The Two-Headed Eagle

Memories, memories. You must think me an awful old bore. Yet for sixty- five years I scarcely breathed a word about my time as a U-Boat com­mander, until the photograph album turned up again this spring. And I would also like to be able to say that I never told anyone about my brief flying career. But this is not strictly true: just once, not many years ago, I was persuaded to talk about my days with the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe.

It was in 1978 I think, in the Home at Iddesleigh Road in Ealing, where I had already lived for several years after Edith died and I could no longer look after myself. It was one wet summer afternoon as I was sitting in an armchair in the lounge trying to read. Gradually I became aware that I was being irritated by a loud, honking voice with an American accent. It came from over in Mr Kempowski’s corner. I turned around to look, and saw the old fool sitting in an armchair with a blanket over his legs being interrogated by a large—not to say gross—individual in his early thir­ties with a great curly mane of hair, heavy horn-rimmed spectacles and a drooping moustache in the style of the late Pancho Villa. The young man was holding the microphone of a tape recorder towards Kempowski and trying to induce him to talk into it by bawling into the old man’s ear. He was evidently not having much joy: Kempowski was near-senile by then and his English had always been minimal, while the young man’s German was ludicrously poor. This puzzled me: why German in a Polish old peo­ple’s home? Then I remembered: some weeks before, Mother Superior had received a letter from an American air-historian—or “aviation buff” as he styled himself—asking whether he might have an interview with the noted World War One flying ace Gustav Kempowski. I thought “flying ace” was a bit thick: Kempowski had flown briefly as a junior officer in Jasta 2—Richthofen’s old squadron—in the autumn of 1918 and had then transferred to the Polish Air Force.

It appeared that the interview was not going well: Kempowski was pretty well gaga by then—he died a few weeks later—and in any case, he regarded the Polish-Soviet war of 1920 as vastly more interesting and important than the earlier conflict in which he had flown for the German Kaiser. At length the old man cackled maliciously and pointed across to me.

“Prohaska zere—he also flieger in First Weltkrieg—fly in Austriacki Fliegertruppe gegen Italia—you speak him also, yes-no?” The old rogue had remembered, as people sometimes will when their minds are fail­ing, an interview which I had given to a Berlin paper in 1916 after I had brought down the Italian airship. I got up to leave, but my lines of escape were blocked: the young American had also got up and was advancing to pin me into the corner with his bison-like bulk. I saw Mother Superior simpering in the background. I would have to be polite or there would be trouble for me later on.

He proferred me a huge, flabby paw to shake. It was like having a giant toad placed in my hand.

“Wow! I mean, this is incredible—another First World War aviator in the same afternoon—I can hardly believe this.” Without so much as a by your leave he sat down opposite me and loaded another cassette into his little machine. I was already irritated by his evident belief that we old people have no minds of our own, no independent value except as histori­cal relics and memoir-quarries. But with Mother Superior eyeing me in that sinister way of hers I had to sit still and try to be civil.

Without looking at me he introduced himself.

“Hi there. I’m Frank T. Mahan of the Lansing Michigan World War One Air Enthusiasts’ Society. I’m over here in Europe collecting remi­niscences from those who flew in that great conflict and you, sir, are the first person I’ve met so far who flew in the Austro-Hungarian Air Force on the Italian Front.”

“Then I congratulate you on your success. But what is it that you want to know? I am no historian myself and I can only tell you what I happened to see, which was not a great deal really. It was all rather confused and quite frankly I have not given it a great deal of thought in the years since. I was a naval officer you see, and only seconded for a while to the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe. And anyway, I flew as an observer in two-seaters, which was usually rather boring.”

“But sir, do you realise that you are one of the privileged few who had the honour to fly in that first great war in the air?”

“It was a privilege that I would gladly have foregone. And what do you mean by ‘privileged few’ anyway? That I was privileged to be able to do it, or that I was privileged to be among the few who came out of it alive? I think that I might disagree with you on the first count at least.”

He appeared not to have heard this remark; only stuck the microphone impertinently under my nose. “Tell me, how many missions did you fly in all? And how many aerial combats were you involved in? What was your personal score?”

“Really, I have no idea. I was with the Fliegertruppe on the Isonzo Front for about three months, then for a month or so with the Naval Air Service on convoy patrol. I don’t think that we ever thought of them as ‘ missions.’ We went up in the air when we got an order from Army Headquarters or from the division, and most of the time it was reco

This person’s ma

“Tell me sir, what was it really like to be a flier in that war?”

Well, I thought, a question as asinine as that deserves some sort of answer. So I thought for a moment or two.

“If you really want to know what it was like, to fight in the air in the Great War, then go up to someone you have never met before and who has never done you the slightest harm and pour a two-gallon tin of petrol over them. Then apply a match, and when they are nicely ablaze, push them from a fifteenth-floor window, after first perhaps shooting them a few times in the back with a revolver. And be aware as you are doing these things that ten seconds later someone else will quite probably do them to you. This will exactly reproduce for you and your fellow enthusiasts the substance of First World War aerial combat and will cost your country nothing. It will also avoid the necessity for ten million other people to die in order for you to enjoy it.”

I saw that the interview was now at an end: Mother Superior moved in to usher the man away, saying, “Please—you must not mind him—he old man, head not so good any more.” After he had left it was only my ad­vanced age which saved me from ten days’ solitary on bread and water.