The Lost Prince

by Selden Edwards

  “I have come,” he said loudly, raising his sword, “not to threaten but to anoint. It is your destiny,” were his final words, before he dissolved before me. “It is your destiny” echoed after he had vanished.

  I awoke in an agitated state and could not fall back into sleep, and as I rose in the morning, I found myself in a continued fitfulness, which stayed with me until that afternoon, when I visited the commander of my old regiment, and he explained the need for officers in service of the railroads. It was after that meeting that I decided to revive my commission and that I wrote my letter to St. Gregory’s. I hope you understand.

  Arnauld did indeed accept a posting on the general staff, feeling, he admitted, something of the patriotic, with the call to duty of his inherited commission. “It all happened too quickly for proper reflection,” he admitted later. Suddenly, he found himself in a position of authority over the national railroads, a position that drew his attention through the immediate and almost overwhelming demands of the mobilization. “There was a sudden need for planning,” he said, “and I stepped in. Working with the complexity of movements and railroads, I must admit, was both demanding and fascinating.”

  He wrote to Eleanor,

  Every cavalry officer travels with at least one horse, and every horse travels with at least one week’s food, and then there are the guns and the munitions. It is a huge challenge, one unlike anything in peacetime. And that is why the general staff requires many logistics officers like me. We work day and night and still find ourselves needy of more time for planning. And I must admit that, so unlike anything else I have done in my life, it is compelling work of compelling interest. I cannot tell you the number of trips I have taken to the railroad yards to count boxcars and to the train stations to count seats on the antiquated passenger cars. Everyone it seems is being pressed into service, regardless of age, even old officers who thought themselves long retired. This is a far cry from teaching American schoolboys on the quiet banks of the Charles River.

  Arnauld expressed his fear that the huge energy of mobilization would lead inevitably to deployment and that deployment with all its mass movement would lead inevitably to war: “I do not see and no one asks how what we have done will ever be reversed.” With all the intricacies of planning, he noted, there seemed to be no word for demobilization. Later, after the massive war was fully engaged, it was observed that no one of the participating countries, Austria included, had a plan for demobilization. “What is done cannot be undone,” one general said.

  When on July 28 the declaration of war was issued by Austria against Serbia, with wild tumult in the streets, men and horses and equipment began marching toward the railroad cars that Arnauld and his fellow staff officers had assembled all over the country. “With great pride,” Arnauld wrote, “we watched the lines of young men marching off to war. We were very pleased with what we had accomplished. It could not have been done without us, we told ourselves. Of course there are those who are predicting horrible effects, but they are dismissed quickly as misguided and not knowing what they are talking about. In this, I feel we are reliving Mark Twain’s very cynical ‘War Prayer.’”

  As Arnauld had feared, the huge energy of mobilization by his Austria-Hungary and by all the European powers set in motion the inevitable. Tensions that were building up between Austria and Serbia burst into flame when Austria declared war, setting off a firestorm of reactive war declarations: Russia on Austria, Germany on Russia and France, England on Germany, and so on, eventually involving all major powers. Austria’s first encounters, with Russia in Galicia, turned out to set the tone quickly. It was from the first day a horrible and bloody affair. The devastation of the first few months of war on the eastern front produced shocking results at home. As Arnauld described it, “Our trains that departed carrying the materials of war now returned carrying the near-dead, the maimed, the senseless, pouring back from the eastern front, from the confrontations with Russian artillery.” And Arnauld, the officer in charge of the scheduling, often found himself among them, seeing the bloodied bandages, the stumps of lost limbs, the haggard faces, and hearing the unceasing moans of pain from young men unaccustomed to war. “It is an introduction. Now you are experiencing the horrors of war,” an old officer said to Arnauld as they watched stretchers being unloaded at the Nordbahnhof. “Accustom yourself to it.”

  It was during the time of these first grim war letters from Vienna in August and September 1914 that the world watched in horror as one country after another hurled itself into the fray.

  And it was also at that time when Eleanor, watching safely from the remove of Boston, became certain that she was pregnant.

  33

  “IF NOT YOU, WHO?”

  We felt such elation,” Arnauld wrote, “before such foreboding. We watched our trains pull out from the Nordbahnhof on their way to Galicia and the Russian front, with men and horses and supplies, and we marveled at our modern world and our new role in it, with no idea of what was to come. That was before one of our number, a gloomy son of the aristocracy from Salzburg, pointed out that the same trains would be ‘bringing back the wounded and the dead.’”

  During the mobilization and even in the aftermath of the outbreak of the fighting, Arnauld was of two minds about returning to Boston and the nearness to his beloved Eleanor. He admitted to being consumed by the popular mania fueled by the belief that the whole troublesome matter would be over by Christmas, as soon as the enormous army he and his fellow officers had transported to the eastern front reigned victorious, but he also admitted to a dark pessimism that swept over him, especially in the dead of night, that saw the horror of the battle they had made possible raging on indefinitely.

  The dream came to him nearly every night of fevered sleep, the heroic prince Eugene rising up before him, asking not for war, but for sanity. “You didn’t warn of the horror,” Arnauld said.

  “It is war,” the prince said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. “That is what happens in war.”

  “It is insanity.”

  “It can be stopped, you know.”

  “But how?” Arnauld would ask.

  “What if all sides simply stopped the trains?” he asked Arnauld. “What if someone—someone charismatic like you—rose up princelike on a tabletop in the general headquarters and commanded it?”

  “But I am not a prince,” Arnauld repeated each time, feebly. “I am not charismatic.”

  And always the heroic Eugene, his doppelgänger, responded the same as he did each time he appeared. “If not you, who?” the prince would say. And Arnauld would awake each time with a deep sense of despair and dread.

  Part of him wished simply to return to Boston, to be done with this whole business of war. He carried with him always and everywhere the image of Eleanor’s beautiful presence, and now with the almost overpowering memory of that last night. He cherished it now above all other memories, as he knew the circumstances would not be possible ever again. And over time, in the midst of the anguish that followed the initial enthusiasms for Austria, he longed for a return to the peaceful life of a teacher in a New England boys’ school and the nearness to his Beatrice. But something kept drawing him to war, and the dream kept returning.

  His position took him from staff headquarters out to Galicia, to the Russian front, to inspect the supply lines and to oversee the initial stages of the new challenges of transporting human fare: soldiers to the front and then indeed prisoners of war and the wounded and dead on the return trip.

  On these trips to the battlefields, visits by rail to work out transportation logistics, where he traveled with new recruits—some, having heard now of the horrors there, vomiting from apprehension and fear—and back to Vienna with the countless wounded, so many of them moaning in pain and crying out that it was difficult to concentrate, he saw for himself the evidence that these engagements with both the Russians and the Serbs were so substantial in nature that only the misinformed and the hopelessly jingoisti
c could believe that this war would be over soon, or that war had been a good idea. His letters to Eleanor took on a pessimistic tone. “I fear that I shall not be returning,” he actually said once. “My great inextinguishable fear, haunting me nightly with this specter of war, is that I shall never see you again.”

  Eleanor never faltered in her confidence in his safe return. Once, she wrote, “It will be hard for you, dear Arnauld, but I know, know as surely as I know any part of life, that you will return to St. Gregory’s and to your friends here.”

  Reading these words seemed to transfer that confidence to him, as for the remainder of the first year of the war he never mentioned the dark thoughts again; in fact, he began to sound, at least in writing, positive and optimistic.

  Then in 1915, when the Italians, wishing to better themselves by acquiring new territory, worked out a deal with the Allies—Winston Churchill would later call them “the whores of Europe”—and entered the war on the side of the English and French, Arnauld reflected, along with the Austrian sense of betrayal, a renewed gloom. “Imagine,” he wrote, “being enemies now with old friends with whom we have shared so much literature and culture over the centuries, and only months ago a beer.” And he noted that the opening of a whole new front in northern Italy, all around Trieste, put an entirely new strain on the railroads and gave him a demanding new challenge, pulling him deeper and deeper into the daily logistics, so that resigning his commission and returning to Boston, as he had planned, now seemed “a remote dream.”

  That Arnauld had friends in Italy, as he had friends all over Europe; that he had visited Italy countless times as a young man; that he could walk the streets of Florence, Venice, Verona, and Rome nearly as well as the Ringstrasse, made this whole conflict absurd. As an officer in the Hapsburg army doing his part to make sure that supplies and munitions traveled speedily and efficiently along the railroads, he tried not to think about the possibility that the specific supplies and munitions he sent along their way would lead to the deaths and injuries of his friends and their loved ones.

  When the Italians decided to enter the war on the side of the Allies and began their military campaign to take over Trieste, the principal seaport of the empire, one of his favorite cities in the world, his transportation efforts took on the greatest irony. Arnauld simply could not imagine that those Italians he knew well and whose coffeehouses he had frequented with regularity would think that attacking the Austrian Empire was a good idea.

  Most difficult in this rapid adjustment to Italy’s declaration of war was the tragic consequence for his great friend and cousin Miggo.

  “Remember, he thinks he’s a Rough Rider,” Arnauld said, trying to explain to Alma how, back in Genoa, hearing the call of gallantry and war, Miggo had accepted an officer position in the army. But unlike Arnauld, his cousin Miggo, his father’s nephew, did love the look of an officer’s uniform and the entrée into hearts and beds it brought with it. “Especially the latter,” Arnauld told Alma. “You would have preferred him as your childhood friend,” he added.

  Alma had met Miggo on a number of occasions and admitted to being quite taken, as Eleanor had been, by his panache and flair. “He is for you,” she told her introverted friend Arnauld, “what our Herr Dr. Freud would call a good alter ego.” And then she added, rolling her eyes with her famous license, “Were I not taken…”

  In 1914, while Italy and Austria were still allies, and Arnauld had been sent to Rome to discuss railroad matters with the Italian high command, Miggo had met him and had escorted him around the city, introducing him to every manner of artist and coffeehouse eccentric, using their respective uniforms for maximum effect. He had even tried to arrange for Arnauld a tryst with an exotic Romanian violinist. “We’ll send you back to Vienna,” the irrepressible Miggo said, “with your blood a little more Romanian and your stature a few centimeters taller.”

  And so it was that in his newly activated position in the Italian army, being swept up, Arnauld was sure, in nationalistic fervor—not giving much thought that it would be Austrians and Hungarians and Czechs he would be shooting at—Miggo embraced with vigor the thought of racing across southern Tyrol and into Trieste in a “quick war.” Later, Arnauld wondered how even his brash and impulsive Italo-American cousin could have thought the proud Austrians capable of sitting idly by and watching the pretentious and deceitful takeover.

  And now, adding to the grinding negative effect of watching the wounded pouring back from the Russian front on his trains for all those months, word reached him. Because, this southern war being sudden and new, communication between Genoa and Vienna had not fully terminated, the news arrived almost immediately. It was just as the Italians approached the Isonzo River, on the first day of combat on the plains of Friuli, that an artillery shell burst from an unknown quarter, both sides not yet knowing fully how to coordinate firings with troop movements, and fell into the center of the advanced convoy in which Major Michelangelo Sabatini was riding. Miggo was dead. And Arnauld’s decline into emotional chaos was under way.

  34

  THE BATTLE OF CAPORETTO

  Exactly why Arnauld’s posting had been shifted to the Italian front is never made clear in the various sources. We can only guess. His original assignment of organizing the priorities of the railroad lines from general headquarters in Vienna, “far from harm,” as he described it, had evolved to assignments at stations on the actual fronts, first and temporarily in the east, against the stubborn Russians in Galicia, then what appeared to be permanent placement on the Italian front, securing delivery of supplies and transporting wounded and prisoners away from the war zone. Perhaps as movement of supplies and men became more and more overburdened, it became essential for officers of Arnauld’s experience to be in the center of the action.

  What is certain is that by 1917, the two huge armies had been locked in a two-year stalemate the whole length of the Isonzo River, from the high and rugged Dolomites down to the flatlands of the Adriatic coast, seen from the start by both sides as crucial for capture or defense of the great prize: the port of Trieste.

  The fateful stalemate was punctuated by twelve separate battles, in which one million soldiers died. Since the Austrian defenses featured mountain gun emplacements along the whole expanse of the Isonzo front, Italian attacks required charging up perilously steep mountainsides, encountering barbed wire two and three lines deep and withering machine-gun fire. Occasionally the attackers would break through, leading to hand-to-hand combat and violent counterattack.

  In the first battle alone, there were tens of thousands of casualties on each side.

  The Italian strategy was based on faith in superior numbers in constant attack, wearing down the enemy and allowing no chance of rest.

  Wars are fought with yesterday’s strategies and tomorrow’s technologies, it is said. And so it was on the Isonzo, where the strategies of the nineteenth century met the barbed wire, machine guns, and artillery shells of the twentieth. The Italian high command believed implacably that an enemy who uses mountainous positions is always vulnerable to undercover advancement at the inevitable weak points unexpected by the defender. The Austrians would defend both the Tyrolean and Isonzo regions by holding such high positions, and the Italians would attack uphill with overwhelming numbers, after devastating artillery barrages. The result of this hopelessly antiquated strategy was a total advance of less than ten miles in twelve battles over two years, with too many casualties to count accurately.

  For the Italians, it was to have been a quick acquisition of territory, and the occupation of the ancient seaport. For the outnumbered Austrians, it was simply a fierce resistance to the takeover by the treacherous former allies.

  Life in the trenches on all sections of the stalemated Isonzo was grim. There was little ground on either side of the river that had not been subjected to artillery shelling, machine-gun fire, and carnage. Bodies that had been hastily buried during one part of the campaign were blown out of the ground in the n
ext. The rainwater that accumulated at the bottom of most trenches was rendered fetid by the decomposed flesh and human waste. There were rats everywhere and lice the size of pebbles. The armies of both sides had no choice but to dig in and wait for an enemy offensive or one of its own.

  The change in tone in Arnauld’s letters and journal entries appeared gradually in 1917, a year or so before the armistice and about the time he found himself permanently assigned to a regiment in the heart of the war zone on the Isonzo River. Earlier, in 1915, Arnauld’s letters to Eleanor and his parents bore the rational and objective tone of a university intellectual, his writings to Eleanor more restrained perhaps than those to his parents, such as the following:

  Life along the front, mostly along the Isonzo River, is bleak, and after months of fighting and five separate battles, the soldiers of the empire are resigned to the most wretched of conditions. My journeys there accompanying supply trains through countryside and seeing the effects of deprivation on towns and villages that depended on our trains for food and supplies is shocking. Townspeople stand beside the tracks and at the stations and watch us pass through without stopping. One feels a hopelessness, feeling everything, able to do nothing. Then on the return trip, our train cars filled with wounded and prisoners, no one appears trackside.

  Conditions are even worse in the enemy trenches. Captured Italian soldiers describe the prospects of spending the duration of the war in Austrian prison camps, regardless of how grim they might be, as far better than serving in General Cadorna’s army.

  And then this passage from Arnauld’s war journal. Written now with shaky hand, his sketchy and stark notations tell of the appalling conditions mostly omitted from his letters to his parents and Eleanor.