Book Review: "Baron Bagge" by Alexander Lernet-Holenia

I read this book in a coffee shop where I sat and drank two americanos and a bottle of sparkling water. I am still astonished that even when reading a book in a coffee shop, some people feel the need to stare. Any time I looked up to take a sip of water or coffee, there was always someone just staring at me, confused or in shock that there are people who enjoy reading instead of gawping at their phones. I have this awful habit though of pulling a ‘what are you staring at?’ expression at these people and they tend to quickly look away. It shouldn’t be controversial to enjoy yourself alone but apparently it is. Well, let’s get on with the book I was reading, it is a short novel called ‘Baron Bagge’ and deals with a man who experiences either a hallucination or a near-death experience. The frame narrative is him announcing a confession from years ago when he was a soldier in the war…

Bagge recalls serving as a cavalry officer on the Eastern Front during World War I. His regiment is ordered to ride against overwhelming Russian forces. Facing certain death, the cavalry charge is both heroic and hopeless. The descriptions of horses, uniforms, and weapons ground the story in concrete military detail, but there is already a sense of unreality about the suicidal mission. Honestly, for such a short book I wasn’t expecting so much vivid description but it was such a treat of atmosphere. You could really feel the wartime setting and the reality of being a cavalry soldier.

To Bagge’s astonishment, the regiment seems to survive the charge unharmed. They ride through Russian lines without suffering casualties, as if the enemy bullets pass harmlessly by. This miraculous survival feels dreamlike, and Bagge struggles to reconcile it with his rational understanding of war. The soldiers continue onward, riding deeper into unknown territory. As we get to know more about Bagge as well, we can tell that he is part leader and part a man who is just like everyone else - he’s trying to survive too. He can’t understand the reasons for the war, but he knows he needs to make it and so, in this tension we have a narrator who sometimes feels like he’s on edge but still has the mental clarity to tell us the complete story.

The regiment passes through landscapes that feel increasingly unreal like: eerily quiet villages, fields bathed in unnatural light, and places that seem emptied of ordinary life. The men ride without fatigue, the horses never stumble. This passage is written with haunting beauty, evoking both serenity and foreboding. Bagge senses that something profound and uncanny is unfolding, but he cannot name it. The author does such a brilliant job here of presenting the atmosphere. Especially when we get to towns where things are almost too quiet. There’s no sign of the enemy but there is also no sense of alarm. It is a complete change from the war’s own atmosphere where the enemy were closing in and our characters were on edge. Here they are still on edge but for entirely different reasons.

Eventually, the regiment arrives at a picturesque village, far removed from the violence of war. Here, the soldiers are welcomed warmly by the locals. The atmosphere is pastoral, timeless, almost Arcadian. In the village, Bagge meets Charlotte Szent-Kiraly, the daughter of a local landowner. Their connection is immediate and intense. Bagge falls in love with her, and she seems equally enchanted by him. Charlotte seems to be the antidote to the chaos of the war and eventually they marry. But once one of the men wants to go and find the enemy again, he knows he can never return to his dear ‘wife’. This horrifying vision between life and death comes with the realisation that actually, the regiment never actually survived the enemy attack and Charlotte had been dead long before the confession in which Bagge finds himself wounded in the latter half of the book. The author does a brilliant job of this as it is not quite a reveal (because we know from the start that many of the events are not as they seem) but the gradual creeping and foreboding is still maddening.

All in all, I thought this book was fantastic and though I haven’t given away the whole thing, I hope I’ve given you enough to interest you into reading it. It (I believe) is around 80 pages long but that doesn’t make it any less incredibly entertaining.