The results of this imbecility were plain enough to see as the war went on. Our fliers invariably fought bravely, but the level of initiative and enterprise, it has to be said, was generally not high: not when compared with the German Flying Corps—which had once been as caste-conscious as our own but had changed its ideas under the pressure of events—and certainly not with the British on the Piave Front in 1918, when our Air Force had rings run around it by a handful of RFC squadrons whose pilots were almost all second lieutenants and whose daring was quite legendary. Certainly the mind-numbing routine of the old pre-war k.u.k. Armee—lots of drill and parades, because they cost less to put on than proper exercises, impressed the populace and required very little mental effort—was no very good preparation for a type of fighting that required the utmost qualities of self-reliance and initiative.
So it was that in the afternoon of my second day with Flik 19F, after returning from Oberleutnant Rieger’s funeral, I made the acquaintance of the man who was to be my own personal coachman in whatever desperate adventures lay ahead. The Operations Warrant Officer had informed me that I was to make my first operational flight the next morning, to photograph ammunition dumps near the town of Palmanova at the urgent behest of 5th Army Headquarters. So I naturally felt it to be important to prepare for this quite lengthy flight over enemy territory by at least being introduced to the man who was to fly me there and (all being well) back again.
I came upon Feldpilot-Zugsfuhrer Zoltan Toth engaged in playing cards in the shade of a hangar with the ground crew of our machine, a Hansa-Brandenburg two-seater like the one that had incinerated poor Rieger the previous day. It was just after dinner and the men were enjoying their regulation hour’s rest. They got up reluctantly and saluted as I approached. I had already met Feldwebel Prokesch, the craftsman sergeant in charge of the aeroplanes’ six-man ground crew—but this creature . . . there must be some mistake. The man who stepped forward scowling to salute me and shake my extended hand . . . no, surely not. Few people, I think, would feel completely easy at first about entrusting their life, four thousand metres above the enemy lines and without a parachute, to the care of a complete stranger. But to a complete stranger who looked like an artist’s reconstruction based on a jawbone and cranial fragments recovered from a Danubian gravel-bed? Prognathous, bow-legged and barrel-chested, this frightful apparition—altogether one of the ugliest, most ungainly looking men I have ever seen—glowered at me from beneath his beetling brows; or to be more precise, a single protruding brow like the eaves of a cottage. Offhand, I was not quite able to remember the minimum height requirement for the Imperial and Royal Army, but I was still pretty sure that even in wartime this man fell short of it by a good head; that even if he had stood up straight, so that his trailing knuckles had not come quite so close to the ground, his head would barely have reached my shoulder. To describe his appearance as “simian” would be grossly defamatory to the monkey tribe. I half expected him to swing himself up into the rafters of the open hangar and start jabbering and pelting us with nutshells. This was bad enough, to be sure; but Zugsfuhrer Toth had not yet opened his mouth to make his report. When he did the effect almost managed to make me forget his appearance.
What on earth could these frightful sounds mean? Was it German or Magyar, or some other quite unknown tongue? Was it human speech at all? No, I decided at last: the words were approximations to German; it was just that they seemed to have been chosen at random by sticking a pin into the pages of a dictionary.
In theory, the language of command throughout the old Imperial and Royal Army was German. Even if less than a fifth of its men in fact spoke German as their native language, and even if most regiments conducted their internal business in the language of the majority of their men, every soldier of the Austro-Hungarian Army, no matter how illiterate or plain stupid, was supposed to learn at least a basic German military vocabulary: the famous Eighty Commands of the Habsburg Army. But in the purely Hungarian part of the Army—the Honved regiments from which Toth had transferred to the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe—the merest lip service was paid to German, and sometimes not that much. Even in the last years of the war there were cases of Hungarian full colonels who could barely understand German, let alone speak it. The Flying Service had been hurriedly put together from volunteers gathered from all nationalities of the Empire, so it was only to be expected that the standard of written and spoken German should often be very shaky. But even so, Toth’s German there that morning was in a class of its own for sheer incomprehensibility. In the end we had to exchange our formal courtesies through a young mechanic who came from the Burgenland, east of Vienna, and knew both German and Magyar. It was also plain at this very first meeting that Feldpilot-Zugsfuhrer Toth did not greatly care for officers as a class, whatever their nationality.
That evening in the mess I had my first real opportunity to talk with my brother-officers in Flik 19F; all, that is, except for Hauptmann Kraliczek, who had not been present at supper since he had to work (he said) on his statistical abstracts. I learnt that he usually took his meals alone in his office, so now that Rieger was dead the mess presidency devolved by right of age upon the Technical Officer—the TO—Oberleutnant Meyerhofer. Franz Meyerhofer was a good deal older than the rest—a year older even than myself in fact—and was a pre-war reserve officer who had been called to the colours only in 1915. A Jew from the Sudetenland, his normal job was as manager of a machine-tool company in the town of Eger. He had volunteered for the Fliegertruppe out of a wish to fly, but had been securely grounded ever since for the simple reason that, in the k.u.k. Armee, officers with such a thorough knowledge of engineering were extremely scarce; far too rare at any rate to be risked in flying operations. A solid, calm, reassuring sort of man, I took an immediate liking to him for reasons that I cannot quite define.
The other old greybeard in the mess was Oberleutnant Schraffl, my tent-mate. He had been a professional officer before the war, in one of the crack Kaiserjager regiments, and his route into the Fliegertruppe had been that followed by a great many other flying officers in those years: that is to say, he had been too severely wounded to be able to serve any longer in the infantry, but was still able to hobble out to an aeroplane and climb into it. In his case he had been shot through the knee at Przemysl in 1914, and then bayoneted for good measure by a passing Russian as he lay in a shell hole. An aluminium kneecap allowed his leg to bend (more or less), but he had to walk everywhere with a stick and needed a mechanic to help him into his seat. I must say that I got to know him very little. He was a rather reserved man; and in any case, there would not be the time.
The other three officers—Leutnants Barinkai and Szuborits and Fahnrich Teltzel—were extremely young: none of them more than twenty and straight out of gymnasium into the Army. I must say that I found them rather tiresome; not least because only Barinkai (who was a Hungarian) knew any language other than German. Relations were cordial enough I suppose, but these young men lacked tact, I felt, and had a disturbing tendency to admire everything German while disdaining the empire whose badge they wore. I had been a Habsburg career officer for sixteen years, but never in all that time until now had I ever heard it suggested in any gathering of officers at which I had been present that a Czech or a Pole or an Italian was any less loyal a soldier of the House of Austria than an ethnic German or a Magyar. Now I heard it all the time: allusions to the Czech regiments which had gone over to the Russians on the Eastern Front and the stories that the Heir-Apparent’s Italian wife Zita was in secret contact with the Allies. On occasions I even suspected that these young sprigs were mimicking my Czech accent. But I supposed that perhaps I was growing sensitive on the point.