The Lost Prince (36 page)

The decisive move, the now-infamous Battle of Caporetto, came in the fall of 1917. Because of significant reinforcement from the German army, the Austrians were able to overrun the Italian positions and send the hapless Italians in humiliating and disorganized retreat westward toward the plains near the Piave River and Venice. After more than two years of grim stalemate, the Austrians were victorious.

The battle had begun with a gas attack, the shells landing among the Italians causing mayhem and panic. So when the Austrians descended from the mountains and eventually crossed the prized Isonzo River and overran trenches and gun emplacements along the way, the first sights they saw were enemy soldiers dead and dying from the ravages of gas, their faces contorted in the most awful grimaces, “a journey through hell,” the soldiers called it. For Arnauld, already having seen too much death and suffering, the scenes were unspeakable. It was his and his men’s assignments to search through the carnage for soldiers still alive to be taken prisoner. He wrote a number of entries in his war journal before the final event in the rail yard that brought about his end.

These entries become more erratic and spotty, evidence that a sensitive and poetic man was witness to too much. Finally, after the letters had ceased, the almost illegible journal entries descend into the near-deranged.

And then came the experience with the Italian prisoners at the rail yard that is described not by Arnauld himself but by the accounts that Eleanor demanded and Dr. Jung commissioned from his inside sources after the armistice.

The last war journal entry is almost unintelligible, the shaky hand almost illegible, the page stained with what one could assume was human blood.

From the later descriptions, one can imagine the scene that followed. In the chaos of fleeing Italian soldiers, many were taken prisoner, some against their will, some too wounded to know or care, some convinced that their chances were better as Austrian prisoners than retreating Italians. Only hours, perhaps minutes, after the last hasty entry in his war journal, one assumes, the chaos unabated, Arnauld organized a group of officers to handle the roundup and prevent the soldiers on his side from shooting the men coming at them with hands in the air. “We haven’t time to stop for them,” one corporal yelled, waving his carbine, his intentions made clear by that and the urgency in his voice, and Arnauld yelled, “Nonsense. We are not barbarians,” and he waded into the middle of the surrendering group, so as to protect them and to make clear their status as prisoners. “Leave all weapons,” he yelled. “We will form orderly lines,” he said, and the young Czech officer, Arnauld’s friend, the one who read his own poetry during the long nights, stepped forward to assist.

The group, sides and nationalities indistinguishable perhaps, was clustered together for protection, surrounded by witnesses, when the shell exploded directly above them.

UNDENIABLE NEWS

E
leanor first received word of Arnauld’s death in a telegram from Ernst Kleist from Vienna. It was on a gray Boston morning in late 1917, shortly before the time of the dreaded influenza. Not willing to accept the news at first, she placed a transatlantic telephone call to her friend Carl Jung in Zurich and set in motion an elaborate and not-inexpensive plan to have the matter investigated, the first news having left, as she said, room for question.

After a number of weeks there was a second telegram, this time from Jung, and it struck the final blow, one that threw everything into ruin. Over the years, nothing had been easy, granted, and there had certainly been moments of doubt, despair even, but then, in spite of all the ups and downs, at day’s end, all that was supposed to happen had happened. For twenty years, all the Vienna journal’s predicted events had come to be. Somehow, she had kept her part of the bargain. Until this second telegram, this one from her friend Jung, as trusted a source as could be, a shocking reversal of the future.

At first, staring in disbelief at the pasted strips of teletyped text that she held in her hand, she was thrust into another short-lived period of denial. It simply could not be true. Then after a good deal of waiting, she heard Jung’s muffled, crackly telephone voice coming in over the transatlantic cable from Zurich, authenticating the details.

“I’m afraid so,” Jung said distinctly, with his thick Germanic accent,
“confirmed, regrettably. No room for question, from the three witnesses you demanded.”

“Are you absolutely positive?” she said with a kind of firmness her Swiss friend had become accustomed to.

“Absolutely,” he said with corresponding directness. She knew Carl Jung and his conviction well enough to find little room for hope in what he was now telling her. “Undeniable. It was on the Italian front, as you know, on the Isonzo River. An artillery shell among a group of Italian prisoners. He was in charge. There was horrible carnage.” He paused. “Dismemberment even.” Then he paused again. “Word has come from Vienna that finality has been fully accepted by Arnauld’s parents and friends there.”

“No chance that anyone escaped—” She stopped, unable to continue.

“I am sorry,” the Swiss doctor said with his famous decisiveness.

So finally the unavoidable sank in. Arnauld Esterhazy was dead.

The confirmation enveloped her in a new despondency. For twenty years now she had been living with the belief that her life was predetermined and that Arnauld was to play a major part in it. She knew also of the important role Arnauld Esterhazy was supposed to play in the life of St. Gregory’s and her son’s education, and the belief that he was now dead in the war was a bewildering deviation from what was supposed to be. Up until this very moment in the devastating war everything had gone as preordained. Enough of the predictions had proven accurate for her to have total faith that all would come to pass. Her curse was an accurate and active one: She did in fact know the future. Arnauld’s departure in 1914 had been expected, though his volunteering to return to his old commission in the imperial army had been a surprise. Now the fact that he was dead, killed in the war, destroyed her understanding of life as she was supposed to live it.

The shock had been one she could share with no one, not her husband Frank Burden, nor her Boston friends, nor her children. In this one fateful stroke, the events in that predicted and preordained future that she had grown to trust had dissolved into total randomness, a randomness in which anything could happen, a randomness that the rest of the world considered the normal course of events. Only William James would have understood. More than ever now she missed him and his avuncular wisdom,
the only one who had known the full story—in the end at least—the only one she could really talk to.

She would not have elected to attend the memorial service at St. Gregory’s School had not Frank, oblivious to the intensity of her shock and grief, accepted for them. “I liked young Esterhazy,” he said with characteristic bullish certitude. “Princely fellow. He was a good conversationalist, and he contributed well to the life of the St. Gregory’s boys.”

The memorial service, not held until the spring following the first rumors of Arnauld’s death in battle, drew a surprisingly large group of former students, fellow teachers, and friends in attendance at the school chapel, in spite of warnings about public gatherings. The dreaded influenza that had recently established its terrifying grip on Boston and the entire East Coast was so very much on everyone’s mind, but the large gathering was, in the words of the school chaplain, “a testament to this man’s great appeal and effect. He was with us for only four years and yet his sensitive presence touched us all deeply.”

As Eleanor sat beside her husband now, listening to the eulogies in praise of Arnauld Esterhazy, the beloved and talented young teacher from Austria-Hungary now lost in the war, celebrating the life of this bright and cultured man who had spent so many evenings in their home, she gave little outward sign of the devastation that consumed her. No one knew the depth of her despair, or how she fought for composure as the school’s Anglican chaplain read inspiring words about the nobility and sacrifice of war. And no one in that congregation or elsewhere in Boston even began to suspect the secret identity she worked to preserve or the secret bond she shared with this man being eulogized.

As the chaplain spoke, she felt more and more in the grip of the darkness, and she could barely pull herself to her feet and return, when the service was over, to her family. She sat in secret anguish, carrying deep within her the one inextinguishable and inexpressible fear. She could not help thinking that this whole miserable turn of events had come about because of her actions on Arnauld’s last night in Boston four years before and some unknown and unpredicted effect on him.

The chaplain pieced together what he knew of Arnauld’s life before he came to Boston in 1910. He had grown up the son of an aristocratic family
and had been part of the intellectual life of the cafés, had gone on to a distinguished life at the university, had become a military officer, then a teacher. In summarizing this life, the chaplain cited passages from the popular book
City of Music,
pointing out how aptly the passages portrayed the culture and intellectual life Arnauld had led in his beloved Vienna. And then he told how the artistic young Viennese had graced the school for four years, giving so much of himself, inspiring all the boys. “There is so very much loss in war,” he said, “but each individual loss reverberates in us with poignancy, this loss especially because of the lives this fine good man touched.”

During the whole St. Gregory’s service, she did not dare look at Rose Spurgeon, who sat near the back of the chapel, but as always she felt her presence, and before the service the two women had communicated only through eye contact. “He was such a fine man,” Rose had said, Rose who had just suffered a great loss herself. No one knew what Eleanor was going through, except Rose. Without a word being exchanged, Rose always seemed to know what Eleanor was thinking.

And she had barely been able to look at Will Honeycutt, who was there as one of Arnauld’s great friends. As abrupt and abrasive as he was, he had become over the years her close ally, the only person in Boston, since the death of William James in 1910, who knew at least part of her story.

Will and Arnauld, these two unlikely friends, “the pure scientist and the poet,” a Harvard friend had called them, had been introduced originally by Eleanor, again, no accident, and had been in the habit of meeting with regularity at their favorite café on Brattle Street in Cambridge, struggling to replicate, Arnauld would admit in his journals, at least in part, the café ambiance of his native city he had given up to come to Boston. “This will do you good,” Will had said, continuing the introduction of his sensitive European friend to his Harvard colleagues, “some good old American pragmatism.”