The Two-Headed Eagle

My feelings about all this were curiously mixed, I must say. On the one hand, after the excitements and terrors of my time as a front flier with the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe I might have been expected to have relished the boring safety of this sort of flying; and all the more so when I had a wife six months pregnant back in Vie

Compared with flying over—or more usually among—the Alps, there was not even any great intrinsic risk in the flying itself. The Lohner boat in which I flew, number L149, was a comfortable and safe old bus: like all flying-boats, of very modest performance even when compared with the Hansa-Brandenburg, but soundly built and extremely reliable when fitted like ours with a 160hp German-built Mercedes engine. Built by the Jakob Lohner carriageworks in Vie

The other half of the “we” in this instance was my pilot Fregatten- leutnant Franz (or Frantisek) Nechledil. Like myself, Nechledil was a Czech by birth, the son of a chemist from the town of Pribram in southern Bohemia. I liked Nechledil, who was seven years my junior, but we never spoke Czech together, only German. The Habsburg Army permitted— even encouraged—its officers to speak with their men in their own lan­guage, even if this meant having to learn it specially. But among officers and senior NCOs the speaking of national languages, though not actu­ally forbidden, was regarded as bad form outside a few Hungarian and Polish regiments. The official doctrine was that anyone who put on the Emperor’s Coloured Coat as an officer put aside nationality. Thus the only permissible language among officers in the Austrian half of the Monarchy was that curious, now almost forgotten tongue called “official German”: a language distinguished by the fact that, of those who spoke it, wrote it, thought in it, told jokes—even made love—in it, a good two-thirds were using it as a foreign language; like Elisabeth and myself for example, since I knew no Magyar while she could only stumble along in Czech.

But where Franz Nechledil was concerned there were other, darker reasons for his avoiding the Czech language even when we were alone together in private. His father had been founder of the local branch of the society “Sokol” in Pribram: a Czech patriotic and sporting organisa­tion which was officially dedicated to “elevating the moral and spiritual tone of Czech youth,” but which had for some years before the war been viewed with increasing alarm in Vie

But worse was to follow, for it came to light early in 1915 that Nech­ledil’s elder brother, a Captain in Infantry Regiment No. 28, had not been killed at Przemysl after all but had gone over to the Russians and was now helping organise the Czechoslovak Legion in Siberia. Nechledil had been summoned to the Military Procurator’s department and had undergone a series of very unpleasant interviews concerning his own activities in the Sokol. He had been returned to duty in the end, but had been left under no illusions but that he was a marked man and was being closely watched. The result was that he regarded anything Czech—even a Dvorak gramophone record—with the sort of mildly hysterical aversion that some people have towards wasps or spiders. Between us two there was an unspoken pact never to mention or allude to any national political question, even to the extent of never talking about our respective home towns. This sounds like duplicity, and I suppose that in a way it was. But please understand that we Central Europeans have become masters of the art of partial amnesia, of excising from our minds anything that is not convenient to those set in authority over us. How does the joke go?

“Gra

“Hush, child, and don’t talk about politics.”

Still, it was good to be back in my own chosen service at last, among people whom I understood and who talked a common language. The massacre of the old k.u.k. Armee officer corps in 1914 had meant that the Army’s ranks had been filled up with pre-war Einjahrigers; but so far its naval counterpart had escaped serious casualties and in consequence had retained much of the old pre-war mentality. I felt far more comfortable in the tiny, spartan mess hut at Lussin than I ever did among my brother- officers at Caprovizza.

Nechledil was officially the pilot of L149 and I was the observer. But in practice our duties were not so neatly divided. I had qualified as a pilot in 1912 and had flown some of the Navy’s earliest flying-boats, emerging with a badly injured leg to prove it when I crashed one of them off Abbazia in 1913. I had not flown a great deal in the years since, but my residual skill did at least mean that Nechledil and I could break the monotony of patrolling over the steel-grey winter sea by changing places every hour. As flying-boats go I found the Lohner to be a pleasant and easy machine to handle: well-balanced and light on the controls, so that one did not have to spend the entire four- or five-hour flight lugging desperately at the column to keep the thing flying level.

Even so it was a depressingly humdrum business, escorting convoys: more like the life of a Vie