The Two-Headed Eagle

It appeared also that in 1914 he and a gang of like-minded despera­does had tried to force the hand of the dithering Italian government by provoking a war with Austria. They had hired a ship and arms and had been about to sail from Rimini to attack the island of Cherso when the carabinieri had arrived and arrested them. Carraciolo had received a sen­tence of five years, but in the event he had served only a few months, since Italy had declared war on Austria in May 1915. He had then organised a similar expedition against an Adriatic islet off Lissa: an expedition which I myself had unwittingly frustrated the previous July, when my submarine U8 had torpedoed the Italian cruiser leading the force.

All in all, it looked quite an impressive curriculum vitae. Major di Carraciolo was now (he said) ablaze with a passionate desire to clear the Habsburg eagle out of the remnants of Italia irredenta in Trieste and Dalmatia and the South Tyrol. He had no personal animus against us, he assured the Swiss journalist: “The Austrian is a brave and determined fighter,” he said, “but he is also ill-organised and not very well equipped and now outnumbered into the bargain. I think that I can promise him a hot time of it once Squadriglia 64a gets into action.” Some of our younger officers dismissed the article as empty Latin bragging; but for myself I had little doubt that the Major would be as good as his word. I hoped that so long as I was flying a Brandenburger we would never meet him in the air.

We were to meet, though, and a good deal sooner than I had an­ticipated. 21 September dawned su

In the event they had no need to come up after us: they were already waiting as we crossed the lines, circling a thousand metres above and positioned to make the best use of the sun. Everything just happened so fast: six or seven black specks hurtling down upon us out of the glare as our shadows skimmed phantom-like across a white field of cloud about five hundred metres below. Outnumbered, our only hope of survival lay inside the cloud. I turned as I cocked the machine gun and saw Potocznik’s aeroplane waggling its wings to tell us to follow, then putting his nose down to head into the white fluff. But the Nieuports were upon us before we could hide ourselves, two of them edging beneath us to shoot us down if we tried to dive. Donhanyi’s aeroplane was the first victim. I swung around and fired a hurriedly aimed burst or two in an attempt to knock out the Nieuport manoeuvring under his tail. Then the Schwarzlose jammed. I opened the breech and fumbled in my thick gloves to clear the block­age. I cleared it, but I was too late to be of any help to Donhanyi: orange flame burst suddenly from behind the Brandenburger’s engine mantle, and there was nothing more to be done except watch helpless as the aero­plane curved away to port and down into the cloud, ablaze and leaving a plume of greasy black smoke floating in the air. But there was no time to stand watching, only swing the gun around to fire at an Italian coming at us from the starboard side. He was firing at us as he came. Somehow Toth managed to flick us sideways and down into the cloud—just as our engine coughed and missed fire.

I suspected a bullet through the fuel pump, but it scarcely mattered as we drifted down through the clinging damp murk with the engine splutter­ing to a standstill. By the time we emerged from the underside of the cloud a half-minute later, the engine was gone for good, the wind singing eerily in the bracing-wires as the propeller windmilled idly in the slipstream. In the sudden, intense silence I was aware for the first time of the noise of other aeroplane engines and the dry rattle of firing above us.

I looked about us fearfully as we emerged into the sunshine once more. No one was to be seen for the moment. The Italians were presum­ably off chasing Potocznik and Szuborits. I looked below, trying to get my bearings. The first thing that I saw was the familiar outline of Gorz below me. Well, I thought to myself, if the Italians had jumped upon us as we crossed the lines, this did at least mean that the cripples might have some chance of limping home. I signalled to Toth to turn us around towards our lines, then lugged our two bombs up on to the edge of the cockpit and tipped them overboard. Provided that we could escape the atten­tions of Italian fighters and flak batteries, we might still make it back. We were still about three thousand metres up and our lines were perhaps five kilometres to the east. The aeroplanes of 1916 might have been primitive, slow, flimsy contraptions, but they could at least glide well.

I stood behind the machine gun, sca

Quaint as it might sound now, such chivalrous behaviour was by no means uncommon in those days. By 1916, war in the air had become a fairly murderous business: not at all the gentlemanly jousting of legend. Even so, men had been flying then for something not much over a decade. The very act of taking to the sky was still something only marginally less dangerous than fighting in it, so it is scarcely surprising that we aviators were still bound together in some degree by a fellow-feeling that crossed the battle lines. I believe that even in the last months of 1918 in France, where the air battles had long since turned from duels into vast, ruth­less engagements involving hundreds of aircraft on each side, there was still a general disposition to leave obviously broken-down aircraft to their fate rather than simply shoot them out of the sky. In any event, Major di Carraciolo shepherded us down until we were within reach of our lines, and on the way headed off another Nieuport which was moving in to attack us. As we crossed the lines he waved in farewell and turned away, leaving us to glide down and land on a level stretch of pasture near the village of Biglia, suffering nothing worse than a burst tyre in the process. When we got the engine panels off we found that it was not battle damage that had forced us down but a blocked fuel filter.