No doubt the townsfolk of Haidenschaft were doing well enough out of the war, standing up or lying down. But there would have been little disaffection in these parts anyway. Beneath a thin Austro-Italian veneer the people of this region were mostly Slovenes, and the Slovenes had every reason to support Habsburg Austria because the alternative was so much worse. The Italians claimed this whole area as their own terri- tory—in fact had been secretly promised it by Britain and France once the war was over—and it was widely feared that if they ever managed to lay hands upon it they would soon set about Italianising the inhabitants. The anxieties of the local people were well grounded as it turned out, for in 1920 Italy annexed this whole region and embarked upon a vigorous campaign against the Slovene language and customs, making liberal use of castor oil and rubber truncheons to persuade the natives of the superiority of Italian culture.
For its part Vienna had always tended to look down upon the Slovenes as a “Dienervolk,” a peasant people without a culture or literature or educated class of its own. Yet of all the Habsburg peoples in those years I suppose that none fought as bravely or as long in the service of Old Austria. Ethnographers used to say in those days that the Slovenes were the original stock from which all the Slav peoples sprang, preserved in their purity by centuries of isolation in their mountain valleys. I have no idea what truth there was in that theory: probably like most “racial science” it was complete twaddle. But certainly the Slovenes had a characteristic look about them: a squarish, fair-haired people with strong, regular, wide-mouthed faces and long straight-bridged noses and grey-blue eyes. Even in 1916 the country people still wore what would now be described as “folk costume”—wide-brimmed felt hats, embroidered waistcoats and wide breeches for the men; bodices and brightly striped flounced skirts for the women—for the simple reason that they had never worn anything else. Relations between these villagers and the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe were very cordial, despite the odd haystack demolished by a forced landing. Many a crashed Austrian airman in those years would return to his flying field lying in the straw of a peasant cart, accompanied by the entire village with the priest at its head and surrounded by baskets of hard-boiled eggs and curd cakes to sustain him during his stay in hospital.
Relations were also warm at a more personal level, as I was to discover one evening early in August. I had been out for a stroll from the flying field that afternoon, having nothing else to do. I had smashed my right shin in a flying accident in 1913 and although the surgeons had done an exemplary job on me, I still had to use a stick sometimes and found that the leg tended to stiffen unless I walked a good deal. I was returning along the single, dusty street of the hamlet of Caprovizza—or Koprivijca, as the local people called it—when I saw coming towards me my pilot Zugsfuhrer Zoltan Toth. And on his arm was a quite delightful village girl of about eighteen or nineteen, flax-blonde and dressed in the flower- embroidered bodice and flared, red-blue-green-striped skirt of the locality. Toth had just been awarded the Silver Bravery Medal for his exploits in the spring—much to Hauptmann Kraliczek’s disgust—and this now clanked gallantly against the Truppenkreuz on the breast of his best tunic (we still wore medals on our service dress in those days, ribbons folded into triangles as laid down by regulations). I must say that he looked very dapper, and he saluted me with only a trace of irony as we passed, the girl on his arm smiling winsomely and bidding me good-evening in German. Funny, I thought as I walked on: strange what the company of a pretty woman will do for even the ugliest of men; the fellow normally looks like a mentally retarded ape, but put a handsome country girl on his arm and her radiance seems to reflect from him. Probably just a village pick-up, I supposed: a local doxy prepared to roll with him behind a hayrick for a few kronen and a little diversion from the embraces of the village youths. But even so, Toth had certainly done pretty well for himself in the doxy line. Perhaps he possessed that most unaccountable of skills, a way with women.
As it turned out I could not have been more wrong about the girl and Toth’s attachment to her, or have felt more ashamed of myself for having even imagined such farmyard goings-on. For the next morning, while bicycling through Caprovizza to post a letter to my wife at Haidenschaft post office, I nearly ran into the same girl coming around a corner with a basket of eggs on her arm. She curtsied prettily and dimpled, and enquired after my health in accented but still perfectly creditable German. I replied in Slovene, which I knew quite well since it is very similar to my native Czech. This delighted her. I learnt that her name was Magdalena Loncarec and that she was the daughter of the village blacksmith, who also ran a bicycle shop and farm-machinery repair business. She had been to convent school in Gorz, she told me, and had been training to be a schoolmistress when the war and the approach of the Front had shut the college. She had met Toth in May when he had come into her father’s shop to have a loop spliced in the end of a snapped bracing-wire. The two had fallen for one another at first sight—God alone knows how, since my first instinct on seeing Toth, had I been a young woman, would have been to scream and run for my life—and now they were inseparable. Curious, I asked how they managed to communicate. After all, Toth’s German was almost nonexistent, so far as I knew he spoke no Slovene, and I doubted very much whether she spoke Magyar.
“Oh,” she said, “in Latin. I studied it to the sixth grade and I speak Italian anyway, so it’s no problem for me. As for Zolli, Herr Leutnant, he’s such a clever man you’d never believe: ever so well-read and so kind and considerate as well. I don’t think there’s anyone in the whole world like him. He trained in a seminary before the war, you know, and wanted to be a priest. But he’s given that up now. When the war’s over we’re going to get married and take over my father’s business with my brother, when he comes back from Russia; and we’re making plans to set up an air mail- delivery service—Zolli says that there’ll be lots of aeroplanes being sold off cheap once it’s all over. He’s full of good ideas like that and he knows so many things. Really, Herr Leutnant, you don’t know how lucky you are to have such a clever man flying you around.” She grasped my arm and gazed at me with her great, long-lashed blue eyes, so that despite myself my knees suddenly felt unsteady. “Please, Herr Leutnant,please promise me that you’ll look after him and see that he comes to no harm. Don’t let him do anything dangerous.” I mumbled something to the effect that I would do my best to fulfil her wishes, and kissed her hand as we parted. I was not sure about this afterwards: Old Austria had very definite ideas concerning what courtesies could be paid by whom to whom, and an officer kissing the hand of a Slovene village girl was something that was certainly well outside the accepted codes of conduct. Yet this Magdalena seemed so unlike any village maiden that I had ever met: so modest and unaffected, yet so poised and graceful and ladylike. But courting in Latin though: “O cara amatrix mea, convenire cum mihi hora septis ante tab- ernam . . .” No, no, it was all too much.
At last, on 2 August, Toth and I received orders to make ready for a flying mission the next morning. In the temporary absence of our usual mount we were to take up one of the Flik’s Lloyd CII biplanes. Our task, it appeared, was to be artillery-spotting with the aid of wireless. But this was to be no ordinary observation for a common-or-garden field-artillery battery. Instead we would be spotting for a single gun in an extremely difficult operation far away from our usual sector of the Front: an operation so delicate and vital that 5th Army Headquarters was anxious that the observer should be an experienced gunnery officer with a sound command of Morse code. For that reason the choice had fallen on me: I had indeed been a gunnery officer—though aboard a battleship long before the war—while as a sailor my command of Morse, though not quite as good as that of a full- time telegraphist, was still quite good enough for what was required.
It was plain at first sight that the Lloyd CII was an aeroplane of a somewhat earlier vintage than the sturdy Hansa-Brandenburg: a pre-war design in fact, marked by long, narrow, swept-back wings and by a much sharper nose and more fish-like fuselage than that of the Brandenburger. I understand that it got its curious name because the factory which built it in Budapest had been part-owned by the Austro-Lloyd shipping line. Certainly it had taken many twists and random convolutions of events over the years to get the name of a seventeenth-century London- Welsh coffee-house proprietor attached to an Austro-Hungarian warplane. For me, one lasting consequence was that I was never able to see the sign “Lloyd’s Bank” in Ealing Broadway without having a sudden faint odour of petrol and cellulose dope wafted to me from all those years ago.
The Lloyd CII had been chosen for this particular mission because although it was somewhat slower than the Brandenburger in level flight, and a good deal less manoeuvrable, its payload was larger and its performance at high altitudes marginally better (one of them had in fact taken the world altitude record in the summer of 1914). This ability to carry loads to great heights was going to be very necessary, I learnt as a staff officer briefed me for the flight, because we were to be flying over the Julian Alps—over Monte Nero, to be precise: 2,245 metres above sea level, which was not far short of the effective ceiling for a two-seater aeroplane in those days, especially when it would also be carrying the full weight of an airborne wireless transmitter.
So far in 1916 there had been little fighting in the mountainous sectors of the Isonzo Front north of Tolmein. There had been some sharp encounters here in late 1915, as their initial ardour carried the Italians across the Isonzo to capture some of the mountain ridges beyond. But, as in the Alps proper, the lie of the land—that is to say, most of it standing on end—had allowed us to hold it against them with only a handful of defenders. Most of the time in fact all that we had to do was to roll boulders over the edge of thousand-metre precipices on to the
