Childhood Home
boy had once taken, a vow not to go back to his native village until he had become somebody.
Now his goal was reached; but no one in the village remembered the little boy of years before, and he himself found the village had grown strange to him.
When at last he retired at fifty-six, he could never have stood his retirement a single day as a “do-nothing.” He bought property in the neighborhood of the Upper Austrian market town of Lambach, farmed it, and thus completed the circle of a long and hard-working life by going back to the origins of his fathers.
Probably about this time, my first ideals were taking shape. Constant romping around outdoors, the long road to school, and an association with extremely robust boys which sometimes gravely worried my mother all combined to make me anything but a stay-at-home. So, if I had scarcely any serious ideas about my future life work, at any rate my tendency was by no means toward my father’s career. I believe that even then my oratorical gift was being schooled by more or less violent disputes with my playmates. I had become a little ringleader, who learned easily and well at school, but otherwise was fairly hard to handle.
In my free time I had singing lessons at the Canons’ Chapter in Lambach, and thus had ample opportunity to be intoxicated by the solemn pomp of the splendid church festivals. What more natural, then, than that as my father had once looked upon the little village pastor, so now I should think the abbot an ideal to be striven after? At least for a time this was so. But since my father understandably did not think highly enough of his quarrelsome boy’s oratorical talents to draw from them any pleasing conclusion regarding the future of his offspring, he had no feeling for such youthful ideas either. He must have watched anxiously this discord of nature.
And, in fact, my temporary longing for that calling soon disappeared to make way for hopes better suited to my temperament. In rummaging through my father’s library I had come upon various books of a military nature, among them a popular edition of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. Two volumes of an il-
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