I don’t know how you writers feel about it — to me, at least, to live in a halo of glory seems unnatural and unendurable, and I felt genuinely relieved when I was no longer obliged to strut about with my heroic history writ large on my uniform. Even to this day it annoys me when people rake up my glorious past, and I may as well confess to you that I was very nearly on the point yesterday of coming over to your table and telling that chattering fool he’d better find someone else to brag about. The awed look you gave me kept riling me for the rest of the evening, and I had a good mind, just in order to give that fellow the lie, to compel you to hear from my own lips by what tortuous paths I attained to the status of a hero. It’s a very odd story, and yet it may serve to show that courage is often nothing but inverted weakness. Incidentally, I wouldn’t mind telling you the whole story straight out here and now. Something that goes back a quarter of a century in a man’s life no longer concerns him, but quite another person. Have you time? And it wouldn’t bore you, would it?’

Of course I had time, and we paced up and down the now deserted streets far into the night. I have only made a few changes in his narrative (I need scarcely add it was not related to me at a single interview), such as putting Uhlans instead of Hussars, to conceal the identity of the various garrisons, and, of course, changing the names of people and places. But in no instance have I added anything essential of my own invention, and it is not I but the man who lived the story who now narrates it.

* * *

The whole thing began with a blunder on my part, an entirely innocent piece of clumsiness, a gaffe, as the French call it. Then followed an attempt to put things right; but if you try to repair a watch in too much of a hurry, you’re as likely as not to put the whole works out of order. Even today, now that years have gone by, I am unable to decide exactly where my sheer gaucherie ended and my guilt began. I dare say I shall never know.

I was twenty-five at the time and a second lieutenant in the —th Regiment of Imperial Uhlans. I cannot claim ever to have been particularly keen about soldiering or felt it to be my vocation. But when you get four growing boys with voracious appetites and two girls in the family of an Austrian official, and there’s barely enough to feed them, you don’t bother much about their inclinations, but push them out at an early age into the treadmill of a profession, so that they won’t be a charge on the household any longer than necessary. My brother, who even at his first school swotted so hard that he ruined his eyesight, was sent to a seminary for priests; I was packed off, because of my sturdy physique, to a military academy. From that point onwards the thread of life spins itself out mechanically, there’s no need to do any more lubricating. The State sees to everything. In a few years, out of a pale, adolescent youngster it fashions, free of charge, after the prescribed military pattern, an ensign with a downy moustache, and hands him over, ready for use, to the army. One day, on the Emperor’s birthday, according to the usual custom, I was discharged from the academy, not yet eighteen years old, and shortly afterwards the first star flashed out on my collar; thus the first stage was reached, and now the successive stages of promotion could reel themselves off mechanically at suitable intervals, to end up with gout and a pension. That I should enter the cavalry of all things, the most fashionable and expensive arm of the service, was by no means my personal wish, but a caprice on the part of my Aunt Daisy, who had married my father’s elder brother as his second wife on his leaving the Ministry of Finance for a more remunerative post as the president of a bank. At once rich and snobbish, she could not bear the thought that anyone connected with her who happened also to be called Hofmiller should ‘disgrace’ the family by serving in the infantry; and since she made me an allowance of a hundred crowns a month to indulge this whim, I had to make a show of humble gratitude to her on every possible occasion. Whether it was to my liking to serve in the cavalry or, indeed, to enter the army at all, no one had ever considered, I myself least of all. Whenever I was in the saddle I felt fine, and my thoughts did not travel far beyond my horse’s neck.

In November, 1913, the year when my story opens, some order or other must have passed from one department to another, for before you could say Jack Robinson our squadron was transferred from Jaroslau to another small garrison town on the Hungarian frontier. It is of no importance whether I call the little town by its right name or not, for two buttons on a uniform could not more closely resemble each other than does one Austrian provincial garrison town another. In one as in the other the same military establishments: barracks, a riding-school, a parade-ground, an officers’ mess, and in addition three hotels, two cafés, a pâtisserie, a wine-bar, a dingy music-hall with faded soubrettes who, as a side-line, most obligingly divide their attentions between the regular officers and the volunteers. Everywhere soldiering entails the same busily empty monotony; hour after hour is mapped out in accordance with inflexible, antediluvian regulations, and even one’s leisure does not seem to offer much in the way of variety. In the officers’ mess the same faces, the same conversation; at the café the same games of cards and billiards. Sometimes one is amazed that the good God should trouble to give the six or seven hundred roofs of a little town of this sort the background of a different sky and a different countryside.

My new garrison had, it is true, one advantage to offer over the former one in Galicia; it was a stopping-place for express trains, and was situated on the one hand near Vienna and on the other at no great distance from Budapest. Anyone who had money — and there are no end of wealthy fellows in the cavalry, to say nothing of the volunteers, who are either aristocrats or sons of industrialists — might, if he could get off, take the five o’clock train to Vienna and be back again at half-past two in the morning by the night express: time enough, that is, to do a theatre, to saunter about the Ringstrasse, to play the cavalier and keep a look-out for chance amours; some of the officers were even in the enviable position of keeping a flat or some kind of pied-à-terre for such purposes. Unfortunately, such diverting escapades were beyond the scope of my monthly allowance.