It was a hand devoid of warmth or pressure. It branded the word ‘son’ as a lie, contradicted it even. Elizabeth came and the hatter spared me the trouble of speaking: ‘Herr Trotta is going to the war,’ said my father-in-law, as if he had meant to say that I was going to the Riviera for my health, ‘and he would like to marry you first.’

He must have used the same tone of voice an hour earlier in the procurement section of the War Office whilst speaking of the uniform caps. Elizabeth, however, was there, with her smile which shone out from her to me, born of her, an eternal, self-renewing, silvery joy, which seemed to ring out although it was soundless.

We embraced.We kissed, for the first time, hotly, almost shamelessly, although her father was watching us; perhaps, indeed, in consciously wanton delight that a witness to our secret stood nearby. I had to break off. There was no time. Death stood behind me, and already I was more the child of death than the son of the hatter. I had to report to my Twenty-First Jägers in the Landstrasser Hauptstrasse. I hurried out, straight from her arms and into the army; from love to extinction. I bore each with equal courage in my heart. I called a cab and drove to the barracks.

There I met several friends and comrades. Among them, like myself, some who had come straight from an embrace.

[XV]

THEY CAME WARM from an embrace, and to them it seemed as if they had already performed their greatest duty of the war. Their betrothals were announced. Every one of them had a girl to marry even if she were not so much appropriate as accidental, for in those days they came flying to the likes of us, from unknown districts and out of undiscoverable motives, like moths on summer nights, fluttering through open windows on to table, bed or mantelpiece, flighty, wanton, yielding, the silken offerings of a short and splendid night. If only peace had continued all of us would certainly have gone on resisting any legal commitment to a woman. Only heirs to thrones were, in those days, constrained to marry young. By the time they were thirty our fathers had already been serious heads of households, often with numerous progeny. In our generation, however, doomed as it was to war, the procreative instinct was visibly extinguished. We had no wish to continue our line. Death not only crossed his bony hands above the glasses from which we drank, but also at night above the beds in which we slept with women. And for that very reason our women were of very little consequence. We were not even particularly addicted to the pastime which procured us our pleasure.

But now that war was suddenly calling us up to the reserve depots our first reaction was not a consideration of death, but of honour and honour’s sister, danger. A sense of honour, too, is an anaesthetic, and in us it lulled both fear and foreboding.When the incurably ill make their wills and put their earthly affairs in order, a shiver may well run up their spines. But we were still young, and sound in every limb! No real shivers crawled down our spines although it amused and flattered us to provoke them in others.We made our wills out of vanity, and out of vanity we rushed into betrothal at a speed which from the start ruled out any question of serious consideration or even of remorse. Betrothal made us seem even nobler than we were already through our willingness to shed our blood. Although we feared death, though at the arm’s length of a long lifetime, betrothal made death less hateful and less frightening. In a way we were burning our own boats, and that unforgettable, fierce frenzy with which we went into our first unlucky battles was certainly sustained by the fear of returning to ‘domestic life’, to fading furniture, to women losing their first fresh charm, to children which come into the world as angels and grow up into alien and detestable creatures. No, we would have none of that. Danger was inescapable anyway, but to sweeten it we engaged ourselves to marry, and so armoured ourselves to face it as if it were an unknown but far from hostile home which beckoned to us . .