Lussin Piccolo had once had a marine academy of its own, and a powerful guild of ship owners. But iron steamships and the Suez Canal had finally done for the place, and it had long since sunk into shabby poverty, alleviated a little only in the early years of this century when the Archduke Karl Stefan had built a villa here and the place had become, like the rest of the Dalmatian coast under Austrian rule, a riviera for second-rank nobility and imperial bureaucrats in summer and a sanatorium for invalids in winter. This always struck me as an odd belief, I must say: that the warm, sunlit Adriatic coast was an ideal place for consumptives. I had served fifteen years in the Austrian fleet and knew perfectly well from officiating at recruiting depots that the entire coast was in fact rotten with tuberculosis.
But then, this was scarcely a matter for wonder: the diet of the common people had always been miserable here in Dalmatia. The limestone islands—no more than karst mountain-tops protruding from the water— were stony and arid to a degree where even goats could scarcely browse a living from most of them. The islanders had imported their food in peacetime and had paid for it with tourist income and remittances from abroad. But now that the war was into its third year, tourism and remittances were both things of the past. The 1916 harvest had been disastrously bad throughout Central Europe. The Hungarian government had just forbidden the export of grain to the rest of the Monarchy, so Dalmatia was indeed in a precarious state. If the people of Vienna were now sub sisting on turnips and barley-meal, what would be left over for the folk of the poor, distant, forgotten Adriatic coastlands? By November supplies to the islands were down to the bare minimum needed to prevent people from dying of starvation in the streets. Even fish was no longer available to feed the people, now that the local fishing fleet was under military control and its catch requisitioned at the dockside to be taken away and canned for army rations.
But the scarcity of food on Lussin Island in the autumn of 1916 had one good side to it: if there was nothing much for the people to eat, that at least meant that they no longer had to bother about finding fuel to cook it. Coal had been short throughout the Monarchy for a year or more past, as the blast-furnaces consumed everything that Austria’s increasingly decrepit rail system was able to transport. The cities got only what was left over from the war industries. By mid-November electricity and gas were off for most of the day in Vienna, so it was not very likely that places like Lussin were going to see much coal, dangling as they did at the end of a precarious steamer line down from Fiume. About the middle of the month a violent bora tore an old three-masted barque from her moorings on the mainland and drove her ashore on the eastern coast of the island just across from the air station. Word spread to the town and within minutes the entire population were on the move, armed with axes and crowbars. I was telephoned by the local coastguards to provide a naval picket to guard the wreck; but by the time I had collected the men and got to the ridge of the island above the shore it was already too late. We stood open- mouthed, staring in disbelief as the old wooden ship simply evaporated in front of our eyes, disappearing like a piece of camphor in the sunshine, only much faster.
There were about forty of us at Naval Air Station Lussin Piccolo, lodged in a small wooden-hutted encampment on the shores of Kovcanja Bay, at the opposite end of the long, narrow fjord-harbour from the town about five kilometres distant. The flying-boat base had recently been moved here out of the way because a minesweeper flotilla was using the town harbour, and things had become too crowded for safe take-off and landing. Lussin’s fjord was a splendid natural anchorage, sheltered by low hills to eastward from the bora and with only one narrow entrance, about half-way down the seaward side. The French Navy had occupied the place in the war of 1859 with the intention of using it as a base for stirring up revolt in Hungary—if the war had not ended after only a few weeks with Austria’s defeat. The War Ministry had learnt its lesson though and had built a number of forts on the island in the 1860s, as well as providing a chain barrier to block the harbour entrance.
By the looks of it the War Ministry might very well have installed the personnel of the Naval Air Station at the same time as the defences, because the average age of the lower deck was (I should think) nearer to sixty than to fifty: a collection of ancient naval reservists and pensioners called up for the duration and commanded—for want of a better word—by a delightful old gentleman called Fregattenkapitan Maximillian von Lotsch. Fregattenkapitan von Lotsch had not so much been called from retirement to command the station as returned from the embalmers. Nobody knew for sure how old he was, but it was reasonably certain on the evidence of old daguerreotype photographs that he had been a Seefahnrich aboard the brig Hus%ar at the siege of Venice in 1849. Certainly he must have been eighty-five if he was a day when I knew him: a charming old boy straight out of Biedermeyer Austria, but pretty well gaga and unshake- ably convinced that we were at war with the Prussians. He had not the remotest idea about aviation, or about running a naval air station. But it scarcely mattered, since he spent most of the day dozing peacefully in an armchair in his office, waking only from time to time to enquire whether the “Pfiff- Chinesers” had managed to capture Prague yet. We just gave him things to sign every now and then and got on with running the station as best we could.
Not that our crew gave us much trouble. Apart from a few young engine fitters and other such craftsmen from our parent unit, the naval air base at Pola, the station personnel were simply too old to present us with the disciplinary problems that usually arise from having a ship full of feckless and hot-blooded young men. There was none of the drunkenness, none of the whoring, none of the fights and none of the requests to visit pox clinics that normally make life so tiresome for divisional officers; only a good deal of grumbling among a collection of aged men who had suddenly found themselves in naval uniform again when they were already grandfathers, and who had now been exiled to spend the war on a remote island in the Adriatic. They would while away their off-duty hours huddled around the stove at the Cafe Garibaldi in town, playing backgammon and wheezing complaints against the war and the “verfluchtete Kriegsmarine” as they snapped their arthritic knuckles.
My servant was an ancient Pola-Italian naval pensioner called Tomas- sini who claimed (with what truth I cannot say) to have served as a powder- monkey aboard the wooden battleship Kaiser at Lissa in 1866. It was a pity, I once told him, that the Monarchy’s desperate shortage of manpower should have compelled it to call up men in their sixties. Tomassini sucked his remaining teeth and thought for a while about this.
“Can’t say that it bothers me too much, Herr Leutnant, if you really want to know what I think. It gets me away from the old woman for a bit, and all things considered this isn’t too bad a place to sit out the war, specially now as they’re copping it back in Pola. There’s an air-raid every other day now, the missus says. They had a bomb come down the chimney of the house next door last week and bring our ceiling down. Frightened the life out of her it did. No danger of that out here anyway.”
He was quite right about that: Lussin Island was way outside the range of the smaller Italian aircraft, and had nothing whatever to attract the big Caproni bombers that were now raiding Austrian towns as far behind the Front as Graz and Laibach. Fighter aircraft could not get this far, and we ourselves were too far from the Italian ports to be employed for bombing- raids. So air operations from Naval Air Station Lussin Piccolo consisted entirely of the humdrum business of convoy escort, varied only occasionally by the odd anti-submarine patrol.
It was difficult to say which of these two was the more tedious. Escorting convoys meant flying over them in circles for four or five hours at a stretch all the way down from the port of Fiume through the Quarnerolo Gulf to the limit of our sector at the northern tip of Lunga Island—sometimes further, if the aeroplane from Zara had not turned up to relieve us. But, tiresome or not, it was certainly a necessary task. The Balkans in those days were a wild and primitive land, almost devoid of roads and railways. This meant that most of the supplies for our fleet at Cattaro and for the Austrian armies in Albania had to travel by sea, down a long coast which lay everywhere within easy striking distance of the Italian shore.
If the convoys had not been properly protected, Allied submarines and motor boats would have been free to slaughter at will like foxes in a hencoop. But they never managed it: in fact thanks to our Navy’s competent use of escorts, only a handful of merchantmen were ever sunk on the Fiume—Durazzo run, even though the number of sailings must have run into thousands. But it was arduous work for all those involved, both for the overworked destroyer and torpedo-boat crews who did the surface escorting and for the flying-boat pilots above.
The trouble from our point of view was that even at half-throttle, down nearly to stalling speed, a Lohner flying-boat was about eight times as fast as a convoy of elderly merchant steamers with engines worn out by lack of grease and burning lignite in their boilers. We had to circle above them all the time, turning in great slow loops as the merchantmen doddered along below at five or six knots with a couple of harassed torpedo- boats fussing about on their flanks. Sometimes we would go clockwise, sometimes anti-clockwise, for no other reason than to break the monotony and stop ourselves getting dizzy, and also because our riggers warned us that this circling in the same direction all the time gave a permanent warp to the airframe. Yet it was a job that demanded unrelenting vigilance: constantly on the look-out not only for the tell-tale white plume of a periscope but for the tiny black dot of a drifting
