equivalents might give up after suffering a mere seventy-five per cent casualties. Even so, for two armies conventionally dismissed by military historians as “moderate,” they contrived to do one another frightful damage.
But then, for the k.u.k. Armee the Italian Front was special: the only one where, right up until November 1918, troops from all the nationalities of the Monarchy—even ethnic Italians—would fight with equal enthusiasm against the despised “Wellischen.” Elsewhere, one could be confident that German-Austrian troops would fight pretty well on any front. As for the rest though, the Magyars would fight with some enthusiasm on the Serbian or Romanian Fronts, against their own national rivals, but showed little interest in shooting at the Russians. Likewise the Poles were only too glad to fight the hated Muscovites, but had little concern with the Balkans. Czech and Ruthene regiments were liable to be wobbly on most fronts. But in Italy all nationalities fought, if not outstandingly well, then at least with a measure of enthusiasm.
It sounds perhaps a little strange now, to speak of men being enthusiastic about the prospect of getting themselves killed. But please try to understand that it was a different, less questioning world that we lived in then. Even in the year 1916 it was scarcely possible for those of us who had been through the cadet colleges of the old Monarchy to so much as hear the word “Italien” without suddenly seeing a vision of black and yellow; without hearing the blare of bugles and the “Sommacampagna March” and the steady tramp of boots on the dusty summer roads; Novara and Custozza; Mantua-Peschiera-Verona-Legnago; “Graf Radetzky, Edler degen, schwur’s sein’ Kaisers Feind zu fegen aus der falschen Lombardei . . .” It was still an enticing prospectus, and one in which (naturally) the carnage at Magenta and Solferino tended to be somewhat played down; as did the fact that since 1849 every Austrian campaign in Italy had ended ultimately in defeat and loss of territory, even when the Whitecoats had won on the battlefield.
In those last days of July the storm was clearly about to break. The incessant banging of artillery in the distance had turned to a constant steady, air-trembling rumble as the Italian guns poured shells down upon our trenches, from Monte Sabotino across the Isonzo valley in front of Gorz, then from Monte San Michele around the western rim of the Carso to the coastal marches at Monfalcone. The gun-flashes which lit the night sky to westward had now merged into a constant flickering like that of a failing electric light bulb. Yet for us at Fliegerfeld Caprovizza it was a time of profound idleness. Apart from a few requests from Army HQ in Marburg for photo reconnaissance on the other side of the lines, Flik 19F sat twiddling its thumbs, condemned to inactivity by lack of aircraft. On the last day of the month 5th Army Staff sent a request for a long-range bombing-raid on the railway junction at Udine, the Friulian provincial capital, in the hope—highly optimistic, we all felt—of interrupting the flow of troops and munitions to the Front. A Brandenburger had just come back from repairs at the Fliegeretappenpark in Marburg, so Leutnant Szuborits and Fahnrich Teltzel and their pilots were hastily detailed to set off on a night raid. It was a fiasco, their bombs falling harmlessly in open country. They had got lost, searchlights and flak had put them off their aim when they at last found their target, and in the end the townspeople of Udine had refused to succumb to mass panic and rush out and drown themselves like lemmings in the river. Only Szuborits made it back to file a report. Teltzel and his pilot failed to return and were posted missing, a state in which (I learnt many years later) they remained until 1928, when wood-cutters discovered the wreckage of an aeroplane and a jumble of bones deep in a pine forest amid the hills north of Cormons.
As for myself, sans aeroplane, I was left to kick my heels and try to pass the time as best as I could. This was no easy task I can assure you at k.u.k. Fliegerfeld Caprovizza in the summer of 1916. The flying field itself was just that: a field used the previous year for growing barley, and now used for flying military aircraft, with no modification other than getting an infantry battalion to march up and down it for an afternoon to flatten out the worst of the ruts and hummocks. Amenities there were none; not even a proper canteen for the men. Our sole luxury, compared with Flik 19 at Haidenschaft, was that we were on the banks of the Vippaco. True, the river was low in the summer drought, but in the baking August heat and dust of that valley it was pleasant to be able to bathe in what remained of it, even if the water barely reached knee level. I was particularly glad of this I must say, because I was still condemned to wear my navy-blue serge jacket, my field-grey summer tunic having gone astray in the post on its way up from Cattaro. But in wartime an officer cannot reasonably bathe more than twice a day, and my tent was insufferably hot, and I had soon run out of books to read; so when I was not on duty or filling in Kraliczek’s endless forms I had no choice but to go off exploring.
In truth, there was little enough to explore in the immediate neighbourhood of Haidenschaft. Before the war this part of the world—the Gefurstete Grafschaft Gorz und Gradiska, to give it its official title— had been an obscure and seldom-visited region: a strange little corner of Europe where the Teutonic, Latin and Slav worlds met and overlapped. The Vippaco Valley was moderately fertile, but the stony Carso region to southwards had long been one of the most poverty-stricken parts of the entire Monarchy, fit to stand comparison with Eastern Galicia or the backwoods of Transylvania as an area where most of the men called up for the Army each year were sent home as being too weak and ill-nourished to stand the rigours of military service: some of them with voices that had still not broken at nineteen years of age.
Once upon a time—perhaps back in the fourteenth century or thereabouts—the municipality of Haidenschaft (or Aidussina or Ajdovscina) had evidently been a place of some note, at least to judge from what remained of the town walls that had once surrounded it. In fact I have a vague recollection lurking at the back of my mind that “Count of Haidenschaft” figured somewhere about number fifty-seven among the sixty-odd titles read out at Imperial coronations. But perhaps I am wrong about that: perhaps by the time I arrived there the place had been in decline for so long that not even Habsburg court protocol took cognisance of it any longer. Certainly the town was situated picturesquely enough, nestling beneath the limestone crags of the Selva di Ternova which towered above it to north and east. But otherwise there was little to remark upon. In fact I am not really sure that, whatever its former status, the appellation “town” fairly describes Haidenschaft in the year 1916. It was one of those seedy, sleepy little settlements, scattered in their thousand across the Dual Monarchy, that were not quite large enough to be towns but still too large to be villages, places whose sole reason for existence seemed to be the Habsburg state’s mania for scribbling on sheets of Kanzlei- Doppel paper. Apart from the ochre-painted government offices— the town’s largest building as always—there were two streets and a half-dozen shops, a small town square, the usual miniature corso with its row of chestnut trees, a gendarmery post—and very little else. The houses were Italian-looking, with their crumbling stucco and wide eaves and slatted wooden shutters. But the red roof tiles were still weighted down Slovene- fashion with chunks of limestone to stop them becoming airborne in the bora, while the town’s two peasant-baroque churches, though they had Venetian-style campaniles, both wore on top of these the octagonal onion- domes which are the hallmark of Central Europe. The war had brought airfields and supply dumps and a makeshift hospital in wooden huts just outside the town. But off-duty entertainments were still basic, consisting of two cafes, packed solid now with field grey; a makeshift cinema under awnings rigged against the town wall; and two military brothels: the “Offizierspuff” and the “Mannschaftspuff.”
Ever since losing my virginity in such an establishment in the Brazilian port of Pernambuco in 1902 I had never again set foot in a maison- close except on service business. And even if I had not recently married a delightful woman whom I loved to distraction, I would still certainly have found the commissioned-ranks bordello intensely unappetising: a business (no doubt) of fake champagne and twenty-year-old newly commissioned Herr Leutnants trying to swagger like hard-bitten soldiers of fortune in front of the bored-looking girls. But as for the establishment provided by the War Ministry for the common soldiery, as I walked past it struck me as one of the least alluring suburbs of that peculiar twentieth-century version of hell known as the Front.
Over the years, in the course of my duties as a junior officer leading naval police pickets, I had seen many such places in the seaports of the Mediterranean. But what I remembered of them, I have to admit, was not so much their sleaziness as the rather jolly atmosphere of roistering debauchery that surrounded them: sailors and marines of all nationalities laughing and hitting one another in the street outside among the pimps and accordion players in that seafarer’s elysium still known (I remember) in the Edwardian Royal Navy as “Fiddler’s Green,” or in the French fleet as the “Rue d’Alger.” Here though I was struck by the utter sadness of it all: dead-eyed soldiery on a few hours’ leave from the trenches, queuing patiently two-by-two under the supervision of the Provost NCOs, waiting their turn to exchange five kronen for a two-minute embrace on an oilcloth-covered couch, then trousers on and out into the street again. There they waited in their dust-matted grey uniforms, like animals in the layerage pen at a slaughterhouse; standing as patiently as they would soon queue in the trenches, laden down with stick- grenades and equipment, waiting for the whistles to blow and the ladders to go up against the parapet. It seemed to me that not the least of the horrors of machine-age warfare was the way in which it had brought the assembly- line system even to the time-hallowed business of military fornication.
