The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [72]
20. heil wien! heil berlin!
The century is fourteen years old, and so is Elisabeth, a serious young girl who is allowed to sit at dinner with the grown-ups. These are ‘men of distinction, high civil servants, professors and high-ranking officers in the army’ and she listens to the talk of politics, but is told not to talk herself unless she is talked to. She walks with her father to the bank each morning. She is building up her own library in her bedroom: each new book has a neat EE in pencil and a number.
Gisela is a pretty young girl of ten who enjoys clothes. Iggie is a boy of nine who is slightly overweight and self-conscious about it; he isn’t good at maths, but likes drawing very much indeed.
Summer arrives, and the children travel to Kövesces with Emmy. She has ordered a new costume, black with pleating to the blouse, for riding Contra, her favourite bay.
On Sunday 28th June 1914 the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Hapsburg Empire, is assassinated in Sarajevo by a young Serbian nationalist. On Thursday Die Neue Freie Presse writes that ‘the political consequences of this act are being greatly exaggerated’.
On the following Saturday, Elisabeth writes a postcard to Vienna:
4th July 1914
Dearest Papa
Thank you so much for arranging about the Professors for next term. Today it was very warm in the morning so we could all go swimming in the lake but now it is colder and it may rain. I went to Pistzan with Gerty and Eva and Witold but I didn’t like it very much. Toni has had nine puppies, one has died and we have to feed them with a bottle. Gisela likes her new clothes. A thousand kisses.
Your Elisabeth
On Sunday 5th July the Kaiser promises German support for Austria against Serbia, and Gisela and Iggie write a postcard of the river at Kövesces: ‘Darling Papa, My dresses fit very well. We swim every day as it is so hot. All well. Love and kisses from Gisela and Iggie.’
On Monday 6th July it is cold at Kövesces and they don’t swim. ‘I painted a flower today. Love and heaps of kisses from Gisela.’
On Saturday 18th July mother and children return to Vienna from Kövesces. On Monday 20th July the British Ambassador, Sir Maurice de Bunsen, reports to Whitehall that the Russian Ambassador to Vienna has left for a fortnight’s holiday. That same day the Ephrussi leave for Switzerland: for their ‘long month’.
The bathing lake at Kövesces
The Russian imperial flag still flies from the boathouse roof. Viktor, worried that his son will grow up and have to do military service in Russia, has petitioned the Tsar to change his citizenship. This year Viktor has become a subject of his Majesty Franz Josef, the eighty-four-year-old Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary and Bohemia, King of Lombardy-Venetia, of Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, Galicia, Lodomeria and Illyria, Grand Duke of Tuscany, King of Jerusalem and Duke of Auschwitz.
On 28th July Austria declares war on Serbia. On 29th July the Emperor declares: ‘I put my faith in my peoples, who have always gathered round my throne, in unity and loyalty, through every tempest, who have always been ready for the heaviest sacrifices for the honour, the majesty, the power of the Fatherland.’ On 1st August Germany declares war on Russia. On the 3rd Germany declares war on France, and then the following day invades neutral Belgium. And the whole pack of cards falls: alliances are invoked and Britain declares war on Germany. On 6th August Austria declares war on Russia.
Mobilisation letters are sent out in all the languages of the Empire from Vienna. Trains are requisitioned. All Jules and Fanny Ephrussi’s young French footmen, careful around the porcelain and good at rowing on the lake, are called up. The Ephrussi are stuck in the wrong country.
Emmy travels to Zurich to enlist the help of the Austrian Consul General, Theophil von Jäger – a lover of hers – to get the household back to Vienna. There