The Two-Headed Eagle

I wiped the snow off my goggles once more and peered over Toth’s shoulder at the altimeter in the dim yellow light. Holy Mother of God! We had lost nearly a thousand metres already. I looked up at the wings—and at once saw why. A thick crust of ice was forming on the doped canvas. Toth stood up in the cockpit with the control column gripped between his knees and tried to bang it loose with his fists. I scrambled out over the cockpit edge in the howling slipstream, too frightened to be afraid any longer, and kicked desperately at the ice on the lower wing with the heel of my boot. It cracked, and sheets flew away astern. But it was hopeless: fresh ice formed almost as soon as the old had gone, stuck to the wings by the freezing rain. We were coming down, but where? I peered out into the swirling sheets of snow, billowing like theatre curtains in a wind. At last the air cleared a little. I saw a dark smother beyond. Perhaps it was mountain forest in the distance, glimpsed through a chink in the cloud. I looked again—and realised aghast that it was indeed a mountain side: sheer naked rock-face hurtling past about four metres from our port wing- tip! Toth saw it as well and lugged at the column to bank us away. At that moment the clouds chose to part to let the sunlight pour through.

These might well be the last moments of our lives, but I still caught my breath at the vision of unearthly splendour as the sun streamed through the eddying snow to reveal where we were; flying along a high mountain valley surrounded on every side by vast precipices and snow-covered pin­nacles so fantastically shaped that any stage-set designer who had repro­duced them would have been denounced as a madman. But we had to land. I leant out and looked below. We were only ten or fifteen metres above a level, smooth-white surface: perhaps a high mountain pasture covered in the first of the winter snow, I thought. Well, there was no choice: a sheer wall of rock towered a few kilometres ahead of us, so high that it would have taken us half an hour to climb over it even in calm weather. The snowstorm would soon close in again. It was now or never. I signalled to Toth to come down. He nodded. But amid the crazed vortices in the heart of the storm it was impossible even for such a pilot as Toth to maintain our height: in the end we managed a landing of the kind described by my old flying instructors as “ground three metres too low”: in other words dropping out of the air on the last part of the landing to belly-flop on the ground.

It was no mountain meadow under snow: we discovered that the mo­ment our undercarriage touched and was ripped off. It was a glacier, its jagged, rasping surface of ice-lumps temporarily smoothed out by feathery, drifting snow into an illusory flat sheet. We skidded along it for perhaps fifty metres before coming to a halt: us two and what was left of the aero­plane after each ice-claw had torn off its portion. It seemed to last several minutes, even though I suppose that it must have been no more than a few seconds. I came around smothered in snow and scalded by water hissing from the fractured radiator tubes. All was deathly quiet now apart from the moaning of the wind. It was snowing again. I picked myself up from on top of Toth’s still form on the cockpit floor. The forward bulkhead had collapsed and the engine had been smashed back into the crew space to join us. I checked myself limb by limb. I was shaken and badly bruised and suspected a couple of cracked ribs, but otherwise everything seemed to work. I dragged Toth out. He was alive but unconscious, bleeding pro­fusely from a gash on his forehead. I found the first-aid kit and bandaged the wound after making a compress of snow to reduce the bleeding. Then I found the bottle of samogon given us by the Russians and uncorked it to trickle a few drops on to his tongue. This brought him back to con­sciousness as brutally as if I had stuck a red-hot poker into his mouth. He moaned something, badly concussed. I tried to move him and he howled with pain. Both his ankles were broken. I found the blankets and wrapped him up as best I could, then took the saw from the tool kit and hacked off the upper wings at the roots to make a rough shelter over him. Then I huddled up with him to keep him warm and myself out of the snow.

It must have been about three hours before it let up. The sky cleared and the sun shone once more to reveal that we were in one of the very highest valleys of the Dolomites, way above the snowline and far from human help. I had to go and get assistance. Luckily I had done quite a lot of mountaineering in my youth when my brother Anton and I were junior officers, back in the days when ample leave made up in some degree for our miserable salaries. I knew in particular that I must not attempt to fol­low the glacier down to wherever it went, winding out of sight among the peaks: my brother and I had both nearly perished on the Oetztal glacier in 1908 when we had attempted something similar. No, I must leave Toth and head for the edge of the glacier, then climb the rock-face of the valley side and get over the ridge into the next valley, which might be deeper and extend below the snowline.

I was loath to leave him, still dazed and confused. But in the end I brought our remaining supplies up to him, gave him a half-syringe of morphine from the first-aid kit and put together a flare made from the hacked-open fuel tank filled with sump oil and petrol and with a wick of rag for him to light if he heard an aeroplane above. Surely we would have been missed at Judenburg by now. I also moved up the machine gun near him, cocked it and told him to fire it if he heard searchers. For myself I took the aeroplane compass and the rocket pistol. Before I left I assured Toth as best I could in my execrable school-Latin that he would soon be rescued: that the Dolomites were really not much more than a mountain park criss-crossed with paths, where even maiden aunts could come “rock- climbing” in their long loden skirts and little hats with the cord around the brim. As I set off I wished that I felt as confident as I sounded about the suburban tameness of this particular Alpine range.

I took the greatest care crossing the glacier, probing gingerly in front of me with a broken wooden strut. Even so I slipped into a small crevasse at one point and spent five or so terror-filled minutes dragging myself back over the edge, lying exhausted on the ice with wildly beating heart before I was able to get up and go on. But at last I reached the edge of the glacier, a chaotic jumble of ice-blocks and fallen boulders where the mountainside and the billions of to

I had often noticed when mountaineering that coming downhill is usually far more arduous than going up. In this case the going was par­ticularly tough because the rock-faces were mostly north-facing and were still festooned with loose and highly dangerous patches of rotten ice from last winter, treacherously masked by a light veil of fresh snow. It took me upwards of three hours to get down to the treeline. As I neared it, sliding down a rock scree and across snow patches, I paused. It was hu­man voices. Quickly I fumbled a red flare into the rocket pistol and fired it into the air. Then I saw them, among the small trees at the edge of the forest. I ran down towards them, slithering in the snow and shouting to attract their attention. They turned and stopped. It was only as I got to within perhaps twenty meters of them that I stopped too. They were soldiers, in peaked caps with snow-goggles and with pairs of skis slung on their backs with their rifles. But there was something not quite right about the cut of the grey uniforms; also a rather un-Austrian swarthiness about their features. I stopped and we stared at one another as the awful truth dawned upon me: that these were not Landeschutzen as I had in­nocently supposed, but Italian Alpini.