by Джон Биггинс
“We are from Flik 19F at Caprovizza and we have just carried out a bombing-raid on the city of Venice. We are here on our way home, which takes us north of the lines in the Dolomites.”
“Caprovizza? Never heard of it. Is that on the Eastern Front?”
By now I was growing more than a little irritated. “Not when I last looked. It is just outside the town of Haidenschaft.”
“Where’s that?”
I was beginning to drum my fingers on the desk. “On the Isonzo Front, in the sector held by the 7th Corps of the 5th Army. But surely you must have been expecting us: this was all arranged last week by the High Command itself?”
“Haven’t heard anything about it here; not a thing.” He rummaged beneath an untidy heap of paper on the desk, muttering to himself as he did so. “You wouldn’t believe the amount of rubbish Divisional Headquarters sends us each week. Honestly, we need another Adjutant full-time just to sort through the circulars . . . Ah, this might be it.” He pulled out a crumpled telegram and began to read it, eyeing me suspiciously from time to time. He broke off to look out of the window, then addressed himself to me. “This says two aeroplanes. How come there’s only one of you?” “Our companion aeroplane, piloted by Oberleutnant Potocznik, developed engine trouble and turned back just before we started to cross the Gulf of Trieste. I think that they must have landed safely, but I’m not sure. If you want me to find out I can ask when I telephone my base to tell them that we’ve arrived. Do you mind . . . ?” I reached for the telephone on his desk, but before I could touch it he had snatched it away.
“You can’t use the Kanzlei telephone for operator calls: the Kom- mandant’s very strict about economy—orders from Army Group Headquarters.”
“But that’s ludicrous. I have to telephone Caprovizza or we’ll be posted missing. How am I to contact them if I can’t use your telephone?”
“Herr Kommandant says we’ve got to use letters wherever possible.” “But . . . we’ll be home long before a letter gets there.”
“Well, you could always carry it with you. Or if you’re set on telephoning there’s a post office down in the town.”
“Anyway, where is your commanding officer? And everyone else on this airfield, if it comes to that?”
“The Old Man’s in hospital in Trient. He got the horrors from drinking grappa. Keep well clear of it if you’ll take my advice: it’s foul stuff. As for the rest of them, it’s been a bad month for crashes, so we’re a bit low on aircraft and flying crew. We no sooner get a batch of stupid bastards from the flying schools than they all write themselves off on the mountainside. We’ve only got one aeroplane serviceable—an Aviatik on patrol now up Asiago way—so I thought I might as well give everyone the afternoon off, especially seeing as it’s Friday anyway.”
“I see,” I said, detecting the drift of the conversation, “so would I be right in assuming that we will get no assistance at this flying field today in replacing two worn-out magnetoes?”
“Perfectly correct: we aren’t authorised to carry out major engine repairs in the workshops here, and anyway we fly Lohners and Aviatiks— Hiero engines you see. Yours is a Brandenburger isn’t it?”
“How perceptive of you to have noticed, Herr Leutnant.”
“Thought so: Daimler 160. No luck I’m afraid. Flik 24 uses the other end of the field but they’ve got German Fokkers, Benz engine, so no use either.”
“So what do you suggest? We can’t stand here on your flying field until we take root.”
He yawned and swung his boots on to the desk. I was beginning to take a most intense dislike to this young man.
“Better try the Flep down in Trient, they might be able to oblige.”
I saluted and turned to leave. “Thank you for nothing then. Servitore.” “Don’t mention it. Oh, and by the way . . .”
“Yes?”
“Be a good chap and move your aeroplane; it’s blocking the entrance to our hangars.”
We moved the aeroplane across the field, Toth and I, laboriously pushing it along by ourselves since there were no ground crew to be seen. I left Toth on his own, bidding him to leave me something from the provisions given us by the anarcho-syndicalist peasants of Busovecchio, and set off on foot for Pergine village.
I returned empty-handed. It was Friday afternoon, so the post office was closed, and anyway the entire town was shut up for some church festival or other, St Thuribus of Mongrevejo, or the Veneration of the Authentic Elbow of Padua or something. It was late afternoon when I trudged back, footsore and dusty. There was no help for it: we would have to get airborne once more and fly the ten or so kilometres to Fliegeretappenpark 3 on the other side of the town of Trient. So I swung the propeller once more and the engine coughed and backfired into motion, pouring out clouds of smoke as we lurched unsteadily into the evening sky.
We had some difficulty finding Flep 3 from the air and making our landing. As we did so a bespectacled major came running out to us, waving his arms, and gave me a most severe dressing-down as I sat in the cockpit, even before the propeller had stopped turning. It was strictly forbidden, he said, for aircraft to land within the perimeters of the Fliegeretappenpark without first submitting a written application and being given express permission. Otherwise all aircraft whatever must arrive on a railway flatbed truck or by a special aeroplane transporter wagon (horse- or motor-powered) with wings and tailplane ready dismantled. I said as politely as I could that this was an emergency landing, and that we were here until repairs could be made for the simple reason that I doubted whether the engine would start again. In the end he consented to let us talk with a staff-sergeant engine fitter in one of the workshops, saying that it was no business of his and we were to get ourselves off his site as soon as we could fly.
In complete contrast to his commanding officer, the Stabsfeldwebel could not have been more helpful to us—at any rate, so far as he was able. Which, sadly, was not very far at all. He stood looking at the naked engine after we had removed the cowling panels. He shook his head slowly.
“Sorry, Herr Leutnant, but I can’t be of any help. We haven’t got a single spare magneto in stores for a 26-series Brandenburger.”
“But that’s ridiculous: the 160hp Austro-Daimler must be the most widely used engine in the entire Imperial and Royal Flying Service.”
“Not around here it isn’t, Herr Leutnant. The Brandenburger Fliks in the 11th Army sector use Mercedes 160s, on account of the mountains. They reckon the Mercedes is slower accelerating but a bit better at altitude. The trouble is that they use Bosch magnetoes, and this batch of Austro- Daimlers use Zoelly. And anyway . . .” (he glanced at his watch) “. . . it’s half-past five already—sorry, 1730 hours—so my lads couldn’t help you now even if we had anything in stores.”
“Why ever not?”
“Sorry, Herr Leutnant, but it’s a Friday and they all went off duty half an hour or more ago.”
“Gone home? But this is monstrous. What about duty-men? God damn it, man, there’s a war on: the Front’s not twenty kilometres south of here.”
He looked at me for some time: the sad, mildly reproachful gaze of one who has no time for such juvenile follies. He was a solid, calm, kindly- looking man in his early fifties, with the air about him of a watchmaker; or the sort of cobbler whom you almost feel the urge to thank when he tells you that he can’t have your dress-uniform boots ready for the gala on Thursday after all on account of how you just can’t get the leather these days.
“War or no war, Herr Leutnant, you won’t get them working shifts here. This is an aircraft-repair park so it would rate as a rear echelon even if the Italians were just across the fence. The men work peacetime hours here and go home early Fridays.”
“What the devil do you mean, peacetime hours? We’ve just come from an extremely dangerous mission over Venice in broad daylight. I’ve just been counting the bullet holes and I’ve got up to fifty-seven already. And while we’ve been getting our backsides sho
t at your men have been pushing off early!”
He nodded in agreement, utterly incapable of being provoked to anger. “Fair point, Herr Leutnant, fair point: there’s a lot in what you say, I don’t deny that. But the fact is, all my men here are reservists—1860 class, one or two of them—who’ve had nothing to do with the Army for thirty-odd years, then got called up. They’re in uniform, but they’ll be blowed if they’re going to keep army hours. Half of them are local men anyway and have families down in the town.”
“What about military discipline?”
“Oh, Herr Leutnant, Herr Leutnant. We get little enough work out of them as it is, and if I started coming the old eiserne Diszipline mallarkey here we’d get none at all. Military discipline my arse, if you’ll pardon the expression: you can’t get skilled engine fitters for love nor money now, so I have to keep them on a loose rein if I want to get anything done at all. As it is they’re on army pay, which is about a quarter what they’d be getting if they were in the munitions factories. Anyway . . .” (he adjusted his spectacles and turned to me), “if you like I can take out those contact breakers myself and clean them up a bit for you. That’d at least get you up the valley to Gardolo. If I remember rightly they’ve got a few old Aviatiks up there with Flik 17. They’ve got Austro-Daimler 160s, so they might have a couple of magnetoes lying around in stores.”
In the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe one word that was in constant use in those years was the noun “Kraxe,” derived from the verb “kraxeln,” which is Austro-German for “clamber up” but which had become fliers’ slang for a pile-up on landing. It was something that happened with depressing frequency around Haidenschaft, with the mountains towering above and savage, unpredictable winds whipping down the side valleys. Yet of all the flying fields of the South-West Front I think that none could have been more perfectly designed for kraxelling than Fliegerfeld Gardolo, some kilometres up the Adige valley from Trient. In the gathering darkness the landing at Fliegerfeld Gardolo was even more alarming than that at Pergine. The airfield lay in the narrow valley bottom with the walls of mountain soaring almost sheer on both sides for a thousand metres or more, so that landing was rather like touching down in a vast horse trough. On balance I was glad of the gathering dusk, in that I was at least spared the horror of seeing the precipices looming above us as we lined up to land. I thought that we had had it just as we reached the edge of the flying field. An eddying back-draught of wind off the mountainsides had created a sort of air-hollow, into which we suddenly dropped ten metres or more like a house-brick, to the sound of a great squeal of anguish from the wings. It took all Toth’s skill to bring us level again before the wheels bumped the ground.
But when we had landed safely we found that we might as well not have bothered. True, Flik 17 had a number of Aviatik two-seaters on the strength with 160hp Austro-Daimler engines. But, like Flik 19F, they had not seen a new magneto in months. All that they could suggest was that we stayed overnight with them and took off again in the morning to fly further up the valley to Feldfliegerschule 2 at Neumarkt, where they suspected there might be some magnetoes in the stores, because the school had once had a couple of pensioned-off Brandenburgers from an earlier series, but had recently written them both off in the course of flying lessons. We thanked them, staked our aeroplane down for the night (a chill wind was already moaning down the valley), then ate a most welcome meal with them in their mess hut before bedding down in a stores tent. Tomorrow was Saturday.
14 SUNDAY MOUNTAINEER
It was drizzling when we got up: thin rain turning to sleet. We refuelled at Gardolo after breakfast. We could not use Flit 17’s petrol without a requisition signed by no less than three officers of a rank of Major or above. These were finally found for us at a neighbouring supply depot. They signed the forms for us with every sign of irritation before driving away in a pre-war sports car with luggage and two rather nice- looking army nurses in the back: off (we were told) for a couple of days touring in the Tyrol on a tank filled, no doubt, with government petrol. I could only hope that it stayed fine for them. As for Toth and me and our bullet-riddled, faltering aeroplane, it was yet another leg of our miserable begging-tour of the airfields and supply depots of the South Tyrol.
In the course of a half-century or more spent in the armed services I have often had cause to remark upon the fact that, among the military, comradeship, honour and kindliness all decrease the further one gets from the front line. In my younger days I would often wonder why this should be; but it was only with time that it gradually dawned upon me that it is precisely those qualities of honesty, selflessness and courage that tend to land men in the firing line—and their opposites that facilitate the wangling of safe little jobs in the rear. The truth of the matter is that two world wars were, for Europe, nothing but a vast experiment in negative Darwinism, in which the best died and the worst survived to breed.
Nowhere was this more apparent to me than at Fliegeretappenpark St Jakob repair workshops located just outside 11th Army Headquarters at Bozen and specially attached to the army divisions in the Tyrol. We arrived there mid-morning after finding that the Feflisch at Neumarkt could be no help whatever, having just closed down for half-term. The Kommandant was anything but pleased to have two flying mendicants turn up at his door on a Saturday morning in a consumptive aeroplane, one of them a naval lieutenant and the other an apparently cretinous Magyar NCO.
“This repair park is strictly for machines from units on the Tyrolean Front, do you hear?” he shouted, waving a cane at us as we formed up beneath the balcony of the ex-Gasthof that housed the unit offices. “We’re attached directly to 11th Army Command and we aren’t here to offer repairs to any vagrants who happen by. Go on, be off with you, I say! No, I don’t care a copper farthing what General-Oberst Boroevic will say: General-Oberst Boroevic is on the Isonzo Front, not here, and as far as I’m concerned he might as well be in Patagonia. I don’t care if you do either, you insolent bugger. Just clear off back where you came from—you and your pet monkey.”
Utterly dejected, we ambled back around the workshops—deserted and locked for the weekend—to where our aeroplane stood. There was no hope whatever of going on now, even if we had anywhere left to go. No, we would just have to abandon the aeroplane and make our way back to Caprovizza by train—perhaps even riding on the roofs of goods wagons, since I had barely ten kronen left in my trouser pockets. For God’s sake, were we in the same army as these people or weren’t we? If the Italians had captured us at Busovecchio they could scarcely have treated us worse. All that we had to eat now was the leftovers from the food that the villagers had given us. Toth sat miserably beneath a wing on the wet grass as I removed the engine cowling panels yet again to see if anything could be done with the magnetoes.
As I had suspected, they were past praying for, except perhaps via St Jude the Patron of Hopeless Cases. The contact-breaker electrodes had now worn away and honeycombed to the point of disintegration. As I tinkered I suddenly heard a voice over my shoulder, speaking in heavily accented German.
“Excuse, Excellence, but wad kin’ of engine is dat?”
I turned around to find myself looking at a Russian prisoner of war, one of the many employed about the supply bases here in the Tyrol as porters and labourers. He was leaning on his broom and looking with intense interest at what I was doing: in his early twenties I would have thought, with a wide, honest, slightly Asiatic face and wearing a peaked cap and khaki blouse. I answered in Russian, which I was able to speak fairly well from Polish.
“An Austro-Daimler 160hp, soldier. But why the interest?”
“Oh, it’s nothing, High-Born One. It’s just that before the war I was an apprentice at the Putilov Works in St Petersburg, and I used to work on Daimler engines. We were building them under licence: the 80hp kind for motor cars. They’re the same as this one only a bit smaller. But those contact breakers of yours are done for.”
“Thank you, but I had gathered that.”
“What’s your name?”
“Trofimov, Excellency: Arkady Feodorovich, Junior Corporal, 3rd Battery, 258th Regiment of Field Artillery. I got captured at Lutsk in the summer. There’s about twenty of us here, mostly Siberians.”
“Do they treat you well?”
“Well enough, Excellency. The food here’s no worse than in Russia and the local people are all right. They don’t give me anything interesting to do though, only sweeping up and collecting salvage.”
“What do you mean, interesting?”
“Work as a motor mechanic. I’ve offered to be the Herr Kommand- ant’s driver but he only laughs and slaps me round the head and calls me an ignorant peasant from the steppes. But honestly, I could do the job much better than most of the people here.” His eyes suddenly pleaded with me. “Let me have a go at those contacts at least. I could do you a replacement set in an afternoon if I could get some files and a vice and a grinding wheel.”
So I took Lance-Corporal Trofimov up on his kind offer. True, the workshops were locked up for the weekend. But Toth had acquired a number of strange skills in his seminary, apart from that of seducing nuns in marrow-beds, and one of these was the picking of locks. Before long Trofimov was at work in a shed, singing to himself as he filed away and the grinding wheel screeched and sparked. By the end of the afternoon he had fashioned us two perfect sets of contact-breaker electrodes; and not only that but replaced them, reset the magneto timing and removed and cleaned the sparking plugs. They were test-running the engine when I returned from Bozen carrying a large ham sausage which I had bought for Trofimov as a present with my remaining ten kronen. He was pleased, but was more anxious that I should recommend him for a vehicle fitter’s course. I said that I thought this might cause problems under the Hague Convention, but I promised to see what could be done.