The Two-Headed Eagle

It was some time before I could answer, the breath having been taken out of me by the stark idiocy of this question; by its total incomprehension of the conditions of fighting in the air.

“I regret, Herr Kommandant, but it somehow slipped my mind in the tension of the moment to follow them down and perhaps snatch off the pilot’s shoulder-straps as we passed. I’m afraid that having just narrowly escaped being shot down ourselves, with another enemy aeroplane closing upon us, twenty kilometres behind enemy lines, we thought it best to put our nose down and head for home without any further delay. Perhaps we could go back and get their names and addresses?”

“Spare me your facetiousness, Prohaska: I am not amused. Nor am I amused by the fact that your wanton engagement of enemy aircraft—clean outside the scope of your orders, I might add, since they made no mention of aerial combat—has led to extensive damage to yet another of this unit’s aircraft. In fact, following Oberleutnant Rieger’s writing-off of a machine the day before yesterday . . .”

“. . . Not to speak of Oberleutnant Rieger’s writing-off of himself.” “Be silent. As I was saying, following the loss of our machine just back from repair, and following Feldpilot Toth’s recent criminal mistreatment of yet another aeroplane, the effective establishment of Fliegerkompagnie 19F is now reduced from six aircraft to four: two Hansa-Brandenburg CIs and two Lloyd CIIs. And I wish to leave you in no doubt that I regard this as highly unsatisfactory. I gather from the Technical Officer that your own aeroplane, number 26.74, is likely to be under repairs for at least a fortnight, so please comprehend if you will . . .” he tapped a graph with a little ebony pointer like that used by orchestral conductors, “. . . please comprehend exactly what it is that you have done. The graph line for Effective Against Reserve Aircraft for the month of August should have gone—so. Now it will have to go here.”

“Herr Kommandant, with respect, we may have damaged an aero­plane, but we brought it home intact. And not only that but we carried out our mission successfully and destroyed an enemy aeroplane in the process. Surely that should more than make up for some minor damage to one of the unit’s aircraft? After all, this is a war we are engaged in, not a statisti­cal exercise . . .” I stopped: this last remark had clearly brought Kraliczek to that condition which, in any normal person, would manifest itself as bellowing purple-faced apoplectic rage and flinging the inkstand at the head of his interlocutor. That is to say, he grew even paler than usual and pursed his thin lips.

“What? How dare you question the value of statistics! Perfect knowl­edge of what is going on will win this war for us. If it were not so then why do you imagine that at my own expense—my own expense mark you!—I have designed and had printed a series of return forms to supplement those used by the War Ministry? That, Herr Linienschiffsleutnant, is how deeply I care for the efficiency of this unit: why I slave here in this office into the small hours of each morning without even an adjutant to help me, collating information for Army Headquarters. Anyway . . .” he looked at me triumphantly over his spectacles, as if producing an argument to stop all further debate, “anyway, as regards your mission this morning, your Italian aeroplane shot down is of no consequence whatever. Flik 19F is a long-range reco

He turned to look at me again, smiling a curious little self-satisfied smirk. “Ah, Herr Linienschiffsleutnant, there I am afraid that I have to correct you: the victory, if it is credited to anyone, must be credited to you as commander of the aeroplane.”

“But all the shots were fired by Feldpilot Toth, from the forward ma­chine gun. I did not fire the rear weapon once.”

“Perhaps so; perhaps not. Altitude and the confusion of combat cause people to make mistakes. My reports after you landed were that you had fired the shots.”

“But this ca

Kraliczek rolled up his eyes in a look of weary patience such as one reserves for dealing with tiresome and confused elderly relatives. He sighed.

“Very well, if you insist I shall accompany you to look. But I ca

So we strode out—Kraliczek with an insufferable and quite unchar­acteristic air of jauntiness—to the Brandenburger being serviced by Feldwebel Prokesch and the rest of the ground crew. They put down their work and stood to attention as we approached.

“Feldwebel,” said Kraliczek, “show us the machine guns from this aircraft.” The two weapons had been dismounted and laid out on a trestle bench for cleaning by the armourers. “Open the breech of the forward gun.” Prokesch slid the breech block back as instructed. It revealed a firing-chamber as shiny-clean as if the gun had never been fired in its en­tire life. “Now the observer’s weapon.” The breech slid back to disclose a barrel clogged with the characteristic greyish-black grime of the cordite residue. “There.” He turned to me, smiling. “What did I tell you? Don’t worry: an understandable mistake. You had better get to bed early tonight. As for that Italian aeroplane of yours, you had better claim it in a separate report to Army Headquarters . . .”

“With respect, Herr Kommandant, I have no wish to claim it as a vic­tory since it was none of my doing.”

“Oh well, that’s all right then. If you don’t want to claim it then no one gets it and it didn’t happen: much the best thing if you ask me. Such mis­cellaneous entries make nonsense of orderly compilation. Only by ruth­less excision of such statistical irrelevances can we hope to see the greater picture and achieve that organisational perfection which will bring us vic­tory. Now, if you will excuse me, I have wasted enough time already this morning on these trifling matters. I must be getting back.”

“Herr Kommandant?”

“Yes?” He turned to look back at me.

“By your leave, I have what I think may be a useful suggestion to make.”

“And what might that be?”

“If we were to regard all the separate events of this world war as sta­tistical irrelevances, as you call them, then perhaps we would find that the war had never happened at all. In which case we could all stop killing one another and go home.”

He thought this over for some moments, then smiled at me. “Yes, yes, Herr Linienschiffsleutnant: very amusing, most droll. Now, perhaps if you will excuse me at last? Some of us have better things to do than to waste our time composing witty epigrams. Myself, as a professional soldier, I would have considered that war was too serious a business for jokes.”

I noticed that throughout this exchange Sergeant Prokesch and the ground crewmen had been busy about their work, backs turned to us, rather than standing about with ears cocked relishing every word and storing it up to be recounted in the mess that evening. I sensed that the men were embarrassed by the scene they had just witnessed. Although they had acted under orders in swapping the barrels of the two machine guns, they doubtless felt that they had been made accomplices to a shabby piece of knavery and were correspondingly ashamed of themselves. I served in the armed forces for over half my life, and one of the things that I learnt was that a sense of honour is by no means the exclusive property of the commissioned ranks.