I must admit that what Vackar had to say to me in the fo’c’sle there that morning did disturb me a good deal; brought a number of uncomfortable half-formed ideas to the surface about the direction the war was taking.
But please understand that if the pull of my old nationality and language was strong, the bonds of loyalty to Dynasty and Fatherland were still much stronger. Things looked different in those days from how they look now, seventy years on. All of us officers—even first-generation officers like myself from the old peasant peoples—had been subjected to years of very subtle and effective mind-shaping as we went through the schools and military colleges of the Old Monarchy. Loyalty to our Emperor; loyalty to our ruling house; loyalty to our multinational Fatherland and to our ship and service; loyalty to the officer’s code of honour and to our oath; loyalty to the Catholic Church and to our country’s allies: all these were extremely powerful ties. And just because we had been indoctrinated to accept these things does not necessarily mean that they were themselves worthless: in fact, looking back on it now, I think that even if the Habsburg multinational empire was a pretty disastrous affair in practice, not all of its ideals were ignoble ones.
But any inner struggle that I might perhaps have undergone was rapidly forestalled by a shout from the other side of the door. Vackar sprang to his feet and rushed out on deck, leaving a very young Croat sailor with a pistol to guard me. Before long shouting and confused sounds of struggle came to me from amidships as the boat began to lose way. Something was happening in the engine room. I set to work upon my guard, who was clearly very perplexed by it all.
“Sailor,” I said in Croat, “do you hear that?”
“Obediently report that yes, Herr Schiffsleutnant.”
“What will you do now? ”
His voice trembled as he replied. “Obediently report . . . Obediently report that I’ll . . . shoot you dead if you move—by your leave, Herr Schiffsleutnant.”
“Shoot me, sailor? Oh dear, you shouldn’t have said that you know: offering threats to an officer is a death- penalty offence in wartime. ‘Tod durch erschiessen . . .’ Is that how you want your parents to remember you?” The poor lad was almost in tears by now. I held out my hand. “There, there. You’re a young lad and no doubt they threatened you into joining them. Give me that pistol and we’ll say no more about it.” He handed me the pistol almost thankfully and I rushed up the ladder on to the deck abaft the conning tower.
A strange scene greeted me in the gathering dusk. A naked man, covered from head to foot in grime and rust, stood at the conning-tower rails with a pistol in his hand and a naval cap on his head. He was haranguing a crowd of open-mouthed, staring ratings below, like some crazed prophet just arrived in Jerusalem from the wilderness to tell everyone to repent and escape the wrath to come. It was only with difficulty that I recognised this bizarre, staring-eyed figure as Franz Nechledil.
“Sailors,” he yelled, “sailors, don’t listen to these fools and deceivers who would lead you to the enemy, who would entice you to destruction and sell your country to the perfidious King of Italy. Czechs, Slovenes, Germans, Croats—we all fight for one another, for our Emperor and King and for our common Fatherland; for God and for our honour as sailors of Austria. Will you let these reptiles make you into traitors and mutineers? No future awaits you in Italy but a prison camp, a prison camp which will take in the whole of the Adriatic coastlands and all your families as well if the Italians win. Be true to your oath; true to your comrades; true to the Noble House of Habsburg!” Out of the corner of my eye I saw a movement behind the after funnel. It was Eichler, levelling a rifle at Nechledil on the bridge and about to fire. But I fired first. Hitting someone with a pistol at twenty metres is by no means certain, but my luck was in. He dropped the rifle and fell to his knees, clutching his arm. That was the hair that tipped the scales: within a few minutes the waverers had joined us and the mutineers were firmly under lock and key in the fo’c’sle with sentries posted at every door and skylight. S.M. Tb14 had rejoined the Imperial and Royal Fleet.
The full story only came out later: how Nechledil had almost fainted in the foul air of the bilges, but had still managed to turn that tight corner and worm his way up into the base of the oilskin locker at the foot of the companionway ladder. The plate that made up the locker floor had given him some trouble, but luck and the slipshod workmanship of Messrs Ganz and Danubius had been on our side: instead of a steel plate the floor of the locker was nothing but plywood. He had managed to prise it open, climb up into the locker—then burst out upon an astonished sentry at the foot of the ladder. The man had given no trouble when Nechledil appeared, naked and black as the devil with rust and bilge-grime: in fact had run for his life yelling that the murdered officer had come back aboard to haunt everyone. This unexpected turn had so thrown the engine-room crew off balance that they had barricaded themselves in and drawn the boiler fires. Nechledil had unlocked the door of the Captain’s cabin and the prisoners had then rushed out armed with legs from the cabin table. Things had hung in the balance for a few minutes, but in the end it was undoubtedly the awesome spectacle of Nechledil’s naked speech of Kaisertreu devotion from the bridge that had finally swung the crew against the mutineers. Just before dusk we fell in with the destroyer S.M.S. Sne%nik and were escorted back to Zara, all of us under arrest pending investigations.
In the end Vackar and Eichler paid with their lives for their humanity in stopping to pick us up. That much is indisputable, for without the half-hour’s loss of time, and without my special knowledge of the detailed construction of Tb1-class torpedo-boats, and without Nechledil’s determination, I am pretty sure that they would have got away with it, boilers or no boilers. I pleaded extenuating circumstances as vigorously as I could at their court martial aboard the flagship Viribus Unitis in Pola Harbour the following week, but it was a hopeless task from the outset. Mutiny, murder and desertion are all death-penalty offences in wartime, whatever the country, and in 1916 they would have suffered death for them in any other country in Europe as well. The best that I could do was to get more lenient sentences for the lesser mutineers, particularly for the young Croat sailor who had handed me his pistol and who got off with eighteen months. As for the rest, two men got twelve-year sentences—of which they served only two, thanks to Austria’s collapse—while the remainder were landed and dispersed to shore establishments.
Vackar and Eichler were shot at dawn on the morning of 12 December, against the wall of Pola’s Naval Cemetery, where two graves had been dug ready for them. Like all the rest of the fleet in harbour I had to stand to attention on deck and listen as the volleys crashed among the black cypress trees on the hill and the crows rose cawing from their roosts into the early morning air. Old Austria was good at pageantry, and no effort had been spared here to drive home the lesson that mutiny did not pay. The lesson sank in, to judge from the pale, tense faces of the ratings paraded on the decks of the warships at anchor as the Articles of War were read out to them by their captains.
First one volley rang out, then another—then a third, more ragged than the first two, and finally a disordered spatter of shots. I felt sick: clearly something had gone badly wrong. It has always amazed me that human life can be snuffed out so easily by falling backwards off a chair or inhaling a cherry pit or—as a Polish great-aunt of mine is supposed once to have done—through dislocating one’s neck with a violent sneeze, yet when the state’s professional operatives set out to achieve the same end they so often botch the job. I heard afterwards that Eichler had died at the first volley, but that poor Vackar had only been wounded, and shouted, “You can kill us, but not our ideas!” as the blindfold fell off. The second volley also failed to kill him, and the third, by which time the firing squad’s nerve had gone. The officer stepped up and tried to administer the coup de grace with his pistol, but it misfired and jammed. In the end the municipal gravedigger had to put Vackar out of his misery with a couple of well-aimed blows from his spade. He had been a horse slaughterer before he went to work for the town council and knew about these things.
For me at least that was not the end of the affair. The very next day I was summoned, not to my own court martial as I had half expected, but to the Imperial Residence at the Villa Wartholz, near Bad Reichenau. When I arrived I was ushered straight into the Emperor’s audience room. He had heard about my part in suppressing the mutiny aboard Tb14 and was anxious to meet me. I must say that my immediate reaction after the events of the previous day was one of nausea. No doubt I would be fulsomely congratulated on my dog-like fidelity to my imperial master and would receive some disc of metal on a bit of ribbon to reward me for having procured the deaths of two of my fellow-countrymen. But it was not like that at all. The Emperor shook my hand and said all the usual things: asked about my family and how long had I been an officer and so forth. Then he sent out his aides and bade me sit down in the armchair opposite him in his private study.
“Prohaska,” he said, “this was a bad business and must have been very distressing for you.”
“I obediently report that not in the least, Your Imperial Majesty. I merely did my duty as an officer of the House of Austria.”
“Yes, yes, I know that: I can read as much in the Armee Zeitung any day of the week. But mutinies don’t just happen. Tell me what you think were the reasons—and mind you, tell me what you really think, not what you think
