The Two-Headed Eagle поп-3

by Джон Биггинс

  And that was the end of the matter as far as we were concerned. I signed a few slips of paper for the farmer and his wife, who had by now stopped screaming and invoking the saints, for want of breath. Then Toth and I went back to our aeroplane to take off for Caprovizza airfield. So that, if you please, is how I came to achieve what I suppose must be my one claim to singularity in the course of something over a hundred years of earthly existence: that of being the only man—so far as I know—ever to have brought down two airships.

  8 IL CARSO SQUALLIDO

  There was a wondrous row about it all when I made my report to Hauptmann Kraliczek that evening, back at Fliegerfeld Caprovizza. Not only had I brought down a lighter-than-air machine when there was no appropriate form on which to report the fact; I had made a complete nonsense of his graphic projections for the entire month of August, no less. Fliegertruppe standing orders clearly stated that for the purposes of computing pilots’ aerial victories, one airship would be regarded as equivalent to five heavier-than-air machines; and this meant that Kraliczek’s new, reluctantly introduced line for Enemy Aircraft Destroyed climbed so abruptly when it reached the month of August that not even the airship itself could have gained altitude with such speed. In the end Kraliczek had to paste an extension-piece of squared paper above the main graph to accommodate the line. That was bad enough, but when I told him how we had done it—bombing the airship with a wireless set—his normally pallid features took on the livid white hue of a fish’s underbelly.

  “You . . . you . . . what?” he stammered, aghast.

  “Obediently report that I dropped the wireless set on it. I had fired five clips of ammunition into the thing to no effect and there was noth­ing else that we could do, short of ramming it. But where’s the problem? Surely an enemy airship destroyed is worth a wireless set at any rate of exchange?”

  “What do you mean, worth a wireless set, you maniac! That wireless apparatus was a top-secret item of equipment, of inestimable value to the enemy. And now you’ve gone and dropped the thing on their side of the lines! Du lieber Gott . . . Do you realise that you could be court-martialled for betraying military secrets to the enemy?” I tried to persuade him that after a fall of something like three thousand metres a fragile item like a wireless set would have virtually exploded on impact, transforming it­self into a thousand unrecognisable fragments. But he was unpersuaded: unfortunately he remembered the freakish incident in May when Toth’s observer, the ill-fated Leutnant Rosenbaum, had fallen from about the same height to land inside a convent greenhouse in Gorz, stone dead but with hardly a mark on him. He was silent for some time, staring at me reproachfully from behind his spectacles. At last a faint smirk of self­satisfaction returned some colour to his features.

  “Herr Linienschiffsleutnant,” he said in his most solemn tones, “oh my dear Herr Linienschiffsleutnant, it is my duty to inform you that you are in the very deepest trouble. There is only one course of action open to you. I shall delay making my report on this disgraceful incident on condi­tion that you and Zugsfuhrer Toth fly out at the earliest opportunity to try and find the remains of the wireless set. If you can bring it back—even in pieces—then the War Ministry may—I say only may—be content with charging you its cost of, er, let me see . . . 7,580 kronen. If you are unable to find it then I am afraid that my report of its loss will go to 5th Army Headquarters by tomorrow evening at the latest. Is that clear?”

  I protested that this was a ludicrous assignment; that quite apart from the hazards of landing close behind the enemy lines, I had no real idea of where I had dropped the thing to the nearest square kilometre or so, and that even if I had, it would either have smashed into innumerable frag­ments on the rocks of the Carso edge or buried itself deep in the Isonzo marshes.

  However, war is war, and an order from one’s commanding officer is an order—especially when backed by a threat of immediate court martial. So at first light the next morning Toth and I took off from Caprovizza airfield on what looked set to be the most hazardous mission of my entire three-week career as an officer-observer.

  By comparing our own recollections of the previous day’s events and by checking them against the map, we had eventually narrowed our area of search down to a two-kilometre square of marshland and pasture between the town of Monfalcone and the River Isonzo, south of the Cervignano road. We had managed to contact a number of front-line observation posts by telephone and they more or less confirmed this, as did the look-outs of the battleship Prag, who had taken bearings as they saw us close with the airship. Even so I was not at all hopeful of finding anything other than death or captivity as we set off that morning. The search area was only a couple of kilometres behind the Italian lines and would doubtless be stiff with troops and guns. The best that we could hope for was that the sheer bare-faced effrontery of our mission—flying at tree-top height over enemy territory in broad daylight—would so dumbfound the Italians that they would be put off their aim.

  We crossed the lines east of Gradisca, taking advantage of early- morning mist, then flew the Lloyd in a wide half-circle to land on a stretch of pasture in a thinly populated region of marshland south of Cervignano. We waited there until about 1000, by which time the sun was clearing the last rags of mist from the flatlands, then took off again to approach Monfalcone from the west, flying low and hoping to be taken for an Italian aeroplane if anyone noticed us. Then the fun began. The first two passes over the area of search went well—except that I saw not a sign of the wireless set as I scanned the ground beneath through my binoculars. But on the third sweep, heading south this time, we passed over a tented encampment and some sentry noticed the black crosses beneath our wings. There was a sudden outbreak of bright little flashes among the tents as they opened fire. Machine-gun posts joined in, sending streams of tracer up at us, and before long the flash-puffs of anti-aircraft fire were following us as we flew—then bursting above and ahead of us as they found the range, kicking us about as urchins kick a tin can in the street. Then I saw it, in the middle of a field: a battered, splayed-out metal box of about the right size and shape for our wireless set. I signalled to Toth to turn us round and land.

  It was a magnificent piece of flying, even by Toth’s high standards: to bring an aeroplane about and put it down under fire on a space pehaps a hundred metres square. I can only assume that we survived either because the Italian gunners thought that we had been hit, or perhaps because they thought that we had gone mad. At any rate, their fire slackened for just long enough to enable me to scramble out of the cockpit and run to the metal box. Sure enough, it was the remains of the wireless set. The box had burst open on impact and its contents had been distributed over a good fifty metres’ radius. I saw a valve lying near by, miraculously intact, and the metal base of another. I knew enough about wireless to know that the valves were what would really be of interest to an enemy intelligence offi­cer, so I gathered them up, then ran back to the Lloyd, which was standing by with its engine idling. Just as I reached it the first Italian soldiers ap­peared at the field’s edge. They shouted, then began to fire. Breathless and too confused by it all to be frightened, I quickly cocked the Schwarzlose and fired a couple of bursts at them to keep them at their distance while Toth turned the aeroplane’s nose into the breeze and pushed the throttle forward. Bullets cracked around us as we wobbled into the air. Against all the odds we had done it: found the remains of the wireless set and secured enough of it to convince even the most obdurate security officer that the thing had smashed on impact to a degree where no one would ever be able to deduce how it had worked.

  That, it soon became clear, had been the easy part of our exploit. We were no sooner into the air and heading over the Lisert Marshes than the Italian flak gunners found our range again. They were not going to let us escape this time. Shells were bursting all round us as we climbed over the roofless, gutted buildings of Monfalcone, heading for the rim of the Carso and the safety of our own lines among the hills to the north-
east of the town. Then the inevitable happened: there was a flash and a deafening concussion to starboard, and something hit my shoulder. As I regained my senses and Toth brought the aeroplane level again I saw that the starboard lower wing had been reduced to a fluttering jumble of smashed ribs and trailing rags of fabric; also that the fuselage and wings had been riddled by shell splinters, one of which (I later discovered) had gone through the shoulder of my flying jacket and grazed the skin beneath, leaving a faint brown burn-scar which I carry to this day. But that was not the worst: the engine was faltering as steam and boiling water hissed from the radiator above the upper wing. We ducked to avoid the scalding spray as Toth struggled to keep the aeroplane up. I looked ahead, and saw a low, bare, rat-coloured ridge of limestone looming ahead of us as we lost height. Its slopes were pocked with shell craters and streaked with the dark smudges of wire-belts. We were approaching the notorious ridge of the Svinjak.

  The Svinjak—more or less “the Hill of the Pig” in Slovene—did indeed rather resemble a sleeping sow. Not that anyone would have given it a second glance before the war: it was merely a barren, eroded limestone ridge exactly like a hundred other such limestone ridges on the Carso Plateau; an arid jumble of rocks and scrub barely capable of providing a living for a herd of scrawny goats. But since the start of 1916 it had been one of the most ferociously contested parts of the Austro-Italian Front, constantly bombarded and fought over as the lines swayed up and down its desolate slopes. The Austrian strongpoint at the northern edge of the Carso, Monte San Michele, had been taken the week before, but the south­ern bastion here on the edge of the Adriatic had held firm, much to the dissatisfaction of General Cadorna, who clearly intended to capture our positions here—Hill 144 and the Svinjak and Debeli Vrh—and turn the Austrian flank. So Toth and I now found ourselves descending into one of the hotspots of European civilisation in the year 1916. The only ques­tion now was: would we be able to keep the Lloyd airborne long enough to be able to come down on our own side of the lines?

  As it turned out the answer was: nearly but not quite. The engine failed as we crossed the Italian forward trenches, and we finally hit the ground about two-thirds of the way across no man’s land, just in front of our own first belt of wire. At first I thought that it would make little difference to us, hearing the fearful tearing crunch as the aeroplane’s undercarriage smashed and the belly skidded along the confusion of rocks that passed for ground in these parts. I think in fact that what saved us was hitting an outer line of barbed wire, which brought us to a halt like the arrester-wire on the deck of an aircraft carrier before we had skidded far enough for the aeroplane to break up around us. All I remember at any rate is a violent jolt as we came to a stop, then distentangling myself from Toth in the front of the cockpit and the two of us scrambling over the side, cut and bruised and shaken but otherwise unhurt, to dive for cover in a nearby shell hole as the first bullets whined around us.

  My first instinct on tumbling into the crater was to tumble out again as quickly as possible and never mind the shots cracking overhead. Even with a hail of lead buzzing a couple of metres above our heads it was a shock to find that the hole was occupied already. As for the tenant, he seemed not to mind our intrusion; only grinned in welcome. It was evident at first glance that he had been here for quite some time. Still, it is remark­able, I have always found, how quickly one can grow accustomed to things which, in other circumstances, would make one’s flesh creep with re­vulsion; and this is doubly true when (as on this occasion) lifting one’s head above the lip of the crater to look for other accommodation would certainly mean having it blown off. Toth and I quickly reached the conclu­sion that, on balance, the dead are less threat than the living, and settled down to make the best of things, trying not to look at our silent compan­ion lying on his back against the other side of the crater and gazing with empty eye sockets into the cloudless blue sky. I think that he had been an Italian, but I was not sure. Both armies wore grey, but if ours had a some­what bluer tint and theirs a somewhat greener, months of sun and rain and dust had long since faded away such distinctions. I was not concerned anyway to carry out a post mortem: the dead have about them a silent finality that makes mock of such petty considerations as nationality.

  I took stock of our position. We two had survived the crash intact, and if we were pinned down by the enemy’s fire for the rest of the the hours of daylight, I supposed that the Italians further down the hill would be similarly pinned down by our people and would not come bothering us. A small shell had landed near by just as we had scrambled into the crater, but there had been nothing since, so I concluded that the enemy would wait until dark, then send out a patrol to remove anything of interest from the wreck. My intention was that we should have left by then, after setting it alight.

  So for the time being it just meant lying here in a shell crater under the blistering sun with a corpse for company, counting the hours until sundown. I looked at my wristwatch: 1135. That meant another ten hours grilling here before it would be dark enough to make a run for it. My mouth was already parched from excitement and exertion. It was going to be a long wait. Toth and I sought what shade we could, arranging our fly­ing jackets into a crude awning across a couple of strands of barbed wire strung over a shattered rifle which we had found in the bottom of the hole. We settled down to wait, trying to ignore the huge blowflies which had already located us and were beginning to gather into a swarm. It puzzled me that with so many other items of interest in the area—as could readily be detected by the least sensitive nose—these insects should still pay such attention to the living.

  Quite apart from the stench, the other feature of this wasteland that impressed itself upon me as we lay there that August morning was the unspeakable noise. This was what I supposed would be called “a quiet spell” on the Svinjak—which is to say that the two armies had temporarily exhausted themselves fighting over it. But even so the shells moaned and rumbled overhead incessantly, looking for the trackways and communi­cation trenches behind the lines and the sweating ration parties trudging along them. Rifle fire crackled constantly along the line, like dry twigs in a stubble fire after harvest. It seemed that it needed only one shot in a sector to cause a blaze-up of musketry which would take several minutes to subside, much as one village dog barking in the night will set off all the other dogs in the district until they grow tired of it. If this was a quiet spell, I thought, what must a noisy one be like? Yet amid all this din one could sometimes make out curiously ordinary domestic sounds, like a latrine bucket clanking in a nearby trench, or someone chopping up ration boxes for firewood, or a man whistling: noises that reminded us that this bleak hillside, which only two years before had doubtless been as deserted as the Arctic tundra, was now as crowded with humanity as a city street.

  Around midday the noise of firing died down sufficiently for me to listen incredulously to the sounds drifting faintly down from our front line, about two hundred metres up the ridge. It was a violinist, playing the tune “In Prater bluhn wieder die Baume,” which was all the rage that sum­mer of 1916. Quite apart from the bizarre effect of its syrupy harmonies in this charnel-house of a place, I must say that the music itself rather set my teeth on edge. While I enjoyed most operettas I had never cared too much for this glutinous Schrammel-quartet stuff, which for me always conjured up visions of fat civil servants weeping into their half-litre wine mugs in Viennese Heurige-gardens of a Sunday afternoon. In any case, I could hear even at this range that the player was not very good: probably more of a trial to his comrades than even the stench and the flies. Then there was a heavy thump somewhere down the hill. A few seconds later, looking up into the sky above us, we saw an object like a beer barrel with fins flying through the air and trailing sparks behind it. It vanished from sight—and a moment later the whole hillside shook to an enormous blast like a miniature earthquake; so powerful that the back-draught made our eardrums pop and caused the wreck of our aeroplane (which I could just see ov
er the edge of the crater) to lift momentarily into the air. It was a trench-mine, thrown by one of the “bombardi” which the Italians had been making lately in large numbers: about two hundred kilograms of TNT mixed with bits of scrap metal and packed into a barrel. As our hearing returned I heard a bugle away in our trenches sound the call “Stretcher bearers.” More routine wastage, I thought; the battalion diarist would make a laconic entry that evening: “Quiet day in the line: nothing to report. Four men killed by trench-mortar mine.” As for the violinist, he had given up for the while, having no doubt dived for cover in the nearest dug-out when he heard the mine coming over. I had often suffered in the past from amateur musicians, who are a plague aboard naval vessels, but on balance I considered that dropping oil drums full of high explosive on them was going rather too far by way of showing disapproval.