The Two-Headed Eagle

16 LAST FLIGHT

Fregattenleutnant Franz Nechledil and I made our first flight on behalf of the Emperor Karl on the morning of 4 December. For once it was not the usual business of convoy es­cort. We had been preparing to take off on the customary Lunga-and-back run, but at the last moment an orderly came running from the air-station Kanzlei hut. A telephone call had just been received from the Naval Air Station at Pola, our parent unit. One of their flying-boats had reported sight­ing a submarine about thirty miles west of Sansego Island. The aeroplane had been returning to Pola and was running low on petrol, and had anyway lost contact with the mystery vessel in a rain squall. Now we were to fly out and see whether we could catch the thing unawares before it gave us the slip. Our convoy escort would be taken over by an aeroplane from Fiume.

Well, we were bombed-up and ready for submarine hunting, so what were we waiting for? I doubted very much whether we would catch the prowler, who would certainly have sighted the Pola aeroplane and turned around if he had any sense at all. But this promised to be a welcome break from the monotony of circling endlessly above a flock of worn-out mer­chant steamers. Submarines, I knew from experience, had a way of turn­ing out to be floating logs or dolphins or upturned lifeboats; but there was always just a slim chance that one day it might be the real thing. As Nechledil warmed up the engine I turned quickly to check the four anti­submarine bombs slung beneath the wings just behind the cockpit. They were 20kg contact-fuse bombs, but with an additional calcium fuse which would detonate them at about four metres’ depth if the submarine had dived by the time they hit the water. One of them exploding alongside would be quite enough to do for any submarine afloat.

We arrived in the search area about 8:30. The cloud had lifted some­what, but occasional curtains of drizzle still drifted slowly across the winter sea. For over an hour we quartered and requartered the twenty- kilometre square where I thought the submarine might be lurking, hav­ing first circled it several times to make sure that the thing was not trying to escape on the surface, where its speed would be much higher. I tried to work out what I would do as a U-Boat commander if I thought that an aeroplane was prowling above me: probably idle around at a couple of knots about ten metres below the surface, conserving batteries as much as possible and hoping that the aeroplane would run low on fuel and patience after about an hour and go home. As for us, our only chance of getting at him would be if he came up to periscope depth and lay there, dimly visible from above like a pike lurking just below the surface of a pond. In that case we had him: prismatic periscopes to search the sky for aircraft were still well into the future in 1916, and if our luck was in, the first that he would know of our presence would be the crash of a bomb alongside and the sudden rush of water as the hull plating blew in.

We were flying about fifty metres up as I scanned the sea through my binoculars. We reached the end of one of our sweeps and turned to make the next one, like a man ploughing a field. Suddenly Nechledil caught my arm and pointed excitedly below. I leant over him at the controls to look. It was an oil slick, spreading across the surface of the sea and reflecting the pallid light with the iridescent gleam of a peacock’s feather. Well, that settled it: our submarine was somewhere below us with one of his tanks seeping oil. All that we had to do now was to track him until he came up to the surface. I checked our petrol gauge: three-quarters full. That gave us a good four hours. We were both filled now with the lust of the chase. As for myself, I was determined if need be to follow him like a bloodhound until our tanks ran dry, even if it meant landing on the sea and being towed back in. I was not going to let a chance like this pass us by because of any old-womanish concern about getting back home after­wards. Nechledil checked the compass bearing as I tapped out a message: “L149—8:56 a.m.—Field 167—Just sighted oil slick from submarine. In pursuit. Send assistance.” A few minutes later back came the reply, “Good luck and good hunting. Torpedo-boat on way from Lussin.”

By now we were intent on following the oil slick. It could only be coming from a submarine, spreading across the sea like a snail track, mile after mile, marking on the surface the boat’s silent progress down in the depths. We held our breath, expecting any moment to see the dim outline as the vessel came up to take a look around. But after some forty minutes of this, doubts began to creep in. Surely we had flown over that patch of seaweed before? I checked the compass bearing. The same thought had just occurred to Nechledil, and I saw him peer as well at his notepad, then at the compass on the dashboard. The realisation hit us both at the same moment: that for the past three-quarters of an hour we had in fact been flying round and round in the same huge circle about four miles across, by now on about our eighth or ninth lap. I glanced astern—and saw to my horror what was the real cause of the circular oil slick! A thin black dribble was trickling from beneath the engine and being blown astern by the slipstream to be beaten to spray by the propeller. We had been follow­ing our own track, like a dog chasing a tin can tied to its tail.

I stared at the oil-pressure gauge—and saw that the pointer had dropped almost to zero. The Mercedes 160hp engine contained eight litres of oil in its sump and had a fresh oil tank in the upper wing contain­ing a further sixteen litres. A pump sucked oil out of this tank at each turn of the crankshaft and returned an equal amount of used oil back into the tank. The drain-tap beneath the sump had clearly shaken itself open in flight, so that instead of circulating the oil, the pump was squirting out a little of the engine’s heart’s blood at each stroke. It was too late to do anything now: after an hour or more of this both sump and tank must be nearly dry. I checked the cooling-water thermometer and saw that it was nearly boiling as the engine overheated. Already I heard it beginning to seize up. The best that we could do now was to thank the kind fates that we were in a flying-boat and that there was only a light swell running: also that there was a torpedo-boat already on its way.

I sent out a hurried SOS message giving our position and saying that we were being forced to ditch by engine failure. Then I remembered the bombs. I had leant overboard at the start of our foot’s chase to remove the nosecaps and set the fuses. The calcium fuses could not be made safe again once they had been armed. The smallest splash of salt water would deto­nate them, so they had to be dropped before we landed. I placed my hand on the bomb-release levers. Then I saw it, about a mile ahead: a low, shad­owy shape obscured by drizzle with a smoking funnel amidships, head­ing west. My heart jumped for joy: it must be the torpedo-boat. Nechledil turned towards it as I fired a signal rocket to attract their attention, then pulled the bomb releases and felt the aeroplane lift momentarily as the bombs fell away to throw up great mounds of spray astern. We certainly needed the lift: the engine was coughing and faltering now as boiling water spumed out of the radiator safety valve above us. We would try to come down in the water beyond them so that the slight wind would blow us towards and not away from them as they lowered their dinghy.

It was not until we were almost above our would-be rescuer that I realised something was badly wrong: that it was not a torpedo-boat at all, let alone an Austrian one, and that what I had taken to be signal flares were in fact tracer rounds from a machine gun being fired up at us— fortunately with very little accuracy. A few bullets flicked through the wings as we skimmed over the mystery vessel to land on the sea about eight hundred metres beyond. As I turned to see who on earth they were I saw that it was in fact a steam-powered submarine which had now lowered its funnel and was in the act of submerging. Within ten seconds the thing had vanished like a ghost, leaving only a patch of foam to prove that it had ever existed. So that was it: the submarine we had set out to hunt had been a submarine after all, one of the large French steam-driven boats of the Ventose class which had been operating in the Adriatic now for two years with somewhat patchy results. Nechledil and I sat down and awaited developments. Would they leave the scene as quickly as they could, not bothering about us? Or would they realise that we had ditched and come back up to take us prisoner?

In the event they did neither. The submarine had been submerged for only a minute or so when suddenly it reappeared in almost the same place, bows breaking surface in a tumult of spray, submerging and then bobbing back up again. We watched fascinated. Within a few seconds the entire forward section of the submarine was sticking out of the water at forty-five degrees. Soon it was almost vertical, like a sporting whale. It hung there for a good two minutes, pirouetting slowly, until the forward hatch burst open to cascade human figures scrambling into the water. They did so among an evil-looking yellowish cloud which I knew must be chlorine coming from the batteries as the seawater poured in. A minute later and it was all over: the bows had disappeared beneath the surface in a boiling heap of air bubbles, leaving only flotsam and the heads of swimmers to mark its final exit. Had we been the agents of its destruc­tion? Surely not: our bombs had fallen into the sea a good thousand metres short. No, all that I could imagine was that they had panicked as they saw us coming towards them and had dived with a hatch left open. It was an easy enough thing to do in any submarine, and doubly so in these steam-powered boats with their telescopic funnel and numerous ventila­tor trunks. I had good cause to know about these things, since I myself had narrowly escaped drowning aboard just such a vessel, the Reamur, during a visit to Toulon before the war, when a piece of driftwood had jammed beneath the funnel hatch during a demonstration dive. Apart from that, what I particularly remembered about these French boats was the nonchalant, hair-raising disregard for any sort of consistency in their design. Some valves, I recalled, opened anti-clockwise, others clockwise; some electrical switches worked down, others up; certain cocks closed with the handle parallel to the pipe, others across it, others still at an angle to it. Sailing these contraptions must have been hazardous enough in peacetime: what they were like to operate in a war zone hardly bore thinking about. But what would become of her crew, swimming now in the sea thirty-odd miles from land? We had inadvertently sunk them, but now we were their only hope of staying afloat long enough to be picked up. The breeze was drifting us gradually towards them. As we drew near I hoped that they would understand the situation and not simply slake their desire for vengeance upon us. Just in case, Nechledil and I drew our pistols.

As it turned out we need not have worried about being lynched. In fact when we finally drifted among them we found that they barely noticed our arrival, being too busy trying to lynch one of their own number, the unfortunate diving coxswain whom they clearly blamed for having dived the boat with a window left open, so to speak. Fortunately for him it is far from easy to beat up a man swimming in the sea—especially when his assailants are also treading water. So Nechledil and I laid about with our paddles at the wet heads around us, then took hold of the wretched man and dragged him aboard. It was not until we had placed him safely on the bows of the boat in front of the cockpit that we set about rescuing the others: twenty-three of them in all, the boat’s entire complement of two officers and twenty-two men.

Our most immediate concern was to prevent them from swamping us by clambering aboard all at once. Nechledil, whose French was excellent, explained the position to them and beseeched them to behave sensibly in the interests of us all. They did, and we took them aboard one by one, distributing them carefully around the flying-boat to spread the strain upon its flimsy hull and wings. Lohner flying-boats were sturdily built as aeroplanes went in those days; but getting on for a tonne of wet human­ity was a load that they had never been designed to carry. In the end the best that we could do was to sit six on each of the lower wings inboard of the floats, huddled together for warmth like swallows on a telegraph wire. Six more perched around the cockpit where the hull was broadest, and four were seated on the hull aft of the wings. The space beneath the engine was used to lay out two engine-room ratings who had taken in too much chlorine and were not feeling very well at all. When the loading was finished the boat sat evenly in the water, though very low. It would do for the time being; but if even a moderate sea got up before help arrived the aeroplane would break up and we would all drown for sure.

I sent out a distress message in clear. The wireless was normally driven by a wind-powered dynamo. We had a small battery to allow us to transmit while standing still, but it was too small for more than three repetitions of the message “L149 ditched 44.27N by 13.55E with crew of French submarine aboard. Send help urgently.” It would be heard I knew. But by whom? And who would reach us first?

While we sat waiting to be picked up there was not much for us to do but exchange introductions with our dripping guests. The submarine, I learnt, had been the Laplace, based at Brindisi. The crew were as surly as one might have expected in the distressing circumstances, but at least the Captain did as courtesy demanded and shook hands with me to in­troduce himself. I would have expected no less: he was plainly a very aristocratic sort of Frenchman indeed and was not at all averse to letting me know it. His name was Lieutenant de Vaisseau the Chevalier Dagobert St Jurienne Greoux-Chasseloup d’Issigny: about the same age as myself or a bit younger and very aloof indeed. I sensed that he was not much liked by his crew, and that he had no great liking for them either. He sat with his legs dangling over the cockpit side and talked with me while wring­ing out his trousers with as much refinement as one can manage in such circumstances.

“Enfin, mon cher lieutenant,” he said, “while I must congratulate you on your rare chivalry and Christian spirit in landing to rescue me and my crew, I regret very much to tell you that you are now our prison­ers. However, do not despair: I shall personally contact Admiral Boue de Lapeyrere at Brindisi to make sure that you are courteously treated, and I shall make every effort to see that you and your gallant companion are given parole. You will find I think that even in this frightful war, towns like Limoges are far from disagreeable places in which to be held captive. But tell me, are you also a nobleman? I understand that most Austrian officers are.”

“Only by recent creation. I am a Knight of the Military Order of Maria Theresa, but my father is only a Czech postal official I’m afraid.” He sniffed a little and looked down his nose at me. I continued though. “However, my dear Lieutenant d’Issigny, I am afraid that I have to inform you that you are in fact our prisoners rather than the other way around. An Austrian torpedo-boat was on its way even before we sighted you, so I imagine that we shall all be picked up shortly. I am grateful though for your concern for Fregattenleutnant Nechledil and myself, and I shall do my utmost to see that you and your men are treated with all the hospitality at our disposal. By the way though—I am afraid that I must set you right on one small point: we did not sink your vessel. We mistook you for one of our torpedo-boats and were trying to land. The bomb-splashes you saw were when I jettisoned our bombs before landing. I imagine that you sank because you dived with a hatch left open. I was once a submarine captain myself and I commiserate with you: these things happen. In fact I myself was very nearly drowned aboard one of your steam-driven boats in Toulon harbour back in 1910 in very similar circumstances. If you ask me it’s an idiotic system for driving a submarine and I feel sorry for you fellows having to sail aboard such vessels.”

He looked more than a little concerned at this news and, after mum­bling that it had not been like that at all, he set to work with a will on wringing out his clothes.

We soon gathered that the Laplace had not been a happy ship, too long at Brindisi and far too long without a refit. We learnt as much by talking with her Second Officer, a fellow called Handelsman. Handelsman had been the Laplace’s Second Officer since before the war and clearly felt that, being a Jew and a staunch republican, he had been unfairly passed over for command in favour of the aristocratic, Catholic and probably cryptoroyalist d’Issigny, even though the latter was a poor leader of men in small ships and had paid very little attention to training. I gathered that such things were far from uncommon in the French Navy, which was manned largely by Catholic Bretons and which had consequently been viewed with very little favour by the anti-clericals of the Third Republic.

“Our matelots, you understand, they are very devot,” Handelsman had confided in me. I replied that so far as I could see, with boats like the Laplace and captains like d’Issigny that was probably just as well. As for the matelots themselves, they seemed a thoroughly dispirited lot even af­ter making allowance for their recent narrow escape from drowning and their present plight sitting dripping wet in the middle of the Adriatic with nothing to support them but the flimsy structure of an enemy flying-boat. They sat and glowered at us with their glum, heavy-moustached faces, and nothing seemed capable of cheering them up: not even Nechledil’s well-meaning attempts to generate a little animal warmth by getting them singing the “Marseillaise” and “Sambre et Meuse.” All that we could offer them by way of hospitality was a single boiled sweet each from the aeroplane’s emergency ration pack, and a capful of schnapps from my hipflask.

This merely seemed to increase their dejection—until Nechledil started to sing a song which he had learnt some years before at a Sokol summer youth camp among emigrant Czech miners in the Nord coalfield. It was called “Revenant de Nantes” and seemed to be a ditty peculiar to the French Army, which was perhaps why our devout Catholic matelots appeared never to have heard it before. It certainly did the trick of raising spirits, as he sang each verse and then taught it to them. There were about seventy-five of them I think, each of them more luminously bawdy than the last as the song wound its picaresque way among blond-haired farmers’ daughters, cuckolded station masters, rapacious widows and lascivious cures. It was all tremendous fun, and soon our sailors were steaming away nicely as they roared out each chorus with the utmost zest. When it was over Nechledil bowed modestly to a round of applause and sat down in the pilot’s seat. I wondered as he did so whether this was quite the sort of thing that the Sokol movement’s founders had in mind when they set out to improve the moral and spiritual tone of Czech youth.

It was about 3:00 p.m. that we saw the smoke on the horizon—to westward. That, we realised with sinking hearts, meant a French warship, and for Nechledil and me a spell of indefinite duration in a prison camp. True, it was better than being drowned, but I still felt a certain chagrin that rescuing these Frenchmen had landed us in that predicament. If we had come down on an empty expanse of sea we would have sent a distress signal in code instead of giving our position in clear and would have been picked up in due course by our own people. But there: the fortunes of war I supposed. With heavy heart I loaded a red flare into the rocket pistol and fired it into the air, almost hearing as I did so the sound of a key turning in a lock. I would probably survive the war now, but how long would it be before I saw my child?

Our rescuer hove into sight to a loud cheer from our guests. As I expected it was a French two-funnelled destroyer: Branlebas- class. As it approached I saw that d’Issigny and his maltreated diving coxswain were deep in a whispered consultation. Twenty minutes later a whaler from the destroyer had come alongside and the Laplace’s crew were being loaded on to it, one by one so as not to overbalance our aeroplane. Nechledil and I were the last to leave as the French prepared to take the machine in tow. I had my cigarette lighter ready to set her on fire and swim for it, but the French had thought of that possibility. Three men with rifles kept us covered, and when we boarded the whaler we had to do so with our hands on our heads.

I saluted the destroyer’s captain at the head of the gangway, and shook hands with him in as curt a fashion as I thought the occasion demanded. Then Nechledil and I were politely relieved of our pistols and escorted below to the wardroom. So this was it at last: prisoners of war. But I supposed that it could have been worse. At least we were prisoners of the French and not the Italians. I suspected that life as a prisoner in France might not be quite the gentlemanly eighteenth-century affair that Lieutenant the Chevalier d’Issigny had made it out to be; but at worst a prison camp could hardly be more lacking in amenities than Lussin Piccolo, while as to the food, I was sure that it would be a good deal better. But would we be prisoners of the French? That thought preoccupied me as I sat there in the wardroom under armed guard, gratefully drinking the coffee laced with brandy which a steward had brought me. Imprisonment on parole in Bizerta or Toulouse might be quite agreeable, I thought. But suppose that they handed us over to the Italians after all? My old U-Boat comrade Hugo Falkhausen had been taken prisoner with his entire crew earlier in 1916 when his boat had been caught in nets by British armed trawlers in the Otranto Straits. The British had handed him over to the Italians and since then his accommodation and diet had been so poor that he had been bombarding the Red Cross and the Swiss government—even the Vatican—with letters of complaint. I wondered also whether and how soon I would be able to get a telegram off to tell Elisabeth that I was safe. The alarm would have been raised by now at Lussin and if we were not found by nightfall tomorrow we would be posted missing. In her present condition I was anxious to spare her any upset.

These thoughts were interrupted as an orderly entered: I was cor­dially requested to attend an interview with the commanding officer. The Captain of the destroyer Bombardier was a portly little man in his fif­ties called Kermadec-Ploufragan: a Breton like most French seamen. He invited me to sit down and offered me a cigar, which I gladly accepted. For some reason he insisted on speaking with me in English, though my French was reasonably good. It was only as the conversation progressed that I realised that this might have something to do with the presence of a fusilier marin standing sentry on the other side of the door.

“My most dear Lieutenant,” he began, “Lieutenant d’Issigny has just related to me of your quite incredible chivalry: that you sink his subma­rine after long and bitter struggles, then you land on the water to rescue him and his equipage even though you yourselves will become prison­ers.” I was about to point out that we had not sunk the Laplace after long and bitter struggles, that on the contrary, so far as I could make out the Laplace had sunk herself through incompetence. But he went on before I could speak. “Yes, my dearest Lieutenant, it is indeed a most sad and piti­able thing that yourself and your pilot should have become captive solely because of your honourable and gentle behaviour.”

“Captain, think nothing of it. These are the fortunes of war I am afraid. If our torpedo-boat had found us before you did then Lieutenant d’Issigny and his crew would now be our prisoners. Lieutenant Nechledil and I can at least console ourselves that we managed to rescue twenty-four of our enemies from drowning once they could no longer wage war on us. We are both seafarers like yourself and regard ourselves as waging war on the French government, not on the human race.”

Kermadec almost wiped away a tear at these words. “Ah, my dear Lieutenant, your noble words, they move me so deeply. Such distinguished sentiments. We French have always considered you Austrians to be a civilised people like ourselves, not beast-brutes and savages like les sales Boches. Your actions today confirm me only in this. But . . .” his face brightened, “but courage; it must not that we despair ourselves of the situation. There may yet be a solution.”

“A solution, Captain? I’m afraid that I don’t understand. Lieutenant Nechledil and I are your prisoners and that’s all there is to be said on the matter.”

“Please, please to wait a little moment. I have spoken with Lieutenant d’Issigny and we are agreed that perhaps it may be possible to de-capture you, if you understand my meaning.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t follow you . . .”

“It is almost dark. Your aeroplane, it is towed astern. You may still get into it and we will cut you loose. Voila—you have escaped. No one will say anything or know anything. But you must first promise me two things.” “And what are they, if I might ask?”

“The first, that you will not start your motor and take off until we are out of hearing; the second, that you will give me your paroles as officers never again in this war to fly against France. Against the Italians—pah! they are crapule: it signifies nothing. But not against France.”

It certainly looked an attractive offer. I sensed now that both d’Issigny and the Captain of the destroyer were intensely anxious to have us both out of the way. Of course—d’Issigny himself must have been in the conning- tower hatch firing the machine gun at us as we roared overhead. A subma­rine has no portholes, so only he and his unfortunate diving coxswain knew that their boat had been sunk purely through accident and not from our bombs. If Nechledil and I conveniently disappeared from the scene then he and his crew might get medals from this action instead of facing a court of enquiry. He and Kermadec would explain away the rescue by saying that we had flown away before we could be captured, leaving the Laplace's crew swimming in the water for the destroyer to pick up. The professional hon­our of La Royale would be preserved and everyone would be happy.

The only question now was, what was in it for us? Our engine was defunct, so we would be set adrift and left to our fate. It would be a long, cold night and perhaps by morning a bora would be blowing. In the end we might merely have exchanged a prison camp for a watery grave.

“Captain,” I asked, “if we were to be landed by you, whose prisoners would we be?”

“Ah, that is simple. We would have to hand you over to the Italians. The Marine Nationale are guests at Brindisi and we have no faculties for holding prisoners. There is an agreement for this.”

That settled it: five minutes later Nechledil and I were seated once more in the cockpit of the flying-boat L149 as it drifted away astern into the Adriatic night. A few minutes more, and the noise of the Bombardier’s engines had been swallowed up by the darkness. We were on our own once more.

Many years later, about 1955, I happened to see a recently published book entitled A Sailor Remembers, by none other than Rear-Admiral Dagobert St Jurienne, Chevalier Greoux-Chasseloup d’Issigny, French Navy (Rtd). Written in a most entertainingly florid style, it told of his adventures from the time when he had chosen the seafaring life up to his retirement in 1953. I must say however that I found it to be more interesting for what a sailor had managed to forget than for what he had remembered, par­ticularly as regards his own murky activities during the Second World War when he had served as Deputy Minister of the Marine in the Vichy government, then attached himself to Admiral Darlan in North Africa, then deftly changed sides in 1943 and emerged among the ranks of the victors. My main interest though was in finding out what (if anything) he had to say about certain events one day in December 1916. I was not to be disappointed: After a ferocious battle lasting over an hour with the many Austrian aeroplanes, the immortal submarine Laplace slid at last beneath the waters of the Adriatic, overwhelmed by the superior might of the en­emy. As the waves closed over them our brave matelots raised three cheers of “Vive la France!” and sang the “Marseillaise” while the perfidious enemies circled above them like odious vultures.

Yet even in the darkest moments of war some sparks of humanity may be found in the adversary, and as we swam among the wreck­age an Austro-Hungarian hydroplane alighted on the waves beside us and supported me and my brave fellows in the water until suc­cour arrived. These very chivalrous and gentle Austrians, by name the Chevalier von Parchatzky and the Vicomte de Nec-Ledil, would have supported us longer even at the cost of themselves becom­ing prisoners, but I bade them leave with a cry of “Save yourselves while there is still time, my braves!” So they started their motor and climbed into the air, waving to us as they did so in farewell. Alas, we later heard that these noble fellows were both lost soon afterwards, and that the sea had swallowed them up forever.

I was unable to resist sending a postcard to the Admiral’s publisher say­ing that while sadly the Vicomte de Nec-Ledil was no more, the noble Austrian Chevalier von Parchatzky was very much alive and would in fact be glad to meet him if he were ever in London. I read a few weeks later in The Times that he had died suddenly of a stroke. I hope that there was no connection.

For the time being though, Lieutenant d’Issigny’s surmise about our being engloutis par la mer came uncomfortably close to being fulfilled. A north-west wind got up during the night and soon raised a sea that would have been uncomfortable in any small boat, let alone one like ours with a great venetian-blind structure of wings and tailplane on top of it. By dawn we were wet through, frozen and exhausted by lack of sleep and continu­ous bailing. Nor had we the slightest idea where we were. The hazy sun came up to reveal a heaving grey disc of water with our flying-boat tossing and lurching in the middle of it as its flat bottom slithered down into each wave-trough. We were being drifted along at about six or seven knots by the wind, I thought. But at least drifting was better than staying still. In an almost land-locked sea like the Adriatic drifting with the wind would bring us eventually to one shore or another. I decided to aid this process. I took out my clasp-knife and clambered out on to the lower wings. I slit open the fabric on the under-surface of the wings above and pulled this down in flaps, which I fastened to the lower wings to make crude sails.

Steering with our paddles and the rudder, this would help us to make bet­ter speed before the wind and might get us to land before we were dead from exposure and fatigue.

Even so it was a miserable business to huddle there in the cockpit, soaked through with spray, each trying to snatch a half-hour’s sleep as the other bailed. Yet despite the chill and wet, we were soon tormented by thirst as the salt spray caked on our lips. We had no water apart from a couple of litres milked from the engine radiator, barely drinkable from rust and engine oil. As for food, there was none apart from a packet of ship’s biscuits which we had been too ashamed to offer to the survivors from the Laplace. Crunching these and trying to swallow them with our parched throats was like trying to masticate broken bottles. About midday I decided to try and get the wireless working, charging the battery by attaching a makeshift crank to the wind-driven dynamo. It was a bitter disappointment: an hour or more of strenuous cranking produced barely enough current for four repetitions of the message “L149—SOS.”

This purgatory lasted until early afternoon, when the breeze dropped and the sea lessened to leave us drifting aimlessly once more. Then we both saw it together: the smoke on the horizon to northward. I fired three flares as the upperworks came into sight. Through my binoculars it looked like an Austrian Tb/-class torpedo-boat, in fact a small two-funnelled coastal destroyer. But had they seen us? They seemed to be steaming at about seven knots and were within three thousand metres of us. A drift­ing flying-boat is hardly something that a look-out can miss, but still they steamed on past us and disappeared in a bank of haze, ignoring us as I desperately fired our last flares.

“Nechledil,” I said through cracked lips, “how could they have missed us? Surely they must have seen us at this range.” Nechledil said nothing, merely sat staring glumly as the vessel faded into the murk. I could see that the apathy of exhaustion was already creeping over him. I too gazed at the spot where the torpedo-boat had vanished, lost for words. So imagine my surprise about five minutes later when the boat reappeared, heading in the opposite direction and turning towards us. I waved and shouted as if they would hear us at that range. Why had they ignored us the first time? They were coming to pick us up, no question of that.

The dinghy bumped alongside us a few minutes later. To my sur­prise the two ratings in it refused to answer us when we spoke, only told us curtly to sit down and shut up. I was even more surprised when one of them proceeded to take a crowbar and smash holes in the floor and sides of the flying-boat—and told me to be quiet when I asked him what he thought he was doing. My suspicion that something was badly amiss was confirmed shortly afterwards as we came alongside the torpedo-boat Tb14. We were greeted by two ratings with levelled rifles and a petty officer with a pistol. I asked what the devil was going on—and was told to come aboard with my hands up. As I was bundled across the rail the incredible truth finally dawned upon me. The vessel was in the hands of mutineers.