RogerBW's Blog

1992 historical naval fiction. In spite of his best efforts, Linienschiffsleutnant Otto Prohaska of the Austro-Hungarian Navy is not going to avert the First World War.

This is rather more bitty than the first book, which was largely held together by Prohaska's submarine commands. He trains as a naval pilot; gets seconded to the staff of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire; gets reassigned to a dead-end river monitor posting; falls in with hopeless anarchists; ends up in China as the war is slowly gathering pace; tries to get back into Europe across Ottoman territory… but there's never any real sense of progress, just of being storm-tossed from one bad situation to another.

It's very much a picaresque, more interested in showing bits of the world than in developing Prohaska's character. It's fascinating to visit the German-built town of Tsingtao, or the feud-ridden backwoods of Montenegro, but I at least always felt that the purpose of all this was to move the narrator somewhere new and interesting more than to tell us about the narrator himself by his reactions to his situations.

"Very well then: you may have your crew and your vessel and the necessary armament. I shall ask for volunteers tomorrow. Personally i think that you're just courting death to no purpose, but if nothing else it'll make something worthwhile to put down in the official history of the siege. Austria's military annals are largely a record of heroic futility, I fear, so you'll at least be part of a long tradition."

It's still great fun, but with a more serious undertone, as war comes back to a Europe that had thought it outgrown, and various horrible people who expect to profit from the chaos encourage the rush towards a short punitive war, because what could possibly go wrong with that.