The Two-Headed Eagle

Even as the Italians shelled the other side of the mountain, those stronger measures were being made ready by shifts working around the clock in the Skoda Armaments Works at Pilsen. In 1913 Skoda had already built a giant gun: the 30.5cm howitzer called (with the nauseating coyness that seems obligatory in these cases) “Schlanke Emma,” or “Slim Emma.” A battery of those monsters had been loaned to the German Army in August 1914 to deal with the forts at Liege, which were holding up the German advance through Belgium. They had proved gruesomely efficient in that task, and a larger 38cm version had been built in 1915. Now, in July 1916, a 42cm howitzer, the very non plus ultra of Austrian artillery, was nearing completion and looking for a suitable proving-ground. And what field trial could be more conclusive than here in the Julian Alps, dealing with the Italian howitzer battery so frustratingly beyond reach in its valley on the other side of the mountain?

The great steel monster was made ready and loaded on to a special strengthened railway wagon for transport to Feistritz, the nearest point on the railway to Monte Nero. Then, unloaded after dark in strictest secrecy, the tarpaulin-shrouded colossus had begun its slow journey up into the mountains, broken down into three loads—barrel, carriage and mounting—each drawn by its own motor tractor and riding on wheels surrounded by pivoting steel feet. The villages on the way had been evacu­ated for secrecy, and when the procession finally reached a point where the specially made trackway was too steep for the tractors alone, teams of horses and motor winches had been brought up to assist. The last kilome­tre of the journey had taken two entire days, with thousands of soldiers and Russian POWs sweating at drag-ropes and cursing as their boots slipped in the mud, to drag the thing to its final firing position in a shal­low valley just below the treeline on the east side of the mountain. There it had been assembled, and concreted into its emplacement: another two days of labour. A small railway was laid to bring up its shells, each of which weighed just over a to

But it was still a blind monster as it squatted there among the pine forest, surrounded by camouflage netting. Our part in this exercise, Toth and I, would be to provide it with eyes. Visibility permitting, firing would commence at 0830 on the morning of 2 August, as soon as the sun had risen sufficiently for any mist to clear and the western face of the mountain to come out of the shadow. We were to circle above the Italian battery at about three thousand metres and use the wireless to provide spotting for the gu

It became clear as we made our preparations at Caprovizza that af­ternoon that it was not going to be anywhere near as simple as it had sounded. The first problem was the sheer weight of the wireless appara­tus. The guts of the system was a marvellously archaic contraption called a spark-generator. This worked by creating an arc through the teeth of a brass cog-wheel spi

That part of the wireless alone weighed about thirty kilograms. But there were all the other accoutrements that went with it. Power was pro­vided by a dynamo fixed on to a bracket under the aeroplane’s nose and driven by a leather belt from a pulley-wheel on the propeller shaft: that weighed about seven kilograms. Then there was the aerial: twenty metres of wire with a lead weight at one end to trail behind us in flight, plus a cable reel to wind it in when not in use: about ten kilograms’ worth in all. Other accessories comprised a signal amplifier, a tuning coil, an emer­gency battery, an ammeter, a set of signal rockets plus pistol and a repair kit. Altogether the wireless apparatus—which could only transmit, mind you, not receive—weighed about 110 kilograms. Or to put it another way, the weight of a very fat man as a third crew member.

With all that in mind you will perhaps understand my trepidation as I examined a relief-map of the Julian Alps. Laden down like that I was very doubtful that the Lloyd would be able to reach its advertised ceiling of 4,500 metres. In fact three thousand seemed to be expecting a great deal, and that was uncomfortably close to the height of some of the loftier peaks. In that aerial war over the Alps many a machine came to grief by ru

Another worrying consequence of the weight of our wireless set was that we would be flying unarmed: there was simply not enough lift to carry a machine gun, nor enough space left in the cockpit to work it if we had. Toth and I would have only our pistols to defend ourselves. However, some cover would be provided against the possibility of the Italians send­ing a Nieuport up after us. One of the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe’s impressive total of three fighter aircraft—a German-supplied Fokker Eindecker— would be detached from Flik 4 at Wippach and sent to the field at Veldes, from where it would fly to escort us over Monte Nero. I must say that I was none too happy about this arrangement: the previous week I had been talking with our senior ranker-pilot, Stabsfeldwebel Zwierzkowski. He had recently been able to test-fly a newly delivered Eindecker against an Italian Nieuport which had run out of petrol over our lines some weeks before and landed at Prosecco. No comparison, he had reported: the German aeroplane’s only good point was its machine gun firing through the pro­peller arc. Otherwise he had found it to be slow and unresponsive, with a poor rate of climb, restricted downward vision because of the wings and a disturbingly flimsy feel about it. But the Nieuport though, that was a real lady, “eine echte Dame”: climbed like an electric lift and as agile as a cat. The only thing he had not much liked was the machine gun mounted above the top wing—difficult to reload in flight and the magazine held only fifty or so rounds. But in view of the Nieuport’s other virtues, he said, he doubted whether as many as fifty rounds would be required for it to do its work.

6 DUEL OVER THE MOUNTAIN

I think that i have seldom been struck so forcibly as on that August morning by the sheer fortuity of human existence; by the contrast between the serene majesty of the natural creation and the puny bellicosity of men. As we flew northwards along the valley of the Isonzo the pin-point flashes of the early-morning fire-fight crackled over the mountain slopes below. Then the sun came up at last over the looming mass of the Julian Alps ahead of us, turning the patchy summer snow on the triple summit of Triglav to a blaze of pink and orange. It seemed so absurd, so blasphemous almost, to be fighting for possession of these indifferent mountains, as if two rival strains of microbe should be disputing ownership of a granite boulder. Perhaps the intrinsic crazi­ness of war was less obvious on the plains of Galicia, where a marching soldier was usually higher than anything within sight.