recently established, to be one of the more efficient air units of the Imperial and Royal Army. And I can assure you that it is my intention to make it the most efficient. Tell me, Prohaska, at what time did you arrive at Fliegerfeld Caprovizza?”
“Fifteen minutes past twelve or thereabouts, Herr Kommandant. My movement order said twelve p.m., but there was no lorry from Divacca so I had to borrow a motor cycle, and my orders instructed me to report first to Flik 19 at Haidenschaft . . .”
He pursed his lips in a curiously spinsterish expression of disapproval.
“Herr Linienschiffsleutnant,” he said quietly, as if I had just committed some unspeakable solecism, “I believe that I just heard you refer on two occasions to hours of the military day as ‘fifteen minutes past twelve’ and ‘twelve p.m.’ Such a slipshod method of denoting time may be acceptable in the k.u.k. Kriegsmarine, I cannot say; but I must ask you never to use it here. You must accustom yourself without delay to the clockwork precision with which the k.u.k. Armee conducts its affairs. The correct military formulations are ‘twelve hours fifteen’ and ‘twelve hours’ respectively and will be used at all times while you remain with this unit. Is that clear?” I replied that this was clear. “Very good: until further notice, and pending the arrival of your posting papers from Vienna, your duties with this unit will be those of an officer-observer.”
“Herr Kommandant, by your leave . . .”
“Yes, what is it?”
“Herr Kommandant, I obediently report that I am a qualified pilot and have been for nearly four years past. Given a little training in flying modern land-based aeroplanes I am quite capable of fulfilling the duties of an officer- pilot, and before he died Oberleutnant Rieger said that I ought to get some flying hours in on my own . . .”
He had turned even paler than usual as I said this. “Herr Linien- schiffsleutnant, pray contain yourself and reserve your helpful suggestions for when I ask you for them. Your substantive post here, I understand, is to be that of an officer-observer; so as far as I am concerned, until I receive further orders that is what you will do even though you should be the last qualified pilot left alive in the entire Dual Monarchy. Quite apart from anything else, to permit otherwise would be to make absolute nonsense of the manning establishments laid down for this calendar quarter by the Imperial and Royal War Ministry. Anyway, that is all that I have to say to you.” He sat down at his desk and took out a folder of foolscap sheets densely covered in figures, along with a pencil and ruler and pocket reckoner—a thing rather like a pepperpot where one twiddled knobs in the top and read off the figures in a little window at the side. He looked up. “Yes, have you anything more to say?”
I rummaged in the breast pocket of my jacket.
“I obediently report that before I departed from Fliegerkompagnie 19 this morning the Adjutant there gave me a present for you from Hauptmann Heyrowsky: a bicycle, to be precise. You will find it leaning against the back wall of this hut. He also gave me this message for you.” I handed him the envelope which had been tucked under the bicycle saddle, then saluted with as much irony as I could risk without ending up on a charge of insubordination. He took the envelope. I saw that his hands were trembling slightly.
“Er, was there any verbal message accompanying it, by any chance?” “I have the honour to report, Herr Kommandant, that there was; the gist of it as conveyed to me by the Adjutant was that Hauptmann Heyrowsky is prepared to teach you to ride the bicycle if you so desire.” He smiled nervously and slit open the envelope, then pulled out the sheet of paper inside. He swallowed hard as he read it, then looked at me with a sickly grin.
“Yes, yes, Prohaska, Hauptmann Heyrowsky and I are old comrades—always pulling one another’s legs; you mustn’t take what he says too seriously. He is a fairly capable officer even if he is lamentably lacking in military precision. We have a great deal of respect for one another, I can assure you. Anyway . . .” (he tore the letter up into minute scraps and dropped them into the waste-paper basket), “if you will excuse me I must get on with my returns. We are already into the last week of the month.” I saluted once more and turned to leave. “Oh, by the way, Prohaska.” “Herr Kommandant? ”
“I am assigning you to fly with Feldpilot-Zugsfuhrer Toth for the time being. I shall expect you to manage the man with a firm hand. He is totally lacking in discipline and respect for military order: to a degree in fact where I am considering whether a posting to the trenches or even a court martial may not soon be necessary. Aerial discipline is already lamentably lax in the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe and I shall make it my principal concern while I am in command of this unit to tighten it up. As far as I am concerned the fewer unruly degenerates like that we have in the Flying Service the better it will be for Austria.” With that he adjusted his spectacles and set to work on his papers, apparently blind to my departure.
I learnt over the next few weeks that, before the war, Hauptmann Kraliczek had once been one of the brightest rising stars of the Imperial and Royal General Staff. His tour of duty as an infantry Fahnrich had been lacklustre to say the least of it, marked only by a regrettable incident during the 1906 summer manoeuvres in Dalmatia, when he had fallen off his horse in front of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and several thousand onlookers—then remounted with the wrong foot in the stirrup so that he ended up astride the beast facing its tail. But his career as a military administrator had been far more promising. After obtaining the highest marks ever recorded in the 1910 Staff College examinations at Wiener Neustadt he had been posted straight into the Military Rail Movements Directorate, the department of the War Ministry responsible for the Austro-Hungarian version of those vast, minutely detailed mobilisation plans by which the gigantic conscript armies of the European Powers would be moved to their appointed places in time of war. This was extremely exacting work in those days before the computer. In fact it used to be said, not entirely without truth, that the best brains from the Staff College went into the Eisenbahntruppe and ended up in padded cells before they were forty.
Kraliczek had shone at this arduous work. But when the fateful day finally came, at the end of July 1914, these elaborate plans were found wanting. The Monarchy had two microscopically detailed mobilisation timetables, worked out to the last second and the last soldier’s bootlace: one for a war against Russia with a holding force to take care of the Serbs; the other for a war against Serbia with only a holding force against the Russians. What the plans had failed to take account of however was the possibility of a war on two fronts. The result was a month or more of indescribable chaos as the two plans ran foul of one another: of trains of cattle trucks rattling past empty while exhausted soldiers trudged along beside the railway tracks laden down with their entire kit and supplies; of gunners being sent to Serbia while their guns went to Poland and their ammunition to the Tyrol; of troop-trains clanking day after day across the sweltering Hungarian plain at eight kilometres per hour—then burning out their axle boxes as they tried to storm the Carpathian passes at express-train speeds. A cousin in Cracow—where enthusiasm for a war against the hated Muscovites bordered on the hysterical—told me years later of the scene as a flower-bedecked trainload of Polish reservists had left the Hauptbahnhof for the front one morning early that August: how the soldiers had climbed into the bunting-draped carriages laden down with presents of tobacco and chocolate, then steamed out of the station before a wildly cheering crowd as the band played the “Gott Erhalte” and the Polish national anthem. The Cardinal Archbishop was there in full canonicals to sprinkle them with holy water from an enamel bucket and to assure them that they were off to take part in a God-sanctioned crusade against Tsarist tyranny and Orthodox heresy. The train disappeared around the bend, he said—then promptly reappeared, steaming backwards into the station, where the whole patriotic effect was somewhat undermined, to say the least, as the entire complement disembarked on to the crowded platforms.
The outcome of all this had been a series of notable thrashings for the k.u.k. Armee at the hands of the Russians and the Serbs—followed by a discreet purge among the staff officers who were held to have been responsible for this appalling mess. Heads had to roll if the prestige of the Dynasty was not to suffer, and poor Kraliczek—whether justly or not, I cannot say—was among those upon whose necks the axe fell. In fact it was only by expressing a sudden interest in flying that he had been able to escape immediate posting to an infantry- reinforcement battalion on its way to the Carpathians, where the Russians looked about to batter their way through the passes into Hungary.
Thus the immediate danger of bayonet fighting with wild Siberians had been averted. But in the end poor Kraliczek had found himself faced with the prospect—perhaps even more frightful to someone with his retiring nature—of being required to soar thousands of metres above the earth in a fragile, unreliable contraption of wood and linen driven by some reckless castaway suffering quite probably from the long-term effects of serious head injuries. Urgent requests to transfer out of the Fliegertruppe had been turned down, so in the end the only way out for him was to seek command of an air unit and use his seniority to make sure that his immaculate footwear stayed firmly planted on terra firma. His method for accomplishing this would become clear to me over the next few weeks.
In brief, it consisted of avoiding flying duties—so far as I know he never once took to the air—by filling his
