But even as we clanked southwards through Graz and Marburg I was not to be left in peace. As I made my way along the corridor to the meagre wartime buffet car, brother-officers had jostled to shake my hand and slap me on the back and wish me well in my new career now that (according to the Vienna newspapers) command of a U-Boat had become too humdrum for me and I had volunteered for flying duties, “. . . as the only field left in which he may provide fresh evidences of his matchless valour in the service of Emperor and Fatherland.” When I was at last able to find some peace back in my compartment I looked down once more at the decoration pinned to the left breast of my jacket. It seemed a small enough thing to be making such a fuss about, I thought as I gazed at it lying in the palm of my hand: a small white-enamelled gold cross with a little red-white-red medallion in the middle, encircled by the word Fortitudini . Such a small thing, yet within a few hours it had turned my life upside-down to a degree where I was already beginning to suspect that malignant fairies had substituted someone else for me while I slept.
Nor was there to be any respite at Divacca, that bleak little township up on the arid limestone plateau above Trieste. Word of my arrival had somehow travelled ahead of me during the night and the townspeople— mostly Slovenes in these parts—had arranged a reception for me. As I appeared at the door of the carriage to descend to the platform I saw a crowd waiting. Before I realised what was happening the town band had struck up the “Radetzky March” and I was being hoisted on to their shoulders to be carried through the station vestibule into the square in front of the building. A crowd cheered and the Burgermeister stood holding a large bouquet of flowers as the band played the “Gott Erhalte” and the local gendarmery and fire brigade presented arms. The houses were bedecked with black-and-yellow and red-white-red bunting, while on the opposite side of the square a banner proclaimed:
VIVAT OSTERREICH—NIEDER MIT DEN ITALIENERN!
ZIVELA AVSTRIJA—DOL S ITALIJANI!
VIVA AUSTRIA—A BASSO GLI ITALIANI!
With that little ceremony over, I am afraid that the whole thing rather ran out of steam. If you are carrying someone on your shoulders you have to be carrying them somewhere, and the welcoming committee clearly had no idea of what to do with me next. So after the Burgermeister had made a short patriotic speech and the crowd had applauded I was unceremoniously put down on the cobbles of the station forecourt while everyone dispersed to go about their daily business, leaving me holding the bouquet and a scroll of paper giving me the freedom of the commune of Divacca—surely, now as then, one of the least desirable privileges on the whole of God’s earth.
I went back into the station, which had resumed its normal wartime bustle of men proceeding on leave and men returning from leave. I took out my movement order and looked at it: “Report at 1200 hours 24/VII/16 to HQ Fliegerkompagnie 19F, flying field Haidenschaft-Caprovizza.” Well, it was now just past 8:00 a.m., so I had four hours in hand. But how to get there? The order took me only as far as Divacca by train, so how was I to get myself and my belongings to Haidenschaft and then to Caprovizza, wherever that might be? Clearly, expert advice was called for. I entered the station offices and eventually found a door marked PERSONNEL MOVEMENTS—k.u.k. armee (commissioned and warrant officer ranks) . They would surely know in here. I opened the door and entered to find an unkempt and rather shabby-looking Stabsfeldwebel dozing with his boots resting on a paper-littered desk. A copy of the dubious Viennese magazine Paprika lay open beside him, while the walls of the office were decorated with numerous bathing beauties, evidently cut out from this same magazine, whose sumptuous padding had not yet been reduced to any noticeable degree by the privations of wartime. I coughed. He stirred, looked at me with one eye, then got up and made a perfunctory salute while fastening the topmost buttons of his tunic.
“Obediently report, Herr, er—” (he gazed at my three cuff-rings for some moments in puzzlement)—“Leutnant, that you’ve got the wrong office: naval personnel movements is upstairs.”
“I’m not concerned with that. I have been seconded to the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe, Flik 19F, at a place called Caprovizza near Haidenschaft. I’ve no idea where it is or how to get there, so I would be grateful if you could help me. Do you deal with movements of flying personnel or only with ground troops?”
“Obediently report that both, Herr Leutnant.”
“Excellent. So how do I get from here to Caprovizza?”
He rubbed his chin—he had not yet shaved that morning—and rummaged beneath some papers. It was quite plain that he felt it to be really no part of his duties to assist anything that wore blue instead of field grey, even if it did have the Maria Theresa pinned to it. At length he answered.
“I’m afraid that’s not going to be so easy, Herr Leutnant. Normally there’s a lorry comes up here mornings and evenings to collect people for the Vippaco Valley airfields. But the rear axle broke yesterday evening so there won’t be any transport now before about nineteen-hundred.” He paused for a while. “Tell you what though, Herr Leutnant, I could help you perhaps. Strictly outside regulations of course, but . . .”
So in the end, once I had reluctantly parted with a precious tin of cigarettes, a way was found of getting me to Haidenschaft by midday. It appeared that a despatch rider’s motor cycle had to be returned to my new posting’s parent unit, Flik 19 at Haidenschaft. The reason for this, I learnt, was that the previous day, on the station platform, a Hungarian soldier proceeding home on leave had sought to demonstrate to his comrades the utter unreliability of Italian hand-grenades, using a captured example which he was taking home as a souvenir. The result had been three onlookers dead and seven more or less seriously injured, among them Flik 19’s despatch rider, who had been standing nearby waiting to collect a packet of documents from the Vienna express. The motor cycle had to be returned to its unit, but since it had been moved to a shed on the other side of the town I would have to wait while an orderly was sent to fetch it. There was time for refreshments.
As I made my way to the station buffet I began to grasp for the first time exactly how strange a territory it was that I was entering, this Zone of the Armies which I had heard and read so much about while stationed down at Cattaro, but which I had never visited. The station was thronged with soldiery from every nationality of the polyglot Army of the Emperor of Austria and Apostolic King of Hungary: Magyars and Slovaks and Bosnians and Tyroleans and Ruthenes and Croats, all reduced now to a weary sameness, not only by their shabby grey uniforms, and the rust-red mud of the Isonzo trenches which still caked the boots and puttees of most of them, but also by that glazed, apathetic look which I was soon to learn was the inevitable consequence of a prolonged spell at the Front. It was a look which I was to see again a quarter-century later in the Nazi death camps. The men going home on leave jostled wearily on the platforms as the provost NCOs bellowed at them, loading them into the trains that would take them back for a few brief days with their wives and children in their mud hovels in the Hungarian puszta or their cottages in the Carpathian valleys. For many of these gaunt-faced peasant soldiers with their drooping black moustaches it would no doubt be their last leave. After the failure of our offensive on the Asiago Plateau in May, the Italians were preparing a counter-blow of their own on the Isonzo. The men now clambering down from the returning leave trains at Divacca would be in the front line to face it.