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The farm labourers watched as Toth and I removed the aluminium panels around the engine so that we could get at the two magnetoes on the front of the cylinder block. I was thankful now that my first submarine command, U8, had been powered by Austro-Daimler petrol engines and that my Chief Engineer had given me a thorough course of instruction in their workings. It would be me who would have to get the engine ru
Like most Porsche-designed inline engines the Austro-Daimler had two spark plugs in each cylinder, each row run off its own magneto and coil. This was to guard against spark failure and should have been foolproof since it was most unlikely that both magnetoes would fail at once. But as I removed the bakelite magneto cover I saw that, if both were still working, both were in an equally decrepit state. The contact- breaker electrodes were badly eroded. They must have been made from some wretched wartime alloy and the constant sparking was wearing them away. Standing orders were to change each magneto every fifty flying hours, so that one would always be near-new; but over the past month Feldwebel Prokesch had been forced to ignore this instruction owing to the lack of spares from the Fliegeretappenpark. All that I could do now was dismantle the two contact breakers and clean them up as best I could with a file, then put the whole thing back together again and hope for the best.
It was not until after midday that we finally put the cowling panels back in place and prepared to leave. While I worked on the magnetoes I had been obliged to field a barrage of embarrassing questions from the villagers, who had now been joined by a crowd of women and children. “Your man doesn’t say much does he? Is he a deaf-mute?”
“No, he’s a little quiet it is true, but he’s an excellent pilot. It’s just that he’s a Sardinian.”
“Sardinian? Looks more like an ape to me. Get him to say something in Sardinian then.” I turned desperately to Toth and whispered:
“Toth, di aliquid, per misericordiam Dei.” He obliged with a few sentences of Magyar.
“Couldn’t understand a word of it. That’s the trouble with the Sards: all pig-ignorant Mauritanos. Worse even than Sicilians.”
At last we were ready. I swung the propeller and at the second attempt, to my intense relief, the engine sprang into life, firing with less than perfect smoothness but certainly well enough to get us airborne and over the mountains to Pergine. It warmed up, straining the undercarriage against the logs which we had stuck beneath the wheels as chocks, while I climbed into the cockpit behind Toth. The village elder climbed up behind me and presented me with a large rush basket covered with a cloth. It contained some loaves, a cheese, a large black-smoked country sausage and a straw- wrapped bottle of brown local wine. I turned to thank him, ashamed to have practised such a suave deception upon these simple people. A sudden horrible thought had struck me. Suppose that word got around later and they were hauled in by the authorities on a charge of aiding and comforting the enemy? From what I knew of the Italian military I doubted whether a plea of terminal ignorance would save them from an army penal battalion.
“Some provisions for your journey,” shouted the head-man above the noise of the engine. “Remember to send us a postcard when you get back to Austria.”
I was speechless for a few moments.
“Austria . . . but . . . we are Italians.”
“Don’t give me that horse-shit, Austriaco. We may be poor here but we aren’t stupid.”
“But . . . why did you help us then?”
“We’re anarcho-syndicalists in this village. Anyone who’s against the landlords and the carabinieri is on our side. If we lived in Austria we’d help Italian fliers just the same. That’s why we don’t have a priest here: we burnt the bugger out ten years ago and since then no black-frock has dared show his nose in these parts. We’ll do the landlords next, come the revolution. Here, here’s some reading-matter for your flight.” He thrust a wad of papers into my hand: pamphlets with titles like “The Death of Property” by Proudhon and Prince Kropotkin’s “Uselessness of Laws.” There were also some copies of the newspaper La Rivolta. I glanced at the back page of one of them and saw an article entitled “Chemistry in the Home, No. 35: The Properties of Nitro-Glycerine.” “Anyway,” he said, “be on your way now before the carabinieri arrive and be thankful you landed among us and not elsewhere.”
I shook hands with him and thanked him as he stepped down to the ground and Toth revved up the engine. As we began to trundle across the field they all waved and gave us clenched-fist salutes. “Arrivederci!” the foreman shouted, “and remember, mankind will never be happy until we’ve hanged the last priest with the guts of the last king. When you get home tell your old Emperor from us that when we’ve finished with King Vittorio the Short-Arsed we’re coming for him next!”
So we climbed away from that field as the cawing rooks flapped around the poplars below us and the villagers stood waving. In the years since, I have never heard anarchists mentioned except as wolves in the guise of men: bomb tossers, assassins and enemies of the human race. Yet these were the only anarchists that I ever met in person, and I must say that they treated us with every kindness.
We landed at k.u.k. Fliegerfeld Pergine at about three that afternoon after an uneventful flight, following the River Brenta as far as Bassano del Grappa then climbing over the hills and the front line until we saw the twin lakes of Caldonazzo gleaming in the distance. The Pergine flying field, home of Fliegerkompagnie 7, was as rudimentary as all other airfields on the Italian Front in those days: a hummocky grass field surrounded by a makeshift jumble of wooden huts and canvas tent-hangars. What made it different from Caprovizza was the alarming approach along the side of a vineyard-clad mountain with a rather vulgar nineteenth- century mock-Renaissance castle half-way up. Down-draughts and thermals from the mountainside made us skip and bounce like a rubber ball as Toth brought us in to land.
Nor were matters at all helped by the fact that after an hour or so of relatively smooth ru
Toth switched off the engine and climbed stiffly down from the cockpit, red-eyed and grimy-faced after four hours in the air and three hours or so standing by in a muddy field while I filed away at the contact breakers. He stretched his arms and yawned while I strode up the steps of the Kanzlei hut. We had fired the agreed yellow and white flares as we came in to land, but no one had watched our arrival. In fact there was nobody to be seen. Had there been an outbreak of cholera, I wondered? Had the Allies chosen the place to try out a death ray, or some devastating new poison gas that made its victims evaporate into thin air? I opened the door and entered the outer office. Still no one to be seen. I peered into the i