The Two-Headed Eagle

Various thoughts raced through my brain in those few seconds. We were effectively prisoners of war now, but at least Toth would be rescued swiftly when the Italians sent up a search party. Anyway, I had to get food and rest for a while. My leather flying overalls were wet through from snow, heavy and clammy to feel. Nor had I eaten since that morning. I was in such a state that quite frankly I would have surrendered myself to a tribe of ca

The patrol leader was a sergeant: a dark, sharp-featured young man who spoke with the characteristic accent of the South Tyrolean valleys, where many of the local people in those days still used a strange patois of Latin called Ladinisch. He pushed up his goggles and regarded me suspiciously.

“Aviatore austriaco? Osterreichischer Flieger?”

“No, no,” I replied, “sono aviatore italiano.”

“Why did you shout to us in German then?”

“I thought that you must be an Austrian patrol. I’m lost and I thought that I must have come down behind their lines. But thank God I’m still on our side.”

“Who are you and from which airfield?”

“Tenente-Pilota Giuseppe Falzari, Squadriglia 27a at Feltre flying field. I was flying a Savoia-Pomilio but got lost in a snowstorm and had the engine cut out. I managed to land somewhere up there on a pasture in the snow, but I’ve no idea where I am now. I’ve been wandering all day and had to cross a glacier.”

He looked puzzled. “Fu

“Yes, yes, no trouble. I came out of the landing unhurt. But I’m very tired so I would be glad if you walked slowly.”

The patrol was based at a rifugio: a small wooden climber’s hut perched precariously on the edge of a snow-covered precipice on the chilly north face of the mountain, about two thousand metres up. It was barely big enough to hold the ten men and their equipment, but it had a stone hearth and log fire blazing most invitingly as I entered. Before long my wet leather overalls were steaming gently as I sat by the fire devouring a bowl of spaghetti with some cheese crumbled over it. A delicious and almost forgotten smell of real coffee pervaded the hut from the enamel pot brewing in the embers. It would have been a little heaven on earth after the cold and wet and exhaustion—had it not been for the conscious­ness of Toth lying up there on the glacier with two broken ankles and night drawing on, with a leather pouch of top-secret documents resting beneath his head.

There was also the more pressing problem of my host, Sergente Agorda. He was a talkative man, and not only talkative but unpleasantly inquisitive, with sharp eyes and (I found to my dismay) a detective’s instinct for the small inconsistencies in people’s stories. My Italian was convincing enough to pass muster, I knew; the problem was rather that of making up a plausible life history for myself as I went along. The Sergeant’s men were not too much trouble: to my surprise, most of them were not Tyroleans but came from the Abruzzi or even further south. But Agorda himself was a tougher proposition. He was a local man—his peacetime job had been as a mountain guide in Cortina d’Ampezzo—but he had travelled widely enough in northern Italy to be able to pick me up on more than one detail of my story.

“We’ve been using this rifugio as a base all summer,” he said, pouring me a steaming tin mug of coffee, “but we’re going to have to move down the mountain in a few weeks I reckon. The snow’s early this year and they all say it’s going to be a hard winter.”

“Has there been much fighting up here?”

“Not a great deal so far. There’s been a lot going on down in the Tofane and the Marmolada these past few months, quite heavy some of it. But for the time being it looks like neither our generals nor the Austrians want these mountains badly enough to do any serious fighting over them.”

“Where are the lines? Are they far from here?”

He laughed. “Lines? There’s no lines up here, any more than there are for you fellows up in the air. The Austrians are over the other side of the massif and we’re over here and so far it’s been skirmishes most of the time. Sometimes their artillery chucks a few shells over and we chuck a few back, but mostly it’s patrols taking a few shots at one another up among the cols. We lost two men back in March when the bastards brought a machine gun up on a sledge, but we ambushed them the next month and killed three of them, so it’s about quits at the moment. Fu

“Eighteen months, almost.”

“What were you in before, if I might ask?”

“The cavalry.” I adjusted the collar of my still tightly buttoned leather flying jacket to conceal the naval officer’s jacket underneath.

“Which regiment?”

“Er . . . the Aosta Dragoons.” This seemed a good choice: in 1916 a very high proportion of flying officers in all the air forces of Europe had come from the cavalry, tired of sitting behind the lines and waiting for the breakthrough that would never happen.

“Aosta Dragoons? But you come from the Veneto don’t you?”

I could hardly deny this: the Habsburg Navy had been entirely Italian­speaking until the 1850s and the version of the language taught in the Marine Academy had been the soft, lilting Venetian dialect which one used to hear in those days all the way down the Adriatic coast as far as Corfu. This man’s questions were becoming impertinent, but I sensed that it would be unwise to—how do you say?—pull rank and tell him to mind his own business.

“Yes, from Pordenone if you must know. My father was a wine mer­chant there.” I saw at once that I would regret this lie. His face brightened.

“Ah, from Pordenone? I know it well. I have cousins there. But on which street, if I might ask?”

“The Strada della Liberta.”

“Which number? ”

I swallowed hard. I was not enjoying this game at all. “Number twenty-seven.”

“Then you’ll remember old Ernesto the drunkard and his wife. Were you there when it happened? ”

Mother of God, help me, I thought.

“No, should I have been?”

“That’s odd then: it was all over the papers when they found her buried in the cellar.”