Quinquina Martial Wine flashed into his mind, a medicament she had taken for many long years. Her face? Shutting his eyes, he could still evoke it, but soon it vanished, blurring into the reddish circular twilight. He became mild-mannered in the house and on the farm, sometimes stroking a horse, smiling at the cows, drinking liquor more often than before, and one day he wrote a brief letter to his son outside the normal schedule. People began greeting him with smiles; he nodded pleasantly. Summer came. The holidays brought the son and the friend; the old man drove them to town, entered a restaurant, had a few gulps of slivovitz, and ordered a lavish meal for the boys.

The son became a lawyer, visited home more frequently, looked around the estate, felt one day that he wanted to manage it and abandon his law career. He confessed his wish to his father. The major said, “It’s too late. You’ll never become a farmer or manage an estate in your lifetime. You’ll make an able official, that’s all.” The matter was settled. The son obtained a political office, becoming a district commissioner in Austrian Silesia. While the Trotta name may have disappeared from the authorized schoolbooks, it had not vanished from the secret files of the higher political authorities, and the five thousand guldens allotted by the Kaiser’s favor assured Trotta the official a constant benevolence and furtherance from anonymous higher places. He advanced swiftly. Two years before the son’s promotion to district captain, his father died.

He left a surprising will. Since he was certain—he wrote—that his son was not a good farmer, and since he hoped that the Trottas, grateful to the Kaiser for his continual favor, could advance to high ranks in government service and live more happily than he, the author of the testament, he had decided, in memory of his late father, to bequeath the estate, made over to him years earlier by his father-in-law, together with all his movable and immovable chattel, to the Military Invalid Fund, whereby the beneficiaries of this last will and testament would have no further obligation than to bury the testator as modestly as possible in the cemetery where his father had been interred and, if it was convenient, near the deceased. He, the testator, requested that they refrain from any ostentation. All residual moneys, fifteen thousand florins plus accrued interest placed with the Efrussi Bank in Vienna, as well as any other money, silver and copper, to be found in the house, and also the late mother’s ring, watch, and necklace, belonged to the testator’s only son, Baron Franz von Trotta und Sipolje.

A Viennese military band, an infantry company, a representative of the Knights of the Order of Maria Theresa, a few officers of the south Hungarian regiment whose modest hero the major had been, all military invalids capable of marching, two officials of the Royal and Cabinet Chancellery, an officer of the Military Cabinet, and a junior officer carrying the Order of Maria Theresa on a black-draped cushion: they formed the official cortège. Franz, the son, walked, black, thin, and alone. The band played the same march they had played at the grandfather’s funeral. The salvos fired this time were louder and faded out with longer echoes.

The son did not weep. No one wept for the deceased. Everyone remained dry and solemn. No one spoke at the grave. Near the constable sergeant lay Major Baron von Trotta und Sipolje, the Knight of Truth. They set up a plain military headstone on which, beneath name, rank, and regiment, the proud epithet was engraved in thin black letters: THE HERO OF SOLFERINO.

Now little was left of the dead man but this stone, a faded glory, and the portrait. That is how a farmer walks across the soil in spring—and later, in summer, the traces of his steps are obscured by the billowing richness of the wheat he once sowed. That same week, the Imperial and Royal High Commissioner Trotta von Sipolje received a letter of condolence from His Majesty, which spoke twice about the forever “unforgotten services” rendered by the late deceased.

Chapter 2

NOWHERE IN THE entire jurisdiction of the division was there a finer military band than that of Infantry Regiment No. Ten in the small district town of W in Moravia. The bandmaster was one of those Austrian military musicians who, thanks to an exact memory and an ever-alert need for new variations on old melodies, were able to compose a new march every month. All the marches resembled one another like soldiers.