and imbeciles of a horror equal to any port in Italy or the Levant, but still perversely stuck on to the fringe of Central Europe: the slums of Naples without the gaiety. Increasingly depressed, I returned from the old Marine Academy— now a tumbledown “public hospital” of the kind that serves only as a sorting-house for the cemeteries—and stopped for a drink in a cafe that I had once known on the Riva Szapary, now rechristened the Via Vittorio Emmanuele or something. As I stood at the bar I heard a voice from behind me.
“Tenente, non si me ricorda?” I turned around. I was quite unable to recognise him at first, this wretched creature with the eyepatch and the missing teeth, sitting at a table over a stagnant coffee with a crutch resting beside him. “Tenente, surely you remember me: your old enemy Oreste di Carraciolo, whom you helped escape that morning from under the rifles of the firing squad.”
I bought him a grappa, since he was quite clearly in great poverty. He gulped it greedily, then began to tell me what had happened in the years since we last met.
He had served with distinction for the rest of the war, he told me, scoring another eight victories, and had then returned to the studio after the Armistice, doing a wonderful trade for some time as the cities and towns of Italy vied with one another in the splendour of their war memorials. However, a measure of boredom had set in, and he had entered politics. He had returned to Fiume in 1919 with the poet-aviator Gabriele d’Annunzio and had played a leading part over the next year in that brief, bizarre episode in Europe’s history the proto-Fascist “Regency of Fiume,” when d’Annunzio and his desperadoes—mostly half-deranged survivors of the Isonzo trenches—had run the place as an independent city-state on messianic, near-lunatic principles. Parades and public circuses had been a major part of the Regency—especially when the bread ran out—and the Major had been appointed as a sort of artistic director for the whole ludicrous spectacle. In the end the League of Nations had moved in, but di Carraciolo had simply returned to Italy and taken part in Mussolini’s march on Rome.
This had advanced his career as a sculptor no end: for five or six years he had been effectively artist-in- residence to Il Duce. But then, in the early 1930s, as the residual wartime idealism was replaced in the Fascist movement by blackjacks and castor oil, he had quarrelled with the leadership and finally been thrown out of the party. He had refused to be quiet, so in 1932 he had been summarily arrested by the Blackshirts and so savagely beaten up that he had lost an eye and been permanently lamed. Six months later they had released him, tipping what was left of him back on to the street. Since then he had been a non-person, avoided by everyone who cared for their health and deprived of all pensions and royalties. By a nice irony, his only source of income was a small monthly payment from the Austrian Republic, which had expropriated some family property in 1919 and was now paying compensation. He was understandably bitter about it all.
“Before the war,” he said, “our slogan here in Fiume was ‘Give us Italy or death.’ ” He swallowed at his drink. “And now do you know what we have? Italy and death.”
That was the last I ever saw of him. I read many years later that he had not let up in his denunciations of Mussolini and his followers, whom he believed had stolen and misdirected the Fascist movement. In the end they lost patience altogether. In 1942 I understand that he was arrested one night and taken to the concentration camp on the Adriatic island of Molata. Very few people ever came back from that dreadful place, and di Carraciolo was not among those who did.
Often I think that perhaps it would have been better if we had let them shoot him there that morning. His marvellous white-marble monument would have been built, and each generation of Italian schoolchildren would now be taught about him as a great artist and patriot who died nobly for his people, not as a great artist and patriot who died miserably at the hands of his own people, after having helped bring to birth the cause which eventually devoured him.
13 LA SERENISSIMA
Hauptmann Rudolf Kraliczek was not a happy man in those early days of October 1916. Not only had the flying unit he commanded been reduced from a total establishment of eight aircraft to two, but he himself was being held responsible by his superiors both for these losses and for the fact that nothing had been achieved in return—except, that is, for a prodigious output of paper. And now, as if this were not enough, several of his officers were under investigation by the Military Procurator on suspicion of having aided and abetted the escape of an Italian prisoner.
It was all getting to be too much, and had become extremely disruptive of the form-filling and statistical compilation that was Kraliczek’s reason for military existence. Something bold had to be done. Drastic measures were called for. Leadership must be asserted in the strongest possible terms. So Hauptmann Kraliczek took a sheaf of Kanzlei-Doppel paper, a pencil and a ruler, and sat down to plan a desperate last throw of the dice; an operation so daring that it would entirely vindicate the concept of long-range bombing and perhaps (with any luck) keep him safely seated behind an office desk; a project in which other men would risk their lives in a last attempt to change the direction of all those relentlessly plunging red and black and green and blue lines drawn on sheets of squared paper. In the end he must have frightened even himself by his own audacity, for the remaining two aircraft of Flik 19F were to attempt no less a feat of arms than a daylight bombing-raid on the city of Venice.
There were two main obstacles to this scheme. The first and lesser of the two was that for our Hansa- Brandenburg CIs to carry any worthwhile bombload such a distance we would have to fly to Venice with the prevailing east wind of autumn, then turn north to try and reach the nearest Austrian flying field, in the foothills of the Alps. The second—and by far the greater—of the objections was that in the whole embattled continent of Europe in the year 1916 it is doubtful if there was another city more formidably protected against air attack than Venice. A major naval port and the site of several munitions factories, the island city was protected against air-raids by layer after layer of defences: first a line of watch vessels and patrolling airships out in the Gulf of Venice, then the fighter airfield “La Serenissima” at the Lido and the powerful flak batteries at Forts Alberone, Malamocco and Sabbioni, then further belts of flak artillery mounted on barges, then lines of tethered kite-balloons. The flying-boats of the Imperial and Royal Navy had been carrying out bombing-raids against Venice practically each day since the war with Italy began, but the defences forced them now to attack at night and flying above three thousand metres, which—given the primitive bomb-sights of those days—meant that most of their bombs had no other effect than flinging up spouts of muddy water in the lagoons.
In Hauptmann Kraliczek’s master plan the problem of range was to be overcome by making the flight from Caprovizza to Venice merely one leg of a four-cornered journey. The two aircraft—Potocznik and Feldwebel Maybauer in their Brandenburger and Toth and myself in Zoska—would carry two of the new 100kg bombs each, slung on electrically operated bomb racks beneath the centre section, and would fly to Venice with a tail wind. We would drop our bombs, then—in the event of our still being airborne after all this—would head northwards to cross the lines north of Vicenza and land to refuel at Fliegerfeld Pergine, among the mountains near Trient. We would then take off again and fly behind the lines along the crest of the Alps as far as Villach, where we would refuel once more before flying south on the final leg of our journey, through the Julian Alps to Caprovizza. Altogether the round trip would take about two days, weather and the enemy permitting.
Normally, in all such missions conceived on paper by Hauptmann Kraliczek, the hostile purpose of the operation seemed very much to take second place to the business of accumulating Kilometres Flown. But this time our commander had selected a really grandiose aim for us: no less an undertaking than severing Venice’s connection with the rest of Italy, by destroying the causeway-bridge that carried the road and railway line across the lagoon to the mainland. It was of little concern to Kraliczek that the entire well-equipped Imperial and Royal Navy Flying Service had been trying without success to do precisely that for a year or more; as far as he was concerned, no one had ever thought of the idea before, and anyone who dared to suggest that the Italians might have thought of it first and taken precautions was dismissed out of hand as a niggling defeatist. But there we were: orders are orders, however crazy and ill-conceived they may seem to be to the poor devils who are given the task of translating them into reality. The General Staff and the 5th Army Command had been told of the scheme and had given their approval, so who were mere lieutenants to demur? As officers of the House of Habsburg, had we not sworn to do our duty or die in the attempt?
Once again we checked our maps and made our preparations. The two aeroplanes would head out over the Gulf of Trieste just after dawn on the morning of 13 October, and, if they avoided the flak batteries and fighter aircraft off Sdobba, would make landfall some way west of the former Austrian seaside resort of Grado, then head
