The Lost Prince (34 page)
His letters to his friend Will Honeycutt always took a markedly different tone, more starkly realistic. The two had shared an affectionately contentious friendship from almost the moment of Arnauld’s arrival in Boston in 1910. And like their relationship, the tone of their letters was different from the one that Eleanor and Arnauld had established.
You inquire as to the mood of the city. There is a fervor all around that drowns out any voices of calm and reason. The anger at the rude and disrespectful Serbs is palpable. That is the starting point. And everyone is itching to mobilize the army and attack, oblivious to the fierce Russian resistance that would accompany such a move. Everyone is convinced now that the English and French are our traditional bitter enemies, forgetting that just weeks ago this city welcomed visitors from those lands with open arms.
Having Germany as a spiritual ally, of course, fuels the nationalistic confidence. The Russian Bear, fearsome as he sees himself, would think twice before offending the belligerent Germans, or so popular opinion goes. The nightmare, of course, would be a tumbling of one domino into another, and then another and another and another, leading to a huge collapse of everything we consider civilized.
But this furor in the streets of my city does not fill one with confidence in the triumph of rational powers. I think that you would be woefully apprehensive, not that your abrasive influence would be allowed any sway. I will admit to fearing the worst, my friend.
I surprise myself with the sudden sense of duty I am feeling—I cannot account for it at all. I have indeed decided to postpone my return to take up a position on the army’s general staff, to help out temporarily. I have written to St. Gregory’s and requested a year’s leave of absence and I regret that this will keep us apart for some little time, but I feel that for once I can serve in a meaningful way, and for a short and manageable duration.
THE HORRORS OF WAR
I
ndeed, Arnauld found himself swept up in the fervor when his old regiment began calling up reserves and asking former officers to step forward. It was then that he wrote one of his most remarkable letters back to Eleanor in Boston:
Shortly after my decision, as the tensions and furor for war reached fever pitch in Vienna, a series of dreams seized me with a most powerful effect. For some nights in sequence I had been visited by a gallant figure on horseback who rides up to me in a state of some urgency, sword drawn, his horse greatly agitated and he gesturing that I should come near. Always it is the same figure, and after the second or third night, I began to realize that it was Eugene of Savoy, the great eighteenth-century savior of the empire, the one who built the magnificent Belvedere Palace. Only as I approached did I realize that he looked very much like me; as Herr Dr. Freud would say, my doppelgänger, my twin.
Each night I awoke from the dream with a good deal of apprehension. Finally, a few nights ago, the third and fourth appearances, the figure of Prince Eugene appeared for such an extended visit that the next morning I had no trouble writing down details in great profusion, and soon, I found myself, through my writing, engaging in a dialogue with this mythic and grandiose double. As you know, I had numerous conversations with our dear Honeycutt in Cambridge about
his dialogues from dreams, and I have read his splendid thesis from Harvard that you provided.
The other day I took the trolley up to the Upper Belvedere and sat beside the marvelous reflecting pool and fountain, pen in hand, writing out my encounters with this character from my unconscious, as Dr. James would call him. I write this here with a good deal of lightness, but I assure you that the whole experience—the apprehensions of nighttime and the encounters with the writing in daylight—has had a deep and unsettling effect on me.
I asked the prince why he was coming to me, and at first I received no response, or at least I could not call up a response with my writing or from my memory. Then the following night the figure came to me and made himself absolutely clear. He said that the empire was without its prince because of the tragedy of Mayerling and that someone—some charismatic figure—needed to step forward in this time of chaos.
“But I am not that person,” I objected feebly.
“If not you, who?” the prince offered as if part of a litany.
“But I am not the one,” I argued in my dream, and Eugene only stared at me as if there was some truth I was not admitting.
“I have come,” he said loudly, raising his sword, “not to threaten but to anoint. It is your destiny,” were his final words, before he dissolved before me. “It is your destiny” echoed after he had vanished.
I awoke in an agitated state and could not fall back into sleep, and as I rose in the morning, I found myself in a continued fitfulness, which stayed with me until that afternoon, when I visited the commander of my old regiment, and he explained the need for officers in service of the railroads. It was after that meeting that I decided to revive my commission and that I wrote my letter to St. Gregory’s. I hope you understand.
Arnauld did indeed accept a posting on the general staff, feeling, he admitted, something of the patriotic, with the call to duty of his inherited commission. “It all happened too quickly for proper reflection,” he admitted later. Suddenly, he found himself in a position of authority over the national railroads, a position that drew his attention through the immediate and almost overwhelming demands of the mobilization. “There was a sudden need for planning,” he said, “and I stepped in. Working with the
complexity of movements and railroads, I must admit, was both demanding and fascinating.”
He wrote to Eleanor,
Every cavalry officer travels with at least one horse, and every horse travels with at least one week’s food, and then there are the guns and the munitions. It is a huge challenge, one unlike anything in peacetime. And that is why the general staff requires many logistics officers like me. We work day and night and still find ourselves needy of more time for planning. And I must admit that, so unlike anything else I have done in my life, it is compelling work of compelling interest. I cannot tell you the number of trips I have taken to the railroad yards to count boxcars and to the train stations to count seats on the antiquated passenger cars. Everyone it seems is being pressed into service, regardless of age, even old officers who thought themselves long retired. This is a far cry from teaching American schoolboys on the quiet banks of the Charles River.
Arnauld expressed his fear that the huge energy of mobilization would lead inevitably to deployment and that deployment with all its mass movement would lead inevitably to war: “I do not see and no one asks how what we have done will ever be reversed.” With all the intricacies of planning, he noted, there seemed to be no word for demobilization. Later, after the massive war was fully engaged, it was observed that no one of the participating countries, Austria included, had a plan for demobilization. “What is done cannot be undone,” one general said.
When on July 28 the declaration of war was issued by Austria against Serbia, with wild tumult in the streets, men and horses and equipment began marching toward the railroad cars that Arnauld and his fellow staff officers had assembled all over the country. “With great pride,” Arnauld wrote, “we watched the lines of young men marching off to war. We were very pleased with what we had accomplished. It could not have been done without us, we told ourselves. Of course there are those who are predicting horrible effects, but they are dismissed quickly as misguided and not knowing what they are talking about. In this, I feel we are reliving Mark Twain’s very cynical ‘War Prayer.’”
As Arnauld had feared, the huge energy of mobilization by his Austria-Hungary and by all the European powers set in motion the inevitable. Tensions that were building up between Austria and Serbia burst into flame when Austria declared war, setting off a firestorm of reactive war declarations: Russia on Austria, Germany on Russia and France, England on Germany, and so on, eventually involving all major powers. Austria’s first encounters, with Russia in Galicia, turned out to set the tone quickly. It was from the first day a horrible and bloody affair. The devastation of the first few months of war on the eastern front produced shocking results at home. As Arnauld described it, “Our trains that departed carrying the materials of war now returned carrying the near-dead, the maimed, the senseless, pouring back from the eastern front, from the confrontations with Russian artillery.” And Arnauld, the officer in charge of the scheduling, often found himself among them, seeing the bloodied bandages, the stumps of lost limbs, the haggard faces, and hearing the unceasing moans of pain from young men unaccustomed to war. “It is an introduction. Now you are experiencing the horrors of war,” an old officer said to Arnauld as they watched stretchers being unloaded at the Nordbahnhof. “Accustom yourself to it.”
It was during the time of these first grim war letters from Vienna in August and September 1914 that the world watched in horror as one country after another hurled itself into the fray.
And it was also at that time when Eleanor, watching safely from the remove of Boston, became certain that she was pregnant.
“IF NOT YOU, WHO?”
W
e felt such elation,” Arnauld wrote, “before such foreboding. We watched our trains pull out from the Nordbahnhof on their way to Galicia and the Russian front, with men and horses and supplies, and we marveled at our modern world and our new role in it, with no idea of what was to come. That was before one of our number, a gloomy son of the aristocracy from Salzburg, pointed out that the same trains would be ‘bringing back the wounded and the dead.’”
During the mobilization and even in the aftermath of the outbreak of the fighting, Arnauld was of two minds about returning to Boston and the nearness to his beloved Eleanor. He admitted to being consumed by the popular mania fueled by the belief that the whole troublesome matter would be over by Christmas, as soon as the enormous army he and his fellow officers had transported to the eastern front reigned victorious, but he also admitted to a dark pessimism that swept over him, especially in the dead of night, that saw the horror of the battle they had made possible raging on indefinitely.
The dream came to him nearly every night of fevered sleep, the heroic prince Eugene rising up before him, asking not for war, but for sanity. “You didn’t warn of the horror,” Arnauld said.
“It is war,” the prince said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. “That is what happens in war.”
“It is insanity.”
“It can be stopped, you know.”
“But how?” Arnauld would ask.
“What if all sides simply stopped the trains?” he asked Arnauld. “What if someone—someone charismatic like you—rose up princelike on a tabletop in the general headquarters and commanded it?”
“But I am not a prince,” Arnauld repeated each time, feebly. “I am not charismatic.”
And always the heroic Eugene, his doppelgänger, responded the same as he did each time he appeared. “If not you, who?” the prince would say. And Arnauld would awake each time with a deep sense of despair and dread.
Part of him wished simply to return to Boston, to be done with this whole business of war. He carried with him always and everywhere the image of Eleanor’s beautiful presence, and now with the almost overpowering memory of that last night. He cherished it now above all other memories, as he knew the circumstances would not be possible ever again. And over time, in the midst of the anguish that followed the initial enthusiasms for Austria, he longed for a return to the peaceful life of a teacher in a New England boys’ school and the nearness to his Beatrice. But something kept drawing him to war, and the dream kept returning.
His position took him from staff headquarters out to Galicia, to the Russian front, to inspect the supply lines and to oversee the initial stages of the new challenges of transporting human fare: soldiers to the front and then indeed prisoners of war and the wounded and dead on the return trip.
On these trips to the battlefields, visits by rail to work out transportation logistics, where he traveled with new recruits—some, having heard now of the horrors there, vomiting from apprehension and fear—and back to Vienna with the countless wounded, so many of them moaning in pain and crying out that it was difficult to concentrate, he saw for himself the evidence that these engagements with both the Russians and the Serbs were so substantial in nature that only the misinformed and the hopelessly jingoistic could believe that this war would be over soon, or that war had been a good idea. His letters to Eleanor took on a pessimistic tone. “I fear that I shall not be returning,” he actually said once. “My great inextinguishable fear, haunting me nightly with this specter of war, is that I shall never see you again.”