by Джон Биггинс
“Please, please to wait a little moment. I have spoken with Lieutenant d’Issigny and we are agreed that perhaps it may be possible to de-capture you, if you understand my meaning.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t follow you . . .”
“It is almost dark. Your aeroplane, it is towed astern. You may still get into it and we will cut you loose. Voila—you have escaped. No one will say anything or know anything. But you must first promise me two things.” “And what are they, if I might ask?”
“The first, that you will not start your motor and take off until we are out of hearing; the second, that you will give me your paroles as officers never again in this war to fly against France. Against the Italians—pah! they are crapule: it signifies nothing. But not against France.”
It certainly looked an attractive offer. I sensed now that both d’Issigny and the Captain of the destroyer were intensely anxious to have us both out of the way. Of course—d’Issigny himself must have been in the conning- tower hatch firing the machine gun at us as we roared overhead. A submarine has no portholes, so only he and his unfortunate diving coxswain knew that their boat had been sunk purely through accident and not from our bombs. If Nechledil and I conveniently disappeared from the scene then he and his crew might get medals from this action instead of facing a court of enquiry. He and Kermadec would explain away the rescue by saying that we had flown away before we could be captured, leaving the Laplace's crew swimming in the water for the destroyer to pick up. The professional honour of La Royale would be preserved and everyone would be happy.
The only question now was, what was in it for us? Our engine was defunct, so we would be set adrift and left to our fate. It would be a long, cold night and perhaps by morning a bora would be blowing. In the end we might merely have exchanged a prison camp for a watery grave.
“Captain,” I asked, “if we were to be landed by you, whose prisoners would we be?”
“Ah, that is simple. We would have to hand you over to the Italians. The Marine Nationale are guests at Brindisi and we have no faculties for holding prisoners. There is an agreement for this.”
That settled it: five minutes later Nechledil and I were seated once more in the cockpit of the flying-boat L149 as it drifted away astern into the Adriatic night. A few minutes more, and the noise of the Bombardier’s engines had been swallowed up by the darkness. We were on our own once more.
Many years later, about 1955, I happened to see a recently published book entitled A Sailor Remembers, by none other than Rear-Admiral Dagobert St Jurienne, Chevalier Greoux-Chasseloup d’Issigny, French Navy (Rtd). Written in a most entertainingly florid style, it told of his adventures from the time when he had chosen the seafaring life up to his retirement in 1953. I must say however that I found it to be more interesting for what a sailor had managed to forget than for what he had remembered, particularly as regards his own murky activities during the Second World War when he had served as Deputy Minister of the Marine in the Vichy government, then attached himself to Admiral Darlan in North Africa, then deftly changed sides in 1943 and emerged among the ranks of the victors. My main interest though was in finding out what (if anything) he had to say about certain events one day in December 1916. I was not to be disappointed: After a ferocious battle lasting over an hour with the many Austrian aeroplanes, the immortal submarine Laplace slid at last beneath the waters of the Adriatic, overwhelmed by the superior might of the enemy. As the waves closed over them our brave matelots raised three cheers of “Vive la France!” and sang the “Marseillaise” while the perfidious enemies circled above them like odious vultures.
Yet even in the darkest moments of war some sparks of humanity may be found in the adversary, and as we swam among the wreckage an Austro-Hungarian hydroplane alighted on the waves beside us and supported me and my brave fellows in the water until succour arrived. These very chivalrous and gentle Austrians, by name the Chevalier von Parchatzky and the Vicomte de Nec-Ledil, would have supported us longer even at the cost of themselves becoming prisoners, but I bade them leave with a cry of “Save yourselves while there is still time, my braves!” So they started their motor and climbed into the air, waving to us as they did so in farewell. Alas, we later heard that these noble fellows were both lost soon afterwards, and that the sea had swallowed them up forever.
I was unable to resist sending a postcard to the Admiral’s publisher saying that while sadly the Vicomte de Nec-Ledil was no more, the noble Austrian Chevalier von Parchatzky was very much alive and would in fact be glad to meet him if he were ever in London. I read a few weeks later in The Times that he had died suddenly of a stroke. I hope that there was no connection.
For the time being though, Lieutenant d’Issigny’s surmise about our being engloutis par la mer came uncomfortably close to being fulfilled. A north-west wind got up during the night and soon raised a sea that would have been uncomfortable in any small boat, let alone one like ours with a great venetian-blind structure of wings and tailplane on top of it. By dawn we were wet through, frozen and exhausted by lack of sleep and continuous bailing. Nor had we the slightest idea where we were. The hazy sun came up to reveal a heaving grey disc of water with our flying-boat tossing and lurching in the middle of it as its flat bottom slithered down into each wave-trough. We were being drifted along at about six or seven knots by the wind, I thought. But at least drifting was better than staying still. In an almost land-locked sea like the Adriatic drifting with the wind would bring us eventually to one shore or another. I decided to aid this process. I took out my clasp-knife and clambered out on to the lower wings. I slit open the fabric on the under-surface of the wings above and pulled this down in flaps, which I fastened to the lower wings to make crude sails.
Steering with our paddles and the rudder, this would help us to make better speed before the wind and might get us to land before we were dead from exposure and fatigue.
Even so it was a miserable business to huddle there in the cockpit, soaked through with spray, each trying to snatch a half-hour’s sleep as the other bailed. Yet despite the chill and wet, we were soon tormented by thirst as the salt spray caked on our lips. We had no water apart from a couple of litres milked from the engine radiator, barely drinkable from rust and engine oil. As for food, there was none apart from a packet of ship’s biscuits which we had been too ashamed to offer to the survivors from the Laplace. Crunching these and trying to swallow them with our parched throats was like trying to masticate broken bottles. About midday I decided to try and get the wireless working, charging the battery by attaching a makeshift crank to the wind-driven dynamo. It was a bitter disappointment: an hour or more of strenuous cranking produced barely enough current for four repetitions of the message “L149—SOS.”
This purgatory lasted until early afternoon, when the breeze dropped and the sea lessened to leave us drifting aimlessly once more. Then we both saw it together: the smoke on the horizon to northward. I fired three flares as the upperworks came into sight. Through my binoculars it looked like an Austrian Tb/-class torpedo-boat, in fact a small two-funnelled coastal destroyer. But had they seen us? They seemed to be steaming at about seven knots and were within three thousand metres of us. A drifting flying-boat is hardly something that a look-out can miss, but still they steamed on past us and disappeared in a bank of haze, ignoring us as I desperately fired our last flares.
“Nechledil,” I said through cracked lips, “how could they have missed us? Surely they must have seen us at this range.” Nechledil said nothing, merely sat staring glumly as the vessel faded into the murk. I could see that the apathy of exhaustion was already creeping over him. I too gazed at the spot where the torpedo-boat had vanished, lost for words. So imagine my surprise about five minutes later when the boat reappeared, heading in the opposite direction and turning towards us. I waved and shouted as if they would hear us at that range. Why had they ignored us the first time? They were coming to pick us up, no question of that.
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br /> The dinghy bumped alongside us a few minutes later. To my surprise the two ratings in it refused to answer us when we spoke, only told us curtly to sit down and shut up. I was even more surprised when one of them proceeded to take a crowbar and smash holes in the floor and sides of the flying-boat—and told me to be quiet when I asked him what he thought he was doing. My suspicion that something was badly amiss was confirmed shortly afterwards as we came alongside the torpedo-boat Tb14. We were greeted by two ratings with levelled rifles and a petty officer with a pistol. I asked what the devil was going on—and was told to come aboard with my hands up. As I was bundled across the rail the incredible truth finally dawned upon me. The vessel was in the hands of mutineers.
17 FIAT JUSTITIA
As Nechledil and I were being searched before being hustled below decks I overheard an argument going on between the petty officer who had greeted us at the gangway and a senior rating. Both were Czechs, and the rating was plainly not all pleased with the Petty Officer.
“For God Almighty’s sake why did we have to pick them up? I told the helmsman to keep his course when I saw them. They’ll be out after us by now and we’ve still got three hours left until it gets dark.”
“Shut up Eichler. Who’s giving the orders here, me or you?”
“I thought there weren’t going to be any orders any more. You and your finer feelings, Vackar. We ought to have left the bastards to drown. They’re only officers.”
“They’re human and we’re socialists. They were men like us once: only Austria turned them into officers.”
“Oh be quiet and get them below with the others then. I’ve got a ship to run.” He turned to us. “What’s your names?”
“No business of yours, sailor,” I answered. “And stand to attention when you speak to an officer. Who’s in charge here?”
He laughed. “Don’t come that tone of voice here Herr Leutnant or you’ll both end up back in the sea. We’re all in charge here.” A sailor stuck a pistol into my stomach as he reached down the neck of my flying tunic to pull out my identity tag. He collected Nechledil’s by the same means and handed them to Eichler, who examined the names stamped on the back. “I don’t believe it—both Czechs as well. And one of them the celebrated Ritter von Prohaska of the U-Boat Service. Well meine Herren, remember any of our Czech do we? Or did they wash that out of you at cadet school as well? Filth—you’d forget your own names if the Austrians told you to do it. Your sort make me sick.”
With that we were pushed down the narrow companionway and shoved into the Captain’s cabin. The door was locked behind us. We found ourselves packed into the tiny steel cubicle with five other men: the ship’s captain, a Seefahnrich and three NCOs who had remained loyal when the ship had been taken over. The Captain was a fellow called Klemmer whom I knew vaguely from the Marine Academy. He was in a bad way, shot through the left lung and coughing blood. They had bandaged him with a torn bedsheet and laid him out on a bunk. We gathered that Tb14 had been operating with the 5th Torpedo Boat Division at Sebenico, engaged day-in, day-out for the past ten months on convoy escort along the Dalmatian coast. Working-hours had been long, leave minimal and the food increasingly poor. Likewise the First Officer, one Strnadl, had been very unpopular, combining tyranny with incompetence in about equal measure. Yet no one had suspected anything until just before eight bells that morning off Premuda, when the Captain had suddenly found himself barricaded into his cabin just as he was about to relieve Strnadl on the forenoon watch. He had finally managed to lever the cabin door open with a chair-leg, but had emerged on deck pistol in hand only to be knocked over by a rifle-shot from Eichler on a conning tower. Our fellow prisoners said that, so far as they knew, Eichler and Vackar had taken an equal part in organising the mutiny. Both had been heard talking some days before about a Czech Legion which was being formed among Austrian prisoners in Italy. Quite clearly the boat was bound for Ancona to surrender.
As for the rest of the eighteen-man crew, they thought that most were undecided about the mutiny: a few of the South Slavs disposed to join it, others probably against and the engine-room crew wavering. No one knew what had happened to Fregattenleutnant Strnadl. He might have been locked up in the fo’c’sle, but shots had been heard and it seemed more likely that he had gone overboard with a bullet through his head.
It looked then as if, having been generously released from French captivity, I was now on my way to become a prisoner of the Italians after all. That was a matter for regret to be sure, and for acute shame on behalf of my service in view of the circumstances in which it had happened, but at least it cast no slur upon either my loyalty or my professional competence. As for poor Nechledil though, I sensed that he would gladly accept life imprisonment in a cesspit with scorpions for company and bread and water to eat in exchange for his present predicament. His father had been condemned for treason, his brother was a deserter and his relatives were sitting in Austrian internment camps on suspicion of Czech nationalist subversion. And now he found himself through no fault of his own aboard a warship about to desert to the enemy after having fallen victim to a Czech-led mutiny. He was in a pretty mess and no mistake. What would happen if Tb14 were captured before nightfall by Austrian ships? What would happen to his mother and brother when he arrived in Italy and the news got back via the Red Cross? Suppose that Italy finally lost the war and Austrian deserters were handed over? I could vouch for his loyalty, but who would listen to me? I was a Czech myself after all, and already under investigation for various breaches of military discipline. Something had to be done.
I knew the Tb1-class torpedo-boats quite well from having served aboard one as second-in-command back in 1909; not only served aboard her, but worked on her in the shipyard where she was being built. In order to get the Hungarian parliamentary deputation to vote money for them, half of the Tb1-class orders had been placed with the Kingdom of Hungary’s only salt-water shipyard, the Ganz-Danubius AG in Fiume. Although only set up a couple of years before, Ganz-Danubius had already established a formidable reputation for poor design and shoddy workmanship. The Danubius Tb1 boats were no exceptions to this unhappy rule. Long, narrow steel canoes driven by a single propeller, they were unstable and top-heavy at the best of times. But Danubius had managed to make the basic design even worse by taking no account whatever of the enormous torque-effect from the propeller. The result on speed-trials had been a list to starboard which grew more alarming with every knot, until I had been obliged to have men hanging on to the port rails to trim ship and the crew below moving every available piece of gear over to the port side. The boats had been refused acceptance by the Navy and had returned to the yard for months of modifications.
I had been at the Danubius yard throughout those alterations. And now, seven years later, I was sitting in the captain’s cabin of one of these boats with a pencil and sheet of paper, trying to remember what had been done. At last I had it: below the cabin a certain lubricating-oil tank had been taken out and moved to the other side of the ship. So far as I could remember the holes in the frames had never been plated in because there was no need for it. It was worth a try. I pulled open the door of the captain’s locker on the starboard side, up against the forward bulkhead, and dragged out a couple of suitcases, then ripped up a sheet of linoleum from the steel deck beneath. Yes, there was an inspection plate as I had expected: a removable section of deck to allow workmen to look inside the ship’s bottom during a major refit and find any sprung rivets before recoating the bilges with rust-proofing compound. It might just be possible . . . I rummaged in the drawer of the captain’s desk and found a clasp-knife with a screwdriver of sorts then returned to the wardrobe floor and got to work on the counter-sunk screws holding the plate in position. They were well rusted in, but after half an hour or so of exertion we had wormed them out and levered up the plate. I lowered my head inside the hole and struck a match. Yes, there was a hole through the bulkhead, about the size of a largish dinner plate. A thin
man with very narrow shoulders might just be able to wriggle through into the next compartment of the boat’s bilges, which happened to be below the vestibule at the bottom of the companion ladder where a sentry was now standing to keep guard on us. The vestibule contained several lockers in addition to the officers’ lavatory. If he could then force open the floor of one of the lockers . . . But who would undertake the task? He would need to be a circus contortionist or a human eel. I looked around. Franz Nechledil was the obvious choice: tall, but so thin that he was difficult to see when he stood sideways.
As for Nechledil, in his present predicament he would cheerfully have volunteered to jump into a vat of boiling acid to prove his loyalty to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. But it was still going to be extremely tricky.
He would have to go down into the bilges head-first, we decided, then worm his way through the hole and bend in the middle to come up on the other side. In the end he had to strip himself naked while we smeared him with the contents of a large pot of cold-cream which Klemmer had been taking home to Pola as a present for his wife. Then we lashed a bedsheet about his ankles in order to haul him up if he fainted. He took a pocket torch, and down into the musty blackness he went.
Just as Nechledil’s feet disappeared the key sounded in the lock and the door swung open. Two armed ratings entered and laid hold of me to drag me out to Vackar, who was waiting on deck. Fortunately they were in such a hurry that they failed to notice that they were one prisoner short. Was this it, I thought to myself as they hustled me up the ladder? Was I due to be shot and dumped overboard in order to impress the others? When we were on deck I shook off my captors and stood as straight as I could, rearranging my disordered clothes as I did so.
“Herr Schiffsleutnant Prohaska?” said Vackar.