The Secret of the Empire

Heimito von Doderer (born 5 September 1896) served in the Austro-Hungarian army from April 1915 and shaped this novel around his experiences as a prisoner-of-war in Siberia during the Russian Civil War Though published in German in 1930, the novel only appeared in English translation in 1998.  In his afterword, the translator, John S. Barrett, refers to an earlier book in this project:
“Like the Englishman, Edmund Blunden, who wrote in his introduction to Undertones of War (see my blog), ‘I must go over the ground again,’ Doderer returned — in his mind at least — to go over the ground on which he had stood some 50 years before, to Siberia. At the very end, in a losing race against death in 1966, he was reworking the themes of The Secret of the Empire, reshaping the events and people encountered into a novel in his mature style, titled Der Grenzwald (The Border Forest).”

In another part of the afterword, Barrett brings to mind the biography of Eric Lomax (The Railway Man). Lomax was a railway enthusiast who as a prisoner-of-war in Burma in the Second World War was tortured in the construction of a railway. Barrett ponders:
“Some of the author’s earliest memories were of the rail lines, the viaducts and the puffing trains near the home rented by his father while he was designing and overseeing the construction of the commuter lines into Vienna. What must it have meant later, to the young Austrian soldier, to be carried off to the most memorable time and place of his life, into Siberia, by the same creatures of steel?”

Doderer detailed the plight of the thousands of prisoners:
“In the gigantic camps... where the captured enlisted men live stacked on top of one another in bunks without bedding or covers... the Russian state is squeezing every bit of work out of those man that can possibly be squeezed out. The rapidly expanding camp cemetery receives the worn-out material.”

For the survivors at the end of the ordeal there was, however, compassion:
“To those wandering homeward, the peasants along the way still offered, a thousand times over, a hospitable roof, a friendly word, and shared their bread and their milk pails with them, and asked whether their mothers were still alive back home, whether perhaps there were wives or sweethearts or maybe even children... who were awaiting their return...
And then there were those last, memorable conversations about the sin of taking part in wars and the salvation from it through our Lord, Jesus Christ. In that way the peasants imparted to those wanderers... that most necessary advice, offered in such a touching way even to many a godless one.”