usually rather boring.”
“But sir, do you realise that you are one of the privileged few who had the honour to fly in that first great war in the air?”
“It was a privilege that I would gladly have foregone. And what do you mean by ‘privileged few’ anyway? That I was privileged to be able to do it, or that I was privileged to be among the few who came out of it alive? I think that I might disagree with you on the first count at least.”
He appeared not to have heard this remark; only stuck the microphone impertinently under my nose. “Tell me, how many missions did you fly in all? And how many aerial combats were you involved in? What was your personal score?”
“Really, I have no idea. I was with the Fliegertruppe on the Isonzo Front for about three months, then for a month or so with the Naval Air Service on convoy patrol. I don’t think that we ever thought of them as ‘ missions.’ We went up in the air when we got an order from Army Headquarters or from the division, and most of the time it was reconnaissance or artillery-spotting or a little bombing behind the lines. But usually we just sat on the ground because of bad weather or lack of aircraft. As for combats, I don’t really remember. Certainly the Italians shot at us a good deal, and we shot back at them where we could; sometimes with less success, sometimes with more. But ‘combats’ is a grand-sounding name for what took place. Usually it was so quick that it was over before we realised it had happened. You pressed the trigger and shut your eyes, and when you opened them again they had either gone away or you were lying in hospital.”
This person’s manner was already beginning to irritate me intensely. I usually get on well with Americans— far better than the English in fact— but when I meet one whom I dislike, the aversion usually borders on the homicidal. What right had this fat buffoon to come digging around among the bones of the dead to feed his hobby, collecting our pain like stamps? Already the memories were coming back: the smells of acetone and petrol and cordite; the sound of Mizzi Gunther and Hubert Marischka as the Carso wind rattled the tent sides; the pock-pock- pock of machine-gun fire and the dreadful crunching as we slithered across the glacier. What could he know of it all? He had not even been in Vietnam, he said, having wangled a draft exemption (though he did not put it quite as bluntly as that). At last he fixed me with a bovine gaze through his thick spectacles. I sensed that the Big Question was coming. When it came it was of such stark imbecility that it fairly knocked the breath out of me.
“Tell me sir, what was it really like to be a flier in that war?”
Well, I thought, a question as asinine as that deserves some sort of answer. So I thought for a moment or two.
“If you really want to know what it was like, to fight in the air in the Great War, then go up to someone you have never met before and who has never done you the slightest harm and pour a two-gallon tin of petrol over them. Then apply a match, and when they are nicely ablaze, push them from a fifteenth-floor window, after first perhaps shooting them a few times in the back with a revolver. And be aware as you are doing these things that ten seconds later someone else will quite probably do them to you. This will exactly reproduce for you and your fellow enthusiasts the substance of First World War aerial combat and will cost your country nothing. It will also avoid the necessity for ten million other people to die in order for you to enjoy it.”
I saw that the interview was now at an end: Mother Superior moved in to usher the man away, saying, “Please—you must not mind him—he old man, head not so good any more.” After he had left it was only my ad vanced age which saved me from ten days’ solitary on bread and water.
A couple of months after this I happened to pick up a library book: The Traveller’s Guide to Northern Yugoslavia, published the previous year. Curious, I looked up the chapter on the Carso region. One paragraph caught my eye.
The lives of the people of mountain-Slovenia often take on the quality of Greek tragedy, of something as stony and unyielding as the landscape itself. In one village where the entire male population was massacred in 1943 by the SS the women swore an oath that thereafter, as long as they lived, no man would ever enter the village again. Likewise in a village just outside Ajdovscina there lived until about 1975 an old woman who had once been the sweetheart of an Austrian airman, during the First World War when there was an airfield near by. He was posted missing over the Alps in 1917 and we were told that every day from then until her death she had walked into Ajdovscina to ask at the post office whether there was any news of him. We saw her in 1973, dressed in black from head to foot like a crow, quite mad as she hobbled along the dusty road in the midday heat.
“What was it like?” The question stuck in my mind, and now, eight years after I met that odious young man, I have tried to answer it for you, confident that you my listeners will have a maturer understanding of what it all meant—if indeed it meant anything at all, which I sometimes doubt. That war which we fought there above the Alps in those fragile, desperate aircraft with their unreliable engines and flimsy petrol tanks and no parachutes was not a light-hearted, boy’s-story-book adventure as some would have you believe. But neither was it remotely comparable to the monstrous butchery that was going on below us. The death rate was enormous—a good half of those who flew I should think—and of those deaths, the majority were by burning. But in all that war and all the years since I have never heard of anyone who ever applied to transfer back to the trenches. Likewise nearly all of those who flew in that war went on doing it afterwards, test-flying aeroplanes and mapping out the world’s air routes—like young Leutnant Szuborits of Flik 19F, who went to work for the French Breguet company after the war and disappeared without trace in 1925 while trying to fly across the Sahara.
And soon the memory of it will have vanished, now that the gorse and willow bushes have grown back over the rubble-filled trenches of the Isonzo and the last of the old men who saw it all are being carried one by one to their graves. May they rest in peace, those warriors of three- quarters of a century ago, gone now to join those who never came back. What was it all for, that so much blood should have been spilt for so little? I cannot say, only tell you what I saw and hope that you will know about it when I am no more: know about it, and perhaps understand better than we did.
