,14=/,15=#,23=%,24==> 7The War 1914{-18 A~U~S~T~R~I~A is now our theme, Austria and the last days of an empire and culture whose variety, whose failings, and whose charm mirrored human nature itself. Through those last days and through their sad aftermath, Wittgenstein was to live, largely by choice, among his countrymen, sharing at times (largely by choice) dangers, privation, and humiliation, at others the rarefied idealism and carefully unostentatious wealth of his family. Janik and Toulmin called their book Wittgenstein's Vienna and dealt with the city in the period before the First World War:1 a more important concept from the biographical point of view is Wittgenstein's Austria_the history and life of the country that he lived in between the ages of 25 and 40. These are the really formative years of a man's life and in them his mood of prevailing pessimism became established but also his vision of what could or might be saved from the general decline. In these years the last traces of the little Wittgenstein that went to Berlin disappeared. Nieces and nephews saw him before the war as a sunny and charming uncle, afterwards as a figure of authority and too often of disapproval. After the collapse of 1918_the breakdown or Zusammenbruch _Wittgenstein too went through a period of despair and of comparative estrangement from his family. Throughout the 1920s, despite false starts and setbacks, there was development and germination. And the end-result was a kind of harmony of spirit which made it possible for him to take up his real work again. More fortunate than his country he was not limited by a geographical situation; but we shall see in a later volume how the events of the 1930s in Austria were also reflected in his personal life. As so often with historical events, we seem to be seeing patterns rather than causes. The development that the war brought about in Wittgen- stein seemed to be a necessary one for him. Years later he made a point of discussing his war-experiences at length with a nephew and when the nephew made some remark of pacifist tendency, he said of the war: "It saved my life; I don't know what I'd have done without it.'2 Russell was shocked by the mystical and religious tendencies that he found in Wittgenstein after the war. These can in part be explained, we shall see, by the pressures of the war itself and by accidents during it, yet they also contributed an essential element to the book on which he had been working since 1911. Even the philosophic silence that he observed in the 1.London and New York 1973. 2.Professor Felix Salzer (personal communication). 205 7The War 1914{-18 1920s, which can easily, and to some extent truly, be ascribed to despondency, had also its philosophic justification, both in the doctrines of his first book and in the deeper view of thought and language that his immersion in other activities gave him. "For internal as well as external reasons...' (Aus inneren and a$3usseren Gru$3nden!...), Wittgenstein was fond of saying to explain (or refuse to explain) one of his actions; and we too usually have to look at them in both lights. Wittgenstein had returned to Austria; for the July and August, as it seems, for he meant to go on a holiday with Pinsent in September and to make a short visit to England before returning to Skjolden. At the end of July he came down from the Hochreith to Vienna for a meeting which, in the event, determined many of his friendships and interests over the succeeding years. Admirer as he was of Karl Kraus, he had read Kraus's reference to Der Brenner, a literary and intellectual periodical published in Innsbruck. "That the only honest periodical in Austria comes out in Innsbruck ought to be known, if not in Austria at least in Germany, whose only honest periodical also comes out in Innsbruck,' said Kraus. Its editor, a few years older than Wittgenstein, was Ludwig von Ficker, a writer himself, but chiefly one with a nose for what was good_with Spu$3rsinn, as Wittgenstein himself called it. In Der Brenner, fortnightly since 1910, there had appeared poems, criticisms, stories, articles of philosophical or social interest, comments on events of the time. There was no one theme: Karl Kraus was an obvious influence and the name of the journal was meant to indicate an opening from German into Mediterranean culture. There was no political tendency in the magazine but a sustained attempt to achieve authenticity in art and life. Names now familiar to historians of literature occur in those early numbers_Theodor Da$3ubler, Peter Altenburg, Albert Ehrenstein, Else Lasker-Schu$3ler, above all, perhaps, Georg Trakl. Some but not all of these would have been to Wittgen- stein's taste; but it is natural to suppose that he was affected by the frequent discussions of Dostoevsky and the translations into German (the earliest translations easily available) of Kierkegaard. Wittgenstein actually mentions that he himself was struck by what Ficker had written on Kraus.3 The magazine seems to have been an attempt to do in a less personal and individualistic manner_in a less fastidious one too_what Kraus also was attempting: something very Austrian, and something, we can now see, very Wittgensteinian_to achieve a kind of moral reform of life and thought without attempting to alter the conditions of life. The unworldliness can be seen as a reflection of the actual political impotence of the intellectuals of the time, or as a reflection more generally of the 3.A small selection of Brenner articles about Kraus had been published in 1913, Studien u$3ber Karl Kraus, and was advertised in Die Fackel, which Wittgenstein surely saw. 206 Wittgenstein: A Life rottenness of the Austro-Hungarian Empire;4 but it can also be seen as an important discovery, the discovery that the revolution needed (however impossible it might be) was not one in institutions but one in the thinking and the sensibility_Kraus would say, in the language_of men. It was not by accident, then, that Wittgenstein turned to Ficker for help in the following matter. He wanted to arrange for 100,000 crowns (over #4,000 in the sterling of those days) to be distributed among Austrian "artists' (Ku$3nstler was the term used, and it gave rise to some misgivings_Were only graphic or plastic artists meant, like those Wittgenstein's father had aided?).5 Ficker would know, he said, the best and the most needy. He had recently inherited a large fortune, he explained in a second letter, and it was the custom (perhaps he meant that of his family) to devote a sum to charitable purposes. Kraus (we have seen this for ourselves) was the connexion that had led him to Ficker. Could a meeting be arranged? Ficker in fact arranged to go to Vienna when Wittgenstein would next be there. Meanwhile he inquired of his Viennese friends and heard (not always without irony) of the identity of Karl Wittgenstein and the patronage he had extended to the arts. No trace of this irony was felt by Ficker when the meeting actually took place: I had travelled through the heat of the day and darkness was falling when the taxi stopped at the the open garden gate of a mansion among the parks of Neuwaldegg. The building itself was some way back from the road and was only indistinctly visible, but the terrace in front was brightly lit and there, already awaiting me, stood the young benefactor, a modest figure, reminiscent perhaps of Alyosha or Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky. No sooner had he noticed me than he came to meet me, down the few steps and along the wide gravel path. He greeted me warmly and led me into the house. He seemed in the best of spirits at supper too, which a servant brought us, and though there was something awkward in his manner of speech he seemed possessed by a deep need for communication. I soon saw that I had to do not only with a lover of the fine arts but with a thinker...6 Wittgenstein told Ficker how he mant to go back to his wood-cabin in Norway in order to sift and clarify his thoughts. 4.So, if I understand them, Janik and Toulmin in the book referred to above. 5.The correspondence is printed in L.W. Briefe an Ludwig von Ficker with many helpful notes by W. Methlagl and G.H. von Wright. It is also included in Briefe (1980) and is translated in W. Sources and Perspectives, ed. C.G. Luckhardt (1979). 6.L. Ficker in the last number of Der Brenner 18 (1954) 238, "Rilke und der unbekannte Freund'_the article is a mixture of unique memories and simple confusions about dates and the order of events. 207 7The War 1914{-18 It was not until the next morning, as they walked in the park that reached right up into the hills_the private Wienerwald of the Wittgen- steins_that Wittgenstein came round to the reason for Ficker's visit. It seems likely from the correspondence that he had the cheque ready and it was simply a question of its division among beneficiaries. Ficker at once proposed 20,000 crowns each for Rilke and Trakl. It seems that Wittgenstein already admired Rilke7 and was prepared to accept the suggestion of Trakl, knowing perhaps little of him at that time. He only stipulated that an amount (10,000 crowns) should go to the Brenner itself. For the rest, Wittgenstein left the decision to Ficker and it seems that Ficker largely followed the following list (it still survives): Georg Trakl 20 000 Kronen Rainer Maria Rilke 20 000 Kronen Carl Dallago 20 000 Kronen Redaktion Der Brenner 10 000 Kronen Oskar Kokoschka 5 000 Kronen Else Lasker-Schu$3ler 4 000 Kronen Adolf Loos 2 000 Kronen Karl Borroma$3us Heinrich 1 000 Kronen Hermann Wagner 1 000 Kronen Josef Georg Oberkofler 1 000 Kronen Theodor Haecker 2 000 Kronen Theodor Da$3ubler 2 000 Kronen Ludwig Erik Tesar 2 000 Kronen Richard Weiss 2 000 Kronen Karl Hauer 5 000 Kronen Franz Kranewitter 2 000 Kronen Hugo Neugebauer 1 000 Kronen All the beneficiaries except Hauer, Kranewitter, Kokoschka, and Rilke were contributors to Der Brenner, and Rilke, perhaps in consequence, did contribute something to the single volume that appeared in 1915. There is no reason to attribute to Wittgenstein any particular attitude towards the individual beneficiaries unless we find one expressed by him: apart from Trakl, Rilke, and the Brenner itself, he left the whole matter to Ficker. He acknowledges a letter of thanks from Dallago (the philo- sopher) and when later he is sent a collection of thanks to the unknown benefactor, he tells Ficker: I am sending back the acknowledgements, with the exception of the lines addressed to me by Hauer and the kind and noble letter from Rilke. I didn't need the other letters as acknowledgements; and as thanks I found 7.Friends say that he found Rilke's later work unsympathetic. 208 Wittgenstein: A Life them_to be frank_extremely distasteful. A certain ignoble almost fraudulent tone, etc. Rilke's letter to you touched me and gave me great pleasure. The affection of any noble-minded human being is a mainstay in the unstable equilibrium of my life. I am quite unworthy of his splendid gift, which I will wear next my heart as a sign and reminder of that affection. Could you convey to Rilke my most heartfelt thanks and my complete devotion? (LW to LvF 13.2.15) This letter, of course, was written after several months of war, and some of the sourness may be attributed to that. But in general Wittgenstein, who saw things in black and white, was only too liable to regret some of the benefactions that he had authorized. In a letter to his friend Paul Engelmann in 1917: I received today from Zurich two books by Albert Ehrenstein_the one who used to write in Die Fackel (once I helped him financially without really wanting to). Now he returns the favour by sending me his Tubutsch and Man Screams. Dog-dirt, if I'm not mistaken. And such stuff is sent to me out here! (LW to PE 31.3.17) Since Ehrenstein was also a contributor to Der Brenner, it is tempting to suppose that Ficker's plans were changed and his name substituted for one of those on the list we have preserved_though then Wittgenstein would have had little justification in disavowing the benefaction. It is also possible that he made further benefactions_perhaps through Kraus. It is worth reflecting on the scale of his generosity: his yearly income (known from his military papers) was 300 000 crowns (say #7,500) and, from what we know alone, nearly a third of the first year's income was being given away. As for Wittgenstein's hostility to Ehrenstein, Engelmann himself explains it8 by a dislike for expressionism and any reader of the books in question can see (to use Engelmann's quotation from Plato) that they are not "conducted in the rhythms of a decorous and manly life'. Ehrenstein's pacifism (the reason why the books were sent from Zurich) may have been an additional reason for distaste in this case, but Wittgenstein tolerated it readily enough in Engelmann, to whom this very letter was addressed. As for Dallago and Haecker, we can gather from a later letter of Wittgenstein's only that he thought himself every bit as well worth publishing as they were.9 Walter Methlagl has described10 how these wholly unforeseen gifts were received by the beneficiaries. Perhaps two should be picked out: Trakl had been in complete despair because of his inability to support his 8.P. Engelmann: Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir, p. 85. 9.LW to LvF 4.12.19. 10.In LW: Briefe an LvF (Salzburg, 1969). 209 7The War 1914{-18 sick sister; from this trouble at least his mind will have been relieved in his own last days_for such they proved to be. Kokoschka's letter to Ficker will perhaps be of some interest to historians of art: Despite your declining all thanks, I must allow myself to send you mine from the bottom of my heart. You can scarcely imagine what this great help has done for me by way of freeing me from cares_something I have wanted and struggled to achieve for years but which never turned out to be possible has now occurred. I can work and my powers will not be squandered in the struggle for existence. If I am now called up, I shall have carried my plans a good distance forward.11 Kokoschka was to be supported again later by the Wittgenstein family_so far, that is, as purchasers may be termed supporters. Though he had little to do with the selection of beneficiaries, Wittgenstein's idea of distributing among individuals, who were worthy of support and in need of it, was in his father's tradition. Where he differed from his father was in not insisting on making the selection for himself. The meeting with Ficker had two other important consequences for Wittgenstein. The first was friendship: Ficker, some nine years older than himself, was for a short time to take the place of the older friend, vacated by Russell, later filled by Moore in England (though with less intimacy) and by Ha$3nsel in Austria. It was a figure he often seemed to be in search of. Indeed the other consequence of the meeting with Ficker was perhaps another example of it. Ficker took him down on that Sunday, after they had discussed their business, to the Cafe$0 Imperial where they met the architect Adolf Loos. Loos was famous, indeed controversial, at the time as the architect of the building on the Michaelerplatz, directly opposite the magnificent baroque gateway of the imperial palace. It avoided all ornamentation_it was known as the house without eyebrows because it had not even dripstones above the windows. At once Wittgenstein engaged him in a lively discussion on the principles of modern architecture_lively, that is, as far as content went, since its actual conduct was slowed down by Loos's deafness. This is the first indication we have of Wittgenstein's interest in architecture though he had, of course, designed furniture in England and a simple traditional cabin in Norway. We remember only his advice to his sister on how to draw. He was not quite the universal man of the renaissance: it was rather that he would take up someone else's subject, someone else's ideas, and do it or make them better. We shall discuss later, and illustrate, his own house 11.ibid.. p. 54. 210 Wittgenstein: A Life and his collaboration with Loos's pupil Engelmann; that house too lacks all ornament and employs the Loosian device of interlocking split-levels to prevent the division of the interior space into "floors' though only in the lower storeys: but in other respects, notably the tall and narrow windows and doors, it is unlike Loos's work and reminiscent, though remotely, of Cambridge. In some ways the contact with Loos was more important than that with Ficker_to Ficker Wittgenstein must write, but Loos was always in Vienna and the acquaintance could be kept alive and could introduce Wittgenstein into the periphery (on one occasion the centre) of the Kraus circle. As a small part of his life Wittgenstein was on the way to becoming a Viennese intellectual, with his favourite cafe$0_in his case the Cafe$0 Museum near the art schools, its interior designed by Loos. Loos the individual, like many friends, seems to have incurred Wittgenstein's displeasure in the difficult years after the war; but the side of Wittgenstein's life he represented did not disappear for good. Ficker went back to Innsbruck on 28 July_the day of the declaration of war on Serbia. Wittgenstein's family came to Vienna_no doubt he himself simply stayed there. All was confusion_his brothers Kurt and Paul had regiments to join. But what was Ludwig to do? David Pinsent mentions an attempt to obtain non-combatant work. If there is any basis for this, it will presumably be that Ludwig thought his double rupture (which had excused him military service) might disqualify him from a fighting arm. Several days passed before this was resolved. It was on 7 August (the day after the declaration of war on Russia) that he enlisted as a volunteer gunner for the duration_his double rupture is simply not mentioned on the documents under the heading for bodily defects. Wittgenstein commented on how incredibly friendly the authorities were: people who were asked for advice daily by thousands, none the less gave friendly and detailed answers. How cheering this was_it reminded him of English conditions!12 It was a time of confusion as well as of enthusiasm: the Austro- Hungarian mobilization had begun late_on 31 July. They were involved in a race with the Russians, who, fortunately for them, were almost equally slow. One of the main aims of the High Command was to strengthen the forces in Galicia and to make such advances as they could into Russian territory in order to forestall the Russian cavalry who were thought to be ready to sweep through Galicia.13 A small advance into 12.The diary from which these reactions of Wittgenstein's are quoted is described shortly below in the text. Dates are often confirmed and other details given by the relatively very full documentation available in the Kriegsarchiv and the Innenministerium in Vienna. 13.Wittgenstein's campaigning on the Eastern Front took place in the Austrian provinces of Galicia and Bukovina and to a small extent in the then neighbouring provinces or governments of Russia. The places mentioned are now largely in the Soviet Union, partly in Poland. Between the two wars they were largely in Poland, partly in Rumania. In my text, except where there is an English 211 7The War 1914{-18 Russian territory did in fact begin on 6 August itself and the use of troops from the Cracow garrison for this purpose was authorized. From this larger view it is not surprising that Wittgenstein's medical examination was a formality, that his education and his knowledge of mathematics were completely overlooked, and that within two days he found himself attached to a Garrison Artillery Regiment in Cracow and instructed first and briefly in the working of an antiquated mortar and then in that of a searchlight (for his regiment had a searchlight detachment) on a small river gunboat captured from the Russians (the Goplana, as it continued to be called). This travelled down the Vistula into Russian territory. He was on active service within ten days and by 1 a.m. on 18 August we find him called up to the bridge in his nightclothes to man the searchlight_a post of obvious danger, though on this occasion it turned out to be a false alarm. With what spirit he went into the army, we can collect from various witnesses. David Pinsent thought of him as patriotic. His sister Mining speaks of his wish to defend his country but also_she is very emphatic on this point_"he had the intense wish to assume some heavy burden and to perform some task other than purely intellectual work'.14 Arvid Sjo$3gren who came to know him during the war and was perhaps his greatest friend immediately after it gives a similar explanation: he wanted to share the burden that fell on others.15 Similarly Paul Engelmann (who as a friend came second to Arvid Sjo$3gren about this time) speaks of Wittgenstein's repeated refusal to accept privileges_ though we shall see that this could not be followed out in practice. As for patriotism, it is clear that Wittgenstein accepted military service as a civic duty and that he felt identified with his country. But this by no means connoted confidence in victory. On 25 October, commenting on a senseless rumour that Paris had fallen, he wrote: It makes me feel today more than ever the terribly sad position of our race_the German race. Because it seems to me as good as certain that we cannot get the upper hand against England. The English_the best race in the world_cannot lose. We, however, can lose and shall lose, if not this year, then next year. The thought that our race is going to be beaten depresses me terribly, because I am completely German.16 name place-names follow the form given in Austro-Hungarian war-maps and documents (usually a slightly Germanized Polish). I have allowed myself to regard "Lwow' as the English for "Lemberg'. 14.In her Familienerinnerungen, p. 108. 15.Personal communication. 16.See below for the notebook from which this remark is taken. It will be evident enough from previous chapters how far Wittgenstein was "German'. With Wittgenstein's attitude here towards national character contrast his excoriation of Malcolm in 1939 (M. Malcolm, Memoir, p. 32). Perhaps both the times and Wittgenstein had changed. 212 Wittgenstein: A Life In conversation with Groag and the others later in the war, he said that he was sure the Allies would defeat the Central Powers. They would just laugh, he said, at Kaiser Karl's proposals (these must have been those of the letter of March 1917). He also said that he thought the German generals had a good grasp of their job, but the Austrian generals knew nothing. Some of these remarks we have already quoted are taken from a remarkable document consisting of a diary, in clear for a few pages and then in code, contained in the three notebooks whose philosophic content is reprinted in Notebooks 1914{-17. The diary, though not a very full one, runs from 9 August 1914 to 22 June 1915 and then from 29 March to 19 August 1916. It seems highly likely that there were three further notebooks from the time of the First War, no doubt similar in content to those we have.17 We have seen (p. 56 above) that the practice of writing down thoughts about himself on bits of paper began in his Berlin days and also that in 1929{-30 he could speak of not having made notebook entries "for so many years'. It is possible that there were personal notes among the manuscripts left in England in 1913, manuscripts which he was insistent should be burnt. It is also possible that there were such in "the large book' in which_pupils and neighbours noticed_he would write at night in the 1920s. But all these are lost. What we can infer from the corpus of notebooks preserved is that he felt the need to make personal notes most strongly when he was not among friends_as in the First War, so in Norway in 1936{-7. Thus of the motives mentioned in 1929{-30, that of creating a substitute for a person in whom he could confide was perhaps the strongest. It would be inappropriate to transcribe the whole diary here even if space permitted it, so a remark based on a reading of the whole may be in place: the wartime entries have great immediacy and openness. It is impossible to believe that any important elements of Wittgenstein's moral, emotional, or even sensual life (above the level of consciousness) have been concealed. At some points reading it is like hearing a death-bed confession. Code-entries begin on 15 August, perhaps because Wittgenstein was about to go towards enemy territory. The code is a simple one (a = z, b = y, etc.): all the same he shows a comparative facility in using it from the first, so that he had perhaps practised it earlier. The aim was of course not concealment for ever but concealment from anyone who casually picked up the book.18 17.See von Wright's account of the origin of the TLP in Prototractatus. He calculates that there may have been three or four more wartime notebooks. See below p. 264, where I explain why I think there were three. 18.One of the 1930s notebooks has instructions written in code about how it is to be disposed of in case of Wittgenstein's death. There are also other subtler indications that the remarks written down in the 1930s and 1940s were thought of as a kind of testament or autobiography meant to be read by others. 213 7The War 1914{-18 So much for our chief source. The light it throws on his attitude when entering the army supports what his sister says. The prospect excited him: it would be a crucial test for his character_an ordeal by fire_a test whether he had the necessary strength not to lose his energy and good spirits. Other and severer tests were to come in battle. There is every sign that as tests he welcomed them. At the same time, he meant to work, that is, to continue with his philosophical thinking during the war. The first philosophical entry in his notebook occurs on 22 August, but there are several references to work's being done before that date. Clearly "work' meant reflection and perhaps writing down something on a slip of paper_entry into the notebook was the second or third stage. The results of his work from before the war were evidently contained in one large notebook, which he had left with his father's secretary in Vienna for safe-keeping. His wartime notebooks, in like manner, carry instruc- tions suggesting that they too, when completed, were left in Vienna and were intended to be sent to Russell after the war, if Wittgenstein himself did not survive it. The first days in the army_who that has experienced them can forget the confusion and the novelty, the mass of events that press in on one, the sense of complete isolation from one's earlier life? Each day seemed like a week. Wittgenstein would wake up and fancy himself still in some dream that he was back at school. The humble duties of a recruit he could perform with an ironic smile to himself, but some of the physical hardships suited him particularly badly_to avoid bed-bugs he planned to sleep out of the barracks; but the food in the canteen, which he found uneatable, soon upset his stomach, which was never strong. As so often, he was his own enemy: a lieutenant who came across him in the canteen (and recognized him no doubt as an educated man) was surprised: why was he not in the mess? Having graduated from a Realschule Wittgenstein was entitled to the distinctive stripe and the privileges of an Einja$3hrigfrei- williger, perhaps we should say a cadet though there was another rank with that title in the Austro-Hungarian army. During the war the commission might be expected within months and in the meantime there was a life shared to some extent with the officers. Pride seems to have kept him from claiming these privileges though he sorely needed them. He was merely amused when the other Einja$3hrigfreiwilligen, learning of his background, addressed him as Herr Kollege and urged him to make himself one of them. With the captain, Wittgenstein, perhaps because of his unmilitary bearing, had less success than with the lieutenant in the canteen. He was sent to the comparatively humble task already described on the Goplana. No question of privileges here_though he probably none the less incurred the suspicions of his uneducated comrades. For his part he found them impossible to get on with. Stupid, coarse, and above all men 214 Wittgenstein: A Life of ill-will, he thought. It was not true that men were necessarily made nobler by some great common aim. On the contrary; although external circumstances, the voyage down the Vistula and the shipboard tasks could have made this the happiest of times the men themselves made their work into drudgery. It was not easy for Wittgenstein to see that the others were only too accustomed to physical labour and that the thought of doing it for no adequate pay and with the prospect even of danger, to be incurred by them_Poles and Czechs for the most part_in a German war, will have soured them even beyond the ordinary harsh conditions of their peacetime life. Then, especially on the ship, there was the problem of constant proximity. The smell, the continual noise was too much for him. He tried sleeping on deck, but it was too cold. Later he seems to have had a cabin to himself_or perhaps the cabin to himself, since, being the searchlight orderly, he had to be on watch all night and to sleep during the day, which kept him to a certain extent away from the others. When winter-quarters impended, he, who normally avoided all privileges, sought leave not to sleep in the barrack- room. (In the event a new posting in December made that easily possible.) The picture was not wholly black_a change of crew brought improvement, and he allowed some exceptions to his sweeping condem- nations of meanness. But, as a rule, he despised his shipmates: in a crisis they would get drunk and, as for himself, they plagued him. No doubt his status was unclear to them: it was a great surprise when he returned (after six weeks on the ship) with the stripe of an Einja$3hrigfreiwilliger, which the captain had eventually instructed him to assume. They made it impossible for him to get work done properly: when the searchlight would not function and he wanted to approach it slowly and in a considered manner, as was his wont, they pushed him aside. What was he to do? He felt betrayed and completely dependent on others as he had not felt since his schooldays in Linz. The important thing, in his own words, was not to lose hold of oneself (sich selbst nicht verlieren), not to give in to others. Perhaps this could be done by enduring everything, trying to view everything as an observer, doing one's work humbly and not involving oneself in what went on. If he tried to defend himself he was bound to fly out at them. But withdrawal was hardly possible in practice: he could not work with people and have nothing to do with them_ something must be said, questions must be asked, rude and inadequate answers must be endured. Besides "unaccountably', unbegreiflicher- weise, (surely only Wittgenstein would have viewed the matter in this way) it was no easy matter to cut oneself off from others. Not that he felt drawn to any of them in the least, but the habit of being friendly with people was so strong. 215 7The War 1914{-18 Sometimes he ascribed his inability to be on good terms with them to the lack of the necessary vulgarity; but on another occasion he contrasted himself with the lieutenant: A very nice man. He can have to do with the biggest scoundrels and be friendly without losing any of his dignity. When we hear a Chinaman talk, we are inclined to think his speech nothing but inarticulate gurgling. Someone who understands Chinese will recognize it as language. Similarly I often cannot recognize the human being in a man. (Diary 21.8.14) With the non-commissioned officers immediately in charge of him he was not on good terms either_perhaps because of too haughty a demeanour. He resented it bitterly (and naturally) when one of them tried to suggest to an officer that he had behaved in a cowardly fashion, though he had actually performed his task faithfully. A later talk with the non-commissioned officer cleared the air a bit. But, as with the drunkenness of the soldiers, so Wittgenstein's fastidiousness noted and felt all the customary faults of petty authority. A siege was expected in Cracow: The worse the situation becomes, the cruder are the NCOs. Because they feel that they can give free rein to their meanness unchecked by the officers, who are now losing their heads and no longer exercise any control to keep things on the right path. Every word you hear now is a piece of abuse. Because there is not the slightest reward for decency any more, so that people abandon even the small amount of it that may still be left to them. It is all extremely sad. (Diary 11.11.14) There was the occasional officer with whom he got on well. The first commandant of his ship was one such and would talk to him about all sorts of subjects. There was the lieutenant in the canteen whom we have mentioned. Another lieutenant came on board at Tarnobrzeg and seemed not to be stupid. Wittgenstein was delighted to be called Du by him_the form of address used by one officer to another. One of these officers must have been the Lieutenant Mole$0 who wrote to Ficker and described a fine summer's night on deck, when Wittgenstein peeled potatoes and discussed philosophy with animation.19 But among the officers too there was much to depress him: overhearing a conversation between a later commandant and another officer, he wrote: What mean voices! You can hear all the viciousness of the world croaking and snarling in them. Meanness wherever I look. Not a single heart with feeling in it in sight! (Diary 9.11.14) 19.L. Ficker in Der Brenner (1954) 237; cf. LW: Briefe an LvF, p. 19. 216 Wittgenstein: A Life He longed for a friend to whom he could say everything and pined for David Pinsent in particular. But even within his own country the letters were uncertain and slow: he quoted Karl Kraus's joke_"we are cut off from the outside world by the Military Post.'20 It was 10 November before he even learnt that he could write to England via Switzerland and 21 December before he had a letter from David: in his excitement he kissed it and in the following month the receipt or failure of a letter from David was the most important matter for a diary entry. It is sad to have to begin the account of a new phase in Wittgenstein's life with another recital of difficulties with his fellow-men. It is important to see that the feelings recorded are those neither of a saint nor of a curmudgeon. They are confessions written down by one who in this area as in others was trying to embody a moral ideal. It is almost as if the war came to him as an especially good occasion for this, as if that were why he was so excited on enlisting at the prospect of his future life. Much of the accounts of Wittgenstein's life in these years must be an attempt to trace the lineaments of that ideal. One feature of that ideal explains why he mentions so often the extent to which the behaviour of those around him grated upon him. He wanted to make himself independent not only of material circumstances but also (what was even more difficult) of other human beings. On the same day that he heard the mean voices of the officers, he had a postcard from his uncle Paul, of the sort that ought to have refreshed and heartened him: But in the last few days I have been a subject for depression! I have no real pleasure in anything and my life is full of anxiety about the future! Because I am no longer at peace within myself. Every failure in decency in my environment_and there's always something of that kind_inflicts a wound deep inside me, and there is always a new wound opened before an old one has healed. Even at times_like the evenings nowadays_when I am not depressed, I still don't feel properly free. Only occasionally, and then very fleetingly, have I the taste for work. Because I can't bring myself to feel at ease. I feel myself as dependent on the world and so I have to be afraid of it even when for the present nothing bad is going to happen to me. I see myself_that self in which I was once able to rest secure_as a distant country, now vanished, that I long for. _The Russians are advancing fast on Cracow. The entire civilian population is having to leave the city. Things look very bad for us. God help me!!! (Diary 9.11.14)21 20.Von der Mitwelt durch die Feldpost abgeschnitten, Briefe an LvF, p. 25. 21."A distant country': the German text is indecipherable though the general sense is clear. "that self in which I was once able to rest secure': it is difficult to think what period Wittgenstein might be referring to. Perhaps "in which I might be able to etc.' (ko$3nnte rather than konnte) is what is meant. But "vanished' (von mir gewichen) speaks against that. 217 7The War 1914{-18 This passage will serve us as a key and as a reminder that Wittgenstein's inner life was determined simultaneously by a number of moments that we are bound to separate in our exposition. We have dwelt on his relations with his comrades, but we can note also the implicit references here to the dangers of the war (the approach of the Russians), to its privations (Wittgenstein was less depressed in the evenings, he thought, because, though tired still, he had then at least the prospect of sleep), to the importance for him of his philosophic work, and to the strength that he found through prayer. The operations in which Wittgenstein was involved during the first four months of the war were of the following nature. It was thought (as said above) that the Russian armies would sweep through Galicia in the direction of the Silesian industrial districts and, behind Cracow, the Moravian gap, which was the road to Vienna. A false appreciation led to the view that their attack would come from the direction of Lublin. Conrad, the Austro-Hungarian Chief of Staff, accordingly ordered an advance into Russia in the direction of Lublin on the left and Chelm on the right. Dankl's I Army to which Wittgenstein's regiment was attached formed the left wing of this advance, and on its left was the Vistula, along which Wittgenstein's vessel sailed. There was as yet no Eastern Front: scattered bodies of skirmishers created intermittent alarm but the main bodies of troops met only occasionally and by accident. Ignorant armies clashed by night. I Army, therefore, moved into Russia, and we find an entry to this effect in Wittgenstein's diary for 17 August, presumably meaning that his vessel had gone down the Vistula beyond Sandomierz, where the Austro-Hungarian frontier took a turn to the south-east, following roughly the line of the San. The Russian cavalry_the Cossacks, as the Imperial and Royal troops called them_were very skilful at harassment, at creating the impression of being a much larger force than was the fact. Hence, no doubt, the alarms to which Wittgenstein was subject. The function of his vessel, to judge by his occasional references and by the obvious probabilities of the case, was to provide mobile fire-power to assist river-crossings or troops involved in engagements in the vicinity of the Vistula or its tributaries, and also on occasion to transport troops and mate$0riel. The searchlight would be needed, sometimes to assist in the directing of fire, sometimes for navigation, and sometimes to enable works on another vessel to be continued at night. In the first case particularly, and in the second to some degree, the searchlight and hence its orderly would be an obvious target for enemy fire. Wittgenstein was very conscious of the danger but, as is often the case in combat, he was much more disturbed by the possibility that the searchlight might be extinguished, for whatever reason, in which case the whole responsibility would have fallen on him. 218 Wittgenstein: A Life To return to the general picture: Dankl's army had some success against the Russians at the battle of Krasnik (23{-25 August) and on 2 September Wittgenstein heard of a big five-day battle_presumably the battle of Komarow, in which the Austrian IV Army defeated the Russian V. But meanwhile, on another front the results of Conrad's false appreciation of Russian intention and of his tardy decision to devote his troops to Galicia rather than to Serbia were becoming apparent: in battles on the Gnila Lipa and the Zlota Lipa (tributaries of the Dniester that Wittgenstein was to know well later) the Austro-Hungarian III Army and elements of II Army, arriving from the Serbian front, were driven back by much stronger Russian forces. It was in the east, not in the north, of Galicia, that the Russians had planned to advance. Thus Lwow fell and Przemysl held out only for a while as a surrounded fortress. This news disheartened the otherwise successful I Army, which in any case began to feel increased Russian pressure (as the slow mobilization in that country began to take effect). This pressure was particularly strong along the Russian right, which was formed by the Vistula, with Wittgenstein's vessel on it. Conrad had various plans_it might have been an excellent idea to press on in the north (in the sector of I and IV Army) and to turn the Russian flank, but Hindenburg, for the Germans, was not at that point prepared to commit further German forces to support adventures in the East: the general plan (in so far as there was a unified general plan) of the Central Powers was still to achieve decisive victory on the Western Front first. Conrad in fact did allow I Army to continue to advance for a while, but switched IV Army in the direction of Lwow, thus opening a potentially dangerous gap between the two Armies. This, and other, events forced a general retreat. I Army moved back between 11 and 15 September to the lower San, but found this position untenable. On 12 September Wittgenstein speaks of bad news and a state of instant readiness. On 13 September they abandon the ship to the Russians. On 15 September they re-occupy it and sail upstream as far as the Dunajec (the tributary on which Tarnow stands) with the Russians on their heels. On 16 September they hear heavy gun and rifle fire. It was then planned to sail further, to Cracow itself, but for a day or so they feared that the frontier (here the Vistula itself up which they must sail) was occupied by "Cossacks'. In the event they reached Cracow safely enough by 19 September_the Russians had been beaten back from the river suf- ficiently far not to harass them. By 28 September the Austro-Hungarian forces as a whole had fallen back to the line of Gorlice and Tarnow. Wittgenstein_whose notes give a picture of the morale of the forces that corresponds very well with events_reports that in Cracow a siege was now expected and that there were many cases of dysentery. 219 7The War 1914{-18 This was the first advance and retreat in which Wittgenstein was concerned. Another was shortly to follow, because the Central Powers saw that some steps must be taken to restore the Imperial and Royal Army as a fighting force after the heavy casualties and loss of mate$0riel involved in this retreat. By a remarkable feat of logistics a new German army_IX, under Hindenburg_was assembled on Dankl's left, and an advance on Warsaw in conjunction with the Austro-Hungarian I Army was planned. Wittgenstein heard about it on 4 October and set off for Russia on 6 October. At Szczuczin on 7 October the Russians were still 80 km away but as Wittgenstein and his comrades moved towards Sandomierz and halted at Tarnobrzeg they heard artillery in the distance. At Sandomierz itself they could see and hear the shells. Still under barrage they were meant to advance to Sawichost on 10 October and protect the German crossing of the river. Various such plans_which Wittgenstein would hardly have survived had they been carried out_were formed and cancelled in the next few days. But, while the Central Powers advanced, the Russians had been gathering their "steam-roller' and on 13 October Wittgenstein's vessel_as part of a general retreat_got the order to make its way back, by night, to Sandomierz, which it did, with grenades flying over it. For the rest of October their vessel plied between Tarnobrzeg and Sandomierz on various errands, until on 28 October it broke a wheel and had to be towed back to Cracow. They reached Cracow on 5 November. This was in fact about the date that saw the completion of the retreat of the Central Powers forces in this theatre: the planned drive towards Warsaw had been completely frustrated by the advance of the steam-roller from Warsaw. Here, in front of Cracow, the Imperial and Royal I Army was to stay for the winter. The Russians were advancing fast, the civilians were evacuated, firing could soon be heard at the fortifications. The best that could be expected was a long siege. Battles long ago, soon forgotten except by the most specialized military historians, fought over remote territory by the forces of two vanishing empires: these were to divide Wittgenstein from his later pupils in Cambridge more completely even than the experience of the trenches marked off his English contem- poraries from their juniors. It was a more open war than that on the Western Front: in Galicia there was no tight network of communications. Hence the surges to and fro (much greater ones were to come in the following years) as one side or the other gained local superiority. Hence too some of the discomfort: Wittgenstein's ship in particular could not easily be provisioned, and they had to rely often enough on local purchase in a region impoverished even when no army was feeding off it. Wittgenstein was sick sometimes, tired often; on one occasion he mentions not changing his boots or clothes for four days: on another he 220 Wittgenstein: A Life had to man the light in his night clothes, in that inhospitable climate a chill task even in autumn. Later, but particularly in the siege, he mentions the ice and the walk sometimes to the sanitary facilities. But for the most part he was cooped up on board the small vessel. He observes very acutely and frankly how the sensuality that hard work might repress would return when there was inadequate opportunity for physical movement. Like the barely tolerable companions, the physical hardships were felt by Wittgenstein chiefly as a hindrance to attaining the right state of mind. The war seems to have provided him paradoxically with the possibility of a new life by focussing his expectations and his attention on danger and death. Remembering his remarks about his father's death being worth a whole life, we may say that the war "saved his life', as he put it, by confronting him with the simple task of preparing himself for a good death. Describing his first experience of action he says: Suddenly woke about 1 a.m. Called for by the Lieutenant who says I must go to the searchlight straightaway: "no getting dressed'. I ran to the bridge almost naked. Icy wind, rain. I was certain I was going to die on the spot. Turned on the searchlight. Went back to get dressed. It was a false alarm. I was frightfully agitated and groaned audibly. I felt the terrors of war. Now (in the evening) I have got over the terror. Unless I change my present bent of mind I'll strive with all my might to stay alive. (Diary 18.8.14) More than once later he complains about the difficulty of finding the courage to accept life as it is, to "live for the spirit', when he was exhausted by cold and lack of sleep and an empty stomach. One help that he found is indicated in the words just quoted. On 1 September he began reading Tolstoy's The Gospel in Brief and within a couple of days felt that he was drawing great profit from it. As so often with an influential book it fell into his hands by accident. He went into a small bookshop in Tarnow, which, however, seemed to contain nothing but picture postcards. However, he went inside and found that it contained just one book: Tolstoy on the Gospels. He bought it merely because there was no other. He read it and re-read it, and thenceforth had it always with him, under fire and at all times. (BR to OM 20.12.19)22 At one time he was a byword among the soldiers for carrying it_"the one with the Gospels' he would be called. The Christianity that he found in Tolstoy seemed to him the only sure way to happiness, but it was not 22.This is from Russell's account of his first meeting with Wittgenstein after the war. 221 7The War 1914{-18 an easy way. Man must renounce the flesh, the gratification of his own will, must make himself independent of outward circumstances, in order to serve the spirit which is in himself and in all men. This spirit makes all men the sons of God and the only true life for a man is communion with that spirit, without any concern for his own wishes or for the past or future: the only true life is life in the present. For a man living not the personal but the common life of the spirit, there is no death. These themes occur in Wittgenstein's notebooks throughout the war, and of course later in his Tractatus: Tolstoy's Christianity with a particular stamp given to it by Wittgenstein. The news gets worse and worse. Tonight there will be instant readiness. I work every day, more or less, and with fair confidence. I say Tolstoy's words over and over again in my head: "Man is powerless in the flesh but free because of the spirit.' May the spirit be in me! In the afternoon the lieutenant heard shots in the vicinity. I became very agitated. Probably there will be an alarm. How will I behave when it comes to shooting? I am not afraid of being shot but of not doing my duty properly. God give me strength! Amen. Amen. Amen. (Diary 13.9.14) What he added to Tolstoy_the particular way in which he saw Tolstoy's teaching_was his intense awareness of his identity with the spirit in him: this was that self that he was always anxious not to lose, not to make a present of to the mean natures that surrounded him. Thus on the day after the last entry he wrote: Today, very early, we abandoned the ship with everything on it... The Russians are on our heels. Have lived through frightful scenes. No sleep for 30 hours, am feeling very weak and can see no external hope. If it is all over with me now, may I die a good death mindful of my self. May I never lose myself. (Diary 13.9.14) And two days later: Now I might have an opportunity to be a decent human being, because I am face to face with death. May the spirit enlighten me. (Diary 15.9.14) Generally before action he prays like this: God be with me! The spirit be with me! Sometimes he fears that the spirit has forsaken him or speaks of an icy cold within him. If only he could for once sleep properly before things came to a head! He has to struggle to attain the right state of mind: I still do not understand how to do my duty just because it is my duty and to reserve all of the human being in me for the life of the spirit. I may die 222 Wittgenstein: A Life in an hour, I may die in two hours, I may die in a month, or not for a few years. I cannot know about it and I cannot do anything for or against it: such is this life. How then ought I to live in order to hold my own at that moment, to live amid the good and the beautiful until life stops of itself. (Diary 7.10.14)23 It is difficult to estimate how far he was successful in attaining his aim. Of his intellectual work, whose progress may give some clue, we shall speak shortly. Generally his spirits were good in the immediate prospect of action: he would only pray in the way described. But there were times of depression: Periods of indifference towards my external fate alternate with ones in which I long again for external freedom and peace, in which I am tired of carrying out any and every command, willy nilly and in complete uncertainty about the immediate future. In short, there are times when I cannot simply live in the present and for the spirit. One ought to enjoy the good hours of life thankfully, as a boon, and otherwise face life with indifference. (Diary 12.10.14) It will be seen that it was not danger that depressed him. On the same day, after writing the above, he heard that they were that night to sail under the Russian positions to Sawichost in order to land troops and mate$0riel: Tonight then. _We are supposed to fire with Quick Firing guns and machine-guns, more to make noise, I am told, than to hit anything. I gather too that it is going to be a dangerous affair. If I am supposed to guide the searchlight, then I shall certainly be lost. But that does not matter, because only one thing is necessary! We sail in an hour. God is with me! (Diary 12.10.14) In fact they sailed upstream to Nadbrzesze and then, by a reversal of orders, back to their original position. It was a dangerous enough day of heavy gunfire from both sides. Wittgenstein was elated, in the best of humour the whole time and intoxicated by the thunder of the guns. "I am spirit and that is why I am free,' he wrote.24 In danger and in depression his spirit, his share of the spirit, supported him, if it did not quite conquer. Depression, the harder of the two to combat, came from 23.Das geistige Leben: I have translated this as "the life of the spirit'. It could include intellectual life_and in some authors (but not in Wittgenstein) this would be its meaning. In jenem Augenblick zu bestehen: if jedem were the reading the meaning would be "to exist at every moment'. 24.Ich bin Geist und darum bin ich frei (Diary 13.10.14). It might be translated "I am a spirit' but other passages make clear that the meaning is that the Tolstoyan spirit is in him, God is with him. 223 7The War 1914{-18 such sources as we have already seen_the hard conditions of his life, bad news about the war, a reverse for the Central Powers, the news (in fact some false rumour) that his second adoptive country, Norway, had now allied itself with the enemy, anxiety about his family_was his mother still alive?_or bad news concerning it. In particular he heard that his brother Paul the pianist was a prisoner of the Russians and had lost his right arm (we have already mentioned how he overcame this (p. 30 above) but Ludwig could not at the time foresee the event): I cannot help thinking of poor Paul the whole time_so suddenly deprived of his occupation! How terrible! What philosophy it would take to get over that! If only there is some solution other than suicide!! (Diary 28.10.14) (Philosophy and his occupation, as we shall shortly see, were essential to keeping Ludwig somehow in equilibrium.) Depression is the element in his inner life that yet remains to be described. Sometimes the depressions seemed to Wittgenstein without cause (grundlos), most frequently they were occasioned by the bad terms he was on with his fellow soldiers and his own failure to achieve impassivity in this particular. He longed all the more_though it ought not to be necessary_for someone with whom he could speak openly. Ficker told him that the poet Trakl was in Cracow and as they fell back on that city his hopes rose. He wanted to call on him immediately they arrived there, but had to wait until the next day and then he was shattered to learn that Trakl had died three days before of a heart-attack. It came to be thought that Trakl had taken poison which was available to him as a hospital orderly, and the exact circumstances of Trakl's death have been much discussed.25 Ficker wrote to ask what had happened_somehow a human reaction_but Wittgenstein replied that when the one important thing had been told him he felt a reluctance to inquire further into the circumstances. (LW to LvF 16.11.14) Ludwig longed all the more for David_"I wonder whether he thinks of me half as much as I think of him?' (Diary 11.11.14). Trakl had perhaps presented the idea of a spiritualized friendship, of the warmth and sensitivity that was missing from his military life. When such opportunities came, in 1915 and 1916, he accepted them eagerly, but for the moment, in Cracow, he had to endure the friction with his comrades without such support. The situation was a little easier for him in that carrying out his garrison duties left him the opportunity, evidently not his while the Goplana was under way, to sit alone in his quarters and collect his thoughts ("collect myself', mich sammeln, is what he said). He had the opportunity to get himself into a better state of mind, to lay 25.For one account see Stupp: Su$3dostdeutsche Semesterbla$3tte 19 Sommersemester (1966), pp. 32{-9. 224 Wittgenstein: A Life firmer hold upon that spirit which was in him, which was him, if he but so lived as to be it. We have already seen many instances of his speaking so: another indication that he so thought is that he turned now for help to Emerson's Essays (it seems that books were available in Cracow, for he bought a volume of Nietzsche there, and Emerson too was read in Central Europe at the time). The Essays are still sometimes recommended for style: Wittgenstein surely read them primarily for content_they even open with a favourite thought of his in these years: There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. ("History', in Emerson's Works, 1888, p.1) The mystical and moral implications of this are worked out in "Self-Reliance' and "The Over-Soul': A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favourable event, raises your spirit, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles. ("On Self-Reliance', ibid. p.21) Let man, then, learn the revelation of all nature and all thought to his heart; this, namely, that the Highest dwells with him; that the sources of nature are in his own mind, if the sentiment of duty is there. But if he would know what the great God speaketh, he must "go into his closet and shut the door', as Jesus said. God will not make himself manifest to cowards... The soul gives itself, alone, original, and pure, to the Lonely, Original, and Pure, who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads, and speaks through it. ("The Over-Soul', ibid. p.66) A taste for Emerson was an indirect sign of fidelity to his own traditions_Emerson shared with Carlyle a deep respect for the German genius: he detected in Goethe what was lacking in French, English, and American writers_"an habitual reference to moral truth.' Like Goethe he looked for a lofty conception of the world without the trappings of religion. The actual result, called Transcendentalism by its more sectarian adherents, was derived ultimately from Kant: transcendental knowledge, originally, was the understanding's awareness of the con- ditions of its own knowledge; for these thinkers it was the moral and mystical guidance that the soul could obtain by the consideration of its own nature. As for Emerson's style, the constant near epigrams, the elevation of the language, the poetical and rhetorical treatment of philosophical themes, all have parallels in Wittgenstein's preferred reading_in Lichtenberg, St. Augustine, Schopenhauer and others. His 225 7The War 1914{-18 own style is more pared down_he was chaster in what he wrote than in what he read_but one cannot read Emerson without being reminded from page to page of the Tractatus and the wartime Notebooks. Poetical and epigrammatic also was Nietzsche. Within a month of reading Emerson Wittgenstein bought volume 8 of Nietzsche's works in Cracow_presumably from Naumann's Leipzig edition, where volume 8 contains inter alia "Der Antichrist' the first book of the intended Der Wille zur Macht.26 The volume also contains "Der Fall Wagner', "Go$3tzen- Da$3mmerung', "Nietzsche contra Wagner', and Nietzsche's poems. Paral- lels and faint echoes are worth looking for in all, but it seems to be "The Antichrist' that Wittgenstein refers to when he says: I am strongly affected by his hostility against Christianity. Because his writings too have some truth in them. To be sure, Christianity is the only sure way to happiness; but what if someone spurned this happiness? Might it not be better to perish unhappily in the hopeless struggle against the external world? But such a life is senseless. But why not lead a senseless life? It is ignoble?_How can it be reconciled with the strict solipsistic position? But what must I do in order that my life shall not be lost to me? I must be conscious of it always. (Diary 8.12.14) Just as Nietzsche took the Schopenhauerian analysis of the will seriously, but instead of renouncing the will affirmed it, so also he took seriously the Schopenhauerian version of Christianity espoused by Tolstoy_"only one thing is necessary, resist not evil'_and branded it as the enemy of humanity and of reality itself. Nietzsche seemed important for Wittgen- stein because Nietzsche's starting-point was the same as his own. Just as we have seen that he said of Weininger that you could take every sentence in his works and negate it, so Nietzsche was a possible attitude towards a set of questions. These questions arose_for Nietzsche and Tolstoy and Emerson and Wittgenstein_from taking as a starting-point the rejection of the miraculous and the mysterious in Christianity. It was all part of the legacy of David Friedrich Strauss. What Nietzsche attacked in Strauss was the particular set of values that he relied on in 26.The preface to Der Wille zur Macht begins with the words:"This book is the property of the very few. Perhaps indeed not one of them is yet on earth.' (Dies Buch geho$3rt den Wenigsten. Vielleicht lebt selbst noch keiner von ihnen.) Surely this is echoed in the preface to the Tractatus, and even more strikingly in Wittgenstein's later remark that he thought he was writing for a race of men who would think in a quite different way from us. A later judgement of Wittgenstein's on Nietzsche_that he alone among philosophers touched the problems of our culture that Goethe and Beethoven knew: but then he was more of a poet than a philosopher_is quoted above, p. 33. Der Antichrist itself begins with the impressive evocation of the strangeness and novelty of Nietzsche's doctrines. "Let us look one another full in the face. We are Hyperboreans_we know well enough how aloof our life is. {"Neither by land nor by sea shalt thou find the road to the Hyperboreans{', so much about us Pindar already knew. Our life, our happiness is beyond the north, beyond ice, beyond death... We have discovered happiness, we know the road, we have found after thousands of years the way out of the labyrinth.' Similarly, Professor von Wright points out to me, Zarathustra is subtitled Ein Buch fu$3r alle und niemanden. 226 Wittgenstein: A Life order to determine what remained of Christianity when these elements had been removed. All of Wittgenstein's mentors believed, like himself, that they could isolate what was true in Christianity by asking what said something to them, that the spiritual measure of inspiration is the depth of thought, and that every peasant knows in his heart how to live according to God's word. Nietzsche was alone in envisaging the opposite, as it were the Titanic, answer to the problem. Problem and answer: these were Wittgenstein's concerns in his work also, if we use the word, as he did, for the philosophical activity that accompanied_it might be said supported_his military duties, the danger, the depression, the loneliness, the physical privations, and the spiritual struggle for a stable equilibrium. When he joined the army Wittgenstein wrote almost as if philosophy was one of the purposes of his doing so: "I am very excited about my future life. Shall I be able to work now?' (Notebook 9.8.14). The thought is: Will this change restore my ability to work? It will be remembered that his house-building in Norway during the summer of 1914 was the result of a lull in his philosophic powers. His work went together with his spiritual progress. He works with confidence (Zuversicht) and constantly repeats Tolstoy's words about freedom through the spirit. Work was a boon_Die Gnade der Arbeit!_he exclaimed more than once. In the middle of hardship one could reteat into oneself and work, but the work must not be simply a way of getting through the time but must be undertaken in a devout spirit in order to make life possible.27 It followed that he felt better when he worked_his depression left him. But conversely if he was not at peace with himself, he could not work: All morning I did my best to work but in vain. Clarity of vision refuses to come. I think a lot about my life. And that is an additional reason why I cannot work. [He goes on to reflect that he has not yet cut himself off sufficiently from the other members of the crew.] (Notebooks 13.11.14) The ability to work goes in cycles and the determination of them is generally an inner one. Headaches, tiredness, shells overhead, and danger often occur on days when he also worked better than usual. We have already noted that he could work, presumably in the sense of thinking out the solutions to his problems, while peeling potatoes: it led him, in fact, to volunteer for that fatigue. By a trick of the mind which was very characteristic of him, he assimilated his philosophical tasks to military situations: 27.I interpret here the notebook entry for 12.11.14, which brings several themes together. "The important thing is not to lose hold of oneself!!! Pull yourself together! And do your work not as a pastime but devoutly, in order to live! Do no one an injury!' The idea of work as a retreat is implied in the entry for 2.11.14: "It is bitter cold: it is a real piece of good fortune that one has oneself and can always take refuge in oneself. Much work done. What a boon work is!' 227 7The War 1914{-18 A great deal of work done: no success as yet but great confidence. I am laying siege to my problem. (Notebooks 24.10.14) Worked the whole day. Stormed the problem in desperation. But I will leave my blood in front of this fortress rather than withdraw with nothing accomplished. The greatest difficulty is to retain captured forts long enough to sit quietly in them. And until the city has fallen, it is impossible to go on sitting quietly in one of the forts. (Notebooks 31.10.14) As he wrote this he was on his way to Cracow where he would be himself besieged while, in Eastern Galicia, Przemysl, the model of a stonghold protected by a ring of detached forts, was long to hold out against the Russians. It is as if he did not distinguish clearly between his various problems or tasks; to acquit himself with dignity in battle and in military life; to produce the philosophical solution that he was searching for, and to put his life finally right, by making himself independent of fate and of other people. He seems to have regarded each of them as an opportunity to justify his life. It is perhaps typical, therefore, that he thought of each as something to be done once and for all: he adhered, as it were, to the theory of the "knock-out blow' that was popular in military thinking just before the first war. It was as if he thought there was just one task to be performed_to meet death without disgracing himself, to break through to the solution of all his philosophical problems by a coup de main. This was not just a trick of style or fancy but a deep-seated habit of thought, which Russell detected. We have already seen how Wittgenstein used to think of logic and his sins; now, as Russell remarked after the war, his attitude to philosophy was affected by the fact that he had to compete with the dogmatism of shells and bullets. At heart he did not distinguish between der erlo$3sende Gedanke in different spheres_the word or thought that would deliver him from fear or anxiety, from fastidious irritation with his comrades, and from the frustrating struggle with continually elusive problems of logic. It was for this reason that one problem might interfere with another_as he said shortly afterwards to Engelmann: How can I be a good philosopher when I can't manage to be a good man? Tractatus and Notebooks show how the problems interacted: the philosophical solution was the solution to the problem of life; in both areas it was a matter not simply of not asking for the wrong thing but of not asking for anything. What we notice in the early days of his journal is a similarity of structure in his approach to the problems. He treats philosophy as if it were a war: only victory will do_only a definitive solution which will enable us to set the problems aside. This is said in the preface to the Tractatus, of course, but the same idea is present in the analogy of the siege. As long as the defenders were in their main fortress, 228 Wittgenstein: A Life the detached forts alone were of no use to an attacker, but if he abandoned them and they were re-captured by a sally, they could again be used to keep him out of range of the fortress. What the fortress stood for was the general view (der U$3berblick), the solution, the great discovery, that Wittgenstein at this time constantly felt he was on the point of making. It was on the tip of his tongue, but he was always somehow frustrated. Winter is setting in... Once again no clarity of vision. Yet I am obviously on the point of solving the most profound problems, so much so that the solution is practically under my nose!!! The thing is, my mind is simply blind to it just at this moment. I feel that I am at the very gate but cannot see it clearly enough to be able to open it. This is an extremely remarkable state which I have never experienced so clearly as at present. (Diary 16.11.14) The lack of a general view meant that he saw only details without realizing how they fitted into the whole: what he ought to see, he felt, was that each problem was the main problem. "Only one thing is necessary'_as Tolstoy put it, following a traditional text now once again favoured by critics28_the maxim served for life, for philosophy, and for war. Wittgenstein's later philosophy too is characterized, no doubt, by a unity of method, but the thought then is that philosophy constantly returns to bewitch us, it cannot be laid once and for all. Now however in the First War he thought of a breakthrough, a definitive solution. In the war_even perhaps because of the war: it is as if the war and its way of thinking came at the right time and put him into the right circumstances, as if he went along with the war, anxious, as we have seen, to see what would become of his life. He let it affect, if not dictate, his thought. By a similar habit of thinking he often wonders whether he will get as far as the discovery that he feels to be impending: impossible to say that he meant distinctly either "Shall I be killed first?' or "Will my intellectual powers desert me?' Just as he often did not indicate whether he was suffering from a physical or a spiritual ailment, and spoke of being lost or going under without indication whether physical or moral death was meant. He hurt his leg, and felt that it lamed his thoughts. This attitude was part of his solipsism, which in his case was not an intellectual exercise but a moral and mystical attitude. Everything that he was involved in was seen as part of what passed before, what constituted the world for, a mind or soul, and the task of that mind or soul was to accept and thereby harmonize that multiplicity. For that reason, he felt the power of Nietzsche, because Nietzsche also was able to grasp life and experience as a whole towards which some 28.From the reply to Martha at Luke 10.42. 229 7The War 1914{-18 definite attitude must be taken; but on the other hand, Wittgenstein could not accept Nietzsche's attitude of defiance of putting oneself at odds with the world. "How can it be reconciled with the strict solipsistic position?', we have seen him asking (p. 225) and can now see why. One thing only was necessary, to live for the moment and for the spirit in himself. This theme will recur, and_what is bound to matter most in a philosopher's biography_we shall see it decisively affecting the form and content of his first work. Wittgenstein was apt to set dates for himself_or to assume that dates had been set_by which a specific task must be achieved. Even in peacetime he expected death to put an end to his activity. The year before, in Norway, he had led Russell to suppose that he would commit suicide in February. Now he thought, as November came to a close, that his fertility too was at an end. Meine 3/4 Monate_the three or four months of productivity that he had promised himself at the beginning of autumn and the war_sind um_were over. It is with premonitions as with suspicions_if enough are voiced or felt, some will be strikingly confirmed. In four months he had written 32 printed pages worth of philosophy; in the next five he was to write 9. It is possible that he was conscious of a longer-term cycle in his inspiration than the day-to-day fluctuations we have noted. It is interesting that_in a way he could not have foreseen_these four lean months coincided with the opening of a new phase in his army life in which both his duties and his relations with his fellows were to engage much more of his attention. He was indeed in some despair in this latter respect at the end of November: how could he support such comrades and such superiors in the close quarters of a siege? A kindly commandant promised him at least a room to himself. There was talk of his joining the balloon section. When this came to nothing Wittgenstein went to the garrison head- quarters and by good fortune an Oberleutnant Gu$3rth who was there overheard a reference to his knowledge of mathematics and had him assigned to his section, housed in a factory. Within a few days, actually on 9 December, he had become a member of the "Auto.-Artillerie' detachment of the Garrison Workshop (dealing, evidently, both with vehicles and with ordnance), and on the next day enjoyed for the first time in four and a half months the luxury of being alone, in a proper room, and with a bed to sleep in. As happens from time to time in army life he had found a home, almost a family, such as he was to come to rest in from time to time throughout his life. His work was at first tedious enough_to make a list of all the vehicles in a certain barracks and the like_and he would usually have to spend the whole day in the office_G.T.K. (Ganzen Tag Kanzlei_"Office all day') became a typical entry in his Diary. Better things awaited him; but the most significant of them was that he 230 Wittgenstein: A Life was at once invited to meet and put on equal terms with some of the officers, men of background and tastes to some degree comparable with his own. That first evening he had supper in Gu$3rth's lodgings to meet a captain (no doubt Captain Scholz) whom Gu$3rth had told about him. He had supper with five officers: Gu$3rth had originally seemed "very nice', now the captain seemed "infinitely likeable' (unendlich sympathisch) and the others "extremely friendly' (riesig liebenswu$3rdig). They talked until half past ten and parted very cordially. A small enough event but a boon to one brought up amid every refinement of correctness and considerateness and now for some time forced to have to do with the uneducated and crude. Before meeting Gu$3rth Wittgenstein himself had noticed the pleasure he took, once back in Cracow, in drinking two cups of coffee every evening in a cafe: "The respectability of the atmosphere does me good' (die wohlansta$3ndige Atmospha$3re tut mir gut). Now he found himself constantly invited to officers' messes and evidently treated as a person of interest and distinction. Not that the officers all came up to his requirements. On one day he comments: Spent the evening with many officers in the cafe$0. Most of them behaved like pigs. Even I drank a tiny bit more than was necessary. (Diary 27.1.15) And when Gu$3rth on a journey stopped for supper with a captain who was "infinitely unlikeable', Wittgenstein made his excuses the moment they got up from table. Even when he was in good spirits he would from time to time feel his loneliness like a cold shiver running down his back. But he had now some support in the men that surrounded him. Gu$3rth was obviously a friend and Captain Scholz was a particularly agreeable host: on one occasion Wittgenstein mentions music-making until midnight _exactly his idea of an evening. Anything of this sort was a great boon in surroundings where it was a noteworthy event to meet and sit in a cafe with a young man who had been in the University or Polytechnic in Lwow. At the New Year Gu$3rth went on an official journey to Vienna and took Wittgenstein, whose chief comment is that they spent many very agreeable hours together and that he was now very curious about his future life. It is significant of his attitude towards his family that meeting them again after so long and so anxious an absence elicits no further comment than that his mother was understandably extremely surprised and pleased and that he wanted to record that his own moral standing was now considerably lower than, say, at Eastertime. He gives the impression of being uneasy with his family but made at least two visits in this short time to the old composer Labor. Gu$3rth soon realized that he had found a remarkable new assistant and brought him forward as best he could. Wittgenstein was surprised to 231 7The War 1914{-18 find himself almost immediately promoted Milita$3rbeamter (really desig- nated a clerk not actually given a rank) and then shortly afterwards Adjutant (again not a rank but an assignment to the Oberleutnant as assistant). More important and more interesting was his appointment on 3 February 1915 to have oversight of the forge. He saw that this would lead to difficulties_his exceptional status, enjoying the support of the Oberleutnant but no official rank had already led to some heated moments and he had thought that it was up to him to take some decisive step. But now he said simply May the Spirit help me! It will be very difficult. But don't give up! (Diary 3.2.15) Nevertheless within a few days he found himself in very strained relations with one of the officers, Cadet by rank and thus presumably rather young. There is a reminiscence of the young man who was so dangerous for Wittgenstein in the laboratory at Manchester. It is possible that it might come to a duel between us. All the more then live a good life and follow your conscience. The spirit be with me. Now and in whatever the future may bring! (Diary 11.2.15) It is curious that Wittgenstein felt powerless to avoid such an outcome: perhaps both the intensity of his anger and disapproval and the respect he felt for the established procedure were in play. All the same, from what he later said about single combat,29 it is hard to believe that he ever meant to draw aim himself. But even to let the other man do so... Perhaps either the institution is too remote from us, or we are simply betraying an inability to see Wittgenstein as not in charge of a situation, as twenty-five years old. He reports unpleasantness_obviously not always on this level_again and again. He worked long hours in the forge and his position there was quite unsatisfactory. No doubt he had the responsibility for what happened but the men (he mentions die Mannschaft) were ill-disposed to take instructions from one equal or inferior to them in rank. It is likely also that he was sufficiently sure of his technical judgement to seem overbearing. There was much to anger and offend him and he felt that he was wasting his inner powers. It got in the way of his thinking. He had long talks with Gu$3rth about it but (as he thought) these came to nothing. 29.One of the pieces of advice he gave Drury when he went into the Second War was that if it ever came to hand-to-hand fighting Drury must just let himself be killed. 232 Wittgenstein: A Life The consequences were as always_his spirits were troubled, he felt isolated, not in his right mind. He would quote Goethe to himself: Feiger Gedanken, Ba$3ngliches Schwanken, A$3ngstliches Zagen, Weibliches Klagen, Wendet kein Elend, Macht dich nicht frei. which (correcting a slight misquotation) may be translated: Cowardly thinking Means hesitant shrinking And womanish quailing And timorous wailing: These cure no troubles, These won't make you free.30 but it helped little, he was near to weeping, he thought of suicide, he felt that the externals of his life, the meanness of those around him, had invaded his inner self and filled it with hate so that there was no possibility to make room for the spirit. Various plans occurred to him_to go to the Front as an infantryman, or to join the Light Infantry (the Kaiserja$3ger) where Ficker was. Russell sent him the address of Dziewicki, a philosophical correspondent of his in Cracow, and Wittgen- stein called on him within days ("a nice old man', "a most genial young man' (i.e. a young man of genius) were their mutual impressions), but when he did so he expressed gloomy forebodings. It is clear that his mind ran on leaving the workshop and almost equally on entering some combatant arm and being killed. Wittgenstein must clearly have been the best-qualified person in the workshop. On 22 April he mentions having complete oversight of it and even if this was during a temporary absence of Gu$3rth's it argues a high degree of responsibility. Gu$3rth tried to alleviate the awkward situation in various ways. He applied for a promotion of some kind for Wittgenstein, and in the meanwhile gave him provisionally the title and allowed him to wear the uniform of a Landsturmingenieur a reservist's post and presumably intended for maturer men. This application (which we shall describe) finally came up for a decision at the beginning of 1916, but in the meantime Wittgenstein's activity as "the engineer' continued, successfully enough, but with a considerable sense on his side that he was 30.Feiger Gedanken etc. from Goethe's Lila. Von allen guten Geistern verlassen, literally "abandoned by all good spirits': a phrase Wittgenstein used also at the time of his father's death, LW to BR 6.1.13. 233 7The War 1914{-18 being exploited_that is, presumably, that his abilities were being made use of without his receiving the necessary protection, in rank or standing, against inconveniences. One consolation was that his ability to work returned, though slowly. He had felt exhausted and dead in this respect. It would need a miracle to make him produce anything: some outside force must lift the veil from his eyes. But by the middle of February he noticed that there was no day in which he failed to think (even if only fleetingly) about logic. Despair and gleams of hope alternate, until on 17 April he briefly notes: "Arbeite' ("Am working'). Such notes recur, and it is indeed notable that from this time on the philosophical entries in his notebooks become longer and more continuous, until in June, when the current notebook ends and we are temporarily deprived of evidence about his day-to-day activities, he was working almost as productively as in the first months of the war. The inconclusive winter fighting in the Carpathians and the fall of Przemysl in the middle of March affected the morale of the Cracow garrison. The lull from then until the end of April, on the other hand, was a time of intense activity in the workshop. An offensive was preparing, part of whose aim was to restore the confidence of the Austro-Hungarian forces. When it came_in Wittgenstein's sector it was known as the breakthrough at Gorlice-Tarnow_it was preceded by an artillery barrage on a scale hitherto known only on the Western Front, for which every piece of ordnance available must have been required. It throws light on Wittgenstein's comments on German and Austrian commanders that the offensive in this sector was in fact led by the German General Mackensen and that the artillery tactics were devised by the German Colonel Bruchmu$3ller ("Durchbruchmu$3ller' as he was inevitably nicknamed). The pressure on the workshop did not cease with the offensive, because it was determined to push forward as far as possible in order to weaken decisively the Russian position in the Carpathians_and indeed with some hope of crushing them in the East altogether, though the German High Command were divided on this point. For these purposes and indeed in general it was necessary for the outnumbered Central Powers to maintain and exploit their superiority in mate$0riel. It was in this haste and under this pressure that Wittgenstein suffered his first injury of the war: as he told it later to Arvid Sjo$3gren he had to intervene when a colleague (one cannot exactly say a sub- ordinate) had carried out some foolish operation. In the resulting explosion of the barrel under treatment, he suffered shock and a number of injuries_the scar of one was observable on his forehead for the rest of his life. He had to spend some time (it was now July) in hospital. Fortune had favoured Mackensen's offensive, it had proved possible to release further troops from the Western Front; Przemysl and Lwow were recovered and by September the Central Powers had established a 234 Wittgenstein: A Life line running almost due north from Czernowitz to Riga. A huge salient consisting of most of Poland and Lithuania had been captured and in prisoners alone the Russians had lost 750,000. At this point it became necessary to withdraw troops to the west, where French attacks were expected; thus the front in the East was stabilized. Wittgenstein in the meantime had moved forward probably in August to a workshop train at Sokal north of Lwow, a railhead of the Austro-Hungarian system. Here he was to spend the winter. We lack at least one notebook here but we have an independent account of Wittgenstein's life there in a letter from Dr Max Bieler,31 which gives a convincing picture not only of Wittgenstein but of the sort of friend he attracted. In 1915 I was employed as a doctor in a military hospital on the Russian front. Then I was ordered to take over a Red Cross Hospital Train whose commandant was sick. The train stood behind the front in a forlorn railway station at a place called Sokal, north of Lwow. Since things were at a comparative standstill on the front, the train was empty and I was able to recover from my intensive work in the hospital. Opposite my hospital train a military workshop train was standing, where vehicles, guns, etc. were repaired. I introduced myself to my neighbour, the commandant of the workshop train, and he kindly proposed that I should eat not in the mess of the local headquarters but in that of his train. I accepted gladly. Among those present at the first meal_who were all officers_a slender man about 25 years old and without military rank. He ate and drank little and did not smoke, whereas the others stuffed themselves with food and drink and made a great deal of noise. When I asked my neighbour about him, he told me that the man was called Wittgenstein and was attached to the train as an engineer. I was glad to find a university man among the empty-headed young professional officers, especially one whom I found immediately likeable (I too eat and drink little and do not smoke). He gave the impression of not belonging to his surroundings_he was simply present there because he had to be. I think he found me likeable too, because after the first supper he invited me to see his compartment in the train. This is how our friendship began, which lasted several months and led to daily conversations of hours at a time (without alcohol or cigarettes). After some days he proposed that we used the familiar Du. We talked about philosophical and metaphysical themes and these sometimes absorbed us so completely that we lost sight of place and time. I remember one comical incident. It was New Year's Eve 1915. The local Commandant had invited us all to the Officers' Mess for the New Year's 31.The letter, dated 30 September 1961, was addressed to Dr George Pitcher, who was at that time contemplating a book like the present one. With extreme kindness he made me aware of it and placed it at my disposal. 235 7The War 1914{-18 celebrations. When supper was over, getting on for 10 o'clock, the two of us retired to Wittgenstein's room in order to resume yesterday's theme. At about 11 o'clock the officers from the train let us know that it was time to set off in order to arrive at the party in good time. Wittgenstein conveyed to them that they should simply go and we would follow immediately. We quickly forgot about the invitation and the time and continued our discussion until loud voices became audible outside. It was our comrades, returning merrily at 4 a.m._and we thought it was not yet midnight. The next day we had to make our excuses to the local commandant and pay him our New Year's compliments belatedly. I once told Wittgenstein that when I reflect on the fundamental principle it seems to me that I am dealing with a kind of kaleidoscope in which, every time a wheel is turned, a new board comes into view with the answer to my question written on it. Only the mechanism of the wheel is defective. Just when the last board with the solution of the cardinal question is due to appear in my field of vision, it falls irretrievably into the depths as a result of the faulty mechanism. Our concern was: how could one repair the mechanism? Would one ever be in a position to do it? The winter of 1916 was very severe. The hardships on the front were very great and the dearest wish of the soldiers was that the war might soon come to an end. Once when we were talking about this, Wittgenstein told me that he had just had a letter from Russell in London in which Russell had told him that the war would last a long time yet... In April (?)32 1916 Wittgenstein suddenly received orders to leave for the front. It was a heavy blow for us both. He took with him only what was absolutely necessary, leaving everything else behind and asking me to divide it among the troops. On this occasion he told me that he had had a house built beside a Norwegian fjord where he would sometimes take refuge in order to have peace for his work (I think also that Russell had visited him there). He now wanted to make me a present of this house. I refused it and took in its place a Waterman's Fountain Pen. Among a few other books he took with him The Brothers Karamazov. He liked this book very much. We often spoke about the figure of the starets. ... In one of our animated conversations Wittgenstein said to me "You will become a great disciple but not a prophet.' I could say of him that he had many of the traits of a prophet but absolutely not the traits of a disciple. He was sometimes snappish but never overbearing. ... Bieler is speaking of Wittgenstein in a most favourable constellation of circumstances. Perhaps, indeed, one of the most important features was precisely that he had (in Bieler himself) a disciple. It is interesting to contrast the content of the immediately preceding notebook with the 32.It was in fact in late March: the hesitation does Dr Bieler's memory credit. Similarly he is uncertain below about a visit by Russell to Norway: in fact Moore was the visitor and the house referred to was not yet built. 236 Wittgenstein: A Life subjects that he and Bieler discussed. In June 1915 Wittgenstein wrote perhaps the most arid and strictly logical of the remarks from which his book was drawn. We cannot doubt that at the same time his mind was full of reflections about life and its meaning of the kind to which Tolstoy and Dostoevsky gave rise. These perhaps could only be discussed with another. To go over them, to develop metaphors, to extract lessons was essentially work for two together. It was like making music together rather than recording something for an impersonal posterity. As well as a disciple he had a prote$0ge$0. Not being an officer he had no claim to an orderly, Bieler told Pitcher in another letter. But the commandant of a local camp for prisoners of war assigned a young Russian to act as his servant. Constantin was a good boy and took care of Wittgenstein with great zeal. Wittgenstein treated him very well and in a short time the lean, frail, and dirty prisoner of war was transformed into the most fleshy and cleanest soldier of the whole garrison. This was the Constantin of whom Wittgenstein would occasionally tell anecdotes when he was a schoolmaster_how completely he had preferred Wittgenstein's comfort to his own, how he had been a prodigious drinker, and so on_simple Russian characteristics of the kind to appeal to Wittgenstein (the farmers who overheard were principally surprised by the presumption of a schoolmaster in having had a servant). From Bieler's account one would guess that the personal difficulties Wittgenstein had felt in the workshop in Cracow no longer bulked large in his life. His work had entered on a new phase. Previously it had been embodied in a large pre-war notebook (presumably identical with the manuscript shown to Moore at Easter 1914) and a manuscript consisting of two notebook volumes written during the war. There were also of course the notes he had dictated to Moore in Norway. The notes were fundamentally right, but were hard to understand; and Moore (so he was led to believe) had been unable to explain his ideas to Russell.33 His notebook entries of May (he felt) were yet harder to understand than the Moore notes. "The problems are becoming more and more lapidary and general and the method has changed drastically.' The plan was to explain these to Russell after the war or to have them sent to him should he not survive. On one occasion he vowed that his manuscript must be printed whether anyone understood it or not. By October he was not only pleased with the success of his recent work but was engaged in summarizing his results and writing them down 33.Moore was indignant when he heard of this (from reading LW to BR (received Jan. 1915)). Russell, he said in his diary, had not asked him to explain Wittgenstein's ideas to him. 237 7The War 1914{-18 in the form of a treatise (the German word is Abhandlung, which was indeed used in the German title of the Tractatus). In his letter to Russell of 22 October 1915 he refers to "the final summary written in pencil on loose sheets of paper' which Russell must not be put off by, though it would be hard to understand. This was probably the first of about three preliminary versions of the Tractatus. As far as we can judge in default of diary entries the period in the workshop train was one of relative calm and progress. The sudden departure for the front did indeed signify being pushed out from a sort of haven into open and stormy waters where he would again have to find himself and where he would for the first time experience the full horrors of the war. The departure came about in the following way. With Gu$3rth's support_no doubt at his prompting_Wittgenstein made application in the autumn to have his status as engineer somehow legitimized. His civil studies_two years at Berlin, three at Manchester and two at Cambridge_entitled him to the venia legendi in England: further he had a year's work experience now in an artillery workshop. Gu$3rth, in the report that accompanied this application, emphasized that Wittgenstein, despite his double rupture, had hastened to enlist at the beginning of the war, that he had made no use of his volunteer status, that he had undertaken humble tasks_those of a sanitary orderly and the like, until he had quite accidentally come to Gu$3rth's notice in the artillery workshop. He had been allowed to wear an officer's uniform to overcome disciplinary difficulties. For months he had done good work there and on the train. In July (an appeal to sympathy) he had been badly hurt when a gun-barrel exploded. He wished indeed to go to the Front as a gunner, but clearly he was of great use in the workshop unit. In a further document attention is drawn to his total unfitness at three medical inspections (presumably those before the war): his recurrent hernia and his astigmatic short-sightedness (it was implied) made him quite unsuitable for front-line service.34 It is possible to sympathize with the authorities in their dilemma. No blame attached to Wittgenstein they emphasized (clearly Gu$3rth's actions on the other hand were regarded as questionable). Wittgenstein was extremely employable (a$3usserst verwendbar_a masterpiece of military vocabulary since it suggests no suitable employment for him) but promotion to Landsturmingenieur was impossible_for one thing he was in the army proper or Landwehr, not in the Territorial Army or Landsturm. Another possibility that had been floated_Artillerie Zeugs- Akzessist in der Reserve_was intended for soldiers with 12 or 13 years' service. Wittgenstein could clearly not retain the title and uniform of an Ingenieur, nor otherwise stay with the train. So he packed what was 34.The file on this application is among the documents collected under Wittgenstein's name in the Kriegsarchiv in Vienna. 238 Wittgenstein: A Life absolutely necessary, gave away everything else, and left like one who did not expect to return to normal life. (It is striking that correspondence with Russell and Ficker stops with the year 1915 and is not resumed until after the war. A letter written to Russell on 28 April 1915 seems not to have arrived.) He went to the 4th battery of the 5th Field Howitzer Regiment on about 21 March. (When howitzers and field-guns were no longer grouped separately, this regiment was renamed Field Artillery Regiment 105.) The regiment's headquarters were at Olmu$3tz in Moravia. The battery at the time he joined it was evidently on its way to the front, being attached to the 24th Infantry Division which had recently been transferred to VII Army under Pflanzer-Baltin, one of the best Austrian generals. The general situation on the Eastern Front at this time was that the Central Powers had little hope of knocking out the Russians by a large-scale encirclement. A further advance into Russia (given the almost unlimited possibilities of Russian withdrawal) would only extend their line without bringing any compensating advantage. For this reason the Western and the newly opened Italian Fronts were preferred and the forces on the Eastern Front correspondingly weakened. In the Austro-Hungarian sectors of the front this took the form of a reduction in the number of pieces of artillery available and a lowering in the quality of the troops engaged. To some extent German-Austrians and Magyars were replaced by troops from the minor nationalities whose loyalty could not be relied on. Conscious political sentiment was rare at this time but it was most common among troops from the Czech lands when mustering, so that traces of it may have been felt by Wittgenstein. On the front morale was low because of the positional warfare that had gone on since the line had been established in September, with no prospect of change for the better. Wittgenstein's notebook for this period has survived and gives a picture of one of the hardest times of his life. The physical conditions alone were too much for him and he was forced into all sorts of exertions that he was unaccustomed to and ill-fitted for. He seems to have contracted food-poisoning and to have suffered from other illnesses. His commandant spoke of sending him back to the rear. In his sufferings after the food-poisoning life had seemed attractive; but he felt that if he were to be sent away from the front he would commit suicide. He used later to say that the war alone saved his life: its dangers (it seems) forced him to want life in the ordinary way and its duties removed from him the choice whether to go on living and the responsibility for doing so. Long marches, nights of coughing, heavy physical work left him unable to work and completely a-sexual, and gave him the sunken face that was to mark him for the rest of his life no longer as a serious young man but as one who had suffered deeply. 239 7The War 1914{-18 As before, the troops were his greatest difficulty. Fortunately the officers liked him well enough and protected him to some degree, but the other ranks (he thought) almost all hated him, just because he was a One-year Volunteer with the status we have described. He found them drunken and stupid and mean; evil and heartless; it was almost impossible to find a trace of human nature in them; he does not hate them but they nauseate him; they are caricatures of humanity, a mean riff-raff; indeed he seems to say that human beings in general are miserable scoundrels. A moving letter from David Pinsent makes him aware that he is living in exile among monsters. Thus he flies out against them in his notebook: partly of course in order not to fly out at them in reality. He knew that it was useless to be angry with them and, as on the Goplana, he struggled to remain impassive. He blamed himself for his failures: he was a weak man, he was not a saint, his discontent with his surroundings was the sign of a bad life. He ought to try to understand his fellow men rather than hate them. Those among whom he found himself were not mean or stupid but enormously limited: they were intelligent enough in their own circle but they lacked character and hence amplitude: "A true believer's heart understands everything,' he said, with allusion, perhaps, both to himself and to them. His notebook has as much self-exhortation and prayer as that written at the beginning of the war. Now comes inspection. My soul shrivels up. God give me light! God give me light! God give light to my soul! (Diary 29.3.16) Do your best. You cannot do more. And be cheerful. Be content with yourself. Because others will not prop you up or at most only for a short time (then you will become burdensome to them). Help yourself and help others with all your strength. And at the same time be cheerful. But how much strength ought one to use for oneself and how much for others? It is difficult to live a good life. But the good life is something fine. Yet not my will but thine be done. (Diary 30.3.16) As before the prayers to God for help and the resignation into the hands of God redouble when he finds himself in battle. This happened on about 21 April_a month after he joined the battery. He was at first employed on the gun position, where there would be heavy physical work and (at his rank) nothing that required his particular abilities. It is worthy of remark how little training was thought necessary. Twice he was sent up to the observation-post, once during a surprise bombardment, both times he came under fire. Thought of God. Thy will be done! God be with me. God is all that man needs. (Diary 29 and 30.4.16) 240 Wittgenstein: A Life He had in fact asked to be sent permanently to that position and (very sensibly) his application was granted. It is clear that he was an excellent aide in the observation post and the loneliness suited him tempera- mentally: I am like the prince in the enchanted castle in the observation post. (Diary 5.5.16) There was another and more questionable attraction: Tomorrow perhaps I shall be sent out, at my own request, to the observation post. Then and only then will the war begin for me. And_possibly_life too! Perhaps nearness to death will bring light into my life. (Diary 4.5.16) Here he had defined and accurate tasks of spotting and plotting on the map enemy positions, of observing and directing the fire of his own guns; all leading up to the sound of the barrage, which, later, he always remembered with excitement. Enemy fire and that of his own side did not distract him, but (by one of the illogicalities that he permitted himself) he complained bitterly in retrospect about the constant shouting into the field-telephone_though of course the passing of messages back is the raison d'e$2tre of an observation post. The constant danger of death meant that he prayed constantly_ when he had danger to face and when he had survived it. If he lost heart (verzagt wu$3rde), if his soul flinched when he heard a shot (note the implication that his body did not), it was a sign of a false conception of life. It was a sin and a weakness, just as his irritation with his fellow-men was a sin. He was deep in sin, but God would forgive him. If his spirit were stronger he would be happier. He must think of the goal of life. "Only death gave life its meaning' he said during his first days in the observation post (his remarks at the time of his father's death will be recalled p. 166). This has at least two senses_only the prospect of death makes life desirable; only facing death is worthwhile in life. Wittgenstein had acted on the latter in making his way to the position of greatest danger: he was bound to experience the former too. It was as if he was determined to put himself in the most difficult situation. It would somehow overrule or cancel out his failures to master his weakness of getting angry with his comrades if he could overcome this apparently much greater and much more immediate temptation. Or, on another plane, he needed to become master of himself: he could do so in a way satisfying to himself only if he succeeded in some considerable task. He was putting himself into danger in order to force himself to be a decent human being as he conceived it. 241 7The War 1914{-18 This is perhaps the place to comment on the question whether Wittgenstein was in fact a saint, as his sister Mining sometimes believed. The answer seems to be, as he himself thought, that he was not: but he had the concept of being a saint and was aware how far he fell short. This made him (saint-like in this) anything but a comfortable com- panion; also he was sometimes an inspiration to others and sometimes a hero. The diary entries were not written for self-justification (certainly Wittgenstein would have looked askance at such a motive) nor is it our business to judge his life in this respect. As far as they were written for us they were meant to show the sense of his life_not its success but its point. What we must try to see from them is the nature of his ideal: what it meant for him to lead a good life and to purify himself ("ein gutes Leben fu$3hren und mich la$3utern', Diary 26.7.14). Positional warfare continued throughout May, but toward the end of the month it became clear that a Russian offensive was imminent. Ammunition and troops were being brought up in large quantities and numbers to practically every sector of the Russian south-west army group. On 27 May Wittgenstein expected an attack "today or to- morrow': the circumstances made him nervous_as is commonly re- ported of the Austro-Hungarian troops at the time: Very disturbed sleep in the last weeks. Constantly dreaming of my duties. Dreams that bring me to the brink of waking. (Diary 28.5.16) In fact the offensive came on 4 June and though it extended over the whole Russian south-west front the main areas in which it developed were at Luck to the north and at Okna immediately north of the Dniester, where Wittgenstein was stationed. The Tsar had agreed on a summer offensive to relieve his Western allies of some pressure. That however had been planned for July. Now there came a call for an earlier move in order to save the Italians. Of the Russian army group commanders only Brusilov was prepared to undertake this. The nature of the offensive (known as the Brusilov offensive and one of the most considerable Russian victories of the war) was as follows. The troops of the Central Powers (for there were a certain number of Germans in these sectors) were in strongly prepared positions. It was proposed to bombard these with mortars and artillery and to advance wherever a break- through of the front line seemed to have been achieved. Naturally this was expected and the defence plan was to keep the infantry in foxholes protected from the drumfire barrage until the breakthrough actually took place, when they would emerge quite fresh to engage their exhausted assailants. Meanwhile the defence's artillery engaging in counterbattery fire would reduce the effectiveness of the drumfire barrage. What Brusilov correctly anticipated was that the drumfire of 242 Wittgenstein: A Life the attackers would prevent the observation and disrupt the com- munications on which the defence plan depended; and the confusion_ literally the smoke of battle_would make it very difficult for the defending infantry to emerge from their foxholes at precisely the right time. Moreover, because of the defence uncertainty about where the main thrust would develop, there would be no substantial reserves available behind the line to counter and contain it. This is connected with a feature affecting morale: it was common to speak then of Durchbruchsfieber, the panic that overtook troops on either flank of a breakthrough: they had, after all the immense rounding-up of Russians in 1915 as an example. It was not so much the quality of the Austro-Hungarian troops as the fact that they were committed to a plan which depended too much on the front line's holding that led to Brusilov's success. He was aided, of course, by the multi-lingual character of the army he was attacking and perhaps by some failures in generalship.35 Wittgenstein had just been promoted Vormeister (something like Lance-Bombardier). His division was on the left flank of XI Corps and therefore just south of the Benigni Group (soon after renamed VII Corps and given Wittgenstein's division), a collection of troops of very mixed origin, who however held out very well against some of the best Russian troops in the battle of Okna. We have two reports recommending Wittgenstein for a decoration which give a picture of his duties and conduct in this battle: the longer runs: Volunteer Wittgenstein was attached to the Observer officer during the engagements in front of Casemate JR77 (Cardinal Point Saro(?Sanvo?)krynicznyi) and the Cavalry Strongpoint Hill 458 from 4{-6 vi 16. Ignoring the heavy artillery fire on the casemate and the exploding mortar bombs he observed the discharge of the mortars and located them. The Battery in fact succeeded in destroying two of the heavy-calibre mortars by direct hits, as was confirmed by prisoners taken. On the Battery Observation Post, Hill 417, he observed without intermission in the drumfire, although I several times shouted to him to take cover. By this distinctive behaviour he exercised a very calming effect on his comrades.36 The decoration recommended was the Silver Medal for Valour 2nd Class, a considerable distinction for one of such humble rank. That 35.For a recent account, written very much from the Russian point of view and emphasizing "Habsburg-Bourbon incompetence' in the Austro-Hungarian command see Norman Stone: The Eastern Front 1914{-17, 1975. 36.The other recommendation merely adds the detail of infantry fire and varies the spelling of the "Cardinal Point'. 243 7The War 1914{-18 decoration was in fact conferred on him in October, but evidently for a previous engagement of which we have no details. The present recommendation seems to have resulted in the Bronze Medal for Valour, also conferred in October.37 The Cavalry Strongpoint referred to did in fact hold out for some time and delay the Russians, but on 10 June a breakthrough took place to the north west of Wittgenstein's position and Pflanzer-Baltin was forced to withdraw, the Benigni group moving west and XI Corps moving south-west (across the Dniester where necessary) to the line of the Pruth and later to that of the Sereth. Wittgenstein presumably went with his division in the latter direction. Here now, as at Luck to the north, the Austro-Hungarian army was in full and chaotic retreat. Many were lost: by 12 June it has been calculated Pflanzer-Baltin had only 3500 men at his disposal of the 16,000 that there should have been in Wittgenstein's formation. Wittgenstein himself later told a nephew of his long retreat from this offensive, in which he sat utterly exhausted on a horse in an endless column, with the one thought of keeping his seat, since if he fell off he would be trampled to death. "Colossal exertions in the last month' Wittgenstein wrote on 7 July. There are, naturally enough, no diary entries to give us any hint exactly which operations he was engaged in. The south-western retreat of much of VII Army allowed the Russians to advance into Bukovina in mid-June. Wittgenstein's division took part in this fighting and then in the battle of Kolomea from 24 June to 6 July. In the event the Austrians were forced back into the Carpathians, where they spent the rest of the campaigning season. In one of his rare notebook entries Wittgenstein mentions being in the mountains: Terrible weather. In the mountains, bad, quite inadequate shelter, icy cold, rain, and mist. An excruciating life. Terribly difficult not to lose oneself. Because I am indeed a weak human being. But the spirit helps me. The best thing would be if I did fall sick; then at least I should have a little peace. (Notebooks 15.7.16) Hardship and danger made him fear that he would lose himself, his portion of the spirit. His comrades too often added another difficulty to be overcome. Throughout July and August Pflanzer-Baltin made a number of counter-offensives in the region south of the Dniester. These were in so far effective that they confined Letchitski, his Russian opponent, more or 37.Documents in the Kriegsarchiv in Vienna under Wittgenstein's name. His Hauptgrundbuchblatt signalizes the award of the Silver Medal as being "for the second time' but it does not in fact list an earlier time and Wittgenstein himself in an official report mentions only one. 244 Wittgenstein: A Life less to the area originally won. The Russians were held off from the passes into Hungary (which were more important for public opinion than for any military purpose). Finally this army at least demonstrated that the Imperial and Royal forces could not be written off. True, they had suffered a severe reverse; in many sectors they had to be stiffened by the infusion of German formations. Many Austro-Hungarian troops now came under Hindenburg's command and even Pflanzer-Baltin in the south had to accept von Seeckt (the archetype of a Prussian officer) as his chief of staff, as later did the Archduke Carl, the Austrian commander- in-chief in the south. Still, the Russians were held and their failure in the war was precisely that the Brusilov offensive was their greatest victory. Their last throw had achieved only partial success. Wittgenstein evidently played a normal part in these operations. We hear of his being under fire, of messing with the infantry (he castigates himself for minding being sent to mess with the men rather than with the officers as promised and for trying to obtain his rights), of a three-day journey to a new position. Towards the middle of August he heard that he would shortly be sent back to the rear for training and he welcomed this, to all appearances because at present he was surrounded by meanness. Normal training must continue even in war_or even more in war; and Wittgenstein with his skill and his courage was an obvious candidate for a commission. It may also have played a part that the severe fighting in his sector now seemed to be coming to an end, so that he could be released. Wittgenstein had been continuously in the field for five months. The notes he made, both philosophical and personal, are few, but they testify to a change in his thinking as great as that which he himself saw in his countenance. In April he made a handful of notes (barely a page and a half of print) on propositions, functions, and objects_the topics of his previous wartime notes. In May there are a few scribbles that do little more than raise questions, except for one extremely interesting remark about the modern illusion that the laws of nature explain natural phenomena. The ancients (for whom God and Fate played the part now reserved for the laws of nature) were to this extent clearer, that they recognized a clear terminus_they did not think that everything could have grounds given for it. (These remarks are used in Tractatus 6.371{-2.) Wittgenstein is beginning to make general remarks about the Welt- anschauung of his time. It was the beginning of July38 before he could write anything again_the reason for his silence we have seen in his campaigns. But during that May of mounting tension and that June of 38.1 or 4 July (though 11 seems to be written) appears to be the real date of the remarks ascribed to 11.6.16 by the editors of Notebooks 1914{-17 even in their second edition. There are also a couple of scribbled formulae, apparently from late May. The code diary also is silent between 29 May and 6 July. 245 7The War 1914{-18 rout he had reflected (he tells us on 6 July) a great deal on every possible subject. "Oddly enough I cannot establish the connexion with my mathematical modes of thought.'39 The difficulty can be seen from the remarks with which he reopens his philosophical notes: What do I know about God and the purpose of life? I know that this world exists. That I have a place in it like that of my eye in its visual field. That there is something problematic about it, which we call its sense. That this sense is not situated in the world but outside it. ... The sense of life, i.e. the sense of the world, can be called God. And connected with the image of God as a father. (Notebooks 1(4?).7.16) Throughout the rest of the notebook_some twenty printed pages_ reflections on life, on religion, on ethics, on the will, on solipsism are interspersed among (and indeed outweigh) his more customary discus- sions of the general form of a proposition and the nature of an operation. It is significant moreover that these reflections are no longer of such a personal character as the prayers and self-analysis of his earlier notebooks_and that they are not written in cypher. It is as if he had bridged_or was about to bridge_some gap between his philosophy and his inner life. Indeed he seems to say this on 2 August: Yes, my work has broadened out from the foundations of logic to the essence of the world.40 We have mentioned above (p. 77) that the implications for Weltweisheit_for the philosophy of life_of his technical philosophy were not always apparent to him, though no doubt they were unconsciously part of his motivation. But now, in this the worst summer of danger and defeat, somewhere between the shells and the bullets, he began to feel that the two were connected; that grasping the essence of propositions or of an operation had something to do with adopting the right attitude towards life. No longer does his attitude towards his philosophy merely exhibit the same structure as his attitude towards life: the two are now identified. The critic of Russell is fused in the reader of Dostoevsky. Wittgenstein's first philosophy (and much of his later personality) is the fruit of that campaigning season, but for fruition was also required the succeeding autumn, comparatively free of military exertions and annoyances, but full of intellectual and personal factors which combined 39.This occurs in a code pasage. 40."Ja meine Arbeit hat sich ausgedehnt von den Grundlagen der Logik zum Wesen der Welt.' Notebooks 2.8.16 (Miss Anscombe's translation seems to me to miss the point here.) 246 Wittgenstein: A Life and intensified the amalgamation of religion and logic that was to surprise Russell so much after the war. These factors also evoked contradictory elements in his attitude towards others_the affectionate and dependent alongside the authoritarian. The roulette-wheel of military life now released him from banishment and allowed him to fall for a while into another of the "families' we have mentioned. It was, perhaps for the first time, a family in which he was at least the elder brother, if not the uncle or the father. The circumstances can be reconstructed as follows. Wittgenstein was posted from his regiment to a Reserve Officers' School in the town of Olmu$3tz in Moravia but first went on leave to Vienna. There he met Loos41 who gave him the name of a young pupil just then convalescing in that very town. This was Paul Engelmann. Engelmann has given his account of the meeting that resulted and begins by describing the physical setting_the town itself. It was in my time still an entrancing ruin of bygone days arising out of the spiritual ruin of the twentieth century. A childhood spent between the flaking town houses grouped round two vast market-places, or in one of the crooked little lanes tightly crammed into the inadequate space of a former fortress, in houses with dark vaulted stairways, in flats consisting of a few huge and gloomy rooms with badly dilapidated floors of varnished boards, inhabited by the last off-shoots of old and slowly dying burgher families_such a childhood will endow a man with a musical ear, as it were, for things past which must elude those brought up in more ordinary surroundings.42 Engelmann does not say, perhaps he did not feel, that to the Viennese Olmu$3tz was a byword for provincialism, a remote German outpost in the Czech lands. This was part of the reason for the intensity of its cultural life. It is striking how many of the thinkers of the last half-century of the Dual Empire came from such small towns_Freud, Mach, Husserl, Gomperz, Loos from Moravia, Kraus from Bohemia (even the German writers of Prague, Rilke and Kafka, are a related phenomemon). Theirs was a German culture, its last efflorescence matching the Czech national revival, which eventually overtook it. It was a Catholic culture_the churches and pillars and statues of the Counter-reformation were in every square, the saints' days were observed, every Olmu$3tzer knew of the 41.An undated notebook entry (in cypher) of about this time probably refers to this meeting: "Am depressed. Alone, alone! Thank God. Loos is alive.' Whether Wittgenstein is glad to be alone after the campaigning or depressed to find himself isolated even at home is not clear; but perhaps the second is the more probable interpretation and the thought is that Loos had been a refuge from his family, as Labor may have been when Gu$3rth took him to Vienna at the beginning of 1915. 42.P. Engelmann: Letters fom Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir (Oxford, 1967). I was also in correspondence with P. Engelmann and have further been able to consult Dr Heinrich Groag and Dr Max Zweig, survivors of this period. 247 7The War 1914{-18 unique rank and privileges of the archbishop. And it was a culture to a large extent transmitted by Jews, some few being converts like Arch- bishop Kohen of Olmu$3tz or for a while Kraus himself, most of them still Jews as far as registration went but willing to embrace the essence, or what they took to be the essence, of Christianity. So it was, at all events, in the small group of young people to whom Wittgenstein was now brought. Engelmann, who introduced him to them, had many of the qualities Wittgenstein looked for in a disciple. He was gentle, not self-seeking, even ineffectual, but above all painfully critical of his own failings. By profession he was, or was training himself as, an architect, more particularly an Innenarchitekt or interior designer. He was small, was generally considered likeably ugly, and his health was not good.43 In 1915 he was invalided out of the army after only a few days. In one respect he thought himself very different from Wittgenstein. At the outbreak of war he had shared in the general upsurge of patriotic feeling, which we have traced in Wittgenstein's notes; but with time he became convinced of the justice of Karl Kraus's opposition to the conduct of the war by the Central Powers. He helped Kraus to collect the newspaper cuttings that made up so much of the wartime Fackel and were then, in many cases, used in the phantasmagoric and unperformable drama The Last Days of Mankind. These were, typically, official reports, which by their very wording, without commentary, revealed the barbarity of the authorities and the corruption of the press. One often-cited example is the following report from 1916: Berlin, 22 September. The Wolff bureau reports: One of our U-boats hit in the Mediterranean on 17 September a packed enemy troopship. The ship sank within 43 seconds.44 To which Kraus merely added the title "With watch in hand'. There is something Austrian about the fact that this bitter satire on the official propaganda was commonly carried by officers at the front, while British officers were satisfied with broadsheets reprinting pieces by Dickens, Macaulay, Shakespeare, and Scott. The Austrians were called upon to show courage without confidence in the value, let alone the success, of their cause. It was natural for them to emerge with a sourer and more realistic view of the nature of human societies and, on the internal side, with a sense of duty not supported by a general confidence in the group 43.On the whole Wittgenstein naturally preferred good looks but he also liked to "take up' someone, to see something where others did not: "All Luki's swans are geese,' his sister Gretl used to say. 44.Die Fackel 437{-42, October 1916, p. 121. 248 Wittgenstein: A Life they belonged to, with a conscience focused on motive and manner rather than effect_the precursor of what was later called inner emigration. We have seen signs of this attitude in Wittgenstein: it reflected a more hopeless moral situation than that facing his English contemporaries and many of his differences from them in the 30s and 40s can be traced back to it. But Engelmann's reaction was not that of Wittgenstein; he went further even than Kraus. Kraus is said to have admitted later that he had from the first hoped for the defeat of the Central Powers. Engelmann was not against one side in the war: he was a pacifist completely. In his memoir he refuses to describe his activities, and only claims that their effects were not quite as fanciful and imaginary as Wittgenstein, like many others, assumed at the time.45 He is not here speaking of the effect of Kraus's Fackel but perhaps of incidents like the following. Once when he was sick in bed a new transport for the front was at Mass (as the custom was) in the church of St. Maurice outside his house. He rose from his bed and went into the church and exhorted the men in the name of the Holy Spirit to lay down their arms. This, naturally, he did in German and it is unlikely that the Czech troops understood it. In a kindly way the officer in charge simply told Englmann to be off and took no further action. Engelmann, back in bed, was greatly relieved, and, as soon as he could be moved, his friend Groag took him to Vienna and then to Zell-am-See, returning only when all might be supposed forgotten. Engelmann's whole circle was an unworldly one_children of commercial or professional families, all aspiring to devote themselves to the arts or to things of the mind. Engelmann's own father was not a success in business and made a living but not on the level that the family had achieved in the past. His brother was a gifted and satirical cartoonist under the name Peter Eng and a sister was a painter also and deeply depressive. Engelmann was to spend his life on small but choice commissions, on private publications and on composing, in exquisite hand-writing, his own collection of the best German poems, which he feared might otherwise perish. All were at odds with the world, rather as Engelmann's mother, the warm centre of intellectual evenings in their slightly shabby flat, resented the richer but more recently arrived burghers of the town. Of the circle too were the cousins Zweig_Fritz the musician and Max the writer; Max studied the law but devoted his life to writing dramas written according to the strictest rules of unity. He did not take over his father's practice in Prossnitz but spent the greater part of his life, with Engelmann, in a sort of exile in Israel, where German culture must indeed have seemed precarious. Lastly there was Heini Groag, already 45.P. Engelmann: Letters, p. 73. 249 7The War 1914{-18 mentioned, the most practical perhaps and the most amusing. He wished for a stage career but eventually became a successful lawyer: traces of the idealism of his youth remained in his devotion to pacifism, until survival in Moravia, first as a Jew, then as a bourgeois, necessarily preoccupied him. These now became Wittgenstein's circle too, and by degrees were associated with his family_in the twenties Engelmann would be called on for architecture and design, Groag for a legal task, Groag's cousin when an engineer was required, and so on. They were, we have said already, a family to him. Like them he was inclined not to practise the skills that had made his family rich; and his own family, like their small group, spent its time making music, performing plays, discussing books and poems. It was like being back with Gretl and her friends. Except that here he could set the tone: where she had taught him not to believe, he could lead them to the passages of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky that came closest to his ideal of religion. And here was the benign motherly figure of Mrs Engelmann to approve of everything. And Engelmann himself, earnest and self-accusing was just such a disciple as he needed. Wittgenstein still stammered but Engelmann's companionship enabled him_served, he used to say, as a forceps_to bring the words out. Indeed Engelmann was so familiar with his thinking that he would come out first with the correct formulation. Or Wittgenstein would use the sharp mind and phenomenal memory of Groag to develop his ideas. With one or the other (Groag or Engelmann) he would leave the evening's gathering and each would accompany the other home in turn, prolonging the conversation well into the night. Here surely there was respite from battle, here surely the hearts with feeling that he had cried out for on the Vistula. For them, certainly, these were unforgettable days. Here came a man from Vienna only a little older than themselves but already knowing so much, bringing the answers to their questings from remote realms of logic and mathematics where lucidity and certainty seemed to be possible. They were in awe of him of course: he had seen and suffered more, he bought his uniform from the best tailor in Olmu$3tz, he came from one of the first families of Vienna_it never occurred to them that he was nearly as Jewish as themselves, he had talked on equal terms with the great. He came to them with a mixture of attitudes very character- istic of him_on the one hand an engaging modesty and the politeness_ more than the politeness, the Liebenswu$3rdigkeit, the engaging charm_of his family, on the other hand a severity of moral judgement and a brutality or directness in its utterance which alarmed them. One respect in which he stood apart from them was that he took no part whatever in the amorous intrigues to which a circle devoted to the life of the mind lends itself. They thought he had no relation to women, while for his part 250 Wittgenstein: A Life he told one of them_not a close friend_"You are like pigs rolling in filth.' They knew him well enough_at least Groag did_to ask him about his evident need to keep others at a distance: it was then that he recited Schopenhauer's parable of the porcupines and their conflicting demands, for warmth and to avoid one another's prickles (above, p. 44). And so it was with himself_he had need of their comfortable and contentious evenings, but in the middle of it all he would cast imploring looks, perhaps to Groag, wanting the other to take him away. (Here, to be sure, the severe stomach troubles from which he suffered at this time provide an alternative explanation; but an unconvincing one since he could talk happily with a single friend.) Perhaps indeed Wittgenstein's difficulty was that of finding the correct distance_either he was shunning all contact, as when he wanted to live in the high tower of the Rathaus, or he was so involved in his friends' lives that their failings rankled. To these young people Wittgenstein was chiefly a guide: they played and read and talked all their lives_but the time with him remained in their memories. He set the tone. He was not the performer but the critic whose judgement mattered. Fritz Zweig would play to them, Fritz who was later to be conductor of the Berlin opera: Wittgenstein's role was to be leader of the audience. When the neighbours above stamped on the floor (it was 9.30 when the concert began) Mrs. Engelmann began to demur but Wittgenstein insisted that the neighbours ought to be happy to hear such music. He led the audience at their plays_no one thought he might act but his presence and participation made their performance of the Malade imaginaire into a memorable occasion. As often with Wittgenstein what was enjoyed and explored was a limited repertoire of the great creative artists of the past: Molie$1re was performed, Shakespeare too we hear.46 Fritz Zweig would play them Bach on the organ of the synagogue: humming and playing the piano at the same time he would render vocal and orchestral pieces by Mozart, Schumann, Schubert, and Brahms. (We are reminded of Wittgenstein's whistling with Moore and Pinsent_and he did indeed whistle for Engelmann too.) The younger men execrated Wagner and this was tolerated by Wittgenstein. So too with poetry: the most severely classical poems of Goethe and Mo$3rike, Engelmann points out, were what Wittgenstein required as an antidote to the poems of Albert Ehrenstein, when these were sent to him at the front (p. 260 below). It was to Groag that Wittgenstein praised Schiller's passion for freedom (p. 34 above) and to him also that he said of Grillparzer, "We do not know how beautiful he is' (p. 35 above); and every day in their time together he talked to Groag of Goethe. Engelmann tells (like other witnesses) of 46."I often think of you, of the Midsummer Night's Dream and the second ballet in the Malade imaginaire etc.' LW to PE 31.3.17. 251 7The War 1914{-18 Wittgenstein's admiration for Gottfried Keller with his exact fit of expression and feeling. The same quality seemed to Engelmann to be present in a poem of Uhland's which in Karl Kraus's phrase was "so clear that no one understands it'. Graf Eberhards Weissdorn, romantic in theme, classical in the precision and reticence of its presentation: Engelmann rightly attached great significance to Wittgenstein's few lines of comment on this poem: The poem by Uhland is really magnificent. And this is how it is: if only you do not try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be_unutterably_contained in what has been uttered. (LW to Engelmann 9.4.17) Two things are noteworthy here: that Wittgenstein's feeling for literature is wedded to one of the central ideas of his philosophical work_what is shown by a proposition cannot also be stated explicitly in it; and that the idea seems to have been suggested by Engelmann_Wittgenstein in the letter is agreeing with him. In their conversation Engelmann had not aspired to do more than follow at a distance the logical conceptions that Wittgenstein was developing but he felt he was able, because of his own spiritual crisis at the time, to grasp the motives that led Wittgenstein to write the book he was engaged on. That book was to be a reaction against sensationalism and psychologism in philosophy: it was of a piece with Wittgenstein's rejection of most of contemporary literature. It was the reactionaries that he turned to_Kraus first, and through him Weininger and the critic Ku$3rnberger, from whom Wittgenstein used to quote the phrase later used as the motto of the Tractatus (curiously enough he would not say where the quotation came from: it was in fact quoted also by Kraus).47 That motto is typical of the circle he found himself in or perhaps created. They too thought for a while that everything worth saying could be said in a few words. "One thing is necessary'_the keynote of the Tolstoyan Christianity that Wittgenstein had discovered at the front_was now applied to the intellectual life generally. It seems probable that the approach was in the broadest sense linguistic: Engelmann seeks to draw a parallel between Kraus's taking his opponent at his word, convicting him out of his own mouth by what is made manifest in what he says, and Wittgenstein's critique of philosophical language;48 it seems likely also that it was during this time that Wittgenstein read or reflected on the Nachwort to the Grimms' fairy tales by Paul Ernst, which influenced him so powerfully with its account of how language misleads us_graphic modes of expression and 47.Wittgenstein often discussed Ku$3rnberger with Heinrich Groag, to whom I owe this point. 48.Paul Engelmann: Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, pp. 124{-7. 252 Wittgenstein: A Life metaphors being taken literally.49 Wittgenstein in both cases goes beyond his sources: he detects and dissects nonsense, not mere deception or deceptiveness. There is some speculation in these suggestions, however: what Wittgenstein certainly dwelt on in this Olmu$3tz period was a theme common to Weininger and Kraus, the idea that logic, ethics, and aesthetics were one. Wittgenstein often discussed Weininger's chapters on these themes at Olmu$3tz, and he echoes them in the Tractatus when he says that ethics and aesthetics are one. Engelmann points out two aspects of Kraus's work that are relevant here: Kraus insisted that works must not be judged by one-sided aesthetic canons and that a moral defect will generally be manifest in an aesthetic fault in an artist's work: but clearly more than this was meant by Wittgenstein and his friends. The general lines of their thought can be recovered from his 1916 notebooks: The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connexion between art and ethics. (Notebooks 7.10.16) Is it the essence of the artistic way of looking at things that it looks at the world with a happy eye? Life is serious, art is gay. [Schiller] For there is certainly something in the idea that the end of art is the beautiful. And the beautiful is what makes happy. (Notebooks 20{-21.10.16) A way of looking at things: we shall see later that this is connected with the notion of something that can only be communicated in a special way, shown or manifested but not said. What is shown in art is perhaps what Engelmann describes as a solution.50 This accords with Wittgenstein's liking (manifested admittedly at a later date) for a "happy ending' in films and also for his penchant for the edifying in poetry_a slight limitation in taste not indeed required by but consentaneous with his views. As for ethics, the point is that there too_i.e. in the world as a whole_there is a solution to be seen, by eyes that are prepared for it. We shall shortly describe what that solution seemed to the Olmu$3tz circle to be. It is less clear (from Engelmann's memoir and from the reports of survivors) how they understood the identity of logic with ethics and aesthetics. Wittgenstein made some of them read Frege and he talked to them about Kant and Schopenhauer, with whom they had, like 49.Max Zweig was a great admirer and follower of Paul Ernst, a neo-classic writer and critic. Groag recalled his being much talked about at Olmu$3tz. Wittgenstein later told Rhees that he would have liked to include Ernst's name in the preface of the work in later editions, for the reason given in our text. Wittgenstein may, however, have known Ernst's Nachwort earlier: Russell's library has a copy of the relevant edition of the tales, probably one of Wittgenstein's pre-First War books, which Russell bought. 50.P. Engelmann: Letters, p. 93. 253 7The War 1914{-18 himself, the normal educated man's acquaintance. "In the words of the great Kant' he would quote from time to time: Engelmann gathered that Wittgenstein did not believe in the existence of synthetic propositions a priori.51 Now there was indeed a parallel between Wittgenstein's aim and Kant's: the one wanted to abolish reason to make way for faith, the other to remove the whole of ethics and religion from the area of speculation into that of the inexpressible; but the concentration on logic important for Wittgenstein is lacking in Kant. The point was to show that logical statements too (the best that philosophy could aspire to) said nothing. Logic therefore did not present us with a set of truths independent of experience: it was in this like ethics, so that he could say, in July of that year, Ethics does not treat of the world. Ethics must be a condition of the world, like logic. (Notebooks 24.7.16) Logic is thus the paradigm of the inexpressible: there is something to be seen but nothing to be said. At the time of his Olmu$3tz discussions he was experimenting in his notebooks with the notion of an operation (later discussed in propositions 5.21{-5.254 of the Tractatus) and this emphasis is naturally and correctly reflected in Engelmann's account of Wittgen- stein's thought (Letters etc. p.104). The knowledge of forms of propositions and their relations, which is what logic gives us, is really the recognition that one proposition can be produced out of others by certain operations. That it can be is not a logical fact and seeing that it can be is not a logical experience. There it was a matter of how one looked at things, just as in ethics it was a matter of how one willed (Notebooks 29.7.16: "Here everything seems to turn, so to speak, on how one wants.') This variant on Schopenhauer's views appears in Wittgenstein's notebooks at this time and in his conversations with his friends. It is as if behind the ordinary life of wanting and willing there was a deeper life and a truer will for which success and failure in the ordinary life ought to be indifferent. Thus he said to Groag, in a conversation later repeated in a letter to Engelmann: We are asleep. Our life is like a dream. But in our better hours we wake up just enough to realize that we are dreaming. Most of the time, though, we are fast asleep. I cannot awaken myself! I am trying hard, my dream body moves, but my real one does not stir. This, alas, is how it is! (LW to PE 9.4.17) 51.P. Engelmann: Letters, p. 125. 254 Wittgenstein: A Life How quite to accommodate such thoughts within a Schopenhauerian framework is uncertain; Wittgenstein himself said at this time "I am conscious of the complete unclarity of all these sentences' (Notebooks 2.8.16) but the general outlines of his thought at the time and of its reflection in his conversations with his Olmu$3tz friends are not in doubt. Ethics, the good, the happy, the harmonious life were not marked by any objective feature, by anything within the sphere of the will conceived as an agent altering the facts of the world. The good life is marked on the contrary by a metaphysical or transcendental feature_by an attitude of the willing subject in the deeper sense, an attitude which can surmount and accept the misery of the world and can regard its amenities as boons granted by fortune which can always be renounced. As with Schopen- hauer the impression remains that misery predominates in the world and that death is not simply to be faced but even welcomed. "Nothing better could have happened to him' (Es ko$3nnte ihm nichts besseres passieren) was Wittgenstein's comment when they spoke of the death in battle of an Olmu$3tz friend. But he seems to have rejected suicide rather for Schopenhauer's reason (that it was the supreme act of self-assertion of the will_here the ordinary will). Thus he says that if suicide is allowed, everything is allowed. But he hesitates and asks, "Or perhaps even suicide is in itself neither good nor evil?' (Notebooks 10.1.17_the last entry preserved in his wartime notebooks). He was disturbed, he told his Olmu$3tz friends, by the suicide of Weininger. (His later letters to Engelmann indicate that for a period suicide was never far from his thoughts and also that he thought suicide involves a misuse of the will.) A whole spiritual attitude is not easily described: it is probable that Wittgenstein and his friends also felt that they were exploring and creating it and had never quite fully grasped it. Acceptance and resignation before the facts of the world were only a part of what they aspired to: indeed it was much more the heights and depths within one's own soul that they sought to be reconciled with. Every reader of Wittgenstein's letters_particularly those to Engelmann_will recognize the theme: "the state of not being able to get over a particular act' (wenn man u$3ber eine bestimmte Tatsache nicht hinweg kommt) is mentioned in the very letter in which Wittgenstein analyses the sordidness of suicide and we have seen the same sort of preoccupation in the earlier wartime diary. Of the same kind is the admiration that Engelmann reports (Memoir, p.80) for the self-knowledge of the pilgrim in Tolstoy's story who admits that "Sin got the better of me' and does not try to excuse his action. In the other scale is the enthusiasm Wittgenstein felt for the exclamation that Dmitri Karamazov_even and precisely he, the libertine_makes when he says: "Hail to the Highest_also within me!' Dostoevsky was preferred as a teacher even to Tolstoy, probably because the sense of something good in human nature even in its depths, of 255 7The War 1914{-18 happiness to be found even in a life that it would be a blessing to be rid of, is stronger in him. In July of 1916 Wittgenstein uses Dostoevsky to illustrate and explain the attitude towards the will and the world that we have mentioned. Right willing gives a meaning to the world without altering anything in it. And to this extent [he says] Dostoevsky too is right when he says that the man who is happy is fulfilling the purpose of existence.52 The essential feature of this attitude in Wittgenstein's view is the renunciation of an influence upon what happens, so he goes on to refine on Dostoevsky: Or one could also say that the one who fulfils the purpose of existence is he who needs no further purpose other than life. That is to say, who is satisfied. (Notebooks 6.7.16) The elder in Dostoevsky tells the woman of little faith that this happiness will be achieved, and that the answer to all her questions and doubts will be found, only by active love of our neighbours. It is clear that for him, as for Wittgenstein, results do not matter, but he is more specific about the aim with which one should live, whereas Wittgenstein, at a higher level of abstraction, as it were, simply says that we must be in agreement with the world. Life itself, his thought seems to be, will from moment to moment provide us with something we clearly ought to aim at. If we depart from this we shall have a bad conscience.53 As in his notebook reflections, so in his conversation with his Olmu$3tz friends, the ethical went over into the religious. They would read the Bible_chiefly the New Testament_together: "It must be more than human inspiration,' said Engelmann as he read passages to Groag. Wittgenstein thought it best read in Latin. The great building blocks of that language always appealed to him, but there was also the remoteness, the hieratic quality that Latin lent to the text, quite the opposite of that familiarity with the sacred which he so much disliked. Thus the New Testament was not a set of precepts for life, but its tone or approach, properly dwelt on, were those appropriate for life. "I know nothing of religion', he told Groag, "but there is surely something right in the concept of a God and of an after-life_only something quite different 52.Notebooks 6.7.16: the reference is presumably to The Brothers Karamazov, pt. 1, bk. 2, ch. 4, where the elder Zossima says, "Men are made for happiness and he who is completely happy has a right to say to himself: I've carried out God's sacred will on earth.' 53.Concretely conscience speaks like Dostoevsky's elder: "When my conscience upsets my equilibrium, there is something with which I am not in agreement. But what is that? Is it the world? ... For example: it makes me unhappy to think that I have offended so and so. Is that my conscience?' Notebooks 8.7.16 256 Wittgenstein: A Life from what we are capable of imagining.' Engelmann's poem,54 in which the soul after death realizes that flames that surround it are the love of God, represents the same attitude. In seeing this, the soul wakes from a dream_our life is a dream as Wittgenstein said to Groag. Religion would give one a right view, a waking view, of the world, and, with it, an acceptance of fate_if his manuscripts went astray, it was God's will55 (there was also modesty here about the value of his work, Groag thought); while the war was welcome because it forced one to realize one was in God's hands. There remained the problem of behaving decently (the word ansta$3ndig again) in the field, as in ordinary life. On this point Wittgenstein shared his scruples chiefly with Engelmann. Both were given to self-castigation, as can be seen from the correspondence between them (though this was even more a theme for talk). Wittgenstein's military training proceeded smoothly enough, with minor interruptions. He was not studying hard enough (Ich bin ein Schweinehund.) He suffered from gastric flu. Engelmann carried gruel from his mother to Wittgenstein's lodgings on the outskirts of the small town: "You overwhelm me!'_"No, I overwhelm myself!' (Engelmann had spilt some of the gruel on his own topcoat.) The humour and the care for the sick friend were very much to Wittgenstein's taste. The flu was evidently a recurring affliction, because Wittgenstein described Dr. Hahn's medicine as "the only one that has ever helped me'. In later life he ate bland foods_what a child would like, he said_and sometimes explained that his simple diet was in no way penitential but was what he preferred. It was rather that of an ulcer patient and it seems likely that the hardships of the war had accentuated a pre-existing diathesis. On 1 December 1916 Wittgenstein was given the rank of Fa$3hnrich in der Reserve for the duration of the war (later back-dated to 1 October 1916): he had previously been a Kriegsfreiwilliger Kanonier with the title of Vormeister (from 1 June 1916) and Korporal (from 1 September 1916). In his new rank as officer he remained attached to the 4th battery of the 5th Field Howitzer Regiment (later 105 Field Artillery Regiment), which he had joined from the workshop in March 1916. The course at the Reserve Officers' School seems to have been over before Christmas and Wittgenstein left for leave in Vienna, first wrapping up carefully his Christmas presents for Engelmann's mother and delivering them in a laundry-basket. His stay in Olmu$3tz was at an end, but he was to return there occasionally, since it was the depot of his regiment; and in any case he kept in touch with his Olmu$3tz friends. Even in Vienna one of his first acts was to call on Loos, with a commission from Engelmann. Fritz Zweig 54.Printed in P. Engelmann: Letters and in L. Wittgenstein: Briefe, p. 79. Wittgenstein liked it well enough to want to read it to his sister Mining. 55.Undated letter to Engelmann: Letters, p. 7; Briefe, p. 79. 257 7The War 1914{-18 was also there and called on Wittgenstein. Engelmann arrived just after Wittgenstein himself left but his friendship with the Wittgenstein family_into which he was soon completely adopted_probably began about this time. About this time, too, according to Hermine Wittgenstein, Ludwig made a gift of 1,000,000 crowns to the state for the purchase of a 30 cm calibre mortar.56 The dating seems correct: Ludwig's income is put at 300,000 crowns per year in one of the forms that Gu$3rth made out when urging his promotion and three or four years of modest living might have left him with a surplus of this order. Hermine makes gentle fun of her brother for the unpractical manner of this donation. The state had no way, she says, of using this money for the purpose intended, so it was put into the Emperor's (by now Kaiser Karl) Charitable Fund and vanished in the later inflation, wasted, just as the K.600,000 given for cancer research after her father's death had been wasted through lack of proper supervision. No more wasted, one would have thought, than any money taken by the state in taxes, and thus as much a contribution as the million given by Paul, who (like his father for once) actually saw to the manufacture of military greatcoats. Still it is true that we have here another example of how Wittgenstein distanced himself from his money and left the management of it to others. The other aspect to note is the simple patriotism of the gesture, which completely ignored the pessimism about the outcome of the war that Wittgenstein did not conceal from his Olmu$3tz friends. Wittgenstein was on active service again from 19 January. His battery was now attached to a Croatian division, 42 HID, of the Honved or Hungarian Territorial Army (successsively commanded by Lieutenant- Field-Marshals S$5njaric$0, Lipos$5c$0ak (March{-June 1917), and Mihaljevic$0) in the XIII Corps (FML von Csicserics) and III Army (Colonel- General von Tersztya$0nszky)_the names, and those of the towns and rivers involved give some idea of what it was like to belong to the Dual Monarchy. In general the Austro-Hungarian troops in this sector were in the same positions in which they had halted the flagging Russian advance when Wittgenstein left for his training course. The early part of 1917 was a period of comparative silence between the Carpathians and the Dniester, with occasional minor attacks by 42 HID (and 5 ID with other batteries of Wittgenstein's regiment) across the Bystrzyca Solotwinska towards Bohorszcsany. In March there was a flurry of patrolling activity. It was much hoped that the February Revolution would affect the supplies, the state of preparedness, and the morale of the opposing troops. At the very least information was required. Wittgen- stein, in fact, volunteered to lead a patrol against Drwiniacz on 15 56.Familienerinnerungen, pp. 109 and 112ff. Probably the Austrian 12-inch howitzer, which even the Germans used for its mobility, is meant. 258 Wittgenstein: A Life March, the day of the Tsar's abdication. We hear this from a citation, which says that the patrol was undertaken in very difficult weather conditions and that valuable information was brought back.57 In fact the troops opposite 42 HID and III Army generally were not at this point greatly affected by Red or other propaganda. There were even some slight Russian advances, and war-maps show Wittgenstein's division still opposite Lachowce at the end of June. At this point it was clear that a Russian attack was imminent (the last major one of the war, as it turned out) and III Army's reserves, Wittgenstein among them, were grouped at Rosulna awaiting it. They were thus involved on the flank of the battle of Stanislau-Kalusz in which the Russian 8 Army under Kornilov drove the Austro-Hungarian forces back from the line of the Bystrzyca Solotwinska as far as that of the Lomnica, where (in Wittgenstein's sector) a stand was made at Ldziany. This Russian advance enjoyed some success. An entire Czech regiment defected. Above all, there was a threat to the East Galician petroleum fields. German troops reinforced III Army and General Kritek was given command. The stand was successful. At Ldziany itself the part played by defensive fire in beating off an attack on 42 HID is particularly commented on in the official history.58 A further citation for Wittgen- stein is preserved covering these days (10{-20 July 1917). He was awarded the Silver Medal for Valour first class "for carrying out admirably the duties of an Observer Officer ... under heavy fire. Heavy losses were caused to the enemy in decisive moments. Fire was directed onto threatened positions which were otherwise invisible to the Battery Commander.'59 This was not, of course, a context for understatement, but the confidence felt in Wittgenstein by his immediate superiors is very evident. We find it again in an account drawn up, partly by him, partly by them, of his activities from 30 September 1916 to 30 September 1917. Under the heading "Suitability for next level of command' Lt.i.d.R. Scholz writes: Suitable to be a troop-commander. In view of his special qualities of character and his misgivings (no doubt unfounded) regarding other forms of service, his employment in a framework other than that of an observer would not be of much use. Conduct outstanding, especially in the engagements round Ldziany. Scholz also mentions, under another heading, Wittgenstein's good influence on subordinates, especially effective in battle.60 57.Verzeichnis u$3ber ... Tapferkeitsmedaillen of FHR5 in 3 Army Kriegsarchiv, Vienna. 58.Oesterreich-Ungarns letzter Krieg VI.278 59.Verzeichnis u$3ber beauftragte Auszeichnungen FHR 5, 3 Army, Kriegsarchiv, Vienna. 60.Vormerkblatt fu$3r die Qualifikationsbeschreibung, Kriegsarchiv, Vienna. 259 7The War 1914{-18 This offensive was the Russians' last. It had been ordered by Kerensky in the hope of a success that would recommend his war policy. It was conducted by Brusilov, then, after his defeat at Zboro$0w, by Kornilov who was shortly to attempt a military coup d'e$0tat. It failed because of the chaotic state of the Russian forces. The infantry morale was low. Officers had lost their authority and "delegates' had little effect. As General Fox reported to Lloyd-George,61 co-ordination and the organization of artillery support and of supplies was inadequate. The Austro-Hungarian III Army crossed the Lomnica and began to advance on 23 July. Wittgenstein's own official record of his employment shows him following the movements of 42 HID, crossing the two branches of the Bystrzyca, assisting 36 ID at the capture of Starumia (24 July), advancing to Kolomea, Kniaze, and finally at the rate of 10 or 20 kilometres a day along the course (roughly) of the Pruth towards Czernowitz. Here, 20 km WNW of the city, they were held up for a day or two_the Russians wanted to save their supplies and the Imperial and Royal forces were hampered by their lack of fodder (the fuel of those days) and of rail connexions. But not for long. On 3 August Wittgenstein took part along with his own division and 5 ID in the capture of the city. Though small, a city, indeed, with three cathedrals, a synagogue, a university, a medley of races, religions and languages, but a centre of culture. It changed hands more than a dozen times in the First World War, after which it became a small town in Rumania. It is now a small town in the Ukraine. Not glory, perhaps, but something passed away, and Wittgenstein saw it do so. His English friends, in their "unbesieged cities' (Rilke's phrase) had no such experience. Here and round here Wittgenstein spent the rest of the autumn, in positional warfare and in one limited advance (to capture a height called Dolzok on 27 August), which seems to have put an end to the artillery duel in that sector. There were no particular strategic goals to be pursued locally and the bulk of 42 HID was moved north but Wittgenstein remained, by his own account, until the armistice signed by the Bolsheviks took effect on 29 November. He had been in the field continuously since January and we have little record of his intellectual and spiritual life_a postcard and two letters to Engelmann before the main engagements of the year, two postcards and two brief notes after them.62 Back in the field, he is able to work again (after the depression of his Christmas leave). Disgusted by books of 61.D. Lloyd-George: War Diaries, vol. 2, p. 1527. 62.78{-81 and 82 and 84{-86 in the Suhrkamp volume of Wittgenstein letters. 83, the letter that mentions the manuscript lent to Groag and the poem written by Engelmann, I am inclined to date to early 1918. When it was written Wittgenstein had recently seen Engelmann and was shortly going to see his own sister Hermine. Neither condition held in early 1917. Also Groag's recollection was that the manuscripts were lent him at the end of 1917. This is of some importance for the pre-history of the Tractatus. 260 Wittgenstein: A Life Ehrenstein's sent to him, as we have seen,63 he asks for an antidote in the form of Mo$3rike's poems and some of those of Goethe. "Drawing on the purest well of classical German poetry,' says Engelmann,64 and it is true that many of the Goethe poems by which the desired volume is identified (the Venetian Epigrams, the Elegies, and the Epistles) are written in classical metres, but note that the volume also includes (in those Roman Elegies) Goethe's declaration of independence from the morality, the pre- occupations, the responsibilities, even the taste of his time and of his own past, in favour of a simpler life strongly marked by eroticism. Perhaps Wittgenstein could identify in some ways not only with the sage of Weimar but with the idyllist of the room off the Corso. Certainly there are parallels between the unconventionality of Goethe when he returned from his Italian Journey, and that of Wittgenstein after the war_the deliberate informality of dress of both is only the indicator of a more radical break with the past. Engelmann himself stresses the value placed on Mo$3rike, which we have already touched on_the perfect fit of style and content p. 34 above) and so on, but the poems of Goethe mentioned here show that Wittgenstein's taste was regulated by something more complex than the "rhythms of a decorous and manly life', of Engelmann's Platonic phrase. Mo$3rike did seem to Wittgenstein to be closely related to Goethe, but more perhaps to the Goethe of Iphigenie.65 The Uhland letter already quoted (p. 251) should teach us caution, however, in all such interpretations. Apart from these poems Wittgenstein asks for a portable but legible Bible. He reports on two further occasions that he is able to work_or that his brain is working (April and August_the latter occasion being that of the Austrian advance we have just described) but we have no notebook covering the period. He wishes he were better and cleverer (gescheiter), which two are the same thing, and he repeated to Engelmann his remarks about living in a dream that we have already touched on but in general he indicates that it is impossible for him to set down the personal things that he has to say. We know, or can infer, that his work had advanced so far that he could leave with Groag a manuscript of numbered remarks like those later used in the Tractatus: perhaps this happened at Olmu$3tz on Wittgenstein's way back to Vienna.66 Likewise we know, or can infer, some of the effects of his thinking about his own nature. 63.pp. 208 and 250 above. Engelmann himself had scruples about Ehrenstein, too much of a poseur, perhaps: Man ehrte gern den Ehrenstein Nur seine Werke sto$3ren ein', he used to say (a Schu$3ttelreim with the Viennese "ein'' for "einen'). 64.P. Engelmann: Letters, p. 85. 65.A letter to Russell of January 1914 (no. 35 in Briefe) makes this connexion. 66.Groag's recollection supports this date and also the description of the manuscript just given. 261 7The War 1914{-18 There's a difference (he writes at the time to Engelmann) between how I am now and how I was when we saw one another in Olmu$3tz; and the difference is that I am a little more decent now. By that I only mean that I am a little clearer about my lack of decency than then. (LW to PE 16.1.18) One solution that he tried over this winter was that of having himself transferred to the infantry. Perhaps he also tried to revert to the ranks, but nothing seems to have come of that. The attempt to change his arm was more serious. There was some occasion for it in that the Austro- Hungarian army was re-grouping as the war in the East had come to an end. Also in that winter there was a reorganization of infantry divisions and a renumbering of artillery regiments. Still Wittgenstein's request was a very odd one: the staff officers could hardly adjust to an officer's wanting to move to employment which was not less but more dangerous. Wittgenstein went as far as General Lo$3bl, with whom his sister Gretl had connexions, and a conversion-course for him was evidently approved.67 Comments on his success in it and on the pleasure of having him near home were exchanged between his sisters, Gretl in Switzerland (she was an American national and had gone into exile) and Mining at home. But to the sisters' relief it was eventually decided that he should remain in the artillery. The grounds for this sensible decision are not known, but his own motives for seeking the change were obvious to his friends: he wanted to be in the position of greatest danger. Eine Bejahung des Todes_an acceptance of death, certainly, but also a way of putting himself in a position where he would be forced to live up to his own standards. The letter just quoted continues, perhaps with a reference to plans such as this: If you reply that I have no faith, you are quite right, only I had none earlier either. It's obvious that a man who tries to invent a machine for becoming decent has no faith. But what am I to do? (LW to PE 16.1.18) Wittgenstein, now promoted Leutnant i.d.R., duly left for the Italian front and seems to have arrived on 10 March. He was detached from his own Czech regiment and posted to a Mountain Artillery Regiment (GAR 11), Galician troops, part of 11 Army (General von Scheuchen- stu$3hl). He was stationed at the north east of the plain of the Veneto and thus on the right flank of the Austro-Hungarian position in the Trentino, where the general strategy was to descend and, in concert with another similar attack across the Piave, to capture as much of the plain, with its 67.The incident is known from the recollection of the late Dr Groag, communicated orally, and from the letters of Margaret Stonborough to Hermine Wittgenstein (seen when in the possession of Dr T. Stonborough). 262 Wittgenstein: A Life wealth of supplies, as might be possible. Save that for the present there was no offensive. The defeat at Caporetto the previous October had by no means been decisive. The Italians had rallied even on the Piave, and in January they took two Austro-Hungarian positions in the Asiago area, from which repeated counterattacks could not drive them. Both Austro-Hungarians and Italians were under pressure from their allies to launch an offensive. That of the Austro-Hungarians was planned for April but occurred in June; that of the Italians, pre-empted by the Austrians in June, actually occurred in October. Until June the Austro-Hungarians were reorganizing and marshalling the troops ar- rived from Russia (Wittgenstein himself was on a training course in May) and in the meantime engaged in positional warfare, rendered particularly uncomfortable in the mountains by the rigour of living conditions and communications. Wittgenstein used to recall that on arrival he found that the troops had to reach their posts by a funicular meant for goods. As he nerved himself to the ascent he was much helped by a quiet figure sitting in the corner of the shed who simply said "Don't be afraid' (Fu$3rchte dich nicht!).68 His health seems to have suffered. We find him asking Engelmann for a prescription to deal with his gastric flu and at some point in the year his mother in Vienna received a letter from a brother officer, stiff but well-meaning, to tell her that Wittgenstein was in hospital at Bolzano. Perhaps there were health grounds for the long leave that he was given in the summer. But first he had to take part in the Austrian offensive. Conrad, now a Field Marshal but no longer Chief of Staff, was to attack from Asiago and Monte Grappa with 55 divisions, while at the same time Boroevich attacked with 51 across the Piave. A third, preliminary and diversionary attack from the Stelvio region into North East Lombardy came to nothing. Italian sources and the German observer with the Austrian forces (General von Cramon) agree that the Austrian spirit and technical preparation were excellent. Discipline was good, racial harmony pre- vailed. There was probably an underestimate of Italian powers of resistance and it was a mistake, at the highest level, not to concentrate on a single offensive, in the plain.69 On Conrad's front, the Asiago plateau, the brave title Radetzky Offensive was chosen. Wittgenstein went forward with the first wave on 15 June, as observer for an advancing battery. A recommendation for a decoration describes him reporting on the tactical situation in the middle of fierce machine- gun and artillery fire. Two of his patrol were wounded and he saw to their evacuation despite the drum-fire. He then made his way back to 68.Recollection of the late Arvid Sjo$3gren, communicated orally. 69.See P. Broucek (ed.): Ein General im Zwielicht (the memoirs of E. Glaise von Horstenau), vol. 1 (1980). 263 7The War 1914{-18 the new gun-position, which was itself under heavy fire. One shell buried the Gun Position Officer and three of the gun-crew. Wittgenstein took over and directed the rescue-work at the risk of his own life. When orders came to withdraw the gun to the start-line, he did so in good time despite the intensity of the drum-fire. His exceptionally courageous behaviour, calmness, sang-froid, and hero- ism won the total admiration of the troops. By his conduct he gave a splendid example of loyal and soldierly fulfilment of duty. The Gold Medal for Valour (Officers) was recommended, the highest award possible, but one of the independent witnesses, an Oberst Denzer, objected that the effect of the action (that on the enemy was meant) was very slight. The guns were often silent for hours. A Gold Medal would be too much. In the event Wittgenstein was awarded the Band of the Military Service Medal with Swords, itself a high distinction, and this method of measuring valour by success afforded him at any rate some later amusement. Ironically enough, his opponents here were British troops. His heroism cannot have been common, but his experiences were a microcosm of the offensive. The attack had been known to be imminent and the enemy were well-prepared. Everywhere they brought down devastating counter-battery fire: guns were silenced, concentration points heavily shelled, communications and the moving up of reserves made difficult if not impossible. The Austrians were attempting to advance into wooded hills honeycombed with machine-gun nests. Observation of enemy positions and of the effect of their own fire was almost impossible. On 16 June Conrad was forced to withdraw to his original position: there was not a single division, he said, which could for the time being be regarded as capable of fighting. The offensive on the Piave was forced back also and by some estimates the Austrians lost some 100,000 men in all. The wider repercussions of this on morale in the army, on the Hungarian parliament, on the war as a whole do not fall to be considered here. What affected Wittgenstein is that the Italians too had suffered and were in no position to counter- attack. The Austrians managed to put up a discouragingly stout resistance to one or two local attacks in the Asiago sector, but the Italian supply services were in any case heavily strained. On the Piave front their losses had been heavy. Both armies fell back, therefore, on their original positions, the Austrians to recover, General Diaz on the Italian side to amass reserves and to mature a more ambitious plan, whose execution in October we shall have to describe later.70 70.For accounts of this offensive see L. Villari: The War on the Italian Front and the article "Italian Campaigns' in the 12th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 31. 264 Wittgenstein: A Life Soon after the Asiago offensive Wittgenstein went on leave. The indications are that this lasted from 5 July (when he made out his section of a Vormerkblatt fu$3r die Qualifikationsbeschreibung) to the end of September. It is not clear whether so long a period had its rationale in ill-health, exhaustion, or accumulated entitlement. Wittgenstein's de- velopment seems more than once to have undergone a sharp acceleration during the war and this leave was certainly an eventful one, marking in some ways a break with his old life and the beginnings of a new role. One shadowily attested but very important event almost certainly belongs to it,71 and perhaps to its beginning: Wittgenstein's uncle Paul came across him unexpectedly at a railway station (Salzburg is the obvious possibility) in a state of great mental anguish. In fact Ludwig was on his way to commit suicide somewhere in the mountains (of the Salzkammergut, one supposes). Paul, the man of the world, frowned on by severer aunts, had a genial liking for his nephew and even his nephew's philosophy, which is perhaps what made it posible for him to persuade Ludwig to come instead to Hallein, where Paul had a house. Useless to ask for the reasons of the suicide plan. Wittgenstein felt alone in the world now: news had come of the accidental death as a military test-pilot of David Pinsent, his friend in England. The saving environ- ment of active service was being left behind. Now he was going back to his family, to an atmosphere and a set of pressures that, objectively, he had avoided for many years. At Hallein, and in August on the Hochreith, he brought to completion the work of the last six years, preparing and sending for publication (unsuccessfully on this first attempt) more or less the final version of his Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung, later christened by Moore Tractatus Logico-philosophicus and often known simply as the Tractatus. Something, but inevitably not enough, is known about the physical origins of this work. It was extracted, Engelmann said, from seven large notebooks and this is testimony of one who was with Wittgenstein on the Hochreith that summer. Three notebooks certainly survive and have been published: we have quoted from them freely above.72 Von Wright calculates that the gaps in the dating allow for four more lost notebooks, but such calculation is dangerous both a priori and since we know that Wittgenstein's rate of entry in his notebooks (though perhaps not his rate of "work' by which he meant the mental solution of problems) fell during periods of active service. Engelmann may have been mistaken in his recollection, or, more probably, he may have included the notebook now called the Prototractatus in his reckoning. This contains an early version of 71.The event was during the war and near Salzburg. He was there in July 1918 and there is hardly another time free in the war years. 72.Notebooks 1914{-16 (actually 1914{-1917). The second edition is a slight improvement on the first as far as the German text is concerned. 265 7The War 1914{-18 the Abhandlung arranged in an interesting manner. The work was to consist (as the Tractatus finally does) of propositions, aphorisms or remarks of at most paragraph length, numbered so as to show their logical relations. n.1 was to be a comment on n, n.11 on n.1, and so on. The most obvious exemplar of this system of numbering is Principia Mathematica. It will be remembered that Russell wanted Wittgenstein to rewrite the first chapters of that work. The implication that these philosophical propositions have the lack of ambiguity and the quite definite logical relations of the lemmata, definitions, axioms, and theorems of a logical system is, though paradoxical, quite certainly intended. For composition this method of numbering (like the Dewey classification) has the merit that a number, an afterthought, can always be inserted between any two existing numbers_thus between n.11 and n.12 we can insert first n.111 then n.112 (or n.1101), then n.1121 (or n.1111 or n.1102 or n.11001), and so on (other series are obviously possible). The Prototractatus notebook indicates such numbers for the propositions composing it (which seem to have been copied directly or indirectly out of the dated notebooks that have been preserved and others like them) but does not itself put the propositions in the desired order.73 Rather it writes out first the pivotal propositions 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 (6 and 7 as it happens come later) on an early page and follows them by propositions intended as comments on them_following sometimes the order in which they occur in the original notebooks, sometimes simply the order in which they occurred to Wittgenstein's mind or else some other principle of order not now divinable. It is, in short, an early version in which Wittgenstein worked out the desired order of his remarks. Since it is written in large part in field-pencil, I am inclined to suppose that it was composed actually at the front. One possibility is that it was done at Asiago. Perhaps Wittgenstein used also a yet earlier numbered treatise lent to Groag (as we have mentioned on p. 260 above) and requested back earlier that year. The other possibility is that the Prototractatus was the manuscript lent, or was among the manuscripts lent, to Groag, and this is indeed supported by the principle of economy. In that case it will date in essence from his time at the front in 1917. At all events I suppose Wittgenstein on his way back from Italy to Vienna to have arrived at Salzburg with our manuscript. Its arrange- ment was not ideal, some renumbering was necessary, a preface needed to be written, and the like. But essentially his views had reached a maturity and a completeness that demanded publication. Now at Hallein he sat down with the volume and revised the numbers and the text. He added a preface_much what we see in the Tractatus today, but with a tribute also to his Uncle Paul. A dedication to the memory of 73.The original and the intended order can both be seen in facsimile and in print respectively in the published Prototractatus, ed. myself and others (London, 1971). 266 Wittgenstein: A Life David Pinsent was added on an early page, next to a quotation from the feuilletonist Ku$3rnberger, possibly borrowed, as we have seen, from Karl Kraus. The dedication is our first record of Wittgenstein's great loss. There is a moving letter to Dame Ellen in the possession of her family. The content and the significance of the work we shall review in another chapter. Here we are concerned with its effect on Wittgenstein's summer and his spirits. The stages we can be sure of are these: an intermediary version must have been prepared, on the basis of the now revised manuscript and then altered, by renumbering and a certain amount of addition or subtraction of material, into a form from which a typist (presumably in Vienna and probably in the family office in the Alleegasse) could make the two very slightly different typescripts that survive of the Abhandlung together with a third one.74 Two typings may have been needed to allow for the production of carbon copies, giving Wittgenstein perhaps four (or at most six) copies in all. Between Hallein, Vienna, and the Hochreith, the work was finished in August. "My life's work' he was to call it when he could again write to Russell: "containing all my work of the last six years. I believe I've solved our problems finally. This may sound arrogant but I can't help believing it.'75 He sent off a copy immediately to the Viennese publisher, Jahoda. Jahoda because Karl Kraus's publisher. Wittgenstein saw his work as a contribution to the aims of Die Fackel (we shall see later how he put this sort of point to Ficker) and hoped or suggested that Kraus would or should be consulted about publication. He was in touch with the Kraus circle: Loos was a friend and Engelmann, the former adjutant of Kraus, was in Vienna and visited Wittgenstein on the Hochreith at this very time. 74.There must have been a third typescript and von Wright recollects seeing it, accompanied by a copy of Russell's introduction, in Gmunden in 1952. This was probably an earlier translation of the introduction since the copy of Russell's introduction used by Ostwald is known to have been lost. In any case it or its translation into German would naturally have been attached to the Engelmann typescript, which is demonstrably that from which the Ostwald printing was done. 75.LW to BR (13.3.19), see also letter of 12.6.19.