might get us to land before we were dead from exposure and fatigue.
Even so it was a miserable business to huddle there in the cockpit, soaked through with spray, each trying to snatch a half-hour’s sleep as the other bailed. Yet despite the chill and wet, we were soon tormented by thirst as the salt spray caked on our lips. We had no water apart from a couple of litres milked from the engine radiator, barely drinkable from rust and engine oil. As for food, there was none apart from a packet of ship’s biscuits which we had been too ashamed to offer to the survivors from the Laplace. Crunching these and trying to swallow them with our parched throats was like trying to masticate broken bottles. About midday I decided to try and get the wireless working, charging the battery by attaching a makeshift crank to the wind-driven dynamo. It was a bitter disappointment: an hour or more of strenuous cranking produced barely enough current for four repetitions of the message “L149—SOS.”
This purgatory lasted until early afternoon, when the breeze dropped and the sea lessened to leave us drifting aimlessly once more. Then we both saw it together: the smoke on the horizon to northward. I fired three flares as the upperworks came into sight. Through my binoculars it looked like an Austrian Tb/-class torpedo-boat, in fact a small two-funnelled coastal destroyer. But had they seen us? They seemed to be steaming at about seven knots and were within three thousand metres of us. A drifting flying-boat is hardly something that a look-out can miss, but still they steamed on past us and disappeared in a bank of haze, ignoring us as I desperately fired our last flares.
“Nechledil,” I said through cracked lips, “how could they have missed us? Surely they must have seen us at this range.” Nechledil said nothing, merely sat staring glumly as the vessel faded into the murk. I could see that the apathy of exhaustion was already creeping over him. I too gazed at the spot where the torpedo-boat had vanished, lost for words. So imagine my surprise about five minutes later when the boat reappeared, heading in the opposite direction and turning towards us. I waved and shouted as if they would hear us at that range. Why had they ignored us the first time? They were coming to pick us up, no question of that.
The dinghy bumped alongside us a few minutes later. To my surprise the two ratings in it refused to answer us when we spoke, only told us curtly to sit down and shut up. I was even more surprised when one of them proceeded to take a crowbar and smash holes in the floor and sides of the flying-boat—and told me to be quiet when I asked him what he thought he was doing. My suspicion that something was badly amiss was confirmed shortly afterwards as we came alongside the torpedo-boat Tb14. We were greeted by two ratings with levelled rifles and a petty officer with a pistol. I asked what the devil was going on—and was told to come aboard with my hands up. As I was bundled across the rail the incredible truth finally dawned upon me. The vessel was in the hands of mutineers.
17 FIAT JUSTITIA
As Nechledil and I were being searched before being hustled below decks I overheard an argument going on between the petty officer who had greeted us at the gangway and a senior rating. Both were Czechs, and the rating was plainly not all pleased with the Petty Officer.
“For God Almighty’s sake why did we have to pick them up? I told the helmsman to keep his course when I saw them. They’ll be out after us by now and we’ve still got three hours left until it gets dark.”
“Shut up Eichler. Who’s giving the orders here, me or you?”
“I thought there weren’t going to be any orders any more. You and your finer feelings, Vackar. We ought to have left the bastards to drown. They’re only officers.”
“They’re human and we’re socialists. They were men like us once: only Austria turned them into officers.”
“Oh be quiet and get them below with the others then. I’ve got a ship to run.” He turned to us. “What’s your names?”
“No business of yours, sailor,” I answered. “And stand to attention when you speak to an officer. Who’s in charge here?”
He laughed. “Don’t come that tone of voice here Herr Leutnant or you’ll both end up back in the sea. We’re all in charge here.” A sailor stuck a pistol into my stomach as he reached down the neck of my flying tunic to pull out my identity tag. He collected Nechledil’s by the same means and handed them to Eichler, who examined the names stamped on the back. “I don’t believe it—both Czechs as well. And one of them the celebrated Ritter von Prohaska of the U-Boat Service. Well meine Herren, remember any of our Czech do we? Or did they wash that out of you at cadet school as well? Filth—you’d forget your own names if the Austrians told you to do it. Your sort make me sick.”
With that we were pushed down the narrow companionway and shoved into the Captain’s cabin. The door was locked behind us. We found ourselves packed into the tiny steel cubicle with five other men: the ship’s captain, a Seefahnrich and three NCOs who had remained loyal when the ship had been taken over. The Captain was a fellow called Klemmer whom I knew vaguely from the Marine Academy. He was in a bad way, shot through the left lung and coughing blood. They had bandaged him with a torn bedsheet and laid him out on a bunk. We gathered that Tb14 had been operating with the 5th Torpedo Boat Division at Sebenico, engaged day-in, day-out for the past ten months on convoy escort along the Dalmatian coast. Working-hours had been long, leave minimal and the food increasingly poor. Likewise the First Officer, one Strnadl, had been very unpopular, combining tyranny with incompetence in about equal measure. Yet no one had suspected anything until just before eight bells that morning off Premuda, when the Captain had suddenly found himself barricaded into his cabin just as he was about to relieve Strnadl on the forenoon watch. He had finally managed to lever the cabin door open with a chair-leg, but had emerged on deck pistol in hand only to be knocked over by a rifle-shot from Eichler on a conning tower. Our fellow prisoners said that, so far as they knew, Eichler and Vackar had taken an equal part in organising the mutiny. Both had been heard talking some days before about a Czech Legion which was being formed among Austrian prisoners in Italy. Quite clearly the boat was bound for Ancona to surrender.
As for the rest of the eighteen-man crew, they thought that most were undecided about the mutiny: a few of the South Slavs disposed to join it, others probably against and the engine-room crew wavering. No one knew what had happened to Fregattenleutnant Strnadl. He might have been locked up in the fo’c’sle, but shots had been heard and it seemed more likely that he had gone overboard with a bullet through his head.
It looked then as if, having been generously released from French captivity, I was now on my way to become a prisoner of the Italians after all. That was a matter for regret to be sure, and for acute shame on behalf of my service in view of the circumstances in which it had happened, but at least it cast no slur upon either my loyalty or my professional competence. As for poor Nechledil though, I sensed that he would gladly accept life imprisonment in a cesspit with scorpions for company and bread and water to eat in exchange for his present predicament. His father had been condemned for treason, his brother was a deserter and his relatives were sitting in Austrian internment camps on suspicion of Czech nationalist subversion. And now he found himself through no fault of his own aboard a warship about to desert to the enemy after having fallen victim to a Czech-led mutiny. He was in a pretty mess and no mistake. What would happen if Tb14 were captured before nightfall by Austrian ships? What would happen to his mother and brother when he arrived in Italy and the news got back via the Red Cross? Suppose that Italy finally lost the war and Austrian deserters were handed over? I could vouch for his loyalty, but who would listen to me? I was a Czech myself after all, and already under investigation for various breaches of military discipline. Something had to be done.
I knew the Tb1-class torpedo-boats quite well from having served aboard one as second-in-command back in 1909; not only served aboard her, but worked on her in the shipyard where she was being built. In order to get the Hungarian parliamentary deputation to vote money for them, half of the Tb1-class orders had been placed with the Kingdom of Hungary’s only salt-water shipyard, the Ganz-Danubius AG in Fiume. Although only set up a couple of years before, Ganz-Danubius had already established a formidable reputation for poor design and shoddy workmanship. The Danubius Tb1 boats were no exceptions to this unhappy rule. Long, narrow steel canoes driven by a single propeller, they were unstable and top-heavy at the best of times. But Danubius had managed to make the basic design even worse by taking no account whatever of the enormous torque-effect from the propeller. The result on speed-trials had been a list to starboard which grew more alarming with every knot, until I had been obliged to have men hanging on to the port rails to trim ship and the crew below moving every available piece of
