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The outcome of all this had been a series of notable thrashings for the k.u.k. Armee at the hands of the Russians and the Serbs—followed by a discreet purge among the staff officers who were held to have been responsible for this appalling mess. Heads had to roll if the prestige of the Dynasty was not to suffer, and poor Kraliczek—whether justly or not, I ca
Thus the immediate danger of bayonet fighting with wild Siberians had been averted. But in the end poor Kraliczek had found himself faced with the prospect—perhaps even more frightful to someone with his retiring nature—of being required to soar thousands of metres above the earth in a fragile, unreliable contraption of wood and linen driven by some reckless castaway suffering quite probably from the long-term effects of serious head injuries. Urgent requests to transfer out of the Fliegertruppe had been turned down, so in the end the only way out for him was to seek command of an air unit and use his seniority to make sure that his immaculate footwear stayed firmly planted on terra firma. His method for accomplishing this would become clear to me over the next few weeks.
In brief, it consisted of avoiding flying duties—so far as I know he never once took to the air—by filling his entire waking life with administration. God alone knows there was enough paperwork in the old k.u.k. Armee: endless forms to be filled in, returns to be made, authorisations to be sought, derogations to be obtained in regard to an intricate mesh of often contradictory regulations that governed every aspect of service life, down to the precise daily ration scales for the cats employed to catch mice in military supply depots. Yet Kraliczek had somehow contrived to add to even this mountain of paper, inventing reports and statistical compilations of his own, even going so far as to design and print at his own expense official forms as yet undreamt of by the War Ministry. Thus ensconced, spider-like, at the centre of a dense administrative web which only he fully understood, he clearly hoped to be able to sit out the entire war in his office, sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, eating at his desk and taking his few hours’ nightly rest on a camp-bed in the orderly room, retiring long after the nightingales had gone to roost in the willow thickets by the river. How could he do otherwise, he would argue, when the Fliegertruppe could not even supply an adjutant to help him? What he failed to mention here was that each of the three adjutants who had arrived at Caprovizza since May had left after a week or so with nervous prostration. Questions would be asked one day. But the Imperial and Royal military bureaucracy moved slowly even in wartime, and with any luck it would all be over before he was smoked out of his burrow. Then he would be able to return to what he called “proper soldiering”; that is to say, sitting once more behind a desk in Vie
My first official engagement as a member of Fliegerkompagnie 19F took place the next morning in the cemetery at Haidenschaft. It was a ceremony that I was to attend on many occasions over the next few months—though somehow I always managed to avoid appearing in the leading role. Rieger’s coffin was lowered into the grave while we stood by with bared heads. The priest finished his prayers, the guard of honour fired off its three salvoes into the summer sky, and we then filed past to toss our handful of earth on to the lid of the coffin, the smell of incense still not quite managing to mask the faint odour of roasted meat. The k.u.k. Fliegertruppe had been here not quite three months, yet already a row of twenty or so wooden crosses stood beneath the black cypress trees against the cemetery wall: crucifixes in which the cross-beam was made from a cut-down aeroplane propeller painted white and inscribed with the name and rank of the deceased. The non-German names looked faintly odd in black Gothic lettering: Strastil and Fontanelli and Kovess and Jasinski. We used to call it the “Fliegerkreuz,” I remember. It was a frequently awarded decoration, and one which—unusually for the Imperial and Royal armed forces—was distributed to officers and other ranks without distinction.
3 FLYING COMPANY
For me, as someone whose mother tongue was not German, one of the most curious things about the old Austrian variant of that language was the way in which its extraordinary regard for titles, and its endless inventiveness in creating jaw-breaking composite nouns—monstrosities like “Herr Obersektionsfuhrerstellvertreter” or “Frau Dampfkesselreinigungunternehmersgattin”—was balanced by an equal facility for cutting down these same sonorous titles to hideous little truncated stumps like “Krip” and “Grob” and “Frop”: names which to my ear always sounded like someone being seasick. It was as if a man should wear himself out and spend his entire substance equipping an ordinary house with marble staircases and balustrades worthy of a palace, then spend his time entering and leaving the house and getting from floor to floor within it by a system of makeshift scaffolding and rope ladders hanging from the windows.
The Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Flying Service in the year 1916 was particularly rich in these uncouth acronyms. The basic unit, the Fliegerkompagnie, was cut down in common parlance to “Flik”; while the workshop that undertook care and maintenance for each group of Fliks, the Fliegeretappenpark, was reduced to “Flep”; and the units which supplied men to the squadrons, the Fliegerersatzkompagnien, were “Fleks.” The rear-area supply unit, the Fliegermaterialdepot, was the “Flemp”; while the flying-schools for officers and for other ranks came out as “Flosch” and “Feflisch” respectively. There were also entities called the “Febsch” and the “Flobsch”—though God help me now three-quarters of a century later if I can remember what on earth they signified.
In the summer of 1916 each of the thirty or so Fliks of His Imperial, Royal and Apostolic Majesty’s Flying Service consisted (on paper at least) of eight aircraft—six operational and two in reserve—and a total of about 180 men: a commanding officer, a Chefpilot, a technical officer, an adjutant, eight or nine pilots and a similar number of officer-observers and, beyond them, about 150 ground crew. The trouble here though was that since in the years before 1914 the k.u.k. Armee had always been too strapped for cash to call up more than about half of its a
Nor were we any better off as regards aircraft that summer on the Isonzo Front. Always conservative in outlook as well as financially hard- up, the Imperial and Royal Army had paid very little attention to aeroplanes in the years before the war. Indeed, that the Dual Monarchy had an air force at all worthy of the name was almost entirely the work of one tireless officer, a Croat major-general of Sappers by the name of Emil Uzelac—“Unser Uz,” as we used to call him. Uzelac—whom I met on several occasions—looked the very archetype of all the numerous gallant Croatian dimwits who had formed such a high proportion of the Habsburg corps of regimental officers over the previous three centuries: a square-skulled, wooden-countenanced man in his early fifties with a sweeping moustache and an air of permanent indigestion. But in reality old Uzelac had a remarkably lively and flexible mind. In the mid-1900s he had taken up sailing—and then taught himself marine navigation to be able to take a merchant master’s ticket, which he did at the first attempt. The flying bug had bitten him about 1910, and although he was already well into his forties he set about learning to fly; then, once he had obtained his pilot’s licence, got to work remorselessly hounding the sceptical War Ministry to allocate money for building up a military air service. In this though he was only partially successful, for whenever he did manage to wring a few miserable kronen out of the Arar for the purchase of an aeroplane he almost always had to go to France or Germany to buy it.