Paul [Wittgenstein] was twenty-six years old and had just begun a career as a concert pianist ([his father] Karl having died in January 1913, his sons were free to follow their own inclinations) when World War I broke out, and he was called up to rejoin the cavalry regiment in which he was a junior officer.  Three days after arriving on the Eastern Front, he was shot in the right elbow while on a reconnaissance mission, and his arm was clumsily amputated in a field hospital.  He was then shipped to a series of freezing, disease-ridden Russian prisoner of war camps, whose inhuman conditions Waugh vividly evokes:

 

[The commandant] had them [the Austrian officers] stripped and horsewhipped in front of him, constantly searched, forced to run the gauntlet of Cossack knouts for minor offences, and deprived of all manner of basic needs...  Even the tea was made from water that some insame Krepost commander had insisted be dragged up by the prisoners in buckets from the exact spot in the river where all the town’s sewage was disgorged.  For lavatories the prisoners had to make do with holes in the ground.  Amputees with one or no legs needed to be supported by their comrades to use them and when a delegation of prisoners came forward to ask permission to construct a lavatory seat from a wooden box their request was sadistically turned down.

 

Yet from the very beginning of his imprisonment, Paul was determined to play the piano again.  Having drawn the image of a piano keyboard on an empty crate in a Russian prisoner of war hospital in which he was sent, “Day after day and for hour upon hour, he addressed himself to [his] arduous and improbable task, tapping his freezing fingers on the wooden box, listening intently to the imagined music sounding in his head and creating, in the corner of a crowded festering invalids’ ward, a tragicomic spectacle that aroused the sympathy and curiosity of his fellow prisoners and all the hospital staff.”

 

When he was finally released in November 1915, Paul returned to Vienna and closeted himself in his apartments in the Palais Wittgenstein, practicing the piano until he could perform with one hand pieces that other pianists required two to play.  He also commissioned some of the finest composers of the period – Ravel, Prokofiev, Richard Strauss – to write piano concertos specifically for the left hand, for which they received generous payment, although they were often angered to discover that he’d changed their pieces to highlight his own playing at the expense of the orchestra.  During the late 1920’s and the 1930’s, he had a successful, sometimes even a triumphant, performing career, not only in Vienna but throughout Europe.   It is not always possible to tell, however, whether he was being praised as a pianist or as a one-armed pianist.  Certainly the members of his family, whose musical tastes were perhaps more exacting than the general public, never really joined in the acclaim.  Hermine once wrote to Ludwig of Paul’s piano-playing that it was “a torture for me and a lasting source of sorrow.”

 

Like his father and brothers, Paul exhibited certain peculiarities of character of a slightly autistic kind (one wonders if there might have been a strain of Asperger’s syndrome among the males of the family).  Unable to engage in ordinary social conversation or to deal with the simplest practical matter, he once wore a hat onto the street when it was still attached to its hatbox.  When his hostess at a dinner party told him that a goulash had been cooked specially for him, he set the tureen in front of him and ate the entire contents while the other guests looked on in astonishment...  Although his playing deteriorated, he never gave up concertizing completely.  He continued to take on piano pupils, always for free, and in 1958, three years before his death, published several volumes of piano music for the left hand.