by Unbreakable- The Woman Who Defied the Nazis in the World's Most Dangerous Horse Race (retail) (epub)
Male visitors to Řitka were not unknown, but there is no reason to believe that there were swarms of eager suitors. Lata was shy, and disliked dancing. ‘I was fond of horses and dogs,’ she explained simply. ‘I get on well with them.’ The subtext was that people were trickier. As for what men thought of her, many would in due course consider her beautiful: she was handsome, blonde, greyeyed and glowing with fitness. This may not have been enough to offset her awkwardness and lack of a dowry. Spontaneous romance was in any case strongly discouraged in noble families – and was relatively rare as a result. Arranged betrothals to penniless brides were rarer still.
Eventually, three of Lata’s sisters would take the radical step of marrying outside the nobility. But that was much later, when the world had changed. For the time being, all seven Brandis daughters were trapped by convention and, like other impoverished young noblewomen, could only wait demurely for a romantic miracle. Or, more wisely, they could seek other forms of fulfilment.
Lata chose the latter course. Horse riding was her most obvious calling: ‘the great passion of my life,’ she said later. Another was religion. Her parents did not discourage this; indeed, it is said that Lata received some additional education from a monastic establishment in Prague’s Smíchov district. If so, she embraced what she was taught with the trusting sincerity of youth. Several of the girls kept commonplace books in which, typically, friends marked visits by inscribing their names, often adding short quotations of an improving nature (e.g. ‘Man proposes, God disposes’) or – in the case of Alžběta’s book – a romantic nature (e.g. ‘The rose smells, the thorn pricks, the violet says do not forget me’). Alžběta’s book even contains a loose scrap of paper arranging a rendezvous ‘in the usual place’. Lata’s book is full not of names or tender sentiments but, instead, of prayers, all neatly copied out in German, French and Czech. There is something mesmerising about the precise but flowing handwriting: page after page of pleas to her Maker: ‘Oh God, help me in your mercy . . . Oh Jesus, meek and mild, let me be like you . . . Oh Lord of love, I put all my confidence in you . . . Make me an instrument of your peace . . . Lead me with you to Calvary . . .’ It is hard not to sense a fierce, pent-up energy: a yearning to be something more than she was; or, at the very least, to still the turbulence within.
It would be fanciful to infer from such thin evidence that the teenage Lata was consumed by frustration at the constraints society placed on her because of her gender. It seems unlikely, however, that she welcomed such limits. A photograph in the family’s collection shows the aftermath of what seems to have been a regular form of horseborne entertainment. Lata, aged about twelve, stands with four younger sisters by an old wooden bench. It is autumn – the ground is blanketed with leaves – and the girls seem flushed with excitement. They are all dressed as jockeys. Each carries a whip of some kind, and each has a moustache painted onto her face. Lata stands slightly apart, carrying what might be an improvised winner’s ‘certificate’. On the back of the picture, the adult Lata has written: ‘As children, my four sisters and I. After an officers’ race (we were all officers).’
This image illustrates well the balance of privilege and servitude in Lata’s life. As a child of the nobility, she had drawn a winning ticket in the lottery of life. As a woman, she had not. She was lucky enough to have the wherewithal to take part in pretend races. The road to real officers’ races was closed to her. Mikuláš, her surviving brother, could anticipate a future rich with opportunity and adventure, initially to be facilitated by training to be an officer in the largely barracks-bound imperial army. The best Lata could hope for was a life like her mother’s: a comfortable treadmill of domesticity and child-bearing, relieved (as Johanna’s was) by the occasional foray into polite society. Under the Austrian legal code of 1811, a woman was obliged to do the housework, had to obey her husband in domestic matters and could not embark on a career without her husband’s consent – always assuming that she was lucky enough to find a husband. A spinster’s horizons were more limited still.
Is it any wonder that, imagining more thrilling adventures for themselves, Lata and her sisters should have begun by disguising themselves as men?
6.
The winds of change
As Lata approached adulthood, her confidence in the saddle grew. So did her faith in her methods of gentle mastery. There were nine horses in Řitka’s stables, including a chestnut mare, purchased as a carriage horse by the estate manager, that would allow no one but Lata to approach it. ‘The horse is the noblest animal,’ she explained, ‘unless man has spoiled it by rudeness and lack of understanding. Therefore [a woman] should win the horse like a noble man through love and not through brute force.’
In other respects, life continued upon its preordained lines: for the count and countess, the rituals of polite society; for their children, a largely uneventful jumble of family, pets, friends; for the village, the centuries-old rhythms of the agricultural year. With hindsight, this calm, comfortable world would seem idyllic in its predictability. At the time, for a restlessly energetic young woman with a thirst for adventure, the sleepiness may have been hard to bear.
Small variations in routine were welcome – yet could easily disappoint. Most summers, for example, Count Brandis would allow the imperial army to use the hills behind Řitka for military exercises. The visiting battalions could camp, manoeuvre, parade and drill. Leopold could renew friendships with his fellow officers. For the fulltime soldiers it was a welcome change of scene, while Leopold could rekindle his sense of himself as a dashing dragoon.
In the summer of 1912 there was an additional attraction: the visiting officers included Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Este, heir presumptive to the Habsburg throne. The forty-eight-year-old archduke owned (among much else) a Gothic hunting lodge at Konopiště, about twenty miles to the east. He would probably have known Count Leopold from Vienna. As inspector-general of the army, he often attended such training exercises. He had a reputation for being a demanding critic, but his overall influence was limited: the military establishment was stuck in its old ways from the Emperor downwards. Europe’s other great powers were furiously modernising and preparing for war. Austria-Hungary continued to spend three times as much on beer, wine and tobacco as it did on its armed forces.
The watching Brandis sisters may or may not have shared Řitka’s excitement at Franz Ferdinand’s presence on the hillside of splendidly uniformed soldiers. They would certainly have noticed that everyone involved was male. The fact would have meant something different to Lata’s youngest sister, eleven-year-old Johanna, than it did to her eldest, twenty-three-year-old Marie Therese. But it is hard to believe that Lata, who at just seventeen was by far the most proficient in the family at cavalryrelated pursuits, did not at some point ask herself why boys, in this as in everything else, had all the fun.
Mikuláš was by now away at cadet school in Moravia – and could expect, in due course, to join in this kind of exercise. He too would be able to manoeuvre and march and ride and drill, and show off his horsemanship, and swagger or hell-raise as he saw fit. He could even dream of putting his mettle to the ultimate test in battle. The girls could only watch and admire – and envy.
If Lata ever wondered why, she will also have known the answer. Things were as they were because that was how they were. This was the principle that held the Habsburg world together. Absurdities and injustices abounded; change was unthinkable. The Emperor Franz Joseph, Franz Ferdinand’s uncle, had been on the throne for sixty-four years, fatherly and well-meaning – and perfectly in tune with his inbred dynasty’s tradition of constipated conservatism. His inherited empire encompassed eighteen different nations, from Lake Constance to the Carpathians, and the vast machinery of state that held it together for him was obsessed with preserving past glories. ‘That was how things were back then,’ explained Joseph Roth in his great novel of Austro-Hungarian decline, The Radetzky March. ‘People lived on memories.’ As an aide-memoire, F
ranz Joseph’s whiskery face glowered from near-identical portraits in public buildings and patriotic homes right across his realms, unvarying as the divinely ordained status quo he symbolised.
For those with a stake in the system – aristocrats, army officers, civil servants, and those with old money – there was something deeply comforting in this sense of permanence. All they had to do was observe the established proprieties and honour their elderly Emperor and – as Roth’s fellow novelist Stefan Zweig put it in The World of Yesterday – ‘in even rhythm, leisurely and quietly, the wave of time bore them from the cradle to the grave’.
But those with a stake in the system had three things in common: they were men; they owned property; and they spoke German. Barely a tenth of the Austro-Hungarian population fell into all three categories. And, as Lata was growing up, voices from the excluded 90 per cent had been making themselves heard with increasing volume. Yes, change was unthinkable: everyone knew that. Yet how could things continue as they were? The discontented were everywhere: democrats whose hopes of a less autocratic regime had been crushed following the failed revolutions of 1848-9; have-nots who resented the grotesquely unequal distribution of wealth and land; nationalists who believed that Bohemia should be governed for the benefit of Czechs rather than their Austrian overlords.
There were even a handful of eccentrics who challenged the idea that women should be second-class citizens. They were seen as a lunatic fringe, with little chance of achieving their aims. Yet pioneering feminists such as Františka Plamínková had made slow but significant progress by allying their cause to the Czech nationalist movement. By the turn of the century, opportunities had begun to open up in higher education and in the professions, while in 1905 a Committee for Women’s Suffrage had been founded in Prague. In 1912, a woman was even elected to the Bohemian parliament, although she wasn’t allowed to take her seat.
For most people, however, no agitation was enough to disturb the inertia of the age. Dreamers could dream all they wanted about a better future; sensible folk were happy in the time-honoured certainty that tomorrow would resemble today. And so, for two more years, the empire, and Bohemia, and Řitka, and the Brandis family, muddled on as before.
Then – well, you know what happened next. On 28 June 1914, in a cul-de-sac in Sarajevo, a bullet fired by Gavrilo Princip brought Franz Ferdinand’s life to an abrupt, unanticipated end. Within a month, the empire was at war, with the rest of Europe scrambling to join in. The long twilight of the Habsburg world was sinking into its final darkness.
Count Leopold was not invited to the funeral but wrote a letter of condolence to Franz Ferdinand’s younger brother, who had been living in Prague. He then arranged, at the age of sixty, to return to his old regiment for active service. Lata’s brother Mikuláš, forty years younger, enlisted too – having been given special permission to leave cadet school prematurely. Neither man can have imagined the true scale of the catastrophe that had been set in motion, or the terror and obscenity of the industrialised slaughter in which they would soon be engulfed. Even so, those last days of peace must have been melancholy.
In the great horse-racing centres of Bohemia and Hungary, the remaining English expatriates were forbidden to travel. In England, Karel Kinský said his farewells and came home to fight for his Emperor. Austria-Hungary’s long love affair with the English was over. Individual friends exchanged reassurances to the effect that (as Kinský put it in a letter to a Newmarket trainer), ‘Whatever happens we two will always remain the same friends as ever’; most feared that such declarations would count for little once the blood began to flow. Kinský asked to be sent to the eastern front, so that he would not have to kill any Englishmen.
In Řitka there was a last gathering on 12 September for Mikuláš and his friends. ‘Alas,’ wrote one of them in a memory book, ‘on this dark Earth, what is made to be united is rarely united . . .’
Soon, the Brandis home would be inhabited exclusively by women.
There is reason to believe that Lata’s mother, Countess Johanna, did not cope well. The loss of her first-born son still grieved her; the fear of losing her other menfolk must have been hard to bear. She had heart trouble, too. And there was the stress of trying to untangle the web of debts left by her own mother. Some family members believe that the countess was absent from Řitka for an extended period. No proof of this survives; but there is a family consensus that, for one reason or another, the countess had by 1914 relinquished much of her role as commander-in-chief of home, family and estate. When Leopold went off to join his regiment, taking with him two horses and the coachman but otherwise leaving a full stable, he paused at the gates of his property, saluted – and left nineteen-year-old Lata in charge.
7.
The breaking of nations
Lata was not the only young woman in Europe to find herself saddled with unexpected responsibility. The great armies drained their nations of men. Women in their millions filled the gaps. Jobs that had been closed to them were suddenly jobs that it was their patriotic duty to do; and while most soon yearned for peace, there was no denying that, for many, war offered a rare and welcome chance to experience the possibilities of work beyond the home.
The paradox applied to Lata, too. Running the estate was probably better than sitting indoors trying to be ladylike. It cannot have been easy. Even without all the worrying about family and friends on the front, war put a huge strain on agricultural estates such as Řitka. With one farmworker in two called up for military service, acute labour scarcity set in. Horses were taken as well. All but one of the eight remaining in the Brandis stables were soon requisitioned. Lata contested each call-up, but could secure exemption only for her favourite, a three-year-old gelding called Sarek. She remembered the assessments as a ‘terrible’ experience but consoled herself with the knowledge that the chestnut carriage horse that had once been too wild for anyone but her to approach was now so biddable that the acquisition commission commented favourably on its tameness. She cannot have imagined the horror that awaited her ‘darlings’ on the front line.
The reduction in the horse population made Lata’s life easier in some ways: initially she had been feeding and mucking out all eight horses herself, with the help of one small stable lad. But any work the horses had been doing now had to be done in other ways, or not done at all. Fertiliser was also in short supply, while state regulation of food prices made it harder for farmers to make a viable business from what they did grow. Empire-wide, agricultural output would fall by 40 per cent in the course of the war.
Yet the estate still had to function. In peacetime, the main Řitka property was home to more than forty people, only ten of whom were family members. Dozens of others in the village – and their families – were dependent on the Brandis family for their living. The mostly female residues of these populations had somehow to be both managed and looked after.
These were big issues for a nineteen-year-old to handle, yet Lata appears to have done so with confidence. ‘She had a rational personality,’ according to her nephew, Petr Jaroševský. ‘She was almost general-like.’ Each sister had a bedroom; Lata set up hers as an office. It had the advantage of being on the ground floor, at the end of the house, with its own external door, where employees and tradespeople could visit her without tramping through the rest of the house.
Word came back that her desk was usually piled high with correspondence, and that the air was thick with her cigarette smoke. Neither detail will have harmed her image as a serious, grown-up estate manager. None the less, there were some who felt that the estate was easy prey. Lata found it necessary to patrol the grounds at night in search of intruders, and on one occasion she apprehended a notorious poacher at gunpoint. ‘My horse caught a scent,’ she recalled matter-of-factly years later. ‘All of a sudden, I’m looking in his face. Right from the saddle I ordered him to put his hands up and drove him in front of me to the police station in Mníšek.’
She knew how to use her weap
on, a Flobert hunting rifle that her father had bought her. She had been shooting since her early teens, at least – a photograph shows her doing so in the woods on a sunny day, in a long dress, a cartridge pouch slung from her shoulder – and had become frighteningly accurate. Her father preserved a coin, dented in the middle by a bullet, which Lata is said to have shot in 1913 as it spun in the air. (Some family members dispute this account, but I have seen the coin: a five-crown piece.) She habitually carried her father’s revolver around with her. She would probably have been a useful asset to the imperial army. But that, of course, was not a woman’s place either.
War went badly for Austria-Hungary’s male warriors. The dragoons fought well at Kraśnik, routing the Russians, and also at Jaroslavice – said to have been history’s last true cavalry battle. But those successes took place in the first weeks of conflict. Everything else had been a disaster. The imperial army had lost to the Serbians, to the Russians, to the Italians. Linguistic barriers between the Emperor’s subjects caused communication difficulties; some nationalities, notably the Czechs, seemed reluctant to fight for their German-speaking Emperor at all. Large-scale defections were being reported as early as April 1915. Territorial losses, for example in Galicia, had a disastrous effect on food supply. And with each passing week it became clearer that the army’s most cherished tactic – the fearless cavalry charge – was lethally out of date against machine guns. Half of the regular army had been killed before 1915 even began. Among them were Lata’s cousin Norbert Kinský, Oktavian’s twenty-one-year-old great-nephew, who was shot through the heart while rescuing a wounded comrade on the Russian front.
