Barbarossa Red [antikvár]

Schoenbrunn Palace, Vienna March 1 The sky was stone-gray, drawn in and cold. Out in the great park to the south of the palace, the trees shed heavy beads of frozen rain, and in the Fountains of the Naiads the drops congealed on the shoulders and breasts of the nymphs half sunk in the cold basins. Nearer the palace the intricate whorls of the flowerbeds lay dormant and sodden, earthen brown. Because the wind was from the southeast, the palace's rear facade, especially under the balconies and on the sills of the tall arched windows, was rimed with ice; on the rooftops rain froze in the cornices and encrusted the balustrades and the marble sculptures in pebbled glassy sheaths. Occasional gusts of wind drove the sleet against the green louvered shutters and the windowpanes where the drops, because of the warmth of the palace's interior, were unable to freeze. Except for those on the very topmost story, Schoenbrunn's windows were all alight, yellow and warm as they had been when the great palace was home to the emperors of Austria-Hungary, before the monstrous watershed of the First World War. It was in Schoenbrunn in 1914 that Emperor Franz-Joseph decided to order his armies into the tiny rebellious state of Serbia, and by doing so had precipitated the long horror of trench warfare in France, the human and military disasters of Verdun and the Somme and Passchendaele, the ruin of Germany, the collapse of his own dynasty, and the bloody end to a thousand years of Czarist rule in Imperial Russia.