The Two-Headed Eagle

So for the time being it looked as if we must go on trying to do our duty in our unwieldly Brandenburg two-seaters. It had been a hazardous business even when the Italians had been operating their Nieuports in ones and twos. But now that they would be going around in gangs, our life expectancy would be quite dramatically reduced, to a point where even Oberleutnant Friml would decline to quote us a premium. Our own strength in single-seat fighter aircraft consisted of precisely three aircraft: Fokker Eindeckers reluctantly sold to us by the Germans and grounded for most of the time at their base at Wippach because Flik 4 could no longer obtain the castor oil used as a lubricant in their rotary engines. Not that they would have been much use however, even if they could have got air­borne more often. The Eindecker had not been a brilliant aircraft even in 1915, and it stood little chance now in single combat with a Nieuport flown by a half-way competent pilot. In any case, the Eindeckers were forbidden to operate west of the front line. The Germans were still wor­ried that the Allies would capture and copy the secret mechanism that allowed the Eindecker’s gun to fire through the propeller arc, so they had only agreed to sell them to us on strict condition that they always stayed on our side of the lines.

The wretched early-autumn weather and our lack of serviceable air­craft put paid to flying for most of the third week of September. It also gave a marked downward trend to nearly all the lines on nearly all of the graphs that decorated the walls of Hauptma

For our commanding officer, what we were to do when—and if—we reached Verona was of quite secondary importance. Photographs of the railway junction and a barracks were cursorily indicated at our briefing session that afternoon; but even if we managed to get that far and iden­tify them, there was not going to be a great deal that we would be able to do to them. The raid would be in daylight, so each aeroplane would have to carry an observer and machine gun for defence, while at that range our bombload would be limited to two 10kg bombs each. So far as we could make out, Hauptma

None of us was at all confident as we made our preparations that we would even complete the hundred-kilometre round trip, let alone do anything worthwhile on the way. No one cared to say as much, but we all knew that intelligence reports had revealed the presence of a new Italian single-seater squadron recently arrived at San Vito airfield, just east of Palmanova and directly under our pla

I suppose that, along with the tank, the fighter aces were the year 1916’s great i

It was against this background that one morning early in September we officers at Caprovizza had circulated among us at breakfast a cutting from a Swiss newspaper. It carried a photograph of a shortish, thick-set man in the uniform of an Italian army officer, standing against the side of a Nieuport fighter. The aeroplane bore the emblem of a rampant black cat, claws extended, and the article was entitled “Italy’s Black Cat: Ready to Pounce on the Austrians.” It appeared from the text of the article that a journalist from a Berne newspaper had managed to obtain an interview with Major Oreste di Carraciolo: sculptor, explorer, duellist, racing driver and aviator.

The Major, we learnt, though not a career army officer and although well past forty years of age, had volunteered for the Italian Air Corps in 1915. Since then he had made a spectacular career as a flier, with ten kills to his credit already, including one of our Fokker Eindeckers and a Halberstadt single-seater from a German squadron that had operated briefly from Veldes. But by all accounts this extraordinary turn to his career was something that might well have been expected; for Major di Carraciolo was clearly a character in the mould of the condottieri of the Italian Renaissance.

His early life had mostly been spent as a sculptor, helping found the Futurist movement and leaving a few score writhing monuments in white marble in the squares of Italian towns and cities, as well as en­joying the friendship and patronage of Rodin. His “Monument to the Heroes of Adowa” had been particularly praised: to a degree where it had almost overshadowed the fact that Adowa was a battle in which an entire Italian army had been wiped out by the Emperor Menelik’s barefooted Abyssinians. But he had managed to take time off from hammer and chisel to live the life of the literary salons; and to enjoy the favours of a great many salon hostesses; and to fight a great many duels—sometimes victorious, sometimes not—with their husbands. It was one of these com­plications (the article said) that had obliged him to go and live for several years in the wild mountain fringes of the Italian colony of Eritrea. During his time in Africa he had discovered a major lake in the Rift Valley; had been mauled almost to death by a dying lioness; and had later rescued the lioness’s cub, which he had brought up in his household and which now followed him about like a pet dog. He had driven racing cars, had taught himself to fly about 1910, and had then flown in the Italian war against Turkey, where he claimed to have been the first man to drop a bomb from an aeroplane: on a Turkish steamer in Benghazi harbour.