Almost from the moment Louise and Mattachich crossed the border into Croatia, he realized that their return to his native country was a mistake. The fantasy that once there they would somehow find a solution to their problems disappeared as soon as the country itself became a reality. In backwoods Croatia they were as deep in debt as ever, in greater danger of arrest than they had been before, and dependent on others for their accommodation. Everyone from the Banus (governor) of Croatia downwards knew where they were, the newspapers in Agram included. They had to submit to the humiliation of being transformed from Ozegovich’s patrons to his beggarly lodgers; and Ozegovich’s wife (his ‘Platonic’ wife, since she and her husband were barely on speaking terms) made no secret of her resentment of their presence.
Nevertheless she asked neighbours from miles around to come and goggle at this notorious couple, and encouraged them night after night to drink too much and to pester the newcomers with unwanted questions. Formerly an actress, Eleana Ozegovich was a tall, slender woman with long arms that hung from her shoulders in a curiously inert, sexually provocative manner. She also had a round chin and baby-blue eyes and gave herself airs when merely walking across a room – arms dangling, hands dangling, pointed shoes turning out at every stride. When no neighbours were present she herself took up the role of inquisitor and hint-dropper; and did it crudely enough too. ‘Why don’t you tell us what really happened?…You know so much more about that money-business than all those stupid people in Vienna…Last time I was there people were talking about nothing else…’ Eventually this kind of nagging produced the effect she was seeking, consciously or otherwise. One evening Mattachich snarled at her that he’d had enough, she had better fucking leave him alone. At that point both husband and wife turned on him. Who did he think he was, they owed him nothing, he was a guest in their house, he was nobody’s boss here, everybody knew what he’d got up to with those moneylenders, and so forth. It ended with the two men challenging each other to a duel with swords, pistols, stones, bottles, who cared, yes, now, outside the house, yes, in the bloody dark, why not, he (Mattachich) couldn’t miss anything so big and fat while Ozegovich swore to God that he’d just aim at the smell…
By that time the women were in tears, Louise was clinging to Ozegovich and Eleana to Mattachich, with Marie Fugger going from the one pair to the other, pleading with the men to shake hands. Which they refused to do, before staggering upstairs to bed.
So they had to go. After an exchange of telegrams the Mattachich party left for the Schloss Lobor. This was something Mattachich had hoped to avoid. Keglevich had made it plain that he wanted to have nothing to do with the runaways, and in any case Mattachich’s pride made it difficult for him to crawl home to his mother. But he had nowhere else to go. When they arrived at the Schloss, they learned that Keglevich had left immediately he heard they were coming. Mattachich also found his mother and Fiedler, the estate manager, on such close terms he had to wonder if Keglevich’s departure hadn’t been imminent anyway.
All this took place before Bachrach’s visit to the Schloss; by the time the lawyer arrived Mattachich’s attitude to his situation and Louise’s was both more settled and more desperate. He now had a trick up his sleeve – or in his pocket – that freed him from fear of the actions and judgements of others. If he and Louise were ‘attacked’, as he put it, he would shoot her and then kill himself. It was as simple as that. To show how serious he was about it, he carried his revolver with him at all times by day and kept it at night on the cabinet beside the bed.
These threats succeeded in alarming everyone around him, his mother and Louise aside. His mother did not believe he would go through with it – and said so, which made him watch his tongue in her presence. Louise on the other hand did believe him and was unperturbed. Even before leaving Nice she had told him that she was as ready to die with him as Mary Vetsera had been with Rudolph. (‘Do you think that little tart loved Rudolph more than I love you?’) The two had even taken to playing murder-and-suicide games together in the privacy of their bedroom. He would empty the chamber of the gun in front of her, put its muzzle to her temple and pull the trigger. To his delight Louise sometimes collapsed theatrically in her chair after the resounding metallic smack of the hammer; sometimes she just waved her pseudo-murderer away like an importunate waiter. Then he would hold the gun to his own head and repeat the performance. Each time he carefully reloaded the pistol and put it back in his pocket or on the cabinet. Since they were going to die anyway, sooner or later, why should they not rehearse doing it on their own terms? Take comfort in the thought of the disappointment they would inflict on their enemies?
And if they were to die soon – what then? He was a materialist, a nihilist; he believed that all the meanings people gave to their existence were nothing more than illusions that were necessary to them. ‘Necessary’ because humans simply couldn’t live without trying to find meaning in the world around them – which wouldn’t exist as a world if they were not there to think of it as such. ‘Illusions’ because not one of the meanings they proclaimed could be justified by anything outside the words used to express it. Louise, by contrast, insisted that she still thought of herself as a Catholic, though a very bad one. A world so complicated, she argued, could not have ‘just happened’; it had to have been planned by its creator with a purpose in mind. And what was that purpose? He had to make himself known to mortals almost as intelligent as himself, who would be capable of recognizing and responding to him. Then, if they deserved it, he would take their souls back into his own. If not, goodbye.
‘Poor, lonely God,’ Mattachich teased her. ‘He needs us to talk to. Us, of all people!’
Conversations of this sort made them feel refreshed, even virtuous; they helped to renew their attachment to one another – it wasn’t all money and defiance and passion between them; they were soul-mates too. (Especially now that physical passion was failing them, and the time Mattachich spent alone with the faded yet fine-featured Marie Fugger, with her pale lips, watchful hazel eyes and heavy head of hair, was a topic he and Louise never discussed.) In the mornings Mattachich got up early, and in a bizarre parody of his habits as an army officer inspected his guards – pairs of household servants or men from the estate farms equipped with shotguns – whom he had conscripted and kept posted in shifts for a full twenty-four hours a day around the Schloss. He genuinely feared that ‘they’, the authorities in Vienna or their minions in Agram, would mount a raid on the house and try to snatch Louise from him. The purpose his guards would then serve was clear in his mind. He wanted them outside the house not because he dreamed of fighting off the armed forces of the empire, but to give himself and Louise time to cheat their enemies of victory.
After exchanging words with the men he would walk across the fields, if it was a fine day, enjoying sole possession of the gleaming world around him: grass dew-heavy; soil breathing out the last of its wintry odours; meek, inexorable sunlight creeping into furrows and ditches; green leaves unfurling day by day; the occasional copper beech and early sycamore mimicking for reasons of their own the ruddy colours of autumn. How remote and veiled, unimaginable really, that autumn seemed, waiting for him on the far side of yet another summer he himself might never live to see. Birds wheezed, whistled like urchins, snipped at the air with their scissors-like beaks, while down below crows did their ungainly, double-legged hop about the fields. Then he would turn back to the house for breakfast, which he had alone with his mother. Louise, always a late riser, usually ate hers with Marie Fugger from trays sent upstairs. After what had gone on in their previous resting-place – the drinking, shouting, gambling, shooting for fun into the night, punctuated with tantrums from Eleana – Mattachich was grateful to his mother for the restraint she had shown in greeting her unexpected guests and taking care of them subsequently. Not flustered, not reproachful, not overawed, not indecently curious: just businesslike. She knew that they were in trouble, deep trouble – everyone knew it – but she was too proud and too considerate to press him to speak of it. So he did not.*
And to think of a woman like his mother chucking herself away on this Fiedler! (If that was what she was doing.) It was a mystery to him, but he was careful not to let her know what he felt about the man. There was a kind of truce between mother and son: if she did not ask him about money or forged documents, he asked no questions about the departure of Keglevich and his substitution by Fiedler. However, when he was alone with Fiedler, a stout, shifty, self-important fingerer of his greying beard, the two men wrangled about any idiotic subject that came up between them – the correct names and social ranking of regiments, the derivation of words, varieties of apples and cherries, the training of dogs. Fiedler made no attempt when alone with Mattachich to hide how much it irked him to have his unlikely triumph with the countess trampled over by these fugitives; nor his distaste at the intruders carrying on as if the entire household was at war with the Banus and everyone else in the empire. Sentries, if you please! Shotguns!
What Mattachich did not know was that at the end of Bachrach’s visit to the Schloss, Fiedler had waylaid the visitor at a point out of sight from the house. Standing under a clump of trees by the side of the chalky road, the two men came to an understanding. Fiedler assured the visitor of his unshakeable loyalty to the crown and offered to keep the Herr Regierungsrat informed of everything that went on in the Schloss. In return Bachrach gave him the address of a colleague, a lawyer in Zlatar, Tonkovich by name, with whom he should get in touch immediately he had something to report. His services would not be forgotten, Bachrach assured him, when this ‘unfortunate business’ was finally cleared up.
Now imagine yourself on your way to Agram, several weeks later, immured in a carriage with Mattachich and Louise. A cheerless afternoon. Rain falling heavily at intervals. Wind moving the clouds about and draping them at random over hilltops. Trees going spectral in the mist and emerging in fragments from it. Patient cattle, their hindquarters turned to the wind, tolerating what they cannot change. All this accompanied by the elaborate music of a horse-drawn carriage travelling on a wet highway – grindings, squeakings, slappings, rumblings, with an occasional splash or squelch in addition. Look at the coachman on his perch outside, his green overcoat almost blackened by the rain directly falling on him or shaken in spatters from the brim of his tall hat, while Louise, Mattachich and Marie Fugger are seated within, behind blurred glass and padded carriage-work. Marie sits with her back to the driver, facing the other two; all three have travelling rugs over their knees and are trying to sleep. They have spent the night in Breznica, chez Ozegovich, which is why they are now catching up on sleep lost the previous night.
The visit had been something of a kiss-and-make-up affair, by intention anyway, after their ruinous previous stay in the household. Subsequently neither side had communicated with the other until, to his surprise, Ozegovich received a note from Mattachich in which he wrote that he, Louise and Marie Fugger were leaving shortly for Agram and were wondering if they could spend a night in Breznica on the way. He had some questions to ask of his ‘old friend and comrade-in-arms’. Ozegovich responded in equally friendly fashion, though on one subject his mind was made up. Should he be asked to perjure himself when Mattachich was put on trial – which he had no doubt was going to happen sooner or later – he would not do it.
But that, he learned, wasn’t the reason for the visit. Mattachich had received a summons from the headquarters of the 13th Uhlans in Agram, addressed with the utmost punctilio to ‘the on-extended-absence-from-duty lieutenant’. The letter commanded him to appear in the city for medical examination, and for reregistration too, as the period of leave granted to him had expired. Had Ozegovich received such a document? That was what Mattachich wanted to know. The answer was no, nothing of the kind had come Ozegovich’s way. After a silence he added that if he were Mattachich he wouldn’t answer the summons. It smelled fishy to him. Why after all this time was the regiment so curious about his fitness to serve? Even if he hadn’t had…you know…question marks…hanging over him…
Mattachich was disappointed, and it showed. ‘Christ! I’ve had two letters from the Banus – if you please! – telling me to report to the prefect in Zlatar and I’ve done bugger all about it. But this is different. It’s my regiment. And yours. If I can’t trust them to be straight with me who in God’s name can I trust?’
‘Nobody,’ Ozegovich answered.
Another stare, another silence.
Mattachich groped in the inside pocket of his jacket and took out a folded letter, which he did not open but just shook in the air. ‘That’s not the only letter I got from Agram this week. This is from some lawyer there. He tells me my stepfather’s given him instructions. First of all his lordship says I must get out of the Schloss or he’ll call the police to chuck me out. It’s his property, not mine. Or my mother’s. Secondly, he’s already written to some office in Agram telling them he’s determined to cancel the order he’d made to adopt me…Can he do such a thing? Who knows? I must find out while I’m there.’ Mattachich put the letter back in his pocket, and went on as if he had not changed the subject at all. ‘Now you say the regiment’s also plotting against me. I just don’t believe it. I can’t. We took an oath at the passing-out parade – we’d be faithful to one another to the end. Remember? Bis in den Tod. One by one we said it and then we shouted it together. You tell me it means nothing? That they’re double-crossing me, just like everyone else?’
Ozegovich did not notice the implied slur in what Mattachich had just said. He saw in the man’s eye the hunger to believe and heard the obstinacy in his voice. So he kept silent.
‘Anyway,’ Mattachich said, conceding defeat, or at least the possibility of it, his hope now indistinguishable from despair, ‘the princess will be with me. They won’t dare do anything to me as long as we’re together.’
The rest of the evening they spent drinking. The women in the house joined in. All went peacefully and all went on for too long.
The carriage slowly making its way towards Agram now comes to a halt at a roadside inn. The passengers get out to relieve themselves and drink coffee. Soon they return to the vehicle and try once more to sleep – or to doze at least, feeling their bodies shake to the rhythms of the carriage, constantly hearing the noises from below and around them for what they really are and also as what they are not: cries, musical notes, floorboards creaking under footsteps, human voices saying the same word over and over again. Then a real human voice intrudes: it is that of Mattachich. To his shame he has suddenly been seized by stomach cramps. Marie Fugger bangs on the partition between herself and the driver and the carriage comes to a halt. Mattachich clambers out and hurries behind some bushes. Through the still-open door they hear retching noises. The two women exchange concerned glances. A silence follows. When Mattachich re-emerges, the look of his rumpled clothes shows that retching is not all he has had to cope with. He is pale; his breathing is irregular.
‘I don’t know what it is,’ he says shakily, as people do at such moments. ‘I haven’t been feeling right all morning. And all of a sudden…It must be something I ate last night.’
He pulls his blanket over his head this time and huddles in his corner of the carriage. Pulling up the blanket has left his knees and ankles exposed, so Fugger puts her blanket over his lower limbs and Louise helps her to tuck it around him. He remains swathed in this fashion until the next emergency stop is made.
Their plan had been to be in Agram by nightfall, but the journey is slowed by the repeated stops they have to make. Only towards sunset does the sky perversely break and brighten spectacularly. Crucibles of fiery stuff are spilled in all directions, as if a new world is being smelted and fused up there. But within minutes the gushes of gold, bronze and silver begin to curdle, to go dark; the clouds thicken; the mist returns; the rain falls; night has begun. At last there is a change in the sound of the turning wheels beneath them. They have struck a fully paved road and have entered the outskirts of the city. Revived by the imminent end of the journey, Mattachich pushes aside his cocoon of blankets and looks out of the window. In a thin voice he assures Louise that he is feeling much better; it was just…something. Nothing.
Soon they are approaching the Hotel Pruker on the city’s main street, where the obliging Fiedler, on his last trip from the Schloss to the telegraph station, has booked rooms for them.
In the end Mattachich made things easier for his enemies than they could ever have hoped. That a man who had ignored a pair of summonses from the Banus should quixotically obey a call from his regiment was something Bachrach, who had been behind both initiatives, had hardly dared to believe. It had always been the call from the regiment, rather than that of the Banus, which he thought the better of the two options from his point of view; and that was just the one Mattachich had chosen to obey. That he would also have had a helpful stomach-upset beforehand was just pure luck; nothing else. By the time the couple had wearily gone to bed in their room and Marie Fugger to hers, plain clothes detectives were already on the watch in the hotel foyer downstairs; before dawn the next morning additional policemen had been posted in a coffeehouse across the road. Observing from a slightly greater distance were Bachrach, the local chief of police, Tonkovich the lawyer from Zlatar, and yet another lawyer. The particular rooms booked for the visitors had actually been chosen by the chief of police himself, who had been in touch throughout with Fiedler and Tonkovich, and had called at the hotel and studied a plan of its layout well before the party from the Schloss was due to arrive.
Being on the spot, hearing all this, Bachrach began to believe for the first time that he had truly out-generalled Mattachich. All the preparations he had been making in the name of the ‘highest authority’ over the last few weeks – the telegrams and handwritten messages he had sent to the Banus and to handfuls of key officials in the army, the police, the civil service and the railway system, and the time he had spent coordinating their replies – had not been wasted. But he could not afford to relax just yet. Then one additional item of information was delivered to him from the helpful clerk at the hotel desk. As he was still feeling poorly, Mattachich had asked the regimental doctor to come to the hotel to carry out his examination and an extra room upstairs had been hired for this purpose.
Perfect.
The ambush itself was carried out with a more than military efficiency. The regimental doctor arrived and was directed to the room reserved for the examination. A few minutes after Mattachich had joined him, the watching policemen and an army major rushed in through the unlocked door, seized the half-naked man, hand-cuffed him and hurried him downstairs into a waiting landau. It was done in a moment. ‘So Mattachich was taken into custody without mishap,’ Bachrach telegraphed to Philipp that same day.*
Once the landau had gone around the corner, his party made for Louise’s room. She was a woman and a princess so there was no question here of handcuffs or of hustling her in a dishevelled state across the hotel foyer and on to the pavement outside. But they were as determined as they had been with Mattachich to see the job through. First the lawyer Tonkovich was sent to knock on her door and call out his name, as it was known that Louise would recognize his voice and open the door to him – which she did. The others immediately followed him through the door. Confronted by this irruption into her bedroom of a handful of men, most of whom she had never seen before, the mixture of hauteur and apathy that was one of her specialities came to her aid. She refused to answer Bachrach’s questions about who had slept in the rumpled second bed in the room, or whose nightgown it was that lay on top of it. When asked if there were any weapons in the room, she pointed silently at the drawer of a bedside cabinet and made no comment as Bachrach drew out the loaded revolver. She became agitated only after he told her that she was going to be taken back to the Coburg palace in Vienna. Nothing, nobody, she said fiercely, could force her to go back there or to see her husband again. Bachrach then assured her that her wishes would be respected and she would not be compelled to do either. A maid was sent next door to tell Marie Fugger that she was needed. She came into the room, saw at once what was going on and asked Bachrach if he had ‘approval of the highest authority’ for what he was doing. Yes, he answered, the emperor himself wished it. From then on she cooperated with the princess’s captors, though she too refused to answer when Bachrach asked who had spent the night in the other bed in Louise’s room.
Conscientious as ever in his master’s service, Bachrach was busy looking for evidence that would come in useful later, if Philipp sued for divorce. With this in mind, Mattachich claimed later, the lawyer snooped through the bedroom – ‘not omitting to bring the bed-sheets into view, hoping to find on them tell-tale signs of acts of adultery…That was the lowest of all the deeds that took place in the course of the morning…A common prostitute would not have been treated so! That the princess was not driven insane by this shameful event…but managed to maintain remarkably calm is itself testimony to her psychological stability.’*
Within an hour or two, confident that she would not be compelled to meet Philipp or to return to his palace, Louise was in a two-coach special train that had been kept waiting at a siding outside Agram to carry her back to Vienna. Even before leaving the hotel she had been told that Mattachich was under arrest: an item of news she received with much the same calm she had shown when the men burst into her room. But she did insist on writing him a letter, which she gave to Bachrach – and which its intended recipient never received. As the train drew nearer to Vienna, Bachrach broke the news to Louise that since she had refused to return to the Coburg palace, her destination would be a ‘sanatorium’ in Döbling, on the outskirts of the city. Shortly afterwards he let her know that this sanatorium was actually a private lunatic asylum. A declaration that she was voluntarily committing herself for treatment in the institution was then given to her to sign, which she did. Apparently it occurred to no one there that since she had not ‘volunteered’ to be brought to Vienna in the first place, her signature on the document was in itself something of a forgery.
Louise, Marie Fugger and a specially hired nurse who had accompanied them on the train were housed in a small villa in the grounds of the institution. Four days later Louise was put through a lengthy examination by an entire team of physicians and psychiatrists, the ‘keeper’ of the asylum, Dr Obersteiner, among them. Representatives of the Hofburg and of King Leopold were present in the next room, as well as the indispensable Bachrach. The only physical ailment the doctors reported was an outbreak of ‘psoriasis vulgaris’ on various parts of her body.* They were agreed, however, that her psychological condition betrayed serious symptoms of ‘intellectual insufficiency’ and ‘moral weakness’. On these grounds they declared it necessary for her to be kept in strict seclusion and under constant observation in the asylum for the next six months. The task of supervising her during this period was assigned to Dr Obersteiner.
Philipp would have been better pleased with an outright declaration from the doctors, there and then, that she was insane. Likewise their imperial majesties, Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary and Leopold of Belgium. That disappointment aside, everyone involved (apart from Louise) was satisfied with what had been accomplished. The danger of her having to appear in any court of law – in what Philipp feared would be ‘the most scandalous public proceedings imaginable’ – had been averted. ‘In confining her,’ he wrote, ‘I have succeeded in preventing future disorders…though it has been difficult indeed to bring this about.’ He admitted that neither the public at large nor the lawyers representing Louise’s creditors believed in the story of her mental illness, but, he went on, ‘I cannot permit Louise to appear before any trial by jury…I cannot do it to my family.’ With his trademark display of helplessness and indignation he went on to grumble that ‘nothing will move Leopold; he will not lift a finger to help in the settlement of his daughter’s debts’.†
So much for the sentiments of Louise’s enemies. As for Louise herself, twenty years later she described these events as follows: ‘Thus I was suddenly kidnapped and found myself in a cell at the Döbling asylum in the suburbs of Vienna. I was kept under constant scrutiny through a Judas-eye in the door. The window was barred. I heard screams and yells from outside…I had been put in that part of the asylum in which those most severely ill were segregated. I saw a patient running around a little courtyard, during an exercise period, and throwing himself with terrible cries against a wall lined with mattresses…I turned away, shocked and horrified, and flung myself down on the narrow bed. All I could do was put my head under the pillow, hoping to see and hear no more. But I could not quench my tears.’*
The next day, however, she asked for a piano to be brought to her ‘pavilion’ in the grounds; and soon afterwards one of the rooms in the house was turned, at her request, into a studio, complete with an ample provision of paint, canvases, pencils and paper. The nurse who had travelled with her from Agram was replaced by a lady’s maid, Olga Börner, who was to remain with her to the end. And Marie Fugger continued to live in the villa until it was discovered that she was helping to sustain a secret correspondence between Louise in her asylum and Mattachich in his cell.†
How can the latter facts be reconciled with her account of the horrors accompanying her admission to the Döbling asylum?
Readily enough, if you are prepared to try. Imagine that both accounts of her reactions to what had happened to her are essentially true. Imagine that she was outraged and relieved to be confined. Humiliated and comforted, after the alarms and escapades of the previous months, to know that she would be living in the same place for the next half-year. Degraded and gratified to know that she would not be asked to take any decisions about her future during that period. There is no need therefore to jump to the conclusion that what she wrote twenty years later was merely retrospective play-acting. Without warning she had been snatched away from her lover, rushed across hundreds of miles, thrust behind high walls and locked gates, stripped of her rights in law (including the right to be prosecuted as well as to defend herself in a courtroom), and declared fit to reside only in a closed institution filled with demented strangers.
The stark truth is that any enforced confinement among sick, desperate and self-torturing people is bound to be regarded – even by those who may be most in need of it – as in itself a form of torture.
So who can blame her if she later chose to remember just one side of the ‘bargain’ that others had struck on her behalf?
From the Hotel Pruker Mattachich had been taken immediately to the detention barracks of the garrison in Agram. ‘Though I had offered no resistance,’ he wrote later, ‘the upstanding major who had carried out the arrest kept on telling me to keep my temper. I saw from his demeanour that he had been expecting to carry out an heroic deed and was disappointed that I kept so calm throughout.’*
Since he had been arrested under military law, not the civil law of the empire, the authorities were not obliged to bring him to trial within a set period or even to tell him what charges he would eventually have to face. In other words, with both lovers consigned into limbo, Philipp and Bachrach could now gather at leisure whatever evidence they could find against Mattachich and await without misgiving the next psychiatric examination Louise would be put through. No wonder that Daszynski, the deputy who was eventually to bring the whole business to the attention of parliament, spoke of what was done to the lovers as an example of ‘court justice’ or ‘royal justice’ – arbitrary justice, that is, the justice of a despotism, not that of a state bound by its own laws.
For something like seven months Mattachich was left in the garrison prison in Agram. Through its walls he heard the familiar sounds of military life going on without him, as if to remind him day and night of what he had lost. Lost in every sense, since he was not merely shut out of it, as of everything else that had made up his life, but because he was convinced that the army itself had betrayed him. ‘Five weeks passed,’ Mattachich wrote, ‘before proceedings were put in hand relating to the offence – the forging of documents – for which they claimed I had been arrested…For the following six months, until December of that year, I was forced to travel through a world that was new to me: that of the Austrian system of military justice, an atrocious institution about which the Austrian public cares little or nothing, and which is therefore left free to carry on in its own way. I have felt the workings of this institution on my own body…And you, Austrian fathers and mothers, who have a caring heart for your children [who will have to do their military service], do not believe the ministers when they tell you that reform is on its way, because I know that it is not.’*
By any standards Mattachich’s trial was a travesty. Once he had been informed of the charges laid against him, a further three months passed before he saw the evidence that had been gathered in Vienna. It was made available to him only in written form, so he had no opportunity to cross-question witnesses before or during the trial. No lawyer was permitted to speak on his behalf at any time, for the trial was handled throughout by a military ‘Auditor’ who served simultaneously as prosecutor, defence counsel and judge, and who also had total discretion over the rights of the accused at every stage. The proceedings came to an end on New Year’s Eve, seven months after his arrest, when he was instructed to put on full parade uniform – brought up specially from the Schloss – for his appearance before the panel that would pronounce judgement and sentence. He was taken into a chamber, a trumpet sounded, and the chairman of the panel (also in full parade uniform, as were his colleagues) declared him guilty and imposed on him a sentence of six years’ imprisonment for his crimes. Chief among them, of course, was the forging of the signatures on the documents put before the court; lesser offences included his sojourn abroad without the prior permission of the War Minister, his unauthorized extension of the leave of absence granted him, and his failure to respond to messages dispatched to him while absent from duty. No allowance was made for the seven months he had already served in prison; and the sentence was made much harsher still by the additional penalties attached to it. He was condemned to go without food on the fifteenth day of every calendar month; to sleep on ‘a hard bed’ (hartes lager) on the twenty-fifth day of each month; and to spend the first and seventh months of each year of his sentence in solitary confinement. He was then stripped of his commission and his ‘noble status’ (such as it was) and sent back to his cell to await immediate transport to the military prison in Möllersdorf, Austria.
This is how he later wrote of his response to the sentence and his immediate return to the cell in the garrison prison: ‘I could not help it, but the reading of the sentence made a strangely comic impression on me. Quietly and firmly I followed the duty officer to my cell. Once there, however, I fiercely tore off the uniform I had worn for eleven years and would never don again. As I did it, I suddenly felt a terrible distress and an overwhelming wish to be alone…These feelings lasted for seconds only. I had no time for sentimentalities; I needed composure and understanding…Only with strength and calm would I be able to overcome the despair into which I was being deliberately driven.’*