Unlike his English, French, and even German confrère, the Austrian officer was not allowed to wear mufti when off duty, and military regulations prescribed that in his private life he should always act ‘standesgemäss’, that is, in accordance with the special etiquette and code of honour of the Austrian military caste. Among themselves officers of the same rank, even those who were not personally acquainted, never addressed each other in the formal third person plural, ‘Sie’, but in the familiar second person singular, ‘Du’, and thereby the fraternity of all members of the caste and the gulf separating them from civilians were emphasized. The final criterion of an officer’s behaviour was invariably not the moral code of society in general, but the special moral code of his caste, and this frequently led to mental conflicts, one of which plays an important part in this book.

—STEFAN ZWEIG

There are two kinds of pity. One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart’s impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another’s unhappiness ...; and the other, the only kind that counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond.

‘To him that hath, to him shall be given.’ These words from the Scriptures the writer may safely restate as: ‘To him that hath told much, to him shall much be told.’ Nothing is further from the truth than the only too common notion that the author’s fantasy is incessantly at work within him, that his invention has an inexhaustible and continuous fund of stories and incidents upon which to draw. In reality he need only, instead of setting out to find, let himself be found by, characters and happenings, which, in so far as he has preserved the heightened capacity for observing and listening, unceasingly seek him out as their instrument of communication. To the person who has over and over again tried to trace human destinies, many tell their own story.

The following story was related to me almost entirely in the form in which I here present it — and, moreover, in most unusual circumstances. One evening when I was last in Vienna, tired after a very full day, I sought out a restaurant on the outskirts of the city which I imagined had long since ceased to be fashionable and was but little frequented. No sooner had I entered it, however, than I was made disagreeably aware of my mistake. As I passed the first table, an acquaintance jumped up with every sign of genuine pleasure — I, to be sure, did not respond with equal warmth — and invited me to join him. It would be untrue to say that this importunate gentleman was in himself an impossible or unpleasant fellow; he was merely one of those embarrassingly convivial souls who collect acquaintances as assiduously as children collect postage-stamps and are therefore peculiarly proud of every fresh addition to their collection. To this good-natured eccentric — in his spare time an erudite and competent archivist — the whole meaning of existence lay in the modest satisfaction derived from being able to remark with airy nonchalance at the mention of any name that received mention from time to time in the Press: ‘A close friend of mine,’ or ‘Ah, I met him only yesterday!’ or ‘My friend A. tells me, and my friend B. thinks,’ and so on throughout the entire alphabet. His friends could always count on him to applaud loudly at their first nights, he would ring up every actress the morning after the show to offer his congratulations, he never forgot a birthday, he forbore to mention disagreeable Press notices and invariably drew attention to the favourable ones out of genuine friendliness. Not at all a bad fellow, then, for he was genuinely anxious to please and was delighted if one so much as asked a small favour of him, or better still, added a fresh specimen to his cabinet of curiosities.

But there is no need to describe friend ‘Also-present’ — the name by which this variety of good-natured parasite within the variegated species of snob is generally known in Vienna — in greater detail, for everyone is familiar with the type and knows it is impossible to repel its touching and inoffensive advances without being brutal. Resigning myself to my fate, therefore, I sat down beside him, and a quarter of an hour had passed in idle chatter when a man entered the restaurant — tall and striking on account of the contrast between his fresh, youthful complexion and an intriguing greyness at the temples. Something about the way he held himself immediately betrayed the ex-officer. My neighbour jumped up eagerly to hail him with the assiduity so typical of him. The newcomer, however, responded with indifference rather than politeness, and scarcely had the waiter dashed up and taken his order when friend ‘Also-present’ turned to me and said in a low whisper: ‘Do you know who that is?’ Knowing of old the pride he took in triumphantly displaying any even moderately interesting specimen from his collection, and fearing long-winded explanations, I merely uttered a perfunctory ‘No,’ and continued to dissect my Sachertorte. This apathy on my part merely had the effect of increasing the celebrity-monger’s excitement; screening his mouth cautiously with his hand, he breathed in an undertone: ‘Why, that’s Hofmiller of the Commissariat. You know, the fellow who won the Order of Maria Theresa in the war.’ Since this information did not seem to bowl me over as he had hoped, he began, with the fervour of a patriotic school primer, to enlarge upon all the valiant deeds performed by Captain Hofmiller in the war, first with the cavalry, then on an observation flight over the Piave, when he had shot down three planes single-handed, and finally with a machine-gun company, when for three days he had occupied and held a sector of the front — all this accompanied by a mass of detail (which I omit) and punctuated the whole time by exclamations of boundless astonishment that I should never have heard of this paragon, upon whom the Emperor Charles had in person conferred the most rare of all decorations in the Austrian army.

Involuntarily I yielded to the temptation to glance across at the other table so as to see for once at close quarters a duly and historically certified hero. But I encountered a hard, indignant look that seemed to say, ‘So that fellow’s been talking a lot of rot about me, has he? You won’t find anything to look at here.’ Whereupon he slewed his chair round with an unmistakably hostile movement and flatly turned his back on us. Somewhat abashed, I looked away, and from now on avoided so much as a glance at the cloth on his table. Shortly afterwards I took leave of my good gossip, noticing, however, as I left, that he immediately went over to his hero’s table, no doubt to give him as glowing an account of me as he had given me of him.

That was all — a mere exchange of glances. And I should have forgotten all about this fleeting encounter, but it so happened that the very next day, at a small party, I once more found myself face to face with this forbidding gentleman. In evening dress he looked even more striking and elegant than in the informal tweeds of the day before. We both had some difficulty in suppressing a faint smile, that significant smile that passes between two people who, in a fairly large group of people, share a closely guarded secret. He recognized me, as I did him, and we were probably both equally irritated or amused at the thought of our unsuccessful celebrity-monger of the day before. At first we avoided speaking to each other, and in any case it would have been useless to try to do so, for a heated discussion was already going on all around us.

The subject of this discussion will easily be guessed when I mention that it took place in the year 1937. Future historians of our epoch will one day record that in the year 1937 almost every conversation in every country of this distracted Europe of ours was dominated by speculation as to the probability or improbability of a new world war. Wherever people met, this theme exercised an irresistible fascination, and one sometimes had a feeling that it was not the people themselves who were working off their fears in conjectures and hopes, but, so to speak, the very air, the storm-laden atmosphere of the times, which, charged with latent suspense, was endeavouring to unburden itself in speech.

Our host, a lawyer by profession and dogmatic by nature, opened the discussion.