by Джон Биггинс
So di Carraciolo’s blindfold was removed and, with me as interpreter, he was politely asked to indicate exactly where he had lived a quarter- century before, so that it could be decided whether Austrian or Hungarian troops would have the honour of shooting him. This delighted him.
“Tenente,” he gasped, “please tell these buffoons to hurry up and shoot me, because if they don’t I think that I’m going to choke myself to death with laughing.”
In the end no decision was reached as to the precise nationality of the condemned man. Baumann thereupon settled the matter in his usual manner.
“Herr Oberleutnant, clear these greasy Magyar reptiles out of the way and shoot this man.”
“Herr Major, I must protest . . . My government will take a very serious . . .”
“Stuff your protests up your arse, you Levantine gyppo. Firing party— make ready . . . !”
But the firing party was otherwise occupied. The Honveds had moved up to the white line and attempted to elbow them out of the way. A scuffle had broken out and rifle butts were being used by the time the two officers restored some semblance of order. In the end an agreement of sorts was reached: the ten-man firing party would be made up of five Austrian and five Hungarian soldiers. However, the problem then arose of who would give the order to fire, and in what language. It was finally agreed that both officers would stand with raised sabres, and that the fatal order would be given in French. Thus it came about that the k.u.k. Militarexezierplatz above Trieste early one autumn morning in the year
1916 witnessed the bizarre spectacle of ten Austro-Hungarian soldiers standing for several minutes chanting, “Tirez bedeutet Feuer, Tirez bedeutet Feuer . . .”
They were still busy sorting themselves out when I heard it: the first droning in the distance. Meyerhofer and I turned to gaze into the sky to north-west. There were five of them. As they drew closer we could make out four Nieuports and a two-seater which looked like a Savoia-Pomilio. As for Baumann and the international execution squad, they were too preoccupied with French imperative verbs to notice anything amiss, almost until the first bullets were whining off the rocks as the leading single- seaters dived to attack. A few men tried to stand and return the fire, but most just scrambled for cover behind the lorries and among the boulders, contenting themselves with only the odd snap-shot as the two-seater came in to land on the other side of the exercise ground.
Meyerhofer and I scrambled from cover and ran to where di Carraciolo was standing, bound to the post, still blindfolded and (I should imagine) extremely bewildered by the sudden turn of events. When we were being questioned later we said that he had already cut himself free and that we grappled with him as he was about to make his escape. The reality though was rather different. Meyerhofer tore off the blindfold as I hacked at the cords with my pocket-knife. Bullets were singing about us in all directions now that the exchange between the soldiers and the circling fighters had been joined by the pilot of the Italian two-seater, who was firing bursts from his machine gun above our heads to harass the soldiers behind the lorries. I fear that even when he was free Major di Carraciolo was a troublesome customer. He had evidently been working himself up for martyrdom for several days past and was now finding it difficult to accept the sudden and dramatic change in his fortunes. I had judged at our first meeting that he was a powerfully built man, and I now had the opportunity to test that observation as he landed me a thump which knocked me clean over. In the end Meyerhofer and I had to overpower him between us, then practically frog-march him over to the aeroplane and fling him bodily into the cockpit before lying down flat as the pilot pushed the throttle forward and the aircraft began to bounce away across the stony field, followed by a spatter of farewell shots from behind the lorries. The last we saw of them they were climbing away into the autumn sky above the Gulf of Trieste, surrounded by their escorts. It was all over—at least, as far as Major di Carraciolo was concerned. The rest of us would now have to clear up the mess as best we could.
As you might expect, there was the devil’s own row about it: a condemned political prisoner impudently snatched in broad daylight from under the very noses of his executioners on the outskirts of one of the principal cities of the Dual Monarchy. Meyerhofer and I both underwent prolonged and detailed questioning by the Military Procurator’s department, who plainly detected a strong smell of rodents. We perjured ourselves energetically, and since we had all agreed our story beforehand they were not able—for the time being at any rate—to garner sufficient evidence to prosecute: even though Major di Carraciolo was found to have severed the ropes that bound him with an Austrian-made pocket-knife picked up on the scene afterwards and clearly marked with the initials o.p. My story that he must have picked this from my pocket before being bound to the stake sounded lame in the extreme and I knew it. I was dismissed for the moment, but was left in no doubt that investigations would continue.
As for Major Oreste di Carraciolo, he returned home to find himself a national hero. The Italians had little enough to celebrate that autumn, after a summer of appalling carnage on the Isonzo for minimal gains, so here was a wonderful opportunity for whipping up the flagging enthusiasm of the public. He was promoted to Colonel, given a new squadron of the most modern aircraft to lead, sent to tour the United States and generally lionised wherever he went. He also wrote a book about his adventures. This came out early in 1917 and a copy was procured via Switzerland and sent to me at Cattaro, where I was back commanding a U-Boat. It was all highly entertaining, I have to admit—grand opera rendered into prose— but quite marvellously inaccurate on a number of points: notably on how the Major had smuggled a message to his squadron from his dungeon in the Trieste Citadel—conveyed, needless to say, by a jailer’s daughter who had fallen in love with him—and on how his oration from the scaffold (in his version they had been going to hang him) had so moved the Hungarian soldiery present that they had turned their rifles upon their Austrian oppressors with a cry of “Viva la liberta d’Ungheria! A basso la tiranneria Austriaca!” then set him free. I got only a walk-on part in all this I am afraid: as an Austrian naval officer of Polish extraction called Brodaski whose slumbering national conscience had been so pricked by the Major’s call to freedom that he had finally cast off the yoke of an Old Austria and thrown himself upon his own sword by way of expiation. Major di Carraciolo averred with complete confidence that it was his escape that had finally broken the heart of our old Emperor, whose dying words (it was reliably reported) had been: “O Carraciolo, questo diavolo incarnato!”
There was also the condemned man’s last letter to be disposed of, handed to the official of the Military Procurator’s department, on the morning of the execution. Normally this would have been forwarded unopened to the dead man’s relatives: even in 1916 Austria still had enough decency left to observe the proprieties in these matters. But now, since the condemned man had not been shot after all, it was felt proper to open the fat, triple-sealed envelope. It was found to contain detailed drawings for Carraciolo’s memorial, to be erected after the war on the site of his execution on the ridge above Trieste. Meticulously drawn during his last days in prison, it would certainly have been a most impressive sight if it had ever been built: a sort of wedding-cake structure of naked figures— mostly young women—in white marble with the top tier bearing a statue of the man himself in his death agony, radiant as Our Lord arising from the tomb, while his Austrian tormentors fell back blinded and confounded on every side. The inscription was to have read “Giovenezza, Giovanezza, Sacra Primavera di Bellezza!”—“Youth, Youth, Sacred Springtime of Beauty!”—which I thought frankly was a bit thick, coming from a man who was nearing forty-five at the time of these events.
That was not in fact the last that I saw of Major Oreste di Carraciolo, that September morning as his aeroplane climbed away into the Adriatic sky. It was in the year 1934 I remember, when Polish naval business took me once again to the port of Fiume to visit the former Ganz-Danubius s
hipyard at Bergudi, now rechristened the Cantieri Navale di something- or-other. There had been many changes since I had last seen the city where I had once been a pupil for fours years at the Imperial and Royal Naval Academy. I was now a grey-haired commodore approaching my halfcentury, charged with the task of organising the Polish Navy’s infant submarine service. As for Fiume, it was now at the very easternmost edge of Mussolini’s Italy. The years had not been particularly kind to either of us; but on balance I considered that Fiume had come off worst, as I surveyed the shabby streets of this once busy city. From being the principal— indeed only—seaport of the Kingdom of Hungary, Fiume had been reduced to the status of a ghost town, straddling the bitterly disputed frontier with Yugoslavia and split in two by a hideous rusting fence of barbed wire and corrugated iron.
Politics had done most of it, and the Great Depression had done the rest. My business in the town was to inspect the old Danubius shipyard, which was tendering to supply a number of submarines to the Polish Navy. I had concluded that in just about every conceivable respect the other tenderer, the Fijenoord yard at Rotterdam, offered the best bargain to the Polish taxpayer. So, having written out my report in my room at the old Lloyd-Palazzo Hotel on the waterfront—and having thereby added my two-pennyworth to Fiume’s decline—I went out for a stroll since I had half a day to kill before I caught the Vienna train.
“Never go back” is a sound rule for life, I have always found. The prosperous city where I had spent four happy years in my youth was now a poor bedraggled ghost of what it had once been: a living graveyard where grass grew in the streets and mangy dogs scavenged among the rubbish; a necropolis peopled by cripples and beggars and imbeciles of a horror equal to any port in Italy or the Levant, but still perversely stuck on to the fringe of Central Europe: the slums of Naples without the gaiety. Increasingly depressed, I returned from the old Marine Academy—now a tumbledown “public hospital” of the kind that serves only as a sorting-house for the cemeteries—and stopped for a drink in a cafe that I had once known on the Riva Szapary, now rechristened the Via Vittorio Emmanuele or something. As I stood at the bar I heard a voice from behind me.
“Tenente, non si me ricorda?” I turned around. I was quite unable to recognise him at first, this wretched creature with the eyepatch and the missing teeth, sitting at a table over a stagnant coffee with a crutch resting beside him. “Tenente, surely you remember me: your old enemy Oreste di Carraciolo, whom you helped escape that morning from under the rifles of the firing squad.”
I bought him a grappa, since he was quite clearly in great poverty. He gulped it greedily, then began to tell me what had happened in the years since we last met.
He had served with distinction for the rest of the war, he told me, scoring another eight victories, and had then returned to the studio after the Armistice, doing a wonderful trade for some time as the cities and towns of Italy vied with one another in the splendour of their war memorials. However, a measure of boredom had set in, and he had entered politics. He had returned to Fiume in 1919 with the poet-aviator Gabriele d’Annunzio and had played a leading part over the next year in that brief, bizarre episode in Europe’s history the proto-Fascist “Regency of Fiume,” when d’Annunzio and his desperadoes—mostly half-deranged survivors of the Isonzo trenches—had run the place as an independent city-state on messianic, near-lunatic principles. Parades and public circuses had been a major part of the Regency—especially when the bread ran out—and the Major had been appointed as a sort of artistic director for the whole ludicrous spectacle. In the end the League of Nations had moved in, but di Carraciolo had simply returned to Italy and taken part in Mussolini’s march on Rome.
This had advanced his career as a sculptor no end: for five or six years he had been effectively artist-in-residence to Il Duce. But then, in the early 1930s, as the residual wartime idealism was replaced in the Fascist movement by blackjacks and castor oil, he had quarrelled with the leadership and finally been thrown out of the party. He had refused to be quiet, so in 1932 he had been summarily arrested by the Blackshirts and so savagely beaten up that he had lost an eye and been permanently lamed. Six months later they had released him, tipping what was left of him back on to the street. Since then he had been a non-person, avoided by everyone who cared for their health and deprived of all pensions and royalties. By a nice irony, his only source of income was a small monthly payment from the Austrian Republic, which had expropriated some family property in 1919 and was now paying compensation. He was understandably bitter about it all.
“Before the war,” he said, “our slogan here in Fiume was ‘Give us Italy or death.’ ” He swallowed at his drink. “And now do you know what we have? Italy and death.”
That was the last I ever saw of him. I read many years later that he had not let up in his denunciations of Mussolini and his followers, whom he believed had stolen and misdirected the Fascist movement. In the end they lost patience altogether. In 1942 I understand that he was arrested one night and taken to the concentration camp on the Adriatic island of Molata. Very few people ever came back from that dreadful place, and di Carraciolo was not among those who did.
Often I think that perhaps it would have been better if we had let them shoot him there that morning. His marvellous white-marble monument would have been built, and each generation of Italian schoolchildren would now be taught about him as a great artist and patriot who died nobly for his people, not as a great artist and patriot who died miserably at the hands of his own people, after having helped bring to birth the cause which eventually devoured him.
13 LA SERENISSIMA
Hauptmann Rudolf Kraliczek was not a happy man in those early days of October 1916. Not only had the flying unit he commanded been reduced from a total establishment of eight aircraft to two, but he himself was being held responsible by his superiors both for these losses and for the fact that nothing had been achieved in return—except, that is, for a prodigious output of paper. And now, as if this were not enough, several of his officers were under investigation by the Military Procurator on suspicion of having aided and abetted the escape of an Italian prisoner.
It was all getting to be too much, and had become extremely disruptive of the form-filling and statistical compilation that was Kraliczek’s reason for military existence. Something bold had to be done. Drastic measures were called for. Leadership must be asserted in the strongest possible terms. So Hauptmann Kraliczek took a sheaf of Kanzlei-Doppel paper, a pencil and a ruler, and sat down to plan a desperate last throw of the dice; an operation so daring that it would entirely vindicate the concept of long-range bombing and perhaps (with any luck) keep him safely seated behind an office desk; a project in which other men would risk their lives in a last attempt to change the direction of all those relentlessly plunging red and black and green and blue lines drawn on sheets of squared paper. In the end he must have frightened even himself by his own audacity, for the remaining two aircraft of Flik 19F were to attempt no less a feat of arms than a daylight bombing-raid on the city of Venice.
There were two main obstacles to this scheme. The first and lesser of the two was that for our Hansa-Brandenburg CIs to carry any worthwhile bombload such a distance we would have to fly to Venice with the prevailing east wind of autumn, then turn north to try and reach the nearest Austrian flying field, in the foothills of the Alps. The second—and by far the greater—of the objections was that in the whole embattled continent of Europe in the year 1916 it is doubtful if there was another city more formidably protected against air attack than Venice. A major naval port and the site of several munitions factories, the island city was protected against air-raids by layer after layer of defences: first a line of watch vessels and patrolling airships out in the Gulf of Venice, then the fighter airfield “La Serenissima” at the Lido and the powerful flak batteries at Forts Alberone, Malamocco and Sabbioni, then further belts of flak artillery mounted on barges, then lines of tethered kite-balloons. T
he flying-boats of the Imperial and Royal Navy had been carrying out bombing-raids against Venice practically each day since the war with Italy began, but the defences forced them now to attack at night and flying above three thousand metres, which—given the primitive bomb-sights of those days—meant that most of their bombs had no other effect than flinging up spouts of muddy water in the lagoons.
In Hauptmann Kraliczek’s master plan the problem of range was to be overcome by making the flight from Caprovizza to Venice merely one leg of a four-cornered journey. The two aircraft—Potocznik and Feldwebel Maybauer in their Brandenburger and Toth and myself in Zoska—would carry two of the new 100kg bombs each, slung on electrically operated bomb racks beneath the centre section, and would fly to Venice with a tail wind. We would drop our bombs, then—in the event of our still being airborne after all this—would head northwards to cross the lines north of Vicenza and land to refuel at Fliegerfeld Pergine, among the mountains near Trient. We would then take off again and fly behind the lines along the crest of the Alps as far as Villach, where we would refuel once more before flying south on the final leg of our journey, through the Julian Alps to Caprovizza. Altogether the round trip would take about two days, weather and the enemy permitting.
Normally, in all such missions conceived on paper by Hauptmann Kraliczek, the hostile purpose of the operation seemed very much to take second place to the business of accumulating Kilometres Flown. But this time our commander had selected a really grandiose aim for us: no less an undertaking than severing Venice’s connection with the rest of Italy, by destroying the causeway-bridge that carried the road and railway line across the lagoon to the mainland. It was of little concern to Kraliczek that the entire well-equipped Imperial and Royal Navy Flying Service had been trying without success to do precisely that for a year or more; as far as he was concerned, no one had ever thought of the idea before, and anyone who dared to suggest that the Italians might have thought of it first and taken precautions was dismissed out of hand as a niggling defeatist. But there we were: orders are orders, however crazy and ill-conceived they may seem to be to the poor devils who are given the task of translating them into reality. The General Staff and the 5th Army Command had been told of the scheme and had given their approval, so who were mere lieutenants to demur? As officers of the House of Habsburg, had we not sworn to do our duty or die in the attempt?