I returned to Fliegerfeld Haidenschaft-Caprovizza on the first day of September 1916. It appeared that not a great deal had happened during my fortnight’s absence. The Sixth Battle of the Isonzo had fizzled out around 20 August, as the Italians ran low on artillery shells. In those two weeks they had captured the town of Gorz and had then pushed on to the Carso Plateau to a maximum depth of about five kilometres, leaving them now with a more or less straight front line some ten kilometres in length, running from Gorz down the shallow depression called the Vallone to reach the sea a little to the east of Monfalcone. It had cost them something over sixty thousand lives to gain, and us about the same number to lose. Both sides were now gathering their breath and preparing for the next round.
Flik 19F had flown a number of reconnaissance flights when requested by Army Headquarters, and had also done a little long-range bombing, losing one Brandenburger along with Fahnrich Baltassari and Corporal Indrak in an attempt to bomb the rail junction at Treviso. Otherwise there was little to report in the first couple of weeks after my return to the unit. Zugsfuhrer Toth had been home on leave to visit his parents in Hungary. I would dearly have loved to have been able to question him more closely about this, since Toth having parents was a concept that I found quite fascinating, giving rise to visions of creatures sitting around a fire on the floor of a cave gnawing the bones of an aurochs. But my Latin was not quite up to the task; and anyway Toth, though impeccably “kor- rekt” in his relations with officers—at least when not tipping them out of aeroplanes—was someone who would not willingly discuss his private life with strangers.
The weather was beginning to close in now, autumn approaching a good deal earlier than usual, which (so the local countryfolk said) presaged a hard winter. Morning fog and low cloud made flying impossible for much of the time—“Fliegerwetter” the ranker-pilots used to call it, since they did not wear the black-and-yellow sword-belt and were thus under no obligation to pretend that they were anxious to get themselves killed. But the fog and cloud began to clear around mid-month as the bora season set in.
I did once understand the precise mechanism of the bora, eighty-five years ago when I was studying meteorology at the k.u.k. Marine Akademie. As I remember it, it works rather like the syphon in a lavatory cistern: that cold air accumulates behind the mountain ranges of the Balkans until some of it overflows down a mountain pass, and that this initial flow brings the rest rushing down after it. The danger signs, I remember, were clear air and a low, white cap of cloud over the distant mountain peaks. There would be a few hours’ stillness and an uneasy feeling in the air, then whoosh! suddenly a howling gale would be shaking the tents and scurrying loose gear across the flying field as the ground crews struggled to wheel the aircraft into the shelter of their log-and-earth bora pens. The bora would make flying impossible for the next day or two, even though the air was as clear as could be and the sun shining brightly. We knew that. But so, unfortunately, did the Italians. The bora rarely blows west of the Isonzo, so they could take off and land as they pleased while we were firmly grounded. Likewise the bora is a curious wind in that, although it blows with extreme fury, it only blows near to ground level, up to about a thousand metres or so.
We at Flik 19F made this discovery one morning in mid-September just after breakfast. We had woken to find our tents flapping wildly as the wind screamed down a side valley from the Selva di Ternova. But the meteorologists at Army HQ had warned us the previous evening, so everything had been securely pegged down and the aeroplanes moved into shelter. It seemed a pity not to be able to fly on a day of such perfect visibility, but there we were: man proposes, God disposes. I held my jacket closed with one hand and my cap on my head with the other and struggled across the field in the face of the gale to enter the heaving mess tent. Breakfast was the usual meagre affair of ersatz coffee and kriegsbrot, the only matter for comment being the proportion of sawdust in the latter. I read in the Triester An%eiger that the Western Front was holding firm in the face of massive and costly British assaults: what you called the Battle of the Somme and we called the Battle of the Ancre. I finished my breakfast, and Meyerhofer and I set off for the workshops to inspect our Hansa- Brandenburg Zoska, which had arrived back from the repair workshops the previous evening. As we walked out of the tent into the blustering gale Meyerhofer stopped and held his hand to his ear, listening.
“What is it?” I asked, shouting to be heard above the wind.
“Funny thing,” he replied, “I could have sworn I heard engines. Surely not in this wind though. Can you hear anything, Prohaska?”
I listened. Sure enough, above the buffeting of the bora I could now hear aircraft engines: not one or two engines but a great many of them.
“Look!” he shouted, pointing down the valley towards Gorz. “I don’t believe it—not in this weather! ” It was a formation of eight or nine aeroplanes high above the valley, perhaps three or four thousand metres up. They were plainly not ours. They were large biplanes with twin-boom fuselages and three engines: Italian Caproni heavy bombers. We dived for cover in a slit-trench as the first bombs came crashing down on the airfield, throwing up fountains of rock and earth. We had anti-aircraft machine-gun nests placed around the airfield, but they were only to deal with low-flying attacks. They loosed off belts of ammunition into the sky: to no effect whatever. Two figures leapt into the trench beside us as we peered out at the destruction going on all around. It was Potocznik and Zwierzkowski, both in flying kit.
“Come on!” Potocznik yelled above the din, “come and help us get after them! ”
We scrambled out and ran to a bora shelter where a dozen or so soldiers were struggling to wheel out a Brandenburger into the shrieking wind. Somehow we all managed to hold it steady as Feldwebel Prokesch swung the propeller and Potocznik scrambled into the observer’s seat. “Gluck auf!” we all shouted as the engine roared and the aeroplane started to lurch crazily across the field with five or six men hanging on to each wing, staggering forward then sideways then forward again like a drunkard as the wind snatched at it. It was not to be: directly the ground crew let go of the wings a vicious gust of wind got beneath the fragile contraption and flicked it contemptuously to one side. The next thing we knew it was lying upside-down, smashed against one of the wooden hangars. We ran over to it and dragged the two men from the wreckage, both shaken but fortunately unhurt. The drone of engines was now submerged once more beneath the blasting of the wind as the attackers turned away towards Trieste and home, mission accomplished. We looked sadly about us. Only one man had been killed, but a hangar had been wrecked, along with our remaining Lloyd CII inside it, while still-smoking bomb craters peppered the airfield as reminders of our impotence. It was all intensely humiliating.
Still, as your proverb remarks, it is an ill wind that blows nobody some good. A bomb had landed at the end of the officers’ tent lines and had destroyed the tent next to mine. Leutnant Szuborits’s gramophone was found intact among the debris, but a bomb-splinter had gone through his box of records. And, to my inexpressible joy, “Sport und immer Sport” had been among the casualties. A blissful silence descended upon Fliegerfeld Caprovizza now that Mizzi Gunther would squawk no more. I almost felt moved to write a letter to the Italian Air Corps to thank them for enabling me to keep my sanity.
Then came the autumn rains, as the fighting flared up again on 17 September: the start of the so-called Seventh Battle of the Isonzo. And if the bora is one of the two great natural freaks of the Carso region, its drainage pattern is the other. A whole hidden world of caverns and grottoes and underground rivers lay beneath that dreary plateau; something which only began to be appreciated in 1916, as the excavation of trenches and dug-outs revealed a hitherto unsuspected network of caves and passages in the limestone. As the human insects fought and died in their swarms up on the surface, the patient stalactites dripped as they had dripped for the past ten thousand years: steady; calm; patient in their purpose; totally indifferent to empires, kingdoms and generals sticking flags into maps.
Yet this hidden world would occasionally make its presence known. Rain would pour down in torrents for weeks on end in the Carso autumn, turning the churned-up trackways to troughs of rust red mud in which the men and mules would flounder and curse as they struggled forward under their loads. Yet on the bare rock, most of the rainwater would disappear as if it had never been, seeming scarcely to dampen the arid surface. Then one morning, we woke up at Fliegerfeld Caprovizza to find the field a gleaming sheet of water. The mysterious underground lakes which feed the tributaries of the Vippaco had filled up at last, and were now decanting their excess water down the valley like an overflow pipe.
We flew infrequently in those early weeks of September: a little photo reconnaissance work when holes opened in the clouds, or some artillery- spotting over the battlefields when Army Headquarters requested it. We also flew a series of desultory bombing-raids into the Italian hinterland by night, in an attempt to disrupt supplies to the Front by damaging this or that or the other rail junction. They had a magic all of their own, those night-time raids: the charm of the mystery rail outings of my childhood, in which one bought a ticket and perhaps ended up for the day in Olmutz or Trencin, or even in Prague for long enough to consume a lemonade and a couple of frankfurters at the station buffet. They were largely without danger to us—the Italians had no more idea of night fighting in the air at that stage of the war than anyone else—but by the same token they posed very little threat indeed to the enemy.
Quite apart from navigational problems, not the least of the reasons for the basic harmlessness of these raids was that about the middle of the month, gazing in despair at his graph line Total Weight of Bombs Dropped, which had nose-dived during early September because of bad weather, Hauptmann Kraliczek had been struck by a sudden thunderbolt of inspiration: he would rectify the situation by drawing the graph in future, not according to the weight of bombs dropped on enemy territory each day, but according to their number! In this way (he explained to us), if an aeroplane took off on a raid carrying—say—four 20kg bombs instead of two 40kg, the statistical efficacy of the raid would be doubled at a stroke and the graph line would immediately climb like a rocket. We all came away from his lecture feeling very depressed, knowing as we did that a telegram had already gone to the munitions depot in Marburg requesting them to supply us with the smallest aerial bombs they had in stock. These were old 5kg and 10kg models which had lain there since
1915 because they were pretty well useless, the accuracy of a bomb generally being a function of its weight. Meyerhofer did his best with the Marburg people over the telephone, pleading with them to dump their old stock in the nearest river and tell Kraliczek that they had nothing smaller than 20kg. But it was too late, and anyway it was plain that the Ordnance Officer in charge of the depot was only too happy to unload surplus munitions on to those idiots at Caprovizza rather than having to keep entering it on his own monthly stock inventory. A red-painted ammunition wagon arrived at Haidenschaft Station the next day. From now on the only thought with which we could comfort ourselves as we risked our lives on bombing-raids over Italy was that no one on the ground was likely to come to any harm. Our only chance of influencing the outcome of the war, Meyerhofer said ruefully, was if one of our puny bombs happened to hit Cadorna on the head.
The first of my own night-time excursions took place in the third week of September, lurching away into the sunset from Caprovizza airfield with eight 10kg Carbonit bombs stowed on the cockpit floor beneath my feet. Our objective was the town of Gemona in the Alpine foothills, and our task was to bomb the railway station, incidentally (though this was not explicitly stated in our orders) causing alarm and despondency in the Italian rear, panic on the Milan stockmarket, the soil to ooze blood, the moon to be obscured and cows to give birth to two-headed calves across the whole of Lombardy-Venetia. The only problem was that, like most people in 1916, we had no experience whatever of night flying and no equipment for it beyond the aeroplane’s dubious magnetic compass and a pair of spirit-levels for judging our attitude and angle of bank. I had made some experiments a few days before in using a nautical sextant to find our way by the stars; but, experienced sea navigator though I was, I had found it to be a hopeless task with no visible horizon to work to and nothing but the ponderous Nautical Ephemerids to do the calculations with.
The bubble sextant and look-up tables would not be available for another twenty years—and quite frankly would not be a lot of use even then.
There was no moon that night, so in the end the best that Toth and I could do was to fly west until we found the River Tagliamento, its tangled channels gleaming dully below us in the starlight like a half-unwound skein of silver thread. We then turned to follow the river up through the forests and hills until it began to bend to westward. It is a curiously hypnotic state, to be flying in an open-cockpit biplane at night over enemy territory. The absence of any sensations but the steady roar of the engine, the rushing of the cold wind and the flickering pulse of flame from the engine’s six stub-exhausts all conspired to produce (I must admit) a rather drowsy state in which it was far from easy to concentrate on navigational landmarks. I made a point of prodding Toth’s shoulder every five minutes to keep him alert. With a single-engined aeroplane in those days it was all too easy for even an experienced pilot to lose his sense of balance, especially if the night was overcast, and for propeller torque to tip the aeroplane gradually over to port until it would be flying along on one ear, dropping out of the sky as it did so.
The Italians had enough experience of air-raids now to be careful about black-out, so it was only by the unmistakable glow of a railway engine’s firebox and some lights in a goods yard that we managed to find Gemona. Numb and stiff with cold despite layers of clothing, I struggled to lug the first bomb on to the cockpit edge. Then suddenly I was struck blind by an amazing glare of light. The Italians had searchlights below. The first flak shells flashed around us as Toth banked away to starboard and I lost my grip on the bomb. I suppose that the searchlight crew must have heard it whistling down, because it was quite extraordinary to see how smartly they turned off the light. I saw the bomb flash red below as Toth brought us back round to repeat the compliment. I tipped the remaining bombs overboard one after another. As we climbed away at full throttle into the night sky with the searchlight beams criss-crossing vainly behind us, I saw that we had set a building on fire: a wooden goods shed, to judge by the sparks boiling up into the sky.
It was a tricky landing back at Caprovizza, coming down on to a rough field only by the uncertain light of a few flares made out of petrol tins half-filled with sump oil and with wicks of rag. We both went to get a few hours’ sleep before I wrote out and filed my report on the raid. I then strolled over to the hangars, where the Brandenburger was being serviced after our flight. Feldwebel Prokesch saluted, then said that I might care to see something. He pointed silently to the aeroplane’s plywood fuselage. The sides bore two holes the size of my hand exactly opposite each other athwart the observer’s seat. A piece of shrapnel had gone clean through the aeroplane when the flak shell burst near by. If I had not been standing up to hoist the first bomb on to the cockpit edge it would undoubtedly have passed through me on the way, at about kidney level.
Because he was busy with his compilations I was not able to make my verbal report to Hauptmann Kraliczek until nearly midday. I found him to be in an even more peevish mood than usual.
“Well, Prohaska, a fine mess you have landed us in this time.”
“In what respect, Herr Kommandant?”
“It wasn’t Gemona that you bombed, it was Tolmezzo. And it wasn’t a railway station, it was a brickworks.”
“Permit me to ask, Herr Kommandant, what difference does it make? Where bombing-raids are concerned one Italian town is much the same as any other I should think; while as for the target, it was unfortunate that we didn’t hit the railway station as intended, but I imagine that bricks are necessary for the Italian war effort as well.”
“Difference? My form giving you your orders for the raid had ‘Gemona’ clearly written in the box ‘Primary objective’ and ‘To attack railway station’ in the box ‘Purpose of mission.’ It said nothing whatever about either brickyards or Tolmezzo. If you had said that you were diverted by heavy fire over the target and flew on to bomb somewhere else that would have been acceptable, though a matter for regret. But in your report—which has now been forwarded without my approval to Army Headquarters—you stated categorically that you attacked Gemona when in fact you bombed Tolmezzo. I have it here in black and white on this form which you filled in when you landed. I regard this as a serious breach of discipline.”
“But Herr Komandant, navigating an aeroplane by night is a very hit-or-miss business, everyone knows that . . .”
“Not in Flik 19F it isn’t: your targets are given to you, and I shall expect you in future either to reach them or to give a very good reason why you were not able to do so: ‘Unable to find the target’ will simply not be acceptable, do you understand? Precision in reporting is the essence of operational effectiveness. But quite apart from that, I gather from Army Headquarters that your attack on the brickworks has caused us serious problems.”
“Permit me to ask how that can be?”
“A railway station is state property, and attacks upon it are permitted by the 1907 Hague Convention. A brickyard is private property, and is therefore immune to attack under the provisions of the same convention. But what makes it all far, far more serious in this case is the fact” (he adjusted his spectacles) “that the brickworks in question now turns out to have been the property of an Austrian national: one Herr Wranitzky of the Sudkarntner Ziegelkombinat AG in Klagenfurt. The factory manager telephoned him this morning via Switzerland to tell him of the attack, and I gather that the insurers are refusing to pay on the grounds that his policy excludes acts of war committed by the forces of his own country. He has already been to visit the War Ministry to complain, and is talking, I understand, of suing you in person for damages.”
So after that I took good care on all such night-time raids to unload our bombs over open country near the target. I also evolved an infallible system for precision bombing at night. We would be given a form specifying our target—say Latisana—before we took off. Usually we would be quite unable to find Latisana, or at most would end up dropping our bombs near somewhere that looked as if it might conceivably be Latisana. We would return from the raid, and I would go to my tent and sleep a few hours before writing out my report in longhand, leaving blank spaces for the name of the place attacked. I would then go back to bed until about midday, and when I woke up, send my batman Petrescu down into Haidenschaft on the station bicycle to buy the midday edition of the TriesterAn%eiger. This would usually contain a report received via Reuters in Zurich and entitled “Our Heroic Fliers Bomb the Town of Pordenone”—or Udine, or Portogruaro or somewhere similar: usually anywhere but Latisana. I would dismiss Petrescu with a tip of a few kreuzers, and then fill in a name—perhaps “Pordenone”—and maybe add a few convincing details gleaned from the article before handing it over to the Kanzlei to be typed out. I would then fill in Kraliczek’s report form, entering “Unable to attack primary objective because of heavy flak fire” or something like that against Latisana, and writing “Pordenone” in the box “Secondary target chosen.” It worked splendidly. In fact before long I had received a special mention from 5th Army Headquarters complimenting me on the extraordinary precision of my bombing-missions. I was fast becoming an accomplished practitioner of the art of retrospective aerial navigation: that is to say, not of getting from where one is to where one wants to be, but rather from where one was to where one ought to have been. But I was lost to shame now and cared about it no longer. So far as Toth and I were concerned, precision bombing at night meant hitting the right country.
All things considered though, it was perhaps no bad thing that we could do so little flying in the early part of September, for the Italians were now stationing a number of specialist single-seater squadrons along the Isonzo Front. These fighter squadrons were very much a new idea in 1916. When the Germans had brought out their revolutionary Fokker Eindecker on the Western Front at the end of 1915 they had been content to operate them singly, each aeroplane prowling like a peregrine falcon above a specified sector of the Front and pouncing on any Allied aeroplane that tried to cross. But in the skies above Verdun that summer the French had finally dealt with the Eindecker by forming special squadrons of single-seat fighters: the famous Escadrilles de Chasse, led by pilots like Nungesser and Fonck. Always quick to see which way the wind was blowing, the Germans had followed suit, forming their own specialised fighter units—the Jagdstaffeln—which would make up for the German Air Force’s inferiority in numbers by moving about the Front to wherever the High Command was planning something, and then simply sweeping the enemy out of the sky for a fortnight or so.
And now, in the autumn of 1916, the Italian Air Corps had also taken up this idea. Special squadrons of Nieuport single-seaters were being formed under leaders like Barracca and Ruffo di Calabria. The cult of the fighter ace was reaching now even to the remote and little-regarded Austro-Italian Front. But as yet, only to one side of it. The official doctrine on our side of the lines was an aeroplane worthy of the name ought to be able to carry out any front-flying task demanded of it, even if the result was that it did them all more or less poorly. We were told that General Uzelac had been moving heaven and earth in Vienna to get a budget allocation for an Austro-Hungarian single-seater capable of taking on the Nieuport. But so far nothing had emerged. Aircraft procurement was the business of the k.u.k. Fliegerarsenal, not the pilots at the Front. While we fought and cursed and died amid the stink of cordite and petrol and burning bodies, the desk-aviators sat in their offices at the War Ministry, floating serene and godlike above the suffering of mankind, and exchanged memoranda and aides-memoire with their fellow-bureaucrats at Fischamend. It was only by removing themselves (they said) as far as possible from the vulgar brawl—“der Kriegskrawalle”—taking place on the Isonzo that they could arrive at considered and administratively correct decisions on how best to spend the taxpayers’ money.
So for the time being it looked as if we must go on trying to do our duty in our unwieldly Brandenburg two-seaters. It had been a hazardous business even when the Italians had been operating their Nieuports in ones and twos. But now that they would be going around in gangs, our life expectancy would be quite dramatically reduced, to a point where even Oberleutnant Friml would decline to quote us a premium. Our own strength in single-seat fighter aircraft consisted of precisely three aircraft: Fokker Eindeckers reluctantly sold to us by the Germans and grounded for most of the time at their base at Wippach because Flik 4 could no longer obtain the castor oil used as a lubricant in their rotary engines. Not that they would have been much use however, even if they could have got airborne more often. The Eindecker had not been a brilliant aircraft even in 1915, and it stood little chance now in single combat with a Nieuport flown by a half-way competent pilot. In any case, the Eindeckers were forbidden to operate west of the front line. The Germans were still worried that the Allies would capture and copy the secret mechanism that allowed the Eindecker’s gun to fire through the propeller arc, so they had only agreed to sell them to us on strict condition that they always stayed on our side of the lines.
The wretched early-autumn weather and our lack of serviceable aircraft put paid to flying for most of the third week of September. It also gave a marked downward trend to nearly all the lines on nearly all of the graphs that decorated the walls of Hauptmann Kraliczek’s office: particularly to the all-important red line Kilometres Flown over Enemy Territory, which, for our commanding officer, was the touchstone of Flik 19F’s efficiency as a fighting unit. At last, on 20 September, three days after the resumption of large-scale fighting on the Carso, Kraliczek was able to bear the strain no longer. Perhaps because they could no longer be bothered organising them when the results were so meagre, 5th Army Command had given the commander of Flik 19F a completely free hand in planning long-range bombing operations: in future he would be able to go and bomb whatever he pleased, provided that he submitted his plans first for approval by the High Command and provided that his aeroplanes were not required elsewhere for photo reconnaissance. The result was a daring plan; so daring in fact that it was plain at first sight that whoever had conceived of it was confident that someone else would have the job of turning it into reality. The next day Flik 19F’s entire effective strength of four Hansa-Brandenburgs would take off to fly on a raid to the very limit of their range: to the city of Verona, some 250 kilometres behind the Italian lines.
For our commanding officer, what we were to do when—and if—we reached Verona was of quite secondary importance. Photographs of the railway junction and a barracks were cursorily indicated at our briefing session that afternoon; but even if we managed to get that far and identify them, there was not going to be a great deal that we would be able to do to them. The raid would be in daylight, so each aeroplane would have to carry an observer and machine gun for defence, while at that range our bombload would be limited to two 10kg bombs each. So far as we could make out, Hauptmann Kraliczek had selected Verona as a target and chosen to send four aircraft against it purely on the grounds that 4 X 250km x 2 = 2,000km, which would suffice to pull the Kilometres Flown line back up to where it had been at the beginning of August. My polite enquiry, whether we might just send up one aeroplane four nights running with instructions to fly around in circles until its tank was empty, was met with a baffled stare from behind the round spectacles. That is the trouble with people of Kraliczek’s cast of mind, I have always found: sarcasm is quite wasted upon them, since their brains can only proceed from A to B and from B to C.
None of us was at all confident as we made our preparations that we would even complete the hundred-kilometre round trip, let alone do anything worthwhile on the way. No one cared to say as much, but we all knew that intelligence reports had revealed the presence of a new Italian single-seater squadron recently arrived at San Vito airfield, just east of Palmanova and directly under our planned flight path. It was the recently formed Squadriglia 64a , led by the legendary Major Oreste di Carraciolo.
I suppose that, along with the tank, the fighter aces were the year 1916’s great innovation in the field of warfare. Or perhaps it was all just public relations, I cannot say. At any rate, they fulfilled a deep public need. The grey, anonymous infantry might be perishing by the million, gassed, blown up and burnt alive with as little compunction as rats in their burrows. But up in the air above this frightful massacre—as if to give the public’s numbed imagination something that it could grasp—the flying aces were fast acquiring the status of opera singers. Even this early, in the summer of 1916, cigarette cards and books of salon photographs and the first ghost-written autobiographies were being produced to feed the public’s hunger for heroes to worship in this, the most monstrously unheroic war the world had ever seen. Fonck, Guynemer, Boelcke, Immelmann: even in tradition-encrusted old Austria the naval fighter pilot Godfrey Banfield was already being styled by the newspapers as “the Eagle of Trieste.”
It was against this background that one morning early in September we officers at Caprovizza had circulated among us at breakfast a cutting from a Swiss newspaper. It carried a photograph of a shortish, thick-set man in the uniform of an Italian army officer, standing against the side of a Nieuport fighter. The aeroplane bore the emblem of a rampant black cat, claws extended, and the article was entitled “Italy’s Black Cat: Ready to Pounce on the Austrians.” It appeared from the text of the article that a journalist from a Berne newspaper had managed to obtain an interview with Major Oreste di Carraciolo: sculptor, explorer, duellist, racing driver and aviator.
The Major, we learnt, though not a career army officer and although well past forty years of age, had volunteered for the Italian Air Corps in 1915. Since then he had made a spectacular career as a flier, with ten kills to his credit already, including one of our Fokker Eindeckers and a Halberstadt single-seater from a German squadron that had operated briefly from Veldes. But by all accounts this extraordinary turn to his career was something that might well have been expected; for Major di Carraciolo was clearly a character in the mould of the condottieri of the Italian Renaissance.
His early life had mostly been spent as a sculptor, helping found the Futurist movement and leaving a few score writhing monuments in white marble in the squares of Italian towns and cities, as well as enjoying the friendship and patronage of Rodin. His “Monument to the Heroes of Adowa” had been particularly praised: to a degree where it had almost overshadowed the fact that Adowa was a battle in which an entire Italian army had been wiped out by the Emperor Menelik’s barefooted Abyssinians. But he had managed to take time off from hammer and chisel to live the life of the literary salons; and to enjoy the favours of a great many salon hostesses; and to fight a great many duels—sometimes victorious, sometimes not—with their husbands. It was one of these complications (the article said) that had obliged him to go and live for several years in the wild mountain fringes of the Italian colony of Eritrea. During his time in Africa he had discovered a major lake in the Rift Valley; had been mauled almost to death by a dying lioness; and had later rescued the lioness’s cub, which he had brought up in his household and which now followed him about like a pet dog. He had driven racing cars, had taught himself to fly about 1910, and had then flown in the Italian war against Turkey, where he claimed to have been the first man to drop a bomb from an aeroplane: on a Turkish steamer in Benghazi harbour.
It appeared also that in 1914 he and a gang of like-minded desperadoes had tried to force the hand of the dithering Italian government by provoking a war with Austria. They had hired a ship and arms and had been about to sail from Rimini to attack the island of Cherso when the carabinieri had arrived and arrested them. Carraciolo had received a sentence of five years, but in the event he had served only a few months, since Italy had declared war on Austria in May 1915. He had then organised a similar expedition against an Adriatic islet off Lissa: an expedition which I myself had unwittingly frustrated the previous July, when my submarine U8 had torpedoed the Italian cruiser leading the force.
All in all, it looked quite an impressive curriculum vitae. Major di Carraciolo was now (he said) ablaze with a passionate desire to clear the Habsburg eagle out of the remnants of Italia irredenta in Trieste and Dalmatia and the South Tyrol. He had no personal animus against us, he assured the Swiss journalist: “The Austrian is a brave and determined fighter,” he said, “but he is also ill-organised and not very well equipped and now outnumbered into the bargain. I think that I can promise him a hot time of it once Squadriglia 64a gets into action.” Some of our younger officers dismissed the article as empty Latin bragging; but for myself I had little doubt that the Major would be as good as his word. I hoped that so long as I was flying a Brandenburger we would never meet him in the air.
We were to meet, though, and a good deal sooner than I had anticipated. 21 September dawned sunny after a week of mist and drizzle, though with some patchy cloud coming from the west. Laden down with fuel and bombs, the four Brandenburgers had squelched across the waterlogged flying field at Caprovizza and lumbered heavily into the air. We were all climbing slowly, the aeroplanes not only heavy-laden but themselves damp-soaked and sluggish after weeks of standing around in the rain and fog on the airfield. It was not until we were almost over the trench lines east of Gorz, still climbing, that we finally got into formation. We would fly in a diamond shape, perhaps fifty metres apart. The leading aeroplane would be flown by Oberleutnant Potocznik, Toth and I would fly on the starboard flank, while a new officer called Leutnant Donhanyi would take the port flank. The rear aeroplane would be flown by Stabsfeldwebel Zwierzkowski with Leutnant Szuborits as observer. The idea of the diamond formation was to guard against aeroplanes wandering off and getting lost. We also hoped that we might be able to give one another supporting fire if the Italians came up after us.
In the event they had no need to come up after us: they were already waiting as we crossed the lines, circling a thousand metres above and positioned to make the best use of the sun. Everything just happened so fast: six or seven black specks hurtling down upon us out of the glare as our shadows skimmed phantom-like across a white field of cloud about five hundred metres below. Outnumbered, our only hope of survival lay inside the cloud. I turned as I cocked the machine gun and saw Potocznik’s aeroplane waggling its wings to tell us to follow, then putting his nose down to head into the white fluff. But the Nieuports were upon us before we could hide ourselves, two of them edging beneath us to shoot us down if we tried to dive. Donhanyi’s aeroplane was the first victim. I swung around and fired a hurriedly aimed burst or two in an attempt to knock out the Nieuport manoeuvring under his tail. Then the Schwarzlose jammed. I opened the breech and fumbled in my thick gloves to clear the blockage. I cleared it, but I was too late to be of any help to Donhanyi: orange flame burst suddenly from behind the Brandenburger’s engine mantle, and there was nothing more to be done except watch helpless as the aeroplane curved away to port and down into the cloud, ablaze and leaving a plume of greasy black smoke floating in the air. But there was no time to stand watching, only swing the gun around to fire at an Italian coming at us from the starboard side. He was firing at us as he came. Somehow Toth managed to flick us sideways and down into the cloud—just as our engine coughed and missed fire.
I suspected a bullet through the fuel pump, but it scarcely mattered as we drifted down through the clinging damp murk with the engine spluttering to a standstill. By the time we emerged from the underside of the cloud a half-minute later, the engine was gone for good, the wind singing eerily in the bracing-wires as the propeller windmilled idly in the slipstream. In the sudden, intense silence I was aware for the first time of the noise of other aeroplane engines and the dry rattle of firing above us.
I looked about us fearfully as we emerged into the sunshine once more. No one was to be seen for the moment. The Italians were presumably off chasing Potocznik and Szuborits. I looked below, trying to get my bearings. The first thing that I saw was the familiar outline of Gorz below me. Well, I thought to myself, if the Italians had jumped upon us as we crossed the lines, this did at least mean that the cripples might have some chance of limping home. I signalled to Toth to turn us around towards our lines, then lugged our two bombs up on to the edge of the cockpit and tipped them overboard. Provided that we could escape the attentions of Italian fighters and flak batteries, we might still make it back. We were still about three thousand metres up and our lines were perhaps five kilometres to the east. The aeroplanes of 1916 might have been primitive, slow, flimsy contraptions, but they could at least glide well.
I stood behind the machine gun, scanning the sky about us. We might just escape unobserved . . . Then I saw the shape swooping on us out of the cloud. I ground my teeth and traversed the gun around—more out of a feeling of honour than from any hope of beating off our attacker. A two- seater would stand little enough chance against a Nieuport even under full power. Gliding along like this, though, we were the most pitiful of sitting targets, incapable of doing anything more than drift gently downwards in a straight line at about half our maximum speed. The Italian came along behind us, manoeuvring for the fatal burst. Then to my surprise the little grey aeroplane turned away to port and throttled back to fly alongside us. As the pilot waved to me I saw that the aeroplane bore the familiar emblem of the pouncing black cat painted on its side. It was the famous Major di Carraciolo in person. As he raised his gauntleted hand and pointed down I grasped that he was signalling us to fly on towards our own side of the lines—with himself as our escort.
Quaint as it might sound now, such chivalrous behaviour was by no means uncommon in those days. By 1916, war in the air had become a fairly murderous business: not at all the gentlemanly jousting of legend. Even so, men had been flying then for something not much over a decade. The very act of taking to the sky was still something only marginally less dangerous than fighting in it, so it is scarcely surprising that we aviators were still bound together in some degree by a fellow-feeling that crossed the battle lines. I believe that even in the last months of 1918 in France, where the air battles had long since turned from duels into vast, ruthless engagements involving hundreds of aircraft on each side, there was still a general disposition to leave obviously broken-down aircraft to their fate rather than simply shoot them out of the sky. In any event, Major di Carraciolo shepherded us down until we were within reach of our lines, and on the way headed off another Nieuport which was moving in to attack us. As we crossed the lines he waved in farewell and turned away, leaving us to glide down and land on a level stretch of pasture near the village of Biglia, suffering nothing worse than a burst tyre in the process. When we got the engine panels off we found that it was not battle damage that had forced us down but a blocked fuel filter.
We sat dolefully in the mess tent that evening back at Caprovizza. Kraliczek’s Verona raid had been a costly fiasco. Toth and I had got back with little more than a few bullet holes, but the others had fared a good deal worse. Potocznik had managed to limp home with a badly shot-up aeroplane and a dying observer. But at least he had sent down one of the attacking Nieuports in the process. As for Szuborits and Zwierzkowski, they had crashed near Ranziano as they tried to get home. Szuborits was all right except for a few cuts and bruises, but Zwierzkowski had a suspected fractured pelvis, while the aeroplane was a wreck. As for young Donhanyi and his pilot, there was no point whatever in speculating about their fate: in 1916 one did not usually survive a fall from four thousand metres in a burning aeroplane. Even in the k.u.k. Armee there were certain limits beyond which incompetence would not be allowed to run, and with the virtual elimination of an entire squadron those limits had been reached. Hauptmann Kraliczek was summoned that same evening to Marburg to explain himself to the 5th Army’s Air Liaison Officer and to General Uzelac himself. He duly set off in the staff car next morning, wearing his best General Staff officer’s salon trousers and shiny dress-shako, and with a thick folder of statistical abstracts under his arm in order to demonstrate how, despite losing nine aircraft and five crew over the past eight weeks for negligible gains, Flik 19F was still the most meticulously administered unit in the entire Imperial and Royal Flying Service. In the mean time the rest of us were left orphan-like at Fliegerfeld Caprovizza, suspended in a sort of administrative limbo while it was decided what to do with us: whether to rebuild the unit with new aircraft and fliers or whether—as Hauptmann Heyrowsky at Flik 19 wanted—to reabsorb us into the parent unit. Among us remaining officers, feelings on the matter were mixed.
“It always was a stupid idea,” said Potocznik in the mess that evening, downing a double schnapps to steady hands that were still trembling after the morning’s battle. “Long-range bombing in daylight’s a complete waste of time. If you’re going to drop bombs on cities, then do it at night and do it unexpectedly with everything you’ve got instead of sending out four aeroplanes with a couple of jam-tin bombs each.”
“I agree,” I said, “but the trouble with night bombing is that if they can’t see you, you can’t see them either. Showering bombs about at random means that innocent civilians are liable to get hurt. Bomb-aiming’s an uncertain enough business in daylight.”
He looked at me steadily, turning the destroyed side of his face away from me as was his custom. A curious look had come into his normally rather dreamy eyes.
“There’s no such thing as an innocent civilian. This is war, not a game of croquet. The civilian behind the lines is every bit as much our enemy as the soldier in the trenches, and just as legitimate a target.”
“But that’s monstrous . . . The Hague Convention clearly lays down . . .” “To hell with the Hague Convention and all the rest of the laws imposed on us by the Latins and the Anglo-Saxons. This is a twentieth- century war we’re fighting, not one of Louis XIV’s little summer campaigns in Flanders where the ladies come out to watch the battle from a grandstand. And we’re not civilised fighters but Germanic warriors, descendants of the tribesmen who wiped out a Roman legion in the Teuto- berger Wald and then sacrificed every last survivor to their gods. I only wish that I could convince our suet-brained generals of that, what with their permitted targets and their laws of war. Just look at the way we handed Gorz over to the Wellischers: a whole town given to them intact ‘so as to spare it from further damage.’ I tell you, the German Army wouldn’t have stood for it: the Italians might have taken the site of Gorz, but not one stone would have been standing on another when they got there. Every house would have been blown up, every tree sawn down, every well poisoned and every cellar booby-trapped.”
“For heaven’s sake Potocznik, why are we fighting then? If we had to win the war by such means then frankly I’d rather we lost it a hundred times over.”
“And we will lose it too, I know that in my bones. There are too many against us already and the Americans are going to come in before long. But I promise you this, Germany will lose this war only to rise next time and win. That’s the war I’m planning for now, not this miserable abortion: the war when we’ll have got rid of the Kaisers and the Kraliczeks and the rest of the desk-warriors and be able to fight it according to our own rules.”
“Do you mean then that you’re fighting this war now without any hope of our winning?”
He smiled: the old, agreeable Potocznik smile. “Between ourselves, quite without any hope, my dear Prohaska. I realised back in the winter of 1914 when I was lying in hospital that Germany had already lost. The mistakes we made at the beginning were simply too great for us to overcome them. It may take us two years, perhaps even three to lose, but for the time being our enemies are too strong for us. The German High Command tries everything a little; flame-throwers, poison gas, U-Boats and so forth. But it always fails.”
“From my experience of poison gas, we deserve to lose for having used such filthy stuff.”
“The trouble, Prohaska, is not that we used such filthy stuff but that we used it half-heartedly. Just like aerial bombing: we do it too little, and piecemeal, without any sort of plan.” He leant across to stare into my eyes. “Personally I couldn’t give a hoot about poison gas, or about bombing hospitals or orphanages. In fact if it were left to me I’d aim for them specially, and use poison-gas bombs on cities too, if it did the job more efficiently. Terror is a weapon like any other, and civilians are as fit a target for it as anyone else. Only, if we’re going to use it, we must use it for maximum effect; not pinpricks with four or five aircraft against cities of a hundred thousand people, but raids with a hundred or even a thousand aircraft against towns of ten thousand people: arrive out of a blue sky and fly away five minutes later leaving the place a blazing cemetery. And leave them guessing which town will be on the menu for tomorrow. That’s war as I understand it: strike ruthlessly and hard, at random, without warning. If thine enemy offend thee—then go one night and blow his house up and cut the throats of his wife and children and poison his dog. That way he’ll leave you alone in future.”
I was silent for some time. I had always considered Potocznik to be slightly odd, a dreaming German poet-philosopher perhaps with some rather strange opinions, but at base a decent enough person. But now here he was preaching this murderous lunacy with the conviction of a dogmatic vegetarian or a convert to Christian Science. It was rather as if next door’s pedigree spaniel, always so playful and gentle, should suddenly appear in front of you with a crazed light in its eyes and a child’s torn-off arm dripping in its mouth. I suddenly understood Elisabeth’s remark (which I had previously taken to be flippant) about calling for help when he started questioning her about the shade of her nipples.
“I see,” I said, “so you are an enthusiast for long-range bombing after all. Are you planning to use it on a large scale in your second world war?” “Not in the least. I consider that strategic bombing may have some place in modern warfare, but not a major one except as a terror weapon.
Do it regularly, night after night, and the enemy will have time to build up defences and get used to it, like our famous preparatory barrages which last for weeks and merely serve to let the enemy move up his reserves in readiness. No, the sort of air power I’m interested in is completely different: massive and overwhelming air power, but used as close to the Front as possible in direct support of the armies—battlefield flying carried out by an air force specially designed for that purpose; fleets of aircraft in contact with the ground troops by wireless and used to smash any strong points ahead of an advance.”
“The wireless sets are going to be rather heavy for the ground troops to carry, don’t you think?”
“Not in my German army of the future. The British have been using armoured caterpillar tractors on the Ancre, I read in this week’s ‘Corps Intelligence Summary.’ Only the complacent idiots who write it are dismissing them as ‘mechanical toys of no lasting signficance.’ Not if I know anything about it they won’t be. That’s the war of the future: columns of armoured motor cars with wireless and with fleets of aeroplanes to call up as flying artillery. No more of your nine-day bombardments and twenty thousand lives to capture a square kilometre. We’ll win by speed and ruthlessness—and we’ll keep what we’ve conquered by the same means. It’s Latin, but it’s still a good motto: ‘Let them hate us so long as they fear us.’ ”
“Are you going to lead Germany in person in this war of yours, then?” “No, not me. Nor Ludendorff nor Kaiser Wilhelm nor the House of Hohenzollern. No: in ten, twenty, even thirty years a kaiser will arise from among the German people to lead us to our final victory. But I’ll tell you something: I think that he won’t be a German from the fat, complacent beer-swilling heart of Germany, but someone from the borderlands like myself, where we know what it really means to be a German.”
I returned to my tent that evening feeling rather depressed. Was the entire world going mad? Terror bombing and women’s nipple-colour and Volkskaisers—it was as if everyone had mild shell-shock now. As I reached the door of my tent I met Leutnant Szuborits, who had just been brought back by staff car. He had a bandaged hand, but otherwise seemed very pleased with himself. I congratulated him on his escape and asked how Zwierzkowski was doing. He smiled that fat, rather self-satisfied little smile of his.
“Oh, he’s fine. They took him to a civilian hospital in Trieste. I went in the ambulance with him to see him in. Here . . .” he rummaged in a paper bag, “here, I had a couple of hours to spare afterwards before they could get a car to bring me back here. I went into a music shop and found this. It was the last one in stock.”
The record gleamed black in the twilight. I looked at the label with sinking heart. It was Mizzi Gunther and Hubert Marischka singing the duet “Sport und immer Sport” from the operetta Endlich Allein by Franz Lehar.