The Two-Headed Eagle

“What on earth was all that about?” I asked him as he clipped my rail warrant.

“Nothing really, Herr Leutnant, just some trouble further up the line.”

“Trouble with whom?”

“With bandits, Herr Leutnant.” He lowered his voice. “At least, that’s what we’re supposed to say. Everyone knows it’s really deserters.”

“Deserters? Surely not around here, this far from the Front.”

“Deserters sure enough: men who came home on leave and didn’t bother reporting back. There’s a lot of them in these forests now. They live by robbing the farms—though from what I hear there’s more than enough of the villagers who’ll give them food and hide them in their barns. Dirty rotten Czechs—the Bohmes all want shooting if you ask me. There’s not one of them wouldn’t run away if you gave them the chance.”

10 PAPER AEROPLANES

I returned to Fliegerfeld Haidenschaft-Caprovizza on the first day of September 1916. It appeared that not a great deal had happened during my fortnight’s absence. The Sixth Battle of the Isonzo had fizzled out around 20 August, as the Italians ran low on artil­lery shells. In those two weeks they had captured the town of Gorz and had then pushed on to the Carso Plateau to a maximum depth of about five kilometres, leaving them now with a more or less straight front line some ten kilometres in length, ru

Flik 19F had flown a number of reco

The weather was begi

I did once understand the precise mechanism of the bora, eighty-five years ago when I was studying meteorology at the k.u.k. Marine Akademie. As I remember it, it works rather like the syphon in a lavatory cistern: that cold air accumulates behind the mountain ranges of the Balkans un­til some of it overflows down a mountain pass, and that this initial flow brings the rest rushing down after it. The danger signs, I remember, were clear air and a low, white cap of cloud over the distant mountain peaks. There would be a few hours’ stillness and an uneasy feeling in the air, then whoosh! suddenly a howling gale would be shaking the tents and scurrying loose gear across the flying field as the ground crews struggled to wheel the aircraft into the shelter of their log-and-earth bora pens. The bora would make flying impossible for the next day or two, even though the air was as clear as could be and the sun shining brightly. We knew that. But so, unfortunately, did the Italians. The bora rarely blows west of the Isonzo, so they could take off and land as they pleased while we were firmly grounded. Likewise the bora is a curious wind in that, although it blows with extreme fury, it only blows near to ground level, up to about a thousand metres or so.

We at Flik 19F made this discovery one morning in mid-September just after breakfast. We had woken to find our tents flapping wildly as the wind screamed down a side valley from the Selva di Ternova. But the meteorologists at Army HQ had warned us the previous evening, so ev­erything had been securely pegged down and the aeroplanes moved into shelter. It seemed a pity not to be able to fly on a day of such perfect vis­ibility, but there we were: man proposes, God disposes. I held my jacket closed with one hand and my cap on my head with the other and struggled across the field in the face of the gale to enter the heaving mess tent. Breakfast was the usual meagre affair of ersatz coffee and kriegsbrot, the only matter for comment being the proportion of sawdust in the latter. I read in the Triester An%eiger that the Western Front was holding firm in the face of massive and costly British assaults: what you called the Battle of the Somme and we called the Battle of the Ancre. I finished my break­fast, and Meyerhofer and I set off for the workshops to inspect our Hansa- Brandenburg Zoska, which had arrived back from the repair workshops the previous evening. As we walked out of the tent into the blustering gale Meyerhofer stopped and held his hand to his ear, listening.

“What is it?” I asked, shouting to be heard above the wind.

“Fu

I listened. Sure enough, above the buffeting of the bora I could now hear aircraft engines: not one or two engines but a great many of them.

“Look!” he shouted, pointing down the valley towards Gorz. “I don’t believe it—not in this weather! ” It was a formation of eight or nine aero­planes high above the valley, perhaps three or four thousand metres up. They were plainly not ours. They were large biplanes with twin-boom fuselages and three engines: Italian Caproni heavy bombers. We dived for cover in a slit-trench as the first bombs came crashing down on the airfield, throwing up fountains of rock and earth. We had anti-aircraft machine-gun nests placed around the airfield, but they were only to deal with low-flying attacks. They loosed off belts of ammunition into the sky: to no effect whatever. Two figures leapt into the trench beside us as we peered out at the destruction going on all around. It was Potocznik and Zwierzkowski, both in flying kit.

“Come on!” Potocznik yelled above the din, “come and help us get after them! ”

We scrambled out and ran to a bora shelter where a dozen or so soldiers were struggling to wheel out a Brandenburger into the shrieking wind. Somehow we all managed to hold it steady as Feldwebel Prokesch swung the propeller and Potocznik scrambled into the observer’s seat. “Gluck auf!” we all shouted as the engine roared and the aeroplane started to lurch crazily across the field with five or six men hanging on to each wing, staggering forward then sideways then forward again like a drunkard as the wind snatched at it. It was not to be: directly the ground crew let go of the wings a vicious gust of wind got beneath the fragile contraption and flicked it contemptuously to one side. The next thing we knew it was lying upside-down, smashed against one of the wooden hangars. We ran over to it and dragged the two men from the wreckage, both shaken but fortu­nately unhurt. The drone of engines was now submerged once more be­neath the blasting of the wind as the attackers turned away towards Trieste and home, mission accomplished. We looked sadly about us. Only one man had been killed, but a hangar had been wrecked, along with our remaining Lloyd CII inside it, while still-smoking bomb craters peppered the airfield as reminders of our impotence. It was all intensely humiliating.