Béla Zombory-Moldován was a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Army during the Great War. His grandson, Peter Zombory-Moldovan, spent the past few years carefully and lovingly translating the written account his grandfather left behind. The Burning of the World: A Memoir of 1914 was released last year by New York Review Books. This week Mr. Zombory-Moldovan took time from his busy schedule to answer some questions.
The Strawfoot: Your grandfather, Béla Zombory-Moldován, was a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Army in the Great War. What was his experience?
He was called up on 28 July 1914, the day that Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. An artist aged 29, he was a junior officer in the reserve, having done a year’s military service after graduation. He reported for duty on 4 August in Veszprém, in the west of Hungary, with the 31st infantry regiment of the Royal Hungarian Army, the Honvéd.
His battalion was sent to Galicia on 2 September 1914, where they were immediately thrown into action against the Russians at the battle of Rava-Russka – the climax of a titanic clash of four Austro-Hungarian and five Russian armies around what is now the Polish-Ukrainian border. The Russians had broken through, and Béla’s unit was ordered into a last-ditch attempt to hold up their advance. Hopelessly ill-prepared, poorly equipped, outnumbered, and comprehensively out-gunned, the Hungarians were pinned down in open ground by enemy artillery, without cover or prepared positions. Standing orders forbade the digging of fox-holes, on the grounds that these “undermined discipline and led to cowardice”; nonetheless, Béla – determined to survive – dug himself in, as best he could, with a discarded tin-lid, telling his men to do likewise. Between dawn and dusk on 11 September, under a relentless barrage of shrapnel and high-explosive shells, Béla’s company were cut to pieces. He was the only officer in the company to survive that day unscathed.
The next day, as scattered remnants of the battalion tried to regroup under the cover of a forest, Béla witnessed slaughter at close quarters as shrapnel shells rained down around him, before he too was hit in the head. By great good luck, the wound was not fatal, and he was carried to a field dressing station where he was hastily patched up. By now, the Austro-Hungarians were in general retreat. Béla was among the last to be evacuated, with the dead and the dying, on a peasant cart. One step ahead of advancing Russian cavalry units, they just made it to the last train sent up the line to evacuate the wounded.
After a lengthy stay in military hospital in Budapest, where he was diagnosed with “traumatic neurosis”, he was given three months’ leave to recuperate. His physical injuries had healed, but the effects of what would today be recognised as post-traumatic stress disorder continued to haunt him. He experienced a profound sense of alienation from those around him, and from his own past. He sought solitude and was prone to sudden panic attacks. He was in a state of mourning for the civilisation he already knew had been irretrievably lost, and filled with a sense of foreboding. Only the beauty of nature consoled him.
He returned to military service in April 1915, but saw no more combat. After a spell training newly-conscripted men, he was put in charge of a new prisoner-of-war camp for captured Russians in western Hungary. It was a posting he relished. He had a high regard for Russian culture and an affection for the ordinary Russian men under his charge. A photograph from 1915 shows him standing proudly beside a handsome masonry well-head newly constructed, to his design, with the assistance of the camp’s inmates. He encouraged them to spend their time in captivity in the practice of handicrafts, for which he must have arranged the supply of tools and materials. The beautifully fashioned wooden objects given to him by the men (which he kept all his life) attest to their gratitude for the humanity with which they were treated. Deeply moved by the majestic sound of the massed prisoners singing the Orthodox Easter anthem, he joined the men on their knees.
In 1916, he was seconded to the War Ministry, where his duties included the design of numerous posters associated with the war effort (illustrating the demands of “total war”): appeals for waste materials, war bond campaigns, and exhibitions of military aircraft and photographs from the front to benefit war-widows and orphans. He also drew skilful portraits of the military high command – the men in charge of the carnage he had witnessed at first hand. One must assume that he kept to himself the scathing observations on the incompetence and heartlessness of the senior officer class that he saved for the privacy of his secret memoir.
2) Where was he when the war broke out?
He was holidaying with friends on the Adriatic coast, at a small resort called Novi Vinodolski in Croatia, which was then a province of the Kingdom of Hungary. There is a wonderful photograph of the group taken on the beach, presumably by a local photographer, who inscribed the plate with his reference number and the date: 25/vii/1914. Béla, stylishly dressed in a white linen suit, open-necked shirt and jaunty sailor’s cap, sits smiling in the front row, tanned and at ease. (The contrast between the genial face in the photograph and the brooding, haunted self-portrait he drew in 1915 is remarkable.) In three days’ time, war would be declared, he would be called up, and the idyll would be at an end. A detail of the photograph appears on the cover of The Burning of the World. For me it encapsulates, with extraordinary poignancy, the world that was about to be lost forever.
Béla’s memoir starts on the morning of 29 July 1914, when – still oblivious to the declaration of war announced in Vienna the previous day – he goes for an early dip in the sea, only to find the beach deserted, and a notice of mobilization freshly pasted to the wall of the bathing-station. Stunned, he returns to the pension where he and his friends are staying. The news has obviously already got out. In the dining room, he notices that the usual convivial mingling of guests of different nationalities has come to a sudden end: they now group themselves strictly by nationality at separate tables, conferring anxiously and surreptitiously in their various national languages. It is a remarkably telling observation, presaging the break-up of the multinational Habsburg empire that was a direct consequence of the Great War.
3) The water and the sea were important to him, weren’t they?
He was fascinated by the sea. Perhaps the fact that he had grown up so far from the sea (in Eastern Hungary as a boy, and then in Budapest) had something to do with it. The sea was, for him, the Mediterranean, and so it was associated with Italy, art, the warm south, the classical world, history – all things that he loved. As a young man before the war, he travelled widely, in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, studying art and living the good life. Between 1908 and 1914, he spent several summers on the Mediterranean coast, at Taormina and Naples, as well as the Adriatic resorts. He returned to some of those places after the Great War with his wife and young children.
It was to the sea that he returned during his convalescence early in 1915, seeking – and, at last, finding – peace of mind and artistic inspiration. He describes in The Burning of the World the joy that rose up in him as he first glimpsed the Adriatic again from the windows of the train that brought him to the coast, the long walks he took along the shore, the crashing of the waves against the rocks one day when the Bora was blowing, and – most touchingly – the day he spent on the beach with his watercolours, capturing on paper how the waves reared up and broke on the shingle. It was the moment when he rediscovered his artistic inspiration after the months of creative frustration that followed his traumatic experience at the front. He painted the sea again and again after that. Some of those watercolours survive, and they are among the best things he ever did as a painter.
4) What had his life been like before the war? Describe the cultural milieu in which he moved.
He came from a privileged background. His mother was from the minor nobility and his father belonged to the provincial gentry. They were not enormously wealthy but they lived comfortably. Béla knew from an early age that he wanted to be an artist. He attended the prestigious Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, after which he began to make a name for himself as a painter and illustrator. He had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances in the artistic community of pre-war Budapest, which was in a state of creative ferment in the years around 1910. The modernist avant-garde was emerging, and Béla was caught up in the heated debates and controversies between the traditionalists (of which he was one) and the modernists. One of his closest friends was the artist Ervin Voit, cousin of the composer Béla Bartók; he recounts a conversation in which they despair at the atonality of Bartók’s latest composition. He moved in bohemian circles but was too much of a gentleman, and perhaps too conventional in outlook, to be attracted by the lifestyle of the penniless young artist. He earned enough from teaching at the Budapest School of Applied Art and drawing illustrations for children’s magazines to live well, dress elegantly, and travel. He was a fine-looking young man with an eye for the ladies, and it seems that they returned the compliment; he savoured the freedom of the bachelor life as young man-about-town, flitting between his favourite coffeehouse (the Fészek in Pest, a haunt of artists) and parties in the aristocratic homes of Buda.
The war, of course, put a stop to all of that.
5) Who were the “coffeehouse Conrads?”
This was a mocking term used to describe the civilians who, by one means or another, managed to avoid conscription but had strong opinions on how the war should be fought. They were named after Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, chief of the general staff of the Austro-Hungarian armed forces (and the principal architect of the war) until 1917. The English equivalent would be “armchair generals”. In common with fighting men and combat veterans throughout the ages, Béla had a particularly low opinion of the stay-at-home brigade who professed expert knowledge of military matters. Suspecting that the Fészek would be full of them, he could not bring himself to enter the place while he was in Budapest on leave in the winter of 1914-15. He was equally scathing of the “bellicose guff” that filled the newspapers.
6) How did the war affect your grandfather?
I’ve already described the short-term effect of his brief but terrible experience of battle. Some readers of the book have commented, perhaps a little disparagingly, on the brevity of Béla’s time in combat. They seem to miss the point that, in the opening weeks of the war in the East, most soldiers’ experience in the front line was painfully short: casualty rates were so appallingly high that relatively few men survived their first contact with the enemy without injury, or at all. In just the first two weeks of fighting, Austria-Hungary lost a staggering 400,000 killed, wounded or captured; by the end of 1914, over 850,000. The standing army was wiped out with such rapidity that reserve units, like Béla’s, were rushed straight from a couple of weeks’ training into the front line to fill the gaps. This was not trench warfare; they fell like flies, mostly to artillery, on the open battlefields of Galicia. Many of the casualties cannot have fired a single shot in anger before being cut down by shrapnel or shell-fragments.
After the war, he just got on with life. He married in 1922, raised three children, and enjoyed growing success as a painter, especially of portraits. According to my father, he never spoke of his time at the front. He was a man of enormous self-discipline, and like countless others, he kept the worst of his memories of combat to himself. It seems, however, that something of the psychological damage he had suffered stayed with him to the very end, half a century later. The last words he uttered were those he was heard to cry out in his sleep the night he died: “Get down! Get down! They’re shooting from over there as well!”
7) How did he write the manuscript and how did it come to you? What did it look like and how did you work on it?
The Burning of the World is actually a fragment of a larger, but unfinished, autobiographical project, starting with Béla’s earliest memories of childhood in the 1880s and evidently intended to cover his life up to at least 1945. The early chapters, up to about 1907, appear to be complete. Then there is a gap to July 1914 (i.e., the beginning of The Burning of the World.) His account of the war stops abruptly, with an incomplete chapter starting with his return from leave to Budapest in April 1915 (which is where The Burning of the World ends). There is nothing beyond this.
The manuscript is in longhand, on loose sheets of paper of many different kinds, some torn from exercise books, some from old address books, some trimmed to size from larger sheets. I am no expert in these things, but it looks as if the early chapters – those dealing with his childhood and youth – were written first, at a steady pace, over a long period of time. The chapters covering the war appear to have been written later. Some sections were evidently written at speed. There are corrections here and there, and some inserted passages, but not many.
It’s hard to tell exactly when it was written. No one in the family knew of its existence until after Béla’s death in 1967. That suggests that it was written in seclusion. Having been dismissed from his post as principal of the School of Applied Arts by the communist regime in 1947, he spent several months each year from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s in solitude at a cottage on Lake Balaton, painting the local landscapes during the day and – I would guess – devoting his evenings to reflection and writing.
My grandmother discovered the manuscript when, after Béla’s death, she opened the locked strongbox in which he kept his personal papers. She gave the manuscript to my uncle in Germany. In about 1987 he gave it my father, who first showed it to me in 2012.
At first, I could scarcely make out more than a few words of the Hungarian. As I leafed through the forbidding-looking pages, my eye was caught by what I realized was a remarkable first-hand account of battle. The more I read, the stronger became my impression that it was worth the effort, and that this material might be of more than family interest.
I tentatively began the English translation in 2013, initially with the shortest chapter I could find, as an experiment. By then, I was able to work from a transcript of the manuscript, which made the task much easier. What began to emerge, and the reaction of the people I showed it to, was sufficiently encouraging to induce me to undertake the entire project, and make this remarkable find available to a wider readership.
8) How well did you know Béla, if at all?
I met him only three times. My parents came to England in 1956, after the Hungarian uprising, but Béla and my grandmother stayed in Hungary. He came to visit us when I was about six years old; he was then in his late seventies. I have a vivid memory of an elegant, kindly man in a well-cut suit and wearing a brown homburg hat. He had piercing eyes, and his grey moustache was neatly trimmed. He seemed to belong to a distant, more graceful age. He spoke quietly and chose his words with care. He had the air of a man used to being respected.
I saw him again a year later, when we visited Hungary for the first time. He and my grandmother were staying at Balatonfüred in the thatched summer house he designed in the 1930s. Though still a commanding presence, he seemed a lot older. I watched as he worked on a painting in a rickety shed, hunched on an old wooden stool and somehow beyond my reach. He only came into the house for meals and for his afternoon nap, when we all tiptoed around, even out in the garden.
The last time I saw him was in the summer of 1967, when I was nine. He had a cancer in his throat and called for us, one by one, to say goodbye to him in his little bedroom in the summer house. I remember how his unshaven cheek bristled as I kissed it while he gripped my hand. When I woke the next morning, he was dead.
It has been a tremendous privilege, and a joy, to get to know him all these years later through my work on his amazing memoir. It is truly a revelation, not only of a vanished world and a hitherto largely undocumented aspect of the Great War, but also of the subtle, ironic, and engaging mind of a remarkable and highly civilized man.
(All images provided by and courtesy of Peter Zombory-Moldovan)