might be some magnetoes in the stores, because the school had once had a couple of pensioned-off Brandenburgers from an earlier series, but had recently written them both off in the course of flying lessons. We thanked them, staked our aeroplane down for the night (a chill wind was already moaning down the valley), then ate a most welcome meal with them in their mess hut before bedding down in a stores tent. Tomorrow was Saturday.
14 SUNDAY MOUNTAINEER
It was drizzling when we got up: thin rain turning to sleet. We refuelled at Gardolo after breakfast. We could not use Flit 17’s petrol without a requisition signed by no less than three officers of a rank of Major or above. These were finally found for us at a neighbouring supply depot. They signed the forms for us with every sign of irritation before driving away in a pre-war sports car with luggage and two rather nice- looking army nurses in the back: off (we were told) for a couple of days touring in the Tyrol on a tank filled, no doubt, with government petrol. I could only hope that it stayed fine for them. As for Toth and me and our bullet-riddled, faltering aeroplane, it was yet another leg of our miserable begging-tour of the airfields and supply depots of the South Tyrol.
In the course of a half-century or more spent in the armed services I have often had cause to remark upon the fact that, among the military, comradeship, honour and kindliness all decrease the further one gets from the front line. In my younger days I would often wonder why this should be; but it was only with time that it gradually dawned upon me that it is precisely those qualities of honesty, selflessness and courage that tend to land men in the firing line—and their opposites that facilitate the wangling of safe little jobs in the rear. The truth of the matter is that two world wars were, for Europe, nothing but a vast experiment in negative Darwinism, in which the best died and the worst survived to breed.
Nowhere was this more apparent to me than at Fliegeretappenpark St Jakob repair workshops located just outside 11th Army Headquarters at Bozen and specially attached to the army divisions in the Tyrol. We arrived there mid-morning after finding that the Feflisch at Neumarkt could be no help whatever, having just closed down for half-term. The Kommandant was anything but pleased to have two flying mendicants turn up at his door on a Saturday morning in a consumptive aeroplane, one of them a naval lieutenant and the other an apparently cretinous Magyar NCO.
“This repair park is strictly for machines from units on the Tyrolean Front, do you hear?” he shouted, waving a cane at us as we formed up beneath the balcony of the ex-Gasthof that housed the unit offices. “We’re attached directly to 11th Army Command and we aren’t here to offer repairs to any vagrants who happen by. Go on, be off with you, I say! No, I don’t care a copper farthing what General-Oberst Boroevic will say: General-Oberst Boroevic is on the Isonzo Front, not here, and as far as I’m concerned he might as well be in Patagonia. I don’t care if you do either, you insolent bugger. Just clear off back where you came from—you and your pet monkey.”
Utterly dejected, we ambled back around the workshops—deserted and locked for the weekend—to where our aeroplane stood. There was no hope whatever of going on now, even if we had anywhere left to go. No, we would just have to abandon the aeroplane and make our way back to Caprovizza by train—perhaps even riding on the roofs of goods wagons, since I had barely ten kronen left in my trouser pockets. For God’s sake, were we in the same army as these people or weren’t we? If the Italians had captured us at Busovecchio they could scarcely have treated us worse. All that we had to eat now was the leftovers from the food that the villagers had given us. Toth sat miserably beneath a wing on the wet grass as I removed the engine cowling panels yet again to see if anything could be done with the magnetoes.
As I had suspected, they were past praying for, except perhaps via St Jude the Patron of Hopeless Cases. The contact-breaker electrodes had now worn away and honeycombed to the point of disintegration. As I tinkered I suddenly heard a voice over my shoulder, speaking in heavily accented German.
“Excuse, Excellence, but wad kin’ of engine is dat?”
I turned around to find myself looking at a Russian prisoner of war, one of the many employed about the supply bases here in the Tyrol as porters and labourers. He was leaning on his broom and looking with intense interest at what I was doing: in his early twenties I would have thought, with a wide, honest, slightly Asiatic face and wearing a peaked cap and khaki blouse. I answered in Russian, which I was able to speak fairly well from Polish.
“An Austro-Daimler 160hp, soldier. But why the interest?”
“Oh, it’s nothing, High-Born One. It’s just that before the war I was an apprentice at the Putilov Works in St Petersburg, and I used to work on Daimler engines. We were building them under licence: the 80hp kind for motor cars. They’re the same as this one only a bit smaller. But those contact breakers of yours are done for.”
“Thank you, but I had gathered that.”
“Can I have a look at one?” I handed him the corroded electrodes and he examined them carefully. “Of course,” he said, “I could make you some like these if I had the tools. It’s not much of a job. I used to do things like that for my apprenticeship tests.”
“What’s your name?”
“Trofimov, Excellency: Arkady Feodorovich, Junior Corporal, 3rd Battery, 258th Regiment of Field Artillery. I got captured at Lutsk in the summer. There’s about twenty of us here, mostly Siberians.”
“Do they treat you well?”
“Well enough, Excellency. The food here’s no worse than in Russia and the local people are all right. They don’t give me anything interesting to do though, only sweeping up and collecting salvage.”
“What do you mean, interesting?”
“Work as a motor mechanic. I’ve offered to be the Herr Kommand- ant’s driver but he only laughs and slaps me round the head and calls me an ignorant peasant from the steppes. But honestly, I could do the job much better than most of the people here.” His eyes suddenly pleaded with me. “Let me have a go at those contacts at least. I could do you a replacement set in an afternoon if I could get some files and a vice and a grinding wheel.”
So I took Lance-Corporal Trofimov up on his kind offer. True, the workshops were locked up for the weekend. But Toth had acquired a number of strange skills in his seminary, apart from that of seducing nuns in marrow-beds, and one of these was the picking of locks. Before long Trofimov was at work in a shed, singing to himself as he filed away and the grinding wheel screeched and sparked. By the end of the afternoon he had fashioned us two perfect sets of contact-breaker electrodes; and not only that but replaced them, reset the magneto timing and removed and cleaned the sparking plugs. They were test-running the engine when I returned from Bozen carrying a large ham sausage which I had bought for Trofimov as a present with my remaining ten kronen. He was pleased, but was more anxious that I should recommend him for a vehicle fitter’s course. I said that I thought this might cause problems under the Hague Convention, but I promised to see what could be done.
“You see, Excellency,” he said earnestly, “this war’s not going to go on for ever, and when I get home I’m going to help build a new Russia: a Russia of the twentieth century, with motor cars and aeroplanes and electricity. I’ve taught myself to read since I’ve been here, you know.”
I often wonder whether he got home after the war, and what happened to him later.
We spent the night at St Jakob, lying on the field under the aeroplane’s wing, sheltered against the unseasonable chill only by our blankets and an old tarpaulin procured for us by the Russians. The Kommandant had returned from Bozen unexpectedly that evening and had caught us in the workshop. We told him that the door had been open, but we could see that he did not believe us. He kicked us out, then locked up the hut and posted a sentry with instructions to fire if he saw anyone trying to break in again. For good measure he ordered us to be on our way at first light next morning, saying that he was running a base repair unit and not a hostel for tramps.
We woke and breakfasted on bread and tea supplied us by the Russians, who seemed delightfully free of petty prejudices on the matter of nationality. They even made us packed lunches to take with us, and provided us with an old winebottle full of “samgonka,” a probably lethal home-made vodka distilled from mashed potatoes. All they asked in return were some old newspapers. Puzzled, I asked why. After all, most of them looked illiterate even in Russian, and all that I had was an old copy of the Triester An%eiger which someone had left in the cockpit. No matter, they said: they only wanted it for rolling cigarettes from the foul-smelling tobacco which they grew for themselves on the airfield. I asked whether they would prefer proper cigarette papers? I was a smoker myself and had a few boxes in my jacket pockets. No, they said; newspapers had more flavour, on account of the ink.
