by Джон Биггинс
He turned to leave. I called after him.
“Oh, Herr Kommandant.”
He turned back irritably. “What do you want?”
“I thought that you might like to see this.” I rummaged inside the breast of my flying jacket. “It’s a telegram of congratulation to us from a fellow who claims to be commanding the 5th Army, a chap called Boroevic or something like that. I thought that you might perhaps care to read it out to the assembled ranks on parade this morning.”
He snatched the telegram—and tore it up into tiny pieces before striding back to his office. The fragments fluttered among the grass blades on the field. As I climbed out of the aeroplane I saw the assembled ground crew grinning among themselves in delight. Any old soldier will tell you that, for an enlisted man, being spectator to an exchange of insults between two officers of equal rank is one of the very sweetest pleasures that military life affords.
7 THE GREATER REICH
I suppose that if I had been minded To do so I could have dug out my manual of military law and contested my sentence of five days’ confinement to base. But in the event I was no more troubled by it than Toth was by his own summary condemnation to five days’ close arrest on bread and water. They would have needed to transfer him to Army HQ in Marburg for this anyway, since we had no lock-up ourselves and the Provost Major of the local infantry division had stood firm on regulations and refused to lend Flik 19F the use of a prison cell. And anyway, there were more important things to think about that week, for the next day, 4 August, after an intense nine-hour bombardment, the Italian 3rd Army began its long-awaited offensive: the Sixth Battle of the Isonzo, which merged with the Seventh, Eighth and Ninth Battles into a conflict which was to rage on until the onset of winter.
The Italians captured Monte Sabotino across the river from Gorz after two days of bitter fighting. By the 8th our positions on either side of the town were collapsing under the ferocious barrage, and that night the 5th Army Command decided to pull back the line for fear of being outflanked. So on the morning of 9 August the Italian Army marched triumphantly into the deserted but still largely undamaged town of Gorz: by far the most worthwhile Allied gain of that whole blood-saturated year. With Gorz taken, the action shifted to the south and the approaches to Trieste. The battle for the Carso Plateau had begun, and with it one of the most terrible episodes even of that four-year catalogue of butchery.
I think that one of the hallmarks of the twentieth century must be the way in which the names of the most humdrum and obscure places on the whole of God’s earth have become synonyms for horror, so that the very words themselves seem to twist and buckle under the weight of misery piled upon them. When I was a small boy I remember how we used to pay visits to my grandparents, decayed Polish gentry living in a small manor house on a hard-up country estate some way west of the city of Cracow: how we would get off the train at a typically small, sordid Polish provincial town and hire its one shabby fiacre; and how we would creak and sway the five kilometres or so along the rutted road across the flat fields by the Vistula and pass as we did so a small military-clothing depot built on land that my grandfather had sold to the War Ministry about 1880. It was barely worth noticing, I remember: five or six wooden huts surrounded by a decrepit fence, and with a black-and-yellow-striped gate which the bored sentry would open from time to time to admit a cartload of tunics and trousers from the Jewish sweatshops in Bielsko-Biala. This was k.u.k. Militarbekleidungs Depot No. 107 Oswi^cim—or Auschwitz, to give it its German name. The collection of huts would pass in 1919 to the Polish Army, who would enlarge it a little; then in 1940 to new and more purposeful owners, who would expand it a great deal and really put the place on the map, so to speak.
It was the same on that dreary limestone plateau east of the Isonzo in the summer of 1916: places that no one had ever heard of—San Martino and Doberdo and Monte Hermada—suddenly turned into field fortresses around which titanic battles raged: lives squandered by the hundred thousand for places which were just names on a local map—and sometimes not even that, so that the hills for which entire divisions perished had to be denoted by their map-height above sea level. So it was at Verdun that summer. I saw some photographs, in a colour supplement a few months ago: the Meuse battlefields seventy years after. It appears that even today large areas are still derelict, that the incessant shelling and gassing so blasted away the topsoil and poisoned the earth that the landscape is still a semi-desert of exposed rock and old craters, covered (where anything grows at all) by a thin scrub.
The chief difference, I suppose, between Verdun now and the Carso then is that, so far as I could make out, the Carso had always looked like that: a landscape reminiscent of Breughel’s “Triumph of Death” even before the armies got to work on it. Indeed I think that the whole of Europe could scarcely have contained a piece of ground intrinsically less worth fighting over than the Carso—or the “Krst” as its few mostly Slovene inhabitants called it, as if the place was too poor even to afford vowels. It was an undulating, worn-down plateau of low limestone hills devoid of trees, grass or any vegetation whatever except for a few meagre patches of willow and gorse which had managed to get roots down into the fissures in the rock. What little soil there was had collected by some freak of nature into puddle-like hollows in the rock, called “dolinas,” and was bright red in colour, like pools of fresh blood. What little rain water there was had a way of disappearing as if bewitched into pot-holes in the rock, to reappear perversely a dozen kilometres away where an underground stream came out into the open. Baked by the sun all summer and swept by freezing winds all winter, the Carso was scourged in between times by the notorious bora, the sudden, violent north wind of the Adriatic coastline which would work itself up in these parts to nearhurricane force in the space of a few minutes, and had been known to blow over trains of goods wagons on the more exposed stretches of the Vienna—Trieste railway line.
At the best of times the Carso was a place such as even an early- Christian hermit might have thought twice about inhabiting. But as a battlefield it was a hell all of its own: a howling grey-brown desolation of broken rock spattered with dried blood and the dirty yellowish residue of TNT. The peculiar horror of the Carso fighting—the local specialty that distinguished it from the other great abattoirs of those years—was the enormous number of the wounded who lost their eyesight; small wonder, when every shellburst would send knife-sharp splinters of rock whining in all directions. Before long every last stone, every pulverised village of this wilderness would be stained with agony: places like the ruined market square in Sagrado, where a thousand or so Italians had staggered back from the trenches to die, remains of a brigade which had just been gassed with phosgene; or the little valley leading up on to the plateau from the hamlet of Selz, known as “the Cemetery of the Hungarians” after an entire Honved battalion had blundered into it in the smoke and confusion of a counter-attack and had been wiped out to a man by the Italian machine guns.
Before the war, if it had been mine to sell, I would cheerfully have sold you the entire Carso Plateau for a gulden. Yet now whole armies would immolate themselves for it as if it contained all the riches of the world. Before the war the eroded hills of Fajtji Hrib and Cosich and Debeli Vrh had been unvisited, known only to a few Slovene shepherds. Now their barren slopes and gullies would become the graveyards of a generation. When your great dramatist wrote of a little patch of ground that is not tomb or continent enough to bury the slain, I think that he must have had the Carso in mind. That summer of 1916, they lay everywhere, visible through any trench periscope: the sad, sunken bundles of rags tumbled among the rocks or sprawled across the thickets of barbed wire where they had fallen, their only passing-bells the frenzied jangling of the tin cans which our men used to hang from the wire as alarm signals. Even a thousand metres above the battlefields that August one could detect the sinister, sweetish taint of decay. By some black joke on the part of biochemistry, it had (for my nose at
any rate) a faint hint of overripe strawberries to it. Many years later my second wife Edith bought a lipstick perfumed with just such a synthetic strawberry scent. It brought back so many disturbing memories that I had to ask her to stop using it.
Yes, I speak as though I saw it all. But then I did, as near as makes no difference. The Carso sector was tiny—perhaps ten kilometres in total— so we airmen could see pretty well the whole of it as we flew above that terrible greyish-dun landscape: the shallow valleys below us boiling with smoke suffused with orange flame; then coming down sometimes when the murk parted to see the lines of tiny human specks scurrying forward among the shellbursts: the evil greenish-yellow clouds of poison gas and the sudden white puffs of grenades and the boiling black-fiery squirts of flame-throwers; men rushing forward to kill and maim one another with grenades and entrenching tools so as to gain or regain another few square metres of this ghastly desolation. The memory haunts me to this day: the sheer crushing lunacy of it all. Why did we do it? Why did we allow them to do it to us? I was there and you were not, so I wonder if you could tell me why. Because I was there to see it, yet sometimes I think that I perhaps understand it less than you who were not.
The battle raged to westward of us throughout that second week of August. The Italians had captured Gorz, and they were now attacking the hills of Monte San Michele on the north edge and Debeli Vrh on the southern edge of the Carso escarpment, trying to fight their way on to the plateau above. Our men in the front line were suffering atrociously in their rock-bound trenches, shelled day and night so that it was impossible either to bring up food and water or to evacuate the wounded. Rationed sometimes to a cup of water a day in the summer heat and dust, plagued by great corpse-fattened blowflies, they hung on as best they could, counterattacked when ordered to do so and died in their anonymous thousands for their distant Emperor and King. Yet while this whole dismal tragedy was being played out a few kilometres away, Flik 19F sat idly on the field at Caprovizza and chewed the ends of its collective moustache with boredom and frustration. We were on standby—which is why Toth and I were not much affected in practice by our sentence of arrest—but otherwise little happened. We were short of aircraft of course: one Brandenburger had arrived back from repair, but the Lloyd which we had flown on the Monte Nero artillery-spotting operation was out of action. Toth had let the revs build up during our dive to a degree where the cylinder liners had been irretrievably damaged, so the machine was now standing in a hangar waiting for a replacement engine. This left us with three effective aircraft—two Brandenburgers and a Lloyd. Yet we felt that there was still work that we could do to support our hard-pressed comrades in the trenches. Flik 19 at Haidenschaft had been heavily engaged from the first day. Its aircraft would often return, badly shot-up, to deposit yet another blanket-shrouded bundle on the handbarrow, and add one more to the rapidly extending line of propeller-crosses in the cemetery.
It galled us all beyond measure, sitting there waiting for the telephone to ring. We were under the command of 5th Army HQ, not the local division, and it seemed as if Marburg had entirely forgotten our existence. At last, on the Saturday after Gorz fell, it all became too much: the entire officer strength of the unit—except for myself, who was confined to base—elbowed the protesting Kraliczek aside and marched down the road to Haidenschaft to offer their services to Flik 19. Heyrowsky was not able to see them—he was in the air over Gradisca that afternoon, where he shot down a Nieuport with his hunting rifle—but when he got back he sent a curt reply to the effect that Flik 19 was a front-line fighting unit and would only use the services of (as he put it) “fashion photographers and killers of civilians” when its last able-bodied flier was dead. When they got back Kraliczek had thrown a fit and threatened to have everyone court- martialled for mutiny. In the end Oberleutnant Meyerhofer, standing in temporarily as Chefpilot, had called everyone together in the mess tent and composed a round robin (as I believe you call it) to General-Oberst Boroevic. It protested our undying loyalty to the Noble House of Austria and offered our lives as pledges of our devotion, if not in the air then (if need be) in the front-line trenches, where we would fight to our last breath come shot, shell, bayonet, flamethrower or poison gas. We all signed, even the wretched Kraliczek, whom we dragged out of his office and whose reaction, when shown the document, had been that of someone in the early stages of rabies confronted with a glass of water. His hand shook visibly as he signed, with the rest of us standing around him wearing our swords and black-and-yellow belts to offer moral support. The General’s reply next day thanked us for our loyalty to our Emperor and King, but said that trained airmen were in short supply and must not have their lives squandered without thought for the future. Boroevic concluded by promising us all the fighting we wanted, and more besides, in the weeks to come.
So the early part of August passed peacefully enough for us at Capro- vizza, as the guns thundered in the west and the wind sometimes brought us the faint smell of TNT fumes, mingled (as the hot days wore by) with a hint of something even less pleasant. We often saw Italian aircraft overhead, but were prevented by our orders from doing anything about it; that is, until one day when Meyerhofer had gone up with Stabsfeldwebel Zwierzkowski to test-fly a Brandenburger just back from repair. They were away for an hour or so, and when they returned they were preceded by a large, clumsy-looking pusher-engined biplane. It was an Italian Farman SP2 artillery spotter which they had sighted over Doberdo and engaged.
The SP2 was an awful aeroplane by all accounts: a pre-war French design—outdated even in 1914—which the Italians had licence-built in huge numbers as part of an emergency programme to create an air force out of nothing. It was a mistake which I believe Lord Beaverbrook was to make a generation later: tooling up the aircraft factories to turn out vast numbers of obsolete machines. The Italians were now trying to use up stocks. But in so doing they were also using up the lives of their airmen at a fine old rate, because the SP2 was simply a death trap: too slow to run away, unable to climb out of trouble, too clumsy to dodge and with so restricted a field of fire for the observer’s machine gun in the front cockpit that the thing was effectively a flying blind spot. Meyerhofer and Zwierzkowski had made a first pass at it with the forward machine gun and shot it about a little, had allowed the Italian observer to fire back at them as much as honour required, and had then stood off to observe events. Seeing that their line of retreat across their own lines was cut off and that they were done for if they resisted further, the observer had finally stood up in his cockpit and held up his hands in surrender; very sensibly too, we all agreed. The Italians were escorted over to meet us and shook hands with us all: Tenente Balboni and Caporale-Pilota Scaranza. Their feelings were as mixed as one might have expected: downcast at their capture and the prospect of a long spell behind the wire, but glad to have come out of it alive—which was not the usual fate of Farman aircrew. We commiserated with them as we looked over their bullet-peppered machine, and all said (I was interpreting for the rest, being fluent in Italian) that it was a shame that men should be sent up to die in such miserable contraptions.
“You know what ‘SP2’ stands for, Tenente?” the observer said to me. “ ‘Seppultoro per due’—‘the Sepulchre for Two.’ ”
“No, no,” added his pilot, laughing, “it means ‘Siamo perduti’—‘We are lost’!” We entertained them to dinner that evening, and waved them goodbye the next morning as the staff car came to take them away to the prison camp. In the end the only dissatisfied party was Kraliczek, whose returns for August had been upset on three counts: (a) that yet another machine had been brought down by a unit which was not supposed to engage the enemy; (b) that the Italian had been forced down by an aeroplane which officially did not exist, since it had been signed off the books at the Fliegeretappenpark but had not yet been accepted back on to the strength of Flik 19F; and (c) —gravest dereliction of all—it had been brought down by an officer who was not on the combat flying strength of the un
it. We learnt later that rather than deal with the administrative nightmares thus caused, Kraliczek had proposed letting the Italians get back into their aeroplane and fly home under a safe-conduct.
Thus the days passed idly, sitting on that sun-scorched field trying to find what shade we could as the hot, irritating Carso wind scurried straw and dust along the ground and rattled the tent-sides. There were few diversions for us except reading and playing cards—and listening to Leutnant Szuborits’s gramophone in the tent next to mine.
He had a rather nice wind-up portable gramophone which his mother had bought him; but records were in short supply in Austria by 1916 (the blockade had stopped the importation of the shellac from which they were made and no substitute had been found), and anyway the Leutnant’s musical tastes were limited. So it was constant, maddening repetition of the duet “Sport und immer Sport” from a failed Lehar operetta of 1914 or thereabouts—called Endlich Allein if I remember rightly—with Hubert Marischka and Mizzi Gunther squawking away like an egg-bound hen. It was an intensely irritating piece of music: one of those maddeningly catchy marschlieder so beloved of Viennese light-music composers about 1913—14, when the sudden Europe-wide vogue for deep breathing and general outdoor heartiness had spread to affect even dingy, sedentary old Austria. It was to turn up again many years later (I recall) as “Frei und Jung Dabei” when Lehar tried reviving his old operetta, only to see it sink once more to well-merited oblivion after a couple of nights.
Records in those days tended to wear out very quickly, but this one seemed to be made of tungsten carbide: just went on and on and on playing until I was tearing my hair out in tufts and trying not to look at my pistol in its holster hanging on the tentpole. And that is how I remember the summer of 1916 on the Isonzo Front: the sun’s glare and the nagging moan of the wind and the sound of aircraft engines; the fretful flapping of tent canvas and Mizzi Gunther warbling scratchily through “Sport und immer Sport,” accompanied by the ever-present rumbling orchestra of high explosive to westwards.