“‘Who saw them shooting?”
‘The Captain and ten men.”
“Did they see it for sure?”
“Yes.”
The five peasants immediately had to get on their knees behind a bank, and the bullets of a squad banged against them. The youngest looked barely fifteen years of age.
The date in the diary is Sunday, August 16, 1914. The attack on Serbia by Austro-Hungarian forces had only commenced four days previously. The keeper of the diary was 29 years old Egon Erwin Kisch, an Austrian soldier in the 11th Imperial and Royal Infantry Regiment. He noted this execution prosaically as he also noted that on the same day an ensign in the regiment, befallen by raving madness, had to be disarmed and restrained en masse, spewing white foam and screaming: “Here are the Serbian Dogs!” On that Sunday he additionally observed an Austrian gunner tearing off his clothes while rabidly screaming—“psychological casualties,” the diarist dryly noted of these events.
The diary first published in an abbreviated version in 1922 under the title A Soldier in the Prague Corps and in its entirety in 1929, entitled Kisch, write that down, Kisch! (republished in a new German edition, February 2014), is one of the most unsparing and brutally honest battlefield accounts of the First World War. Egon Erwin Kisch’s background as a journalist and investigative reporter made him an astute observer of what Wilfred Owen called “the pity of war” and a sober raconteur of the banality of army life. His post-war fame as the “Raging Reporter” was already pre-shadowed by his perceptive observations of military propaganda, the social and ethnic hierarchy of the old Austria, and the overall war effort of the Central Powers.
Source: nationalinterest.org
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