The Two-Headed Eagle

“Oh,” she said, “in Latin. I studied it to the sixth grade and I speak Italian anyway, so it’s no problem for me. As for Zolli, Herr Leutnant, he’s such a clever man you’d never believe: ever so well-read and so kind and considerate as well. I don’t think there’s anyone in the whole world like him. He trained in a seminary before the war, you know, and wanted to be a priest. But he’s given that up now. When the war’s over we’re going to get married and take over my father’s business with my brother, when he comes back from Russia; and we’re making plans to set up an air mail- delivery service—Zolli says that there’ll be lots of aeroplanes being sold off cheap once it’s all over. He’s full of good ideas like that and he knows so many things. Really, Herr Leutnant, you don’t know how lucky you are to have such a clever man flying you around.” She grasped my arm and gazed at me with her great, long-lashed blue eyes, so that despite myself my knees suddenly felt unsteady. “Please, Herr Leutnant,please promise me that you’ll look after him and see that he comes to no harm. Don’t let him do anything dangerous.” I mumbled something to the effect that I would do my best to fulfil her wishes, and kissed her hand as we parted. I was not sure about this afterwards: Old Austria had very definite ideas concerning what courtesies could be paid by whom to whom, and an of­ficer kissing the hand of a Slovene village girl was something that was certainly well outside the accepted codes of conduct. Yet this Magdalena seemed so unlike any village maiden that I had ever met: so modest and unaffected, yet so poised and graceful and ladylike. But courting in Latin though: “O cara amatrix mea, convenire cum mihi hora septis ante tab- ernam . . .” No, no, it was all too much.

At last, on 2 August, Toth and I received orders to make ready for a fly­ing mission the next morning. In the temporary absence of our usual mount we were to take up one of the Flik’s Lloyd CII biplanes. Our task, it appeared, was to be artillery-spotting with the aid of wireless. But this was to be no ordinary observation for a common-or-garden field-artillery battery. Instead we would be spotting for a single gun in an extremely dif­ficult operation far away from our usual sector of the Front: an operation so delicate and vital that 5th Army Headquarters was anxious that the observer should be an experienced gu

It was plain at first sight that the Lloyd CII was an aeroplane of a somewhat earlier vintage than the sturdy Hansa-Brandenburg: a pre-war design in fact, marked by long, narrow, swept-back wings and by a much sharper nose and more fish-like fuselage than that of the Brandenburger. I understand that it got its curious name because the factory which built it in Budapest had been part-owned by the Austro-Lloyd shipping line. Certainly it had taken many twists and random convolutions of events over the years to get the name of a seventeenth-century London-Welsh coffee-house proprietor attached to an Austro-Hungarian warplane. For me, one lasting consequence was that I was never able to see the sign “Lloyd’s Bank” in Ealing Broadway without having a sudden faint odour of petrol and cellulose dope wafted to me from all those years ago.

The Lloyd CII had been chosen for this particular mission because al­though it was somewhat slower than the Brandenburger in level flight, and a good deal less manoeuvrable, its payload was larger and its performance at high altitudes marginally better (one of them had in fact taken the world altitude record in the summer of 1914). This ability to carry loads to great heights was going to be very necessary, I learnt as a staff officer briefed me for the flight, because we were to be flying over the Julian Alps—over Monte Nero, to be precise: 2,245 metres above sea level, which was not far short of the effective ceiling for a two-seater aeroplane in those days, especially when it would also be carrying the full weight of an airborne wireless transmitter.

So far in 1916 there had been little fighting in the mountainous sec­tors of the Isonzo Front north of Tolmein. There had been some sharp encounters here in late 1915, as their initial ardour carried the Italians across the Isonzo to capture some of the mountain ridges beyond. But, as in the Alps proper, the lie of the land—that is to say, most of it stand­ing on end—had allowed us to hold it against them with only a handful of defenders. Most of the time in fact all that we had to do was to roll boulders over the edge of thousand-metre precipices on to the Italians below. The furthest that the Italians had got, after heavy losses, was to cross the river and work their way up a few mountain ridges on the other side; most notably the one called the Polovnik, which swells up from the bend of the river at Zersoccia to become Monte Nero. And there the two armies had left matters for the past year, outposts often within earshot of one another, but separated by dense belts of barbed wire on picket stakes cemented into the rock-faces. Both sides made life as unpleasant as pos­sible for the other by sniping and trench-mortaring and patrol skirmishes, but no large-scale action was considered by the generals to be either pos­sible or necessary.

In this stalemate, artillery work tended to turn into virtual duels of battery against battery: exchanges lasting for months in which ingenu­ity and ant-like persistence counted for as much as any practical effect. Whole weeks were sometimes spent in hoisting field guns piece by piece up sheer rock-faces so that they could lob a few shells into the next val­ley before being hastily lowered back again. In places tu

For two weeks past, the Italian battery had been making life extremely difficult for the trains of mules and the human porters who carried sup­plies and ammunition up the trackways to our front line. The Italian out­posts, though lower down the ridge than ours, gave an excellent field of view over the country to the east of Monte Nero and were doubtless con­nected by telephone to the battery to give fire direction. At any rate, even after the convoys had taken to moving up to the line only by night, the shells would still come howling over, screaming down to excavate craters the size of a house and—more often than not—blow some panic-stricken team of animals and their drivers to oblivion. Before long the trees along­side the mountain trackways to the east of Monte Nero were festooned with blackening rags of mule-flesh and tatters of grey uniform cloth, often with an arm hanging out of a torn-off sleeve or a head wedged in a crook of the boughs. Carrying-parties were already getting extremely nervous of making the journey, even at night, and were turning back at the first sound of a shell coming over. If this went on (the staff officer told me) the k.u.k. Armee might no longer be able to hold the summit of the mountain. Something had to be done. Attempts at bombing from the air had proved futile, so stronger measures would now be taken.