The Radetzsky March by Joseph Roth

The Radetzky march by Joseph Roth

A distinctly central European novel that is at once strange yet familiar. Strange because I know very little about Austria-Hungary and its empire, and familiar in the sense that the relationship between monarchies and their militaries are not very different at different times and in different places. Written in the early 30s and set just before WW1, the style and story have echoes of 19th century French literature. Descriptions of genteel affairs could have come directly from the pen of Balzac, while the descriptions of peasants and peasant villages could have been written by a young Zola. There is acute observation of imperial administration with all its pathos and absurdity that can only have been written by an outsider. The reader is beset throughout by a deep sense of foreboding. War is clearly coming, it is inevitable, yet its actual arrival at the remote eastern garrison is a shock and the resultant chaos and bloodlust quite incomprehensible.

The dissolute lives of the soldiers in remote garrisons is depressing to read and makes the loss of the empire understandable, and the innate snobbery across the military is made clear by the hero’s eventual transfer from the cavalry to the infantry. He has a minor barony but he can’t ride. But the greatest burden he has to bear is that he is the grandson of the ‘Hero of Solferino’, his grandfather had saved the Kaiser’s life in battle and was both promoted and ennobled in the field. The assumption that he has necessarily inherited individual military prowess is a terrible load for a barely competent officer to bear, he is only three generations removed from peasant stock and it is among peasants that he is clearly more comfortable. His final act of heroism is both surprising and mundane, and curiously satisfying. Reading this novel a hundred years after it is set has a certain poignancy. The book feels much older than that and having recently read Boyd’s ‘Waiting for Sunrise’ set at around the same time and having Vienna as a common location, it is difficult not to make comparisons. Boyd’s novel is very modern in style and make’s ‘The Radetsky March’ seem positively antediluvian. Yet for all that, it is a wonderful book, evocative of both the time at which it is set and the time when it was written.