The most obsessive part of my current WWI obsession is reading a book called Intimate Voices from the First World War. Compiled by documentarians Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Wallis, the book takes on WWI chronologically with diaries, letters and oral histories. Starting off with Gavrilo Princip’s co-assassin, Vaso ÄŒubrilović, who recounts the day when Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie met their deaths and set off the war, in a letter to his sisters, Palmer and Wallis amazingly found sources from both sides of battles, sometimes fighting opposite each other that very day. At one point, on November 5, 1914, diarists Dr. Ludwig Deppe, a Dresden doctor working in Tanga in what is today Tanzania, and Richard Meinertzhagen, a British officer, meet and each write about the meeting that evening.

After each diary cuts off, I flip hurriedly to the back to see if the writer lived. Most live, perhaps the reason why their diaries also survived. Yet, a couple have died so far.

First, my lovely Dr. Josef Tomann on May 16, 1915. Trapped in PrzemyÅ›l during the siege, Tomann had a sense of humour about the citizens’ predicament (”What is the difference between the heroes of Troy and those of PrzemyÅ›l? The Trojans were in the belly of a horse, while we have horse in our bellies!”) Two months before his death, he had commemorated an anniversary in his diary: “Mitzl, it is seven years to the day since we first kissed!” (Mitzl was his pregnant wife, back home in Eger, Hungary.)

Then my self-righteous Austrian - despite his confidence in the sanctity of his side’s mission, he remains a human and the chance to know him through his writing makes him precious - dies. His July 19, 1915 final entry is:

It is enough to drive you insane. Dead, wounded, massive losses. This is the end. Unprecedented slaughter, a horrific bloodbath. There is blood everywhere and the dead and the bits of bodies lie scattered about so that …

The compilers explain:

The diary breaks off here in mid-sentence as the Austrian officer unknowingly records the moment of his own death. A Hungarian officer finds the body when the firing dies down at the end of that day, adding to the diary underneath the Austrian’s last words: ‘I found this diary in the hand of a dead officer on the Doberdo plateau: God bless him.’

My poor nameless Austrian never met his Maria, his Italian love that the war turned into an enemy, again. I wish that Hungarian took care to note his colleague’s name so that we could find Maria and tell her descendants that he always thought of her.