request for an Austrian supplier to make a copy. Weeks later a letter was received thanking Meyerhofer for the sample and saying that the matter “was receiving the most active consideration.” It was still receiving the most active consideration a year later when the war ended—though, to be fair to the Fliegerarsenal, it had reached committee stage by then.
Of those who had flown with me in Flik 19F only he, I and Svetozar von Potocznik were still alive. Most of the rest—Szuborits, Barinkai and Zwierzkowski and the others—had survived the war, but by 1926 all were dead, killed in peacetime flying accidents. Meyerhofer was now a pilot with the Belgian airline Sabena, and a few weeks after our meeting he too would “find the flier’s death,” colliding with a factory chimney as he tried to land in fog at Le Bourget.
As for Svetozar von Potocznik, paladin of the Germanic Race, I had met him already in Paraguay in 1926 when I was briefly commanding the Paraguayan river fleet during the murderous Chaco War with Brazil. Rather odd when I had known him at Caprovizza, he was by now completely crazed, but in a disturbingly calm, rational sort of way. He had flown in the shadowy little war in Carinthia in 1919 when the infant Austrian Republic had fought to prevent the Slovenes—now part of Yugoslavia— from taking the area south of Klagenfurt. And that was the reason why he was now in South America under the name of Siegfried Neumann: he was wanted throughout Europe as a war criminal after he had dive-bombed his father’s old school at Pravnitz and killed some forty or so children in a ground-floor classroom. He was now flying in the Paraguayan Air Force and practising on Indian villages the theories of terror bombing he had developed during the last years of the world war.
About 1931 he returned to Germany and became a test-pilot for Junkers, then entered the Luftwaffe and became one of the leaders of the infamous Condor Legion during the Spanish Civil War—the ones who used the town of Guernica as a test-laboratory. He had risen to the rank of Major-General by the end of the war. But the Balkans which had given him his original name seemed to draw him back with some fateful magnetism. After being injured in a crash in 1941 he had been assigned to ground duties, commanding a region in occupied Yugoslavia. Partisan activity was intense, but the activities of “Sonderkommando Neumann”— a force made up of Luftwaffe ground troops, SS and Croat Ustashas—had been even intenser, and much more systematic. He was handed over to the Yugoslavs in 1946 and hanged as a war criminal responsible for the deaths of at least twenty-five thousand people.
Meyerhofer had no idea what had become of the miserable Hauptmann Kraliczek after I had tried to choke him that day at Caprovizza: he had just disappeared from the scene. It was not until the 1960s that I remembered him, when I saw an article about him in one of the Sunday papers. It appeared that after the war Kraliczek had become a desk official with the Vienna police, collating crime statistics or something. For twenty years he had led the obscure life of a civilian police official. But recognition sometimes comes even late in life. In 1938 the Nazis arrived in Austria, and in 1940 Kraliczek’s section had been incorporated into Himmler’s SS empire and moved to Berlin. There he was put to work on his old job, organising rail movements. And now be came into his own. In the old days his diligence and attention to detail had been able to work only through the rickety Habsburg administrative machine. But now, as Section Head, he had at his disposal a superbly efficient and unquestioningly obedient administration, absolutely dedicated to its allotted task.
He had undoubtedly done a superb job, organising dozens of rail transports a day across occupied Europe despite the chaos brought about by bombing and the collapse of the fighting fronts. In fact the worse things got, the more effective Kraliczek’s team became. When the British had arrested him near Flensburg in 1945 he had boasted to his captors that in the summer of 1944 he had been routing thirty or forty trains a day across Slovakia even as the Russian armies were pushing into Hungary. Had he ever given any thought to what was being done with the contents of the trucks when they reached their destination? he had been asked. No, he said indignantly; that was totally outside his area of responsibility and no concern of his whatever. They gave him twenty years at Nuremberg. He came out early, about 1962, and was immediately approached for interviews by a young American-Jewish woman journalist—hence the newspaper articles later. He had taken a great liking to her for her qualities of precision and hard work, and had told her everything that she wanted to know in great detail. It was not until near the end of the interviews that she revealed that both her parents had died in the gas chambers. Kraliczek had been genuinely shocked and horrified by this revelation, quite unable to comprehend that it was one of his trains that had taken them there.
So much for the players: what about the stage? As for the Carso Plateau, if I had never seen the place again that would have been far too soon for me. Not steam winches and No. 6 hawsers would ever have dragged me back to that poisonous wilderness. But not everyone felt the same way, I understand. In fact I believe that in the years after the war there were many survivors—Italian and Austrian and ex-Austrian—who kept on going back to those barren hills, spending days at a time wandering alone among the rusty wire-belts and crumbling dug-outs in search of they knew not what, whether the comrades they had left behind there, or their own stolen youth, or perhaps expiation for having come out of it all alive when so many had not. One of these sad living ghosts was Meyerhofer’s youngest brother, who had served on the Carso in the thick of the 1916—17 fighting as a twenty-year-old Leutnant in a Feldjager battalion, straight out of school into the Army. He had gone back every year, Meyerhofer told me, until the previous summer, when he had been killed one evening near Castagnevizza, blown up (the carabinieri said) after he had lit his campfire on top of an old artillery shell buried in a dolina.
Like myself, he had been a keen amateur photographer and Meyer- hofer, while he was in Vienna, was going to bequeath his brother’s album to the Military History Museum at the Arsenal. He showed it to me back in his hotel room. Many of the photographs were from the years after the war, when the Mussolini regime was dotting the Carso with bombastic war memorials designed not so much to honour the dead as to assert the grandeur of armed struggle. But one photograph showed an unofficial war memorial, erected by the troops themselves in the field. It was taken, I should think, some time after the rout at Caporetto, when the Italian Army on the Carso had abandoned in an afternoon all that it had just taken them two years and half a million lives to gain. Marked simply Fajtji Hrib, Autumn 1917, it showed a pyramid of twenty or thirty skulls, piled together without any regard to their owners’ nationality and surmounted by a crucifix made from two thigh bones and a screw-picket stake lashed together with barbed wire. I have no idea what became of that photograph. Perhaps it was lost, because I have never seen it reproduced anywhere. Which is a pity, since I think that if all war memorials had the stark honesty of that simple monument then we might perhaps have fewer wars to commemorate.
15 NAVAL AIRMAN
Imperial and Royal Naval Air station Lussin Piccolo in November 1916 was really not much of a place. But then Lussin Piccolo itself was not much of a place either; though it seemed that it had once known more spacious days, perhaps a century before.
Like many another title in the Habsburg realms, even here on their furthest Dalmatian fringes, the name was confusing. There were two towns on the long, narrow, straggling island of Lussin: Lussin Grande and Lussin Piccolo. Yet Lussin Piccolo was the only one of the two that could be described as a town. Despite its name the other settlement on the opposite side of the island, though it had once been the capital, was by now no more than a dilapidated fishing village with a very large old church. It puzzled me why anyone should ever have bothered to build a town on that side of the island at all. It faced the Velebit Mountains on the Balkan mainland and was exposed to the full fury of the bora, which blew here in winter with a ferocity that, over the ages, had left the entire east-facing coast looking rather as if it had been sand-blasted at maximum pressure: every stick of vegetation shrivelled and worn away by the salt spray and the grit whipped up from the shore.
Lussin Piccolo was a typical small island port town barely distinguishable from several dozen other such towns along the Dalmatian coast. Centuries of Venetian rule had given them all a characteristic pattern-book appearance. There was the usual great baroque-byzantine church with its fluted campanile; and the same rows of shabby yellow-stuccoed palazzi along the riva, once the homes of the ship-owning dynasties who had made this a considerable port in the days of sail, but which had long since been reduced to mausoleums peopled by a few aged survivors of the old patrician families. One saw them sometimes early in the morning on their way to mass: the shrivelled Donna Carlottas and Donna Lugarezzias hobbling along in their black-lace mantillas with equally ancient maids trailing behind them to carry their breviaries, on their way to one or other of the five or so barn-like churches where the walls were covered in memorial tablets to generations of Cosuliches and Tarabocchias lost at sea.
