the Mezzo Channel and down the Quarnerolo between the outer and inner belts of islands. They would be there waiting for us, beneath their usual brownish haze of lignite smoke: six or seven merchant steamers with a couple of small warships as escorts. I would launch the agreed signal rockets as we approached and then fire up the wireless to contact the operators aboard the escorts. We would circle above the convoy while they sorted themselves out, dismiss the aeroplane which had accompanied them out of Fiume, then settle down for the next four hours of acute boredom. The steamers would shamble along below at their customary five or six knots— provided it was a good day and there was no head-wind—meandering along like a string of old-age pensioners on their way to the post office as their helmsmen struggled with worn- out steering gear to keep them on course. Meanwhile I would sweep the sea with my Zeiss binoculars, checking off the islands as we passed by: Cherso, Plavnik, Arbe, Dolin, Lussin, Asinello, Pago, Skarda, Selbe, Ulbo, Premuda, Meleda . . . Sometimes I would think to myself that the profusion of islands along the Dalmatian coast spoke of some mental disorder on the part of the Creator. Surely no one in their right mind could possibly need so many of them . . .
In the end Lunga Island would come into sight, and with it (all being well) the aeroplane from Naval Air Station Zara waiting to take over from us, with perhaps a north-bound convoy waiting to be escorted back. Recognition signals would be exchanged, I would sign off to the wireless operators below and we would gratefully turn the aeroplane north once more. The islands would pass below us again: Meleda and Premuda and Ulbo and Selbe and Skarda and Pago and Asinello, until at long weary last we would be touching down on the fjord at Lussin and skimming across the water into Kovcanja Cove. The mooring-lines would be tossed to us and we would be hauled in towards the slipway.
“Anything happen this time, Herr Schiffsleutnant?”
“No, nothing to report—as usual. Here, help me out will you? I’m so stiff I can hardly move.”
Amid such a general lack of action and excitement, trifling details of life at the air station tended to inflate themselves into major issues. Like food for instance. The rations had been mediocre for a good year past. First the daily wine ration had gone, then coffee had been replaced by the nauseous black “kaffeesurrogat.” Then meat had come off the menu for three days each week, and the warm evening meal had been replaced by a fluid described as “tea” with bread and cheese—or, more usually now, just bread. A thin washy soup of dehydrated turnips and barley-groats was the main meal on most days of the week. And when meat was available, it was often barely fit for human consumption.
When I was not flying, one of my duties as watch officer at the air station was that of inspecting the meat when the fortnightly supply ship arrived from Pola. And amid one consignment of beef carcasses early in November I discovered a creature so stunted and deformed that I took alarm at once. The occasional horse carcass had to be tolerated nowadays among shipments of beef, but I was damned if I was going to put up with my men being fed on dead dogs. I called over the Supplies Warrant Officer from the steamer gangway and told him that I was not going to sign for the delivery. He demurred, insisting that the creature was in fact beef. I began to suspect fraud: it was well known that many officials of the Marine Commissariat at Pola were taking advantage of the growing wartime misery and lining their own pockets by selling off government supplies to the civil population, then making up the short weight with whatever rubbish they could find. I was adamant that I would not accept the delivery, and he was equally adamant that I would. In the end I decided that I would refer the matter to higher authority and sent a rating off on a bicycle to find the station’s Medical Officer.
Naval Air Station Lussin Piccolo had no resident surgeon. Instead it had been allocated the services—such as they were—of a retired naval doctor living in the town. I devoutly hoped that I would be able to avoid injury, because the physician in question was scarcely younger than Fregattenkapitan von Lotsch and not in much better mental shape. He was not in a good mood when he arrived at the jetty half an hour later, riding on the crossbar of the rating’s bicycle.
“Well Herr Schiffsleutnant, what is it?”
“Herr Schiffsarzt, we have had a very dubious carcass of beef delivered here and I am refusing to accept it. I would like you to inspect it so that I can lodge a complaint with the Marine Commissariat.”
“What? Have you called me out all this way just for that? Is the beef maggoty or what? ”
“With respect, Herr Schiffsarzt, I suspect that it is not beef at all but dog: possibly an Alsatian or some such large breed.”
He walked with me to the supply shed and adjusted his pince-nez. But as he saw the horrible misshapen thing hanging among the mauve and yellow carcasses his annoyance rapidly gave way to wonder.
“My goodness, yes,” he said, examining the dead creature, “I see what you mean. Thank you for having called me.”
“It is a dog then, Herr Schiffsarzt?”
“No, no. It’s definitely of the bovine species, but so badly deformed that you’d almost think it was a dog, or perhaps a baboon.”
“Is it a calf, perhaps? ”
“No, it’s an adult animal all right, but worthy of a freak show. Look at the way the spine’s bent and the vertebrae are fused with the pelvis. I wonder that the poor animal managed to exist at all. It must be a veterinary version of Pott’s disease or something similar. I say—you don’t think do you that when your men have consumed the meat you might let me have the skeleton to mount? The local veterinary inspector and I have built up quite a collection of lusus naturae over the years . . .”
“Consume? . . . Excuse me, Herr Schiffsarzt, but I don’t understand: this meat is diseased.”
“Good Lord man, no one will ever know. Just get the cooks to wipe it down with a cloth dipped in vinegar. If there are any microbes in the meat the cooking will probably kill them. I doubt whether it’s communicable to humans anyway.”
“But this is monstrous, to serve up . . .”
“Oh do be sensible my dear fellow; there’s a war on, don’t you know? It’s not much worse than the rest of your consignment anyway. By the looks of it the other carcasses must have died of old age or disease.”
Life on Lussin was quiet, to be sure. But at least the remoteness of the station seemed to have spared me for the time being from further investigations into my assault on Hauptmann Kraliczek and my involvement in the escape of Major di Carraciolo. Each day I returned to base expecting to be given a message telling me to report to the Marine Auditor’s office in Pola. But nothing came. By the second half of November things seemed to have quietened down sufficiently for me to risk a trip back to the mainland, to spend a week’s leave in Vienna with my wife, who had by now left the hospital and was staying with my Aunt Aleksia on the Josefsgasse. I had urgent matters to discuss with her anyway: chiefly that of moving her out of the capital now that she was into the sixth month of her pregnancy and things were becoming so difficult. Her last letter had painted a dismal picture of life in the city: the electricity off at least half of each day; the trams not running; queues everywhere and even potatoes hard to come by. Soap was practically unobtainable, she wrote, or if it could be found, consisted of nothing more than a block of scouring sand held together by the thinnest smear of grease. By now the only food item that could be obtained regularly was the dismal vegetable which would brand that bitterly cold winter into the memory of all who lived through it in Central Europe as “the Turnip Winter.” Already substitute substitutes had begun to appear: a new type of ersatz coffee made from roasted turnips, and a wondrous material called “imitation leather substitute.” Buildings were being shaken to pieces now that motor lorries had finally lost their rubber tyres and been fitted with surrogates, which had originally consisted of two concentric steel hoops held apart by springs, but in which the springs had now been replaced by wooden blocks since spring-steel was in short supply. My aunt was helping run a charity clinic for children in Favoriten and said that the incidence of rickets and scabies was increasing most alarmingly among the poor.
In a word, it all sounded utterly dismal. I had already written to my cousins in Poland to seek their help. They had a sizeable estate in the country near Myslenice and had written back to say that Elisabeth would be more than welcome to stay with them for as long as she pleased, both before the birth and afterwards.
She was not pleased when I told her that evening outside the Sud- bahnhof, trying to find a fiacre to take us to the Josefsgasse since the trams were not running.
“But dearest, be reasonable. Surely you can’t want to stay in Vienna for the birth. The place already looks as if it’s been under siege for a year, and this is only November.”
“Otto, I’ve stuck the war out so far in Vienna and I don’t intend quitting now. Anyway, there’s bags of room at your aunt’s and we get on well together.”
