Is the Professional Official Fibber of Europe really troubled with our morals? Dear Parisian friend, are you taking seriously the daily remark of the newspaper and the orator about “this noble nation with an illustrious history”? That is mere kindness, mere charity for a people in temporary hard luck. The newspaper and the orator do not mean it. They wink when they say it.
And so you are ashamed. Do not be ashamed; there is no occasion for it.
DUELING
(Vienna, Austria, 1898)
This pastime is as common in Austria to-day as it is in France. But with this difference--that here in the Austrian states the duel is dangerous, while in France it is not. Here it is tragedy, in France it is comedy; here it is a solemnity, there it is monkeyshines; here the duelist risks his life, there he does not even risk his shirt. Here he fights with pistol or saber, in France with a hairpin--a blunt one. Here the desperately wounded man tries to walk to the hospital; there they paint the scratch so that they can find it again, lay the sufferer on a stretcher, and conduct him off the field with a band of music.
At the end of a French duel the pair hug and kiss and cry, and praise each other’s valor; then the surgeons make an examination and pick out the scratched one, and the other one helps him on to the litter and pays his fare; and in return the scratched one treats to champagne and oysters in the evening, and then “the incident is closed,” as the French say. It is all polite, and gracious, and pretty, and impressive. At the end of an Austrian duel the antagonist that is alive gravely offers his hand to the other man, utters some phrases of courteous regret, then bids him good-by and goes his way, and that incident also is closed. The French duelist is painstakingly protected from danger, by the rules of the game. His antagonist’s weapon cannot reach so far as his body; if he gets a scratch it will not be above his elbow. But in Austria the rules of the game do not provide against danger, they carefully provide for it, usually. Commonly the combat must be kept up until one of the men is disabled; a nondisabling slash or stab does not retire him.
For a matter of three months I watched the Viennese journals, and whenever a duel was reported in their telegraphic columns I scrap-booked it. By this record I find that dueling in Austria is not confined to journalists and old maids, as in France, but is indulged in by military men, journalists, students, physicians, lawyers, members of the legislature, and even the Cabinet, the bench, and the police. Dueling is forbidden by law; and so it seems odd to see the makers and administrators of the laws dancing on their work in this way. Some months ago Count Badeni, at that time chief of the government, fought a pistol duel here in the capital city of the Empire with Representative Wolf, and both of those distinguished Christians came near getting turned out of the Church--for the Church as well as the state forbids dueling.
In one case, lately, in Hungary, the police interfered and stopped a duel after the first innings. This was a saber duel between the chief of police and the city attorney. Unkind things were said about it by the newspapers. They said the police remembered their duty uncommonly well when their own officials were the parties concerned in duels. But I think the underlings showed bread-and-butter judgment. If their superiors had carved each other well, the public would have asked, “Where were the police?” and their place would have been endangered; but custom does not require them to be around where mere unofficial citizens are explaining a thing with sabers.
There was another duel--a double duel--going on in the immediate neighborhood at the time, and in this case the police obeyed custom and did not disturb it. Their bread and butter was not at stake there. In this duel a physician fought a couple of surgeons, and wounded both--one of them lightly, the other seriously. An undertaker wanted to keep people from interfering, but that was quite natural again.
Selecting at random from my record, I next find a duel at Tranopol between military men. An officer of the Tenth Dragoons charged an officer of the Ninth Dragoons with an offense against the laws of the card table. There was a defect or a doubt somewhere in the matter, and this had to be examined and passed upon by a court of honor. So the case was sent up to Lemberg for this purpose. One would like to know what the defect was, but the newspaper does not say. A man here who has fought many duels and has a graveyard says that probably the matter in question was as to whether the accusation was true or not; that if the charge was a very grave one--cheating, for instance--proof of its truth would rule the guilty officer out of the field of honor; the court would not allow a gentleman to fight with such a person. You see what a solemn thing it is; you see how particular they are; any little careless speech can lose you your privilege of getting yourself shot, here. The court seems to have gone into the matter in a searching and careful fashion, for several months elapsed before it reached a decision. It then sanctioned a duel and the accused killed his accuser.
Next I find a duel between a prince and a major; first with pistols--no result satisfactory to either party; then with sabers, and the major badly hurt.