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As for myself, I wandered back towards the mess tent in a state of some depression. In my sixteen years as a career officer of the Noble House of Austria it had been my lot to serve under some notable blockheads. But in all that time I had never met one, however tyra
“It’s Schraffl and Jahudka. We’ve just had a telephone call from Vertoiba. They’ve crash-landed in a field near by.”
“Are they all right? ”
“Jahudka’s dead. Schraffl’s unhurt it seems but in a bad state of nervous shock. They’re bringing him along by motor car. They should be here any minute.”
“What happened? ”
“So far as I can make out from talking to Schraffl they lost contact with you in the clouds east of Palmanova, then saw an aeroplane falling out of the sky a few minutes later. They thought that it must be you and Toth, so they gave full throttle to get back across the lines. I gather that they crossed near Gradisca at about four thousand metres to avoid the flak—and had a Nieuport single-seater drop on them out of the sun. The first burst knocked the engine out and put a bullet through Jahudka’s neck. They fell about a thousand metres with petrol pouring all over them from the fuel tank before Schraffl managed to drag Jahudka out of the pilot’s seat and pull them level again. The poor devil was already near-dead—severed artery by the sound of it—so all Schraffl could do was to glide them down into a field on our side of the lines. It was a miracle they weren’t set alight. With the propeller windmilling the magneto must have been sparking all the way down, a good ten minutes or so. The people at Vertoiba say that when they reached the wreck they found Schraffl still in the pilot’s seat, sitting up to his ankles in a pool of petrol and staring into space. A pretty impressive piece of flying though by the sound of it, bringing down a dead machine with a dying man on board and the cockpit awash with petrol. Rather him than me though, all the same. The poor sod’s had a rough enough war of it already by all accounts. He got blown up by a shell at Sanok, even before he stopped that bullet in the knee, and they say he’s never been quite the same since.” We turned. It was the sound of a motor-car horn. A large dun-coloured staff car was lurching up the trackway from the Haidenschaft road. It drew up, and the passenger door was opened for Schraffl, dazed and grey-faced, to be set down, half carried between two medical orderlies. He was still wearing the jacket of his leather flying overalls, but I saw that his breeches and puttees were saturated in blood like the garments of a butcher. They led him past us to undress him and lay him out on the folding bed in our shared tent. As they left, one of the orderlies spoke with Meyerhofer.
“The Medical Officer thinks he’ll be all right after a while, Herr Leutnant. He’s given him an injection to make him sleep, and says if there’s any further trouble to telephone the hospital in Haidenschaft. It’s acute nervous prostration, but the MO says he should get over it once he’s had a spell of leave.”
Schraffl did not get over it, and he never managed to go on leave. He got up that evening and ate a little, saying nothing to any of us, then went back to bed and slept heavily until mid-morning of the next day, when our servant Petrescu came ru
“Herr Leutnant, Herr Leutnant, you will come quick please! Herr Oberleutnant Schraffl not well.” I made my way to the tent while Petrescu ran to fetch Meyerhofer. I lifted the tent flap—and was greeted by an awful farmyard stench. Schraffl was lying curled up on the camp-bed, arms crossed tightly over his head, crying to himself like a small child. He had fouled his breeches. Flies buzzed about us as Meyerhofer and I tried to get him to speak. He seemed not to see us, only stared and blubbed uncontrollably in great uncouth sobs. In the end the two of us had to lift him bodily, still curled up with his knees against his chest, and load him on to the stretcher as the motor ambulance from Haidenschaft pulled up outside. The ambulance doors closed, and we never saw him again: only learnt later that he had been diagnosed as suffering from complete mental breakdown and confined to a ward for acute shell-shock cases in the Steinhof Mental Hospital outside Vie
5 CIVIL POPULACE
The result, then, of my first airborne mission over enemy lines was credit—thirty aerial photographs successfully taken and one enemy aeroplane shot down—against debit: one of our own aeroplanes moderately damaged and another destroyed, since Schraffl’s Brandenburger had been so badly knocked about by its crash-landing at Vertoiba that in the end it had been written off by the inspectors: “total- havariert,” to use that characteristic Austrian official formulation. This brought Flik 19F’s operational aircraft park at the end of July 1916 down to three aeroplanes—not to speak of putting Meyerhofer and myself hors de combat for the next three days or so filling in crash reports and damage return forms, now that Hauptma
Not that there was much that I could have done anyway in the flying line. As Toth and I had watched our dismantled Zoska being loaded on to a flat-bed wagon at Haidenschaft railway station the Repair Officer had told us that she would be away at the Fliegeretappenpark in Marburg for a fortnight at least. A largely peasant country, the Danubian Monarchy had never been too flush with skilled craftsmen at the best of times, and the policy of recklessly drafting every man in sight in 1914 for the war that was to have been over by Christmas had not helped matters, now that a high proportion of Austria-Hungary’s potential airframe fitters and engine mechanics were either fully occupied building railways in Siberia or lying picked clean by the crows in the fields of Poland. The Monarchy’s aircraft-repair parks were desperately short of hands. Seventy- and even eighty-year-old retired cabinet-makers were being conscripted into the factories to build airframes. Two years into the war it seemed that only the bureaucracy of the rear areas was able to meet its ma
But even if the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe on the South-West Front had been up to complement in men and aircraft, our strength would still have been inadequate for the trials that loomed ahead of us that summer of 1916. For as July turned to August we stood on the brink of one of the most haunting, if most obscure, tragedies of the twentieth century: the battles of the Isonzo. I say “battles” because there were in fact no less than eleven of them between the summer of 1915 and October 1917, when the Italian lines finally collapsed at Caporetto. That last battle would take place further up the river though, along the stretch that ran through the mountains between Flitsch and Tolmein. The previous ten battles had been fought for two blood-soaked years on one of the tiniest battlefronts of the entire First World War—the mere thirty kilometres or so between Gorz and the sea—a front so minute that a man with powerful binoculars, standing on Monte Sabotino at one end of it, could clearly see men moving on the hills above Monfalcone at the other.