“With respect Herr Kommandant, that is incorrect: I tried to kill him.” Heyrowsky stuck his fingers into his ears.
“Tut tut, Prohaska; you really mustn’t say things like that or there’ll have to be a court martial after all. No, I didn’t hear what you said. My eardrums have been troubling me lately: altitude and all that. You’re a flier yourself so I’m sure you understand. No, I think that if we play this one intelligently we can still get you off the hook.”
“Might I enquire how, Herr Kommandant? I am undeniably guilty of a death-penalty offence. Court martial is mandatory in such cases.”
“Well, it is and it isn’t. Evidence has to be gathered, and there were no witnesses I understand: at any rate, none who’d testify against you. And anyway, Flik 19F has just been merged with Flik 19, so while the papers are being transferred from their Kanzlei to ours I would imagine it to be quite possible that some might get mislaid. I think if we can discreetly lose you along the way as well . . .”
“Lose me? How?”
“I gather that you were only seconded to the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe from the Navy, so you’re not technically on the strength. I also understand from contacts of mine in Pola that they’re short of pilots in the Imperial and Royal Naval Flying Service. Now, I may be a fighting soldier but I haven’t served twenty years in the k.u.k. Armee without learning something about paperwork. If we’re quick we can get you up to Divacca and on to the next train to Pola before the Military Procurators people come here looking for you. They’ve still got a file open on you after that affair with the Italian pilot chap.” He looked at his watch. “Eleven-thirty-five precisely. Get your kit together and report back here in fifteen minutes while I talk with the lorry driver. Mustn’t make your departure too public I think. There’ll be a rail warrant waiting for you at Divacca.”
“But Herr Kommandant . . .”
“Prohaska, you are in no position to argue, believe me. Just go, and take damned good care not to leave a forwarding address.”
So that was how I bade farewell to the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe: lying under a tarpaulin in the back of a motor lorry full of empty lubricating- oil cans, as we lumbered out through the gate of k.u.k Fliegerfeld Haidenschaft and on to the Divacca road. It had been eighty-nine days in total. It only seemed much longer.
I met Franz Meyerhofer in Vienna in 1930 or thereabouts. I had just returned from South America and he was in the city for a family funeral, so we met for a couple of drinks for old times’ sake. Meyerhofer told me that they had fought on after I left, first in Flik 19 then in other units. Meyerhofer himself had at last won his pilot’s wings and had eventually led a fighter squadron over the Montello sector in the battles of the summer of 1918. The k.u.k. Fliegertruppe had fought on to the end, he said, outnumbered, and handicapped by every imaginable deficiency of equipment, organisation and training. Even in 1917, he said, the Germans would still not sell us Fokker interrupter gear to allow machine guns to fire through the propeller arc, so we had used a homemade version called the Zaparka system. This had worked, but only with the engine between twelve hundred and two thousand revs per minute—which meant that a pilot had to keep one eye on his target and the other on the tachometer as he pressed the firing button, otherwise he might only shoot off his own propeller blades. Likewise they still had to soldier on with the wretched Schwarzlose machine gun and its canvas ammunition belts. At the end of 1917, Meyerhofer told me, they had shot down a British Sopwith Camel fighter and had found that its machine guns were fed by self-destructing ammunition belts, made up of a chain of aluminium clips which held each cartridge to its neighbour and which fell off when the bullet had been fired. Samples were rushed to the k.u.k. Fliegerarsenal with an urgent request for an Austrian supplier to make a copy. Weeks later a letter was received thanking Meyerhofer for the sample and saying that the matter “was receiving the most active consideration.” It was still receiving the most active consideration a year later when the war ended—though, to be fair to the Fliegerarsenal, it had reached committee stage by then.
Of those who had flown with me in Flik 19F only he, I and Svetozar von Potocznik were still alive. Most of the rest—Szuborits, Barinkai and Zwierzkowski and the others—had survived the war, but by 1926 all were dead, killed in peacetime flying accidents. Meyerhofer was now a pilot with the Belgian airline Sabena, and a few weeks after our meeting he too would “find the flier’s death,” colliding with a factory chimney as he tried to land in fog at Le Bourget.
As for Svetozar von Potocznik, paladin of the Germanic Race, I had met him already in Paraguay in 1926 when I was briefly commanding the Paraguayan river fleet during the murderous Chaco War with Brazil. Rather odd when I had known him at Caprovizza, he was by now completely crazed, but in a disturbingly calm, rational sort of way. He had flown in the shadowy little war in Carinthia in 1919 when the infant Austrian Republic had fought to prevent the Slovenes—now part of Yugoslavia— from taking the area south of Klagenfurt. And that was the reason why he was now in South America under the name of Siegfried Neumann: he was wanted throughout Europe as a war criminal after he had dive-bombed his father’s old school at Pravnitz and killed some forty or so children in a ground-floor classroom. He was now flying in the Paraguayan Air Force and practising on Indian villages the theories of terror bombing he had developed during the last years of the world war.
About 1931 he returned to Germany and became a test-pilot for Junkers, then entered the Luftwaffe and became one of the leaders of the infamous Condor Legion during the Spanish Civil War—the ones who used the town of Guernica as a test-laboratory. He had risen to the rank of Major-General by the end of the war. But the Balkans which had given him his original name seemed to draw him back with some fateful magnetism. After being injured in a crash in 1941 he had been assigned to ground duties, commanding a region in occupied Yugoslavia. Partisan activity was intense, but the activities of “Sonderkommando Neumann”— a force made up of Luftwaffe ground troops, SS and Croat Ustashas—had been even intenser, and much more systematic. He was handed over to the Yugoslavs in 1946 and hanged as a war criminal responsible for the deaths of at least twenty-five thousand people.
Meyerhofer had no idea what had become of the miserable Hauptmann Kraliczek after I had tried to choke him that day at Caprovizza: he had just disappeared from the scene. It was not until the 1960s that I remembered him, when I saw an article about him in one of the Sunday papers. It appeared that after the war Kraliczek had become a desk official with the Vienna police, collating crime statistics or something. For twenty years he had led the obscure life of a civilian police official. But recognition sometimes comes even late in life. In 1938 the Nazis arrived in Austria, and in 1940 Kraliczek’s section had been incorporated into Himmler’s SS empire and moved to Berlin. There he was put to work on his old job, organising rail movements. And now be came into his own. In the old days his diligence and attention to detail had been able to work only through the rickety Habsburg administrative machine. But now, as Section Head, he had at his disposal a superbly efficient and unquestioningly obedient administration, absolutely dedicated to its allotted task.
He had undoubtedly done a superb job, organising dozens of rail transports a day across occupied Europe despite the chaos brought about by bombing and the collapse of the fighting fronts. In fact the worse things got, the more effective Kraliczek’s team became. When the British had arrested him near Flensburg in 1945 he had boasted to his captors that in the summer of 1944 he had been routing thirty or forty trains a day across Slovakia even as the Russian armies were pushing into Hungary. Had he ever given any thought to what was being done with the contents of the trucks when they reached their destination? he had been asked. No, he said indignantly; that was totally outside his area of responsibility and no concern of his whatever. They gave him twenty years at Nuremberg. He came out early, about 1962, and was immediately approached for interviews by a young American-Jewish woman journalist—hence the newspaper articles later. He had taken a great liking to her for her qualities of precision and hard work, and had told her everything that she wanted to know in great detail. It was not until near the end of the interviews that she revealed that both her parents had died in the gas chambers. Kraliczek had been genuinely shocked and horrified by this revelation, quite unable to comprehend that it was one of his trains that had taken them there.