Joseph Roth - The Emperor's Tomb

I never saw the doctor again, but I never forgot him. Grünhut was his name.

I went into battle as a “seconded officer.” In my initial access of anger, hurt pride, irritation, vengefulness, what do I know, I had crumpled up my wife’s note and stuck it in my trouser pocket. Now I took it out, smoothed it out, and read the line over again. It was clear to me that I had sinned against Elisabeth. A little later, it even seemed to me that I had sinned gravely against her. I decided to write to her, and set about getting some paper out of my pack — in those days, we travelled into battle with leather writing-cases; the empty blue sheet reflected my own irritation back to me. It seemed to say everything I wanted to say to Elisabeth, and I wanted to send it off, as smooth and empty as it was. I just signed my name to it. I posted it at the next station we came to. I crumpled Elisabeth’s note a second time. And put it back in my pocket.

I was, according to the “open orders” issued by the War Ministry and signed by Stellmacher, to report directly to the Thirty-Fifth Yeomanry regiment, wherever they might be met with, without first reporting to the auxiliary local HQ, which, as a result of the recent fighting, had been withdrawn from the dangerous border region into the interior. I saw myself therefore confronted with the tricky task of tracking down my regiment, which must be on a course of continual retreat, somewhere in a village or wood or small town, in a word, in their “position,” which meant more or less an errant individual hoping to encounter his errant fugitive unit. It was an aspect of warfare that had been neglected in manoeuvres.

It was just as well that this problem took up all my attention. I positively fled into it. That way, I didn’t have to think about my mother any more, or my wife, or our dead manservant. My train stopped every half hour or so in some tiny insignificant station. We travelled, a first lieutenant and I, in a small matchbox of a compartment for some eighteen hours to Kamionka. Beyond that point, the regular rails were down. There was only a provisional, narrow-gauge train with three tiny uncovered baggage cars that led on to the nearest field command position that might be able — without guarantees, admittedly — to give information about the whereabouts of individual regiments to “seconded officers.” The little train trundled along. The locomotive driver kept ringing his bell, because great numbers of casualties, on foot and on various farm vehicles, were streaming the other way. I am — as I had occasion then to learn — pretty impervious to shock. So for instance I found the sight of wounded men lying on litters, presumably because their feet or their legs had been shot off, less terrible than that of single soldiers staggering along with flesh wounds, and fresh blood oozing up through the clean white bandages. And with all that, on both sides of the narrow-gauge rail, the tardy crickets were chirruping, because a deceptively warm September afternoon had misled them into thinking that it was summer yet or again. At the field-command post, I happened to run into the padre of the Thirty-Fifth. He was a plump, self-satisfied man of god, in a tight, close-fitting, gleaming surplice. He had got lost on the retreat, he and his batman, his coachman, and his horse and his canvas-covered baggage wagon, where he kept his altar and mass serving gear, as well as a number of fowls, bottles of brandy, hay for his horse, and various other goodies confiscated from farmers. He hailed me like a long-lost friend. He seemed to be afraid of getting lost again, nor could he bring himself to surrender his fowls to the command post where for the past ten days there had been only conserved goods and potatoes to eat. He wasn’t especially well-liked there. But he refused to set out at a peradventure or in a proximate direction, whereas for me, thinking of my cousin Joseph Branco and the cabbie Manes Reisiger, anywhere seemed better than waiting. Our Thirty-Fifth, thus the vague reports we had, was stationed some two miles north of Brzezany. So I set out with the field chaplain, his cart and his fowls, with no better map than a hand-drawn sketch.

When we found the Thirty-Fifth, not admittedly north of Brzrezany, but in the hamlet of Strumilce, I reported to the colonel. News of my promotion had already been passed to the regimental adjutant. I asked to see my friends. They came. I asked for them to be put in my platoon. And how they came! I was waiting for them in the office of Warrant Officer Cenower, but they hadn’t been informed that it was I who had sent for them. At first, they failed even to recognize me. But the next instant, Manes Reisiger was flinging his arms round my neck, rule book be damned, while my cousin Joseph Branco, from a mixture of astonishment and discipline, stood to attention. He was a Slovene, of course. But Manes Reisiger was a Jewish cabbie from the East, heedless and mindless of any rule book. His beard was so many wild hard knots; the man didn’t look uniformed so much as in disguise. I kissed one of the knots in his beard, and threw my other arm around Joseph Branco. I too was forgetting about the army. I was only thinking about the war, and called out maybe ten times in succession, “You’re alive! You’re alive!. .” and Joseph Branco straightaway noticed the wedding ring on my finger, and pointed silently at it. “Yes,” I said, “I’ve got married.” I could feel, I could see that they wanted to hear more about my wedding and my new wife, I went out with them on to the tiny square around the church in Strumilce. But I didn’t talk about Elisabeth at all, until suddenly I remembered — how could I have forgotten it — that I had a photograph of her in my wallet. Surely it was the easiest thing to save myself so many words, and just show my friends her picture. I pulled out my wallet, and I looked and looked, and the picture wasn’t in it. I began to wonder where I could have lost it or left it, and suddenly I seemed to remember that I had left the picture with my mother, at home. A baffling, yes, an absurd terror gripped me, as though I had ripped up or burned Elisabeth’s picture. “I can’t find it,” I told my friends. Instead of replying, my cousin Joseph Branco took out the picture of his wife from his pocket and showed it to me. She was a fine-looking woman, voluptuous and proud, in Slovene village costume, with a crown of coins over her smooth parted hair, and a tripled chain of the same coins round her neck. Her strong-looking arms were bare, and she had her hands on her hips. “The mother of my son!” proclaimed Joseph Branco. “Are you married?” asked Manes the cabbie. “When the war is over, I will marry her, our son is called Branco, like me. He is ten years old. He is with his grandfather. He can carve beautiful pipes.”

The days ahead, capacious and fraught with danger, gloomy and lofty and mysterious and opaque, brought at least no prospect of fighting, just further retreats. Two days later, we left Strumilce for Jeziory, and three days after that we were in Pogrody. The Russians were coming after us. We withdrew as far as Krasne-Busk. Probably as a result of lost or delayed orders, we stayed there for longer than the Second Army intended us to. Early one morning, the Russians laid into us. We had no time to dig in. This was the historic battle of Krasne-Busk, in which one third of our regiment was wiped out, and another third taken prisoner.

We were among the prisoners, Joseph Branco, Manes Reisiger and I. That was the ignominious outcome of our first encounter with the foe.

I would like very much at this point to write about the feelings and perspectives of a prisoner of war. But I know how little interest there is in such a subject nowadays. Being a prisoner is bad enough, being the author of prison reminiscences is beyond endurance. People today would hardly understand me if I started writing about freedom and honour, much less about captivity. Nowadays, silence is the better policy. I am writing purely to obtain clarity for myself, and, so to speak, pro nomine dei . May He forgive me my sin!