The Two-Headed Eagle

And I suppose that they must still be there, the last flier and the last aeroplane of the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Flying Service. The glacier will make its grinding way down the mountain trough, a metre or so a year, until one summer it will melt and crumble open at the bottom of the valley to reveal Toth’s frozen body and the remains of the aeroplane, perhaps thousands of years hence, when we are all dust and the Habsburg Monarchy (if anyone remembers anything about it at all) will be known only to scholars: one with the kingdom of the Seleucids, the Egyptian Second Dynasty and all the other gaudy, tinsel-and-paste empires that were to have lasted for eternity.

They gave me the job of breaking the news to Magdalena, there in the front room of her father’s house in Caprovizza. I had expected tears, but the girl just became dreadfully quiet, the colour draining from her normally rosy face as if someone had opened a tap. I tried to comfort her by saying that her fiance was not killed, just missing, and that a patrol might yet find him alive in the mountains. But I knew that it was hope­less: that he had probably died of cold and shock on the first night. And I think that she knew as well. I left her parents to comfort her and walked back to the flying field. On the Carso the guns were thundering away in the preparatory barrage for the Ninth Battle of the Isonzo, the Italians having pushed forward some three kilometres since mid-September at a cost of about 150,000 lives. What did one more life mean, in the face of such monstrous carnage, one bereaved Slovene country girl when widows and orphans were being created every day by the thousand? The world had gone mad.

I returned to find a visitor waiting for me in the Kanzlei hut. It was a major from the Air Liaison Section at 5th Army Headquarters. He questioned me closely about the mission which had led Toth and me to our fateful flight over the Alps. In the end he shut his folder and prepared to leave.

“Well Prohaska, I can’t say that this business leaves a very pleasant taste in the mouth.”

“Why not, Herr Major?”

He smiled a bitter, mirthless smile. “I suppose that I’d better tell you, even though I ought not to according to the strict letter of regulations. Those documents of yours.”

“Yes?”

“They weren’t secret papers at all: they were love-letters from Conrad von Hotzendorf to his wife.”

“They were . . . what? How do you know?”

“The field police stopped the car at Teschen flying field and ques­tioned them. Everyone in Vie

“I suppose that’s very wise of him,” I said. “He stole her from another man I hear, so perhaps he’s worried she’ll do the same to him if he doesn’t keep an eye on her.”

“Quite possibly. Anyway, he had been away from Teschen for a week touring the Tyrolean Front, so the letters had built up and he roped you fellows in to fly them to Teschen for him: special express delivery at the expense of the War Ministry. Conrad loves little flourishes like that, I understand. Pity that your pilot had to lose his life for it.” He rose to leave. “Anyway, sorry and all that. You were quite outrageously misled, but there’s nothing we can do about it. And even if we could put our own Chief of Staff in front of a court martial for misuse of army perso

He left, and Hauptma

“Herr Kommandant, I have a request to make.”

“What is that, Herr Schiffsleutnant?”

“I wish to transfer from this unit and resign from the k.u.k. Flieger­truppe. It’s all one to me where I go: the U-Boats, the trenches in the worst part of the front line—I don’t care any longer.”

He smirked behind his spectacles. “I see: the Maria-Theresien Ritter’s courage has deserted him. I understand—the Flying Service is too danger­ous for him. And what are your reasons for requesting this transfer, pray? I ca

I tried to remain calm. “My reason for requesting the move, Herr Kommandant, is simply to be as far away as possible from a creeping thing like you: a commanding officer of a flying unit who, so far as I am aware, has never once flown in an aeroplane and whose sole talent is for designing forms and sending brave men to their deaths in order to draw lines on pieces of graph paper afterwards.”

“Watch your tongue, Prohaska: what you have just said is court- martial talk and might . . . might lead me to demand satisfaction from you.” I noticed that his voice trembled as he spoke these words.

“Herr Kommandant, you will surely be aware as I am that the K.u.K. Dienstreglement absolutely forbids an officer to challenge his superior to a duel in wartime. If it did not then you would have been cold meat long ago.” “But this is outrageous! You are quite obviously unhinged.”

“I obediently report that if I am unhinged, Herr Kommandant, that is because I have seen so many good men’s lives squandered these past three months to no effect. In fact I have just been informed that my pilot was sent to die of cold and injuries on a glacier high up in the Alps so that a field marshal’s wife could get a packet of letters a day earlier than she would have done if he had put them in the post. This does not please me and I want no further part in it.”

“Nonsense. Your duty is to carry out whatever tasks your superiors give you. An order is an order. Anyway . . .” He sniffed. “I can’t see what you’re making such a fuss about. Your pilot fellow was only a ranker . . .”

They told me afterwards that when the orderlies rushed into the of­fice they found me kneeling on Kraliczek’s chest with my hands about his throat, choking the life out of him as I endeavoured to drive his head through the floorboards. Another five seconds or so, the Medical Officer said, and I would probably have been up for court martial on a charge of murder. For my part I remember nothing of it, only a blind, murderous animal rage such as I have never known before or since. I had killed men in battle before that and would do so again; but never would I be filled with such a pure, intense, single-minded, near-ecstatic lust to take someone’s life. It was not Kraliczek’s odious features that I saw there as I gripped his throat, it was Magdalena’s pale, shocked young face; and Toth dazed and moaning glassy-eyed on that cursed icefield; Conrad von Hotzendorf’s self-satisfied little nervous twitch; and Rieger’s charred, gri

There was an awful row of course: Maria-Theresien Ritter or no Maria-Theresien Ritter, war or no war, most armies in the world regarded it then and (I believe) still regard it to this day as a fairly serious breach of discipline to have attempted to throttle one’s commanding officer. What saved me in the end from court martial and a possible firing squad was a quite fortuitous piece of luck. For the next day, on 19 October, Flik 19F ceased to exist and was officially merged once more with its parent unit Flik 19. My new commanding officer was not therefore Hauptma