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We held the oath-taking ceremony the morning after I got back: put on our best uniforms and paraded in the December drizzle, caps under left arms and right hands raised with first and second fingers together, standing before our commanding officer dozing in a chair, a military chaplain and a petty officer bearing the red-white-red naval ensign on a staff. There we swore undying loyalty to our prince and lord Karl, by the Grace of God Emperor of Austria, Apostolic King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, Croatia . . . and so on through a list of thirty-something fairy-book titles like Illyria and Lodomeria, finishing for good measure with “. . . and King of Jerusalem.” Mass was celebrated by the chaplain. Then the Petty Officer roared “Abtreten sofort!” Fregattenkapitan von Lotsch woke with a start to enquire what was the matter, we dispersed to our duties, and that was that: the Emperor was dead, long live the Emperor.
I was called from the Adjutant’s office half an hour later. There was trouble in the ratings’ mess hut and would I please come over, since they wished to see an officer? I put my cap and sword on and hurried across the rain-lashed square of cinders. I entered the hut to be greeted by silence. The men did not rise to attention but sat at the trestle tables, plates before them. I was met by that month’s president of the messing commission, a Slovak telegraphist rating called Kucar. He stood stony-faced, holding out a plate bearing two oblong slabs of gritty-looking yellowish- grey substance.
“Well Kucar, what’s the trouble? Why aren’t the men eating their di
“Obediently report that we aren’t going to eat this stuff, Herr Schiffs- leutnant. It’s polenta.”
I looked closely at the unappetising slabs on the plate. It was indeed polenta, that sad pudding of boiled corn-meal that weighs down so many a table in northern Italy. As an accompaniment to something else—for example fried and served with jugged hare in Friuli—polenta is at least tolerable, if an acquired taste, by which I mean that it is rather horrid but that one can get hardened to it in time. But served on its own it is undeniably a most depressing dish, rather like cold slices of congealed porridge only with less flavour. I prodded it with my finger.
“Nonsense Kucar, that’s perfectly good polenta.”
“With respect Herr Schiffsleutnant, we couldn’t care less whether it’s perfectly good or perfectly bad: it’s polenta and we’re not going to eat it. Only the shit-poor eat polenta.”
And he was more or less right there of course: along the Dalmatian coast poverty and polenta went together like twin brothers. For the people of the port towns and the islands the consumption of polenta marked the final slide into indigence, rather as eating horsemeat would for the English or setting down black-eye peas and chitterlings in front of poor white people in Mississippi. In the end we had to get the Proviantmeister to open his stores and serve out bread and bacon to the men. But there would come a time not very far into the future when they would eat even polenta and be glad of it.
16 LAST FLIGHT
Fregattenleutnant Franz Nechledil and I made our first flight on behalf of the Emperor Karl on the morning of 4 December. For once it was not the usual business of convoy escort. We had been preparing to take off on the customary Lunga-and-back run, but at the last moment an orderly came ru
Well, we were bombed-up and ready for submarine hunting, so what were we waiting for? I doubted very much whether we would catch the prowler, who would certainly have sighted the Pola aeroplane and turned around if he had any sense at all. But this promised to be a welcome break from the monotony of circling endlessly above a flock of worn-out merchant steamers. Submarines, I knew from experience, had a way of turning out to be floating logs or dolphins or upturned lifeboats; but there was always just a slim chance that one day it might be the real thing. As Nechledil warmed up the engine I turned quickly to check the four antisubmarine bombs slung beneath the wings just behind the cockpit. They were 20kg contact-fuse bombs, but with an additional calcium fuse which would detonate them at about four metres’ depth if the submarine had dived by the time they hit the water. One of them exploding alongside would be quite enough to do for any submarine afloat.
We arrived in the search area about 8:30. The cloud had lifted somewhat, but occasional curtains of drizzle still drifted slowly across the winter sea. For over an hour we quartered and requartered the twenty- kilometre square where I thought the submarine might be lurking, having first circled it several times to make sure that the thing was not trying to escape on the surface, where its speed would be much higher. I tried to work out what I would do as a U-Boat commander if I thought that an aeroplane was prowling above me: probably idle around at a couple of knots about ten metres below the surface, conserving batteries as much as possible and hoping that the aeroplane would run low on fuel and patience after about an hour and go home. As for us, our only chance of getting at him would be if he came up to periscope depth and lay there, dimly visible from above like a pike lurking just below the surface of a pond. In that case we had him: prismatic periscopes to search the sky for aircraft were still well into the future in 1916, and if our luck was in, the first that he would know of our presence would be the crash of a bomb alongside and the sudden rush of water as the hull plating blew in.
We were flying about fifty metres up as I sca
By now we were intent on following the oil slick. It could only be coming from a submarine, spreading across the sea like a snail track, mile after mile, marking on the surface the boat’s silent progress down in the depths. We held our breath, expecting any moment to see the dim outline as the vessel came up to take a look around. But after some forty minutes of this, doubts began to creep in. Surely we had flown over that patch of seaweed before? I checked the compass bearing. The same thought had just occurred to Nechledil, and I saw him peer as well at his notepad, then at the compass on the dashboard. The realisation hit us both at the same moment: that for the past three-quarters of an hour we had in fact been flying round and round in the same huge circle about four miles across, by now on about our eighth or ninth lap. I glanced astern—and saw to my horror what was the real cause of the circular oil slick! A thin black dribble was trickling from beneath the engine and being blown astern by the slipstream to be beaten to spray by the propeller. We had been following our own track, like a dog chasing a tin can tied to its tail.