The Two-Headed Eagle

2 KNIGHT ON A BICYCLE

I first began to notice it that morning about an hour after dawn, as the train stopped to take on water at the station in that wide, high wind-swept defile know to us in those days as the Adelsberg Pass, where the railway line from Vienna crosses the last range of moun­tains before Trieste. It seemed to bounce to and fro between the scrubby, eroded slopes of limestone and come at us from all directions at once: not a distinct rumbling or booming as I had expected but a faint, sinister, barely audible shuddering of the air, irregular but incessant, as if some vast sheet of tin were being shaken somewhere away over the mountains. It told me—as if there should have been any doubt on the matter—that we were getting near the war zone. For this was the last week of July 1916, and only a few score kilometres away, along the valley of the River Isonzo, the Italian armies were preparing for their next assault on the lines guarding the south-western frontier of our great multi-national empire. I was now approaching the zone of the armies, which began just beyond Adelsberg. Soon I too, like perhaps thirty million others, would become a subject of that new state which had been carved out of the body of Europe over the past eighteen months: the Front, that strange linear kingdom hundreds of kilometres long, but sometimes only metres wide, which now snaked across northern France and through the marshes of Volhynia and along the crest of the Alps—a curious country, where the inhabitants were ex­clusively male and, although mostly under twenty-five, suffered a mortality rate so high that the population could be kept up only by constant immi­gration; a strange topsy-turvy land where men lived underground, worked by night and slept by day, and courted instant death if they appeared in the open for a couple of seconds. It was a hungry land as well, one that produced nothing whatever but which consumed so prodigally that the entire economic life of the world was now devoted to feeding it. Soon I too would cross its borders and become one of its subjects. For how long exactly remained to be seen.

The train moved out of the station once more in a haze of lignite smoke, and was soon clanking through the five successive tunnels be­yond Adelsberg, where the line burrows through a series of mountain spurs. Before long we were squealing to a halt alongside the low plat­form of the station at Divacca. I had changed trains here many times during the previous sixteen years, for Divacca was the junction for the line down the Istrian Peninsula to Austria’s principal naval base at Pola. But this morning it was to be different: my rail warrant extended only as far as Divacca, where I was to get off the train and carry on to an ob­scure little town called Haidenschaft some twenty-five kilometres away, thence to a doubtless even more God-forsaken place called Caprovizza, so out-of-the-way that I had been unable to find it even on quite large-scale maps of the Kustenland region.

The other difference that marked off my arrival that morning at Divacca from all the previous ones was that I was now stepping down from the train as someone else. On all previous occasions I had been travelling as a plain, ordinary naval lieutenant called Ottokar Prohaska, the son of a Czech postal official from a small town in northern Moravia. Now though, even if I was still only a Linienschiffsleutnant as regards ser­vice rank, I was altogether something far more exalted in social standing: Ottokar Prohaska, Ritter von Strachnitz, the most recent recipient of the very rarest and most prized of all the Old Monarchy’s honours for brav­ery in action, the Knight’s Cross of the Military Order of Maria Theresa, awarded to me a few days previously at Schonbrunn by the Emperor him­self, in recognition of my feat one night a few weeks previously, when I had shot down an Italian airship off Venice and then, for good measure, torpedoed one of their submarines as well. And to be honest I was finding it more than a little hard to get used to my sudden fame and elevation to noble rank. I had tried to leave Vienna quietly the previous evening—not least because I had got married only two days before. But quiet farewells to my wife had not been possible, not with the crowds which had somehow gathered ahead of me at the Sudbahnhof, and the autograph hunters, and the popping magnesium flashes and the children being held up on their fathers’ shoulders to get a look at me. In the end, unused to such celebrity, I was heartily glad when the train steamed out of the station.

But even as we clanked southwards through Graz and Marburg I was not to be left in peace. As I made my way along the corridor to the meagre wartime buffet car, brother-officers had jostled to shake my hand and slap me on the back and wish me well in my new career now that (according to the Vienna newspapers) command of a U-Boat had become too humdrum for me and I had volunteered for flying duties, “. . . as the only field left in which he may provide fresh evidences of his matchless valour in the service of Emperor and Fatherland.” When I was at last able to find some peace back in my compartment I looked down once more at the decoration pinned to the left breast of my jacket. It seemed a small enough thing to be making such a fuss about, I thought as I gazed at it lying in the palm of my hand: a small white-enamelled gold cross with a little red-white-red medallion in the middle, encircled by the word Fortitudini . Such a small thing, yet within a few hours it had turned my life upside-down to a degree where I was already beginning to suspect that malignant fairies had substituted someone else for me while I slept.

Nor was there to be any respite at Divacca, that bleak little township up on the arid limestone plateau above Trieste. Word of my arrival had somehow travelled ahead of me during the night and the townspeople— mostly Slovenes in these parts—had arranged a reception for me. As I ap­peared at the door of the carriage to descend to the platform I saw a crowd waiting. Before I realised what was happening the town band had struck up the “Radetzky March” and I was being hoisted on to their shoulders to be carried through the station vestibule into the square in front of the building. A crowd cheered and the Burgermeister stood holding a large bouquet of flowers as the band played the “Gott Erhalte” and the local gendarmery and fire brigade presented arms. The houses were bedecked with black-and-yellow and red-white-red bunting, while on the opposite side of the square a banner proclaimed:

With that little ceremony over, I am afraid that the whole thing rather ran out of steam. If you are carrying someone on your shoulders you have to be carrying them somewhere, and the welcoming committee clearly had no idea of what to do with me next. So after the Burgermeister had made a short patriotic speech and the crowd had applauded I was un­ceremoniously put down on the cobbles of the station forecourt while everyone dispersed to go about their daily business, leaving me holding the bouquet and a scroll of paper giving me the freedom of the commune of Divacca—surely, now as then, one of the least desirable privileges on the whole of God’s earth.

I went back into the station, which had resumed its normal wartime bustle of men proceeding on leave and men returning from leave. I took out my movement order and looked at it: “Report at 1200 hours 24/VII/16 to HQ Fliegerkompagnie 19F, flying field Haidenschaft-Caprovizza.” Well, it was now just past 8:00 a.m., so I had four hours in hand. But how to get there? The order took me only as far as Divacca by train, so how was I to get myself and my belongings to Haidenschaft and then to Caprovizza, wherever that might be? Clearly, expert advice was called for. I entered the station offices and eventually found a door marked PERSONNEL MOVE­MENTS—k.u.k. armee (commissioned and warrant officer ranks) . They would surely know in here. I opened the door and entered to find an unkempt and rather shabby-looking Stabsfeldwebel dozing with his boots resting on a paper-littered desk. A copy of the dubious Viennese magazine Paprika lay open beside him, while the walls of the office were decorated with numerous bathing beauties, evidently cut out from this same magazine, whose sumptuous padding had not yet been reduced to any noticeable degree by the privations of wartime. I coughed. He stirred, looked at me with one eye, then got up and made a perfunctory salute while fastening the topmost buttons of his tunic.

“Obediently report, Herr, er—” (he gazed at my three cuff-rings for some moments in puzzlement)—“Leutnant, that you’ve got the wrong office: naval personnel movements is upstairs.”

“I’m not concerned with that. I have been seconded to the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe, Flik 19F, at a place called Caprovizza near Haidenschaft. I’ve no idea where it is or how to get there, so I would be grateful if you could help me. Do you deal with movements of flying personnel or only with ground troops?”

“Obediently report that both, Herr Leutnant.”

“Excellent. So how do I get from here to Caprovizza?”

He rubbed his chin—he had not yet shaved that morning—and rum­maged beneath some papers. It was quite plain that he felt it to be really no part of his duties to assist anything that wore blue instead of field grey, even if it did have the Maria Theresa pinned to it. At length he answered.

“I’m afraid that’s not going to be so easy, Herr Leutnant. Normally there’s a lorry comes up here mornings and evenings to collect people for the Vippaco Valley airfields. But the rear axle broke yesterday evening so there won’t be any transport now before about nineteen-hundred.” He paused for a while. “Tell you what though, Herr Leutnant, I could help you perhaps. Strictly outside regulations of course, but . . .”

So in the end, once I had reluctantly parted with a precious tin of cigarettes, a way was found of getting me to Haidenschaft by midday. It appeared that a despatch rider’s motor cycle had to be returned to my new posting’s parent unit, Flik 19 at Haidenschaft. The reason for this, I learnt, was that the previous day, on the station platform, a Hungarian soldier proceeding home on leave had sought to demonstrate to his comrades the utter unreliability of Italian hand-grenades, using a captured example which he was taking home as a souvenir. The result had been three on­lookers dead and seven more or less seriously injured, among them Flik 19’s despatch rider, who had been standing nearby waiting to collect a packet of documents from the Vienna express. The motor cycle had to be returned to its unit, but since it had been moved to a shed on the other side of the town I would have to wait while an orderly was sent to fetch it. There was time for refreshments.

As I made my way to the station buffet I began to grasp for the first time exactly how strange a territory it was that I was entering, this Zone of the Armies which I had heard and read so much about while stationed down at Cattaro, but which I had never visited. The station was thronged with soldiery from every nationality of the polyglot Army of the Emperor of Austria and Apostolic King of Hungary: Magyars and Slovaks and Bosnians and Tyroleans and Ruthenes and Croats, all reduced now to a weary sameness, not only by their shabby grey uniforms, and the rust-red mud of the Isonzo trenches which still caked the boots and puttees of most of them, but also by that glazed, apathetic look which I was soon to learn was the inevitable consequence of a prolonged spell at the Front. It was a look which I was to see again a quarter-century later in the Nazi death camps. The men going home on leave jostled wearily on the plat­forms as the provost NCOs bellowed at them, loading them into the trains that would take them back for a few brief days with their wives and chil­dren in their mud hovels in the Hungarian puszta or their cottages in the Carpathian valleys. For many of these gaunt-faced peasant soldiers with their drooping black moustaches it would no doubt be their last leave. After the failure of our offensive on the Asiago Plateau in May, the Italians were preparing a counter-blow of their own on the Isonzo. The men now clambering down from the returning leave trains at Divacca would be in the front line to face it.

When I had at last fought my way into the crowded station buffet— reserved for officers but still packed to standing—and purchased the glass of tea (in fact dried raspberry leaves) and slice of kriegsbrot that would be my breakfast, I had leisure to look around me. It was only then that I realised quite how much the Imperial and Royal Army had changed in two years: how the great battles against the Russians in Poland in the autumn of 1914 had torn the heart out of the old k.u.k. officer corps, and how the numerous gaps in the ranks had been filled with hurriedly commissioned pre-war Einjahrigers or youths straight from secondary school. I noticed that one chair was free at a side table, and moved over to ask the other customer, a young Leutnant, whether I might sit down. He could only have been twenty or so but he looked much older, tunic dusty and torn by barbed wire. He did not answer; in fact seemed not to notice me as he stared into nowhere with sunken, dark-ringed eyes. I saw that his lips were moving slightly as he talked to himself, and that his hand shook as he con­tinuously stirred his tea, mechanically, like a toy in a fairground, as if he would go on doing it for ever unless someone pressed the stop-button.

I finished my breakfast just as the orderly returned with the motor cycle. I signed the appropriate receipts, then fastened my luggage to the carrier and set off, glad that in this dusty summer weather I had brought my pre-war pair of flying goggles with me from Vienna. It was a Laurin und Klement machine I remember, with no kick-starter so that I had to run alongside it down Divacca’s main street and leap into the saddle as the engine began firing. I was soon glad though that I had chosen to make my own way to my new posting instead of waiting for transport. It was a beautiful morning, too early yet for the July heat to be shimmering among the limestone boulders and myrtle thickets of this bleak plateau. I puttered along the smooth metalled road at a leisurely speed as I enjoyed the view, leaving a cloud of white dust behind me as I droned through Senosetsch and then down from the Birnbaumerwald into the Vippaco Valley, a sud­den ribbon of greenness among the bare, grey mountains of the Carso.

Curious, I thought, that there should be so little traffic on this road. Here we were, only kilometres behind one of the major battlefronts of the great­est war in history, yet there seemed to be little more movement than in peacetime, when the only vehicles would be those long, narrow-bodied farm carts, with the horse harnessed to one side of the single shaft, which characterise the Slav world from Slovenia to Vladivostok. Most of the supplies for the Isonzo Front came either down from Laibach or up from Trieste along the branch railway line to Dornberg; so apart from the air­fields at St Veit and Wippach this winding valley road was not much used by the military. I passed a few motor lorries throwing up choking clouds of dust, and one or two columns of marching men, but otherwise saw little sign of the war except when I had to stop for a gang of Russian POWs engaged in road-mending. They seemed a cheerful enough lot and waved in farewell as I went on my way, having dispensed my remaining tin of cigarettes among them as largesse. They were supervised only by an elderly, bearded Landsturm reservist who (I observed) left his rifle in the care of one of his charges as he went into the bushes on a certain er­rand. Otherwise the scene in the Vippaco Valley was one of immemorial peace, the summer-shallow river winding half-heartedly among banks of pale grey limestone pebbles and the twittering of the birds in the willow thickets quite undisturbed by that constant ill-tempered rumbling in the distance.

I have always found journeys to be conducive to thought; and that morning I was particularly grateful for solitude and the opportunity to think things over, after the dizzying succession of events over the pre­vious week. Last Wednesday morning I had been a national hero. The hurrah-patriotic press had worked itself up into a frenzy of adulation over me—“one of the greatest feats of arms of the entire war” the Reichspost had called it—not least because the performance of Austro-Hungarian arms elsewhere that summer had been so uniformly dismal. But being cre­ated a Maria-Theresien Ritter had not been my only engagement that week, for on the Saturday I was to have been married in the Votivekirche to a beautiful Hungarian noblewoman, the Countess Elisabeth de Bratianu, to whom I had been engaged since the previous autumn and who was working as a nurse in a Vienna military hospital. But Fortune’s wheel was to turn with bewildering speed. By three o’clock that same afternoon I had found myself standing in the War Ministry before an unofficial court martial, accused of having sunk a German minelayer submarine off Venice in mistake for an Italian boat—and of having killed my own future brother-in-law, who had been among the German vessel’s crew. Elisabeth’s relatives had immediately forbidden the wedding on pain of disinheritance. But it had gone ahead just the same—not least because (as I now learnt for the first time) she was two months pregnant with my child—and we had got married the next day in a registry office while she was duly disinherited by her family.

As for myself, the War Ministry was in a quandary. Though uncon­vinced that I had sunk the German minelayer, they were in no position to resist Berlin’s demands for my immediate court martial. The best that they could do in the end, short of having me shoot myself or pushing me under a tram, was to get me out of the way by posting me to the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe on the Italian Front. This (officialdom felt) would put me beyond the German Admiralty’s reach at least for the time being and quite probably for good, soon reposting me either into the next world or into an Italian prison camp for the rest of the war or—most probably—to join my elder brother Anton in that indeterminate category “missing in action.” One way or another, I had been placed in Austrian bureaucracy’s favourite desk-tray: the one marked asserviert, or “pending.”

It was only after asking for directions from townspeople and from soldiers on the streets that I was able to find my way to the headquarters of my parent unit Fliegerkompagnie 19, based on a rough meadow some way to the west of the little town of Haidenschaft (or Ajdovscina or Aidussina as its largely Slovene and Italian inhabitants called it). It was near midday now and already very hot in this trough in the karst mountains. But my reception in the orderly room at k.u.k. Fliegerfeld Haidenschaft brought an immediate chill into the air. I had expected a certain reserve on my first arrival here. The Austro-Hungarian military and naval air services were largely self-contained forces under their own commands and did not generally have much to do with one another. The Navy’s aircraft, it is true, did give a great deal of support to the Army on its southernmost flank during the later Isonzo battles, bombing Italian batteries and shoot­ing up the enemy in the trenches. But since the Navy’s aeroplanes were exclusively flying-boats, for obvious reasons their pilots were reluctant to take them very far inland. So for most of the time the two air arms kept themselves to themselves. A few army pilots had flown with the Naval Flying Service, but so far as I knew I was the first naval officer to serve with the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe.

Even so, I felt that my reception at Haidenschaft flying field broke all bounds of civilised courtesy. As I arrived at the gate, stiff and caked in dust, I noticed that the sentries did not salute me. I was just about to demand the meaning of this when the Adjutant appeared from the guard­room. I saluted, introduced myself and presented my compliments—prior to giving him a piece of my mind on the standard of his sentries, who appeared not to recognise a naval officer when they saw one. But before I could gather breath he merely grunted:

“Hmnph! That’s our motor bike isn’t it? What d’you think you’re doing with it? ”

“I was asked to return it from the station at Divacca.”

“About time too and all.” He seized the handlebars from me and be­gan to wheel the machine away as I tried to unstrap my valise.

“Wait a moment,” I said. “My orders are to report here to the Kom- mandant of Fliegerkompagnie 19 and then proceed to your sub-unit 19F at Caprovizza.”

He paused and turned round. “We don’t have much to do with that lot here, and as for Hauptmann Heyrowsky I doubt whether he’ll be very pleased to see you. If I were you I’d just push off and not bother him.” “Very well then,” I said, trying to sound as dignified as I could while removing my luggage from the carrier. “Since you clearly can’t spare the courtesy to receive me as befits a brother-officer I shall consider that I have reported here as ordered and make my way now to Fliegerfeld Caprovizza. Might you be so kind as to give me directions?”

Without turning round the Adjutant pointed over his shoulder with his thumb in a vague southerly direction.

“Other side of the road, over the level crossing and past the cem­etery . . .” He paused as if a thought had just struck him. “Feldwebel!” he shouted into the guard hut, “bring out that bicycle would you? We’ve got someone here who’s going to join those bastards over at Caprovizza.” The bicycle was wheeled out from behind the hut and thrust at me. “Be a good fellow and take this with you, will you? Hauptmann Heyrowsky saw it in town and thought that it might be a nice present for your Herr Kommandant. He said to tell Hauptmann Kraliczek that if he’s feeling in a particularly daring mood one day he can come over here and we’ll teach him to ride it.”

“Might I request that comment in writing, if you wish me to convey it to my commanding officer?” I said, as stiffly as I could. “You understand I’m sure: duels and courts of honour and all that sort of thing.”

The Adjutant smiled. “Certainly. There’s a note under the saddle springs already. As for duels between our CO and yours, I doubt very much whether it’d ever come to that. But if it did I certainly know where I’d place my bet.”

I felt after this last insult that there was little point in prolonging this sour and uncomradely exchange. So I swung myself on to the bicycle— which mercifully still had rubber tyres instead of the hemp-filled canvas tubes which were now being supplied as substitutes—and pedalled away down the side road and across the railway line as instructed. Soon I was skimming along a level, poplar-fringed road among the flat maize fields of the valley bottom: one of the very few bits of the Vippaco Valley (I soon discovered) level enough for airfields. A couple of kilometres outside the town I stopped and shaded my eyes against the sun to watch the approach of an aeroplane, coming in low to land at Flik 19’s flying field. It was a Lloyd two-seater by the looks of it. As it roared overhead I saw that a good half of one of its lower wings had been reduced to a chaos of splintered ribs and tatters of trailing fabric. Dark drops plopped into the dust of the road as the aeroplane passed overhead, and one of them splashed warmly on to my forehead. Damn it! Engine oil, I thought, hoping that none had got on my clothes. I wiped it off with my handkerchief—and saw that it was not oil but blood.

I arrived at k.u.k. Fliegerfeld Caprovizza at sixteen minutes past twelve, according to my wristwatch. Not that anybody seemed to mind very much. I made my report to the duty warrant officer and was led to my quar­ters—a distinctly threadbare tent—by a private soldier. The base of Flik 19F was not at all an imposing sight: a stony stretch of more-or-less level field on the edge of the River Vippaco with four or five canvas hangars and two wooden ones under construction, a Stationskanzlei hut, a small marquee which I took to be the officers’ mess and a few rows of tents for accommodation. At the edge of the field stood a row of log-and-earth shelters whose purpose entirely escaped me. A motor lorry and one or two horse-drawn wagons stood near by; likewise a field kitchen and a couple of barrows with petrol drums for fuelling aircraft (standing dangerously near the field kitchen, I considered). The only aeroplane that I could see was a Hansa-Brandenburg two-seater being rolled out of one of the can­vas hangars. Otherwise the place seemed deserted in the midday heat that wobbled above the field, stilling even the cicadas in the riverside thick­ets and making the barren karst hills to southward appear to dance and undulate like the waves of the sea.

I put down my bags on one of the two camp-beds—the soldier obedi­ently reported that I would be sharing the tent with a certain Oberleutnant Schraffl—then washed and brushed the dust off my clothes as best I could, combed my hair and straightened my bow-tie before making for the mess tent. I found it to be deserted except for one officer in flying kit smoking a pipe with his back turned to me. The mess cook reported that dinner had finished half an hour past and that the Herren Offiziere had all gone to rest in the shade of the cypress trees on the other side of the field. As for food, there was only some tinned meat with cold potatoes and some warmed-over mehlspeis. I took this as courteously as I could and sat down at one of the trestle tables.

The officer in flying kit turned round—and we both recognised one another. It was Karl Rieger, late captain in the 26 th Jager Regiment and a close friend of my elder brother Anton. We shook hands and embraced, not having met since 1912 or thereabouts. My first enquiry was after my brother, who had been missing in Serbia since August 1914, when the 26th Jagers had been wiped out in the fighting around Loznica. Since then I had questioned every survivor I could find in the faint hope that my brother might have been taken prisoner. But Rieger could offer no help: he had gone down with dysentery just after Potiorek’s army had crossed into Serbia and had been lying in a hospital bed back in Sarajevo when the regiment had gone to their doom. Having no unit left to rejoin when he came out of hospital, he had volunteered for the Fliegertruppe and had served as an officer-observer on the Russian Front before training as a pilot. He was now the recently formed Flik 19F’s “Chefpilot”: in theory the only officer in the unit apart from the Kommandant who could fly an aeroplane, since all the rest of the pilots on the strength were NCOs.

“I haven’t been here that long myself,” he said. “Only arrived last month when they split us off from Heyrowsky’s lot over at Haidenschaft. As you can see, we’re still using canvas hangars and the pens are only half finished.”

“The what? ”

“The pens: those log-and-sandbag things over on the other side.” “Please tell me—what on earth are they for? Surely you don’t expect the Italians to start shelling the place: we must be a good twenty kilome­tres behind the lines here.”

“If it was only shelling we had to worry about! They’re against the bora. It’s not too bad now in summer, but believe me, come the autumn the wind’ll be howling along this valley like anything. Flik 4 had their en­tire aircraft strength written off in five minutes last winter because they left them outside with nothing but tentpegs and a few sandbags to hold them down. One of them blew so far away they still haven’t found it. I can tell you, Mother Nature’s not going to catch us like that: we’ve taken enough losses from the Italians lately without having to worry about storm damage as well.”

“How are things on this sector then—in the air I mean?”

He drew reflectively on his pipe before answering.

“Not too bad until the past few weeks. In fact for the first twelve months of this war we had it pretty well our own way over the Isonzo: hardly saw the Italians at all, which is scarcely surprising, since I believe they came in with only about fifty serviceable planes in the whole country. But since about Easter things haven’t been so bright. They’ve been setting up aircraft factories over there like nobody’s business and buying up every­thing they can lay their hands on abroad, so now we’re pretty well equal as regards numbers. But I’m giving away no secrets if I say that the quality’s got much better on their side these past few months. I reckon our fellows have still just about got the edge, man for man. But the Italians have been getting Nieuport single-seaters from the French lately and, believe me, they’re a handful if you meet one when you’re flying one of our old furni­ture vans: nimble as a bluebottle and climb so fast you wouldn’t believe it. We’ve had a hot summer of it so far in Flik 19F: forty-one aircrew joined the unit so far, of which twenty-three killed, wounded or missing and ten aircraft written off, five in crashes and five from enemy action. But that’s enough of me rambling on, Prohaska. Tell me, what’s our newest Maria- Theresien Ritter doing honouring our humble unit with his presence?” “Sent here at short notice I’m afraid.”

“Extremely short: I was over in Kanzlei before dinner and we still haven’t got your posting papers, only a telephone call from the War Ministry. What have you been up to, old man? Caught in bed with the Heir-Apparent’s wife or what? ”

I smiled. “No such luck I’m afraid: just a minor disagreement with the Marine Sektion. It looks as if I shall be off U-Boating for a while. I’m here as an officer-observer I believe, though I can fly if needed: I’ve had a licence since 1912.”

“Splendid—you’ll certainly find that useful. All the pilots except for me are rankers.”

“What about the Kommandant?”

Rieger smiled wryly. “Herr Kommandant? Oh, not him I’m afraid: he says that flying would get in the way of his duties as commanding officer.”

“What duties? Surely in an air unit the commanding officer’s main duty is in the air? ”

“Perhaps so in most units. But not in ours. I suspect that our man would get dizzy standing on the edge of the kerb. Anyway, you’ll see what I mean when you meet him, so don’t let me prejudice you. But going back to what I said before, I certainly advise you to get some flying time in on your own as soon as ever you can, even if you only intend flying as a passenger. Life’s getting pretty hectic now and more than once we’ve had officer-observers landing their own plane when their pilot’s been knocked out. Oh yes, my dear Prohaska, I assure you that flying over the South-West Front is no easy number these days: we live fast here in the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe.” He rose and picked up his leather flying helmet. “Anyway, can’t sit here all day. I hope that you’ll excuse me but we’ll talk further this evening. The Kommandant presents his compliments and says that he’ll see you at fourteen-fifteen hours when he gets back from Haidenschaft. He’s been at the printers it seems, looking at the proofs of a new form for us to fill in. As for me, I’ve got to go and look at a machine with the Technical Officer. It came back from the repair shops only this morning and I want to see that everything’s as it should be before I sign for it. Auf wiederschauen.”

Rieger went out, and I was left on my own. The mess orderly brought me a cup of that black, bitter infusion of roasted acorns described as “kaffeesurrogat” and I picked up a day-old copy of the Weiner Tagblatt. I felt a good deal happier now than I had done after my oafish reception at Flik 19 a couple of hours before. I had just walked into a tent and had immediately run into someone I already knew, so perhaps this would be a congenial posting—at least for as long as I survived to enjoy it. I glanced at my watch: five-past two. I would go back to my tent and change out of my travel-grimed uniform into field dress for my interview with the commanding officer.

I emerged from the stuffy mess tent into the glaring sunlight to be greeted by the drone of an aero engine. An aeroplane was coming in to land on the field: a Hansa-Brandenburg CI to judge by the characteristic inward-sloping wing struts. It lined up to land, about fifteen metres up and as steady as could be. But as I watched, something went terribly wrong: the aeroplane suddenly lurched over on to one wingtip, which struck the ground with a splintering crash, kicking up a cloud of dust. I thought that the pilot had managed to right the aeroplane, but the thing simply cart­wheeled into the ground before my horrified gaze, nosed over and then skidded crazily across the field to end up in the bushes on the bank of the river. I ran towards the wreck, joined on the way by a number of ground crewmen. But as we neared it, whumpf!—the whole thing went up in a bright orange puffball of flame. We ducked and stooped about the bon­fire, eyebrows singeing from the heat, coming in as close as we dared to peer into the blaze and see whether the pilot might still be dragged clear. In the end we were driven back by the crackle of ammunition going off in the inferno.

By the time a hand-pumped fire engine had been brought up and a thin spray of water was playing on the wreck there was hardly anything left to burn, just a smoking tangle of bracing-wire and steel tubing jumbled up with glowing embers, a blackened engine and the upturned, tyreless bicycle wheels of the undercarriage. Gingerly we approached it, fearful of finding what we knew we must find. In the end I almost tripped over the ghastly thing before I recognised it for what it was. It lay twisted and grinning horribly, smoking gently as its charred fingers gripped the smoul­dering remains of the steering wheel. Fighting back a desperate urge to be sick, I knelt down, trying not to smell the stench of burning bacon. Only the boots and the steel goggle-frames remained intact; that and the metal identity tag hanging on a chain around the shrivelled throat. Without thinking I bent to pick it up—and yelped with pain. In the end I had to lever a stick under it and twist. The chain snapped and it went flying, to land hissing in the damp grass by the edge of a streamlet. I walked over and picked it up. It was the usual Austrian identity tag: a small metal case like a girl’s locket, embossed with the two-headed eagle and containing a little booklet giving the wearer’s personal details. I prised open the case, and found the paper toasted brown by the flames but still legible. It read, Rieger. Karl Ferdinand. Oblt Geb. 1885 Leitmerit%. Rm Ktlsch. Not fifteen minutes before, I had been chatting in the mess with this fire-blackened obscenity smouldering among the embers. As he had so recently observed, in those days we lived fast in the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe.

I left the scene of the crash feeling very weak at the knees. The birds had now resumed their interrupted chirping in the under-growth by the riverbank, and two ground crewmen—both Poles I could hear—were heading towards the wreck with the tarpaulin-shrouded handbarrow re­served for such errands. They did not seem unduly awed by the solem­nity of their gruesome task, which I learnt later they were often called upon to perform. As they neared the site of the crash they met a fellow- countryman coming the other way.

“Carbonised this time, Wojtek?”

“Completely. But never mind—it was only an officer.”

Hauptmann Rudolf Kraliczek, commanding officer of Fliegerkompagnie 19F, was not at all pleased that I had arrived three minutes and twenty-seven seconds late for my interview with him. Still shaky from the terrible sight I had seen only a few minutes before, I blurted out my apologies and reported that I had just witnessed a crash on the other side of the flying field. He waved my excuses aside irascibly.

“Herr Linienschiffsleutnant, please refrain from bothering me with such trifles.”

“But Herr Kommandant, your Chief Pilot Oberleutnant Rieger has just been killed . . .” He rolled up his eyes in despair behind his pince-nez. “Oh no, not another one. Rieger, did you say?”

“By your leave, Herr Kommandant, Oberleutnant Rieger.”

“Are you sure? ”

“Perfectly certain, Herr Kommandant: burnt beyond recognition. I saw his remains with my own eyes and removed his identity tag myself.” He got up from his desk and selected a crayon.

“Which aeroplane was it? ”

“A Hansa-Brandenburg just back from repairs. It seemed to go out of control just as he was coming in to land. From what I could see of it . . .” “Be quiet,” he snapped peevishly, turning to face a board which cov­ered the entire back wall of his office and which was itself covered by twenty or so sheets of squared paper with jagged rising and falling lines of various colours and with a rainbow-hued array of bars. He had a red crayon in his hand and seemed to be talking to himself.

“One more officer-pilot down and one aeroplane less. Oh gottver- dammt, it’s really too bad: how can they expect to keep orderly re­turns if they behave like this? Let me see: Effective Against Nominal Establishment for July should have been here . . .” he traced a line on the graph, “. . . and now it’ll have to go here. Why couldn’t the idiot have crashed next month?”

While Hauptmann Kraliczek was thus engaged, rubbing out and cor­recting lines on his beautifully drawn charts, I was able to get an unin­terrupted look at the man. And really, even if I have never been much addicted to what might be called the “male-model” view of military leader- ship—that an effective fighting man should necessarily look like a Viking chieftain or a Greek god—I have to say that he did seem a remarkably odd specimen to be running a front-line flying unit in the middle of a world war: a most unsoldierly-looking soldier. Not that he was deficient in military smartness: rather that there was too much of it. Although he was kitted out in the standard field-grey service tunic I noticed that this was immaculately brushed, and entirely free of the patches and darns that were increasingly widespread among front-officers now that we were approach­ing the third year of the war. I also observed that instead of the breeches and puttees which were de rigueur nowadays, he wore pre-war salonhosen of the General Staff pattern, dark grey with a double red stripe, impec­cably pressed, and leather shoes rather than field-boots like the rest of us. As for the man inside this get-up, he had more the air of a rising deputy bank manager than of a military officer: pale, sleek and bespectacled, with neatly manicured little hands which looked far more accustomed to wielding a pen than a stick-grenade or a pair of wire cutters. I saw also, as he turned to face me, that although he wore the balloon-badge of the Fliegertruppe on his collar patches behind the captain’s three stars, he had neither the wings of a pilot nor those of an officer-observer. He brushed the eraser-crumbs carefully off his tunic before speaking.

“Well Prohaska, I have to welcome you to Fliegerkompagnie 19F. I think that you will find it, though but recently established, to be one of the more efficient air units of the Imperial and Royal Army. And I can assure you that it is my intention to make it the most efficient. Tell me, Prohaska, at what time did you arrive at Fliegerfeld Caprovizza?”

“Fifteen minutes past twelve or thereabouts, Herr Kommandant. My movement order said twelve p.m., but there was no lorry from Divacca so I had to borrow a motor cycle, and my orders instructed me to report first to Flik 19 at Haidenschaft . . .”

He pursed his lips in a curiously spinsterish expression of disapproval.

“Herr Linienschiffsleutnant,” he said quietly, as if I had just commit­ted some unspeakable solecism, “I believe that I just heard you refer on two occasions to hours of the military day as ‘fifteen minutes past twelve’ and ‘twelve p.m.’ Such a slipshod method of denoting time may be accept­able in the k.u.k. Kriegsmarine, I cannot say; but I must ask you never to use it here. You must accustom yourself without delay to the clockwork precision with which the k.u.k. Armee conducts its affairs. The correct military formulations are ‘twelve hours fifteen’ and ‘twelve hours’ respec­tively and will be used at all times while you remain with this unit. Is that clear?” I replied that this was clear. “Very good: until further notice, and pending the arrival of your posting papers from Vienna, your duties with this unit will be those of an officer-observer.”

“Herr Kommandant, by your leave . . .”

“Yes, what is it?”

“Herr Kommandant, I obediently report that I am a qualified pilot and have been for nearly four years past. Given a little training in flying modern land-based aeroplanes I am quite capable of fulfilling the duties of an officer-pilot, and before he died Oberleutnant Rieger said that I ought to get some flying hours in on my own . . .”

He had turned even paler than usual as I said this. “Herr Linien- schiffsleutnant, pray contain yourself and reserve your helpful suggestions for when I ask you for them. Your substantive post here, I understand, is to be that of an officer-observer; so as far as I am concerned, until I receive further orders that is what you will do even though you should be the last qualified pilot left alive in the entire Dual Monarchy. Quite apart from anything else, to permit otherwise would be to make absolute non­sense of the manning establishments laid down for this calendar quarter by the Imperial and Royal War Ministry. Anyway, that is all that I have to say to you.” He sat down at his desk and took out a folder of foolscap sheets densely covered in figures, along with a pencil and ruler and pocket reckoner—a thing rather like a pepperpot where one twiddled knobs in the top and read off the figures in a little window at the side. He looked up. “Yes, have you anything more to say?”

I rummaged in the breast pocket of my jacket.

“I obediently report that before I departed from Fliegerkompagnie 19 this morning the Adjutant there gave me a present for you from Hauptmann Heyrowsky: a bicycle, to be precise. You will find it leaning against the back wall of this hut. He also gave me this message for you.” I handed him the envelope which had been tucked under the bicycle saddle, then saluted with as much irony as I could risk without ending up on a charge of insubordination. He took the envelope. I saw that his hands were trembling slightly.

“Er, was there any verbal message accompanying it, by any chance?” “I have the honour to report, Herr Kommandant, that there was; the gist of it as conveyed to me by the Adjutant was that Hauptmann Heyrowsky is prepared to teach you to ride the bicycle if you so desire.” He smiled nervously and slit open the envelope, then pulled out the sheet of paper inside. He swallowed hard as he read it, then looked at me with a sickly grin.

“Yes, yes, Prohaska, Hauptmann Heyrowsky and I are old com­rades—always pulling one another’s legs; you mustn’t take what he says too seriously. He is a fairly capable officer even if he is lamentably lacking in military precision. We have a great deal of respect for one another, I can assure you. Anyway . . .” (he tore the letter up into minute scraps and dropped them into the waste-paper basket), “if you will excuse me I must get on with my returns. We are already into the last week of the month.” I saluted once more and turned to leave. “Oh, by the way, Prohaska.” “Herr Kommandant? ”

“I am assigning you to fly with Feldpilot-Zugsfuhrer Toth for the time being. I shall expect you to manage the man with a firm hand. He is to­tally lacking in discipline and respect for military order: to a degree in fact where I am considering whether a posting to the trenches or even a court martial may not soon be necessary. Aerial discipline is already lamentably lax in the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe and I shall make it my principal concern while I am in command of this unit to tighten it up. As far as I am con­cerned the fewer unruly degenerates like that we have in the Flying Service the better it will be for Austria.” With that he adjusted his spectacles and set to work on his papers, apparently blind to my departure.

I learnt over the next few weeks that, before the war, Hauptmann Kraliczek had once been one of the brightest rising stars of the Imperial and Royal General Staff. His tour of duty as an infantry Fahnrich had been lacklustre to say the least of it, marked only by a regrettable incident during the 1906 summer manoeuvres in Dalmatia, when he had fallen off his horse in front of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and several thousand onlookers—then remounted with the wrong foot in the stirrup so that he ended up astride the beast facing its tail. But his career as a military admin­istrator had been far more promising. After obtaining the highest marks ever recorded in the 1910 Staff College examinations at Wiener Neustadt he had been posted straight into the Military Rail Movements Directorate, the department of the War Ministry responsible for the Austro-Hungarian version of those vast, minutely detailed mobilisation plans by which the gigantic conscript armies of the European Powers would be moved to their appointed places in time of war. This was extremely exacting work in those days before the computer. In fact it used to be said, not entirely without truth, that the best brains from the Staff College went into the Eisenbahntruppe and ended up in padded cells before they were forty.

Kraliczek had shone at this arduous work. But when the fateful day finally came, at the end of July 1914, these elaborate plans were found wanting. The Monarchy had two microscopically detailed mobilisation timetables, worked out to the last second and the last soldier’s bootlace: one for a war against Russia with a holding force to take care of the Serbs; the other for a war against Serbia with only a holding force against the Russians. What the plans had failed to take account of however was the possibility of a war on two fronts. The result was a month or more of in­describable chaos as the two plans ran foul of one another: of trains of cattle trucks rattling past empty while exhausted soldiers trudged along beside the railway tracks laden down with their entire kit and supplies; of gunners being sent to Serbia while their guns went to Poland and their ammunition to the Tyrol; of troop-trains clanking day after day across the sweltering Hungarian plain at eight kilometres per hour—then burn­ing out their axle boxes as they tried to storm the Carpathian passes at express-train speeds. A cousin in Cracow—where enthusiasm for a war against the hated Muscovites bordered on the hysterical—told me years later of the scene as a flower-bedecked trainload of Polish reservists had left the Hauptbahnhof for the front one morning early that August: how the soldiers had climbed into the bunting-draped carriages laden down with presents of tobacco and chocolate, then steamed out of the station before a wildly cheering crowd as the band played the “Gott Erhalte” and the Polish national anthem. The Cardinal Archbishop was there in full canonicals to sprinkle them with holy water from an enamel bucket and to assure them that they were off to take part in a God-sanctioned crusade against Tsarist tyranny and Orthodox heresy. The train disap­peared around the bend, he said—then promptly reappeared, steaming backwards into the station, where the whole patriotic effect was somewhat undermined, to say the least, as the entire complement disembarked on to the crowded platforms.

The outcome of all this had been a series of notable thrashings for the k.u.k. Armee at the hands of the Russians and the Serbs—followed by a discreet purge among the staff officers who were held to have been responsible for this appalling mess. Heads had to roll if the prestige of the Dynasty was not to suffer, and poor Kraliczek—whether justly or not, I cannot say—was among those upon whose necks the axe fell. In fact it was only by expressing a sudden interest in flying that he had been able to escape immediate posting to an infantry-reinforcement battalion on its way to the Carpathians, where the Russians looked about to batter their way through the passes into Hungary.

Thus the immediate danger of bayonet fighting with wild Siberians had been averted. But in the end poor Kraliczek had found himself faced with the prospect—perhaps even more frightful to someone with his re­tiring nature—of being required to soar thousands of metres above the earth in a fragile, unreliable contraption of wood and linen driven by some reckless castaway suffering quite probably from the long-term effects of serious head injuries. Urgent requests to transfer out of the Fliegertruppe had been turned down, so in the end the only way out for him was to seek command of an air unit and use his seniority to make sure that his im­maculate footwear stayed firmly planted on terra firma. His method for accomplishing this would become clear to me over the next few weeks.

In brief, it consisted of avoiding flying duties—so far as I know he never once took to the air—by filling his entire waking life with admin­istration. God alone knows there was enough paperwork in the old k.u.k. Armee: endless forms to be filled in, returns to be made, authorisations to be sought, derogations to be obtained in regard to an intricate mesh of often contradictory regulations that governed every aspect of service life, down to the precise daily ration scales for the cats employed to catch mice in military supply depots. Yet Kraliczek had somehow contrived to add to even this mountain of paper, inventing reports and statistical compilations of his own, even going so far as to design and print at his own expense official forms as yet undreamt of by the War Ministry. Thus ensconced, spider-like, at the centre of a dense administrative web which only he fully understood, he clearly hoped to be able to sit out the entire war in his of­fice, sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, eating at his desk and taking his few hours’ nightly rest on a camp-bed in the orderly room, retiring long after the nightingales had gone to roost in the willow thickets by the river. How could he do otherwise, he would argue, when the Fliegertruppe could not even supply an adjutant to help him? What he failed to mention here was that each of the three adjutants who had arrived at Caprovizza since May had left after a week or so with nervous prostration. Questions would be asked one day. But the Imperial and Royal military bureaucracy moved slowly even in wartime, and with any luck it would all be over be­fore he was smoked out of his burrow. Then he would be able to return to what he called “proper soldiering”; that is to say, sitting once more be­hind a desk in Vienna compiling mobilisation timetables and calculating his pension entitlement.

My first official engagement as a member of Fliegerkompagnie 19F took place the next morning in the cemetery at Haidenschaft. It was a ceremony that I was to attend on many occasions over the next few months—though somehow I always managed to avoid appearing in the leading role. Rieger’s coffin was lowered into the grave while we stood by with bared heads. The priest finished his prayers, the guard of honour fired off its three salvoes into the summer sky, and we then filed past to toss our handful of earth on to the lid of the coffin, the smell of incense still not quite managing to mask the faint odour of roasted meat. The k.u.k. Fliegertruppe had been here not quite three months, yet already a row of twenty or so wooden crosses stood beneath the black cypress trees against the cemetery wall: crucifixes in which the cross-beam was made from a cut-down aeroplane propeller painted white and inscribed with the name and rank of the deceased. The non-German names looked faintly odd in black Gothic lettering: Strastil and Fontanelli and Kovess and Jasinski. We used to call it the “Fliegerkreuz,” I remember. It was a fre­quently awarded decoration, and one which—unusually for the Imperial and Royal armed forces—was distributed to officers and other ranks with­out distinction.