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He had undoubtedly done a superb job, organising dozens of rail transports a day across occupied Europe despite the chaos brought about by bombing and the collapse of the fighting fronts. In fact the worse things got, the more effective Kraliczek’s team became. When the British had arrested him near Flensburg in 1945 he had boasted to his captors that in the summer of 1944 he had been routing thirty or forty trains a day across Slovakia even as the Russian armies were pushing into Hungary. Had he ever given any thought to what was being done with the contents of the trucks when they reached their destination? he had been asked. No, he said indignantly; that was totally outside his area of responsibility and no concern of his whatever. They gave him twenty years at Nuremberg. He came out early, about 1962, and was immediately approached for interviews by a young American-Jewish woman journalist—hence the newspaper articles later. He had taken a great liking to her for her qualities of precision and hard work, and had told her everything that she wanted to know in great detail. It was not until near the end of the interviews that she revealed that both her parents had died in the gas chambers. Kraliczek had been genuinely shocked and horrified by this revelation, quite unable to comprehend that it was one of his trains that had taken them there.
So much for the players: what about the stage? As for the Carso Plateau, if I had never seen the place again that would have been far too soon for me. Not steam winches and No. 6 hawsers would ever have dragged me back to that poisonous wilderness. But not everyone felt the same way, I understand. In fact I believe that in the years after the war there were many survivors—Italian and Austrian and ex-Austrian—who kept on going back to those barren hills, spending days at a time wandering alone among the rusty wire-belts and crumbling dug-outs in search of they knew not what, whether the comrades they had left behind there, or their own stolen youth, or perhaps expiation for having come out of it all alive when so many had not. One of these sad living ghosts was Meyerhofer’s youngest brother, who had served on the Carso in the thick of the 1916—17 fighting as a twenty-year-old Leutnant in a Feldjager battalion, straight out of school into the Army. He had gone back every year, Meyerhofer told me, until the previous summer, when he had been killed one evening near Castagnevizza, blown up (the carabinieri said) after he had lit his campfire on top of an old artillery shell buried in a dolina.
Like myself, he had been a keen amateur photographer and Meyer- hofer, while he was in Vie
15 NAVAL AIRMAN
Imperial and Royal Naval Air station Lussin Piccolo in November 1916 was really not much of a place. But then Lussin Piccolo itself was not much of a place either; though it seemed that it had once known more spacious days, perhaps a century before.
Like many another title in the Habsburg realms, even here on their furthest Dalmatian fringes, the name was confusing. There were two towns on the long, narrow, straggling island of Lussin: Lussin Grande and Lussin Piccolo. Yet Lussin Piccolo was the only one of the two that could be described as a town. Despite its name the other settlement on the opposite side of the island, though it had once been the capital, was by now no more than a dilapidated fishing village with a very large old church. It puzzled me why anyone should ever have bothered to build a town on that side of the island at all. It faced the Velebit Mountains on the Balkan mainland and was exposed to the full fury of the bora, which blew here in winter with a ferocity that, over the ages, had left the entire east-facing coast looking rather as if it had been sand-blasted at maximum pressure: every stick of vegetation shrivelled and worn away by the salt spray and the grit whipped up from the shore.
Lussin Piccolo was a typical small island port town barely distinguishable from several dozen other such towns along the Dalmatian coast. Centuries of Venetian rule had given them all a characteristic pattern-book appearance. There was the usual great baroque-byzantine church with its fluted campanile; and the same rows of shabby yellow-stuccoed palazzi along the riva, once the homes of the ship-owning dynasties who had made this a considerable port in the days of sail, but which had long since been reduced to mausoleums peopled by a few aged survivors of the old patrician families. One saw them sometimes early in the morning on their way to mass: the shrivelled Do
Lussin Piccolo had once had a marine academy of its own, and a powerful guild of ship owners. But iron steamships and the Suez Canal had finally done for the place, and it had long since sunk into shabby poverty, alleviated a little only in the early years of this century when the Archduke Karl Stefan had built a villa here and the place had become, like the rest of the Dalmatian coast under Austrian rule, a riviera for second-rank nobility and imperial bureaucrats in summer and a sanatorium for invalids in winter. This always struck me as an odd belief, I must say: that the warm, sunlit Adriatic coast was an ideal place for consumptives. I had served fifteen years in the Austrian fleet and knew perfectly well from officiating at recruiting depots that the entire coast was in fact rotten with tuberculosis.
But then, this was scarcely a matter for wonder: the diet of the common people had always been miserable here in Dalmatia. The limestone islands—no more than karst mountain-tops protruding from the water— were stony and arid to a degree where even goats could scarcely browse a living from most of them. The islanders had imported their food in peacetime and had paid for it with tourist income and remittances from abroad. But now that the war was into its third year, tourism and remittances were both things of the past. The 1916 harvest had been disastrously bad throughout Central Europe. The Hungarian government had just forbidden the export of grain to the rest of the Monarchy, so Dalmatia was indeed in a precarious state. If the people of Vie