by Джон Биггинс
Apart from the affair of the captured SP2, the only diversion of those early days of August was the arrival of a new Chefpilot to replace poor Rieger. He arrived by staff car one morning just after breakfast. I was the only one around to meet him, and as he stepped down with his bags I thought that he was surely one of the pleasantest-looking men I had ever seen: in his early twenties, of medium height, gracefully formed, with fine light brown hair and gentle, rather melancholy blue eyes such as a poet or composer might possess. He gazed at me sideways, smiled politely in greeting and saluted. Then he turned his head slightly—and I saw that most of the left side of his face had gone, cheekbone and temple replaced by a tortured confusion of lumps and puckered scar tissue surrounding an eyeball which looked to be in danger of tumbling out on to his cheek. Despite myself I winced slightly and tried not to look. My wife Elisabeth had worked for the past two years in a specialist facial-injuries unit at the Vienna Medical School, and she had shown me a good many spine-crawling photographs of “before.” Well, this was clearly one of the “after” cases: one of those less severely damaged casualties whose face the surgeons had managed to rebuild sufficiently for an army medical board to class him once more as “dienstauglich.” He shook my hand—no doubt noticing that, like everyone else he met, I was trying not to look at his face—and introduced himself as Oberleutnant-Feldpilot Svetozar von Potocznik.
I got to talk with Potocznik that evening and over the next few days, and I must say that I found him at first to be one of the more engaging people I had so far encountered: tactful, humorous, modest and endowed with great precision and sensitivity of expression. He was also quite remarkably intelligent. Little by little I learnt his story. He had been born in 1894 in the small town of Pravnitz on the southern edge of Carinthia, where his father was chemistry master of the local grammar school. And of course, the gymnasium at Pravnitz in the 1900s had become a cause celebre throughout the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy because of a bitter dispute over the language of instruction in the school, now that the local Slovene population were demanding equality with German-speakers. This wretched dispute had dragged on for years, with the school closed down for long periods because of riots and boycotts and blockades, punctuated by outbreaks of pandemonium in the Vienna Reichsrat as the German and Slovene deputies from Carinthia hurled inkpots at one another. At least three k.k. Ministers for Education had resigned because of the Pravnitz gymnasium affair. At last, in 1908, to the inexpressible disgust of German Nationalists throughout the entire Monarchy, Vienna had given in and made the school officially bilingual.
But while this nonsense had been going on, events had been moving for the Potocznik family in another direction. Always an ingenious man, Herr Doktor von Potocznik had used his long spells of enforced leave to perfect a revolutionary new process for synthesis of ammonia. In the end he had managed to patent it and sell it to the CIVAG syndicate, who made it a condition of purchase that he should move to Germany to supervise the setting-up of the first process line. So in 1909 the family had sold up and moved to Mannheim, bidding a not very affectionate farewell to the decrepit old Austrian Monarchy which had given in so easily to the insolent demands of its lower races.
Thus young Potocznik had grown up in Germany. An outstanding pupil and talented poet, he had excelled at music, though his interests had turned towards theology and moral philosophy. He had also, about 1910, become involved with the Wandervogel, the curious movement among the idealistic German young which rejected the horsechair-stuffed values of the Wilhelmine Reich and instead set out in search of the authentic and the natural: birdsong in the forest, church bells in the Alpine valleys, rucksacks and lederhosen and guitars around campfires, running barefoot in the morning dew and all the rest of the nonsense which (I must confess) made me thankful for a youth spent playing billiards in the smoke-filled ambience of Austrian provincial coffee-houses.
Potocznik had been due to enter Gottingen University in 1914 to study philosophy. But the war had got there first. Like millions of other German adolescents, he had rushed to the colours filled with a burning desire for self-sacrifice in this war, which (they believed) was not about territory or dynastic claims but about power and youth and the force of the spirit; a near-religious crusade to give Germany her rightful place in the world and break the shackles forged for her by the old nations. There had been official reservations about his nationality of course: he was still technically an Austrian subject. But he was eventually given permission to join the German Army, “pending an administrative decision.” He enlisted in the Academic Legion and was flung almost immediately, after the sketchiest of training, into the fighting at Ypres, given the task of storming the village of Langemarck. Eighteen thousand of them had set out across the water meadows that morning, singing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” as they advanced. Less than two thousand were to come back. “The Massacre of the Innocents,” they called it. A patrol had found Potocznik next day among the stacks of corpses, the left side of his face smashed by a rifle bullet.
He had spent the next six months in hospital in Germany, and had then been transferred to the specialist facial-injuries unit being set up by Professor Kirschbaum and his colleagues at Vienna University. My wife Elisabeth had been one of the sisters on his ward. They had patched him up after a fashion, rebuilding his cheekbone with bone-grafts and creating a metal bridge for his upper jaw. But plastic surgery was a primitive business in those still-experimental days before antibiotics, and the surgeons had in the end only been able to restore function, not appearance. But another unpleasant surprise awaited him in mid-1915: the Imperial German Minister for War—having probably concluded that someone with a name like Svetozar von Potocznik was not an acceptable soldier of the Reich—had not been pleased to grant his application to serve in the German armed forces. To my surprise, though, I found him not to be too upset about this.
“Of course,” he had said to me in the mess tent after supper, “it was a let-down not to be able to serve in the German Army, especially after I started getting interested in flying. Their air force is about five years ahead of ours in every respect. But quite frankly it doesn’t make a lot of difference to me now. We’re all fighting for the Greater German Reich, and wearing an Austrian cap badge signifies as little for me as wearing that of Bavaria or Saxony. Germany and Austria are being welded together now into a single billet of steel under the blows of the enemy, tempered in the forge of war into a weapon such as the world has not yet seen. True, I’d have more fun flying on the Western Front against the Britishers and the French. But there: I think we’ll have sport enough here on the South-West Front before long, once the Americans come into this war. And anyway, I’m glad in a way to be defending this region.”
“What, the Kustenland?”
“No, Carinthia, my home province: defending the southern marches of Germany against the Latins and Slavs. That was something I could never convince them of in north Germany: that we Germans who live on the frontiers of the Reich have a far keener awareness of what it means to be German than those who sit comfortably in Darmstadt and Mannheim and never look into the eyes of the wolf-packs that surround us.”
“You seem to have a very clear idea of what you are fighting for,” I remarked.
“I certainly have. But what are you fighting for, Prohaska, if I might ask?”
“Me? I can’t say that I’ve ever thought much about it. I just fight for the House of Austria because that’s my job and it’s what I swore on oath to do. Anyway, my time’s been so taken up thinking about how to do it these past two years that I’ve never wondered a great deal about why. I’m just a career naval officer; things like that are for the politicians to decide.”
“Precisely. That’s the trouble, if you’ll excuse my saying so: you professional officers always fight bravely, but sadly you lack any very deep appreciation of what this war is about. Probably I’d have been the same if I had grown up in this corpse-empire of ours and been through a cad
et school. But as it was I saw the future in Germany—the factories, the cities, the laboratories. And I also had time to read a great deal when I was laid up in hospital: Nietzsche, Darwin, Treitschke, Bernhardi, the lot. It was then that I first fully understood why I was lying in bed with half my face missing; and I swore to dedicate my life to Greater Germany. Our German revolution is being created in this war. Nothing can stop it now—not even defeat—and it’ll turn the world upside-down before it’s finished.”
“You sound like a socialist to me.” He smiled, his mouth twisted to one side by his rebuilt jaw. I could see how sweet his smile would have been before his face was wrecked. His eyes were not those of a crazed fanatic but of a seer; a dreamer of dreams.
“Perhaps I am, my dear Prohaska. But a German socialist second and a German warrior first.” It may have been ill-natured of me, but I could not help interjecting at this point that some might consider “Svetozar von Potocznik” a pretty odd sort of name for a warrior of the Greater German Reich. But he had obviously been asked that question before. He laughed, and answered me with his usual calm earnestness. “We all have to have a name, Prohaska, and names are handed down in the male line except, I believe, in a few odd little countries in Africa. The ‘Svetozar’ bit is rather awful, I agree: my mother was greatly addicted to romantic novels when I was born and she thought that it went better with ‘Potocznik’ than ‘Willibald’ or ‘Englebert,’ which were my father’s choices. As to the ‘Potocznik,’ it doesn’t argue for any but the tiniest element of Slav blood. Tell me Prohaska, how long do you think people in Europe have been using surnames?”
“I really couldn’t say. Since the fifteenth century perhaps? Up in the Tyrol I believe they still give people names according to their occupation.”
“Good, the fifteenth century: say twenty generations ago to be on the safe side?” I nodded my assent. “Well then, I worked it out recently and that gives me a theoretical possibility of something over two million ancestors. Only one of those needed to have the name “Potocznik” to have passed it on to me. And anyway, there’s no certainty that he was a Slav: he could have been a German kidnapped in a border raid and taken into serfdom by the Croats. No, there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that I am of purely Germanic stock.”
“I see. So where precisely does that leave me in this crusade for the Greater German Reich? After all, I’m a Czech on my father’s side and a Pole on my mother’s, and as you can hear I still speak German with an accent.”
“Well, since you ask me I would have said that by becoming an Austrian officer you have automatically cast your vote for Germanic culture.”
“I see. And will you let me in?”
“Of course: to be a German is not only a matter of blood and soil but of culture. The Romans—who were the earliest Germans by the way: I read a book about it recently—never had anything against barbarians becoming Roman citizens, after they had given sufficient proof of their loyalty. The border peoples like the Czechs and the Poles will be offered a choice after this war: either become part of the German Reich or become German protectorates outside it—or if you don’t want either of those alternatives then clear off to join your Slav brothers beyond the Urals.” “And do you think that they’ll accept that choice willingly?”
“I don’t doubt it: look at all the Czechs in the k.u.k. Armee who’ve been voting for Russia lately by raising both hands. As for the rest, I don’t imagine that they’ll have much choice. Did the Britishers ever ask the people of India whether they wanted to be part of their empire? The mark of a truly vigorous nation is that it has a way of resolving these matters without the need for ballot boxes. The British and French only became interested in democracy once they had taken as much of the world as they wanted by force.”
“But surely, Potocznik, haven’t you noticed that in this pan-German crusade some of our best fighters are Slavs? Look at the Bosnians for instance. Or the Slovenes: I doubt whether you’d find a braver and more loyal people in the entire Monarchy.”
He snorted. “Brave and loyal: you certainly wouldn’t have found them very brave and loyal if you’d seen them back in Pravnitz during the gymnasium affair. The sheer colossal impudence of it: a silly little ethnographic relic of a people with no literature and no history and no culture of their own, challenging the rights of a major world nation. It’s just too absurd. There’s no such people as the Slovenes, and their language is a fraud: a monkey-jabber made to look like a proper language by a German-speaking bishop—a Jewish convert, by the way—to create enemies for Germany and keep it under the thumb of Rome. The Slovene Nation, indeed—not a million of them, and nothing but a lot of illiterate yokels in felt hats and silly costumes. For them to claim equality with the nation of Goethe and Schiller and Beethoven is like a sparrow claiming equality with an eagle. Darwin proved that there is no such thing as equality in nature, only the stronger and the weaker.”
“Do I take it, then, that you propose shooting all the Slovenes once we win this war? It seems pretty shabby thanks after the way they’ve fought for us.”
“Of course not: the so-called Slovene people would continue to exist for as long as it wished to. But with no equality in German-speaking areas, that’s for sure, and with German as a compulsory subject in all their schools from the lowest level up.”
“Do you think that they’d take kindly to that? You make it sound like running a colony in Africa.”
“Perhaps it is rather like that. If they are eventually absorbed into Germany, then frankly we would be doing them a kindness. Honestly, Prohaska, there’s no future in these little peoples now: the Slovenes and Czechs and the rest. They only survived this long because the Habsburg state has somehow managed to stagger a century too far. From now on it’ll be the big nations who count; this war demostrates that if nothing else. Cruel to absorb them into Greater Germany? We’d be far crueller to them in the long run if we didn’t, with the Italians waiting out there to swallow them up. We’re bringing them into the modern world, making them catch up with the rest of Europe after a thousand years of slumber. That’s our Germanic mission: to force these fossil peoples into the twentieth century. ‘Deutsche Wesen soll die Welt genesen.’ ”
The next morning the telephone rang at last in the Kanzlei at Caprovizza airfield. We were to make ready for a fresh experiment in wireless artillery direction from the air. The news of our success at Monte Nero at the beginning of August had spread as far as the High Command, and a new operation was being planned to try and take some of the pressure off our troops on the Carso. The elderly coast-defence battleship S.M.S. Prag was lying at Pola and would steam up to the Gulf of Trieste on 14 August to shell a large group of ammunition dumps which had just been revealed by aerial photography in a wood near the railway line between Sagrado and Ronchi. The ship would anchor off Sistiana and her battery of four 24cm guns would fire at maximum elevation to try and hit the dumps, hoping to set off a general and demoralising explosion since (our artillery experts said) the Italians had stacked the shells far too close together for safety. It would need wireless spotting to do the job—the target was twelve kilometres inland and hidden from our spotters by the edge of the Carso escarpment—and it would also require an officer-observer used to naval signalling and gunnery practice. The choice was obvious, so Toth and I were ordered to get ready to fly the next morning.
We would be flying a Lloyd once again, since the fuselage of the Brandenburger was still not quite roomy enough for all the paraphernalia of a wireless station. Likewise we would once again be flying unarmed, for reasons of weight-saving. I was none too happy about this after our encounter with the Nieuport over Monte Nero, so I was determined this time to take along something more powerful than a Steyr pistol by way of protection. A Mannlicher cavalry carbine was not a great improvement, it is true, but it might give us some chance if we could let the enemy get close enough.
As to the wireless station, we learnt that we would not be carrying the c
lumsy spark transmitter which we had used at Monte Nero. Instead we would be provided with the very latest in German wireless technology: a Siemens-Halske valve set. This apparatus was (we were told) more fragile than the spark set, and almost as heavy, but it could be tuned more precisely and, above all, would allow us not only to transmit but also to receive signals, thus doing away with the previous rigmarole of white and red and green rockets.
That part at least was reasonably simple, installing the wireless set that afternoon and going up to run a few test-exchanges of signals with a ground station at Haidenschaft airfield. The fun started when we landed and found a naval liaison officer waiting for us so that we could coordinate our plans for tomorrow. The first thing we discovered was that the naval charts did not extend as far inland as our target, and that the k.u.k. Armee’s maps of the area were not only on a different scale but used an entirely different grid system. In the end I had to make up an “oleat”: a sheet of transparent paper with a naval grid marked on it so that we could superimpose it on the army map.
That problem was simple enough to solve; far trickier was the difference in gunnery signalling practice between the Army and the k.u.k. Kriegsmarine. This would make it necessary for the Prag to carry a major of artillery as a liaison officer. However, the officer in question did not know Morse code, so it would be necessary to assign him a naval telegraphist. But at this point questions of inter-service etiquette began to arise. The Navy’s self-esteem would not permit an army officer to give direct orders to the crew of a battleship while at sea, so a naval Korvettenkapitan would have to be detailed to transmit instructions from the Major to the ship’s Wireless Operator. Likewise the army officer would not be permitted to give orders direct to the Prag’s turret captains. Instead (it was eventually decided) he would give the necessary bearing and elevations to the ship’s Gunnery Officer as “recommendations,” and the latter would then transmit them to the turrets as orders. Likewise the order “Fire!” would be respectfully suggested to the naval Liaison Officer, who would give it to the Gunnery Officer, who would then convey it to the turret-commanders. Furthermore, it was decided that in case things went wrong and the two services started blaming one another, all orders were to be duplicated in writing. In fact I suspect that it was only because I was a naval officer myself that I escaped having a petty officer telegraphist squeezed into the aeroplane cockpit with me to relay my signals to the ship. As it was it involved a chain of no less than seven persons in converting my aerial observations into a shell issuing from the muzzle of a gun. It was a fire- control system such as only Habsburg Austria could have devised.