In the end, twenty minutes later, the airship hit the ground way behind the lines, some distance outside the hamlet of Logavec, a Carso settlement so remote that no one had even bothered to transliterate its name into Italian. The crash was a prolonged and untidy business. The airship draggled along the ground like a wounded partridge for a good kilometre, leaving bits behind on stone walls and thickets, before what was left of it fetched up among the buildings of a farm, the envelope and broken keel finally draping themselves across the roof of a stone cottage. We circled above, looking for somewhere to land. A larger-than-usual dolina lay near by, about two hundred metres long and level from years of culivation. So we decided to chance a landing, despite the demolition charge which we were still carrying. Toth brought the Lloyd to a stop only a couple of metres in front of the steep, rocky end of the hollow and we leapt out to scramble towards the farm, intent on capturing the survivors before they could sort themselves out after the crash.
I carried the empty carbine and Toth his Steyr pistol. They were not a great deal of use, but at least I thought that we might menace the Italians into surrendering quietly if they were still disentangling themselves from the wreckage. But we were too late. I stuck my head up over a drystone wall to get a look at the wreck—and was obliged to pull it down again smartly as a burst of machine-gun fire rattled and whined off the rocks. The Italians had barricaded themselves into a stone outbuilding, carrying the airship’s weapons with them. No doubt they hoped to hold out until nightfall and then slip away unobserved. The front to northwards of Gorz, among the forests of the Bainsizza, was much less densely manned than the Carso sector, and anyway there were more than enough ethnic Italians in these parts to provide them with shelter and civilian clothes. Troops would reach us eventually—the entire Isonzo Front must have watched the airship coming down—but they would take time to find us. Clearly, our task was to hold the Italians where they were until reinforcements arrived.
I crept round as close as I dared to the outbuilding where the airmen were hiding and called out to them. Lucky, I thought, that four years at the k.u.k. Marine Akademie had made me fluent in Italian. The reply was another short burst of fire, aimed at random as far as I could make out. I tried again.
“Friends . . .” I paused, awaiting more shots. But none came. I went on, “Friends, Italian aviators, we mean you no harm.” There was a single shot, but I went on regardless. “Please see sense: you are now deep in Austrian territory after being brought down in a fair combat with no dishonour to yourselves. You have done everything that your country could reasonably expect of you and you must not sacrifice your lives in so futile a fashion after surviving a crash. You are now surrounded and heavily outnumbered . . .” (I have to add that I choked a little at this whopper), “so please be reasonable and surrender. You will be treated with every courtesy and in strict accordance with the Hague Convention and the laws of war: I myself promise you this upon my honour as an officer of the House of Austria.”
There was a long silence, then a voice answered. The accent was Piedmontese, I noticed.
“Do you have Ungheresi with you, or Bosniaci?”
Biting my tongue, I assured the invisible speaker that I had only one Hungarian among my men, and no Bosnians whatever. “But why do you ask?” I called.
“Because it is well known that the Hungarians carry bill-hooks with which they scalp their prisoners. While as for your Bosnians, they are Mohammedan bandits and make eunuchs of their captives in order to sell them to the Sultan of Turkey for guarding his harem. This much is common knowledge: I read it myself only the other day in the Corriere.” I answered that, to the best of my knowledge, our own single Hungarian had never so much as owned a bill-hook in his life, let alone scalped anyone with it; while as for the Bosnian eunuch dealers, whether Muslim or of any other religion, I had no such people under my command (I might have added that from what I had heard of the Bosnians they very rarely took any prisoners; but this would have been extremely tactless in the circumstances).
When I had finished, the voice still seemed unconvinced. Meanwhile, from within the stone cottage on top of which the airship had landed, there had issued for the past five minutes or so the sounds of a woman having hysterics in Slovene, pausing every now and then to implore the aid of each of the saints in the Church’s calendar, starting with St Anna the Mother of Our Lady. She was already on the line to SS Cyril and Methodius, Apostles to the Slavs, and the shrieks in between were growing louder by the minute. At that moment one of the numerous goats browsing the scrub around the farmstead was bold enough to climb up a drystone wall and peer over the top—only to fall back a second or two later riddled with machine-gun-bullets. It was clear that our Italians still required some persuasion as to the hopelessness of their case. I felt a sudden tug at my sleeve. It was Toth, creeping along in the lee of the wall, pistol in hand.
“Magnum fragorem face—boom!—auxilio Ekrasito.” I stared at him for a moment in bewilderment, then realised what he meant. Of course: the slab of TNT. We scrambled back along the wall and ran to the Lloyd, which was standing out of sight of the Italians in the sunken dolina. Toth seized the block of Ekrasit and its detonators while I ripped out the aerial wire and the wireless set’s emergency battery. Then we ran back to the lee of the outbuilding and heaped up rocks from the wall on top of the explosive charge. When all was ready we clambered over a wall, trailing the wires behind us, and took cover. I looked at Toth and he nodded back. I was far from sure that this would work . . . I touched the two ends of the wire to the battery terminals.
It did work. There was a most impressive bang, and Toth and I had to huddle up to the wall for shelter as stones rained from the sky around us. The flock of goats was scattering in all directions, bleating in panic as the rocks showered down among them. From within the cottage there came a piercing scream, followed by frenzied calls for St Blasius of Ragusa to orare pro nobis. I crept up to the outbuilding and called out:
“Come out and surrender. Your position is hopeless. Our artillery has these buildings ranged now. That was a warning shot. I have only to signal to them and the next one will land among you.”
The moral effect upon the airship crew was much as I had hoped: before long a man in leather flying overalls came out of the outbuilding bearing a white handkerchief fixed to a stick. There were ten of them in all, largely unharmed by the crash, apart from a mechanic who had fallen out of an engine gondola as they hit the ground and broken his leg. Toth gave him morphine from the aeroplane’s first-aid kit as I parleyed with the airship’s commander, an army Capitano in his late twenties. He marched up and saluted me stiffly, then, seeing with some surprise that I was wearing naval uniform (I had cast aside my flying jacket in the heat), demanded to speak with the local troop commander. I answered that so far as he was concerned I was in command of the troops in the immediate area—which happened to be perfectly true, since there was only one of them. Where were the rest of them then, he demanded? I intimated as politely as I could that this was none of his business. He persisted: it was my duty to provide a proper prisoners’ escort at once, as laid down in the relevant international conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war; and in any case he was not going to surrender either his crew or the wreck of his airship—for which he demanded a signed receipt, by the way—to anyone of a rank less than his own. I replied that I was an Austro- Hungarian Linienschiffsleutnant, and that so far as I was aware that rank was equivalent to Capitano in the Italian Army; at any rate, it was equal to a Hauptmann in ours. With this he changed tack and said that as an officer in an Italian cavalry regiment—and a rather grand one too by the sound of him—he could not agree to present his formal surrender to a naval officer: the honour of the Army would not allow it. I sympathised, but said that I thought that with things as they were he was in no position to lay down terms.