The Two-Headed Eagle поп-3

by Джон Биггинс

  I took the greatest care crossing the glacier, probing gingerly in front of me with a broken wooden strut. Even so I slipped into a small crevasse at one point and spent five or so terror-filled minutes dragging myself back over the edge, lying exhausted on the ice with wildly beating heart before I was able to get up and go on. But at last I reached the edge of the glacier, a chaotic jumble of ice-blocks and fallen boulders where the mountainside and the billions of tonnes of ice had spent millennia grind­ing against one another. The climb up the rock-face must have taken me a good hour and a half. My flying-boots had smooth soles and the first of the winter’s snow was making the crags slippery, while the wind- eddies tried their best to pluck me from the cliff as I panted in the thin air. Then at last, after an infinity of scrambling and clawing, I found my­self on the saw edge of the ridge, perhaps a thousand metres above the glacier, where I could just make out the wreck of the aeroplane lying in the snow. I peered over the edge, fearful that I would find nothing but another glacier. But no; I was looking down into a deep valley: so much deeper than the one that I had just climbed out of that dark blue-green forests of pine grew in it below the snowline. I could see no sign of human habitation, but in the Dolomites forests meant trackways, and trackways led to villages. All that I had to do now was descend and follow the moun­tain streams down to safety. I took one last look at the wreck below, to fix its position in my mind so that I could guide the rescue party. Then I began the descent.

  I had often noticed when mountaineering that coming downhill is usually far more arduous than going up. In this case the going was par­ticularly tough because the rock-faces were mostly north-facing and were still festooned with loose and highly dangerous patches of rotten ice from last winter, treacherously masked by a light veil of fresh snow. It took me upwards of three hours to get down to the treeline. As I neared it, sliding down a rock scree and across snow patches, I paused. It was hu­man voices. Quickly I fumbled a red flare into the rocket pistol and fired it into the air. Then I saw them, among the small trees at the edge of the forest. I ran down towards them, slithering in the snow and shouting to attract their attention. They turned and stopped. It was only as I got to within perhaps twenty meters of them that I stopped too. They were soldiers, in peaked caps with snow-goggles and with pairs of skis slung on their backs with their rifles. But there was something not quite right about the cut of the grey uniforms; also a rather un-Austrian swarthiness about their features. I stopped and we stared at one another as the awful truth dawned upon me: that these were not Landeschutzen as I had in­nocently supposed, but Italian Alpini.

  Various thoughts raced through my brain in those few seconds. We were effectively prisoners of war now, but at least Toth would be rescued swiftly when the Italians sent up a search party. Anyway, I had to get food and rest for a while. My leather flying overalls were wet through from snow, heavy and clammy to feel. Nor had I eaten since that morning. I was in such a state that quite frankly I would have surrendered myself to a tribe of cannibals if they had been prepared to give me a place by the fire and some food before eating me. But then, quite suddenly, a chilling realisa­tion struck me: the secret papers! The entire fate of the Monarchy might depend upon them. If the Italians found Toth they would also find the aeroplane, and would certainly find the pouch of documents which I had entrusted to his care when I left him. No, I must try to confuse them: play for time, then escape if I could and get back to our lines—which surely could not be far away—and get a search party sent up from our side. What could the life of my pilot weigh against the whole Austro-Hungarian war effort? A higher duty beckoned.

  The patrol leader was a sergeant: a dark, sharp-featured young man who spoke with the characteristic accent of the South Tyrolean valleys, where many of the local people in those days still used a strange patois of Latin called Ladinisch. He pushed up his goggles and regarded me suspiciously.

  “Aviatore austriaco? Osterreichischer Flieger?”

  “No, no,” I replied, “sono aviatore italiano.”

  “Why did you shout to us in German then?”

  “I thought that you must be an Austrian patrol. I’m lost and I thought that I must have come down behind their lines. But thank God I’m still on our side.”

  “Who are you and from which airfield?”

  “Tenente-Pilota Giuseppe Falzari, Squadriglia 27a at Feltre flying field. I was flying a Savoia-Pomilio but got lost in a snowstorm and had the engine cut out. I managed to land somewhere up there on a pasture in the snow, but I’ve no idea where I am now. I’ve been wandering all day and had to cross a glacier.”

  He looked puzzled. “Funny. We got a telephone call to go up and look for a crashed aeroplane, but that was an SP2 from San Vittorio with two men on board. There must have been some mistake. But anyway, we’ve found you now wherever it was that you flew from, so let’s get you down the mountain. Can you walk?”

  “Yes, yes, no trouble. I came out of the landing unhurt. But I’m very tired so I would be glad if you walked slowly.”

  The patrol was based at a rifugio: a small wooden climber’s hut perched precariously on the edge of a snow-covered precipice on the chilly north face of the mountain, about two thousand metres up. It was barely big enough to hold the ten men and their equipment, but it had a stone hearth and log fire blazing most invitingly as I entered. Before long my wet leather overalls were steaming gently as I sat by the fire devouring a bowl of spaghetti with some cheese crumbled over it. A delicious and almost forgotten smell of real coffee pervaded the hut from the enamel pot brewing in the embers. It would have been a little heaven on earth after the cold and wet and exhaustion—had it not been for the conscious­ness of Toth lying up there on the glacier with two broken ankles and night drawing on, with a leather pouch of top-secret documents resting beneath his head.

  There was also the more pressing problem of my host, Sergente Agorda. He was a talkative man, and not only talkative but unpleasantly inquisitive, with sharp eyes and (I found to my dismay) a detective’s instinct for the small inconsistencies in people’s stories. My Italian was convincing enough to pass muster, I knew; the problem was rather that of making up a plausible life history for myself as I went along. The Sergeant’s men were not too much trouble: to my surprise, most of them were not Tyroleans but came from the Abruzzi or even further south. But Agorda himself was a tougher proposition. He was a local man—his peacetime job had been as a mountain guide in Cortina d’Ampezzo—but he had travelled widely enough in northern Italy to be able to pick me up on more than one detail of my story.

  “We’ve been using this rifugio as a base all summer,” he said, pouring me a steaming tin mug of coffee, “but we’re going to have to move down the mountain in a few weeks I reckon. The snow’s early this year and they all say it’s going to be a hard winter.”

  “Has there been much fighting up here?”

  “Not a great deal so far. There’s been a lot going on down in the Tofane and the Marmolada these past few months, quite heavy some of it. But for the time being it looks like neither our generals nor the Austrians want these mountains badly enough to do any serious fighting over them.”

  “Where are the lines? Are they far from here?”

  He laughed. “Lines? There’s no lines up here, any more than there are for you fellows up in the air. The Austrians are over the other side of the massif and we’re over here and so far it’s been skirmishes most of the time. Sometimes their artillery chucks a few shells over and we chuck a few back, but mostly it’s patrols taking a few shots at one another up among the cols. We lost two men back in March when the bastards brought a machine gun up on a sledge, but we ambushed them the next month and killed three of them, so it’s about quits at the moment. Funny thing really, but we know most of them, the Landeschutzen I mean. In fact some of our local men and some of theirs are cousins and brothers-in- law. Crazy really: fighting over mountains when the mountains could wipe out the lot of us if they chose.” He topped up my
mug of coffee. “That happened last spring over on Monte Cristallo, you know? There were two companies shooting it out on the mountainside with their rifles. Then some stupid sod tossed a hand-grenade and that started an avalanche and neither our lot nor the Austrians have been heard of since. No, Tenente, if you’ve earned your living up here as a guide then believe me you treat the mountains with a bit of respect.” He paused and stoked the fire. “But that’s enough about us, Tenente, what about yourself? Have you been long in the Corpo Aereo? ”

  “Eighteen months, almost.”

  “What were you in before, if I might ask?”

  “The cavalry.” I adjusted the collar of my still tightly buttoned leather flying jacket to conceal the naval officer’s jacket underneath.

  “Which regiment?”

  “Er . . . the Aosta Dragoons.” This seemed a good choice: in 1916 a very high proportion of flying officers in all the air forces of Europe had come from the cavalry, tired of sitting behind the lines and waiting for the breakthrough that would never happen.

  “Aosta Dragoons? But you come from the Veneto don’t you?”

  I could hardly deny this: the Habsburg Navy had been entirely Italian­speaking until the 1850s and the version of the language taught in the Marine Academy had been the soft, lilting Venetian dialect which one used to hear in those days all the way down the Adriatic coast as far as Corfu. This man’s questions were becoming impertinent, but I sensed that it would be unwise to—how do you say?—pull rank and tell him to mind his own business.

  “Yes, from Pordenone if you must know. My father was a wine mer­chant there.” I saw at once that I would regret this lie. His face brightened.

  “Ah, from Pordenone? I know it well. I have cousins there. But on which street, if I might ask?”

  “The Strada della Liberta.”

  “Which number? ”

  I swallowed hard. I was not enjoying this game at all. “Number twenty-seven.”

  “Then you’ll remember old Ernesto the drunkard and his wife. Were you there when it happened? ”

  Mother of God, help me, I thought.

  “No, should I have been?”

  “That’s odd then: it was all over the papers when they found her buried in the cellar.”

  “I was away at military college at the time: I only heard about it later.” “At military academy? They must have sent you there young then. It was about 1892 or 1893. She was a cousin on my mother’s side. But if your father was a wine merchant he must have been a member of the Guild.” “The Guild? ”

  “The Guild. Surely you know about that affair? The Guild of San Salvatore: all the wine-trade people were in it. They were making wine out of horse-beans with logwood and sulphuric acid. A lot of them went to jail when people started dying from it. The whole of Italy must have heard of it.” He got up. “Here, let’s put another log on the fire, shall we? It’s perishing cold in here.”

  In fact, far from being perishing cold, the interior of the hut was like a Turkish bath. I divined now what the game was: to force me to open my flying jacket and reveal the uniform underneath, without the risk of being put on a charge of insubordination if he simply ordered me to open it and I turned out to be an Italian officer after all. It was a cunning ruse: inside my flying overalls I was already beginning to feel little rivulets of sweat trickling down my body. Agorda stuck another couple of logs on the blaz­ing fire, sending a blast of sparks up the chimney. He turned to me.

  “Tenente, wouldn’t you like to remove that flying suit? You’ll catch a chill sitting there in damp leather.”

  In the end I tried to gain some relief from the stifling heat by remov­ing my overall trousers and belt. I was wearing field-grey breeches and puttees which I hoped would look indeterminate-coloured enough in their sweat-soaked state to pass for Italian uniform. As I placed them on the table the Sergeant took the belt and the holster attached to it and removed the pistol inside. “Where did you get this Steyr pistol, Tenente?”

  “I picked it upon the Isonzo last year and decided to keep it. It’s bet­ter than our issue.” This was nonsense and he must have known it: the 9mm Steyr pistol must have been one of the most substandard military firearms ever devised. I only carried mine because regulations required it—and to put a bullet through my head if need be to escape death by fire. He examined it.

  “Nice piece of work. But these overalls—did you capture them from the Austrians as well? Ours are black, not brown, and they have a fur lining. I know because we had to go up last month to bring down the body of one of our fliers. But don’t you want to take the jacket off?”

  “No, no thank you. These jackets have to dry on the body, otherwise they get stiff.” I realised that if I did not make my escape now it would soon be too late. “Sergente, I must go outside—you understand.”

  “Ah yes, the latrine’s out along the path there. I’ve kept it swept of snow.”

  I made my way out into the air. Its chill was like a slap in the face after the smothering warmth inside the rifugio. It was snowing again and beginning to get dark. I looked about me in the swirling flakes, know­ing full well that several keen pairs of eyes were watching my every move from inside the hut. Damn it! The skis had been locked away in a shed. I would have to find some other means of escape. I made my way to the rickety privy and shut the door. It was a sheet-metal box like an enlarged biscuit tin perched precariously on a creaking wooden frame above a slope of snow falling away to invisibility in the murk below. What was I to do? Only the back of the privy was invisible from the hut. I tried the back wall, above the board with a hole in it which served as the seat. A sheet of tinplate was loose. Slowly and carefully I worked it free and pulled it out. Snowflakes came pouring in through the gap. It was about a metre and a half long by perhaps three-quarters of a metre across. It might be worth a try. I placed it on the seat, stood on it and bent the front edge upwards to make a crude toboggan. I had my leather gauntlets in my pockets, so I put them on to save my hands from being cut to pieces by the edge of the metal. It seemed like suicide: for all I knew the slope below might run down into the darkness, then turn into a five-hundred-metre sheer drop. I stood on the seat holding the makeshift sledge in front of me, trying to nerve myself to jump. Suddenly the door rattled.

  “Tenente, are you in there? Open this door and come out with your hands above your head or I shoot at the count of ten. Uno, due, tre . . .” I quickly said the Act of Contrition—then launched myself into space.

  The belly-landing on the filthy snow beneath knocked the breath out of me, and I almost rolled over with the tin sheet on top of me. There were shouts from above, and lights, then pistol shots as I hurtled away into the dusk down a near-vertical ice-slope. But luck was with me. An unknown distance later I came to an abrupt halt in a snowdrift among trees. I quickly abandoned the toboggan and floundered away among the trees on foot. Voices could be heard further up the mountainside, but that was the last I saw of them.

  I have no idea where or how long I wandered that night. I had left the compass behind and it was snowing again while the cloud had come down, so I could only wade through drifts and scramble along up rock-faces and down ice-slopes in the hope that instinct was leading me towards the Austrian lines. This went on until near dawn the next morning, when the first light revealed me traversing my way down a high north slope across a steep snowfield above a forest. I was worn out and utterly, hopelessly lost, all sense of direction gone. I paused to regain my breath, knee-deep in the rotten grainy snow of last winter. I realised suddenly that something was wrong, even if at first I put it down to the light-headedness of exhaustion: I had stopped walking, but I was still moving perceptibly downhill. I tried desperately to scramble sideways on to firm snow. Too late. I went over, then was buried by the sliding white mass, then surfaced for a moment, then went under again like a swimmer being swept over a weir. Stifled, tumbled, rolled over and over, I lost all sense of where I was in the grind­ing, roaring smother.

  At
last all was still, and I knew that I was dead: buried metres deep by the avalanche. It seemed strange that sensation should still persist after death. I wondered when they would come for me, whoever they were who acted as doorkeepers for this world beyond. I suppose that I could have lain like that for minutes or for hours: I have no idea. I remember that my first thought as I peered through snow-clogged eyes was that, whether they were angels or devils, neither type of attendant in the next world had ever been described to me as wearing puttees. I looked up. A dim shape stood over me. For some reason I spoke in Italian.

  “Who are you? Take me with you.”

  The mysterious being spoke at last. The accent was broad Tyrolean.

  “Warum sprechen Sie Italienisch? Wir sind Osterreichern.”

  They sent patrols up all that day and the next, even called aircraft up from Bruneck to join the search. But the snow had been heavy that night up in the high Dolomites, and in any case after my wanderings I had very little idea where Toth and the wreck of the aeroplane might be. It was a particularly savage winter in the Alps that year. A record ten metres of snow fell on the Marmolada in December. By January 1917 the wretched troops in the line had declared an unofficial armistice in order to fight for sheer survival against the weather. Tens of thousands perished in avalanches, swept away and never seen again. Sentries froze to blocks of ice in their rock-bound eyries while entire companies were buried without trace in a few minutes by the terrible blizzards that raged along the moun­tain ridges. By the time the spring came Zugsfuhrer-Feldpilot Zoltan Toth and the wreck of the aeroplane Hansa-Brandenburg CI number 26.74, Zoska, must have been buried metres deep in that unknown glacier.

  And I suppose that they must still be there, the last flier and the last aeroplane of the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Flying Service. The glacier will make its grinding way down the mountain trough, a metre or so a year, until one summer it will melt and crumble open at the bottom of the valley to reveal Toth’s frozen body and the remains of the aeroplane, perhaps thousands of years hence, when we are all dust and the Habsburg Monarchy (if anyone remembers anything about it at all) will be known only to scholars: one with the kingdom of the Seleucids, the Egyptian Second Dynasty and all the other gaudy, tinsel-and-paste empires that were to have lasted for eternity.