The Radetzky March Read Online Free PDF

time he would ever see his father in this life.
    It
was
the last time. The son wrote his father the routine letters—there was no other visible link between them; Captain Trotta was severed from the long procession of his Slavic peasant forebears. A new dynasty began with him.
    The round years rolled by, one by one, like peaceful, uniform wheels. In keeping with his status, Trotta married his colonel’s not-quite-young well–off niece, the daughter of a district captain in western Bohemia; he fathered a boy, enjoyed the uniformity of his healthy military life in the small garrison, rode horseback to the parade ground every morning, and played chess every afternoon with the lawyer at the café, eventually feeling at home in his rank, his station, his standing, and his repute. He had an average military gift, of which he provided average samples at maneuvers every year; he was a good husband, suspicious of women, no gambler, grouchy, but a just officer, a fierce enemy of all deceit, unmanly conduct, cowardly safety, garrulous praise, and ambitious self–seeking. He was as simple and impeccable as his military record, and only the anger that sometimes took hold of him would have given a judge of human nature some inkling that Captain Trotta’s soul likewise contained the dim nocturnal abysses where storms slumber and the unknown voices of nameless ancestors.
    He read no books, Captain Trotta, and secretly pitied his growing son, who had to start handling slate, pencil, and sponge, paper, ruler, and arithmetic, and for whom the unavoidable primers were already waiting. The captain was convinced his boy had to become a soldier. It never crossed his mind that—from now until the extinction of his dynasty—a Trotta could follow any other calling. Had he had two, three, four sons (but his wife was sickly, needed doctors and treatments, and pregnancy was risky for her), they would all have become soldiers. That was what Captain Trotta still thought. There was talk of another war; Trotta was ready any day. Yes, it struck him as almost certain that he was destined to die in combat. His unshakable simplicity viewed death in the field as a necessary consequence of warrior fame. Until one day, out of idle curiosity, he picked up the first reader assigned to his son, who had just turned five and who, because of his mother’s ambition, had far too prematurely tasted the ordeals of school, thanks to a private tutor. Trotta read the rhymed morning prayer. It had been the same for decades; he could still remember it. He read “The Four Seasons,” “The Fox and the Hare,” “The King of the Beasts.” Then he opened to the table of contents and found the tide of a selection that seemed to refer to him, for it was called “Franz Joseph I at the Batde of Solferino”; he read and had to sit down. “In the Battle of Solferino,” the piece began, “our Emperor and King, Franz Joseph I, was beset by great danger.” Trotta himself appeared, but how utterly transformed!
    The monarch [it said] had ventured so far ahead in the heat of fighting that he suddenly found himself ringed by a throng of enemy troopers. At that moment of supreme need, a lieutenant of tender years galloped over at full speed on a sweat–covered sorrel, swinging his saber. Oh, how the blows rained upon the heads and necks of the enemy riders!
    And further:
    An enemy lance bored through the young hero’s chest, but most of the foes were already slain. Gripping his naked sword in his hand, our young undaunted monarch could easily fend off the ever-weakening attacks. The entire enemy cavalry was taken prisoner. And the young lieutenant—Sir Joseph von Trotta was his name—was awarded the highest distinction that our Fatherland has to bestow on its heroic sons, the Order of Maria Theresa.
    Captain Trotta, clutching the reader, stepped into the small orchard behind the house, where his wife busied herself on balmier afternoons, and, his lips pale, his voice very