upsetting the other passengers with your silly jakes then you really shouldn’t fly at all. I’m afraid that in this country we just don’t behave like that.”
I have often had cause to wonder, both then and since, at that effortless tone of authority which seems to come so naturally to the English upper-middle-class female, whether the genuine article or (as I suspect in this case) one promoted from the ranks. I spent over half my life as a career officer at sea, on land and in the air; leading men under fire aboard ships, in the control rooms of submarines and on a dozen battlefields from the hills of north China to the Paraguayan chaco. Yet I could never hope to equal the faultless self-confidence of that young woman’s voice: as if only a moral degenerate or a person utterly devoid of decency could possibly fail to do as they were told. I suppose it was the result of three centuries of being able to lay down the law to the natives wherever the guns of the Royal Navy could reach. What a pity, I think now, that she should have been born into an age when the natives were fast acquiring bigger and better guns of their own.
When we arrived at my sister-in-law’s house we discovered that Edith’s mother had already been dead several hours, so we might just as well not have bothered. Not surprisingly, Edith insisted on returning by sea, saying that she would far rather remain on Jersey for the rest of her life, sleeping under hedges if necessary, than ever fly again.
A silly incident really, and I must apologise for having rambled on so and bored you with it. But I was reminded of it by that silly film on television. And it made me cast my mind back even further to events forty years earlier still: to my brief but hectic career in the summer and autumn of 1916 as a flier for the Noble House of Austria: not quite four months with the Austro-Hungarian Army Flying Service, followed by a period of nine weeks with the Imperial and Royal Navy’s air arm. After Sister Assumpta had helped me up to my room that evening (I can still manage the stairs on my own but they prefer someone to be with me), I took out my old photograph album and began leafing through the pages.
The Sisters brought me down here in May, after I had suffered so badly from bronchial asthma in Ealing the previous summer. It was to have been only a short seaside holiday, but they have shown no disposition to move me back and anyway, a lengthy military career has taught me that nothing lasts quite so long as a temporary posting. No, I suppose that I might as well die here as there, almost on the shore of the great ocean which is now the only fatherland to which I feel any attachment whatever. And anyway, we have to be practical about these things. I understand that the Sisters have a cheaper-by-the-dozen concession with the Swansea and West Glamorgan Co-op and receive no less than ten books of stamps for each funeral, which makes no small contribution to the Order of the Perpetual Veneration’s finances over the course of a year. They are not allowed to do it back in Ealing because the Order’s chaplain, a ferocious old bigot called Father Czogala, holds the Co-operative retail movement to be a part of the worldwide Jewish-Bolshevik-Masonic conspiracy. But down here they are far enough away from his rantings to have some discretion about their trading arrangements. I have enquired of Mother Superior whether she could get the Co-op to bury me at sea—no nonsense about a coffin; just a seaman-like shroud of canvas and a couple of bricks tied to my feet—but she is dead set against the notion, I fear. Being a landlocked people the Poles like to have a grave to mourn beside (though no one at all is left to mourn beside mine), and anyway, she tells me that the local Co-op are reluctant to do sea burials after a distressing incident a few months ago, when hake fishermen trawled up a coffin off Tenby. So I suppose that I shall just have to be content with being devoured by worms like the rest.
But there, I am wandering again. Yes, what about the photograph album? Well, the photograph album covers the years 1915 to 1918, kept with the Imperial and Royal War Ministry’s permission as the basis for a post-war book about the career of an Austro-Hungarian submarine. It was restored to me back in May by a quite extraordinary stroke of luck after it had turned up among the possessions of a dead Ukrainian emigre in a west London bed-sitter. Most of the surviving photographs detail my career as a k.u.k. U-Boat captain: Linienschiffsleutnant Ottokar, Ritter von Prohaska, submarine ace of the Mediterranean theatre and holder of Old Austria’s highest military honour the Knight’s Cross of the Military Order of Maria Theresa. It was these faded pictures that provided the background for my reminiscences when Kevin and Sister Elabieta prevailed upon me to tape-record them some weeks ago. But one photograph—and one only— remains from those months in late 1916 when I was taking an enforced break from submarining and instead doing my best to get myself killed in the air. I gazed at it that evening by the light of the bedside lamp.
Faded and sepia-grey with the passage of seventy years, it shows a group of men standing in front of an aeroplane on a sunlit, stone-littered field fringed by a few wooden huts and canvas hangars. By the foliage on the trees in the background, it looks like early September or thereabouts, and in the distance one can see a low range of eroded, bare mountains. The two men are wearing leather flying overalls with helmets and goggles, and are accompanied by four mechanics in the baggy grey uniforms and high- fronted peaked caps of Austrian soldiers. The taller of the two airmen is clearly me as I was then: erect, confident, with binoculars slung around my neck and a map case under my arm, every centimetre the Habsburg career officer. The creature standing beside me however is barely recognisable as a human being at all: at least a head and a half shorter, hunch-shouldered, bandy-legged, with a prognathous beetle-browed face scowling out from under the brim of his flying helmet like something from a zoo cage or a fairground side-show. This is—or was—my personal chauffeur, Feldpilot- Zugsfuhrer Zoltan Toth—or Toth Zoltan as he would have styled himself back in his native Hungary.
As for the aeroplane behind us, even if it were not for the black Maltese crosses on the tail and beneath the lower wings, one would scarcely need to be an expert on aviation history to identify it as one of that numerous family of German-designed two-seater reconnaissance biplanes of the First World War: a large, squared-off, uncompromising machine without much pretension to grace or refinement, only the sturdy utilitarian good looks of a well-bred carthorse. It stands there behind us on that field, rearing up in indignation on its large-wheeled undercarriage as if to say “What the devil do you mean?” its short nose occupied by a six-cylinder inline engine, and with the space between that and the upper wing’s leading edge occupied by the clumsy box-radiator which gives it away to the expert as an Austrian machine: to be precise, a Hansa-Brandenburg CI.
In fact, if the expert really knew his stuff he might be able to date the photograph to 1916 or thereabouts by the fact that the aeroplane is still not in camouflage paint but left in its natural colours: gleaming varnished plywood for the fuselage and clear-doped linen for the wings, the latter so translucent (I now notice) that if I look carefully I can just make out the black crosses on the upper wings showing through on the underside. One can also just see the number on the fuselage side, 26.74, and the name, Zoska, bequeathed to us by some earlier Polish crew. Curious now to think that this was probably the only aeroplane in the entire history of aviation ever to have been flown in Latin.
Strange also how merely touching the grainy surface of that faded photograph evokes all the smells of those months so many years ago, rather like one of those children’s ornamental stickers (Mr Dabrowski’s great- granddaughter showed me one last summer), where scratching it with a fingernail liberates a pungent odour of peppermint or cinnamon. I have only to touch it and back come all the various scents of seventy years ago, flying over the now forgotten battlefields of the Austro-Italian Front: the smell of early-morning dew on the tyre-crushed grass of the airfields; the smell of petrol and cellulose dope and lubricating oil on hot engines; the warm sweet-sour perfume of mahogany plywood; the reek of cordite and fresh blood; and the nauseating rotten-egg stench of anti aircraft shellbursts. And the smell of burning wood and linen left hanging in the thin, cold air, flavoured sometimes with a sinister taint like that of fat burning in a frying-pan.
I never spoke or even thought much about it in the years that followed: we had lost the war, while I had lost my country and my career and had a new life to build for myself. Many of the memories were distressing—in fact are painful to me even now, a lifetime after the events. And to tell you the truth, I very much doubted whether anyone would be at all interested. But young Kevin and Sister Elgbieta tell me that I am now one of the very few left who remember it all. So perhaps now that I have at last committed my U-Boat reminiscences to posterity I might as well tell you about my flying career as well. It may perhaps interest you; and if nothing else it will help me to pass the time before the undertakers come to screw down the lid on me. You will probably think some of the tales a little improbable, but there you are, I am afraid that I can do nothing about that: Austria-Hungary was a rather improbable sort of country, and in the year 1916 flying was still a decidedly eccentric sort of thing to be doing, so much so that the psychiatric tests which became de rigueur for aspirant fliers in the Second World War were held to be completely unnecessary in the First since, by definition, anyone who volunteered to fly must be not quite right in the head—or if he was not already, very soon would be. I hope that these yarns of mine may at least entertain you, and perhaps give you some idea as well of what it was like to go up in an aeroplane in those few brief years when men took to the air wearing the two-headed-eagle emblem of the Holy Roman Empire.
