by Джон Биггинс
“Yes, I wondered that as well. In fact I was about to call for help in case he went completely loopy and started attacking me. But once I’d got my breath back he asked me again, so I told him that although I’d never had a great deal of opportunity to make comparisons—at convent we had to bathe wearing linen gowns—if he really had to know I thought that mine were quite dark, what with being half-Romanian and fairly brownskinned. And that did it: the silly fool just sat back and nodded to himself as if to say ‘Yes, just as I thought,’ then announced to me that we could never marry. ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘Because science has shown that dark nipples in a woman are a sign at least of Latin and possibly even of Jewish ancestry. No true German of pure racial stock can ever think of diluting the blood by miscegenation with those of other races. Women of pure Nordic race invariably have rose-pink nipples.’ ”
“I see what you mean. And what did you have to say to that?”
“I didn’t cry. Once I’d got over my surprise I just laughed and told him he was either joking or completely mad, and that either way I didn’t want anything to do with someone who sorts the human race into bloodlines like a racehorse breeder. In fact I told him that if he wanted a nice Germanic brood mare with a backside on her like the side of a house and blond plaits hanging down over her rose-pink nipples he’d better go putting advertisements in the local papers in the Salzkammergutt. The impertinent sod! And what’s wrong with Jewish ancestry anyway? I don’t know whether I’ve got any, but the de Bratianus have got a bit of just about everything else, so I’d be surprised if they didn’t have that as well.”
I considered all this for a while. “Yes, I suppose that it does sound a bit odd really, Liserl. But that isn’t conclusive proof of insanity. We’re all of us a little mad about something, and I’ve often seen that even the most reasonable people can have a potty opinion about something or other. When I was a cadet on my first voyage my old captain Slawetz von Lowenhausen was as fine a sailor as you could hope to meet—we’d all have followed him to the ends of the earth. But he had a thing about the crew shaving the hair off their legs: tried to make us do it each month because he believed it prevented malaria.”
“Yes, I know. But I still say he’s completely cracked. It’s just that there are so many cranks in Germany nowadays—weltpolitikers and macht- politikers and Wotanists and sun-worshippers and vegetarians and racial hygienists—that you don’t notice it any more. But believe me, if someone as bright as Svetozar von Potocznik can seriously believe that the worth of human beings is determined by the colour of their nipples, then there’s no hope for any of us. He’s mad I tell you: I’d suspected as much before then but ignored my instinct. It was a good thing I found out when I did—and that I met you the following week.” She turned to me. “You don’t care what colour my nipples are, do you Otto? And I’ll bet you’ve had more opportunity than most for making comparisons.”
“My dearest love, if they’re yours then for all I care they might as well be viridian or cobalt blue.”
She cuddled up to me as we walked. “You are sweet. I thought you’d say something like that.”
We set off to return to Vienna on the last day of August. We had agreed that Elisabeth would hand in her month’s notice when she got back to the hospital, and would then move to live with my Aunt Aleksia in her flat on the Josefsgasse. For my part I would return to my flying duties and hope that somehow, Zugsfuhrer Toth, Zoska and the Blessed Virgin between them would contrive to keep us airborne. So we bade my father farewell. He hardly noticed our departure since he was leaning over a world-map on the dining-room table, engrossed in a pamphlet concerning German plans for building a giant ship canal through the Caucasus and Hindu Kush to the head waters of the Ganges, so that ships would be able to steam overland from Rotterdam to Calcutta. He had asked my professional opinion upon the project as a naval officer, and had not been at all pleased when I had commented that it seemed an expensive way of avoiding seasickness. We took a fiacre to the station, and caught the local stopping train to get us to Oderberg junction so that we could board the Cracow—Vienna express.
We were only a couple of minutes out of the station at Grussbach when the train suddenly came to a shuddering, clanking halt in the middle of a pine forest. For some time there was no sound except the hissing of steam. Then there were shots in the wood, and the unmistakable crash of a stick-grenade. We waited uneasily. After a few minutes we heard the sound of voices and the crunch of boots on the trackside ballast. It was a party of five or six yellow-helmeted gendarmes with rifles slung at their shoulders, leading a captive. He was about nineteen or twenty I should think: tousle- haired, unshaven and with his face streaked with blood. He was wearing a tattered army greatcoat. His hands were tied behind his back and they were pulling him along by a halter around his neck, kicking him to his feet each time he stumbled and fell. They disappeared and the train started to move once more. The conductor came into our compartment.
“What on earth was all that about?” I asked him as he clipped my rail warrant.
“Nothing really, Herr Leutnant, just some trouble further up the line.”
“Trouble with whom?”
“With bandits, Herr Leutnant.” He lowered his voice. “At least, that’s what we’re supposed to say. Everyone knows it’s really deserters.”
“Deserters? Surely not around here, this far from the Front.”
“Deserters sure enough: men who came home on leave and didn’t bother reporting back. There’s a lot of them in these forests now. They live by robbing the farms—though from what I hear there’s more than enough of the villagers who’ll give them food and hide them in their barns. Dirty rotten Czechs—the Bohmes all want shooting if you ask me. There’s not one of them wouldn’t run away if you gave them the chance.”
10 PAPER AEROPLANES
I returned to Fliegerfeld Haidenschaft-Caprovizza on the first day of September 1916. It appeared that not a great deal had happened during my fortnight’s absence. The Sixth Battle of the Isonzo had fizzled out around 20 August, as the Italians ran low on artillery shells. In those two weeks they had captured the town of Gorz and had then pushed on to the Carso Plateau to a maximum depth of about five kilometres, leaving them now with a more or less straight front line some ten kilometres in length, running from Gorz down the shallow depression called the Vallone to reach the sea a little to the east of Monfalcone. It had cost them something over sixty thousand lives to gain, and us about the same number to lose. Both sides were now gathering their breath and preparing for the next round.
Flik 19F had flown a number of reconnaissance flights when requested by Army Headquarters, and had also done a little long-range bombing, losing one Brandenburger along with Fahnrich Baltassari and Corporal Indrak in an attempt to bomb the rail junction at Treviso. Otherwise there was little to report in the first couple of weeks after my return to the unit. Zugsfuhrer Toth had been home on leave to visit his parents in Hungary. I would dearly have loved to have been able to question him more closely about this, since Toth having parents was a concept that I found quite fascinating, giving rise to visions of creatures sitting around a fire on the floor of a cave gnawing the bones of an aurochs. But my Latin was not quite up to the task; and anyway Toth, though impeccably “kor- rekt” in his relations with officers—at least when not tipping them out of aeroplanes—was someone who would not willingly discuss his private life with strangers.
The weather was beginning to close in now, autumn approaching a good deal earlier than usual, which (so the local countryfolk said) presaged a hard winter. Morning fog and low cloud made flying impossible for much of the time—“Fliegerwetter” the ranker-pilots used to call it, since they did not wear the black-and-yellow sword-belt and were thus under no obligation to pretend that they were anxious to get themselves killed. But the fog and cloud began to clear around mid-month as the bora season set in.
I did once understand the precise mechanism of the bora, eighty-f
ive years ago when I was studying meteorology at the k.u.k. Marine Akademie. As I remember it, it works rather like the syphon in a lavatory cistern: that cold air accumulates behind the mountain ranges of the Balkans until some of it overflows down a mountain pass, and that this initial flow brings the rest rushing down after it. The danger signs, I remember, were clear air and a low, white cap of cloud over the distant mountain peaks. There would be a few hours’ stillness and an uneasy feeling in the air, then whoosh! suddenly a howling gale would be shaking the tents and scurrying loose gear across the flying field as the ground crews struggled to wheel the aircraft into the shelter of their log-and-earth bora pens. The bora would make flying impossible for the next day or two, even though the air was as clear as could be and the sun shining brightly. We knew that. But so, unfortunately, did the Italians. The bora rarely blows west of the Isonzo, so they could take off and land as they pleased while we were firmly grounded. Likewise the bora is a curious wind in that, although it blows with extreme fury, it only blows near to ground level, up to about a thousand metres or so.
We at Flik 19F made this discovery one morning in mid-September just after breakfast. We had woken to find our tents flapping wildly as the wind screamed down a side valley from the Selva di Ternova. But the meteorologists at Army HQ had warned us the previous evening, so everything had been securely pegged down and the aeroplanes moved into shelter. It seemed a pity not to be able to fly on a day of such perfect visibility, but there we were: man proposes, God disposes. I held my jacket closed with one hand and my cap on my head with the other and struggled across the field in the face of the gale to enter the heaving mess tent. Breakfast was the usual meagre affair of ersatz coffee and kriegsbrot, the only matter for comment being the proportion of sawdust in the latter. I read in the Triester An%eiger that the Western Front was holding firm in the face of massive and costly British assaults: what you called the Battle of the Somme and we called the Battle of the Ancre. I finished my breakfast, and Meyerhofer and I set off for the workshops to inspect our Hansa- Brandenburg Zoska, which had arrived back from the repair workshops the previous evening. As we walked out of the tent into the blustering gale Meyerhofer stopped and held his hand to his ear, listening.
“What is it?” I asked, shouting to be heard above the wind.
“Funny thing,” he replied, “I could have sworn I heard engines. Surely not in this wind though. Can you hear anything, Prohaska?”
I listened. Sure enough, above the buffeting of the bora I could now hear aircraft engines: not one or two engines but a great many of them.
“Look!” he shouted, pointing down the valley towards Gorz. “I don’t believe it—not in this weather! ” It was a formation of eight or nine aeroplanes high above the valley, perhaps three or four thousand metres up. They were plainly not ours. They were large biplanes with twin-boom fuselages and three engines: Italian Caproni heavy bombers. We dived for cover in a slit-trench as the first bombs came crashing down on the airfield, throwing up fountains of rock and earth. We had anti-aircraft machine-gun nests placed around the airfield, but they were only to deal with low-flying attacks. They loosed off belts of ammunition into the sky: to no effect whatever. Two figures leapt into the trench beside us as we peered out at the destruction going on all around. It was Potocznik and Zwierzkowski, both in flying kit.
“Come on!” Potocznik yelled above the din, “come and help us get after them! ”
We scrambled out and ran to a bora shelter where a dozen or so soldiers were struggling to wheel out a Brandenburger into the shrieking wind. Somehow we all managed to hold it steady as Feldwebel Prokesch swung the propeller and Potocznik scrambled into the observer’s seat. “Gluck auf!” we all shouted as the engine roared and the aeroplane started to lurch crazily across the field with five or six men hanging on to each wing, staggering forward then sideways then forward again like a drunkard as the wind snatched at it. It was not to be: directly the ground crew let go of the wings a vicious gust of wind got beneath the fragile contraption and flicked it contemptuously to one side. The next thing we knew it was lying upside-down, smashed against one of the wooden hangars. We ran over to it and dragged the two men from the wreckage, both shaken but fortunately unhurt. The drone of engines was now submerged once more beneath the blasting of the wind as the attackers turned away towards Trieste and home, mission accomplished. We looked sadly about us. Only one man had been killed, but a hangar had been wrecked, along with our remaining Lloyd CII inside it, while still-smoking bomb craters peppered the airfield as reminders of our impotence. It was all intensely humiliating.
Still, as your proverb remarks, it is an ill wind that blows nobody some good. A bomb had landed at the end of the officers’ tent lines and had destroyed the tent next to mine. Leutnant Szuborits’s gramophone was found intact among the debris, but a bomb-splinter had gone through his box of records. And, to my inexpressible joy, “Sport und immer Sport” had been among the casualties. A blissful silence descended upon Fliegerfeld Caprovizza now that Mizzi Gunther would squawk no more. I almost felt moved to write a letter to the Italian Air Corps to thank them for enabling me to keep my sanity.
Then came the autumn rains, as the fighting flared up again on 17 September: the start of the so-called Seventh Battle of the Isonzo. And if the bora is one of the two great natural freaks of the Carso region, its drainage pattern is the other. A whole hidden world of caverns and grottoes and underground rivers lay beneath that dreary plateau; something which only began to be appreciated in 1916, as the excavation of trenches and dug-outs revealed a hitherto unsuspected network of caves and passages in the limestone. As the human insects fought and died in their swarms up on the surface, the patient stalactites dripped as they had dripped for the past ten thousand years: steady; calm; patient in their purpose; totally indifferent to empires, kingdoms and generals sticking flags into maps.
Yet this hidden world would occasionally make its presence known. Rain would pour down in torrents for weeks on end in the Carso autumn, turning the churned-up trackways to troughs of rust red mud in which the men and mules would flounder and curse as they struggled forward under their loads. Yet on the bare rock, most of the rainwater would disappear as if it had never been, seeming scarcely to dampen the arid surface. Then one morning, we woke up at Fliegerfeld Caprovizza to find the field a gleaming sheet of water. The mysterious underground lakes which feed the tributaries of the Vippaco had filled up at last, and were now decanting their excess water down the valley like an overflow pipe.
We flew infrequently in those early weeks of September: a little photo reconnaissance work when holes opened in the clouds, or some artillery- spotting over the battlefields when Army Headquarters requested it. We also flew a series of desultory bombing-raids into the Italian hinterland by night, in an attempt to disrupt supplies to the Front by damaging this or that or the other rail junction. They had a magic all of their own, those night-time raids: the charm of the mystery rail outings of my childhood, in which one bought a ticket and perhaps ended up for the day in Olmutz or Trencin, or even in Prague for long enough to consume a lemonade and a couple of frankfurters at the station buffet. They were largely without danger to us—the Italians had no more idea of night fighting in the air at that stage of the war than anyone else—but by the same token they posed very little threat indeed to the enemy.
Quite apart from navigational problems, not the least of the reasons for the basic harmlessness of these raids was that about the middle of the month, gazing in despair at his graph line Total Weight of Bombs Dropped, which had nose-dived during early September because of bad weather, Hauptmann Kraliczek had been struck by a sudden thunderbolt of inspiration: he would rectify the situation by drawing the graph in future, not according to the weight of bombs dropped on enemy territory each day, but according to their number! In this way (he explained to us), if an aeroplane took off on a raid carrying—say—four 20kg bombs instead of two 40kg, the statistical ef
ficacy of the raid would be doubled at a stroke and the graph line would immediately climb like a rocket. We all came away from his lecture feeling very depressed, knowing as we did that a telegram had already gone to the munitions depot in Marburg requesting them to supply us with the smallest aerial bombs they had in stock. These were old 5kg and 10kg models which had lain there since
1915 because they were pretty well useless, the accuracy of a bomb generally being a function of its weight. Meyerhofer did his best with the Marburg people over the telephone, pleading with them to dump their old stock in the nearest river and tell Kraliczek that they had nothing smaller than 20kg. But it was too late, and anyway it was plain that the Ordnance Officer in charge of the depot was only too happy to unload surplus munitions on to those idiots at Caprovizza rather than having to keep entering it on his own monthly stock inventory. A red-painted ammunition wagon arrived at Haidenschaft Station the next day. From now on the only thought with which we could comfort ourselves as we risked our lives on bombing-raids over Italy was that no one on the ground was likely to come to any harm. Our only chance of influencing the outcome of the war, Meyerhofer said ruefully, was if one of our puny bombs happened to hit Cadorna on the head.
The first of my own night-time excursions took place in the third week of September, lurching away into the sunset from Caprovizza airfield with eight 10kg Carbonit bombs stowed on the cockpit floor beneath my feet. Our objective was the town of Gemona in the Alpine foothills, and our task was to bomb the railway station, incidentally (though this was not explicitly stated in our orders) causing alarm and despondency in the Italian rear, panic on the Milan stockmarket, the soil to ooze blood, the moon to be obscured and cows to give birth to two-headed calves across the whole of Lombardy-Venetia. The only problem was that, like most people in 1916, we had no experience whatever of night flying and no equipment for it beyond the aeroplane’s dubious magnetic compass and a pair of spirit-levels for judging our attitude and angle of bank. I had made some experiments a few days before in using a nautical sextant to find our way by the stars; but, experienced sea navigator though I was, I had found it to be a hopeless task with no visible horizon to work to and nothing but the ponderous Nautical Ephemerids to do the calculations with.