RogerBW's Blog

A Sailor Of Austria, John Biggins 06 January 2024

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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See also:
The Good Soldier Schweik, Jaroslav Hasek

Series: Otto Prohaska | Next in series: Emperor's Coloured Coat, The

  1. Posted by John Dallman at 11:15pm on 06 January 2024

    It is, I think, my favourite piece of naval fiction.

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