The Two-Headed Eagle

Our second shot fell even further short than the first, dropping right into the bed of the torrent that ran down the mountain valley. I suppose that there must still be a miniature lake there, interrupting the course of the stream and providing puzzlement for the area’s natural historians. I like to think that, now the trees have grown back around it, the village children from Caporetto go up there to fish and to swim on summer after­noons, unaware of the events that took place in that quiet valley when their great-grandfathers were young. I signalled back “K300” as we banked away once more to await the Italian reply. Neither contender could move of course: the Italian howitzers, though (we understood) mounted on wheels, would have taken several hours to dig out of their emplacements and haul away. As for our Skoda weapon, it was concreted into its em­placement and could only be released with the aid of blasting charges and pneumatic drills. Neither contender could do anything more than await the enemy’s riposte. It was like watching some bizarre medieval duel to the death, prescribed perhaps in a fable to establish which suitor would have the hand of the princess; the two opponents with their feet set in tubs of mortar and taking turns to lunge at one another through a paper screen, their thrusts guided only by the calls of the spectators in the gallery.

The Italians fired a second salvo after three minutes or so, just as we were coming back over them. It was more closely grouped this time, and it landed only four hundred metres or so from our gun. Meanwhile our third shot went wide again: two hundred metres over and one hundred too far right. Damn them, what was wrong with our gu

Watched from my position, four hundred metres up in the singing cold air, there was something dreadfully, sickeningly fascinating about observing this duel of monsters taking place below us: watching the great flashes that shook the trees and the sudden plumes of smoke, feeling the aeroplane shudder around us as the shock waves reached it. Sitting there like some indifferent god, tapping the Morse key and pencilling crosses on the map, it was only too easy to forget that in a few minutes one battery or the other would be reduced to a smoking pile of twisted steel, smeared with the blood and entrails of perhaps fifty of my fellow-men. What would happen if the wireless broke down, or if the Italian flak gu

In the end it was them and not us. The Skoda gun’s fifth shell landed just on the edge of the hundred-metre circle within which I judged a shell- burst would put the battery out of action. After that, things happened with bewildering rapidity. The smoke dispersed in the breeze to reveal a patch of devastated forest. But then a confused series of flashes and spurts of fire began to spread through the still standing trees. I suppose that it was the usual story: that in his haste to load and fire the battery commander had allowed too many propellant charges to accumulate on the lines, so that the flash of one catching fire set off the next in a powder-train which finally led back to the ammunition dump. I hope that some of the Italians survived, crouching terrified in their slit-trenches as the world exploded about them. But somehow I doubt it: not when I saw the entire ponderous carriage of one of the howitzers being tossed into the air as casually as a child’s toy. Within a few seconds a vast ochre-coloured cloud of smoke was boiling into the summer sky like some obscene toadstool. By the time we were safely back over our side of Monte Nero it must have been visible to the Austrian gu

Our orders were that once firing had ceased we were to make for the flying field of Flik 2 at Veldes. Our route would take us over the long, narrow Wocheiner Lake which lay in a deep trough of the mountains be­low the Triglav massif, about ten kilometres to the east. I shut down the transmitter and scribbled another note in Latin to direct Toth to Veldes, where we would land and rest awhile before refuelling and heading back to Caprovizza—once more over the Italian side of the lines, if we took any notice of Kraliczek’s mysterious orders. The only thing that puzzled me was where that damned Eindecker of ours had got to. It should have been waiting over Monte Nero for us when we arrived, but I had seen no sign of it. Engine trouble? Muddied instructions from the Air Liaison Officer at Marburg? Probably the latter, I thought: none of us had much of an opinion of staff officers. Anyway, it scarcely mattered now that we were on our way home.

I first saw the speck in the sky to the north-east as we came within sight of the Wocheinersee. Must be the Eindecker, I thought, and peered at it more out of curiosity than anything else. It was a rather disturbing sensation to find as I tried to steady my binoculars on the cockpit edge that instead of the expected monoplane front-view of an Eindecker, I was looking at what was quite unmistakably a small, rotary-engined biplane with its lower wings markedly shorter than the upper and with a machine gun mounted on the top wing.

I dropped the binoculars and scrawled a note for Toth: “Festina— hostis insequitur nobis!” He turned around and nodded, but did noth­ing. I thumped him on the back and wrote “Accelera, inepte!” so fiercely that the point of my pencil snapped off. The Nieuport was gaining on us fast as we ambled along, seemingly unconcerned. What was the matter with this Hungarian imbecile? Did he want us to die? Before long the Italian was only about twenty metres astern, jockeying on our tail some way above us now that he had seen that we carried no machine gun. No doubt he was congratulating himself on having surprised two such dim- witted Austrians, and was not in too much of a hurry to despatch us, much as a cat will play for a while with a sparrow before biting its head off. I turned to shake my pilot and urge him to give full throttle—and saw the Italian pilot laugh as he watched his victims now apparently fighting one another. I drew my Steyr pistol from its holster, intent on making even a futile attempt to defend ourselves. As for Toth though, he merely looked over his shoulder at the Italian single-seater. His face wore the malicious half-smile of an idiot child. Then he put our nose down a little and opened the throttle. The Italian brought his nose down too to take aim, evidently thinking that we were going to try diving away from him. He had come so close that I could see his tongue clenched in concentration between his white teeth. He would lower his nose until we were in his sights—an unmissable target at less than fifteen metres—and a sudden flickering orange flash would obscure the gun muzzle above his upper wing. That would probably be my last sight in this world. Yet despite the imminence of death, I found that sight of the Nieuport intensely interesting, as I suppose the closeness of danger sharpens all the senses. It was such a pretty little machine I thought, so delicately French: painted a smart silver-grey with black edges to the wings and with the Italian red-white-green tricolour on the rudder. So pleasing to look at, yet so deadly, like a poisonous snake.