The Two-Headed Eagle

As I had suspected, they were past praying for, except perhaps via St Jude the Patron of Hopeless Cases. The contact-breaker electrodes had now worn away and honeycombed to the point of disintegration. As I tinkered I suddenly heard a voice over my shoulder, speaking in heavily accented German.

“Excuse, Excellence, but wad kin’ of engine is dat?”

I turned around to find myself looking at a Russian prisoner of war, one of the many employed about the supply bases here in the Tyrol as porters and labourers. He was leaning on his broom and looking with intense interest at what I was doing: in his early twenties I would have thought, with a wide, honest, slightly Asiatic face and wearing a peaked cap and khaki blouse. I answered in Russian, which I was able to speak fairly well from Polish.

“An Austro-Daimler 160hp, soldier. But why the interest?”

“Oh, it’s nothing, High-Born One. It’s just that before the war I was an apprentice at the Putilov Works in St Petersburg, and I used to work on Daimler engines. We were building them under licence: the 80hp kind for motor cars. They’re the same as this one only a bit smaller. But those contact breakers of yours are done for.”

“Thank you, but I had gathered that.”

“Can I have a look at one?” I handed him the corroded electrodes and he examined them carefully. “Of course,” he said, “I could make you some like these if I had the tools. It’s not much of a job. I used to do things like that for my apprenticeship tests.”

“What’s your name?”

“Trofimov, Excellency: Arkady Feodorovich, Junior Corporal, 3rd Battery, 258th Regiment of Field Artillery. I got captured at Lutsk in the summer. There’s about twenty of us here, mostly Siberians.”

“Do they treat you well?”

“Well enough, Excellency. The food here’s no worse than in Russia and the local people are all right. They don’t give me anything interesting to do though, only sweeping up and collecting salvage.”

“What do you mean, interesting?”

“Work as a motor mechanic. I’ve offered to be the Herr Kommand- ant’s driver but he only laughs and slaps me round the head and calls me an ignorant peasant from the steppes. But honestly, I could do the job much better than most of the people here.” His eyes suddenly pleaded with me. “Let me have a go at those contacts at least. I could do you a replacement set in an afternoon if I could get some files and a vice and a grinding wheel.”

So I took Lance-Corporal Trofimov up on his kind offer. True, the workshops were locked up for the weekend. But Toth had acquired a number of strange skills in his seminary, apart from that of seducing nuns in marrow-beds, and one of these was the picking of locks. Before long Trofimov was at work in a shed, singing to himself as he filed away and the grinding wheel screeched and sparked. By the end of the afternoon he had fashioned us two perfect sets of contact-breaker electrodes; and not only that but replaced them, reset the magneto timing and removed and cleaned the sparking plugs. They were test-ru

“You see, Excellency,” he said earnestly, “this war’s not going to go on for ever, and when I get home I’m going to help build a new Russia: a Russia of the twentieth century, with motor cars and aeroplanes and electricity. I’ve taught myself to read since I’ve been here, you know.”

I often wonder whether he got home after the war, and what hap­pened to him later.

We spent the night at St Jakob, lying on the field under the aeroplane’s wing, sheltered against the unseasonable chill only by our blankets and an old tarpaulin procured for us by the Russians. The Kommandant had returned from Bozen unexpectedly that evening and had caught us in the workshop. We told him that the door had been open, but we could see that he did not believe us. He kicked us out, then locked up the hut and posted a sentry with instructions to fire if he saw anyone trying to break in again. For good measure he ordered us to be on our way at first light next morning, saying that he was ru

We woke and breakfasted on bread and tea supplied us by the Russians, who seemed delightfully free of petty prejudices on the matter of nation­ality. They even made us packed lunches to take with us, and provided us with an old winebottle full of “samgonka,” a probably lethal home-made vodka distilled from mashed potatoes. All they asked in return were some old newspapers. Puzzled, I asked why. After all, most of them looked illiterate even in Russian, and all that I had was an old copy of the Triester An%eiger which someone had left in the cockpit. No matter, they said: they only wanted it for rolling cigarettes from the foul-smelling tobacco which they grew for themselves on the airfield. I asked whether they would prefer proper cigarette papers? I was a smoker myself and had a few boxes in my jacket pockets. No, they said; newspapers had more flavour, on account of the ink.

After breakfast we washed, shaved and smartened ourselves up, more for reasons of morale than of appearance. It was a good thing that we did, however, for just as we had climbed into the cockpit and were about to signal to Arkady Feodorovich to swing the propeller (a privilege which he had wheedled out of me), we heard the distant honking of a car horn. We turned to see the Herr Kommandant ru

“Stop, stop!” he shouted. “Wait a moment if you please!” He was panting fit to choke by the time he reached us, to a degree where a heart attack looked imminent. “Herleutnanteinmomentbitte!” he gasped, “. . . if you please . . . just wait a moment . . .”

I must say that after our reception the day before I was in no mood to be polite.

“Herr Major,” I replied coldly, “a letter thanking you for the particular warmth of your hospitality will be sent to you when we get back to our base. In the mean time, if you think that we are trying to leave without paying the bill I can show you the receipt.”

“No . . . No . . . There is something most important. Please to wait a moment . . . I shall explain.” The motor car was close enough now for me to see that it was no ordinary army staff car but the very plushest, most sumptuous vehicle that one could hope to find in that category, short of the Emperor’s limousine itself. It was a beautiful sleek Mercedes of the very finest pre-war make, though now painted over in khaki drab. In the back were two very high-ranking officers indeed. Toth and I scrambled out to stand by our aeroplane at the salute. Could it be an archduke? No, there was no black-and-yellow eagle-pe

“Prohaska, Excellency. Ottokar, Ritter von Prohaska, k.u.k. Linien- schiffsleutnant.”

“Aha, a sailor. Of course, you’re the Maria-Theresien Ritter aren’t you? The one who commanded a U-Boat and then got bored with it and took up flying. How are you enjoying it? ”