The Secret War (20 page)

“The Viennese women are notoriously the most beautiful in the world, perhaps through the admixture of races in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire since the upper classes of them all frequented the capital; but
among all those superbly beautiful women the lady of my heart was surely the most beautiful. At least I thought so and, although you may find it difficult to believe now, I was considered a very handsome young man in those days; also as a Cavalry Officer in one of the crack regiments who had been transferred to the General Staff I was naturally much sought after, so I had ample opportunity to meet all the loveliest girls in Vienna.

“Fortunately our families were much of the same standing so the obstacles to be overcome before we could marry were mostly the products of our own imaginations. In the spring of 1914, when I screwed up my courage to ask her father for an interview, he listened to my proposals with the utmost kindness and a few days later our engagement was announced.

“In June we were married; having received the blessings of both our families and the good wishes of a host of friends. I had obtained long leave from my military duties for the honeymoon and we settled down to enjoy two utterly carefree months in the country on an estate which formed part of my patrimony.

“Five weeks later I was recalled by telegram. We had been shocked and distressed by the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand but, in our bliss, we had not bothered our heads about the quarrel with Servia which followed. Indeed, we had hardly seen a paper. We were utterly absorbed in the supreme joy of possessing each other. That I should wake each morning beside my beautiful young wife seemed a miracle. The new way in which she dressed her hair seemed infinitely more important than the threatening note drafted by some elderly diplomat in our foreign office.

“I left at once for Vienna. Few of us had the power to realise it then, but one by one the lights of Europe
were
going out, a civilisation and free intercourse between free people which it had taken centuries to build was to be destroyed in one mad hour, and it does not
look as if it will ever come again in our lifetime. Ten million men, at least, were earmarked for death within the next few years, although they could not know it; most of them young, healthy, happy people like myself, and not a fraction of them had the least interest in the quarrel for which they died.

“I resigned my Staff appointment in order to be with my regiment. Any young man would have done the same. But my resignation was not accepted. Instead, I was sent to a Divisional Headquarters not far from the Russian frontier. The Division was composed of Czechish soldiers. The Czechs were a subject people who had always hated Austrian rule, much as the Irish have always been resentful of English domination. Perhaps we should have been wiser to have given them some form of home rule when their Deputies pressed for it before the war. Of course, they have their own republic now, but when the war broke out they were in a ferment of discontent, and they welcomed it as a chance to gain their liberty.

“Instead of fighting for us, whole battalions of them, led by their own officers, marched over to the Russians, with all their equipment and their bands playing. We did what we could to stem the tide of desertion, but in a few hours Austrian machine-guns and Austrian bullets were being used to massacre the handfuls of loyal troops with which we attempted to hold the frontier. Within three days of the opening of the war I was taken prisoner by the Russians.”

The Baron paused to drink from his glass of lager, in which the ice had long since melted. Valerie eased her position a little; even now the sultry night had come her garments were still sticking to her. After a moment the Austrian went on:

“It was not so bad at first. Some sense of chivalry still existed between the officers on both sides. The normal feelings of decency and humanity inherent in most men of every nation had not then been destroyed by the
hideous hate propaganda which later turned honourable opponents into savages.

“The Russians sent me under escort with a number of other prisoners to Kiev. There I endeavoured to get news of my young wife. I could learn nothing definite, but from prisoners who were captured later I heard rumours that, in the national emergency, she had become a nurse and was tending the wounded on the Polish front.

“During those awful empty weeks of dull prison routine the one overwhelming craving which obsessed me was to get back to her. The war had not settled down sufficiently for a regular service of prisoners' letters and parcels to be established. She wrote to me, I don't doubt, but I never received any of her letters. In those early days of the war everything was chaotic. Our only news was hearsay; rumours that the German drive on Paris had been checked, but that the Russian steamroller was lumbering down towards Berlin; rumours of our friends fighting on many fronts and that this or that relation had taken up some kind of national work. I could not stand the uncertainty and inaction, so I determined to escape.

“I will not weary you with details of those feverish days of preparation for the attempt, or the excitement of the actual dash for liberty, which I made with two other officers. We got away, but we were caught again two days later.

“As a punishment we were separated and each of us transferred to a harsher form of captivity. I was sent to Omsk in Siberia; a little ugly town that, although it was the centre of a Government controlling thousands of square miles of territory, seemed to be composed only of many hundred shoddy, wooden buildings scattered over a great area.

“It always seemed to be raining there, except when it was snowing, and in winter the cold was intense. To appreciate the torture that cold can be you must not
think of winter in Switzerland, where you are well fed and wrapped in warm furs, but of a bleak plain where the wind cuts like a knife, through garments worn paper-thin, to an ill-nourished body.

“Month after month dragged by. There was hardly a soul in the prison who could speak more than a few words of my language. I learnt Russian, but my spirit grew numb from continuous physical discomfort and the knowledge that I was many thousands of miles from home. In that remote place no post ever reached me, and news of the war itself was of the vaguest. All one could do was to cling to life and hope on that the war would soon be over. I could learn nothing of my wife, but all through those dark days the thought of her warm loveliness and our eventual reunion was the one thing which sustained me.

“The revolution in St. Petersburg, when it came, had no effect upon us prisoners. We heard tell of it, of course, but the Whites, who represented the old regime, dominated an area as big as Austria-Hungary, of which Omsk was nearly in the centre. The Ural Mountains and vast tracts of unmapped forest lay between it and the cities where the Reds had their first successes. The dreary round of prison life went on much as before.

“When the news of the peace of Brest-Litovsk filtered through we appealed to be sent home; but in the meantime spasmodic outbreaks had been taking place from one end of Russia to the other. The Red virus was spreading. Every town and village had its secret committee. The White officers were wholly occupied with their attempts to check the Revolution; they had no time to spare for the repatriation of prisoners or the means to send them home even if they had wished to do so.

“Within six months we had half a dozen different Governors. They could do nothing but tell us that, for the time being, we must stay where we were. There was a revolt among the prisoners, engineered in secret by the Bolsheviks, who were out to make any sort of
trouble for the Whites. Realising the root from which the mutiny sprang, the authorities acted with the utmost brutality. Scores of the prisoners were shot down and the rest of us were herded into kennels so that a handful of troops could keep us covered with machine-guns and prevent a repetition of the outbreak.

“Shortly afterwards fighting began in the streets of Omsk itself. For several days it was indecisive, but in the end the Reds gained the upper hand. All my fellow prisoners were then released except the officers. As representatives of the old order we were condemned to die.

“Those ruffians shot down my friends in batches. I dropped before they fired and feigned death. I allowed myself to be carted off and buried alive in a hastily dug trench with the bodies of the others. I nearly died of suffocation, but, when the murderers had gone, I clawed my way out through the thin layer of earth they had shovelled on top of us. Then I started to walk home.

“I found the whole country in a ferment. The hand of every man was raised against his brother. I dared not go near a town of any size, because, by that time, the Reds were in possession of all the railways.

“I took to the forests, living on berries and roots and the occasional charity of solitary peasants that I encountered who seemed as utterly bewildered as myself. No one knew what was happening outside his immediate area. Everyone was terrified of strangers. The accepted policy was to shoot first and ask questions afterwards. Reds and Whites were hated with equal intensity, and both were murdered by the country people on every possible occasion when they thought they would be able to escape reprisals. I lived in a nightmare from which it seemed that I should never waken as, week after week, I progressed a few miles farther south.

“Often I had to make detours which delayed me many days. Once I built a raft to float myself across a broad
river, but of its name I have no idea. Countless hours were wasted in hiding from ragged bands of desperate-looking men. Sometimes sheer starvation compelled me to go into villages, and the sights I saw then do not bear a full description. Wholesale massacre seemed to have depopulated the land. Every hamlet had its quota of naked corpses rotting where they lay, and the survivors must have fled to the forests or the mountains. I saw women with their breasts cut off and bayonets left sticking in their swollen stomachs. Men with their eyes gouged out and their finger-nails torn away. Little children who had been clubbed to death or impaled upon wooden stakes. If there is a God in Heaven He will call the Bolsheviks to account for the unbelievable barbarities they perpetrated during those years in order to achieve a political idea. Liberal-minded theorists in every country are seeking to excuse them now. The human memory is short, atrocities are soon forgotten, but the blood and tortured agony of countless thousands of their own people still cry out against them, and any country which tolerates their disciples lays itself open to the possibility of similar horrors. They are at work in India to-day, and Spain. At any time there …”

The Baron broke off and passed his hand across his eyes. “Forgive me. It is all years ago now; but when I was in Russia I saw such terrible sights with my own eyes that I am apt to get over-excited when I think of what may be in store for other countries. Where was I?”

“You were telling us of your journey home,” Valerie said almost in a whisper.

“Ah, yes! Well, I lived as a wild beast, and, like an animal, I shunned all contact with men, convinced that the whole race had degenerated into packs of bloodthirsty hunters. I was still over five hundred miles from the old Austrian frontier when I sickened and was stricken down with cholera.

“I was wrong to think that charity was dead in the
hearts of all men. I owe my life to a
moujhik
who found me and carried me to his shack. He and his family nursed me through the crisis of the fever. I recovered, but every one of them caught the cholera from me and died. I was so weak that, after I had buried them, I had to lie up there for a long time before I could begin to stagger south again. The adventures which befell me and the hardships I encountered would take a dozen nights to tell, but the one thought which braced me up was that if only I could keep going I should eventually get home and find my beautiful young wife again. At last, a lean, starved skeleton, I crept out of Russia.

“But the country that I entered was not a part of Austria as it used to be. It was a new Republic where the people were hostile to Austrians and refused to speak German or succour a German-speaking stranger. The war was long since over, but the whole of Central Europe was still in a turmoil and racial feeling was running high. The peasantry were little better off than those I had left on the other side of the frontier. True, their homes were not being burnt over their heads by merciless Commissars who accused them of giving help to the Whites, but their barns were empty, thousands of them were dying from the influenza plague which ravaged Europe after the war, the breasts of the nursing mothers were bone-dry, their feverish eyes buried deep in their emaciated faces, while the children who survived on starvation rations were twisted with rickets and prematurely old. The people had the same wolfish look that I had grown to know so well in Russia, yet they were too weak and apathetic to do much work upon their farms. It seemed as if they were just waiting for death to take them; convinced that things had gone too far for the world ever to right itself again.

“When I reached Austria, a filthy, broken-down, penniless tramp, no one to whom I spoke would believe my story and lend me money for a train-fare. Starvation was rampant there also, work at a standstill, and
everybody bankrupt. I had to tramp even the last hundred miles until I entered Vienna.

“I went straight to my house. It was empty, shut up, and to let. For a little I just walked about the streets, not knowing what to do. In spite of all that I had seen while begging my way through the country, I had somehow expected my house and servants to be ready to receive me if I could only reach the end of my journey. The blow was a terrible one and I almost lost the last remnant of sanity which lingered in my brain; already half-crazed from years of acute privation. Then I thought of Sacher's Hotel.

“Old Madame Sacher, who owned the place, was a great character. Every member of the Austrian nobility before the war was known to her, and many of us counted her a dear friend. She is dead now, but her hotel is still, I think, the most comfortable in Vienna. Its cuisine has a European reputation, and there is that personality about the place which makes it far more attractive than some of its larger rivals. I went to Sacher's and, before the waiter could stop me, slipped through the bar, which adjoins the street, to her private office on the ground floor.