2 KNIGHT ON A BICYCLE
I first began to notice it that morning about an hour after dawn, as the train stopped to take on water at the station in that wide, high wind-swept defile know to us in those days as the Adelsberg Pass, where the railway line from Vienna crosses the last range of mountains before Trieste. It seemed to bounce to and fro between the scrubby, eroded slopes of limestone and come at us from all directions at once: not a distinct rumbling or booming as I had expected but a faint, sinister, barely audible shuddering of the air, irregular but incessant, as if some vast sheet of tin were being shaken somewhere away over the mountains. It told me—as if there should have been any doubt on the matter—that we were getting near the war zone. For this was the last week of July 1916, and only a few score kilometres away, along the valley of the River Isonzo, the Italian armies were preparing for their next assault on the lines guarding the south-western frontier of our great multi-national empire. I was now approaching the zone of the armies, which began just beyond Adelsberg. Soon I too, like perhaps thirty million others, would become a subject of that new state which had been carved out of the body of Europe over the past eighteen months: the Front, that strange linear kingdom hundreds of kilometres long, but sometimes only metres wide, which now snaked across northern France and through the marshes of Volhynia and along the crest of the Alps—a curious country, where the inhabitants were exclusively male and, although mostly under twenty-five, suffered a mortality rate so high that the population could be kept up only by constant immigration; a strange topsy-turvy land where men lived underground, worked by night and slept by day, and courted instant death if they appeared in the open for a couple of seconds. It was a hungry land as well, one that produced nothing whatever but which consumed so prodigally that the entire economic life of the world was now devoted to feeding it. Soon I too would cross its borders and become one of its subjects. For how long exactly remained to be seen.
The train moved out of the station once more in a haze of lignite smoke, and was soon clanking through the five successive tunnels beyond Adelsberg, where the line burrows through a series of mountain spurs. Before long we were squealing to a halt alongside the low platform of the station at Divacca. I had changed trains here many times during the previous sixteen years, for Divacca was the junction for the line down the Istrian Peninsula to Austria’s principal naval base at Pola. But this morning it was to be different: my rail warrant extended only as far as Divacca, where I was to get off the train and carry on to an obscure little town called Haidenschaft some twenty-five kilometres away, thence to a doubtless even more God-forsaken place called Caprovizza, so out-of- the-way that I had been unable to find it even on quite large-scale maps of the Kustenland region.
The other difference that marked off my arrival that morning at Divacca from all the previous ones was that I was now stepping down from the train as someone else. On all previous occasions I had been travelling as a plain, ordinary naval lieutenant called Ottokar Prohaska, the son of a Czech postal official from a small town in northern Moravia. Now though, even if I was still only a Linienschiffsleutnant as regards service rank, I was altogether something far more exalted in social standing: Ottokar Prohaska, Ritter von Strachnitz, the most recent recipient of the very rarest and most prized of all the Old Monarchy’s honours for bravery in action, the Knight’s Cross of the Military Order of Maria Theresa, awarded to me a few days previously at Schonbrunn by the Emperor himself, in recognition of my feat one night a few weeks previously, when I had shot down an Italian airship off Venice and then, for good measure, torpedoed one of their submarines as well. And to be honest I was finding it more than a little hard to get used to my sudden fame and elevation to noble rank. I had tried to leave Vienna quietly the previous evening—not least because I had got married only two days before. But quiet farewells to my wife had not been possible, not with the crowds which had somehow gathered ahead of me at the Sudbahnhof, and the autograph hunters, and the popping magnesium flashes and the children being held up on their fathers’ shoulders to get a look at me. In the end, unused to such celebrity, I was heartily glad when the train steamed out of the station.
But even as we clanked southwards through Graz and Marburg I was not to be left in peace. As I made my way along the corridor to the meagre wartime buffet car, brother-officers had jostled to shake my hand and slap me on the back and wish me well in my new career now that (according to the Vienna newspapers) command of a U- Boat had become too humdrum for me and I had volunteered for flying duties, “. . . as the only field left in which he may provide fresh evidences of his matchless valour in the service of Emperor and Fatherland.” When I was at last able to find some peace back in my compartment I looked down once more at the decoration pinned to the left breast of my jacket. It seemed a small enough thing to be making such a fuss about, I thought as I gazed at it lying in the palm of my hand: a small white-enamelled gold cross with a little red-white-red medallion in the middle, encircled by the word Fortitudini . Such a small thing, yet within a few hours it had turned my life upside-down to a degree where I was already beginning to suspect that malignant fairies had substituted someone else for me while I slept.
Nor was there to be any respite at Divacca, that bleak little township up on the arid limestone plateau above Trieste. Word of my arrival had somehow travelled ahead of me during the night and the townspeople— mostly Slovenes in these parts—had arranged a reception for me. As I appeared at the door of the carriage to descend to the platform I saw a crowd waiting. Before I realised what was happening the town band had struck up the “Radetzky March” and I was being hoisted on to their shoulders to be carried through the station vestibule into the square in front of the building. A crowd cheered and the Burgermeister stood holding a large bouquet of flowers as the band played the “Gott Erhalte” and the local gendarmery and fire brigade presented arms. The houses were bedecked with black-and-yellow and red-white-red bunting, while on the opposite side of the square a banner proclaimed:
VIVAT OSTERREICH—NIEDER MIT DEN ITALIENERN!
ZIVELA AVSTRIJA—DOL S ITALIJANI!
VIVA AUSTRIA—A BASSO GLI ITALIANI!
With that little ceremony over, I am afraid that the whole thing rather ran out of steam. If you are carrying someone on your shoulders you have to be carrying them somewhere, and the welcoming committee clearly had no idea of what to do with me next. So after the Burgermeister had made a short patriotic speech and the crowd had applauded I was unceremoniously put down on the cobbles of the station forecourt while everyone dispersed to go about their daily business, leaving me holding the bouquet and a scroll of paper giving me the freedom of the commune of Divacca—surely, now as then, one of the least desirable privileges on the whole of God’s earth.
I went back into the station, which had resumed its normal wartime bustle of men proceeding on leave and men returning from leave. I took out my movement order and looked at it: “Report at 1200 hours 24/VII/16 to HQ Fliegerkompagnie 19F, flying field Haidenschaft-Caprovizza.” Well, it was now just past 8:00 a.m., so I had four hours in hand. But how to get there? The order took me only as far as Divacca by train, so how was I to get myself and my belongings to Haidenschaft and then to Caprovizza, wherever that might be? Clearly, expert advice was called for. I entered the station offices and eventually found a door marked PERSONNEL MOVEMENTS—k.u.k. armee (commissioned and warrant officer ranks) . They would surely know in here. I opened the door and entered to find an unkempt and rather shabby-looking Stabsfeldwebel dozing with his boots resting on a paper-littered desk. A copy of the dubious Viennese magazine Paprika lay open beside him, while the walls of the office were decorated with numerous bathing beauties, evidently cut out from this same magazine, whose sumptuous padding had not yet been reduced to any noticeable degree by the privations of wartime. I coughed. He stirred, looked at me with one eye, then got up and made a perfunctory salute while fastening the topmost buttons of his tunic.
“Obediently report, Herr, er—” (he gazed at my three cuff-rings for some moments in puzzlement) —“Leutnant, that you’ve got the wrong office: naval personnel movements is upstairs.”
“I’m not concerned with that. I have been seconded to the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe, Flik 19F, at a place called Caprovizza near Haidenschaft. I’ve no idea where it is or how to get there, so I would be grateful if you could help me. Do you deal with movements of flying personnel or only with ground troops?”
“Obediently report that both, Herr Leutnant.”
“Excellent. So how do I get from here to Caprovizza?”
He rubbed his chin—he had not yet shaved that morning—and rummaged beneath some papers. It was quite plain that he felt it to be really no part of his duties to assist anything that wore blue instead of field grey, even if it
