The Two-Headed Eagle поп-3
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“Well Prohaska, I have to welcome you to Fliegerkompagnie 19F. I think that you will find it, though but recently established, to be one of the more efficient air units of the Imperial and Royal Army. And I can assure you that it is my intention to make it the most efficient. Tell me, Prohaska, at what time did you arrive at Fliegerfeld Caprovizza?”
“Fifteen minutes past twelve or thereabouts, Herr Kommandant. My movement order said twelve p.m., but there was no lorry from Divacca so I had to borrow a motor cycle, and my orders instructed me to report first to Flik 19 at Haidenschaft . . .”
He pursed his lips in a curiously spinsterish expression of disapproval.
“Herr Linienschiffsleutnant,” he said quietly, as if I had just committed some unspeakable solecism, “I believe that I just heard you refer on two occasions to hours of the military day as ‘fifteen minutes past twelve’ and ‘twelve p.m.’ Such a slipshod method of denoting time may be acceptable in the k.u.k. Kriegsmarine, I cannot say; but I must ask you never to use it here. You must accustom yourself without delay to the clockwork precision with which the k.u.k. Armee conducts its affairs. The correct military formulations are ‘twelve hours fifteen’ and ‘twelve hours’ respectively and will be used at all times while you remain with this unit. Is that clear?” I replied that this was clear. “Very good: until further notice, and pending the arrival of your posting papers from Vienna, your duties with this unit will be those of an officer-observer.”
“Herr Kommandant, by your leave . . .”
“Yes, what is it?”
“Herr Kommandant, I obediently report that I am a qualified pilot and have been for nearly four years past. Given a little training in flying modern land-based aeroplanes I am quite capable of fulfilling the duties of an officer-pilot, and before he died Oberleutnant Rieger said that I ought to get some flying hours in on my own . . .”
He had turned even paler than usual as I said this. “Herr Linien- schiffsleutnant, pray contain yourself and reserve your helpful suggestions for when I ask you for them. Your substantive post here, I understand, is to be that of an officer-observer; so as far as I am concerned, until I receive further orders that is what you will do even though you should be the last qualified pilot left alive in the entire Dual Monarchy. Quite apart from anything else, to permit otherwise would be to make absolute nonsense of the manning establishments laid down for this calendar quarter by the Imperial and Royal War Ministry. Anyway, that is all that I have to say to you.” He sat down at his desk and took out a folder of foolscap sheets densely covered in figures, along with a pencil and ruler and pocket reckoner—a thing rather like a pepperpot where one twiddled knobs in the top and read off the figures in a little window at the side. He looked up. “Yes, have you anything more to say?”
I rummaged in the breast pocket of my jacket.
“I obediently report that before I departed from Fliegerkompagnie 19 this morning the Adjutant there gave me a present for you from Hauptmann Heyrowsky: a bicycle, to be precise. You will find it leaning against the back wall of this hut. He also gave me this message for you.” I handed him the envelope which had been tucked under the bicycle saddle, then saluted with as much irony as I could risk without ending up on a charge of insubordination. He took the envelope. I saw that his hands were trembling slightly.
“Er, was there any verbal message accompanying it, by any chance?” “I have the honour to report, Herr Kommandant, that there was; the gist of it as conveyed to me by the Adjutant was that Hauptmann Heyrowsky is prepared to teach you to ride the bicycle if you so desire.” He smiled nervously and slit open the envelope, then pulled out the sheet of paper inside. He swallowed hard as he read it, then looked at me with a sickly grin.
“Yes, yes, Prohaska, Hauptmann Heyrowsky and I are old comrades—always pulling one another’s legs; you mustn’t take what he says too seriously. He is a fairly capable officer even if he is lamentably lacking in military precision. We have a great deal of respect for one another, I can assure you. Anyway . . .” (he tore the letter up into minute scraps and dropped them into the waste-paper basket), “if you will excuse me I must get on with my returns. We are already into the last week of the month.” I saluted once more and turned to leave. “Oh, by the way, Prohaska.” “Herr Kommandant? ”
“I am assigning you to fly with Feldpilot-Zugsfuhrer Toth for the time being. I shall expect you to manage the man with a firm hand. He is totally lacking in discipline and respect for military order: to a degree in fact where I am considering whether a posting to the trenches or even a court martial may not soon be necessary. Aerial discipline is already lamentably lax in the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe and I shall make it my principal concern while I am in command of this unit to tighten it up. As far as I am concerned the fewer unruly degenerates like that we have in the Flying Service the better it will be for Austria.” With that he adjusted his spectacles and set to work on his papers, apparently blind to my departure.
I learnt over the next few weeks that, before the war, Hauptmann Kraliczek had once been one of the brightest rising stars of the Imperial and Royal General Staff. His tour of duty as an infantry Fahnrich had been lacklustre to say the least of it, marked only by a regrettable incident during the 1906 summer manoeuvres in Dalmatia, when he had fallen off his horse in front of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and several thousand onlookers—then remounted with the wrong foot in the stirrup so that he ended up astride the beast facing its tail. But his career as a military administrator had been far more promising. After obtaining the highest marks ever recorded in the 1910 Staff College examinations at Wiener Neustadt he had been posted straight into the Military Rail Movements Directorate, the department of the War Ministry responsible for the Austro-Hungarian version of those vast, minutely detailed mobilisation plans by which the gigantic conscript armies of the European Powers would be moved to their appointed places in time of war. This was extremely exacting work in those days before the computer. In fact it used to be said, not entirely without truth, that the best brains from the Staff College went into the Eisenbahntruppe and ended up in padded cells before they were forty.
Kraliczek had shone at this arduous work. But when the fateful day finally came, at the end of July 1914, these elaborate plans were found wanting. The Monarchy had two microscopically detailed mobilisation timetables, worked out to the last second and the last soldier’s bootlace: one for a war against Russia with a holding force to take care of the Serbs; the other for a war against Serbia with only a holding force against the Russians. What the plans had failed to take account of however was the possibility of a war on two fronts. The result was a month or more of indescribable chaos as the two plans ran foul of one another: of trains of cattle trucks rattling past empty while exhausted soldiers trudged along beside the railway tracks laden down with their entire kit and supplies; of gunners being sent to Serbia while their guns went to Poland and their ammunition to the Tyrol; of troop-trains clanking day after day across the sweltering Hungarian plain at eight kilometres per hour—then burning out their axle boxes as they tried to storm the Carpathian passes at express-train speeds. A cousin in Cracow—where enthusiasm for a war against the hated Muscovites bordered on the hysterical—told me years later of the scene as a flower-bedecked trainload of Polish reservists had left the Hauptbahnhof for the front one morning early that August: how the soldiers had climbed into the bunting-draped carriages laden down with presents of tobacco and chocolate, then steamed out of the station before a wildly cheering crowd as the band played the “Gott Erhalte” and the Polish national anthem. The Cardinal Archbishop was there in full canonicals to sprinkle them with holy water from an enamel bucket and to assure them that they were off to take part in a God-sanctioned crusade against Tsarist tyranny and Orthodox heresy. The train disappeared around the bend, he said—then promptly reappeared, steaming backwards into the station, where the whole patriotic effect was somewhat undermined, to say the least, as the entire complement
disembarked on to the crowded platforms.
The outcome of all this had been a series of notable thrashings for the k.u.k. Armee at the hands of the Russians and the Serbs—followed by a discreet purge among the staff officers who were held to have been responsible for this appalling mess. Heads had to roll if the prestige of the Dynasty was not to suffer, and poor Kraliczek—whether justly or not, I cannot say—was among those upon whose necks the axe fell. In fact it was only by expressing a sudden interest in flying that he had been able to escape immediate posting to an infantry-reinforcement battalion on its way to the Carpathians, where the Russians looked about to batter their way through the passes into Hungary.
Thus the immediate danger of bayonet fighting with wild Siberians had been averted. But in the end poor Kraliczek had found himself faced with the prospect—perhaps even more frightful to someone with his retiring nature—of being required to soar thousands of metres above the earth in a fragile, unreliable contraption of wood and linen driven by some reckless castaway suffering quite probably from the long-term effects of serious head injuries. Urgent requests to transfer out of the Fliegertruppe had been turned down, so in the end the only way out for him was to seek command of an air unit and use his seniority to make sure that his immaculate footwear stayed firmly planted on terra firma. His method for accomplishing this would become clear to me over the next few weeks.
In brief, it consisted of avoiding flying duties—so far as I know he never once took to the air—by filling his entire waking life with administration. God alone knows there was enough paperwork in the old k.u.k. Armee: endless forms to be filled in, returns to be made, authorisations to be sought, derogations to be obtained in regard to an intricate mesh of often contradictory regulations that governed every aspect of service life, down to the precise daily ration scales for the cats employed to catch mice in military supply depots. Yet Kraliczek had somehow contrived to add to even this mountain of paper, inventing reports and statistical compilations of his own, even going so far as to design and print at his own expense official forms as yet undreamt of by the War Ministry. Thus ensconced, spider-like, at the centre of a dense administrative web which only he fully understood, he clearly hoped to be able to sit out the entire war in his office, sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, eating at his desk and taking his few hours’ nightly rest on a camp-bed in the orderly room, retiring long after the nightingales had gone to roost in the willow thickets by the river. How could he do otherwise, he would argue, when the Fliegertruppe could not even supply an adjutant to help him? What he failed to mention here was that each of the three adjutants who had arrived at Caprovizza since May had left after a week or so with nervous prostration. Questions would be asked one day. But the Imperial and Royal military bureaucracy moved slowly even in wartime, and with any luck it would all be over before he was smoked out of his burrow. Then he would be able to return to what he called “proper soldiering”; that is to say, sitting once more behind a desk in Vienna compiling mobilisation timetables and calculating his pension entitlement.
My first official engagement as a member of Fliegerkompagnie 19F took place the next morning in the cemetery at Haidenschaft. It was a ceremony that I was to attend on many occasions over the next few months—though somehow I always managed to avoid appearing in the leading role. Rieger’s coffin was lowered into the grave while we stood by with bared heads. The priest finished his prayers, the guard of honour fired off its three salvoes into the summer sky, and we then filed past to toss our handful of earth on to the lid of the coffin, the smell of incense still not quite managing to mask the faint odour of roasted meat. The k.u.k. Fliegertruppe had been here not quite three months, yet already a row of twenty or so wooden crosses stood beneath the black cypress trees against the cemetery wall: crucifixes in which the cross-beam was made from a cut-down aeroplane propeller painted white and inscribed with the name and rank of the deceased. The non-German names looked faintly odd in black Gothic lettering: Strastil and Fontanelli and Kovess and Jasinski. We used to call it the “Fliegerkreuz,” I remember. It was a frequently awarded decoration, and one which—unusually for the Imperial and Royal armed forces—was distributed to officers and other ranks without distinction.
3 FLYING COMPANY
For me, as someone whose mother tongue was not German, one of the most curious things about the old Austrian variant of that language was the way in which its extraordinary regard for titles, and its endless inventiveness in creating jaw-breaking composite nouns—monstrosities like “Herr Obersektionsfuhrerstellvertreter” or “Frau Dampfkesselreinigungunternehmersgattin”—was balanced by an equal facility for cutting down these same sonorous titles to hideous little truncated stumps like “Krip” and “Grob” and “Frop”: names which to my ear always sounded like someone being seasick. It was as if a man should wear himself out and spend his entire substance equipping an ordinary house with marble staircases and balustrades worthy of a palace, then spend his time entering and leaving the house and getting from floor to floor within it by a system of makeshift scaffolding and rope ladders hanging from the windows.
The Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Flying Service in the year 1916 was particularly rich in these uncouth acronyms. The basic unit, the Fliegerkompagnie, was cut down in common parlance to “Flik”; while the workshop that undertook care and maintenance for each group of Fliks, the Fliegeretappenpark, was reduced to “Flep”; and the units which supplied men to the squadrons, the Fliegerersatzkompagnien, were “Fleks.” The rear-area supply unit, the Fliegermaterialdepot, was the “Flemp”; while the flying-schools for officers and for other ranks came out as “Flosch” and “Feflisch” respectively. There were also entities called the “Febsch” and the “Flobsch”—though God help me now three-quarters of a century later if I can remember what on earth they signified.
In the summer of 1916 each of the thirty or so Fliks of His Imperial, Royal and Apostolic Majesty’s Flying Service consisted (on paper at least) of eight aircraft—six operational and two in reserve—and a total of about 180 men: a commanding officer, a Chefpilot, a technical officer, an adjutant, eight or nine pilots and a similar number of officer-observers and, beyond them, about 150 ground crew. The trouble here though was that since in the years before 1914 the k.u.k. Armee had always been too strapped for cash to call up more than about half of its annual contingent of recruits, and since the losses in the early battles of the war had been appalling, these manning levels were never anything like met in practice.
Nor were we any better off as regards aircraft that summer on the Isonzo Front. Always conservative in outlook as well as financially hard- up, the Imperial and Royal Army had paid very little attention to aeroplanes in the years before the war. Indeed, that the Dual Monarchy had an air force at all worthy of the name was almost entirely the work of one tireless officer, a Croat major-general of Sappers by the name of Emil Uzelac—“Unser Uz,” as we used to call him. Uzelac—whom I met on several occasions—looked the very archetype of all the numerous gallant Croatian dimwits who had formed such a high proportion of the Habsburg corps of regimental officers over the previous three centuries: a square-skulled, wooden-countenanced man in his early fifties with a sweeping moustache and an air of permanent indigestion. But in reality old Uzelac had a remarkably lively and flexible mind. In the mid-1900s he had taken up sailing—and then taught himself marine navigation to be able to take a merchant master’s ticket, which he did at the first attempt. The flying bug had bitten him about 1910, and although he was already well into his forties he set about learning to fly; then, once he had obtained his pilot’s licence, got to work remorselessly hounding the sceptical War Ministry to allocate money for building up a military air service. In this though he was only partially successful, for whenever he did manage to wring a few miserable kronen out of the Arar for the purchase of an aeroplane he almost always had to go to France or Germany to buy it.
It was not that the
Dual Monarchy lacked good aircraft designers; it was rather that it seemed incapable of using them to any purpose. Igo Etrich, Kurt Sablatnig, the immortal Dr Ferdinand Porsche—all very soon grew tired of trying to squeeze money out of the Austrian bureaucracy, whose attitude to aviation was probably that if God had meant Austrians to get both feet off the ground at once he would not have created the Habsburgs to rule over them. One by one they had left to work in Germany, where the official attitude to these things was much less blinkered. An Austro- Hungarian aircraft industry of sorts had begun to put out shoots by 1914, but it was always a feeble and sickly plant. Industrialisation had anyway come late to our venerable Empire, and when the war arrived it was far too late to make up the arrears. By the end of it, Austro-Hungarian aircraft designs were by no means bad: I understand that the Phonix two-seaters of 1918 could give even the much-feared Sopwith Camel a run for its money, and Austro-Daimler aero engines were outstandingly good. But the numbers of aircraft built were always miserably small, and production of engines was anyway very fitful as the wartime shortages spread and the electricity supply was cut off for much of each day. When the Armistice Commissioners arrived in 1919 I believe that they found entire hangars full of finished airframes waiting for engines that never arrived.
A good deal of the trouble, I think, was that the enormous Imperial and Royal bureaucracy, though undeniably conscientious and hard-working enough in its way, was simply unable to adjust mentally to the twentieth century: in fact seemed never to have been entirely comfortable with the nineteenth. Even as I arrived there at Haidenschaft in July 1916, almost two years into the most desperate, bloody war in the Monarchy’s long history, the official doctrine was still that it would all be over before long, and that there was thus no call to crank up war production unduly for a conflict that would soon have ended. No cutting of corners, no reduction of paperwork, no lowering of pre-war standards was still Vienna’s motto. Not the least of Uzelac’s difficulties in getting half-way decent aircraft in sufficient quantity was that right up until the end of the war the government department responsible for aircraft procurement was not the military itself but a civilian organisation called the k.u.k. Fliegerarsenal, at Fischamend just outside Vienna. Nobody and nothing in the world seemed capable of moving this body to speed up its majestic pre-war pace and authorise construction of modern aircraft—not even collective threats from bodies of front-fliers in 1917 to come along with bags of stick-grenades and conduct a general massacre of the officials. Long, long after all the other warring nations had realised that aircraft would be built in production runs of thousands at a time—and would often be obsolete almost as soon as they rolled out of the factory—Fischamend still clung obstinately to its pre-1914 belief that aeroplanes would be ordered individually like ships and that, like ships, they would last for a quarter century. Even in 1915 Austrian aircraft were still being given individual names.