The Two-Headed Eagle

Vackar and Eichler were shot at dawn on the morning of 12 December, against the wall of Pola’s Naval Cemetery, where two graves had been dug ready for them. Like all the rest of the fleet in harbour I had to stand to attention on deck and listen as the volleys crashed among the black cypress trees on the hill and the crows rose cawing from their roosts into the early morning air. Old Austria was good at pageantry, and no effort had been spared here to drive home the lesson that mutiny did not pay. The lesson sank in, to judge from the pale, tense faces of the ratings paraded on the decks of the warships at anchor as the Articles of War were read out to them by their captains.

First one volley rang out, then another—then a third, more ragged than the first two, and finally a disordered spatter of shots. I felt sick: clearly something had gone badly wrong. It has always amazed me that human life can be snuffed out so easily by falling backwards off a chair or inhaling a cherry pit or—as a Polish great-aunt of mine is supposed once to have done—through dislocating one’s neck with a violent sneeze, yet when the state’s professional operatives set out to achieve the same end they so often botch the job. I heard afterwards that Eichler had died at the first volley, but that poor Vackar had only been wounded, and shouted, “You can kill us, but not our ideas!” as the blindfold fell off. The second volley also failed to kill him, and the third, by which time the firing squad’s nerve had gone. The officer stepped up and tried to administer the coup de grace with his pistol, but it misfired and jammed. In the end the municipal gravedigger had to put Vackar out of his misery with a couple of well-aimed blows from his spade. He had been a horse slaughterer before he went to work for the town council and knew about these things.

For me at least that was not the end of the affair. The very next day I was summoned, not to my own court martial as I had half expected, but to the Imperial Residence at the Villa Wartholz, near Bad Reichenau. When I arrived I was ushered straight into the Emperor’s audience room. He had heard about my part in suppressing the mutiny aboard Tb14 and was anxious to meet me. I must say that my immediate reaction after the events of the previous day was one of nausea. No doubt I would be ful­somely congratulated on my dog-like fidelity to my imperial master and would receive some disc of metal on a bit of ribbon to reward me for hav­ing procured the deaths of two of my fellow-countrymen. But it was not like that at all. The Emperor shook my hand and said all the usual things: asked about my family and how long had I been an officer and so forth. Then he sent out his aides and bade me sit down in the armchair opposite him in his private study.

“Prohaska,” he said, “this was a bad business and must have been very distressing for you.”

“I obediently report that not in the least, Your Imperial Majesty. I merely did my duty as an officer of the House of Austria.”

“Yes, yes, I know that: I can read as much in the Armee Zeitung any day of the week. But mutinies don’t just happen. Tell me what you think were the reasons—and mind you, tell me what you really think, not what you think you are expected to say. If people can’t tell the truth even to their Emperor then we are indeed lost.”

So I told him what I thought: about this mutiny, and others, and the near-mutinies that had never got into the papers. I told him that it was not socialist agitators or secret nationalists or agents of the Entente as the hurrah-press said, but boredom, too little leave and bad food piled on top of a system of discipline which might have been appropriate for the armies of Maria Theresa, ruled by the pace-stick and the lash, but which was grotesquely ill-adapted to ru

“Prohaska, you have told me what you think. And I will now tell you as one of my bravest officers what I think about it all. I think that the Monarchy ca

“I obediently report that we did, Your Imperial Highness.” Well I’ll be damned, I thought to myself, he remembered after all . . .

“Well, I was as good as my word, and I got Baron Lerchenfeld to look into the details of the case. As a result of what he discovered—and also, I might add, as a result of petitions from your brother-officers and your for­mer crew—I have reached the conclusion that a grave injustice took place. I also have the satisfaction of telling you that new evidence has come to light which throws doubt on whether the submarine which you torpedoed off Chioggia that night was in fact the German minelayer. I gather that in August an Italian submarine ran aground off Cape Galliola and when its crew were taken prisoner several of them asked whether they would be going to the same camp as the men from the Anguilla, which they said had left Venice on the night of 3 July and had not been heard of since. In short, Prohaska, I think that the German Navy’s case against you—which was never too strong in the first place—now collapses entirely. Tell me, would you wish to be reinstated in the U-Boat Service or would you like to go on flying? ”

I said that while I was prepared to serve my Emperor and Fatherland on land, sea or air, I felt that my particular talents might be better em­ployed back in my old trade rather than in flying round in circles above convoys.

“Good then. The Marineoberkommando tells me that your old crew from U13 are for the moment ashore following a navigational error on the part of their Captain. Now Prohaska, what would you say to rejoining them aboard one of our newest submarines currently completing at Pola N aval Dockyard? ”

The interview ended and we shook hands as I left, taking with me a feeling—which I still hold to this day—that if the old Emperor had done the decent thing and died about (say) 1906, and if Franz Ferdinand had already died from tuberculosis—as he nearly did in 1893—then perhaps with the earnest young Karl as Emperor and King, succeeded about 1950 by the Emperor Otto, the Austro-Hungarian state might still be with us today, transformed from a rickety, bilious, shambling quasi-autocracy into a rickety, bilious, shambling constitutional monarchy. Perhaps.

So I returned officially to the Imperial and Royal U-Boat Service on Christmas Eve 1916. I had been exactly five months in the Flying Service, yet it had seemed so much longer. I handed in my flying kit, removed my airman’s wings from my jacket and, from that day to this, have never flown in an aeroplane except as a passenger. The events of my brief but hectic career as an aviator for the House of Habsburg were soon put behind me, then gradually buried and lost beneath the detritus of all the years and all the lives that followed.

And Franz Nechledil, my pilot in the Naval Air Service? The trial and shooting of the mutineers caused something to snap inside him I think. He became a great Czech patriot and rose to the rank of general in the Czechoslovak Air Force in the 1930s. He stayed in Prague after 1939 and was deeply involved from the begi