The Two-Headed Eagle поп-3

by Джон Биггинс

  It was not until then, skimming down towards Caprovizza flying field, that I had time at last for the luxury of thought. The whole of the previous ten minutes or so had been conducted largely by instinct, on spinal cord alone. But now the sun was shining and it was peaceful once more, and apart from that constant throbbing of the air the war might never have existed. Only a smoke-grimed face and bullet holes letting the sunlight shine through the fuselage—and a hot machine-gun barrel burnt blue with excessive firing—served to remind me that the recent events had not been some kind of brief but intense nightmare. I looked down at the camera. Good, it was intact still. We had lost one aeroplane but we had accomplished our mission. Oh yes, and we had also shot down Major di Carraciolo.

  I suddenly remembered this with surprise—then with a flooding sense of dismay, as I recalled how I had last seen him, spinning down on fire. War was war, and I had far rather that it had been him than us; but all the same it seemed to me a scurvy thing to repay a chivalrous enemy for his generosity by burning him alive. I hoped that he might already have been dead as the Nieuport began its plunge, perhaps killed by a bullet of mine through the head. But I knew enough of aerial warfare to doubt it. Had he perished with his skin bubbling and sizzling as he struggled to bring the aeroplane down? Or had he managed to release his seat straps and fling himself out, to endure perhaps a minute of stark terror as he plummeted down to burst like a blood bomb on the pitiless rocks? Either way it seemed a wretched end. Death by fire was the secret dread of us all in those days before parachutes. Like most fliers, I carried a pistol; not for defence, but with a view to my own deliverance if I should ever find myself trapped in a burning aeroplane. I hoped that di Carraciolo had been able to use his, if that was what it had come to.

  We landed at Caprovizza around midday. The boxes of photographic plates were handed over, we made our verbal reports and I then went straight to my tent to lie down. It never ceased to amaze me how fight­ing in the air, though it usually lasted only a few seconds, seemed to drain reserves of nervous energy that would normally suffice for several months. As I was taking off my flying overalls Petrescu stuck his head around the tent flap and respectfully reported that there was a telephone call for me in the Kanzlei hut. I got up wearily from my camp-bed. What on earth did they want now? Couldn’t the idiots leave me in peace for an hour at least? When I picked up the receiver from the Adjutant’s desk I found that it was a staff officer from 7th Corps Headquarters at Oppachiasella.

  “I say, are you the fellow who shot down that Italian single-seater over Fajtji Hrib about an hour ago?” I answered that so far as I knew I had that melancholy honour. I was expecting to be told where the aero­plane had come down and to be offered some fire-blackened fragment as a souvenir—a trophy for which I must say I had no desire whatever. What came next was a complete surprise. “Well, the pilot’s here with us at Corps Headquarters: chap called Major Carraciolo or something—quite famous, I understand.”

  “I’m sorry . . . I just don’t understand. The aeroplane was ablaze when I saw it go down . . .”

  “Quite so. I understand that your Major Whatshisname climbed out of his cockpit and stood on the wing, steering the thing by leaning over the edge. Apparently he managed to slide it sideways to blow the flames away from the petrol tank, then brought the thing down in a field next to one of our batteries. Our fellows said they’d never seen flying like it—the Italian ought to be a circus performer.”

  “Is he badly hurt?”

  “Not in the least: dislocated shoulder and a few bruises and a bit singed, but that’s about it. The Medical Officer’s patching him up at the moment and when he’s finished we’ll send him over to you. I believe that he’s Flik 19F’s prisoner. You can have the aeroplane too, for what it’s worth. We’ve posted a sentry by the wreck to keep the village brats away, but frankly there’s not a lot of it left except ashes.”

  Major Oreste di Carraciolo arrived in some state at Caprovizza flying field about an hour later, seated in the back of a large drab-coloured staff car. A sentry with rifle and fixed bayonet sat on each side of him and in the front seat was a staff colonel. The door was opened and he stepped down from the running-board to meet us. He wore a bandage about his head and had his left arm in a sling, but otherwise seemed undamaged except that his eyebrows and moustache and neat pointed beard were a little scorched. He wore the grey-green uniform of the Italian Air Corps and a leather flying coat, unbuttoned in the afternoon heat; also a pair of smart, and evidently very expensive, high lace-up boots.

  I have perhaps made the man sound a trifle foppish. It is true that he was trim and not very tall; but his powerful shoulders and hands were clearly those of a sculptor. He stepped up grim-faced and saluted with his good hand, giving us a glare of intense hatred as he did so. I stepped forward and saluted in return, then held out my hand. Any remaining doubts about the Major’s powerful build were immediately dispelled as the bones in my hand were crushed against one another. Trying not to betray my pain I welcomed him to Fliegerfeld Caprovizza in Italian, rearranging the bones of my hand as I did so. He glowered at me, his intense black eyes boring into mine—then broke into a radiant smile.

  “Ah, Herr Leutnant, was it then you who . . . ? ”

  “Yes,” I answered, “I have the honour to be the one who shot you down this morning. But believe me, my dear Major, it gives me a thousand times more pleasure to see that you are alive and unharmed. I apologise. But you will understand, I hope, that war is a ruthless business.”

  “Ah, my dear Tenente, please do not reproach yourself, I beg you. You were only doing your duty—and you may comfort yourself with the fact that you will be able one day to tell your grandchildren that it was you who brought to an end the career of Major di Carraciolo . . .” He smiled, “. . . Or perhaps I should rather say, caused a temporary interruption in the career of Major di Carraciolo, until such time as he escapes from prison and returns to fight again for his country.”

  “Your confinement need not be close, Major, if you gave your word not to escape. You are now in your forties, I understand, and might easily be repatriated on parole.”

  “I would never give it. In an ordinary war such things might be per­missible, but a patriot fighting for the final liberation of his people has a sacred duty to escape and fight once more, so long as there is breath left in his body.”

  “Very well. But you must at least be the guest of honour in our mess this evening. I and my brother-officers insist upon it. Surely you can give your word not to try to escape just for these few hours.”

  He smiled broadly. “Then you may consider it given, and I shall be delighted to accept your hospitality. I have always considered myself to be fighting against the Austrian Monarchy and not against the Austrians, whom I regard as an intelligent and artistic people like ourselves.”

  “Splendid. But tell me one thing if you will, Major. How exactly did I manage to shoot you down? The sun was in my eyes and I was quite unable to take aim, and I fired only a few shots anyway. You had us in your sights and could hardly have missed, yet you veered away at the last moment. What went wrong? I ask as one aviator to another.”

  “It is the fortunes of war, my dear . . . er . . . ?”

  “Prohaska. Otto Prohaska. Lieutenant of the Imperial and Royal Navy.”

  “Ah yes, Prohaska. Well, as I attacked I knew that you could not aim at me because of the sun, and also that your Schwarzlose gun is as much use as a garden syringe. But there, even random shots sometimes find their mark. One of your bullets severed an oil-feed pipe and hot oil sprayed back in my face. By the time I had regained my sight I was flying past your tail and you were shooting at me again. Then I saw fire coming at me from the engine cowling—and after that I lost all interest in you, as I think you will understand. But the rest of the story I believe you already know?”

  “Yes, the Intelligence Officer at Oppachiasella told me all about it. You are to be congratulated by all accounts on a magnificent
piece of flying. But, dear Major, I am doubly glad to meet you because it was you who escorted us back across the lines a few days ago when our engine failed.”

  He looked puzzled for a moment—then laughed loudly and slapped my shoulder.

  “So it was you? I remember now: your Brandenburg Zoska if my mem­ory serves me right? Then we are acquaintances already. My sergeant wanted to shoot you down but I headed him away from you. ‘Why did you let the Austrian pigs escape, Maggiore?’ he asked me later. ‘No,’ I said, ‘to spare the life of an enemy in distress will bring us luck. And who knows? he may well do the same for us one day.’ Well, you certainly brought me luck.”

  It was as convivial an evening in the mess as our increasingly mea­gre rations would allow. The food might have been poor, but the local wine flowed freely and we were entertained by Flik 19F’s gypsy orches­tra, drawn from its Hungarian ground crewmen; also by Potocznik, who played a good deal of Schubert very well indeed on the mess piano. Even Hauptmann Kraliczek was there, looking as unhappy as an owl forced into daylight, and only present because Meyerhofer and Potocznik and I had arm-locked him into attending. As for Major di Carraciolo, he provided us with magnificent entertainment of his own. He spoke German tolerably well, and I was able to help him out in Italian when needed, so the evening was one long succession of anecdotes about his days in Africa. His time there, it appeared, when he was not discovering lakes or being mauled by lionesses, had been spent mostly in the arms of a succession of Eritrean mistresses who had their teeth filed to points and who chewed qhat leaves. And when the African reminiscences failed there was always his career as a sculptor, adulterer, duellist and racing driver to fall back upon. All in all he seemed to have lived enough lives for a roomful of people. He was a flamboyant and theatrical character it is true, but I found myself not at all irritated by it. The Major loved to entertain people, while as to the truth of his stories I had not the slightest doubt that most of them had really happened—or at least almost happened. Only Potocznik made a rather disapproving face. I asked him afterwards what was the matter.

  “That insufferable Wellischer and his greasy lies. And a lot of Hun­garian gypsies scraping fiddles. And that Levantine Meyerhofer into the bargain. It’s enough to make anyone sick. This is supposed to be a German­speaking empire, not some filthy bazaar in Constantinople.”

  “Oh come on: Carraciolo’s a bit of a boaster but I don’t doubt most of it’s true.”

  “A typical degenerate Latin—would laugh in your face while he’s sticking a knife in your back. I tell you the bastard uses scent like a woman! We should have shot him when he landed and had done with it.”

  Apart from this drop of acid, all went splendidly until about 2300, when I heard a motor lorry draw up outside and the noise of soldiers, boots crunching on the cinder pathway. Thinking that it was the liberty-lorry bringing the drunkards back from Haidenschaft I went out to tell them to quieten down—and found myself confronting a Provost major and a squad of soldiers with rifles and fixed bayonets. From their grim faces it was clear at first glance that they were here on official business.

  “Excuse me,” I said, “but I think that there must be some mistake. This is a k.u.k. Fliegertruppe flying field and this tent is the officers’ mess.” “I know that. Kindly stand aside.”

  “What do you mean . . . ? ”

  “What I said. We’re here to make an arrest.” He shouldered me aside to enter the mess tent, followed by his men. I heard the sudden silence inside, and made my way in. Everyone had frozen in his place and was staring at the intruders, some swaying slightly.

  No one spoke. Di Carraciolo still sat between Meyerhofer and Potocz­nik behind the long trestle table, one hand raised with a glass in it. In the pale, flaring light and deep shadows of the petrol lamps the scene put me irresistibly in mind of the Caravaggio “Last Supper”: distant memories perhaps of all those Easter Thursday masses when I was a child. Kraliczek was the first to recover from his surprise.

  “Herr Major, might I enquire what is the meaning of this intrusion?” “Herr Kommandant, do you have here an Italian prisoner by the name of . . .” he examined the slip of paper in his hand, “by the name of Oreste Carlo Borromeo di Carraciolo, currently serving as a major in the Italian Air Corps?”

  “We do. But he is our guest for this evening and will be transferred to a prisoner-of-war camp tomorrow morning. This is the custom . . .” He looked around him, suddenly uncertain. “Er . . . at any rate, my officers here inform me that this is the custom in the Fliegertruppe.”

  “I couldn’t give a farthing about your customs.” He turned to address di Carraciolo. “Are you Oreste Carlo Borromeo di Carraciolo?”

  Our prisoner answered calmly, in German, “I am.”

  “I have here a warrant for your arrest on a charge of high treason and desertion from the armed forces of His Imperial Majesty. You will come with us. Feldwebel—put the handcuffs on him.”

  “But this is monstrous,” Meyerhofer spluttered as we moved to close ranks about our guest. “This man is a major in the Italian Air Corps and a prisoner of war, shot down this morning by one of our aeroplanes . . .” “For all I care he could be a Chinese station master. As far as the k.u.k. Armee is concerned the man is an Austrian subject who has evaded military service to fight against his Emperor in the armed forces of a hostile state. If you don’t believe me you can examine the warrant. Come with us if you please now, my Signor di Carraciolo. We’ll give you a nice cell of your own in the Caserne Grande and an interview tomorrow with Heir Major Baumann. I don’t envy you one bit. Take him to the lorry, Corporal.”

  We all moved to defend our guest-captive: to all right-thinking front- soldiers in every army on earth the military police are objects of instinc­tive dislike. But in the end there was nothing much that we could do. The arrest warrant was unarguable, bearing as it did the signature of Major Baumann, the Governor of Trieste’s aide in charge of security. Baumann was a functionary of the notorious KUA, the Kriegsuberwachungsamt, which had been set up to govern the Austrian war zones under martial law. He had not been long in Trieste, but he had already acquired a grim reputation for his ungentle ways in dealing with political suspects.

  In the end we had to let them lead Major Carraciolo away in handcuffs and bundle him on to the lorry. All that we could do was to assure him as they drove away that we would see to it that he was decently looked after in prison and treated according to international law as a legitimate prisoner of war.

  We did not have much success in fulfilling either of these promises. In fact when we saw the Trieste newspapers the next morning we knew beyond a shadow of doubt that it was curtains for our late guest. We read that although he had been resident in Italy since 1891 he had been born and brought up in the city of Fiume and had never renounced Austrian nationality. We also learnt that when called up for military service in that year he had simply done what thousands of other young Austrians would do, one Adolf Hitler among them: that is to say, simply ignored the letter instructing them to report for medical examination and left the country instead. Tens of thousands had done it over the years, and it had been over twenty-five years ago now, but it still made him in theory an army deserter. And now he had been captured in Italian uniform after a series of newspaper articles in which he had proclaimed his undying hostility to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. It was going to be a fair trial and a fair hanging.

  The trial four days later before the k.u.k. Militarhofgericht in Trieste was correct enough in the legal sense I suppose: at least the outward forms were preserved throughout the entire fifteen minutes that it lasted. A counsel for the defence was present, and Meyerhofer and I were there for the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe, but otherwise it was Old Austria at its most unappealing: a harsh, crashing military puppet-show in the worst tradi­tions of General Haynau. The verdict had been announced by the Trieste German-language papers the day before. But it could not really have been otherwise. Di Carraciolo did not deny any of the char
ges against him: only said that he had done what he did for Italy and that he would regard it as a singular honour to die as a martyr for the final redemption of his people. I sensed that he was already assuming the heroic pose of one of his own statues. He had quite plainly not been well treated in prison: his face was bruised, his hair and beard had been savagely cropped and to increase his humiliation he had been stripped of his own clothes and given the worn- out grey fatigues of an Austrian private about twice his own height, so that he had to stand in the dock holding his trousers up while two stone-faced sentries stood behind him with fixed bayonets. He finished his remarks. The bored-looking judge-president looked up from his crossword and enquired, “Is that all?” in a listless voice. It was.

  “Very well then. Oreste Carlo Borromeo di Carraciolo, you have been found guilty by this court of high treason and desertion as defined by the Austrian Criminal Code, by the Military Penal Code and by the Articles of War. You are hereby condemned to death by shooting, the sentence to be carried out within twenty-four hours. Next case, please.”

  Back at Fliegerfeld Caprovizza that afternoon a hurried officers’ conference took place in the privacy of a stores hut. All of us—even Potocznik, oddly enough—were incensed at this highhanded treatment of a guest of the unit, who was now to be shot next morning, on tenuous moral and legal grounds, as an example to the thousands of other ex- Austrians currently serving the King of Italy. “Judicial murder” was one of the politer phrases used. We decided that something must be done, if for no other reason than to save the honour of Flik 19F and to assert the soli­darity of fliers of every nationality. In the end Meyerhofer and I—the two uncles of the unit—were detailed to make the necessary arrangements. I requisitioned the station motor cycle to go to Trieste while, towards dusk, Oberleutnant Meyerhofer took off into the sunset in a lone Hansa- Brandenburg with a white cloth fluttering from each wingtip. There was not much time. We were all involved now up to the eyebrows in what I suppose, looking back on it, must have been one of the strangest episodes in the entire history of the Habsburg officer corps: a business which, had it come to light, could easily have landed us all in front of a firing squad along with Major di Carraciolo.