by Джон Биггинс
The Fliegerarsenal also hung on far longer than most to the idea— already fast waning in 1916—that an aeroplane was an aeroplane was an aeroplane, capable of being used equally well for any purpose that required a flying machine, whether reconnaissance, photography, artillery-spotting, bombing, shooting up ground troops or bringing down enemy aircraft. It was a belief that had already been comprehensively shot out of the skies over France, where in late 1915 it had only been their limited numbers that had prevented the notorious Fokker Eindeckers—the world’s first effective fighter aircraft—from wiping out the entire British and French air forces with their forward-firing machine guns. Aeroplanes were already beginning to split up into specialised types, and even here on the Austro- Hungarian South-West Front the first moves were beginning to be made towards setting up air units with special tasks.
This was why I had joined not Flik 19 but Flik 19F: the “F” stood for “Fernaufklarung,” or “long-range reconnaissance.” Previously all frontline Fliegerkompagnien had been attached to an infantry division, for which they provided artillery-spotting and air photography and a little (usually not very effective) bombing and close support for the troops. But in February a daring experiment had been tried. Early one morning a flight of three Lloyd two-seaters had lumbered into the air from Gardolo flying field, in the Alps north of Lake Garda, and had flown a four-hour round trip to bomb the city of Milan. The results had been so gratifyingly out of proportion to the meagre investment—mass panic in a city that until now had thought itself far away from the war—that the Austrian High Command had decided to make further experiments in this direction. After all, the war had never been very popular in Italy—their parliament had been manoeuvred into it in May 1915 by something little short of trickery—and it was quite possible that a few more daylight raids on Italian cities might shake public morale to breaking-point.
The only problem here was our Emperor. The Old Gentleman was by no means the kindly grandfather of popular legend: he was as hard-boiled as most monarchs of the old school and was said to have been quite unmoved by the carnage at Solferino, whilst his adversary Napoleon III was violently sick when he saw and smelt that ghastly field the following day. But though seriously understocked in the imagination department, Franz Joseph was unquestionably a man of principle, and by his limited lights dropping bombs—even accidentally—on to unarmed civilians was something that he would never countenance, least of all in a city like Milan, which had been an Austrian provincial capital within living memory and where (it was rumoured) he still had an account at a military outfitters. In fact the very word “bomb” was said to produce a noticeable agitation in this otherwise phlegmatic and rather dull old man: perhaps because he had spent so much of his long life having them tossed at him by would- be assassins. Arguments that bombing-raids would be directed solely at military targets—barracks, arms factories, railway yards and the like—had completely failed to budge him; maybe because, although not especially intelligent, he possessed a good deal more common sense than most of his advisers and knew instinctively what we airmen had yet to find out: that dropping bombs from two thousand metres under fire with primitive bombsights is one of the most inexact sciences of which it is possible to conceive. Unimaginative though he was, the old boy perhaps knew in his aged bones what we young men did not: that when we staggered into the air in those feeble wood-and-linen biplanes of ours with their ludicrous bombloads we were in fact taking off on a flight which would lead via Rotterdam and Dresden to end amid the vitrified rubble of Hiroshima.
Anyway, the outcome was that when a specialist long-range bombing squadron was created—after long delays for the appropriate paperwork to be completed, naturally—it was split off from an existing unit, Flik 19, and disguised as a long-range reconnaissance unit. It was a rather neat piece of duplicity. But in the end it created as many problems as it solved, both administrative and personal. The parent unit, Flik 19, formed in the spring of 1916, had already built up a reputation as one of the best and most enterprising Austro-Hungarian flying units; largely because of its remarkable commanding officer Hauptmann Adolf Heyrowsky, the man who had not been able to meet me when I arrived at Haidenschaft and who it seemed was conducting a running campaign of insults against my own commanding officer Hauptmann Kraliczek.
Heyrowsky was the very model of the Old Austrian career officer, one of the few survivors of a species which had been largely destroyed in the autumn of 1914 at Limanowa and Krasnik. A superb fencer, skier and marksman, Heyrowsky—though not especially bright—was a man of exemplary courage, unshakeable loyalty to the House of Habsburg and spotless personal integrity. Although completely without experience in the air, he had insisted on flying as an observer from his first day with Flik 19, and within a month had bagged two Italian aircraft with a Mannlicher hunting rifle. And as if this were not enough, during the Fifth Isonzo battle in May, when the weather had been too bad for flying, he had volunteered to fight evenings and weekends (so to speak) as an infantry officer in the trenches.
Such a man as this was no more likely than his imperial master to take kindly to the idea of running an air unit designed to drop bombs on cities far behind the lines. Quite apart from the risks to civilians, he held it to be the duty of fighting airmen to fight in the closest possible support of the men in the trenches. But there was also the administrative insult offered to him by the existence of Flik 19F. Flik 19, you see, remained under the command of its nearest corps headquarters—the Archduke Joseph’s 7th Corps at Oppachiasella if I remember rightly—while we, being a strategic flying unit, came directly under 5th Army Headquarters far away in Marburg. Now, there is nothing that a professional officer loathes more than to have responsibility for a unit but no operational control over it—rather like being responsible for one’s wife’s debts when she has been living with another man for years past. So quite apart from the personalities involved, Hauptmann Heyrowsky could scarcely have been expected to look with any favour on this bastard offspring of his.
But the fact is that quite apart from his professional dislike of Flik 19F, Heyrowsky nursed an almost homicidal enmity towards the wretched Kraliczek, whom he despised as a desk-soldier of the most abject kind. It was not poor Kraliczek’s fault, I suppose, that his name was a Germanised version of the Czech word for “little rabbit” (a fact of which Heyrowsky was well aware, since he spoke that language fluently along with six or seven others). But it was a pity that the man’s timid, grey, burrowing, nocturnal nature should have corresponded so exactly with his name. The very sight of such a creature might well be expected to arouse in a warrior like Heyrowsky feelings—well, feelings like those of a weasel confronted with a rabbit. I was told in fact (confidentially, since it had had to be kept quiet at the time for fear of a court martial) that, a few weeks before, there had been a disgraceful scene when Kraliczek had arrived at Fliegerfeld Haidenschaft to visit Heyrowsky on some business or other and had emerged from the Kanzlei hut after a few minutes pursued by Heyrowsky, with his sporting rifle, firing shots around Kraliczek’s boots as the latter scurried towards his staff car and shouting, “Run for your life, bunny rabbit!” Since then scarcely a day had gone by without some elaborate insult—like the offer of bicycle-riding lessons—being conveyed from Haidenschaft to Caprovizza: all with perfect impunity, since Heyrowsky knew that any complaint by Kraliczek would involve the latter in a court of honour and the choice either of fighting a duel or of being cashiered in disgrace.
Quite apart from its shortcomings as regards supply of aircraft and organisation, the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe when I was seconded to it in July
1916 still suffered from yet another crippling disadvantage imposed on it by the intense conservatism of its superiors. This was the doctrine, still held to by the War Ministry even if it was beginning to break down in the field, that it was the job of an officer to command an aeroplane and the job of an enlisted man—a sergeant at best—to fly the thing. The trouble was, I think,
that even if k.u.k. military officialdom had by now grudgingly accepted that it needed an air force of some sort, it was damned if it was going to let the exigencies of flying get in the way of the famous Old Austrian discipline which, over the previous two centuries, had caused the Habsburg Army to be kicked about the deck by a succession of enemies ranging in size from France to Montenegro. In particular it would countenance no dilution whatever of that sacred entity the Habsburg officer corps, twin pillar of the Dynasty along with the Catholic Church.
By 1916 this was frankly a crazy notion: ever since the 1870s the old Imperial aristocracy had been withdrawing from military life and its place had been taken by ordinary people like myself, grandson of a Bohemian peasant. Even before 1914 the k.u.k. officer corps had been a thoroughly bourgeois body, and the terrible losses of that year had made it even more so by bringing in huge numbers of hastily commissioned cadets and one- year volunteers: youths who would have been pharmacists and schoolteachers but for the war, and who would certainly go back to dispensing pills and teaching French grammar once it was over. Yet still the War Ministry behaved as if we were all Schwarzenbergs and Khevenhullers, and as if tying on the sacred black-and-yellow silk sword-belt (which large numbers of newly commissioned officers were now not even bothering to buy) was the next best thing to being anointed with consecrated oil by the Pope. Meanwhile men from the ranks—without the all-important Matura certificate which allowed them to apply for a commission—were debarred absolutely from becoming officers, no matter how able and energetic they might be. So far as I know, no ranker-pilot in the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe was ever made an officer, though I believe that as a special mark of esteem the Hungarian ace Josef Kiss was promoted to officer-aspirant in 1918, once he was dead and safely out of the way.
The results of this imbecility were plain enough to see as the war went on. Our fliers invariably fought bravely, but the level of initiative and enterprise, it has to be said, was generally not high: not when compared with the German Flying Corps—which had once been as caste-conscious as our own but had changed its ideas under the pressure of events—and certainly not with the British on the Piave Front in 1918, when our Air Force had rings run around it by a handful of RFC squadrons whose pilots were almost all second lieutenants and whose daring was quite legendary. Certainly the mind-numbing routine of the old pre-war k.u.k. Armee—lots of drill and parades, because they cost less to put on than proper exercises, impressed the populace and required very little mental effort—was no very good preparation for a type of fighting that required the utmost qualities of self-reliance and initiative.
So it was that in the afternoon of my second day with Flik 19F, after returning from Oberleutnant Rieger’s funeral, I made the acquaintance of the man who was to be my own personal coachman in whatever desperate adventures lay ahead. The Operations Warrant Officer had informed me that I was to make my first operational flight the next morning, to photograph ammunition dumps near the town of Palmanova at the urgent behest of 5th Army Headquarters. So I naturally felt it to be important to prepare for this quite lengthy flight over enemy territory by at least being introduced to the man who was to fly me there and (all being well) back again.
I came upon Feldpilot-Zugsfuhrer Zoltan Toth engaged in playing cards in the shade of a hangar with the ground crew of our machine, a Hansa-Brandenburg two-seater like the one that had incinerated poor Rieger the previous day. It was just after dinner and the men were enjoying their regulation hour’s rest. They got up reluctantly and saluted as I approached. I had already met Feldwebel Prokesch, the craftsman sergeant in charge of the aeroplanes’ six-man ground crew—but this creature . . . there must be some mistake. The man who stepped forward scowling to salute me and shake my extended hand . . . no, surely not. Few people, I think, would feel completely easy at first about entrusting their life, four thousand metres above the enemy lines and without a parachute, to the care of a complete stranger. But to a complete stranger who looked like an artist’s reconstruction based on a jawbone and cranial fragments recovered from a Danubian gravel-bed? Prognathous, bow-legged and barrel-chested, this frightful apparition—altogether one of the ugliest, most ungainly looking men I have ever seen—glowered at me from beneath his beetling brows; or to be more precise, a single protruding brow like the eaves of a cottage. Offhand, I was not quite able to remember the minimum height requirement for the Imperial and Royal Army, but I was still pretty sure that even in wartime this man fell short of it by a good head; that even if he had stood up straight, so that his trailing knuckles had not come quite so close to the ground, his head would barely have reached my shoulder. To describe his appearance as “simian” would be grossly defamatory to the monkey tribe. I half expected him to swing himself up into the rafters of the open hangar and start jabbering and pelting us with nutshells. This was bad enough, to be sure; but Zugsfuhrer Toth had not yet opened his mouth to make his report. When he did the effect almost managed to make me forget his appearance.
What on earth could these frightful sounds mean? Was it German or Magyar, or some other quite unknown tongue? Was it human speech at all? No, I decided at last: the words were approximations to German; it was just that they seemed to have been chosen at random by sticking a pin into the pages of a dictionary.
In theory, the language of command throughout the old Imperial and Royal Army was German. Even if less than a fifth of its men in fact spoke German as their native language, and even if most regiments conducted their internal business in the language of the majority of their men, every soldier of the Austro-Hungarian Army, no matter how illiterate or plain stupid, was supposed to learn at least a basic German military vocabulary: the famous Eighty Commands of the Habsburg Army. But in the purely Hungarian part of the Army—the Honved regiments from which Toth had transferred to the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe—the merest lip service was paid to German, and sometimes not that much. Even in the last years of the war there were cases of Hungarian full colonels who could barely understand German, let alone speak it. The Flying Service had been hurriedly put together from volunteers gathered from all nationalities of the Empire, so it was only to be expected that the standard of written and spoken German should often be very shaky. But even so, Toth’s German there that morning was in a class of its own for sheer incomprehensibility. In the end we had to exchange our formal courtesies through a young mechanic who came from the Burgenland, east of Vienna, and knew both German and Magyar. It was also plain at this very first meeting that Feldpilot-Zugsfuhrer Toth did not greatly care for officers as a class, whatever their nationality.
That evening in the mess I had my first real opportunity to talk with my brother-officers in Flik 19F; all, that is, except for Hauptmann Kraliczek, who had not been present at supper since he had to work (he said) on his statistical abstracts. I learnt that he usually took his meals alone in his office, so now that Rieger was dead the mess presidency devolved by right of age upon the Technical Officer—the TO—Oberleutnant Meyerhofer. Franz Meyerhofer was a good deal older than the rest—a year older even than myself in fact—and was a pre-war reserve officer who had been called to the colours only in 1915. A Jew from the Sudetenland, his normal job was as manager of a machine-tool company in the town of Eger. He had volunteered for the Fliegertruppe out of a wish to fly, but had been securely grounded ever since for the simple reason that, in the k.u.k. Armee, officers with such a thorough knowledge of engineering were extremely scarce; far too rare at any rate to be risked in flying operations. A solid, calm, reassuring sort of man, I took an immediate liking to him for reasons that I cannot quite define.
The other old greybeard in the mess was Oberleutnant Schraffl, my tent-mate. He had been a professional officer before the war, in one of the crack Kaiserjager regiments, and his route into the Fliegertruppe had been that followed by a great many other flying officers in those years: that is to say, he had been too severely wounded to be able to serve any longer in the infantry, but was still able to
hobble out to an aeroplane and climb into it. In his case he had been shot through the knee at Przemysl in 1914, and then bayoneted for good measure by a passing Russian as he lay in a shell hole. An aluminium kneecap allowed his leg to bend (more or less), but he had to walk everywhere with a stick and needed a mechanic to help him into his seat. I must say that I got to know him very little. He was a rather reserved man; and in any case, there would not be the time.