The Two-Headed Eagle поп-3 Read online

  “Well,” she enquired brightly, “everyone enjoying their flight I hope?” She spoke—as did all air hostesses in those days—in the carefully culti­vated tones of the J. Arthur Rank Charm School: the sort of well-groomed debutante-cum-Esher diction which was so perfected by the late Jessie Matthews and which seems almost to have died out now, along with elocu­tion classes and the Court Turn. We all agreed that we were enjoying the flight. I sensed that the man in front of me already seemed a trifle uneasy; but the other passengers appeared not to have noticed anything amiss so I nodded with the rest.

  “Splendid, super.” Then there was an ominous pause, although the smile remained as fixed as ever. “I say, I wonder whether anyone has ever flown before?” By the murmur of assent I judged that about half the pas­sengers had in fact flane befaw. A faint, barely discernible shadow stole across the radiance of the smile. “No, no. I meant, has anyone actually flown an aeroplane before. You know: flown an aeroplane, not flown in an aeroplane.” The significance of this question appeared not to have sunk in, so she persisted. “I mean, is any of you actually—er—a qualified pilot?”

  This question produced a sudden chill in the cabin—accompanied as it was by a distinct and ominous lurch to starboard. I looked across at Edith, who was staring in a sort of trance with tiny drops of sweat already break­ing through the face powder on her forehead. Quite clearly, something was badly amiss. I raised my hand—and saw the young woman’s smile freeze as she glanced at me.

  “Excuse me young lady, but I am a qualified pilot.”

  She looked at me, struggling valiantly to conceal her dismay. I was a well cared-for old gentleman I suppose, in my early seventies and still (I imagine) with some vestiges of the stiff-backed bearing of a one-time career naval officer of the House of Habsburg, without a walking-stick or even spectacles. No, I suppose that it must have been other factors that did it: the Central European accent and the bristly white moustache and the rather squarish, high-cheekboned Slavic cast of countenance. One of the least endearing traits of the English, I have often had cause to observe— now quite as much as in those early post-imperial days—is their total in­ability to take any nationality but themselves seriously; as if Englishness were some God-ordained ideal state of humanity of which all the other peoples of the earth fall short to a greater or lesser degree. And in my case of course, being an Austro-Czech by birth placed me immediately in a sort of third-class compartment of risibility some way below Belgians and only just above the Portuguese and the Greeks: remote, quaint and absurd, probably untrustworthy but basically harmless; bracketed for ever in the realms of operetta along with Rupert of Hentzau and the late Richard Tauber, complete with monocle and silly accent.

  The hostess’s response to my intervention was at any rate the normal reaction of the English Lady when confronted with anything alarming or unwelcome: that is to say, she simply ignored it and went on as before, raising her voice this time and craning to look over our heads as though she suspected that Captain Lindbergh in full flying kit might be aboard, concealing himself behind the seats for a joke.

  “I said, is anyone here a qualified pilot?”

  Well, I can be stubborn too, and matters were clearly getting serious: the aircraft’s pitching was now so pronounced that she was having to hold on to a seat-top to steady herself.

  “Excuse me, young lady, but I said that I am a qualified pilot.” She looked at me as if I had just made an indecent suggestion, but still with that glassy smile. Feeling that my credentials were being called into question I decided to elaborate. “In fact I have held a pilot’s licence since the year 1912, though it has not been renewed since before the last war . . .”

  “Oh really? How very interesting, I said, is there anyone here who . . .” “. . . I was one of the first pilots of the Austro-Hungarian Naval Flying Corps, and I flew as an officer-observer with the Imperial and Royal Flying Service for five months on the Italian Front in 1916. It is true, I have not piloted an aeroplane since that year, and I think that twin- engined aircraft might give me some problems at first. But I am quite confident that I could still handle a small piston-engined aircraft like this with no difficulty whatever . . .”

  If, until now, the full gravity of our plight had not fully dawned upon my fellow-passengers, it certainly did at that moment: the sudden, awful realisation that they were several thousand metres above the middle of the English Channel in a small aeroplane with no co-pilot and with some unspecified but dreadful emergency taking place on the flight deck. And as if that were not bad enough, that their only hope of survival should now rest in the hands of a decrepit old Mitteleuropean zany who claimed to have last flown with Prince Eugen of Savoy during the War of the Spanish Succession. As if to underline the point, the aeroplane suddenly leant over on to one wingtip for a second or two, causing the hostess to lose her balance and land in my lap with a squeal of alarm.

  “I said, I am a qualified pilot . . .”

  “Shut UP, you horrible old man!” she hissed as the aeroplane came level again and she got up, smoothing her uniform and trying to reassume her smile as near-hysteria broke out among the passengers (Edith, merci­fully, had just fainted). In the end my qualifications were rejected and she scrambled through the curtain dragging after her the passenger who had been sitting in front of me: a large, mild-mannered commercial traveller in carborundum wheels who (it transpired) had been a flight engineer in a Halifax bomber during the war.

  We heard later that while the aeroplane had been standing on the field at Eastleigh a large bumble bee had flown in through the cockpit window to escape the heat and had remained dozing behind the instrument panel until we had passed the Isle of Wight, whereupon it had flown out in alarm—perhaps realising belatedly that it was bound for a new life in the Channel Islands—and stung the pilot on the bridge of his nose. He was one of those people who have an allergy to bee stings, and within a few minutes the poor man had become woozy while his face had swollen up to a degree where he could barely see out of his eyes. In the end though, assisted by our flying carborundum-wheel man, he recovered sufficiently for us to make a safe if bumpy landing at St Helier, where fire engines and ambulances were standing by to receive us. As we descended the steps—myself following Edith, who was being carried out unconscious on a stretcher—the air hostess stood at the foot of the steps, a model of well-groomed composure once more. As the passengers filed past she bade them a smiling farewell, making the expected apology for “the un­fortunate incident” and hoping that they had otherwise had a pleasant flight. And the passengers for their part—who not twenty minutes before had expected to be entering the Eternal Kingdom—assured her as the English will that yes, it had been a pleasant flight and that it was no bother to them at all to have narrowly missed nose-diving into the sea. My turn came, last in the queue. But for me there were no comforting words: only a suddenly frozen smile and the reproachful stare reserved for someone who cannot really be expected to behave well, but who has still contrived to act in a base and cowardly manner—letting the side down even though he could never have aspired to belong to the side.

  “I’m afraid,” she said, “that your behaviour back there was simply disgraceful—there are no other words for it—and you must never, never, do you hear me? never do that sort of thing again. If you can’t restrain yourself from upsetting the other passengers with your silly jakes then you really shouldn’t fly at all. I’m afraid that in this country we just don’t behave like that.”

  I have often had cause to wonder, both then and since, at that effort­less tone of authority which seems to come so naturally to the English upper-middle-class female, whether the genuine article or (as I suspect in this case) one promoted from the ranks. I spent over half my life as a career officer at sea, on land and in the air; leading men under fire aboard ships, in the control rooms of submarines and on a dozen battlefields from the hills of north China to the Paraguayan chaco. Yet I could never hope to equal the faultless self-confid
ence of that young woman’s voice: as if only a moral degenerate or a person utterly devoid of decency could possibly fail to do as they were told. I suppose it was the result of three centuries of being able to lay down the law to the natives wherever the guns of the Royal Navy could reach. What a pity, I think now, that she should have been born into an age when the natives were fast acquiring bigger and better guns of their own.

  When we arrived at my sister-in-law’s house we discovered that Edith’s mother had already been dead several hours, so we might just as well not have bothered. Not surprisingly, Edith insisted on returning by sea, saying that she would far rather remain on Jersey for the rest of her life, sleeping under hedges if necessary, than ever fly again.

  A silly incident really, and I must apologise for having rambled on so and bored you with it. But I was reminded of it by that silly film on television. And it made me cast my mind back even further to events forty years earlier still: to my brief but hectic career in the summer and autumn of 1916 as a flier for the Noble House of Austria: not quite four months with the Austro-Hungarian Army Flying Service, followed by a period of nine weeks with the Imperial and Royal Navy’s air arm. After Sister Assumpta had helped me up to my room that evening (I can still manage the stairs on my own but they prefer someone to be with me), I took out my old photograph album and began leafing through the pages.

  The Sisters brought me down here in May, after I had suffered so badly from bronchial asthma in Ealing the previous summer. It was to have been only a short seaside holiday, but they have shown no disposi­tion to move me back and anyway, a lengthy military career has taught me that nothing lasts quite so long as a temporary posting. No, I suppose that I might as well die here as there, almost on the shore of the great ocean which is now the only fatherland to which I feel any attachment whatever. And anyway, we have to be practical about these things. I understand that the Sisters have a cheaper-by-the-dozen concession with the Swansea and West Glamorgan Co-op and receive no less than ten books of stamps for each funeral, which makes no small contribution to the Order of the Perpetual Veneration’s finances over the course of a year. They are not allowed to do it back in Ealing because the Order’s chaplain, a ferocious old bigot called Father Czogala, holds the Co-operative retail movement to be a part of the worldwide Jewish-Bolshevik-Masonic conspiracy. But down here they are far enough away from his rantings to have some discre­tion about their trading arrangements. I have enquired of Mother Superior whether she could get the Co-op to bury me at sea—no nonsense about a coffin; just a seaman-like shroud of canvas and a couple of bricks tied to my feet—but she is dead set against the notion, I fear. Being a land­locked people the Poles like to have a grave to mourn beside (though no one at all is left to mourn beside mine), and anyway, she tells me that the local Co-op are reluctant to do sea burials after a distressing incident a few months ago, when hake fishermen trawled up a coffin off Tenby. So I suppose that I shall just have to be content with being devoured by worms like the rest.

  But there, I am wandering again. Yes, what about the photograph album? Well, the photograph album covers the years 1915 to 1918, kept with the Imperial and Royal War Ministry’s permission as the basis for a post-war book about the career of an Austro-Hungarian submarine. It was restored to me back in May by a quite extraordinary stroke of luck after it had turned up among the possessions of a dead Ukrainian emigre in a west London bed-sitter. Most of the surviving photographs detail my career as a k.u.k. U-Boat captain: Linienschiffsleutnant Ottokar, Ritter von Prohaska, submarine ace of the Mediterranean theatre and holder of Old Austria’s highest military honour the Knight’s Cross of the Military Order of Maria Theresa. It was these faded pictures that provided the background for my reminiscences when Kevin and Sister Elabieta prevailed upon me to tape-record them some weeks ago. But one photograph—and one only— remains from those months in late 1916 when I was taking an enforced break from submarining and instead doing my best to get myself killed in the air. I gazed at it that evening by the light of the bedside lamp.

  Faded and sepia-grey with the passage of seventy years, it shows a group of men standing in front of an aeroplane on a sunlit, stone-littered field fringed by a few wooden huts and canvas hangars. By the foliage on the trees in the background, it looks like early September or thereabouts, and in the distance one can see a low range of eroded, bare mountains. The two men are wearing leather flying overalls with helmets and goggles, and are accompanied by four mechanics in the baggy grey uniforms and high- fronted peaked caps of Austrian soldiers. The taller of the two airmen is clearly me as I was then: erect, confident, with binoculars slung around my neck and a map case under my arm, every centimetre the Habsburg career officer. The creature standing beside me however is barely recognisable as a human being at all: at least a head and a half shorter, hunch-shouldered, bandy-legged, with a prognathous beetle-browed face scowling out from under the brim of his flying helmet like something from a zoo cage or a fairground side-show. This is—or was—my personal chauffeur, Feldpilot- Zugsfuhrer Zoltan Toth—or Toth Zoltan as he would have styled himself back in his native Hungary.

  As for the aeroplane behind us, even if it were not for the black Maltese crosses on the tail and beneath the lower wings, one would scarcely need to be an expert on aviation history to identify it as one of that numerous fam­ily of German-designed two-seater reconnaissance biplanes of the First World War: a large, squared-off, uncompromising machine without much pretension to grace or refinement, only the sturdy utilitarian good looks of a well-bred carthorse. It stands there behind us on that field, rearing up in indignation on its large-wheeled undercarriage as if to say “What the devil do you mean?” its short nose occupied by a six-cylinder inline engine, and with the space between that and the upper wing’s leading edge occupied by the clumsy box-radiator which gives it away to the expert as an Austrian machine: to be precise, a Hansa-Brandenburg CI.

  In fact, if the expert really knew his stuff he might be able to date the photograph to 1916 or thereabouts by the fact that the aeroplane is still not in camouflage paint but left in its natural colours: gleaming varnished plywood for the fuselage and clear-doped linen for the wings, the latter so translucent (I now notice) that if I look carefully I can just make out the black crosses on the upper wings showing through on the underside. One can also just see the number on the fuselage side, 26.74, and the name, Zoska, bequeathed to us by some earlier Polish crew. Curious now to think that this was probably the only aeroplane in the entire history of aviation ever to have been flown in Latin.

  Strange also how merely touching the grainy surface of that faded photograph evokes all the smells of those months so many years ago, rather like one of those children’s ornamental stickers (Mr Dabrowski’s great-granddaughter showed me one last summer), where scratching it with a fingernail liberates a pungent odour of peppermint or cinnamon. I have only to touch it and back come all the various scents of seventy years ago, flying over the now forgotten battlefields of the Austro-Italian Front: the smell of early-morning dew on the tyre-crushed grass of the airfields; the smell of petrol and cellulose dope and lubricating oil on hot engines; the warm sweet-sour perfume of mahogany plywood; the reek of cordite and fresh blood; and the nauseating rotten-egg stench of anti­aircraft shellbursts. And the smell of burning wood and linen left hanging in the thin, cold air, flavoured sometimes with a sinister taint like that of fat burning in a frying-pan.

  I never spoke or even thought much about it in the years that followed: we had lost the war, while I had lost my country and my career and had a new life to build for myself. Many of the memories were distressing—in fact are painful to me even now, a lifetime after the events. And to tell you the truth, I very much doubted whether anyone would be at all inter­ested. But young Kevin and Sister Elgbieta tell me that I am now one of the very few left who remember it all. So perhaps now that I have at last committed my U-Boat reminiscences to posterity I might as well tell you about my flying career as
well. It may perhaps interest you; and if nothing else it will help me to pass the time before the undertakers come to screw down the lid on me. You will probably think some of the tales a little improbable, but there you are, I am afraid that I can do nothing about that: Austria-Hungary was a rather improbable sort of country, and in the year 1916 flying was still a decidedly eccentric sort of thing to be doing, so much so that the psychiatric tests which became de rigueur for aspirant fliers in the Second World War were held to be completely unnecessary in the First since, by definition, anyone who volunteered to fly must be not quite right in the head—or if he was not already, very soon would be. I hope that these yarns of mine may at least entertain you, and perhaps give you some idea as well of what it was like to go up in an aeroplane in those few brief years when men took to the air wearing the two-headed-eagle emblem of the Holy Roman Empire.

  2 KNIGHT ON A BICYCLE

  I first began to notice it that morning about an hour after dawn, as the train stopped to take on water at the station in that wide, high wind-swept defile know to us in those days as the Adelsberg Pass, where the railway line from Vienna crosses the last range of moun­tains before Trieste. It seemed to bounce to and fro between the scrubby, eroded slopes of limestone and come at us from all directions at once: not a distinct rumbling or booming as I had expected but a faint, sinister, barely audible shuddering of the air, irregular but incessant, as if some vast sheet of tin were being shaken somewhere away over the mountains. It told me—as if there should have been any doubt on the matter—that we were getting near the war zone. For this was the last week of July 1916, and only a few score kilometres away, along the valley of the River Isonzo, the Italian armies were preparing for their next assault on the lines guarding the south-western frontier of our great multi-national empire. I was now approaching the zone of the armies, which began just beyond Adelsberg. Soon I too, like perhaps thirty million others, would become a subject of that new state which had been carved out of the body of Europe over the past eighteen months: the Front, that strange linear kingdom hundreds of kilometres long, but sometimes only metres wide, which now snaked across northern France and through the marshes of Volhynia and along the crest of the Alps—a curious country, where the inhabitants were ex­clusively male and, although mostly under twenty-five, suffered a mortality rate so high that the population could be kept up only by constant immi­gration; a strange topsy-turvy land where men lived underground, worked by night and slept by day, and courted instant death if they appeared in the open for a couple of seconds. It was a hungry land as well, one that produced nothing whatever but which consumed so prodigally that the entire economic life of the world was now devoted to feeding it. Soon I too would cross its borders and become one of its subjects. For how long exactly remained to be seen.