The Two-Headed Eagle

13 LA SERENISSIMA

Hauptmann Rudolf Kraliczek was not a happy man in those early days of October 1916. Not only had the flying unit he commanded been reduced from a total establishment of eight aircraft to two, but he himself was being held responsible by his superiors both for these losses and for the fact that nothing had been achieved in return—except, that is, for a prodigious output of paper. And now, as if this were not enough, several of his officers were under investi­gation by the Military Procurator on suspicion of having aided and abetted the escape of an Italian prisoner.

It was all getting to be too much, and had become extremely disrup­tive of the form-filling and statistical compilation that was Kraliczek’s reason for military existence. Something bold had to be done. Drastic measures were called for. Leadership must be asserted in the strongest possible terms. So Hauptmann Kraliczek took a sheaf of Kanzlei-Doppel paper, a pencil and a ruler, and sat down to plan a desperate last throw of the dice; an operation so daring that it would entirely vindicate the concept of long-range bombing and perhaps (with any luck) keep him safely seated behind an office desk; a project in which other men would risk their lives in a last attempt to change the direction of all those relentlessly plunging red and black and green and blue lines drawn on sheets of squared paper. In the end he must have frightened even himself by his own audacity, for the remaining two aircraft of Flik 19F were to attempt no less a feat of arms than a daylight bombing-raid on the city of Venice.

There were two main obstacles to this scheme. The first and lesser of the two was that for our Hansa-Brandenburg CIs to carry any worth­while bombload such a distance we would have to fly to Venice with the prevailing east wind of autumn, then turn north to try and reach the near­est Austrian flying field, in the foothills of the Alps. The second—and by far the greater—of the objections was that in the whole embattled continent of Europe in the year 1916 it is doubtful if there was another city more formidably protected against air attack than Venice. A major naval port and the site of several munitions factories, the island city was protected against air-raids by layer after layer of defences: first a line of watch vessels and patrolling airships out in the Gulf of Venice, then the fighter airfield “La Serenissima” at the Lido and the powerful flak bat­teries at Forts Alberone, Malamocco and Sabbioni, then further belts of flak artillery mounted on barges, then lines of tethered kite-balloons. The flying-boats of the Imperial and Royal Navy had been carrying out bombing-raids against Venice practically each day since the war with Italy began, but the defences forced them now to attack at night and flying above three thousand metres, which—given the primitive bomb-sights of those days—meant that most of their bombs had no other effect than flinging up spouts of muddy water in the lagoons.

In Hauptmann Kraliczek’s master plan the problem of range was to be overcome by making the flight from Caprovizza to Venice merely one leg of a four-cornered journey. The two aircraft—Potocznik and Feldwebel Maybauer in their Brandenburger and Toth and myself in Zoska—would carry two of the new 100kg bombs each, slung on electrically operated bomb racks beneath the centre section, and would fly to Venice with a tail wind. We would drop our bombs, then—in the event of our still being airborne after all this—would head northwards to cross the lines north of Vicenza and land to refuel at Fliegerfeld Pergine, among the mountains near Trient. We would then take off again and fly behind the lines along the crest of the Alps as far as Villach, where we would refuel once more before flying south on the final leg of our journey, through the Julian Alps to Caprovizza. Altogether the round trip would take about two days, weather and the enemy permitting.

Normally, in all such missions conceived on paper by Hauptmann Kraliczek, the hostile purpose of the operation seemed very much to take second place to the business of accumulating Kilometres Flown. But this time our commander had selected a really grandiose aim for us: no less an undertaking than severing Venice’s connection with the rest of Italy, by destroying the causeway-bridge that carried the road and railway line across the lagoon to the mainland. It was of little concern to Kraliczek that the entire well-equipped Imperial and Royal Navy Flying Service had been trying without success to do precisely that for a year or more; as far as he was concerned, no one had ever thought of the idea before, and anyone who dared to suggest that the Italians might have thought of it first and taken precautions was dismissed out of hand as a niggling defeatist. But there we were: orders are orders, however crazy and ill-conceived they may seem to be to the poor devils who are given the task of translating them into reality. The General Staff and the 5th Army Command had been told of the scheme and had given their approval, so who were mere lieutenants to demur? As officers of the House of Habsburg, had we not sworn to do our duty or die in the attempt?

Once again we checked our maps and made our preparations. The two aeroplanes would head out over the Gulf of Trieste just after dawn on the morning of 13 October, and, if they avoided the flak batteries and fighter aircraft off Sdobba, would make landfall some way west of the former Austrian seaside resort of Grado, then head inland and follow the railway line through Portogruaro and San Dona di Piave until they reached Mestre. We would then fly across the lagoons to attack the bridge from the east, hoping in this way to get in between the defences that protected Venice to seaward and the balloon lines and anti-aircraft batteries that guarded it against attack from the north.

It would be a hazardous business, the crossing of the Gulf of Trieste nearly as dangerous in its way as the attempt to penetrate the defences of Venice. But in between those two danger zones I did not expect too much trouble. In those days before radar, aircraft in ones and twos usually had little trouble in wandering about over open countryside. Biplanes look much alike from the ground, telephones were few in the Italian countryside in those days, and anyway, people’s vision had not yet become adjusted to looking up into the sky all the time. For this reason, and in order to save weight, we decided to do without the forward-firing machine guns. On this flight we would have only the observer’s Schwarz- lose to protect us.

Toth and I made our final checks that October evening by the light of the petrol lamps in our hangar. Flying suits, maps, compasses, pistols, emergency rations; also razors, towels, soap and two blankets, since we expected to be away overnight and knew that such things were now in so short a supply that host flying fields expected visitors to bring their own with them. We completed our preparations and while I had a few final words with Feldwebel Prokesch and the mechanics—the ignition had been giving trouble lately—Toth went down to the village to see Magdalena.

Quite a number of our men had taken up with village girls of late. Only the day before, Kraliczek had received his first formal request for permission to marry a local girl—and had promptly set to work devis­ing a suitable wad of printed application forms. There had already been a number of paternity suits filed against enlisted men. It astonished me how quickly our men—drawn from every province of our vast empire and totally ignorant of either Italian or Slovene—had managed to put down roots in the locality. Not for the first time it occurred to me that one of the few good things to be said about war is that it does at least do something to prevent inbreeding, which must once have been a serious problem in an out-of-the-way place like the Vippaco Valley. On the contrary, to judge by the noises I had heard among the haycocks on evening walks that sum­mer, the men were doing everything in their power to make breeding an outdoor activity.

I went for a walk as dusk fell, and met Toth and his belle walking up the lane arm-in-arm and chatting in the curious modified Latin that they used to exchange endearments. Magdalena bade me good-evening as graciously as always; really a quite extraordinarily confident and poised young woman, I thought, considering that she was only a village girl and only nineteen years old.

“Well, Herr Leutnant, I hear that you’re off tomorrow on another long-distance flight.”

“Indeed? I hope that Zugsfuhrer Toth here has not been compromis­ing field security by telling you where?”

“No, Zolli here is being tighter-lipped than usual and won’t tell me a thing; but I hope that doesn’t mean that it’s going to be somewhere dangerous?”

“No, my dear young lady, nowhere in the least bit dangerous,” I said, hoping that my patent insincerity would not show through the smile. “Please don’t worry yourself in the slightest on our account. I expect in fact that it will all be rather tedious. But we shall be gone for two days at least.”

“Oh all right then. But make sure that he behaves himself and doesn’t get into any scrapes. We’re planning to get engaged at Christmas; sooner perhaps, if the war’s over by then.”

I made my way back to my tent to turn in. It was autumn now and getting too cold to sleep under canvas in the blustering Carso wind. Still the promised wooden barrack huts had not arrived. “If the war’s over by then . . .” Some hopes: the war had been going to be over in three months ever since August 1914; but now it had been going on for so long that it was getting to seem as though it had always been with us and always would be. It was about that autumn, I remember, that the first signs became vis­ible of that war-weariness which would eventually bring our venerable Monarchy tottering to its final collapse. The harvest had been wretched that year, as old Josef the forester had predicted. But that I suppose was at least bearable, the common lot of populations under siege. What was more disturbing was the way in which the shortages were now beginning to affect our ability to fight. Copper and brass had been unobtainable for a year or more, now that all of Central Europe’s pre-war coinage and most of its church bells, statues, doorknobs and curtain rails had been requisitioned and melted down. Engine exhausts which should have been made of copper were now fabricated from thinly galvanised steel sheet. A number of Fliegertruppe pilots had already been injured by corroded exhaust stubs snapping off and flying back to hit them in the face. Steel tube radiators constantly sprang leaks.

But far worse was the shortage of rubber. Our German allies were commandeering every last scrap of the rubber smuggled in through the blockade via Holland. So the Austro-Hungarian aircraft factories were left to make do with a loathsome substitute called “gummiregenerat”—more usually known as “gummi-degenerat”—confected from old motor tyres, galoshes and ladies’ mackintoshes shredded and dissolved in ether to form an evil-smelling, sticky substance that tore like paper and would not vul­canise. This was used for engine hoses and inner tubes. Aeroplane tyres were still made from proper rubber, but we were under strict orders to save them from unnecessary wear. The aeroplane could only run on its own wheels at take-off and landing: at all other times it was to be dragged around with a sledge fitted beneath its axles, and when an aeroplane was sent for repair to a Fliegeretappenpark we were instructed to remove its tyres and store them under lock and key in the Kanzlei safe for fear that they would be stolen in transit by other units. To judge by the number of orders on the subject that we had recently received at Caprovizza, it now appeared that the aeroplane was merely an accessory to its tyres.

But even when we had retrieved our tyres from the Kanzlei safe, dis­carded our skids and got airborne, things were not much better. The sup­ply of aviation petrol had lately been “rationalised,” which in k.u.k. terms meant that it still came from the same refineries, but that a thousand- strong supply agency had been set up to administer its distribution—with the inevitable result that it became much harder to get and was now of poorer quality, so that aeroplanes could rarely reach their stated speeds or service ceilings. Things were in a mess.

Still the war went on, and showed no signs whatever of ending. They said that some of the more elaborate dug-outs up on the Carso already had electric light and stoves and armchairs; even wallpaper, according to some sources. We were still due for wooden barrack huts at Caprovizza, but Flik 19 at Haidenschaft had received theirs some weeks before. Perhaps the war had now become such a fixed feature of the national economies of Europe, and the fronts so immobile, that in a few years we would be liv­ing in permanent bases behind the lines, complete with married quarters, and travelling to the trenches each day by tram.

During the summer my own ground crew had laid down a vegetable garden behind the main hangar and were now spending a large part of their off-duty hours hoeing, weeding and watering. I was quite content that they should do so: it augmented their increasingly miserable rations and even gave them a surplus to sell for tobacco-money in Haidenschaft market. I was beginning to feel though that Feldwebel Prokesch’s runner beans were fast coming to eclipse the war in importance, and wondered at what point I ought to mention it at morning parade; particularly when the men dropped their work and ran out with buckets and shovels whenever a horse-drawn artillery train passed along the road. But they were still a conscientious and devoted ground crew, so I was happy to let it go on for the time being. Only Oberleutnant Potocznik looked down his nose at the whole business. After all, a warrior for the Greater German Reich could hardly be expected to approve of such distractions. What would Siegfried have said if the Nibelungs had started to grow lettuces?

The next morning was overcast, with a light north-east wind. It was still dark as Toth and I made our way out on to the field and climbed into the cockpit of our aeroplane. We made the regulation pre-flight checks, and when everything was in order called, “Ready!” to Potocznik, seated in the cockpit of his Brandenburger parked alongside us. Potocznik called back, “Ready!” in reply, and the process of starting the engines began, Toth cranking the starter magneto as the mechanic swung the propeller. The two engines snorted into life almost at the same instant, pouring out grey smoke and occasional gouts of blue and yellow flame as they warmed up. At last Potocznik waved to me to signal that they were about to move off. The mechanics pulled the wheel chocks away and the aeroplane began to trundle forward, lumbering heavily under the weight of two 100kg bombs slung beneath its belly. I watched apprehensively as the machine waddled slowly to the far end of the field. With two of the heaviest bombs available, plus two men and a full load of fuel, a Brandenburger was dangerously near its maximum permissible load—in fact well over it, if one took the most prudent view of that rather hypothetical figure. In order to get into the air we were going to need the longest possible takeoff run, and even so I was still far from certain that the airframe would not collapse under the strain as we lifted off. Selfish as it might sound, I was more than happy to let Potocznik and Maybauer try it first.

In the event they did manage to stagger into the air, engine roaring at full throttle and the whole airframe wobbling most alarmingly under the load. Then it was our turn. We went about into the breeze at the end of the airfield. With my heart fluttering wildly I slapped Toth on the shoul­der and called “Ite nunc—celere!” Toth pushed the throttle lever forward through its gate latch and black smoke belched from the stub-exhausts as we began to creak and lurch forward. I thought that we had had it as the wheels left the ground: the wings gave a tortured groan and bounced visibly as they took the weight. But Toth was a good pilot. Somehow he managed to sweat and coax our protesting lattice of wood and piano wire up into the air, climbing ponderously to join Potocznik, who was making a circuit of the airfield—with the sedateness of an old lady in a bath chair, for fear that the strain of banking too tightly would leave the wings be­hind. We formed up in line ahead, Potocznik leading, and then began the slow, tedious business of climbing as we flew south-east up the Vippaco Valley, gaining height at barely ten metres per thousand, a rate of climb that would have been unimpressive in a goods train.

It was not until we were above Niedendorf at the head of the valley that we had enough altitude to turn east over Sesana and fly across the karst ridge above Trieste. It was just getting light as we flew over the steep scarp-edge at Villa Opicina and saw the city spread out below us, with the still dark expanse of the Adriatic beyond. It was now just light enough to make out the white turrets of the Schloss Miramare on its headland above the sea. I hoped that this would not be an ill omen for what was already a hazardous enough enterprise: Miramare had been the residence of the unfortunate Archduke Ferdinand Max, who had ended his days in front of a Mexican firing squad. Legend had it that the castle had since brought misfortune and a violent end to all who had anything to do with the place.

When we were a couple of kilometres out to sea I noticed that we were slowly overtaking Potocznik’s aeroplane: also that his engine was giving out fitful puffs and coughs of bluish smoke and leaving a strong smell of burning oil in its wake. Before long they were starting to lose height. I watched as Maybauer in the observer’s seat conferred with Potocznik, then turned to me and shrugged his shoulders, shaking his head in an exagger­ated pantomime. They were turning back to land at Prosecco airfield—a broken piston-ring, we learnt later. I wondered for a moment what we should do. But no, our orders were specific on the point: if one aeroplane fell out the other must press on regardless. We were on our own now.

Though only about twenty kilometres in all, the crossing of the Gulf of Trieste was likely to be the most hazardous part of our flight until we reached the outer defence lines of Venice. We had chosen to fly over the sea, in order to dodge the flak batteries on the Isonzo; but even so it was a dangerous business. The gulf was now little more than a salt-water no man’s land, thickly sown with minefields and fought over day and night by seaplanes and motor-boats. If we ditched in the sea and managed to avoid drowning, then in all probability it would be at the cost of being fished out and taken prisoner by an Italian MAS boat.

As it turned out, our crossing was surprisingly uneventful. The k.u.k. Kriegsmarine’s flying-boats were already at work harassing the Italian batteries at Sdobba, so I suppose that must have diverted their attention. An Italian seaplane tried to climb up after us as we made landfall at Porto Buso, west of Grado, but we were too high up for him and a providential patch of low cloud allowed us to give him the slip while he was still climb­ing round in circles. After that there was not a great deal to remark upon, flying along at 120 kilometres per hour three thousand metres above the monotonous green and brown coastal marshes of the Veneto. Winter was setting in early, and I constantly readjusted my scarf to try and block out the nagging chill that kept creeping down the collar of my flying jacket. I would have huddled down behind Toth and out of the wind, but I was the officer and the job of officers was to navigate.

Not that there was a great deal of navigating to do. In fact all the help that we required in that line was provided by the gleaming railway tracks running dead-straight across the marshy fields and meadows below us. The countryside here was thinly populated, and in those days still malarial in places. I checked the few towns as we flew across them—Portogruaro and Latisana and San Dona—and also the rivers that ran down from the Alps, already swollen with the autumn rains: Tagliamento, Ausa, Livenza and Piave. I interrupted my map-reading from time to time in order to scan the sky about us for enemy aircraft. All that I saw however in the whole journey was a lone biplane in the far distance. It turned away and disappeared when it saw us: quite possibly one of our own.

The plan was that we would turn sharp south just short of the town of Mestre and then drop down to attack the bridge at low level from the landward side. But it was not until we emerged from a patch of thin, low cloud west of San Dona that I realised that—as usual—my wayward pilot had other ideas. As we sliced through the last thinning tendrils of cloud into the pallid, watery sunshine of a Venetian autumn morning I saw that below us there lay not a further expanse of wet farmland, but the vast dull pewter expanse of the lagoons east of Venice, intricately fern-leaf- patterned with a million creeks and rivulets and dotted with dark islands of reed and sedge. I was not going to stand for this: I scribbled, “Quo vademus?” on my notepad and shoved it under Toth’s arm. He glanced at it, then scrawled a note on his own pad. It read “Aspice ad septentriones versus.” I looked to the north as requested—and saw that once again Toth’s flying instinct had served us well. East of Mestre there swayed and bobbed an immense barrier of kite-balloons: three successive layers, no less, arranged at heights from about a thousand metres up to four thou­sand. The Corps Air Intelligence Officer had made no mention of them when we were planning the raid. If we had followed our planned route we would have flown out of the cloud and straight in among them, slicing our wings off against the steel cables and plunging to our deaths almost before we knew what had happened. It now looked as if, thanks to Toth, we had found our way into the last gap in Venice’s aerial defenceworks. It was at this point I think that I finally made the decision to abandon all attempts at back-seat driving and leave the business of flying to my pilot, realising that if I was not exactly in safe hands—Toth was still a hair-raising man to fly with—I was at least with someone who was competently dangerous.

It looked as if he had decided not to try attacking the bridge from the landward side. In fact as the domes and towers of the city appeared before us across the flat expanse of lagoon it became obvious that we were going to try an entirely different line of approach—and at extremely low level.

We skimmed across the water at a height of barely ten metres. I kept watch astern as clouds of waterfowl rose into the air, screaming in alarm as we roared over them. There were few defences here apart from the odd anti­aircraft pontoon moored among the reedbeds, so poorly camouflaged that it was an easy matter to fly around them. A few desultory streams of tracer curved up at us, to no effect whatever. But I saw signal rockets arching into the sky in our wake. Venice was being warned of our approach and would doubtless give us a warm welcome.

It is a noble perspective, that approach to Venice from the sea, one of the finest in the entire world I think: the Canale di San Marco with the island of San Giorgio Maggiore to port and the Riva delli Schiavoni to starboard and the Madonna del Salute and the Basilica ahead. Yet I think that of all the millions of tourists who must have seen it over the centuries, none ever had or ever again will see it as I saw it that October morning in the pale sunlight, rushing along at full throttle in a flimsy wood and canvas biplane a few metres above the waves while the Day of Judgement crashed about us, as the men on shore and aboard the warships riding at anchor let fly at us with everything at their disposal. It was terrifying yet wildly exhilarating, with rifle and machine-gun fire coming at us from every side and the angry orange and yellow flashes of flak shells burst­ing above as the gunners tried to get down low enough to hit us. I looked ahead into the howling air, peering over Toth’s shoulder and down the side of the engine cowling. A sudden familiar outline loomed ahead— and a strangely terrible thought flashed through my brain: that even if we survived this mad exploit I might be known for the rest of my life as “Prohaska—the man who demolished the Basilica of San Marco.” Toth lugged at the control column and we rose to skim over the house-tops, barely missing the pinnacled roof. We rushed on across the roof-tops and the sudden chasm of the Grand Canal as I grasped the bomb-release lever and tried to make out the glass roof of Santa Lucia Station ahead. I have a vivid recollection to this day of glancing down and catching a glimpse of an Italian officer on a roof-top firing a pistol at us with one hand while he pulled up his trousers with the other and a woman scurried in terror to hide behind a chimney. We swerved to avoid a church dome. Yes, there was the station! We would make our bombing-run along the bridge instead of approaching it side-on. I waited until the station canopies had disap­peared below us—then yanked at the lever and felt the aeroplane leap as it was relieved of the weight of the two bombs. There was a flash and a mighty confusion of smoke astern as Toth banked us sharply away to avoid the flak batteries at the landward end of the bridge. Our mission had been accomplished: we could now dedicate ourselves entirely to the business of saving our own skins. I later learnt, by the way, that one of our bombs had damaged a bridge support while the other had landed in the mud and failed to explode. Traffic between Venice and the mainland had been held up for all of half an hour while Italian sappers carried out repairs.

Somehow we managed to climb away and evade the flak shells coming up at us from the batteries below. I can only assume that they failed to hit us because they were expecting attack only from the landward side and we took them by surprise. At any rate, after five minutes we were clear of it all, flying over the mainland. The fighter aircraft from Alberone flying field would be up after us by now, but we had a head-start on them and, relieved of its bombs, our Brandenburger was not much slower than a Nieuport in level flight. We would head across country to the River Brenta and then follow it northward to where it entered the Alpine foothills at Bassano. After that it would be a simple matter to fly along the mountain valleys and cross the front line to reach Pergine.

The Camposampiero lay below us now as we gained height, a monotonous expanse of drained marshland east of the Brenta. It should have taken us about half an hour to reach the river and turn north—had our engine not suddenly begun to splutter and misfire. Before long we were losing altitude as the revs fell away. I suspected trouble with the ignition magnetoes, to judge by the noise: at any rate, all the cylinders seemed to be firing, but fitfully, so that the engine was shaking and jolting like a cement mixer. No, there was nothing for it but to land and try to clear the trouble ourselves, then get airborne again before we were noticed. I looked down. At least the fields hereabouts looked level—mostly green pasture—and there were few villages. I shook Toth’s shoulder and pointed down. He nodded, and a couple of minutes later we were bumping down on to as remote a stretch of meadow as I had been able to find.

It sounds hazardous I know, touching down on a field in enemy terri­tory; but flying in those days was utterly remote from anything practised nowadays, and emergency landings were an occurrence so normal as to be scarcely worth remarking upon. With her large-wheeled, generously sprung undercarriage and a landing-run not much longer than a football pitch, our Brandenburger had little to fear from a forced landing—in fact could probably have landed across a freshly ploughed field without coming to any harm. In any case, the field on which we touched down was a smooth expanse of grass preferable in every respect to the rut­ted, stone-littered stretch of ex-ploughland so grandly described as k.u.k. Fliegerfeld Caprovizza. As we slowed down and the tail-skid bit the grass I pointed Toth towards a clump of poplars. The Brandenburger would be horribly conspicuous on the ground with its pale yellow wings and tailplane, so I was concerned to get us into the shadow of the trees as quickly as possible. Our pursuers would not be far behind us, but I hoped that they would be too intent on scanning the sky ahead to look down­wards. I have always found that people tend to miss things they do not expect to see.

This turned out to have been a very bad decision on my part. We discovered as much when our slow, wobbling progress across the field suddenly became glutinous, then stopped altogether even though the pro­peller was still spinning as before. I clambered over the cockpit edge and sprang to the ground to see what was the matter—and promptly sank up to my ankles in the soft cattle-trodden mud. We had taxied into a patch of grass-covered marsh and were now embedded up to our wheel hubs. Rev the engine as he might, Toth could not dislodge us, stuck now like some immense bluebottle buzzing frantically on a fly-paper. I squelched around to the tail and shoved my shoulder under the tail-skid to lift it, hoping to lessen the drag. But the wheels only sank further into the soft, black ground. We both cut brushwood to lay beneath the wheels, and tried levering under the axle with a fallen branch, but it was no use. We were trapped, stuck fast in a field deep in enemy territory with no hope whatever of getting free unless we could find horses or a motor lorry to drag us out. Toth turned off the engine as I leant against the fuselage, wiping my brow and panting from exertion.

It was only then that I saw them. They must have been standing there for some minutes watching us as we strained and heaved. They stood silent, in a row, gazing at us with black eyes and tanned, dark-whiskery faces: straw-hatted and dressed in ragged shirts and trousers, each of them carrying a bill-hook or a fork. We were captives. No doubt these vil­lagers had come to prevent our escape while others had gone to fetch the carabinieri. I wondered suddenly what one did to pass the time in a prisoner-of-war camp. Then a sudden mad urge took hold of me. Why not? We had nothing to lose, and these labourers were certainly poor and probably illiterate as well, living in a remote area and incapable of reading even newspaper headlines, let alone aircraft-recognition handbooks. It was certainly worth a try. Why had I sweated through four years of Italian classes at the Marine Academy if not for such moments as this? I decided to address myself to a sturdy middle-aged man who looked as if he might be some sort of foreman or village elder.

“Buon giorno,” I bade him, smiling. “As you see, we have been forced to land here by engine trouble. I wonder, might you have a telephone near by, or failing that, might you be able to help us extract our aeroplane from the mud so that we can take off and fly on our way?”

“Who are you, strangers, and where are you from?”

“Two airmen of the Corpo Aereo flying from our base at Venice to the airfield at Bassano. But tell me,” I asked, “do you have a carabiniere or a priest in your village?” I was worried that even if there was no police­man hereabouts there might at least be a priest who would be well enough informed about the world to recognise an Austrian aeroplane when he saw one.

“There is no priest in our village, and no carabinieri nearer than the barracks in Castelfranco.”

“Good—I mean, what a pity. Can you then perhaps help us to get free?”

The man turned to a small boy standing near by, gaping at us. “Mauro, run to the house of Ronchelli and tell him to bring his plough-oxen; also a coil of rope.”

The barefooted child scampered away. Really, this was all too easy. I supposed that it was quite possible that these ignorant rustics had never seen an aeroplane before, at least on the ground.

I began to feel myself a rotter for having deceived them so smoothly.

“My friends,” I said, “we will see that you are well rewarded for your trouble when we reach our airfield. What is the name of this village?”

“Busovecchio di Camposampiero, if it’s any business of yours,” said the foreman. “But tell me one thing that puzzles me: what’s the meaning of those black crosses on your aeroplane?”

I swallowed hard—then a brilliant idea struck me.

“They are to signify that the aircraft was blessed by the Pope, at a ceremony in Rome earlier this year. He anointed it with holy oil and the crosses were painted on to mark the places where he applied it. As you will see, they represent the five wounds of Our Lord.”

He grunted and craned his neck to look at the markings on the upper wing. “I see. In that case then His Holiness must have used a step-ladder to get up there.” He sounded dubious, but I supposed that this was just his way, since he seemed a surly man at the best of times.

By now the small boy had reappeared, leading two wheezing, steam­ing, cream-coloured oxen and with a coil of plaited straw rope slung about his shoulder. We attached this to the undercarriage axle, and after five minutes or so of straining and lugging we had the aeroplane free, standing once more upon firm ground. While this was going on we had stopped to look up into the sky as a flight of aeroplanes passed by, head­ing north at speed. There seemed to be four Nieuports and a two-seater of some kind, but they had evidently not seen us. So much the better, I thought; we can get airborne and proceed to Pergine at a discreet distance behind them.

The farm labourers watched as Toth and I removed the aluminium panels around the engine so that we could get at the two magnetoes on the front of the cylinder block. I was thankful now that my first subma­rine command, U8, had been powered by Austro-Daimler petrol engines and that my Chief Engineer had given me a thorough course of instruc­tion in their workings. It would be me who would have to get the engine running again. Toth was a superb flier, but with him it was as entirely a matter of instinct as with an eagle. Otherwise he was about as completely unmechanical as it is possible to be. If he had not been, then I think he would not have been such a formidable pilot, since only a man totally in­different to machinery could have maltreated airframes and engines with such ruthless disregard.

Like most Porsche-designed inline engines the Austro-Daimler had two spark plugs in each cylinder, each row run off its own magneto and coil. This was to guard against spark failure and should have been foolproof since it was most unlikely that both magnetoes would fail at once. But as I removed the bakelite magneto cover I saw that, if both were still working, both were in an equally decrepit state. The contact- breaker electrodes were badly eroded. They must have been made from some wretched wartime alloy and the constant sparking was wearing them away. Standing orders were to change each magneto every fifty flying hours, so that one would always be near-new; but over the past month Feldwebel Prokesch had been forced to ignore this instruction owing to the lack of spares from the Fliegeretappenpark. All that I could do now was dismantle the two contact breakers and clean them up as best I could with a file, then put the whole thing back together again and hope for the best.

It was not until after midday that we finally put the cowling panels back in place and prepared to leave. While I worked on the magnetoes I had been obliged to field a barrage of embarrassing questions from the villagers, who had now been joined by a crowd of women and children. “Your man doesn’t say much does he? Is he a deaf-mute?”

“No, he’s a little quiet it is true, but he’s an excellent pilot. It’s just that he’s a Sardinian.”

“Sardinian? Looks more like an ape to me. Get him to say something in Sardinian then.” I turned desperately to Toth and whispered:

“Toth, di aliquid, per misericordiam Dei.” He obliged with a few sentences of Magyar.

“Couldn’t understand a word of it. That’s the trouble with the Sards: all pig-ignorant Mauritanos. Worse even than Sicilians.”

At last we were ready. I swung the propeller and at the second attempt, to my intense relief, the engine sprang into life, firing with less than per­fect smoothness but certainly well enough to get us airborne and over the mountains to Pergine. It warmed up, straining the undercarriage against the logs which we had stuck beneath the wheels as chocks, while I climbed into the cockpit behind Toth. The village elder climbed up behind me and presented me with a large rush basket covered with a cloth. It contained some loaves, a cheese, a large black-smoked country sausage and a straw- wrapped bottle of brown local wine. I turned to thank him, ashamed to have practised such a suave deception upon these simple people. A sud­den horrible thought had struck me. Suppose that word got around later and they were hauled in by the authorities on a charge of aiding and com­forting the enemy? From what I knew of the Italian military I doubted whether a plea of terminal ignorance would save them from an army penal battalion.

“Some provisions for your journey,” shouted the head-man above the noise of the engine. “Remember to send us a postcard when you get back to Austria.”

I was speechless for a few moments.

“Austria . . . but . . . we are Italians.”

“Don’t give me that horse-shit, Austriaco. We may be poor here but we aren’t stupid.”

“But . . . why did you help us then?”

“We’re anarcho-syndicalists in this village. Anyone who’s against the landlords and the carabinieri is on our side. If we lived in Austria we’d help Italian fliers just the same. That’s why we don’t have a priest here: we burnt the bugger out ten years ago and since then no black-frock has dared show his nose in these parts. We’ll do the landlords next, come the revolution. Here, here’s some reading-matter for your flight.” He thrust a wad of papers into my hand: pamphlets with titles like “The Death of Property” by Proudhon and Prince Kropotkin’s “Uselessness of Laws.” There were also some copies of the newspaper La Rivolta. I glanced at the back page of one of them and saw an article entitled “Chemistry in the Home, No. 35: The Properties of Nitro-Glycerine.” “Anyway,” he said, “be on your way now before the carabinieri arrive and be thankful you landed among us and not elsewhere.”

I shook hands with him and thanked him as he stepped down to the ground and Toth revved up the engine. As we began to trundle across the field they all waved and gave us clenched-fist salutes. “Arrivederci!” the foreman shouted, “and remember, mankind will never be happy until we’ve hanged the last priest with the guts of the last king. When you get home tell your old Emperor from us that when we’ve finished with King Vittorio the Short-Arsed we’re coming for him next!”

So we climbed away from that field as the cawing rooks flapped around the poplars below us and the villagers stood waving. In the years since, I have never heard anarchists mentioned except as wolves in the guise of men: bomb tossers, assassins and enemies of the human race. Yet these were the only anarchists that I ever met in person, and I must say that they treated us with every kindness.

We landed at k.u.k. Fliegerfeld Pergine at about three that afternoon af­ter an uneventful flight, following the River Brenta as far as Bassano del Grappa then climbing over the hills and the front line until we saw the twin lakes of Caldonazzo gleaming in the distance. The Pergine fly­ing field, home of Fliegerkompagnie 7, was as rudimentary as all other airfields on the Italian Front in those days: a hummocky grass field sur­rounded by a makeshift jumble of wooden huts and canvas tent-hangars. What made it different from Caprovizza was the alarming approach along the side of a vineyard-clad mountain with a rather vulgar nineteenth- century mock-Renaissance castle half-way up. Down-draughts and ther­mals from the mountainside made us skip and bounce like a rubber ball as Toth brought us in to land.

Nor were matters at all helped by the fact that after an hour or so of relatively smooth running, the engine was beginning to misfire once more. One thing was certain: that before we flew another kilometre on our circuitous journey back to Caprovizza we would have to get the magnetoes replaced. Flying over the Alps in October would be a risky enough enterprise without having a faltering engine to contend with. As Toth taxied up to the aircraft parking area in front of the hangars (I was walking alongside to guide him since he could not see direct ahead), I had decided that I would report to the commanding officer of Flik 7, then place the aeroplane in the hands of their workshop while I telephoned Caprovizza to tell them that our mission had been successful, but that we would be getting home late.

Toth switched off the engine and climbed stiffly down from the cock­pit, red-eyed and grimy-faced after four hours in the air and three hours or so standing by in a muddy field while I filed away at the contact break­ers. He stretched his arms and yawned while I strode up the steps of the Kanzlei hut. We had fired the agreed yellow and white flares as we came in to land, but no one had watched our arrival. In fact there was nobody to be seen. Had there been an outbreak of cholera, I wondered? Had the Allies chosen the place to try out a death ray, or some devastating new poison gas that made its victims evaporate into thin air? I opened the door and entered the outer office. Still no one to be seen. I peered into the inner office just as a young Oberleutnant with an unbuttoned tunic and dangling braces caught sight of me. He made no effort to rise from his desk.

“Yes, who is it?”

I saluted smartly. “Ottokar Ritter von Prohaska, Linienshiffsleutnant of the Imperial and Royal Navy, currently attached to k.u.k. Fliegertruppe Flik 19F at Fliegerfeld Caprovizza.” He stared at me, uncomprehending. I continued. “I have the honour to report that my pilot Zugsfuhrer Toth and I have just landed after successful completion of a bombing mission against the lagoon bridge at Venice.”

He went on staring at me, as completely baffled as if I had just an­nounced my arrival from Valparaiso by way of Winnipeg.

“What are you doing here then?” I began to wonder whether I was dealing with a mental case, perhaps posted here as a convalescent after acute shell-shock. So I tried to be patient.

“We are from Flik 19F at Caprovizza and we have just carried out a bombing-raid on the city of Venice. We are here on our way home, which takes us north of the lines in the Dolomites.”

“Caprovizza? Never heard of it. Is that on the Eastern Front?”

By now I was growing more than a little irritated. “Not when I last looked. It is just outside the town of Haidenschaft.”

“Where’s that?”

I was beginning to drum my fingers on the desk. “On the Isonzo Front, in the sector held by the 7th Corps of the 5th Army. But surely you must have been expecting us: this was all arranged last week by the High Command itself?”

“Haven’t heard anything about it here; not a thing.” He rummaged be­neath an untidy heap of paper on the desk, muttering to himself as he did so. “You wouldn’t believe the amount of rubbish Divisional Headquarters sends us each week. Honestly, we need another Adjutant full-time just to sort through the circulars . . . Ah, this might be it.” He pulled out a crumpled telegram and began to read it, eyeing me suspiciously from time to time. He broke off to look out of the window, then addressed himself to me. “This says two aeroplanes. How come there’s only one of you?” “Our companion aeroplane, piloted by Oberleutnant Potocznik, de­veloped engine trouble and turned back just before we started to cross the Gulf of Trieste. I think that they must have landed safely, but I’m not sure. If you want me to find out I can ask when I telephone my base to tell them that we’ve arrived. Do you mind . . . ?” I reached for the telephone on his desk, but before I could touch it he had snatched it away.

“You can’t use the Kanzlei telephone for operator calls: the Kom- mandant’s very strict about economy—orders from Army Group Head­quarters.”

“But that’s ludicrous. I have to telephone Caprovizza or we’ll be posted missing. How am I to contact them if I can’t use your telephone?”

“Herr Kommandant says we’ve got to use letters wherever possible.” “But . . . we’ll be home long before a letter gets there.”

“Well, you could always carry it with you. Or if you’re set on telephon­ing there’s a post office down in the town.”

“Anyway, where is your commanding officer? And everyone else on this airfield, if it comes to that?”

“The Old Man’s in hospital in Trient. He got the horrors from drink­ing grappa. Keep well clear of it if you’ll take my advice: it’s foul stuff. As for the rest of them, it’s been a bad month for crashes, so we’re a bit low on aircraft and flying crew. We no sooner get a batch of stupid bastards from the flying schools than they all write themselves off on the mountainside. We’ve only got one aeroplane serviceable—an Aviatik on patrol now up Asiago way—so I thought I might as well give everyone the afternoon off, especially seeing as it’s Friday anyway.”

“I see,” I said, detecting the drift of the conversation, “so would I be right in assuming that we will get no assistance at this flying field today in replacing two worn-out magnetoes?”

“Perfectly correct: we aren’t authorised to carry out major engine re­pairs in the workshops here, and anyway we fly Lohners and Aviatiks— Hiero engines you see. Yours is a Brandenburger isn’t it?”

“How perceptive of you to have noticed, Herr Leutnant.”

“Thought so: Daimler 160. No luck I’m afraid. Flik 24 uses the other end of the field but they’ve got German Fokkers, Benz engine, so no use either.”

“So what do you suggest? We can’t stand here on your flying field until we take root.”

He yawned and swung his boots on to the desk. I was beginning to take a most intense dislike to this young man.

“Better try the Flep down in Trient, they might be able to oblige.”

I saluted and turned to leave. “Thank you for nothing then. Servitore.” “Don’t mention it. Oh, and by the way . . .”

“Yes?”

“Be a good chap and move your aeroplane; it’s blocking the entrance to our hangars.”

We moved the aeroplane across the field, Toth and I, laboriously push­ing it along by ourselves since there were no ground crew to be seen. I left Toth on his own, bidding him to leave me something from the provisions given us by the anarcho-syndicalist peasants of Busovecchio, and set off on foot for Pergine village.

I returned empty-handed. It was Friday afternoon, so the post office was closed, and anyway the entire town was shut up for some church festi­val or other, St Thuribus of Mongrevejo, or the Veneration of the Authentic Elbow of Padua or something. It was late afternoon when I trudged back, footsore and dusty. There was no help for it: we would have to get airborne once more and fly the ten or so kilometres to Fliegeretappenpark 3 on the other side of the town of Trient. So I swung the propeller once more and the engine coughed and backfired into motion, pouring out clouds of smoke as we lurched unsteadily into the evening sky.

We had some difficulty finding Flep 3 from the air and making our landing. As we did so a bespectacled major came running out to us, waving his arms, and gave me a most severe dressing-down as I sat in the cockpit, even before the propeller had stopped turning. It was strictly forbidden, he said, for aircraft to land within the perimeters of the Fliegeretappenpark without first submitting a written application and being given express per­mission. Otherwise all aircraft whatever must arrive on a railway flatbed truck or by a special aeroplane transporter wagon (horse- or motor-powered) with wings and tailplane ready dismantled. I said as politely as I could that this was an emergency landing, and that we were here until repairs could be made for the simple reason that I doubted whether the engine would start again. In the end he consented to let us talk with a staff-sergeant engine fitter in one of the workshops, saying that it was no business of his and we were to get ourselves off his site as soon as we could fly.

In complete contrast to his commanding officer, the Stabsfeldwebel could not have been more helpful to us—at any rate, so far as he was able. Which, sadly, was not very far at all. He stood looking at the naked engine after we had removed the cowling panels. He shook his head slowly.

“Sorry, Herr Leutnant, but I can’t be of any help. We haven’t got a single spare magneto in stores for a 26-series Brandenburger.”

“But that’s ridiculous: the 160hp Austro-Daimler must be the most widely used engine in the entire Imperial and Royal Flying Service.”

“Not around here it isn’t, Herr Leutnant. The Brandenburger Fliks in the 11th Army sector use Mercedes 160s, on account of the mountains. They reckon the Mercedes is slower accelerating but a bit better at altitude. The trouble is that they use Bosch magnetoes, and this batch of Austro- Daimlers use Zoelly. And anyway . . .” (he glanced at his watch) “. . . it’s half-past five already—sorry, 1730 hours—so my lads couldn’t help you now even if we had anything in stores.”

“Why ever not?”

“Sorry, Herr Leutnant, but it’s a Friday and they all went off duty half an hour or more ago.”

“Gone home? But this is monstrous. What about duty-men? God damn it, man, there’s a war on: the Front’s not twenty kilometres south of here.”

He looked at me for some time: the sad, mildly reproachful gaze of one who has no time for such juvenile follies. He was a solid, calm, kindly- looking man in his early fifties, with the air about him of a watchmaker; or the sort of cobbler whom you almost feel the urge to thank when he tells you that he can’t have your dress-uniform boots ready for the gala on Thursday after all on account of how you just can’t get the leather these days.

“War or no war, Herr Leutnant, you won’t get them working shifts here. This is an aircraft-repair park so it would rate as a rear echelon even if the Italians were just across the fence. The men work peacetime hours here and go home early Fridays.”

“What the devil do you mean, peacetime hours? We’ve just come from an extremely dangerous mission over Venice in broad daylight. I’ve just been counting the bullet holes and I’ve got up to fifty-seven already. And while we’ve been getting our backsides shot at your men have been pushing off early!”

He nodded in agreement, utterly incapable of being provoked to anger. “Fair point, Herr Leutnant, fair point: there’s a lot in what you say, I don’t deny that. But the fact is, all my men here are reservists—1860 class, one or two of them—who’ve had nothing to do with the Army for thirty-odd years, then got called up. They’re in uniform, but they’ll be blowed if they’re going to keep army hours. Half of them are local men anyway and have families down in the town.”

“What about military discipline?”

“Oh, Herr Leutnant, Herr Leutnant. We get little enough work out of them as it is, and if I started coming the old eiserne Diszipline mallarkey here we’d get none at all. Military discipline my arse, if you’ll pardon the expression: you can’t get skilled engine fitters for love nor money now, so I have to keep them on a loose rein if I want to get anything done at all. As it is they’re on army pay, which is about a quarter what they’d be getting if they were in the munitions factories. Anyway . . .” (he adjusted his spectacles and turned to me), “if you like I can take out those contact breakers myself and clean them up a bit for you. That’d at least get you up the valley to Gardolo. If I remember rightly they’ve got a few old Aviatiks up there with Flik 17. They’ve got Austro-Daimler 160s, so they might have a couple of magnetoes lying around in stores.”

In the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe one word that was in constant use in those years was the noun “Kraxe,” derived from the verb “kraxeln,” which is Austro-German for “clamber up” but which had become fliers’ slang for a pile-up on landing. It was something that happened with depress­ing frequency around Haidenschaft, with the mountains towering above and savage, unpredictable winds whipping down the side valleys. Yet of all the flying fields of the South-West Front I think that none could have been more perfectly designed for kraxelling than Fliegerfeld Gardolo, some kilometres up the Adige valley from Trient. In the gathering dark­ness the landing at Fliegerfeld Gardolo was even more alarming than that at Pergine. The airfield lay in the narrow valley bottom with the walls of mountain soaring almost sheer on both sides for a thousand metres or more, so that landing was rather like touching down in a vast horse trough. On balance I was glad of the gathering dusk, in that I was at least spared the horror of seeing the precipices looming above us as we lined up to land. I thought that we had had it just as we reached the edge of the flying field. An eddying back-draught of wind off the mountainsides had created a sort of air-hollow, into which we suddenly dropped ten metres or more like a house-brick, to the sound of a great squeal of anguish from the wings. It took all Toth’s skill to bring us level again before the wheels bumped the ground.

But when we had landed safely we found that we might as well not have bothered. True, Flik 17 had a number of Aviatik two-seaters on the strength with 160hp Austro-Daimler engines. But, like Flik 19F, they had not seen a new magneto in months. All that they could suggest was that we stayed overnight with them and took off again in the morning to fly further up the valley to Feldfliegerschule 2 at Neumarkt, where they sus­pected there might be some magnetoes in the stores, because the school had once had a couple of pensioned-off Brandenburgers from an earlier series, but had recently written them both off in the course of flying lessons. We thanked them, staked our aeroplane down for the night (a chill wind was already moaning down the valley), then ate a most welcome meal with them in their mess hut before bedding down in a stores tent. Tomorrow was Saturday.