mine or the miniscule grey outlines of a flotilla of Italian MAS boats lurking among the myriad islands and waiting to skim in and launch their torpedoes. We were looking all the time for something which was probably not there, but which would wreak disaster if it were there and we failed to see it. If there was any doubt on that point it was dispelled early in November when the Ungaro-Croatia steamer Gabor Bethlen was torpedoed and sunk off Lunga Island after the other Lussin aeroplane had fumbled the hand-over to the relief from Zara and a submarine had taken advantage of the gap. As an ex-submarine captain myself I liked to think that he would never have had the chance if I had been there, but secretly I was far from sure of that. Observer and pilot used to work one-hour shifts in those flying-boats; but in the winter cold it was dreadfully easy to drift into trains of thought and miss a periscope wake, especially when the sea was flecked with white-caps from the wind or if there had been a lot of dolphins about.
My feelings about all this were curiously mixed, I must say. On the one hand, after the excitements and terrors of my time as a front flier with the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe I might have been expected to have relished the boring safety of this sort of flying; and all the more so when I had a wife six months pregnant back in Vienna. But I also knew that hundreds of thousands of my comrades were risking their lives every minute of the day and dying in hetacombs for their Emperor and Fatherland. Somehow it seemed a slightly seedy thing for a Maria-Theresien Ritter to be living this semi-retired life of modest comfort and minimal risk on a pleasant Adriatic island while my fellows were undergoing the most terrible hardships and dangers in the trenches and the U-Boats.
Compared with flying over—or more usually among—the Alps, there was not even any great intrinsic risk in the flying itself. The Lohner boat in which I flew, number L149, was a comfortable and safe old bus: like all flying- boats, of very modest performance even when compared with the Hansa-Brandenburg, but soundly built and extremely reliable when fitted like ours with a 160hp German-built Mercedes engine. Built by the Jakob Lohner carriageworks in Vienna, one-time specialists in the horse-drawn hearses that still occasionally feature in horror films, it had a long, elegant boat-hull of varnished mahogany and the propeller mounted pusher- fashion behind the two long, curving, slightly swept-back wings. My pilot and I sat side by side in the open cockpit as if in a sort of airborne sports car. We could carry a machine gun for defence, mounted on a folding spigot on the observer’s side of the cockpit, but since we were so far from enemy fighters we usually left this ashore in the interests of weight- saving and took a wireless set instead. For armament we carried four 20kg bombs on racks beneath the wingroots to deal with a submarine if we spotted one.
The other half of the “we” in this instance was my pilot Fregatten- leutnant Franz (or Frantisek) Nechledil. Like myself, Nechledil was a Czech by birth, the son of a chemist from the town of Pribram in southern Bohemia. I liked Nechledil, who was seven years my junior, but we never spoke Czech together, only German. The Habsburg Army permitted— even encouraged—its officers to speak with their men in their own language, even if this meant having to learn it specially. But among officers and senior NCOs the speaking of national languages, though not actually forbidden, was regarded as bad form outside a few Hungarian and Polish regiments. The official doctrine was that anyone who put on the Emperor’s Coloured Coat as an officer put aside nationality. Thus the only permissible language among officers in the Austrian half of the Monarchy was that curious, now almost forgotten tongue called “official German”: a language distinguished by the fact that, of those who spoke it, wrote it, thought in it, told jokes—even made love—in it, a good two-thirds were using it as a foreign language; like Elisabeth and myself for example, since I knew no Magyar while she could only stumble along in Czech.
But where Franz Nechledil was concerned there were other, darker reasons for his avoiding the Czech language even when we were alone together in private. His father had been founder of the local branch of the society “Sokol” in Pribram: a Czech patriotic and sporting organisation which was officially dedicated to “elevating the moral and spiritual tone of Czech youth,” but which had for some years before the war been viewed with increasing alarm in Vienna as a secret society dedicated to Czech independence, the possible kernel of a Czech underground army of resistance. When the war came, and the k.u.k. Armee had been well and truly thrashed by the Russians and Serbs, the authorities had panicked and arrested Czech nationalists by the hundred, hanging some after trumped- up trials in front of military courts and sending the rest to hastily set-up concentration camps in Austria. Nechledil’s father had been found guilty of espionage and sentenced to death, but had cheated the hangman by dying of typhus in jail. His mother and younger brother had ended up in a camp at Steinfeld outside Vienna.
But worse was to follow, for it came to light early in 1915 that Nechledil’s elder brother, a Captain in Infantry Regiment No. 28, had not been killed at Przemysl after all but had gone over to the Russians and was now helping organise the Czechoslovak Legion in Siberia. Nechledil had been summoned to the Military Procurator’s department and had undergone a series of very unpleasant interviews concerning his own activities in the Sokol. He had been returned to duty in the end, but had been left under no illusions but that he was a marked man and was being closely watched. The result was that he regarded anything Czech—even a Dvorak gramophone record—with the sort of mildly hysterical aversion that some people have towards wasps or spiders. Between us two there was an unspoken pact never to mention or allude to any national political question, even to the extent of never talking about our respective home towns. This sounds like duplicity, and I suppose that in a way it was. But please understand that we Central Europeans have become masters of the art of partial amnesia, of excising from our minds anything that is not convenient to those set in authority over us. How does the joke go?
“Granny, where were you born? ”
“Hush, child, and don’t talk about politics.”
Still, it was good to be back in my own chosen service at last, among people whom I understood and who talked a common language. The massacre of the old k.u.k. Armee officer corps in 1914 had meant that the Army’s ranks had been filled up with pre-war Einjahrigers; but so far its naval counterpart had escaped serious casualties and in consequence had retained much of the old pre-war mentality. I felt far more comfortable in the tiny, spartan mess hut at Lussin than I ever did among my brother- officers at Caprovizza.
Nechledil was officially the pilot of L149 and I was the observer. But in practice our duties were not so neatly divided. I had qualified as a pilot in 1912 and had flown some of the Navy’s earliest flying-boats, emerging with a badly injured leg to prove it when I crashed one of them off Abbazia in 1913. I had not flown a great deal in the years since, but my residual skill did at least mean that Nechledil and I could break the monotony of patrolling over the steel-grey winter sea by changing places every hour. As flying-boats go I found the Lohner to be a pleasant and easy machine to handle: well-balanced and light on the controls, so that one did not have to spend the entire four- or five-hour flight lugging desperately at the column to keep the thing flying level.
Even so it was a depressingly humdrum business, escorting convoys: more like the life of a Viennese tram driver than that of an airman in a world war. There would be the usual checks in the hangar before dawn, then the bleary-eyed ground crew trundling the machine out on its trolley and down the concrete slipway to leave it sitting like a sea-gull on the water. This was always the trickiest part of the operation, the launching. The hull was matchbox-fragile and, although it had a shallow V-section up at the bows, the rest of the bottom was flat, which meant that it would drift sideways in the wind like a paper bag. If the sailors holding the mooring-lines let their attention wander, a sudden bora gust could snatch the aeroplane from them and send it gliding across the cove to pile up on the rocks at the other side. Once the boat was safely in the water Nechledil and I would paddle up in our dinghy and clamber aboard. As observer, it would fall to me to start the engine. I always approached this task with some trepidation, standing on the cockpit edge and straining at a hand-crank above me to turn over the six-cylinder engine. It was liable to backfire on starting and if one was grasping the starting-handle too tightly, then dislocated wrists could be the result. Once the engine was thundering away and the aeroplane straining at the mooring-lines I would sit down and test the wireless, tapping out a few words on the Morse key and checking the reply from the naval wireless station up at Fort Lussin. Then if all was well Nechledil would ease the throttle forward and signal to the ground crew to release the mooring-lines, and we would begin our take-off run.
I often think that the French verb for take-off, “decoller,” must have been coined by a flying-boat pilot, because in calm weather the boat would seem to stick to the water as if to a sheet of glue, requiring the most strenuous efforts to get the thing into the air. In winter however this was not such a problem: there would usually be a breeze blowing and we would huddle behind the windscreen in the driving spray as the boat thumped its way across the waves, hurtling down the fjord on its take-off run through the short, spume-laden chop ruffled up by the wind. We would get airborne, then bank away over the entrance to this almost land-locked harbour before turning northwards to make our way to our rendezvous with the convoy.
Our pick-up point would be either the Cape Porer lighthouse, if the convoy was coming down from Pola, or (more usually) the northernmost tip of Cherso Island if it was a convoy proceeding southward from Fiume, through
