The Two-Headed Eagle

“The wireless sets are going to be rather heavy for the ground troops to carry, don’t you think?”

“Not in my German army of the future. The British have been using armoured caterpillar tractors on the Ancre, I read in this week’s ‘Corps Intelligence Summary.’ Only the complacent idiots who write it are dismissing them as ‘mechanical toys of no lasting signficance.’ Not if I know anything about it they won’t be. That’s the war of the future: col­umns of armoured motor cars with wireless and with fleets of aeroplanes to call up as flying artillery. No more of your nine-day bombardments and twenty thousand lives to capture a square kilometre. We’ll win by speed and ruthlessness—and we’ll keep what we’ve conquered by the same means. It’s Latin, but it’s still a good motto: ‘Let them hate us so long as they fear us.’ ”

“Are you going to lead Germany in person in this war of yours, then?” “No, not me. Nor Ludendorff nor Kaiser Wilhelm nor the House of Hohenzollern. No: in ten, twenty, even thirty years a kaiser will arise from among the German people to lead us to our final victory. But I’ll tell you something: I think that he won’t be a German from the fat, compla­cent beer-swilling heart of Germany, but someone from the borderlands like myself, where we know what it really means to be a German.”

I returned to my tent that evening feeling rather depressed. Was the entire world going mad? Terror bombing and women’s nipple-colour and Volkskaisers—it was as if everyone had mild shell-shock now. As I reached the door of my tent I met Leutnant Szuborits, who had just been brought back by staff car. He had a bandaged hand, but otherwise seemed very pleased with himself. I congratulated him on his escape and asked how Zwierzkowski was doing. He smiled that fat, rather self-satisfied little smile of his.

“Oh, he’s fine. They took him to a civilian hospital in Trieste. I went in the ambulance with him to see him in. Here . . .” he rummaged in a paper bag, “here, I had a couple of hours to spare afterwards before they could get a car to bring me back here. I went into a music shop and found this. It was the last one in stock.”

The record gleamed black in the twilight. I looked at the label with sinking heart. It was Mizzi Gunther and Hubert Marischka singing the duet “Sport und immer Sport” from the operetta Endlich Allein by Franz Lehar.

11 THE SPIDER AND THE BLACK CAT

If the continuing existence of Fliegerkompagnie 19F might have been a matter of some uncertainty in the last week of September 1916, the continuation of the war most certainly was not. The fight­ing had broken out again on the Carso on 17 September, as the Italians once again felt strong enough to continue their blood-soaked, metre-by- metre push towards Trieste. The weather had cleared for a while, so the two remaining serviceable aircraft with Flik 19F were assigned on 25 September to fly a very important photo reco

The mission involved photographing a wood near Gradisca which was known to be concealing a large naval gun mounted on a railway carriage. This weapon—at least 30cm according to intelligence reports—had been brought up the previous week and was now causing a great deal of grief to our troops on the Carso. Known popularly as “Waldschani”—Vie

A heavy bombing-raid would have to be laid on, since no Austrian gun on the Carso Front had enough range to reach Grandisca. The first requisite for this, though, would be to find out exactly where the gun was firing from, since we had now lost the heights along the rim of the Carso and no kite-balloon could get high enough to peer over the edge. Photo reco

The fighter escort had been a last-minute decision on Vie

“Lining up” is scarcely an accurate term for what was going on: the three aeroplanes were swaying and weaving through the air like a flight of drunken gnats. The first two managed untidy, bouncing landings on the field, but the third had no sooner touched its wheels to the ground than it promptly nosed over, seemed to stand still with its wheels like a recalcitrant mule, and stood on its head, then did a sort of forward som­ersault to end up lying on its back with a smashed propeller and a badly bent undercarriage. We all ran over to the wreck to find the pilot alive but badly concussed, hanging upside-down by his seat straps. We got him down and wheeled him to the ambulance on the hand barrow used for the injured. Then we went to look at the aeroplanes that had survived the journey, standing now under camouflage netting in the bora shelters. We all stood gazing for some time in silence.

Bear in mind if you will that in the year 1916 aeroplanes had not been flying for very long. Szuborits was the youngest of us, little more than an adolescent still, but even he had been at junior school in 1903 when the Wright brothers had made their first flight. Since that time every pos­sible layout had been designed, built and (usually) crashed by aspiring designers: tractors, pushers, monoplanes, biplanes, triplanes, sesquiplanes, canards and deltas. There was as yet no settled notion of what an aeroplane ought to look like. Yet even so, standing there that evening, we all realised that there was something not quite right about the Hansa-Brandenburg Kampfdoppeldecker. It was as if the plans for an aeroplane had mistakenly been posted to a manufacturer of agricultural machinery.