And all the while this pantomime was going on I was thinking, damn them, where are they? They must have seen the airship come down. When would help reach us? For I sensed from the way the conversation was drifting that if our Italian captives realised that there were only two of us, they might seriously reconsider their earlier intention to surrender. I could even foresee a possibility that the tables might be turned, and that Toth and I would end up by being dragged back across the lines with them into captivity. And as if that were not enough to worry about, I now had the farmer and his wife to deal with as well. She had at last overcome her fright enough to be able to come out of the cottage. Even today I still think that she was one of the fattest women I have ever seen: like a walking fairground tent in the striped dress of the locality. The airship envelope was billowing flaccidly above the cottage, the remaining gas having collected inside the nose section; but the farmer’s wife still almost managed to upstage it as regards bulk. Her husband was a whiskery-chinned, pegtoothed Slovene peasant with a white walrus moustache. He stood before me with the limp, riddled carcass of the goat in his arms, like Our Lady with the dead Christ.
“Kompensat,” he wheezed toothlessly, “koza mea e ganz kaput— capria moja ist finito—totalverlust, capisco?” He rubbed finger and thumb together, then pointed to the devastated thatch of his cottage. “Casa mea je auch havariert! Pagare—geld—penezy!”
I answered in Slovene as best I could. “In a moment, Gospodar . . . the War Damage Assessment Officer will be notified and will deal with your claim in due course, you may rest assured of that . . . Now, if you will excuse me . . .”
The airship captain was by now asking me a number of rather impertinent questions about how exactly the Austriaci had brought down his airship: the Citta di Piacenza, we later learnt. He had evidently not seen Toth and me land near by after the crash and did not associate us with the aeroplane that had attacked him. I was beginning to suspect that he was looking around for an excuse—having been unfairly shot down or something—that would allow him to square his earlier word as an officer and gentleman with his present intention of overpowering us and making a run for it . . . Then, at last, to my intense relief, I heard the sound of a motor lorry coming up the trackway. It was a party of soldiers. As they got down and came to join us I saw with some dismay that they were Hungarian Honveds, and that several of them had hanging at their belts the wicked-looking bill-hook or “fokos” which was much favoured by the Magyars as a trench-fighting weapon. The Capitano saw this as well and grew pale—then turned to me with a most reproachful look, marking me down for future reference as a trickster and a man devoid of honour. With that, we left things to the Army. The Italians climbed on to the lorry peaceably enough, and an ambulance was sent for to take the injured man to hospital. They waved to us in farewell as they bumped away down the track. I could see that, whatever their commander might think, the crew were mightily relieved to have come out of it all alive and unhurt. Hydrogen-filled airships were extremely inflammable and very few people ever survived being shot down in one.
And that was the end of the matter as far as we were concerned. I signed a few slips of paper for the farmer and his wife, who had by now stopped screaming and invoking the saints, for want of breath. Then Toth and I went back to our aeroplane to take off for Caprovizza airfield. So that, if you please, is how I came to achieve what I suppose must be my one claim to singularity in the course of something over a hundred years of earthly existence: that of being the only man—so far as I know—ever to have brought down two airships.
8 IL CARSO SQUALLIDO
There was a wondrous row about it all when I made my report to Hauptmann Kraliczek that evening, back at Fliegerfeld Caprovizza. Not only had I brought down a lighter-than-air machine when there was no appropriate form on which to report the fact; I had made a complete nonsense of his graphic projections for the entire month of August, no less. Fliegertruppe standing orders clearly stated that for the purposes of computing pilots’ aerial victories, one airship would be regarded as equivalent to five heavier-than-air machines; and this meant that Kraliczek’s new, reluctantly introduced line for Enemy Aircraft Destroyed climbed so abruptly when it reached the month of August that not even the airship itself could have gained altitude with such speed. In the end Kraliczek had to paste an extension-piece of squared paper above the main graph to accommodate the line. That was bad enough, but when I told him how we had done it—bombing the airship with a wireless set—his normally pallid features took on the livid white hue of a fish’s underbelly.
“You . . . you . . . what?” he stammered, aghast.
“Obediently report that I dropped the wireless set on it. I had fired five clips of ammunition into the thing to no effect and there was nothing else that we could do, short of ramming it. But where’s the problem? Surely an enemy airship destroyed is worth a wireless set at any rate of exchange?”
“What do you mean, worth a wireless set, you maniac! That wireless apparatus was a top-secret item of equipment, of inestimable value to the enemy. And now you’ve gone and dropped the thing on their side of the lines! Du lieber Gott . . . Do you realise that you could be court-martialled for betraying military secrets to the enemy?” I tried to persuade him that after a fall of something like three thousand metres a fragile item like a wireless set would have virtually exploded on impact, transforming itself into a thousand unrecognisable fragments. But he was unpersuaded: unfortunately he remembered the freakish incident in May when Toth’s observer, the ill-fated Leutnant Rosenbaum, had fallen from about the same height to land inside a convent greenhouse in Gorz, stone dead but with hardly a mark on him. He was silent for some time, staring at me reproachfully from behind his spectacles. At last a faint smirk of selfsatisfaction returned some colour to his features.
“Herr Linienschiffsleutnant,” he said in his most solemn tones, “oh my dear Herr Linienschiffsleutnant, it is my duty to inform you that you are in the very deepest trouble. There is only one course of action open to you. I shall delay making my report on this disgraceful incident on condition that you and Zugsfuhrer Toth fly out at the earliest opportunity to try and find the remains of the wireless set. If you can bring it back—even in pieces—then the War Ministry may—I say only may—be content with charging you its cost of, er, let me see . . . 7,580 kronen. If you are unable to find it then I am afraid that my report of its loss will go to 5th Army Headquarters by tomorrow evening at the latest. Is that clear?”
I protested that this was a ludicrous assignment; that quite apart from the hazards of landing close behind the enemy lines, I had no real idea of where I had dropped the thing to the nearest square kilometre or so, and that even if I had, it would either have smashed into innumerable fragments on the rocks of the Carso edge or buried itself deep in the Isonzo marshes.