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Authors: Bela Zombory-Moldovan

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Then there was the nagging question of the future of the monarchy itself. Franz Joseph, on the throne since 1848, was held in general affection as the paternalistic guarantor of Hungary’s privileged place in the empire; but he was about to turn eighty-five, and even he would not live forever. That his heir, the archduke Franz Ferdinand (shortly to visit the recently annexed province of Bosnia-Herzegovina and its capital, Sarajevo), loathed all Hungarians was a poorly kept secret. What would the future hold for Hungary once the shrewd old patriarch of the “brotherhood of nations” was gone?

Such anxieties simmered just below a surface of apparent stability and confidence in material progress. Cultural and intellectual life in Budapest—a city widely admired for its elegance and modernity—was in vigorous ferment; it was centered on Pest’s many and famous coffeehouses, some of which, like the one called the New York, were of glittering magnificence.
[3]
Artists, writers, journalists, actors, boulevardiers, and hangers-on (overwhelmingly, but not exclusively, male) occupied regular tables, sometimes all day and late into the night, where conversation, debate, gossip, and badinage flowed freely. In an age when most unmarried men lived with their parents, it was a familiar, convivial place to meet friends; for family men it offered a refuge from domesticity for a brandy, a cigar, and a game of chess. Newspaper articles and sometimes entire novels were written at corner tables, literary journals were edited and the occasional revolution was planned amid the clink of espresso cups. For those in search of fresh air and a refreshing spritzer or cold beer, charming old taverns in the hills of Buda offered outdoor tables under the welcoming shade of trees.

The
Sezession
style in architecture and design of the turn of the century, which had recently left its distinctive, faintly exotic mark all over Pest, was being superseded by the first waves of twentieth-century modernism in the visual arts: fauvism, cubism, expressionism—a dizzying torrent of “isms” that stirred intense debate and divided the artistic and critical community between traditionalists (like Béla and his circle) and enthusiasts for the avant-garde (many of whom were Jewish). Similar developments were afoot in literature and music, with the poetry of Endre Ady and the challenging tonalities of Béla Bartók. In a society like that of Budapest in 1914, in which culture (in an age when that word needed neither quotation marks nor qualification) held an almost sacred place in the lives of the educated classes, these controversies, and the increasing polarization of opinion around them, counted for a great deal.

Still, the material lives of the upper middle class and the gentry were comfortable and seemingly secure, with summers spent away from the oppressive heat of the city on the shores of Lake Balaton, the pleasant Adriatic coast (a day’s travel by fast train), and in the Alps, with
Baedeker
in hand; or, for the wealthy, perhaps in Italy, or the smart resorts of the French Riviera and the Atlantic coast. These people, on the whole, encountered courtesy and deference wherever they went; like Béla, they could tip their way through life. Modern conveniences—the telephone, the electric tram, the motorcar, the espresso machine, aspirin—had become part of everyday life. Yet conversations turned, again and again, to seemingly insoluble political problems and threats, internal and external, to the established order. It was a society that managed to combine deep complacency with an uneasy sense that things could not go on as they were.

The one thing that practically nobody foresaw was what actually happened: a continent-wide “total” war lasting for four relentless years, by the end of which Austria-Hungary’s human and material resources would be utterly exhausted, its institutions wrecked, and its very existence as an entity coming to an abrupt end.

The terrible toll of human lives and physical suffering imposed by the war of 1914–1918 on all of the combatant nations is its defining feature in our historical imagination. The losses suffered by Austria-Hungary are, nonetheless, still shocking. In just the first two weeks of fighting, the monarchy’s casualties—killed, wounded, or captured —numbered 400,000;
[4]
by the end of 1914, over 850,000. The first three months of 1915 added another 800,000 to the casualty lists. More than 40 percent of these losses were from the Hungarian lands.
[5]
By the end of the war, Austro-Hungarian casualties were almost 7 million out of a population (in 1914) of 51 million. (For the sake of comparison, British casualties were 2.5 million out of a population of 46 million.)
[6]
An average of more than 4,500 Austro-Hungarian men in uniform were killed, wounded, or captured every single day of the war.

This recently discovered memoir covers a period of eight months, from the day that news of Austro-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia reaches the little Adriatic resort where Béla is holidaying with friends to the day when—after brief military training, the hell of battle against the Russians on the Galician front, serious injury, and slow recuperation—he returns to Budapest in early April 1915 to report once more for duty. Vivid, acutely observant, and intensely personal, it offers a rare insight into a long-lost world and a largely forgotten theater of the Great War, and into the engagingly skeptical and subtle mind of a man—and an artist—who is at once a product of his age and privileged background, and a quietly sardonic critic of the jingoism, folly, self-deception, and hypocrisy that he sees all around him, as the country is first caught up in enthusiasm for the war and then increasingly in denial of its realities.

At the heart of the narrative is the description of combat in the sandy hills and forests of northern Galicia, deep inside what the historian Timothy Snyder has called eastern Europe’s “bloodlands”—the scene of human slaughter on a vast scale in the twentieth century, including the Nazi holocaust of European Jewry. (Oblivious, of course, to what was to come, the author observes a remote Jewish shtetl with a mixture of fascinated curiosity and the faint disdain characteristic of his class and age.) There is no shortage of writing about life at the front in the First World War (although firsthand accounts of the Galician campaign of 1914 are rare);
[7]
nonetheless, this record of the experience of battle stands out for its subjective intensity, self-awareness, and richness of detail. It makes for terrifying reading. It is no wonder that the writer emerged from the experience bearing, in addition to his physical wounds, psychological damage (diagnosed, in the terminology of the day, as “traumatic neurosis,” but otherwise untreated) that haunts him and blocks his artistic creativity during the months of his slow recuperation, and left him inwardly scarred to the end of his long life.

The memoir is no less interesting for the picture it provides of the culture and mores of the stylishly dressed but woefully ill-prepared Austro-Hungarian army of 1914. (In this respect it complements Joseph Roth’s great novel of military life,
The Radetzky March
.) Called up as a junior reserve officer in the infantry, the young Béla observes, with his distinctive laconic irony, the complacency and heartlessness of the regular officer class, with its absurd insistence on punctilios of dress and decorative military ritual. About to go into the carnage at Rava Ruska, he is reprimanded for failing to present his sword on parade. (“This should really scare the Russians,” he comments in a typically dry aside, as he straps on the useless ornament. “It’s what makes a man fit for court,” a Hungarian villager says later, awestruck at being allowed to touch the sacred object.) Troops are sent on long forced marches in full gear, rendering them useless for battle. Men ordered into withering artillery fire are forbidden to dig foxholes, as this “leads to cowardice and undermines discipline”; defying this homicidal instruction, they claw at the ground with discarded lids from tin cans and their bare hands as the barrage erupts around them.

But it is the account of what happens after his return from the front that is, from a psychological point of view, the most revealing and interesting part of the work. After a spell in the “crazies” ward of a military hospital, Béla becomes a lost soul, wandering the streets of his beloved Budapest in search of his past, a parody of the flaneur and young blade that he once was. He notes the changes that even a few weeks of a distant war have wrought on his city and its people: the trim little park trampled to mud, a porter yelling in the railway station, rowdiness at his favorite coffeehouse, and a sullen, silent struggle between those who have been conscripted and those who have not. As he revisits his old haunts, he feels the ties that bound him to the place dissolving and the city turning its back on him. There are intriguing echoes here of the classic early twentieth-century texts of the city as locus of alienation and memory. It is a quintessentially “modern” predicament—dislocation, the fruitless search to recover a past that was once whole and charged with meaning. It is the condition evoked in T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land
, Hermann Hesse’s
Steppenwolf
, and the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico.

In the final section of the book, the search for quietude and the wellspring of his creativity takes the author away from Budapest—first to a spell in the deep country, where memories of childhood and a still-undisturbed old order of parish life and village custom promise an escape of sorts, and where a reluctant encounter with rustic gastronomy (on the occasion of the slaughter of a prize pig) provides an episode of beautifully observed comic relief; and finally back to the sea, the Adriatic coast where he spent the last summer of peacetime, and where spring has already returned. Here, amid the beauty of his beloved warm south and the simple familial kindness of his hosts, he begins at last to find inner calm and to draw again. He is joined for a while by his friend and fellow artist Ervin, and together they explore the coastline and discuss what is happening to the world. Béla is filled with a sense of foreboding: “And all this is nothing compared with what still awaits us.” But he is ready to face the uncertain future.

That future—in case the reader is curious to know how it turned out—was to be bound up in Hungary’s troubled history after 1914.

Béla spent the rest of the war in uniform but away from the front. After a short period of training newly conscripted men, he was put in charge of a camp for Russian prisoners of war at Kissitke in western Hungary. The posting seems to have suited him well, and the beautifully worked wooden objects that he received from grateful prisoners, and treasured all his life, suggest that he encouraged handicrafts among his charges and treated them with humanity. In 1916 he returned to Budapest to work in the war ministry’s information office as a designer; here he created, among other things, notable designs for posters for the war effort and to advertise exhibitions associated with it.
[8]
He was also responsible for designing the coronation ceremony of the hapless Karl in December 1916.

After the war, he returned to teaching at the Budapest School of Applied Arts, as he had done from 1909 to 1914; he became the principal in 1935 and an adviser to the education minister, for which he was honored. These were also years of recognition and success for him as a painter. His work (invariably realistic and “painterly” in style) won numerous prizes and was shown at the Barcelona International Exposition of 1929. He enjoyed particular success as a portraitist: sitters doubtless appreciated his traditionalism and technical skill in rendering what they would have regarded as a proper likeness.

Plain “Béla Moldován” until 1933, in that year he officially took his mother’s family name as a prefix to his own. She was from an old titled family (Zombory de Tarczal) and had died when he was ten.

He was a lifelong conservative by temperament, a lover of old and well-worn things, and a determined disparager of modernist tendencies in art; but he disliked the increasingly rightward drift under the Horthy regime from the mid-1930s, and spurned an invitation to join the so-called Order of Gallantry (Vitézi Rend) established by the regime as elite guardians of the nationalist flame.
[9]
Following the German military occupation of Hungary in March 1944, at great personal risk, he sheltered a Jewish family from deportation and murder,
[10]
and he had nothing but contempt for the Hungarian Fascists, the Arrow Cross (Nyilasok), who came to power in October of that year. (He was characteristically bemused by the unannounced visit, shortly after the war, of a deputation from the local synagogue who insisted on blessing him as a “righteous Gentile.”)

The establishment of a Moscow-sponsored Communist regime in Hungary after World War II was a personal as well as a national catastrophe. Béla was interrogated by the secret police, the dreaded ÁVO, at their headquarters at 60 Andrássy Avenue. In 1946, caught up in a purge of “right-wing elements” from public service in which some sixty thousand officials were removed from their posts, Béla was dismissed from the School of Applied Arts. Unable to sell his work and excluded from the state-approved artists’ organizations after the Communists tightened their grip on power from 1948, he withdrew into virtual seclusion, spending long periods alone in the little thatched summer house he had designed in the 1930s at Balatonfüred in western Hungary. There, he occupied himself with making paintings, watercolors, and etchings of the region’s open landscapes and the shores of Lake Balaton, getting about on an ancient black bicycle. These are probably his finest body of work: Restrained, modest in scale, and filled with a quiet, calm luminosity, they express his love of the land. The writing of this memoir—part of an unfinished wider project—probably also dates from this period.

Béla Zombory-Moldován died at Balatonfüred on August 20, 1967.

My childhood memories of him are of his last years. He came to visit us in England when I was about six; an old man, but erect and dapper in a well-cut Prince of Wales check suit, leather gloves casually clasped in one hand, a homburg tilted just so above piercing eyes, and a neatly trimmed gray moustache. Even in those days, he seemed to belong to a distant, more graceful age. He spoke quietly and chose his words with care. He had the air of a man used to being respected.

BOOK: The Burning of the World: A Memoir of 1914
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