The Two-Headed Eagle

17 FIAT JUSTITIA

As Nechledil and I were being searched before being hustled below decks I overheard an argument going on between the petty officer who had greeted us at the gangway and a senior rating. Both were Czechs, and the rating was plainly not all pleased with the Petty Officer.

“For God Almighty’s sake why did we have to pick them up? I told the helmsman to keep his course when I saw them. They’ll be out after us by now and we’ve still got three hours left until it gets dark.”

“Shut up Eichler. Who’s giving the orders here, me or you?”

“I thought there weren’t going to be any orders any more. You and your finer feelings, Vackar. We ought to have left the bastards to drown. They’re only officers.”

“They’re human and we’re socialists. They were men like us once: only Austria turned them into officers.”

“Oh be quiet and get them below with the others then. I’ve got a ship to run.” He turned to us. “What’s your names?”

“No business of yours, sailor,” I answered. “And stand to attention when you speak to an officer. Who’s in charge here?”

He laughed. “Don’t come that tone of voice here Herr Leutnant or you’ll both end up back in the sea. We’re all in charge here.” A sailor stuck a pistol into my stomach as he reached down the neck of my flying tunic to pull out my identity tag. He collected Nechledil’s by the same means and handed them to Eichler, who examined the names stamped on the back. “I don’t believe it—both Czechs as well. And one of them the celebrated Ritter von Prohaska of the U-Boat Service. Well meine Herren, remember any of our Czech do we? Or did they wash that out of you at cadet school as well? Filth—you’d forget your own names if the Austrians told you to do it. Your sort make me sick.”

With that we were pushed down the narrow companionway and shoved into the Captain’s cabin. The door was locked behind us. We found ourselves packed into the tiny steel cubicle with five other men: the ship’s captain, a Seefahnrich and three NCOs who had remained loyal when the ship had been taken over. The Captain was a fellow called Klemmer whom I knew vaguely from the Marine Academy. He was in a bad way, shot through the left lung and coughing blood. They had bandaged him with a torn bedsheet and laid him out on a bunk. We gathered that Tb14 had been operating with the 5th Torpedo Boat Division at Sebenico, en­gaged day-in, day-out for the past ten months on convoy escort along the Dalmatian coast. Working-hours had been long, leave minimal and the food increasingly poor. Likewise the First Officer, one Strnadl, had been very unpopular, combining tyranny with incompetence in about equal measure. Yet no one had suspected anything until just before eight bells that morning off Premuda, when the Captain had suddenly found himself barricaded into his cabin just as he was about to relieve Strnadl on the forenoon watch. He had finally managed to lever the cabin door open with a chair-leg, but had emerged on deck pistol in hand only to be knocked over by a rifle-shot from Eichler on a conning tower. Our fellow prisoners said that, so far as they knew, Eichler and Vackar had taken an equal part in organising the mutiny. Both had been heard talking some days before about a Czech Legion which was being formed among Austrian prisoners in Italy. Quite clearly the boat was bound for Ancona to surrender.

As for the rest of the eighteen-man crew, they thought that most were undecided about the mutiny: a few of the South Slavs disposed to join it, others probably against and the engine-room crew wavering. No one knew what had happened to Fregattenleutnant Strnadl. He might have been locked up in the fo’c’sle, but shots had been heard and it seemed more likely that he had gone overboard with a bullet through his head.

It looked then as if, having been generously released from French captivity, I was now on my way to become a prisoner of the Italians after all. That was a matter for regret to be sure, and for acute shame on behalf of my service in view of the circumstances in which it had happened, but at least it cast no slur upon either my loyalty or my professional compe­tence. As for poor Nechledil though, I sensed that he would gladly accept life imprisonment in a cesspit with scorpions for company and bread and water to eat in exchange for his present predicament. His father had been condemned for treason, his brother was a deserter and his relatives were sitting in Austrian internment camps on suspicion of Czech nationalist subversion. And now he found himself through no fault of his own aboard a warship about to desert to the enemy after having fallen victim to a Czech-led mutiny. He was in a pretty mess and no mistake. What would happen if Tb14 were captured before nightfall by Austrian ships? What would happen to his mother and brother when he arrived in Italy and the news got back via the Red Cross? Suppose that Italy finally lost the war and Austrian deserters were handed over? I could vouch for his loyalty, but who would listen to me? I was a Czech myself after all, and already under investigation for various breaches of military discipline. Something had to be done.

I knew the Tb1-class torpedo-boats quite well from having served aboard one as second-in-command back in 1909; not only served aboard her, but worked on her in the shipyard where she was being built. In or­der to get the Hungarian parliamentary deputation to vote money for them, half of the Tb1-class orders had been placed with the Kingdom of Hungary’s only salt-water shipyard, the Ganz-Danubius AG in Fiume. Although only set up a couple of years before, Ganz-Danubius had already established a formidable reputation for poor design and shoddy workman­ship. The Danubius Tb1 boats were no exceptions to this unhappy rule. Long, narrow steel canoes driven by a single propeller, they were unstable and top-heavy at the best of times. But Danubius had managed to make the basic design even worse by taking no account whatever of the enor­mous torque-effect from the propeller. The result on speed-trials had been a list to starboard which grew more alarming with every knot, until I had been obliged to have men hanging on to the port rails to trim ship and the crew below moving every available piece of gear over to the port side. The boats had been refused acceptance by the Navy and had returned to the yard for months of modifications.

I had been at the Danubius yard throughout those alterations. And now, seven years later, I was sitting in the captain’s cabin of one of these boats with a pencil and sheet of paper, trying to remember what had been done. At last I had it: below the cabin a certain lubricating-oil tank had been taken out and moved to the other side of the ship. So far as I could remember the holes in the frames had never been plated in because there was no need for it. It was worth a try. I pulled open the door of the captain’s locker on the starboard side, up against the forward bulkhead, and dragged out a couple of suitcases, then ripped up a sheet of linoleum from the steel deck beneath. Yes, there was an inspection plate as I had expected: a removable section of deck to allow workmen to look inside the ship’s bottom during a major refit and find any sprung rivets before recoat­ing the bilges with rust-proofing compound. It might just be possible . . . I rummaged in the drawer of the captain’s desk and found a clasp-knife with a screwdriver of sorts then returned to the wardrobe floor and got to work on the counter-sunk screws holding the plate in position. They were well rusted in, but after half an hour or so of exertion we had wormed them out and levered up the plate. I lowered my head inside the hole and struck a match. Yes, there was a hole through the bulkhead, about the size of a largish dinner plate. A thin man with very narrow shoulders might just be able to wriggle through into the next compartment of the boat’s bilges, which happened to be below the vestibule at the bottom of the companion ladder where a sentry was now standing to keep guard on us. The vestibule contained several lockers in addition to the officers’ lavatory. If he could then force open the floor of one of the lockers . . . But who would under­take the task? He would need to be a circus contortionist or a human eel. I looked around. Franz Nechledil was the obvious choice: tall, but so thin that he was difficult to see when he stood sideways.

As for Nechledil, in his present predicament he would cheerfully have volunteered to jump into a vat of boiling acid to prove his loyalty to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. But it was still going to be extremely tricky.

He would have to go down into the bilges head-first, we decided, then worm his way through the hole and bend in the middle to come up on the other side. In the end he had to strip himself naked while we smeared him with the contents of a large pot of cold-cream which Klemmer had been taking home to Pola as a present for his wife. Then we lashed a bedsheet about his ankles in order to haul him up if he fainted. He took a pocket torch, and down into the musty blackness he went.

Just as Nechledil’s feet disappeared the key sounded in the lock and the door swung open. Two armed ratings entered and laid hold of me to drag me out to Vackar, who was waiting on deck. Fortunately they were in such a hurry that they failed to notice that they were one prisoner short. Was this it, I thought to myself as they hustled me up the ladder? Was I due to be shot and dumped overboard in order to impress the others? When we were on deck I shook off my captors and stood as straight as I could, rearranging my disordered clothes as I did so.

“Herr Schiffsleutnant Prohaska?” said Vackar.

“Yes, in what may I perhaps be of service to you now that your ruf­fians have dragged me up on deck?”

“Come with me if you will. I wish to talk with you in private.”

I was tempted to stand on my dignity and refuse. But a rifle muzzle stuck into the small of one’s back is the most pressing of invitations, and in any case the longer I kept the ringleaders of this mutiny preoccupied the longer Nechledil and the rest would have to break out of their prison.

Vackar led me to the fo’c’sle crew-space and shut the door after bid­ding the two ratings stand guard outside. He sat down at the mess table and indicated that I should do the same. I considered standing, but felt that I could talk better with him sitting down. He seemed very anxious to speak with me.

“Care for a cigarette, Herr Schiffsleutnant? They belonged to Herr Leutnant Strnadl, but he won’t be needing them now.”

“In that case, no thank you. I don’t touch stolen property.”

“Please yourself. You don’t mind if I light up, do you?”

“Feel free.” He lit his cigarette, and turned to face me across the table. “Look here, Prohaska . . .”

“ ‘Herr Schiffsleutnant,’ if you please . . .”

“Prohaska: you’re not in a position to get on your high horse. Look, I’ll come straight with you: I’m inviting you to join us.”

“Join mutineers and murderers ? You must be out of your mind. But why on earth do you think that I’d want to join you anyway?”

“You’re a Czech like Eichler and me, and I think it’s high time you began to consider where your real interests lie.”

“Perhaps you ought to have done some thinking about where your best interests lie—or, rather, lay, since as far as I can see it’s far too late for it now. Mutiny, murder, desertion to the enemy and offering violence to your superiors are all death-penalty offences.”

“So they shoot me four times if they catch me? Come off it: we’re within thirty miles of Italian waters now and it’ll be starting to get dark in an hour. No, we’ll make sure they don’t catch us—one way or another. I think I ought to warn you though that Eichler’s talking of shooting you one by one as hostages if they come after us. He’s a much harder nut than I am, as I think you may already have noticed.”

“But if you’re so sure of reaching the Italian side before nightfall why should it matter to you whether I join you or not?”

“Partly concern for your own long-term interests . . .”

“Thank you. I’m most touched.”

“. . . And partly concern for ours.”

“What do you mean?”

“There was a flying-boat overhead half an hour ago, and it certainly wasn’t Italian. The Wireless Operator managed to get a message off before we took control of the ship. Also the boilers are in bad shape.”

“Why are you telling me all this? You’re beginning to sound as if you aren’t quite so sure of getting to Italy after all.”

He was silent for a few moments. “It’s the stokers down in the engine room. They can’t make up their minds whether to join us or not and they’re just dawdling, waiting to see what happens. If we could get an officer to tell them to do it they’d certainly come over to us and put their backs into it. They’re mostly Croat peasants and used to doing what they’re told.”

“I see. But why should I come over to you? If I don’t your friend Eichler might shoot me and tip me overboard like Fregattenleutnant Strnadl; but if that doesn’t happen the worst I can expect is a spell in an Italian prison camp.”

“Because you’re a Czech like us, that’s why, you and your pilot.”

“I’m sorry; I may have been born a Czech but I became an officer of the House of Austria a long time ago now and gave up my nationality.” “Well, perhaps it’s high time you considered applying to rejoin. Austria’s dead, Prohaska: had been dead for years, even before the war. Now the Old Man’s gone the corpse has finally fallen to pieces.”

“I beg to differ: Austria-Hungary is probably going to win this war.” “Austria won’t win this war, whatever happens. Austria can’t win. But Germany might, and what’s going to happen to us all then?” He leant across the table and stared into my face. “For God’s sake, Prohaska, wake up will you? They say that you’re an intelligent man. This whole precious Austria-Hungary of yours is nothing more now than a way of forcing us Slavs to fight for Germany. What sort of future do you think there’ll be for any of us if they win? Come over and join us, you and your pilot. When we get to Italy we’ll all volunteer to join this Czech Legion of theirs.”

“You seem to know a lot about these things for a petty officer tele­graphist, Vackar.”

“I’ve made it my business to know. We wireless operators talk to one another a lot, despite the war. I’ve been in touch with Masaryk and the National Council through Switzerland for a year or more now. There’s a lot of us organising in the fleet and the garrisons, just waiting for the day. It hasn’t come yet, but when it does then believe me there’ll be a lot of us Czechs ready to do what needs to be done.”

“All very impressive. So why all the trouble aboard this ship?”

“The Croats and the Slovenes. We could still get them on our side, but for the moment they’re more frightened of the Italians than of Germany. And anyway, they’re half of them long-service men: heads of solid wood. If an officer told them to jump over a cliff for their Emperor they’d do it.”

I must admit that what Vackar had to say to me in the fo’c’sle there that morning did disturb me a good deal; brought a number of uncomfortable half-formed ideas to the surface about the direction the war was taking.

But please understand that if the pull of my old nationality and language was strong, the bonds of loyalty to Dynasty and Fatherland were still much stronger. Things looked different in those days from how they look now, seventy years on. All of us officers—even first-generation officers like myself from the old peasant peoples—had been subjected to years of very subtle and effective mind-shaping as we went through the schools and military colleges of the Old Monarchy. Loyalty to our Emperor; loyalty to our ruling house; loyalty to our multinational Fatherland and to our ship and service; loyalty to the officer’s code of honour and to our oath; loyalty to the Catholic Church and to our country’s allies: all these were extremely powerful ties. And just because we had been indoctrinated to accept these things does not necessarily mean that they were themselves worthless: in fact, looking back on it now, I think that even if the Habsburg multina­tional empire was a pretty disastrous affair in practice, not all of its ideals were ignoble ones.

But any inner struggle that I might perhaps have undergone was rap­idly forestalled by a shout from the other side of the door. Vackar sprang to his feet and rushed out on deck, leaving a very young Croat sailor with a pistol to guard me. Before long shouting and confused sounds of struggle came to me from amidships as the boat began to lose way. Something was happening in the engine room. I set to work upon my guard, who was clearly very perplexed by it all.

“Sailor,” I said in Croat, “do you hear that?”

“Obediently report that yes, Herr Schiffsleutnant.”

“What will you do now? ”

His voice trembled as he replied. “Obediently report . . . Obediently report that I’ll . . . shoot you dead if you move—by your leave, Herr Schiffsleutnant.”

“Shoot me, sailor? Oh dear, you shouldn’t have said that you know: offering threats to an officer is a death-penalty offence in wartime. ‘Tod durch erschiessen . . .’ Is that how you want your parents to remember you?” The poor lad was almost in tears by now. I held out my hand. “There, there. You’re a young lad and no doubt they threatened you into joining them. Give me that pistol and we’ll say no more about it.” He handed me the pistol almost thankfully and I rushed up the ladder on to the deck abaft the conning tower.

A strange scene greeted me in the gathering dusk. A naked man, cov­ered from head to foot in grime and rust, stood at the conning-tower rails with a pistol in his hand and a naval cap on his head. He was haranguing a crowd of open-mouthed, staring ratings below, like some crazed prophet just arrived in Jerusalem from the wilderness to tell everyone to repent and escape the wrath to come. It was only with difficulty that I recognised this bizarre, staring-eyed figure as Franz Nechledil.

“Sailors,” he yelled, “sailors, don’t listen to these fools and deceivers who would lead you to the enemy, who would entice you to destruction and sell your country to the perfidious King of Italy. Czechs, Slovenes, Germans, Croats—we all fight for one another, for our Emperor and King and for our common Fatherland; for God and for our honour as sailors of Austria. Will you let these reptiles make you into traitors and mutineers? No future awaits you in Italy but a prison camp, a prison camp which will take in the whole of the Adriatic coastlands and all your families as well if the Italians win. Be true to your oath; true to your comrades; true to the Noble House of Habsburg!” Out of the corner of my eye I saw a move­ment behind the after funnel. It was Eichler, levelling a rifle at Nechledil on the bridge and about to fire. But I fired first. Hitting someone with a pistol at twenty metres is by no means certain, but my luck was in. He dropped the rifle and fell to his knees, clutching his arm. That was the hair that tipped the scales: within a few minutes the waverers had joined us and the mutineers were firmly under lock and key in the fo’c’sle with sentries posted at every door and skylight. S.M. Tb14 had rejoined the Imperial and Royal Fleet.

The full story only came out later: how Nechledil had almost fainted in the foul air of the bilges, but had still managed to turn that tight corner and worm his way up into the base of the oilskin locker at the foot of the companionway ladder. The plate that made up the locker floor had given him some trouble, but luck and the slipshod workmanship of Messrs Ganz and Danubius had been on our side: instead of a steel plate the floor of the locker was nothing but plywood. He had managed to prise it open, climb up into the locker—then burst out upon an astonished sentry at the foot of the ladder. The man had given no trouble when Nechledil appeared, naked and black as the devil with rust and bilge-grime: in fact had run for his life yelling that the murdered officer had come back aboard to haunt everyone. This unexpected turn had so thrown the engine-room crew off balance that they had barricaded themselves in and drawn the boiler fires. Nechledil had unlocked the door of the Captain’s cabin and the prisoners had then rushed out armed with legs from the cabin table. Things had hung in the balance for a few minutes, but in the end it was undoubtedly the awesome spectacle of Nechledil’s naked speech of Kaisertreu devotion from the bridge that had finally swung the crew against the mutineers. Just before dusk we fell in with the destroyer S.M.S. Sne%nik and were escorted back to Zara, all of us under arrest pending investigations.

In the end Vackar and Eichler paid with their lives for their human­ity in stopping to pick us up. That much is indisputable, for without the half-hour’s loss of time, and without my special knowledge of the detailed construction of Tb1-class torpedo-boats, and without Nechledil’s deter­mination, I am pretty sure that they would have got away with it, boilers or no boilers. I pleaded extenuating circumstances as vigorously as I could at their court martial aboard the flagship Viribus Unitis in Pola Harbour the following week, but it was a hopeless task from the outset. Mutiny, murder and desertion are all death-penalty offences in wartime, whatever the country, and in 1916 they would have suffered death for them in any other country in Europe as well. The best that I could do was to get more lenient sentences for the lesser mutineers, particularly for the young Croat sailor who had handed me his pistol and who got off with eighteen months. As for the rest, two men got twelve-year sentences—of which they served only two, thanks to Austria’s collapse—while the remainder were landed and dispersed to shore establishments.

Vackar and Eichler were shot at dawn on the morning of 12 December, against the wall of Pola’s Naval Cemetery, where two graves had been dug ready for them. Like all the rest of the fleet in harbour I had to stand to attention on deck and listen as the volleys crashed among the black cypress trees on the hill and the crows rose cawing from their roosts into the early morning air. Old Austria was good at pageantry, and no effort had been spared here to drive home the lesson that mutiny did not pay. The lesson sank in, to judge from the pale, tense faces of the ratings paraded on the decks of the warships at anchor as the Articles of War were read out to them by their captains.

First one volley rang out, then another—then a third, more ragged than the first two, and finally a disordered spatter of shots. I felt sick: clearly something had gone badly wrong. It has always amazed me that human life can be snuffed out so easily by falling backwards off a chair or inhaling a cherry pit or—as a Polish great-aunt of mine is supposed once to have done—through dislocating one’s neck with a violent sneeze, yet when the state’s professional operatives set out to achieve the same end they so often botch the job. I heard afterwards that Eichler had died at the first volley, but that poor Vackar had only been wounded, and shouted, “You can kill us, but not our ideas!” as the blindfold fell off. The second volley also failed to kill him, and the third, by which time the firing squad’s nerve had gone. The officer stepped up and tried to administer the coup de grace with his pistol, but it misfired and jammed. In the end the municipal gravedigger had to put Vackar out of his misery with a couple of well-aimed blows from his spade. He had been a horse slaughterer before he went to work for the town council and knew about these things.

For me at least that was not the end of the affair. The very next day I was summoned, not to my own court martial as I had half expected, but to the Imperial Residence at the Villa Wartholz, near Bad Reichenau. When I arrived I was ushered straight into the Emperor’s audience room. He had heard about my part in suppressing the mutiny aboard Tb14 and was anxious to meet me. I must say that my immediate reaction after the events of the previous day was one of nausea. No doubt I would be ful­somely congratulated on my dog-like fidelity to my imperial master and would receive some disc of metal on a bit of ribbon to reward me for hav­ing procured the deaths of two of my fellow-countrymen. But it was not like that at all. The Emperor shook my hand and said all the usual things: asked about my family and how long had I been an officer and so forth. Then he sent out his aides and bade me sit down in the armchair opposite him in his private study.

“Prohaska,” he said, “this was a bad business and must have been very distressing for you.”

“I obediently report that not in the least, Your Imperial Majesty. I merely did my duty as an officer of the House of Austria.”

“Yes, yes, I know that: I can read as much in the Armee Zeitung any day of the week. But mutinies don’t just happen. Tell me what you think were the reasons—and mind you, tell me what you really think, not what you think you are expected to say. If people can’t tell the truth even to their Emperor then we are indeed lost.”

So I told him what I thought: about this mutiny, and others, and the near-mutinies that had never got into the papers. I told him that it was not socialist agitators or secret nationalists or agents of the Entente as the hurrah-press said, but boredom, too little leave and bad food piled on top of a system of discipline which might have been appropriate for the armies of Maria Theresa, ruled by the pace-stick and the lash, but which was grotesquely ill-adapted to running units made up from intelligent young technicians. As I spoke he made notes and kept interrupting me to ask a great many very intelligent questions. Then he said something that made me stare in goggle-eyed disbelief.

“Prohaska, you have told me what you think. And I will now tell you as one of my bravest officers what I think about it all. I think that the Monarchy cannot survive another year of this war; nor can it survive in its present form even if peace should come tomorrow. My first priority as Emperor will be to bring about a negotiated end to this dreadful butch- ery—without Germany if necessary—and then set about a programme of root-and-branch reform at home. What you have told me here today only confirms me in the correctness of these views. But,” he picked up a bulky folder from his desk, “I have something else to discuss with you before you leave. When we met at Haidenschaft back in August we spoke briefly, did we not, about the circumstances of your transfer from the U-Boat service to the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe?”

“I obediently report that we did, Your Imperial Highness.” Well I’ll be damned, I thought to myself, he remembered after all . . .

“Well, I was as good as my word, and I got Baron Lerchenfeld to look into the details of the case. As a result of what he discovered—and also, I might add, as a result of petitions from your brother-officers and your for­mer crew—I have reached the conclusion that a grave injustice took place. I also have the satisfaction of telling you that new evidence has come to light which throws doubt on whether the submarine which you torpedoed off Chioggia that night was in fact the German minelayer. I gather that in August an Italian submarine ran aground off Cape Galliola and when its crew were taken prisoner several of them asked whether they would be going to the same camp as the men from the Anguilla, which they said had left Venice on the night of 3 July and had not been heard of since. In short, Prohaska, I think that the German Navy’s case against you—which was never too strong in the first place—now collapses entirely. Tell me, would you wish to be reinstated in the U-Boat Service or would you like to go on flying? ”

I said that while I was prepared to serve my Emperor and Fatherland on land, sea or air, I felt that my particular talents might be better em­ployed back in my old trade rather than in flying round in circles above convoys.

“Good then. The Marineoberkommando tells me that your old crew from U13 are for the moment ashore following a navigational error on the part of their Captain. Now Prohaska, what would you say to rejoining them aboard one of our newest submarines currently completing at Pola N aval Dockyard? ”

The interview ended and we shook hands as I left, taking with me a feeling—which I still hold to this day—that if the old Emperor had done the decent thing and died about (say) 1906, and if Franz Ferdinand had already died from tuberculosis—as he nearly did in 1893—then perhaps with the earnest young Karl as Emperor and King, succeeded about 1950 by the Emperor Otto, the Austro-Hungarian state might still be with us today, transformed from a rickety, bilious, shambling quasi-autocracy into a rickety, bilious, shambling constitutional monarchy. Perhaps.

So I returned officially to the Imperial and Royal U-Boat Service on Christmas Eve 1916. I had been exactly five months in the Flying Service, yet it had seemed so much longer. I handed in my flying kit, removed my airman’s wings from my jacket and, from that day to this, have never flown in an aeroplane except as a passenger. The events of my brief but hectic career as an aviator for the House of Habsburg were soon put behind me, then gradually buried and lost beneath the detritus of all the years and all the lives that followed.

And Franz Nechledil, my pilot in the Naval Air Service? The trial and shooting of the mutineers caused something to snap inside him I think. He became a great Czech patriot and rose to the rank of general in the Czechoslovak Air Force in the 1930s. He stayed in Prague after 1939 and was deeply involved from the beginning with the Czech Resistance, taking part in an early attempt in 1941 to kill the infamous Reichsprotektor Heydrich. The Gestapo caught him in October of that year. He knew a great deal about the organisation of the Resistance, and his captors knew that he knew. Yet still he appears to have kept his mouth shut for ten awful days, resisting the worst that they could do to him until he finally died of heart failure. I have no way of knowing, but I imagine that what sustained him through his atrocious ordeal was the memory of how he had turned in two of his fellow-countrymen a quarter-century before. But he gave away nothing, and when the Gestapo arrested his fellow-conspirators two days later it was because someone had betrayed them for money. They put his name on a monument to the Martyrs of the Nation in Prague in 1946—in the next row to Vackar and Eichler as it happened. The Communists demolished it two years later I understand.

Memories, memories. You must think me an awful old bore. Yet for sixty- five years I scarcely breathed a word about my time as a U-Boat com­mander, until the photograph album turned up again this spring. And I would also like to be able to say that I never told anyone about my brief flying career. But this is not strictly true: just once, not many years ago, I was persuaded to talk about my days with the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe.

It was in 1978 I think, in the Home at Iddesleigh Road in Ealing, where I had already lived for several years after Edith died and I could no longer look after myself. It was one wet summer afternoon as I was sitting in an armchair in the lounge trying to read. Gradually I became aware that I was being irritated by a loud, honking voice with an American accent. It came from over in Mr Kempowski’s corner. I turned around to look, and saw the old fool sitting in an armchair with a blanket over his legs being interrogated by a large—not to say gross—individual in his early thir­ties with a great curly mane of hair, heavy horn-rimmed spectacles and a drooping moustache in the style of the late Pancho Villa. The young man was holding the microphone of a tape recorder towards Kempowski and trying to induce him to talk into it by bawling into the old man’s ear. He was evidently not having much joy: Kempowski was near-senile by then and his English had always been minimal, while the young man’s German was ludicrously poor. This puzzled me: why German in a Polish old peo­ple’s home? Then I remembered: some weeks before, Mother Superior had received a letter from an American air-historian—or “aviation buff” as he styled himself—asking whether he might have an interview with the noted World War One flying ace Gustav Kempowski. I thought “flying ace” was a bit thick: Kempowski had flown briefly as a junior officer in Jasta 2—Richthofen’s old squadron—in the autumn of 1918 and had then transferred to the Polish Air Force.

It appeared that the interview was not going well: Kempowski was pretty well gaga by then—he died a few weeks later—and in any case, he regarded the Polish-Soviet war of 1920 as vastly more interesting and important than the earlier conflict in which he had flown for the German Kaiser. At length the old man cackled maliciously and pointed across to me.

“Prohaska zere—he also flieger in First Weltkrieg—fly in Austriacki Fliegertruppe gegen Italia—you speak him also, yes-no?” The old rogue had remembered, as people sometimes will when their minds are fail­ing, an interview which I had given to a Berlin paper in 1916 after I had brought down the Italian airship. I got up to leave, but my lines of escape were blocked: the young American had also got up and was advancing to pin me into the corner with his bison-like bulk. I saw Mother Superior simpering in the background. I would have to be polite or there would be trouble for me later on.

He proferred me a huge, flabby paw to shake. It was like having a giant toad placed in my hand.

“Wow! I mean, this is incredible—another First World War aviator in the same afternoon—I can hardly believe this.” Without so much as a by your leave he sat down opposite me and loaded another cassette into his little machine. I was already irritated by his evident belief that we old people have no minds of our own, no independent value except as histori­cal relics and memoir-quarries. But with Mother Superior eyeing me in that sinister way of hers I had to sit still and try to be civil.

Without looking at me he introduced himself.

“Hi there. I’m Frank T. Mahan of the Lansing Michigan World War One Air Enthusiasts’ Society. I’m over here in Europe collecting remi­niscences from those who flew in that great conflict and you, sir, are the first person I’ve met so far who flew in the Austro-Hungarian Air Force on the Italian Front.”

“Then I congratulate you on your success. But what is it that you want to know? I am no historian myself and I can only tell you what I happened to see, which was not a great deal really. It was all rather confused and quite frankly I have not given it a great deal of thought in the years since. I was a naval officer you see, and only seconded for a while to the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe. And anyway, I flew as an observer in two-seaters, which was usually rather boring.”

“But sir, do you realise that you are one of the privileged few who had the honour to fly in that first great war in the air?”

“It was a privilege that I would gladly have foregone. And what do you mean by ‘privileged few’ anyway? That I was privileged to be able to do it, or that I was privileged to be among the few who came out of it alive? I think that I might disagree with you on the first count at least.”

He appeared not to have heard this remark; only stuck the microphone impertinently under my nose. “Tell me, how many missions did you fly in all? And how many aerial combats were you involved in? What was your personal score?”

“Really, I have no idea. I was with the Fliegertruppe on the Isonzo Front for about three months, then for a month or so with the Naval Air Service on convoy patrol. I don’t think that we ever thought of them as ‘ missions.’ We went up in the air when we got an order from Army Headquarters or from the division, and most of the time it was reconnais­sance or artillery-spotting or a little bombing behind the lines. But usu­ally we just sat on the ground because of bad weather or lack of aircraft. As for combats, I don’t really remember. Certainly the Italians shot at us a good deal, and we shot back at them where we could; sometimes with less success, sometimes with more. But ‘combats’ is a grand-sounding name for what took place. Usually it was so quick that it was over before we realised it had happened. You pressed the trigger and shut your eyes, and when you opened them again they had either gone away or you were lying in hospital.”

This person’s manner was already beginning to irritate me intensely. I usually get on well with Americans—far better than the English in fact— but when I meet one whom I dislike, the aversion usually borders on the homicidal. What right had this fat buffoon to come digging around among the bones of the dead to feed his hobby, collecting our pain like stamps? Already the memories were coming back: the smells of acetone and petrol and cordite; the sound of Mizzi Gunther and Hubert Marischka as the Carso wind rattled the tent sides; the pock-pock-pock of machine-gun fire and the dreadful crunching as we slithered across the glacier. What could he know of it all? He had not even been in Vietnam, he said, having wangled a draft exemption (though he did not put it quite as bluntly as that). At last he fixed me with a bovine gaze through his thick spectacles. I sensed that the Big Question was coming. When it came it was of such stark imbecility that it fairly knocked the breath out of me.

“Tell me sir, what was it really like to be a flier in that war?”

Well, I thought, a question as asinine as that deserves some sort of answer. So I thought for a moment or two.

“If you really want to know what it was like, to fight in the air in the Great War, then go up to someone you have never met before and who has never done you the slightest harm and pour a two-gallon tin of petrol over them. Then apply a match, and when they are nicely ablaze, push them from a fifteenth-floor window, after first perhaps shooting them a few times in the back with a revolver. And be aware as you are doing these things that ten seconds later someone else will quite probably do them to you. This will exactly reproduce for you and your fellow enthusiasts the substance of First World War aerial combat and will cost your country nothing. It will also avoid the necessity for ten million other people to die in order for you to enjoy it.”

I saw that the interview was now at an end: Mother Superior moved in to usher the man away, saying, “Please—you must not mind him—he old man, head not so good any more.” After he had left it was only my ad­vanced age which saved me from ten days’ solitary on bread and water.

A couple of months after this I happened to pick up a library book: The Traveller’s Guide to Northern Yugoslavia, published the previous year. Curious, I looked up the chapter on the Carso region. One paragraph caught my eye.

“What was it like?” The question stuck in my mind, and now, eight years after I met that odious young man, I have tried to answer it for you, confident that you my listeners will have a maturer understanding of what it all meant—if indeed it meant anything at all, which I sometimes doubt. That war which we fought there above the Alps in those fragile, desperate aircraft with their unreliable engines and flimsy petrol tanks and no parachutes was not a light-hearted, boy’s-story-book adventure as some would have you believe. But neither was it remotely comparable to the monstrous butchery that was going on below us. The death rate was enormous—a good half of those who flew I should think—and of those deaths, the majority were by burning. But in all that war and all the years since I have never heard of anyone who ever applied to transfer back to the trenches. Likewise nearly all of those who flew in that war went on doing it afterwards, test-flying aeroplanes and mapping out the world’s air routes—like young Leutnant Szuborits of Flik 19F, who went to work for the French Breguet company after the war and disappeared without trace in 1925 while trying to fly across the Sahara.

And soon the memory of it will have vanished, now that the gorse and willow bushes have grown back over the rubble-filled trenches of the Isonzo and the last of the old men who saw it all are being carried one by one to their graves. May they rest in peace, those warriors of three- quarters of a century ago, gone now to join those who never came back. What was it all for, that so much blood should have been spilt for so little? I cannot say, only tell you what I saw and hope that you will know about it when I am no more: know about it, and perhaps understand better than we did.