subsided into a moan, then ceased altogether.
“Right,” said Friml, “we’d better get back now. I didn’t want to use that second grenade. The Italians’ll soon be calling down artillery on us if they’ve spotted the smoke-puffs. Let’s go. Just get out when I say and follow me.”
The Italians had indeed seen the grenade bursts: we left the crater just as their first shell arrived. After that I have only a very hazy recollection of events as we scrambled crazily from hole to hole with shells dropping all around us. We fell into an old trench and half ran, half crawled along that for some way, tumbling as we did so over dimly glanced things which I was heartily thankful not to have time to examine properly. At last we found the entrance to the tunnel in the wire from which Friml and his companions used to sally forth on their raids, and squirmed our way along it on our bellies like rabbits in a gorse thicket. What seemed like several hours later, we heard at last the challenge of an Austrian sentry. We were safe.
Our hosts were the ninth battalion of Imperial and Royal Infantry Regiment No. 4, “Hoch-und- Deutschmeister”; the city of Vienna’s local regiment. I had seen the old Deutschmeisters back in 1913, swinging proudly along the Ringstrasse in the great parade to mark the centenary of the battle of Leipzig. That had been a different world, and they had been different men. The old k.u.k. Armee was odd among the armies of Europe in having no foot-guards regiments. However, among the Emperor of Austria’s soldiers it was generally recognised that the four Tiroler Kaiserjager regiments were the elite, and that after them the Deutschmeisters were the premier line-infantry regiment, allocated the finest-looking of each year’s crop of recruits. They were all long since gone, dead in Poland and Serbia. The ranks had been refilled several times already, and the Deutschmeisters of 1916 were sorry specimens in comparison with their predecessors of only two years before: undersized, ill- nourished and pathetically young conscripts from the grey slum tenements of Vienna’s outer districts. Clad in shoddy wartime ersatz uniforms, they looked a woebegone lot, even after making allowance for the effects of a prolonged sojourn in the Carso trenches. Not the least of the disturbing effects of service in the front line, I observed, was that it made everyone look alike: lifeless, drawn faces and eyes sunk deep into their sockets. It seemed that the battalion had already been holding this sector without relief since early August, its losses made up by sending new drafts forward into the line by night, or whenever the shelling eased up. Those who had been here since the beginning of the Sixth Battle—perhaps a third of the battalion now—already had that characteristic glazed look that resulted from a long stay at the Front. My second wife Edith had been a nurse in Flanders in 1917, and she told me of the extreme shell-shock cases, the ones whose minds had completely given way, like poor Schraffl’s. But myself, from what I saw during that brief spell in the trenches on the Svinjak, I think that everyone who survived the front line in that war must have come out of it at least mildly deranged. Quite apart from anything else there was the awful brain-jarring noise. At least in France I suppose that some of the noise from exploding shells was muffled by the soil. Here on the Carso they had only rock to burst on, and they would go off with a bright yellow flash and a vicious, jarring crash which seemed to make one’s skull ring like a bell in sympathy. It was maddening; unendurable except (I suppose) by switching one’s brain off and going through it all on reflexes alone.
The Adjutant of the Deutschmeister battalion was very courteous to us, once Friml had handed us over. He greeted me before I recognised him. He was a young officer called Max Weinberger, the son of the Viennese music publisher. We had met one evening late in 1913 at one of my Aunt Aleksia’s literary evenings, but I had failed to recognise him now under the dust and grey exhaustion of the Front. He was now the only other survivor from the ninth battalion’s officer strength at the start of August, he said. But he still found time to make arrangements for our transfer to the rear, along with a batch of prisoners captured after the recent trench raid. I noticed that he was very solicitous of their welfare and had appointed three sentries to watch over them in their dug-out. I thought this excessive, since they showed no inclination whatever to escape; in fact seemed only too pleased to be getting out of the war.
“They’re not there to stop them escaping,” he confided in me. “They’re there to protect the poor bastards against Friml and his gang. The day before yesterday we were holding twenty of them in a dug-out, waiting to get them back when the barrage lifted, and one of Friml’s men tossed a grenade in among them for fun. The swine was grinning all over his face: said that he’d dropped it by accident. I was going to have him arrested but Friml kicked up a row and said that line officers have no authority over the Stosstruppen . . .” he smiled, “. . . and all the more so when they’re dirty Jews like myself.”
“From what you tell me Oberleutnant Friml sounds a difficult guest.”
“Difficult? I tell you, the man’s completely mad, more of a danger to us than to the Italians. Everywhere he goes he stirs up trouble, then leaves us to dodge the mortar bombs they send over. Every time he goes out we hope he’ll get it, but always he comes back. He’s not right in the head and half his men would have ended up on the gallows as common murderers but for this rotten war. Do you know what he makes them do to qualify for his storm-company? They have to pull the toggle on a stick bomb, then balance it on top of their helmet and stand to attention until it goes off. He must have killed dozens with that trick. And now I hear they’re putting him up for the Maria Theresa. I tell you, if I were a Maria-Theresien Ritter and they made that criminal one as well, I’d send them their medal back by the next post.”
Toth and I made our way back along the communication trench that evening. We were shaken, and torn by barbed wire, and my chest ached from the effects of the gas, but otherwise we were none the worse for our crash landing in no man’s land—and I still had the valves from the wireless sets tucked inside my flying jacket. There were about thirty of us in the party: a guide, Toth and me, the Italian prisoners, plus three badly wounded men on stretchers and two corpses, whom we made the Italians carry. The dead were both victims of the trench-mortar mine about midday: two blanket- covered forms and two pairs of dust-clogged boots joggling lifelessly as we manhandled the stretchers across heaps of broken rock and squeezed against the trench-walls to let ration parties go by. Alongside one of the bundles on the stretcher were the smashed remains of a crude violin made from a petrol can. I saw it, and suddenly felt very ashamed of myself for my flippant thoughts that morning about amateur musicians.
Once we were over the brow of the Svinjak and in the dead ground on the other side, out of view of the enemy, I was able stand up straight and look back at the fantastic jumble of dug-outs and shelters on the reverse slope. Made promiscuously from the local stone and from sandbags and cement and timber and corrugated iron, the whole crazy troglodyte town sprawled along the safe side of the bleak limestone ridge, like a lost city of the Incas high in the Andes, or the rock tombs of some long-forgotten civilisation in the Arabian desert. What an odd world we live in, I thought; once we buried old men because they were dead, and now young men have to bury themselves in order to stay alive.
The need for this impressed itself upon me very forcibly as we came out of the protective lee of the Svinjak. The Italians might not be able to see us, but their artillery could still throw shells over the ridge. Almost before we could think they were howling down to burst on the rock all about us, sending more splinters and fragments of hot metal rattling viciously along the trench walls. Our guide motioned us all into a bomb shelter cut into the side of the rock trench and roofed with railway sleepers. We scrambled in, leaving only the dead outside. The guide was a battalion message-runner, a Viennese lad of about nineteen selected not for his physique—he was an under- nourished product of the slum tenements—but for his agility and cunning in dodging shells. We crouched there for the next half-hour until the shelling stopped. Our guide seemed not to be unduly concerned. Cigarettes were passed around by one of the Italians, and he lit his up as calmly as if he had been waiting for a tram on the Mariahilferstrasse.
“Hot this evening,” I ventured as a shell crashed near by, showering us with dust and debris.
He considered for a moment, exhaling the smoke with an expression of intense pleasure: it was months since we had been able to get cigarettes free of dried horse manure.
“Obediently report that it’s not too bad today, Herr Leutnant. They dropped a heavy right in among a relief party here last week: scraping them up with spoons we were.” I saw that he was not exaggerating: I had suddenly noticed a blackening human finger lying below the duckboards of the shelter. “No,” he went on, drawing on his cigarette, “most days it’s worse than this.”
“How do you stand it out here, week after week?”
He laughed at this. “Oh, we get by, Herr Leutnant, we get by somehow. All depends what you’re used to I suppose. I grew up in Ottakring, eight of us in one room and my dad out of work for three years, so I suppose this isn’t too bad really. The smell’s about the same, the food’s better and the meals are more regular if the ration parties don’t get blown up on the way; and there’s about the same amount of space to lie down in our dug-out. So
