The Two-Headed Eagle

I was sure that he was just about to fire when Toth pushed the throttle forward and put our nose down a little more (he had a motor-car mirror fixed above the windshield and had been watching the Italian intently all the time with one eye). The Italian laughed, and brought his nose down as well to regain his aim. Toth replied by making our dive a little steeper. The Italian followed: if we expected to escape him by diving away then we were even greater buffoons than we had seemed at first. His nose came down, and he fired a burst which cracked over our upper wing, snicking the fabric in places. With magisterial calm, Toth merely increased our angle of dive and eased the throttle forward to full speed. We were screaming down at forty-five degrees now as the cobalt-blue lake rushed up towards us. The Italian fired another burst, which just missed. It was certain death for us now, either from bullets or from diving into the lake. I looked about me in terror as the wind howled past. I saw that the fabric on our wings was begi

It began as a slight flexing of his lower wings, starting at the wingtips and spreading inward to the roots. He tried to pull back the stick, but it was too late: with a great shudder the upper wing of the Nieuport shook itself, then broke away to fly astern, turning over and over in the air like a giant sycamore seed. He hurtled past us out of control and breaking up as Toth lugged at the column to pull us out of our own plunge, only metres above the waters of the lake. I thought that our own airframe was going to break up under the strain, but somehow we managed to level out, then bank away to port to come back to the place where we had parted company with our pursuer. It was a flower-sprinkled Alpine meadow between two pine woods at the head of the lake. Toth brought us in to land on the lush grass while a herd of cows rushed away in panic, bells clunking wildly. We jumped out as the Lloyd came to a halt and set out to look for the wreck as soldiers camped in the next field came ru

I had never expected that such a flimsy thing as an aeroplane could embed itself so deeply in the ground. Only the shattered wings and part of the tailplane had been left on the surface. As for the pilot, there was no sign of him. We entered the cool, dark silent glade of pine trees, the carpet of needles deadening our footsteps. Toth stopped and seized my arm. “Vide,” he said, and pointed. It was a windless morning, but one of the pine trees was shuddering slightly. We looked up. Blood was dripping slowly through the branches from thirty metres above. In the end we had to borrow a two-handed saw from a pioneer battalion camped near by, and cut down the tree before we could remove him. His identity disc pro­claimed him as Sergente-Pilota Antonio Patinelli, aged twenty-three, from Ferrara. We stayed at Althammer for his funeral and saw that everything was fittingly done: guard of honour, flag over the coffin and the Italian anthem played by special permission of the local corps commander. It was the least we could do for an enemy whose tenacity had been greater than the structural strength of his machine. We felt sure that he and his com­rades would have done the same for us, had the positions been reversed.

When my nerves had calmed down sufficiently from the morning’s excitements I took Toth aside for a confessional session in a mixture of Latin and Service German. I found that he spoke Latin well, though with a marked Magyar accent and often having to grope for a while (as I did also) to find words to describe things unknown to the ancients. I was keen to question him because that morning’s reckless adventure had set my mind working about events a few days earlier over Palmanova.

“Di mihi, O Toth,” I said, “how on earth did you get us out of that spin?” I was extremely curious to know how he had done it. An English airman, Major Hawker, was reported to have pulled out of a spin in the summer of 1914, but the outbreak of the war had prevented us from asking him how he had done it. Now Toth had performed the same feat, and I suspected that it was not by sheer good luck. Toth considered for a while, then spoke.

“Res facilis est,” he said, gri

“I see,” I said, “and did you discover this yourself?” “Gehorsamstmelde jawohl, Herr Leutnant. Inveniego ipse. Zugs- fuhrer Toth Magyarus est . . .” He tapped the side of his head. “He has good brain—cerebrum bonum habet, nicht wahr?”

I considered this for a while, then called over a Hungarian sergeant who was working on our aeroplane. I was far from sure how much German Toth understood, since he spoke it so villainously, and I wanted there to be no ambiguity about what I said. I also admit that sixteen years after leaving school I had no great confidence in my own ability to com­pose impromptu Latin orations. The sergeant agreed to act as our inter­preter, so I was able to have my say in German.

“Very good, Toth. It is my considered opinion, after having flown with you twice, and after what you have just told me, that you are a dan­gerous madman and perhaps more of a threat to the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe than to the enemy. You have just hazarded our lives and one of the King of Hungary’s aircraft by wantonly engaging an enemy single-seater in direct disobedience to my orders, while a few days before, on your own admission, you tried to kill the pair of us by deliberately putting us into a spin. I could have you court-martialled on both counts if I were so minded. However, it seems to me as a qualified pilot myself that you are an exceptionally talented flier, and that the system of my telling you how to fly the aeroplane is a remarkably poor one, regardless of whether I give the orders in Latin, German, Magyar or colloquial Hottentot. Therefore I have decided that from now on, as long as we fly together, I shall leave you in effective command of the aeroplane while we are in the air. I shall give you only general instructions beforehand as to where we are to go, and I shall leave it entirely to your own best judgement how we get there. I know that I could be court-martialled for suggesting this, since I am still technically in command of the aeroplane, but I feel that the present system ca

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