The Two-Headed Eagle поп-3

by Джон Биггинс

  “From what you tell me Oberleutnant Friml sounds a difficult guest.”

  “Difficult? I tell you, the man’s completely mad, more of a danger to us than to the Italians. Everywhere he goes he stirs up trouble, then leaves us to dodge the mortar bombs they send over. Every time he goes out we hope he’ll get it, but always he comes back. He’s not right in the head and half his men would have ended up on the gallows as common murderers but for this rotten war. Do you know what he makes them do to qualify for his storm-company? They have to pull the toggle on a stick bomb, then balance it on top of their helmet and stand to attention until it goes off. He must have killed dozens with that trick. And now I hear they’re put­ting him up for the Maria Theresa. I tell you, if I were a Maria-Theresien Ritter and they made that criminal one as well, I’d send them their medal back by the next post.”

  Toth and I made our way back along the communication trench that eve­ning. We were shaken, and torn by barbed wire, and my chest ached from the effects of the gas, but otherwise we were none the worse for our crash landing in no man’s land—and I still had the valves from the wireless sets tucked inside my flying jacket. There were about thirty of us in the party: a guide, Toth and me, the Italian prisoners, plus three badly wounded men on stretchers and two corpses, whom we made the Italians carry. The dead were both victims of the trench-mortar mine about midday: two blanket- covered forms and two pairs of dust-clogged boots joggling lifelessly as we manhandled the stretchers across heaps of broken rock and squeezed against the trench-walls to let ration parties go by. Alongside one of the bundles on the stretcher were the smashed remains of a crude violin made from a petrol can. I saw it, and suddenly felt very ashamed of myself for my flippant thoughts that morning about amateur musicians.

  Once we were over the brow of the Svinjak and in the dead ground on the other side, out of view of the enemy, I was able stand up straight and look back at the fantastic jumble of dug-outs and shelters on the reverse slope. Made promiscuously from the local stone and from sandbags and cement and timber and corrugated iron, the whole crazy troglodyte town sprawled along the safe side of the bleak limestone ridge, like a lost city of the Incas high in the Andes, or the rock tombs of some long-forgotten civilisation in the Arabian desert. What an odd world we live in, I thought; once we buried old men because they were dead, and now young men have to bury themselves in order to stay alive.

  The need for this impressed itself upon me very forcibly as we came out of the protective lee of the Svinjak. The Italians might not be able to see us, but their artillery could still throw shells over the ridge. Almost before we could think they were howling down to burst on the rock all about us, sending more splinters and fragments of hot metal rattling viciously along the trench walls. Our guide motioned us all into a bomb shelter cut into the side of the rock trench and roofed with railway sleep­ers. We scrambled in, leaving only the dead outside. The guide was a battalion message-runner, a Viennese lad of about nineteen selected not for his physique—he was an under-nourished product of the slum tene­ments—but for his agility and cunning in dodging shells. We crouched there for the next half-hour until the shelling stopped. Our guide seemed not to be unduly concerned. Cigarettes were passed around by one of the Italians, and he lit his up as calmly as if he had been waiting for a tram on the Mariahilferstrasse.

  “Hot this evening,” I ventured as a shell crashed near by, showering us with dust and debris.

  He considered for a moment, exhaling the smoke with an expression of intense pleasure: it was months since we had been able to get cigarettes free of dried horse manure.

  “Obediently report that it’s not too bad today, Herr Leutnant. They dropped a heavy right in among a relief party here last week: scraping them up with spoons we were.” I saw that he was not exaggerating: I had suddenly noticed a blackening human finger lying below the duckboards of the shelter. “No,” he went on, drawing on his cigarette, “most days it’s worse than this.”

  “How do you stand it out here, week after week?”

  He laughed at this. “Oh, we get by, Herr Leutnant, we get by some­how. All depends what you’re used to I suppose. I grew up in Ottakring, eight of us in one room and my dad out of work for three years, so I sup­pose this isn’t too bad really. The smell’s about the same, the food’s better and the meals are more regular if the ration parties don’t get blown up on the way; and there’s about the same amount of space to lie down in our dug-out. So overall it’s not too bad a life if you don’t think more than twenty seconds ahead. I’ve got a brother with the 11th Army in the Alps and he says it’s like a holiday camp up there—except that the Wellischers send a shell over every now and then and someone gets killed. He hopes the war’ll go on until he retires, he says.”

  I found that our Italians were also realists about the war. Peasants from Basilicata with sad, honest brown faces and lugubrious black mous­taches, they had the look of men who never expected life to be much fun—and who have not been disappointed in this expectation. I could barely understand what they were saying with my Venetian Austro-Italian. But from what I could grasp I gathered that they were less than totally filled with eroismo ardente. I asked one of them, a man rather older than the rest, where they were supposed to be going with this offensive of theirs. He replied that he had no idea and cared less; knew only that the signori ufficiali and the military police would take a poor view of them if they didn’t go forward when the whistles blew.

  “Pah! La guerra—cosa di padroni!” he spat. His companions all spat as well and cursed the whims of the bosses, which had torn them from their families and smallholdings and sent them to fight for the Carso Plateau—“il Carso squallido,” as they called it, with a great deal of spit­ting and obscene gestures. Then they fell to reviling the politicians and journalists who had got them into this mess.

  “Politics,” they said, “dirty business. Where we live Italy is an express train: it only stops around election time. All we see of it in between is the tax collector and the recruiting sergeant.”

  “And what about your oppressed brothers in Trieste, groaning under the Austrian yoke? At least, that’s what the newspapers tell you.”

  “We don’t read the newspapers,” replied the older man with great dig­nity, “because we are illiterate. But as for the Triestini, we couldn’t care a farthing. Would the Triestini come and rescue us when the landlords and the money lenders tip us off our land to beg? I tell you, Tenente, I care as much about fighting for Trieste as I do for New York.”

  A younger soldier interrupted him. “No, Beppo, fair’s fair. Myself, I’d much rather fight for New York than for Trieste: I’ve got a brother liv­ing in Brooklyn and he sends us money orders.” Everyone laughed, and thought this a very apt remark.

  “Well,” I asked, “if you are so fed up with the war why do you go on fighting? ”

  They found this hugely amusing. One of them levelled a finger and traversed it around slowly, squinting along it as he did so:

  “. . . Sette, otto, nove—PAFF! . . . diciasette, diciaotto, diciannove— PAFF!”

  From this I gathered that, if nothing else, the Kingdom of Italy, self-proclaimed heir to ancient Rome, had borrowed from its ancestor a number of practices in the area of military discipline.

  Some weeks after these events I happened to mention Oberleutnant Friml to Flik 19F’s Technical Officer Franz Meyerhofer, who was also a Sudetenlander.

  “Oh, that thug?” he said, “ ‘the Death-Angel of the Isonzo Front,’ as the papers are calling him? Funny thing, but we were at school together in Eger. He was about six years below me, but my brother was in the same class.”

  “What was he like then? ”

  “Rather a weed, my brother said: always being picked on, and wouldn’t go skating and playing football like the rest. He left school after his Matura and became a life-insurance salesman. It’s strange really what the war brings out in people.”

  I happened to meet Friml again on the las
t day of 1916, at a New Year’s party in Vienna. He had recently won the Maria Theresa, but he was clearly in a very bad way: nerves completely gone to pieces. He was killed a few weeks after he got back to the trenches: by snake bite, I understand. It was a very odd business I remember, from the reports that I heard of the enquiry. He took his boots off and got into the bunk in his dug-out after a raid, and was bitten by a horn-nosed viper hiding under the blankets. His men said that the snake must have been hibernating there, but they called in a snake expert who said that horn-nosed vipers don’t hibernate.

  So they changed tack and said that it must have hidden there from fright during a bombardment. In which case, said the expert, it must have been a very frightened reptile indeed, and very disorientated, because horn-nosed vipers are unknown north of the Dinara Mountains, about three hundred kilometres further south. The military procurators tried pinning it on a Croat soldier in Friml’s storm-company, but the rest of the men closed ranks and they could never get enough evidence for a charge of murder. I suppose that it was better in a way that he died: I would have hated to think of him back in civilian clothes, reduced to selling life insurance on the streets of Eger with his spring-loaded cosh in one hand and a briefcase in the other. The “trincera-crazies,” the Italians called them. Europe’s tragedy was not the Oberleutnant Frimls who died, I think; it was the ones who came back.

  9 HOME FRONT

  We arrived back at Fliegerfeld Caprovizza early next morning to find that we had been posted missing. Obser­vation posts on the ridge of Debeli Vrh had seen a Lloyd two-seater hit by anti-aircraft fire over Monfalcone and had watched it come down in no man’s land on the Svinjak. I also discovered to my fury that my commanding officer Hauptmann Kraliczek had gone a step further and reported us both dead in action, in consequence of which a telegram had already been sent to my wife in Vienna. So it was nec­essary for me to leap straight away on to a bicycle, still in my tattered flying overalls, bone-weary and covered in trench grime, and rush to Haidenschaft telegraph office to send a telegram telling her that I was all right. Then it was back to Caprovizza, muttering curses against my commanding officer, and to bed for a few hours’ much-needed sleep, my head still ringing from shellbursts and my lungs aching from the after-effects of gas.

  I was woken up by my batman Petrescu a few hours later, still feel­ing rather seedy. A staff officer was waiting to see me outside my tent. I came out, unshaven and blinking in the sunlight, and had my hand warmly shaken by an Oberst, the Air Liaison Officer from 5th Army Headquarters, who had motored down from Marburg to meet me. He congratulated me on my extraordinary feat in bringing down the airship Citta di Piacenza the previous day, and requested that I should please to present myself with my pilot in Haidenschaft that afternoon to be intro­duced to the Heir-Apparent, the young Archduke Karl, who was visiting the troops in the area and had expressed the wish to meet us. I mentioned the missing wireless set, and obediently reported that we had managed to retrieve some parts of it the previous day even if we had lost an aeroplane and almost lost our own lives in doing so. He seemed surprised.

  “Top-secret? Not to my knowledge. I’ll speak with the Corps Technical Officer, but so far as I’m aware those valve sets came off the secret list last month. There must have been a clerical slip-up somewhere. Anyway, don’t worry about it: your commanding officer was probably misinformed.”

  So we washed and shaved and spruced ourselves up, Toth and I, and got into a staff car to be driven to the town square in Haidenschaft to meet our future Emperor as he reviewed a guard of honour. A sizeable crowd had gathered in the little square to greet the Archduke and his entourage. As he drew up in his grey-green Daimler I got my first good look at the man who must surely become our ruler before much longer. He was a slight young man with an amiable if rather weak face, wearing the tunic—the austere field-grey “Karlbluse”—which he had made his trademark and which had been widely adopted of late as a mark of loyalty by front-officers of the more Kaisertreu variety. I noticed however, once I had had the chance to inspect this garment close-up, that it was well cut and of noticeably finer material than the increasingly shoddy wartime cloth that the rest of us wore.

  The young Archduke shook my hand: a curious palm-downwards handshake in which I had been schooled beforehand by an ADC and which involved me extending my own hand palm upwards as if solicit­ing a tip. He made the usual small talk—how long I had been an officer, where I came from etc. etc.? Then he questioned me on every detail of our attack on the Italian airship, and also on our exploit the previous day in landing behind enemy lines to retrieve the fragments of the wireless set. As to our experience in the front line, I must admit that I glossed over certain incidents: like that of our rummaging beneath a decomposing corpse in our desperate search for a gas mask. I suspected that members of the Imperial House were even more solicitously protected than the gen­eral public from the gruesome realities of life and death in the trenches, and I felt that he would find this story—like the murderous exploits of Oberleutnant Friml—too distressing to be borne. I took good care though to say a great deal about Toth’s courage and quick-wittedness in flinging a hand-grenade out of our shell hole—omitting only to mention that it was one of our side who had thrown it in the first place.

  The Heir-Apparent enquired why I had left the submarine service to take up flying? And I, for my part, was preparing to give him the expected answers: looking for ever more dangerous ways of winning honour for the Noble House of Austria and so on and so forth. But then I thought, why should I? Perhaps it was the shaking-up administered to my brain by shell fire the previous day, but a sudden wild thought came into my head: why not tell him the truth for once? There are more than enough lies and half-lies in this venerable Monarchy of ours, I thought, and more than enough court flunkeys to filter reality; and anyway, who needs the truth more than this young man, who will soon be ruling over fifty-five million people? So I told him that in fact I had not volunteered for the Flying Service, but had been volunteered for it by my superiors to get them off the hook with the Germans over their sunken U-Boat; and that while I had no objection to risking my neck each day as an officer-observer in the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe, I felt that my talents might still be more profit­ably employed back in my own trade at sea. He listened sympathetically, nodding as he did so and intoning, “Yes, yes.” He seemed to have had a look of concern built into his face in his mother’s womb. He concluded the conversation by remarking that so far as he could see an injustice had been done, then shook my hand in farewell and moved on to speak with Zugsfuhrer Toth.

  I knew now that I would henceforth be a marked man among the Habsburg officer corps for the rest of my days. In military life there are few offences against service propriety more heinous than that of going over the head of one’s immediate superior and complaining to his superi­ors. It is something which can occasionally be done, but only in the direst extremities and in the knowledge that one will be regarded with suspicion ever after. And now I, a junior naval officer, had committed the ultimate solecism by going to the man very near the top. Short of complaining to the Emperor himself I could scarcely have committed a greater outrage. And all for nothing: for I knew perfectly well from my experience of roy­alty that he would probably have forgotten about it already.

  The Heir-Apparent made a great deal of talking with Toth in Magyar. I asked him afterwards in Latin what the Archduke had said to him. He replied that he had not the faintest idea: he thought that the man was try­ing to speak Magyar, but that he was by no means sure.

  But at least there was some brightness in that dismal little square in Haidenschaft that afternoon. Our orders for the presentation had said that, if we wished, we might bring family members along to watch. Well, I had no family members nearer than Vienna. But not so Zugsfuhrer Toth: his Slovene girlfriend, the delightful Magdalena, had come along with him. And very fine she looked as well, wearing the gala version of the local costume: her best frock and bodice with the ad
dition of a lace-trimmed headband and coloured ribbons in her hair. The written orders had said “Ladies: promenade toilette or national costume,” and as I looked at her I was profoundly glad that she had chosen the latter, making herself a glori­ous splash of gaiety and colour amid the field-grey wartime drabness of the square, like a kingfisher amid a flock of town-sparrows. She was presented to the Heir-Apparent afterwards, curtsied most prettily and answered his questions intelligently and confidently in German.

  The Archduke passed on to someone else—and his place was imme­diately taken by a gangling and achingly aristocratic young ADC with a toothbrush moustache and a foolish grin: General stabshauptmann the Prince von and zu Steyer-Wurmischgarten and Rothenfels, or something like that. He completely ignored Toth, who as a ranker had to stand rigidly to attention before him. But he seemed very interested indeed in young Magdalena, even proposed taking her for a ride in his motor car, with perhaps a spot of supper afterwards at a hotel he knew in Marburg? I held my breath and watched Toth: assaulting an officer in wartime was a death- penalty offence. But I need not have worried; Magdalena smiled graciously and announced in her clear voice, “It is true, Your Serene Highness, that I am only a simple village girl and that you are a prince. But I’m afraid that Your Serene Highness has been watching too many operettas: we simple village girls aren’t anything like as simple as we used to be. However, if Your Serene Highness is desirous of the company of local young ladies I can supply him with the address of some very nice ones indeed.” The prince looked disappointed. But like a true soldier he seemed to recognise failure when he saw it and to be prepared to accept second-best. So the address was duly noted down in his pocket book before he bowed and left us. When he was out of earshot I asked her: