I
A scene in Schabatz, when the Austro-Hungarians attempted to flank Belgrade in early August, 1914, has seared itself into my memory. I was in the shambles of an overgrown village. The blood of both armies flowed in the streets and the wine from broken casks and bottles flowed in the cellars, soldiers walking in it up to their knees.
The street was deserted save for an Unteroffizier who was passing. An old woman, bent and shriveled, her white locks escaping the yellow sash around her head, tottered from a whitewashed mixture of mud and thatch, saw the enemy soldier, started back, thought better of it, and sank to her knees while she extended her bony arms for mercy. He drew his saber—still a relic of war. “A little despicable stage play and magnanimous pardon,” I thought. I was mistaken. The saber whistled and slashed the outstretched arms, the woman’s shriek cut me like saws and knives, and I turned away bewildered.
I came face to face with the man a few minutes later. He was not drunk. Nor did he look like a wild man from the hills. He was a Viennese, the kind of man I had seen on scores of occasions lolling in a café, mild and gentle as a kitten. He looked mild and gentle now.
“Why did you do it?” I had to ask.
“She was a pig-dog Serb, an enemy of my country. I did my duty.” And he said it in a manner which showed him satisfied in his conscience that he had done what was right.
I realize now that I had had my first war-time example of the German system of education. The code is that anything done in the name of the Fatherland is correct. A man can be educated in such a manner that he will wipe out “crawling verminous pests of his country” with as little compunction as a farmer would rid his field of potato bugs.