The city was brimming with life. It was idly giving over its vast body to the pleasures of the night. It contentedly drank lemonade and ate sausages in cheap cafés, or squandered its superfluous means in costly establishments of unbridled excess.
Work proceeded as usual in the bakeries and printing houses. Bread and newspapers were produced during the night. Bakers, stripped to the waist, pushed lumps of dough into the ovens with long-handled shovels. Soon afterwards, they pulled out steaming loaves of bread, covered with a brownish glaze.
Compositors stood, bent over their type-cases, unconcernedly baking early-morning bread for the souls of the populace. Steaming, odorous words. It was the compositors who were the first to start trembling that night. From the countless stores of microbial leaden characters, among which the history of the world lies atomized, the shirtless compositors had picked out three letters. Each of these letters is meaningless on its own, but when joined together they spell a chemical formula for disaster. While typesetting, the hand of one of the compositors began to shake. Then, for a moment, his mind went blank. When his confused consciousness returned to normal after a short while, he rubbed his eyes and realized that he had set a meaningless word: waf. Sadly, he removed the letter f and threw it back into the type-case, where hundreds of its brothers were resting. With a sense of guilt, he picked out the correct letter with hesitant fingers and confirmed the truth he could not believe. Then he washed his hands.
The row ended up crooked and entered the printing press like that. The dreadful word came off the press into the world, trailing in its wake a black, mournful train of printing ink smeared over the letters.
The apprentices kneading dough on long breadboards in the bakeries suddenly stopped working. Scraping off with knives the remains of the dough clinging to their fingers, they ran out into the street.
The trams suddenly came to a halt in the busiest parts of the city. With a hiss, green sparks flashed from the overhead cables, as if they were short-circuiting. The electric current ran along the nerves of passengers, conductors and drivers. They could not even wait for the next stop. They all got off in the middle of the road and made a dash for the newspapers. Then, for the first time, they noticed that the letters were black.
Mr M. Rosenzweig from Drohobycz, biggest shareholder of the Anglo-Rosenzweig Oil Company, who had interrupted his journey to Venice and was about to spend the first night of his honeymoon in one of the luxury hotels, got out of bed, dressed in a hurry and dashed collarless to the hotel lobby to obtain a copy of the special edition of the Neues Wiener Journal.
Even lovers embracing on benches in the municipal gardens or intoxicated with each other in the undergrowth at the Prater suddenly broke off. Love, startled by death’s icy breath, deserted its perfumed or smelly refuges and made for the bustling boulevards. The rushing sound of Old Father Danube could be heard as usual beyond the Prater, carrying its eternal peace out to sea, into the Black Sea, for safekeeping. The Danube’s last wave carried away with it for an age the enchanting melody of this city, a melody that would never return, just as good blood sapped from the people would never return to their hearts.
The news spread by word of mouth. The mouths bit it, chewed it, ground it and crunched it until suddenly a million mouths spat one word out onto the pavement like a bitter almond. War had already pervaded all the cafés, bars and restaurants. Orchestras everywhere were already playing Old Master Haydn’s Imperial anthem. The one, two and five-crown coins, with the eagle on one side and the Emperor’s head impressed on their obverse, made a sound different from the usual one; somehow, they gave a more metallic ring on the veined marble tabletops when alarmed officers called for their bills.
War took over all public establishments. It leapt over the fences of the moonlit, sleepy villas on the slopes of the Gersthof vineyards, squeezed its way through the gaps in the old inner-city walls, predatory as a she-cat in March frolicking on the Opera House’s green copper roof. It lay in wait in the cloakrooms of the cabarets, and sprang at the throats of the high-spirited, unsuspecting customers bringing their numbered tabs to collect their hats and coats. Like a sudden attack of the plague, it began playing havoc with the citizens’ relaxed minds. Like a mysterious nightmare, it befuddled the brains of happy Pilsner drinkers. A blissful yet deadly shudder shook hearts prone to suffer from apoplexy. Vague, garish images arose from old, long-forgotten school textbooks. Random historical battle scenes, known only from cheap fly-blown prints that used to hang in hairdressers’ salons, began to penetrate the sanctuaries of bourgeois souls, taking by storm the long-lived peacefulness of previous years. There suddenly appeared before one’s eyes every wet-nurse’s dream, familiar from shoe-polish tins, a martial Hussar-shoeblack standing to attention, with his upturned black moustache. Something crumbled away in everyone’s brain.
Lights are flickering at the windows of the barracks. Something that hasn’t been seen for many years—it’s past midnight, and lights on in the barracks! The soldiers are rolling up their coats, fastening their backpacks, filling their ammunition belts, cleaning their mess kits, oiling the knives they call bayonets. In the stables, the cavalry officers stroke their mounts’ sleek haunches with a rag and comb their manes. The poor horses whinny, noisily chomping on their oats. The corporals are inspecting the harnesses and saddles, cursing the Dragoons over missing buttons. The sergeants are hurrying as though possessed from one office to another. In the officers’ quarters, the lieutenants’ wives have been dragged out of bed to wax waterproof socks and have thermos flasks ready with hot tea.
It’s the same in all the towns.
Only the villages are asleep, the eternal reservoir of all kinds of soldiery, the inexhaustible source of physical strength. The villages are asleep among Danubian meadows; the villages are asleep along the banks of the Vistula, the Dniester and the Inn. The villages are asleep behind enclosures in the Alps, in Transylvania and the Sudetenland. Everywhere, red-faced farmworkers lie in the straw beside their horses, their bellies full of potatoes and rye bread. They sleep sweatily. The cattle in the cowsheds are breathing heavily, calmly, in biblical peace.
A startled signalman in distant Hutsul country wakes up every now and then, rubs his eyes, pulls up his trousers, pulls his cap down over his sticking-out ears, and picks up his red flag. He keeps lowering the level-crossing barrier. So many trains that night, and all bound for Hungary.
“What’s up?” he asks the engine driver of a stationary goods train.
“War!”
“War?” repeats the signalman, his jaw dropping. Either he hasn’t heard properly, or he can’t believe it. He stands stiffly to attention, saluting the windowless wagons carrying ammunition and pigs.
At dawn, a swarm of locusts descended on every town. The darkness of that night had spawned a swarm of blue insects—centipedes stabbing with bayonets, wasps armed with deadly stings. Are these the same soldiers who entertained us last Sunday with a fine parade?