“A typical peacetime soldier’s view,” he replied. “The reason why people like you can’t cope with this war—and most regular officers can’t in my opinion—is that you regard this sort of war, total war, as an aberration. Well, it isn’t, the Front is the future: permanent war; the Darwinian battle for survival in which only the strongest and those of the purest blood will survive.”
So this was the modern age, I thought to myself: less than two decades into the Century of Scientific Progress and Rationality and here are men fighting in this dreadful wilderness with weapons and ideas more appropriate to the Dark Ages.
“Anyway,” I said at last, “do you want us to come back with you now or shall we wait until dark? Sunbathing out here with a corpse for company is not really my idea of a pleasant afternoon.”
Friml looked puzzled for a moment, then regarded the remains of the dead Italian as if he had just noticed them.
“What, this one here?” He laughed. “You’ll pretty soon get used to sights like that once you’ve been here at the Front for a while: that and much worse. It’s nothing really: just a quantity of decaying tissue returning to the soil from which it grew . . .” At that moment there was a tremendous crash near by which knocked the breath from our lungs and sent stone fragments shrieking over our heads. As we picked ourselves up I put my fingers into my ears in an attempt to stop the ringing in my dislodged eardrums. Friml was much amused by this.
“War music, Herr Leutnant, the orchestra of battle. That was a 20cm by the sound of it. You’ll get used to it after a while, so that you hardly notice it any longer . . .” He paused, alert. “Quiet,” he whispered, “what’s that? . . .”
As my ears began to function once more I realised that what I had taken to be the ringing left by the blast was in fact voices nearby: voices talking quite loudly in Italian. We all listened intently. There seemed to be two of them, in a crater near the aeroplane wreck: two soldiers left behind by the raiders to guard it until nightfall and the arrival of the salvage party. By the sound of their voices they seemed to be an older man and a youth. Whoever they were, they were certainly very unwise to be conversing so loudly in broad daylight when predators like Friml and his men were roaming the battlefield. Friml crouched, intent as a cat stalking a bird. Slowly, he drew a stick-grenade out of his haversack, tugged the toggle at the base of the handle, waited poised for what seemed like hours, but could only have been a couple of seconds—then threw it in a graceful arc to land somewhere out of sight. There was a muffled explosion and a puff of white smoke, then silence for a while. Then the wailing began. It was frightful to listen to. The older man seemed to have been killed outright, but the younger was still alive—just. If you see people in films spinning around and falling and lying still, do not imagine for one moment that this represents anything other than Hollywood’s deodorised idea of death in action. In reality sixty or seventy kilograms of muscle, blood and bone have a great deal of life left in them even when they have been blasted and scorched and shot through with a hundred slivers of red- hot metal. It began with invocations to the Holy Virgin, then to God and Jesus and the saints, then to his mother. A second grenade served only to make the screams louder, until at last they subsided into a moan, then ceased altogether.
“Right,” said Friml, “we’d better get back now. I didn’t want to use that second grenade. The Italians’ll soon be calling down artillery on us if they’ve spotted the smoke-puffs. Let’s go. Just get out when I say and follow me.”
The Italians had indeed seen the grenade bursts: we left the crater just as their first shell arrived. After that I have only a very hazy recollection of events as we scrambled crazily from hole to hole with shells dropping all around us. We fell into an old trench and half ran, half crawled along that for some way, tumbling as we did so over dimly glanced things which I was heartily thankful not to have time to examine properly. At last we found the entrance to the tunnel in the wire from which Friml and his companions used to sally forth on their raids, and squirmed our way along it on our bellies like rabbits in a gorse thicket. What seemed like several hours later, we heard at last the challenge of an Austrian sentry. We were safe.
Our hosts were the ninth battalion of Imperial and Royal Infantry Regiment No. 4, “Hoch-und-Deutschmeister”; the city of Vienna’s local regiment. I had seen the old Deutschmeisters back in 1913, swinging proudly along the Ringstrasse in the great parade to mark the centenary of the battle of Leipzig. That had been a different world, and they had been different men. The old k.u.k. Armee was odd among the armies of Europe in having no foot-guards regiments. However, among the Emperor of Austria’s soldiers it was generally recognised that the four Tiroler Kaiserjager regiments were the elite, and that after them the Deutschmeisters were the premier line-infantry regiment, allocated the finest-looking of each year’s crop of recruits. They were all long since gone, dead in Poland and Serbia. The ranks had been refilled several times already, and the Deutschmeisters of 1916 were sorry specimens in comparison with their predecessors of only two years before: undersized, ill- nourished and pathetically young conscripts from the grey slum tenements of Vienna’s outer districts. Clad in shoddy wartime ersatz uniforms, they looked a woebegone lot, even after making allowance for the effects of a prolonged sojourn in the Carso trenches. Not the least of the disturbing effects of service in the front line, I observed, was that it made everyone look alike: lifeless, drawn faces and eyes sunk deep into their sockets. It seemed that the battalion had already been holding this sector without relief since early August, its losses made up by sending new drafts forward into the line by night, or whenever the shelling eased up. Those who had been here since the beginning of the Sixth Battle—perhaps a third of the battalion now—already had that characteristic glazed look that resulted from a long stay at the Front. My second wife Edith had been a nurse in Flanders in 1917, and she told me of the extreme shell-shock cases, the ones whose minds had completely given way, like poor Schraffl’s. But myself, from what I saw during that brief spell in the trenches on the Svinjak, I think that everyone who survived the front line in that war must have come out of it at least mildly deranged. Quite apart from anything else there was the awful brain-jarring noise. At least in France I suppose that some of the noise from exploding shells was muffled by the soil. Here on the Carso they had only rock to burst on, and they would go off with a bright yellow flash and a vicious, jarring crash which seemed to make one’s skull ring like a bell in sympathy. It was maddening; unendurable except (I suppose) by switching one’s brain off and going through it all on reflexes alone.
The Adjutant of the Deutschmeister battalion was very courteous to us, once Friml had handed us over. He greeted me before I recognised him. He was a young officer called Max Weinberger, the son of the Viennese music publisher. We had met one evening late in 1913 at one of my Aunt Aleksia’s literary evenings, but I had failed to recognise him now under the dust and grey exhaustion of the Front. He was now the only other survivor from the ninth battalion’s officer strength at the start of August, he said. But he still found time to make arrangements for our transfer to the rear, along with a batch of prisoners captured after the recent trench raid. I noticed that he was very solicitous of their welfare and had appointed three sentries to watch over them in their dug-out. I thought this excessive, since they showed no inclination whatever to escape; in fact seemed only too pleased to be getting out of the war.
“They’re not there to stop them escaping,” he confided in me. “They’re there to protect the poor bastards against Friml and his gang. The day before yesterday we were holding twenty of them in a dug-out, waiting to get them back when the barrage lifted, and one of Friml’s men tossed a grenade in among them for fun. The swine was grinning all over his face: said that he’d dropped it by accident. I was going to have him arrested but Friml kicked up a row and said that line officers have no authority over the Stosstruppen . . .” he smiled, “. . . and all the more so when they’re dirty Jews like myself.”