So much for the players: what about the stage? As for the Carso Plateau, if I had never seen the place again that would have been far too soon for me. Not steam winches and No. 6 hawsers would ever have dragged me back to that poisonous wilderness. But not everyone felt the same way, I understand. In fact I believe that in the years after the war there were many survivors—Italian and Austrian and ex-Austrian—who kept on going back to those barren hills, spending days at a time wandering alone among the rusty wire-belts and crumbling dug-outs in search of they knew not what, whether the comrades they had left behind there, or their own stolen youth, or perhaps expiation for having come out of it all alive when so many had not. One of these sad living ghosts was Meyerhofer’s youngest brother, who had served on the Carso in the thick of the 1916—17 fighting as a twenty-year-old Leutnant in a Feldjager battalion, straight out of school into the Army. He had gone back every year, Meyerhofer told me, until the previous summer, when he had been killed one evening near Castagnevizza, blown up (the carabinieri said) after he had lit his campfire on top of an old artillery shell buried in a dolina.
Like myself, he had been a keen amateur photographer and Meyer- hofer, while he was in Vienna, was going to bequeath his brother’s album to the Military History Museum at the Arsenal. He showed it to me back in his hotel room. Many of the photographs were from the years after the war, when the Mussolini regime was dotting the Carso with bombastic war memorials designed not so much to honour the dead as to assert the grandeur of armed struggle. But one photograph showed an unofficial war memorial, erected by the troops themselves in the field. It was taken, I should think, some time after the rout at Caporetto, when the Italian Army on the Carso had abandoned in an afternoon all that it had just taken them two years and half a million lives to gain. Marked simply Fajtji Hrib, Autumn 1917, it showed a pyramid of twenty or thirty skulls, piled together without any regard to their owners’ nationality and surmounted by a crucifix made from two thigh bones and a screw-picket stake lashed together with barbed wire. I have no idea what became of that photograph. Perhaps it was lost, because I have never seen it reproduced anywhere. Which is a pity, since I think that if all war memorials had the stark honesty of that simple monument then we might perhaps have fewer wars to commemorate.
15 NAVAL AIRMAN
Imperial and Royal Naval Air station Lussin Piccolo in November 1916 was really not much of a place. But then Lussin Piccolo itself was not much of a place either; though it seemed that it had once known more spacious days, perhaps a century before.
Like many another title in the Habsburg realms, even here on their furthest Dalmatian fringes, the name was confusing. There were two towns on the long, narrow, straggling island of Lussin: Lussin Grande and Lussin Piccolo. Yet Lussin Piccolo was the only one of the two that could be described as a town. Despite its name the other settlement on the opposite side of the island, though it had once been the capital, was by now no more than a dilapidated fishing village with a very large old church. It puzzled me why anyone should ever have bothered to build a town on that side of the island at all. It faced the Velebit Mountains on the Balkan mainland and was exposed to the full fury of the bora, which blew here in winter with a ferocity that, over the ages, had left the entire east-facing coast looking rather as if it had been sand-blasted at maximum pressure: every stick of vegetation shrivelled and worn away by the salt spray and the grit whipped up from the shore.
Lussin Piccolo was a typical small island port town barely distinguishable from several dozen other such towns along the Dalmatian coast. Centuries of Venetian rule had given them all a characteristic pattern-book appearance. There was the usual great baroque-byzantine church with its fluted campanile; and the same rows of shabby yellow-stuccoed palazzi along the riva, once the homes of the ship-owning dynasties who had made this a considerable port in the days of sail, but which had long since been reduced to mausoleums peopled by a few aged survivors of the old patrician families. One saw them sometimes early in the morning on their way to mass: the shrivelled Donna Carlottas and Donna Lugarezzias hobbling along in their black-lace mantillas with equally ancient maids trailing behind them to carry their breviaries, on their way to one or other of the five or so barn-like churches where the walls were covered in memorial tablets to generations of Cosuliches and Tarabocchias lost at sea.
Lussin Piccolo had once had a marine academy of its own, and a powerful guild of ship owners. But iron steamships and the Suez Canal had finally done for the place, and it had long since sunk into shabby poverty, alleviated a little only in the early years of this century when the Archduke Karl Stefan had built a villa here and the place had become, like the rest of the Dalmatian coast under Austrian rule, a riviera for second-rank nobility and imperial bureaucrats in summer and a sanatorium for invalids in winter. This always struck me as an odd belief, I must say: that the warm, sunlit Adriatic coast was an ideal place for consumptives. I had served fifteen years in the Austrian fleet and knew perfectly well from officiating at recruiting depots that the entire coast was in fact rotten with tuberculosis.
But then, this was scarcely a matter for wonder: the diet of the common people had always been miserable here in Dalmatia. The limestone islands—no more than karst mountain-tops protruding from the water— were stony and arid to a degree where even goats could scarcely browse a living from most of them. The islanders had imported their food in peacetime and had paid for it with tourist income and remittances from abroad. But now that the war was into its third year, tourism and remittances were both things of the past. The 1916 harvest had been disastrously bad throughout Central Europe. The Hungarian government had just forbidden the export of grain to the rest of the Monarchy, so Dalmatia was indeed in a precarious state. If the people of Vienna were now subsisting on turnips and barley-meal, what would be left over for the folk of the poor, distant, forgotten Adriatic coastlands? By November supplies to the islands were down to the bare minimum needed to prevent people from dying of starvation in the streets. Even fish was no longer available to feed the people, now that the local fishing fleet was under military control and its catch requisitioned at the dockside to be taken away and canned for army rations.
But the scarcity of food on Lussin Island in the autumn of 1916 had one good side to it: if there was nothing much for the people to eat, that at least meant that they no longer had to bother about finding fuel to cook it. Coal had been short throughout the Monarchy for a year or more past, as the blast-furnaces consumed everything that Austria’s increasingly decrepit rail system was able to transport. The cities got only what was left over from the war industries. By mid-November electricity and gas were off for most of the day in Vienna, so it was not very likely that places like Lussin were going to see much coal, dangling as they did at the end of a precarious steamer line down from Fiume. About the middle of the month a violent bora tore an old three-masted barque from her moorings on the mainland and drove her ashore on the eastern coast of the island just across from the air station. Word spread to the town and within minutes the entire population were on the move, armed with axes and crowbars. I was telephoned by the local coastguards to provide a naval picket to guard the wreck; but by the time I had collected the men and got to the ridge of the island above the shore it was already too late. We stood open-mouthed, staring in disbelief as the old wooden ship simply evaporated in front of our eyes, disappearing like a piece of camphor in the sunshine, only much faster.