The Two-Headed Eagle

“Well Prohaska,” he said, “I must say that you’ve gone and got yourself into a pretty little spot here and no mistake. If Oberleutnant Meyerhofer hadn’t got you into the ambulance straight away and off to the loony bin in Trieste the Provost’s people would have come for you and you’d have found yourself in a cell in the Caserne Grande. I gather from this report here that you attempted to inflict grievous bodily harm on Hauptma

“With respect Herr Kommandant, that is incorrect: I tried to kill him.” Heyrowsky stuck his fingers into his ears.

“Tut tut, Prohaska; you really mustn’t say things like that or there’ll have to be a court martial after all. No, I didn’t hear what you said. My eardrums have been troubling me lately: altitude and all that. You’re a flier yourself so I’m sure you understand. No, I think that if we play this one intelligently we can still get you off the hook.”

“Might I enquire how, Herr Kommandant? I am undeniably guilty of a death-penalty offence. Court martial is mandatory in such cases.”

“Well, it is and it isn’t. Evidence has to be gathered, and there were no witnesses I understand: at any rate, none who’d testify against you. And anyway, Flik 19F has just been merged with Flik 19, so while the papers are being transferred from their Kanzlei to ours I would imagine it to be quite possible that some might get mislaid. I think if we can discreetly lose you along the way as well . . .”

“Lose me? How?”

“I gather that you were only seconded to the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe from the Navy, so you’re not technically on the strength. I also understand from contacts of mine in Pola that they’re short of pilots in the Imperial and Royal Naval Flying Service. Now, I may be a fighting soldier but I haven’t served twenty years in the k.u.k. Armee without learning something about paperwork. If we’re quick we can get you up to Divacca and on to the next train to Pola before the Military Procurators people come here looking for you. They’ve still got a file open on you after that affair with the Italian pilot chap.” He looked at his watch. “Eleven-thirty-five precisely. Get your kit together and report back here in fifteen minutes while I talk with the lorry driver. Mustn’t make your departure too public I think. There’ll be a rail warrant waiting for you at Divacca.”

“But Herr Kommandant . . .”

“Prohaska, you are in no position to argue, believe me. Just go, and take damned good care not to leave a forwarding address.”

So that was how I bade farewell to the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe: lying under a tarpaulin in the back of a motor lorry full of empty lubricating- oil cans, as we lumbered out through the gate of k.u.k Fliegerfeld Haiden­schaft and on to the Divacca road. It had been eighty-nine days in total. It only seemed much longer.

I met Franz Meyerhofer in Vie

Of those who had flown with me in Flik 19F only he, I and Svetozar von Potocznik were still alive. Most of the rest—Szuborits, Barinkai and Zwierzkowski and the others—had survived the war, but by 1926 all were dead, killed in peacetime flying accidents. Meyerhofer was now a pilot with the Belgian airline Sabena, and a few weeks after our meeting he too would “find the flier’s death,” colliding with a factory chimney as he tried to land in fog at Le Bourget.

As for Svetozar von Potocznik, paladin of the Germanic Race, I had met him already in Paraguay in 1926 when I was briefly commanding the Paraguayan river fleet during the murderous Chaco War with Brazil. Rather odd when I had known him at Caprovizza, he was by now com­pletely crazed, but in a disturbingly calm, rational sort of way. He had flown in the shadowy little war in Carinthia in 1919 when the infant Austrian Republic had fought to prevent the Slovenes—now part of Yugoslavia— from taking the area south of Klagenfurt. And that was the reason why he was now in South America under the name of Siegfried Neuma

About 1931 he returned to Germany and became a test-pilot for Junkers, then entered the Luftwaffe and became one of the leaders of the infamous Condor Legion during the Spanish Civil War—the ones who used the town of Guernica as a test-laboratory. He had risen to the rank of Major-General by the end of the war. But the Balkans which had given him his original name seemed to draw him back with some fateful magnetism. After being injured in a crash in 1941 he had been assigned to ground duties, commanding a region in occupied Yugoslavia. Partisan activity was intense, but the activities of “Sonderkommando Neuma

Meyerhofer had no idea what had become of the miserable Hauptma