Somehow we managed to climb away and evade the flak shells coming up at us from the batteries below. I can only assume that they failed to hit us because they were expecting attack only from the landward side and we took them by surprise. At any rate, after five minutes we were clear of it all, flying over the mainland. The fighter aircraft from Alberone flying field would be up after us by now, but we had a head-start on them and, relieved of its bombs, our Brandenburger was not much slower than a Nieuport in level flight. We would head across country to the River Brenta and then follow it northward to where it entered the Alpine foothills at Bassano. After that it would be a simple matter to fly along the mountain valleys and cross the front line to reach Pergine.
The Camposampiero lay below us now as we gained height, a monotonous expanse of drained marshland east of the Brenta. It should have taken us about half an hour to reach the river and turn north—had our engine not suddenly begun to splutter and misfire. Before long we were losing altitude as the revs fell away. I suspected trouble with the ignition magnetoes, to judge by the noise: at any rate, all the cylinders seemed to be firing, but fitfully, so that the engine was shaking and jolting like a cement mixer. No, there was nothing for it but to land and try to clear the trouble ourselves, then get airborne again before we were noticed. I looked down. At least the fields hereabouts looked level—mostly green pasture—and there were few villages. I shook Toth’s shoulder and pointed down. He nodded, and a couple of minutes later we were bumping down on to as remote a stretch of meadow as I had been able to find.
It sounds hazardous I know, touching down on a field in enemy territory; but flying in those days was utterly remote from anything practised nowadays, and emergency landings were an occurrence so normal as to be scarcely worth remarking upon. With her large-wheeled, generously sprung undercarriage and a landing-run not much longer than a football pitch, our Brandenburger had little to fear from a forced landing—in fact could probably have landed across a freshly ploughed field without coming to any harm. In any case, the field on which we touched down was a smooth expanse of grass preferable in every respect to the rutted, stone-littered stretch of ex-ploughland so grandly described as k.u.k. Fliegerfeld Caprovizza. As we slowed down and the tail-skid bit the grass I pointed Toth towards a clump of poplars. The Brandenburger would be horribly conspicuous on the ground with its pale yellow wings and tailplane, so I was concerned to get us into the shadow of the trees as quickly as possible. Our pursuers would not be far behind us, but I hoped that they would be too intent on scanning the sky ahead to look down wards. I have always found that people tend to miss things they do not expect to see.
This turned out to have been a very bad decision on my part. We discovered as much when our slow, wobbling progress across the field suddenly became glutinous, then stopped altogether even though the propeller was still spinning as before. I clambered over the cockpit edge and sprang to the ground to see what was the matter—and promptly sank up to my ankles in the soft cattle-trodden mud. We had taxied into a patch of grass- covered marsh and were now embedded up to our wheel hubs. Rev the engine as he might, Toth could not dislodge us, stuck now like some immense bluebottle buzzing frantically on a fly-paper. I squelched around to the tail and shoved my shoulder under the tail-skid to lift it, hoping to lessen the drag. But the wheels only sank further into the soft, black ground. We both cut brushwood to lay beneath the wheels, and tried levering under the axle with a fallen branch, but it was no use. We were trapped, stuck fast in a field deep in enemy territory with no hope whatever of getting free unless we could find horses or a motor lorry to drag us out. Toth turned off the engine as I leant against the fuselage, wiping my brow and panting from exertion.
It was only then that I saw them. They must have been standing there for some minutes watching us as we strained and heaved. They stood silent, in a row, gazing at us with black eyes and tanned, dark-whiskery faces: straw-hatted and dressed in ragged shirts and trousers, each of them carrying a bill-hook or a fork. We were captives. No doubt these villagers had come to prevent our escape while others had gone to fetch the carabinieri. I wondered suddenly what one did to pass the time in a prisoner-of-war camp. Then a sudden mad urge took hold of me. Why not? We had nothing to lose, and these labourers were certainly poor and probably illiterate as well, living in a remote area and incapable of reading even newspaper headlines, let alone aircraft-recognition handbooks. It was certainly worth a try. Why had I sweated through four years of Italian classes at the Marine Academy if not for such moments as this? I decided to address myself to a sturdy middle-aged man who looked as if he might be some sort of foreman or village elder.
“Buon giorno,” I bade him, smiling. “As you see, we have been forced to land here by engine trouble. I wonder, might you have a telephone near by, or failing that, might you be able to help us extract our aeroplane from the mud so that we can take off and fly on our way?”
“Who are you, strangers, and where are you from?”
“Two airmen of the Corpo Aereo flying from our base at Venice to the airfield at Bassano. But tell me,” I asked, “do you have a carabiniere or a priest in your village?” I was worried that even if there was no policeman hereabouts there might at least be a priest who would be well enough informed about the world to recognise an Austrian aeroplane when he saw one.
“There is no priest in our village, and no carabinieri nearer than the barracks in Castelfranco.”
“Good—I mean, what a pity. Can you then perhaps help us to get free?”
The man turned to a small boy standing near by, gaping at us. “Mauro, run to the house of Ronchelli and tell him to bring his plough-oxen; also a coil of rope.”
The barefooted child scampered away. Really, this was all too easy. I supposed that it was quite possible that these ignorant rustics had never seen an aeroplane before, at least on the ground.
I began to feel myself a rotter for having deceived them so smoothly.
“My friends,” I said, “we will see that you are well rewarded for your trouble when we reach our airfield. What is the name of this village?”
“Busovecchio di Camposampiero, if it’s any business of yours,” said the foreman. “But tell me one thing that puzzles me: what’s the meaning of those black crosses on your aeroplane?”
I swallowed hard—then a brilliant idea struck me.
“They are to signify that the aircraft was blessed by the Pope, at a ceremony in Rome earlier this year. He anointed it with holy oil and the crosses were painted on to mark the places where he applied it. As you will see, they represent the five wounds of Our Lord.”
He grunted and craned his neck to look at the markings on the upper wing. “I see. In that case then His Holiness must have used a step-ladder to get up there.” He sounded dubious, but I supposed that this was just his way, since he seemed a surly man at the best of times.
By now the small boy had reappeared, leading two wheezing, steaming, cream-coloured oxen and with a coil of plaited straw rope slung about his shoulder. We attached this to the undercarriage axle, and after five minutes or so of straining and lugging we had the aeroplane free, standing once more upon firm ground. While this was going on we had stopped to look up into the sky as a flight of aeroplanes passed by, heading north at speed. There seemed to be four Nieuports and a two-seater of some kind, but they had evidently not seen us. So much the better, I thought; we can get airborne and proceed to Pergine at a discreet distance behind them.
The farm labourers watched as Toth and I removed the aluminium panels around the engine so that we could get at the two magnetoes on the front of the cylinder block. I was thankful now that my first submarine command, U8, had been powered by Austro-Daimler petrol engines and that my Chief Engineer had given me a thorough course of instruction in their workings. It would be me who would have to get the engine running again. Toth was a superb flier, but with him it was as entirely a matter of instinct as with an eagle. Otherwise he was about as completely unmechanical as it is possible to be. If he had not been, then I think he would not have been such a formidable pilot, since only a man totally indifferent to machinery could have maltreated airframes and engines with such ruthless disregard.
Like most Porsche-designed inline engines the Austro-Daimler had two spark plugs in each cylinder, each row run off its own magneto and coil. This was to guard against spark failure and should have been foolproof since it was most unlikely that both magnetoes would fail at once. But as I removed the bakelite magneto cover I saw that, if both were still working, both were in an equally decrepit state. The contact- breaker electrodes were badly eroded. They must have been made from some wretched wartime alloy and the constant sparking was wearing them away. Standing orders were to change each magneto every fifty flying hours, so that one would always be near-new; but over the past month Feldwebel Prokesch had been forced to ignore this instruction owing to the lack of spares from the Fliegeretappenpark. All that I could do now was dismantle the two contact breakers and clean them up as best I could with a file, then put the whole thing back together again and hope for the best.
It was not until after midday that we finally put the cowling panels back in place and prepared to leave. While I worked on the magnetoes I had been obliged to field a barrage of embarrassing questions from the villagers, who
