The Two-Headed Eagle

4 LITTLE SOPHIE

Oberleutnant Schraffl and I were up and dressed at eight bells—sorry, 0400 hours—next morning, wakened by our shared soldier-servant Petrescu. Petrescu was an illiterate Romanian peasant from near Klausenburg in Transylvania—my wife’s birthplace—and we had been introduced only the day before. His eyes had widened with wonder when he saw me standing with Schraffl. I had been wearing my blue naval jacket with field-grey breeches and puttees, and I later discovered that within a couple of hours he had broadcast it about the entire district that I was a British officer—the son of the English King no less—whom “der Herr Lejtnant Schraffl” had just shot down and was holding prisoner until a ransom could be paid: a harmless enough yarn I suppose, except that the following week, while I was out for an evening stroll, a posse of rustics armed with pitchforks surrounded me and sent for the village gendarme in the belief that I was trying to escape.

We ate a hurried breakfast of coffee and bread, then walked out across the flying field to where our two aeroplanes, their pilots (Toth and a Czech corporal called Jahudka) and their respective ground crews were waiting in the pale, faint-shadowed light of an early summer’s morning, long be­fore the sun’s rays had begun to stream over the mountain pinnacles that loomed above Haidenschaft to the north and east. In the distance the rumbling of artillery was growing louder by the minute as the daily round began in the Isonzo trench lines. It had been decided the previous evening, following intelligence reports of a new Italian single-seater squadron near Udine, that instead of proceeding alone on our mission we would fly with Schraffl’s aeroplane about five hundred metres above us as an escort.

Our own aeroplane, number 26.74, named Zoska — “Little Sophie” in Polish—was a Hansa-Brandenburg CI built under licence by the Phonix company at Stadtlau. This was a matter of some comfort to me on my maiden combat-flight, since the “Gross Brandenburger” was generally reckoned to be the best of the Austro-Hungarian two-seaters. Able to perform most front-flying tasks at least competently, it was easy to fly, im­mensely strong, stable enough to make a good reconnaissance aircraft yet sufficiently fast and manoeuvrable to give it at least some chance of sur­vival if attacked by a single-seat fighter. One of the better products of that brilliant if patchy designer Ernst Heinkel, we owed the Brandenburger— like so much else in the Imperial and Royal armed forces—to a succession of administrative accidents and half-decisions; but also to the foresight and imagination of the Trieste-Jewish financier and aviation enthusiast Camille Castiglione who, when war broke out in 1914, had solved the Dual Monarchy’s aircraft industry problem—that is to say, the almost total lack of one—at a stroke by simply buying up a complete factory in Germany along with its chief designer. The Hansa-Brandenburg plant near Berlin produced the designs and the prototypes, and these were then licensed out to be built by Austro-Hungarian factories. It was far from being an ideal system: the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe tended to get only those designs that Herr Heinkel had been unable to sell to the German Air Force. But it was better than nothing, and in the Hansa-Brandenburg CI it gave us a reconnaissance two-seater which served us faithfully right up to the end of the war, fitted with ever more powerful engines. In fact I recall that the Czechoslovak Air Force was still flying a few of them in the early 1930s.

The machine that stood before us in the half-light that morning at Caprovizza was a sturdy-looking, squarish, rather uncompromising bi­plane with curious inward-sloping struts between the wings. Its 160hp Austro-Daimler engine and attendant radiator completely blocked the pilot’s view forward, so that Toth had to crane his neck out and look along one side of the nose like an engine driver peering out of his cab. The two of us were to sit in a long, shared cockpit. For defence to rearward I had a stripped-down Schwarzlose machine gun mounted to slide on rails around the cockpit edge, while for attack—that is to say, something getting in front of us for long enough to be worth a shot—Toth had a second Schwarzlose, complete with water-jacket this time, mounted on a pylon above the top wing so that it could fire ahead over the radiator and propeller. Looking at it that morning I was not at all sure that this second machine gun was worth the trouble of lugging it along with us. Thanks to the lack of forward view for the pilot, the sights consisted merely of a brass eyelet and a pin fixed into the interplane struts while the firing mechanism—since the weapon was way above the pilot’s reach—was a lavatory chain and handle.

As for the photography which was our business that morning, I fore­saw little problem. The previous afternoon I had received such instruction as was considered necessary for an officer-observer to be able to work an aerial-reconnaissance camera, and really there was nothing to it. A war­rant officer from the army photographic laboratory at Haidenschaft had bicycled over to Caprovizza to tutor me in the principles of air photogra­phy and, when he learnt that I had been a keen amateur photographer from about the age of ten, had kindly agreed to omit the introductory parts of his lecture (properties of light rays, refraction through lenses, chemistry of the photographic plate, etc.) and just show me how to work the thing: so simple, he assured me, that even cavalry officers had been known to master it. The camera was about a metre high and was fixed to look down­wards through a little sliding trapdoor in the belly of the aeroplane just behind the observer’s position. It had a magazine of thirty photographic plates, and all that I had to do was to wait until we were flying level over the target, at the prescribed height and a steady speed, then keep pulling a lever until all the plates were used up. The lever would operate the shut­ter and then, on the return stroke, allow the exposed plate to drop into a collecting-box while loading a fresh one.

It looked like being a simple enough operation. Our orders were to be over Palmanova at 0630 precisely and then to fly northwards along the Udine railway line at exactly three thousand metres and a hundred kilo­metres per hour, taking photographs at precise five-second intervals. The reason for all this precision (I learnt) was that the Italians were stacking ar­tillery shells alongside the railway line in preparation for the great Isonzo offensive that was expected any day now. The intelligence officers at 5th Army Headquarters were keen to know exactly how much ammunition the Italians were accumulating, which might give them some indication as to which side of Gorz the blow would fall. We were to photograph the ammunition dumps at a precise time and height so that, by taking the alti­tude of the sun at that moment and measuring the length of the shadows cast, it would be possible to work out exactly how high the stacks were. To my mind this seemed a rather futile exercise: if you have ever been on the receiving end of an artillery bombardment (as I have several times and devoutly hope that you may never be) then it is largely of academic interest whether the enemy has a thousand shells to lob at you or only 973. But there we are: Old Austria was much addicted to such meaning­less precision; and anyway, orders are there to be obeyed no matter how inane they may appear.

Hauptmann Kraliczek’s remarks notwithstanding, I used the services of our young Burgenlander mechanic to hold a brief conference with Toth, pointing out the proposed route on the map and signalling by dumb-show what we were to do. He grunted and nodded his head and appeared to signal his agreement, so we clambered aboard and made our pre-flight checks: guns, camera, compass, altimeter and the rest of the rudimentary equipment considered necessary for fliers in those days. As we finished the first rays of the sun were reaching over the bare limestone peaks of the Selva di Ternova. Up there the shepherds would soon be piping to gather their flocks as they had done every summer’s morning for the past four millennia, still living a life that would be entirely familiar to their counter­parts in Ancient Greece. Yet here we were, only a few kilometres away in the valley, about to take off on an adventure at the very forefront of the twentieth century, doing something which even in my not so distant youth had been completely unthinkable: the very crime for which the gods had punished Icarus. It was all extremely dangerous; but I have to say that at the same time it was marvellously exciting.

The checks completed, I turned to wave to Schraffl in the other Brandenburger. He waved back, and I slapped Toth on the shoulder to signal him to get ready. Given our problems with language, it was at least some comfort that speech would soon be entirely redundant; since, once we were up in the air, we would be able to communicate only by hand sig­nals or at best by notes scrawled on signal pads. Toth nodded, and I leant out of the cockpit to call to Feldwebel Prokesch and the two mechanics waiting by the aeroplane’s nose.

“Ready to start?”

“Ready to start, Herr Leutnant. Electrical contacts closed?”

I glanced at the switch panel. “Electrical contacts closed: suck in.”

Prokesch turned the propeller to suck air-and-petrol mixture into the cylinders.

“Sucked in, Herr Leutnant. Open contacts now if you please.” I indi­cated the ignition switch to Toth, who flicked it down.

“Electrical contacts open. Start the engine.” With that, Toth began cranking the little starter magneto—“the coffee grinder”—on the cock­pit bulkhead while Prokesch took a swing at the propeller. It fired first time, the engine roaring into life as gouts of smoke and blue-green flame rippled from the six stub-exhausts. I let it warm up for a minute or so, looked to make sure that Schraffl’s engine was also running, then waved to the ground crew. The mechanics pulled the chocks from in front of the wheels, threw them aside, then ducked underneath the aeroplane to sprawl themselves forward over the lower wings, one man lying on each side just inboard of the struts. The reason for this was that, with the engine and radiator completely blocking the pilot’s view forward, Brandenburgers were notoriously tricky to taxi on the ground and were always piling up against posts or running into other aircraft. The mechanics were there to give directions to Toth as he opened the throttle and the aeroplane started to lurch across the stony grass field.

We turned into the wind—a faint westerly breeze this early in the morning—and Toth gave full throttle as the two mechanics waved to signal “All clear ahead” and slid back off the wings. The air began to sing past us as the Brandenburger gathered speed, wheels bouncing on the bumpy field. Take-off runs were minimal in those days when aeroplanes started to lift off at near-bicycle speeds: 150 metres or less if the aeroplane was lightly laden. Soon a faint lurch and sudden smoothing of the mo­tion signalled that we had left the ground behind. Toth lugged back the control column—not a modern joystick but a backward-and-forward post with a small wooden motor-car steering wheel on top—and soon we were climbing away from Fliegerfeld Caprovizza, banking to port to make the regulation two circuits of the airfield: a precaution against engine failure, since the probability was that if a piston was going to seize, it would do so now rather than later on. Meanwhile Schraffl and Jahudka had climbed into the air astern of us. Once I saw that they had made their circuits too I fired a green flare to signal that all was well, and we set off down the Vippaco Valley, heading for the town of Gorz and the enemy lines in the hills to west of it. We were on our way. Whether we would make the same journey in the opposite direction would become clear during the next ninety minutes or so.

We climbed gently as we flew down the broad, uneven valley of the Vippaco, heading for the point where that river joins the Isonzo just south of Gorz. Our aim was to cross the lines at about three thousand metres, then head north-east towards Udine for a while to confuse the Italian ob­servers on the ground, who would telephone our height and direction as soon as they saw us pass overhead. We would then turn south-westwards and circle round to approach Palmanova from the direction of Venice, hoping in this way that we would be taken for Italian aircraft and left alone by any anti-aircraft batteries around our target. I checked my map and ticked off the towns and villages of the Vippaco Valley as we flew over them: Santa Croce and Dornberg and Prvacina and Ranziano; not so much for navigational purposes—we were following the railway line and river anyway—as to memorise their appearance for future flights when visibility might be poor and there might be no time to consult the map. How considerate it had been of previous generations (I thought) to have built so many hill-top monasteries around Gorz—Monte Vecchio and San Gabriele and Monte Santo. As a sceptic I doubted their religious efficacy; but there was no denying that as air-navigation beacons they took some beating, stuck up there on their mountain-peaks and painted white and yellow to stand out against the dark green pine forests. Meanwhile, away to westward, the guns flashed from time to time among the wooded hills across the Isonzo.

The sun was well up as we passed over the town of Gorz: still largely undamaged despite the closeness of the lines. The castle and the twin- domed cathedral were clearly visible in the early-morning light, and the silvery ribbon of the Isonzo branching and rejoining among the summer- dry banks of pebbles as it made its way towards the sea. Then we crossed the trench lines, which here climbed up from the valley floor to wind among the devastated forests of Podgora and Monte Sabotino on the west bank of the Isonzo. It was around here if anywhere that we would meet flak artillery fire. I peered ahead apprehensively—then saw three quick red flashes and puffs of dirty black smoke in the sky far ahead of us. A feeling of intense relief surged through me. Utterly feeble: so typical of the Italians and their charming incompetence. If that was the best they could do then—It was like a sudden, heavy kick in the backside: three or four shells bursting below us with a concussion that knocked the air out of my lungs and tossed the aeroplane around much as a number of badminton players will bat a shuttlecock from one to the other. I clutched the cockpit edge in alarm as Toth looked down, snorted in disgust and began to weave the aeroplane from side to side to put the gunners off their aim. I looked up and saw that Schraffl—now well above us—was doing the same. Other shells followed, but none came as close as that early group, and within a minute or two we were well beyond the lines and out of reach. A few puffs of smoke hung in the sky astern as if to say “You are lucky this time, porci Austriaci, but there’s always another day . . .” Twenty minutes later we were approaching Palmanova from the west.

Because everything happens so much faster, and in three dimensions instead of two, air navigation has always been a rather hit-or-miss busi­ness compared with position-finding at sea. I imagine that this is still largely true even now; and in those far-off times seventy years ago it was true—how do you say?—with brass knobs on it. Even so, it would have required a complete imbecile not to have recognised the town of Palmanova, because I think that in the whole of Europe there can scarcely be another settlement so instantly recognisable from the air. I whistled in admiration as we flew over it, so lost in wonder that I almost forgot to check the time and line us up for our photographic run along the railway line. I suppose that in the years since, the growth of suburbs and factory estates must have blurred its outlines; but as I saw it that July morning it still possessed that pristine purity of form in which its builders had left it: a perfect Renaissance fortress-town laid out like a star of David with successive rings of earthworks—lunettes and ravelins and bastions— surrounding it in what could well have been an engraving from a Leonardo da Vinci treatise on the art of fortification. It was so perfect that I half expected to see a scrolled cartouche in the fields near by with a pair of dividers, a scale of yards and a copperplate legend: “Senatus Serenissimae Republicae Venetii castrum et oppidum Palmae Novae aedificavit anno domini 1580,” or something similar. It suddenly occurred to me that Toth and I were among the very few people who had ever had the privilege to see the place from above, exactly as its architects had designed it.

But we had more important things to do that morning than study sixteenth-century military engineering. More technologically advanced and far less aesthetically pleasing ways of killing people were our im­mediate concern as we lined up to run along the railway track leading towards Udine. Toth brought us down until the altimeter read exactly the three thousand metres prescribed by our orders. I pulled back the cuff of my flying overall and glanced at my wristwatch. Even in July over Italy the air was near-freezing this high up, and I felt the cold suddenly bite at my exposed skin. Right on time: the seconds hand was just sweeping up towards 0630. Really this was too easy. I glanced down and saw the dark oblong stacks of shells piled up neatly alongside the railway track for a good two or three kilometres. Then I bent down to slide open the hatch in the cockpit floor. As the hands of the watch touched 0630 I pulled the lever for the first exposure.

My attention was not entirely devoted to working the camera lever every five seconds: in fact ever since we had left Caprovizza I had been ceaselessly scanning the sky above and astern of us for the first sight of anything suspicious. I must say that I was somewhat apprehensive about this. Being a naval officer my eyesight was excellent; but I suspected that the skills of a good U-Boat look-out—like the trick of never looking di­rectly at the horizon but always slightly above it—might not be entirely applicable in the air. I had also, I must admit, something well short of total confidence in the means by which I was to defend us if we were attacked from behind.

The 8mm Schwarzlose had been the Austro-Hungarian Army’s stan­dard machine gun since 1906 or thereabouts, selected after an exhaustive series of competitive trials in which it alone had been able to meet the War Ministry’s stringent specification as regards price. I suppose that the thing might have been just about adequate for a peacetime army, but for fighting a world war it was a very dubious contraption indeed. Whereas most other machine guns in service around the world were operated by muzzle-gas, Herr Schwarzlose had chosen to make his design work by recoil—and had then (for some quite unaccountable reason) decided to dispense with the locking system generally considered necessary to hold a machine gun breech shut while each round is fired. These twin eccen­tricities meant that the Schwarzlose had to have a very short barrel—and thus mediocre range and accuracy, not to mention a picturesque gout of flame as each round left the muzzle.

It also necessitated a massive breech block, like a miniature black­smith’s anvil, so that its inertia would prevent it from being blown back into the gunner’s face. This in its turn meant a further loss of range, be­cause so much of the energy from each shot was absorbed in kicking the breech open. As a result its rate of fire was poor: about four hundred shots per minute on paper but barely three-quarters of that in practice.

And that was just the army version: the air Schwarzlose, which now rested behind me on its rails ready for action, was a still further declension of mediocrity. Unlike the excellent Parabellum—standard observer’s gun in the German two-seaters—it had no shoulder-stock to allow the gunner to keep his aim however violently the pilot was throwing the aeroplane about the sky. Instead it had a pair of handles like those of a child’s toy scooter. The water-jacket had been removed to save weight; but this had only made the aim even more uncertain since it abolished the foresight, and also meant that we could fire bursts of only twelve or so shots at a time, for fear of burning the barrel. As for the ammunition feed, it con­sisted of a canvas belt of five hundred rounds coiled in a metal drum on the side of the thing. This belt would always absorb some damp in the early mornings, waiting out on the airfields, and even in summer this would often freeze in the upper air, causing the gun to jam. This was bad enough, but our gun that morning was an early model—pensioned off no doubt from the Army—in which each cartridge had to be lubricated by a little oil-pump as it went into the breech so that the empty case would extract afterwards. This oil would become sticky in the cold, so that even if the gun would still fire it would slow down to two hundred rounds or so per minute, making it sound like an exhausted woodpecker on a hot summer’s afternoon. All things considered, I think that a Singer sewing machine would have been about as much use for defending ourselves—as well as being a good deal lighter.

In the event though it looked as if the wretched Schwarzlose might not be needed that morning, there in the summer sky above the Friulian Plain. I pulled the lever to expose plate number thirty, heard it clack into the box and then turned thankfully to Toth to tap him on the shoulder and signal “Finished—head for home.” I was glad of this, because cloud was coming in fast from the west: white cauliflowers of cumulus which were for the moment above us, but which seemed to be coming down to our altitude. I looked up and saw Schraffl’s aeroplane disappear into the cloud above us, reappear for a moment and then vanish again as we turned for home. He had seen us I was sure, but to make certain that he knew we were finished I fired a white flare just before we lost sight of one another.

When I next caught sight of an aeroplane, about three kilometres astern and slightly above us, it took me some moments to realise that I was not looking at Schraffl and Jahudka’s machine. I could not see exactly what it was, but head-on it was most certainly not a Brandenburger, whose inward-sloping struts gave it an unmistakable appearance when viewed from the front. It was a biplane, but of what kind I could not say except that it appeared to be somewhat smaller than ours—though still too large for a Nieuport—and that it was most certainly closing with us at speed. Then I saw another one, at the same altitude but about two kilometres astern of the first. Whoever they were, they had seen us and were gain­ing on us fast. Heart pounding, I turned around and seized Toth by the shoulder. He looked around to where I was pointing, and nodded casually. I signalled for “Full throttle” by thrusting my fist forward. He nodded, and eased the throttle lever forward a little. Meanwhile I had turned to fumble desperately with the machine gun, releasing the clamp which held it still on its mounting-rails and jerking back the cocking lever. Damn them, where were Schraffl and Jahudka? They were supposed to be escort­ing us and ought to be manoeuvring now to drop down on the Italians as they came in astern of us. And why were we moving so slowly? Surely a Brandenburger could travel faster than this at full throttle.

The leading aeroplane was close enough behind us now for me to get a good look at it. It was most definitely an Italian two-seater. Of what make though I have no idea at all, except that it had a rotary engine and a gun mounted on the top wing to fire over the propeller. They were still out of range, but weaving about slightly in our wake in an effort (I suppose) to confuse us before they moved in for the kill. The Italian was smaller and evidently rather more manoeuvrable than our Zoska, and also looked as if it might be slightly faster. Although I had no way of knowing it at the time, he was about to use what would become the standard technique for shooting down a reconnaissance two-seater. He would make a series of feints like a boxer to put me off my aim, then drop down into the blind spot under our tail until Toth had banked away—say to starboard—to let me take aim. Then he would dodge away to port before I could fire, and use his higher speed and tighter turning circle to come up on the other side as I was desperately trying to lug the gun around on its rails. There would then follow a short burst fired at perhaps twenty metres’ range into the belly of our aeroplane; a burst which, even if it were not to kill the pair of us, would certainly knock out the engine, or hack out a wingroot, or rip open the fuel tank to send petrol pouring over hot engine and sparking magneto and send us spinning down in flames to our deaths.

In the event though, both the Italian pilot and I had reckoned with­out Zugsfuhrer Toth. He banked us a little to starboard as expected. I caught a glimpse of the Italian machine—a mottled greenish-buff colour I remember—under our tail and was just about to loose off a few shots at him when he disappeared back under it. In panic I turned to Toth—and felt my stomach and liver hit the top of my skull as Toth suddenly gave full throttle and dropped into a power dive. Then I was squeezed to the floor as the whole airframe squealed in protest about me: Toth had wrenched the control column back to take us up in a tight loop! I was not strapped in of course: the observer’s folding seat had shoulder-belts, but to fire the machine gun I had to stand up with nothing but gravity to hold me into the aeroplane. I still shudder to remember the sudden, stark terror of find­ing myself upside-down, three thousand metres above the meadows and woodlands of Friuli, clutching convulsively at the cockpit coaming as the engine coughed and faltered at the top of the loop. Then, just as I felt sure that I must let go and fall to my death—I was already hanging in mid-air like a gymnast performing a somersault between parallel bars—the nose dipped down as we dived out of the loop. As we did so I saw ahead of us the Italian, taken by surprise, trying to execute the same manoeuvre.

I see it now as vividly as in that split second one summer morning seventy years ago: the perfect plan view fifty metres ahead; the black V-marking on the centre section of the upper wing; the red-white-green Italian colours on the wingtips and tailplane; the observer swinging his machine gun up in a desperate attempt to get a burst at us as we passed. In the event though it was Toth who fired first. Given the extreme crude­ness of our gunsights and the primitive firing system I think that it must still be one of the finest pieces of aerial marksmanship on record. Our forward-firing Schwarzlose clattered, and the hot cartridge cases show­ered back over us. The burst of ten or so shots hit the Italian just as he was into the tightest part of his loop, and therefore when the airframe was under maximum stress. I think that our bullets must have smashed the main wingspar, but I cannot say for sure: all I know is that as we hurtled past, swerving to avoid him, the Italian aeroplane seemed to pause in its abrupt climb and hang motionless for a moment as though undecided whether or not to go any further. Then it began to fall backwards as its wings crumpled like those of a shot partridge, dropped back out of its loop, then nosed over and began to spiral down, transformed in a couple of seconds from a neat, fast, fighting biplane into a confused jumble of fabric and snapping wood. As we lost sight of him plunging down into a cloud he was already breaking up, leaving sections of wing and strut drifting behind him.

That left us to face the other Italian aeroplane, which was now upon us, apparently undeterred by the fate of its companion. Toth had put us into a shallow, banking dive and I was just swinging the gun around to port to bear on the Italian—who was some way above us still and about seventy metres astern—when I suddenly realised that things were dread­fully amiss. It was a curiously unpleasant sensation; the queasy realisa­tion that something had gone terribly, unaccountably wrong: the way in which all the normal noises of flight except for the engine—the hum of the wind in the wires, the rushing slipsteam—suddenly ceased as we be­gan to fall out of the sky. The patchwork fields and woods below started to whirl crazily before my eyes as the ghastly truth dawned upon me. We had gone into a spin.

I suppose that in those early days of flying there was no condition, except death by burning, that was quite so dreaded as a spin. But even a petrol fire was susceptible to rational explanation: the peculiar horror of the spin was that it happened for no apparent reason. One moment the aeroplane would be flying along without a care in the world, the next it would be spiralling down to destruction, falling like a cardboard box and suddenly, bafflingly immune to whatever desperate measures the pilot might be taking to try and get it flying once more. Left aileron; right aile­ron; elevators up; elevators down; full throttle until the engine screamed itself to pieces—none of them were the slightest use. The only thing to do was to watch in horror as the ground came rushing up. Very few people had ever survived a spin, and those who had emerged from the wreckage alive usually found that their nerve had gone and never flew again. It was as if the gods of the upper air had condemned all of us fliers to death for our impudence in defying gravity, but were graciously pleased to keep to themselves the precise moment when they would execute sentence. All that I could do was to cling desperately to the cockpit edge as we fell and shut my eyes tight, waiting for the final smash.

I think that we must have fallen a good thousand metres. Then, as suddenly as it had stopped flying, the Brandenburger groaned and creaked a little then began to fly once more, straight and even in a shallow dive be­low the clouds. As for our Italian attacker, there was no sign of him. Toth scanned the sky above us as I picked myself up, white-faced and trembling, from the floor of the cockpit. He seemed not to be unduly bothered by our terrifying experience, and certainly showed no particular gratitude for an escape so miraculous that even I was tempted to think—for a while at least—that there might be a god after all.

As for the two men in the Italian aeroplane we shot down that morn­ing, I can hardly think that they could have survived such a fall. I was sad afterwards for them and their families, once I had leisure to think about the morning’s events. But there: what would you? It was kill or be killed in those days before parachutes, and I suppose that the Fliegertod was at least preferable to choking with gas in some stinking dug-out or being casually blown to bits by a chance artillery shell. It is a noble and glorious thing, the Latin poet observes, to die for one’s country. But given the choice I think that I would still prefer to make the other fellow die for his.

We landed safely at Caprovizza about 0800; much to my relief, since our poor Zoska’s racked frame was creaking and sagging in a most alarm­ing fashion as a result of the brutal strains imposed upon it by Toth’s aero­batics. From the observer’s seat alone I could count a good half-dozen snapped bracing-wires. We had come out of it alive—even contrived somehow to escape from a spin. But having had a taste of Toth’s flying I could now quite understand how Leutnant Rosenbaum had met his end over Gorz. If I had been a fraction slower about letting go of the gun and seizing the cockpit coaming when we reached the top of the loop I would now be embedded half a metre deep in some Friulian cow pasture.

I saw as we came in to land that a motor-cyclist was standing by, waiting for the camera to be unloaded so that he could collect the box of photographs for the dark-room in Haidenschaft. We taxied to a halt and Toth switched off the engine as the ground crew came running across the field towards us. The sudden silence was stunning after nearly two hours of engine drone and roaring wind. As Toth lifted up his goggles I saw that his eyes too were bloodshot from the strain placed on our circulations by our violent manoeuvres over Palmanova. We were both pale and tired from a combination of excitement, altitude, exertion and inhaling petrol fumes in the freezing cold. As I climbed down to the field I noticed that my knees were unsteady and my heart still fluttering from the after-effects of the brief dog-fight and the spin that had followed it. Franz Meyerhofer was the first to reach me, clapping me on the shoulder.

“Well Prohaska old man, back in one piece I see. Did you get your holiday snaps?”

I smiled. “Yes, thank you very much,” I said, signing the motor­cyclist’s receipt for the photographs against the side of the fuselage. “Mission accomplished exactly as per orders. But that wasn’t all: Toth here shot down an Italian two-seater on the way home.” A cheer went up from the ground crew and, smiling self-deprecatingly, Toth was hoisted on to their shoulders to be carried across the field in triumph. They would have done the same to me, but the gulf between officers and rankers in the k.u.k. Armee was too great for them to feel confident about such horseplay, so I followed behind the triumphal progress.

“But what’s happened to Schraffl and Jahudka?” I asked. “Are they back yet? We saw them go into a cloud somewhere this side of Palmanova, but then the Italians came after us and we had other things to think about. I’d have expected them to have got home ahead of us.”

“Don’t worry about it: they’ve probably had an engine failure or got lost or something and landed at another field. It happens all the time. Bad pennies always turn up somehow. Anyway, you’d better go and get a bite to eat. Kraliczek’s working on his monthly returns, so he can’t see you just yet.”

“Can Toth come with us for a drink in the mess?”

Meyerhofer suddenly looked doubtful. “No, no, I think not: better not risk it. Herr Kommandant wouldn’t like it—against regulations, thin end of the wedge and all that. But Toth can entertain you in the NCOs’ mess if he wants; can’t see anything against that.” So I shook my faithful coachman’s hand in farewell and made my way to my tent.

I managed about an hour’s much-needed nap before Petrescu shook me awake, obediently reporting that Herr Kommandant Kraliczek wished to see me now. I rinsed my face hurriedly at the canvas washbasin—I was still grimy from exhaust smoke—ran a comb through my hair and set off to meet him in his office.

As I stepped up to salute and report the success of our mission I could see at first glance that Hauptmann Kraliczek was not pleased. He returned my salute in perfunctory fashion, then bade me sit down. He however remained standing; in fact stalked around the office throughout the interview with his hands behind his back, addressing his remarks to the corners of the room so that I had to keep swivelling my neck around to listen to him. His first question emerged only after some moments of evident inner struggle.

“Pray tell me, how many kilometres did you fly today, Herr Linien- schiffsleutnant?”

“Forgive me, Herr Kommandant, but I have no real idea. It’s about fifty kilometres from here to Palmanova as the crow flies, but we took a more circuitous route to get there, over Gorz, and we flew some way to west of our target so as to be able to come at it from the direction of Venice. Meanwhile, as for our return journey, I can’t say exactly where we flew since we were engaged with the enemy for part of the way.”

“So you mean to say, in other words, that you are an officer-observer, but you have no real idea of how far you flew in total? Some might consider that a grave dereliction of duty.”

“But Herr Kommandant,” I protested, “surely the precise distance we flew is of no great importance? The point is that we reached our tar­get, carried out our mission and returned unharmed to our base, having accounted for one enemy aeroplane on the way and successfully dodged another. Exactly how much ground we covered in the process is surely quite irrelevant.”

“Not in the least, Herr Linienschiffsleutnant, not in the least. The suc­cess of this unit depends, like the success of all military operations, upon minute precison and the scrupulous maintenance of records. In future I shall require your written combat reports and attendant forms to contain a clear statement, accurate to the nearest hundred metres, of the distance flown, so that this can be compared with the stated consumption of fuel for the flight. However . . .” he turned to address his remarks to a differ­ent corner of the room, “I have to say that there are other serious matters to discuss with you concerning your verbal report of this mission, at least as it was related to me a few minutes ago by Oberleutnant Meyerhofer. It appears that you shot down an Italian aeroplane?”

“I have the honour and satisfaction to report that we did—or rather, Zugsfuhrer Toth did.”

“I see. Of what kind?”

“Herr Kommandant, I really cannot say. It was a two-seater certainly, with a rotary engine, possibly of the Nieuport family. I cannot say for sure. Certainly it was not a type that I remember from my study of the recognition handbooks. If Corps Air Intelligence want a rough sketch I am sure . . .”

“So you really have no idea what aircraft it was?” he snapped.

“Not really. All that concerned me at the time was that it was manoeu­vring under our tail to try and shoot us down.”

“And have you any tangible evidence of having destroyed it? Stand­ing orders from Fliegertruppe headquarters are that positive identifica­tion of crashed enemy aircraft and their crews is to be secured wherever possible.”

It was some time before I could answer, the breath having been taken out of me by the stark idiocy of this question; by its total incomprehension of the conditions of fighting in the air.

“I regret, Herr Kommandant, but it somehow slipped my mind in the tension of the moment to follow them down and perhaps snatch off the pilot’s shoulder-straps as we passed. I’m afraid that having just narrowly escaped being shot down ourselves, with another enemy aeroplane closing upon us, twenty kilometres behind enemy lines, we thought it best to put our nose down and head for home without any further delay. Perhaps we could go back and get their names and addresses?”

“Spare me your facetiousness, Prohaska: I am not amused. Nor am I amused by the fact that your wanton engagement of enemy aircraft—clean outside the scope of your orders, I might add, since they made no mention of aerial combat—has led to extensive damage to yet another of this unit’s aircraft. In fact, following Oberleutnant Rieger’s writing-off of a machine the day before yesterday . . .”

“. . . Not to speak of Oberleutnant Rieger’s writing-off of himself.” “Be silent. As I was saying, following the loss of our machine just back from repair, and following Feldpilot Toth’s recent criminal mistreatment of yet another aeroplane, the effective establishment of Fliegerkompagnie 19F is now reduced from six aircraft to four: two Hansa-Brandenburg CIs and two Lloyd CIIs. And I wish to leave you in no doubt that I regard this as highly unsatisfactory. I gather from the Technical Officer that your own aeroplane, number 26.74, is likely to be under repairs for at least a fortnight, so please comprehend if you will . . .” he tapped a graph with a little ebony pointer like that used by orchestral conductors, “. . . please comprehend exactly what it is that you have done. The graph line for Effective Against Reserve Aircraft for the month of August should have gone—so. Now it will have to go here.”

“Herr Kommandant, with respect, we may have damaged an aero­plane, but we brought it home intact. And not only that but we carried out our mission successfully and destroyed an enemy aeroplane in the process. Surely that should more than make up for some minor damage to one of the unit’s aircraft? After all, this is a war we are engaged in, not a statisti­cal exercise . . .” I stopped: this last remark had clearly brought Kraliczek to that condition which, in any normal person, would manifest itself as bellowing purple-faced apoplectic rage and flinging the inkstand at the head of his interlocutor. That is to say, he grew even paler than usual and pursed his thin lips.

“What? How dare you question the value of statistics! Perfect knowl­edge of what is going on will win this war for us. If it were not so then why do you imagine that at my own expense—my own expense mark you!—I have designed and had printed a series of return forms to supplement those used by the War Ministry? That, Herr Linienschiffsleutnant, is how deeply I care for the efficiency of this unit: why I slave here in this office into the small hours of each morning without even an adjutant to help me, collating information for Army Headquarters. Anyway . . .” he looked at me triumphantly over his spectacles, as if producing an argument to stop all further debate, “anyway, as regards your mission this morning, your Italian aeroplane shot down is of no consequence whatever. Flik 19F is a long-range reconnaissance and bombing unit, so there are no statistical returns emanating from here as regards enemy aircraft destroyed, and will not be until such time as I have devised an appropriate record form. The aeroplane which you say you have shot down may be claimed by you as a personal victory—unconfirmed by the way—if you wish; that is entirely your own affair. But as far as my reports are concerned no mention will be made of it. Such anomalies do not lie within my purview, I am afraid.” “Herr Kommandant, you may call it an anomaly if you wish, and there may, as you say, not yet be any suitable piece of paper on which to record it. But I feel compelled to point out that the victory took place, and that it was not mine but entirely the work of Zugsfuhrer Toth. It was his flying and marksmanship that brought the Italian down.”

He turned to look at me again, smiling a curious little self-satisfied smirk. “Ah, Herr Linienschiffsleutnant, there I am afraid that I have to correct you: the victory, if it is credited to anyone, must be credited to you as commander of the aeroplane.”

“But all the shots were fired by Feldpilot Toth, from the forward ma­chine gun. I did not fire the rear weapon once.”

“Perhaps so; perhaps not. Altitude and the confusion of combat cause people to make mistakes. My reports after you landed were that you had fired the shots.”

“But this cannot be. I can show you if you wish.”

Kraliczek rolled up his eyes in a look of weary patience such as one reserves for dealing with tiresome and confused elderly relatives. He sighed.

“Very well, if you insist I shall accompany you to look. But I cannot take long: I am a very busy man with only two clerks to assist me and the end of the reporting month is drawing near.”

So we strode out—Kraliczek with an insufferable and quite unchar­acteristic air of jauntiness—to the Brandenburger being serviced by Feldwebel Prokesch and the rest of the ground crew. They put down their work and stood to attention as we approached.

“Feldwebel,” said Kraliczek, “show us the machine guns from this aircraft.” The two weapons had been dismounted and laid out on a trestle bench for cleaning by the armourers. “Open the breech of the forward gun.” Prokesch slid the breech block back as instructed. It revealed a firing-chamber as shiny-clean as if the gun had never been fired in its en­tire life. “Now the observer’s weapon.” The breech slid back to disclose a barrel clogged with the characteristic greyish-black grime of the cordite residue. “There.” He turned to me, smiling. “What did I tell you? Don’t worry: an understandable mistake. You had better get to bed early tonight. As for that Italian aeroplane of yours, you had better claim it in a separate report to Army Headquarters . . .”

“With respect, Herr Kommandant, I have no wish to claim it as a vic­tory since it was none of my doing.”

“Oh well, that’s all right then. If you don’t want to claim it then no one gets it and it didn’t happen: much the best thing if you ask me. Such mis­cellaneous entries make nonsense of orderly compilation. Only by ruth­less excision of such statistical irrelevances can we hope to see the greater picture and achieve that organisational perfection which will bring us vic­tory. Now, if you will excuse me, I have wasted enough time already this morning on these trifling matters. I must be getting back.”

“Herr Kommandant?”

“Yes?” He turned to look back at me.

“By your leave, I have what I think may be a useful suggestion to make.”

“And what might that be?”

“If we were to regard all the separate events of this world war as sta­tistical irrelevances, as you call them, then perhaps we would find that the war had never happened at all. In which case we could all stop killing one another and go home.”

He thought this over for some moments, then smiled at me. “Yes, yes, Herr Linienschiffsleutnant: very amusing, most droll. Now, perhaps if you will excuse me at last? Some of us have better things to do than to waste our time composing witty epigrams. Myself, as a professional soldier, I would have considered that war was too serious a business for jokes.”

I noticed that throughout this exchange Sergeant Prokesch and the ground crewmen had been busy about their work, backs turned to us, rather than standing about with ears cocked relishing every word and storing it up to be recounted in the mess that evening. I sensed that the men were embarrassed by the scene they had just witnessed. Although they had acted under orders in swapping the barrels of the two machine guns, they doubtless felt that they had been made accomplices to a shabby piece of knavery and were correspondingly ashamed of themselves. I served in the armed forces for over half my life, and one of the things that I learnt was that a sense of honour is by no means the exclusive property of the commissioned ranks.

As for myself, I wandered back towards the mess tent in a state of some depression. In my sixteen years as a career officer of the Noble House of Austria it had been my lot to serve under some notable block­heads. But in all that time I had never met one, however tyrannical, stupid or plain incompetent he might have been, who would knowingly have told a lie or practised sleight of hand either on a brother-officer or upon the lowliest ranker. For the first time it struck me what disaster had fallen upon Old Austria now that creatures as abject as Hauptmann Kraliczek were creeping into positions of command. As I passed the Kanzlei hut I saw Meyerhofer descending the steps. I was about to speak with him concerning my recent conversation with our commanding officer. But he spoke first.

“It’s Schraffl and Jahudka. We’ve just had a telephone call from Vertoiba. They’ve crash-landed in a field near by.”

“Are they all right? ”

“Jahudka’s dead. Schraffl’s unhurt it seems but in a bad state of ner­vous shock. They’re bringing him along by motor car. They should be here any minute.”

“What happened? ”

“So far as I can make out from talking to Schraffl they lost contact with you in the clouds east of Palmanova, then saw an aeroplane falling out of the sky a few minutes later. They thought that it must be you and Toth, so they gave full throttle to get back across the lines. I gather that they crossed near Gradisca at about four thousand metres to avoid the flak—and had a Nieuport single-seater drop on them out of the sun. The first burst knocked the engine out and put a bullet through Jahudka’s neck. They fell about a thousand metres with petrol pouring all over them from the fuel tank before Schraffl managed to drag Jahudka out of the pilot’s seat and pull them level again. The poor devil was already near-dead—severed artery by the sound of it—so all Schraffl could do was to glide them down into a field on our side of the lines. It was a miracle they weren’t set alight. With the propeller windmilling the mag­neto must have been sparking all the way down, a good ten minutes or so. The people at Vertoiba say that when they reached the wreck they found Schraffl still in the pilot’s seat, sitting up to his ankles in a pool of petrol and staring into space. A pretty impressive piece of flying though by the sound of it, bringing down a dead machine with a dying man on board and the cockpit awash with petrol. Rather him than me though, all the same. The poor sod’s had a rough enough war of it already by all ac­counts. He got blown up by a shell at Sanok, even before he stopped that bullet in the knee, and they say he’s never been quite the same since.” We turned. It was the sound of a motor-car horn. A large dun-coloured staff car was lurching up the trackway from the Haidenschaft road. It drew up, and the passenger door was opened for Schraffl, dazed and grey-faced, to be set down, half carried between two medical orderlies. He was still wearing the jacket of his leather flying overalls, but I saw that his breeches and puttees were saturated in blood like the garments of a butcher. They led him past us to undress him and lay him out on the folding bed in our shared tent. As they left, one of the orderlies spoke with Meyerhofer.

“The Medical Officer thinks he’ll be all right after a while, Herr Leutnant. He’s given him an injection to make him sleep, and says if there’s any further trouble to telephone the hospital in Haidenschaft. It’s acute nervous prostration, but the MO says he should get over it once he’s had a spell of leave.”

Schraffl did not get over it, and he never managed to go on leave. He got up that evening and ate a little, saying nothing to any of us, then went back to bed and slept heavily until mid-morning of the next day, when our servant Petrescu came running to me out on the field.

“Herr Leutnant, Herr Leutnant, you will come quick please! Herr Oberleutnant Schraffl not well.” I made my way to the tent while Petrescu ran to fetch Meyerhofer. I lifted the tent flap—and was greeted by an aw­ful farmyard stench. Schraffl was lying curled up on the camp-bed, arms crossed tightly over his head, crying to himself like a small child. He had fouled his breeches. Flies buzzed about us as Meyerhofer and I tried to get him to speak. He seemed not to see us, only stared and blubbed un­controllably in great uncouth sobs. In the end the two of us had to lift him bodily, still curled up with his knees against his chest, and load him on to the stretcher as the motor ambulance from Haidenschaft pulled up outside. The ambulance doors closed, and we never saw him again: only learnt later that he had been diagnosed as suffering from complete mental breakdown and confined to a ward for acute shell-shock cases in the Steinhof Mental Hospital outside Vienna. To my certain knowledge he was still there in 1930—and quite possibly ten years later, when the SS began its programme of “merciful release” for the incurable mental cases left over from the previous war; incidentally clearing the beds needed for the new intake.