The Two-Headed Eagle

It was the same on that dreary limestone plateau east of the Isonzo in the summer of 1916: places that no one had ever heard of—San Martino and Doberdo and Monte Hermada—suddenly turned into field fortresses around which titanic battles raged: lives squandered by the hundred thou­sand for places which were just names on a local map—and sometimes not even that, so that the hills for which entire divisions perished had to be denoted by their map-height above sea level. So it was at Verdun that summer. I saw some photographs, in a colour supplement a few months ago: the Meuse battlefields seventy years after. It appears that even to­day large areas are still derelict, that the incessant shelling and gassing so blasted away the topsoil and poisoned the earth that the landscape is still a semi-desert of exposed rock and old craters, covered (where anything grows at all) by a thin scrub.

The chief difference, I suppose, between Verdun now and the Carso then is that, so far as I could make out, the Carso had always looked like that: a landscape reminiscent of Breughel’s “Triumph of Death” even before the armies got to work on it. Indeed I think that the whole of Europe could scarcely have contained a piece of ground intrinsically less worth fighting over than the Carso—or the “Krst” as its few mostly Slovene inhabitants called it, as if the place was too poor even to afford vowels. It was an undulating, worn-down plateau of low limestone hills devoid of trees, grass or any vegetation whatever except for a few meagre patches of willow and gorse which had managed to get roots down into the fissures in the rock. What little soil there was had collected by some freak of nature into puddle-like hollows in the rock, called “dolinas,” and was bright red in colour, like pools of fresh blood. What little rain water there was had a way of disappearing as if bewitched into pot-holes in the rock, to reappear perversely a dozen kilometres away where an underground stream came out into the open. Baked by the sun all sum­mer and swept by freezing winds all winter, the Carso was scourged in between times by the notorious bora, the sudden, violent north wind of the Adriatic coastline which would work itself up in these parts to near­hurricane force in the space of a few minutes, and had been known to blow over trains of goods wagons on the more exposed stretches of the Vie

At the best of times the Carso was a place such as even an early- Christian hermit might have thought twice about inhabiting. But as a battlefield it was a hell all of its own: a howling grey-brown desolation of broken rock spattered with dried blood and the dirty yellowish residue of TNT. The peculiar horror of the Carso fighting—the local specialty that distinguished it from the other great abattoirs of those years—was the enormous number of the wounded who lost their eyesight; small wonder, when every shellburst would send knife-sharp splinters of rock whining in all directions. Before long every last stone, every pulverised village of this wilderness would be stained with agony: places like the ruined mar­ket square in Sagrado, where a thousand or so Italians had staggered back from the trenches to die, remains of a brigade which had just been gassed with phosgene; or the little valley leading up on to the plateau from the hamlet of Selz, known as “the Cemetery of the Hungarians” after an en­tire Honved battalion had blundered into it in the smoke and confusion of a counter-attack and had been wiped out to a man by the Italian machine guns.

Before the war, if it had been mine to sell, I would cheerfully have sold you the entire Carso Plateau for a gulden. Yet now whole armies would im­molate themselves for it as if it contained all the riches of the world. Before the war the eroded hills of Fajtji Hrib and Cosich and Debeli Vrh had been unvisited, known only to a few Slovene shepherds. Now their barren slopes and gullies would become the graveyards of a generation. When your great dramatist wrote of a little patch of ground that is not tomb or continent enough to bury the slain, I think that he must have had the Carso in mind. That summer of 1916, they lay everywhere, visible through any trench periscope: the sad, sunken bundles of rags tumbled among the rocks or sprawled across the thickets of barbed wire where they had fallen, their only passing-bells the frenzied jangling of the tin cans which our men used to hang from the wire as alarm signals. Even a thousand metres above the battlefields that August one could detect the sinister, sweetish taint of decay. By some black joke on the part of biochemistry, it had (for my nose at any rate) a faint hint of overripe strawberries to it. Many years later my second wife Edith bought a lipstick perfumed with just such a synthetic strawberry scent. It brought back so many disturbing memories that I had to ask her to stop using it.

Yes, I speak as though I saw it all. But then I did, as near as makes no difference. The Carso sector was tiny—perhaps ten kilometres in total— so we airmen could see pretty well the whole of it as we flew above that terrible greyish-dun landscape: the shallow valleys below us boiling with smoke suffused with orange flame; then coming down sometimes when the murk parted to see the lines of tiny human specks scurrying forward among the shellbursts: the evil greenish-yellow clouds of poison gas and the sudden white puffs of grenades and the boiling black-fiery squirts of flame-throwers; men rushing forward to kill and maim one another with grenades and entrenching tools so as to gain or regain another few square metres of this ghastly desolation. The memory haunts me to this day: the sheer crushing lunacy of it all. Why did we do it? Why did we allow them to do it to us? I was there and you were not, so I wonder if you could tell me why. Because I was there to see it, yet sometimes I think that I perhaps understand it less than you who were not.

The battle raged to westward of us throughout that second week of August. The Italians had captured Gorz, and they were now attacking the hills of Monte San Michele on the north edge and Debeli Vrh on the southern edge of the Carso escarpment, trying to fight their way on to the plateau above. Our men in the front line were suffering atrociously in their rock-bound trenches, shelled day and night so that it was impossible either to bring up food and water or to evacuate the wounded. Rationed sometimes to a cup of water a day in the summer heat and dust, plagued by great corpse-fattened blowflies, they hung on as best they could, counter­attacked when ordered to do so and died in their anonymous thousands for their distant Emperor and King. Yet while this whole dismal tragedy was being played out a few kilometres away, Flik 19F sat idly on the field at Caprovizza and chewed the ends of its collective moustache with bore­dom and frustration. We were on standby—which is why Toth and I were not much affected in practice by our sentence of arrest—but otherwise little happened. We were short of aircraft of course: one Brandenburger had arrived back from repair, but the Lloyd which we had flown on the Monte Nero artillery-spotting operation was out of action. Toth had let the revs build up during our dive to a degree where the cylinder liners had been irretrievably damaged, so the machine was now standing in a hangar waiting for a replacement engine. This left us with three effective aircraft—two Brandenburgers and a Lloyd. Yet we felt that there was still work that we could do to support our hard-pressed comrades in the trenches. Flik 19 at Haidenschaft had been heavily engaged from the first day. Its aircraft would often return, badly shot-up, to deposit yet another blanket-shrouded bundle on the handbarrow, and add one more to the rapidly extending line of propeller-crosses in the cemetery.

It galled us all beyond measure, sitting there waiting for the telephone to ring. We were under the command of 5th Army HQ, not the local division, and it seemed as if Marburg had entirely forgotten our exis­tence. At last, on the Saturday after Gorz fell, it all became too much: the entire officer strength of the unit—except for myself, who was confined to base—elbowed the protesting Kraliczek aside and marched down the road to Haidenschaft to offer their services to Flik 19. Heyrowsky was not able to see them—he was in the air over Gradisca that afternoon, where he shot down a Nieuport with his hunting rifle—but when he got back he sent a curt reply to the effect that Flik 19 was a front-line fighting unit and would only use the services of (as he put it) “fashion photographers and killers of civilians” when its last able-bodied flier was dead. When they got back Kraliczek had thrown a fit and threatened to have everyone court- martialled for mutiny. In the end Oberleutnant Meyerhofer, standing in temporarily as Chefpilot, had called everyone together in the mess tent and composed a round robin (as I believe you call it) to General-Oberst Boroevic. It protested our undying loyalty to the Noble House of Austria and offered our lives as pledges of our devotion, if not in the air then (if need be) in the front-line trenches, where we would fight to our last breath come shot, shell, bayonet, flamethrower or poison gas. We all signed, even the wretched Kraliczek, whom we dragged out of his office and whose re­action, when shown the document, had been that of someone in the early stages of rabies confronted with a glass of water. His hand shook visibly as he signed, with the rest of us standing around him wearing our swords and black-and-yellow belts to offer moral support. The General’s reply next day thanked us for our loyalty to our Emperor and King, but said that trained airmen were in short supply and must not have their lives squandered without thought for the future. Boroevic concluded by promising us all the fighting we wanted, and more besides, in the weeks to come.