‘To him that hath, to him shall be given.’ These words from the Scriptures the writer may safely restate as: ‘To him that hath told much, to him shall much be told.’ Nothing is further from the truth than the only too common notion that the author’s fantasy is incessantly at work within him, that his invention has an inexhaustible and continuous fund of stories and incidents upon which to draw. In reality he need only, instead of setting out to find, let himself be found by, characters and happenings, which, in so far as he has preserved the heightened capacity for observing and listening, unceasingly seek him out as their instrument of communication. To the person who has over and over again tried to trace human destinies, many tell their own story.

The following story was related to me almost entirely in the form in which I here present it — and, moreover, in most unusual circumstances. One evening when I was last in Vienna, tired after a very full day, I sought out a restaurant on the outskirts of the city which I imagined had long since ceased to be fashionable and was but little frequented. No sooner had I entered it, however, than I was made disagreeably aware of my mistake. As I passed the first table, an acquaintance jumped up with every sign of genuine pleasure — I, to be sure, did not respond with equal warmth — and invited me to join him. It would be untrue to say that this importunate gentleman was in himself an impossible or unpleasant fellow; he was merely one of those embarrassingly convivial souls who collect acquaintances as assiduously as children collect postage-stamps and are therefore peculiarly proud of every fresh addition to their collection. To this good-natured eccentric — in his spare time an erudite and competent archivist — the whole meaning of existence lay in the modest satisfaction derived from being able to remark with airy nonchalance at the mention of any name that received mention from time to time in the Press: ‘A close friend of mine,’ or ‘Ah, I met him only yesterday!’ or ‘My friend A. tells me, and my friend B. thinks,’ and so on throughout the entire alphabet. His friends could always count on him to applaud loudly at their first nights, he would ring up every actress the morning after the show to offer his congratulations, he never forgot a birthday, he forbore to mention disagreeable Press notices and invariably drew attention to the favourable ones out of genuine friendliness. Not at all a bad fellow, then, for he was genuinely anxious to please and was delighted if one so much as asked a small favour of him, or better still, added a fresh specimen to his cabinet of curiosities.

But there is no need to describe friend ‘Also-present’ — the name by which this variety of good-natured parasite within the variegated species of snob is generally known in Vienna — in greater detail, for everyone is familiar with the type and knows it is impossible to repel its touching and inoffensive advances without being brutal. Resigning myself to my fate, therefore, I sat down beside him, and a quarter of an hour had passed in idle chatter when a man entered the restaurant — tall and striking on account of the contrast between his fresh, youthful complexion and an intriguing greyness at the temples. Something about the way he held himself immediately betrayed the ex-officer. My neighbour jumped up eagerly to hail him with the assiduity so typical of him. The newcomer, however, responded with indifference rather than politeness, and scarcely had the waiter dashed up and taken his order when friend ‘Also-present’ turned to me and said in a low whisper: ‘Do you know who that is?’ Knowing of old the pride he took in triumphantly displaying any even moderately interesting specimen from his collection, and fearing long-winded explanations, I merely uttered a perfunctory ‘No,’ and continued to dissect my Sachertorte. This apathy on my part merely had the effect of increasing the celebrity-monger’s excitement; screening his mouth cautiously with his hand, he breathed in an undertone: ‘Why, that’s Hofmiller of the Commissariat. You know, the fellow who won the Order of Maria Theresa in the war.’ Since this information did not seem to bowl me over as he had hoped, he began, with the fervour of a patriotic school primer, to enlarge upon all the valiant deeds performed by Captain Hofmiller in the war, first with the cavalry, then on an observation flight over the Piave, when he had shot down three planes single-handed, and finally with a machine-gun company, when for three days he had occupied and held a sector of the front — all this accompanied by a mass of detail (which I omit) and punctuated the whole time by exclamations of boundless astonishment that I should never have heard of this paragon, upon whom the Emperor Charles had in person conferred the most rare of all decorations in the Austrian army.

Involuntarily I yielded to the temptation to glance across at the other table so as to see for once at close quarters a duly and historically certified hero. But I encountered a hard, indignant look that seemed to say, ‘So that fellow’s been talking a lot of rot about me, has he? You won’t find anything to look at here.’ Whereupon he slewed his chair round with an unmistakably hostile movement and flatly turned his back on us. Somewhat abashed, I looked away, and from now on avoided so much as a glance at the cloth on his table. Shortly afterwards I took leave of my good gossip, noticing, however, as I left, that he immediately went over to his hero’s table, no doubt to give him as glowing an account of me as he had given me of him.

That was all — a mere exchange of glances. And I should have forgotten all about this fleeting encounter, but it so happened that the very next day, at a small party, I once more found myself face to face with this forbidding gentleman. In evening dress he looked even more striking and elegant than in the informal tweeds of the day before. We both had some difficulty in suppressing a faint smile, that significant smile that passes between two people who, in a fairly large group of people, share a closely guarded secret. He recognized me, as I did him, and we were probably both equally irritated or amused at the thought of our unsuccessful celebrity-monger of the day before. At first we avoided speaking to each other, and in any case it would have been useless to try to do so, for a heated discussion was already going on all around us.

The subject of this discussion will easily be guessed when I mention that it took place in the year 1937. Future historians of our epoch will one day record that in the year 1937 almost every conversation in every country of this distracted Europe of ours was dominated by speculation as to the probability or improbability of a new world war. Wherever people met, this theme exercised an irresistible fascination, and one sometimes had a feeling that it was not the people themselves who were working off their fears in conjectures and hopes, but, so to speak, the very air, the storm-laden atmosphere of the times, which, charged with latent suspense, was endeavouring to unburden itself in speech.

Our host, a lawyer by profession and dogmatic by nature, opened the discussion. Employing the usual arguments, he put forward the usual airy nonsense: the present generation, he said, knew all about war and would not let itself be tricked so innocently into the next war as it had been into the last. At the very moment of mobilization the guns would be pointed in the wrong direction, for ex-soldiers like himself in particular had not forgotten what was in store for them. I was annoyed by the smug assurance with which, at a moment when in thousands and hundreds of thousands of factories explosives and poison gas were being manufactured, he dismissed the possibility of a war as lightly as he might flip the ash off his cigarette with a tap of his forefinger. One should not always let the wish be father to the thought, I protested with some firmness. The ministries and the military authorities who ran the whole war machine had likewise not been sleeping, and while we had been befuddling ourselves with Utopias, they had taken full advantage of the interval of peace in order to organize the masses in advance and have them ready to hand, at half-cock, so to speak. Even now, while Europe was at peace, the general attitude of servility had, thanks to modern methods of propaganda, increased to unbelievable proportions, and one ought boldly to face the fact that from the very moment when the news of mobilization came hurtling through the loudspeakers no opposition could be looked for from any quarter. The grain of dust that was man no longer counted today as a creature of volition.

Of course they were all against me, for, as is borne out by experience, the instinct of self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them nonexistent, and a warning such as mine against cheap optimism was bound to prove particularly unwelcome at a moment when a sumptuously laid supper was awaiting us in the next room.

And now, to my surprise, the gallant hero of the day before entered the lists in my support — the very man in whom my false intuition had led me to suspect an opponent. Yes, it was sheer nonsense, he declared vehemently, to try nowadays to take into account the willingness or unwillingness of human material, for in the next war all the actual fighting would be done by machines, and men would be reduced to no more than a kind of component part of the machine. Even in the last war he had not met many men at the front who had either unequivocally acquiesced in or opposed the war. Most of them had been whirled into it like a cloud of dust and had simply found themselves caught up in the vast vortex, each one of them tossed about willy-nilly like a pea in a great sack. On the whole, more men had perhaps escaped into the war than from it.

I listened in astonishment, my interest particularly aroused by the vehemence with which he now went on: ‘Don’t let us deceive ourselves. If in any country whatever a recruiting campaign were to be launched today for some utterly preposterous war, a war in Polynesia or in some corner of Africa, thousands and hundreds of thousands would rush to the colours without really knowing why, perhaps merely out of a desire to run away from themselves or from disagreeable circumstances. But as for any effective opposition to a war — I wouldn’t care to put it above zero. It always demands a far greater degree of courage for an individual to oppose an organized movement than to let himself be carried along with the stream — individual courage, that is, a variety of courage that is dying out in these times of progressive organization and mechanization. During the war practically the only courage I came across was mass courage, the courage that comes of being one of a herd, and anyone who examines this phenomenon more closely will find it to be compounded of some very strange elements: a great deal of vanity, a great deal of recklessness and even boredom, but, above all, a great deal of fear — yes, fear of staying behind, fear of being sneered at, fear of independent action, and fear, above all, of taking a stand against the mass enthusiasm of one’s fellows. It was not until later on in civil life that I personally realized that most of those reputed to be the bravest at the front were very questionable heroes — oh, please don’t misunderstand me!’ he said, turning politely to our host, who was pulling a wry face. ‘I do not by any means except myself.’

I liked the way in which he spoke, and I had an impulse to go up to him, but at that moment our hostess called us in to supper and, since we were placed far apart at table, we had no further opportunity of talking to each other. Not until the party broke up did we run into each other, in the cloakroom.

‘I believe,’ he said with a smile, ‘we have already been indirectly introduced by our common patron.’

I also smiled. ‘And, what is more, very thoroughly.’

‘I expect he made me out to be no end of an Achilles, and no doubt he was as proud as a peacock of my Order.’

‘That’s about it!’

‘Yes, he’s damned proud of it — just as he is of your books.’

‘A rum customer. But I’ve met worse. By the way — if you’ve no objection, I’ll walk along with you.’

We walked along together. Suddenly he turned to me.

‘Believe me, I’m not talking for effect when I say that for years nothing has been a greater bore to me than this Maria Theresa Order of mine — it’s far too conspicuous for my liking. I must admit, to be quite honest, that when it was awarded to me out there at the front I was, of course, absolutely bowled over. After all, I’d been brought up as a soldier, and as a cadet I’d heard this Order spoken of as something almost legendary, this one Order which comes the way of perhaps no more than a dozen men in every war — a positive bolt from the blue. Why, for a young chap of twenty-eight that sort of thing means a devil of a lot. All at once you find yourself standing before the whole brigade, everyone gazes up reverently as something suddenly sparkles out on your breast like a little sun, and His Majesty, the Emperor, that unapproachable deity, shakes you by the hand and congratulates you. But a distinction of that kind, you know, only had any sort of point in our military world; and when the war was over, it seemed to me ridiculous to have to go about for the rest of my life labelled as a hero, just because on one occasion I had acted with real courage for twenty minutes — probably no more courageously than thousands of others, except that I had had the good fortune to be noticed, and the perhaps still more astounding good fortune to come back alive. By the end of a year I was fed to the teeth with stalking about like a walking monument, seeing people wherever I went stare at the little metal disc and then let their gaze travel in awed admiration up to my face; in fact, my exasperation at being so eternally conspicuous was one of the reasons why, at the end of the war, I left the army and entered civilian life.’

He strode along more vigorously.

‘I say one of the reasons, but the chief reason was one that you may be able to appreciate even more. The chief reason was that I myself had become thoroughly sceptical as to my claim to be called a hero and of my heroism. After all, I knew better than all these strangers who gaped at me that the man behind the Order was anything but a hero, was even definitely the reverse — one of those who only rushed headlong into the war in order to extricate themselves from a desperate situation, men who were running away from their responsibilities rather than patriotic heroes. I don’t know how you writers feel about it — to me, at least, to live in a halo of glory seems unnatural and unendurable, and I felt genuinely relieved when I was no longer obliged to strut about with my heroic history writ large on my uniform. Even to this day it annoys me when people rake up my glorious past, and I may as well confess to you that I was very nearly on the point yesterday of coming over to your table and telling that chattering fool he’d better find someone else to brag about. The awed look you gave me kept riling me for the rest of the evening, and I had a good mind, just in order to give that fellow the lie, to compel you to hear from my own lips by what tortuous paths I attained to the status of a hero. It’s a very odd story, and yet it may serve to show that courage is often nothing but inverted weakness. Incidentally, I wouldn’t mind telling you the whole story straight out here and now. Something that goes back a quarter of a century in a man’s life no longer concerns him, but quite another person. Have you time? And it wouldn’t bore you, would it?’

Of course I had time, and we paced up and down the now deserted streets far into the night. I have only made a few changes in his narrative (I need scarcely add it was not related to me at a single interview), such as putting Uhlans instead of Hussars, to conceal the identity of the various garrisons, and, of course, changing the names of people and places. But in no instance have I added anything essential of my own invention, and it is not I but the man who lived the story who now narrates it.