Unbreakable
Page 14
There was plenty of trouble to be distracted from. Six weeks earlier, the German Jewish philosopher Theodor Lessing, living in exile in the Czechoslovak spa town of Mariánské Lázně, had been assassinated by Nazi agents – chilling proof that, even if Czechoslovaks tried to ignore what was happening in Germany, the new German regime would not be ignoring them. Then, at the beginning of October, Konrad Henlein launched the Front of the Sudeten German Homeland, soon to be renamed the Sudeten German Party (SdP). Its agenda was nationalist, separatist and, as it gathered strength, increasingly fascist. (Henlein insisted on being greeted with the words: ‘Heil, mein Führer’ , and many former members of the Sudeten German Nazi Party were happy to do so.) Its financial support was delivered, covertly, from Berlin. Its calls for German rule, backed by Hitler, would have catastrophic consequences, for Czechoslovakia, for Europe and, ultimately, for the Sudeten Germans.
For some racegoers, such shadows may have added an intriguing new level of contrast to the 1933 Velká Pardubická. The previous year, Austria’s Remus had beaten Czechoslovakia’s Gyi Lovam! by half a length, controversially and tragically. Few will have noticed that Remus’s owner was Jewish: merely that Czechoslovak hopes had been dashed by German-speaking visitors. Maybe this year such visitors could be put in their place by a local champion.
Those who were actually riding probably took a less partisan view. Most watched the pre-race unveiling of a memorial plaque to Captain Popler on the main grandstand, and some may still have been reflecting at the start on the potentially lethal risks of the impending contest. Others will have been focusing on what they needed to do to win; but the glory they sought was primarily for themselves rather than their nation.
There were thirteen runners. One expert described the field as ‘the best in history’ . Ferber, from Germany, was the strong favourite, with a string of wins behind him; but there were also three former Velká Pardubická winners to consider: Remus, still trained and ridden in Austria by Rugiero Spano; Gyi Lovam!, being ridden in Popler’s absence by the experienced Josef Seyfried; and Pohanka, entrusted by Ra to another French officer, Lieutenant du Corail. (Neklan was now being kept back for next year.) Ataraxia, from Germany, and Clematis, from Austria, were also priced in single figures; and there were three fancied French runners, Jeune Chef, Eckmühl and Regalon, which had arrived by train the previous day. Lata and Norma were the outsiders, at 25:1.
What the punters hadn’t bargained for was Lata and Norma’s resilience. The challenge ahead seemed to hold no terrors for them, whereas others seemed doubtful. Ferber was slow to start running at all, then refused at the second obstacle. Pelide refused at the first. Gyi Lovam!, who never really recovered the spring in his step after Popler’s death, gave up at the third (a water jump). Wehrwolf refused at the fourth (Taxis).
Lata and Norma continued at a steady pace, near the back, and were able to avoid trouble when Ataraxia fell at Taxis. A French journalist observed that ‘she rode very beautifully’ , while Norma took each obstacle in her stride. It hardly seemed worth trying to overtake: the field seemed intent on defeating itself. Eventually, after the Irish Bank, the survivors settled down, in three distinct groups. In the lead were Eckmühl, Regalon, Jeune Chef and Remus. Then came Clematis, Deputation and Norma, about fifteen lengths behind. Pohanka was a distant last. All progressed without drama until the Snake Ditch, nineteenth of twenty-nine obstacles and frequently the cruellest. On this occasion, the horses were met with a perfect storm of disorienting difficulties: deep water; winding, unmarked ditch; uneven ground (the landing is much lower than the take-off); and, getting worse with each faller, a chaotic, terrifying kaleidoscope of splashing water. Not a single runner jumped it successfully.
Norma was not in the habit of falling, but the chaos was too bewildering even for her. The dynamics would have been simple. Norma, moving at pace, dropped like a stone into the water as the turf vanished without warning and was brought to an abrupt halt when her chest came to rest on the far bank. Lata, consequently, was propelled forward like a projectile from a catapult. I have seen footage in which Velká Pardubická jockeys are propelled twenty feet forward in such falls. All who saw it agreed that Lata’s fall was severe, yet neither horse nor rider broke anything. Lata dragged herself to her feet. Norma was led patiently from the water. They regathered themselves. Lata remounted, and off they went again.
There was little hope of winning by now. Rugiero Spano had been fast remounting Remus, and the 4:1 favourite was far in the lead. Eckmühl, too, had resumed very quickly. Yet Lata’s tactic of simply keeping going continued to bring dividends. Clematis refused at the twenty-second (Little Taxis); Jeune Chef gave up at the Garden fences (the twenty-third). By the time they had shaken off Deputation and Pohanka – who would be the only other finishers – Lata and Norma were a convincing third, calmly jumping obstacle after obstacle with obvious confidence and little sign of exhaustion.
Remus won, in a record time of 11 minutes 24.6 seconds; Eckmühl was second. But Lata and Norma, approaching the finish, were greeted with an ‘enthusiastic ovation’ . At least someone was doing something for Czechoslovak pride. The next day’s papers described Lata, almost matter-of-factly, as ‘the fearless Countess Brandisová’ . Perhaps they were desperate for something positive to celebrate, given that the main prize had once again gone to Austria. Yet the epithet was hard to quarrel with.
Four times Lata had ridden in the race. Four times, the non-finishers had outnumbered the finishers. Four times, on three different horses, Lata had been among the minority who were able to complete the course – and on the last two occasions she had been placed. This time, moreover, she had done so on a horse that was, it turned out, slightly lame: Norma had been struck hard on the leg by a flying flag dislodged by a falling horse at, probably, the Snake Ditch. Yet horse, rider and the partnership between them had all proved strong enough to stay the course. This was steeplechase-riding of the highest order, and it underlined a self-evident truth: the idea that Lata was somehow an interloper had been comprehensively demolished. It was the other Czechoslovak riders who were starting to seem out of their depth.
Fearless or not, however, victory was still beyond her. And although she had silenced complaints about her gender, another issue would soon arise. Journalists were too polite to ask the question, but Lata knew the answer: she was thirty-eight. By any sensible measure she was approaching the end of her steeplechasing career.
18.
The Germans
Over the next twelve months, Lata and Norma got to know each other. To facilitate this, Ra put Norma into training with Karel Šmejda at Velká Chuchle. Norma made the ninety-mile journey from Chlumec on foot, with Lata on her back. Their route took them over rough country: along the Labe as far as Kolín, then across densely coniferous hills until they reached the Vltava and, just beyond it, Šmejda’s stables. Norma was happy to ‘jump over everything they encountered’. Prized racehorses usually did their long-distance travelling by train, but the Kinskýs didn’t believe in mollycoddling. Sometimes, Ra would travel from Chlumec to Žďár nad Sázavou on horseback, with his young children following on ponies. The sixty-five-mile journey took them two days, with any number of obstacles to be jumped en route. Everyone was assumed to benefit from the experience. Lata took a similar view with Norma. You don’t win the Velká Pardubická by sparing yourself.
There were several advantages to keeping the mare within easy reach of Řitka. Ra had other claims on his attention. For one reason or another – perhaps it was a mid-life crisis, or perhaps there were more ideological motives – he had set his heart on winning the 1934 Velká Pardubická, come what may. In addition to Norma, he was planning to run four other Kinský horses in that year’s race: Čigýr, Padova, Neva and Neklan. Delegating Norma’s preparation to Lata and Šmejda gave him one less thing to worry about.
Lata rode Norma at Velká Chuchle regularly, and the two became, in Lata’s words, ‘real friends’. She began to refer to her b
y the affectionate diminutive ‘Normička’, and as time passed ‘my confidence in this little mare grew and grew.’ Before long, Lata was nursing her own slightly wild Velká Pardubická ambition: ‘I believed that, together, one day, we two girls could win that great race . . . ’
Meanwhile, there was much else to keep Lata at Řitka: notably a two-year-old chestnut colt, Hubertus, whom she bought from Kasalický that spring. Under Šmejda’s gentle guidance, Hubertus would eventually become the most successful horse to race in Lata’s colours. Lata was closely involved in his development, which limited her opportunities for travel. There were other horses to think about too, including those in Řitka’s stables, which appear to have been kept either for work or as a form of transport for Lata and her sisters. Lata used to ride every Sunday to church in Líšnice: observers were struck by how beautifully both horse and rider were turned out. Gabriele, Kristýna, Alžběta, Markéta and Johanna were also conscientious churchgoers, but they may have travelled by carriage. It is possible that Lata rode because it was faster. On Sunday afternoons she often went racing at Velká Chuchle, and it would have been a rush to get there, after church, in time for the first race soon after 2 p.m. (The family had no car; Kasalický sometimes gave them lifts in his.)
The carriage that took the sisters to church was presumably a four-wheeled barouche rather than a twowheeled kočárek; but the kočárek was also used, and, when it was, it is possible that Norma pulled it. She certainly pulled a carriage at times, although not necessarily in Řitka. This was unusual for a racehorse still in training but not unique: Brutus, second in the 1927 Velká Pardubická and also trained by Šmejda, sometimes pulled a plough. Ra believed that steeplechasers in general, and Norma in particular, thrived on a combination of recovery, variety and hard exercise; and Šmejda presumably shared that view. Pulling a kočárek provided the mare with the first two. Then it was down to Lata to provide the hard exercise.
She did so whenever and wherever she could: around Řitka; on visits to Ra’s various homes; and, mostly, at Velká Chuchle, where Šmejda was training not just Norma and Hubertus but also Dante, Dorian, Savoy – and a host of other horses with other owners (including Kasalický), for which he presumably still welcomed Lata’s help. It seems unlikely that Lata was regularly riding them all, but even if she just rode two or three a morning she must have been doing an awful lot of riding, and her body must sometimes have protested. Yet her mind, while she rode, was at peace. In the saddle, there was no need to worry about the world’s other troubles, or about her own.
As October approached, the press began to talk about Ra’s Velká Pardubická ambitions in unexpectedly nationalist terms: as a showdown between the great Czech stable of the Kinskýs and a powerful contingent of German visitors. If it wasn’t entirely true, it didn’t need much repeating to become true.
Sport and nationalism were hard to separate in both Czechoslovak and German culture. The Sokol gymnastic movement and its German equivalent, the Turner-Bund, promoted them as two manifestations of the same desirable end: healthy minds in healthy bodies, united by a shared sense of national roots and community. The hardcore nationalists of the 1930s drew on this tradition when they promoted ‘völkisch’ ideas of ‘blood and soil’ – as SdP leader Konrad Henlein (a former Turner-Bund instructor) did to great effect while promoting Sudetenland separatism, and as the Third Reich did in Germany. But there was a sinister difference. The new rhetoric of National Socialism was underpinned by old-fashioned hatreds: of Jews, of socialists, of capitalists, even of democrats. The trick was to vary the mix of wholesomeness and poison to suit your audience, if necessary luring people in with völkisch talk and saving the hate for later. The long-term aim was to promote Nazi values; in the short term, what mattered was for as many people to get with the programme as possible.
With that in mind, the Nazis had weaponised sport since their earliest days in power – especially glamorous sports involving fast cars or fast horses, and ‘martial’ sports (Wehrsportarten) that honed the skills and spirit required for warfare. Hitler himself proclaimed that ‘a young German must be of slender build, as agile as a greyhound, as tough as leather and as hard as Krupp steel’ – clearly thinking of applications for those qualities that went far beyond recreation. Sports enthusiasts who felt inspired were drawn a little further into the Nazi web.
At the same time, several of Hitler’s most ambitious henchmen poured money and time into nurturing a new breed of steel-hard German horsemen. They did so initially by developing prestigious equestrian events. The Braune Band von Deutschland, a flat race in Munich – created in 1934 by Christian Weber, Hitler’s former bodyguard – was one example. The prize money rose rapidly from 19,500 marks to (by 1936) a staggering 100,000 marks. Hermann Goering in due course responded by rebranding Berlin’s big race as the Grosser Preis der Reichshauptstadt (the Grand Prix of the Reich Capital), and this too ended up with a 100,000-mark prize. Major German steeplechases, such as East Prussia’s Von der Goltz-Querfeldein, also became more lucrative and prestigious, and attracted interest from much of Europe. Needless to say, money, energy and political will were poured into ensuring that the Germans won most of the prizes.
All this was propaganda: a ruse to make the regime seem successful by association. But the Nazis also used equestrian sports as a way of spreading and enforcing Nazi ideology among those who took part in them. These were mostly rural or upper-class Germans who would otherwise have been hard for the propagandists to reach. Soon after Hitler became Chancellor, the Reich Ministry of the Interior had decreed that all German riding associations must join one of the party’s two paramilitary wings: either the original ‘brownshirt’ Sturmabteilung (SA) – which Hitler was in the process of marginalising – or the more ideologically reliable Schutzstaffel (SS), which would largely supersede the SA as Hitler’s main band of uniformed henchmen following the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ in July 1934. Most German riding associations joined the SA, but in horse-breeding regions such as East Prussia, Hanover and Westphalia, which was where many elite steeplechase riders came from, the SS was more popular.
So it was that, for the rest of the decade, most competitive German riders who were not in the army were members of the Equestrian SS. They may not have joined enthusiastically, or with full comprehension of the organisation’s cruel purposes; some may have believed that it was merely a wholesome vehicle for moral renewal. Yet they could not remain untouched by the evil at its heart. Their ultimate leader, Heinrich Himmler, was as viciously fanatical as any senior Nazi. He required all SS members, including horsemen, to train as soldiers. In 1934 he introduced guidelines specifying that members should be Nordic types and at least 1.70 metres tall. Before long, there were exhaustive investigations into their racial backgrounds. Members were also expected to join the Nazi Party and, from 1935, to read the SS’s weekly newspaper, Das Schwarze Korps, whose bêtes noires included Jews, Communists, freemasons and, not least, ‘Amazons’ – that is, women who followed traditionally masculine pursuits rather than staying at home to cherish families.
It would be wrong to assume that every German horseman who rode for the SS or the SA in the 1930s signed up to such values, but many clearly did so. Meanwhile, a growing number of Czechoslovaks began to think of them, over the next few years, as Hitler’s willing henchmen. Those who followed such matters could see the gathering strength of equestrian sports in the Third Reich; and the pride that Hitler’s regime took in German horsemen’s successes; and the role – emphasised by Nazi propagandists – that SS members in particular played in them. Günter Temme, multiple winner of the German showjumping Derby, was one much lauded example; Oskar Lengnik, the East Prussian steeplechaser, was another. If you didn’t like the Nazis, you would not enjoy seeing such men triumph.
As it happened, Lengnik didn’t come to Czechoslovakia to ride in the 1934 Velká Pardubická – although he would enter Lata’s story soon enough. Nor, as far as we can tell, did any other SS riders. But Heinrich
Wiese, the most significant German horseman in Pardubice that year, was the next-worst thing: a member of the SA, the oldest and most thuggish of Hitler’s early support groups. SA-Standartenführer Wiese, whose horse, Wahne, was the big race favourite, had been involved in right-wing paramilitary activities since before the SS existed, and long before it became obligatory to join such a group. A year younger than Lata, he came from Eutin, in the Holstein region, and had originally trained to be a farmer and miller. He fought in the First World War and, though barely out of his teens, was awarded the Iron Cross. After the war, he developed an interest in far-right politics and joined first the Orgesch – an anti-Semitic paramilitary group that was suppressed in 1921 – and then, from 1923, the Stahlhelm (‘steel helmets’), an ultra- conservative veterans’ group with paramilitary leanings which was later subsumed into the SA. In 1929, he joined the Nazi Party, and since 1933 he had represented the Schleswig-Holstein region as a deputy in the Nazi Reichstag. This was an occasional and purely ceremonial role, since the Reichstag by then convened rarely, its only function being to applaud and ratify Hitler’s diktats. It was not a role for non-Nazis.
Many German riders who went along with the National Socialist programme did so because they felt that there was no safe alternative: by 1934 there were at least eleven dissenting equestrians in Dachau, while another, Anton von Hohberg und Buchwald, had been shot on Himmler’s orders. So we should not leap too glibly to judge those who did as they were told. But Wiese appears to have signed up with enthusiasm. If his triumphs in the saddle brought glory to the Third Reich, so much the better, as far as he was concerned. As an SA-Standartenführer, Wiese held a rank roughly equivalent to colonel. He seemed proud of it. With his cropped hair and intimidating physique, he held himself like a soldier: chin high, forehead back, brown eyes staring disdainfully down a large, proud nose. Part of his left thumb was missing, perhaps a legacy of his bravery in war. You would think twice before picking a fight with him; or even, if you were a jockey, before jostling with him for position in the world’s most dangerous steeplechase.