1991 historical naval fiction. In 1915, Linienschiffsleutnant Otto
Prohaska of the Austro-Hungarian Navy takes command of a submarine…
I think if this has a genre it's "historical misadventure",
somewhat in the vein of the Flashman books, and of course sharing its
national setting with The Good Soldier Švejk. The major conflict is
between the senior officers and planners (cheerfully predicting that
Austria-Hungary will have a larger Mediterranean fleet than France by
1938, and than Brtain by 1963), and the men at the sharp end,
particularly Prohaska himself, who can see just how much the Empire is
crumbling.
And anyway (I thought to myself) if you were so scared of drowning
you could have stayed in Hirschendorf and become a pharmacist or a
schoolmaster—in which case you would also have become a reserve Army
officer and the crows would long since have picked your bones in
some field in Serbia or Poland.
That in turn is combined with thoroughly-researched action
aboard the extremely primitive submarines of the era (Prohaska's first
command is a petrol-engined Holland boat)—not just patrols and
commerce raiding, though that's most of it, but special missions too,
such as smuggling silver to the Senussi in Libya… and being required
to return, as a gift to the Emperor, a prime racing camel. Or getting
stuck in mud on the bottom of the sea, with no hope of rescue…
"But tell me, Prohaska, how long have you been in the u-Boat service?"
"About ninety minutes, I think."
He looked at me with some pity. "And they're giving you U8…?"
"Why, is there something wrong with the boat?"
"'Der Achtzer'? Oh no, not really…"
This isn't particularly my period, but I spotted no errors, which is
always pleasing. It's a grim story of a grim war, but has its moments
of humour too, or at least appreciation of the ridiculousness of life.
My father had received the fateful telegram the previous morning as
I had set out for Pola: "The k.u.k. Minister for War regrets to
inform you… exhaustive perusal of the Red Cross lists has failed to
reveal… therefore presumed dead… Personal effects of the deceased
may be collected from regimental depot, Leitmeritz, within thirty
days of today's date (date as postmark)…" The old man had not taken
it too badly, I thought: in fact as a convert to pan-German
nationalism, his chief grievance seemed to be that his son had been
killed in a quarrel between the moribund house of Habsburg and a
tribe of Balkan sheep-stealers when he could have been fulfilling
the higher racial destiny of the Germanic peoples through getting
himself shot by the Russians.
There's off-duty time too, as Prohaska woos and marries a scion of
very minor aristocracy. The story as a whole is framed by the very old
Prohaska in a nursing-home in Wales in the 1980s, clearly waiting to
die, but on the whole not too unhappy about it.
Suicide was very common in central europe in those days, and
whatever the church might say, spattering one's brains over the
ceiling was still widely accepted in the Habsburg officer corps as a
fitting and gentlemanly way of resolving life's little difficulties:
women, gambling debts, syphilis, falling off one's horse in front of
the Emperor, being caught selling mobilisation plans to the
Russians, and so forth. Myself, being a plebeian Czech by birth, I
had never had a great deal of time for these sub-aristocratic
rituals…
Things end up with the very well-drawn utter collapse of
Austria-Hungary at the end of the war, both through actual defeat and
because of the degree to which it's been suffering during the
blockades. Three more books follow; rather than trace Prohaska's life
after the War, they deal with different periods before and during it.
There's certainly more to be said by and about Prohaska, though I fear
that this book may have used the best bits.
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