Last Days in Old Europe

by Richard Bassett

  I was invited to visit him on yet another of those sunny bright January mornings in his office near the Riva at the headquarters of the Tripcovich shipping company. Those who visit the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni in Venice will see in the dark ground-floor room, beneath the great series of Carpaccio paintings, the name of a sixteenth-century Captain Tripcovich commemorated in one of the wooden stalls. The Tripcovichs, like the better-known Cosulichs, were Triestine shipping aristocracy: they had all originally hailed from the small island of Lussin Piccolo in the Quarnero. Banfield had married a descendant of this intrepid family in the Brompton Oratory in 1920.

  Escorted up a grand staircase by a liveried porter, I was ushered into the Barone’s anteroom. His secretary, another elegant lady, sensed my lack of fluency in Italian and spoke to me in French. While I waited outside Banfield’s office, she looked at me intently and asked what I was reading. It turned out that she had never heard of Stephen Spender.

  ‘Have you read any Proust?’ she asked. I cannot now remember what I replied, but it obviously exhausted my limited understanding of modern French. She showed me a copy of L’École des femmes by Molière and urged me to read it, saying I should find it ‘full of insights’. In later years I came across many personal assistants to important men who acted like gargoyles on drawbridges guarding a castle. This lady, in contrast, was utterly charming. I promised her I would read Molière. A few seconds later, I was shown into a large office with three windows overlooking the Adriatic. Below an old steam locomotive chugged slowly along the Riva towards the port.

  I was not sure what this hero of the Great War would be like. In 1915, at the age of twenty-five, Banfield had been given command of the newly established Trieste naval air station. At first his command had consisted of two flying-boats and one machine gun but by 1918 he was commanding a squadron of twenty-four planes which daily faced an enemy three times as numerous. As the Great War developed, the Gulf of Trieste became the fulcrum of Italian attacks and it was largely due to Banfield and his fellow pilots that their opponents in the Entente, despite their overwhelming superiority in numbers, never enjoyed undisputed access to Trieste’s airspace. He had conducted daring rescues of wounded colleagues, fought brave dogfights against countless enemy planes and had even disabled a British submarine. When I met him, six decades later, in 1979, he was the last former Imperial Austrian officer alive to have been decorated personally by Emperor Franz Josef. In 1917 he had also been awarded the empire’s highest award of chivalry, the Order of Maria Theresa, by Franz Josef’s successor, the last Habsburg Emperor Charles. This decoration automatically conferred the title of Freiherr of the Empire, elevating the handsome pilot in his twenties to the junior ranks of the Austrian aristocracy.

  The man opposite me seemed smaller than I had expected, but his silver-grey hair framed a face still strong and handsome with penetrating blue eyes. In so many ways he appeared English, yet his face was softened by smiling Austrian lips and an aquiline nose. He was the lowest of low keys, diffident and charming. One hand waved me to a chair while another pulled out a deep drawer in his desk from which emerged two glasses and a bottle of Stock brandy. The distillery, in those days still run by the formidable Baroness Stock, was less than two miles away along the coast.

  ‘Mr Bassett. Can I offer you something to drink?’ It was shortly before nine in the morning. Banfield’s English was faultless. He enjoyed flitting effortlessly into Italian and occasionally into the Triestine dialect whose dry open vowels were becoming familiar to me: ‘xe un bel zità’ (it’s a beautiful city) as he pointed with one hand towards the Riva below. But he also spoke the Viennese dialect of the aristocracy with its clipped past participles and drawling French adjectives. Things were either mi-se-raabel or ak-zep-taabel. After discussing the imperial naval engagements in 1915, he moved the conversation to England where he had worked as a draughtsman for Vickers Armstrong in Newcastle in the 1920s. The English industrial unrest and social dislocation which prevailed in the late 1970s struck him as the inevitable consequence of a failure to adapt to ‘modern conditions’. How calm Trieste appeared compared to the England of power cuts and trade union anarchy which I had left a few weeks earlier! He was confident the English would learn from their mistakes although it would require a change of approach. ‘I remember during my days working for Vickers in Newcastle that when I pointed out certain things could be done more quickly or more easily, the refrain always was: “My dear Geoffrey, we are going to do it this way, because we have always done it this way.” ’ Thus our conversation meandered over industry, finance, geopolitics, before settling on the Emperor Franz Josef. Here Banfield’s expression became serious.

  Two months before his death in 1916, the old Habsburg Emperor – who by that point had reigned for nearly sixty-eight years – had spent more than an hour talking alone to Banfield, eager to hear all about the ‘war in the air’. His parting words to the young pilot had been ‘See to it that you come through this war alive, my dear Banfield. Austria will need men and pilots like you after the war.’ Even more than his later encounter with the Emperor Charles, this was, Banfield confided, the most vivid memory of his entire career and the one that had left the deepest imprint.

  Although he had clearly been a hero and without doubt one of the most skilful pilots of the entire war, after 1918 Banfield never sat in the cockpit of an aeroplane again. Had the war in the air with its ceaseless combat and killing disillusioned him? I formulated the question with exaggerated obliqueness and received the answer it deserved: ‘Some more brandy, Mr Bassett?’

  Wandering back along the Riva, past the faded, peeling stucco of Caffè Tommaseo, I sat down in one of the chairs that overlooked the sea and the Molo Audace and ordered a caffè latte (what in the rest of Italy is called a cappuccino). Boats rarely moor alongside the Molo these days, but in 1914 the scene was very different. Photographs show the bustling Molo San Carlo, as the Austrians named it, loading and disgorging passengers and luggage to accompany the busy traffic between Trieste and Dalmatia under a bright sun and cloudless sky. The Molo is Trieste’s most poignant and yet understated monument to its once glorious past. No individual is commemorated. No name is inscribed. Only a fine bronze wheel records the landing of the Italians here in November 1918, but there is no hint of earlier poignant memories. It was impossible not to feel the spirit of the place, even before reading the melancholy recollections of Countess Lanjus, the lady-in-waiting of Franz Ferdinand’s wife’s.fn2

  In late June 1914, a launch had taken the Archduke Franz Ferdinand from here to the waiting warship Viribus Unitis and the fateful journey to Sarajevo. Less than a week later, on 2 July, another launch had brought him and his wife Sophie back in coffins. After a brief benediction by the massed ranks of Trieste’s clergy, the coffins were set in front of a large detachment of sailors arrayed in two solemn lines. Then, bedecked in imperial naval battle ensigns, and with a full naval and military escort, they were brought to the Südbahn railway station a mile and a half away. Immediately behind the coffins walked the only woman to have been in the Archduke’s immediate entourage, Countess Wilma Lanjus, who had been in the car directly behind the imperial couple in Sarajevo that tragic morning.

  As she walked behind the coffins under a ‘baking sun’ and a ‘merciless’ Triestine sky, she later recalled, ‘The streets were lined with thousands of mourning Triestini, but in their loyalty to the Habsburg Monarchy I did not hear a single noise from anyone as we walked along. Not a sound. For almost an hour there reigned a silenzio assoluto.’

  I walked on to the Molo, retracing Countess Lanjus’s footsteps, gazing out to sea and pondering the timeless view before turning back. As I rejoined the Riva my eye was caught by a poster in the elaborate red and cream livery applied to all publications emanating from the Teatro Verdi, and my mood changed. It gaily announced a performance of La sonnambula by Bellini to be given the following day.

  A discreet office near the main entrance to the Teat
ro sold me an inexpensive ticket for high up in the amphitheatre, and the next evening I queued to climb the five flights of stairs to reach my seat. The house was packed, and the obbligato of the principal horn, my own instrument, was dazzling. The average age of the audience seemed to be in the seventies, but they came noisily alive after the soprano’s brilliant aria in the last scene, just as it might have been a hundred years earlier when the theatre was a focus for Italian nationalism.

  As spring approached, I realized I needed to find new quarters. Myrta immediately came to the rescue with a suggestion that we visit her friend die Gräfin Korwin, who lived on the second floor of a city palazzo on the Via XXX Ottobre. In Trieste, as in many other Italian cities, streets rejoiced in dates sacred to the Italian Risorgimento. Besides the XXX Ottobre (commemorating the 1918 plebiscite in favour of an Italian Fiume), there was the Viale XX Settembre (commemorating the seizure of the Porta Pia in Rome in 1870), the Riva III Novembre (the day Trieste was taken by the Italians in 1918) and many others. All reinforced the convictions of those Italians who felt that Trieste as well as being a great former Habsburg metropolis could also be la città più italiana d’Italia (the most Italian city of Italy).

  XXX Ottobre ran from the Pantheon-inspired Church of San Antonio in a straight line towards the railway station, exemplifying neo-classical planning. It was not a distinguished street, although it did house the most celebrated chocolatier of the city, a Hungarian gentleman of the old school whose premises appeared unchanged since Habsburg days. Imperial naval officers had once filled La Bonboniera to queue for elaborate boxes of chocolate for their wives and daughters, but by now the place was normally empty. Instead, an elderly lady offered a languid ‘Buongiorno’, as one entered, and an even more adagio ‘a Lei’ in response to any farewells uttered on leaving. In between these two expressions she neither looked up from the counter where she was reading a book nor demonstrated the faintest inclination to engage with her customers.

  Countess Korwin agreed to see us after lunch a few days later. As Myrta and I ascended the staircase, a voice echoed down telling us to mount the steps unhurriedly. ‘Only take your time.’ I dimly made out the source of this encouragement, a small fine head smiling benevolently down. As we reached the third floor, I heard a phrase I would hear often when I lived in Central Europe: ‘English? How nice.’ I looked across the landing to see a lady in her late seventies with a kind and compassionate face. Her arms were folded across a dark cardigan. Two black eyes were gazing at me intently.

  A brass plaque with the name Colomba de Korwin in faint Jugendstil letters still adorned the door. Inside, not much seemed to have changed since imperial times. A kitchen of Balkan primitiveness with an old gas oven occupied one little corner; in a small room with a window on to a wall, tin bowls were stacked up beside a bath. Chaos was kept in check by phalanxes of wooden furniture, dark and heavy in the neo-Renaissance style so beloved of the old imperial aristocracy. I had often encountered this furniture in Graz, accompanied by the seductive smell of freshly applied wax polish.

  ‘You know how difficult it is these days to find … Personal.’ This last word the Gräfin pronounced in the Austrian upper-class nasal manner as ‘Perr-so-naal’. A ‘temporary’ shortage of servants was responsible for the untidiness. Myrta and I smilingly acquiesced in this happy fiction which the manners of old Austria made easy to accept. Generally in Central Europe, even today, there is a studied reluctance to transmit unwelcome facts in anything but the most flattering light.

  Myrta explained that Blanka, as I would soon come to call her, had experienced both the best and the worst of life. Fêted as a great beauty in the 1930s – James Stewart had invited her to Hollywood – she had married first an Italian prince and then, on his sudden death, become involved with the Finance Minister to King Zog of the Albanians. The arrival of the Communists in Tirana towards the end of the 1939–45 war had brought incarceration and torture. Years later in Albania, after Blanka had died, I was given a photograph of her taken by the Albanian authorities when she was released from prison, emaciated and exhausted. When I first met her the scars of her treatment were still faintly discernible, but they had been neutralized by a beatific smile and a general expression of intelligence and the faint hauteur which was second nature to that generation of European nobility.

  After polite discussion of amusing superficialities, I gently moved the conversation to practical matters. Would she mind if I practised the French horn? ‘Ach, of course. How nice. I love ze Corn.’ Myrta emptied the cup of Turkish coffee we had been served, made her excuses and left us to agree the formalities. My room was generous with a single long window on to the street. Opposite there stood an old palazzo of the Josephine era, complete with Biedermeier columns and a grand pediment whose dignity was compromised only by a flashing neon sign on the piano nobile perkily announcing ‘Club Mexico’. The furniture was simple and none of it looked more recent than 1910. In front of the mirror which rose solemnly from a marble commode, there was a fine Jugendstil white marble statue of a lady with all the femme-fatale features of others I had seen in Prague. A pair of doors led into the salon from which two windows opened on to a small stone balcony. On the far side of the salon, also linked by a connecting door, was the Contessa’s bedroom.

  In these musty rooms with their dark furniture and mirrors I would live for the best part of a year, occasionally teaching English to a beautiful Slovene girl from across the road, occasionally writing and sometimes playing the horn. Each day, I conversed in Italian, English, French or German with the Contessa. She came to personify for me more and more all the qualities of the Habsburg world: perseverance, courage, detachment and, perhaps above all, a sense of the absurd married to an inflexible observation of the rules of etiquette. However much we laughed together and became friends, the formal Sie was never once surrendered to the informal Du.

  The tradition of imperial service ran strongly through Blanka’s veins. Her father had been Imperial and Royal naval attaché in Constantinople near where Blanka had been born. Her grandfather had been a Feldmarschalleutnant in the Habsburg army and Stadtkommandant of Zagreb. Her mother, Colomba, had been a Turkish aristocrat and a great beauty – blessed, it was rumoured, with psychic powers. As a child Blanka had gone to school with her three sisters near the Grand Bazaar. ‘Four Korwin girls and the Aya; we were marched each morning through the Bazaar hand in hand until we reached the German School.’ Fluent in six languages including Albanian, Blanka contained within her the cultures of many different worlds. Her devout, unhesitating Catholicism was the religion of Sobieski and the Polish relief of the great Turkish Siege of Vienna in 1683 when an international coalition of Christian Europe saved Austria from the Ottomans. In her mysticism and observation of people and their behaviour there was a hint of the Near East. In matters of form and protocol, there was something almost Prussian in her discipline, yet her gentleness and her love of music and ability to improvise suggested a more Mediterranean inheritance too. She adored Rome and loved the Italians. Like so many Austrians of that generation, she was an embodiment of a culture which took such seemingly irreconcilable differences easily in its stride and whose sum was always greater than the constituent parts.

  As spring advanced, the value of the heavy curtains and chocolate-and-cream-striped blinds became daily more apparent. I grew accustomed to sleeping less and waking up to see from my window Blanka, wrapped in a thick padded dressing gown, pacing the balcony to enjoy the early-morning breeze and the first glimpse of the rising sun. If I needed to get up early to catch a train to the University of Udine where I taught two days a week, Blanka would enter my room with a cup of strong Turkish coffee, theatrically announcing in warning tones that I must ‘stay up!’ as ‘die Flotte’ was weighing anchor. As the daughter of an Imperial Austrian naval officer, educated in Constantinople and then in the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Pressbaum near Vienna, she assumed that the surest way to get an Englishman out of bed must be to invo
ke the Royal Navy.

  This admiration for all things English was born partly from a tempestuous love affair with the last British Ambassador to Nazi Germany, Sir Nevile Henderson. Henderson had fallen in love with Blanka in the 1930s when he had been minister in Belgrade. A few days before the war he had written to her from Berlin on embassy stationery dated August 1939, insisting that ‘Les Allemands non voulaint la guerre.’ The blue-embossed notepaper, together with postcards he sent her from Argentina, were kept in a bedside drawer. Henderson, despite his appeasement views, had a proud and unyielding character, fully convinced that no creature on earth was superior to an Englishman. He had regaled Blanka with many stories of English self-control. One which she enjoyed repeating concerned a consul called Smallbones. Smallbones had been in some forsaken Portuguese colonial African posting when, on a safari, he had discovered a high-ranking Portuguese official having an affair with his wife. Smallbones had stormed into the philanderer’s tent and angrily demanded, ‘Do you love her?’ When the Portuguese replied with an air of cool insouciance, ‘Hardly, old man. It was just a fling,’ Smallbones had preserved his temper only by digging his fingernails tightly into the palms of his hands. ‘So great is your England’ was Blanka’s verdict on this textbook example of the stiff upper lip. Although I did not know it at the time, Blanka’s tale carried a kernel of wider significance. Many decades later, Robert Smallbones, late of Her Majesty’s Consular Service, would be honoured for having saved hundreds of Jewish lives when as Consul in Frankfurt (under Henderson) he issued them with emigration papers to escape the Nazis. His handsome Scandinavian wife even took a riding crop to some Nazi thugs who tried to drag away a Jewish neighbour. Is Selbstbeherrschung (self-discipline) the foundation of all heroism? Clearly Blanka imagined that in this the British led the world.