The Two-Headed Eagle

He looked at me for some time: the sad, mildly reproachful gaze of one who has no time for such juvenile follies. He was a solid, calm, kindly- looking man in his early fifties, with the air about him of a watchmaker; or the sort of cobbler whom you almost feel the urge to thank when he tells you that he can’t have your dress-uniform boots ready for the gala on Thursday after all on account of how you just can’t get the leather these days.

“War or no war, Herr Leutnant, you won’t get them working shifts here. This is an aircraft-repair park so it would rate as a rear echelon even if the Italians were just across the fence. The men work peacetime hours here and go home early Fridays.”

“What the devil do you mean, peacetime hours? We’ve just come from an extremely dangerous mission over Venice in broad daylight. I’ve just been counting the bullet holes and I’ve got up to fifty-seven already. And while we’ve been getting our backsides shot at your men have been pushing off early!”

He nodded in agreement, utterly incapable of being provoked to anger. “Fair point, Herr Leutnant, fair point: there’s a lot in what you say, I don’t deny that. But the fact is, all my men here are reservists—1860 class, one or two of them—who’ve had nothing to do with the Army for thirty-odd years, then got called up. They’re in uniform, but they’ll be blowed if they’re going to keep army hours. Half of them are local men anyway and have families down in the town.”

“What about military discipline?”

“Oh, Herr Leutnant, Herr Leutnant. We get little enough work out of them as it is, and if I started coming the old eiserne Diszipline mallarkey here we’d get none at all. Military discipline my arse, if you’ll pardon the expression: you can’t get skilled engine fitters for love nor money now, so I have to keep them on a loose rein if I want to get anything done at all. As it is they’re on army pay, which is about a quarter what they’d be getting if they were in the munitions factories. Anyway . . .” (he adjusted his spectacles and turned to me), “if you like I can take out those contact breakers myself and clean them up a bit for you. That’d at least get you up the valley to Gardolo. If I remember rightly they’ve got a few old Aviatiks up there with Flik 17. They’ve got Austro-Daimler 160s, so they might have a couple of magnetoes lying around in stores.”

In the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe one word that was in constant use in those years was the noun “Kraxe,” derived from the verb “kraxeln,” which is Austro-German for “clamber up” but which had become fliers’ slang for a pile-up on landing. It was something that happened with depress­ing frequency around Haidenschaft, with the mountains towering above and savage, unpredictable winds whipping down the side valleys. Yet of all the flying fields of the South-West Front I think that none could have been more perfectly designed for kraxelling than Fliegerfeld Gardolo, some kilometres up the Adige valley from Trient. In the gathering dark­ness the landing at Fliegerfeld Gardolo was even more alarming than that at Pergine. The airfield lay in the narrow valley bottom with the walls of mountain soaring almost sheer on both sides for a thousand metres or more, so that landing was rather like touching down in a vast horse trough. On balance I was glad of the gathering dusk, in that I was at least spared the horror of seeing the precipices looming above us as we lined up to land. I thought that we had had it just as we reached the edge of the flying field. An eddying back-draught of wind off the mountainsides had created a sort of air-hollow, into which we suddenly dropped ten metres or more like a house-brick, to the sound of a great squeal of anguish from the wings. It took all Toth’s skill to bring us level again before the wheels bumped the ground.

But when we had landed safely we found that we might as well not have bothered. True, Flik 17 had a number of Aviatik two-seaters on the strength with 160hp Austro-Daimler engines. But, like Flik 19F, they had not seen a new magneto in months. All that they could suggest was that we stayed overnight with them and took off again in the morning to fly further up the valley to Feldfliegerschule 2 at Neumarkt, where they sus­pected there might be some magnetoes in the stores, because the school had once had a couple of pensioned-off Brandenburgers from an earlier series, but had recently written them both off in the course of flying lessons. We thanked them, staked our aeroplane down for the night (a chill wind was already moaning down the valley), then ate a most welcome meal with them in their mess hut before bedding down in a stores tent. Tomorrow was Saturday.

14 SUNDAY MOUNTAINEER

It was drizzling when we got up: thin rain turning to sleet. We refuelled at Gardolo after breakfast. We could not use Flit 17’s petrol without a requisition signed by no less than three officers of a rank of Major or above. These were finally found for us at a neighbouring supply depot. They signed the forms for us with every sign of irritation be­fore driving away in a pre-war sports car with luggage and two rather nice- looking army nurses in the back: off (we were told) for a couple of days touring in the Tyrol on a tank filled, no doubt, with government petrol. I could only hope that it stayed fine for them. As for Toth and me and our bullet-riddled, faltering aeroplane, it was yet another leg of our miserable begging-tour of the airfields and supply depots of the South Tyrol.

In the course of a half-century or more spent in the armed services I have often had cause to remark upon the fact that, among the military, comradeship, honour and kindliness all decrease the further one gets from the front line. In my younger days I would often wonder why this should be; but it was only with time that it gradually dawned upon me that it is precisely those qualities of honesty, selflessness and courage that tend to land men in the firing line—and their opposites that facilitate the wangling of safe little jobs in the rear. The truth of the matter is that two world wars were, for Europe, nothing but a vast experiment in negative Darwinism, in which the best died and the worst survived to breed.

Nowhere was this more apparent to me than at Fliegeretappenpark St Jakob repair workshops located just outside 11th Army Headquarters at Bozen and specially attached to the army divisions in the Tyrol. We arrived there mid-morning after finding that the Feflisch at Neumarkt could be no help whatever, having just closed down for half-term. The Kommandant was anything but pleased to have two flying mendicants turn up at his door on a Saturday morning in a consumptive aeroplane, one of them a naval lieutenant and the other an apparently cretinous Magyar NCO.

“This repair park is strictly for machines from units on the Tyrolean Front, do you hear?” he shouted, waving a cane at us as we formed up be­neath the balcony of the ex-Gasthof that housed the unit offices. “We’re attached directly to 11th Army Command and we aren’t here to offer repairs to any vagrants who happen by. Go on, be off with you, I say! No, I don’t care a copper farthing what General-Oberst Boroevic will say: General-Oberst Boroevic is on the Isonzo Front, not here, and as far as I’m concerned he might as well be in Patagonia. I don’t care if you do either, you insolent bugger. Just clear off back where you came from—you and your pet monkey.”

Utterly dejected, we ambled back around the workshops—deserted and locked for the weekend—to where our aeroplane stood. There was no hope whatever of going on now, even if we had anywhere left to go. No, we would just have to abandon the aeroplane and make our way back to Caprovizza by train—perhaps even riding on the roofs of goods wagons, since I had barely ten kronen left in my trouser pockets. For God’s sake, were we in the same army as these people or weren’t we? If the Italians had captured us at Busovecchio they could scarcely have treated us worse. All that we had to eat now was the leftovers from the food that the villag­ers had given us. Toth sat miserably beneath a wing on the wet grass as I removed the engine cowling panels yet again to see if anything could be done with the magnetoes.