Book Review: For God and Kaiser

For God and Kaiser:The Imperial Austrian Armyby Richard BassettYale University Press, 2015The long and storied history of the Imperial and Royal forces of Austria is the well-nigh hopeless subject of historian Richard Bassett's immensely impressive new book, For God and Kaiser: The Imperial Austrian Army, and for over 500 pages he does that subject proud, cramming in more research, more anecdote, and more narrative drive than any English-language account has ever had before. Every major highlight of the army's career is given its time in the spotlight, always in stirringly-constructed set-pieces. We get the tumultuous conflict with Ottoman forces outside Vienna in 1683, multiple clashes with the Prussians and the French throughout the centuries, and of course the grey slugging-matches of the Imperial twilight during the First World War, and through it all, Bassett mines a vast array of primary sources in order to present an almost unbroken record of bumbling incompetence in the best possible light.In his prolonged quest to make the appalling appealing, he has frequent recourse to anecdotes, and this is wise, since he has a distinct ear for good ones. The book is full of perfect sting-in-the-tail little stories like this one:

Early on a sun-swept November morning in 1918, the commander of the Trieste naval air station Gottfried Banfield waited quietly in his office for his Italian opponents to arrive. Eventually, a famous Italian air ace called Berezzi turned up to take over the base. On being presented to Banfield, the Italian stiffened and saluted: 'Banfield? What an honour. I am so sorry we have not met earlier.' To which Banfield answered evenly: 'Please don't regret it. I am afraid that if we had met earlier, one of us would be unlikely to be present here today.'

Bassett's theme here, if such a happily energetic miscellany as this can be said to have one, is that the Austrian Army was at many times in its history a pivotal force in European geopolitics, often serving as a kind of model or template even for its enemies. Like some of the most entertaining theories, this one is absurd on its face: for virtually the whole of its career, the Imperial and Royal Army was a veritable watch-word for morose, drunken brutality and maudlin organizational incoherence, the very quintessence of a creaking, hidebound bureaucracy always intent on fighting the previous war. That guns if discharged will fire bullets and that men hit with such bullets will fall down – these were the whisker-thin ballistic givens that allowed the Austrian Army to survive a seemingly endless supply of generals whose savagery was only matched by their stupidity, and of rank-and-file beef-faced soldiers who were always punctilious that their oak-leafed headdresses were just so before getting accidentally mowed down by their own comrades while marching in the wrong direction.You could scarcely write a book as heartfelt as For God and Kaiser without to a great extent believing in your subject, and certainly by the time he's worked up a full head of steam, Bassett is as apt to grow wistful over a stein of Weissbrauerei as any hussar in the Mannschaftsheim. When he's winding up about the Army's final hours, you can practically hear the leider wafting in the background:

Today the Habsburg army is no more. The last person to have served in its forced died in Lemberg aged well over 100 in 2003. In literature, art and music something of its memory lives on. It certainly has the finest corpus of any army's military music, with contributions by Schubert, Beethoven and Strauss as well as Lehar, Ziehrer, Komzak and Wagnes. The obituary of the Imperial and Royal Army was penned by some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Joseph Roth, Arthur Schnitzler, Alexander Lernet-Holenia and Robert Musil have all immortalized the traditions, ethos and mores of the old army. In his great novel about the Trotta family, Radetzkymarsch, Roth gave the old army the literary equivalent of its last rites. The beautiful paintings of Alexander Pock and the drawings of Schonpflug offer a memorable visual accompaniment to Roth's theme.

The healthy element of irony (not to say mockery) woven into many of the works he cites either eludes him or displeases him; instead, these and other works like them are presented as simple fond farewells for all the good times we had. This is by a wide margin the most entertaining book about the least entertaining subject yet written this year, a must-read for military history buffs regardless of where they stand on the use of mustard gas. Even its bias is ultimately more charming than incriminating. Bassett quotes Austrian writer Hermann Bahr to the effect that “Austria has not been lucky with its biographers,” and follows up: “If this is the case for Imperial Austria as a structure, it is also true for the Imperial and Royal Army whose efforts supported the empire for so many centuries.” But in truth, Austria has had some of the very best biographers and, like all lachrymose bullies, simply hasn't like the unflattering results. And if this, too, is even more true for the Imperial and Royal Army, then Richard Bassett deserves a medal from Archduke Charles, and promptly.