The Two-Headed Eagle поп-3

by Джон Биггинс

  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.

  6 DUEL OVER THE MOUNTAIN

  I think that i have seldom been struck so forcibly as on that August morning by the sheer fortuity of human existence; by the contrast between the serene majesty of the natural creation and the puny bellicosity of men. As we flew northwards along the valley of the Isonzo the pin-point flashes of the early-morning fire-fight crackled over the mountain slopes below. Then the sun came up at last over the looming mass of the Julian Alps ahead of us, turning the patchy summer snow on the triple summit of Triglav to a blaze of pink and orange. It seemed so absurd, so blasphemous almost, to be fighting for possession of these indifferent mountains, as if two rival strains of microbe should be disputing ownership of a granite boulder. Perhaps the intrinsic crazi­ness of war was less obvious on the plains of Galicia, where a marching soldier was usually higher than anything within sight.

  But there: if the absurdity of it all was so plain to me, seated safely up here in the whistling cockpit of an aeroplane two thousand or so metres above suffering humanity, I doubted wh
ether my philosophical reflections would bring much solace to the poor devils down there in the trenches and battery positions. I tried to make out the main features on the map as we flew northwards over Tolmein. Hauptmann Kraliczek’s form giving us our detailed orders for the mission had specified, for reasons known only to himself, that we were to cross the trench lines at Monte Sabotino, just across the river from Gorz, then turn northwards to fly over Italian- held territory until we crossed the lines once more near Tolmein. But I was damned if I was going to have any of that. One of the first and most important things a career military officer learns is just how far he can go in ignoring orders, and I was little inclined to take Kraliczek’s flying instructions too seriously. We had flown down the Vippaco to Gorz, round the edge of the Selva di Ternova and the Bainsizza Plateau, then turned sharp starboard to follow the Isonzo up to Tolmein, staying safely on our own side of the deep valley for most of the way. Not the least of the haz­ards of flying an aeroplane in that war in the Alps was that ground fire was liable to come at you not only from below but from either side as well, and on occasion (though mercifully it never happened to me) from above.

  In any case, “lines” was altogether too grand a description for the string of outposts and belts of barbed wire which straggled up and down the mountain ridges around Tolmein. I could just make out where they climbed up from the valley at Vollaria to the peak of Mrzli Vrh, then up to just beneath the summit of Monte Nero ahead of us. I had intended that we should turn north-west over Tolmein to take us towards Monte Nero, but as I saw tracer fire coming up at us from Mrzli changed my mind and decided to veer away to the east. But how was I to communicate this change of flight plan to Toth? There was no point in shouting in his ear in the roaring wind, and he barely understood German in any case. Then suddenly a thought struck me. Why not? I reached for my notepad and pencil, and scrawled “Verte ad orientem XX grada—altitudiem sustine.” I tapped Toth on the shoulder and showed him the message. He looked mildly surprised—then nodded and turned the steering wheel to bank us away; just in time, as it happened, since a flak shellburst to port of us with a bright orange flash and a cloud of black smoke. I was pleased to have avoided that little unpleasantness, but I was even more delighted that Toth and I seemed to have established communication at last, even if by such unconventional means.

  We arrived over Schlanke Emma at 0825 as arranged. The weather was good and the mist was lifting rapidly in the valley on the other side of the mountain. It looked as if shooting would commence as planned. I reached down to flick the switch for powering up the transmitter, saw that the blue spark was flickering across the gap as the toothed wheel began to spin, then leant over the side to fire a white rocket: the signal to the battery wireless operators that I had started transmitting. I gazed at the jumble of forest and bare rock below. Even though I knew from the map where it was hidden, there was no visible sign of the Skoda howitzer lurking among the pine trees: the camouflage experts had done their job too well for that. I tapped out the pre-arranged letters “K-U-K” on the Morse key, and saw a white flare arch up from among the trees to signal that they were receiving us. There was a pause as we circled above. Surely something had gone wrong—no, there was the green rocket, the signal for us to begin our work. The enormous gun was loaded and ready to fire. Our task now was to find its target.

  That, I had realised from the outset, would not be easy. The Italians were no fools and had done a thorough job themselves of camouflaging their howitzer battery in its mountain valley, even hanging up screens of wire mesh to break up the noise of firing and prevent us from using sound- location to get a cross-bearing on them. I also knew perfectly well that as soon as an aeroplane appeared above them they would cease firing until it had gone. So in the event it was an extraordinary piece of luck that one of the howitzers should just have fired its first ranging shell of the day as we came over the ridge of the mountain. I missed the flash, but my bin­oculars caught the remains of the brown puff of cordite smoke that it left behind. Hastily I fumbled with the pencil in my thick flying gloves to mark the position on the map, then tapped out its co-ordinates on the Morse key as Toth banked us around to the south. That should give our gunners an area a kilometre square to range upon. Once they were hitting that I would use a crude system of letter-and-number signals to correct their shooting: “U” then so many metres for “Overshoot,” “K”—“Kurz”—for “Undershoot,” “L” for “Too far left” and “R” for “Too far right.” The aim was to signal the conclusion of the process by a single letter: “V” for “Volltreffer”—“Direct hit.” From what I knew of the Skoda 42cm howit­zer I doubted very much whether more than one “V” would be necessary. The thing spoke but seldom, I understood, but when it did its arguments were of impressive finality.

  We had only just circled back across the ridge when the Skoda howit­zer fired its first shot. Even from a thousand metres above it was a spec­tacle of brute explosive violence that remains with me to this day. I had seen heavy guns fire before, of course: I had been a battleship gunnery officer before the war and still had impaired hearing in the upper registers to prove it. But I had never seen anything quite so big fired before—or been looking almost down the barrel as it did so. It astonished me to see that the shock waves were actually visible, spreading out like ripples on a pond around the great gout of orange and brown which suddenly erupted from the dark forest, making the trees about it flex and thrash as if some localised hurricane had struck them. A few seconds later the blast hit our flimsy aeroplane, making it skip and bounce suddenly like a mountain goat. The enormous shell was just visible for a moment or two as it reached the apex of its flight above the mountain ridge, losing speed before toppling over to plummet down towards its target. I was able to imagine—though with no particular relish—the feelings of the Italian gunners as the express-train roar came rushing down upon them to announce the arrival of the mighty projectile.

  It landed on the mountain slope some way above their position. Seen from where I was it looked like the sudden birth of a volcano: a disc of rock and forest floor about fifty metres across, suddenly heaving itself into the air as though a giant mole were stirring beneath it, then belching forth a great cloud of yellowish smoke as full-grown pines flew into the air like so many matchsticks. When the smoke cleared I saw that a hole the size of a small quarry had been excavated in the valley side, surrounded by a chaos of fallen trees and a circle of shattered rock. I marked the crater on my map and signalled “K200 L300” to indicate that the shot had fallen two hundred metres too short and about three hundred metres too far left of the target. Meanwhile the slopes below me broke out into a rash of flashes and smoke clouds as the Italians recovered from their shock and, realising what was afoot, let fly with every gun available to try and find the perpetrator of this outrage. The telephone lines down from the ridge of the mountain must be glowing red, I thought, as the Italian spotters signalled back the position of the muzzle-flash from our gun.

  They began to make it uncomfortably hot for us, now that they had realised what we were up to flying in slow circles over the mountain. A desultory spatter of rifle fire had greeted our first appearance—Italian infantrymen in their rocky trenches relieving the boredom of yet another day in the line by loosing off a few shots at a passing aeroplane. But now the shooting began in earnest: machine guns coming into action, then a flak battery in the valley sending shells up at us. I signalled to Toth to take us higher. Meanwhile the Italian howitzer battery fired a salvo. The shots were well short of our gun, and loosely grouped, but the line was worryingly accurate. By now the Italian outposts up on the ridge must be taking compass bearings to fix the hidden Skoda’s position. Like us, they knew that down there among the trees men were cursing and sweating as they struggled to hoist the enormous shell into the still-hot breech, then swinging the ponderous breech block into place and locking it shut before cranking furiously at the elevation wheels to raise the mighty bar­rel skywards once more.
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  Our second shot fell even further short than the first, dropping right into the bed of the torrent that ran down the mountain valley. I suppose that there must still be a miniature lake there, interrupting the course of the stream and providing puzzlement for the area’s natural historians. I like to think that, now the trees have grown back around it, the village children from Caporetto go up there to fish and to swim on summer after­noons, unaware of the events that took place in that quiet valley when their great-grandfathers were young. I signalled back “K300” as we banked away once more to await the Italian reply. Neither contender could move of course: the Italian howitzers, though (we understood) mounted on wheels, would have taken several hours to dig out of their emplacements and haul away. As for our Skoda weapon, it was concreted into its em­placement and could only be released with the aid of blasting charges and pneumatic drills. Neither contender could do anything more than await the enemy’s riposte. It was like watching some bizarre medieval duel to the death, prescribed perhaps in a fable to establish which suitor would have the hand of the princess; the two opponents with their feet set in tubs of mortar and taking turns to lunge at one another through a paper screen, their thrusts guided only by the calls of the spectators in the gallery.