“Begging your pardon, to what disobedience can you possibly be referring, Herr Kommandant? Zugsfuhrer Toth and I carried out our assignments to the letter . . .”
“Damn and blast you both, I could have you court-matrialled and shot for cowardice! Your orders were to proceed to the scene of action over the enemy side of the lines and to return by the same route, not skulk in safety behind our lines. You are guilty of avoiding contact with the enemy, that’s the truth of it.”
I breathed deeply and tried to count up to ten: the temptation to use violence against a brother-officer was overwhelming.
“Herr Kommandant, I choose to ignore your accusations of cowardice: so far as I understand the term, skulking is something that one does in Kanzlei huts, not in the air. As to your orders for us to proceed to Monte Nero to the west of the lines, they were not clearly expressed and I chose to interpret them as seemed most sensible at the time. If you care to examine this map you will see that the most direct route from here to the operational area keeps us well to the east of the trench lines almost all the way. I could see no point whatever in risking our mission by flying unarmed over Italian territory.” He fairly exploded at this, spluttering with all the fury of a damp firework.
“Not see any sense in it? Who are you to question orders, you degenerate! The whole point of a long-range reconnaissance unit is to fly as many kilometres as possible over enemy territory. You would have added at least a hundred kilometres to our total for August!”
“I see. Might I obediently enquire, then, whether we could bring forward some kilometres on account from September? Or perhaps borrow some unused kilometres from another unit if it helps balance the books? I know for a fact that Flik 4 at Wippach have been grounded for most of July. Surely they would help us out if we asked nicely . . .”
“Be quiet! And there’s the matter of your shooting down an Italian aeroplane, clean contrary to your orders not to engage the enemy . . .”
“. . . By your leave, Herr Kommandant, the enemy engaged us, not we him. And incidentally, we didn’t shoot him down: he tried to follow us into a dive and broke up in mid-air.”
This information seemed merely to enrage Kraliczek even further— so far as I could gather on the grounds that destroying enemy aircraft without the aid of bullets would make nonsense of his monthly returns for expenditure of ammunition. At last he recovered himself sufficiently to speak.
“Herr Linienschiffsleutnant, you are henceforth sentenced by me as your commanding officer to a week’s confinement to this airfield. As to your pilot here—five days’ solitary arrest on bread and water! Abtreten sofort.”
He turned to leave. I called after him.
“Oh, Herr Kommandant.”
He turned back irritably. “What do you want?”
“I thought that you might like to see this.” I rummaged inside the breast of my flying jacket. “It’s a telegram of congratulation to us from a fellow who claims to be commanding the 5th Army, a chap called Boroevic or something like that. I thought that you might perhaps care to read it out to the assembled ranks on parade this morning.”
He snatched the telegram—and tore it up into tiny pieces before striding back to his office. The fragments fluttered among the grass blades on the field. As I climbed out of the aeroplane I saw the assembled ground crew grinning among themselves in delight. Any old soldier will tell you that, for an enlisted man, being spectator to an exchange of insults between two officers of equal rank is one of the very sweetest pleasures that military life affords.
7 THE GREATER REICH
I suppose that if I had been minded To do so I could have dug out my manual of military law and contested my sentence of five days’ confinement to base. But in the event I was no more troubled by it than Toth was by his own summary condemnation to five days’ close arrest on bread and water. They would have needed to transfer him to Army HQ in Marburg for this anyway, since we had no lock-up ourselves and the Provost Major of the local infantry division had stood firm on regulations and refused to lend Flik 19F the use of a prison cell. And anyway, there were more important things to think about that week, for the next day, 4 August, after an intense nine-hour bombardment, the Italian 3rd Army began its long-awaited offensive: the Sixth Battle of the Isonzo, which merged with the Seventh, Eighth and Ninth Battles into a conflict which was to rage on until the onset of winter.
The Italians captured Monte Sabotino across the river from Gorz after two days of bitter fighting. By the 8th our positions on either side of the town were collapsing under the ferocious barrage, and that night the 5th Army Command decided to pull back the line for fear of being outflanked. So on the morning of 9 August the Italian Army marched triumphantly into the deserted but still largely undamaged town of Gorz: by far the most worthwhile Allied gain of that whole blood-saturated year. With Gorz taken, the action shifted to the south and the approaches to Trieste. The battle for the Carso Plateau had begun, and with it one of the most terrible episodes even of that four-year catalogue of butchery.
I think that one of the hallmarks of the twentieth century must be the way in which the names of the most humdrum and obscure places on the whole of God’s earth have become synonyms for horror, so that the very words themselves seem to twist and buckle under the weight of misery piled upon them. When I was a small boy I remember how we used to pay visits to my grandparents, decayed Polish gentry living in a small manor house on a hard-up country estate some way west of the city of Cracow: how we would get off the train at a typically small, sordid Polish provincial town and hire its one shabby fiacre; and how we would creak and sway the five kilometres or so along the rutted road across the flat fields by the Vistula and pass as we did so a small military-clothing depot built on land that my grandfather had sold to the War Ministry about 1880. It was barely worth noticing, I remember: five or six wooden huts surrounded by a decrepit fence, and with a black-and-yellow-striped gate which the bored sentry would open from time to time to admit a cartload of tunics and trousers from the Jewish sweatshops in Bielsko-Biala. This was k.u.k. Militarbekleidungs Depot No. 107 Oswi^cim—or Auschwitz, to give it its German name. The collection of huts would pass in 1919 to the Polish Army, who would enlarge it a little; then in 1940 to new and more purposeful owners, who would expand it a great deal and really put the place on the map, so to speak.
It was the same on that dreary limestone plateau east of the Isonzo in the summer of 1916: places that no one had ever heard of—San Martino and Doberdo and Monte Hermada—suddenly turned into field fortresses around which titanic battles raged: lives squandered by the hundred thousand for places which were just names on a local map—and sometimes not even that, so that the hills for which entire divisions perished had to be denoted by their map-height above sea level. So it was at Verdun that summer. I saw some photographs, in a colour supplement a few months ago: the Meuse battlefields seventy years after. It appears that even today large areas are still derelict, that the incessant shelling and gassing so blasted away the topsoil and poisoned the earth that the landscape is still a semi-desert of exposed rock and old craters, covered (where anything grows at all) by a thin scrub.
The chief difference, I suppose, between Verdun now and the Carso then is that, so far as I could make out, the Carso had always looked like that: a landscape reminiscent of Breughel’s “Triumph of Death” even before the armies got to work on it. Indeed I think that the whole of Europe could scarcely have contained a piece of ground intrinsically less worth fighting over than the Carso—or the “Krst” as its few mostly Slovene inhabitants called it, as if the place was too poor even to afford vowels. It was an undulating, worn-down plateau of low limestone hills devoid of trees, grass or any vegetation whatever except for a few meagre patches of willow and gorse which had managed to get roots down into the fissures in the rock. What little soil there was had collected by some freak of nature into puddle-like hollows in the rock, called “dolinas,” and was bright red in colour, like pools of fresh blood. What little rain water there was had a way of disappearing as if bewitched into pot-holes in the rock, to reappear perversely a dozen kilometres away where an underground stream came out into the open. Baked by the sun all summer and swept by freezing winds all winter, the Carso was scourged in between times by the notorious bora, the sudden, violent north wind of the Adriatic coastline which would work itself up in these parts to nearhurricane force in the space of a few minutes, and had been known to blow over trains of goods wagons on the more exposed stretches of the Vienna—Trieste railway line.