The Two-Headed Eagle

14 SUNDAY MOUNTAINEER

It was drizzling when we got up: thin rain turning to sleet. We refuelled at Gardolo after breakfast. We could not use Flit 17’s petrol without a requisition signed by no less than three officers of a rank of Major or above. These were finally found for us at a neighbouring supply depot. They signed the forms for us with every sign of irritation be­fore driving away in a pre-war sports car with luggage and two rather nice- looking army nurses in the back: off (we were told) for a couple of days touring in the Tyrol on a tank filled, no doubt, with government petrol. I could only hope that it stayed fine for them. As for Toth and me and our bullet-riddled, faltering aeroplane, it was yet another leg of our miserable begging-tour of the airfields and supply depots of the South Tyrol.

In the course of a half-century or more spent in the armed services I have often had cause to remark upon the fact that, among the military, comradeship, honour and kindliness all decrease the further one gets from the front line. In my younger days I would often wonder why this should be; but it was only with time that it gradually dawned upon me that it is precisely those qualities of honesty, selflessness and courage that tend to land men in the firing line—and their opposites that facilitate the wangling of safe little jobs in the rear. The truth of the matter is that two world wars were, for Europe, nothing but a vast experiment in negative Darwinism, in which the best died and the worst survived to breed.

Nowhere was this more apparent to me than at Fliegeretappenpark St Jakob repair workshops located just outside 11th Army Headquarters at Bozen and specially attached to the army divisions in the Tyrol. We arrived there mid-morning after finding that the Feflisch at Neumarkt could be no help whatever, having just closed down for half-term. The Kommandant was anything but pleased to have two flying mendicants turn up at his door on a Saturday morning in a consumptive aeroplane, one of them a naval lieutenant and the other an apparently cretinous Magyar NCO.

“This repair park is strictly for machines from units on the Tyrolean Front, do you hear?” he shouted, waving a cane at us as we formed up be­neath the balcony of the ex-Gasthof that housed the unit offices. “We’re attached directly to 11th Army Command and we aren’t here to offer repairs to any vagrants who happen by. Go on, be off with you, I say! No, I don’t care a copper farthing what General-Oberst Boroevic will say: General-Oberst Boroevic is on the Isonzo Front, not here, and as far as I’m concerned he might as well be in Patagonia. I don’t care if you do either, you insolent bugger. Just clear off back where you came from—you and your pet monkey.”

Utterly dejected, we ambled back around the workshops—deserted and locked for the weekend—to where our aeroplane stood. There was no hope whatever of going on now, even if we had anywhere left to go. No, we would just have to abandon the aeroplane and make our way back to Caprovizza by train—perhaps even riding on the roofs of goods wagons, since I had barely ten kronen left in my trouser pockets. For God’s sake, were we in the same army as these people or weren’t we? If the Italians had captured us at Busovecchio they could scarcely have treated us worse. All that we had to eat now was the leftovers from the food that the villag­ers had given us. Toth sat miserably beneath a wing on the wet grass as I removed the engine cowling panels yet again to see if anything could be done with the magnetoes.

As I had suspected, they were past praying for, except perhaps via St Jude the Patron of Hopeless Cases. The contact-breaker electrodes had now worn away and honeycombed to the point of disintegration. As I tinkered I suddenly heard a voice over my shoulder, speaking in heavily accented German.

“Excuse, Excellence, but wad kin’ of engine is dat?”

I turned around to find myself looking at a Russian prisoner of war, one of the many employed about the supply bases here in the Tyrol as porters and labourers. He was leaning on his broom and looking with intense interest at what I was doing: in his early twenties I would have thought, with a wide, honest, slightly Asiatic face and wearing a peaked cap and khaki blouse. I answered in Russian, which I was able to speak fairly well from Polish.

“An Austro-Daimler 160hp, soldier. But why the interest?”

“Oh, it’s nothing, High-Born One. It’s just that before the war I was an apprentice at the Putilov Works in St Petersburg, and I used to work on Daimler engines. We were building them under licence: the 80hp kind for motor cars. They’re the same as this one only a bit smaller. But those contact breakers of yours are done for.”

“Thank you, but I had gathered that.”

“Can I have a look at one?” I handed him the corroded electrodes and he examined them carefully. “Of course,” he said, “I could make you some like these if I had the tools. It’s not much of a job. I used to do things like that for my apprenticeship tests.”

“What’s your name?”

“Trofimov, Excellency: Arkady Feodorovich, Junior Corporal, 3rd Battery, 258th Regiment of Field Artillery. I got captured at Lutsk in the summer. There’s about twenty of us here, mostly Siberians.”

“Do they treat you well?”

“Well enough, Excellency. The food here’s no worse than in Russia and the local people are all right. They don’t give me anything interesting to do though, only sweeping up and collecting salvage.”

“What do you mean, interesting?”

“Work as a motor mechanic. I’ve offered to be the Herr Kommand- ant’s driver but he only laughs and slaps me round the head and calls me an ignorant peasant from the steppes. But honestly, I could do the job much better than most of the people here.” His eyes suddenly pleaded with me. “Let me have a go at those contacts at least. I could do you a replacement set in an afternoon if I could get some files and a vice and a grinding wheel.”

So I took Lance-Corporal Trofimov up on his kind offer. True, the workshops were locked up for the weekend. But Toth had acquired a number of strange skills in his seminary, apart from that of seducing nuns in marrow-beds, and one of these was the picking of locks. Before long Trofimov was at work in a shed, singing to himself as he filed away and the grinding wheel screeched and sparked. By the end of the afternoon he had fashioned us two perfect sets of contact-breaker electrodes; and not only that but replaced them, reset the magneto timing and removed and cleaned the sparking plugs. They were test-running the engine when I returned from Bozen carrying a large ham sausage which I had bought for Trofimov as a present with my remaining ten kronen. He was pleased, but was more anxious that I should recommend him for a vehicle fitter’s course. I said that I thought this might cause problems under the Hague Convention, but I promised to see what could be done.

“You see, Excellency,” he said earnestly, “this war’s not going to go on for ever, and when I get home I’m going to help build a new Russia: a Russia of the twentieth century, with motor cars and aeroplanes and electricity. I’ve taught myself to read since I’ve been here, you know.”

I often wonder whether he got home after the war, and what hap­pened to him later.

We spent the night at St Jakob, lying on the field under the aeroplane’s wing, sheltered against the unseasonable chill only by our blankets and an old tarpaulin procured for us by the Russians. The Kommandant had returned from Bozen unexpectedly that evening and had caught us in the workshop. We told him that the door had been open, but we could see that he did not believe us. He kicked us out, then locked up the hut and posted a sentry with instructions to fire if he saw anyone trying to break in again. For good measure he ordered us to be on our way at first light next morning, saying that he was running a base repair unit and not a hostel for tramps.

We woke and breakfasted on bread and tea supplied us by the Russians, who seemed delightfully free of petty prejudices on the matter of nation­ality. They even made us packed lunches to take with us, and provided us with an old winebottle full of “samgonka,” a probably lethal home-made vodka distilled from mashed potatoes. All they asked in return were some old newspapers. Puzzled, I asked why. After all, most of them looked illiterate even in Russian, and all that I had was an old copy of the Triester An%eiger which someone had left in the cockpit. No matter, they said: they only wanted it for rolling cigarettes from the foul-smelling tobacco which they grew for themselves on the airfield. I asked whether they would prefer proper cigarette papers? I was a smoker myself and had a few boxes in my jacket pockets. No, they said; newspapers had more flavour, on account of the ink.

After breakfast we washed, shaved and smartened ourselves up, more for reasons of morale than of appearance. It was a good thing that we did, however, for just as we had climbed into the cockpit and were about to signal to Arkady Feodorovich to swing the propeller (a privilege which he had wheedled out of me), we heard the distant honking of a car horn. We turned to see the Herr Kommandant running across the field towards us, followed some way behind by a large, open motor car.

“Stop, stop!” he shouted. “Wait a moment if you please!” He was panting fit to choke by the time he reached us, to a degree where a heart attack looked imminent. “Herleutnanteinmomentbitte!” he gasped, “. . . if you please . . . just wait a moment . . .”

I must say that after our reception the day before I was in no mood to be polite.

“Herr Major,” I replied coldly, “a letter thanking you for the particular warmth of your hospitality will be sent to you when we get back to our base. In the mean time, if you think that we are trying to leave without paying the bill I can show you the receipt.”

“No . . . No . . . There is something most important. Please to wait a moment . . . I shall explain.” The motor car was close enough now for me to see that it was no ordinary army staff car but the very plushest, most sumptuous vehicle that one could hope to find in that category, short of the Emperor’s limousine itself. It was a beautiful sleek Mercedes of the very finest pre-war make, though now painted over in khaki drab. In the back were two very high-ranking officers indeed. Toth and I scrambled out to stand by our aeroplane at the salute. Could it be an archduke? No, there was no black-and-yellow eagle-pennant on the mudguard. An orderly opened the door and the two officers got down. One was a general, the other a full field marshal: a smallish, slim man in his early sixties with grey hair and a moustache in which traces of blond still showed, and with a nervous, rather irritable air about him. This, I realised, was none other than Field Marshal Franz Conrad, Freiherr von Hotzendorf, Commander- in-Chief of the entire Austro-Hungarian armed forces. As he walked up to me I saw that he had a constant faint twitch running from the corner of his mouth to his left eye. He surveyed me for a moment, then smiled. “Stand easy,” he said. “What’s your name?”

“Prohaska, Excellency. Ottokar, Ritter von Prohaska, k.u.k. Linien- schiffsleutnant.”

“Aha, a sailor. Of course, you’re the Maria-Theresien Ritter aren’t you? The one who commanded a U-Boat and then got bored with it and took up flying. How are you enjoying it? ”

“I obediently report that I enjoy it well enough, Excellency,” I said, lying in my teeth as prescribed by regulations.

“Splendid, splendid. Well Prohaska, I’ve got a little errand here that’s right up the street of a man of your calibre. Can I rely upon you?”

“You may rely absolutely upon Zugsfuhrer Toth and myself, Excel­lency.” I saw that he looked rather doubtful about that when he saw Toth, but he said nothing.

“Well Prohaska, I have here a despatch-case of documents for you to deliver for me: papers of such importance that they must be flown direct to their destination in conditions of the utmost secrecy by a courier of the greatest courage and integrity. That is why we have chosen you.”

“I obediently report that I am flattered by your confidence in me, Excellency, and I shall guard these documents with my very life. But might I enquire where you wish them delivered?”

“You were flying to Villach, were you not? That is what the Herr Kommandant told us when we asked if there was an aeroplane ready to take off.”

“I obediently report, to Villach.”

“Well, I want you to fly a little further than that: in fact all the way to Imperial and Royal Supreme Headquarters in Teschen.” This was indeed quite a journey: Teschen was on the very northeastern edge of the Monarchy, quite near to my own home town on the borders of Prussian Silesia. “It should take you about four hours, my staff officer assures me, but if you could make it shorter I would be grateful. You are to make your way up to Brixen and then follow the valley to Lienz, where you can cross over into the Mur valley and fly down to Vienna before heading across Moravia. You will refuel at Judenburg, and during that stop you are on no account to leave the aeroplane, do you understand? When you arrive at Teschen flying field, for reasons of secrecy a lady will be waiting with a staff officer in a green Graef und Stift motor car to collect the documents. In the event of your being forced down by engine failure or other mishap on the way you will keep the documents with you at all times to prevent them from falling into unauthorised hands. This whole mission, I need hardly stress, is so secret that not even our own people must know about it, except for those who need to know. Is that all clear?”

“Perfectly clear, Excellency.”

“Good then, fill up your tanks with petrol and be on your way at once. Austria flies with you.” He turned to leave.

As he did so the base Kommandant bowed and bobbed his way up to him. “Excellency, if you please, your signature will be required upon these petrol requisition forms. Aviation fuel provided for this unit cannot be supplied without authorisation . . .”

“Damn you and your bureaucratic pettifogging—fill the aeroplane up or you’ll find yourself in the front line before you can draw breath.” As if to underline what he had just said, Conrad took the proffered sheaf of forms and flung them contemptuously over his shoulder to scatter in the mud. “Furthermore, imbecile, I wish you to be aware that this flight is of such secrecy that there must be no record of it whatever in the airfield logbook, is that clear? Try to pay more attention to what your superiors say to you in future.” And with that he turned and got into the car without say­ing a further word to any of us and without giving a single wave or even a backward glance. I supposed that the cares of the supreme direction of the Monarchy’s military effort for two long years must excuse such behaviour, which in anyone else would be considered plain rudeness.

We took off just before 0800. It was not going to be an easy flight by any means, with the weather coming down over the Alps, but it should still not be too arduous. We would by flying along mountain valleys most of the way, and beyond Vienna the country would open out into the plains of Moravia. I thought that it might take about five hours, weather per­mitting and inclusive of the stop for refuelling at Judenburg. My spirits rose as we climbed away from Bozen. We had been specially selected to undertake a vital mission to deliver despatches—perhaps even plans of attack for a grand war-winning offensive—which might decide the fate of the Monarchy. The gravity of our task and our pride at being chosen for it gave a keen sense of urgency to the proceedings, especially after two miserable days of creeping from depot to depot like vagrants beg­ging cigarette ends.

But quite apart from that it was a marvellous jaunt in itself, a sudden and totally unexpected break from the routine business of wartime flying. The engine was purring like a well-fed cat, the tank was full of petrol and the sun had at last broken through the clouds to reveal the full autumn glory of the Dolomites before us. Even the aeroplane seemed to sense the mood, climbing with us like Pegasus. And of course, not the least of the reasons for a certain high spirits was that when we arrived back at Caprovizza sometime on Monday, a whole two days late, I would be able to confront the odious Kraliczek with a smug smile and say, “Sorry, Herr Kommandant, can’t tell you where we’ve been: secret orders from the High Command and all that. You had better ring up the Commander-in- Chief if you want further details.” Let me see now, if we arrived at Teschen about 1300 hours and waited half an hour to refuel they could not reason­ably expect us to get back to Caprovizza that evening, not in mid-October. Elisabeth was staying with my aunt in Vienna now. I smiled to myself as I imagined her delighted surprise a few hours hence when the housemaid Franzi would usher me in, still wearing my flying kit, stopping off for an unexpected overnight visit.

Toth and I had conferred briefly about the route just before we took off from St Jakob. I had indicated the line on the map and he had nodded and grunted his assent. But now I saw that we were deviating from our course, heading more to the south to fly over the northern edge of the Brenta Dolomites and cut off the corner where the Rienz flows into the Eisack, just north of Brixen. No matter, I thought: these mountains were low—about 2,500 metres or so. The aeroplane was maintaining her alti­tude with no trouble and we would save a good few kilometres, picking up the railway line as planned at Bruneck or Toblach. I looked southward to see the great massif of the Marmolada, Queen of the Dolomites, looming on the horizon with her permanent lace cap of snow: so vast that I could make out no sign whatever of the trench lines and belts of barbed wire that now scarred the summit.

It was only after we had been flying for twenty minutes or so that I began to have misgivings about Toth’s choice of route. Away to northward an indigo cliff of stormclouds was bearing down on us, its sunlit upper edges that curious orange-brown colour that betokens snow. It was mov­ing fast, blotting out mountain peak after mountain peak of the High Alps to the north of the Rienz valley. I leant out into the rushing wind to look ahead—and saw to my dismay that, while the storm had not yet reached us, it was only because it was advancing in a deep crescent shape, with its two horns cutting off our escape both to west and to east. We could not fly under it because of the mountains, we could certainly not fly over it, and we could no longer avoid it by flying around it. Our only line of retreat now was to turn around and fly due south—straight towards the Italian lines with a pouch of ultra-secret documents on board. No. I swallowed hard; duty left only one course open: we would have to try to fly through it, hoping that it was only a line storm and that we would emerge on the other side before we ran into a mountain-top.

The edge of the storm hit us like a moving brick wall, flicking us and dashing us down again in the violent turbulence at its edge. Toth struggled with the control column to bring us level again as we buried ourselves in the swirling eerie murk inside the cloud. I was right: it was snow, the first of that early and bitter winter. It was wet stuff, but thick and mixed with freezing rain. We had taken a compass bearing before we entered the clouds, but it was hopeless: before long any sense of up and down and sideways had been lost and jumbled, however desperately we checked the spirit-levels to try and judge our angle. Sometimes the curtains of snow were falling down: sometimes they seemed to be falling upwards. Or was it us moving relative to them? I could no longer tell, wiping the snowflakes off my goggles as demon air currents inside the cloud attempted to pull our fragile aeroplane to pieces.

I wiped the snow off my goggles once more and peered over Toth’s shoulder at the altimeter in the dim yellow light. Holy Mother of God! We had lost nearly a thousand metres already. I looked up at the wings—and at once saw why. A thick crust of ice was forming on the doped canvas. Toth stood up in the cockpit with the control column gripped between his knees and tried to bang it loose with his fists. I scrambled out over the cockpit edge in the howling slipstream, too frightened to be afraid any longer, and kicked desperately at the ice on the lower wing with the heel of my boot. It cracked, and sheets flew away astern. But it was hopeless: fresh ice formed almost as soon as the old had gone, stuck to the wings by the freezing rain. We were coming down, but where? I peered out into the swirling sheets of snow, billowing like theatre curtains in a wind. At last the air cleared a little. I saw a dark smother beyond. Perhaps it was mountain forest in the distance, glimpsed through a chink in the cloud. I looked again—and realised aghast that it was indeed a mountain side: sheer naked rock-face hurtling past about four metres from our port wing- tip! Toth saw it as well and lugged at the column to bank us away. At that moment the clouds chose to part to let the sunlight pour through.

These might well be the last moments of our lives, but I still caught my breath at the vision of unearthly splendour as the sun streamed through the eddying snow to reveal where we were; flying along a high mountain valley surrounded on every side by vast precipices and snow-covered pin­nacles so fantastically shaped that any stage-set designer who had repro­duced them would have been denounced as a madman. But we had to land. I leant out and looked below. We were only ten or fifteen metres above a level, smooth-white surface: perhaps a high mountain pasture covered in the first of the winter snow, I thought. Well, there was no choice: a sheer wall of rock towered a few kilometres ahead of us, so high that it would have taken us half an hour to climb over it even in calm weather. The snowstorm would soon close in again. It was now or never. I signalled to Toth to come down. He nodded. But amid the crazed vortices in the heart of the storm it was impossible even for such a pilot as Toth to maintain our height: in the end we managed a landing of the kind described by my old flying instructors as “ground three metres too low”: in other words dropping out of the air on the last part of the landing to belly-flop on the ground.

It was no mountain meadow under snow: we discovered that the mo­ment our undercarriage touched and was ripped off. It was a glacier, its jagged, rasping surface of ice-lumps temporarily smoothed out by feathery, drifting snow into an illusory flat sheet. We skidded along it for perhaps fifty metres before coming to a halt: us two and what was left of the aero­plane after each ice-claw had torn off its portion. It seemed to last several minutes, even though I suppose that it must have been no more than a few seconds. I came around smothered in snow and scalded by water hissing from the fractured radiator tubes. All was deathly quiet now apart from the moaning of the wind. It was snowing again. I picked myself up from on top of Toth’s still form on the cockpit floor. The forward bulkhead had collapsed and the engine had been smashed back into the crew space to join us. I checked myself limb by limb. I was shaken and badly bruised and suspected a couple of cracked ribs, but otherwise everything seemed to work. I dragged Toth out. He was alive but unconscious, bleeding pro­fusely from a gash on his forehead. I found the first-aid kit and bandaged the wound after making a compress of snow to reduce the bleeding. Then I found the bottle of samogon given us by the Russians and uncorked it to trickle a few drops on to his tongue. This brought him back to con­sciousness as brutally as if I had stuck a red-hot poker into his mouth. He moaned something, badly concussed. I tried to move him and he howled with pain. Both his ankles were broken. I found the blankets and wrapped him up as best I could, then took the saw from the tool kit and hacked off the upper wings at the roots to make a rough shelter over him. Then I huddled up with him to keep him warm and myself out of the snow.

It must have been about three hours before it let up. The sky cleared and the sun shone once more to reveal that we were in one of the very highest valleys of the Dolomites, way above the snowline and far from human help. I had to go and get assistance. Luckily I had done quite a lot of mountaineering in my youth when my brother Anton and I were junior officers, back in the days when ample leave made up in some degree for our miserable salaries. I knew in particular that I must not attempt to fol­low the glacier down to wherever it went, winding out of sight among the peaks: my brother and I had both nearly perished on the Oetztal glacier in 1908 when we had attempted something similar. No, I must leave Toth and head for the edge of the glacier, then climb the rock-face of the valley side and get over the ridge into the next valley, which might be deeper and extend below the snowline.

I was loath to leave him, still dazed and confused. But in the end I brought our remaining supplies up to him, gave him a half-syringe of morphine from the first-aid kit and put together a flare made from the hacked-open fuel tank filled with sump oil and petrol and with a wick of rag for him to light if he heard an aeroplane above. Surely we would have been missed at Judenburg by now. I also moved up the machine gun near him, cocked it and told him to fire it if he heard searchers. For myself I took the aeroplane compass and the rocket pistol. Before I left I assured Toth as best I could in my execrable school-Latin that he would soon be rescued: that the Dolomites were really not much more than a mountain park criss-crossed with paths, where even maiden aunts could come “rock- climbing” in their long loden skirts and little hats with the cord around the brim. As I set off I wished that I felt as confident as I sounded about the suburban tameness of this particular Alpine range.

I took the greatest care crossing the glacier, probing gingerly in front of me with a broken wooden strut. Even so I slipped into a small crevasse at one point and spent five or so terror-filled minutes dragging myself back over the edge, lying exhausted on the ice with wildly beating heart before I was able to get up and go on. But at last I reached the edge of the glacier, a chaotic jumble of ice-blocks and fallen boulders where the mountainside and the billions of tonnes of ice had spent millennia grind­ing against one another. The climb up the rock-face must have taken me a good hour and a half. My flying-boots had smooth soles and the first of the winter’s snow was making the crags slippery, while the wind- eddies tried their best to pluck me from the cliff as I panted in the thin air. Then at last, after an infinity of scrambling and clawing, I found my­self on the saw edge of the ridge, perhaps a thousand metres above the glacier, where I could just make out the wreck of the aeroplane lying in the snow. I peered over the edge, fearful that I would find nothing but another glacier. But no; I was looking down into a deep valley: so much deeper than the one that I had just climbed out of that dark blue-green forests of pine grew in it below the snowline. I could see no sign of human habitation, but in the Dolomites forests meant trackways, and trackways led to villages. All that I had to do now was descend and follow the moun­tain streams down to safety. I took one last look at the wreck below, to fix its position in my mind so that I could guide the rescue party. Then I began the descent.

I had often noticed when mountaineering that coming downhill is usually far more arduous than going up. In this case the going was par­ticularly tough because the rock-faces were mostly north-facing and were still festooned with loose and highly dangerous patches of rotten ice from last winter, treacherously masked by a light veil of fresh snow. It took me upwards of three hours to get down to the treeline. As I neared it, sliding down a rock scree and across snow patches, I paused. It was hu­man voices. Quickly I fumbled a red flare into the rocket pistol and fired it into the air. Then I saw them, among the small trees at the edge of the forest. I ran down towards them, slithering in the snow and shouting to attract their attention. They turned and stopped. It was only as I got to within perhaps twenty meters of them that I stopped too. They were soldiers, in peaked caps with snow-goggles and with pairs of skis slung on their backs with their rifles. But there was something not quite right about the cut of the grey uniforms; also a rather un-Austrian swarthiness about their features. I stopped and we stared at one another as the awful truth dawned upon me: that these were not Landeschutzen as I had in­nocently supposed, but Italian Alpini.

Various thoughts raced through my brain in those few seconds. We were effectively prisoners of war now, but at least Toth would be rescued swiftly when the Italians sent up a search party. Anyway, I had to get food and rest for a while. My leather flying overalls were wet through from snow, heavy and clammy to feel. Nor had I eaten since that morning. I was in such a state that quite frankly I would have surrendered myself to a tribe of cannibals if they had been prepared to give me a place by the fire and some food before eating me. But then, quite suddenly, a chilling realisa­tion struck me: the secret papers! The entire fate of the Monarchy might depend upon them. If the Italians found Toth they would also find the aeroplane, and would certainly find the pouch of documents which I had entrusted to his care when I left him. No, I must try to confuse them: play for time, then escape if I could and get back to our lines—which surely could not be far away—and get a search party sent up from our side. What could the life of my pilot weigh against the whole Austro-Hungarian war effort? A higher duty beckoned.

The patrol leader was a sergeant: a dark, sharp-featured young man who spoke with the characteristic accent of the South Tyrolean valleys, where many of the local people in those days still used a strange patois of Latin called Ladinisch. He pushed up his goggles and regarded me suspiciously.

“Aviatore austriaco? Osterreichischer Flieger?”

“No, no,” I replied, “sono aviatore italiano.”

“Why did you shout to us in German then?”

“I thought that you must be an Austrian patrol. I’m lost and I thought that I must have come down behind their lines. But thank God I’m still on our side.”

“Who are you and from which airfield?”

“Tenente-Pilota Giuseppe Falzari, Squadriglia 27a at Feltre flying field. I was flying a Savoia-Pomilio but got lost in a snowstorm and had the engine cut out. I managed to land somewhere up there on a pasture in the snow, but I’ve no idea where I am now. I’ve been wandering all day and had to cross a glacier.”

He looked puzzled. “Funny. We got a telephone call to go up and look for a crashed aeroplane, but that was an SP2 from San Vittorio with two men on board. There must have been some mistake. But anyway, we’ve found you now wherever it was that you flew from, so let’s get you down the mountain. Can you walk?”

“Yes, yes, no trouble. I came out of the landing unhurt. But I’m very tired so I would be glad if you walked slowly.”

The patrol was based at a rifugio: a small wooden climber’s hut perched precariously on the edge of a snow-covered precipice on the chilly north face of the mountain, about two thousand metres up. It was barely big enough to hold the ten men and their equipment, but it had a stone hearth and log fire blazing most invitingly as I entered. Before long my wet leather overalls were steaming gently as I sat by the fire devouring a bowl of spaghetti with some cheese crumbled over it. A delicious and almost forgotten smell of real coffee pervaded the hut from the enamel pot brewing in the embers. It would have been a little heaven on earth after the cold and wet and exhaustion—had it not been for the conscious­ness of Toth lying up there on the glacier with two broken ankles and night drawing on, with a leather pouch of top-secret documents resting beneath his head.

There was also the more pressing problem of my host, Sergente Agorda. He was a talkative man, and not only talkative but unpleasantly inquisitive, with sharp eyes and (I found to my dismay) a detective’s instinct for the small inconsistencies in people’s stories. My Italian was convincing enough to pass muster, I knew; the problem was rather that of making up a plausible life history for myself as I went along. The Sergeant’s men were not too much trouble: to my surprise, most of them were not Tyroleans but came from the Abruzzi or even further south. But Agorda himself was a tougher proposition. He was a local man—his peacetime job had been as a mountain guide in Cortina d’Ampezzo—but he had travelled widely enough in northern Italy to be able to pick me up on more than one detail of my story.

“We’ve been using this rifugio as a base all summer,” he said, pouring me a steaming tin mug of coffee, “but we’re going to have to move down the mountain in a few weeks I reckon. The snow’s early this year and they all say it’s going to be a hard winter.”

“Has there been much fighting up here?”

“Not a great deal so far. There’s been a lot going on down in the Tofane and the Marmolada these past few months, quite heavy some of it. But for the time being it looks like neither our generals nor the Austrians want these mountains badly enough to do any serious fighting over them.”

“Where are the lines? Are they far from here?”

He laughed. “Lines? There’s no lines up here, any more than there are for you fellows up in the air. The Austrians are over the other side of the massif and we’re over here and so far it’s been skirmishes most of the time. Sometimes their artillery chucks a few shells over and we chuck a few back, but mostly it’s patrols taking a few shots at one another up among the cols. We lost two men back in March when the bastards brought a machine gun up on a sledge, but we ambushed them the next month and killed three of them, so it’s about quits at the moment. Funny thing really, but we know most of them, the Landeschutzen I mean. In fact some of our local men and some of theirs are cousins and brothers-in- law. Crazy really: fighting over mountains when the mountains could wipe out the lot of us if they chose.” He topped up my mug of coffee. “That happened last spring over on Monte Cristallo, you know? There were two companies shooting it out on the mountainside with their rifles. Then some stupid sod tossed a hand-grenade and that started an avalanche and neither our lot nor the Austrians have been heard of since. No, Tenente, if you’ve earned your living up here as a guide then believe me you treat the mountains with a bit of respect.” He paused and stoked the fire. “But that’s enough about us, Tenente, what about yourself? Have you been long in the Corpo Aereo? ”

“Eighteen months, almost.”

“What were you in before, if I might ask?”

“The cavalry.” I adjusted the collar of my still tightly buttoned leather flying jacket to conceal the naval officer’s jacket underneath.

“Which regiment?”

“Er . . . the Aosta Dragoons.” This seemed a good choice: in 1916 a very high proportion of flying officers in all the air forces of Europe had come from the cavalry, tired of sitting behind the lines and waiting for the breakthrough that would never happen.

“Aosta Dragoons? But you come from the Veneto don’t you?”

I could hardly deny this: the Habsburg Navy had been entirely Italian­speaking until the 1850s and the version of the language taught in the Marine Academy had been the soft, lilting Venetian dialect which one used to hear in those days all the way down the Adriatic coast as far as Corfu. This man’s questions were becoming impertinent, but I sensed that it would be unwise to—how do you say?—pull rank and tell him to mind his own business.

“Yes, from Pordenone if you must know. My father was a wine mer­chant there.” I saw at once that I would regret this lie. His face brightened.

“Ah, from Pordenone? I know it well. I have cousins there. But on which street, if I might ask?”

“The Strada della Liberta.”

“Which number? ”

I swallowed hard. I was not enjoying this game at all. “Number twenty-seven.”

“Then you’ll remember old Ernesto the drunkard and his wife. Were you there when it happened? ”

Mother of God, help me, I thought.

“No, should I have been?”

“That’s odd then: it was all over the papers when they found her buried in the cellar.”

“I was away at military college at the time: I only heard about it later.” “At military academy? They must have sent you there young then. It was about 1892 or 1893. She was a cousin on my mother’s side. But if your father was a wine merchant he must have been a member of the Guild.” “The Guild? ”

“The Guild. Surely you know about that affair? The Guild of San Salvatore: all the wine-trade people were in it. They were making wine out of horse-beans with logwood and sulphuric acid. A lot of them went to jail when people started dying from it. The whole of Italy must have heard of it.” He got up. “Here, let’s put another log on the fire, shall we? It’s perishing cold in here.”

In fact, far from being perishing cold, the interior of the hut was like a Turkish bath. I divined now what the game was: to force me to open my flying jacket and reveal the uniform underneath, without the risk of being put on a charge of insubordination if he simply ordered me to open it and I turned out to be an Italian officer after all. It was a cunning ruse: inside my flying overalls I was already beginning to feel little rivulets of sweat trickling down my body. Agorda stuck another couple of logs on the blaz­ing fire, sending a blast of sparks up the chimney. He turned to me.

“Tenente, wouldn’t you like to remove that flying suit? You’ll catch a chill sitting there in damp leather.”

In the end I tried to gain some relief from the stifling heat by remov­ing my overall trousers and belt. I was wearing field-grey breeches and puttees which I hoped would look indeterminate-coloured enough in their sweat-soaked state to pass for Italian uniform. As I placed them on the table the Sergeant took the belt and the holster attached to it and removed the pistol inside. “Where did you get this Steyr pistol, Tenente?”

“I picked it upon the Isonzo last year and decided to keep it. It’s bet­ter than our issue.” This was nonsense and he must have known it: the 9mm Steyr pistol must have been one of the most substandard military firearms ever devised. I only carried mine because regulations required it—and to put a bullet through my head if need be to escape death by fire. He examined it.

“Nice piece of work. But these overalls—did you capture them from the Austrians as well? Ours are black, not brown, and they have a fur lining. I know because we had to go up last month to bring down the body of one of our fliers. But don’t you want to take the jacket off?”

“No, no thank you. These jackets have to dry on the body, otherwise they get stiff.” I realised that if I did not make my escape now it would soon be too late. “Sergente, I must go outside—you understand.”

“Ah yes, the latrine’s out along the path there. I’ve kept it swept of snow.”

I made my way out into the air. Its chill was like a slap in the face after the smothering warmth inside the rifugio. It was snowing again and beginning to get dark. I looked about me in the swirling flakes, know­ing full well that several keen pairs of eyes were watching my every move from inside the hut. Damn it! The skis had been locked away in a shed. I would have to find some other means of escape. I made my way to the rickety privy and shut the door. It was a sheet-metal box like an enlarged biscuit tin perched precariously on a creaking wooden frame above a slope of snow falling away to invisibility in the murk below. What was I to do? Only the back of the privy was invisible from the hut. I tried the back wall, above the board with a hole in it which served as the seat. A sheet of tinplate was loose. Slowly and carefully I worked it free and pulled it out. Snowflakes came pouring in through the gap. It was about a metre and a half long by perhaps three-quarters of a metre across. It might be worth a try. I placed it on the seat, stood on it and bent the front edge upwards to make a crude toboggan. I had my leather gauntlets in my pockets, so I put them on to save my hands from being cut to pieces by the edge of the metal. It seemed like suicide: for all I knew the slope below might run down into the darkness, then turn into a five-hundred-metre sheer drop. I stood on the seat holding the makeshift sledge in front of me, trying to nerve myself to jump. Suddenly the door rattled.

“Tenente, are you in there? Open this door and come out with your hands above your head or I shoot at the count of ten. Uno, due, tre . . .” I quickly said the Act of Contrition—then launched myself into space.

The belly-landing on the filthy snow beneath knocked the breath out of me, and I almost rolled over with the tin sheet on top of me. There were shouts from above, and lights, then pistol shots as I hurtled away into the dusk down a near-vertical ice-slope. But luck was with me. An unknown distance later I came to an abrupt halt in a snowdrift among trees. I quickly abandoned the toboggan and floundered away among the trees on foot. Voices could be heard further up the mountainside, but that was the last I saw of them.

I have no idea where or how long I wandered that night. I had left the compass behind and it was snowing again while the cloud had come down, so I could only wade through drifts and scramble along up rock-faces and down ice-slopes in the hope that instinct was leading me towards the Austrian lines. This went on until near dawn the next morning, when the first light revealed me traversing my way down a high north slope across a steep snowfield above a forest. I was worn out and utterly, hopelessly lost, all sense of direction gone. I paused to regain my breath, knee-deep in the rotten grainy snow of last winter. I realised suddenly that something was wrong, even if at first I put it down to the light-headedness of exhaustion: I had stopped walking, but I was still moving perceptibly downhill. I tried desperately to scramble sideways on to firm snow. Too late. I went over, then was buried by the sliding white mass, then surfaced for a moment, then went under again like a swimmer being swept over a weir. Stifled, tumbled, rolled over and over, I lost all sense of where I was in the grind­ing, roaring smother.

At last all was still, and I knew that I was dead: buried metres deep by the avalanche. It seemed strange that sensation should still persist after death. I wondered when they would come for me, whoever they were who acted as doorkeepers for this world beyond. I suppose that I could have lain like that for minutes or for hours: I have no idea. I remember that my first thought as I peered through snow-clogged eyes was that, whether they were angels or devils, neither type of attendant in the next world had ever been described to me as wearing puttees. I looked up. A dim shape stood over me. For some reason I spoke in Italian.

“Who are you? Take me with you.”

The mysterious being spoke at last. The accent was broad Tyrolean.

“Warum sprechen Sie Italienisch? Wir sind Osterreichern.”

They sent patrols up all that day and the next, even called aircraft up from Bruneck to join the search. But the snow had been heavy that night up in the high Dolomites, and in any case after my wanderings I had very little idea where Toth and the wreck of the aeroplane might be. It was a particularly savage winter in the Alps that year. A record ten metres of snow fell on the Marmolada in December. By January 1917 the wretched troops in the line had declared an unofficial armistice in order to fight for sheer survival against the weather. Tens of thousands perished in avalanches, swept away and never seen again. Sentries froze to blocks of ice in their rock-bound eyries while entire companies were buried without trace in a few minutes by the terrible blizzards that raged along the moun­tain ridges. By the time the spring came Zugsfuhrer-Feldpilot Zoltan Toth and the wreck of the aeroplane Hansa-Brandenburg CI number 26.74, Zoska, must have been buried metres deep in that unknown glacier.

And I suppose that they must still be there, the last flier and the last aeroplane of the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Flying Service. The glacier will make its grinding way down the mountain trough, a metre or so a year, until one summer it will melt and crumble open at the bottom of the valley to reveal Toth’s frozen body and the remains of the aeroplane, perhaps thousands of years hence, when we are all dust and the Habsburg Monarchy (if anyone remembers anything about it at all) will be known only to scholars: one with the kingdom of the Seleucids, the Egyptian Second Dynasty and all the other gaudy, tinsel-and-paste empires that were to have lasted for eternity.

They gave me the job of breaking the news to Magdalena, there in the front room of her father’s house in Caprovizza. I had expected tears, but the girl just became dreadfully quiet, the colour draining from her normally rosy face as if someone had opened a tap. I tried to comfort her by saying that her fiance was not killed, just missing, and that a patrol might yet find him alive in the mountains. But I knew that it was hope­less: that he had probably died of cold and shock on the first night. And I think that she knew as well. I left her parents to comfort her and walked back to the flying field. On the Carso the guns were thundering away in the preparatory barrage for the Ninth Battle of the Isonzo, the Italians having pushed forward some three kilometres since mid-September at a cost of about 150,000 lives. What did one more life mean, in the face of such monstrous carnage, one bereaved Slovene country girl when widows and orphans were being created every day by the thousand? The world had gone mad.

I returned to find a visitor waiting for me in the Kanzlei hut. It was a major from the Air Liaison Section at 5th Army Headquarters. He questioned me closely about the mission which had led Toth and me to our fateful flight over the Alps. In the end he shut his folder and prepared to leave.

“Well Prohaska, I can’t say that this business leaves a very pleasant taste in the mouth.”

“Why not, Herr Major?”

He smiled a bitter, mirthless smile. “I suppose that I’d better tell you, even though I ought not to according to the strict letter of regulations. Those documents of yours.”

“Yes?”

“They weren’t secret papers at all: they were love-letters from Conrad von Hotzendorf to his wife.”

“They were . . . what? How do you know?”

“The field police stopped the car at Teschen flying field and ques­tioned them. Everyone in Vienna’s nervy at the moment of course—oh, you wouldn’t have heard, would you? Someone shot the Prime Minister yesterday morning in the Cafe Meissl und Schaden. The place is buzzing with rumours of a German putsch to get rid of Karl when the old Emperor dies. Anyway, they questioned them both and it appears that Conrad’s been writing to her every day of the war without fail.”

“I suppose that’s very wise of him,” I said. “He stole her from another man I hear, so perhaps he’s worried she’ll do the same to him if he doesn’t keep an eye on her.”

“Quite possibly. Anyway, he had been away from Teschen for a week touring the Tyrolean Front, so the letters had built up and he roped you fellows in to fly them to Teschen for him: special express delivery at the expense of the War Ministry. Conrad loves little flourishes like that, I understand. Pity that your pilot had to lose his life for it.” He rose to leave. “Anyway, sorry and all that. You were quite outrageously misled, but there’s nothing we can do about it. And even if we could put our own Chief of Staff in front of a court martial for misuse of army personnel and property, it still wouldn’t bring back your Hungarian chap. Sorry.”

He left, and Hauptmann Kraliczek came in. As he sat down a sudden surge of bile welled up in my throat: a violent loathing for all the field marshals and generals and desk-strategists who poured away men’s lives like water to feed their own preening vanity. I gazed at Kraliczek’s pasty, self-satisfied features before me and something snapped.

“Herr Kommandant, I have a request to make.”

“What is that, Herr Schiffsleutnant?”

“I wish to transfer from this unit and resign from the k.u.k. Flieger­truppe. It’s all one to me where I go: the U-Boats, the trenches in the worst part of the front line—I don’t care any longer.”

He smirked behind his spectacles. “I see: the Maria-Theresien Ritter’s courage has deserted him. I understand—the Flying Service is too danger­ous for him. And what are your reasons for requesting this transfer, pray? I cannot simply enter ‘Cowardice’ on the form, you understand.”

I tried to remain calm. “My reason for requesting the move, Herr Kommandant, is simply to be as far away as possible from a creeping thing like you: a commanding officer of a flying unit who, so far as I am aware, has never once flown in an aeroplane and whose sole talent is for designing forms and sending brave men to their deaths in order to draw lines on pieces of graph paper afterwards.”

“Watch your tongue, Prohaska: what you have just said is court- martial talk and might . . . might lead me to demand satisfaction from you.” I noticed that his voice trembled as he spoke these words.

“Herr Kommandant, you will surely be aware as I am that the K.u.K. Dienstreglement absolutely forbids an officer to challenge his superior to a duel in wartime. If it did not then you would have been cold meat long ago.” “But this is outrageous! You are quite obviously unhinged.”

“I obediently report that if I am unhinged, Herr Kommandant, that is because I have seen so many good men’s lives squandered these past three months to no effect. In fact I have just been informed that my pilot was sent to die of cold and injuries on a glacier high up in the Alps so that a field marshal’s wife could get a packet of letters a day earlier than she would have done if he had put them in the post. This does not please me and I want no further part in it.”

“Nonsense. Your duty is to carry out whatever tasks your superiors give you. An order is an order. Anyway . . .” He sniffed. “I can’t see what you’re making such a fuss about. Your pilot fellow was only a ranker . . .”

They told me afterwards that when the orderlies rushed into the of­fice they found me kneeling on Kraliczek’s chest with my hands about his throat, choking the life out of him as I endeavoured to drive his head through the floorboards. Another five seconds or so, the Medical Officer said, and I would probably have been up for court martial on a charge of murder. For my part I remember nothing of it, only a blind, murderous animal rage such as I have never known before or since. I had killed men in battle before that and would do so again; but never would I be filled with such a pure, intense, single-minded, near-ecstatic lust to take someone’s life. It was not Kraliczek’s odious features that I saw there as I gripped his throat, it was Magdalena’s pale, shocked young face; and Toth dazed and moaning glassy-eyed on that cursed icefield; Conrad von Hotzendorf’s self-satisfied little nervous twitch; and Rieger’s charred, grinning skull smouldering among the embers that first day on the field at Caprovizza— all the poor faceless, helpless victims caught up in this collective lunacy that called itself a war.

There was an awful row of course: Maria-Theresien Ritter or no Maria-Theresien Ritter, war or no war, most armies in the world regarded it then and (I believe) still regard it to this day as a fairly serious breach of discipline to have attempted to throttle one’s commanding officer. What saved me in the end from court martial and a possible firing squad was a quite fortuitous piece of luck. For the next day, on 19 October, Flik 19F ceased to exist and was officially merged once more with its parent unit Flik 19. My new commanding officer was not therefore Hauptmann Rudolf Kraliczek, who was currently lying in hospital at Marburg, but Hauptmann Adolf Heyrowsky of Flik 19.

“Well Prohaska,” he said, “I must say that you’ve gone and got yourself into a pretty little spot here and no mistake. If Oberleutnant Meyerhofer hadn’t got you into the ambulance straight away and off to the loony bin in Trieste the Provost’s people would have come for you and you’d have found yourself in a cell in the Caserne Grande. I gather from this report here that you attempted to inflict grievous bodily harm on Hauptmann Kraliczek?”

“With respect Herr Kommandant, that is incorrect: I tried to kill him.” Heyrowsky stuck his fingers into his ears.

“Tut tut, Prohaska; you really mustn’t say things like that or there’ll have to be a court martial after all. No, I didn’t hear what you said. My eardrums have been troubling me lately: altitude and all that. You’re a flier yourself so I’m sure you understand. No, I think that if we play this one intelligently we can still get you off the hook.”

“Might I enquire how, Herr Kommandant? I am undeniably guilty of a death-penalty offence. Court martial is mandatory in such cases.”

“Well, it is and it isn’t. Evidence has to be gathered, and there were no witnesses I understand: at any rate, none who’d testify against you. And anyway, Flik 19F has just been merged with Flik 19, so while the papers are being transferred from their Kanzlei to ours I would imagine it to be quite possible that some might get mislaid. I think if we can discreetly lose you along the way as well . . .”

“Lose me? How?”

“I gather that you were only seconded to the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe from the Navy, so you’re not technically on the strength. I also understand from contacts of mine in Pola that they’re short of pilots in the Imperial and Royal Naval Flying Service. Now, I may be a fighting soldier but I haven’t served twenty years in the k.u.k. Armee without learning something about paperwork. If we’re quick we can get you up to Divacca and on to the next train to Pola before the Military Procurators people come here looking for you. They’ve still got a file open on you after that affair with the Italian pilot chap.” He looked at his watch. “Eleven-thirty-five precisely. Get your kit together and report back here in fifteen minutes while I talk with the lorry driver. Mustn’t make your departure too public I think. There’ll be a rail warrant waiting for you at Divacca.”

“But Herr Kommandant . . .”

“Prohaska, you are in no position to argue, believe me. Just go, and take damned good care not to leave a forwarding address.”

So that was how I bade farewell to the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe: lying under a tarpaulin in the back of a motor lorry full of empty lubricating- oil cans, as we lumbered out through the gate of k.u.k Fliegerfeld Haiden­schaft and on to the Divacca road. It had been eighty-nine days in total. It only seemed much longer.

I met Franz Meyerhofer in Vienna in 1930 or thereabouts. I had just re­turned from South America and he was in the city for a family funeral, so we met for a couple of drinks for old times’ sake. Meyerhofer told me that they had fought on after I left, first in Flik 19 then in other units. Meyerhofer himself had at last won his pilot’s wings and had eventu­ally led a fighter squadron over the Montello sector in the battles of the summer of 1918. The k.u.k. Fliegertruppe had fought on to the end, he said, outnumbered, and handicapped by every imaginable deficiency of equipment, organisation and training. Even in 1917, he said, the Germans would still not sell us Fokker interrupter gear to allow machine guns to fire through the propeller arc, so we had used a homemade version called the Zaparka system. This had worked, but only with the engine between twelve hundred and two thousand revs per minute—which meant that a pilot had to keep one eye on his target and the other on the tachometer as he pressed the firing button, otherwise he might only shoot off his own propeller blades. Likewise they still had to soldier on with the wretched Schwarzlose machine gun and its canvas ammunition belts. At the end of 1917, Meyerhofer told me, they had shot down a British Sopwith Camel fighter and had found that its machine guns were fed by self-destructing ammunition belts, made up of a chain of aluminium clips which held each cartridge to its neighbour and which fell off when the bullet had been fired. Samples were rushed to the k.u.k. Fliegerarsenal with an urgent request for an Austrian supplier to make a copy. Weeks later a letter was received thanking Meyerhofer for the sample and saying that the matter “was receiving the most active consideration.” It was still receiving the most active consideration a year later when the war ended—though, to be fair to the Fliegerarsenal, it had reached committee stage by then.

Of those who had flown with me in Flik 19F only he, I and Svetozar von Potocznik were still alive. Most of the rest—Szuborits, Barinkai and Zwierzkowski and the others—had survived the war, but by 1926 all were dead, killed in peacetime flying accidents. Meyerhofer was now a pilot with the Belgian airline Sabena, and a few weeks after our meeting he too would “find the flier’s death,” colliding with a factory chimney as he tried to land in fog at Le Bourget.

As for Svetozar von Potocznik, paladin of the Germanic Race, I had met him already in Paraguay in 1926 when I was briefly commanding the Paraguayan river fleet during the murderous Chaco War with Brazil. Rather odd when I had known him at Caprovizza, he was by now com­pletely crazed, but in a disturbingly calm, rational sort of way. He had flown in the shadowy little war in Carinthia in 1919 when the infant Austrian Republic had fought to prevent the Slovenes—now part of Yugoslavia— from taking the area south of Klagenfurt. And that was the reason why he was now in South America under the name of Siegfried Neumann: he was wanted throughout Europe as a war criminal after he had dive-bombed his father’s old school at Pravnitz and killed some forty or so children in a ground-floor classroom. He was now flying in the Paraguayan Air Force and practising on Indian villages the theories of terror bombing he had developed during the last years of the world war.

About 1931 he returned to Germany and became a test-pilot for Junkers, then entered the Luftwaffe and became one of the leaders of the infamous Condor Legion during the Spanish Civil War—the ones who used the town of Guernica as a test-laboratory. He had risen to the rank of Major-General by the end of the war. But the Balkans which had given him his original name seemed to draw him back with some fateful magnetism. After being injured in a crash in 1941 he had been assigned to ground duties, commanding a region in occupied Yugoslavia. Partisan activity was intense, but the activities of “Sonderkommando Neumann”— a force made up of Luftwaffe ground troops, SS and Croat Ustashas—had been even intenser, and much more systematic. He was handed over to the Yugoslavs in 1946 and hanged as a war criminal responsible for the deaths of at least twenty-five thousand people.

Meyerhofer had no idea what had become of the miserable Hauptmann Kraliczek after I had tried to choke him that day at Caprovizza: he had just disappeared from the scene. It was not until the 1960s that I remem­bered him, when I saw an article about him in one of the Sunday papers. It appeared that after the war Kraliczek had become a desk official with the Vienna police, collating crime statistics or something. For twenty years he had led the obscure life of a civilian police official. But recognition sometimes comes even late in life. In 1938 the Nazis arrived in Austria, and in 1940 Kraliczek’s section had been incorporated into Himmler’s SS empire and moved to Berlin. There he was put to work on his old job, or­ganising rail movements. And now be came into his own. In the old days his diligence and attention to detail had been able to work only through the rickety Habsburg administrative machine. But now, as Section Head, he had at his disposal a superbly efficient and unquestioningly obedient administration, absolutely dedicated to its allotted task.

He had undoubtedly done a superb job, organising dozens of rail transports a day across occupied Europe despite the chaos brought about by bombing and the collapse of the fighting fronts. In fact the worse things got, the more effective Kraliczek’s team became. When the British had arrested him near Flensburg in 1945 he had boasted to his captors that in the summer of 1944 he had been routing thirty or forty trains a day across Slovakia even as the Russian armies were pushing into Hungary. Had he ever given any thought to what was being done with the contents of the trucks when they reached their destination? he had been asked. No, he said indignantly; that was totally outside his area of responsibility and no concern of his whatever. They gave him twenty years at Nuremberg. He came out early, about 1962, and was immediately approached for inter­views by a young American-Jewish woman journalist—hence the news­paper articles later. He had taken a great liking to her for her qualities of precision and hard work, and had told her everything that she wanted to know in great detail. It was not until near the end of the interviews that she revealed that both her parents had died in the gas chambers. Kraliczek had been genuinely shocked and horrified by this revelation, quite unable to comprehend that it was one of his trains that had taken them there.

So much for the players: what about the stage? As for the Carso Plateau, if I had never seen the place again that would have been far too soon for me. Not steam winches and No. 6 hawsers would ever have dragged me back to that poisonous wilderness. But not everyone felt the same way, I understand. In fact I believe that in the years after the war there were many survivors—Italian and Austrian and ex-Austrian—who kept on going back to those barren hills, spending days at a time wander­ing alone among the rusty wire-belts and crumbling dug-outs in search of they knew not what, whether the comrades they had left behind there, or their own stolen youth, or perhaps expiation for having come out of it all alive when so many had not. One of these sad living ghosts was Meyerhofer’s youngest brother, who had served on the Carso in the thick of the 1916—17 fighting as a twenty-year-old Leutnant in a Feldjager bat­talion, straight out of school into the Army. He had gone back every year, Meyerhofer told me, until the previous summer, when he had been killed one evening near Castagnevizza, blown up (the carabinieri said) after he had lit his campfire on top of an old artillery shell buried in a dolina.

Like myself, he had been a keen amateur photographer and Meyer- hofer, while he was in Vienna, was going to bequeath his brother’s album to the Military History Museum at the Arsenal. He showed it to me back in his hotel room. Many of the photographs were from the years after the war, when the Mussolini regime was dotting the Carso with bom­bastic war memorials designed not so much to honour the dead as to assert the grandeur of armed struggle. But one photograph showed an unofficial war memorial, erected by the troops themselves in the field. It was taken, I should think, some time after the rout at Caporetto, when the Italian Army on the Carso had abandoned in an afternoon all that it had just taken them two years and half a million lives to gain. Marked simply Fajtji Hrib, Autumn 1917, it showed a pyramid of twenty or thirty skulls, piled together without any regard to their owners’ nationality and surmounted by a crucifix made from two thigh bones and a screw-picket stake lashed together with barbed wire. I have no idea what became of that photograph. Perhaps it was lost, because I have never seen it reproduced anywhere. Which is a pity, since I think that if all war memorials had the stark honesty of that simple monument then we might perhaps have fewer wars to commemorate.