The Two-Headed Eagle by John Biggins

Author:John Biggins
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781590134757
Publisher: McBooks Press

10

PAPER AEROPLANES

I RETURNED TO FLIEGERFELD Haidenschaft-Caprovizza on the first day of September 1916. It appeared that not a great deal had happened during my fortnight’s absence. The Sixth Battle of the Isonzo had fizzled out around 20 August, as the Italians ran low on artillery shells. In those two weeks they had captured the town of Görz and had then pushed on to the Carso Plateau to a maximum depth of about five kilometres, leaving them now with a more or less straight front line some ten kilometres in length, running from Görz down the shallow depression called the Vallone to reach the sea a little to the east of Monfalcone. It had cost them something over sixty thousand lives to gain, and us about the same number to lose. Both sides were now gathering their breath and preparing for the next round.

Flik 19F had flown a number of reconnaissance flights when requested by Army Headquarters, and had also done a little long-range bombing, losing one Brandenburger along with Fähnrich Baltassari and Corporal Indrak in an attempt to bomb the rail junction at Treviso. Otherwise there was little to report in the first couple of weeks after my return to the unit. Zugsführer Toth had been home on leave to visit his parents in Hungary. I would dearly have loved to have been able to question him more closely about this, since Toth having parents was a concept that I found quite fascinating, giving rise to visions of creatures sitting around a fire on the floor of a cave gnawing the bones of an aurochs. But my Latin was not quite up to the task; and anyway Toth, though impeccably “korrekt” in his relations with officers—at least when not tipping them out of aeroplanes—was someone who would not willingly discuss his private life with strangers.

The weather was beginning to close in now, autumn approaching a good deal earlier than usual, which (so the local countryfolk said) presaged a hard winter. Morning fog and low cloud made flying impossible for much of the time—“Fliegerwetter” the ranker-pilots used to call it, since they did not wear the black-and-yellow sword-belt and were thus under no obligation to pretend that they were anxious to get themselves killed. But the fog and cloud began to clear around mid-month as the bora season set in.

I did once understand the precise mechanism of the bora, eighty-five years ago when I was studying meteorology at the k.u.k. Marine Akademie. As I remember it, it works rather like the syphon in a lavatory cistern: that cold air accumulates behind the mountain ranges of the Balkans until some of it overflows down a mountain pass, and that this initial flow brings the rest rushing down after it. The danger signs, I remember, were clear air and a low, white cap of cloud over the distant mountain peaks. There would be a few hours’ stillness and an uneasy feeling in the air, then whoosh! suddenly a howling gale would be shaking

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