The Two-Headed Eagle

15 NAVAL AIRMAN

Imperial and Royal Naval Air station Lussin Piccolo in November 1916 was really not much of a place. But then Lussin Piccolo itself was not much of a place either; though it seemed that it had once known more spacious days, perhaps a century before.

Like many another title in the Habsburg realms, even here on their furthest Dalmatian fringes, the name was confusing. There were two towns on the long, narrow, straggling island of Lussin: Lussin Grande and Lussin Piccolo. Yet Lussin Piccolo was the only one of the two that could be described as a town. Despite its name the other settlement on the op­posite side of the island, though it had once been the capital, was by now no more than a dilapidated fishing village with a very large old church. It puzzled me why anyone should ever have bothered to build a town on that side of the island at all. It faced the Velebit Mountains on the Balkan mainland and was exposed to the full fury of the bora, which blew here in winter with a ferocity that, over the ages, had left the entire east-facing coast looking rather as if it had been sand-blasted at maximum pressure: every stick of vegetation shrivelled and worn away by the salt spray and the grit whipped up from the shore.

Lussin Piccolo was a typical small island port town barely distinguish­able from several dozen other such towns along the Dalmatian coast. Centuries of Venetian rule had given them all a characteristic pattern-book appearance. There was the usual great baroque-byzantine church with its fluted campanile; and the same rows of shabby yellow-stuccoed palazzi along the riva, once the homes of the ship-owning dynasties who had made this a considerable port in the days of sail, but which had long since been reduced to mausoleums peopled by a few aged survivors of the old patrician families. One saw them sometimes early in the morning on their way to mass: the shrivelled Donna Carlottas and Donna Lugarezzias hob­bling along in their black-lace mantillas with equally ancient maids trailing behind them to carry their breviaries, on their way to one or other of the five or so barn-like churches where the walls were covered in memorial tablets to generations of Cosuliches and Tarabocchias lost at sea.

Lussin Piccolo had once had a marine academy of its own, and a powerful guild of ship owners. But iron steamships and the Suez Canal had finally done for the place, and it had long since sunk into shabby poverty, alleviated a little only in the early years of this century when the Archduke Karl Stefan had built a villa here and the place had become, like the rest of the Dalmatian coast under Austrian rule, a riviera for second-rank nobility and imperial bureaucrats in summer and a sana­torium for invalids in winter. This always struck me as an odd belief, I must say: that the warm, sunlit Adriatic coast was an ideal place for consumptives. I had served fifteen years in the Austrian fleet and knew perfectly well from officiating at recruiting depots that the entire coast was in fact rotten with tuberculosis.

But then, this was scarcely a matter for wonder: the diet of the com­mon people had always been miserable here in Dalmatia. The limestone islands—no more than karst mountain-tops protruding from the water— were stony and arid to a degree where even goats could scarcely browse a living from most of them. The islanders had imported their food in peacetime and had paid for it with tourist income and remittances from abroad. But now that the war was into its third year, tourism and remit­tances were both things of the past. The 1916 harvest had been disas­trously bad throughout Central Europe. The Hungarian government had just forbidden the export of grain to the rest of the Monarchy, so Dalmatia was indeed in a precarious state. If the people of Vienna were now sub­sisting on turnips and barley-meal, what would be left over for the folk of the poor, distant, forgotten Adriatic coastlands? By November supplies to the islands were down to the bare minimum needed to prevent people from dying of starvation in the streets. Even fish was no longer available to feed the people, now that the local fishing fleet was under military control and its catch requisitioned at the dockside to be taken away and canned for army rations.

But the scarcity of food on Lussin Island in the autumn of 1916 had one good side to it: if there was nothing much for the people to eat, that at least meant that they no longer had to bother about finding fuel to cook it. Coal had been short throughout the Monarchy for a year or more past, as the blast-furnaces consumed everything that Austria’s increas­ingly decrepit rail system was able to transport. The cities got only what was left over from the war industries. By mid-November electricity and gas were off for most of the day in Vienna, so it was not very likely that places like Lussin were going to see much coal, dangling as they did at the end of a precarious steamer line down from Fiume. About the middle of the month a violent bora tore an old three-masted barque from her moorings on the mainland and drove her ashore on the eastern coast of the island just across from the air station. Word spread to the town and within minutes the entire population were on the move, armed with axes and crowbars. I was telephoned by the local coastguards to provide a naval picket to guard the wreck; but by the time I had collected the men and got to the ridge of the island above the shore it was already too late. We stood open-mouthed, staring in disbelief as the old wooden ship sim­ply evaporated in front of our eyes, disappearing like a piece of camphor in the sunshine, only much faster.

There were about forty of us at Naval Air Station Lussin Piccolo, lodged in a small wooden-hutted encampment on the shores of Kovcanja Bay, at the opposite end of the long, narrow fjord-harbour from the town about five kilometres distant. The flying-boat base had recently been moved here out of the way because a minesweeper flotilla was using the town harbour, and things had become too crowded for safe take-off and landing. Lussin’s fjord was a splendid natural anchorage, sheltered by low hills to eastward from the bora and with only one narrow entrance, about half-way down the seaward side. The French Navy had occupied the place in the war of 1859 with the intention of using it as a base for stirring up revolt in Hungary—if the war had not ended after only a few weeks with Austria’s defeat. The War Ministry had learnt its lesson though and had built a number of forts on the island in the 1860s, as well as providing a chain barrier to block the harbour entrance.

By the looks of it the War Ministry might very well have installed the personnel of the Naval Air Station at the same time as the defences, be­cause the average age of the lower deck was (I should think) nearer to sixty than to fifty: a collection of ancient naval reservists and pensioners called up for the duration and commanded—for want of a better word—by a delightful old gentleman called Fregattenkapitan Maximillian von Lotsch. Fregattenkapitan von Lotsch had not so much been called from retirement to command the station as returned from the embalmers. Nobody knew for sure how old he was, but it was reasonably certain on the evidence of old daguerreotype photographs that he had been a Seefahnrich aboard the brig Hus%ar at the siege of Venice in 1849. Certainly he must have been eighty-five if he was a day when I knew him: a charming old boy straight out of Biedermeyer Austria, but pretty well gaga and unshake- ably convinced that we were at war with the Prussians. He had not the remotest idea about aviation, or about running a naval air station. But it scarcely mattered, since he spent most of the day dozing peacefully in an armchair in his office, waking only from time to time to enquire whether the “Pfiff-Chinesers” had managed to capture Prague yet. We just gave him things to sign every now and then and got on with running the sta­tion as best we could.

Not that our crew gave us much trouble. Apart from a few young engine fitters and other such craftsmen from our parent unit, the naval air base at Pola, the station personnel were simply too old to present us with the disciplinary problems that usually arise from having a ship full of feckless and hot-blooded young men. There was none of the drunken­ness, none of the whoring, none of the fights and none of the requests to visit pox clinics that normally make life so tiresome for divisional officers; only a good deal of grumbling among a collection of aged men who had suddenly found themselves in naval uniform again when they were already grandfathers, and who had now been exiled to spend the war on a remote island in the Adriatic. They would while away their off-duty hours huddled around the stove at the Cafe Garibaldi in town, playing backgammon and wheezing complaints against the war and the “verfluchtete Kriegsmarine” as they snapped their arthritic knuckles.

My servant was an ancient Pola-Italian naval pensioner called Tomas- sini who claimed (with what truth I cannot say) to have served as a powder- monkey aboard the wooden battleship Kaiser at Lissa in 1866. It was a pity, I once told him, that the Monarchy’s desperate shortage of manpower should have compelled it to call up men in their sixties. Tomassini sucked his remaining teeth and thought for a while about this.

“Can’t say that it bothers me too much, Herr Leutnant, if you really want to know what I think. It gets me away from the old woman for a bit, and all things considered this isn’t too bad a place to sit out the war, specially now as they’re copping it back in Pola. There’s an air-raid every other day now, the missus says. They had a bomb come down the chimney of the house next door last week and bring our ceiling down. Frightened the life out of her it did. No danger of that out here anyway.”

He was quite right about that: Lussin Island was way outside the range of the smaller Italian aircraft, and had nothing whatever to attract the big Caproni bombers that were now raiding Austrian towns as far behind the Front as Graz and Laibach. Fighter aircraft could not get this far, and we ourselves were too far from the Italian ports to be employed for bombing- raids. So air operations from Naval Air Station Lussin Piccolo consisted entirely of the humdrum business of convoy escort, varied only occasion­ally by the odd anti-submarine patrol.

It was difficult to say which of these two was the more tedious. Es­corting convoys meant flying over them in circles for four or five hours at a stretch all the way down from the port of Fiume through the Quarnerolo Gulf to the limit of our sector at the northern tip of Lunga Island—some­times further, if the aeroplane from Zara had not turned up to relieve us. But, tiresome or not, it was certainly a necessary task. The Balkans in those days were a wild and primitive land, almost devoid of roads and railways. This meant that most of the supplies for our fleet at Cattaro and for the Austrian armies in Albania had to travel by sea, down a long coast which lay everywhere within easy striking distance of the Italian shore.

If the convoys had not been properly protected, Allied submarines and motor boats would have been free to slaughter at will like foxes in a hen­coop. But they never managed it: in fact thanks to our Navy’s competent use of escorts, only a handful of merchantmen were ever sunk on the Fiume—Durazzo run, even though the number of sailings must have run into thousands. But it was arduous work for all those involved, both for the overworked destroyer and torpedo-boat crews who did the surface escorting and for the flying-boat pilots above.

The trouble from our point of view was that even at half-throttle, down nearly to stalling speed, a Lohner flying-boat was about eight times as fast as a convoy of elderly merchant steamers with engines worn out by lack of grease and burning lignite in their boilers. We had to circle above them all the time, turning in great slow loops as the merchantmen dod­dered along below at five or six knots with a couple of harassed torpedo- boats fussing about on their flanks. Sometimes we would go clockwise, sometimes anti-clockwise, for no other reason than to break the monotony and stop ourselves getting dizzy, and also because our riggers warned us that this circling in the same direction all the time gave a permanent warp to the airframe. Yet it was a job that demanded unrelenting vigilance: con­stantly on the look-out not only for the tell-tale white plume of a periscope but for the tiny black dot of a drifting mine or the miniscule grey outlines of a flotilla of Italian MAS boats lurking among the myriad islands and waiting to skim in and launch their torpedoes. We were looking all the time for something which was probably not there, but which would wreak disaster if it were there and we failed to see it. If there was any doubt on that point it was dispelled early in November when the Ungaro-Croatia steamer Gabor Bethlen was torpedoed and sunk off Lunga Island after the other Lussin aeroplane had fumbled the hand-over to the relief from Zara and a submarine had taken advantage of the gap. As an ex-submarine cap­tain myself I liked to think that he would never have had the chance if I had been there, but secretly I was far from sure of that. Observer and pilot used to work one-hour shifts in those flying-boats; but in the winter cold it was dreadfully easy to drift into trains of thought and miss a periscope wake, especially when the sea was flecked with white-caps from the wind or if there had been a lot of dolphins about.

My feelings about all this were curiously mixed, I must say. On the one hand, after the excitements and terrors of my time as a front flier with the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe I might have been expected to have relished the boring safety of this sort of flying; and all the more so when I had a wife six months pregnant back in Vienna. But I also knew that hundreds of thousands of my comrades were risking their lives every minute of the day and dying in hetacombs for their Emperor and Fatherland. Somehow it seemed a slightly seedy thing for a Maria-Theresien Ritter to be living this semi-retired life of modest comfort and minimal risk on a pleasant Adriatic island while my fellows were undergoing the most terrible hard­ships and dangers in the trenches and the U-Boats.

Compared with flying over—or more usually among—the Alps, there was not even any great intrinsic risk in the flying itself. The Lohner boat in which I flew, number L149, was a comfortable and safe old bus: like all flying-boats, of very modest performance even when compared with the Hansa-Brandenburg, but soundly built and extremely reliable when fitted like ours with a 160hp German-built Mercedes engine. Built by the Jakob Lohner carriageworks in Vienna, one-time specialists in the horse-drawn hearses that still occasionally feature in horror films, it had a long, ele­gant boat-hull of varnished mahogany and the propeller mounted pusher- fashion behind the two long, curving, slightly swept-back wings. My pilot and I sat side by side in the open cockpit as if in a sort of airborne sports car. We could carry a machine gun for defence, mounted on a folding spigot on the observer’s side of the cockpit, but since we were so far from enemy fighters we usually left this ashore in the interests of weight- saving and took a wireless set instead. For armament we carried four 20kg bombs on racks beneath the wingroots to deal with a submarine if we spotted one.

The other half of the “we” in this instance was my pilot Fregatten- leutnant Franz (or Frantisek) Nechledil. Like myself, Nechledil was a Czech by birth, the son of a chemist from the town of Pribram in southern Bohemia. I liked Nechledil, who was seven years my junior, but we never spoke Czech together, only German. The Habsburg Army permitted— even encouraged—its officers to speak with their men in their own lan­guage, even if this meant having to learn it specially. But among officers and senior NCOs the speaking of national languages, though not actu­ally forbidden, was regarded as bad form outside a few Hungarian and Polish regiments. The official doctrine was that anyone who put on the Emperor’s Coloured Coat as an officer put aside nationality. Thus the only permissible language among officers in the Austrian half of the Monarchy was that curious, now almost forgotten tongue called “official German”: a language distinguished by the fact that, of those who spoke it, wrote it, thought in it, told jokes—even made love—in it, a good two-thirds were using it as a foreign language; like Elisabeth and myself for example, since I knew no Magyar while she could only stumble along in Czech.

But where Franz Nechledil was concerned there were other, darker reasons for his avoiding the Czech language even when we were alone together in private. His father had been founder of the local branch of the society “Sokol” in Pribram: a Czech patriotic and sporting organisa­tion which was officially dedicated to “elevating the moral and spiritual tone of Czech youth,” but which had for some years before the war been viewed with increasing alarm in Vienna as a secret society dedicated to Czech independence, the possible kernel of a Czech underground army of resistance. When the war came, and the k.u.k. Armee had been well and truly thrashed by the Russians and Serbs, the authorities had panicked and arrested Czech nationalists by the hundred, hanging some after trumped- up trials in front of military courts and sending the rest to hastily set-up concentration camps in Austria. Nechledil’s father had been found guilty of espionage and sentenced to death, but had cheated the hangman by dying of typhus in jail. His mother and younger brother had ended up in a camp at Steinfeld outside Vienna.

But worse was to follow, for it came to light early in 1915 that Nech­ledil’s elder brother, a Captain in Infantry Regiment No. 28, had not been killed at Przemysl after all but had gone over to the Russians and was now helping organise the Czechoslovak Legion in Siberia. Nechledil had been summoned to the Military Procurator’s department and had undergone a series of very unpleasant interviews concerning his own activities in the Sokol. He had been returned to duty in the end, but had been left under no illusions but that he was a marked man and was being closely watched. The result was that he regarded anything Czech—even a Dvorak gramophone record—with the sort of mildly hysterical aversion that some people have towards wasps or spiders. Between us two there was an unspoken pact never to mention or allude to any national political question, even to the extent of never talking about our respective home towns. This sounds like duplicity, and I suppose that in a way it was. But please understand that we Central Europeans have become masters of the art of partial amnesia, of excising from our minds anything that is not convenient to those set in authority over us. How does the joke go?

“Granny, where were you born? ”

“Hush, child, and don’t talk about politics.”

Still, it was good to be back in my own chosen service at last, among people whom I understood and who talked a common language. The massacre of the old k.u.k. Armee officer corps in 1914 had meant that the Army’s ranks had been filled up with pre-war Einjahrigers; but so far its naval counterpart had escaped serious casualties and in consequence had retained much of the old pre-war mentality. I felt far more comfortable in the tiny, spartan mess hut at Lussin than I ever did among my brother- officers at Caprovizza.

Nechledil was officially the pilot of L149 and I was the observer. But in practice our duties were not so neatly divided. I had qualified as a pilot in 1912 and had flown some of the Navy’s earliest flying-boats, emerging with a badly injured leg to prove it when I crashed one of them off Abbazia in 1913. I had not flown a great deal in the years since, but my residual skill did at least mean that Nechledil and I could break the monotony of patrolling over the steel-grey winter sea by changing places every hour. As flying-boats go I found the Lohner to be a pleasant and easy machine to handle: well-balanced and light on the controls, so that one did not have to spend the entire four- or five-hour flight lugging desperately at the column to keep the thing flying level.

Even so it was a depressingly humdrum business, escorting convoys: more like the life of a Viennese tram driver than that of an airman in a world war. There would be the usual checks in the hangar before dawn, then the bleary-eyed ground crew trundling the machine out on its trolley and down the concrete slipway to leave it sitting like a sea-gull on the water. This was always the trickiest part of the operation, the launching. The hull was matchbox-fragile and, although it had a shallow V-section up at the bows, the rest of the bottom was flat, which meant that it would drift side­ways in the wind like a paper bag. If the sailors holding the mooring-lines let their attention wander, a sudden bora gust could snatch the aeroplane from them and send it gliding across the cove to pile up on the rocks at the other side. Once the boat was safely in the water Nechledil and I would paddle up in our dinghy and clamber aboard. As observer, it would fall to me to start the engine. I always approached this task with some trepidation, standing on the cockpit edge and straining at a hand-crank above me to turn over the six-cylinder engine. It was liable to backfire on starting and if one was grasping the starting-handle too tightly, then dislocated wrists could be the result. Once the engine was thundering away and the aero­plane straining at the mooring-lines I would sit down and test the wireless, tapping out a few words on the Morse key and checking the reply from the naval wireless station up at Fort Lussin. Then if all was well Nechledil would ease the throttle forward and signal to the ground crew to release the mooring-lines, and we would begin our take-off run.

I often think that the French verb for take-off, “decoller,” must have been coined by a flying-boat pilot, because in calm weather the boat would seem to stick to the water as if to a sheet of glue, requiring the most strenu­ous efforts to get the thing into the air. In winter however this was not such a problem: there would usually be a breeze blowing and we would huddle behind the windscreen in the driving spray as the boat thumped its way across the waves, hurtling down the fjord on its take-off run through the short, spume-laden chop ruffled up by the wind. We would get airborne, then bank away over the entrance to this almost land-locked harbour before turning northwards to make our way to our rendezvous with the convoy.

Our pick-up point would be either the Cape Porer lighthouse, if the convoy was coming down from Pola, or (more usually) the northern­most tip of Cherso Island if it was a convoy proceeding southward from Fiume, through the Mezzo Channel and down the Quarnerolo between the outer and inner belts of islands. They would be there waiting for us, beneath their usual brownish haze of lignite smoke: six or seven mer­chant steamers with a couple of small warships as escorts. I would launch the agreed signal rockets as we approached and then fire up the wireless to contact the operators aboard the escorts. We would circle above the convoy while they sorted themselves out, dismiss the aeroplane which had accompanied them out of Fiume, then settle down for the next four hours of acute boredom. The steamers would shamble along below at their customary five or six knots—provided it was a good day and there was no head-wind—meandering along like a string of old-age pensioners on their way to the post office as their helmsmen struggled with worn- out steering gear to keep them on course. Meanwhile I would sweep the sea with my Zeiss binoculars, checking off the islands as we passed by: Cherso, Plavnik, Arbe, Dolin, Lussin, Asinello, Pago, Skarda, Selbe, Ulbo, Premuda, Meleda . . . Sometimes I would think to myself that the profu­sion of islands along the Dalmatian coast spoke of some mental disorder on the part of the Creator. Surely no one in their right mind could possibly need so many of them . . .

In the end Lunga Island would come into sight, and with it (all be­ing well) the aeroplane from Naval Air Station Zara waiting to take over from us, with perhaps a north-bound convoy waiting to be escorted back. Recognition signals would be exchanged, I would sign off to the wireless operators below and we would gratefully turn the aeroplane north once more. The islands would pass below us again: Meleda and Premuda and Ulbo and Selbe and Skarda and Pago and Asinello, until at long weary last we would be touching down on the fjord at Lussin and skimming across the water into Kovcanja Cove. The mooring-lines would be tossed to us and we would be hauled in towards the slipway.

“Anything happen this time, Herr Schiffsleutnant?”

“No, nothing to report—as usual. Here, help me out will you? I’m so stiff I can hardly move.”

Amid such a general lack of action and excitement, trifling details of life at the air station tended to inflate themselves into major issues. Like food for instance. The rations had been mediocre for a good year past. First the daily wine ration had gone, then coffee had been replaced by the nauseous black “kaffeesurrogat.” Then meat had come off the menu for three days each week, and the warm evening meal had been replaced by a fluid described as “tea” with bread and cheese—or, more usually now, just bread. A thin washy soup of dehydrated turnips and barley-groats was the main meal on most days of the week. And when meat was available, it was often barely fit for human consumption.

When I was not flying, one of my duties as watch officer at the air station was that of inspecting the meat when the fortnightly supply ship arrived from Pola. And amid one consignment of beef carcasses early in November I discovered a creature so stunted and deformed that I took alarm at once. The occasional horse carcass had to be tolerated nowadays among shipments of beef, but I was damned if I was going to put up with my men being fed on dead dogs. I called over the Supplies Warrant Officer from the steamer gangway and told him that I was not going to sign for the delivery. He demurred, insisting that the creature was in fact beef. I began to suspect fraud: it was well known that many officials of the Marine Commissariat at Pola were taking advantage of the growing wartime mis­ery and lining their own pockets by selling off government supplies to the civil population, then making up the short weight with whatever rubbish they could find. I was adamant that I would not accept the delivery, and he was equally adamant that I would. In the end I decided that I would refer the matter to higher authority and sent a rating off on a bicycle to find the station’s Medical Officer.

Naval Air Station Lussin Piccolo had no resident surgeon. Instead it had been allocated the services—such as they were—of a retired na­val doctor living in the town. I devoutly hoped that I would be able to avoid injury, because the physician in question was scarcely younger than Fregattenkapitan von Lotsch and not in much better mental shape. He was not in a good mood when he arrived at the jetty half an hour later, riding on the crossbar of the rating’s bicycle.

“Well Herr Schiffsleutnant, what is it?”

“Herr Schiffsarzt, we have had a very dubious carcass of beef deliv­ered here and I am refusing to accept it. I would like you to inspect it so that I can lodge a complaint with the Marine Commissariat.”

“What? Have you called me out all this way just for that? Is the beef maggoty or what? ”

“With respect, Herr Schiffsarzt, I suspect that it is not beef at all but dog: possibly an Alsatian or some such large breed.”

He walked with me to the supply shed and adjusted his pince-nez. But as he saw the horrible misshapen thing hanging among the mauve and yellow carcasses his annoyance rapidly gave way to wonder.

“My goodness, yes,” he said, examining the dead creature, “I see what you mean. Thank you for having called me.”

“It is a dog then, Herr Schiffsarzt?”

“No, no. It’s definitely of the bovine species, but so badly deformed that you’d almost think it was a dog, or perhaps a baboon.”

“Is it a calf, perhaps? ”

“No, it’s an adult animal all right, but worthy of a freak show. Look at the way the spine’s bent and the vertebrae are fused with the pelvis. I wonder that the poor animal managed to exist at all. It must be a veterinary version of Pott’s disease or something similar. I say—you don’t think do you that when your men have consumed the meat you might let me have the skeleton to mount? The local veterinary inspector and I have built up quite a collection of lusus naturae over the years . . .”

“Consume? . . . Excuse me, Herr Schiffsarzt, but I don’t understand: this meat is diseased.”

“Good Lord man, no one will ever know. Just get the cooks to wipe it down with a cloth dipped in vinegar. If there are any microbes in the meat the cooking will probably kill them. I doubt whether it’s communicable to humans anyway.”

“But this is monstrous, to serve up . . .”

“Oh do be sensible my dear fellow; there’s a war on, don’t you know? It’s not much worse than the rest of your consignment anyway. By the looks of it the other carcasses must have died of old age or disease.”

Life on Lussin was quiet, to be sure. But at least the remoteness of the sta­tion seemed to have spared me for the time being from further investiga­tions into my assault on Hauptmann Kraliczek and my involvement in the escape of Major di Carraciolo. Each day I returned to base expecting to be given a message telling me to report to the Marine Auditor’s office in Pola. But nothing came. By the second half of November things seemed to have quietened down sufficiently for me to risk a trip back to the main­land, to spend a week’s leave in Vienna with my wife, who had by now left the hospital and was staying with my Aunt Aleksia on the Josefsgasse. I had urgent matters to discuss with her anyway: chiefly that of moving her out of the capital now that she was into the sixth month of her pregnancy and things were becoming so difficult. Her last letter had painted a dismal picture of life in the city: the electricity off at least half of each day; the trams not running; queues everywhere and even potatoes hard to come by. Soap was practically unobtainable, she wrote, or if it could be found, consisted of nothing more than a block of scouring sand held together by the thinnest smear of grease. By now the only food item that could be obtained regularly was the dismal vegetable which would brand that bit­terly cold winter into the memory of all who lived through it in Central Europe as “the Turnip Winter.” Already substitute substitutes had begun to appear: a new type of ersatz coffee made from roasted turnips, and a wondrous material called “imitation leather substitute.” Buildings were being shaken to pieces now that motor lorries had finally lost their rubber tyres and been fitted with surrogates, which had originally consisted of two concentric steel hoops held apart by springs, but in which the springs had now been replaced by wooden blocks since spring-steel was in short supply. My aunt was helping run a charity clinic for children in Favoriten and said that the incidence of rickets and scabies was increasing most alarmingly among the poor.

In a word, it all sounded utterly dismal. I had already written to my cousins in Poland to seek their help. They had a sizeable estate in the country near Myslenice and had written back to say that Elisabeth would be more than welcome to stay with them for as long as she pleased, both before the birth and afterwards.

She was not pleased when I told her that evening outside the Sud- bahnhof, trying to find a fiacre to take us to the Josefsgasse since the trams were not running.

“But dearest, be reasonable. Surely you can’t want to stay in Vienna for the birth. The place already looks as if it’s been under siege for a year, and this is only November.”

“Otto, I’ve stuck the war out so far in Vienna and I don’t intend quit­ting now. Anyway, there’s bags of room at your aunt’s and we get on well together.”

“But she’s old, and you’ve only got Franzi to look after you both now that Frau Niedermayer’s gone into the munitions factory.”

“Just fancy—two grown women forced by the brutal circumstances of war to fend for themselves with only one servant to help them. Mer­ciful heavens, how will they bear such privation? Oh wake up Otto: the day of servants and ladies of leisure has gone now and it’ll never come back. If I can’t do the cooking and look after a baby on my own then I must really be a prize ninny. What sort of woman did you think you were marrying? ”

“But why stick in Vienna, for heaven’s sake? It’s hungry and cold already, so what will it be like when the snow comes? Why stay here? It’s not your home.”

“I know. But I’ve no other home now, and as for scuttling away to hide in the countryside, be damned to it. The ordinary people of this country have had to suffer a lot because of the emperors and the generals and their precious war. People like us landed them in it, so we ought at least to stick by them now that the going’s getting tough.”

“By Vienna? You always used to say that it wasn’t so much a city as a form of mental disorder.”

“So it is. But its people are real enough.”

I laughed. “Really Liserl, you’re getting to sound like a socialist these days.”

“Perhaps I am, or becoming one. This war’s making me into a revolu­tionary: or at least someone who thinks that we ought to end it by putting the Kaiser and Ludendorff and Conrad and the rest into opposite holes in the ground and making them toss bombs at each other for a bit to see how they like it.”

We woke next morning about 8:00, huddled together under the eider­down in the chilly flat where the stove was now fired with balls of damp­ened newspaper. A wan, grey late-November light filtered through the window panes, grimy with lignite dust now that the building’s caretaker was dead in Siberia and his successor was too old to clean them. Command of a U-Boat had given me an acute instinct for things not being quite right, and I sensed as soon as I woke that the noise from the street outside was not quite the same as on other mornings: more like a Sunday in fact.

Then Franzi came in with our breakfast on a tray: ersatz coffee, but real white-bread rolls, which my aunt had somehow managed to procure in honour of my visit. My aunt’s maidservant was a girl in her mid-twenties from the suburb of Purkersdorf (or “Puahkersdoarf” as she called it) with fluffy blond hair and great china-blue eyes. Franzi was mildly half-witted, so she had not gone to work in the munitions factories. This morning though she was not her usual equable self. Her doll’s eyes were red-rimmed and she wiped them on her apron, sniffing loudly as she did so.

“What’s the matter, Franzi? ”

“It’s him, Herr Leutnant, he’s gone.”

“Who’s gone?”

“The Old Gentleman, God rest his soul.” She crossed herself. “They say he’s gone and died in the night at Schonbrunn.”

It was in this manner that we learnt of the death of our sovereign lord and ruler Franz Joseph the First, by the Grace of God Emperor of Austria and Apostolic King of Hungary for the past sixty-eight years—all but eleven days. Neither Elisabeth nor I were anything but the most tepid of monarchists, but even so we were hushed as we heard the news. It was not that the man had been inordinately loved by his subjects: most in fact knew that he had been an obstinate and short-sighted ruler in peace and a blundering commander in war. Even that morning as the muffled church bells tolled through the city and the flags flew at half-mast there must have been many ancestral memories of the working men summarily shot in the city moat in 1849; of the crows flapping over the mangled white-coated bodies tumbled in the vineyards of the Casa di Solferino; of the half- mad Empress wandering Europe to get away from her dreary husband and his insufferable court; of the sleazy incompetent cover-up after their wretched son had shot his girlfriend in the lodge at Mayerling and then blown his own limited supply of brains through the top of his head. No, it was just that the Emperor—“Old Prohaska,” as the Viennese used to call him—had been around for so long that he had become as fixed a feature in people’s lives as the green summit of the Kahlenberg in the distance. People had excised from their minds the fact that the dear old boy spent much of his regular sixteen-hour working day signing death warrants; or that his ministers were strictly forbidden to deviate from their scheduled subject when they had an audience with him; or that he spoke nineteen languages but would never utter anything else in them but the most leaden platitudes. Instead they remembered the legendary courtesy, and the odd round-shouldered walk, the famous side-whiskers and the hundreds of little anecdotes which had accumulated around the old man over the years like ferns and wildflowers in the cracks of a mausoleum.

And now he was no more. The presence that had shaped the entire lives of all but a few of his subjects and held together his ethnic dust­bin of an empire by sheer personal prestige; all that was gone. Something changed for ever that November morning. Until now, behind the battle- fronts, a curious unreality had hung over Austria-Hungary’s war. The casu­alties had been immense, but the fighting was far away in other people’s countries for the most part, and cafe society had tended to swallow the cheerfully jaunty headlines in the newspapers without demur: “Przemysl Captured”; “Przemysl Recaptured”; “Przemysl Recaptured Again”; or (a couple of days before the rout of Pfanzer-Balltin’s 4th Army) “Our De­fences in Volhynia in a State of Moderate Readiness.” Now there could no longer be any ignoring the Monarchy’s disastrous plight. People suddenly woke up to the fact that they were cold and hungry, and that still no end to the war was in sight.

The dead Emperor’s withered old body even lay between us in bed that evening. We would normally have fallen into one another’s arms with joy. I had been away for two months now and I had been scrupulously faithful to my wedding vows. But when we held one another it was not the embrace of lovers reunited so much as the clinging together of two children lost in a dark wood.

“Oh Otto,” she said at last, “is it my lump? There, let me move over if it gets in the way.”

“No dearest, it’s not that.”

“Why, don’t you like pregnant ladies then?”

“It’s not that either: you know you’re more beautiful to me now than ever. No, I don’t know why . . .”

She gazed into my eyes. “Oh surely not. You don’t mean you’re up­set over the Old Man? Really, I don’t believe it: not in the twentieth century, surely.”

“It’s not that, Liserl, not really. But try to understand: I’ve been a ser­vant of the House of Austria for sixteen years now, and I’ve hardly ever met anyone who could remember when the old boy wasn’t Emperor. I don’t know why, but it just makes me feel odd inside. Perhaps it’s the war and all I’ve seen these past four months. But I’m still bound by oath to the House of Habsburg.”

“And you’re bound by oath to me, and to the child you’ve planted inside me.” She took my hand and placed it on her satin-smooth belly. “There, feel. It’s life in there: a living child who’ll be breathing in a few months and walking not long after that. Why grieve for the dead? There’s simply too many of them: the whole of Europe turned into one vast bone- yard by Franz Joseph and his like. Let all the kings and generals rot, like the millions of young men they’ve sent to moulder into the earth. Come my Maria-Theresien Ritter, forget about Maria Theresa and Franz Joseph and all the dead emperors and dying empires. Long live life! Let’s make love and create a dozen children: it’s the only way people like us can get back at the rotten sods.”

“Liserl, are you quite mad? Have you no respect for the departed, to talk like that? ”

She laughed. “Yes, I think perhaps I am a little crazy now. After what I’ve had to look at these past two years I’m not surprised: all the maimed bodies and damaged minds. Respect for the departed? If we could I’d take you now to Schonbrunn and make love on top of his coffin.”

In the years since, I must have read or listened to several dozen eye-witness accounts of the funeral of the Emperor Franz Joseph. I am sure that you too will be familiar with the solemn pageantry of that grey November day; the muffled hoofs of the horses; the nodding black plumes on the cata­falque; the thirty-four reigning monarchs following bare-headed behind the hearse as the cortege wound its way along streets lined with stunned, grieving people; and of course the traditional exchange at the door of the Capuchin Crypt:

“Who seeks to enter? ”

The Court Chamberlain reeling off the Emperor’s name and his fifty or sixty titles. Then the reply:

“We know of none such here. I ask again, who seeks to enter?” “Franz Joseph, a poor servant of God seeking burial.”

“Enter then,” and the doors slowly swinging open to admit the coffin. No, I shall not bother you yet again by giving a detailed account of what happened. I have found that the aforementioned eye-witness ac­counts usually come either from people who were not there at all, or who were tiny children at the time, or who could not possibly have seen more than a small part of the ceremony if they were indeed present. The reports generally disagree on certain major details, while in other particulars they often show unmistakable signs of having been cribbed one from another. In any case, they almost always compress the two funeral processions into one: the cortege along the Mariahilferstrasse from Schonbrunn on 27 November, and the shorter journey three days later through the Karntnerstrasse to the Capuchin Crypt after the lying in state in St Stephen’s Cathedral.

As to the famous traditional exchange outside the crypt, by the way, while I hate to cast doubt upon a cherished legend, I once discussed this in detail with a Polish general, the very soul of veracity, while we were sitting in a shelter near Victoria Station during a prolonged and noisy air-raid one night in 1941. He had actually been within earshot of the crypt door that day, as a young Rittmeister in an Uhlan regiment, and he assured me upon his honour that no such ritual ever took place. He thought that it might once have done, perhaps back in the eighteenth century; but certainly by 1916 it had long since fallen into disuse. As to the thirty-four crowned heads, neither of us had the slightest idea how that total had been calculated. True, the usual mob of small-time German royalty had turned up—probably more for a free meal than anything else—but Kaiser Wilhelm had pleaded other engagements and there was a war on, so in the end only Ferdinand of Bulgaria had appeared for the non-German monarchies.

The other reason for my not wishing to bore you with yet another account of the funeral of the Emperor Franz Joseph is the simple fact that I was not actually present at either part of the ceremony. I had been due to walk in the cortege from Schonbrunn on the 27th, representing the Knights of the Military Order of Maria Theresa; but at the very last moment I had received a telephone call instructing me to report imme­diately to Aspern flying field. It appeared that the Italian poet-aviator and daredevil Gabriele d’Annunzio had given a newspaper interview in which he had announced his intention of flying to Vienna on the day and bombing the catafalque as it passed through the streets, hoping thus to distribute the Emperor’s embalmed remains among his griev­ing subjects. As an airman I found the whole idea quite preposterous: if d’Annunzio was prepared to fly a six-hour round trip across the Alps and back in winter then in my opinion he was even more intrepid than the Italian press made him out to be. But the local military command had taken alarm and a scratch air-defence squadron had been assembled at Aspern from aircraft out of the workshops and a collection of test-pilots and convalescents. So that is how I spent the afternoon of 27 November, sitting on the field at Aspern in the cockpit of a Brandenburger waiting for the telephone to ring. We were not finally stood down until dusk, so I missed it all.

As to the interment itself, it was the last day of my leave and my pres­ence had not been requested either in the procession or as a pilot. The weather was fine for Vienna in late November, so Elisabeth and I decided to take advantage of the fact that the trams were running and spend the day walking in the Wienerwald: not far, because her waist was beginning to get cumbersome, but enough to get some fresh air and just be together alone before I returned to duty. We kicked up the autumn leaves as we walked arm in arm along the woodland paths, talking of this and that and just luxuriating in one another’s nearness. We drank tea in a little cafe near Grinzing, then climbed up on to the wooded Kahlenberg to look out over the distant city. Despite the anaemic sunshine a light November mist filled the bowl in which Vienna lies, so that only the needle spire of the cathe­dral and a couple of the higher buildings protruded from the golden haze. Then it began, drifting up to us where we sat: the tolling of all the city’s remaining church bells. And above them all rang the sonorous booming of the Pummerin, the great bell of the cathedral cast from Turkish can­non captured in 1683. We both tried hard not to be affected by it all, but it would have taken a heart of granite not to be moved by the sound of a venerable and once-great empire pulling its own passing-bell. We did not speak to one another: there was no need. We merely sat holding hands, acutely aware that the world in which we had been born and grown up was now slipping away for ever.

When it was all over, after a quarter of an hour or so when the last tolling had died away, we got up to make our way home while the trams were still running. As we descended the slope of the hill through the beech woods we saw that others had also given the funeral of their late master a miss. Ragged and thin-faced, dressed in sacking and fragments of army uniform, women and children from the Vienna slums were out gathering wood to keep themselves warm—and berries and mushrooms to eat.

I returned to Pola that evening to catch the boat for Lussin. On my way to the Sudbahnhof I had made a detour to a military outfitters on the Graben, then to the Marine Section of the War Ministry on the Zollamt- strasse to collect a small parcel. Before I kissed Elisabeth goodbye on the station platform I had gone into a cloakroom and removed the Fjl rosette from my cap, replacing it with one purchased that afternoon. It was em­broidered in a dubious-looking wartime gold thread and read simply Kl, cipher of our new Emperor Karl the First—or Karl the Last, as people were already calling him. The parcel contained similar rosettes for my brother-officers at Lussin, and also forty or so of the other-ranks version: a disc of black-japanned metal with the letters embossed in gilt.

We held the oath-taking ceremony the morning after I got back: put on our best uniforms and paraded in the December drizzle, caps under left arms and right hands raised with first and second fingers together, stand­ing before our commanding officer dozing in a chair, a military chaplain and a petty officer bearing the red-white-red naval ensign on a staff. There we swore undying loyalty to our prince and lord Karl, by the Grace of God Emperor of Austria, Apostolic King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, Croatia . . . and so on through a list of thirty-something fairy-book titles like Illyria and Lodomeria, finishing for good measure with “. . . and King of Jerusalem.” Mass was celebrated by the chaplain. Then the Petty Officer roared “Abtreten sofort!” Fregattenkapitan von Lotsch woke with a start to enquire what was the matter, we dispersed to our duties, and that was that: the Emperor was dead, long live the Emperor.

I was called from the Adjutant’s office half an hour later. There was trouble in the ratings’ mess hut and would I please come over, since they wished to see an officer? I put my cap and sword on and hurried across the rain-lashed square of cinders. I entered the hut to be greeted by si­lence. The men did not rise to attention but sat at the trestle tables, plates before them. I was met by that month’s president of the messing com­mission, a Slovak telegraphist rating called Kucar. He stood stony-faced, holding out a plate bearing two oblong slabs of gritty-looking yellowish- grey substance.

“Well Kucar, what’s the trouble? Why aren’t the men eating their dinner? ”

“Obediently report that we aren’t going to eat this stuff, Herr Schiffs- leutnant. It’s polenta.”

I looked closely at the unappetising slabs on the plate. It was indeed polenta, that sad pudding of boiled corn-meal that weighs down so many a table in northern Italy. As an accompaniment to something else—for example fried and served with jugged hare in Friuli—polenta is at least tolerable, if an acquired taste, by which I mean that it is rather horrid but that one can get hardened to it in time. But served on its own it is undeni­ably a most depressing dish, rather like cold slices of congealed porridge only with less flavour. I prodded it with my finger.

“Nonsense Kucar, that’s perfectly good polenta.”

“With respect Herr Schiffsleutnant, we couldn’t care less whether it’s perfectly good or perfectly bad: it’s polenta and we’re not going to eat it. Only the shit-poor eat polenta.”

And he was more or less right there of course: along the Dalmatian coast poverty and polenta went together like twin brothers. For the people of the port towns and the islands the consumption of polenta marked the final slide into indigence, rather as eating horsemeat would for the English or setting down black-eye peas and chitterlings in front of poor white people in Mississippi. In the end we had to get the Proviantmeister to open his stores and serve out bread and bacon to the men. But there would come a time not very far into the future when they would eat even polenta and be glad of it.