The Two-Headed Eagle поп-3

by Джон Биггинс

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

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

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

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

  “To speak with Feldpilot Toth, Herr Kommandant.”

  “With Toth? About what, might I ask?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I discussed this conversation with Meyerhofer after supper.

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

  “Who was that then? ”

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

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

  “How did Toth get off?” I enquired.

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

  “What happened then?”

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

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

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

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

  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 ab
oard 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.