morning in the Cafe Meissl und Schaden. The place is buzzing with rumours of a German putsch to get rid of Karl when the old Emperor dies. Anyway, they questioned them both and it appears that Conrad’s been writing to her every day of the war without fail.”
“I suppose that’s very wise of him,” I said. “He stole her from another man I hear, so perhaps he’s worried she’ll do the same to him if he doesn’t keep an eye on her.”
“Quite possibly. Anyway, he had been away from Teschen for a week touring the Tyrolean Front, so the letters had built up and he roped you fellows in to fly them to Teschen for him: special express delivery at the expense of the War Ministry. Conrad loves little flourishes like that, I understand. Pity that your pilot had to lose his life for it.” He rose to leave. “Anyway, sorry and all that. You were quite outrageously misled, but there’s nothing we can do about it. And even if we could put our own Chief of Staff in front of a court martial for misuse of army personnel and property, it still wouldn’t bring back your Hungarian chap. Sorry.”
He left, and Hauptmann Kraliczek came in. As he sat down a sudden surge of bile welled up in my throat: a violent loathing for all the field marshals and generals and desk-strategists who poured away men’s lives like water to feed their own preening vanity. I gazed at Kraliczek’s pasty, self-satisfied features before me and something snapped.
“Herr Kommandant, I have a request to make.”
“What is that, Herr Schiffsleutnant?”
“I wish to transfer from this unit and resign from the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe. It’s all one to me where I go: the U-Boats, the trenches in the worst part of the front line—I don’t care any longer.”
He smirked behind his spectacles. “I see: the Maria-Theresien Ritter’s courage has deserted him. I understand—the Flying Service is too dangerous for him. And what are your reasons for requesting this transfer, pray? I cannot simply enter ‘Cowardice’ on the form, you understand.”
I tried to remain calm. “My reason for requesting the move, Herr Kommandant, is simply to be as far away as possible from a creeping thing like you: a commanding officer of a flying unit who, so far as I am aware, has never once flown in an aeroplane and whose sole talent is for designing forms and sending brave men to their deaths in order to draw lines on pieces of graph paper afterwards.”
“Watch your tongue, Prohaska: what you have just said is court- martial talk and might . . . might lead me to demand satisfaction from you.” I noticed that his voice trembled as he spoke these words.
“Herr Kommandant, you will surely be aware as I am that the K.u.K. Dienstreglement absolutely forbids an officer to challenge his superior to a duel in wartime. If it did not then you would have been cold meat long ago.” “But this is outrageous! You are quite obviously unhinged.”
“I obediently report that if I am unhinged, Herr Kommandant, that is because I have seen so many good men’s lives squandered these past three months to no effect. In fact I have just been informed that my pilot was sent to die of cold and injuries on a glacier high up in the Alps so that a field marshal’s wife could get a packet of letters a day earlier than she would have done if he had put them in the post. This does not please me and I want no further part in it.”
“Nonsense. Your duty is to carry out whatever tasks your superiors give you. An order is an order. Anyway . . .” He sniffed. “I can’t see what you’re making such a fuss about. Your pilot fellow was only a ranker . . .”
They told me afterwards that when the orderlies rushed into the office they found me kneeling on Kraliczek’s chest with my hands about his throat, choking the life out of him as I endeavoured to drive his head through the floorboards. Another five seconds or so, the Medical Officer said, and I would probably have been up for court martial on a charge of murder. For my part I remember nothing of it, only a blind, murderous animal rage such as I have never known before or since. I had killed men in battle before that and would do so again; but never would I be filled with such a pure, intense, single-minded, near-ecstatic lust to take someone’s life. It was not Kraliczek’s odious features that I saw there as I gripped his throat, it was Magdalena’s pale, shocked young face; and Toth dazed and moaning glassy-eyed on that cursed icefield; Conrad von Hotzendorf’s self-satisfied little nervous twitch; and Rieger’s charred, grinning skull smouldering among the embers that first day on the field at Caprovizza— all the poor faceless, helpless victims caught up in this collective lunacy that called itself a war.
There was an awful row of course: Maria-Theresien Ritter or no Maria-Theresien Ritter, war or no war, most armies in the world regarded it then and (I believe) still regard it to this day as a fairly serious breach of discipline to have attempted to throttle one’s commanding officer. What saved me in the end from court martial and a possible firing squad was a quite fortuitous piece of luck. For the next day, on 19 October, Flik 19F ceased to exist and was officially merged once more with its parent unit Flik 19. My new commanding officer was not therefore Hauptmann Rudolf Kraliczek, who was currently lying in hospital at Marburg, but Hauptmann Adolf Heyrowsky of Flik 19.
“Well Prohaska,” he said, “I must say that you’ve gone and got yourself into a pretty little spot here and no mistake. If Oberleutnant Meyerhofer hadn’t got you into the ambulance straight away and off to the loony bin in Trieste the Provost’s people would have come for you and you’d have found yourself in a cell in the Caserne Grande. I gather from this report here that you attempted to inflict grievous bodily harm on Hauptmann Kraliczek?”
“With respect Herr Kommandant, that is incorrect: I tried to kill him.” Heyrowsky stuck his fingers into his ears.
“Tut tut, Prohaska; you really mustn’t say things like that or there’ll have to be a court martial after all. No, I didn’t hear what you said. My eardrums have been troubling me lately: altitude and all that. You’re a flier yourself so I’m sure you understand. No, I think that if we play this one intelligently we can still get you off the hook.”
“Might I enquire how, Herr Kommandant? I am undeniably guilty of a death-penalty offence. Court martial is mandatory in such cases.”
“Well, it is and it isn’t. Evidence has to be gathered, and there were no witnesses I understand: at any rate, none who’d testify against you. And anyway, Flik 19F has just been merged with Flik 19, so while the papers are being transferred from their Kanzlei to ours I would imagine it to be quite possible that some might get mislaid. I think if we can discreetly lose you along the way as well . . .”
“Lose me? How?”
“I gather that you were only seconded to the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe from the Navy, so you’re not technically on the strength. I also understand from contacts of mine in Pola that they’re short of pilots in the Imperial and Royal Naval Flying Service. Now, I may be a fighting soldier but I haven’t served twenty years in the k.u.k. Armee without learning something about paperwork. If we’re quick we can get you up to Divacca and on to the next train to Pola before the Military Procurators people come here looking for you. They’ve still got a file open on you after that affair with the Italian pilot chap.” He looked at his watch. “Eleven-thirty-five precisely. Get your kit together and report back here in fifteen minutes while I talk with the lorry driver. Mustn’t make your departure too public I think. There’ll be a rail warrant waiting for you at Divacca.”
“But Herr Kommandant . . .”
“Prohaska, you are in no position to argue, believe me. Just go, and take damned good care not to leave a forwarding address.”
So that was how I bade farewell to the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe: lying under a tarpaulin in the back of a motor lorry full of empty lubricating- oil cans, as we lumbered out through the gate of k.u.k Fliegerfeld Haidenschaft and on to the Divacca road. It had been eighty-nine days in total. It only seemed much longer.
I met Franz Meyerhofer in Vienna in 1930 or thereabouts. I had just returned from South America and he was in the city for a family funeral, so we met for a couple of drinks for old times’ sake. Meyerhofer told me that they had fought on after I left, first in Flik 19 then in other units. Meyerhofer himself had at last won his pilot’s wings and had eventually led a fighter squadron over the Montello sector in the battles of the summer of 1918. The k.u.k. Fliegertruppe had fought on to the end, he said, outnumbered, and handicapped by every imaginable deficiency of equipment, organisation and training. Even in 1917, he said, the Germans would still not sell us Fokker interrupter gear to allow machine guns to fire through the propeller arc, so we had used a homemade version called the Zaparka system. This had worked, but only with the engine between twelve hundred and two thousand revs per minute—which meant that a pilot had to keep one eye on his target and the other on the tachometer as he pressed the firing button, otherwise he might only shoot off his own propeller blades. Likewise they still had to soldier on with the wretched Schwarzlose machine gun and its canvas ammunition belts. At the end of 1917, Meyerhofer told me, they had shot down a British Sopwith Camel fighter and had found that its machine guns were fed by self- destructing ammunition belts, made up of a chain of aluminium clips which held each cartridge to its neighbour and which fell off when the bullet had been fired. Samples were rushed to the k.u.k. Fliegerarsenal with an urgent
