The Two-Headed Eagle поп-3

by Джон Биггинс

  They gave me the job of breaking the news to Magdalena, there in the front room of her father’s house in Caprovizza. I had expected tears, but the girl just became dreadfully quiet, the colour draining from her normally rosy face as if someone had opened a tap. I tried to comfort her by saying that her fiance was not killed, just missing, and that a patrol might yet find him alive in the mountains. But I knew that it was hope­less: that he had probably died of cold and shock on the first night. And I think that she knew as well. I left her parents to comfort her and walked back to the flying field. On the Carso the guns were thundering away in the preparatory barrage for the Ninth Battle of the Isonzo, the Italians having pushed forward some three kilometres since mid-September at a cost of about 150,000 lives. What did one more life mean, in the face of such monstrous carnage, one bereaved Slovene country girl when widows and orphans were being created every day by the thousand? The world had gone mad.

  I returned to find a visitor waiting for me in the Kanzlei hut. It was a major from the Air Liaison Section at 5th Army Headquarters. He questioned me closely about the mission which had led Toth and me to our fateful flight over the Alps. In the end he shut his folder and prepared to leave.

  “Well Prohaska, I can’t say that this business leaves a very pleasant taste in the mouth.”

  “Why not, Herr Major?”

  He smiled a bitter, mirthless smile. “I suppose that I’d better tell you, even though I ought not to according to the strict letter of regulations. Those documents of yours.”

  “Yes?”

  “They weren’t secret papers at all: they were love-letters from Conrad von Hotzendorf to his wife.”

  “They were . . . what? How do you know?”

  “The field police stopped the car at Teschen flying field and ques­tioned them. Everyone in Vienna’s nervy at the moment of course—oh, you wouldn’t have heard, would you? Someone shot the Prime Minister yesterday morning in the Cafe Meissl und Schaden. The place is buzzing with rumours of a German putsch to get rid of Karl when the old Emperor dies. Anyway, they questioned them both and it appears that Conrad’s been writing to her every day of the war without fail.”

  “I suppose that’s very wise of him,” I said. “He stole her from another man I hear, so perhaps he’s worried she’ll do the same to him if he doesn’t keep an eye on her.”

  “Quite possibly. Anyway, he had been away from Teschen for a week touring the Tyrolean Front, so the letters had built up and he roped you fellows in to fly them to Teschen for him: special express delivery at the expense of the War Ministry. Conrad loves little flourishes like that, I understand. Pity that your pilot had to lose his life for it.” He rose to leave. “Anyway, sorry and all that. You were quite outrageously misled, but there’s nothing we can do about it. And even if we could put our own Chief of Staff in front of a court martial for misuse of army personnel and property, it still wouldn’t bring back your Hungarian chap. Sorry.”

  He left, and Hauptmann Kraliczek came in. As he sat down a sudden surge of bile welled up in my throat: a violent loathing for all the field marshals and generals and desk-strategists who poured away men’s lives like water to feed their own preening vanity. I gazed at Kraliczek’s pasty, self-satisfied features before me and something snapped.

  “Herr Kommandant, I have a request to make.”

  “What is that, Herr Schiffsleutnant?”

  “I wish to transfer from this unit and resign from the k.u.k. Flieger­truppe. It’s all one to me where I go: the U-Boats, the trenches in the worst part of the front line—I don’t care any longer.”

  He smirked behind his spectacles. “I see: the Maria-Theresien Ritter’s courage has deserted him. I understand—the Flying Service is too danger­ous for him. And what are your reasons for requesting this transfer, pray? I cannot simply enter ‘Cowardice’ on the form, you understand.”

  I tried to remain calm. “My reason for requesting the move, Herr Kommandant, is simply to be as far away as possible from a creeping thing like you: a commanding officer of a flying unit who, so far as I am aware, has never once flown in an aeroplane and whose sole talent is for designing forms and sending brave men to their deaths in order to draw lines on pieces of graph paper afterwards.”

  “Watch your tongue, Prohaska: what you have just said is court- martial talk and might . . . might lead me to demand satisfaction from you.” I noticed that his voice trembled as he spoke these words.

  “Herr Kommandant, you will surely be aware as I am that the K.u.K. Dienstreglement absolutely forbids an officer to challenge his superior to a duel in wartime. If it did not then you would have been cold meat long ago.” “But this is outrageous! You are quite obviously unhinged.”

  “I obediently report that if I am unhinged, Herr Kommandant, that is because I have seen so many good men’s lives squandered these past three months to no effect. In fact I have just been informed that my pilot was sent to die of cold and injuries on a glacier high up in the Alps so that a field marshal’s wife could get a packet of letters a day earlier than she would have done if he had put them in the post. This does not please me and I want no further part in it.”

  “Nonsense. Your duty is to carry out whatever tasks your superiors give you. An order is an order. Anyway . . .” He sniffed. “I can’t see what you’re making such a fuss about. Your pilot fellow was only a ranker . . .”

  They told me afterwards that when the orderlies rushed into the of­fice they found me kneeling on Kraliczek’s chest with my hands about his throat, choking the life out of him as I endeavoured to drive his head through the floorboards. Another five seconds or so, the Medical Officer said, and I would probably have been up for court martial on a charge of murder. For my part I remember nothing of it, only a blind, murderous animal rage such as I have never known before or since. I had killed men in battle before that and would do so again; but never would I be filled with such a pure, intense, single-minded, near-ecstatic lust to take someone’s life. It was not Kraliczek’s odious features that I saw there as I gripped his throat, it was Magdalena’s pale, shocked young face; and Toth dazed and moaning glassy-eyed on that cursed icefield; Conrad von Hotzendorf’s self-satisfied little nervous twitch; and Rieger’s charred, grinning skull smouldering among the embers that first day on the field at Caprovizza— all the poor faceless, helpless victims caught up in this collective lunacy that called itself a war.

  There was an awful row of course: Maria-Theresien Ritter or no Maria-Theresien Ritter, war or no war, most armies in the world regarded it then and (I believe) still regard it to this day as a fairly serious breach of discipline to have attempted to throttle one’s commanding officer. What saved me in the end from court martial and a possible firing squad was a quite fortuitous piece of luck. For the next day, on 19 October, Flik 19F ceased to exist and was officially merged once more with its parent unit Flik 19. My new commanding officer was not therefore Hauptmann Rudolf Kraliczek, who was currently lying in hospital at Marburg, but Hauptmann Adolf Heyrowsky of Flik 19.

  “Well Prohaska,” he said, “I must say that you’ve gone and got yourself into a pretty little spot here and no mistake. If Oberleutnant Meyerhofer hadn’t got you into the ambulance straight away and off to the loony bin in Trieste the Provost’s people would have come for you and you’d have found yourself in a cell in the Caserne Grande. I gather from this report here that you attempted to inflict grievous bodily harm on Hauptmann Kraliczek?”

  “With respect Herr Kommandant, that is incorrect: I tried to kill him.” Heyrowsky stuck his fingers into his ears.

  “Tut tut, Prohaska; you really mustn’t say things like that or there’ll have to be a court martial after all. No, I didn’t hear what you said. My eardrums have been troubling me lately: altitude and all that. You’re a flier yourself so I’m sure you understand. No, I think that if we play this one intelligently we can still get you off the hook.”

  “Might I enquire how, Herr Kommandant? I am undeniably guilty of
a death-penalty offence. Court martial is mandatory in such cases.”

  “Well, it is and it isn’t. Evidence has to be gathered, and there were no witnesses I understand: at any rate, none who’d testify against you. And anyway, Flik 19F has just been merged with Flik 19, so while the papers are being transferred from their Kanzlei to ours I would imagine it to be quite possible that some might get mislaid. I think if we can discreetly lose you along the way as well . . .”

  “Lose me? How?”

  “I gather that you were only seconded to the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe from the Navy, so you’re not technically on the strength. I also understand from contacts of mine in Pola that they’re short of pilots in the Imperial and Royal Naval Flying Service. Now, I may be a fighting soldier but I haven’t served twenty years in the k.u.k. Armee without learning something about paperwork. If we’re quick we can get you up to Divacca and on to the next train to Pola before the Military Procurators people come here looking for you. They’ve still got a file open on you after that affair with the Italian pilot chap.” He looked at his watch. “Eleven-thirty-five precisely. Get your kit together and report back here in fifteen minutes while I talk with the lorry driver. Mustn’t make your departure too public I think. There’ll be a rail warrant waiting for you at Divacca.”

  “But Herr Kommandant . . .”

  “Prohaska, you are in no position to argue, believe me. Just go, and take damned good care not to leave a forwarding address.”

  So that was how I bade farewell to the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe: lying under a tarpaulin in the back of a motor lorry full of empty lubricating- oil cans, as we lumbered out through the gate of k.u.k Fliegerfeld Haiden­schaft and on to the Divacca road. It had been eighty-nine days in total. It only seemed much longer.

  I met Franz Meyerhofer in Vienna in 1930 or thereabouts. I had just re­turned from South America and he was in the city for a family funeral, so we met for a couple of drinks for old times’ sake. Meyerhofer told me that they had fought on after I left, first in Flik 19 then in other units. Meyerhofer himself had at last won his pilot’s wings and had eventu­ally led a fighter squadron over the Montello sector in the battles of the summer of 1918. The k.u.k. Fliegertruppe had fought on to the end, he said, outnumbered, and handicapped by every imaginable deficiency of equipment, organisation and training. Even in 1917, he said, the Germans would still not sell us Fokker interrupter gear to allow machine guns to fire through the propeller arc, so we had used a homemade version called the Zaparka system. This had worked, but only with the engine between twelve hundred and two thousand revs per minute—which meant that a pilot had to keep one eye on his target and the other on the tachometer as he pressed the firing button, otherwise he might only shoot off his own propeller blades. Likewise they still had to soldier on with the wretched Schwarzlose machine gun and its canvas ammunition belts. At the end of 1917, Meyerhofer told me, they had shot down a British Sopwith Camel fighter and had found that its machine guns were fed by self-destructing ammunition belts, made up of a chain of aluminium clips which held each cartridge to its neighbour and which fell off when the bullet had been fired. Samples were rushed to the k.u.k. Fliegerarsenal with an urgent request for an Austrian supplier to make a copy. Weeks later a letter was received thanking Meyerhofer for the sample and saying that the matter “was receiving the most active consideration.” It was still receiving the most active consideration a year later when the war ended—though, to be fair to the Fliegerarsenal, it had reached committee stage by then.

  Of those who had flown with me in Flik 19F only he, I and Svetozar von Potocznik were still alive. Most of the rest—Szuborits, Barinkai and Zwierzkowski and the others—had survived the war, but by 1926 all were dead, killed in peacetime flying accidents. Meyerhofer was now a pilot with the Belgian airline Sabena, and a few weeks after our meeting he too would “find the flier’s death,” colliding with a factory chimney as he tried to land in fog at Le Bourget.

  As for Svetozar von Potocznik, paladin of the Germanic Race, I had met him already in Paraguay in 1926 when I was briefly commanding the Paraguayan river fleet during the murderous Chaco War with Brazil. Rather odd when I had known him at Caprovizza, he was by now com­pletely crazed, but in a disturbingly calm, rational sort of way. He had flown in the shadowy little war in Carinthia in 1919 when the infant Austrian Republic had fought to prevent the Slovenes—now part of Yugoslavia— from taking the area south of Klagenfurt. And that was the reason why he was now in South America under the name of Siegfried Neumann: he was wanted throughout Europe as a war criminal after he had dive-bombed his father’s old school at Pravnitz and killed some forty or so children in a ground-floor classroom. He was now flying in the Paraguayan Air Force and practising on Indian villages the theories of terror bombing he had developed during the last years of the world war.

  About 1931 he returned to Germany and became a test-pilot for Junkers, then entered the Luftwaffe and became one of the leaders of the infamous Condor Legion during the Spanish Civil War—the ones who used the town of Guernica as a test-laboratory. He had risen to the rank of Major-General by the end of the war. But the Balkans which had given him his original name seemed to draw him back with some fateful magnetism. After being injured in a crash in 1941 he had been assigned to ground duties, commanding a region in occupied Yugoslavia. Partisan activity was intense, but the activities of “Sonderkommando Neumann”— a force made up of Luftwaffe ground troops, SS and Croat Ustashas—had been even intenser, and much more systematic. He was handed over to the Yugoslavs in 1946 and hanged as a war criminal responsible for the deaths of at least twenty-five thousand people.

  Meyerhofer had no idea what had become of the miserable Hauptmann Kraliczek after I had tried to choke him that day at Caprovizza: he had just disappeared from the scene. It was not until the 1960s that I remem­bered him, when I saw an article about him in one of the Sunday papers. It appeared that after the war Kraliczek had become a desk official with the Vienna police, collating crime statistics or something. For twenty years he had led the obscure life of a civilian police official. But recognition sometimes comes even late in life. In 1938 the Nazis arrived in Austria, and in 1940 Kraliczek’s section had been incorporated into Himmler’s SS empire and moved to Berlin. There he was put to work on his old job, or­ganising rail movements. And now be came into his own. In the old days his diligence and attention to detail had been able to work only through the rickety Habsburg administrative machine. But now, as Section Head, he had at his disposal a superbly efficient and unquestioningly obedient administration, absolutely dedicated to its allotted task.

  He had undoubtedly done a superb job, organising dozens of rail transports a day across occupied Europe despite the chaos brought about by bombing and the collapse of the fighting fronts. In fact the worse things got, the more effective Kraliczek’s team became. When the British had arrested him near Flensburg in 1945 he had boasted to his captors that in the summer of 1944 he had been routing thirty or forty trains a day across Slovakia even as the Russian armies were pushing into Hungary. Had he ever given any thought to what was being done with the contents of the trucks when they reached their destination? he had been asked. No, he said indignantly; that was totally outside his area of responsibility and no concern of his whatever. They gave him twenty years at Nuremberg. He came out early, about 1962, and was immediately approached for inter­views by a young American-Jewish woman journalist—hence the news­paper articles later. He had taken a great liking to her for her qualities of precision and hard work, and had told her everything that she wanted to know in great detail. It was not until near the end of the interviews that she revealed that both her parents had died in the gas chambers. Kraliczek had been genuinely shocked and horrified by this revelation, quite unable to comprehend that it was one of his trains that had taken them there.

  So much for the players: what about the stage? As for the Carso Plateau, if I had never seen the place again that would have been far too soon f
or me. Not steam winches and No. 6 hawsers would ever have dragged me back to that poisonous wilderness. But not everyone felt the same way, I understand. In fact I believe that in the years after the war there were many survivors—Italian and Austrian and ex-Austrian—who kept on going back to those barren hills, spending days at a time wander­ing alone among the rusty wire-belts and crumbling dug-outs in search of they knew not what, whether the comrades they had left behind there, or their own stolen youth, or perhaps expiation for having come out of it all alive when so many had not. One of these sad living ghosts was Meyerhofer’s youngest brother, who had served on the Carso in the thick of the 1916—17 fighting as a twenty-year-old Leutnant in a Feldjager bat­talion, straight out of school into the Army. He had gone back every year, Meyerhofer told me, until the previous summer, when he had been killed one evening near Castagnevizza, blown up (the carabinieri said) after he had lit his campfire on top of an old artillery shell buried in a dolina.

  Like myself, he had been a keen amateur photographer and Meyer- hofer, while he was in Vienna, was going to bequeath his brother’s album to the Military History Museum at the Arsenal. He showed it to me back in his hotel room. Many of the photographs were from the years after the war, when the Mussolini regime was dotting the Carso with bom­bastic war memorials designed not so much to honour the dead as to assert the grandeur of armed struggle. But one photograph showed an unofficial war memorial, erected by the troops themselves in the field. It was taken, I should think, some time after the rout at Caporetto, when the Italian Army on the Carso had abandoned in an afternoon all that it had just taken them two years and half a million lives to gain. Marked simply Fajtji Hrib, Autumn 1917, it showed a pyramid of twenty or thirty skulls, piled together without any regard to their owners’ nationality and surmounted by a crucifix made from two thigh bones and a screw-picket stake lashed together with barbed wire. I have no idea what became of that photograph. Perhaps it was lost, because I have never seen it reproduced anywhere. Which is a pity, since I think that if all war memorials had the stark honesty of that simple monument then we might perhaps have fewer wars to commemorate.