There was a wondrous row about it all when I made my report to Hauptmann Kraliczek that evening, back at Fliegerfeld Caprovizza. Not only had I brought down a lighter-than-air machine when there was no appropriate form on which to report the fact; I had made a complete nonsense of his graphic projections for the entire month of August, no less. Fliegertruppe standing orders clearly stated that for the purposes of computing pilots’ aerial victories, one airship would be regarded as equivalent to five heavier-than-air machines; and this meant that Kraliczek’s new, reluctantly introduced line for Enemy Aircraft Destroyed climbed so abruptly when it reached the month of August that not even the airship itself could have gained altitude with such speed. In the end Kraliczek had to paste an extension-piece of squared paper above the main graph to accommodate the line. That was bad enough, but when I told him how we had done it—bombing the airship with a wireless set—his normally pallid features took on the livid white hue of a fish’s underbelly.
“You . . . you . . . what?” he stammered, aghast.
“Obediently report that I dropped the wireless set on it. I had fired five clips of ammunition into the thing to no effect and there was nothing else that we could do, short of ramming it. But where’s the problem? Surely an enemy airship destroyed is worth a wireless set at any rate of exchange?”
“What do you mean, worth a wireless set, you maniac! That wireless apparatus was a top-secret item of equipment, of inestimable value to the enemy. And now you’ve gone and dropped the thing on their side of the lines! Du lieber Gott . . . Do you realise that you could be court-martialled for betraying military secrets to the enemy?” I tried to persuade him that after a fall of something like three thousand metres a fragile item like a wireless set would have virtually exploded on impact, transforming itself into a thousand unrecognisable fragments. But he was unpersuaded: unfortunately he remembered the freakish incident in May when Toth’s observer, the ill-fated Leutnant Rosenbaum, had fallen from about the same height to land inside a convent greenhouse in Gorz, stone dead but with hardly a mark on him. He was silent for some time, staring at me reproachfully from behind his spectacles. At last a faint smirk of selfsatisfaction returned some colour to his features.
“Herr Linienschiffsleutnant,” he said in his most solemn tones, “oh my dear Herr Linienschiffsleutnant, it is my duty to inform you that you are in the very deepest trouble. There is only one course of action open to you. I shall delay making my report on this disgraceful incident on condition that you and Zugsfuhrer Toth fly out at the earliest opportunity to try and find the remains of the wireless set. If you can bring it back—even in pieces—then the War Ministry may—I say only may—be content with charging you its cost of, er, let me see . . . 7,580 kronen. If you are unable to find it then I am afraid that my report of its loss will go to 5th Army Headquarters by tomorrow evening at the latest. Is that clear?”
I protested that this was a ludicrous assignment; that quite apart from the hazards of landing close behind the enemy lines, I had no real idea of where I had dropped the thing to the nearest square kilometre or so, and that even if I had, it would either have smashed into innumerable fragments on the rocks of the Carso edge or buried itself deep in the Isonzo marshes.
However, war is war, and an order from one’s commanding officer is an order—especially when backed by a threat of immediate court martial. So at first light the next morning Toth and I took off from Caprovizza airfield on what looked set to be the most hazardous mission of my entire three-week career as an officer-observer.
By comparing our own recollections of the previous day’s events and by checking them against the map, we had eventually narrowed our area of search down to a two-kilometre square of marshland and pasture between the town of Monfalcone and the River Isonzo, south of the Cervignano road. We had managed to contact a number of front-line observation posts by telephone and they more or less confirmed this, as did the look-outs of the battleship Prag, who had taken bearings as they saw us close with the airship. Even so I was not at all hopeful of finding anything other than death or captivity as we set off that morning. The search area was only a couple of kilometres behind the Italian lines and would doubtless be stiff with troops and guns. The best that we could hope for was that the sheer bare-faced effrontery of our mission—flying at tree-top height over enemy territory in broad daylight—would so dumbfound the Italians that they would be put off their aim.
We crossed the lines east of Gradisca, taking advantage of early- morning mist, then flew the Lloyd in a wide half-circle to land on a stretch of pasture in a thinly populated region of marshland south of Cervignano. We waited there until about 1000, by which time the sun was clearing the last rags of mist from the flatlands, then took off again to approach Monfalcone from the west, flying low and hoping to be taken for an Italian aeroplane if anyone noticed us. Then the fun began. The first two passes over the area of search went well—except that I saw not a sign of the wireless set as I scanned the ground beneath through my binoculars. But on the third sweep, heading south this time, we passed over a tented encampment and some sentry noticed the black crosses beneath our wings. There was a sudden outbreak of bright little flashes among the tents as they opened fire. Machine-gun posts joined in, sending streams of tracer up at us, and before long the flash-puffs of anti-aircraft fire were following us as we flew—then bursting above and ahead of us as they found the range, kicking us about as urchins kick a tin can in the street. Then I saw it, in the middle of a field: a battered, splayed-out metal box of about the right size and shape for our wireless set. I signalled to Toth to turn us round and land.
It was a magnificent piece of flying, even by Toth’s high standards: to bring an aeroplane about and put it down under fire on a space pehaps a hundred metres square. I can only assume that we survived either because the Italian gunners thought that we had been hit, or perhaps because they thought that we had gone mad. At any rate, their fire slackened for just long enough to enable me to scramble out of the cockpit and run to the metal box. Sure enough, it was the remains of the wireless set. The box had burst open on impact and its contents had been distributed over a good fifty metres’ radius. I saw a valve lying near by, miraculously intact, and the metal base of another. I knew enough about wireless to know that the valves were what would really be of interest to an enemy intelligence officer, so I gathered them up, then ran back to the Lloyd, which was standing by with its engine idling. Just as I reached it the first Italian soldiers appeared at the field’s edge. They shouted, then began to fire. Breathless and too confused by it all to be frightened, I quickly cocked the Schwarzlose and fired a couple of bursts at them to keep them at their distance while Toth turned the aeroplane’s nose into the breeze and pushed the throttle forward. Bullets cracked around us as we wobbled into the air. Against all the odds we had done it: found the remains of the wireless set and secured enough of it to convince even the most obdurate security officer that the thing had smashed on impact to a degree where no one would ever be able to deduce how it had worked.
That, it soon became clear, had been the easy part of our exploit. We were no sooner into the air and heading over the Lisert Marshes than the Italian flak gunners found our range again. They were not going to let us escape this time. Shells were bursting all round us as we climbed over the roofless, gutted buildings of Monfalcone, heading for the rim of the Carso and the safety of our own lines among the hills to the north-east of the town. Then the inevitable happened: there was a flash and a deafening concussion to starboard, and something hit my shoulder. As I regained my senses and Toth brought the aeroplane level again I saw that the starboard lower wing had been reduced to a fluttering jumble of smashed ribs and trailing rags of fabric; also that the fuselage and wings had been riddled by shell splinters, one of which (I later discovered) had gone through the shoulder of my flying jacket and grazed the skin beneath, leaving a faint brown burn-scar which I carry to this day. But that was not the worst: the engine was faltering as steam and boiling water hissed from the radiator above the upper wing. We ducked to avoid the scalding spray as Toth struggled to keep the aeroplane up. I looked ahead, and saw a low, bare, rat-coloured ridge of limestone looming ahead of us as we lost height. Its slopes were pocked with shell craters and streaked with the dark smudges of wire-belts. We were approaching the notorious ridge of the Svinjak.
The Svinjak—more or less “the Hill of the Pig” in Slovene—did indeed rather resemble a sleeping sow. Not that anyone would have given it a second glance before the war: it was merely a barren, eroded limestone ridge exactly like a hundred other such limestone ridges on the Carso Plateau; an arid jumble of rocks and scrub barely capable of providing a living for a herd of scrawny goats. But since the start of 1916 it had been one of the most ferociously contested parts of the Austro-Italian Front, constantly bombarded and fought over as the lines swayed up and down its desolate slopes. The Austrian strongpoint at the northern edge of the Carso, Monte San Michele, had been taken the week before, but the southern bastion here on the edge of the Adriatic had held firm, much to the dissatisfaction of General Cadorna, who clearly intended to capture our positions here—Hill 144 and the Svinjak and Debeli Vrh—and turn the Austrian flank. So Toth and I now found ourselves descending into one of the hotspots of European civilisation in the year 1916. The only question now was: would we be able to keep the Lloyd airborne long enough to be able to come down on our own side of the lines?
As it turned out the answer was: nearly but not quite. The engine failed as we crossed the Italian forward trenches, and we finally hit the ground about two-thirds of the way across no man’s land, just in front of our own first belt of wire. At first I thought that it would make little difference to us, hearing the fearful tearing crunch as the aeroplane’s undercarriage smashed and the belly skidded along the confusion of rocks that passed for ground in these parts. I think in fact that what saved us was hitting an outer line of barbed wire, which brought us to a halt like the arrester-wire on the deck of an aircraft carrier before we had skidded far enough for the aeroplane to break up around us. All I remember at any rate is a violent jolt as we came to a stop, then distentangling myself from Toth in the front of the cockpit and the two of us scrambling over the side, cut and bruised and shaken but otherwise unhurt, to dive for cover in a nearby shell hole as the first bullets whined around us.
My first instinct on tumbling into the crater was to tumble out again as quickly as possible and never mind the shots cracking overhead. Even with a hail of lead buzzing a couple of metres above our heads it was a shock to find that the hole was occupied already. As for the tenant, he seemed not to mind our intrusion; only grinned in welcome. It was evident at first glance that he had been here for quite some time. Still, it is remarkable, I have always found, how quickly one can grow accustomed to things which, in other circumstances, would make one’s flesh creep with revulsion; and this is doubly true when (as on this occasion) lifting one’s head above the lip of the crater to look for other accommodation would certainly mean having it blown off. Toth and I quickly reached the conclusion that, on balance, the dead are less threat than the living, and settled down to make the best of things, trying not to look at our silent companion lying on his back against the other side of the crater and gazing with empty eye sockets into the cloudless blue sky. I think that he had been an Italian, but I was not sure. Both armies wore grey, but if ours had a somewhat bluer tint and theirs a somewhat greener, months of sun and rain and dust had long since faded away such distinctions. I was not concerned anyway to carry out a post mortem: the dead have about them a silent finality that makes mock of such petty considerations as nationality.
I took stock of our position. We two had survived the crash intact, and if we were pinned down by the enemy’s fire for the rest of the the hours of daylight, I supposed that the Italians further down the hill would be similarly pinned down by our people and would not come bothering us. A small shell had landed near by just as we had scrambled into the crater, but there had been nothing since, so I concluded that the enemy would wait until dark, then send out a patrol to remove anything of interest from the wreck. My intention was that we should have left by then, after setting it alight.
So for the time being it just meant lying here in a shell crater under the blistering sun with a corpse for company, counting the hours until sundown. I looked at my wristwatch: 1135. That meant another ten hours grilling here before it would be dark enough to make a run for it. My mouth was already parched from excitement and exertion. It was going to be a long wait. Toth and I sought what shade we could, arranging our flying jackets into a crude awning across a couple of strands of barbed wire strung over a shattered rifle which we had found in the bottom of the hole. We settled down to wait, trying to ignore the huge blowflies which had already located us and were beginning to gather into a swarm. It puzzled me that with so many other items of interest in the area—as could readily be detected by the least sensitive nose—these insects should still pay such attention to the living.
Quite apart from the stench, the other feature of this wasteland that impressed itself upon me as we lay there that August morning was the unspeakable noise. This was what I supposed would be called “a quiet spell” on the Svinjak—which is to say that the two armies had temporarily exhausted themselves fighting over it. But even so the shells moaned and rumbled overhead incessantly, looking for the trackways and communication trenches behind the lines and the sweating ration parties trudging along them. Rifle fire crackled constantly along the line, like dry twigs in a stubble fire after harvest. It seemed that it needed only one shot in a sector to cause a blaze-up of musketry which would take several minutes to subside, much as one village dog barking in the night will set off all the other dogs in the district until they grow tired of it. If this was a quiet spell, I thought, what must a noisy one be like? Yet amid all this din one could sometimes make out curiously ordinary domestic sounds, like a latrine bucket clanking in a nearby trench, or someone chopping up ration boxes for firewood, or a man whistling: noises that reminded us that this bleak hillside, which only two years before had doubtless been as deserted as the Arctic tundra, was now as crowded with humanity as a city street.
Around midday the noise of firing died down sufficiently for me to listen incredulously to the sounds drifting faintly down from our front line, about two hundred metres up the ridge. It was a violinist, playing the tune “In Prater bluhn wieder die Baume,” which was all the rage that summer of 1916. Quite apart from the bizarre effect of its syrupy harmonies in this charnel-house of a place, I must say that the music itself rather set my teeth on edge. While I enjoyed most operettas I had never cared too much for this glutinous Schrammel-quartet stuff, which for me always conjured up visions of fat civil servants weeping into their half-litre wine mugs in Viennese Heurige-gardens of a Sunday afternoon. In any case, I could hear even at this range that the player was not very good: probably more of a trial to his comrades than even the stench and the flies. Then there was a heavy thump somewhere down the hill. A few seconds later, looking up into the sky above us, we saw an object like a beer barrel with fins flying through the air and trailing sparks behind it. It vanished from sight—and a moment later the whole hillside shook to an enormous blast like a miniature earthquake; so powerful that the back-draught made our eardrums pop and caused the wreck of our aeroplane (which I could just see over the edge of the crater) to lift momentarily into the air. It was a trench-mine, thrown by one of the “bombardi” which the Italians had been making lately in large numbers: about two hundred kilograms of TNT mixed with bits of scrap metal and packed into a barrel. As our hearing returned I heard a bugle away in our trenches sound the call “Stretcher bearers.” More routine wastage, I thought; the battalion diarist would make a laconic entry that evening: “Quiet day in the line: nothing to report. Four men killed by trench-mortar mine.” As for the violinist, he had given up for the while, having no doubt dived for cover in the nearest dug-out when he heard the mine coming over. I had often suffered in the past from amateur musicians, who are a plague aboard naval vessels, but on balance I considered that dropping oil drums full of high explosive on them was going rather too far by way of showing disapproval.
We lay like that until about two in the afternoon, enduring the glare of the sun and the thirst and the flies and the fetid reek of the battlefield. Then, suddenly, Toth gripped my arm and pointed. The crater was on a hill-slope, so the lip on the downhill side was lower than the uphill edge. I could see only sky, unless I wished to lose the top of my skull to a sniper. But as I watched, puzzled, the vivid summer blue was obscured by mist. At first I thought that it was the top of a fog-bank rolling in from the Gulf of Trieste: unusual at this time of year but by no means impossible. Then I saw to my horror that the mist had a sinister yellow hue and that it was rolling uphill towards us on the slight breeze. It was a poison gas cloud, and we were directly in its path!
The same idea seemed to occur to us at the same instant. It was a sickening task, and one that only the threat of imminent death could have nerved us to perform. We nearly gave up, when the body came to pieces as we tried to lift it by its rotted clothing. But we clutched handkerchiefs to our faces and tried not to look, and eventually found what we were searching for among the decaying equipment: a canvas haversack with something resilient inside it. In the event we were only just in time, pulling out the mask just as the first curling wisps of gas came pouring into our hole. The next few minutes were not exactly the pleasantest that I have ever spent, taking turns to inhale through the face piece of a perished gas mask, foul with the smell of decay and of heaven alone knew what efficacy after months of lying out in the open. To this day I have no idea what sort of gas it was; only that it had a cloying sugary smell rather like that of a rotting pineapple, and that it made our eyes burn as well as causing a most painful tightness of the chest. We tried to sit as still as possible, so as to avoid getting more of it into our bloodstreams than we could help, and crawled up on to the crater edge on the assumption that, whatever it was, it was heavier than air and would collect in the bottom of the shell hole.
We ducked back into our refuge as the cloud began to thin. Dim figures were rushing past in the tail end of the cloud, and a great deal of shouting and confused firing was taking place further up the hill. We lay down and hoped to be taken for dead if anyone noticed us. Dear God, when would darkness fall? I did not care in the least for this game of soldiers. After about five minutes, just as the last of the gas cloud was passing, there were two explosions away towards our lines, then a further burst of shooting. I decided to chance a peep over the edge of the crater towards our trenches. Perhaps help was coming. I heard shouts—then saw the tops of steel helmets bobbing among the craters. They were the new German coal-scuttle helmets, so that (I knew) meant Austrian assault troops. Despite the enormous number of head-wounds in the Isonzo fighting, the War Ministry was still only thinking about manufacturing an Austro-Hungarian steel helmet—in fact would not get around to it until the war was in its final months. In the mean time a few thousand steel helmets had been purchased from our German allies, but so far they had only been issued to the “Stosstruppen,” the teams of specialist trench-fighters who were now being given the most difficult and dangerous tasks in the front line. Anyway, that meant we would soon be found and escorted back, even if we still had to wait until nightfall. Had they perhaps got water canteens with them, I wondered? I shouted, “We’re over here!” as loudly as I could above the din, then scrambled back down into the hole.
That shout was very nearly my last words. There was a sudden scratter of stones as something landed in the hole with us. I stared at it, paralysed. It was a stick-grenade, lying and hissing faintly as the fuse burnt down. If it had been left to me we would both have been dead men; but with a true pilot’s reflexes Toth leapt across, seized it and flung it over the edge, ducking as he did so. It exploded just as it cleared the lip, sending vicious fragments of hot metal rattling off the rocks. I was still too afraid to move. But that was not the end of the matter. A moment later I was knocked to the ground as someone fell on top of me. The next thing I was lying with a hand grasping my throat, looking into the face of a creature so obscene that the mere sight of it took my remaining strength away: something that combined grasshopper and pig and horse’s skull into the features of a devil from a medieval doom-painting. Its arm was raised above me with a club in its hand, poised to dash my brains out. “Stop!” I yelled, hoarse from thirst and gas. The arm stayed poised—then was lowered slowly as its owner got off my chest. He knelt back, and removed the steel helmet so that he could lower the hideous can-snouted mask with its two huge, flat black eyepieces. It revealed a sweaty, rather florid face of unmistakably Germanic cast, with fair short-cropped hair and glaucous pale-blue eyes. He wiped his face with his tunic sleeve before replacing the helmet. His two companions released Toth and then removed their gas masks as well.
“Good thing that you shouted in German,” he said, “otherwise I’d have smashed your head in for you. Did you chuck that grenade back out again? ”
“No, he did.” I pointed to Toth, crouched near by. The Stosstruppen leader smiled.
“Not bad, not bad at all. Can I interest you in joining my storm- company perhaps? We could use people with reflexes as quick as yours.” He turned back to me. I noticed that although he had the Edelweiss collar badges of the elite Tyrolean Alpine troops, the Landeschutzen, he spoke with a marked Sudetenland accent. “Anyway, let me introduce myself,” he said. “Oskar Friml, Oberleutnant in the 2nd Landeschutzen Regiment; currently leading the 28th Storm-Troop Company attached to infantry regiment No. 4, Hoch-und-Deutschmeister. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
I thought this display of courtesy rather forced, coming from someone who not a minute before had nearly killed us both. However I said nothing, but merely shook hands and introduced Toth and myself, then thanked him and his men for coming out to rescue us. He smiled: a rather nervous, evasive smile I thought.
“Not a bit of it. We didn’t know you were here. Our look-outs saw your plane come down and we thought you were either dead or taken prisoner by the Wellischers. We came out after that raid to see if we could cut some of them off as they tried to get back. Our people killed quite a lot of them and cleared the rest out of the trenches.”
“Were there many of them? ”
“About a hundred I reckon.”
“Is it usual then for the Stosstruppen to take on the enemy at odds of three against a hundred? ”
“Oh, not unusual at all. Moral force and quickness on your feet is what counts in this sort of warfare. In the trenches a dozen real soldiers can see off a thousand conscripts—or perhaps two thousand if they’re Italians. Cowardly rabble: no stomach for fighting at all—except for a few of their own storm-troops that is, the ‘Arditi.’ Some of them are quite good I understand, but they wear body armour, which isn’t much use and weighs a man down too much. We believe in fighting light, as you see.”
He was quite right about that: he and his men had no rifles or equipment, only a haversack full of stick-grenades slung over one shoulder, a gas-mask canister over the other and a short, vicious-looking spiked cosh. Friml smiled as he showed me his own version of this weapon. It consisted of a wooden handle with a short length of tight-coiled steel spring and, on the end of that, a steel ball studded with hobnails. I noticed that the handle bore rows of filed notches.
“There, how do you like it?” he enquired. “I had it made specially. Much better than the standard issue. Here, look . . .” He bent down and picked up a battered, rusty Italian steel helmet which I supposed had once belonged to the dead soldier: the French “poilu” type, with a raised comb along the crown. He placed it on a stone, then dealt it a sudden blow with his cosh. The helmet-top caved in like an eggshell. “Not bad, eh? And it’s pretty well silent too. Most of them never know what hit them. I’ve killed at least fifty men with it, but I haven’t kept a close account lately. I did for twenty of them at least that afternoon at San Martino. We had about two hundred trapped in a bombshelter. They tried to surrender, but we just squirted flame-throwers in through the air vents. You should have heard them howl in there. I had a wonderful time of it: stood by the entrance knocking them off one by one as they tried to get out with their hair on fire. Half-trained conscript refuse the lot of them: there wasn’t one of them over twenty.” He smiled as if at some idyllic memory.
“How old are you, Herr Leutnant?” I enquired. To me he looked about thirty-five.
“Twenty-three last birthday.”
“And do you expect to see twenty-four at this rate?” To my surprise he seemed not to be at all put out at this question.
“That all depends,” he replied, smiling. “It’s my belief that bullets find out the cowards and weaklings, so I may come through. I’ve been wounded nine times, but nothing serious so far. Anyway, whether I live or not scarcely matters. The thing that the Front has taught me above all else is that in this century the ‘we’ will be everything and the ‘I’ nothing. So what if I do die? The blood and the nation will live on after me as they lived before me. We are the aristocracy of mankind, we trench- fighters: the steel panthers, the very finest specimens that the human race has ever produced, without fear and without pity. The devil take the rest of them, the conscript herd corrupted by town-living and Jew- culture. They’re good for nothing but following up an attack and occupying ground already taken. It’s the front-fighters who bear mankind forward with them in the attack.”
I ventured the view—diffidently, eyeing the spring-loaded cosh as I did so—that at the present rate of losses, if the Stosstruppen were indeed the vanguard of the human species then by about 1924 we would have regressed to the early Stone Age.
“A typical peacetime soldier’s view,” he replied. “The reason why people like you can’t cope with this war—and most regular officers can’t in my opinion—is that you regard this sort of war, total war, as an aberration. Well, it isn’t, the Front is the future: permanent war; the Darwinian battle for survival in which only the strongest and those of the purest blood will survive.”
So this was the modern age, I thought to myself: less than two decades into the Century of Scientific Progress and Rationality and here are men fighting in this dreadful wilderness with weapons and ideas more appropriate to the Dark Ages.
“Anyway,” I said at last, “do you want us to come back with you now or shall we wait until dark? Sunbathing out here with a corpse for company is not really my idea of a pleasant afternoon.”
Friml looked puzzled for a moment, then regarded the remains of the dead Italian as if he had just noticed them.
“What, this one here?” He laughed. “You’ll pretty soon get used to sights like that once you’ve been here at the Front for a while: that and much worse. It’s nothing really: just a quantity of decaying tissue returning to the soil from which it grew . . .” At that moment there was a tremendous crash near by which knocked the breath from our lungs and sent stone fragments shrieking over our heads. As we picked ourselves up I put my fingers into my ears in an attempt to stop the ringing in my dislodged eardrums. Friml was much amused by this.
“War music, Herr Leutnant, the orchestra of battle. That was a 20cm by the sound of it. You’ll get used to it after a while, so that you hardly notice it any longer . . .” He paused, alert. “Quiet,” he whispered, “what’s that? . . .”
As my ears began to function once more I realised that what I had taken to be the ringing left by the blast was in fact voices nearby: voices talking quite loudly in Italian. We all listened intently. There seemed to be two of them, in a crater near the aeroplane wreck: two soldiers left behind by the raiders to guard it until nightfall and the arrival of the salvage party. By the sound of their voices they seemed to be an older man and a youth. Whoever they were, they were certainly very unwise to be conversing so loudly in broad daylight when predators like Friml and his men were roaming the battlefield. Friml crouched, intent as a cat stalking a bird. Slowly, he drew a stick-grenade out of his haversack, tugged the toggle at the base of the handle, waited poised for what seemed like hours, but could only have been a couple of seconds—then threw it in a graceful arc to land somewhere out of sight. There was a muffled explosion and a puff of white smoke, then silence for a while. Then the wailing began. It was frightful to listen to. The older man seemed to have been killed outright, but the younger was still alive—just. If you see people in films spinning around and falling and lying still, do not imagine for one moment that this represents anything other than Hollywood’s deodorised idea of death in action. In reality sixty or seventy kilograms of muscle, blood and bone have a great deal of life left in them even when they have been blasted and scorched and shot through with a hundred slivers of red- hot metal. It began with invocations to the Holy Virgin, then to God and Jesus and the saints, then to his mother. A second grenade served only to make the screams louder, until at last they subsided into a moan, then ceased altogether.
“Right,” said Friml, “we’d better get back now. I didn’t want to use that second grenade. The Italians’ll soon be calling down artillery on us if they’ve spotted the smoke-puffs. Let’s go. Just get out when I say and follow me.”
The Italians had indeed seen the grenade bursts: we left the crater just as their first shell arrived. After that I have only a very hazy recollection of events as we scrambled crazily from hole to hole with shells dropping all around us. We fell into an old trench and half ran, half crawled along that for some way, tumbling as we did so over dimly glanced things which I was heartily thankful not to have time to examine properly. At last we found the entrance to the tunnel in the wire from which Friml and his companions used to sally forth on their raids, and squirmed our way along it on our bellies like rabbits in a gorse thicket. What seemed like several hours later, we heard at last the challenge of an Austrian sentry. We were safe.
Our hosts were the ninth battalion of Imperial and Royal Infantry Regiment No. 4, “Hoch-und-Deutschmeister”; the city of Vienna’s local regiment. I had seen the old Deutschmeisters back in 1913, swinging proudly along the Ringstrasse in the great parade to mark the centenary of the battle of Leipzig. That had been a different world, and they had been different men. The old k.u.k. Armee was odd among the armies of Europe in having no foot-guards regiments. However, among the Emperor of Austria’s soldiers it was generally recognised that the four Tiroler Kaiserjager regiments were the elite, and that after them the Deutschmeisters were the premier line-infantry regiment, allocated the finest-looking of each year’s crop of recruits. They were all long since gone, dead in Poland and Serbia. The ranks had been refilled several times already, and the Deutschmeisters of 1916 were sorry specimens in comparison with their predecessors of only two years before: undersized, ill- nourished and pathetically young conscripts from the grey slum tenements of Vienna’s outer districts. Clad in shoddy wartime ersatz uniforms, they looked a woebegone lot, even after making allowance for the effects of a prolonged sojourn in the Carso trenches. Not the least of the disturbing effects of service in the front line, I observed, was that it made everyone look alike: lifeless, drawn faces and eyes sunk deep into their sockets. It seemed that the battalion had already been holding this sector without relief since early August, its losses made up by sending new drafts forward into the line by night, or whenever the shelling eased up. Those who had been here since the beginning of the Sixth Battle—perhaps a third of the battalion now—already had that characteristic glazed look that resulted from a long stay at the Front. My second wife Edith had been a nurse in Flanders in 1917, and she told me of the extreme shell-shock cases, the ones whose minds had completely given way, like poor Schraffl’s. But myself, from what I saw during that brief spell in the trenches on the Svinjak, I think that everyone who survived the front line in that war must have come out of it at least mildly deranged. Quite apart from anything else there was the awful brain-jarring noise. At least in France I suppose that some of the noise from exploding shells was muffled by the soil. Here on the Carso they had only rock to burst on, and they would go off with a bright yellow flash and a vicious, jarring crash which seemed to make one’s skull ring like a bell in sympathy. It was maddening; unendurable except (I suppose) by switching one’s brain off and going through it all on reflexes alone.
The Adjutant of the Deutschmeister battalion was very courteous to us, once Friml had handed us over. He greeted me before I recognised him. He was a young officer called Max Weinberger, the son of the Viennese music publisher. We had met one evening late in 1913 at one of my Aunt Aleksia’s literary evenings, but I had failed to recognise him now under the dust and grey exhaustion of the Front. He was now the only other survivor from the ninth battalion’s officer strength at the start of August, he said. But he still found time to make arrangements for our transfer to the rear, along with a batch of prisoners captured after the recent trench raid. I noticed that he was very solicitous of their welfare and had appointed three sentries to watch over them in their dug-out. I thought this excessive, since they showed no inclination whatever to escape; in fact seemed only too pleased to be getting out of the war.
“They’re not there to stop them escaping,” he confided in me. “They’re there to protect the poor bastards against Friml and his gang. The day before yesterday we were holding twenty of them in a dug-out, waiting to get them back when the barrage lifted, and one of Friml’s men tossed a grenade in among them for fun. The swine was grinning all over his face: said that he’d dropped it by accident. I was going to have him arrested but Friml kicked up a row and said that line officers have no authority over the Stosstruppen . . .” he smiled, “. . . and all the more so when they’re dirty Jews like myself.”
“From what you tell me Oberleutnant Friml sounds a difficult guest.”
“Difficult? I tell you, the man’s completely mad, more of a danger to us than to the Italians. Everywhere he goes he stirs up trouble, then leaves us to dodge the mortar bombs they send over. Every time he goes out we hope he’ll get it, but always he comes back. He’s not right in the head and half his men would have ended up on the gallows as common murderers but for this rotten war. Do you know what he makes them do to qualify for his storm-company? They have to pull the toggle on a stick bomb, then balance it on top of their helmet and stand to attention until it goes off. He must have killed dozens with that trick. And now I hear they’re putting him up for the Maria Theresa. I tell you, if I were a Maria-Theresien Ritter and they made that criminal one as well, I’d send them their medal back by the next post.”
Toth and I made our way back along the communication trench that evening. We were shaken, and torn by barbed wire, and my chest ached from the effects of the gas, but otherwise we were none the worse for our crash landing in no man’s land—and I still had the valves from the wireless sets tucked inside my flying jacket. There were about thirty of us in the party: a guide, Toth and me, the Italian prisoners, plus three badly wounded men on stretchers and two corpses, whom we made the Italians carry. The dead were both victims of the trench-mortar mine about midday: two blanket- covered forms and two pairs of dust-clogged boots joggling lifelessly as we manhandled the stretchers across heaps of broken rock and squeezed against the trench-walls to let ration parties go by. Alongside one of the bundles on the stretcher were the smashed remains of a crude violin made from a petrol can. I saw it, and suddenly felt very ashamed of myself for my flippant thoughts that morning about amateur musicians.
Once we were over the brow of the Svinjak and in the dead ground on the other side, out of view of the enemy, I was able stand up straight and look back at the fantastic jumble of dug-outs and shelters on the reverse slope. Made promiscuously from the local stone and from sandbags and cement and timber and corrugated iron, the whole crazy troglodyte town sprawled along the safe side of the bleak limestone ridge, like a lost city of the Incas high in the Andes, or the rock tombs of some long-forgotten civilisation in the Arabian desert. What an odd world we live in, I thought; once we buried old men because they were dead, and now young men have to bury themselves in order to stay alive.
The need for this impressed itself upon me very forcibly as we came out of the protective lee of the Svinjak. The Italians might not be able to see us, but their artillery could still throw shells over the ridge. Almost before we could think they were howling down to burst on the rock all about us, sending more splinters and fragments of hot metal rattling viciously along the trench walls. Our guide motioned us all into a bomb shelter cut into the side of the rock trench and roofed with railway sleepers. We scrambled in, leaving only the dead outside. The guide was a battalion message-runner, a Viennese lad of about nineteen selected not for his physique—he was an under-nourished product of the slum tenements—but for his agility and cunning in dodging shells. We crouched there for the next half-hour until the shelling stopped. Our guide seemed not to be unduly concerned. Cigarettes were passed around by one of the Italians, and he lit his up as calmly as if he had been waiting for a tram on the Mariahilferstrasse.
“Hot this evening,” I ventured as a shell crashed near by, showering us with dust and debris.
He considered for a moment, exhaling the smoke with an expression of intense pleasure: it was months since we had been able to get cigarettes free of dried horse manure.
“Obediently report that it’s not too bad today, Herr Leutnant. They dropped a heavy right in among a relief party here last week: scraping them up with spoons we were.” I saw that he was not exaggerating: I had suddenly noticed a blackening human finger lying below the duckboards of the shelter. “No,” he went on, drawing on his cigarette, “most days it’s worse than this.”
“How do you stand it out here, week after week?”
He laughed at this. “Oh, we get by, Herr Leutnant, we get by somehow. All depends what you’re used to I suppose. I grew up in Ottakring, eight of us in one room and my dad out of work for three years, so I suppose this isn’t too bad really. The smell’s about the same, the food’s better and the meals are more regular if the ration parties don’t get blown up on the way; and there’s about the same amount of space to lie down in our dug-out. So overall it’s not too bad a life if you don’t think more than twenty seconds ahead. I’ve got a brother with the 11th Army in the Alps and he says it’s like a holiday camp up there—except that the Wellischers send a shell over every now and then and someone gets killed. He hopes the war’ll go on until he retires, he says.”
I found that our Italians were also realists about the war. Peasants from Basilicata with sad, honest brown faces and lugubrious black moustaches, they had the look of men who never expected life to be much fun—and who have not been disappointed in this expectation. I could barely understand what they were saying with my Venetian Austro-Italian. But from what I could grasp I gathered that they were less than totally filled with eroismo ardente. I asked one of them, a man rather older than the rest, where they were supposed to be going with this offensive of theirs. He replied that he had no idea and cared less; knew only that the signori ufficiali and the military police would take a poor view of them if they didn’t go forward when the whistles blew.
“Pah! La guerra—cosa di padroni!” he spat. His companions all spat as well and cursed the whims of the bosses, which had torn them from their families and smallholdings and sent them to fight for the Carso Plateau—“il Carso squallido,” as they called it, with a great deal of spitting and obscene gestures. Then they fell to reviling the politicians and journalists who had got them into this mess.
“Politics,” they said, “dirty business. Where we live Italy is an express train: it only stops around election time. All we see of it in between is the tax collector and the recruiting sergeant.”
“And what about your oppressed brothers in Trieste, groaning under the Austrian yoke? At least, that’s what the newspapers tell you.”
“We don’t read the newspapers,” replied the older man with great dignity, “because we are illiterate. But as for the Triestini, we couldn’t care a farthing. Would the Triestini come and rescue us when the landlords and the money lenders tip us off our land to beg? I tell you, Tenente, I care as much about fighting for Trieste as I do for New York.”
A younger soldier interrupted him. “No, Beppo, fair’s fair. Myself, I’d much rather fight for New York than for Trieste: I’ve got a brother living in Brooklyn and he sends us money orders.” Everyone laughed, and thought this a very apt remark.
“Well,” I asked, “if you are so fed up with the war why do you go on fighting? ”
They found this hugely amusing. One of them levelled a finger and traversed it around slowly, squinting along it as he did so:
“. . . Sette, otto, nove—PAFF! . . . diciasette, diciaotto, diciannove— PAFF!”
From this I gathered that, if nothing else, the Kingdom of Italy, self-proclaimed heir to ancient Rome, had borrowed from its ancestor a number of practices in the area of military discipline.
Some weeks after these events I happened to mention Oberleutnant Friml to Flik 19F’s Technical Officer Franz Meyerhofer, who was also a Sudetenlander.
“Oh, that thug?” he said, “ ‘the Death-Angel of the Isonzo Front,’ as the papers are calling him? Funny thing, but we were at school together in Eger. He was about six years below me, but my brother was in the same class.”
“What was he like then? ”
“Rather a weed, my brother said: always being picked on, and wouldn’t go skating and playing football like the rest. He left school after his Matura and became a life-insurance salesman. It’s strange really what the war brings out in people.”
I happened to meet Friml again on the last day of 1916, at a New Year’s party in Vienna. He had recently won the Maria Theresa, but he was clearly in a very bad way: nerves completely gone to pieces. He was killed a few weeks after he got back to the trenches: by snake bite, I understand. It was a very odd business I remember, from the reports that I heard of the enquiry. He took his boots off and got into the bunk in his dug-out after a raid, and was bitten by a horn-nosed viper hiding under the blankets. His men said that the snake must have been hibernating there, but they called in a snake expert who said that horn-nosed vipers don’t hibernate.
So they changed tack and said that it must have hidden there from fright during a bombardment. In which case, said the expert, it must have been a very frightened reptile indeed, and very disorientated, because horn-nosed vipers are unknown north of the Dinara Mountains, about three hundred kilometres further south. The military procurators tried pinning it on a Croat soldier in Friml’s storm-company, but the rest of the men closed ranks and they could never get enough evidence for a charge of murder. I suppose that it was better in a way that he died: I would have hated to think of him back in civilian clothes, reduced to selling life insurance on the streets of Eger with his spring-loaded cosh in one hand and a briefcase in the other. The “trincera-crazies,” the Italians called them. Europe’s tragedy was not the Oberleutnant Frimls who died, I think; it was the ones who came back.