the mountain valley. I suppose that there must still be a miniature lake there, interrupting the course of the stream and providing puzzlement for the area’s natural historians. I like to think that, now the trees have grown back around it, the village children from Caporetto go up there to fish and to swim on summer afternoons, unaware of the events that took place in that quiet valley when their great-grandfathers were young. I signalled back “K300” as we banked away once more to await the Italian reply. Neither contender could move of course: the Italian howitzers, though (we understood) mounted on wheels, would have taken several hours to dig out of their emplacements and haul away. As for our Skoda weapon, it was concreted into its emplacement and could only be released with the aid of blasting charges and pneumatic drills. Neither contender could do anything more than await the enemy’s riposte. It was like watching some bizarre medieval duel to the death, prescribed perhaps in a fable to establish which suitor would have the hand of the princess; the two opponents with their feet set in tubs of mortar and taking turns to lunge at one another through a paper screen, their thrusts guided only by the calls of the spectators in the gallery.
The Italians fired a second salvo after three minutes or so, just as we were coming back over them. It was more closely grouped this time, and it landed only four hundred metres or so from our gun. Meanwhile our third shot went wide again: two hundred metres over and one hundred too far right. Damn them, what was wrong with our gunners this morning? Heavy artillery shooting was never an exact science: shot falls varied because of wind and air density and the precise chemistry of each propellant charge—and by 1916 Austrian cordite was becoming very uneven in quality. But even so their shooting was not up to the usually high standards of the Imperial and Royal Artillery. Did they realise what peril they were in? At this rate it was more than likely that the Italian battery would find them before they found the Italians.
Watched from my position, four hundred metres up in the singing cold air, there was something dreadfully, sickeningly fascinating about observing this duel of monsters taking place below us: watching the great flashes that shook the trees and the sudden plumes of smoke, feeling the aeroplane shudder around us as the shock waves reached it. Sitting there like some indifferent god, tapping the Morse key and pencilling crosses on the map, it was only too easy to forget that in a few minutes one battery or the other would be reduced to a smoking pile of twisted steel, smeared with the blood and entrails of perhaps fifty of my fellow-men. What would happen if the wireless broke down, or if the Italian flak gunners managed to knock us out of the sky? We had been at this for some ten minutes now. The Italians were well up in wireless and might soon contrive to jam our signal. The terrible iron logic of war had taken over. Down there was a large number of young Italian soldiers who had never done me the slightest harm and whom I would cheerfully greet as friends if I met them in some cafe. Yet here I was, bending all my efforts to secure their deaths as if we had always been the most mortal of enemies. Sitting here in an armchair it sounds completely insane; but up there that morning a lifetime ago it made chilling sense.
In the end it was them and not us. The Skoda gun’s fifth shell landed just on the edge of the hundred-metre circle within which I judged a shell- burst would put the battery out of action. After that, things happened with bewildering rapidity. The smoke dispersed in the breeze to reveal a patch of devastated forest. But then a confused series of flashes and spurts of fire began to spread through the still standing trees. I suppose that it was the usual story: that in his haste to load and fire the battery commander had allowed too many propellant charges to accumulate on the lines, so that the flash of one catching fire set off the next in a powder-train which finally led back to the ammunition dump. I hope that some of the Italians survived, crouching terrified in their slit-trenches as the world exploded about them. But somehow I doubt it: not when I saw the entire ponderous carriage of one of the howitzers being tossed into the air as casually as a child’s toy. Within a few seconds a vast ochre-coloured cloud of smoke was boiling into the summer sky like some obscene toadstool. By the time we were safely back over our side of Monte Nero it must have been visible to the Austrian gunners down in their emplacement, deafened and dazed with muzzle-blast despite their padded helmets. I tapped the signal “V” on the Morse key, then followed it in a fit of patriotic exultation with a display of white and red rockets and the message “V-I-V-A-T.” Our mission had been accomplished.
Our orders were that once firing had ceased we were to make for the flying field of Flik 2 at Veldes. Our route would take us over the long, narrow Wocheiner Lake which lay in a deep trough of the mountains below the Triglav massif, about ten kilometres to the east. I shut down the transmitter and scribbled another note in Latin to direct Toth to Veldes, where we would land and rest awhile before refuelling and heading back to Caprovizza—once more over the Italian side of the lines, if we took any notice of Kraliczek’s mysterious orders. The only thing that puzzled me was where that damned Eindecker of ours had got to. It should have been waiting over Monte Nero for us when we arrived, but I had seen no sign of it. Engine trouble? Muddied instructions from the Air Liaison Officer at Marburg? Probably the latter, I thought: none of us had much of an opinion of staff officers. Anyway, it scarcely mattered now that we were on our way home.
I first saw the speck in the sky to the north-east as we came within sight of the Wocheinersee. Must be the Eindecker, I thought, and peered at it more out of curiosity than anything else. It was a rather disturbing sensation to find as I tried to steady my binoculars on the cockpit edge that instead of the expected monoplane front-view of an Eindecker, I was looking at what was quite unmistakably a small, rotary-engined biplane with its lower wings markedly shorter than the upper and with a machine gun mounted on the top wing.
I dropped the binoculars and scrawled a note for Toth: “Festina— hostis insequitur nobis!” He turned around and nodded, but did nothing. I thumped him on the back and wrote “Accelera, inepte!” so fiercely that the point of my pencil snapped off. The Nieuport was gaining on us fast as we ambled along, seemingly unconcerned. What was the matter with this Hungarian imbecile? Did he want us to die? Before long the Italian was only about twenty metres astern, jockeying on our tail some way above us now that he had seen that we carried no machine gun. No doubt he was congratulating himself on having surprised two such dim- witted Austrians, and was not in too much of a hurry to despatch us, much as a cat will play for a while with a sparrow before biting its head off. I turned to shake my pilot and urge him to give full throttle—and saw the Italian pilot laugh as he watched his victims now apparently fighting one another. I drew my Steyr pistol from its holster, intent on making even a futile attempt to defend ourselves. As for Toth though, he merely looked over his shoulder at the Italian single-seater. His face wore the malicious half-smile of an idiot child. Then he put our nose down a little and opened the throttle. The Italian brought his nose down too to take aim, evidently thinking that we were going to try diving away from him. He had come so close that I could see his tongue clenched in concentration between his white teeth. He would lower his nose until we were in his sights—an unmissable target at less than fifteen metres—and a sudden flickering orange flash would obscure the gun muzzle above his upper wing. That would probably be my last sight in this world. Yet despite the imminence of death, I found that sight of the Nieuport intensely interesting, as I suppose the closeness of danger sharpens all the senses. It was such a pretty little machine I thought, so delicately French: painted a smart silver-grey with black edges to the wings and with the Italian red-white-green tricolour on the rudder. So pleasing to look at, yet so deadly, like a poisonous snake.
I was sure that he was just about to fire when Toth pushed the throttle forward and put our nose down a little more (he had a motor-car mirror fixed above the windshield and had been watching the Italian intently all the time with one eye). The Italian laughed, and brought his nose down as well to regain his aim. Toth replied by making our dive a little steeper. The Italian followed: if we expected to escape him by diving away then we were even greater buffoons than we had seemed at first. His nose came down, and he fired a burst which cracked over our upper wing, snicking the fabric in places. With magisterial calm, Toth merely increased our angle of dive and eased the throttle forward to full speed. We were screaming down at forty-five degrees now as the cobalt-blue lake rushed up towards us. The Italian fired another burst, which just missed. It was certain death for us now, either from bullets or from diving into the lake. I looked about me in terror as the wind howled past. I saw that the fabric on our wings was beginning to ripple and surge as the airframe creaked ominously above the roar of the engine. Then I looked back at the Italian above us, still trying to take aim. We had only a few seconds now to pull out of our dive, and when we did we would come into his sights and be shot to tatters.
It began as a slight flexing of his lower wings, starting at the wingtips and spreading inward to the roots. He tried to pull back the stick, but it was too late: with a great shudder the upper wing of the Nieuport shook itself, then broke away to fly astern, turning over and over in the air like a giant sycamore seed. He hurtled past us out of control and breaking up as Toth lugged at the column to pull us out of our own plunge, only metres above the waters of the lake. I thought that our own airframe was going to break up under the strain, but somehow we managed to level out, then bank away to port to come back to the place where we had parted company with our pursuer. It was a flower-sprinkled Alpine meadow between two pine woods at the head of the lake. Toth brought us in to land on the lush grass while a herd of cows rushed away in panic, bells clunking wildly. We jumped out as the
