The Two-Headed Eagle

So the early part of August passed peacefully enough for us at Capro- vizza, as the guns thundered in the west and the wind sometimes brought us the faint smell of TNT fumes, mingled (as the hot days wore by) with a hint of something even less pleasant. We often saw Italian aircraft over­head, but were prevented by our orders from doing anything about it; that is, until one day when Meyerhofer had gone up with Stabsfeldwebel Zwierzkowski to test-fly a Brandenburger just back from repair. They were away for an hour or so, and when they returned they were pre­ceded by a large, clumsy-looking pusher-engined biplane. It was an Italian Farman SP2 artillery spotter which they had sighted over Doberdo and engaged.

The SP2 was an awful aeroplane by all accounts: a pre-war French design—outdated even in 1914—which the Italians had licence-built in huge numbers as part of an emergency programme to create an air force out of nothing. It was a mistake which I believe Lord Beaverbrook was to make a generation later: tooling up the aircraft factories to turn out vast numbers of obsolete machines. The Italians were now trying to use up stocks. But in so doing they were also using up the lives of their airmen at a fine old rate, because the SP2 was simply a death trap: too slow to run away, unable to climb out of trouble, too clumsy to dodge and with so restricted a field of fire for the observer’s machine gun in the front cockpit that the thing was effectively a flying blind spot. Meyerhofer and Zwierzkowski had made a first pass at it with the forward machine gun and shot it about a little, had allowed the Italian observer to fire back at them as much as honour required, and had then stood off to observe events. Seeing that their line of retreat across their own lines was cut off and that they were done for if they resisted further, the observer had finally stood up in his cockpit and held up his hands in surrender; very sensibly too, we all agreed. The Italians were escorted over to meet us and shook hands with us all: Tenente Balboni and Caporale-Pilota Scaranza. Their feelings were as mixed as one might have expected: downcast at their capture and the prospect of a long spell behind the wire, but glad to have come out of it alive—which was not the usual fate of Farman aircrew. We commiserated with them as we looked over their bullet-peppered machine, and all said (I was interpreting for the rest, being fluent in Italian) that it was a shame that men should be sent up to die in such miserable contraptions.

“You know what ‘SP2’ stands for, Tenente?” the observer said to me. “ ‘Seppultoro per due’—‘the Sepulchre for Two.’ ”

“No, no,” added his pilot, laughing, “it means ‘Siamo perduti’—‘We are lost’!” We entertained them to di

Thus the days passed idly, sitting on that sun-scorched field trying to find what shade we could as the hot, irritating Carso wind scurried straw and dust along the ground and rattled the tent-sides. There were few diver­sions for us except reading and playing cards—and listening to Leutnant Szuborits’s gramophone in the tent next to mine.

He had a rather nice wind-up portable gramophone which his mother had bought him; but records were in short supply in Austria by 1916 (the blockade had stopped the importation of the shellac from which they were made and no substitute had been found), and anyway the Leutnant’s musical tastes were limited. So it was constant, maddening repetition of the duet “Sport und immer Sport” from a failed Lehar operetta of 1914 or thereabouts—called Endlich Allein if I remember rightly—with Hubert Marischka and Mizzi Gunther squawking away like an egg-bound hen. It was an intensely irritating piece of music: one of those maddeningly catchy marschlieder so beloved of Vie

Records in those days tended to wear out very quickly, but this one seemed to be made of tungsten carbide: just went on and on and on play­ing until I was tearing my hair out in tufts and trying not to look at my pistol in its holster hanging on the tentpole. And that is how I remember the summer of 1916 on the Isonzo Front: the sun’s glare and the nagging moan of the wind and the sound of aircraft engines; the fretful flapping of tent canvas and Mizzi Gunther warbling scratchily through “Sport und immer Sport,” accompanied by the ever-present rumbling orchestra of high explosive to westwards.

Apart from the affair of the captured SP2, the only diversion of those early days of August was the arrival of a new Chefpilot to replace poor Rieger. He arrived by staff car one morning just after breakfast. I was the only one around to meet him, and as he stepped down with his bags I thought that he was surely one of the pleasantest-looking men I had ever seen: in his early twenties, of medium height, gracefully formed, with fine light brown hair and gentle, rather melancholy blue eyes such as a poet or composer might possess. He gazed at me sideways, smiled politely in greeting and saluted. Then he turned his head slightly—and I saw that most of the left side of his face had gone, cheekbone and temple replaced by a tortured confusion of lumps and puckered scar tissue surrounding an eyeball which looked to be in danger of tumbling out on to his cheek. Despite myself I winced slightly and tried not to look. My wife Elisabeth had worked for the past two years in a specialist facial-injuries unit at the Vie

I got to talk with Potocznik that evening and over the next few days, and I must say that I found him at first to be one of the more engaging people I had so far encountered: tactful, humorous, modest and endowed with great precision and sensitivity of expression. He was also quite re­markably intelligent. Little by little I learnt his story. He had been born in 1894 in the small town of Pravnitz on the southern edge of Carinthia, where his father was chemistry master of the local grammar school. And of course, the gymnasium at Pravnitz in the 1900s had become a cause celebre throughout the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy because of a bitter dispute over the language of instruction in the school, now that the local Slovene population were demanding equality with German-speakers. This wretched dispute had dragged on for years, with the school closed down for long periods because of riots and boycotts and blockades, punctuated by outbreaks of pandemonium in the Vie