by Джон Биггинс
“Yes, in what may I perhaps be of service to you now that your ruffians have dragged me up on deck?”
“Come with me if you will. I wish to talk with you in private.”
I was tempted to stand on my dignity and refuse. But a rifle muzzle stuck into the small of one’s back is the most pressing of invitations, and in any case the longer I kept the ringleaders of this mutiny preoccupied the longer Nechledil and the rest would have to break out of their prison.
Vackar led me to the fo’c’sle crew-space and shut the door after bidding the two ratings stand guard outside. He sat down at the mess table and indicated that I should do the same. I considered standing, but felt that I could talk better with him sitting down. He seemed very anxious to speak with me.
“Care for a cigarette, Herr Schiffsleutnant? They belonged to Herr Leutnant Strnadl, but he won’t be needing them now.”
“In that case, no thank you. I don’t touch stolen property.”
“Please yourself. You don’t mind if I light up, do you?”
“Feel free.” He lit his cigarette, and turned to face me across the table. “Look here, Prohaska . . .”
“ ‘Herr Schiffsleutnant,’ if you please . . .”
“Prohaska: you’re not in a position to get on your high horse. Look, I’ll come straight with you: I’m inviting you to join us.”
“Join mutineers and murderers ? You must be out of your mind. But why on earth do you think that I’d want to join you anyway?”
“You’re a Czech like Eichler and me, and I think it’s high time you began to consider where your real interests lie.”
“Perhaps you ought to have done some thinking about where your best interests lie—or, rather, lay, since as far as I can see it’s far too late for it now. Mutiny, murder, desertion to the enemy and offering violence to your superiors are all death-penalty offences.”
“So they shoot me four times if they catch me? Come off it: we’re within thirty miles of Italian waters now and it’ll be starting to get dark in an hour. No, we’ll make sure they don’t catch us—one way or another. I think I ought to warn you though that Eichler’s talking of shooting you one by one as hostages if they come after us. He’s a much harder nut than I am, as I think you may already have noticed.”
“But if you’re so sure of reaching the Italian side before nightfall why should it matter to you whether I join you or not?”
“Partly concern for your own long-term interests . . .”
“Thank you. I’m most touched.”
“. . . And partly concern for ours.”
“What do you mean?”
“There was a flying-boat overhead half an hour ago, and it certainly wasn’t Italian. The Wireless Operator managed to get a message off before we took control of the ship. Also the boilers are in bad shape.”
“Why are you telling me all this? You’re beginning to sound as if you aren’t quite so sure of getting to Italy after all.”
He was silent for a few moments. “It’s the stokers down in the engine room. They can’t make up their minds whether to join us or not and they’re just dawdling, waiting to see what happens. If we could get an officer to tell them to do it they’d certainly come over to us and put their backs into it. They’re mostly Croat peasants and used to doing what they’re told.”
“I see. But why should I come over to you? If I don’t your friend Eichler might shoot me and tip me overboard like Fregattenleutnant Strnadl; but if that doesn’t happen the worst I can expect is a spell in an Italian prison camp.”
“Because you’re a Czech like us, that’s why, you and your pilot.”
“I’m sorry; I may have been born a Czech but I became an officer of the House of Austria a long time ago now and gave up my nationality.” “Well, perhaps it’s high time you considered applying to rejoin. Austria’s dead, Prohaska: had been dead for years, even before the war. Now the Old Man’s gone the corpse has finally fallen to pieces.”
“I beg to differ: Austria-Hungary is probably going to win this war.” “Austria won’t win this war, whatever happens. Austria can’t win. But Germany might, and what’s going to happen to us all then?” He leant across the table and stared into my face. “For God’s sake, Prohaska, wake up will you? They say that you’re an intelligent man. This whole precious Austria-Hungary of yours is nothing more now than a way of forcing us Slavs to fight for Germany. What sort of future do you think there’ll be for any of us if they win? Come over and join us, you and your pilot. When we get to Italy we’ll all volunteer to join this Czech Legion of theirs.”
“You seem to know a lot about these things for a petty officer telegraphist, Vackar.”
“I’ve made it my business to know. We wireless operators talk to one another a lot, despite the war. I’ve been in touch with Masaryk and the National Council through Switzerland for a year or more now. There’s a lot of us organising in the fleet and the garrisons, just waiting for the day. It hasn’t come yet, but when it does then believe me there’ll be a lot of us Czechs ready to do what needs to be done.”
“All very impressive. So why all the trouble aboard this ship?”
“The Croats and the Slovenes. We could still get them on our side, but for the moment they’re more frightened of the Italians than of Germany. And anyway, they’re half of them long-service men: heads of solid wood. If an officer told them to jump over a cliff for their Emperor they’d do it.”
I must admit that what Vackar had to say to me in the fo’c’sle there that morning did disturb me a good deal; brought a number of uncomfortable half-formed ideas to the surface about the direction the war was taking.
But please understand that if the pull of my old nationality and language was strong, the bonds of loyalty to Dynasty and Fatherland were still much stronger. Things looked different in those days from how they look now, seventy years on. All of us officers—even first-generation officers like myself from the old peasant peoples—had been subjected to years of very subtle and effective mind-shaping as we went through the schools and military colleges of the Old Monarchy. Loyalty to our Emperor; loyalty to our ruling house; loyalty to our multinational Fatherland and to our ship and service; loyalty to the officer’s code of honour and to our oath; loyalty to the Catholic Church and to our country’s allies: all these were extremely powerful ties. And just because we had been indoctrinated to accept these things does not necessarily mean that they were themselves worthless: in fact, looking back on it now, I think that even if the Habsburg multinational empire was a pretty disastrous affair in practice, not all of its ideals were ignoble ones.
But any inner struggle that I might perhaps have undergone was rapidly forestalled by a shout from the other side of the door. Vackar sprang to his feet and rushed out on deck, leaving a very young Croat sailor with a pistol to guard me. Before long shouting and confused sounds of struggle came to me from amidships as the boat began to lose way. Something was happening in the engine room. I set to work upon my guard, who was clearly very perplexed by it all.
“Sailor,” I said in Croat, “do you hear that?”
“Obediently report that yes, Herr Schiffsleutnant.”
“What will you do now? ”
His voice trembled as he replied. “Obediently report . . . Obediently report that I’ll . . . shoot you dead if you move—by your leave, Herr Schiffsleutnant.”
“Shoot me, sailor? Oh dear, you shouldn’t have said that you know: offering threats to an officer is a death-penalty offence in wartime. ‘Tod durch erschiessen . . .’ Is that how you want your parents to remember you?” The poor lad was almost in tears by now. I held out my hand. “There, there. You’re a young lad and no doubt they threatened you into joining them. Give me that pistol and we’ll say no more about it.” He handed me the pistol almost thankfully and I rushed up the ladder on to the deck abaft the conning tower.
A strange scene greeted me in the gathering dusk. A naked man, covered from head to foot in grime and rust, stood at the
conning-tower rails with a pistol in his hand and a naval cap on his head. He was haranguing a crowd of open-mouthed, staring ratings below, like some crazed prophet just arrived in Jerusalem from the wilderness to tell everyone to repent and escape the wrath to come. It was only with difficulty that I recognised this bizarre, staring-eyed figure as Franz Nechledil.
“Sailors,” he yelled, “sailors, don’t listen to these fools and deceivers who would lead you to the enemy, who would entice you to destruction and sell your country to the perfidious King of Italy. Czechs, Slovenes, Germans, Croats—we all fight for one another, for our Emperor and King and for our common Fatherland; for God and for our honour as sailors of Austria. Will you let these reptiles make you into traitors and mutineers? No future awaits you in Italy but a prison camp, a prison camp which will take in the whole of the Adriatic coastlands and all your families as well if the Italians win. Be true to your oath; true to your comrades; true to the Noble House of Habsburg!” Out of the corner of my eye I saw a movement behind the after funnel. It was Eichler, levelling a rifle at Nechledil on the bridge and about to fire. But I fired first. Hitting someone with a pistol at twenty metres is by no means certain, but my luck was in. He dropped the rifle and fell to his knees, clutching his arm. That was the hair that tipped the scales: within a few minutes the waverers had joined us and the mutineers were firmly under lock and key in the fo’c’sle with sentries posted at every door and skylight. S.M. Tb14 had rejoined the Imperial and Royal Fleet.
The full story only came out later: how Nechledil had almost fainted in the foul air of the bilges, but had still managed to turn that tight corner and worm his way up into the base of the oilskin locker at the foot of the companionway ladder. The plate that made up the locker floor had given him some trouble, but luck and the slipshod workmanship of Messrs Ganz and Danubius had been on our side: instead of a steel plate the floor of the locker was nothing but plywood. He had managed to prise it open, climb up into the locker—then burst out upon an astonished sentry at the foot of the ladder. The man had given no trouble when Nechledil appeared, naked and black as the devil with rust and bilge-grime: in fact had run for his life yelling that the murdered officer had come back aboard to haunt everyone. This unexpected turn had so thrown the engine-room crew off balance that they had barricaded themselves in and drawn the boiler fires. Nechledil had unlocked the door of the Captain’s cabin and the prisoners had then rushed out armed with legs from the cabin table. Things had hung in the balance for a few minutes, but in the end it was undoubtedly the awesome spectacle of Nechledil’s naked speech of Kaisertreu devotion from the bridge that had finally swung the crew against the mutineers. Just before dusk we fell in with the destroyer S.M.S. Sne%nik and were escorted back to Zara, all of us under arrest pending investigations.
In the end Vackar and Eichler paid with their lives for their humanity in stopping to pick us up. That much is indisputable, for without the half-hour’s loss of time, and without my special knowledge of the detailed construction of Tb1-class torpedo-boats, and without Nechledil’s determination, I am pretty sure that they would have got away with it, boilers or no boilers. I pleaded extenuating circumstances as vigorously as I could at their court martial aboard the flagship Viribus Unitis in Pola Harbour the following week, but it was a hopeless task from the outset. Mutiny, murder and desertion are all death-penalty offences in wartime, whatever the country, and in 1916 they would have suffered death for them in any other country in Europe as well. The best that I could do was to get more lenient sentences for the lesser mutineers, particularly for the young Croat sailor who had handed me his pistol and who got off with eighteen months. As for the rest, two men got twelve-year sentences—of which they served only two, thanks to Austria’s collapse—while the remainder were landed and dispersed to shore establishments.
Vackar and Eichler were shot at dawn on the morning of 12 December, against the wall of Pola’s Naval Cemetery, where two graves had been dug ready for them. Like all the rest of the fleet in harbour I had to stand to attention on deck and listen as the volleys crashed among the black cypress trees on the hill and the crows rose cawing from their roosts into the early morning air. Old Austria was good at pageantry, and no effort had been spared here to drive home the lesson that mutiny did not pay. The lesson sank in, to judge from the pale, tense faces of the ratings paraded on the decks of the warships at anchor as the Articles of War were read out to them by their captains.
First one volley rang out, then another—then a third, more ragged than the first two, and finally a disordered spatter of shots. I felt sick: clearly something had gone badly wrong. It has always amazed me that human life can be snuffed out so easily by falling backwards off a chair or inhaling a cherry pit or—as a Polish great-aunt of mine is supposed once to have done—through dislocating one’s neck with a violent sneeze, yet when the state’s professional operatives set out to achieve the same end they so often botch the job. I heard afterwards that Eichler had died at the first volley, but that poor Vackar had only been wounded, and shouted, “You can kill us, but not our ideas!” as the blindfold fell off. The second volley also failed to kill him, and the third, by which time the firing squad’s nerve had gone. The officer stepped up and tried to administer the coup de grace with his pistol, but it misfired and jammed. In the end the municipal gravedigger had to put Vackar out of his misery with a couple of well-aimed blows from his spade. He had been a horse slaughterer before he went to work for the town council and knew about these things.
For me at least that was not the end of the affair. The very next day I was summoned, not to my own court martial as I had half expected, but to the Imperial Residence at the Villa Wartholz, near Bad Reichenau. When I arrived I was ushered straight into the Emperor’s audience room. He had heard about my part in suppressing the mutiny aboard Tb14 and was anxious to meet me. I must say that my immediate reaction after the events of the previous day was one of nausea. No doubt I would be fulsomely congratulated on my dog-like fidelity to my imperial master and would receive some disc of metal on a bit of ribbon to reward me for having procured the deaths of two of my fellow-countrymen. But it was not like that at all. The Emperor shook my hand and said all the usual things: asked about my family and how long had I been an officer and so forth. Then he sent out his aides and bade me sit down in the armchair opposite him in his private study.
“Prohaska,” he said, “this was a bad business and must have been very distressing for you.”
“I obediently report that not in the least, Your Imperial Majesty. I merely did my duty as an officer of the House of Austria.”
“Yes, yes, I know that: I can read as much in the Armee Zeitung any day of the week. But mutinies don’t just happen. Tell me what you think were the reasons—and mind you, tell me what you really think, not what you think you are expected to say. If people can’t tell the truth even to their Emperor then we are indeed lost.”
So I told him what I thought: about this mutiny, and others, and the near-mutinies that had never got into the papers. I told him that it was not socialist agitators or secret nationalists or agents of the Entente as the hurrah-press said, but boredom, too little leave and bad food piled on top of a system of discipline which might have been appropriate for the armies of Maria Theresa, ruled by the pace-stick and the lash, but which was grotesquely ill-adapted to running units made up from intelligent young technicians. As I spoke he made notes and kept interrupting me to ask a great many very intelligent questions. Then he said something that made me stare in goggle-eyed disbelief.
“Prohaska, you have told me what you think. And I will now tell you as one of my bravest officers what I think about it all. I think that the Monarchy cannot survive another year of this war; nor can it survive in its present form even if peace should come tomorrow. My first priority as Emperor will be to bring about a negotiated end to this dreadful butch- ery—without Germany if necessary—and then set about a programme of root-and-branch refo
rm at home. What you have told me here today only confirms me in the correctness of these views. But,” he picked up a bulky folder from his desk, “I have something else to discuss with you before you leave. When we met at Haidenschaft back in August we spoke briefly, did we not, about the circumstances of your transfer from the U-Boat service to the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe?”
“I obediently report that we did, Your Imperial Highness.” Well I’ll be damned, I thought to myself, he remembered after all . . .
“Well, I was as good as my word, and I got Baron Lerchenfeld to look into the details of the case. As a result of what he discovered—and also, I might add, as a result of petitions from your brother-officers and your former crew—I have reached the conclusion that a grave injustice took place. I also have the satisfaction of telling you that new evidence has come to light which throws doubt on whether the submarine which you torpedoed off Chioggia that night was in fact the German minelayer. I gather that in August an Italian submarine ran aground off Cape Galliola and when its crew were taken prisoner several of them asked whether they would be going to the same camp as the men from the Anguilla, which they said had left Venice on the night of 3 July and had not been heard of since. In short, Prohaska, I think that the German Navy’s case against you—which was never too strong in the first place—now collapses entirely. Tell me, would you wish to be reinstated in the U-Boat Service or would you like to go on flying? ”
I said that while I was prepared to serve my Emperor and Fatherland on land, sea or air, I felt that my particular talents might be better employed back in my old trade rather than in flying round in circles above convoys.
“Good then. The Marineoberkommando tells me that your old crew from U13 are for the moment ashore following a navigational error on the part of their Captain. Now Prohaska, what would you say to rejoining them aboard one of our newest submarines currently completing at Pola N aval Dockyard? ”
The interview ended and we shook hands as I left, taking with me a feeling—which I still hold to this day—that if the old Emperor had done the decent thing and died about (say) 1906, and if Franz Ferdinand had already died from tuberculosis—as he nearly did in 1893—then perhaps with the earnest young Karl as Emperor and King, succeeded about 1950 by the Emperor Otto, the Austro-Hungarian state might still be with us today, transformed from a rickety, bilious, shambling quasi-autocracy into a rickety, bilious, shambling constitutional monarchy. Perhaps.