The Two-Headed Eagle поп-3

by Джон Биггинс

  “Gnadiges Fraulein, what was the address you gave him, if I might ask?”

  She giggled deliciously. “The back entrance of the Other Ranks’ knocking-shop on the Via Gorizia. There should be quite a stir among the townsfolk when his car draws up there. I hope he enjoys himself.”

  She turned to Toth and took him by the arm, digging him in the ribs with her elbow. “Quod dices, O Zolli? Princeps maxime fatuus est, non verum?”

  I must say that I was rather shocked by this, even if filled with a certain admiration. I would not have expected convent-educated Slovene village maidens to know that such things as military bordellos even existed, let alone their address.

  After the presentation Toth and I went to see the Medical Officer in Haidenschaft. We were both suffering from chest pains and nausea. Our eyes were sore and red and Toth was developing a fine inflamed rash around his neck. The Medical Officer diagnosed the after-effects of poi­son gas and wrote us each out a note authorising us to go and take two weeks’ immediate leave somewhere with clear air. He said that we would soon get over it—he thought that it sounded like a phosgene derivative, and apparently one needed to inhale quite a lot of phosgene to be perma­nently injured by it—but he recommended us both to get well away from the Front for a while. “Nervous tension: all the fliers get it before long. Too much altitude and excitement and inhaling petrol fumes. Yes, yes, I know the poor devils in the trenches have a much worse time of it; but for them it’s largely a matter of endurance, and they’ve got their comrades around them all the time to support them. Up in the air you fellows are completely on your own and, believe me, the strain begins to show very quickly.”

  So a telegram was sent to Elisabeth at her hospital in Vienna, and that evening I boarded the train at Divacca. She had been due for leave for quite some time now, and in any case she would soon be tendering her resignation on grounds of pregnancy. However, we wanted to be alone together and I doubted whether we would be allowed that in the capital, so I told her to pack her bags for a holiday in my home town of Hirschendorf in northern Moravia. She had never met my father, so here was a wonder­ful opportunity to combine convalescent leave with filial duty.

  We met early the next morning on the platform at the Franz Josephs Bahnhof. It was not quite a month since I had last seen her, but still her beauty struck me as forcibly as it had the first time I had met her, in Budapest the previous year. Beauty in women, I have always found, is far more a matter of personality than of looks. True, Elisabeth was certainly well provided for in the latter department, as are many Hungarian women (though in her case she counted Romanians, Italians, Russians and even Scots among her ancestors). But her dark-green eyes and dark-brown, almost black hair and fine-boned oval face would have been nothing without the gaiety and intelligence and grace of manner that illuminated them from within. She rushed over to meet me as I climbed down from the fiacre which had carried me from the Sudbahnhof. She was wearing a summer frock and hat and carried a parasol, since military nurses were allowed to wear civilian clothes off-duty. She flung her arms around me and kissed me, then stood back to look at me.

  “Well, still alive I see after all. Whose idea was it to send me that telegram? ”

  “Yes, I know. They could have waited. It was only a minor accident and they might at least have contacted the unit holding the sector where we came down. It was my commanding officer I’m afraid. I’d have wrung his neck for him but he was out when I got back to the airfield. Did it upset you very much?”

  She smiled faintly. “I can’t say that it gave me a very agreeable sen­sation in the pit of my stomach when I opened it—until I looked at the date. Luckily it seems to have been delayed and I’d opened yours first. But your commanding officer—Kralik or whatever his name is—he sounds a first-class rotter. ‘It is my sad but proud duty to announce to you that your husband has died a glorious flier’s death on the field of eternal honour . . .’ I mean, who in their right mind writes stuff like that two years into a world war? He sounded almost glad that you’d been killed—as if I ought to send a telegram back thanking the Army for making me a widow second time around.”

  “Did you think that they had?”

  “Not really: in my heart I knew that you’d be all right. I just knew— woman’s intuition I suppose.”

  “Flying’s a dangerous business, you know? I never wrote to you about how many men and machines we’ve lost these past few weeks, or the scrapes I’ve had.”

  “I knew that perfectly well. We’ve had a lot of burnt and smashed-up airmen coming into the hospital recently. But I still knew that you’d be all right. Don’t ask me why, I just knew. I’ve got a little picture of the Blessed Virgin on my bedside table next to your photograph and I pray to that each morning and evening to keep you safe.”

  “I thought that you didn’t believe in all that sort of thing?”

  “I don’t. But it’s like the man who went around Messina a few years ago after the earthquake selling anti-earthquake pills. When the police arrested him he asked them, ‘Well, what else do you suggest?’ I think that my prayers keep you up in the air and turn aside the bullets by force of will. I know it sounds crazy but I’m sure that it works. And anyway, there’s nothing else that I can do for you. I tried to talk you into desert­ing when we were up in the mountains in Transylvania—even arranged you somewhere to hide until the war was over—but you wouldn’t hear of it: the Honour of the House of Austria and your duty to your men and so on. So I’m afraid that whatever protection that I can give you now is only second-best.”

  “And I’m sure that it’ll see me through.”

  She smiled. “Well, let’s look on the bright side of things. You’ve got this far without a scratch, so I imagine you must be quite good at flying. And anyway, every day’s a day nearer the end of the war. Surely it can’t go on much longer. The papers say that the French have lost half a million men at Verdun; so you can be pretty sure the Germans have lost even more. At this rate there’s not going to be anyone left before long. The k.u.k.

  Armee’s sending men back into the line now after their fourth or fifth wound, barely out of hospital. It can’t last much longer—and between us the Virgin Mary and I are going to make damned well sure that you see the end of it.”

  I was silent for a while, pressing her warm body against me. I was thinking of the dying Italian soldier sobbing and moaning after Friml had tossed the stick-bomb into his shell crater. Doubtless his family and sweetheart had been praying for his safety and lighting candles even as he pumped his life blood out into that dismal hole. And a lot of good it had done him. Like most men who emerged from that war, such vestiges of religious faith as I had once possessed were finally blasted away by the barrages. The mind-numbing enormity of it all so outraged imagination, so transgressed normal experience, that all the comfortable little formu­lations of the bishops and theologians have sounded to me since like the empty jangling of the tin cans on the wire after an attack.

  The train was crowded, shabby and slow, drawn by a locomotive with badly worn axle bearings and burning lignite, which gave about as much heat as damp newspaper. It took us most of the day to crawl miserably across the Moravian countryside, through Lindenberg and Prerau. The day was grey and close; not August weather at all. It had been a dismal sum­mer north of the Alps and one did not need to be a country-town boy like myself to see as we trundled along that the harvest this year would be a poor one. In fact the most obtuse of city dwellers would have noticed the ground visible between the stalks of rye in the fields, and the fact that the harvesters were mostly old people and women and children with the oc­casional soldier on leave and a few parties of Russian prisoners. Elisabeth and I talked little as we clanked along. The compartment was crowded, the corridor was packed with soldiers going on leave, we were both tired out and anyway, it was quite sufficient for us to be near one another: two insignificant specks of dust clinging together for a while as the whirlwind bowled us along.

&nb
sp; We arrived at Hirschendorf Station early that evening—only to find to my utter dismay that the town band and a welcoming committee were waiting for us. There were cheers and speeches, and I was invited to ap­pear next day, 18 August, in the town square at the festivities to mark the Emperor’s eighty-sixth birthday. I groaned inside, but I could hardly refuse. Ever since anyone could remember the Kaisersgeburtstag had been one of the fixed points of the Austrian year, by now (it seemed) as immutable a date on the calendar as Christmas and All Souls’ Day. As the town of Hirschendorf’s most famous son—a Maria-Theresien Ritter no less—it would clearly be impossible for me to refuse my attendance. Already reporters from the Hirschendorfer Nachrichten were buttonholing me to arrange interviews, and someone was asking me something about opening a war exhibition. It was beginning to look as if we might as well have stayed in Vienna after all.

  The town where I was born and grew up was not much of a place re- ally—little more than a scaled-up version of Haidenschaft: a typical small Austrian provincial town of the late nineteenth century with a cobbled square, a large baroque church with onion domes and a government of­fice block in that curious heavy neo-Italianate style—invariably painted a darkish yellow ochre—which distinguished all the public buildings of the Dual Monarchy. Like all such provincial towns, its life before the war had been inseparably bound up with the countryside around it. In my child­hood one always knew which way the wind was blowing by the smell: the warm sweet smell of malt when the south wind was blowing from the brewery; the sharp, clean tang of resin when the east wind was blowing from the sawmills; and that peculiar, sour, dungheap-and-treacle odour of beet when the west wind was blowing across the sugar factory. All that had changed now, as we approached the third year of the war. True, the sawmills were still at their old occupation—in fact working three shifts a day to convert the thousands of trees hacked wantonly from the Silesian forests into boards and timbers for dug-out roofs and ammunition wag­ons. As for the beet factory though, it had been turned over to the manu­facture of artillery shells, lathes screeching day and night like the souls of the damned to produce the cases which would then be taken to a rickety sprawl of huts a few kilometres outside the town to be filled with explosive. Most of the town’s remaining able-bodied population—that is to say, its women—were now working in the munitions factories and could readily be distinguished by the butter-yellow complexions which came from in­haling TNT fumes all day. The wages were good, they said, but they were paid in paper and steel money which brought less and less each week.

  As for the brewery, it was still in business; more or less. But the once powerful and highly esteemed Hirschendorfer lager beer with its stag’s- head label had now become a sorry fluid for lack of barley: a pale straw colour with a froth like soap scum, and barely strong enough to crawl from the tap into the mug now that most of its remaining alcohol content was being extracted for the munitions industry. It made me wonder why on earth anyone bothered drinking the stuff any more. But then, I suppose that there was not a great deal else on offer either in the late summer of 1916. Rubber and copper were distant memories. The parish church of St Johann Nepomuk had voluntarily donated its bells to the war effort by government order the previous year. Even leather for shoes was becom­ing hard to find now, so that the women wore clacking canvas monstrosi­ties with wooden soles once their pre-war footwear had fallen to pieces. As for clothing, wool was reserved for military uniforms and cotton was unobtainable because of the blockade, so that left linen (which was now in increasing demand for covering aircraft) or, failing that, hemp, nettle fibre or spun paper, which had a disturbing way of coming to pieces in the rain.

  Elisabeth told me that for some months past she and her fellow-nurses had been obliged to spend a large part of each day washing cotton ban­dages—except that the bandages were now dropping to pieces from con­stant reuse and were being replaced by crepe paper, or a substitute fibre made from the inner bark of the willow tree: “superior in every respect to cotton,” a journalist had written in the Reichspost. Elisabeth’s eyes had blazed up with fury when I showed her this cheerful little article, and she had uttered certain words in Magyar which, although I could not under­stand them, certainly sounded not to be the sort of expression that nice convent-educated girls ought to know.

  Until now, I was told, food had not been too difficult out here in the countryside, even if groceries like coffee and tea and chocolate and soap had all long since carried the loathsome qualifications “ersatz” and “surrogat” and “kriegs.” But now butter and milk and meat were in short supply, and before long (it was said) even barley and potatoes might be scarce. I talked with old Josef Jindrich the forester, husband of my child­hood nurse Hanuska.

  “Yes, young master Ottokar,” he said, rubbing his bony old chin as we sat in the parlour of their cottage, “it’s a bad business and no mistake, this war of theirs. I fought with the old 54th Regiment back in ’66, and that was bad enough; but at least we lost after six weeks and it was all over. Who’d have thought this war would go on so long? Mark my words, we’re in for a bad harvest this year. They say it’s the British blockade, but that’s eyewash if you ask me. It’s all the men and horses they’ve taken off the land, that’s what. And Vienna and their war prices. They’ve set them so low that the country-people aren’t growing to sell any more, just enough for themselves and some for the black market. Yes, my young sir, if you want my opinion that old fool at Schonbrunn’s declared one war too many this time . . .” he grinned, “. . . and if you like you can bring a gendarme along here to arrest me for saying so. I’ll just show him my old army pay- book and the wound I got at Trautenau.”

  I found though that the changes wrought by the war in the material circumstances of life in that small town were as nothing compared to the alteration in its people, as if the human spirit was also in short sup­ply and being replaced by an ersatz version. I had not been home a great deal in recent years. I had gone to the Imperial and Royal Naval Academy in Fiume in 1900, my mother had died two years later and my brother Anton had entered the Army as an Aspirant in 1903. My father had re­mained in Hirschendorf, immersed in his duties as k.k. Deputy District Superintendent of Posts and Telegraphs and (after hours) in his activities as one of the leading luminaries of the local Pan-German Nationalist movement. I had been home to see him from time to time over the years, even though my home town—in so far as a sailor can ever have one—was now Pola. But this was largely a duty performed out of filial piety. My father had never been an easy man to get on with, so the visits had become less and less frequent with the years.

  We had last met in Vienna back in July, when he was invited to my investiture as a Maria-Theresien Ritter, and also to my wedding two days later. In the event the wedding had been cancelled—or rather, much re­duced in scale and moved to a suburban registry office—and the old man had been cabled not to bother coming. Not that he had minded a great deal: he disapproved of the marriage on eugenic principle—mingling good Germanic blood with that of a Magyar-Romanian minor aristocrat from Transylvania, even though it was patently obvious that both he and I were solid square-faced Slav peasants. Remarks had been made about “the degenerate mongrel aristocracy of the Habsburg corpse-empire; the sweepings of Europe gathered up by Vienna and set to rule over the solid fair-haired peasants and burghers of the Germanic borderlands.” In fact he had not been too keen on the Cross of Maria Theresa either: “a piece of worthless Habsburg tinware manufactured in the Jew-shops of Vienna” was how he had chosen to characterise the Old Monarchy’s high­est military honour. I believe that he bore no particular animus against Elisabeth as a person—after all, being a degenerate mongrel aristocrat was not her fault—but there was no warmth either. Before he had turned to German Nationalism my father had once been a Czech liberal nation­alist, and he still retained a Czech democrat’s somewhat less than total admiration for countesses, even where (as in this case) the countess had renounced her title and was about as d
evoid of snobbery as it is possible for anyone to be.

  In any case, the old boy had more important things on his mind at present than his son’s new wife: he had just become the local organiser of the recently formed Deutscher Volksbund in this part of Moravia. It was a mark, I suppose, of how far the Habsburg state had fallen into senile decay by the year 1916 that it could now look through its fingers when a quite high-ranking provincial civil servant became a part-time function­ary of an extreme German nationalist organisation which, if not exactly a political party, was not far off being one. In days gone by Vienna had been intensely mistrustful of any nationalist activity, German quite as much as any other sort, and would not have tolerated it for one moment in a civil servant. The old doctrine was that whoever entered the service of the House of Austria ceased to have a nationality. And to be fair to them, nearly everyone lived up to that high ideal. But now it seemed that after two years of war and a humiliating chain of defeats rectified only by German troops and German brains, the Dual Monarchy was fast be­coming a spiritual colony of the Greater German Reich, which already extended from Flanders to the marshes of the Tigris.

  The Deutscher Volksbund claimed to be nothing more than a pa­triotic organisation of German-speakers within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But you would certainly have been hard put to it to see any sign of that in our house on the Olmutzergasse. It had been turned into a shrine to the Goddess Germania, with more than a hint of Wotan- worship. Portraits of Hindenburg and Ludendorff hung on the walls, draped in black-red-gold banners. A smaller portrait of the German Kaiser hung below them. Garlands in the black-white-red of Prussia bedecked a full-length portrait of Oberleutnant Brandys, the spike- helmeted hero who was supposed to have captured Fort Douanmont at Verdun virtually single-handed. Everywhere, posters for the German Flottenverein and the 7th War Loan and the German Women’s League; posters exhorting Gott to straff Engeland and for people to give their Gold in exchange for Eisen. A vast map of Europe covered the whole of one wall. On it the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires had been merged with most of Belgium and sizeable chunk of northern France into one dingy uniform expanse of field grey surrounded by barbed wire and with its borders bristling with bayonets. Beneath it was a legend in Gothic script: It has come at fast, never to perish—% reich °f ninety millions. In the alcove in the hallway, where once the family’s statue of the Madonna had stood, was now a wooden pedestal bearing a German steel helmet—the kind Oberleutnant Friml and his marauders had been wearing a few days before—with a slot cut in the top for coins. A plaque fixed to the pedestal proclaimed: The most sublime shape our century has yet produced: not the work of an artist's studio, but forged from the union of the German spirit with German steef. It was all intensely depressing.