The Two-Headed Eagle

“I see. So where precisely does that leave me in this crusade for the Greater German Reich? After all, I’m a Czech on my father’s side and a Pole on my mother’s, and as you can hear I still speak German with an accent.”

“Well, since you ask me I would have said that by becoming an Austrian officer you have automatically cast your vote for Germanic culture.”

“I see. And will you let me in?”

“Of course: to be a German is not only a matter of blood and soil but of culture. The Romans—who were the earliest Germans by the way: I read a book about it recently—never had anything against barbarians becoming Roman citizens, after they had given sufficient proof of their loyalty. The border peoples like the Czechs and the Poles will be offered a choice after this war: either become part of the German Reich or become German protectorates outside it—or if you don’t want either of those alternatives then clear off to join your Slav brothers beyond the Urals.” “And do you think that they’ll accept that choice willingly?”

“I don’t doubt it: look at all the Czechs in the k.u.k. Armee who’ve been voting for Russia lately by raising both hands. As for the rest, I don’t imagine that they’ll have much choice. Did the Britishers ever ask the people of India whether they wanted to be part of their empire? The mark of a truly vigorous nation is that it has a way of resolving these matters without the need for ballot boxes. The British and French only became interested in democracy once they had taken as much of the world as they wanted by force.”

“But surely, Potocznik, haven’t you noticed that in this pan-German crusade some of our best fighters are Slavs? Look at the Bosnians for instance. Or the Slovenes: I doubt whether you’d find a braver and more loyal people in the entire Monarchy.”

He snorted. “Brave and loyal: you certainly wouldn’t have found them very brave and loyal if you’d seen them back in Pravnitz during the gymna­sium affair. The sheer colossal impudence of it: a silly little ethnographic relic of a people with no literature and no history and no culture of their own, challenging the rights of a major world nation. It’s just too absurd. There’s no such people as the Slovenes, and their language is a fraud: a monkey-jabber made to look like a proper language by a German-speaking bishop—a Jewish convert, by the way—to create enemies for Germany and keep it under the thumb of Rome. The Slovene Nation, indeed—not a million of them, and nothing but a lot of illiterate yokels in felt hats and silly costumes. For them to claim equality with the nation of Goethe and Schiller and Beethoven is like a sparrow claiming equality with an eagle. Darwin proved that there is no such thing as equality in nature, only the stronger and the weaker.”

“Do I take it, then, that you propose shooting all the Slovenes once we win this war? It seems pretty shabby thanks after the way they’ve fought for us.”

“Of course not: the so-called Slovene people would continue to ex­ist for as long as it wished to. But with no equality in German-speaking areas, that’s for sure, and with German as a compulsory subject in all their schools from the lowest level up.”

“Do you think that they’d take kindly to that? You make it sound like ru

“Perhaps it is rather like that. If they are eventually absorbed into Germany, then frankly we would be doing them a kindness. Honestly, Prohaska, there’s no future in these little peoples now: the Slovenes and Czechs and the rest. They only survived this long because the Habsburg state has somehow managed to stagger a century too far. From now on it’ll be the big nations who count; this war demostrates that if nothing else. Cruel to absorb them into Greater Germany? We’d be far crueller to them in the long run if we didn’t, with the Italians waiting out there to swallow them up. We’re bringing them into the modern world, making them catch up with the rest of Europe after a thousand years of slumber. That’s our Germanic mission: to force these fossil peoples into the twentieth century. ‘Deutsche Wesen soll die Welt genesen.’ ”

The next morning the telephone rang at last in the Kanzlei at Caprovizza airfield. We were to make ready for a fresh experiment in wireless artil­lery direction from the air. The news of our success at Monte Nero at the begi

We would be flying a Lloyd once again, since the fuselage of the Brandenburger was still not quite roomy enough for all the paraphernalia of a wireless station. Likewise we would once again be flying unarmed, for reasons of weight-saving. I was none too happy about this after our encounter with the Nieuport over Monte Nero, so I was determined this time to take along something more powerful than a Steyr pistol by way of protection. A Ma

As to the wireless station, we learnt that we would not be carrying the clumsy spark transmitter which we had used at Monte Nero. Instead we would be provided with the very latest in German wireless technol­ogy: a Siemens-Halske valve set. This apparatus was (we were told) more fragile than the spark set, and almost as heavy, but it could be tuned more precisely and, above all, would allow us not only to transmit but also to receive signals, thus doing away with the previous rigmarole of white and red and green rockets.

That part at least was reasonably simple, installing the wireless set that afternoon and going up to run a few test-exchanges of signals with a ground station at Haidenschaft airfield. The fun started when we landed and found a naval liaison officer waiting for us so that we could co­ordinate our plans for tomorrow. The first thing we discovered was that the naval charts did not extend as far inland as our target, and that the k.u.k. Armee’s maps of the area were not only on a different scale but used an entirely different grid system. In the end I had to make up an “oleat”: a sheet of transparent paper with a naval grid marked on it so that we could superimpose it on the army map.

That problem was simple enough to solve; far trickier was the dif­ference in gu