confinement to this airfield. As to your pilot here—five days’ solitary arrest on bread and water! Abtreten sofort.”
He turned to leave. I called after him.
“Oh, Herr Kommandant.”
He turned back irritably. “What do you want?”
“I thought that you might like to see this.” I rummaged inside the breast of my flying jacket. “It’s a telegram of congratulation to us from a fellow who claims to be commanding the 5th Army, a chap called Boroevic or something like that. I thought that you might perhaps care to read it out to the assembled ranks on parade this morning.”
He snatched the telegram—and tore it up into tiny pieces before striding back to his office. The fragments fluttered among the grass blades on the field. As I climbed out of the aeroplane I saw the assembled ground crew grinning among themselves in delight. Any old soldier will tell you that, for an enlisted man, being spectator to an exchange of insults between two officers of equal rank is one of the very sweetest pleasures that military life affords.
7 THE GREATER REICH
I suppose that if I had been minded To do so I could have dug out my manual of military law and contested my sentence of five days’ confinement to base. But in the event I was no more troubled by it than Toth was by his own summary condemnation to five days’ close arrest on bread and water. They would have needed to transfer him to Army HQ in Marburg for this anyway, since we had no lock-up ourselves and the Provost Major of the local infantry division had stood firm on regulations and refused to lend Flik 19F the use of a prison cell. And anyway, there were more important things to think about that week, for the next day, 4 August, after an intense nine-hour bombardment, the Italian 3rd Army began its long-awaited offensive: the Sixth Battle of the Isonzo, which merged with the Seventh, Eighth and Ninth Battles into a conflict which was to rage on until the onset of winter.
The Italians captured Monte Sabotino across the river from Gorz after two days of bitter fighting. By the 8th our positions on either side of the town were collapsing under the ferocious barrage, and that night the 5th Army Command decided to pull back the line for fear of being outflanked. So on the morning of 9 August the Italian Army marched triumphantly into the deserted but still largely undamaged town of Gorz: by far the most worthwhile Allied gain of that whole blood-saturated year. With Gorz taken, the action shifted to the south and the approaches to Trieste. The battle for the Carso Plateau had begun, and with it one of the most terrible episodes even of that four- year catalogue of butchery.
I think that one of the hallmarks of the twentieth century must be the way in which the names of the most humdrum and obscure places on the whole of God’s earth have become synonyms for horror, so that the very words themselves seem to twist and buckle under the weight of misery piled upon them. When I was a small boy I remember how we used to pay visits to my grandparents, decayed Polish gentry living in a small manor house on a hard-up country estate some way west of the city of Cracow: how we would get off the train at a typically small, sordid Polish provincial town and hire its one shabby fiacre; and how we would creak and sway the five kilometres or so along the rutted road across the flat fields by the Vistula and pass as we did so a small military-clothing de pot built on land that my grandfather had sold to the War Ministry about 1880. It was barely worth noticing, I remember: five or six wooden huts surrounded by a decrepit fence, and with a black-and-yellow-striped gate which the bored sentry would open from time to time to admit a cartload of tunics and trousers from the Jewish sweatshops in Bielsko-Biala. This was k.u.k. Militarbekleidungs Depot No. 107 Oswi^cim—or Auschwitz, to give it its German name. The collection of huts would pass in 1919 to the Polish Army, who would enlarge it a little; then in 1940 to new and more purposeful owners, who would expand it a great deal and really put the place on the map, so to speak.
It was the same on that dreary limestone plateau east of the Isonzo in the summer of 1916: places that no one had ever heard of—San Martino and Doberdo and Monte Hermada—suddenly turned into field fortresses around which titanic battles raged: lives squandered by the hundred thousand for places which were just names on a local map—and sometimes not even that, so that the hills for which entire divisions perished had to be denoted by their map-height above sea level. So it was at Verdun that summer. I saw some photographs, in a colour supplement a few months ago: the Meuse battlefields seventy years after. It appears that even today large areas are still derelict, that the incessant shelling and gassing so blasted away the topsoil and poisoned the earth that the landscape is still a semi-desert of exposed rock and old craters, covered (where anything grows at all) by a thin scrub.
The chief difference, I suppose, between Verdun now and the Carso then is that, so far as I could make out, the Carso had always looked like that: a landscape reminiscent of Breughel’s “Triumph of Death” even before the armies got to work on it. Indeed I think that the whole of Europe could scarcely have contained a piece of ground intrinsically less worth fighting over than the Carso—or the “Krst” as its few mostly Slovene inhabitants called it, as if the place was too poor even to afford vowels. It was an undulating, worn-down plateau of low limestone hills devoid of trees, grass or any vegetation whatever except for a few meagre patches of willow and gorse which had managed to get roots down into the fissures in the rock. What little soil there was had collected by some freak of nature into puddle-like hollows in the rock, called “dolinas,” and was bright red in colour, like pools of fresh blood. What little rain water there was had a way of disappearing as if bewitched into pot-holes in the rock, to reappear perversely a dozen kilometres away where an underground stream came out into the open. Baked by the sun all summer and swept by freezing winds all winter, the Carso was scourged in between times by the notorious bora, the sudden, violent north wind of the Adriatic coastline which would work itself up in these parts to nearhurricane force in the space of a few minutes, and had been known to blow over trains of goods wagons on the more exposed stretches of the Vienna—Trieste railway line.
At the best of times the Carso was a place such as even an early- Christian hermit might have thought twice about inhabiting. But as a battlefield it was a hell all of its own: a howling grey-brown desolation of broken rock spattered with dried blood and the dirty yellowish residue of TNT. The peculiar horror of the Carso fighting—the local specialty that distinguished it from the other great abattoirs of those years—was the enormous number of the wounded who lost their eyesight; small wonder, when every shellburst would send knife-sharp splinters of rock whining in all directions. Before long every last stone, every pulverised village of this wilderness would be stained with agony: places like the ruined market square in Sagrado, where a thousand or so Italians had staggered back from the trenches to die, remains of a brigade which had just been gassed with phosgene; or the little valley leading up on to the plateau from the hamlet of Selz, known as “the Cemetery of the Hungarians” after an entire Honved battalion had blundered into it in the smoke and confusion of a counter-attack and had been wiped out to a man by the Italian machine guns.
Before the war, if it had been mine to sell, I would cheerfully have sold you the entire Carso Plateau for a gulden. Yet now whole armies would immolate themselves for it as if it contained all the riches of the world. Before the war the eroded hills of Fajtji Hrib and Cosich and Debeli Vrh had been unvisited, known only to a few Slovene shepherds. Now their barren slopes and gullies would become the graveyards of a generation. When your great dramatist wrote of a little patch of ground that is not tomb or continent enough to bury the slain, I think that he must have had the Carso in mind. That summer of 1916, they lay everywhere, visible through any trench periscope: the sad, sunken bundles of rags tumbled among the rocks or sprawled across the thickets of barbed wire where they had fallen, their only passing-bells the frenzied jangling of the tin cans which our men used to hang from the wire as alarm signals. Even a thousand metres above the battlefields that August one could detect the sinister, sweetish taint of decay. By some black joke on the part of biochemistry, it had (for my nose at any rate) a faint hint of overripe strawberries to it. Many years later my second wife Edith bought a lipstick perfumed with just such a synthetic strawberry scent. It brought back so many disturbing memories that I had to ask her to stop using it.
Yes, I speak as though I saw it all. But then I did, as near as makes no difference. The Carso sector was tiny—perhaps ten kilometres in total— so we airmen could see pretty well the whole of it as we flew above that terrible greyish-dun landscape: the shallow valleys below us boiling with smoke suffused with orange flame; then coming down sometimes when the murk parted to see the lines of tiny human specks scurrying forward among the shellbursts: the evil greenish-yellow clouds of poison gas and the sudden white puffs of grenades and the boiling
