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 entire waking life with administration. God alone knows there was enough paperwork in the old k.u.k. Armee: endless forms to be filled in, returns to be made, authorisations to be sought, derogations to be obtained in regard to an intricate mesh of often contradictory regulations that governed every aspect of service life, down to the precise daily ration scales for the cats employed to catch mice in military supply depots. Yet Kraliczek had somehow contrived to add to even this mountain of paper, inventing reports and statistical compilations of his own, even going so far as to design and print at his own expense official forms as yet undreamt of by the War Ministry. Thus ensconced, spider-like, at the centre of a dense administrative web which only he fully understood, he clearly hoped to be able to sit out the entire war in his office, sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, eating at his desk and taking his few hours’ nightly rest on a camp-bed in the orderly room, retiring long after the nightingales had gone to roost in the willow thickets by the river. How could he do otherwise, he would argue, when the Fliegertruppe could not even supply an adjutant to help him? What he failed to mention here was that each of the three adjutants who had arrived at Caprovizza since May had left after a week or so with nervous prostration. Questions would be asked one day. But the Imperial and Royal military bureaucracy moved slowly even in wartime, and with any luck it would all be over before he was smoked out of his burrow. Then he would be able to return to what he called “proper soldiering”; that is to say, sitting once more behind a desk in Vienna compiling mobilisation timetables and calculating his pension entitlement.
My first official engagement as a member of Fliegerkompagnie 19F took place the next morning in the cemetery at Haidenschaft. It was a ceremony that I was to attend on many occasions over the next few months—though somehow I always managed to avoid appearing in the leading role. Rieger’s coffin was lowered into the grave while we stood by with bared heads. The priest finished his prayers, the guard of honour fired off its three salvoes into the summer sky, and we then filed past to toss our handful of earth on to the lid of the coffin, the smell of incense still not quite managing to mask the faint odour of roasted meat. The k.u.k. Fliegertruppe had been here not quite three months, yet already a row of twenty or so wooden crosses stood beneath the black cypress trees against the cemetery walclass="underline" crucifixes in which the cross-beam was made from a cut-down aeroplane propeller painted white and inscribed with the name and rank of the deceased. The non-German names looked faintly odd in black Gothic lettering: Strastil and Fontanelli and Kovess and Jasinski. We used to call it the “Fliegerkreuz,” I remember. It was a frequently awarded decoration, and one which—unusually for the Imperial and Royal armed forces—was distributed to officers and other ranks without distinction.
3 FLYING COMPANY
For me, as someone whose mother tongue was not German, one of the most curious things about the old Austrian variant of that language was the way in which its extraordinary regard for titles, and its endless inventiveness in creating jaw-breaking composite nouns—monstrosities like “Herr Obersektionsfuhrerstellvertreter” or “Frau Dampfkesselreinigungunternehmersgattin”—was balanced by an equal facility for cutting down these same sonorous titles to hideous little truncated stumps like “Krip” and “Grob” and “Frop”: names which to my ear always sounded like someone being seasick. It was as if a man should wear himself out and spend his entire substance equipping an ordinary house with marble staircases and balustrades worthy of a palace, then spend his time entering and leaving the house and getting from floor to floor within it by a system of makeshift scaffolding and rope ladders hanging from the windows.