Джон Биггинс - The Two-Headed Eagle

After the presentation Toth and I went to see the Medical Officer in Haidenschaft. We were both suffering from chest pains and nausea. Our eyes were sore and red and Toth was developing a fine inflamed rash around his neck. The Medical Officer diagnosed the after-effects of poi­son gas and wrote us each out a note authorising us to go and take two weeks’ immediate leave somewhere with clear air. He said that we would soon get over it—he thought that it sounded like a phosgene derivative, and apparently one needed to inhale quite a lot of phosgene to be perma­nently injured by it—but he recommended us both to get well away from the Front for a while. “Nervous tension: all the fliers get it before long. Too much altitude and excitement and inhaling petrol fumes. Yes, yes, I know the poor devils in the trenches have a much worse time of it; but for them it’s largely a matter of endurance, and they’ve got their comrades around them all the time to support them. Up in the air you fellows are completely on your own and, believe me, the strain begins to show very quickly.”

So a telegram was sent to Elisabeth at her hospital in Vienna, and that evening I boarded the train at Divacca. She had been due for leave for quite some time now, and in any case she would soon be tendering her resignation on grounds of pregnancy. However, we wanted to be alone together and I doubted whether we would be allowed that in the capital, so I told her to pack her bags for a holiday in my home town of Hirschendorf in northern Moravia. She had never met my father, so here was a wonder­ful opportunity to combine convalescent leave with filial duty.

We met early the next morning on the platform at the Franz Josephs Bahnhof. It was not quite a month since I had last seen her, but still her beauty struck me as forcibly as it had the first time I had met her, in Budapest the previous year. Beauty in women, I have always found, is far more a matter of personality than of looks. True, Elisabeth was certainly well provided for in the latter department, as are many Hungarian women (though in her case she counted Romanians, Italians, Russians and even Scots among her ancestors). But her dark-green eyes and dark-brown, almost black hair and fine-boned oval face would have been nothing without the gaiety and intelligence and grace of manner that illuminated them from within. She rushed over to meet me as I climbed down from the fiacre which had carried me from the Sudbahnhof. She was wearing a summer frock and hat and carried a parasol, since military nurses were allowed to wear civilian clothes off-duty. She flung her arms around me and kissed me, then stood back to look at me.

“Well, still alive I see after all. Whose idea was it to send me that telegram? ”

“Yes, I know. They could have waited. It was only a minor accident and they might at least have contacted the unit holding the sector where we came down. It was my commanding officer I’m afraid. I’d have wrung his neck for him but he was out when I got back to the airfield. Did it upset you very much?”

She smiled faintly. “I can’t say that it gave me a very agreeable sen­sation in the pit of my stomach when I opened it—until I looked at the date. Luckily it seems to have been delayed and I’d opened yours first. But your commanding officer—Kralik or whatever his name is—he sounds a first-class rotter. ‘It is my sad but proud duty to announce to you that your husband has died a glorious flier’s death on the field of eternal honour . . .’ I mean, who in their right mind writes stuff like that two years into a world war? He sounded almost glad that you’d been killed—as if I ought to send a telegram back thanking the Army for making me a widow second time around.”

“Did you think that they had?”

“Not really: in my heart I knew that you’d be all right. I just knew— woman’s intuition I suppose.”

“Flying’s a dangerous business, you know? I never wrote to you about how many men and machines we’ve lost these past few weeks, or the scrapes I’ve had.”

“I knew that perfectly well. We’ve had a lot of burnt and smashed-up airmen coming into the hospital recently. But I still knew that you’d be all right. Don’t ask me why, I just knew. I’ve got a little picture of the Blessed Virgin on my bedside table next to your photograph and I pray to that each morning and evening to keep you safe.”

“I thought that you didn’t believe in all that sort of thing?”

“I don’t. But it’s like the man who went around Messina a few years ago after the earthquake selling anti-earthquake pills. When the police arrested him he asked them, ‘Well, what else do you suggest?’ I think that my prayers keep you up in the air and turn aside the bullets by force of will. I know it sounds crazy but I’m sure that it works. And anyway, there’s nothing else that I can do for you. I tried to talk you into desert­ing when we were up in the mountains in Transylvania—even arranged you somewhere to hide until the war was over—but you wouldn’t hear of it: the Honour of the House of Austria and your duty to your men and so on. So I’m afraid that whatever protection that I can give you now is only second-best.”

“And I’m sure that it’ll see me through.”

She smiled. “Well, let’s look on the bright side of things. You’ve got this far without a scratch, so I imagine you must be quite good at flying. And anyway, every day’s a day nearer the end of the war. Surely it can’t go on much longer. The papers say that the French have lost half a million men at Verdun; so you can be pretty sure the Germans have lost even more. At this rate there’s not going to be anyone left before long. The k.u.k.

Armee’s sending men back into the line now after their fourth or fifth wound, barely out of hospital. It can’t last much longer—and between us the Virgin Mary and I are going to make damned well sure that you see the end of it.”

I was silent for a while, pressing her warm body against me. I was thinking of the dying Italian soldier sobbing and moaning after Friml had tossed the stick-bomb into his shell crater. Doubtless his family and sweetheart had been praying for his safety and lighting candles even as he pumped his life blood out into that dismal hole. And a lot of good it had done him. Like most men who emerged from that war, such vestiges of religious faith as I had once possessed were finally blasted away by the barrages. The mind-numbing enormity of it all so outraged imagination, so transgressed normal experience, that all the comfortable little formu­lations of the bishops and theologians have sounded to me since like the empty jangling of the tin cans on the wire after an attack.

The train was crowded, shabby and slow, drawn by a locomotive with badly worn axle bearings and burning lignite, which gave about as much heat as damp newspaper. It took us most of the day to crawl miserably across the Moravian countryside, through Lindenberg and Prerau. The day was grey and close; not August weather at all. It had been a dismal sum­mer north of the Alps and one did not need to be a country-town boy like myself to see as we trundled along that the harvest this year would be a poor one. In fact the most obtuse of city dwellers would have noticed the ground visible between the stalks of rye in the fields, and the fact that the harvesters were mostly old people and women and children with the oc­casional soldier on leave and a few parties of Russian prisoners. Elisabeth and I talked little as we clanked along. The compartment was crowded, the corridor was packed with soldiers going on leave, we were both tired out and anyway, it was quite sufficient for us to be near one another: two insignificant specks of dust clinging together for a while as the whirlwind bowled us along.