We merely sat holding hands, acutely aware that the world in which we had been born and grown up was now slipping away for ever.