Self-portraits from an Austrian Army feldpost letter from 28-year-old LT Erwin Schrödinger to his cousin Hugo Hinterberger, dated 23 February 1916.
The Austrian theoretical physicist, who earned his doctorate in 1910 from the University of Vienna, had, as no surprise for a math whiz, trained as a reserve artillery officer before the Great War and was called to rejoin his regiment on 31 July 1914 at a point when the war only contained Serbia and Austro-Hungary.
Assigned to assorted fortress artillery units, by July 1915 he was dispatched to join a scratch battery of naval artillery guns being deployed in the mountains around Gorizia (Görz), a key stronghold during the assorted Battles of the Isonzo in the KuK’s fight against the Italians.
Needing more artillery along the Isonzo front– and suffering losses of hundreds of its precious howitzers and morsers to the Russians in Galicia– the Austrians stripped a series of Krupp/Skoda 15 cm/40 (5.9″) L/40 K94/K96 naval guns from assorted old coastal defense ships, armored cruisers, and pre-dreadnoughts and 12 cm/45 Škoda guns from river monitors and schlepped them to the mountains via tractor, truck, and sled where they would be emplaced in wooden batteries as needed.
Marinebatterie 15 cm kuk ONB 10CACED9
Marinebatterie 15 cm kuk ONB 10CACEE2
Ein schweres Marinegeschütz wird mit Schlitten auf das Nassfeld gefördert kuk ONB 10D3F0FA
Austrian kuk Navy 15 cm L40 Marinegeschütz auf der Straniger Alm, 1916.
Ein schweres Marinegeschütz in Feuerstellung kuk ONB 10D3F110
15cm L.40 naval gun Stpkt.Schwandmgraben adRattendorfer Alpe. kuk ONB 1106A4B9
Marine Batterien 15cm Marine-Geschütz L40 auf der Rattendorfer-Alpe, 02.05.1917 kuk Austran Marines ONB 10EE7FCD
After being decorated for combat with the Marinebatterien, Schrödinger by 1917 was assigned to a battery near Prosecco, a fairly safe village near the city of Trieste, and finished the war in an even quieter post in Vienna, much to his joy, noting it was “a great advantage because I was not affected by the disastrous backflow of that frayed frontline.”
Hanging up his uniform, he was then able to turn to more serious scientific matters post-1918 and soon moved on to a professorship as the chair for theoretical physics at the University of Zurich. By 1933, the whole world knew who he was.
No word on his cats in Kuk service, however.