“Hmmm. Why are you so anxious to attend this execution, Prohaska? Interested in that sort of thing are you? I’ve always tried to avoid it myself, ever since I was a lieutenant on a torpedo-boat and had to attend as a witness when they hanged one of my crew for stabbing a tram conductor in Zara. Leave that kind of business to the provost’s department if you’ll take my advice: they have a taste for it.”
“I obediently report that I have no interest in executions, Herr Admiral. It’s just that my brother-officers and I are . . . er . . . outraged by this man’s dastardly treachery towards his Emperor and King and his base disloyalty towards the Noble House of Austria.”
“You’re what? ”
“Outraged by his disloyalty, Herr Admiral. We feel strongly that now the swine is getting his just deserts there should be representatives there from both armed services to see justice done.”
“But Prohaska, for God’s sake: from what I can see of it this Italian chap of yours is an Austrian subject only in the most technical sense of the word. Damn it all man, if we shot everyone who’d dodged service in the k.u.k. Armee and left the country these past thirty years we’d have all the ammunition factories working overtime to meet the demand. At a guess I’d say that about two-thirds of the United States Army must be technically Austrian subjects. No: in my official capacity as local naval commander I have to agree that the fellow deserves shooting, but as a sailor and a fighting soldier of the House of Austria I have to say that it stinks. If you ask me the military are looking for victims to frighten the rest, and frankly I’m surprised that you young fellows should wish to have any part in this wretched charade. This cursed war’s destroying everything we used to value. Even the junior officers are turning into prigs and informers now—no better than a bunch of Prussians. Frankly I’d have expected better of a Maria-Theresien Ritter. But there you are . . .” He scribbled something contemptuously on a slip of paper. “There’s your damned permission and may you choke on it. Once you’ve seen some poor devil tied to a post and shot you won’t be so keen for a second showing.”
So we waited there on the exercise ground, fortified only by a swig from Meyerhofer’s hipflask. I looked at my watch: 6:10 a.m. We had said 6:30. Would they arrive late even if they arrived at all? What would happen if they arrived before the execution party? It had always been a dictum in the tactics lectures back at the Marine Academy that in military operations, at least seventy-five per cent should be planning and no more than twenty-five per cent left to the vagaries of chance. I was beginning now to suspect, as I shivered in the early-morning chill, that we had pretty well reversed those proportions.
At last we heard the clashing and grinding of gears as a motor lorry laboured up the last steep stretch of the road that zigzagged up from Trieste. It contained the firing squad: a party of ten young and very sick- looking soldiers led by an Oberleutnant whose face expressed an intense desire to be anywhere else on earth but this particular place on this particular morning. The lorry was followed by a motor car containing the notorious Major Baumann—who always liked to be present at the execution of his victims—and a captain from the staff of the Militarhofgericht. They were accompanied by a military chaplain with two gold stripes on the cuffs of his soutane and by an army doctor with a black bag: to certify death I supposed. A working party out on the exercise ground had just finished driving a post into the stony soil and painting a whitewash line on the ground about ten paces in front of it.
Finally there arrived a second lorry, some way behind the rest of the procession. It lumbered to a halt and two soldiers with rifles and fixed bayonets got out to let down the tailboard. The lorry contained the star performer in this entertainment, handcuffed and escorted by four more soldiers. He was helped down none too gently from the lorry. He looked pale and exhausted: clearly Baumann and his assistants had still gone through their accustomed procedures even though the accused had admitted to everything from the very beginning. But I considered that, even with his hair cropped almost to disappearance and dressed in a patched infantry uniform several sizes too large for him, Major di Carraciolo still managed to comport himself with the dignity and bearing of a true officer. I glanced again at my watch. It was 6:17 already. Meyerhofer and I were straining our ears to catch any unusual noise, but so far we had been able to hear only the sounds of the city below awaking to yet another day of the war: the whistles of engines in the goods yards and the sirens of the factories. And of course the constant dull rumble of gunfire away on the Carso.
The rituals of justice now commenced. I had been present at an execution once before: my own, at a fort in the Arabian desert early in 1915, when the Turks had taken it into their heads to hang me as a spy. But this was the first time I had seen these procedures as a witness, and the whole business only served to reinforce my intense dislike of capital punishment. To kill a man in battle is not much: I had done as much several times already and would do so a number of times again. In those circumstances there is usually no time to think about it or to devise any better reason for doing it than that your victim will undoubtedly kill you if you do not kill him first. What I found obscene about this whole rigmarole as I saw it there that morning was the cold-blooded deliberation of it alclass="underline" a thousand times more horrible and despicable than the lowest villain who sticks a knife into a cafe landlord in a brawl.
First the firing squad was marched up and sent forward one by one to pick up a loaded rifle from the ten weapons leaning against the lorry. Two of the ten had been loaded with blanks so that the young conscripts might console themselves afterwards by thinking that they had not after all fired a bullet into a defenceless man: a feeble pretence in fact, because anyone who has ever fired an army rifle will at once recognise the difference in recoil between ball-cartridge and blank. That part of the performance completed, the prisoner was led forward and bound to the post. Then, to my surprise, the doctor came up with his black bag and produced a stethoscope as di Carraciolo’s tunic was unbuttoned. He applied the instrument to the condemned man’s chest, then felt his pulse.
“What’s he doing?” I whispered to Meyerhofer.
“Making sure that the poor sod’s fit to undergo capital punishment.”
“What happens if he isn’t?”
“I suppose they just take him to the prison hospital, then bring him back here and shoot him when he’s feeling better.”
The medical profession having done its bit for the victim’s well-being, it was the turn of the Catholic Church, as embodied in the young Feld- kurat, complete now with crucifix and purple penitential stole. This appeared to be causing problems. Baumann strode over, then the chaplain signalled to me to join them. Di Carraciolo was being awkward and refusing to speak German.
“Tenente,” he said to me, smiling, “I’m afraid that the mental stress of preparing to be shot has caused me to forget how to speak German. Would you be so good as to tell these people that I’m an agnostic and a Freemason, and that I certainly don’t require the ministrations of this reactionary black-frock.” I translated these remarks for the benefit of the chaplain and Major Baumann. It looked for a moment as if the latter was going to explode. A large, red-faced man who always carried his head jutting forward like a bullock, his eyes bulged and he turned purple with rage.
“How dare you, you grovelling miserable Italian serpent! You’re under military law now and if I say you’ll get benediction you’ll damned well get it! Is that clear? Herr Feldkurat, absolve this bastard and give him the last rites at once so that we can get on with shooting him.”
“But Herr Oberst, the prisoner refuses to make confession . . .”