The Two-Headed Eagle

Quite apart from the stench, the other feature of this wasteland that impressed itself upon me as we lay there that August morning was the unspeakable noise. This was what I supposed would be called “a quiet spell” on the Svinjak—which is to say that the two armies had temporarily exhausted themselves fighting over it. But even so the shells moaned and rumbled overhead incessantly, looking for the trackways and communi­cation trenches behind the lines and the sweating ration parties trudging along them. Rifle fire crackled constantly along the line, like dry twigs in a stubble fire after harvest. It seemed that it needed only one shot in a sector to cause a blaze-up of musketry which would take several minutes to subside, much as one village dog barking in the night will set off all the other dogs in the district until they grow tired of it. If this was a quiet spell, I thought, what must a noisy one be like? Yet amid all this din one could sometimes make out curiously ordinary domestic sounds, like a latrine bucket clanking in a nearby trench, or someone chopping up ration boxes for firewood, or a man whistling: noises that reminded us that this bleak hillside, which only two years before had doubtless been as deserted as the Arctic tundra, was now as crowded with humanity as a city street.

Around midday the noise of firing died down sufficiently for me to listen incredulously to the sounds drifting faintly down from our front line, about two hundred metres up the ridge. It was a violinist, playing the tune “In Prater bluhn wieder die Baume,” which was all the rage that sum­mer of 1916. Quite apart from the bizarre effect of its syrupy harmonies in this charnel-house of a place, I must say that the music itself rather set my teeth on edge. While I enjoyed most operettas I had never cared too much for this glutinous Schrammel-quartet stuff, which for me always conjured up visions of fat civil servants weeping into their half-litre wine mugs in Vie

ese Heurige-gardens of a Sunday afternoon. In any case, I could hear even at this range that the player was not very good: probably more of a trial to his comrades than even the stench and the flies. Then there was a heavy thump somewhere down the hill. A few seconds later, looking up into the sky above us, we saw an object like a beer barrel with fins flying through the air and trailing sparks behind it. It vanished from sight—and a moment later the whole hillside shook to an enormous blast like a miniature earthquake; so powerful that the back-draught made our eardrums pop and caused the wreck of our aeroplane (which I could just see over the edge of the crater) to lift momentarily into the air. It was a trench-mine, thrown by one of the “bombardi” which the Italians had been making lately in large numbers: about two hundred kilograms of TNT mixed with bits of scrap metal and packed into a barrel. As our hearing returned I heard a bugle away in our trenches sound the call “Stretcher bearers.” More routine wastage, I thought; the battalion diarist would make a laconic entry that evening: “Quiet day in the line: nothing to report. Four men killed by trench-mortar mine.” As for the violinist, he had given up for the while, having no doubt dived for cover in the nearest dug-out when he heard the mine coming over. I had often suffered in the past from amateur musicians, who are a plague aboard naval vessels, but on balance I considered that dropping oil drums full of high explosive on them was going rather too far by way of showing disapproval.

We lay like that until about two in the afternoon, enduring the glare of the sun and the thirst and the flies and the fetid reek of the battlefield. Then, suddenly, Toth gripped my arm and pointed. The crater was on a hill-slope, so the lip on the downhill side was lower than the uphill edge. I could see only sky, unless I wished to lose the top of my skull to a sniper. But as I watched, puzzled, the vivid summer blue was obscured by mist. At first I thought that it was the top of a fog-bank rolling in from the Gulf of Trieste: unusual at this time of year but by no means impossible. Then I saw to my horror that the mist had a sinister yellow hue and that it was rolling uphill towards us on the slight breeze. It was a poison gas cloud, and we were directly in its path!

The same idea seemed to occur to us at the same instant. It was a sickening task, and one that only the threat of imminent death could have nerved us to perform. We nearly gave up, when the body came to pieces as we tried to lift it by its rotted clothing. But we clutched handkerchiefs to our faces and tried not to look, and eventually found what we were searching for among the decaying equipment: a canvas haversack with something resilient inside it. In the event we were only just in time, pull­ing out the mask just as the first curling wisps of gas came pouring into our hole. The next few minutes were not exactly the pleasantest that I have ever spent, taking turns to inhale through the face piece of a perished gas mask, foul with the smell of decay and of heaven alone knew what efficacy after months of lying out in the open. To this day I have no idea what sort of gas it was; only that it had a cloying sugary smell rather like that of a rotting pineapple, and that it made our eyes burn as well as causing a most painful tightness of the chest. We tried to sit as still as possible, so as to avoid getting more of it into our bloodstreams than we could help, and crawled up on to the crater edge on the assumption that, whatever it was, it was heavier than air and would collect in the bottom of the shell hole.

We ducked back into our refuge as the cloud began to thin. Dim figures were rushing past in the tail end of the cloud, and a great deal of shouting and confused firing was taking place further up the hill. We lay down and hoped to be taken for dead if anyone noticed us. Dear God, when would darkness fall? I did not care in the least for this game of soldiers. After about five minutes, just as the last of the gas cloud was passing, there were two explosions away towards our lines, then a further burst of shooting. I decided to chance a peep over the edge of the crater towards our trenches. Perhaps help was coming. I heard shouts—then saw the tops of steel helmets bobbing among the craters. They were the new German coal-scuttle helmets, so that (I knew) meant Austrian as­sault troops. Despite the enormous number of head-wounds in the Isonzo fighting, the War Ministry was still only thinking about manufacturing an Austro-Hungarian steel helmet—in fact would not get around to it until the war was in its final months. In the mean time a few thousand steel hel­mets had been purchased from our German allies, but so far they had only been issued to the “Stosstruppen,” the teams of specialist trench-fighters who were now being given the most difficult and dangerous tasks in the front line. Anyway, that meant we would soon be found and escorted back, even if we still had to wait until nightfall. Had they perhaps got water can­teens with them, I wondered? I shouted, “We’re over here!” as loudly as I could above the din, then scrambled back down into the hole.

That shout was very nearly my last words. There was a sudden scratter of stones as something landed in the hole with us. I stared at it, paralysed. It was a stick-grenade, lying and hissing faintly as the fuse burnt down. If it had been left to me we would both have been dead men; but with a true pilot’s reflexes Toth leapt across, seized it and flung it over the edge, ducking as he did so. It exploded just as it cleared the lip, sending vicious fragments of hot metal rattling off the rocks. I was still too afraid to move. But that was not the end of the matter. A moment later I was knocked to the ground as someone fell on top of me. The next thing I was lying with a hand grasping my throat, looking into the face of a creature so obscene that the mere sight of it took my remaining strength away: something that combined grasshopper and pig and horse’s skull into the features of a devil from a medieval doom-painting. Its arm was raised above me with a club in its hand, poised to dash my brains out. “Stop!” I yelled, hoarse from thirst and gas. The arm stayed poised—then was lowered slowly as its owner got off my chest. He knelt back, and removed the steel helmet so that he could lower the hideous can-snouted mask with its two huge, flat black eyepieces. It revealed a sweaty, rather florid face of unmistak­ably Germanic cast, with fair short-cropped hair and glaucous pale-blue eyes. He wiped his face with his tunic sleeve before replacing the helmet. His two companions released Toth and then removed their gas masks as well.