Florian (27 page)

He offered his hand, for the first time. Anton clasped only the finger-tips with his work-gnarled hand, and was deeply moved. He did not dare utter another word.

“Come back hale and hearty!” Konrad Gruber said. It sounded like an order. Anton silently vowed to obey this order, too.

He went into the stable once more. Holding Florian's muzzle in his cupped hands he stared long and silently into the great, dark, shining eyes before turning away.

That was his farewell.

Amid the tumult of troops waiting to be entrained he remained alone. Around him hundreds of women and girls, swarms of children. Everyone embracing, kissing, weeping and shouting. No woman, no girl, no child bothered about Anton. No tear was shed at his departure for the battlefield and no kiss lingered on his mouth or cheek.

A drunken soldier fell on his neck and held fast to him. Anton was startled but didn't move; he held up the fellow who babbled incoherent words into his face: “Brother, we'll show 'em. We'll swallow 'em like sandwiches, the dirty dogs. . . .”

The band played one march after the other, obviously to drown out the loud sobbing and wailing of the women and children. The spirits of the soldiers surrounded by their kith and kin had to be kept up, too.

The drunkard let go of Anton. “You're dumb.” He cursed and fell on somebody else's neck.

Anton stood there all alone and listened to the martial airs, lively, stormy, courageous rhythms, ricocheted around by the big bass drum, and bathed in a shower of musical sparks from the crashing cymbals. The horns lilted the military strains in high long breaths. The bombardon carried them on its broad bass back. And the wood-winds adorned each march with tonal arabesques, threw octave-high somersaults, nestled close to the tune or fluttered above it. Without intermission one march followed another.
Under
the Double Eagle, Prinz Eugen, O du mein Österreich.
They enforced good humor, they whipped up the spirit, they caused a concordant tumult. It was a gallant, high-hearted occasion.

Anton listened attentively.

Of festival he could see nothing. Upsurging youthful force sounded here and there; yes. An occasional sanguinary cry to battle was accompanied by shouts induced by alcoholic temerity, by mob courage, by deliberate self-intoxication. Shrieking, men fell into the song, men desirous of making their leavetaking from mothers and wives easier. They acted reckless and gay and unafraid. The military music helped them. Anton did not notice anything of that. The marches knocked at his ear-drums but gained no admittance to his heart. He was obsessed neither by courage nor by fear. The happenings around him meant little to him. He was not bound to all this. His simple soul did not seek to grasp the situation. It so happened that he had put on the uniform. It so happened that he was assigned to the infantry. It so happened that he was about to start on a train journey with many other soldiers—bound somewhere. It had to happen so. A colossal, undeniable “had to.”

Anton was a nonentity, a stableboy whom the mad torrent rushing through the world carried away from his homeland into the unknown distance. This nonentity, called Anton Pointner, which despite its obscurity had known a limited happiness of its own, a human destiny, didn't dare entertain the idea of protest. Anton abandoned himself without resistance, without a trace of resistance.

While the train rolled through the night, while comrades around him chattered, laughed, sang and dropped off to sleep one after the other, he sat in a tomb of silence and stared at nothing.

Florian . . . Konrad Gruber . . . the beautiful, peaceful existence . . . the wide yards of the stable. Anton drove these images from his mind, forbade himself to remember.

A young man in the midst of the sprawling soldiers suddenly launched into the national anthem. His fresh tenor voice sang the hymn as bravely as children sing patriotic hymns in school. He sang in the darkness of the car to reassure himself, to give himself courage.

Anton recalled that distant dawn at Lipizza. Florian, new-born, lay in the straw unable yet to rise. Captain von Neustift came to the stable just as the national anthem sounded.

“Siebele . . .” Anton murmured. “Siebele . . .”

The words the young man was just singing penetrated to his consciousness:
“Gut und Blut für unsern Kaiser, Gut und Blut für's Vaterland.”

That was it! Now he knew. It was the most natural, the most obvious thing. It was this “had to.” Having nothing else to give to the Emperor, he gave his blood. His blood?

Who would want Anton's blood?

Who could want to shed his blood?

What would result, what would be gained, what would be saved after his blood had been spilled?

Anton's head was awhirl and hung heavily against his chest. He fell into the depths of dreamless slumber.

F
LORIAN RARELY QUITTED THE STABLE. Now and then the Emperor drove out; from Schönbrunn to the Imperial Palace; then to several hospitals to visit the wounded. It affected him. And he was old. The war dragged on. The end was not in sight. So he kept to Schönbrunn.

Once Wilhelm II visited him. Franz Joseph sent a representative to the station at Penzing to receive and escort the German Kaiser. There was no Guard of Honor, no team of six
à la Doumont
. Kaiser Wilhelm arrived in Schönbrunn by motorcar. The soldiers had more serious duties than to form guards of honor.

The horses were no longer used. It was deemed unwise to show these luxurious creatures to the populace. Now that nobody saw Franz Joseph anymore, rumors and jokes about him ran from mouth to mouth. They said that Franz Joseph had died, only he was not aware of it because no one had the heart to tell him. And such like nonsense.

But Franz Joseph lived on, in clear sight of his fate. Among the warring Central Powers he was one of the very few whose eye peered unflinchingly into the future. For the first time during his long reign he read the future clearly. In his old age he had become far-sighted.

At Gorlice the army broke through the Russian horde and recaptured Galicia for Austria, in fact penetrated far into enemy territory. In commemoration of this victory a woman friend of the Emperor gave him a statue of Nike.

When she visited him later, Franz Joseph greeted her with upraised arms. “For God's sake,
gnädige Frau
, I beg of you, take back your gift. You mean well, I know that, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart. But please take it back.”

“Oh, your Majesty,” the lady stammered in consternation, “such an important victory . . . one's simply got to be happy.”

“What does it mean?” Franz Joseph cried. “What do you call a victory? To be glad? Really happy?
Gnädige Frau
, there is no cause for that at all. We are going to perish. I am not a pessimist, certainly not! But I know what is and what is going to be.”

“Your Majesty,” the lady broke out in confusion.

With profound sorrow, with all the exalted majesty that was his, he said: “We are standing at the abyss. Only one thing is left: to perish honorably.”

He knew the demoralizing effects of the hunger blockade, knew the people's diminishing powers of resistance, the inner corrosion going on relentlessly. The longer men were in the trenches, the longer they were kept there, the more terribly Death reaped harvest among them.

Franz Joseph looked the Medusa-face of the future straight in the eye, saw the onrushing disaster, the fall of his dynasty. And he was silent.

Beyond that he worked, he did his duty.

The stables waited. One year, a second year. In vain. None but old men busied themselves there now. The younger ones were all at the front. Among the younger were fifty-year-old men. The horses, however, were ignorant of the war; they had been untouched by the famine so far.

Konrad Gruber drove Florian and Capitano around in the yards, and exercised also the other personal horses of the Emperor. He rarely spoke a word. He forced himself to be hopeful, to think of pleasant things. But his heart was heavy, although he wouldn't admit that even to himself.

The entire Imperial Court, the stables included, was like the face of a stopped clock, without movement. Everything had become aimless, meaningless.

A
UTUMN NIGHT FELL, OUT THERE on the Polish plain where the trenches of the Austrians and the Russians faced each other. Dark starless night. But no peace. The torturing thunder of drum-fire had broken out to cover the attack. A hell of bayonet, hand-to-hand fighting.

Tumult. Groans. Wild outcries. Pistol-shots.

Finally a tramping, a clattering, and murmurs lost in the distance.

And at the very end, silence and darkness.

Here and there a groan, a sigh, a death rattle.

Anton lay on his back and did not move. He breathed painfully and could not stop it when his breath turned into throaty rasps. His whole life long he had been a quiet man, never noisy, and he remained to the end of his existence quiet, unobtrusive, alone and in the dark.

His body had been torn apart by shrapnel. When shrapnel knocked him down he had hardly felt any pain. Only surprise. He was surprised to find himself too weak to rise. Patiently he suffered. Waited. The stretcher-bearers would come and fetch him.

He felt his body and his limbs. Wet. . . . Then he gave it up, for even groping with his hands proved terribly difficult.

And his blood flowed. . . .

During his lifetime he had appreciated but little the glory of the realm, of the earth, of the landscape. Now Vienna, St. Stephan's, loomed up before him. The square, that wide square before the Palace laughing in the sun. Over there Maria Theresia sat on her throne. That was all. For those symbols he gave his blood. He hadn't shed his blood voluntarily. It was that overwhelming, that devastating “had to.”

Anton was not thinking of that. Nor of his ebbing life. Only the marvelously beautiful pictures he had carried in his soul awoke and passed in review before his mind's eye now that he was so wide awake.

And he thought of Florian. Of the strong, gentle, intelligent Florian whom he loved and who loved him. Here, right in front of him they were, Florian's great limpid eyes, shining with affection. Anton felt the velvety lips, the rose-tinted, fine, quivering nostrils. His fingers played in the dank ground as they would have over Florian's muzzle.

When morning came Anton lay quiet, his eyes wide open. But he saw the rising sun no more.

•  •  •

November came sluggishly. One afternoon—it was already dusk—all the church-bells in Vienna, all the church-bells in the wide-flung empire began to toll. Franz Joseph had lain down to his eternal slumber.

At his ascension to the throne, sixty-eight years before, the lands under the Hapsburg crown had writhed in blood and fire. He sank into his grave while, more fiercely than then, blood and flame seethed around him.

He sat at his desk, at Schönbrunn, and signed papers when the black wings of death fluttered hoveringly over him.

“I am tired,” he said. They were his last words.

He had never before admitted to fatigue. Untiringly he had stood staunch and refused to admit defeat, be the blow never so crushing. This time he really was deathly tired, and as soon as they had brought him to bed he closed his eyes. As a man of duty, which he always was, he postponed the end long enough to receive the Holy Sacrament. Then he fell asleep.

So used up was his eighty-six-year-old body that his cheek crumbled and remained in the hands of the men who took his death mask.

Franz Joseph had to be borne to the Chapel of the Imperial Palace. Konrad Gruber drove the eight massive blacks which drew the heavy carved hearse. For thirty years he had driven the Emperor. That function he now performed for the last time.

Prince Buchowsky, till now the equerry, retired into private life; whether voluntarily or by order of Emperor Karl, nobody knew. Enough—the prince was on hand no longer. His successor had not yet put in an appearance at the stables. The ceremonial of an Imperial funeral was traditional, however. The councilors knew what to do. Gruber was the novice in this case.