The Two-Headed Eagle

Nor was there to be any respite at Divacca, that bleak little township up on the arid limestone plateau above Trieste. Word of my arrival had somehow travelled ahead of me during the night and the townspeople— mostly Slovenes in these parts—had arranged a reception for me. As I ap­peared at the door of the carriage to descend to the platform I saw a crowd waiting. Before I realised what was happening the town band had struck up the “Radetzky March” and I was being hoisted on to their shoulders to be carried through the station vestibule into the square in front of the building. A crowd cheered and the Burgermeister stood holding a large bouquet of flowers as the band played the “Gott Erhalte” and the local gendarmery and fire brigade presented arms. The houses were bedecked with black-and-yellow and red-white-red bunting, while on the opposite side of the square a ba

VIVAT OSTERREICH—NIEDER MIT DEN ITALIENERN!

ZIVELA AVSTRIJA—DOL S ITALIJANI!

VIVA AUSTRIA—A BASSO GLI ITALIANI!

With that little ceremony over, I am afraid that the whole thing rather ran out of steam. If you are carrying someone on your shoulders you have to be carrying them somewhere, and the welcoming committee clearly had no idea of what to do with me next. So after the Burgermeister had made a short patriotic speech and the crowd had applauded I was un­ceremoniously put down on the cobbles of the station forecourt while everyone dispersed to go about their daily business, leaving me holding the bouquet and a scroll of paper giving me the freedom of the commune of Divacca—surely, now as then, one of the least desirable privileges on the whole of God’s earth.

I went back into the station, which had resumed its normal wartime bustle of men proceeding on leave and men returning from leave. I took out my movement order and looked at it: “Report at 1200 hours 24/VII/16 to HQ Fliegerkompagnie 19F, flying field Haidenschaft-Caprovizza.” Well, it was now just past 8:00 a.m., so I had four hours in hand. But how to get there? The order took me only as far as Divacca by train, so how was I to get myself and my belongings to Haidenschaft and then to Caprovizza, wherever that might be? Clearly, expert advice was called for. I entered the station offices and eventually found a door marked PERSONNEL MOVE­MENTS—k.u.k. armee (commissioned and warrant officer ranks) . They would surely know in here. I opened the door and entered to find an unkempt and rather shabby-looking Stabsfeldwebel dozing with his boots resting on a paper-littered desk. A copy of the dubious Vie

“Obediently report, Herr, er—” (he gazed at my three cuff-rings for some moments in puzzlement)—“Leutnant, that you’ve got the wrong office: naval perso

“I’m not concerned with that. I have been seconded to the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe, Flik 19F, at a place called Caprovizza near Haidenschaft. I’ve no idea where it is or how to get there, so I would be grateful if you could help me. Do you deal with movements of flying perso

“Obediently report that both, Herr Leutnant.”

“Excellent. So how do I get from here to Caprovizza?”

He rubbed his chin—he had not yet shaved that morning—and rum­maged beneath some papers. It was quite plain that he felt it to be really no part of his duties to assist anything that wore blue instead of field grey, even if it did have the Maria Theresa pi

“I’m afraid that’s not going to be so easy, Herr Leutnant. Normally there’s a lorry comes up here mornings and evenings to collect people for the Vippaco Valley airfields. But the rear axle broke yesterday evening so there won’t be any transport now before about nineteen-hundred.” He paused for a while. “Tell you what though, Herr Leutnant, I could help you perhaps. Strictly outside regulations of course, but . . .”

So in the end, once I had reluctantly parted with a precious tin of cigarettes, a way was found of getting me to Haidenschaft by midday. It appeared that a despatch rider’s motor cycle had to be returned to my new posting’s parent unit, Flik 19 at Haidenschaft. The reason for this, I learnt, was that the previous day, on the station platform, a Hungarian soldier proceeding home on leave had sought to demonstrate to his comrades the utter unreliability of Italian hand-grenades, using a captured example which he was taking home as a souvenir. The result had been three on­lookers dead and seven more or less seriously injured, among them Flik 19’s despatch rider, who had been standing nearby waiting to collect a packet of documents from the Vie

As I made my way to the station buffet I began to grasp for the first time exactly how strange a territory it was that I was entering, this Zone of the Armies which I had heard and read so much about while stationed down at Cattaro, but which I had never visited. The station was thronged with soldiery from every nationality of the polyglot Army of the Emperor of Austria and Apostolic King of Hungary: Magyars and Slovaks and Bosnians and Tyroleans and Ruthenes and Croats, all reduced now to a weary sameness, not only by their shabby grey uniforms, and the rust-red mud of the Isonzo trenches which still caked the boots and puttees of most of them, but also by that glazed, apathetic look which I was soon to learn was the inevitable consequence of a prolonged spell at the Front. It was a look which I was to see again a quarter-century later in the Nazi death camps. The men going home on leave jostled wearily on the plat­forms as the provost NCOs bellowed at them, loading them into the trains that would take them back for a few brief days with their wives and chil­dren in their mud hovels in the Hungarian puszta or their cottages in the Carpathian valleys. For many of these gaunt-faced peasant soldiers with their drooping black moustaches it would no doubt be their last leave. After the failure of our offensive on the Asiago Plateau in May, the Italians were preparing a counter-blow of their own on the Isonzo. The men now clambering down from the returning leave trains at Divacca would be in the front line to face it.

When I had at last fought my way into the crowded station buffet— reserved for officers but still packed to standing—and purchased the glass of tea (in fact dried raspberry leaves) and slice of kriegsbrot that would be my breakfast, I had leisure to look around me. It was only then that I realised quite how much the Imperial and Royal Army had changed in two years: how the great battles against the Russians in Poland in the autumn of 1914 had torn the heart out of the old k.u.k. officer corps, and how the numerous gaps in the ranks had been filled with hurriedly commissioned pre-war Einjahrigers or youths straight from secondary school. I noticed that one chair was free at a side table, and moved over to ask the other customer, a young Leutnant, whether I might sit down. He could only have been twenty or so but he looked much older, tunic dusty and torn by barbed wire. He did not answer; in fact seemed not to notice me as he stared into nowhere with sunken, dark-ringed eyes. I saw that his lips were moving slightly as he talked to himself, and that his hand shook as he con­tinuously stirred his tea, mechanically, like a toy in a fairground, as if he would go on doing it for ever unless someone pressed the stop-button.