When I had at last fought my way into the crowded station buffet— reserved for officers but still packed to standing—and purchased the glass of tea (in fact dried raspberry leaves) and slice of kriegsbrot that would be my breakfast, I had leisure to look around me. It was only then that I realised quite how much the Imperial and Royal Army had changed in two years: how the great battles against the Russians in Poland in the autumn of 1914 had torn the heart out of the old k.u.k. officer corps, and how the numerous gaps in the ranks had been filled with hurriedly commissioned pre-war Einjahrigers or youths straight from secondary school. I noticed that one chair was free at a side table, and moved over to ask the other customer, a young Leutnant, whether I might sit down. He could only have been twenty or so but he looked much older, tunic dusty and torn by barbed wire. He did not answer; in fact seemed not to notice me as he stared into nowhere with sunken, dark-ringed eyes. I saw that his lips were moving slightly as he talked to himself, and that his hand shook as he continuously stirred his tea, mechanically, like a toy in a fairground, as if he would go on doing it for ever unless someone pressed the stop-button.
I finished my breakfast just as the orderly returned with the motor cycle. I signed the appropriate receipts, then fastened my luggage to the carrier and set off, glad that in this dusty summer weather I had brought my pre-war pair of flying goggles with me from Vienna. It was a Laurin und Klement machine I remember, with no kick-starter so that I had to run alongside it down Divacca’s main street and leap into the saddle as the engine began firing. I was soon glad though that I had chosen to make my own way to my new posting instead of waiting for transport. It was a beautiful morning, too early yet for the July heat to be shimmering among the limestone boulders and myrtle thickets of this bleak plateau. I puttered along the smooth metalled road at a leisurely speed as I enjoyed the view, leaving a cloud of white dust behind me as I droned through Senosetsch and then down from the Birnbaumerwald into the Vippaco Valley, a sudden ribbon of greenness among the bare, grey mountains of the Carso.
Curious, I thought, that there should be so little traffic on this road. Here we were, only kilometres behind one of the major battlefronts of the greatest war in history, yet there seemed to be little more movement than in peacetime, when the only vehicles would be those long, narrow-bodied farm carts, with the horse harnessed to one side of the single shaft, which characterise the Slav world from Slovenia to Vladivostok. Most of the supplies for the Isonzo Front came either down from Laibach or up from Trieste along the branch railway line to Dornberg; so apart from the airfields at St Veit and Wippach this winding valley road was not much used by the military. I passed a few motor lorries throwing up choking clouds of dust, and one or two columns of marching men, but otherwise saw little sign of the war except when I had to stop for a gang of Russian POWs engaged in road-mending. They seemed a cheerful enough lot and waved in farewell as I went on my way, having dispensed my remaining tin of cigarettes among them as largesse. They were supervised only by an elderly, bearded Landsturm reservist who (I observed) left his rifle in the care of one of his charges as he went into the bushes on a certain errand. Otherwise the scene in the Vippaco Valley was one of immemorial peace, the summer-shallow river winding half-heartedly among banks of pale grey limestone pebbles and the twittering of the birds in the willow thickets quite undisturbed by that constant ill-tempered rumbling in the distance.
I have always found journeys to be conducive to thought; and that morning I was particularly grateful for solitude and the opportunity to think things over, after the dizzying succession of events over the previous week. Last Wednesday morning I had been a national hero. The hurrah-patriotic press had worked itself up into a frenzy of adulation over me—“one of the greatest feats of arms of the entire war” the Reichspost had called it—not least because the performance of Austro-Hungarian arms elsewhere that summer had been so uniformly dismal. But being created a Maria-Theresien Ritter had not been my only engagement that week, for on the Saturday I was to have been married in the Votivekirche to a beautiful Hungarian noblewoman, the Countess Elisabeth de Bratianu, to whom I had been engaged since the previous autumn and who was working as a nurse in a Vienna military hospital. But Fortune’s wheel was to turn with bewildering speed. By three o’clock that same afternoon I had found myself standing in the War Ministry before an unofficial court martial, accused of having sunk a German minelayer submarine off Venice in mistake for an Italian boat—and of having killed my own future brother-in-law, who had been among the German vessel’s crew. Elisabeth’s relatives had immediately forbidden the wedding on pain of disinheritance. But it had gone ahead just the same—not least because (as I now learnt for the first time) she was two months pregnant with my child—and we had got married the next day in a registry office while she was duly disinherited by her family.
As for myself, the War Ministry was in a quandary. Though unconvinced that I had sunk the German minelayer, they were in no position to resist Berlin’s demands for my immediate court martial. The best that they could do in the end, short of having me shoot myself or pushing me under a tram, was to get me out of the way by posting me to the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe on the Italian Front. This (officialdom felt) would put me beyond the German Admiralty’s reach at least for the time being and quite probably for good, soon reposting me either into the next world or into an Italian prison camp for the rest of the war or—most probably—to join my elder brother Anton in that indeterminate category “missing in action.” One way or another, I had been placed in Austrian bureaucracy’s favourite desk-tray: the one marked asserviert, or “pending.”
It was only after asking for directions from townspeople and from soldiers on the streets that I was able to find my way to the headquarters of my parent unit Fliegerkompagnie 19, based on a rough meadow some way to the west of the little town of Haidenschaft (or Ajdovscina or Aidussina as its largely Slovene and Italian inhabitants called it). It was near midday now and already very hot in this trough in the karst mountains. But my reception in the orderly room at k.u.k. Fliegerfeld Haidenschaft brought an immediate chill into the air. I had expected a certain reserve on my first arrival here. The Austro-Hungarian military and naval air services were largely self-contained forces under their own commands and did not generally have much to do with one another. The Navy’s aircraft, it is true, did give a great deal of support to the Army on its southernmost flank during the later Isonzo battles, bombing Italian batteries and shooting up the enemy in the trenches. But since the Navy’s aeroplanes were exclusively flying-boats, for obvious reasons their pilots were reluctant to take them very far inland. So for most of the time the two air arms kept themselves to themselves. A few army pilots had flown with the Naval Flying Service, but so far as I knew I was the first naval officer to serve with the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe.
Even so, I felt that my reception at Haidenschaft flying field broke all bounds of civilised courtesy. As I arrived at the gate, stiff and caked in dust, I noticed that the sentries did not salute me. I was just about to demand the meaning of this when the Adjutant appeared from the guardroom. I saluted, introduced myself and presented my compliments—prior to giving him a piece of my mind on the standard of his sentries, who appeared not to recognise a naval officer when they saw one. But before I could gather breath he merely grunted: