The Two-Headed Eagle

3 FLYING COMPANY

For me, as someone whose mother tongue was not German, one of the most curious things about the old Austrian variant of that language was the way in which its extraordinary regard for titles, and its endless inventiveness in creating jaw-breaking composite nouns—monstrosities like “Herr Obersektionsfuhrerstellvertreter” or “Frau Dampfkesselreinigungunternehmersgattin”—was balanced by an equal facility for cutting down these same sonorous titles to hideous little truncated stumps like “Krip” and “Grob” and “Frop”: names which to my ear always sounded like someone being seasick. It was as if a man should wear himself out and spend his entire substance equipping an or­dinary house with marble staircases and balustrades worthy of a palace, then spend his time entering and leaving the house and getting from floor to floor within it by a system of makeshift scaffolding and rope ladders hanging from the windows.

The Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Flying Service in the year 1916 was particularly rich in these uncouth acronyms. The basic unit, the Fliegerkompagnie, was cut down in common parlance to “Flik”; while the workshop that undertook care and maintenance for each group of Fliks, the Fliegeretappenpark, was reduced to “Flep”; and the units which sup­plied men to the squadrons, the Fliegerersatzkompagnien, were “Fleks.” The rear-area supply unit, the Fliegermaterialdepot, was the “Flemp”; while the flying-schools for officers and for other ranks came out as “Flosch” and “Feflisch” respectively. There were also entities called the “Febsch” and the “Flobsch”—though God help me now three-quarters of a century later if I can remember what on earth they signified.

In the summer of 1916 each of the thirty or so Fliks of His Imperial, Royal and Apostolic Majesty’s Flying Service consisted (on paper at least) of eight aircraft—six operational and two in reserve—and a total of about 180 men: a commanding officer, a Chefpilot, a technical officer, an adju­tant, eight or nine pilots and a similar number of officer-observers and, be­yond them, about 150 ground crew. The trouble here though was that since in the years before 1914 the k.u.k. Armee had always been too strapped for cash to call up more than about half of its annual contingent of recruits, and since the losses in the early battles of the war had been appalling, these manning levels were never anything like met in practice.

Nor were we any better off as regards aircraft that summer on the Isonzo Front. Always conservative in outlook as well as financially hard- up, the Imperial and Royal Army had paid very little attention to aero­planes in the years before the war. Indeed, that the Dual Monarchy had an air force at all worthy of the name was almost entirely the work of one tireless officer, a Croat major-general of Sappers by the name of Emil Uzelac—“Unser Uz,” as we used to call him. Uzelac—whom I met on several occasions—looked the very archetype of all the numerous gal­lant Croatian dimwits who had formed such a high proportion of the Habsburg corps of regimental officers over the previous three centuries: a square-skulled, wooden-countenanced man in his early fifties with a sweeping moustache and an air of permanent indigestion. But in reality old Uzelac had a remarkably lively and flexible mind. In the mid-1900s he had taken up sailing—and then taught himself marine navigation to be able to take a merchant master’s ticket, which he did at the first attempt. The flying bug had bitten him about 1910, and although he was already well into his forties he set about learning to fly; then, once he had obtained his pilot’s licence, got to work remorselessly hounding the sceptical War Ministry to allocate money for building up a military air service. In this though he was only partially successful, for whenever he did manage to wring a few miserable kronen out of the Arar for the purchase of an aero­plane he almost always had to go to France or Germany to buy it.

It was not that the Dual Monarchy lacked good aircraft designers; it was rather that it seemed incapable of using them to any purpose. Igo Etrich, Kurt Sablatnig, the immortal Dr Ferdinand Porsche—all very soon grew tired of trying to squeeze money out of the Austrian bureaucracy, whose attitude to aviation was probably that if God had meant Austrians to get both feet off the ground at once he would not have created the Habsburgs to rule over them. One by one they had left to work in Germany, where the official attitude to these things was much less blinkered. An Austro- Hungarian aircraft industry of sorts had begun to put out shoots by 1914, but it was always a feeble and sickly plant. Industrialisation had anyway come late to our venerable Empire, and when the war arrived it was far too late to make up the arrears. By the end of it, Austro-Hungarian aircraft designs were by no means bad: I understand that the Phonix two-seaters of 1918 could give even the much-feared Sopwith Camel a run for its money, and Austro-Daimler aero engines were outstandingly good. But the numbers of aircraft built were always miserably small, and production of engines was anyway very fitful as the wartime shortages spread and the electricity supply was cut off for much of each day. When the Armistice Commissioners arrived in 1919 I believe that they found entire hangars full of finished airframes waiting for engines that never arrived.

A good deal of the trouble, I think, was that the enormous Imperial and Royal bureaucracy, though undeniably conscientious and hard-working enough in its way, was simply unable to adjust mentally to the twentieth century: in fact seemed never to have been entirely comfortable with the nineteenth. Even as I arrived there at Haidenschaft in July 1916, almost two years into the most desperate, bloody war in the Monarchy’s long his­tory, the official doctrine was still that it would all be over before long, and that there was thus no call to crank up war production unduly for a con­flict that would soon have ended. No cutting of corners, no reduction of paperwork, no lowering of pre-war standards was still Vienna’s motto. Not the least of Uzelac’s difficulties in getting half-way decent aircraft in suf­ficient quantity was that right up until the end of the war the government department responsible for aircraft procurement was not the military itself but a civilian organisation called the k.u.k. Fliegerarsenal, at Fischamend just outside Vienna. Nobody and nothing in the world seemed capable of moving this body to speed up its majestic pre-war pace and autho­rise construction of modern aircraft—not even collective threats from bodies of front-fliers in 1917 to come along with bags of stick-grenades and conduct a general massacre of the officials. Long, long after all the other warring nations had realised that aircraft would be built in produc­tion runs of thousands at a time—and would often be obsolete almost as soon as they rolled out of the factory—Fischamend still clung obstinately to its pre-1914 belief that aeroplanes would be ordered individually like ships and that, like ships, they would last for a quarter century. Even in 1915 Austrian aircraft were still being given individual names.

The Fliegerarsenal also hung on far longer than most to the idea— already fast waning in 1916—that an aeroplane was an aeroplane was an aeroplane, capable of being used equally well for any purpose that required a flying machine, whether reconnaissance, photography, artillery-spotting, bombing, shooting up ground troops or bringing down enemy aircraft. It was a belief that had already been comprehensively shot out of the skies over France, where in late 1915 it had only been their limited numbers that had prevented the notorious Fokker Eindeckers—the world’s first effec­tive fighter aircraft—from wiping out the entire British and French air forces with their forward-firing machine guns. Aeroplanes were already beginning to split up into specialised types, and even here on the Austro- Hungarian South-West Front the first moves were beginning to be made towards setting up air units with special tasks.

This was why I had joined not Flik 19 but Flik 19F: the “F” stood for “Fernaufklarung,” or “long-range reconnaissance.” Previously all front­line Fliegerkompagnien had been attached to an infantry division, for which they provided artillery-spotting and air photography and a little (usually not very effective) bombing and close support for the troops. But in February a daring experiment had been tried. Early one morn­ing a flight of three Lloyd two-seaters had lumbered into the air from Gardolo flying field, in the Alps north of Lake Garda, and had flown a four-hour round trip to bomb the city of Milan. The results had been so gratifyingly out of proportion to the meagre investment—mass panic in a city that until now had thought itself far away from the war—that the Austrian High Command had decided to make further experiments in this direction. After all, the war had never been very popular in Italy—their parliament had been manoeuvred into it in May 1915 by something little short of trickery—and it was quite possible that a few more daylight raids on Italian cities might shake public morale to breaking-point.

The only problem here was our Emperor. The Old Gentleman was by no means the kindly grandfather of popular legend: he was as hard-boiled as most monarchs of the old school and was said to have been quite un­moved by the carnage at Solferino, whilst his adversary Napoleon III was violently sick when he saw and smelt that ghastly field the following day. But though seriously understocked in the imagination department, Franz Joseph was unquestionably a man of principle, and by his limited lights dropping bombs—even accidentally—on to unarmed civilians was some­thing that he would never countenance, least of all in a city like Milan, which had been an Austrian provincial capital within living memory and where (it was rumoured) he still had an account at a military outfitters. In fact the very word “bomb” was said to produce a noticeable agitation in this otherwise phlegmatic and rather dull old man: perhaps because he had spent so much of his long life having them tossed at him by would- be assassins. Arguments that bombing-raids would be directed solely at military targets—barracks, arms factories, railway yards and the like—had completely failed to budge him; maybe because, although not especially intelligent, he possessed a good deal more common sense than most of his advisers and knew instinctively what we airmen had yet to find out: that dropping bombs from two thousand metres under fire with primitive bombsights is one of the most inexact sciences of which it is possible to conceive. Unimaginative though he was, the old boy perhaps knew in his aged bones what we young men did not: that when we staggered into the air in those feeble wood-and-linen biplanes of ours with their ludicrous bombloads we were in fact taking off on a flight which would lead via Rotterdam and Dresden to end amid the vitrified rubble of Hiroshima.

Anyway, the outcome was that when a specialist long-range bombing squadron was created—after long delays for the appropriate paperwork to be completed, naturally—it was split off from an existing unit, Flik 19, and disguised as a long-range reconnaissance unit. It was a rather neat piece of duplicity. But in the end it created as many problems as it solved, both administrative and personal. The parent unit, Flik 19, formed in the spring of 1916, had already built up a reputation as one of the best and most enterprising Austro-Hungarian flying units; largely because of its remarkable commanding officer Hauptmann Adolf Heyrowsky, the man who had not been able to meet me when I arrived at Haidenschaft and who it seemed was conducting a running campaign of insults against my own commanding officer Hauptmann Kraliczek.

Heyrowsky was the very model of the Old Austrian career officer, one of the few survivors of a species which had been largely destroyed in the autumn of 1914 at Limanowa and Krasnik. A superb fencer, skier and marksman, Heyrowsky—though not especially bright—was a man of exemplary courage, unshakeable loyalty to the House of Habsburg and spotless personal integrity. Although completely without experience in the air, he had insisted on flying as an observer from his first day with Flik 19, and within a month had bagged two Italian aircraft with a Mannlicher hunting rifle. And as if this were not enough, during the Fifth Isonzo battle in May, when the weather had been too bad for flying, he had volunteered to fight evenings and weekends (so to speak) as an infantry officer in the trenches.

Such a man as this was no more likely than his imperial master to take kindly to the idea of running an air unit designed to drop bombs on cities far behind the lines. Quite apart from the risks to civilians, he held it to be the duty of fighting airmen to fight in the closest possible support of the men in the trenches. But there was also the administrative insult offered to him by the existence of Flik 19F. Flik 19, you see, remained under the com­mand of its nearest corps headquarters—the Archduke Joseph’s 7th Corps at Oppachiasella if I remember rightly—while we, being a strategic flying unit, came directly under 5th Army Headquarters far away in Marburg. Now, there is nothing that a professional officer loathes more than to have responsibility for a unit but no operational control over it—rather like being responsible for one’s wife’s debts when she has been living with another man for years past. So quite apart from the personalities involved, Hauptmann Heyrowsky could scarcely have been expected to look with any favour on this bastard offspring of his.

But the fact is that quite apart from his professional dislike of Flik 19F, Heyrowsky nursed an almost homicidal enmity towards the wretched Kraliczek, whom he despised as a desk-soldier of the most abject kind. It was not poor Kraliczek’s fault, I suppose, that his name was a Germanised version of the Czech word for “little rabbit” (a fact of which Heyrowsky was well aware, since he spoke that language fluently along with six or seven others). But it was a pity that the man’s timid, grey, burrowing, noc­turnal nature should have corresponded so exactly with his name. The very sight of such a creature might well be expected to arouse in a war­rior like Heyrowsky feelings—well, feelings like those of a weasel con­fronted with a rabbit. I was told in fact (confidentially, since it had had to be kept quiet at the time for fear of a court martial) that, a few weeks before, there had been a disgraceful scene when Kraliczek had arrived at Fliegerfeld Haidenschaft to visit Heyrowsky on some business or other and had emerged from the Kanzlei hut after a few minutes pursued by Heyrowsky, with his sporting rifle, firing shots around Kraliczek’s boots as the latter scurried towards his staff car and shouting, “Run for your life, bunny rabbit!” Since then scarcely a day had gone by without some elabo­rate insult—like the offer of bicycle-riding lessons—being conveyed from Haidenschaft to Caprovizza: all with perfect impunity, since Heyrowsky knew that any complaint by Kraliczek would involve the latter in a court of honour and the choice either of fighting a duel or of being cashiered in disgrace.

Quite apart from its shortcomings as regards supply of aircraft and organisation, the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe when I was seconded to it in July

1916 still suffered from yet another crippling disadvantage imposed on it by the intense conservatism of its superiors. This was the doctrine, still held to by the War Ministry even if it was beginning to break down in the field, that it was the job of an officer to command an aeroplane and the job of an enlisted man—a sergeant at best—to fly the thing. The trouble was, I think, that even if k.u.k. military officialdom had by now grudg­ingly accepted that it needed an air force of some sort, it was damned if it was going to let the exigencies of flying get in the way of the famous Old Austrian discipline which, over the previous two centuries, had caused the Habsburg Army to be kicked about the deck by a succession of enemies ranging in size from France to Montenegro. In particular it would coun­tenance no dilution whatever of that sacred entity the Habsburg officer corps, twin pillar of the Dynasty along with the Catholic Church.

By 1916 this was frankly a crazy notion: ever since the 1870s the old Imperial aristocracy had been withdrawing from military life and its place had been taken by ordinary people like myself, grandson of a Bohemian peasant. Even before 1914 the k.u.k. officer corps had been a thoroughly bourgeois body, and the terrible losses of that year had made it even more so by bringing in huge numbers of hastily commissioned cadets and one- year volunteers: youths who would have been pharmacists and school­teachers but for the war, and who would certainly go back to dispensing pills and teaching French grammar once it was over. Yet still the War Ministry behaved as if we were all Schwarzenbergs and Khevenhullers, and as if tying on the sacred black-and-yellow silk sword-belt (which large numbers of newly commissioned officers were now not even bothering to buy) was the next best thing to being anointed with consecrated oil by the Pope. Meanwhile men from the ranks—without the all-important Matura certificate which allowed them to apply for a commission—were debarred absolutely from becoming officers, no matter how able and energetic they might be. So far as I know, no ranker-pilot in the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe was ever made an officer, though I believe that as a special mark of esteem the Hungarian ace Josef Kiss was promoted to officer-aspirant in 1918, once he was dead and safely out of the way.

The results of this imbecility were plain enough to see as the war went on. Our fliers invariably fought bravely, but the level of initiative and enterprise, it has to be said, was generally not high: not when compared with the German Flying Corps—which had once been as caste-conscious as our own but had changed its ideas under the pressure of events—and certainly not with the British on the Piave Front in 1918, when our Air Force had rings run around it by a handful of RFC squadrons whose pilots were almost all second lieutenants and whose daring was quite legendary. Certainly the mind-numbing routine of the old pre-war k.u.k. Armee—lots of drill and parades, because they cost less to put on than proper exercises, impressed the populace and required very little mental effort—was no very good preparation for a type of fighting that required the utmost qualities of self-reliance and initiative.

So it was that in the afternoon of my second day with Flik 19F, after re­turning from Oberleutnant Rieger’s funeral, I made the acquaintance of the man who was to be my own personal coachman in whatever desper­ate adventures lay ahead. The Operations Warrant Officer had informed me that I was to make my first operational flight the next morning, to photograph ammunition dumps near the town of Palmanova at the urgent behest of 5th Army Headquarters. So I naturally felt it to be important to prepare for this quite lengthy flight over enemy territory by at least being introduced to the man who was to fly me there and (all being well) back again.

I came upon Feldpilot-Zugsfuhrer Zoltan Toth engaged in playing cards in the shade of a hangar with the ground crew of our machine, a Hansa-Brandenburg two-seater like the one that had incinerated poor Rieger the previous day. It was just after dinner and the men were enjoy­ing their regulation hour’s rest. They got up reluctantly and saluted as I approached. I had already met Feldwebel Prokesch, the craftsman sergeant in charge of the aeroplanes’ six-man ground crew—but this creature . . . there must be some mistake. The man who stepped forward scowling to salute me and shake my extended hand . . . no, surely not. Few people, I think, would feel completely easy at first about entrusting their life, four thousand metres above the enemy lines and without a parachute, to the care of a complete stranger. But to a complete stranger who looked like an artist’s reconstruction based on a jawbone and cranial fragments recovered from a Danubian gravel-bed? Prognathous, bow-legged and barrel-chested, this frightful apparition—altogether one of the ugliest, most ungainly looking men I have ever seen—glowered at me from be­neath his beetling brows; or to be more precise, a single protruding brow like the eaves of a cottage. Offhand, I was not quite able to remember the minimum height requirement for the Imperial and Royal Army, but I was still pretty sure that even in wartime this man fell short of it by a good head; that even if he had stood up straight, so that his trailing knuckles had not come quite so close to the ground, his head would barely have reached my shoulder. To describe his appearance as “simian” would be grossly defamatory to the monkey tribe. I half expected him to swing himself up into the rafters of the open hangar and start jabbering and pelting us with nutshells. This was bad enough, to be sure; but Zugsfuhrer Toth had not yet opened his mouth to make his report. When he did the effect almost managed to make me forget his appearance.

What on earth could these frightful sounds mean? Was it German or Magyar, or some other quite unknown tongue? Was it human speech at all? No, I decided at last: the words were approximations to German; it was just that they seemed to have been chosen at random by sticking a pin into the pages of a dictionary.

In theory, the language of command throughout the old Imperial and Royal Army was German. Even if less than a fifth of its men in fact spoke German as their native language, and even if most regiments conducted their internal business in the language of the majority of their men, every soldier of the Austro-Hungarian Army, no matter how illiterate or plain stupid, was supposed to learn at least a basic German military vocabulary: the famous Eighty Commands of the Habsburg Army. But in the purely Hungarian part of the Army—the Honved regiments from which Toth had transferred to the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe—the merest lip service was paid to German, and sometimes not that much. Even in the last years of the war there were cases of Hungarian full colonels who could barely understand German, let alone speak it. The Flying Service had been hur­riedly put together from volunteers gathered from all nationalities of the Empire, so it was only to be expected that the standard of written and spoken German should often be very shaky. But even so, Toth’s German there that morning was in a class of its own for sheer incomprehensi­bility. In the end we had to exchange our formal courtesies through a young mechanic who came from the Burgenland, east of Vienna, and knew both German and Magyar. It was also plain at this very first meeting that Feldpilot-Zugsfuhrer Toth did not greatly care for officers as a class, whatever their nationality.

That evening in the mess I had my first real opportunity to talk with my brother-officers in Flik 19F; all, that is, except for Hauptmann Kraliczek, who had not been present at supper since he had to work (he said) on his statistical abstracts. I learnt that he usually took his meals alone in his of­fice, so now that Rieger was dead the mess presidency devolved by right of age upon the Technical Officer—the TO—Oberleutnant Meyerhofer. Franz Meyerhofer was a good deal older than the rest—a year older even than myself in fact—and was a pre-war reserve officer who had been called to the colours only in 1915. A Jew from the Sudetenland, his nor­mal job was as manager of a machine-tool company in the town of Eger. He had volunteered for the Fliegertruppe out of a wish to fly, but had been securely grounded ever since for the simple reason that, in the k.u.k. Armee, officers with such a thorough knowledge of engineering were ex­tremely scarce; far too rare at any rate to be risked in flying operations. A solid, calm, reassuring sort of man, I took an immediate liking to him for reasons that I cannot quite define.

The other old greybeard in the mess was Oberleutnant Schraffl, my tent-mate. He had been a professional officer before the war, in one of the crack Kaiserjager regiments, and his route into the Fliegertruppe had been that followed by a great many other flying officers in those years: that is to say, he had been too severely wounded to be able to serve any longer in the infantry, but was still able to hobble out to an aeroplane and climb into it. In his case he had been shot through the knee at Przemysl in 1914, and then bayoneted for good measure by a passing Russian as he lay in a shell hole. An aluminium kneecap allowed his leg to bend (more or less), but he had to walk everywhere with a stick and needed a mechanic to help him into his seat. I must say that I got to know him very little. He was a rather reserved man; and in any case, there would not be the time.

The other three officers—Leutnants Barinkai and Szuborits and Fahnrich Teltzel—were extremely young: none of them more than twenty and straight out of gymnasium into the Army. I must say that I found them rather tiresome; not least because only Barinkai (who was a Hungarian) knew any language other than German. Relations were cordial enough I suppose, but these young men lacked tact, I felt, and had a disturbing ten­dency to admire everything German while disdaining the empire whose badge they wore. I had been a Habsburg career officer for sixteen years, but never in all that time until now had I ever heard it suggested in any gathering of officers at which I had been present that a Czech or a Pole or an Italian was any less loyal a soldier of the House of Austria than an ethnic German or a Magyar. Now I heard it all the time: allusions to the Czech regiments which had gone over to the Russians on the Eastern Front and the stories that the Heir-Apparent’s Italian wife Zita was in secret contact with the Allies. On occasions I even suspected that these young sprigs were mimicking my Czech accent. But I supposed that per­haps I was growing sensitive on the point.

I made all my preparations that afternoon for the next morning’s pho­tographic mission to Palmanova: checked my maps, compass, pistol and so forth and drew my suit of leather flying overalls from stores—noting with some dismay as I did so that the breast of the jacket bore three none too discreetly patched bullet holes and that the lining was still stained profusely with blood. Then I had set off for a conference with my pilot, to discuss the route and our plans for tomorrow, even though I might have to use the young ground crewman as an interpreter. I was met on the way by Hauptmann Kraliczek.

“Ah, Prohaska, where are you going if I might enquire?”

I was tempted to tell him to mind his own business—he and I were after all equivalent in rank, while I had several years’ seniority. But he was the commanding officer, so I remained courteous.

“To speak with Feldpilot Toth, Herr Kommandant.”

“With Toth? About what, might I ask?”

I was becoming rather irritated by this obtuseness, but I managed to contain myself. “About the flight tomorrow, Herr Kommandant.”

“The flight, Herr Leutnant?” He looked puzzled. Was the man de­liberately trying to annoy me, I wondered, or was he really as out of touch with events as he seemed?

“The flight, Herr Kommandant: the flight over Palmanova tomorrow morning to take photographs for Army HQ. Surely you remember.”

“Oh yes, of course, that flight. But why should you wish to discuss it with Toth, for goodness’ sake?”

“I obediently report, Herr Kommandant, that Zugsfuhrer Toth is to fly me there and back tomorrow. I wished to outline to him the purpose of the mission, to show him the route we might take and to ask for his views on it.”

He paused for some time and looked at me in bewilderment. “Herr Leutnant,” he said at last, “Herr Leutnant, do my ears deceive me or are you seriously suggesting that you, an Austrian officer, should discuss your plans with a ranker? ”

“Why of course, Herr Kommandant: it seemed to me the merest com­mon sense to tell the man what we are setting out to do and work out with him the best way of doing it. After all, I am not just a newcomer to the Fliegertruppe but to the South-West Front as well. Toth has been here several months I believe and has crossed the Italian lines on numerous occasions, so he should know better than most people what the hazards are and the best way around them.”

“Herr Linienschiffsleutnant” (he always used the cumbersome full form of my rank when he wished to annoy me), “Herr Linienschiffsleut­nant, while I cannot say what the custom is in these matters in the Imperial and Royal U-Boat Service—for all I know you may take it in turns with the cook to command your ship—in the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe the regulations are quite specific: the officer-observer is there to give the orders and the ranker-pilot is there to carry them out, even if he is ordered to dive at full speed into the ground. Toth has neither the right to his own opinion in the matter, nor any need to have one. He does not need to know where to go because you will direct him. And you will direct him because you are an officer and that is what officers are for, is that clear? ”

I discussed this conversation with Meyerhofer after supper.

“Yes I know,” he said, “stupid way to run an air force if you ask me. But I warn you, watch out for Toth: that man’s got a mind of his own and he’s done for one officer-observer already.”

“Who was that then? ”

“A fellow called Rosenbaum, at the end of May, over Gorz. Seems that Toth was manoeuvring the Brandenburger—your Zoska—a bit abruptly to dodge a Nieuport and Rosenbaum just fell out. He dropped through the conservatory roof of a convent you know—just missed a nun who was watering her begonias. Funny thing, but you’d have expected him to have splattered like a Roman candle, what with just having fallen from two thousand metres, but when they picked him up there was scarcely a mark on him. Anyway, there was no end of a row about that: seems that Toth had just done a bunt-turn and flicked him out of the cockpit.”

I should point out here that a bunt-turn is rather like performing a loop, except down rather than up, so that the pilot is on the outside of the loop, not the inside. It is still a court-martial offence I believe in all the world’s air forces because of the brutal strains that it places upon an airframe.

“How did Toth get off?” I enquired.

“Luck. On the way home he met an SP2 artillery spotter. They’re an Italian-built Farman pusher: you’ll see a lot of them before you’ve been here long. I pity the poor buggers who have to go up in them because they’re quite helpless when attacked: more blind spots than you’d think possible. Anyway, Toth decided not to shoot this one down, just got under its tail and kept tormenting it: nudging the tail down when the pilot tried to dive and bumping it underneath when he tried to climb and generally chivvying the poor sod around, further and further from home, until he ran out of petrol and had to land at Sesana. I gather that the observer was really cut up about it—the Principe Umberto di Cariagnano della Novera or something: really posh cavalry-regiment type. Said that he’d been forced down by unfair means—presumably it would have been all right if Toth had just shot him—and demanded immediate repatriation under a flag of truce. Then he got a look at Toth, who’d just landed alongside, and that really did it: carried on like a lunatic about him, a nobleman, being forced down by a “trained orang-utang,” as he put it.”

“What happened then?”

“Oh, Toth just lost his temper and walked over and caught him a beauty under the chin—knocked him clean out. Of course, there was no end of a row about that: a ranker punching an officer and a nobleman into the bargain, especially after he’d just lost an officer of his own. They disallowed him the victory, then Kraliczek stepped in threatening court martials. In the end, rather than lose a pilot for a month in the cells, they gave him eight hours tied to the stake. We said that Kraliczek couldn’t, but Kraliczek knows his regulations and pointed out that Toth’s only a titular sergeant and therefore he’s as liable to corporal punishments as a junior NCO when on active service. I tell you, though, it went down very badly here, to see a fine pilot like that standing for eight hours in the sun with his wrists tied above his head like a Ruthenian ploughboy who hadn’t bothered to clean his rifle.”

This left me very sad and (I confess) not a little apprehensive. The k.u.k. Armee was not alone in 1916 in having a range of humiliating field punishments. I understand that the British Army of the day made a habit of leaving defaulters lashed to wagon wheels for hours on end. But to apply them to a sergeant-pilot in a front-line unit seemed to be going too far. Toth had tipped out one officer already by accident. Might the next one perhaps not fall to his death by design?

Later in the evening, before I turned in for the night, I spoke with the young Hungarian lieutenant Barinkai.

“Oh yes,” he said in his lisping Magyar-German, “Toth, yes, I haven’t spoken much with the man but I believe he transferred from a Honved sapper unit. From what I can gather it seems that he was once a monk, believe it or not; or rather a seminarist, in the abbey at Esztergom. I believe they threw him out after they caught him on top of a nun in the abbot’s marrowbed. Luckily for him it was the week of Sarajevo, so he just came into the Army and no questions asked. Funny really how the war worked out like that for some people. I’d just ploughed my Matura second time around, and I’d borrowed a lot of money for cards and there was a house­maid being troublesome about a kid she said was mine. Then suddenly hey presto! war declared, into uniform and goodbye exams, goodbye debts, goodbye housemaids for the duration. The papers say that this war’s a disaster for the human race. All I can say is, blow the human race: for Feri Barinkai it couldn’t have come at a better time.”