56 Myron SharafFury On Earth
are here,” he shouted, and they fled. In later years Reich was to keep in mind this image of
himself notifying others of dangers they did not know about.
What happened next is obscure. Ottilie believes that both brothers went to Vienna
and stayed with Grandmother Roniger. At least she is sure that Robert, only fifteen at the
time, was cared for by his grandmother during this period. Perhaps she also helped Willy for
a brief time in Vienna before he was mobilized into the Army.
Reich’s military years are not well documented. There is no evidence that he expe-
rienced them with any particular distaste, at least not until close to the end.
Use Ollendorff has gathered together most of the known facts about Reich’s Army
years:
There are a few photographs in the archives which Reich sometimes would look
through with us, showing him as a dashing young officer in the Austrian Army. He
wore a small mustache, and was a very handsome young man, indeed. I think on
the whole he enjoyed his military life. He was not a pacifist by nature, and the
responsibility for a group of people was very much to his liking. He saw active duty
on the Italian front, and sometimes told how they were shelled for days at a time,
dashing out ofa shelter one by one at certain counts to get food and supplies. He
remembered the very cooperative Italian girls who taught him a smattering of
Italian, and he blamed one unhappy episode, when he was stuck for three days in a
swampy ditch, for a renewed outbreak of his skin condition that was never to be
completely cured.
He must have liked wearing an officer’s uniform. He told us that even
though he was in the infantry, he always wore spurs, and that on his rare furloughs
he loved to go riding at the Vienna Reitschule.
I have a feeling that at that time his social conscience was not very devel-
oped,and that he took the war in stride without bothering much about the rights
and wrongs.He was,up to that time, certainly no rebel^25.There are a few important additions that can be made to Ollendorff’s account.
Reich was more affected by the suffering than her summary conveys. He recalled being hor-
rified at seeing a fellow soldier shot before his eyes on the way to get food.
The Reich ofthis period is most clearly described by Ottilie, who saw him when he
visited Vienna on a furlough. She found him “open, lost, hungry for affection as well as
food,” and very responsive to the warmth of Ottilie’s family. By then, Reich was thorough-
ly disillusioned with the war; he found it senseless and wondered what the fighting was all
about.
Reich had a strong sense of World War I as the watershed between an old world
and a new one struggling to be born. Politically, although he could not articulate the posi-
tion,he was ready to leap into the Socialist youth movement of postwar Vienna.
There is a certain similarity in the way Reich experienced his childhood and the way