The Two-Headed Eagle

Still, as your proverb remarks, it is an ill wind that blows nobody some good. A bomb had landed at the end of the officers’ tent lines and had destroyed the tent next to mine. Leutnant Szuborits’s gramophone was found intact among the debris, but a bomb-splinter had gone through his box of records. And, to my inexpressible joy, “Sport und immer Sport” had been among the casualties. A blissful silence descended upon Fliegerfeld Caprovizza now that Mizzi Gunther would squawk no more. I almost felt moved to write a letter to the Italian Air Corps to thank them for enabling me to keep my sanity.

Then came the autumn rains, as the fighting flared up again on 17 September: the start of the so-called Seventh Battle of the Isonzo. And if the bora is one of the two great natural freaks of the Carso region, its drainage pattern is the other. A whole hidden world of caverns and grottoes and underground rivers lay beneath that dreary plateau; some­thing which only began to be appreciated in 1916, as the excavation of trenches and dug-outs revealed a hitherto unsuspected network of caves and passages in the limestone. As the human insects fought and died in their swarms up on the surface, the patient stalactites dripped as they had dripped for the past ten thousand years: steady; calm; patient in their purpose; totally indifferent to empires, kingdoms and generals sticking flags into maps.

Yet this hidden world would occasionally make its presence known. Rain would pour down in torrents for weeks on end in the Carso autumn, turning the churned-up trackways to troughs of rust red mud in which the men and mules would flounder and curse as they struggled forward under their loads. Yet on the bare rock, most of the rainwater would disap­pear as if it had never been, seeming scarcely to dampen the arid surface. Then one morning, we woke up at Fliegerfeld Caprovizza to find the field a gleaming sheet of water. The mysterious underground lakes which feed the tributaries of the Vippaco had filled up at last, and were now decant­ing their excess water down the valley like an overflow pipe.

We flew infrequently in those early weeks of September: a little photo reco

Quite apart from navigational problems, not the least of the reasons for the basic harmlessness of these raids was that about the middle of the month, gazing in despair at his graph line Total Weight of Bombs Dropped, which had nose-dived during early September because of bad weather, Hauptma

1915  because they were pretty well useless, the accuracy of a bomb gen­erally being a function of its weight. Meyerhofer did his best with the Marburg people over the telephone, pleading with them to dump their old stock in the nearest river and tell Kraliczek that they had nothing smaller than 20kg. But it was too late, and anyway it was plain that the Ordnance Officer in charge of the depot was only too happy to unload surplus munitions on to those idiots at Caprovizza rather than having to keep entering it on his own monthly stock inventory. A red-painted ammunition wagon arrived at Haidenschaft Station the next day. From now on the only thought with which we could comfort ourselves as we risked our lives on bombing-raids over Italy was that no one on the ground was likely to come to any harm. Our only chance of influencing the outcome of the war, Meyerhofer said ruefully, was if one of our puny bombs happened to hit Cadorna on the head.

The first of my own night-time excursions took place in the third week of September, lurching away into the sunset from Caprovizza airfield with eight 10kg Carbonit bombs stowed on the cockpit floor beneath my feet. Our objective was the town of Gemona in the Alpine foothills, and our task was to bomb the railway station, incidentally (though this was not explicitly stated in our orders) causing alarm and despondency in the Italian rear, panic on the Milan stockmarket, the soil to ooze blood, the moon to be obscured and cows to give birth to two-headed calves across the whole of Lombardy-Venetia. The only problem was that, like most people in 1916, we had no experience whatever of night flying and no equipment for it beyond the aeroplane’s dubious magnetic compass and a pair of spirit-levels for judging our attitude and angle of bank. I had made some experiments a few days before in using a nautical sextant to find our way by the stars; but, experienced sea navigator though I was, I had found it to be a hopeless task with no visible horizon to work to and noth­ing but the ponderous Nautical Ephemerids to do the calculations with.

The bubble sextant and look-up tables would not be available for another twenty years—and quite frankly would not be a lot of use even then.

There was no moon that night, so in the end the best that Toth and I could do was to fly west until we found the River Tagliamento, its tangled cha

The Italians had enough experience of air-raids now to be careful about black-out, so it was only by the unmistakable glow of a railway engine’s firebox and some lights in a goods yard that we managed to find Gemona. Numb and stiff with cold despite layers of clothing, I struggled to lug the first bomb on to the cockpit edge. Then suddenly I was struck blind by an amazing glare of light. The Italians had searchlights below. The first flak shells flashed around us as Toth banked away to starboard and I lost my grip on the bomb. I suppose that the searchlight crew must have heard it whistling down, because it was quite extraordinary to see how smartly they turned off the light. I saw the bomb flash red below as Toth brought us back round to repeat the compliment. I tipped the re­maining bombs overboard one after another. As we climbed away at full throttle into the night sky with the searchlight beams criss-crossing vainly behind us, I saw that we had set a building on fire: a wooden goods shed, to judge by the sparks boiling up into the sky.