Some weeks after these events I happened to mention Oberleutnant Friml to Flik 19F’s Technical Officer Franz Meyerhofer, who was also a Sudetenlander.
“Oh, that thug?” he said, “ ‘the Death-Angel of the Isonzo Front,’ as the papers are calling him? Funny thing, but we were at school together in Eger. He was about six years below me, but my brother was in the same class.”
“What was he like then? ”
“Rather a weed, my brother said: always being picked on, and wouldn’t go skating and playing football like the rest. He left school after his Matura and became a life-insurance salesman. It’s strange really what the war brings out in people.”
I happened to meet Friml again on the last day of 1916, at a New Year’s party in Vienna. He had recently won the Maria Theresa, but he was clearly in a very bad way: nerves completely gone to pieces. He was killed a few weeks after he got back to the trenches: by snake bite, I understand. It was a very odd business I remember, from the reports that I heard of the enquiry. He took his boots off and got into the bunk in his dug-out after a raid, and was bitten by a horn-nosed viper hiding under the blankets. His men said that the snake must have been hibernating there, but they called in a snake expert who said that horn-nosed vipers don’t hibernate.
So they changed tack and said that it must have hidden there from fright during a bombardment. In which case, said the expert, it must have been a very frightened reptile indeed, and very disorientated, because horn-nosed vipers are unknown north of the Dinara Mountains, about three hundred kilometres further south. The military procurators tried pinning it on a Croat soldier in Friml’s storm-company, but the rest of the men closed ranks and they could never get enough evidence for a charge of murder. I suppose that it was better in a way that he died: I would have hated to think of him back in civilian clothes, reduced to selling life insurance on the streets of Eger with his spring-loaded cosh in one hand and a briefcase in the other. The “trincera-crazies,” the Italians called them. Europe’s tragedy was not the Oberleutnant Frimls who died, I think; it was the ones who came back.
9 HOME FRONT
We arrived back at Fliegerfeld Caprovizza early next morning to find that we had been posted missing. Observation posts on the ridge of Debeli Vrh had seen a Lloyd two-seater hit by anti-aircraft fire over Monfalcone and had watched it come down in no man’s land on the Svinjak. I also discovered to my fury that my commanding officer Hauptmann Kraliczek had gone a step further and reported us both dead in action, in consequence of which a telegram had already been sent to my wife in Vienna. So it was necessary for me to leap straight away on to a bicycle, still in my tattered flying overalls, bone-weary and covered in trench grime, and rush to Haidenschaft telegraph office to send a telegram telling her that I was all right. Then it was back to Caprovizza, muttering curses against my commanding officer, and to bed for a few hours’ much-needed sleep, my head still ringing from shellbursts and my lungs aching from the after-effects of gas.
I was woken up by my batman Petrescu a few hours later, still feeling rather seedy. A staff officer was waiting to see me outside my tent. I came out, unshaven and blinking in the sunlight, and had my hand warmly shaken by an Oberst, the Air Liaison Officer from 5th Army Headquarters, who had motored down from Marburg to meet me. He congratulated me on my extraordinary feat in bringing down the airship Citta di Piacenza the previous day, and requested that I should please to present myself with my pilot in Haidenschaft that afternoon to be introduced to the Heir-Apparent, the young Archduke Karl, who was visiting the troops in the area and had expressed the wish to meet us. I mentioned the missing wireless set, and obediently reported that we had managed to retrieve some parts of it the previous day even if we had lost an aeroplane and almost lost our own lives in doing so. He seemed surprised.
“Top-secret? Not to my knowledge. I’ll speak with the Corps Technical Officer, but so far as I’m aware those valve sets came off the secret list last month. There must have been a clerical slip-up somewhere. Anyway, don’t worry about it: your commanding officer was probably misinformed.”
So we washed and shaved and spruced ourselves up, Toth and I, and got into a staff car to be driven to the town square in Haidenschaft to meet our future Emperor as he reviewed a guard of honour. A sizeable crowd had gathered in the little square to greet the Archduke and his entourage. As he drew up in his grey-green Daimler I got my first good look at the man who must surely become our ruler before much longer. He was a slight young man with an amiable if rather weak face, wearing the tunic—the austere field-grey “Karlbluse”—which he had made his trademark and which had been widely adopted of late as a mark of loyalty by front-officers of the more Kaisertreu variety. I noticed however, once I had had the chance to inspect this garment close-up, that it was well cut and of noticeably finer material than the increasingly shoddy wartime cloth that the rest of us wore.
The young Archduke shook my hand: a curious palm-downwards handshake in which I had been schooled beforehand by an ADC and which involved me extending my own hand palm upwards as if soliciting a tip. He made the usual small talk—how long I had been an officer, where I came from etc. etc.? Then he questioned me on every detail of our attack on the Italian airship, and also on our exploit the previous day in landing behind enemy lines to retrieve the fragments of the wireless set. As to our experience in the front line, I must admit that I glossed over certain incidents: like that of our rummaging beneath a decomposing corpse in our desperate search for a gas mask. I suspected that members of the Imperial House were even more solicitously protected than the general public from the gruesome realities of life and death in the trenches, and I felt that he would find this story—like the murderous exploits of Oberleutnant Friml—too distressing to be borne. I took good care though to say a great deal about Toth’s courage and quick-wittedness in flinging a hand-grenade out of our shell hole—omitting only to mention that it was one of our side who had thrown it in the first place.
The Heir-Apparent enquired why I had left the submarine service to take up flying? And I, for my part, was preparing to give him the expected answers: looking for ever more dangerous ways of winning honour for the Noble House of Austria and so on and so forth. But then I thought, why should I? Perhaps it was the shaking-up administered to my brain by shell fire the previous day, but a sudden wild thought came into my head: why not tell him the truth for once? There are more than enough lies and half-lies in this venerable Monarchy of ours, I thought, and more than enough court flunkeys to filter reality; and anyway, who needs the truth more than this young man, who will soon be ruling over fifty-five million people? So I told him that in fact I had not volunteered for the Flying Service, but had been volunteered for it by my superiors to get them off the hook with the Germans over their sunken U-Boat; and that while I had no objection to risking my neck each day as an officer-observer in the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe, I felt that my talents might still be more profitably employed back in my own trade at sea. He listened sympathetically, nodding as he did so and intoning, “Yes, yes.” He seemed to have had a look of concern built into his face in his mother’s womb. He concluded the conversation by remarking that so far as he could see an injustice had been done, then shook my hand in farewell and moved on to speak with Zugsfuhrer Toth.
I knew now that I would henceforth be a marked man among the Habsburg officer corps for the rest of my days. In military life there are few offences against service propriety more heinous than that of going over the head of one’s immediate superior and complaining to his superiors. It is something which can occasionally be done, but only in the direst extremities and in the knowledge that one will be regarded with suspicion ever after. And now I, a junior naval officer, had committed the ultimate solecism by going to the man very near the top. Short of complaining to the Emperor himself I could scarcely have committed a greater outrage. And all for nothing: for I knew perfectly well from my experience of royalty that he would probably have forgotten about it already.