It was plain at first sight that the Lloyd CII was an aeroplane of a somewhat earlier vintage than the sturdy Hansa-Brandenburg: a pre-war design in fact, marked by long, narrow, swept-back wings and by a much sharper nose and more fish-like fuselage than that of the Brandenburger. I understand that it got its curious name because the factory which built it in Budapest had been part-owned by the Austro-Lloyd shipping line. Certainly it had taken many twists and random convolutions of events over the years to get the name of a seventeenth-century London-Welsh coffee-house proprietor attached to an Austro-Hungarian warplane. For me, one lasting consequence was that I was never able to see the sign “Lloyd’s Bank” in Ealing Broadway without having a sudden faint odour of petrol and cellulose dope wafted to me from all those years ago.
The Lloyd CII had been chosen for this particular mission because although it was somewhat slower than the Brandenburger in level flight, and a good deal less manoeuvrable, its payload was larger and its performance at high altitudes marginally better (one of them had in fact taken the world altitude record in the summer of 1914). This ability to carry loads to great heights was going to be very necessary, I learnt as a staff officer briefed me for the flight, because we were to be flying over the Julian Alps—over Monte Nero, to be precise: 2,245 metres above sea level, which was not far short of the effective ceiling for a two-seater aeroplane in those days, especially when it would also be carrying the full weight of an airborne wireless transmitter.
So far in 1916 there had been little fighting in the mountainous sectors of the Isonzo Front north of Tolmein. There had been some sharp encounters here in late 1915, as their initial ardour carried the Italians across the Isonzo to capture some of the mountain ridges beyond. But, as in the Alps proper, the lie of the land—that is to say, most of it standing on end—had allowed us to hold it against them with only a handful of defenders. Most of the time in fact all that we had to do was to roll boulders over the edge of thousand-metre precipices on to the Italians below. The furthest that the Italians had got, after heavy losses, was to cross the river and work their way up a few mountain ridges on the other side; most notably the one called the Polovnik, which swells up from the bend of the river at Zersoccia to become Monte Nero. And there the two armies had left matters for the past year, outposts often within earshot of one another, but separated by dense belts of barbed wire on picket stakes cemented into the rock-faces. Both sides made life as unpleasant as possible for the other by sniping and trench-mortaring and patrol skirmishes, but no large-scale action was considered by the generals to be either possible or necessary.
In this stalemate, artillery work tended to turn into virtual duels of battery against battery: exchanges lasting for months in which ingenuity and ant-like persistence counted for as much as any practical effect. Whole weeks were sometimes spent in hoisting field guns piece by piece up sheer rock-faces so that they could lob a few shells into the next valley before being hastily lowered back again. In places tunnels were even bored through the rock of mountain ridges so that the gunners could fire at otherwise hidden targets. And several weeks before, one such exercise in levitation had enabled the Italians to lug three or four heavy howitzers— 24cm calibre at least—up a steep, narrow, wooded valley on the western face of Monte Nero, above the village of Caporetto, so that they could fire over the ridge of the mountain. The beauty of it was that thanks to the bulk of the mountain they were completely hidden from our outposts on the summit 1,500 metres above. Likewise there was not a single gun on the Austrian side that could reach them: all had either too little range or too flat a trajectory to lob shells over the mountain into the valleys on its western face.
For two weeks past, the Italian battery had been making life extremely difficult for the trains of mules and the human porters who carried supplies and ammunition up the trackways to our front line. The Italian outposts, though lower down the ridge than ours, gave an excellent field of view over the country to the east of Monte Nero and were doubtless connected by telephone to the battery to give fire direction. At any rate, even after the convoys had taken to moving up to the line only by night, the shells would still come howling over, screaming down to excavate craters the size of a house and—more often than not—blow some panic-stricken team of animals and their drivers to oblivion. Before long the trees alongside the mountain trackways to the east of Monte Nero were festooned with blackening rags of mule-flesh and tatters of grey uniform cloth, often with an arm hanging out of a torn-off sleeve or a head wedged in a crook of the boughs. Carrying-parties were already getting extremely nervous of making the journey, even at night, and were turning back at the first sound of a shell coming over. If this went on (the staff officer told me) the k.u.k. Armee might no longer be able to hold the summit of the mountain. Something had to be done. Attempts at bombing from the air had proved futile, so stronger measures would now be taken.
Even as the Italians shelled the other side of the mountain, those stronger measures were being made ready by shifts working around the clock in the Skoda Armaments Works at Pilsen. In 1913 Skoda had already built a giant gun: the 30.5cm howitzer called (with the nauseating coyness that seems obligatory in these cases) “Schlanke Emma,” or “Slim Emma.” A battery of those monsters had been loaned to the German Army in August 1914 to deal with the forts at Liege, which were holding up the German advance through Belgium. They had proved gruesomely efficient in that task, and a larger 38cm version had been built in 1915. Now, in July 1916, a 42cm howitzer, the very non plus ultra of Austrian artillery, was nearing completion and looking for a suitable proving-ground. And what field trial could be more conclusive than here in the Julian Alps, dealing with the Italian howitzer battery so frustratingly beyond reach in its valley on the other side of the mountain?
The great steel monster was made ready and loaded on to a special strengthened railway wagon for transport to Feistritz, the nearest point on the railway to Monte Nero. Then, unloaded after dark in strictest secrecy, the tarpaulin-shrouded colossus had begun its slow journey up into the mountains, broken down into three loads—barrel, carriage and mounting—each drawn by its own motor tractor and riding on wheels surrounded by pivoting steel feet. The villages on the way had been evacuated for secrecy, and when the procession finally reached a point where the specially made trackway was too steep for the tractors alone, teams of horses and motor winches had been brought up to assist. The last kilometre of the journey had taken two entire days, with thousands of soldiers and Russian POWs sweating at drag-ropes and cursing as their boots slipped in the mud, to drag the thing to its final firing position in a shallow valley just below the treeline on the east side of the mountain. There it had been assembled, and concreted into its emplacement: another two days of labour. A small railway was laid to bring up its shells, each of which weighed just over a tonne, and once that and a few other trifles had been installed—like a concrete bunker to protect the firing crew from the con- cussion—the brute was ready to teach the insolent Wellischers that the Austrian artillery was still a force to be reckoned with.