inland and follow the railway line through Portogruaro and San Dona di Piave until they reached Mestre. We would then fly across the lagoons to attack the bridge from the east, hoping in this way to get in between the defences that protected Venice to seaward and the balloon lines and anti-aircraft batteries that guarded it against attack from the north.
It would be a hazardous business, the crossing of the Gulf of Trieste nearly as dangerous in its way as the attempt to penetrate the defences of Venice. But in between those two danger zones I did not expect too much trouble. In those days before radar, aircraft in ones and twos usually had little trouble in wandering about over open countryside. Biplanes look much alike from the ground, telephones were few in the Italian countryside in those days, and anyway, people’s vision had not yet become adjusted to looking up into the sky all the time. For this reason, and in order to save weight, we decided to do without the forward-firing machine guns. On this flight we would have only the observer’s Schwarz- lose to protect us.
Toth and I made our final checks that October evening by the light of the petrol lamps in our hangar. Flying suits, maps, compasses, pistols, emergency rations; also razors, towels, soap and two blankets, since we expected to be away overnight and knew that such things were now in so short a supply that host flying fields expected visitors to bring their own with them. We completed our preparations and while I had a few final words with Feldwebel Prokesch and the mechanics—the ignition had been giving trouble lately—Toth went down to the village to see Magdalena.
Quite a number of our men had taken up with village girls of late. Only the day before, Kraliczek had received his first formal request for permission to marry a local girl—and had promptly set to work devising a suitable wad of printed application forms. There had already been a number of paternity suits filed against enlisted men. It astonished me how quickly our men—drawn from every province of our vast empire and totally ignorant of either Italian or Slovene—had managed to put down roots in the locality. Not for the first time it occurred to me that one of the few good things to be said about war is that it does at least do something to prevent inbreeding, which must once have been a serious problem in an out-of-the-way place like the Vippaco Valley. On the contrary, to judge by the noises I had heard among the haycocks on evening walks that summer, the men were doing everything in their power to make breeding an outdoor activity.
I went for a walk as dusk fell, and met Toth and his belle walking up the lane arm-in-arm and chatting in the curious modified Latin that they used to exchange endearments. Magdalena bade me good-evening as graciously as always; really a quite extraordinarily confident and poised young woman, I thought, considering that she was only a village girl and only nineteen years old.
“Well, Herr Leutnant, I hear that you’re off tomorrow on another long-distance flight.”
“Indeed? I hope that Zugsfuhrer Toth here has not been compromising field security by telling you where?”
“No, Zolli here is being tighter-lipped than usual and won’t tell me a thing; but I hope that doesn’t mean that it’s going to be somewhere dangerous?”
“No, my dear young lady, nowhere in the least bit dangerous,” I said, hoping that my patent insincerity would not show through the smile. “Please don’t worry yourself in the slightest on our account. I expect in fact that it will all be rather tedious. But we shall be gone for two days at least.”
“Oh all right then. But make sure that he behaves himself and doesn’t get into any scrapes. We’re planning to get engaged at Christmas; sooner perhaps, if the war’s over by then.”
I made my way back to my tent to turn in. It was autumn now and getting too cold to sleep under canvas in the blustering Carso wind. Still the promised wooden barrack huts had not arrived. “If the war’s over by then . . .” Some hopes: the war had been going to be over in three months ever since August 1914; but now it had been going on for so long that it was getting to seem as though it had always been with us and always would be. It was about that autumn, I remember, that the first signs became visible of that war-weariness which would eventually bring our venerable Monarchy tottering to its final collapse. The harvest had been wretched that year, as old Josef the forester had predicted. But that I suppose was at least bearable, the common lot of populations under siege. What was more disturbing was the way in which the shortages were now beginning to affect our ability to fight. Copper and brass had been unobtainable for a year or more, now that all of Central Europe’s pre-war coinage and most of its church bells, statues, doorknobs and curtain rails had been requisitioned and melted down. Engine exhausts which should have been made of copper were now fabricated from thinly galvanised steel sheet. A number of Fliegertruppe pilots had already been injured by corroded exhaust stubs snapping off and flying back to hit them in the face. Steel tube radiators constantly sprang leaks.
But far worse was the shortage of rubber. Our German allies were commandeering every last scrap of the rubber smuggled in through the blockade via Holland. So the Austro-Hungarian aircraft factories were left to make do with a loathsome substitute called “gummiregenerat”—more usually known as “gummi-degenerat”—confected from old motor tyres, galoshes and ladies’ mackintoshes shredded and dissolved in ether to form an evil-smelling, sticky substance that tore like paper and would not vulcanise. This was used for engine hoses and inner tubes. Aeroplane tyres were still made from proper rubber, but we were under strict orders to save them from unnecessary wear. The aeroplane could only run on its own wheels at take-off and landing: at all other times it was to be dragged around with a sledge fitted beneath its axles, and when an aeroplane was sent for repair to a Fliegeretappenpark we were instructed to remove its tyres and store them under lock and key in the Kanzlei safe for fear that they would be stolen in transit by other units. To judge by the number of orders on the subject that we had recently received at Caprovizza, it now appeared that the aeroplane was merely an accessory to its tyres.
But even when we had retrieved our tyres from the Kanzlei safe, discarded our skids and got airborne, things were not much better. The supply of aviation petrol had lately been “rationalised,” which in k.u.k. terms meant that it still came from the same refineries, but that a thousand- strong supply agency had been set up to administer its distribution—with the inevitable result that it became much harder to get and was now of poorer quality, so that aeroplanes could rarely reach their stated speeds or service ceilings. Things were in a mess.
Still the war went on, and showed no signs whatever of ending. They said that some of the more elaborate dug-outs up on the Carso already had electric light and stoves and armchairs; even wallpaper, according to some sources. We were still due for wooden barrack huts at Caprovizza, but Flik 19 at Haidenschaft had received theirs some weeks before. Perhaps the war had now become such a fixed feature of the national economies of Europe, and the fronts so immobile, that in a few years we would be living in permanent bases behind the lines, complete with married quarters, and travelling to the trenches each day by tram.
During the summer my own ground crew had laid down a vegetable garden behind the main hangar and were now spending a large part of their off-duty hours hoeing, weeding and watering. I was quite content that they should do so: it augmented their increasingly miserable rations and even gave them a surplus to sell for tobacco- money in Haidenschaft market. I was beginning to feel though that Feldwebel Prokesch’s runner beans were fast coming to eclipse the war in importance, and wondered at what point I ought to mention it at morning parade; particularly when the men dropped their work and ran out with buckets and shovels whenever a horse-drawn artillery train passed along the road. But they were still a conscientious and devoted ground crew, so I was happy to let it go on for the time being. Only Oberleutnant Potocznik looked down his nose at the whole business. After all, a warrior for the Greater German Reich could hardly be expected to approve of such distractions. What would Siegfried have said if the Nibelungs had started to grow lettuces?
The next morning was overcast, with a light north-east wind. It was still dark as Toth and I made our way out on to the field and climbed into the cockpit of our aeroplane. We made the regulation pre-flight checks, and when everything was in order called, “Ready!” to Potocznik, seated in the cockpit of his Brandenburger parked alongside us. Potocznik called back, “Ready!” in reply, and the process of starting the engines began, Toth cranking the starter magneto as the mechanic swung the propeller. The two engines snorted into life almost at the same instant, pouring out grey smoke and occasional gouts of blue and yellow flame as they warmed up. At last Potocznik waved to me to signal that they were about to move off. The mechanics pulled the wheel chocks away and the aeroplane began to trundle forward, lumbering heavily under the weight of two 100kg bombs slung beneath its belly. I watched apprehensively as the machine waddled slowly to the far end of the field. With two of the heaviest bombs available, plus two men and a full load of fuel, a Brandenburger was dangerously near its maximum permissible load—in fact well over it, if one took the most prudent view of that rather hypothetical figure. In order to get into the air we were going to need the longest possible takeoff run, and even so I was still far from certain that the airframe would not collapse under the strain as we lifted off. Selfish as it might sound, I was more than happy to let Potocznik and Maybauer try it first.
