Thunder at Twilight

by Frederic Morton

  “Oh, civilian clothes. He’s always dressed very smart.”

  “Did he wear a gray hat?”

  “Well, he always takes it off when he comes in. He is such a gentleman.”

  “All right, but what was the color of the hat?”

  “Well—yes, gray. It was gray.”

  “What time did he come in?”

  “What time? About ten, fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Did he go to his room?”

  “Why, yes, of course. He took his key.”

  “Did he say he’ll come down again soon?”

  “No, but he always goes out at night. He likes to dine out.”

  “When he comes down, ask if he has lost this knife sheath.”

  The six weeks Ebinger and Steidl had waited in the room of the nonringing bell were as nothing compared to the eternity they spent hidden behind a potted palm in the lobby of the Hotel Klomser. It lasted about an hour.

  Shortly after 7 P.M. a man in his forties, slight, slim, with a well-brushed blond mustache, stepped down the red carpet of the stairs that led from the second floor of the Hotel Klomser to the lobby. He did not wear a hat but carried under his arm his officer’s kepi. The gold choke-collar of his blue General Staff blouse gleamed with the three stars of his rank.

  “Good evening, Colonel Redl,” said the concierge. “Pardon me, sir, but did you happen to misplace this knife sheath?”

  “Why, yes,” the Colonel said. He extended his hand. He retracted it fast. Too late.

  Shortly after 9 P.M. on that same night, another colonel, August von Urbanski, darted through the neo-Renaissance portals of the Grand Hotel. It was one of the most imposing entrances on the Ringstrasse. In the dining room the gypsy orchestra had finished playing the waltz “Wiener Blut.” The Chief of Staff, General Conrad, flushed from a turn around the dance floor with Frau von Reininghaus, had just sat down and cupped his hand around a glass of champagne. He would never drink it.

  Colonel von Urbanski, his Intelligence Chief, stood over him, bending down, whispering even before he had finished his salute. Within seconds the General’s face turned gray, grayer than the gray streaks in his blond hair. His hand dropped from the goblet. He called to his adjutant at the next table. He had to call twice because most of his voice had abandoned his throat. The adjutant jumped up to alert the General’s chauffeur.

  Four hours later, at one o’clock in the morning of Sunday, May 25, 1913, four officers walked from the staircase of the Hotel Klomser past the dozing night clerk to the street. One of the four carried folded in his breast pocket a white sheet covered with gothic script. It was a statement signed by the occupant of Room One. In exchange for the signature the occupant had received a loaded pistol.

  In Room One the occupant sat, motionless, in the gold choke-collar of the General Staff uniform. The mahogany table before him was bare except for three sealed letters and the pistol.

  On the day following, Monday, May 26, Vienna’s foremost newspaper, the Neue Freie Presse, discussed at length the tension between Serbia and Bulgaria, only recently fellow-victors over Turkey in the Balkan War of 1912. There was also detailed coverage of the nuptials of Kaiser Wilhelm’s daughter Marie Luise to Prince Ernst August von Braunschweig—the sermon of the officiating bishop, the titles, uniforms, and dresses adorning the ceremony and its social significance. A much smaller story began:

  VIENNA, May 26. One of the best known and most able officers in the General Staff, Colonel Alfred Redl, General Staff Chief of the Eighth Army Corps in Prague, committed suicide Sunday night in a hotel in the Inner City. The highly gifted officer, who was on the verge of a great career, killed himself with a shot in the mouth, an act prompted, it is believed, by mental overexertion resulting from severe neurasthenia. Colonel Redl, who served for a long time in a military capacity in Vienna, and who was equally popular in military and civilian circles, had only arrived from Prague on Saturday night and had taken quarters at the hotel . . .

  On the same day the Army announced that Colonel Redl would be buried with full military honors.

  A respectable illusion was thus clapped over an evil reality. It might have shut out the truth forever if, on the Sunday of the suicide, an underdog soccer team had not upset the favorite; that is, if, a hundred and thirty miles northwest of Vienna, in the Prague Amateur League, the Club Union-Holleschowitz had not unexpectedly beaten the Club Sturm by a score of seven to five; and if the Sturm captain, Egon Erwin Kisch, had not been so furious with his star halfback Hans Wagner for not showing up at the game and thus causing the debacle; and if Wagner, coming to Kisch’s office the next day to explain, had not produced such peculiarly lame excuses that they fanned Kisch’s rage still further—until Wagner finally blurted out the truth.

  Wagner was a locksmith by profession and Kisch was a journalist. When he’d been about to leave for the game on Sunday, Wagner said, a detail of soldiers had come down on him. He’d been virtually thrown into a military car, driven at top speed to his shop, ordered to collect his tools, driven at top speed to corps headquarters where he’d been commanded to break open the door to a private apartment.

  And then, voice lowered, Wagner told about the queer sights behind the door, the perfumed drapes, the pink whips hanging from the walls, the photographs in snakeskin frames . . .

  His football captain, listening, was no longer a football captain. He was a reporter whose investigative instincts had been alerted. His pencil was racing across a note pad. And then he himself began to run.

  Within twenty-four hours Kisch not only did all the right leg work, ferreted out all the right people whom he asked all the right questions, but also managed to outmaneuver the usually inexorable arm of Habsburg censorship.

  His trick worked because it was as Austrian as the authorities he must circumvent. A straight expose would have been instantly suppressed. But Kisch, knowing that the official Redl account was a masquerade, produced a counterillusion. In the newspaper that employed him, the Bohemia, he planted a “reverse disclosure”:

  We have been requested by official sources to deny the rumors particularly current in military circles that the General Staff Chief of the Prague Corps, Colonel Alfred Redl, who the day before yesterday committed suicide in Vienna, has betrayed military secrets and has spied for Russia. The Commission sent from Vienna to Prague, which was accompanied by a Colonel and which this past Sunday broke open the apartment and the drawers and closets of Colonel Redl and undertook a three-hour search, was investigating irregularities of a quite different nature.

  Prague censors thought that Vienna had authorized the item; they let it pass. Kisch had smuggled a bombshell through their very fingers. But he had done more. He’d sent the real Redl story to a Berlin paper. And the moment the truth was printed in Germany, it swept across the border into Austria to combine bizarrely with a thousand rumors started by the report in Bohemia. Some of the vilest speculation involved the Imperial family itself. The only way to disperse the miasma was to stop the government lie. On Thursday, May 29, the War Ministry’s Military Review published an official statement:

  The existence of Colonel Alfred Redl has ended through suicide. Redl committed this act as he was about to be accused of the following severe misdeeds:

  1. Homosexual affairs which caused financial difficulties.

  2. Sale of secret official information to agents of a foreign power.

  This jolt was followed by shock waves. A clamor rose up in the press, in parliament, in the public, demanding more facts from the Ministry of War. The facts came, and they sent Vienna reeling through the beginning of June.

  Colonel Alfred Redl, honored with the Order of the Iron Cross Third Class for his outstanding service in Counter-intelligence; Colonel Redl who had been privileged to personally brief the Emperor; whom the Emperor had awarded, in a face-to-face ceremony, a medal signifying “Expression of Supreme Satisfaction’’; Colonel Redl, decorated by the German General Staff with the Royal Prussian Order of the C
rown, Second Class, an honor seldom bestowed on ranks lower than general; Colonel Redl, for whom the Chief of Staff Baron Conrad had already proposed the award of the important Military Service Medal; Colonel Redl, the exemplary light and hope among younger officers of the General Staff; Colonel Redl, known for his uprightness, discipline, good humor, and camaraderie, who wore the sky-blue of the Austrian officer’s uniform with as trim and slim a grace as any of his colleagues; whose fitness report on the part of his superiors judged him to be “. . . strong, honorable, open . . . highly gifted and highly intelligent. . . and brilliantly demonstrating these qualities in espionage cases . . . “; who was characterized during his off-duty hours as “. . . very companionable with excellent manners and frequenting only elegant society . . .”—this same Colonel Redl now stood unmasked as a serpent, as a grotesque, as a criminal, as a treasonous fraud. He had been a secret homosexual debauchee. He had spent a small fortune on hair dyes, scents, cosmetics. He had filled his closets with women’s dresses. He had bought his male paramour, a young cavalry officer named Stefan Hromodka, the most expensive automobile and gifted him with an apartment. He had financed his excesses by selling to Russia data on Austrian mobilization plans, army codes, border fortifications, military transport facilities, and supply structures.

  Like a riptide the disaster churned through the Empire. Some it raised to the crest. Many others were swept under. Egon Erwin Kisch, the young reporter that had brought to light a whole world of darkness, became owner of the most famous byline in Central European journalism for the next quarter of a century; henceforward the best table at the Café Central waited for him on all his visits to Vienna. On the other hand, Redl’s lieutenant-lover, Stefan Hromodka, was tried, found guilty of unnatural prostitution, sentenced to loss of commission as well as to three months of hard labor. (He later married, had children, and lived another fifty years.) Baron Giesl von Gieslingen, Redl’s Commanding General in Prague, was pensioned off. Colonel von Urbanski, chief of the Intelligence Bureau, would be suffering early retirement within the year. Baron Conrad as Chief of Staff offered his resignation. The Emperor refused it. With the Balkans still seething, this was no time for high-level changes. Conrad continued in an office that now faced very heavy weather.

  He found himself summoned to the Castle Belvedere. At the Crown Prince’s Vienna residence the air was sulfurous. It was an infuriating week for Franz Ferdinand even without a spy scandal. He had not been invited, after all, to the wedding of Kaiser Wilhelm’s daughter—the pretext being that “this was a family affair.” Behind the slight he detected the hand of his old foe Prince Montenuovo, Franz Joseph’s First Lord Chamberlain. On top of this affront, for which there was no ready retaliation, came the Redl disgrace. But at least here the Archduke need not hold back. He received General Conrad with a wrath that was almost joyful.

  It had been the General, had it not, who had sent instructions to this wretch Redl to kill himself? And thrusting a suicide pistol at the wretch—that had not been exactly a very religious act, had it? Not exactly the act of a good Catholic? Nor an act observing the chain of command, since the General had not troubled to obtain permission from His Majesty or the Heir Apparent—or had he? Nor a prudent act either! By having the wretch blow his brains out, one eliminated along with his skull all possibility of useful interrogation, didn’t one? But perhaps it was an act consistent with the act of raising such a wretch to a position of responsibility? And leaving such considerations aside—how did the General feel now about his saber-rattling vis-à-vis Serbia and all the Slavs? How much did the General crave a war with Russia now—now that one of his key officers had peddled military secrets to the Tsar? Would the General have the kindness of an answer?

  The General, rigidly at attention, went through the litany of his defense. He had tried to contain the scandal by eliminating its source, Redl. Since it had to be done very fast, there’d been no time to inform the Palace. As to a war with the East, Russia had not gained any really crucial information.

  The Crown Prince waved away such feeble arguments. The General saluted, retreated. The same day he renewed his offer of resignation to the Emperor who refused it once more.

  Less rude than the Crown Prince but equally disturbed was the Chief of Staff of the German Army, General von Moltke, with whom Redl had sometimes conferred in person. Here General Conrad must reassure his ally that Redl had no access to German secrets; that the damage in Austria was limited and remediable; that in fact he, Conrad, had already ordered the devising of new codes, new mobilization plans, and new supply and transport procedures—all of which would make the information now in Russian hands useless.

  Berlin’s response was a mixture of unease and courtesy. More complex still was another man’s attitude—the most important man of all—Franz Joseph. His adjutant reported that on the night after the news broke, the old gentleman could not sleep. But after he rose, as was his custom, at 4 A.M., he strode to his desk and said calmly to his adjutant, Count Paar, “So this is the new era? And that kind of creature comes out of it? In our old days something like that would not even have been conceivable.”

  7

  THE REDL MONSTROSITY MADE THE UPRIGHT SPLENDOR OF FRANZ JOSEPH’S “old days” seem so distant. Yet only forty-eight hours before Redl’s unmasking, the ancient Emperor himself had animated an occasion that made those “old days” young again in Vienna. At the age of eighty-three, the monarch, bareheaded under the morning sun, had walked for two hours at the center of the Corpus Christi procession.

  This spectacle was the Church’s counterpoint to the workers’ May Day, as consummately Viennese in its pagentry and many centuries older. On May 22, 1913, the procession had flowed again like a river cascading with costumes and colors. All the bells in all the city’s towers tolled as it started at St. Stephen’s Square, swirled past the fountains, gargoyles, loggias of the Inner Precinct, poured on under the eyes of thousands of saints (for all apartment dwellers placed their holy pictures on their window sills) until it reached St. Michael’s Square where it stopped for an open-air Mass before flowing back to St. Stephen’s Cathedral.

  At the head billowed the massed senior clergy in long gilt-embroidered vestments, bishops and prelates holding aloft ancient gonfalons of the Fifteen Mysteries of the Faith; then came the Lord Mayor of Vienna with his Great Chain of Office; then the Dean of the University and the faculty in their richly hued gowns with their swords in silvered sheaths; then officers of the great orders, first and foremost among them the Knights of the Golden Fleece, their collars wrought of firestone and steel; then the white-gold canopy under which the Cardinal strode in undulations of his scarlet cape, holding the monstrance that was shrouded in incense and heralded by the acolytes’ tinkling of sanctus bells and flanked by medieval guards with halberd and cuirass; then, all by himself, surrounded by awed, empty space, walked His Majesty, Franz Joseph I, white-fringed head bare to the sky, a white general’s uniform snug on his slightly stooped, still slender frame, green-plumed hat under his left arm, his right holding a candle; he was followed by his First Lord Chamberlain and then by the high members of his Court, the Crown Prince, the Archdukes according to seniority, followed by the Archduchesses down to the most junior, followed in turn by the Crown Prince’s wife, followed by the imperial and ducal equerries and ladies-in-waiting—all in full-dress robes, epaulettes, sashes, and decorations . . .

  Though it began early in the morning, the procession did not escape the strong May sun. Newspaper accounts emphasized “the Emperor’s youthful step”—how well he’d taken the strain. Would he have taken it so well had he known that he was marching toward Redl?

  The Vienna Derby of 1913 was run on Sunday, June 8, but since it came within two weeks of the Redl revelation, it turned out to be a waste of good weather. Bright was the sun, but not the mood. The Crown Prince smoldered in Konopiste. The Imperial Box at the Freudenau track remained empty. But few missed his frown, and anyway, it would have been the frown of someo
ne almost fifty: The Derby, being a very sporty affair, belonged to the new generation. For Vienna’s young bloods it was an annual watershed of fashion: One wore derbies only until the Derby—afterward, summer boaters. The Derby also made a fetching stage for young officers; for their white glace gloves, their casual cigarettes, the ladies on their arms.

  This year, instead of shining in their uniforms, many seemed to cringe. There was much less flaunting by lieutenants of the guard, less flirting, and hardly any dining afterward, in the Sacher Garten of the Prater. Colonel Redl had dishonored the tunic they wore.

  That sunny day on the race track lit up yet further dimensions of damage. It wasn’t just the Imperial and Royal Army that had been soiled. It was a whole class of comers; a class that was about to earn by merit what earlier could only be inherited by birth; a class that advertised its advent through occasions like the Derby and whose most brilliant representatives included Alfred Redl—until now.

  Weaned on cabbage soup as the ninth son of a lowly railway clerk, the Colonel had been well on his way to a field marshal’s baton. A rising star of comely ascent, he’d been described by the Army’s character report mentioned earlier as “very companionable with excellent manners and frequenting only elegant society . ..” Yes, the horses of June ran for the Redls of the realm. The Derby was the one social ritual in Austria where the very talented, very ambitious, very presentable arrives could mingle and chat with those who had arrived many generations ago. Now such mingling had proved calamitous. Redl, the only commoner among the Counts and Barons of the General Staff, had turned out to be its only traitor.

  An unmistakable contrast: Corpus Christi and the Derby. The Corpus Christi procession, two days before Redl’s suicide, had displayed Old Austria’s continued virtuosity in dramatizing its own myth. But the Derby, after Redl, disclosed a loss of image and of nerve among the dynamic young. Now the new generation could not enact “honor” or “dash” with the elan expected of them in Vienna. The case had shown up the hol-lowness of Redl’s parvenu mask as well as the hollowness of General Conrad’s attempt to cover horror with yet another masking. The art of illusion itself had been compromised—the future of its practice in the twentieth century. A Viennese essence was in jeopardy.