The World of Yesterday (25 page)

The detective in charge of the case froze. The mystery was solved. Colonel Redl, the top espionage chief in the Austrian army, was also a spy in the pay of Russia. He had not only sold Austrian secrets and the army’s marching plan, it also instantly became clear why, over the last year, the Austrian agents he sent to Russia had been regularly arrested, tried and found guilty. Frantic telephone conversations began, finally reaching Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, Chief of General Staff of the Austrian army. An eyewitness of this scene told me that on hearing the first few words he turned white as a sheet. Phone calls to the Hofburg palace ensued, discussion following discussion. What should be done next? The police had now made sure that Colonel Redl could not get away. When he was leaving the Hotel Klomser, and was giving the hotel porter some instructions, a detective unobtrusively approached him, offered him the pocketknife and asked, in civil tones, “Did you happen to leave this pocketknife in your cab, Colonel?” At that moment Redl knew that the game was up. Wherever he turned, he saw the familiar faces of secret policemen keeping watch on him, and when he returned to the hotel, two officers followed him up to his room and put a revolver down in front of him, for by now a decision had been reached in the Hofburg—the end of an affair showing the Austrian army
in such an ignominious light would be best hushed up. The two officers stayed on duty outside Redl’s room in the Hotel Klomser until two in the morning. Only then did they hear the sound of the revolver being fired inside the room.

Next day a brief obituary of the highly regarded officer Colonel Redl, who had died suddenly, appeared in the evening papers. But too many people had been involved in tracking him down for the secret to be kept. Gradually, moreover, details that explained a great deal in psychological terms came to light. Unknown to any of his superiors or colleagues, Colonel Redl’s proclivities had been homosexual, and for years he had been a victim of blackmailers who finally drove him to this desperate means of extricating himself from their toils. A shudder of horror passed through the entire army. Everyone knew that if war came, this one man could have cost the country the lives of hundreds of thousands, bringing the monarchy to the brink of the abyss. Only then did we Austrians realise how very close we had been to world war already during the past year.

That was the first time I felt terror take me by the throat. Next day I happened to meet Bertha von Suttner, the generous and magnificent Cassandra of our times. An aristocrat from one of the first families in the land, in her early youth she had seen the horrors of the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 come close to their hereditary castle in Bohemia. With the passion of a Florence Nightingale, she saw only one task in life for herself—preventing a second war, preventing war in general. She wrote a novel entitled
Die Waffen nieder
—Lay Down Your Arms—which was an international success; she organised countless pacifist meetings, and the great triumph of her life was that she aroused the conscience of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. He was induced to make up for the damage his
invention had done by setting up the Nobel Peace Prize to foster international understanding. She came towards me in a state of great agitation. “People don’t realise what’s going on,” she cried out loud in the street, although she usually spoke in quiet, kindly and composed tones. War was so close, and they were hiding everything from us and keeping it secret as usual. “Why don’t you young people do something? It’s more your business than anyone’s! Resist, close ranks! Don’t keep leaving everything to a few old women like us. No one listens to us!”

I told her that I was going to Paris, and perhaps we could try to draw up a joint manifesto there.

“Why ‘perhaps’?” she urged me. “Things look worse than ever, the wheels have begun turning.” Uneasy as I was myself, I had difficulty in calming her down.

But it was in France that a second, personal episode was to remind me how prophetically the old lady, who was not taken very seriously in Vienna, had foreseen the future. It was a very small incident, but it made a powerful impression on me. In the spring of 1914 I had left Paris, with a woman friend, to spend a few days in Touraine, where we were going to see the grave of Leonardo da Vinci. We had walked along the banks of the Loire in mild, sunny weather, and were pleasantly weary by evening. So we decided to go to the cinema in the rather sleepy town of Tours, where I had already paid my respects to the house in which Balzac was born.

It was a small suburban cinema, not at all like our modern picture palaces made of chromium and shining glass. Only a hall perfunctorily adapted for the purpose, and full of labourers, soldiers, market women, a crowd of ordinary people enjoying a gossip and blowing clouds of Scaferlati and Caporal tobacco smoke into the air, in defiance of a No Smoking sign. First on the screen came a newsreel—‘News From All Over the World’. A boat race in England; the people talked and laughed. Then a French military parade, and again the audience took little
notice. But the third item was entitled: ‘Kaiser Wilhelm Visits Emperor Franz Joseph in Vienna’. Suddenly I saw on the screen the familiar platform of the Westbahnhof in Vienna, an ugly railway station building, along with a few policemen waiting for the train to come in. Then a signal was given, and old Emperor Franz Joseph walked past the guard of honour to welcome his guest. As the old Emperor appeared on the screen, stooping slightly and not entirely steady on his feet as he passed the line of men, the audience in Tours smiled kindly at the old gentleman with his white side whiskers. Then there was a picture of the train coming in, the first, the second and the third carriages. The door of the saloon car was opened, and out stepped Wilhelm II, the ends of his moustache bristling, wearing the uniform of an Austrian general.

At the moment when Kaiser Wilhelm appeared in the picture a storm of whistling and stamping broke out entirely spontaneously in the dark hall. Everyone was shouting and whistling, men, women and children all jeering as if they had been personally insulted. For a second the kindly people of Tours, who knew nothing about the world beyond what was in their newspapers, were out of their minds. I was horrified, deeply horrified. For I felt how far the poisoning of minds must have gone, after years and years of hate propaganda, if even here in a small provincial city the guileless citizens and soldiers had been roused to fury against the Kaiser and Germany—such fury that even a brief glimpse on the screen could provoke such an outburst. It was only a second, a single second. All was forgotten once other pictures were shown. The audience laughed heartily at the comedy that now followed, slapping their knees loudly with delight. Only a second, yes, but it showed me how easy it could be to whip up bad feeling on both sides at a moment of serious crisis, in spite of all attempts to restore understanding, in spite of our own efforts.

The entire evening was spoilt for me. I couldn’t sleep. If it had happened in Paris, it would have made me just as uneasy, but
it would not have shaken me so much. However, seeing how far hatred had eaten into the kindly, simple people here in the depths of the provinces made me shudder. In the next few days I told the story of this episode to many friends. Most of them didn’t take it seriously. “Remember how we French mocked stout old Queen Victoria, and two years later came the Entente Cordiale with Britain. You don’t know the French; they don’t feel deeply about politics.” Only Rolland saw it in a different light. “The simpler the people, the easier it is to win them over. Things have looked bad since Poincaré was elected. His journey to Petersburg will not be a pleasure jaunt.” We talked for a long time about the International Socialist Congress that had been fixed for that summer in Vienna, but here too Rolland was more sceptical than most. “Who knows how many will stand firm once the posters ordering mobilisation go up? We have entered a time of mass emotion, crowd hysteria, and we cannot see yet what power it will have if war comes.”

But, as I said earlier, such moments of anxiety passed by like gossamer blowing in the wind. We did think of war now and then, but in much the same way as one sometimes thinks of death—a possibility but probably far away. And Paris was too beautiful at that time, and we ourselves too young and happy to think of it much. I still remember a delightfully farcical ceremony devised by Jules Romains in which the idea of a
prince des poètes
was to be superseded by the crowning of a
prince des penseurs
, a good if rather simple-minded man who let the students lead him to the statue of Rodin’s
Thinker
outside the Panthéon. In the evening we made merry like schoolboys at a parody of a banquet. The trees were in blossom, the air was sweet and mild; who wanted to think of something as unimaginable as war in the face of so many pleasures?

My friends were more my friends than ever, and I was making new friends too in a foreign land—an ‘enemy’ land. The city was more carefree than ever before, and we loved its freedom
from care along with our own. In those final days I went with Verhaeren to Rouen, where he was to give a reading. That night we stood outside the cathedral, its spires gleaming magically in the moonlight—did such mild miracles belong to only one fatherland, didn’t they belong to us all? At Rouen station, where one of the railway engines he had celebrated in verse was to crush him two years later,
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we said our goodbyes. Verhaeren embraced me. “I’ll see you on the first of August at Caillou qui Bique!” I promised to be there. I visited him at his place in the country every year to translate his new poems, working in close collaboration with him, so why not this year too? I said goodbye to my other friends without a care, goodbye to Paris, an unsentimental goodbye such as you say to your own house when you are just going away for a few weeks. My plan for the next few months was clear. I was off to Austria, to somewhere secluded in the country to get on with my work on Dostoevsky (which as things turned out could not be published until five years later), and thus complete my book on
Three Masters of Their Destiny
, depicting three great nations through the work of their greatest novelists. Then I would visit Verhaeren, and perhaps make my long-planned journey to Russia in winter, to form a group there as part of our movement for intellectual understanding. All lay plain and clear before me in this, my thirty-second year; that radiant summer the world offered itself like a delicious fruit. And I loved it for the sake of what it was now, and what it would be in an even greater future.

Then, on 28th June 1914, a shot was fired in Sarajevo, the shot that in a single second was to shatter the world of security and creative reason in which we had been reared, where we had grown up and were at home, as if it were a hollow clay pot breaking into a thousand pieces.

E
VEN WITHOUT THE DISASTER
it brought down on the whole of Europe, that summer of 1914 would have been unforgettable. I have seldom known a summer more luscious, more beautiful, I am tempted to say more
summery
. The sky was a silken blue day after day, the air was soft and sultry, the meadows warm and fragrant, the woods dark and lush with young green growth. Even today, when I say the word ‘summer’, I instinctively think of the glorious July days that I spent in Baden near Vienna that year. I had gone to stay quietly there, in the romantic little spa town that Beethoven liked to visit in summer. I was planning to concentrate entirely on work for that month, and then spend the rest of the summer with my revered friend Verhaeren at his little house in the Belgian countryside. When you are staying in Baden, you do not have to go out of the town to enjoy the landscape. Beautiful woods, covering the gently rolling hills nearby, make their way imperceptibly in among the low-built, Biedermeier houses, which still have the simplicity and charm of Beethoven’s time. You can sit out of doors when you visit a café or restaurant, mingling as you please with the cheerful guests relaxing at the spa resort, promenading in the park or losing their way as they stroll along secluded woodland paths.

It was 29th June, celebrated by staunchly Catholic Austria as the Feast of St Peter and St Paul, and the day before a great many visitors had arrived from Vienna. In pale summer clothes, happy and carefree, the crowd walked around the spa park to the sound of music. The day was mild, there was not a cloud in
the sky above the spreading chestnut trees, it was a day to feel happy. Soon it would be the holiday season for these people and their children, and with this first festival of summer they were looking forward, so to speak, to the whole season with its delightful air, lush green leaves, and a chance to forget all their daily anxieties. At the time I was sitting a little way off from the crowd in the spa park, reading a book with interest and close attention. I still remember what book it was—Mereshkovski’s
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
Yet the wind in the trees, the birdsong and the music wafting through the air from the park still made their way into my mind. I clearly heard the melody of the music without letting it distract me, for the ear is so adaptable that when there is a continuous noise, for instance the thunder of traffic in the street or the babbling of a brook, the conscious mind will have adjusted to it within a few minutes, and after that only an unexpected break in the rhythm will attract the hearer’s attention.

So my mind was instinctively distracted from my reading when the music abruptly stopped. I did not know what musical piece the spa band had been playing, I only sensed that the music had suddenly broken off, and I automatically looked up from my book. A change also seemed to come over the crowd promenading among the trees like a single pale entity flowing along. It too stopped walking up and down. Something must have happened. I stood up and saw the musicians leaving the bandstand. That was strange as well, because the band usually performed for an hour or more. There must be some reason why it had stopped so abruptly. Coming closer, I saw that excited groups of people were crowding around a communiqué that had just been pinned up on the bandstand. A few minutes later I discovered that it was the text of the telegram announcing that His Imperial Highness Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne, and his wife, both of them in Bosnia to inspect military manoeuvres, had been the victims of a political assassination in Sarajevo.

More and more people came up, thronging around this notice. The unexpected news passed from mouth to mouth. But to be honest, there was no special shock or dismay to be seen on the faces of the crowd, for the heir to the throne had not by any means been popular. I still remember another day, in my earliest childhood, when Crown Prince Rudolf, the Emperor’s only son, was found shot dead at Mayerling. Then, the whole city had been in emotional turmoil, and enormous crowds had gone to see him lying in state, expressing their overwhelming sympathy for the Emperor and their horror at the idea that his only son and heir, of whom the nation had cherished great expectations as a progressive member of the Habsburg dynasty who was personally unusually likeable, had died in the prime of life. Franz Ferdinand, however, lacked what mattered most for anyone to win true popularity in Austria—an attractive personality, natural charm and a friendly manner. I had often seen him at the theatre. He sat there in his box, a powerful, broad figure with cold, fixed eyes, never casting a single friendly glance at the audience, or encouraging the actors by applauding them warmly. You never saw him smile, no photograph showed him in a relaxed mood. He had no feeling for music and no sense of humour, and his wife looked just as unapproachable. There was a chilly aura around the couple. It was common knowledge that they had no friends, and that the old Emperor heartily disliked his heir, who was not tactful enough to conceal his impatience to come to the throne and begin his reign. And my almost eerie presentiment that this man with the bulldog neck and cold, staring eyes would bring some kind of misfortune on us was not peculiar to me, but widespread in the country, so that the news of his assassination did not arouse any deep sympathy. Two hours later there was no sign of real grief to be seen. People were talking and laughing, later that evening musicians performed in the cafés again. There were many in Austria who
secretly breathed a sigh of relief that day, because now the old Emperor’s former heir had been replaced by young Archduke Karl, a far more popular figure.

Over the next few days, of course, the newspapers published extensive obituaries expressing appropriate horror at the assassination. There was nothing, however, to indicate that the incident would be exploited in the cause of political action against Serbia. Initially, the death of the Emperor’s heir to the throne left the Imperial House in a very different quandary, concerning the nature of the funeral. In view of his rank as next in line to the throne, and particularly the fact that he had died while doing his duty on behalf of the monarchy, Franz Ferdinand would of course normally have been laid to rest in the Capuchin vault, the historical burial place of the Habsburgs. However, after a long and bitter battle with the Imperial Family, he had married a Countess Chotek, who did indeed come from the upper ranks of the aristocracy but, according to the mysterious centuries-old tradition of the Habsburgs, was not his equal by birth, and the Archduchesses insisted that on great occasions they had the right of precedence over the wife of the heir to the throne, whose children also had no hereditary claim to the succession. In its arrogance, the Court disowned her even now that she was dead. Was a mere Countess Chotek to be buried in the Habsburg imperial vault? Heaven forbid! A tremendous intrigue began, with the Archduchesses up in arms against the old Emperor. While deep mourning for the whole nation was officially decreed, acrimony was rife at the Hofburg Palace, and as might have been expected the dead woman came off worst. The masters of ceremonies invented a story, to the effect that Franz Ferdinand’s own wish had been to be buried in the small provincial Austrian town of Artstetten, and on this pseudo-respectful pretext they were able to suppress any idea of a public lying-in-state or funeral procession, with all the quarrels over rank and precedence that would entail.
The coffins of the two assassination victims were quietly taken to Artstetten and laid to rest there. Vienna, deprived of an occasion to satisfy its eternal love of a good spectacle, was already beginning to forget the whole incident. After all, the violent deaths of Empress Elisabeth and the Crown Prince,
1
and the scandalous defection from court of many members of the Imperial House, had long ago accustomed the Austrians to the idea that the old Emperor, alone and solid as a rock, would survive his entire family, doomed as they seemed to be like the descendants of the house of Atreus. Another few weeks, and the name and person of Franz Ferdinand would have disappeared from history for ever.

However, about a week later a good deal of verbal sniping suddenly began to appear in the papers, all of it reaching a crescendo too simultaneously to be entirely a matter of chance. The Serbian government was accused of collusion in the assassination, and it was insinuated that Austria could not let the murder of its allegedly beloved heir to the throne pass without any repercussions. It was impossible not to feel that the press was preparing the country for action of some kind, but no one thought of war. No banks, businesses or private citizens changed their plans. There was skirmishing with Serbia all the time anyway. Fundamentally, as everyone knew, it had started over some trade agreements concerning the export of Serbian pigs, but what did that dispute have to do with us? My bags were packed for my journey to Belgium to visit Verhaeren, my work was going well; how could the dead Archduke in his sarcophagus affect my life? It was a beautiful summer, and promised to get even better; we all felt carefree as we looked out at the world. I remember how a friend and I were walking through the vineyards on my last day in Baden, and an old workman there told us, “We’ve not had a summer like this many a long year. We’ll have a great vintage if the weather holds. Ah, folks will remember this summer for a long while to come!”

The old man in his blue vintner’s overall had no idea how dreadfully true his words were.

And in Le Coq, the little seaside resort near Ostend where I was planning to spend two weeks before going to stay at Verhaeren’s little country house, as I did every year, the mood was equally carefree. Visitors enjoying their holiday lay on the beach in brightly coloured tents or bathed in the sea, the children flew kites, young people danced outside the cafés on the promenade laid out on the harbour wall. All imaginable nations were gathered companionably together there. In particular, a great deal of German was spoken, because as usual holidaymakers from the nearby Rhineland liked to come to the Belgian beaches. The mood was broken only by newspaper boys crying their wares by bawling out the menacing headlines of the Paris papers. ‘Austria challenges Russia.’ ‘Germany prepares to mobilise.’ You could see people’s faces darken as they bought newspapers, but as yet only for a few minutes. After all, we had had these diplomatic conflicts for years, and they were always satisfactorily settled at the last moment before anything really serious happened. So why not this time too? Half-an-hour later, you could see the same people splashing about in the water again, spluttering happily; the kites rose in the air, seagulls flew overhead, and the sun shone down on the peaceful scene, bright and warm.

But bad news kept on coming, and it was more and more threatening. First there was Austria’s ultimatum to Serbia, then the evasive answer to it, telegrams exchanged by the monarchs, and finally mobilisation, which could hardly be kept under wraps any longer. I could not linger in this small, remote place. I took the small electrified railway over to Ostend every day to find out the latest news, and it was getting worse and worse. The seaside visitors were still bathing, the hotels were still full, there was still a crowd of smiling, talking summer visitors on the promenade.
But for the first time a new note had been struck. Suddenly there were Belgian soldiers in uniform around the place, a sight never usually seen on the beach. By a strange caprice of the Belgian army, its machine guns were transported on little carts with dogs harnessed to them.

At the time I was sitting in a café with a couple of Belgian friends, a young painter and the writer Crommelynck. We had been spending the afternoon with James Ensor, the greatest modern Belgian painter, a very strange, reserved, hermit of a man, who was much prouder of the rather feeble little polkas and waltzes for military band that he composed than of his amazing paintings, executed in brilliant colours. He had shown us his works, if rather reluctantly—for the idea that someone might want to buy one made him comically anxious. His real dream, as his friends told me, was to sell them at a high price but at the same time be able to keep them all, because he was as fond of money as of every single one of his own works. Parting from one always cast him into deep despair for a couple of days. All the odd fancies of this Harpagon
2
of genius made us laugh, and when a troop of soldiers passed by with a dog pulling a machine gun along one of us got up and patted the dog, much to the annoyance of the officer escorting the party, who was afraid that a caress bestowed on an item of war
matériel
could detract from the dignity of a military institution. “Why all this stupid marching about?” one of us murmured. To which someone else replied quite heatedly, “Well, precautions have to be taken.” “Nonsense!” I said with genuine conviction, for in that world of the past we still believed that treaties were sacred. “If something were to make France and Germany annihilate each other to the last man, you Belgians would still be sitting safely here in comfort!” But our friend the pessimist stuck to his point. There must be some reason, he said, why such measures were being ordered in Belgium. Years ago, word had gone round of a secret plan made by the German general staff—if there
was ever an attack on France, the German army would advance through Belgium in defiance of all the treaties that had been signed. I was not giving way either. It seemed to me utterly absurd that, while thousands and tens of thousands of Germans were casually and happily enjoying the hospitality of this neutral little country, there could be a German army stationed on the frontier ready to invade. “Ridiculous!” I said. “If the Germans march in I’ll hang myself from this lamppost!” I am still grateful that my friends didn’t hold me to my word later.

But then came those last, critical days in July, and every hour brought contradictory news—news of Kaiser Wilhelm’s telegrams to the Tsar, the Tsar’s telegrams to Kaiser Wilhelm, Austria’s declaration of war on Serbia, the assassination of Jaurès.
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We sensed that matters were getting serious. All of a sudden a cold wind of fear was blowing over the beach, sweeping it clear. People left their hotels in thousands, there was a rush for the trains, even the most confident began to pack their bags in a hurry. As soon as news of the Austrian declaration of war on Serbia came I myself bought a railway ticket, and not before time, for the Ostend express on which I travelled was the last train to leave Belgium for Germany. We stood in the corridors, agitated and impatient, all talking to each other. No one could sit still or read; we rushed out at every station to get the latest news, imbued by the mysterious hope that some determined hand could still restrain the fateful forces now set loose. We still did not believe in war, and even less in an invasion of Belgium; we couldn’t believe it because we didn’t want to believe anything so crazy. Gradually the train approached the frontier, and we passed Verviers, the Belgian border station. German conductors boarded the train here. In ten minutes’ time we would be on German territory.