The Two-Headed Eagle

7 THE GREATER REICH

I suppose that if I had been minded To do so I could have dug out my manual of military law and contested my sentence of five days’ confinement to base. But in the event I was no more troubled by it than Toth was by his own summary condemnation to five days’ close arrest on bread and water. They would have needed to transfer him to Army HQ in Marburg for this anyway, since we had no lock-up ourselves and the Provost Major of the local infantry division had stood firm on regulations and refused to lend Flik 19F the use of a prison cell. And any­way, there were more important things to think about that week, for the next day, 4 August, after an intense nine-hour bombardment, the Italian 3rd Army began its long-awaited offensive: the Sixth Battle of the Isonzo, which merged with the Seventh, Eighth and Ninth Battles into a conflict which was to rage on until the onset of winter.

The Italians captured Monte Sabotino across the river from Gorz after two days of bitter fighting. By the 8th our positions on either side of the town were collapsing under the ferocious barrage, and that night the 5th Army Command decided to pull back the line for fear of being outflanked. So on the morning of 9 August the Italian Army marched triumphantly into the deserted but still largely undamaged town of Gorz: by far the most worthwhile Allied gain of that whole blood-saturated year. With Gorz taken, the action shifted to the south and the approaches to Trieste. The battle for the Carso Plateau had begun, and with it one of the most terrible episodes even of that four-year catalogue of butchery.

I think that one of the hallmarks of the twentieth century must be the way in which the names of the most humdrum and obscure places on the whole of God’s earth have become synonyms for horror, so that the very words themselves seem to twist and buckle under the weight of mis­ery piled upon them. When I was a small boy I remember how we used to pay visits to my grandparents, decayed Polish gentry living in a small manor house on a hard-up country estate some way west of the city of Cracow: how we would get off the train at a typically small, sordid Polish provincial town and hire its one shabby fiacre; and how we would creak and sway the five kilometres or so along the rutted road across the flat fields by the Vistula and pass as we did so a small military-clothing de­pot built on land that my grandfather had sold to the War Ministry about 1880. It was barely worth noticing, I remember: five or six wooden huts surrounded by a decrepit fence, and with a black-and-yellow-striped gate which the bored sentry would open from time to time to admit a cartload of tunics and trousers from the Jewish sweatshops in Bielsko-Biala. This was k.u.k. Militarbekleidungs Depot No. 107 Oswi^cim—or Auschwitz, to give it its German name. The collection of huts would pass in 1919 to the Polish Army, who would enlarge it a little; then in 1940 to new and more purposeful owners, who would expand it a great deal and really put the place on the map, so to speak.

It was the same on that dreary limestone plateau east of the Isonzo in the summer of 1916: places that no one had ever heard of—San Martino and Doberdo and Monte Hermada—suddenly turned into field fortresses around which titanic battles raged: lives squandered by the hundred thou­sand for places which were just names on a local map—and sometimes not even that, so that the hills for which entire divisions perished had to be denoted by their map-height above sea level. So it was at Verdun that summer. I saw some photographs, in a colour supplement a few months ago: the Meuse battlefields seventy years after. It appears that even to­day large areas are still derelict, that the incessant shelling and gassing so blasted away the topsoil and poisoned the earth that the landscape is still a semi-desert of exposed rock and old craters, covered (where anything grows at all) by a thin scrub.

The chief difference, I suppose, between Verdun now and the Carso then is that, so far as I could make out, the Carso had always looked like that: a landscape reminiscent of Breughel’s “Triumph of Death” even before the armies got to work on it. Indeed I think that the whole of Europe could scarcely have contained a piece of ground intrinsically less worth fighting over than the Carso—or the “Krst” as its few mostly Slovene inhabitants called it, as if the place was too poor even to afford vowels. It was an undulating, worn-down plateau of low limestone hills devoid of trees, grass or any vegetation whatever except for a few meagre patches of willow and gorse which had managed to get roots down into the fissures in the rock. What little soil there was had collected by some freak of nature into puddle-like hollows in the rock, called “dolinas,” and was bright red in colour, like pools of fresh blood. What little rain water there was had a way of disappearing as if bewitched into pot-holes in the rock, to reappear perversely a dozen kilometres away where an underground stream came out into the open. Baked by the sun all sum­mer and swept by freezing winds all winter, the Carso was scourged in between times by the notorious bora, the sudden, violent north wind of the Adriatic coastline which would work itself up in these parts to near­hurricane force in the space of a few minutes, and had been known to blow over trains of goods wagons on the more exposed stretches of the Vienna—Trieste railway line.

At the best of times the Carso was a place such as even an early- Christian hermit might have thought twice about inhabiting. But as a battlefield it was a hell all of its own: a howling grey-brown desolation of broken rock spattered with dried blood and the dirty yellowish residue of TNT. The peculiar horror of the Carso fighting—the local specialty that distinguished it from the other great abattoirs of those years—was the enormous number of the wounded who lost their eyesight; small wonder, when every shellburst would send knife-sharp splinters of rock whining in all directions. Before long every last stone, every pulverised village of this wilderness would be stained with agony: places like the ruined mar­ket square in Sagrado, where a thousand or so Italians had staggered back from the trenches to die, remains of a brigade which had just been gassed with phosgene; or the little valley leading up on to the plateau from the hamlet of Selz, known as “the Cemetery of the Hungarians” after an en­tire Honved battalion had blundered into it in the smoke and confusion of a counter-attack and had been wiped out to a man by the Italian machine guns.

Before the war, if it had been mine to sell, I would cheerfully have sold you the entire Carso Plateau for a gulden. Yet now whole armies would im­molate themselves for it as if it contained all the riches of the world. Before the war the eroded hills of Fajtji Hrib and Cosich and Debeli Vrh had been unvisited, known only to a few Slovene shepherds. Now their barren slopes and gullies would become the graveyards of a generation. When your great dramatist wrote of a little patch of ground that is not tomb or continent enough to bury the slain, I think that he must have had the Carso in mind. That summer of 1916, they lay everywhere, visible through any trench periscope: the sad, sunken bundles of rags tumbled among the rocks or sprawled across the thickets of barbed wire where they had fallen, their only passing-bells the frenzied jangling of the tin cans which our men used to hang from the wire as alarm signals. Even a thousand metres above the battlefields that August one could detect the sinister, sweetish taint of decay. By some black joke on the part of biochemistry, it had (for my nose at any rate) a faint hint of overripe strawberries to it. Many years later my second wife Edith bought a lipstick perfumed with just such a synthetic strawberry scent. It brought back so many disturbing memories that I had to ask her to stop using it.

Yes, I speak as though I saw it all. But then I did, as near as makes no difference. The Carso sector was tiny—perhaps ten kilometres in total— so we airmen could see pretty well the whole of it as we flew above that terrible greyish-dun landscape: the shallow valleys below us boiling with smoke suffused with orange flame; then coming down sometimes when the murk parted to see the lines of tiny human specks scurrying forward among the shellbursts: the evil greenish-yellow clouds of poison gas and the sudden white puffs of grenades and the boiling black-fiery squirts of flame-throwers; men rushing forward to kill and maim one another with grenades and entrenching tools so as to gain or regain another few square metres of this ghastly desolation. The memory haunts me to this day: the sheer crushing lunacy of it all. Why did we do it? Why did we allow them to do it to us? I was there and you were not, so I wonder if you could tell me why. Because I was there to see it, yet sometimes I think that I perhaps understand it less than you who were not.

The battle raged to westward of us throughout that second week of August. The Italians had captured Gorz, and they were now attacking the hills of Monte San Michele on the north edge and Debeli Vrh on the southern edge of the Carso escarpment, trying to fight their way on to the plateau above. Our men in the front line were suffering atrociously in their rock-bound trenches, shelled day and night so that it was impossible either to bring up food and water or to evacuate the wounded. Rationed sometimes to a cup of water a day in the summer heat and dust, plagued by great corpse-fattened blowflies, they hung on as best they could, counter­attacked when ordered to do so and died in their anonymous thousands for their distant Emperor and King. Yet while this whole dismal tragedy was being played out a few kilometres away, Flik 19F sat idly on the field at Caprovizza and chewed the ends of its collective moustache with bore­dom and frustration. We were on standby—which is why Toth and I were not much affected in practice by our sentence of arrest—but otherwise little happened. We were short of aircraft of course: one Brandenburger had arrived back from repair, but the Lloyd which we had flown on the Monte Nero artillery-spotting operation was out of action. Toth had let the revs build up during our dive to a degree where the cylinder liners had been irretrievably damaged, so the machine was now standing in a hangar waiting for a replacement engine. This left us with three effective aircraft—two Brandenburgers and a Lloyd. Yet we felt that there was still work that we could do to support our hard-pressed comrades in the trenches. Flik 19 at Haidenschaft had been heavily engaged from the first day. Its aircraft would often return, badly shot-up, to deposit yet another blanket-shrouded bundle on the handbarrow, and add one more to the rapidly extending line of propeller-crosses in the cemetery.

It galled us all beyond measure, sitting there waiting for the telephone to ring. We were under the command of 5th Army HQ, not the local division, and it seemed as if Marburg had entirely forgotten our exis­tence. At last, on the Saturday after Gorz fell, it all became too much: the entire officer strength of the unit—except for myself, who was confined to base—elbowed the protesting Kraliczek aside and marched down the road to Haidenschaft to offer their services to Flik 19. Heyrowsky was not able to see them—he was in the air over Gradisca that afternoon, where he shot down a Nieuport with his hunting rifle—but when he got back he sent a curt reply to the effect that Flik 19 was a front-line fighting unit and would only use the services of (as he put it) “fashion photographers and killers of civilians” when its last able-bodied flier was dead. When they got back Kraliczek had thrown a fit and threatened to have everyone court- martialled for mutiny. In the end Oberleutnant Meyerhofer, standing in temporarily as Chefpilot, had called everyone together in the mess tent and composed a round robin (as I believe you call it) to General-Oberst Boroevic. It protested our undying loyalty to the Noble House of Austria and offered our lives as pledges of our devotion, if not in the air then (if need be) in the front-line trenches, where we would fight to our last breath come shot, shell, bayonet, flamethrower or poison gas. We all signed, even the wretched Kraliczek, whom we dragged out of his office and whose re­action, when shown the document, had been that of someone in the early stages of rabies confronted with a glass of water. His hand shook visibly as he signed, with the rest of us standing around him wearing our swords and black-and-yellow belts to offer moral support. The General’s reply next day thanked us for our loyalty to our Emperor and King, but said that trained airmen were in short supply and must not have their lives squandered without thought for the future. Boroevic concluded by promising us all the fighting we wanted, and more besides, in the weeks to come.

So the early part of August passed peacefully enough for us at Capro- vizza, as the guns thundered in the west and the wind sometimes brought us the faint smell of TNT fumes, mingled (as the hot days wore by) with a hint of something even less pleasant. We often saw Italian aircraft over­head, but were prevented by our orders from doing anything about it; that is, until one day when Meyerhofer had gone up with Stabsfeldwebel Zwierzkowski to test-fly a Brandenburger just back from repair. They were away for an hour or so, and when they returned they were pre­ceded by a large, clumsy-looking pusher-engined biplane. It was an Italian Farman SP2 artillery spotter which they had sighted over Doberdo and engaged.

The SP2 was an awful aeroplane by all accounts: a pre-war French design—outdated even in 1914—which the Italians had licence-built in huge numbers as part of an emergency programme to create an air force out of nothing. It was a mistake which I believe Lord Beaverbrook was to make a generation later: tooling up the aircraft factories to turn out vast numbers of obsolete machines. The Italians were now trying to use up stocks. But in so doing they were also using up the lives of their airmen at a fine old rate, because the SP2 was simply a death trap: too slow to run away, unable to climb out of trouble, too clumsy to dodge and with so restricted a field of fire for the observer’s machine gun in the front cockpit that the thing was effectively a flying blind spot. Meyerhofer and Zwierzkowski had made a first pass at it with the forward machine gun and shot it about a little, had allowed the Italian observer to fire back at them as much as honour required, and had then stood off to observe events. Seeing that their line of retreat across their own lines was cut off and that they were done for if they resisted further, the observer had finally stood up in his cockpit and held up his hands in surrender; very sensibly too, we all agreed. The Italians were escorted over to meet us and shook hands with us all: Tenente Balboni and Caporale-Pilota Scaranza. Their feelings were as mixed as one might have expected: downcast at their capture and the prospect of a long spell behind the wire, but glad to have come out of it alive—which was not the usual fate of Farman aircrew. We commiserated with them as we looked over their bullet-peppered machine, and all said (I was interpreting for the rest, being fluent in Italian) that it was a shame that men should be sent up to die in such miserable contraptions.

“You know what ‘SP2’ stands for, Tenente?” the observer said to me. “ ‘Seppultoro per due’—‘the Sepulchre for Two.’ ”

“No, no,” added his pilot, laughing, “it means ‘Siamo perduti’—‘We are lost’!” We entertained them to dinner that evening, and waved them goodbye the next morning as the staff car came to take them away to the prison camp. In the end the only dissatisfied party was Kraliczek, whose returns for August had been upset on three counts: (a) that yet another machine had been brought down by a unit which was not supposed to engage the enemy; (b) that the Italian had been forced down by an aero­plane which officially did not exist, since it had been signed off the books at the Fliegeretappenpark but had not yet been accepted back on to the strength of Flik 19F; and (c) —gravest dereliction of all—it had been brought down by an officer who was not on the combat flying strength of the unit. We learnt later that rather than deal with the administrative nightmares thus caused, Kraliczek had proposed letting the Italians get back into their aeroplane and fly home under a safe-conduct.

Thus the days passed idly, sitting on that sun-scorched field trying to find what shade we could as the hot, irritating Carso wind scurried straw and dust along the ground and rattled the tent-sides. There were few diver­sions for us except reading and playing cards—and listening to Leutnant Szuborits’s gramophone in the tent next to mine.

He had a rather nice wind-up portable gramophone which his mother had bought him; but records were in short supply in Austria by 1916 (the blockade had stopped the importation of the shellac from which they were made and no substitute had been found), and anyway the Leutnant’s musical tastes were limited. So it was constant, maddening repetition of the duet “Sport und immer Sport” from a failed Lehar operetta of 1914 or thereabouts—called Endlich Allein if I remember rightly—with Hubert Marischka and Mizzi Gunther squawking away like an egg-bound hen. It was an intensely irritating piece of music: one of those maddeningly catchy marschlieder so beloved of Viennese light-music composers about 1913—14, when the sudden Europe-wide vogue for deep breathing and general outdoor heartiness had spread to affect even dingy, sedentary old Austria. It was to turn up again many years later (I recall) as “Frei und Jung Dabei” when Lehar tried reviving his old operetta, only to see it sink once more to well-merited oblivion after a couple of nights.

Records in those days tended to wear out very quickly, but this one seemed to be made of tungsten carbide: just went on and on and on play­ing until I was tearing my hair out in tufts and trying not to look at my pistol in its holster hanging on the tentpole. And that is how I remember the summer of 1916 on the Isonzo Front: the sun’s glare and the nagging moan of the wind and the sound of aircraft engines; the fretful flapping of tent canvas and Mizzi Gunther warbling scratchily through “Sport und immer Sport,” accompanied by the ever-present rumbling orchestra of high explosive to westwards.

Apart from the affair of the captured SP2, the only diversion of those early days of August was the arrival of a new Chefpilot to replace poor Rieger. He arrived by staff car one morning just after breakfast. I was the only one around to meet him, and as he stepped down with his bags I thought that he was surely one of the pleasantest-looking men I had ever seen: in his early twenties, of medium height, gracefully formed, with fine light brown hair and gentle, rather melancholy blue eyes such as a poet or composer might possess. He gazed at me sideways, smiled politely in greeting and saluted. Then he turned his head slightly—and I saw that most of the left side of his face had gone, cheekbone and temple replaced by a tortured confusion of lumps and puckered scar tissue surrounding an eyeball which looked to be in danger of tumbling out on to his cheek. Despite myself I winced slightly and tried not to look. My wife Elisabeth had worked for the past two years in a specialist facial-injuries unit at the Vienna Medical School, and she had shown me a good many spine-crawling photographs of “before.” Well, this was clearly one of the “after” cases: one of those less severely damaged casualties whose face the surgeons had managed to rebuild sufficiently for an army medical board to class him once more as “dienstauglich.” He shook my hand—no doubt noticing that, like everyone else he met, I was trying not to look at his face—and introduced himself as Oberleutnant-Feldpilot Svetozar von Potocznik.

I got to talk with Potocznik that evening and over the next few days, and I must say that I found him at first to be one of the more engaging people I had so far encountered: tactful, humorous, modest and endowed with great precision and sensitivity of expression. He was also quite re­markably intelligent. Little by little I learnt his story. He had been born in 1894 in the small town of Pravnitz on the southern edge of Carinthia, where his father was chemistry master of the local grammar school. And of course, the gymnasium at Pravnitz in the 1900s had become a cause celebre throughout the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy because of a bitter dispute over the language of instruction in the school, now that the local Slovene population were demanding equality with German-speakers. This wretched dispute had dragged on for years, with the school closed down for long periods because of riots and boycotts and blockades, punctuated by outbreaks of pandemonium in the Vienna Reichsrat as the German and Slovene deputies from Carinthia hurled inkpots at one another. At least three k.k. Ministers for Education had resigned because of the Pravnitz gymnasium affair. At last, in 1908, to the inexpressible disgust of German Nationalists throughout the entire Monarchy, Vienna had given in and made the school officially bilingual.

But while this nonsense had been going on, events had been moving for the Potocznik family in another direction. Always an ingenious man, Herr Doktor von Potocznik had used his long spells of enforced leave to perfect a revolutionary new process for synthesis of ammonia. In the end he had managed to patent it and sell it to the CIVAG syndicate, who made it a condition of purchase that he should move to Germany to supervise the setting-up of the first process line. So in 1909 the family had sold up and moved to Mannheim, bidding a not very affectionate farewell to the decrepit old Austrian Monarchy which had given in so easily to the in­solent demands of its lower races.

Thus young Potocznik had grown up in Germany. An outstanding pupil and talented poet, he had excelled at music, though his interests had turned towards theology and moral philosophy. He had also, about 1910, become involved with the Wandervogel, the curious movement among the idealistic German young which rejected the horsechair-stuffed values of the Wilhelmine Reich and instead set out in search of the authentic and the natural: birdsong in the forest, church bells in the Alpine valleys, rucksacks and lederhosen and guitars around campfires, running barefoot in the morning dew and all the rest of the nonsense which (I must confess) made me thankful for a youth spent playing billiards in the smoke-filled ambience of Austrian provincial coffee-houses.

Potocznik had been due to enter Gottingen University in 1914 to study philosophy. But the war had got there first. Like millions of other German adolescents, he had rushed to the colours filled with a burning desire for self-sacrifice in this war, which (they believed) was not about territory or dynastic claims but about power and youth and the force of the spirit; a near-religious crusade to give Germany her rightful place in the world and break the shackles forged for her by the old nations. There had been official reservations about his nationality of course: he was still technically an Austrian subject. But he was eventually given permission to join the German Army, “pending an administrative decision.” He en­listed in the Academic Legion and was flung almost immediately, after the sketchiest of training, into the fighting at Ypres, given the task of storming the village of Langemarck. Eighteen thousand of them had set out across the water meadows that morning, singing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” as they advanced. Less than two thousand were to come back. “The Massacre of the Innocents,” they called it. A patrol had found Potocznik next day among the stacks of corpses, the left side of his face smashed by a rifle bullet.

He had spent the next six months in hospital in Germany, and had then been transferred to the specialist facial-injuries unit being set up by Professor Kirschbaum and his colleagues at Vienna University. My wife Elisabeth had been one of the sisters on his ward. They had patched him up after a fashion, rebuilding his cheekbone with bone-grafts and creat­ing a metal bridge for his upper jaw. But plastic surgery was a primitive business in those still-experimental days before antibiotics, and the sur­geons had in the end only been able to restore function, not appearance. But another unpleasant surprise awaited him in mid-1915: the Imperial German Minister for War—having probably concluded that someone with a name like Svetozar von Potocznik was not an acceptable soldier of the Reich—had not been pleased to grant his application to serve in the German armed forces. To my surprise, though, I found him not to be too upset about this.

“Of course,” he had said to me in the mess tent after supper, “it was a let-down not to be able to serve in the German Army, especially after I started getting interested in flying. Their air force is about five years ahead of ours in every respect. But quite frankly it doesn’t make a lot of difference to me now. We’re all fighting for the Greater German Reich, and wearing an Austrian cap badge signifies as little for me as wear­ing that of Bavaria or Saxony. Germany and Austria are being welded together now into a single billet of steel under the blows of the enemy, tempered in the forge of war into a weapon such as the world has not yet seen. True, I’d have more fun flying on the Western Front against the Britishers and the French. But there: I think we’ll have sport enough here on the South-West Front before long, once the Americans come into this war. And anyway, I’m glad in a way to be defending this region.”

“What, the Kustenland?”

“No, Carinthia, my home province: defending the southern marches of Germany against the Latins and Slavs. That was something I could never convince them of in north Germany: that we Germans who live on the frontiers of the Reich have a far keener awareness of what it means to be German than those who sit comfortably in Darmstadt and Mannheim and never look into the eyes of the wolf-packs that surround us.”

“You seem to have a very clear idea of what you are fighting for,” I remarked.

“I certainly have. But what are you fighting for, Prohaska, if I might ask?”

“Me? I can’t say that I’ve ever thought much about it. I just fight for the House of Austria because that’s my job and it’s what I swore on oath to do. Anyway, my time’s been so taken up thinking about how to do it these past two years that I’ve never wondered a great deal about why. I’m just a career naval officer; things like that are for the politi­cians to decide.”

“Precisely. That’s the trouble, if you’ll excuse my saying so: you pro­fessional officers always fight bravely, but sadly you lack any very deep appreciation of what this war is about. Probably I’d have been the same if I had grown up in this corpse-empire of ours and been through a cadet school. But as it was I saw the future in Germany—the factories, the cit­ies, the laboratories. And I also had time to read a great deal when I was laid up in hospital: Nietzsche, Darwin, Treitschke, Bernhardi, the lot. It was then that I first fully understood why I was lying in bed with half my face missing; and I swore to dedicate my life to Greater Germany. Our German revolution is being created in this war. Nothing can stop it now—not even defeat—and it’ll turn the world upside-down before it’s finished.”

“You sound like a socialist to me.” He smiled, his mouth twisted to one side by his rebuilt jaw. I could see how sweet his smile would have been before his face was wrecked. His eyes were not those of a crazed fanatic but of a seer; a dreamer of dreams.

“Perhaps I am, my dear Prohaska. But a German socialist second and a German warrior first.” It may have been ill-natured of me, but I could not help interjecting at this point that some might consider “Svetozar von Potocznik” a pretty odd sort of name for a warrior of the Greater German Reich. But he had obviously been asked that question before. He laughed, and answered me with his usual calm earnestness. “We all have to have a name, Prohaska, and names are handed down in the male line except, I believe, in a few odd little countries in Africa. The ‘Svetozar’ bit is rather awful, I agree: my mother was greatly addicted to romantic nov­els when I was born and she thought that it went better with ‘Potocznik’ than ‘Willibald’ or ‘Englebert,’ which were my father’s choices. As to the ‘Potocznik,’ it doesn’t argue for any but the tiniest element of Slav blood. Tell me Prohaska, how long do you think people in Europe have been using surnames?”

“I really couldn’t say. Since the fifteenth century perhaps? Up in the Tyrol I believe they still give people names according to their occupation.”

“Good, the fifteenth century: say twenty generations ago to be on the safe side?” I nodded my assent. “Well then, I worked it out recently and that gives me a theoretical possibility of something over two million an­cestors. Only one of those needed to have the name “Potocznik” to have passed it on to me. And anyway, there’s no certainty that he was a Slav: he could have been a German kidnapped in a border raid and taken into serfdom by the Croats. No, there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that I am of purely Germanic stock.”

“I see. So where precisely does that leave me in this crusade for the Greater German Reich? After all, I’m a Czech on my father’s side and a Pole on my mother’s, and as you can hear I still speak German with an accent.”

“Well, since you ask me I would have said that by becoming an Austrian officer you have automatically cast your vote for Germanic culture.”

“I see. And will you let me in?”

“Of course: to be a German is not only a matter of blood and soil but of culture. The Romans—who were the earliest Germans by the way: I read a book about it recently—never had anything against barbarians becoming Roman citizens, after they had given sufficient proof of their loyalty. The border peoples like the Czechs and the Poles will be offered a choice after this war: either become part of the German Reich or become German protectorates outside it—or if you don’t want either of those alternatives then clear off to join your Slav brothers beyond the Urals.” “And do you think that they’ll accept that choice willingly?”

“I don’t doubt it: look at all the Czechs in the k.u.k. Armee who’ve been voting for Russia lately by raising both hands. As for the rest, I don’t imagine that they’ll have much choice. Did the Britishers ever ask the people of India whether they wanted to be part of their empire? The mark of a truly vigorous nation is that it has a way of resolving these matters without the need for ballot boxes. The British and French only became interested in democracy once they had taken as much of the world as they wanted by force.”

“But surely, Potocznik, haven’t you noticed that in this pan-German crusade some of our best fighters are Slavs? Look at the Bosnians for instance. Or the Slovenes: I doubt whether you’d find a braver and more loyal people in the entire Monarchy.”

He snorted. “Brave and loyal: you certainly wouldn’t have found them very brave and loyal if you’d seen them back in Pravnitz during the gymna­sium affair. The sheer colossal impudence of it: a silly little ethnographic relic of a people with no literature and no history and no culture of their own, challenging the rights of a major world nation. It’s just too absurd. There’s no such people as the Slovenes, and their language is a fraud: a monkey-jabber made to look like a proper language by a German-speaking bishop—a Jewish convert, by the way—to create enemies for Germany and keep it under the thumb of Rome. The Slovene Nation, indeed—not a million of them, and nothing but a lot of illiterate yokels in felt hats and silly costumes. For them to claim equality with the nation of Goethe and Schiller and Beethoven is like a sparrow claiming equality with an eagle. Darwin proved that there is no such thing as equality in nature, only the stronger and the weaker.”

“Do I take it, then, that you propose shooting all the Slovenes once we win this war? It seems pretty shabby thanks after the way they’ve fought for us.”

“Of course not: the so-called Slovene people would continue to ex­ist for as long as it wished to. But with no equality in German-speaking areas, that’s for sure, and with German as a compulsory subject in all their schools from the lowest level up.”

“Do you think that they’d take kindly to that? You make it sound like running a colony in Africa.”

“Perhaps it is rather like that. If they are eventually absorbed into Germany, then frankly we would be doing them a kindness. Honestly, Prohaska, there’s no future in these little peoples now: the Slovenes and Czechs and the rest. They only survived this long because the Habsburg state has somehow managed to stagger a century too far. From now on it’ll be the big nations who count; this war demostrates that if nothing else. Cruel to absorb them into Greater Germany? We’d be far crueller to them in the long run if we didn’t, with the Italians waiting out there to swallow them up. We’re bringing them into the modern world, making them catch up with the rest of Europe after a thousand years of slumber. That’s our Germanic mission: to force these fossil peoples into the twentieth century. ‘Deutsche Wesen soll die Welt genesen.’ ”

The next morning the telephone rang at last in the Kanzlei at Caprovizza airfield. We were to make ready for a fresh experiment in wireless artil­lery direction from the air. The news of our success at Monte Nero at the beginning of August had spread as far as the High Command, and a new operation was being planned to try and take some of the pressure off our troops on the Carso. The elderly coast-defence battleship S.M.S. Prag was lying at Pola and would steam up to the Gulf of Trieste on 14 August to shell a large group of ammunition dumps which had just been revealed by aerial photography in a wood near the railway line between Sagrado and Ronchi. The ship would anchor off Sistiana and her battery of four 24cm guns would fire at maximum elevation to try and hit the dumps, hoping to set off a general and demoralising explosion since (our artillery experts said) the Italians had stacked the shells far too close together for safety. It would need wireless spotting to do the job—the target was twelve kilometres inland and hidden from our spotters by the edge of the Carso escarpment—and it would also require an officer-observer used to naval signalling and gunnery practice. The choice was obvious, so Toth and I were ordered to get ready to fly the next morning.

We would be flying a Lloyd once again, since the fuselage of the Brandenburger was still not quite roomy enough for all the paraphernalia of a wireless station. Likewise we would once again be flying unarmed, for reasons of weight-saving. I was none too happy about this after our encounter with the Nieuport over Monte Nero, so I was determined this time to take along something more powerful than a Steyr pistol by way of protection. A Mannlicher cavalry carbine was not a great improvement, it is true, but it might give us some chance if we could let the enemy get close enough.

As to the wireless station, we learnt that we would not be carrying the clumsy spark transmitter which we had used at Monte Nero. Instead we would be provided with the very latest in German wireless technol­ogy: a Siemens-Halske valve set. This apparatus was (we were told) more fragile than the spark set, and almost as heavy, but it could be tuned more precisely and, above all, would allow us not only to transmit but also to receive signals, thus doing away with the previous rigmarole of white and red and green rockets.

That part at least was reasonably simple, installing the wireless set that afternoon and going up to run a few test-exchanges of signals with a ground station at Haidenschaft airfield. The fun started when we landed and found a naval liaison officer waiting for us so that we could co­ordinate our plans for tomorrow. The first thing we discovered was that the naval charts did not extend as far inland as our target, and that the k.u.k. Armee’s maps of the area were not only on a different scale but used an entirely different grid system. In the end I had to make up an “oleat”: a sheet of transparent paper with a naval grid marked on it so that we could superimpose it on the army map.

That problem was simple enough to solve; far trickier was the dif­ference in gunnery signalling practice between the Army and the k.u.k. Kriegsmarine. This would make it necessary for the Prag to carry a major of artillery as a liaison officer. However, the officer in question did not know Morse code, so it would be necessary to assign him a naval telegraphist. But at this point questions of inter-service etiquette began to arise. The Navy’s self-esteem would not permit an army officer to give direct orders to the crew of a battleship while at sea, so a naval Korvettenkapitan would have to be detailed to transmit instructions from the Major to the ship’s Wireless Operator. Likewise the army officer would not be permitted to give orders direct to the Prag’s turret captains. Instead (it was eventually decided) he would give the necessary bearing and elevations to the ship’s Gunnery Officer as “recommendations,” and the latter would then trans­mit them to the turrets as orders. Likewise the order “Fire!” would be respectfully suggested to the naval Liaison Officer, who would give it to the Gunnery Officer, who would then convey it to the turret-commanders. Furthermore, it was decided that in case things went wrong and the two services started blaming one another, all orders were to be duplicated in writing. In fact I suspect that it was only because I was a naval officer myself that I escaped having a petty officer telegraphist squeezed into the aeroplane cockpit with me to relay my signals to the ship. As it was it involved a chain of no less than seven persons in converting my aerial observations into a shell issuing from the muzzle of a gun. It was a fire- control system such as only Habsburg Austria could have devised.

Another drawback to this operation, from our point of view at least, was that our Siemens-Halske wireless set was ultra-top-secret. In fact at first Kraliczek was going to forbid it to be carried across the lines for fear of its being captured. It was only after we had spent a hour or so explain­ing, with the aid of diagrams, that there is not a great deal of sense in artillery-spotting on one’s own side of the lines that he had relented on this—but only on condition that we flew with a large demolition charge attached to the set so that it would blow up the apparatus, and us, if we crashed. Thus it was that, a generation before the Japanese kamikazes, Toth and I found ourselves flying in an aeroplane containing a two- kilogram slab of Ekrasit, the Austrian brand of TNT, attached to the wireless with surgical tape and wired up to explode if we hit the ground. It was all most reassuring.

In the event, though, our fine new wireless set was barely used that day. Our take-off from Caprovizza was delayed until mid-morning by fog over the target (the lower end of the Isonzo is notoriously foggy, even in summer). So it was not until nearly 1100 hours that we crossed the lines near Gorz and made our way southwards in a half-circle over Gradisca and Sagrado to approach our target from the landward side. It was evidently going to be a rough ride: flak shells banged around us at intervals from Gorz onwards, and once the mist cleared from their airfields there would be Italian single-seaters coming up to chase us. Better get the job done as quickly as possible and make for home, I thought: flying unarmed over enemy territory in broad daylight with a slab of explosive next to me did not appeal to me in the least.

We arrived over the target at two thousand metres amid a desultory peppering of flak bursts—only to find that the target was no more. There could be no doubt about it as we circled overhead and I scanned the for­est clearing with my binoculars: the shell-dump had almost gone. When I compared the scene with an aerial photograph from two days before I could see where the tarpaulin-covered stacks had been—pale oblong patches on the grass of the clearing—but nearly all of them had gone now. As I watched, a beetle-like chain of motor lorries bumped along the forest trackway, carrying the shells forward to the hungry battery positions. I flicked the wireless set switch to “Transmit” and put on the headphones, then tapped out the message “Shells gone—query what now?” There was an acknowledge signal from the Prag, a distant grey shape out on the blue shining expanse of the Adriatic, but nothing more. Meanwhile we circled fretfully, dodging the flak shells. I could imagine the scratching of heads and confusion that reigned inside the conning tower of the old battleship. But that was scarcely any consolation to us now, flying around in slow circles to provide target practice for the Italian flak battery crews. I was just wondering whether to take matters into my own hands and head us for home when Toth turned and tugged at my sleeve excitedly. He pointed away to southward.

I could scarcely believe my eyes. Here indeed was something far more worthy of our attention than the place where a target had once been. Toth needed no order from me to turn and give full throttle. It was an Italian airship, strolling towards the lines above Monfalcone. It was about six kilometres away, and (I thought) about a thousand metres above us. That would mean at least eight minutes of climbing around in circles before we could reach him, not to speak of closing the distance. Still, it seemed worth a try. Airships were a matter of some interest to me that summer. I had won my Maria Theresa in part for having shot down just such an Italian semi-rigid, south of Venice in July. They were not very large airships as such contraptions go: certainly nothing to compare with the German Zeppelins. The gasbag was a single, soft envelope and rigidity was given by a long V-sectioned keel of aluminium girders from which the engines and control gondolas were suspended. The Italians had built quite a number of these airships—the larger ones had a crew of nine or ten—and had been trying for the past year to use them on bombing-raids, with conspicuous lack of success. And here was one of them now, insolently flaunting its toad-like, pale-yellow bulk over the countryside in broad daylight. Such effrontery could not go unanswered.

The only trouble was, I realised as we climbed up towards the air­ship, that apart from my Mannlicher carbine and five clips of ammuni­tion we had no means of attacking the airship short of ramming it. As for the Italians, they were quite well equipped to defend themselves. There seemed to be a machine gun in each of the crew gondolas, to judge by the streams of tracer that sprayed out at us like water from a garden hose each time we tried to manoeuvre within range. The one great advantage of an airship over an aeroplane in those days was the former’s ability to climb. An aeroplane had to labour round in circles for six or seven minutes to gain a thousand metres, whereas all that an airship had to do was to release water ballast and whee! up it would go like a witch on a broomstick. But for some reason which I shall never understand the Italians neglected to escape that way, only continued at the same height and allowed us to climb above them—where we saw to our delight that there was no machine-gun position on the top of the gasbag.

So we circled for a while, like Red Indians around a settler’s wagon, as I fired off our entire stock of ammunition into the airship’s envelope. It had no visible effect though. I suppose that, like me that morning, you have some mental picture of the airship going pop! at the first hit, like a child’s balloon pricked with a pin. Well, forget it: the pressure of the gas in an airship’s envelope is not in fact much above that of the surrounding air, and the seepage of hydrogen from a few puny rifle-bullet holes could probably have gone on for days before the thing even began to lose its shape. As we climbed away from our last futile pass, followed by a valedic­tory spatter of fire from the forward gondola, I looked around desperately for some other means of attack. Then an idea struck me: the wireless set. It weighed forty kilograms and, although it left much to be desired from an aerodynamic point of view, it had lots of jagged edges and sharp cor­ners. Feverishly I got to work wrenching out wires and disconnecting the demolition charge as Toth turned to make another pass at the airship. He seemed to sense what I wanted, and took us roaring in a shallow dive along the airship’s swelling, pig-like back.

I almost ruptured myself as I lugged the wireless set on to the cock­pit coaming, struggling to hold it steady in the howling slipstream, then heaved it into space at what I judged to be the correct moment. The aero­plane skipped and lurched, relieved suddenly of the weight, and it was sev­eral seconds before Toth could steady her enough for us to come around and survey the results—if any—of our unorthodox bombing attack. We saw that the wireless set had almost missed the airship as it plummeted past. Almost, but not quite: a large rent about two metres long had been torn in the fabric about a third of the way forward from the tail. The en­velope was already beginning to sag and billow slightly as we watched, circling above. As for the Italians, they had clearly realised that something was wrong and were trying to turn around and get back across their own lines before they crashed. But to no avail: a rapidly deflating airship is al­most impossible to steer, and in any case a south-west breeze had sprung up. Try as they might, they were being blown deeper and deeper into Austrian territory, losing height as they went. Meanwhile we circled above like a buzzard, waiting to see where our victim would come down.

In the end, twenty minutes later, the airship hit the ground way behind the lines, some distance outside the hamlet of Logavec, a Carso settle­ment so remote that no one had even bothered to transliterate its name into Italian. The crash was a prolonged and untidy business. The airship draggled along the ground like a wounded partridge for a good kilometre, leaving bits behind on stone walls and thickets, before what was left of it fetched up among the buildings of a farm, the envelope and broken keel finally draping themselves across the roof of a stone cottage. We circled above, looking for somewhere to land. A larger-than-usual dolina lay near by, about two hundred metres long and level from years of culivation. So we decided to chance a landing, despite the demolition charge which we were still carrying. Toth brought the Lloyd to a stop only a couple of metres in front of the steep, rocky end of the hollow and we leapt out to scramble towards the farm, intent on capturing the survivors before they could sort themselves out after the crash.

I carried the empty carbine and Toth his Steyr pistol. They were not a great deal of use, but at least I thought that we might menace the Italians into surrendering quietly if they were still disentangling themselves from the wreckage. But we were too late. I stuck my head up over a drystone wall to get a look at the wreck—and was obliged to pull it down again smartly as a burst of machine-gun fire rattled and whined off the rocks. The Italians had barricaded themselves into a stone outbuilding, carry­ing the airship’s weapons with them. No doubt they hoped to hold out until nightfall and then slip away unobserved. The front to northwards of Gorz, among the forests of the Bainsizza, was much less densely manned than the Carso sector, and anyway there were more than enough ethnic Italians in these parts to provide them with shelter and civilian clothes. Troops would reach us eventually—the entire Isonzo Front must have watched the airship coming down—but they would take time to find us. Clearly, our task was to hold the Italians where they were until reinforce­ments arrived.

I crept round as close as I dared to the outbuilding where the airmen were hiding and called out to them. Lucky, I thought, that four years at the k.u.k. Marine Akademie had made me fluent in Italian. The reply was another short burst of fire, aimed at random as far as I could make out. I tried again.

“Friends . . .” I paused, awaiting more shots. But none came. I went on, “Friends, Italian aviators, we mean you no harm.” There was a single shot, but I went on regardless. “Please see sense: you are now deep in Austrian territory after being brought down in a fair combat with no dis­honour to yourselves. You have done everything that your country could reasonably expect of you and you must not sacrifice your lives in so futile a fashion after surviving a crash. You are now surrounded and heavily outnumbered . . .” (I have to add that I choked a little at this whopper), “so please be reasonable and surrender. You will be treated with every courtesy and in strict accordance with the Hague Convention and the laws of war: I myself promise you this upon my honour as an officer of the House of Austria.”

There was a long silence, then a voice answered. The accent was Piedmontese, I noticed.

“Do you have Ungheresi with you, or Bosniaci?”

Biting my tongue, I assured the invisible speaker that I had only one Hungarian among my men, and no Bosnians whatever. “But why do you ask?” I called.

“Because it is well known that the Hungarians carry bill-hooks with which they scalp their prisoners. While as for your Bosnians, they are Mohammedan bandits and make eunuchs of their captives in order to sell them to the Sultan of Turkey for guarding his harem. This much is common knowledge: I read it myself only the other day in the Corriere.” I answered that, to the best of my knowledge, our own single Hungarian had never so much as owned a bill-hook in his life, let alone scalped any­one with it; while as for the Bosnian eunuch dealers, whether Muslim or of any other religion, I had no such people under my command (I might have added that from what I had heard of the Bosnians they very rarely took any prisoners; but this would have been extremely tactless in the circumstances).

When I had finished, the voice still seemed unconvinced. Meanwhile, from within the stone cottage on top of which the airship had landed, there had issued for the past five minutes or so the sounds of a woman having hysterics in Slovene, pausing every now and then to implore the aid of each of the saints in the Church’s calendar, starting with St Anna the Mother of Our Lady. She was already on the line to SS Cyril and Methodius, Apostles to the Slavs, and the shrieks in between were growing louder by the minute. At that moment one of the numerous goats browsing the scrub around the farmstead was bold enough to climb up a drystone wall and peer over the top—only to fall back a second or two later riddled with machine-gun-bullets. It was clear that our Italians still required some persuasion as to the hopelessness of their case. I felt a sudden tug at my sleeve. It was Toth, creeping along in the lee of the wall, pistol in hand.

“Magnum fragorem face—boom!—auxilio Ekrasito.” I stared at him for a moment in bewilderment, then realised what he meant. Of course: the slab of TNT. We scrambled back along the wall and ran to the Lloyd, which was standing out of sight of the Italians in the sunken dolina. Toth seized the block of Ekrasit and its detonators while I ripped out the aerial wire and the wireless set’s emergency battery. Then we ran back to the lee of the outbuilding and heaped up rocks from the wall on top of the ex­plosive charge. When all was ready we clambered over a wall, trailing the wires behind us, and took cover. I looked at Toth and he nodded back. I was far from sure that this would work . . . I touched the two ends of the wire to the battery terminals.

It did work. There was a most impressive bang, and Toth and I had to huddle up to the wall for shelter as stones rained from the sky around us. The flock of goats was scattering in all directions, bleating in panic as the rocks showered down among them. From within the cottage there came a piercing scream, followed by frenzied calls for St Blasius of Ragusa to orare pro nobis. I crept up to the outbuilding and called out:

“Come out and surrender. Your position is hopeless. Our artillery has these buildings ranged now. That was a warning shot. I have only to signal to them and the next one will land among you.”

The moral effect upon the airship crew was much as I had hoped: before long a man in leather flying overalls came out of the outbuilding bearing a white handkerchief fixed to a stick. There were ten of them in all, largely unharmed by the crash, apart from a mechanic who had fallen out of an engine gondola as they hit the ground and broken his leg. Toth gave him morphine from the aeroplane’s first-aid kit as I parleyed with the airship’s commander, an army Capitano in his late twenties. He marched up and saluted me stiffly, then, seeing with some surprise that I was wearing naval uniform (I had cast aside my flying jacket in the heat), demanded to speak with the local troop commander. I answered that so far as he was concerned I was in command of the troops in the immedi­ate area—which happened to be perfectly true, since there was only one of them. Where were the rest of them then, he demanded? I intimated as politely as I could that this was none of his business. He persisted: it was my duty to provide a proper prisoners’ escort at once, as laid down in the relevant international conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war; and in any case he was not going to surrender either his crew or the wreck of his airship—for which he demanded a signed receipt, by the way—to anyone of a rank less than his own. I replied that I was an Austro- Hungarian Linienschiffsleutnant, and that so far as I was aware that rank was equivalent to Capitano in the Italian Army; at any rate, it was equal to a Hauptmann in ours. With this he changed tack and said that as an officer in an Italian cavalry regiment—and a rather grand one too by the sound of him—he could not agree to present his formal surrender to a naval officer: the honour of the Army would not allow it. I sympathised, but said that I thought that with things as they were he was in no position to lay down terms.

And all the while this pantomime was going on I was thinking, damn them, where are they? They must have seen the airship come down. When would help reach us? For I sensed from the way the conversation was drifting that if our Italian captives realised that there were only two of us, they might seriously reconsider their earlier intention to surrender. I could even foresee a possibility that the tables might be turned, and that Toth and I would end up by being dragged back across the lines with them into captivity. And as if that were not enough to worry about, I now had the farmer and his wife to deal with as well. She had at last overcome her fright enough to be able to come out of the cottage. Even today I still think that she was one of the fattest women I have ever seen: like a walking fairground tent in the striped dress of the locality. The airship envelope was billowing flaccidly above the cottage, the remaining gas having col­lected inside the nose section; but the farmer’s wife still almost managed to upstage it as regards bulk. Her husband was a whiskery-chinned, peg­toothed Slovene peasant with a white walrus moustache. He stood before me with the limp, riddled carcass of the goat in his arms, like Our Lady with the dead Christ.

“Kompensat,” he wheezed toothlessly, “koza mea e ganz kaput— capria moja ist finito—totalverlust, capisco?” He rubbed finger and thumb together, then pointed to the devastated thatch of his cottage. “Casa mea je auch havariert! Pagare—geld—penezy!”

I answered in Slovene as best I could. “In a moment, Gospodar . . . the War Damage Assessment Officer will be notified and will deal with your claim in due course, you may rest assured of that . . . Now, if you will excuse me . . .”

The airship captain was by now asking me a number of rather imper­tinent questions about how exactly the Austriaci had brought down his airship: the Citta di Piacenza, we later learnt. He had evidently not seen Toth and me land near by after the crash and did not associate us with the aeroplane that had attacked him. I was beginning to suspect that he was looking around for an excuse—having been unfairly shot down or something—that would allow him to square his earlier word as an officer and gentleman with his present intention of overpowering us and mak­ing a run for it . . . Then, at last, to my intense relief, I heard the sound of a motor lorry coming up the trackway. It was a party of soldiers. As they got down and came to join us I saw with some dismay that they were Hungarian Honveds, and that several of them had hanging at their belts the wicked-looking bill-hook or “fokos” which was much favoured by the Magyars as a trench-fighting weapon. The Capitano saw this as well and grew pale—then turned to me with a most reproachful look, marking me down for future reference as a trickster and a man devoid of honour. With that, we left things to the Army. The Italians climbed on to the lorry peaceably enough, and an ambulance was sent for to take the injured man to hospital. They waved to us in farewell as they bumped away down the track. I could see that, whatever their commander might think, the crew were mightily relieved to have come out of it all alive and unhurt. Hydrogen-filled airships were extremely inflammable and very few people ever survived being shot down in one.

And that was the end of the matter as far as we were concerned. I signed a few slips of paper for the farmer and his wife, who had by now stopped screaming and invoking the saints, for want of breath. Then Toth and I went back to our aeroplane to take off for Caprovizza airfield. So that, if you please, is how I came to achieve what I suppose must be my one claim to singularity in the course of something over a hundred years of earthly existence: that of being the only man—so far as I know—ever to have brought down two airships.