The Two-Headed Eagle поп-3

by Джон Биггинс

  15 NAVAL AIRMAN

  Imperial and Royal Naval Air station Lussin Piccolo in November 1916 was really not much of a place. But then Lussin Piccolo itself was not much of a place either; though it seemed that it had once known more spacious days, perhaps a century before.

  Like many another title in the Habsburg realms, even here on their furthest Dalmatian fringes, the name was confusing. There were two towns on the long, narrow, straggling island of Lussin: Lussin Grande and Lussin Piccolo. Yet Lussin Piccolo was the only one of the two that could be described as a town. Despite its name the other settlement on the op­posite side of the island, though it had once been the capital, was by now no more than a dilapidated fishing village with a very large old church. It puzzled me why anyone should ever have bothered to build a town on that side of the island at all. It faced the Velebit Mountains on the Balkan mainland and was exposed to the full fury of the bora, which blew here in winter with a ferocity that, over the ages, had left the entire east-facing coast looking rather as if it had been sand-blasted at maximum pressure: every stick of vegetation shrivelled and worn away by the salt spray and the grit whipped up from the shore.

  Lussin Piccolo was a typical small island port town barely distinguish­able from several dozen other such towns along the Dalmatian coast. Centuries of Venetian rule had given them all a characteristic pattern-book appearance. There was the usual great baroque-byzantine church with its fluted campanile; and the same rows of shabby yellow-stuccoed palazzi along the riva, once the homes of the ship-owning dynasties who had made this a considerable port in the days of sail, but which had long since been reduced to mausoleums peopled by a few aged survivors of the old patrician families. One saw them sometimes early in the morning on their way to mass: the shrivelled Donna Carlottas and Donna Lugarezzias hob­bling along in their black-lace mantillas with equally ancient maids trailing behind them to carry their breviaries, on their way to one or other of the five or so barn-like churches where the walls were covered in memorial tablets to generations of Cosuliches and Tarabocchias lost at sea.

  Lussin Piccolo had once had a marine academy of its own, and a powerful guild of ship owners. But iron steamships and the Suez Canal had finally done for the place, and it had long since sunk into shabby poverty, alleviated a little only in the early years of this century when the Archduke Karl Stefan had built a villa here and the place had become, like the rest of the Dalmatian coast under Austrian rule, a riviera for second-rank nobility and imperial bureaucrats in summer and a sana­torium for invalids in winter. This always struck me as an odd belief, I must say: that the warm, sunlit Adriatic coast was an ideal place for consumptives. I had served fifteen years in the Austrian fleet and knew perfectly well from officiating at recruiting depots that the entire coast was in fact rotten with tuberculosis.

  But then, this was scarcely a matter for wonder: the diet of the com­mon people had always been miserable here in Dalmatia. The limestone islands—no more than karst mountain-tops protruding from the water— were stony and arid to a degree where even goats could scarcely browse a living from most of them. The islanders had imported their food in peacetime and had paid for it with tourist income and remittances from abroad. But now that the war was into its third year, tourism and remit­tances were both things of the past. The 1916 harvest had been disas­trously bad throughout Central Europe. The Hungarian government had just forbidden the export of grain to the rest of the Monarchy, so Dalmatia was indeed in a precarious state. If the people of Vienna were now sub­sisting on turnips and barley-meal, what would be left over for the folk of the poor, distant, forgotten Adriatic coastlands? By November supplies to the islands were down to the bare minimum needed to prevent people from dying of starvation in the streets. Even fish was no longer available to feed the people, now that the local fishing fleet was under military control and its catch requisitioned at the dockside to be taken away and canned for army rations.

  But the scarcity of food on Lussin Island in the autumn of 1916 had one good side to it: if there was nothing much for the people to eat, that at least meant that they no longer had to bother about finding fuel to cook it. Coal had been short throughout the Monarchy for a year or more past, as the blast-furnaces consumed everything that Austria’s increas­ingly decrepit rail system was able to transport. The cities got only what was left over from the war industries. By mid-November electricity and gas were off for most of the day in Vienna, so it was not very likely that places like Lussin were going to see much coal, dangling as they did at the end of a precarious steamer line down from Fiume. About the middle of the month a violent bora tore an old three-masted barque from her moorings on the mainland and drove her ashore on the eastern coast of the island just across from the air station. Word spread to the town and within minutes the entire population were on the move, armed with axes and crowbars. I was telephoned by the local coastguards to provide a naval picket to guard the wreck; but by the time I had collected the men and got to the ridge of the island above the shore it was already too late. We stood open-mouthed, staring in disbelief as the old wooden ship sim­ply evaporated in front of our eyes, disappearing like a piece of camphor in the sunshine, only much faster.

  There were about forty of us at Naval Air Station Lussin Piccolo, lodged in a small wooden-hutted encampment on the shores of Kovcanja Bay, at the opposite end of the long, narrow fjord-harbour from the town about five kilometres distant. The flying-boat base had recently been moved here out of the way because a minesweeper flotilla was using the town harbour, and things had become too crowded for safe take-off and landing. Lussin’s fjord was a splendid natural anchorage, sheltered by low hills to eastward from the bora and with only one narrow entrance, about half-way down the seaward side. The French Navy had occupied the place in the war of 1859 with the intention of using it as a base for stirring up revolt in Hungary—if the war had not ended after only a few weeks with Austria’s defeat. The War Ministry had learnt its lesson though and had built a number of forts on the island in the 1860s, as well as providing a chain barrier to block the harbour entrance.

  By the looks of it the War Ministry might very well have installed the personnel of the Naval Air Station at the same time as the defences, be­cause the average age of the lower deck was (I should think) nearer to sixty than to fifty: a collection of ancient naval reservists and pensioners called up for the duration and commanded—for want of a better word—by a delightful old gentleman called Fregattenkapitan Maximillian von Lotsch. Fregattenkapitan von Lotsch had not so much been called from retirement to command the station as returned from the embalmers. Nobody knew for sure how old he was, but it was reasonably certain on the evidence of old daguerreotype photographs that he had been a Seefahnrich aboard the brig Hus%ar at the siege of Venice in 1849. Certainly he must have been eighty-five if he was a day when I knew him: a charming old boy straight out of Biedermeyer Austria, but pretty well gaga and unshake- ably convinced that we were at war with the Prussians. He had not the remotest idea about aviation, or about running a naval air station. But it scarcely mattered, since he spent most of the day dozing peacefully in an armchair in his office, waking only from time to time to enquire whether the “Pfiff-Chinesers” had managed to capture Prague yet. We just gave him things to sign every now and then and got on with running the sta­tion as best we could.

  Not that our crew gave us much trouble. Apart from a few young engine fitters and other such craftsmen from our parent unit, the naval air base at Pola, the station personnel were simply too old to present us with the disciplinary problems that usually arise from having a ship full of feckless and hot-blooded young men. There was none of the drunken­ness, none of the whoring, none of the fights and none of the requests to visit pox clinics that normally make life so tiresome for divisional officers; only a good deal of grumbling among a collection of aged men who had suddenly found themselves in naval uniform again when they were already grandfathers, and who had now been exiled to spend the war on
a remote island in the Adriatic. They would while away their off-duty hours huddled around the stove at the Cafe Garibaldi in town, playing backgammon and wheezing complaints against the war and the “verfluchtete Kriegsmarine” as they snapped their arthritic knuckles.

  My servant was an ancient Pola-Italian naval pensioner called Tomas- sini who claimed (with what truth I cannot say) to have served as a powder- monkey aboard the wooden battleship Kaiser at Lissa in 1866. It was a pity, I once told him, that the Monarchy’s desperate shortage of manpower should have compelled it to call up men in their sixties. Tomassini sucked his remaining teeth and thought for a while about this.

  “Can’t say that it bothers me too much, Herr Leutnant, if you really want to know what I think. It gets me away from the old woman for a bit, and all things considered this isn’t too bad a place to sit out the war, specially now as they’re copping it back in Pola. There’s an air-raid every other day now, the missus says. They had a bomb come down the chimney of the house next door last week and bring our ceiling down. Frightened the life out of her it did. No danger of that out here anyway.”

  He was quite right about that: Lussin Island was way outside the range of the smaller Italian aircraft, and had nothing whatever to attract the big Caproni bombers that were now raiding Austrian towns as far behind the Front as Graz and Laibach. Fighter aircraft could not get this far, and we ourselves were too far from the Italian ports to be employed for bombing- raids. So air operations from Naval Air Station Lussin Piccolo consisted entirely of the humdrum business of convoy escort, varied only occasion­ally by the odd anti-submarine patrol.

  It was difficult to say which of these two was the more tedious. Es­corting convoys meant flying over them in circles for four or five hours at a stretch all the way down from the port of Fiume through the Quarnerolo Gulf to the limit of our sector at the northern tip of Lunga Island—some­times further, if the aeroplane from Zara had not turned up to relieve us. But, tiresome or not, it was certainly a necessary task. The Balkans in those days were a wild and primitive land, almost devoid of roads and railways. This meant that most of the supplies for our fleet at Cattaro and for the Austrian armies in Albania had to travel by sea, down a long coast which lay everywhere within easy striking distance of the Italian shore.

  If the convoys had not been properly protected, Allied submarines and motor boats would have been free to slaughter at will like foxes in a hen­coop. But they never managed it: in fact thanks to our Navy’s competent use of escorts, only a handful of merchantmen were ever sunk on the Fiume—Durazzo run, even though the number of sailings must have run into thousands. But it was arduous work for all those involved, both for the overworked destroyer and torpedo-boat crews who did the surface escorting and for the flying-boat pilots above.

  The trouble from our point of view was that even at half-throttle, down nearly to stalling speed, a Lohner flying-boat was about eight times as fast as a convoy of elderly merchant steamers with engines worn out by lack of grease and burning lignite in their boilers. We had to circle above them all the time, turning in great slow loops as the merchantmen dod­dered along below at five or six knots with a couple of harassed torpedo- boats fussing about on their flanks. Sometimes we would go clockwise, sometimes anti-clockwise, for no other reason than to break the monotony and stop ourselves getting dizzy, and also because our riggers warned us that this circling in the same direction all the time gave a permanent warp to the airframe. Yet it was a job that demanded unrelenting vigilance: con­stantly on the look-out not only for the tell-tale white plume of a periscope but for the tiny black dot of a drifting mine or the miniscule grey outlines of a flotilla of Italian MAS boats lurking among the myriad islands and waiting to skim in and launch their torpedoes. We were looking all the time for something which was probably not there, but which would wreak disaster if it were there and we failed to see it. If there was any doubt on that point it was dispelled early in November when the Ungaro-Croatia steamer Gabor Bethlen was torpedoed and sunk off Lunga Island after the other Lussin aeroplane had fumbled the hand-over to the relief from Zara and a submarine had taken advantage of the gap. As an ex-submarine cap­tain myself I liked to think that he would never have had the chance if I had been there, but secretly I was far from sure of that. Observer and pilot used to work one-hour shifts in those flying-boats; but in the winter cold it was dreadfully easy to drift into trains of thought and miss a periscope wake, especially when the sea was flecked with white-caps from the wind or if there had been a lot of dolphins about.

  My feelings about all this were curiously mixed, I must say. On the one hand, after the excitements and terrors of my time as a front flier with the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe I might have been expected to have relished the boring safety of this sort of flying; and all the more so when I had a wife six months pregnant back in Vienna. But I also knew that hundreds of thousands of my comrades were risking their lives every minute of the day and dying in hetacombs for their Emperor and Fatherland. Somehow it seemed a slightly seedy thing for a Maria-Theresien Ritter to be living this semi-retired life of modest comfort and minimal risk on a pleasant Adriatic island while my fellows were undergoing the most terrible hard­ships and dangers in the trenches and the U-Boats.

  Compared with flying over—or more usually among—the Alps, there was not even any great intrinsic risk in the flying itself. The Lohner boat in which I flew, number L149, was a comfortable and safe old bus: like all flying-boats, of very modest performance even when compared with the Hansa-Brandenburg, but soundly built and extremely reliable when fitted like ours with a 160hp German-built Mercedes engine. Built by the Jakob Lohner carriageworks in Vienna, one-time specialists in the horse-drawn hearses that still occasionally feature in horror films, it had a long, ele­gant boat-hull of varnished mahogany and the propeller mounted pusher- fashion behind the two long, curving, slightly swept-back wings. My pilot and I sat side by side in the open cockpit as if in a sort of airborne sports car. We could carry a machine gun for defence, mounted on a folding spigot on the observer’s side of the cockpit, but since we were so far from enemy fighters we usually left this ashore in the interests of weight- saving and took a wireless set instead. For armament we carried four 20kg bombs on racks beneath the wingroots to deal with a submarine if we spotted one.

  The other half of the “we” in this instance was my pilot Fregatten- leutnant Franz (or Frantisek) Nechledil. Like myself, Nechledil was a Czech by birth, the son of a chemist from the town of Pribram in southern Bohemia. I liked Nechledil, who was seven years my junior, but we never spoke Czech together, only German. The Habsburg Army permitted— even encouraged—its officers to speak with their men in their own lan­guage, even if this meant having to learn it specially. But among officers and senior NCOs the speaking of national languages, though not actu­ally forbidden, was regarded as bad form outside a few Hungarian and Polish regiments. The official doctrine was that anyone who put on the Emperor’s Coloured Coat as an officer put aside nationality. Thus the only permissible language among officers in the Austrian half of the Monarchy was that curious, now almost forgotten tongue called “official German”: a language distinguished by the fact that, of those who spoke it, wrote it, thought in it, told jokes—even made love—in it, a good two-thirds were using it as a foreign language; like Elisabeth and myself for example, since I knew no Magyar while she could only stumble along in Czech.

  But where Franz Nechledil was concerned there were other, darker reasons for his avoiding the Czech language even when we were alone together in private. His father had been founder of the local branch of the society “Sokol” in Pribram: a Czech patriotic and sporting organisa­tion which was officially dedicated to “elevating the moral and spiritual tone of Czech youth,” but which had for some years before the war been viewed with increasing alarm in Vienna as a secret society dedicated to Czech independence, the possible kernel of a Czech underground army of resistance. When the war came, and the k.u.k. Armee had been well
and truly thrashed by the Russians and Serbs, the authorities had panicked and arrested Czech nationalists by the hundred, hanging some after trumped- up trials in front of military courts and sending the rest to hastily set-up concentration camps in Austria. Nechledil’s father had been found guilty of espionage and sentenced to death, but had cheated the hangman by dying of typhus in jail. His mother and younger brother had ended up in a camp at Steinfeld outside Vienna.

  But worse was to follow, for it came to light early in 1915 that Nech­ledil’s elder brother, a Captain in Infantry Regiment No. 28, had not been killed at Przemysl after all but had gone over to the Russians and was now helping organise the Czechoslovak Legion in Siberia. Nechledil had been summoned to the Military Procurator’s department and had undergone a series of very unpleasant interviews concerning his own activities in the Sokol. He had been returned to duty in the end, but had been left under no illusions but that he was a marked man and was being closely watched. The result was that he regarded anything Czech—even a Dvorak gramophone record—with the sort of mildly hysterical aversion that some people have towards wasps or spiders. Between us two there was an unspoken pact never to mention or allude to any national political question, even to the extent of never talking about our respective home towns. This sounds like duplicity, and I suppose that in a way it was. But please understand that we Central Europeans have become masters of the art of partial amnesia, of excising from our minds anything that is not convenient to those set in authority over us. How does the joke go?