by Unbreakable- The Woman Who Defied the Nazis in the World's Most Dangerous Horse Race (retail) (epub)
The Brandis family came here in 1896. Count Leopold, Lata’s father, was a former cavalry officer turned chamberlain at the imperial court, with limited cash but plenty of dash. As a young lieutenant in the Hussars, he swam across the Danube and back on horseback for a bet, in full uniform, earning himself a spell under house arrest and the lasting admiration of his fellow officers. Later, having left the army with the rank of lieutenant colonel, he found part-time employment tutoring princelings in Vienna (including the future Emperor Charles I) in, among other things, horsemanship. He also dabbled in horse breeding.
His wife, Johanna, was sixteen years younger, the daughter of a wealthy Viennese-born politician, Christian von Schäffer. Leopold courted her when she was barely fourteen. The resulting quarrel with her father was so violent that shots were fired, and Leopold was barred from the house for the rest of Christian’s life. Family tradition blames this incident for Christian’s premature end soon afterwards – although the official cause of the fifty-five-year-old’s death, in 1885, was ‘exhaustion’. Whatever the truth, the romance survived the mishap. Leopold and Johanna married two years later and set up home with Christian’s widow in the Schäffers’ neoRenaissance chateau at Úmonín, in the central Bohemian region of Kutná Hora.
Children followed quickly: six in nine years. Lata, the fifth, was born on 26 June 1895, moments before her twin, Kristýna. The only account I have heard of her earliest years involves her sleeping outside in a double pram with Kristýna, under the supposed supervision of their four older siblings – who were actually practising driving a horse and carriage with the help of an eighteen-year-old coachman. But we can be sure that the family did not lack for comfort: the chateau at Úmonín was not only large and well appointed – with extensive stables – but employed half a village’s worth of servants.
Shortly after Lata’s first birthday, the family moved out. Christian’s widow had bought another estate, in Řitka, sixty miles to the west, and in August 1896 she sold it to Johanna. It is not clear what prompted this transaction, but one possibility is that Leopold needed to be closer to Vienna. Another is that life in Úmonín had become strained. Christian von Schäffer had been a pillar of respectability: a member of the Bohemian parliament, a director of the local sugar refinery and a canny investor in the stock market. He had restored and developed the chateau at Úmonín, but beyond paying for a new vicarage for the neighbouring village of Křesetice he was not extravagant. His widow – who was later accused of tampering with Christian’s will to ensure that the estate passed to her rather than their sons – was more of a spender than a saver: one local chronicler was scathing about her alleged extravagance. Eventually, in 1902, mounting financial problems resulted in the estate being taken out of her hands and passed to her youngest son. Her eldest son had emigrated by then: he died drunk in Berlin a decade later. Count Brandis, whose grand friends included at least one royal archduke, may not have relished being linked too visibly with such family turmoil – or seeing his wife’s potential inheritance squandered. The twenty-five-year-old Johanna borrowed money to fund the purchase of Řitka, and it was there that the formative years of Lata’s life would be lived.
Over the next six years, Leopold and Johanna added three more children to the six they had brought with them from Úmonín. The final line-up comprised: Marie Therese (b.1888); Gabriele (b.1890); Leopold (b.1892); Mikuláš (b.1893); Lata and Kristýna (b.1895); Alžběta (b.1898); Markéta (b.1899); and Johanna (b.1901). To raise all nine in the manner expected of the nobility was a daunting financial challenge. Leopold was ill-suited to it. He was known as a friendly, good-natured kind of chap, but he may have pined for the more fashionable pleasures of Vienna, to which he made frequent visits.
Responsibility for the day-to-day running of the estate fell on the shoulders of its legal owner, Johanna. The fact that she also had nine children to raise may account for the bags under her eyes in the photograph referred to earlier. None the less, according to village tradition she managed Řitka well. She balanced the books; she managed the workforce (many of whom lived on the premises); she kept land and buildings in good repair; and – in contrast to the allegedly rapacious vendor from whom her mother had purchased it in 1890 – she cared for the wellbeing of workers and tenants. That’s something they still talk about in Řitka today. Sick villagers were cared for; staff received financial gifts upon marrying; locals with a taste for reading were encouraged to borrow books.
Leopold found work in Prague: as director at a bank and, from 1901, as a member of Bohemia’s regional parliament. Some say that he also found time to squander most of the revenues generated by Johanna’s efficiency, spending long periods away in Vienna, where he still had a permanent entry pass for the imperial court. But there were opportunities for squandering closer to home as well. Leopold had an eye for fine horses and fast carriages, and there were some fabulously wealthy neighbours to keep up with. The financial position deteriorated; those three villages would dwindle to one before Lata came of age. The arrival of Leopold’s elderly mother, who lived with them until her death in early 1901, is unlikely to have made things easier for Johanna; nor is the arrival, much later, of her own profligate mother, who suffered a stroke in Řitka in 1911.
Still, those children had to be raised, and Johanna – aided by Marie Therese, the eldest, and, from 1900, by a young live-in governess, Marie Rothländer – did her best to bring them up in a manner appropriate to the nobility. In practice, this seems to have involved a rather random mixture of discipline and anarchy. Outdoors, the children ran wild, with the entire estate as their playground, including miles of old forest (a mix of spruce, firs, maple, larch, beech and oak) on the hills behind the house. The woods, full of wildlife (including deer, hares, rabbits, pheasant and vipers), were nominally rented out for hunting, but the Brandis children could ride, swim, climb and hide there; or gorge themselves on wild blueberries; or even, as they grew older, shoot. Unusually for children of the nobility they were not entirely banned from contact with ordinary village children when they were small, although they were not supposed to stray far from the boundaries of the main property. There were numerous dogs to play with – one visitor later wrote of ‘dogs barking from every window’ – and, always, horses. Their number varied: Leopold tried to breed horses commercially as well as keeping them for the family’s personal use. But there was room in the stables for around ten (plus carriages); and while there were stable staff, including a coachman, to tend them, that didn’t prevent the children from scrambling onto the smaller horses’ backs as they grazed in the paddocks that separated the house from the woods.
Indoors, the rules were stricter. An unchanging timetable of meals and schoolwork was rigidly adhered to, and the count was ferociously insistent on good table manners. Prayers were said daily; Sundays were dominated by churchgoing. Everyday communication took place in a very formal kind of German, with Czech reserved for villagers and servants. (In those days, the family probably used German forms of each other’s names. For simplicity’s sake, I am using the Czech versions throughout.) Daughters of the nobility were also expected to be fluent in French; to understand and help with household management; and to master such lady-like accomplishments as flower arranging, piano playing and needlework. Their mission was to marry, and from their earliest years they were trained for just that.
In fact, the girls’ chances of making good matches were slim. Aristocratic brides were expected to be provided with dowries to keep their husbands in the style to which they were accustomed, and Leopold and Johanna were not in a position to make such provision. Still, a good upbringing could do no harm.
The formal part of this upbringing took place in the neighbouring town of Mníšek pod Brdy, not at the local school but with a private tutor, Augustin Černý. Horses took them there and back, sometimes in a small twowheeled carriage (called a kočárek) but also, as they grew in age and number, in the saddle. Lata and Kristýna had their first riding lessons at ei
ght, on horses that their father had first tired out on long hacks. Soon he was taking them for rides; Lata rode an old Irish mare. Within a year they were confident enough to ride unsupervised, although according to Lata it was still a struggle to mount these ‘gigantic’ creatures. Lata sometimes rode as far as Dobříš, a dozen miles to the south. By the time they were ten the twins could drive a barouche, a four-wheeled carriage – and if the coachman was driving would ‘torture’ him with requests to take the reins themselves. Lata liked driving, and was particularly attached to the old horse that she used for this purpose: she would feed him oats and braid his mane and tail with red ribbons ‘to make the hair nice and wavy’. But it was riding that really excited her. Sometimes a whole line of the children could be seen trotting out to Mníšek, often led by Count Leopold. The girls rode astride, not side-saddle, and wore floppy puff berets rather than helmets. Villagers commented on the beauty of the horses, and on the children’s confidence in the saddle.
The tutoring must have taught them something. The adult Lata had neat handwriting and could speak and write flawless German and French. But it was obvious from an early age that her real gift was for action rather than words. A natural athlete, she excelled at outdoor fun, from tree-climbing to shooting; and the kudos she gained from being best at such games gave her authority beyond her years. One relative described her as ‘the uncrowned king’ among the siblings.
Her greatest gift was for riding. Her father, a noted horseman whose father and grandfather had also been notable equestrians, was quick to recognise Lata’s almost miraculous rapport with horses, and as she grew more assured he used her to help break in younger horses which weren’t yet strong enough to carry adult riders. Her secret was simple: she could see the world through a horse’s eyes. Most riders hope to make the horse ‘an obedient slave’ (as Lata later put it); Lata always aimed to make ‘a friend – a friend that will gladly put his great strength at your disposal’. She made a habit of imitating horses ‘in movement and in temper’. And whereas even the most confident adults tend to harbour a degree of apprehension when they ride, Lata had a naïve faith that no harm could befall her. ‘I simply do not believe that a horse could ever deliberately do something bad to me,’ she said. She rode ‘with peace and love’ – and all else flowed from that.
Our knowledge of her siblings is vaguer, but the seven sisters appear to have been close. Kristýna was good at painting and also shared Lata’s love of horses. Markéta inherited her mother’s gift for herbal medicine. Alžběta was romantic and kind. Marie Therese was described by one family friend as ‘the pretty one’ and in one photograph wears a ball-dress; Gabriele, plumper than the others, was especially fond of Marie Therese, and of her father. Johanna played the piano and was best at cooking. Lata, the sporty one, was strong-minded and decisive. Within the family, she was considered a natural leader.
Her siblings were charming, clever and well-broughtup, but I have never heard anyone tell a story about any of them in a ‘you’ll-never-guess-what’ sort of voice. With Lata, you rarely hear any other sort. She was the kind of person people exchanged stories about, even when her only remarkable feats involved riding, cycling or climbing.
Gossip about her parents notwithstanding, Brandis family photographs give the impression of a warm, affectionate household, in which people laughed and were kind to animals and life was lived more in the outdoors than in the drawing room. Many of the pictures feature dogs as well as children. When the younger Lata appears in them, she is often messing about, especially when her father is present. Children of all ages wear chunky, solid shoes, laced high above the ankle and well suited for climbing trees.
Count Leopold was handsome, even in middle age, with a soldier’s cropped hair, a wide, pointy moustache and a twinkling smile. Although his values were deeply conservative, he had a sense of fun. Countess Johanna was serious but warm. She believed that a mother’s role was to ‘be good and kind, but if necessary to tell the truth’. Children, she believed, should ‘honour’ their father; and if anything happened to her she expected her eldest daughter, Marie Therese, to take on the responsibility of teaching them to do so. Therese may have had other ideas.
Their home would have felt crowded at times. There was no corridor on the top floor – people simply walked from one bedroom to another, regardless of who was there. But the interconnected rooms were richly decorated and elegantly furnished. Paintings hung on the walls, often portraying horses or members of the imperial family; or, in one room, Leopold’s parents. In the corridors and main staircases, the walls bristled with hunting trophies: a giant pair of elk antlers overlooked the landing. Leopold loved to stalk game in the forest, and when he was in residence he would walk up to the woods every day with his gun. He had also made himself some kind of shooting range there. His daughters were encouraged to join him.
Yet for all the outdoor activities, Řitka must often have felt like a solemn place. The count and countess were firm and conventional in their Roman Catholic beliefs, and piety was a fact of daily life in their home. The count’s elder sister, Maria Theresia, was a nun: a member of the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul in Austria. In the local church, in the neighbouring village of Líšnice, the Brandis family had their own pews, on either side of the altar. Unless they were away, they never missed a service.
In the woods above Řitka, meanwhile, the count had a small chapel built, near the brow of the hill. It was dedicated to St Anthony of Padua – patron saint of, among other things, lost property, lost people, horses and the sick. No trace remains today, but the wooded ridge, high above the noise and bustle of daily business, is clearly a place that lends itself to contemplation. A few miles further south, just above Mníšek at a spot called Skalka, a whole cluster of small chapels looks out over the same valley from the same woods, like silent, white-robed saints. If you come across these by chance from the trees behind, the peace of the place takes your breath away. People go up there to say prayers for the dead. As Lata was growing up, Leopold and his family often did the same at their small chapel. Leopold, when he did so, would certainly have remembered his mother, who died in 1901; she may not, however, always have been uppermost in his thoughts. In June 1902, four days before Lata’s seventh birthday, her eldest brother, nine-year-old Leopold, died of scarlet fever. He was not the only child in Řitka to meet such a fate that summer; but that, for his parents, may have added to the horror. Most noble families banned their children from contact with ordinary village children. Had the Brandises’ more relaxed approach exposed young Leopold to the infection that killed him?
For a long time the house was chilled with grief. Johanna was still wearing mourning a year later, while for decades to come the family would light candles in little Leopold’s memory every Christmas Eve. Meanwhile, long after the first agonies of loss had calmed, anyone who walked or rode up the narrow path from the house to the woods had only to pass the chapel to be reminded of their loved ones’ mortality. At some point, as the surviving children became teenagers, the message was reinforced by the appearance at the lower end of the path of an informal pet graveyard.
Like their Victorian counterparts in Britain, the late Habsburg upper classes seem to have been haunted by existential melancholy. You can feel it in their poems, their songs and their ever-more-elaborate cemeteries: a sad, aching dread. They sensed that, for all their good fortune and sophistication, and the tranquillity of their rural retreats, Death would come for them in the end.
They were right. But what he had in mind for most of them was still a few years off.
3.
Horseplay
Under a grey sky, steam rises from a grey trench. The trench is vast – two metres deep and five wide – with a hedge, almost as high as a man, along one side. Within its depths, a great horse struggles to right itself, rolling on its rider as it does so. Bodies are strewn on the muddy ground beyond: another horse, and too many men to count.
It looks like war. It is
supposed to. In another image of the same event, a horse and a rider, a few feet apart, are tumbling, or possibly somersaulting, from a high bank, as if blasted over it by an explosion. It is hard to imagine either man or beast surviving. The bank is higher than the fully stretched length of the horse.
In a third photograph, two riders – both army officers – are on the edge of what looks like a deep stream. One has reached the sodden turf and lies on his back, not necessarily conscious; the other is still up to his waist in the stream, along with his horse, which seems similarly stuck. In the background, a third officer, unsteadily on horseback, gallops out of the picture. A cluster of spectators in the distance is the only hint that this is in fact a sporting contest.
There are even scraps of film footage, although you need a strong stomach to look at them. Horses galloping flat out are halted abruptly and brutally by unexpected obstacles. Their riders shoot forward like human cannon balls, for five, ten, fifteen metres. A horse jumps badly and brings down half a dozen others. When the flailing tangle of legs and bodies resolves itself, two jockeys remain on the ground; they are neither moving nor, it seems, breathing . . .
I would like to say that no horses were harmed in the making of this book. Sadly – and obviously – that wouldn’t be true. Many were, mostly in Pardubice, the central Bohemian racecourse where these scenes and many like them took place. Sometimes Lata Brandisová was present; more than once she was involved. Yet this is not a tale of brutality or cruelty. It is the story of a woman whose distinguishing feature was her compassion for and empathy with horses – someone who, in the words of one friend, ‘would have given her life for her horses – I’m certain of that’. It is also, despite appearances, a story from a time and a place in which horses were valued more deeply than they are today.
