you are expected to say. If people can’t tell the truth even to their Emperor then we are indeed lost.”
So I told him what I thought: about this mutiny, and others, and the near-mutinies that had never got into the papers. I told him that it was not socialist agitators or secret nationalists or agents of the Entente as the hurrah-press said, but boredom, too little leave and bad food piled on top of a system of discipline which might have been appropriate for the armies of Maria Theresa, ruled by the pace-stick and the lash, but which was grotesquely ill-adapted to running units made up from intelligent young technicians. As I spoke he made notes and kept interrupting me to ask a great many very intelligent questions. Then he said something that made me stare in goggle-eyed disbelief.
“Prohaska, you have told me what you think. And I will now tell you as one of my bravest officers what I think about it all. I think that the Monarchy cannot survive another year of this war; nor can it survive in its present form even if peace should come tomorrow. My first priority as Emperor will be to bring about a negotiated end to this dreadful butch- ery—without Germany if necessary—and then set about a programme of root-and-branch reform at home. What you have told me here today only confirms me in the correctness of these views. But,” he picked up a bulky folder from his desk, “I have something else to discuss with you before you leave. When we met at Haidenschaft back in August we spoke briefly, did we not, about the circumstances of your transfer from the U-Boat service to the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe?”
“I obediently report that we did, Your Imperial Highness.” Well I’ll be damned, I thought to myself, he remembered after all . . .
“Well, I was as good as my word, and I got Baron Lerchenfeld to look into the details of the case. As a result of what he discovered—and also, I might add, as a result of petitions from your brother-officers and your former crew—I have reached the conclusion that a grave injustice took place. I also have the satisfaction of telling you that new evidence has come to light which throws doubt on whether the submarine which you torpedoed off Chioggia that night was in fact the German minelayer. I gather that in August an Italian submarine ran aground off Cape Galliola and when its crew were taken prisoner several of them asked whether they would be going to the same camp as the men from the Anguilla, which they said had left Venice on the night of 3 July and had not been heard of since. In short, Prohaska, I think that the German Navy’s case against you—which was never too strong in the first place—now collapses entirely. Tell me, would you wish to be reinstated in the U-Boat Service or would you like to go on flying? ”
I said that while I was prepared to serve my Emperor and Fatherland on land, sea or air, I felt that my particular talents might be better employed back in my old trade rather than in flying round in circles above convoys.
“Good then. The Marineoberkommando tells me that your old crew from U13 are for the moment ashore following a navigational error on the part of their Captain. Now Prohaska, what would you say to rejoining them aboard one of our newest submarines currently completing at Pola N aval Dockyard? ”
The interview ended and we shook hands as I left, taking with me a feeling—which I still hold to this day— that if the old Emperor had done the decent thing and died about (say) 1906, and if Franz Ferdinand had already died from tuberculosis—as he nearly did in 1893—then perhaps with the earnest young Karl as Emperor and King, succeeded about 1950 by the Emperor Otto, the Austro-Hungarian state might still be with us today, transformed from a rickety, bilious, shambling quasi-autocracy into a rickety, bilious, shambling constitutional monarchy. Perhaps.
So I returned officially to the Imperial and Royal U-Boat Service on Christmas Eve 1916. I had been exactly five months in the Flying Service, yet it had seemed so much longer. I handed in my flying kit, removed my airman’s wings from my jacket and, from that day to this, have never flown in an aeroplane except as a passenger. The events of my brief but hectic career as an aviator for the House of Habsburg were soon put behind me, then gradually buried and lost beneath the detritus of all the years and all the lives that followed.
And Franz Nechledil, my pilot in the Naval Air Service? The trial and shooting of the mutineers caused something to snap inside him I think. He became a great Czech patriot and rose to the rank of general in the Czechoslovak Air Force in the 1930s. He stayed in Prague after 1939 and was deeply involved from the beginning with the Czech Resistance, taking part in an early attempt in 1941 to kill the infamous Reichsprotektor Heydrich. The Gestapo caught him in October of that year. He knew a great deal about the organisation of the Resistance, and his captors knew that he knew. Yet still he appears to have kept his mouth shut for ten awful days, resisting the worst that they could do to him until he finally died of heart failure. I have no way of knowing, but I imagine that what sustained him through his atrocious ordeal was the memory of how he had turned in two of his fellow- countrymen a quarter-century before. But he gave away nothing, and when the Gestapo arrested his fellow- conspirators two days later it was because someone had betrayed them for money. They put his name on a monument to the Martyrs of the Nation in Prague in 1946—in the next row to Vackar and Eichler as it happened. The Communists demolished it two years later I understand.
Memories, memories. You must think me an awful old bore. Yet for sixty- five years I scarcely breathed a word about my time as a U-Boat commander, until the photograph album turned up again this spring. And I would also like to be able to say that I never told anyone about my brief flying career. But this is not strictly true: just once, not many years ago, I was persuaded to talk about my days with the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe.
It was in 1978 I think, in the Home at Iddesleigh Road in Ealing, where I had already lived for several years after Edith died and I could no longer look after myself. It was one wet summer afternoon as I was sitting in an armchair in the lounge trying to read. Gradually I became aware that I was being irritated by a loud, honking voice with an American accent. It came from over in Mr Kempowski’s corner. I turned around to look, and saw the old fool sitting in an armchair with a blanket over his legs being interrogated by a large—not to say gross—individual in his early thirties with a great curly mane of hair, heavy horn-rimmed spectacles and a drooping moustache in the style of the late Pancho Villa. The young man was holding the microphone of a tape recorder towards Kempowski and trying to induce him to talk into it by bawling into the old man’s ear. He was evidently not having much joy: Kempowski was near-senile by then and his English had always been minimal, while the young man’s German was ludicrously poor. This puzzled me: why German in a Polish old people’s home? Then I remembered: some weeks before, Mother Superior had received a letter from an American air-historian—or “aviation buff” as he styled himself—asking whether he might have an interview with the noted World War One flying ace Gustav Kempowski. I thought “flying ace” was a bit thick: Kempowski had flown briefly as a junior officer in Jasta 2—Richthofen’s old squadron—in the autumn of 1918 and had then transferred to the Polish Air Force.
It appeared that the interview was not going well: Kempowski was pretty well gaga by then—he died a few weeks later—and in any case, he regarded the Polish-Soviet war of 1920 as vastly more interesting and important than the earlier conflict in which he had flown for the German Kaiser. At length the old man cackled maliciously and pointed across to me.
“Prohaska zere—he also flieger in First Weltkrieg—fly in Austriacki Fliegertruppe gegen Italia—you speak him also, yes-no?” The old rogue had remembered, as people sometimes will when their minds are failing, an interview which I had given to a Berlin paper in 1916 after I had brought down the Italian airship. I got up to leave, but my lines of escape were blocked: the young American had also got up and was advancing to pin me into the corner with his bison-like bulk. I saw Mother Superior simpering in the background. I would have to be polite or there would be trouble for me later on.
He proferred me a huge, flabby paw to shake. It was like having a giant toad placed in my hand.
“Wow! I mean, this is incredible—another First World War aviator in the same afternoon—I can hardly believe this.” Without so much as a by your leave he sat down opposite me and loaded another cassette into his little machine. I was already irritated by his evident belief that we old people have no minds of our own, no independent value except as historical relics and memoir-quarries. But with Mother Superior eyeing me in that sinister way of hers I had to sit still and try to be civil.
Without looking at me he introduced himself.
“Hi there. I’m Frank T. Mahan of the Lansing Michigan World War One Air Enthusiasts’ Society. I’m over here in Europe collecting reminiscences from those who flew in that great conflict and you, sir, are the first person I’ve met so far who flew in the Austro-Hungarian Air Force on the Italian Front.”
“Then I congratulate you on your success. But what is it that you want to know? I am no historian myself and I can only tell you what I happened to see, which was not a great deal really. It was all rather confused and quite frankly I have not given it a great deal of thought in the years since. I was a naval officer you see, and only seconded for a while to the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe. And anyway, I flew as an observer in two-seaters, which was
