The Burning of the World

Book excerpt: A Hungarian artist’s haunting WWI memoir of the Eastern Front, executed with a painter’s eye for color, detail, and heartbreaking symbolism “[A] compact self-portrait against a background of carnage and disillusionment.” —The New York Times The budding young Hungarian artist Béla Zombory-Moldován was on holiday when the First World War broke out in July 1914. Called up by the army, he soon found himself hundreds of miles away, advancing on Russian lines and facing relentless rifle and artillery fire. Badly wounded, he returned to normal life, which now struck him as unspeakably strange. He had witnessed, he realized, the end of a way of life, of a whole world. Published here for the first time in any language, this extraordinary reminiscence is a powerful addition to the literature of the war that defined the shape of the twentieth century.