The Two-Headed Eagle поп-3

by Джон Биггинс

  We lay like that until about two in the afternoon, enduring the glare of the sun and the thirst and the flies and the fetid reek of the battlefield. Then, suddenly, Toth gripped my arm and pointed. The crater was on a hill-slope, so the lip on the downhill side was lower than the uphill edge. I could see only sky, unless I wished to lose the top of my skull to a sniper. But as I watched, puzzled, the vivid summer blue was obscured by mist. At first I thought that it was the top of a fog-bank rolling in from the Gulf of Trieste: unusual at this time of year but by no means impossible. Then I saw to my horror that the mist had a sinister yellow hue and that it was rolling uphill towards us on the slight breeze. It was a poison gas cloud, and we were directly in its path!

  The same idea seemed to occur to us at the same instant. It was a sickening task, and one that only the threat of imminent death could have nerved us to perform. We nearly gave up, when the body came to pieces as we tried to lift it by its rotted clothing. But we clutched handkerchiefs to our faces and tried not to look, and eventually found what we were searching for among the decaying equipment: a canvas haversack with something resilient inside it. In the event we were only just in time, pull­ing out the mask just as the first curling wisps of gas came pouring into our hole. The next few minutes were not exactly the pleasantest that I have ever spent, taking turns to inhale through the face piece of a perished gas mask, foul with the smell of decay and of heaven alone knew what efficacy after months of lying out in the open. To this day I have no idea what sort of gas it was; only that it had a cloying sugary smell rather like that of a rotting pineapple, and that it made our eyes burn as well as causing a most painful tightness of the chest. We tried to sit as still as possible, so as to avoid getting more of it into our bloodstreams than we could help, and crawled up on to the crater edge on the assumption that, whatever it was, it was heavier than air and would collect in the bottom of the shell hole.

  We ducked back into our refuge as the cloud began to thin. Dim figures were rushing past in the tail end of the cloud, and a great deal of shouting and confused firing was taking place further up the hill. We lay down and hoped to be taken for dead if anyone noticed us. Dear God, when would darkness fall? I did not care in the least for this game of soldiers. After about five minutes, just as the last of the gas cloud was passing, there were two explosions away towards our lines, then a further burst of shooting. I decided to chance a peep over the edge of the crater towards our trenches. Perhaps help was coming. I heard shouts—then saw the tops of steel helmets bobbing among the craters. They were the new German coal-scuttle helmets, so that (I knew) meant Austrian as­sault troops. Despite the enormous number of head-wounds in the Isonzo fighting, the War Ministry was still only thinking about manufacturing an Austro-Hungarian steel helmet—in fact would not get around to it until the war was in its final months. In the mean time a few thousand steel hel­mets had been purchased from our German allies, but so far they had only been issued to the “Stosstruppen,” the teams of specialist trench-fighters who were now being given the most difficult and dangerous tasks in the front line. Anyway, that meant we would soon be found and escorted back, even if we still had to wait until nightfall. Had they perhaps got water can­teens with them, I wondered? I shouted, “We’re over here!” as loudly as I could above the din, then scrambled back down into the hole.

  That shout was very nearly my last words. There was a sudden scratter of stones as something landed in the hole with us. I stared at it, paralysed. It was a stick-grenade, lying and hissing faintly as the fuse burnt down. If it had been left to me we would both have been dead men; but with a true pilot’s reflexes Toth leapt across, seized it and flung it over the edge, ducking as he did so. It exploded just as it cleared the lip, sending vicious fragments of hot metal rattling off the rocks. I was still too afraid to move. But that was not the end of the matter. A moment later I was knocked to the ground as someone fell on top of me. The next thing I was lying with a hand grasping my throat, looking into the face of a creature so obscene that the mere sight of it took my remaining strength away: something that combined grasshopper and pig and horse’s skull into the features of a devil from a medieval doom-painting. Its arm was raised above me with a club in its hand, poised to dash my brains out. “Stop!” I yelled, hoarse from thirst and gas. The arm stayed poised—then was lowered slowly as its owner got off my chest. He knelt back, and removed the steel helmet so that he could lower the hideous can-snouted mask with its two huge, flat black eyepieces. It revealed a sweaty, rather florid face of unmistak­ably Germanic cast, with fair short-cropped hair and glaucous pale-blue eyes. He wiped his face with his tunic sleeve before replacing the helmet. His two companions released Toth and then removed their gas masks as well.

  “Good thing that you shouted in German,” he said, “otherwise I’d have smashed your head in for you. Did you chuck that grenade back out again? ”

  “No, he did.” I pointed to Toth, crouched near by. The Stosstruppen leader smiled.

  “Not bad, not bad at all. Can I interest you in joining my storm- company perhaps? We could use people with reflexes as quick as yours.” He turned back to me. I noticed that although he had the Edelweiss col­lar badges of the elite Tyrolean Alpine troops, the Landeschutzen, he spoke with a marked Sudetenland accent. “Anyway, let me introduce myself,” he said. “Oskar Friml, Oberleutnant in the 2nd Landeschutzen Regiment; currently leading the 28th Storm-Troop Company attached to infantry regiment No. 4, Hoch-und-Deutschmeister. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  I thought this display of courtesy rather forced, coming from some­one who not a minute before had nearly killed us both. However I said nothing, but merely shook hands and introduced Toth and myself, then thanked him and his men for coming out to rescue us. He smiled: a rather nervous, evasive smile I thought.

  “Not a bit of it. We didn’t know you were here. Our look-outs saw your plane come down and we thought you were either dead or taken prisoner by the Wellischers. We came out after that raid to see if we could cut some of them off as they tried to get back. Our people killed quite a lot of them and cleared the rest out of the trenches.”

  “Were there many of them? ”

  “About a hundred I reckon.”

  “Is it usual then for the Stosstruppen to take on the enemy at odds of three against a hundred? ”

  “Oh, not unusual at all. Moral force and quickness on your feet is what counts in this sort of warfare. In the trenches a dozen real soldiers can see off a thousand conscripts—or perhaps two thousand if they’re Italians. Cowardly rabble: no stomach for fighting at all—except for a few of their own storm-troops that is, the ‘Arditi.’ Some of them are quite good I understand, but they wear body armour, which isn’t much use and weighs a man down too much. We believe in fighting light, as you see.”

  He was quite right about that: he and his men had no rifles or equip­ment, only a haversack full of stick-grenades slung over one shoulder, a gas-mask canister over the other and a short, vicious-looking spiked cosh. Friml smiled as he showed me his own version of this weapon. It consisted of a wooden handle with a short length of tight-coiled steel spring and, on the end of that, a steel ball studded with hobnails. I noticed that the handle bore rows of filed notches.

  “There, how do you like it?” he enquired. “I had it made specially. Much better than the standard issue. Here, look . . .” He bent down and picked up a battered, rusty Italian steel helmet which I supposed had once belonged to the dead soldier: the French “poilu” type, with a raised comb along the crown. He placed it on a stone, then dealt it a sudden blow with his cosh. The helmet-top caved in like an eggshell. “Not bad, eh? And it’s pretty well silent too. Most of them never know what hit them. I’ve killed at least fifty men with it, but I haven’t kept a close account lately. I did for twenty of them at least that afternoon at San Martino. We had about two hundred trapped in a bombshelter. They tried to surrender, but we just squirted flame-throwers in through the air vents. You shou
ld have heard them howl in there. I had a wonderful time of it: stood by the entrance knocking them off one by one as they tried to get out with their hair on fire. Half-trained conscript refuse the lot of them: there wasn’t one of them over twenty.” He smiled as if at some idyllic memory.

  “How old are you, Herr Leutnant?” I enquired. To me he looked about thirty-five.

  “Twenty-three last birthday.”

  “And do you expect to see twenty-four at this rate?” To my surprise he seemed not to be at all put out at this question.

  “That all depends,” he replied, smiling. “It’s my belief that bullets find out the cowards and weaklings, so I may come through. I’ve been wounded nine times, but nothing serious so far. Anyway, whether I live or not scarcely matters. The thing that the Front has taught me above all else is that in this century the ‘we’ will be everything and the ‘I’ noth­ing. So what if I do die? The blood and the nation will live on after me as they lived before me. We are the aristocracy of mankind, we trench- fighters: the steel panthers, the very finest specimens that the human race has ever produced, without fear and without pity. The devil take the rest of them, the conscript herd corrupted by town-living and Jew- culture. They’re good for nothing but following up an attack and occu­pying ground already taken. It’s the front-fighters who bear mankind forward with them in the attack.”

  I ventured the view—diffidently, eyeing the spring-loaded cosh as I did so—that at the present rate of losses, if the Stosstruppen were indeed the vanguard of the human species then by about 1924 we would have regressed to the early Stone Age.

  “A typical peacetime soldier’s view,” he replied. “The reason why people like you can’t cope with this war—and most regular officers can’t in my opinion—is that you regard this sort of war, total war, as an aberra­tion. Well, it isn’t, the Front is the future: permanent war; the Darwinian battle for survival in which only the strongest and those of the purest blood will survive.”

  So this was the modern age, I thought to myself: less than two decades into the Century of Scientific Progress and Rationality and here are men fighting in this dreadful wilderness with weapons and ideas more appro­priate to the Dark Ages.

  “Anyway,” I said at last, “do you want us to come back with you now or shall we wait until dark? Sunbathing out here with a corpse for company is not really my idea of a pleasant afternoon.”

  Friml looked puzzled for a moment, then regarded the remains of the dead Italian as if he had just noticed them.

  “What, this one here?” He laughed. “You’ll pretty soon get used to sights like that once you’ve been here at the Front for a while: that and much worse. It’s nothing really: just a quantity of decaying tissue re­turning to the soil from which it grew . . .” At that moment there was a tremendous crash near by which knocked the breath from our lungs and sent stone fragments shrieking over our heads. As we picked ourselves up I put my fingers into my ears in an attempt to stop the ringing in my dislodged eardrums. Friml was much amused by this.

  “War music, Herr Leutnant, the orchestra of battle. That was a 20cm by the sound of it. You’ll get used to it after a while, so that you hardly notice it any longer . . .” He paused, alert. “Quiet,” he whispered, “what’s that? . . .”

  As my ears began to function once more I realised that what I had taken to be the ringing left by the blast was in fact voices nearby: voices talking quite loudly in Italian. We all listened intently. There seemed to be two of them, in a crater near the aeroplane wreck: two soldiers left behind by the raiders to guard it until nightfall and the arrival of the sal­vage party. By the sound of their voices they seemed to be an older man and a youth. Whoever they were, they were certainly very unwise to be conversing so loudly in broad daylight when predators like Friml and his men were roaming the battlefield. Friml crouched, intent as a cat stalk­ing a bird. Slowly, he drew a stick-grenade out of his haversack, tugged the toggle at the base of the handle, waited poised for what seemed like hours, but could only have been a couple of seconds—then threw it in a graceful arc to land somewhere out of sight. There was a muffled explo­sion and a puff of white smoke, then silence for a while. Then the wailing began. It was frightful to listen to. The older man seemed to have been killed outright, but the younger was still alive—just. If you see people in films spinning around and falling and lying still, do not imagine for one moment that this represents anything other than Hollywood’s deodorised idea of death in action. In reality sixty or seventy kilograms of muscle, blood and bone have a great deal of life left in them even when they have been blasted and scorched and shot through with a hundred slivers of red- hot metal. It began with invocations to the Holy Virgin, then to God and Jesus and the saints, then to his mother. A second grenade served only to make the screams louder, until at last they subsided into a moan, then ceased altogether.

  “Right,” said Friml, “we’d better get back now. I didn’t want to use that second grenade. The Italians’ll soon be calling down artillery on us if they’ve spotted the smoke-puffs. Let’s go. Just get out when I say and follow me.”

  The Italians had indeed seen the grenade bursts: we left the crater just as their first shell arrived. After that I have only a very hazy recollection of events as we scrambled crazily from hole to hole with shells dropping all around us. We fell into an old trench and half ran, half crawled along that for some way, tumbling as we did so over dimly glanced things which I was heartily thankful not to have time to examine properly. At last we found the entrance to the tunnel in the wire from which Friml and his compan­ions used to sally forth on their raids, and squirmed our way along it on our bellies like rabbits in a gorse thicket. What seemed like several hours later, we heard at last the challenge of an Austrian sentry. We were safe.

  Our hosts were the ninth battalion of Imperial and Royal Infantry Regiment No. 4, “Hoch-und-Deutschmeister”; the city of Vienna’s lo­cal regiment. I had seen the old Deutschmeisters back in 1913, swinging proudly along the Ringstrasse in the great parade to mark the centenary of the battle of Leipzig. That had been a different world, and they had been different men. The old k.u.k. Armee was odd among the armies of Europe in having no foot-guards regiments. However, among the Emperor of Austria’s soldiers it was generally recognised that the four Tiroler Kaiserjager regiments were the elite, and that after them the Deutschmeisters were the premier line-infantry regiment, allocated the finest-looking of each year’s crop of recruits. They were all long since gone, dead in Poland and Serbia. The ranks had been refilled several times already, and the Deutschmeisters of 1916 were sorry specimens in com­parison with their predecessors of only two years before: undersized, ill- nourished and pathetically young conscripts from the grey slum tenements of Vienna’s outer districts. Clad in shoddy wartime ersatz uniforms, they looked a woebegone lot, even after making allowance for the effects of a prolonged sojourn in the Carso trenches. Not the least of the disturbing effects of service in the front line, I observed, was that it made everyone look alike: lifeless, drawn faces and eyes sunk deep into their sockets. It seemed that the battalion had already been holding this sector without relief since early August, its losses made up by sending new drafts forward into the line by night, or whenever the shelling eased up. Those who had been here since the beginning of the Sixth Battle—perhaps a third of the battalion now—already had that characteristic glazed look that resulted from a long stay at the Front. My second wife Edith had been a nurse in Flanders in 1917, and she told me of the extreme shell-shock cases, the ones whose minds had completely given way, like poor Schraffl’s. But my­self, from what I saw during that brief spell in the trenches on the Svinjak, I think that everyone who survived the front line in that war must have come out of it at least mildly deranged. Quite apart from anything else there was the awful brain-jarring noise. At least in France I suppose that some of the noise from exploding shells was muffled by the soil. Here on the Carso they had only rock to burst on, and they would go off with a
bright yellow flash and a vicious, jarring crash which seemed to make one’s skull ring like a bell in sympathy. It was maddening; unendurable except (I suppose) by switching one’s brain off and going through it all on reflexes alone.

  The Adjutant of the Deutschmeister battalion was very courteous to us, once Friml had handed us over. He greeted me before I recognised him. He was a young officer called Max Weinberger, the son of the Viennese music publisher. We had met one evening late in 1913 at one of my Aunt Aleksia’s literary evenings, but I had failed to recognise him now under the dust and grey exhaustion of the Front. He was now the only other sur­vivor from the ninth battalion’s officer strength at the start of August, he said. But he still found time to make arrangements for our transfer to the rear, along with a batch of prisoners captured after the recent trench raid. I noticed that he was very solicitous of their welfare and had appointed three sentries to watch over them in their dug-out. I thought this exces­sive, since they showed no inclination whatever to escape; in fact seemed only too pleased to be getting out of the war.

  “They’re not there to stop them escaping,” he confided in me. “They’re there to protect the poor bastards against Friml and his gang. The day before yesterday we were holding twenty of them in a dug-out, waiting to get them back when the barrage lifted, and one of Friml’s men tossed a grenade in among them for fun. The swine was grinning all over his face: said that he’d dropped it by accident. I was going to have him arrested but Friml kicked up a row and said that line officers have no authority over the Stosstruppen . . .” he smiled, “. . . and all the more so when they’re dirty Jews like myself.”