In the time it took one young man to enjoy a solitary swim, everything suddenly appeared to have changed for ever. And it had. Bela Zombory-Moldovan was 29 in the summer of 1914. His life was happy; he was the beloved only child of fond parents and he was beginning to make a name as a visual artist. A few days earlier, on July 25th, he had been one of a large group of friends, photographed on a beach, posing in the sun. The picture remains, although as his grandson, Peter, translator of this enormously likeable and evocative memoir recalls, “all the rest is gone”.
In this centenary year of the Great War, many books have been re-issued in commemoration of the upheaval caused by the assassin’s bullet in Sarajevo that claimed the life of the heir-apparent of the Austro-Hungarian throne and with it, so many million others. Zombory-Moldovan’s personal account of eight pivotal months at the beginning of the conflict is being published for the first time in any language. It is astonishingly vivid, no doubt because it is written by a painter.
Zombory-Moldovan recalls how it all looked, rather than merely chronicling how he felt, although there is also a powerful if understated sense of his feelings. He does not present himself as a hero. Nor does he rail against the authorities. Instead, he is honest and makes no attempt to conceal his fear or the way in which civilian attitude’s changed from cheering the troops as they first set out to shunning them as the survivors, often wounded, returned in blood-stained uniforms that made clear exactly how grim the great adventure actually was.
On hearing of the declaration of war from the bathing attendant, who told the artist he was leaving to join up, Zombory-Moldovan looked at the notice on the wall of the bathing station. It had details of call-up dates, arranged by year of birth. “I was to report for service at Veszprem,” he recalls, “with the Thirty-First Regiment of the Royal Hungarian Army by the fourth of August. I stared at the poster as if I had just suffered a stroke . . .” His shock still rings true.
Very moving
Zombory-Moldovan’s lively personality, languid and charming, possessed of an easy wit, emerges over the century which has passed since he wrote down his impressions. His grandson, the translator, mentions knowing him only in his last years. “He came to visit us in England when I was about six; an old man, but erect and dapper in a well-cut Prince of Wales check suit, leather gloves casually clasped in one hand . . . Even in those days, he seemed to belong to a distant, more graceful age.”
It is very moving, particularly as the memoir itself recalls a young man, who was known to have been handsome and a bit of a dandy, greatly admired by the ladies. The war never fully left him; the horrors remained in his memory all his life. His grandson recalls, in the wonderful introduction that accompanies this narrative, being told his grandfather had cried out in his sleep as he was dying: “Get down! Get down! They’re shooting from there!”
The holiday makers had their own way of dealing with news of the war; that evening as the news dominated all conversation, Zombory-Moldovan was to notice at dinner something of which he had previously been unaware: “There was something almost ostentatious about the separation of nationalities. The Slavs huddled together. The Germans looked the least concerned: a huge country with a fearsome army.”
Elsewhere he remarks: “There had been no war in Hungary for almost seventy years. When my grandfather spoke of 1848, we would listen with bored half-smiles: it was all so alien to us, so far removed from us. This was the twentieth century! Europe at equilibrium in the era of enlightenment and democratic humanism. It seemed impossible that a dispute should be decided by fighting.”
The ironies begin to multiply. Within pages it becomes obvious that here is a remarkable narrative, a real treasure, a book everyone should read. The Burning of the World is a work of superb reportage as well as being a non-fiction companion volume to Joseph Roth's classic The Radetzky March which was written later. Both convey the initial disbelief that a great empire could ever be challenged, and both express the sorrow at realising that not only could it be threatened, that it could collapse for ever.
Idiotic decision
Soon after, he finds himself in the army and likely to see action. The preparations are carried out with an amount of fussy militaristic ritual: “Another farewell. A ceremonial parade accompanied by resounding marches . . . Crowds had turned out to shower us with flowers. Beside me marched little Drafi, the gypsy, who pattered away on his drum. I told him to stop it, but it was oddly cheering. Just what I needed!” The troops have to march 75km on the order of the regimental commander. It is an idiotic decision. “By the time we reached our destination, half the regiment had been rendered unfit for action from damage to their feet and general exhaustion.”
Alert to the beauty of the late summer, he writes of nature’s competing colours: “Subjects for landscapes: the colours from burnt sienna and ochre to gray umber. Marvellous colours on the shadows.” The troops edge ever closer to Russia. Zombory-Moldovan’s memoir, with its stylistic grace and ease, is unique for many reasons, not least because it gives an account of the wide-open, exposed spaces of the Eastern Front, whereas much of the literature of the first World War is concentrated on the trenches of the Western Front.
At one point in a little town he is billeted in a Jewish shop and he notices a scattered stamp collection on the floor. “I was a collector too, once. I pick a few of them up. You can see they have been carefully handled. Someone looked after them fondly . . . Where’s that person now?
The noise of the fighting shocks him as much as seeing bodies blown to pieces before his eyes. He looks at the faces of the soldiers. “In their eyes, staring blankly ahead, is reflected the fire of the rising sun. They glare at life.” He remembers what he is, an artist, not a soldier and muses on the scene: “Splendid subject for a painting,” before continuing, “A guilty thought, and a useless one.”
His luck does hold out amid the carnage, until the inevitable moment. “The next instant he feels as though the earth has collided with another planet, and I am caught between the two. There is a silence so deep that I think I have gone deaf.” His wounds result in his being sent home and on recovery he was not sent back to action but instead served in a non-combatant capacity.
The literature of the Great War is indeed rich in poetry and powerful images. The Burning of the World is a marvellous discovery with a humility and sense of wonder that places it more than the equal of even Robert Graves's defiant Good-Bye to All That (1929). Most exciting of all though is that Bela Zombory-Moldovan was primarily a painter, not a writer, yet it is his artist's eye that tells the story so much more intensely than mere words on a page.
