Their progenitor had been knighted after the Battle of Solferino. He was a Slovene. Sipolje—the German name for his native village—became his title of nobility. Fate had elected him for a special deed. But he then made sure that later times lost all memory of him.

At the Battle of Solferino, he, as an infantry lieutenant, commanded a platoon. The fighting had been raging for half an hour. Three paces ahead of him, he could see the white backs of his soldiers. The front line of his platoon was kneeling, the second line standing. All the men were cheery and confident of victory. They had lavishly devoured food and liquor at the expense of and in honor of the Kaiser, who had been in the field since yesterday. Here and there, a soldier fell from the line. Trotta swiftly leaped into every gap, shooting from the orphaned rifles of the dead or wounded. By turns he serried the thinned rank or widened it, his eyes sharpened a hundredfold, peering in many directions, his ears straining in many directions. Right through the rattling of guns, his quick ears caught his captain’s few, loud orders. His sharp eyes broke through the blue-gray fog curtaining the enemy’s lines. He never shot without aiming, and his every last bullet struck home. The men sensed his hand and his gaze, heard his shouts, and felt confident.

The enemy paused. The command scurried along the interminable front rank: “Stop shooting!” Here and there a ramrod still clattered, here and there a shot rang out, belated and lonesome. The blue-gray fog between the fronts lifted slightly. All at once, they were in the noonday warmth of the cloudy, silvery, thundery sun. Now, between the lieutenant and the backs of the soldiers, the Kaiser appeared with two staff officers. He held a field glass supplied by one of his escorts and was about to place it on his eyes. Trotta knew what that meant: even assuming that the enemy was retreating, the rear guard must still be facing the Austrians, and anyone raising binoculars was marking himself as a worthy target. And this was the young Kaiser! Trotta’s heart was in his throat. Terror at the inconceivable, immeasurable catastrophe that would destroy Trotta, the regiment, the army, the state, the entire world drove burning chills through his body. His knees quaked. And the eternal grudge of the subaltern frontline officer against the high-ranking staff officers, who haven’t the foggiest sense of bitter reality, dictated the action that indelibly stamped the lieutenant’s name on the history of his regiment. Both his hands reached toward the monarch’s shoulders in order to push him down. The lieutenant probably grabbed too hard; the Kaiser promptly fell. His escorts hurled themselves upon the falling man.