considerate it had been of previous generations (I thought) to have built so many hill-top monasteries around Gorz—Monte Vecchio and San Gabriele and Monte Santo. As a sceptic I doubted their religious efficacy; but there was no denying that as air-navigation beacons they took some beating, stuck up there on their mountain-peaks and painted white and yellow to stand out against the dark green pine forests. Meanwhile, away to westward, the guns flashed from time to time among the wooded hills across the Isonzo.
The sun was well up as we passed over the town of Gorz: still largely undamaged despite the closeness of the lines. The castle and the twin- domed cathedral were clearly visible in the early-morning light, and the silvery ribbon of the Isonzo branching and rejoining among the summer- dry banks of pebbles as it made its way towards the sea. Then we crossed the trench lines, which here climbed up from the valley floor to wind among the devastated forests of Podgora and Monte Sabotino on the west bank of the Isonzo. It was around here if anywhere that we would meet flak artillery fire. I peered ahead apprehensively—then saw three quick red flashes and puffs of dirty black smoke in the sky far ahead of us. A feeling of intense relief surged through me. Utterly feeble: so typical of the Italians and their charming incompetence. If that was the best they could do then—It was like a sudden, heavy kick in the backside: three or four shells bursting below us with a concussion that knocked the air out of my lungs and tossed the aeroplane around much as a number of badminton players will bat a shuttlecock from one to the other. I clutched the cockpit edge in alarm as Toth looked down, snorted in disgust and began to weave the aeroplane from side to side to put the gunners off their aim. I looked up and saw that Schraffl—now well above us —was doing the same. Other shells followed, but none came as close as that early group, and within a minute or two we were well beyond the lines and out of reach. A few puffs of smoke hung in the sky astern as if to say “You are lucky this time, porci Austriaci, but there’s always another day . . .” Twenty minutes later we were approaching Palmanova from the west.
Because everything happens so much faster, and in three dimensions instead of two, air navigation has always been a rather hit-or-miss business compared with position-finding at sea. I imagine that this is still largely true even now; and in those far-off times seventy years ago it was true—how do you say?—with brass knobs on it. Even so, it would have required a complete imbecile not to have recognised the town of Palmanova, because I think that in the whole of Europe there can scarcely be another settlement so instantly recognisable from the air. I whistled in admiration as we flew over it, so lost in wonder that I almost forgot to check the time and line us up for our photographic run along the railway line. I suppose that in the years since, the growth of suburbs and factory estates must have blurred its outlines; but as I saw it that July morning it still possessed that pristine purity of form in which its builders had left it: a perfect Renaissance fortress-town laid out like a star of David with successive rings of earthworks—lunettes and ravelins and bastions— surrounding it in what could well have been an engraving from a Leonardo da Vinci treatise on the art of fortification. It was so perfect that I half expected to see a scrolled cartouche in the fields near by with a pair of dividers, a scale of yards and a copperplate legend: “Senatus Serenissimae Republicae Venetii castrum et oppidum Palmae Novae aedificavit anno domini 1580,” or something similar. It suddenly occurred to me that Toth and I were among the very few people who had ever had the privilege to see the place from above, exactly as its architects had designed it.
But we had more important things to do that morning than study sixteenth-century military engineering. More technologically advanced and far less aesthetically pleasing ways of killing people were our immediate concern as we lined up to run along the railway track leading towards Udine. Toth brought us down until the altimeter read exactly the three thousand metres prescribed by our orders. I pulled back the cuff of my flying overall and glanced at my wristwatch. Even in July over Italy the air was near-freezing this high up, and I felt the cold suddenly bite at my exposed skin. Right on time: the seconds hand was just sweeping up towards 0630. Really this was too easy. I glanced down and saw the dark oblong stacks of shells piled up neatly alongside the railway track for a good two or three kilometres. Then I bent down to slide open the hatch in the cockpit floor. As the hands of the watch touched 0630 I pulled the lever for the first exposure.
My attention was not entirely devoted to working the camera lever every five seconds: in fact ever since we had left Caprovizza I had been ceaselessly scanning the sky above and astern of us for the first sight of anything suspicious. I must say that I was somewhat apprehensive about this. Being a naval officer my eyesight was excellent; but I suspected that the skills of a good U-Boat look-out—like the trick of never looking directly at the horizon but always slightly above it—might not be entirely applicable in the air. I had also, I must admit, something well short of total confidence in the means by which I was to defend us if we were attacked from behind.
The 8mm Schwarzlose had been the Austro-Hungarian Army’s standard machine gun since 1906 or thereabouts, selected after an exhaustive series of competitive trials in which it alone had been able to meet the War Ministry’s stringent specification as regards price. I suppose that the thing might have been just about adequate for a peacetime army, but for fighting a world war it was a very dubious contraption indeed. Whereas most other machine guns in service around the world were operated by muzzle-gas, Herr Schwarzlose had chosen to make his design work by recoil—and had then (for some quite unaccountable reason) decided to dispense with the locking system generally considered necessary to hold a machine gun breech shut while each round is fired. These twin eccentricities meant that the Schwarzlose had to have a very short barrel—and thus mediocre range and accuracy, not to mention a picturesque gout of flame as each round left the muzzle.
It also necessitated a massive breech block, like a miniature blacksmith’s anvil, so that its inertia would prevent it from being blown back into the gunner’s face. This in its turn meant a further loss of range, because so much of the energy from each shot was absorbed in kicking the breech open. As a result its rate of fire was poor: about four hundred shots per minute on paper but barely three-quarters of that in practice.
And that was just the army version: the air Schwarzlose, which now rested behind me on its rails ready for action, was a still further declension of mediocrity. Unlike the excellent Parabellum—standard observer’s gun in the German two-seaters—it had no shoulder-stock to allow the gunner to keep his aim however violently the pilot was throwing the aeroplane about the sky. Instead it had a pair of handles like those of a child’s toy scooter. The water-jacket had been removed to save weight; but this had only made the aim even more uncertain since it abolished the foresight, and also meant that we could fire bursts of only twelve or so shots at a time, for fear of burning the barrel. As for the ammunition feed, it consisted of a canvas belt of five hundred rounds coiled in a metal drum on the side of the thing. This belt would always absorb some damp in the early mornings, waiting out on the airfields, and even in summer this would often freeze in the upper air, causing the gun to jam. This was bad enough, but our gun that morning was an early model—pensioned off no doubt from the Army—in which each cartridge had to be lubricated by a little oil-pump as it went into the breech so that the empty case would extract afterwards. This oil would become sticky in the cold, so that even if the gun would still fire it would slow down to two hundred rounds or so per minute, making it sound like an exhausted woodpecker on a hot summer’s afternoon. All things considered, I think that a Singer sewing machine would have been about as much use for defending ourselves—as well as being a good deal lighter.
In the event though it looked as if the wretched Schwarzlose might not be needed that morning, there in the summer sky above the Friulian Plain. I pulled the lever to expose plate number thirty, heard it clack into the box and then turned thankfully to Toth to tap him on the shoulder and signal “Finished—head for home.” I was glad of this, because cloud was coming in fast from the west: white cauliflowers of cumulus which were for the moment above us, but which seemed to be coming down to our altitude. I looked up and saw Schraffl’s aeroplane disappear into the cloud above us, reappear for a moment and then vanish again as we turned for home. He had seen us I was sure, but to make certain that he knew we were finished I fired a white flare just before we lost sight of one another.
When I next caught sight of an aeroplane, about three kilometres astern and slightly above us, it took me some moments to realise that I was not looking at Schraffl and Jahudka’s machine. I could not see exactly what it was, but head-on it was most certainly not a Brandenburger, whose inward-sloping struts gave it an unmistakable appearance when viewed from the front. It was a biplane, but of what kind I could not say except that it appeared to be somewhat smaller than ours—though still too large for a Nieuport—and that it was most certainly closing with us at speed. Then I saw another one, at the same altitude but about two kilometres astern of the first. Whoever they were, they had seen us and were gaining on us fast. Heart pounding, I turned around and seized Toth by the shoulder. He looked around to where I was pointing, and nodded casually. I signalled for “Full throttle” by thrusting my fist forward. He nodded, and eased the throttle lever forward a little. Meanwhile I had turned to fumble desperately with the machine gun, releasing the clamp which held it still on its mounting-rails and jerking back the cocking lever. Damn them, where were Schraffl and Jahudka? They were supposed to be escorting us and ought to be manoeuvring now to drop down on the Italians as they came in astern of us. And why were we moving so
