The Two-Headed Eagle

5 CIVIL POPULACE

The result, then, of my first airborne mission over enemy lines was credit—thirty aerial photographs successfully taken and one enemy aeroplane shot down—against debit: one of our own aeroplanes moderately damaged and another destroyed, since Schraffl’s Brandenburger had been so badly knocked about by its crash-landing at Vertoiba that in the end it had been written off by the inspectors: “total- havariert,” to use that characteristic Austrian official formulation. This brought Flik 19F’s operational aircraft park at the end of July 1916 down to three aeroplanes—not to speak of putting Meyerhofer and myself hors de combat for the next three days or so filling in crash reports and dam­age return forms, now that Hauptmann Kraliczek’s dreaded “end of the reporting month” was upon us.

Not that there was much that I could have done anyway in the flying line. As Toth and I had watched our dismantled Zoska being loaded on to a flat-bed wagon at Haidenschaft railway station the Repair Officer had told us that she would be away at the Fliegeretappenpark in Marburg for a fortnight at least. A largely peasant country, the Danubian Monarchy had never been too flush with skilled craftsmen at the best of times, and the policy of recklessly drafting every man in sight in 1914 for the war that was to have been over by Christmas had not helped matters, now that a high proportion of Austria-Hungary’s potential airframe fitters and en­gine mechanics were either fully occupied building railways in Siberia or lying picked clean by the crows in the fields of Poland. The Monarchy’s aircraft-repair parks were desperately short of hands. Seventy- and even eighty-year-old retired cabinet-makers were being conscripted into the factories to build airframes. Two years into the war it seemed that only the bureaucracy of the rear areas was able to meet its manning levels. Despite the ever-swelling number of procurement agencies and their insatiable demand for people to staff them, there was as yet no visible shortage of manpower in the ministries and in the munitions factory administra­tions—one of which was already known as “the House of Lords” because of the number of sons of the aristocracy who had been safely tucked away there for the duration.

But even if the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe on the South-West Front had been up to complement in men and aircraft, our strength would still have been inadequate for the trials that loomed ahead of us that summer of 1916. For as July turned to August we stood on the brink of one of the most haunting, if most obscure, tragedies of the twentieth century: the battles of the Isonzo. I say “battles” because there were in fact no less than eleven of them between the summer of 1915 and October 1917, when the Italian lines finally collapsed at Caporetto. That last battle would take place fur­ther up the river though, along the stretch that ran through the mountains between Flitsch and Tolmein. The previous ten battles had been fought for two blood-soaked years on one of the tiniest battlefronts of the entire First World War—the mere thirty kilometres or so between Gorz and the sea—a front so minute that a man with powerful binoculars, standing on Monte Sabotino at one end of it, could clearly see men moving on the hills above Monfalcone at the other.

Looking back on those dreadful, now almost forgotten events, I suppose that there was never a clearer illustration—not even Verdun or Passchendaele—of the aphorism that for its first three months or so the generals ran the First World War, after which the war ran the gener­als. Certainly, when the Kingdom of Italy changed sides in May 1915 and declared war on its former Austrian ally, its politicians and people had ex­pected an easy and rapid victory against our sclerotic old empire, already engaged in desperate and not very successful campaigns against Russia and Serbia. A “jolly little stroll to Laibach”—even to Vienna itself—was confidently predicted in the Italian newspapers. But before they embarked upon this adventure the Italian politicians might have been advised to look elsewhere in Europe and see that, if nothing else, barbed wire and the machine gun had put an end once and for all to jolly little strolls, whether to Vienna, Berlin, Paris or anywhere else.

They might also have done well to consult their maps, because the fact is that in the summer of 1915 Italy was quite exceptionally ill-placed for a war against Austria. Everywhere along that four-hundred-kilometre frontier, from Switzerland to the Adriatic, topography favoured the de­fenders and hindered the attackers. As for the High Alps west of Lake Garda, forget it: in the entire three and a half years this awesome wilder­ness of peaks and glaciers never saw anything more serious than belts of barbed wire staked across the great silent snowfields, or ski patrols exchanging shots down the echoing ice-valleys. Nor was the terrain much more favourable among the mountains east of the Adige. The fighting of 1916—17 in the Dolomites was certainly bitter as the two armies grappled with one another for control of that chain of fantastically shaped moun­tain peaks east of the Marmolada. Sappers tunnelled through the rock for months on end to lay mines which permanently altered the shape of several mountain-tops. Men fought and died by the thousand in those savage battles above the clouds to capture ridges about which, before the war, even the most intrepid of rock climbers would have thought twice before scaling. Probably as many perished from avalanches and frostbite as from enemy action. But, for all its epic qualities, the war in the mountains of the South Tyrol was still a small-scale business; for even if the Italians had succeeded by some stupendous effort in dislodging our armies from the first ridge of the Alps, they would only have found themselves facing a second, even higher ridge, with nothing beyond it more vital to the Central Powers than the shuttered-up tourist hotels of Innsbruck.

That left the easternmost sector of the Austro-Italian Front: the stretch along the valley of the Isonzo from the Carnic Alps southwards to the Adriatic, along the western edge of what is now Yugoslavia. So it was that a lonely, picturesque, fast-flowing mountain river which hardly anyone had ever heard of became to all intents and purposes the en­tire Austro-Italian Front: a miserable little parody of the more grandi­ose destruction taking place on the Western Front, a winding ribbon of smashed villages and silent forests of pine and chestnut reduced to vistas of blackened stumps. Eighty kilometres it ran, winding down from the Alps at Malborgeth through Flitsch and Caporetto and Tolmein to reach the Adriatic at Monfalcone where, in the summer of 1916, the trench lines ran across the Cantieri Navale shipyard and the rusting, bullet-pocked hulk of a half-finished ocean liner still sat forlornly on the slipways, stranded in the middle of no man’s land.

By the time I arrived there in July 1916, the Isonzo Front had already claimed perhaps three hundred thousand lives in five successive battles. Yet the worst was still to come. True, the Julian Alps were not quite as high as the Dolomites. But the mountains through which the Isonzo wound its way north of Gorz were every bit as difficult and unprofitable for an attacking army. So that left only the somewhat lower-lying country to the south: the twenty or so kilometres between the Vippaco Valley and the sea, where the river curves westward then south around the edge of the Carso plateau. Even this was murderously difficult terrain for an attack (as events were to show), but it had something which—from the Italian point of view—no other sector of the front possessed: a worthwhile objective. For only twenty or so kilometres down the Adriatic shore from Monfalcone lay the city of Trieste: largest commercial port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, home to 120,000 ethnic Italians and, ever since the 1870s, largest single item on the shopping-list of Italia irredenta.

Thus, like your own Sir Douglas Haig on the Somme that fateful summer, the Italian Commander-in-Chief Cadorna was presented with a fait accompli, locked into a situation not of his choosing: he had to attack somewhere, and the lower Isonzo happened to be both the only place where he could attack and the only one where there was some worth­while strategic reason for doing so. His own stubborn and self-opinionated temperament did the rest. So for the next fourteen blood-soaked months, like a man compelled to keep picking at the same infected scab, Cadorna battered away obsessively at that tiny front, throwing men’s lives at it by the hundred thousand and then, when they were all dead, flinging a hundred thousand more. It was the same dismal, pitiful story as on the Western Front in those years: gains measured in metres and losses mea­sured in tens of thousands; endless reinforcement of failure; blind stupidity mistaken for determination; utter strategic bankruptcy. In the years since, I have often heard people in this country mock the Italian Army for run­ning away at Caporetto. To me though, who saw something of what they suffered in offensive after grinding, futile offensive, the wonder is that they stuck it as long as they did, division after division of peasant soldiers herded forward to their deaths, always without adequate artillery support, usually ill-fed and often without proper gas masks or wire cutters or even decent boots on their feet.

Individual obsession on the part of one military commander is de­structive enough; but on the Isonzo Cadorna’s manic insistence on attack was mirrored in a sort of military folie a deux by his Austrian counter­part, General-Oberst Svetozar Boroevic, Freiherr von Bojna, commander of the 5th Army’s sector on the lower Isonzo. Old Boroevic was by no means the classic Habsburg military dolt: he had the reputation of being an able staff officer and was one of the very few Austrian generals to have emerged with any credit from the Galician campaign in the autumn of 1914. But he too was a remarkably stubborn man. Known to his officers as “der Bosco,” his long-suffering troops characterised him less flatter­ingly as “der Kroatische Dickschadel”—“the Croatian Numbskull.” The trouble with Boroevic was that whereas Cadorna had a thing about attack, he himself suffered from an equal and opposite mania for defence. Not a centimetre of ground was to be given willingly, be it never so worthless or costly to hold. And if the Italians took ground from us, why, then we were to counter-attack immediately, regardless of cost, to recapture it. It was a recipe for disaster: a long-drawn-out, miserable, grinding disaster which in the end claimed the lives (I imagine) of nearly a million men.

I suppose that for connoisseurs of human destructiveness the Isonzo Front could never quite rival the baroque horror of Verdun or the Ypres Salient; Austria and Italy were not major industrial powers, so neither was ever able to run to the extravaganzas of high explosive that were being staged in France: millions of shells raining down for months on end until the very tops of the hills were blasted down to bare rock. Likewise the two armies involved were not quite as combative as their more northerly neighbours; that is to say, while a German or French infantry battalion in 1916 would still fight on after losing nine men out of ten, its Italian and Austro-Hungarian equivalents might give up after suffering a mere seventy-five per cent casualties. Even so, for two armies conventionally dismissed by military historians as “moderate,” they contrived to do one another frightful damage.

But then, for the k.u.k. Armee the Italian Front was special: the only one where, right up until November 1918, troops from all the nationalities of the Monarchy—even ethnic Italians—would fight with equal enthusi­asm against the despised “Wellischen.” Elsewhere, one could be confident that German-Austrian troops would fight pretty well on any front. As for the rest though, the Magyars would fight with some enthusiasm on the Serbian or Romanian Fronts, against their own national rivals, but showed little interest in shooting at the Russians. Likewise the Poles were only too glad to fight the hated Muscovites, but had little concern with the Balkans. Czech and Ruthene regiments were liable to be wobbly on most fronts. But in Italy all nationalities fought, if not outstandingly well, then at least with a measure of enthusiasm.

It sounds perhaps a little strange now, to speak of men being enthu­siastic about the prospect of getting themselves killed. But please try to understand that it was a different, less questioning world that we lived in then. Even in the year 1916 it was scarcely possible for those of us who had been through the cadet colleges of the old Monarchy to so much as hear the word “Italien” without suddenly seeing a vision of black and yellow; without hearing the blare of bugles and the “Sommacampagna March” and the steady tramp of boots on the dusty summer roads; Novara and Custozza; Mantua-Peschiera-Verona-Legnago; “Graf Radetzky, Edler de­gen, schwur’s sein’ Kaisers Feind zu fegen aus der falschen Lombardei . . .” It was still an enticing prospectus, and one in which (naturally) the carnage at Magenta and Solferino tended to be somewhat played down; as did the fact that since 1849 every Austrian campaign in Italy had ended ultimately in defeat and loss of territory, even when the Whitecoats had won on the battlefield.

In those last days of July the storm was clearly about to break. The in­cessant banging of artillery in the distance had turned to a constant steady, air-trembling rumble as the Italian guns poured shells down upon our trenches, from Monte Sabotino across the Isonzo valley in front of Gorz, then from Monte San Michele around the western rim of the Carso to the coastal marches at Monfalcone. The gun-flashes which lit the night sky to westward had now merged into a constant flickering like that of a failing electric light bulb. Yet for us at Fliegerfeld Caprovizza it was a time of pro­found idleness. Apart from a few requests from Army HQ in Marburg for photo reconnaissance on the other side of the lines, Flik 19F sat twiddling its thumbs, condemned to inactivity by lack of aircraft. On the last day of the month 5th Army Staff sent a request for a long-range bombing-raid on the railway junction at Udine, the Friulian provincial capital, in the hope—highly optimistic, we all felt—of interrupting the flow of troops and munitions to the Front. A Brandenburger had just come back from repairs at the Fliegeretappenpark in Marburg, so Leutnant Szuborits and Fahnrich Teltzel and their pilots were hastily detailed to set off on a night raid. It was a fiasco, their bombs falling harmlessly in open country. They had got lost, searchlights and flak had put them off their aim when they at last found their target, and in the end the townspeople of Udine had refused to succumb to mass panic and rush out and drown themselves like lemmings in the river. Only Szuborits made it back to file a report. Teltzel and his pilot failed to return and were posted missing, a state in which (I learnt many years later) they remained until 1928, when wood-cutters discovered the wreckage of an aeroplane and a jumble of bones deep in a pine forest amid the hills north of Cormons.

As for myself, sans aeroplane, I was left to kick my heels and try to pass the time as best as I could. This was no easy task I can assure you at k.u.k. Fliegerfeld Caprovizza in the summer of 1916. The flying field itself was just that: a field used the previous year for growing barley, and now used for flying military aircraft, with no modification other than getting an infantry battalion to march up and down it for an afternoon to flatten out the worst of the ruts and hummocks. Amenities there were none; not even a proper canteen for the men. Our sole luxury, compared with Flik 19 at Haidenschaft, was that we were on the banks of the Vippaco. True, the river was low in the summer drought, but in the baking August heat and dust of that valley it was pleasant to be able to bathe in what remained of it, even if the water barely reached knee level. I was particularly glad of this I must say, because I was still condemned to wear my navy-blue serge jacket, my field-grey summer tunic having gone astray in the post on its way up from Cattaro. But in wartime an officer cannot reasonably bathe more than twice a day, and my tent was insufferably hot, and I had soon run out of books to read; so when I was not on duty or filling in Kraliczek’s endless forms I had no choice but to go off exploring.

In truth, there was little enough to explore in the immediate neigh­bourhood of Haidenschaft. Before the war this part of the world—the Gefurstete Grafschaft Gorz und Gradiska, to give it its official title— had been an obscure and seldom-visited region: a strange little corner of Europe where the Teutonic, Latin and Slav worlds met and overlapped. The Vippaco Valley was moderately fertile, but the stony Carso region to southwards had long been one of the most poverty-stricken parts of the entire Monarchy, fit to stand comparison with Eastern Galicia or the backwoods of Transylvania as an area where most of the men called up for the Army each year were sent home as being too weak and ill-nourished to stand the rigours of military service: some of them with voices that had still not broken at nineteen years of age.

Once upon a time—perhaps back in the fourteenth century or there­abouts—the municipality of Haidenschaft (or Aidussina or Ajdovscina) had evidently been a place of some note, at least to judge from what re­mained of the town walls that had once surrounded it. In fact I have a vague recollection lurking at the back of my mind that “Count of Haidenschaft” figured somewhere about number fifty-seven among the sixty-odd titles read out at Imperial coronations. But perhaps I am wrong about that: perhaps by the time I arrived there the place had been in de­cline for so long that not even Habsburg court protocol took cognisance of it any longer. Certainly the town was situated picturesquely enough, nestling beneath the limestone crags of the Selva di Ternova which tow­ered above it to north and east. But otherwise there was little to remark upon. In fact I am not really sure that, whatever its former status, the ap­pellation “town” fairly describes Haidenschaft in the year 1916. It was one of those seedy, sleepy little settlements, scattered in their thousand across the Dual Monarchy, that were not quite large enough to be towns but still too large to be villages, places whose sole reason for existence seemed to be the Habsburg state’s mania for scribbling on sheets of Kanzlei- Doppel paper. Apart from the ochre-painted government offices—the town’s largest building as always—there were two streets and a half-dozen shops, a small town square, the usual miniature corso with its row of chestnut trees, a gendarmery post—and very little else. The houses were Italian-looking, with their crumbling stucco and wide eaves and slatted wooden shutters. But the red roof tiles were still weighted down Slovene- fashion with chunks of limestone to stop them becoming airborne in the bora, while the town’s two peasant-baroque churches, though they had Venetian-style campaniles, both wore on top of these the octagonal onion- domes which are the hallmark of Central Europe. The war had brought airfields and supply dumps and a makeshift hospital in wooden huts just outside the town. But off-duty entertainments were still basic, consisting of two cafes, packed solid now with field grey; a makeshift cinema un­der awnings rigged against the town wall; and two military brothels: the “Offizierspuff” and the “Mannschaftspuff.”

Ever since losing my virginity in such an establishment in the Brazil­ian port of Pernambuco in 1902 I had never again set foot in a maison- close except on service business. And even if I had not recently married a delightful woman whom I loved to distraction, I would still certainly have found the commissioned-ranks bordello intensely unappetising: a business (no doubt) of fake champagne and twenty-year-old newly commissioned Herr Leutnants trying to swagger like hard-bitten soldiers of fortune in front of the bored-looking girls. But as for the establishment provided by the War Ministry for the common soldiery, as I walked past it struck me as one of the least alluring suburbs of that peculiar twentieth-century ver­sion of hell known as the Front.

Over the years, in the course of my duties as a junior officer leading naval police pickets, I had seen many such places in the seaports of the Mediterranean. But what I remembered of them, I have to admit, was not so much their sleaziness as the rather jolly atmosphere of roistering debauchery that surrounded them: sailors and marines of all nationalities laughing and hitting one another in the street outside among the pimps and accordion players in that seafarer’s elysium still known (I remember) in the Edwardian Royal Navy as “Fiddler’s Green,” or in the French fleet as the “Rue d’Alger.” Here though I was struck by the utter sadness of it all: dead-eyed soldiery on a few hours’ leave from the trenches, queuing patiently two-by-two under the supervision of the Provost NCOs, wait­ing their turn to exchange five kronen for a two-minute embrace on an oilcloth-covered couch, then trousers on and out into the street again. There they waited in their dust-matted grey uniforms, like animals in the layerage pen at a slaughterhouse; standing as patiently as they would soon queue in the trenches, laden down with stick-grenades and equip­ment, waiting for the whistles to blow and the ladders to go up against the parapet. It seemed to me that not the least of the horrors of machine-age warfare was the way in which it had brought the assembly-line system even to the time-hallowed business of military fornication.

No doubt the townsfolk of Haidenschaft were doing well enough out of the war, standing up or lying down. But there would have been little disaffection in these parts anyway. Beneath a thin Austro-Italian veneer the people of this region were mostly Slovenes, and the Slovenes had every reason to support Habsburg Austria because the alternative was so much worse. The Italians claimed this whole area as their own terri- tory—in fact had been secretly promised it by Britain and France once the war was over—and it was widely feared that if they ever managed to lay hands upon it they would soon set about Italianising the inhabitants. The anxieties of the local people were well grounded as it turned out, for in 1920 Italy annexed this whole region and embarked upon a vigor­ous campaign against the Slovene language and customs, making liberal use of castor oil and rubber truncheons to persuade the natives of the superiority of Italian culture.

For its part Vienna had always tended to look down upon the Slovenes as a “Dienervolk,” a peasant people without a culture or literature or educated class of its own. Yet of all the Habsburg peoples in those years I suppose that none fought as bravely or as long in the service of Old Austria. Ethnographers used to say in those days that the Slovenes were the original stock from which all the Slav peoples sprang, preserved in their purity by centuries of isolation in their mountain valleys. I have no idea what truth there was in that theory: probably like most “racial sci­ence” it was complete twaddle. But certainly the Slovenes had a character­istic look about them: a squarish, fair-haired people with strong, regular, wide-mouthed faces and long straight-bridged noses and grey-blue eyes. Even in 1916 the country people still wore what would now be described as “folk costume”—wide-brimmed felt hats, embroidered waistcoats and wide breeches for the men; bodices and brightly striped flounced skirts for the women—for the simple reason that they had never worn anything else. Relations between these villagers and the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe were very cordial, despite the odd haystack demolished by a forced landing. Many a crashed Austrian airman in those years would return to his flying field lying in the straw of a peasant cart, accompanied by the entire village with the priest at its head and surrounded by baskets of hard-boiled eggs and curd cakes to sustain him during his stay in hospital.

Relations were also warm at a more personal level, as I was to discover one evening early in August. I had been out for a stroll from the flying field that afternoon, having nothing else to do. I had smashed my right shin in a flying accident in 1913 and although the surgeons had done an exemplary job on me, I still had to use a stick sometimes and found that the leg tended to stiffen unless I walked a good deal. I was returning along the single, dusty street of the hamlet of Caprovizza—or Koprivijca, as the local people called it—when I saw coming towards me my pilot Zugsfuhrer Zoltan Toth. And on his arm was a quite delightful village girl of about eighteen or nineteen, flax-blonde and dressed in the flower- embroidered bodice and flared, red-blue-green-striped skirt of the local­ity. Toth had just been awarded the Silver Bravery Medal for his exploits in the spring—much to Hauptmann Kraliczek’s disgust—and this now clanked gallantly against the Truppenkreuz on the breast of his best tunic (we still wore medals on our service dress in those days, ribbons folded into triangles as laid down by regulations). I must say that he looked very dapper, and he saluted me with only a trace of irony as we passed, the girl on his arm smiling winsomely and bidding me good-evening in German. Funny, I thought as I walked on: strange what the company of a pretty woman will do for even the ugliest of men; the fellow normally looks like a mentally retarded ape, but put a handsome country girl on his arm and her radiance seems to reflect from him. Probably just a village pick-up, I supposed: a local doxy prepared to roll with him behind a hayrick for a few kronen and a little diversion from the embraces of the village youths. But even so, Toth had certainly done pretty well for himself in the doxy line. Perhaps he possessed that most unaccountable of skills, a way with women.

As it turned out I could not have been more wrong about the girl and Toth’s attachment to her, or have felt more ashamed of myself for having even imagined such farmyard goings-on. For the next morning, while bicycling through Caprovizza to post a letter to my wife at Haidenschaft post office, I nearly ran into the same girl coming around a corner with a basket of eggs on her arm. She curtsied prettily and dimpled, and enquired after my health in accented but still perfectly creditable German. I replied in Slovene, which I knew quite well since it is very similar to my native Czech. This delighted her. I learnt that her name was Magdalena Loncarec and that she was the daughter of the village blacksmith, who also ran a bicycle shop and farm-machinery repair business. She had been to convent school in Gorz, she told me, and had been training to be a schoolmistress when the war and the approach of the Front had shut the college. She had met Toth in May when he had come into her father’s shop to have a loop spliced in the end of a snapped bracing-wire. The two had fallen for one another at first sight—God alone knows how, since my first instinct on seeing Toth, had I been a young woman, would have been to scream and run for my life—and now they were inseparable. Curious, I asked how they managed to communicate. After all, Toth’s German was almost non­existent, so far as I knew he spoke no Slovene, and I doubted very much whether she spoke Magyar.

“Oh,” she said, “in Latin. I studied it to the sixth grade and I speak Italian anyway, so it’s no problem for me. As for Zolli, Herr Leutnant, he’s such a clever man you’d never believe: ever so well-read and so kind and considerate as well. I don’t think there’s anyone in the whole world like him. He trained in a seminary before the war, you know, and wanted to be a priest. But he’s given that up now. When the war’s over we’re going to get married and take over my father’s business with my brother, when he comes back from Russia; and we’re making plans to set up an air mail- delivery service—Zolli says that there’ll be lots of aeroplanes being sold off cheap once it’s all over. He’s full of good ideas like that and he knows so many things. Really, Herr Leutnant, you don’t know how lucky you are to have such a clever man flying you around.” She grasped my arm and gazed at me with her great, long-lashed blue eyes, so that despite myself my knees suddenly felt unsteady. “Please, Herr Leutnant,please promise me that you’ll look after him and see that he comes to no harm. Don’t let him do anything dangerous.” I mumbled something to the effect that I would do my best to fulfil her wishes, and kissed her hand as we parted. I was not sure about this afterwards: Old Austria had very definite ideas concerning what courtesies could be paid by whom to whom, and an of­ficer kissing the hand of a Slovene village girl was something that was certainly well outside the accepted codes of conduct. Yet this Magdalena seemed so unlike any village maiden that I had ever met: so modest and unaffected, yet so poised and graceful and ladylike. But courting in Latin though: “O cara amatrix mea, convenire cum mihi hora septis ante tab- ernam . . .” No, no, it was all too much.

At last, on 2 August, Toth and I received orders to make ready for a fly­ing mission the next morning. In the temporary absence of our usual mount we were to take up one of the Flik’s Lloyd CII biplanes. Our task, it appeared, was to be artillery-spotting with the aid of wireless. But this was to be no ordinary observation for a common-or-garden field-artillery battery. Instead we would be spotting for a single gun in an extremely dif­ficult operation far away from our usual sector of the Front: an operation so delicate and vital that 5th Army Headquarters was anxious that the observer should be an experienced gunnery officer with a sound com­mand of Morse code. For that reason the choice had fallen on me: I had indeed been a gunnery officer—though aboard a battleship long before the war—while as a sailor my command of Morse, though not quite as good as that of a full-time telegraphist, was still quite good enough for what was required.

It was plain at first sight that the Lloyd CII was an aeroplane of a somewhat earlier vintage than the sturdy Hansa-Brandenburg: a pre-war design in fact, marked by long, narrow, swept-back wings and by a much sharper nose and more fish-like fuselage than that of the Brandenburger. I understand that it got its curious name because the factory which built it in Budapest had been part-owned by the Austro-Lloyd shipping line. Certainly it had taken many twists and random convolutions of events over the years to get the name of a seventeenth-century London-Welsh coffee-house proprietor attached to an Austro-Hungarian warplane. For me, one lasting consequence was that I was never able to see the sign “Lloyd’s Bank” in Ealing Broadway without having a sudden faint odour of petrol and cellulose dope wafted to me from all those years ago.

The Lloyd CII had been chosen for this particular mission because al­though it was somewhat slower than the Brandenburger in level flight, and a good deal less manoeuvrable, its payload was larger and its performance at high altitudes marginally better (one of them had in fact taken the world altitude record in the summer of 1914). This ability to carry loads to great heights was going to be very necessary, I learnt as a staff officer briefed me for the flight, because we were to be flying over the Julian Alps—over Monte Nero, to be precise: 2,245 metres above sea level, which was not far short of the effective ceiling for a two-seater aeroplane in those days, especially when it would also be carrying the full weight of an airborne wireless transmitter.

So far in 1916 there had been little fighting in the mountainous sec­tors of the Isonzo Front north of Tolmein. There had been some sharp encounters here in late 1915, as their initial ardour carried the Italians across the Isonzo to capture some of the mountain ridges beyond. But, as in the Alps proper, the lie of the land—that is to say, most of it stand­ing on end—had allowed us to hold it against them with only a handful of defenders. Most of the time in fact all that we had to do was to roll boulders over the edge of thousand-metre precipices on to the Italians below. The furthest that the Italians had got, after heavy losses, was to cross the river and work their way up a few mountain ridges on the other side; most notably the one called the Polovnik, which swells up from the bend of the river at Zersoccia to become Monte Nero. And there the two armies had left matters for the past year, outposts often within earshot of one another, but separated by dense belts of barbed wire on picket stakes cemented into the rock-faces. Both sides made life as unpleasant as pos­sible for the other by sniping and trench-mortaring and patrol skirmishes, but no large-scale action was considered by the generals to be either pos­sible or necessary.

In this stalemate, artillery work tended to turn into virtual duels of battery against battery: exchanges lasting for months in which ingenu­ity and ant-like persistence counted for as much as any practical effect. Whole weeks were sometimes spent in hoisting field guns piece by piece up sheer rock-faces so that they could lob a few shells into the next val­ley before being hastily lowered back again. In places tunnels were even bored through the rock of mountain ridges so that the gunners could fire at otherwise hidden targets. And several weeks before, one such exercise in levitation had enabled the Italians to lug three or four heavy howitzers— 24cm calibre at least—up a steep, narrow, wooded valley on the western face of Monte Nero, above the village of Caporetto, so that they could fire over the ridge of the mountain. The beauty of it was that thanks to the bulk of the mountain they were completely hidden from our outposts on the summit 1,500 metres above. Likewise there was not a single gun on the Austrian side that could reach them: all had either too little range or too flat a trajectory to lob shells over the mountain into the valleys on its western face.

For two weeks past, the Italian battery had been making life extremely difficult for the trains of mules and the human porters who carried sup­plies and ammunition up the trackways to our front line. The Italian out­posts, though lower down the ridge than ours, gave an excellent field of view over the country to the east of Monte Nero and were doubtless con­nected by telephone to the battery to give fire direction. At any rate, even after the convoys had taken to moving up to the line only by night, the shells would still come howling over, screaming down to excavate craters the size of a house and—more often than not—blow some panic-stricken team of animals and their drivers to oblivion. Before long the trees along­side the mountain trackways to the east of Monte Nero were festooned with blackening rags of mule-flesh and tatters of grey uniform cloth, often with an arm hanging out of a torn-off sleeve or a head wedged in a crook of the boughs. Carrying-parties were already getting extremely nervous of making the journey, even at night, and were turning back at the first sound of a shell coming over. If this went on (the staff officer told me) the k.u.k. Armee might no longer be able to hold the summit of the mountain. Something had to be done. Attempts at bombing from the air had proved futile, so stronger measures would now be taken.

Even as the Italians shelled the other side of the mountain, those stronger measures were being made ready by shifts working around the clock in the Skoda Armaments Works at Pilsen. In 1913 Skoda had already built a giant gun: the 30.5cm howitzer called (with the nauseating coyness that seems obligatory in these cases) “Schlanke Emma,” or “Slim Emma.” A battery of those monsters had been loaned to the German Army in August 1914 to deal with the forts at Liege, which were holding up the German advance through Belgium. They had proved gruesomely efficient in that task, and a larger 38cm version had been built in 1915. Now, in July 1916, a 42cm howitzer, the very non plus ultra of Austrian artillery, was nearing completion and looking for a suitable proving-ground. And what field trial could be more conclusive than here in the Julian Alps, dealing with the Italian howitzer battery so frustratingly beyond reach in its valley on the other side of the mountain?

The great steel monster was made ready and loaded on to a special strengthened railway wagon for transport to Feistritz, the nearest point on the railway to Monte Nero. Then, unloaded after dark in strictest secrecy, the tarpaulin-shrouded colossus had begun its slow journey up into the mountains, broken down into three loads—barrel, carriage and mounting—each drawn by its own motor tractor and riding on wheels surrounded by pivoting steel feet. The villages on the way had been evacu­ated for secrecy, and when the procession finally reached a point where the specially made trackway was too steep for the tractors alone, teams of horses and motor winches had been brought up to assist. The last kilome­tre of the journey had taken two entire days, with thousands of soldiers and Russian POWs sweating at drag-ropes and cursing as their boots slipped in the mud, to drag the thing to its final firing position in a shal­low valley just below the treeline on the east side of the mountain. There it had been assembled, and concreted into its emplacement: another two days of labour. A small railway was laid to bring up its shells, each of which weighed just over a tonne, and once that and a few other trifles had been installed—like a concrete bunker to protect the firing crew from the con- cussion—the brute was ready to teach the insolent Wellischers that the Austrian artillery was still a force to be reckoned with.

But it was still a blind monster as it squatted there among the pine forest, surrounded by camouflage netting. Our part in this exercise, Toth and I, would be to provide it with eyes. Visibility permitting, firing would commence at 0830 on the morning of 2 August, as soon as the sun had risen sufficiently for any mist to clear and the western face of the mountain to come out of the shadow. We were to circle above the Italian battery at about three thousand metres and use the wireless to provide spotting for the gunners. It would not be a leisurely task, I was told: the Italian how­itzers were not quite in the same league of destructiveness as our mighty gun, but there were four of them and they could fire faster: about one shot every three minutes as against five minutes for the Skoda weapon, which had to have its shells loaded into the breech by a small crane. Once our gun fired it would betray its position to the Italians up on the ridge; so when the duel commenced it would be a matter of which side could fire the faster and whose spotting was the more accurate. Once one side had got the other’s range and location it would all be over, the losers faced with an ignominious choice of abandoning their guns or of being blown to bits when a shell finally found them.

It became clear as we made our preparations at Caprovizza that af­ternoon that it was not going to be anywhere near as simple as it had sounded. The first problem was the sheer weight of the wireless appara­tus. The guts of the system was a marvellously archaic contraption called a spark-generator. This worked by creating an arc through the teeth of a brass cog-wheel spinning against an electrode. Every time a tooth passed the electrode a spark jumped across the gap, and in this way, when con­nected to the aerial, it would produce a hideous, rasping crackle—barbed wire made audible—like that which one gets nowadays from a wireless set when there is a badly adjusted switch near by. The principle of signalling was that the operator worked a Morse key to turn this excruciating noise into a signal: a long crackle for a dash and a short one for a dot.

That part of the wireless alone weighed about thirty kilograms. But there were all the other accoutrements that went with it. Power was pro­vided by a dynamo fixed on to a bracket under the aeroplane’s nose and driven by a leather belt from a pulley-wheel on the propeller shaft: that weighed about seven kilograms. Then there was the aerial: twenty metres of wire with a lead weight at one end to trail behind us in flight, plus a cable reel to wind it in when not in use: about ten kilograms’ worth in all. Other accessories comprised a signal amplifier, a tuning coil, an emer­gency battery, an ammeter, a set of signal rockets plus pistol and a repair kit. Altogether the wireless apparatus—which could only transmit, mind you, not receive—weighed about 110 kilograms. Or to put it another way, the weight of a very fat man as a third crew member.

With all that in mind you will perhaps understand my trepidation as I examined a relief-map of the Julian Alps. Laden down like that I was very doubtful that the Lloyd would be able to reach its advertised ceiling of 4,500 metres. In fact three thousand seemed to be expecting a great deal, and that was uncomfortably close to the height of some of the loftier peaks. In that aerial war over the Alps many a machine came to grief by running out of altitude, its engine labouring desperately in the thin, cold air as its pilot struggled in vain to lift it over a mountain ridge.

Another worrying consequence of the weight of our wireless set was that we would be flying unarmed: there was simply not enough lift to carry a machine gun, nor enough space left in the cockpit to work it if we had. Toth and I would have only our pistols to defend ourselves. However, some cover would be provided against the possibility of the Italians send­ing a Nieuport up after us. One of the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe’s impressive total of three fighter aircraft—a German-supplied Fokker Eindecker— would be detached from Flik 4 at Wippach and sent to the field at Veldes, from where it would fly to escort us over Monte Nero. I must say that I was none too happy about this arrangement: the previous week I had been talking with our senior ranker-pilot, Stabsfeldwebel Zwierzkowski. He had recently been able to test-fly a newly delivered Eindecker against an Italian Nieuport which had run out of petrol over our lines some weeks before and landed at Prosecco. No comparison, he had reported: the German aeroplane’s only good point was its machine gun firing through the pro­peller arc. Otherwise he had found it to be slow and unresponsive, with a poor rate of climb, restricted downward vision because of the wings and a disturbingly flimsy feel about it. But the Nieuport though, that was a real lady, “eine echte Dame”: climbed like an electric lift and as agile as a cat. The only thing he had not much liked was the machine gun mounted above the top wing—difficult to reload in flight and the magazine held only fifty or so rounds. But in view of the Nieuport’s other virtues, he said, he doubted whether as many as fifty rounds would be required for it to do its work.