The Two-Headed Eagle поп-3

by Джон Биггинс

  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.