In the event they had no need to come up after us: they were already waiting as we crossed the lines, circling a thousand metres above and positioned to make the best use of the sun. Everything just happened so fast: six or seven black specks hurtling down upon us out of the glare as our shadows skimmed phantom-like across a white field of cloud about five hundred metres below. Outnumbered, our only hope of survival lay inside the cloud. I turned as I cocked the machine gun and saw Potocznik’s aeroplane waggling its wings to tell us to follow, then putting his nose down to head into the white fluff. But the Nieuports were upon us before we could hide ourselves, two of them edging beneath us to shoot us down if we tried to dive. Donhanyi’s aeroplane was the first victim. I swung around and fired a hurriedly aimed burst or two in an attempt to knock out the Nieuport manoeuvring under his tail. Then the Schwarzlose jammed. I opened the breech and fumbled in my thick gloves to clear the blockage. I cleared it, but I was too late to be of any help to Donhanyi: orange flame burst suddenly from behind the Brandenburger’s engine mantle, and there was nothing more to be done except watch helpless as the aeroplane curved away to port and down into the cloud, ablaze and leaving a plume of greasy black smoke floating in the air. But there was no time to stand watching, only swing the gun around to fire at an Italian coming at us from the starboard side. He was firing at us as he came. Somehow Toth managed to flick us sideways and down into the cloud—just as our engine coughed and missed fire.
I suspected a bullet through the fuel pump, but it scarcely mattered as we drifted down through the clinging damp murk with the engine spluttering to a standstill. By the time we emerged from the underside of the cloud a half-minute later, the engine was gone for good, the wind singing eerily in the bracing-wires as the propeller windmilled idly in the slipstream. In the sudden, intense silence I was aware for the first time of the noise of other aeroplane engines and the dry rattle of firing above us.
I looked about us fearfully as we emerged into the sunshine once more. No one was to be seen for the moment. The Italians were presumably off chasing Potocznik and Szuborits. I looked below, trying to get my bearings. The first thing that I saw was the familiar outline of Gorz below me. Well, I thought to myself, if the Italians had jumped upon us as we crossed the lines, this did at least mean that the cripples might have some chance of limping home. I signalled to Toth to turn us around towards our lines, then lugged our two bombs up on to the edge of the cockpit and tipped them overboard. Provided that we could escape the attentions of Italian fighters and flak batteries, we might still make it back. We were still about three thousand metres up and our lines were perhaps five kilometres to the east. The aeroplanes of 1916 might have been primitive, slow, flimsy contraptions, but they could at least glide well.
I stood behind the machine gun, scanning the sky about us. We might just escape unobserved . . . Then I saw the shape swooping on us out of the cloud. I ground my teeth and traversed the gun around—more out of a feeling of honour than from any hope of beating off our attacker. A two- seater would stand little enough chance against a Nieuport even under full power. Gliding along like this, though, we were the most pitiful of sitting targets, incapable of doing anything more than drift gently downwards in a straight line at about half our maximum speed. The Italian came along behind us, manoeuvring for the fatal burst. Then to my surprise the little grey aeroplane turned away to port and throttled back to fly alongside us. As the pilot waved to me I saw that the aeroplane bore the familiar emblem of the pouncing black cat painted on its side. It was the famous Major di Carraciolo in person. As he raised his gauntleted hand and pointed down I grasped that he was signalling us to fly on towards our own side of the lines—with himself as our escort.
Quaint as it might sound now, such chivalrous behaviour was by no means uncommon in those days. By 1916, war in the air had become a fairly murderous business: not at all the gentlemanly jousting of legend. Even so, men had been flying then for something not much over a decade. The very act of taking to the sky was still something only marginally less dangerous than fighting in it, so it is scarcely surprising that we aviators were still bound together in some degree by a fellow-feeling that crossed the battle lines. I believe that even in the last months of 1918 in France, where the air battles had long since turned from duels into vast, ruthless engagements involving hundreds of aircraft on each side, there was still a general disposition to leave obviously broken-down aircraft to their fate rather than simply shoot them out of the sky. In any event, Major di Carraciolo shepherded us down until we were within reach of our lines, and on the way headed off another Nieuport which was moving in to attack us. As we crossed the lines he waved in farewell and turned away, leaving us to glide down and land on a level stretch of pasture near the village of Biglia, suffering nothing worse than a burst tyre in the process. When we got the engine panels off we found that it was not battle damage that had forced us down but a blocked fuel filter.
We sat dolefully in the mess tent that evening back at Caprovizza. Kraliczek’s Verona raid had been a costly fiasco. Toth and I had got back with little more than a few bullet holes, but the others had fared a good deal worse. Potocznik had managed to limp home with a badly shot-up aeroplane and a dying observer. But at least he had sent down one of the attacking Nieuports in the process. As for Szuborits and Zwierzkowski, they had crashed near Ranziano as they tried to get home. Szuborits was all right except for a few cuts and bruises, but Zwierzkowski had a suspected fractured pelvis, while the aeroplane was a wreck. As for young Donhanyi and his pilot, there was no point whatever in speculating about their fate: in 1916 one did not usually survive a fall from four thousand metres in a burning aeroplane. Even in the k.u.k. Armee there were certain limits beyond which incompetence would not be allowed to run, and with the virtual elimination of an entire squadron those limits had been reached. Hauptmann Kraliczek was summoned that same evening to Marburg to explain himself to the 5th Army’s Air Liaison Officer and to General Uzelac himself. He duly set off in the staff car next morning, wearing his best General Staff officer’s salon trousers and shiny dress-shako, and with a thick folder of statistical abstracts under his arm in order to demonstrate how, despite losing nine aircraft and five crew over the past eight weeks for negligible gains, Flik 19F was still the most meticulously administered unit in the entire Imperial and Royal Flying Service. In the mean time the rest of us were left orphan-like at Fliegerfeld Caprovizza, suspended in a sort of administrative limbo while it was decided what to do with us: whether to rebuild the unit with new aircraft and fliers or whether—as Hauptmann Heyrowsky at Flik 19 wanted—to reabsorb us into the parent unit. Among us remaining officers, feelings on the matter were mixed.
“It always was a stupid idea,” said Potocznik in the mess that evening, downing a double schnapps to steady hands that were still trembling after the morning’s battle. “Long-range bombing in daylight’s a complete waste of time. If you’re going to drop bombs on cities, then do it at night and do it unexpectedly with everything you’ve got instead of sending out four aeroplanes with a couple of jam-tin bombs each.”
“I agree,” I said, “but the trouble with night bombing is that if they can’t see you, you can’t see them either. Showering bombs about at random means that innocent civilians are liable to get hurt. Bomb-aiming’s an uncertain enough business in daylight.”