Джон Биггинс - The Two-Headed Eagle

“Tell me sir, what was it really like to be a flier in that war?”

Well, I thought, a question as asinine as that deserves some sort of answer. So I thought for a moment or two.

“If you really want to know what it was like, to fight in the air in the Great War, then go up to someone you have never met before and who has never done you the slightest harm and pour a two-gallon tin of petrol over them. Then apply a match, and when they are nicely ablaze, push them from a fifteenth-floor window, after first perhaps shooting them a few times in the back with a revolver. And be aware as you are doing these things that ten seconds later someone else will quite probably do them to you. This will exactly reproduce for you and your fellow enthusiasts the substance of First World War aerial combat and will cost your country nothing. It will also avoid the necessity for ten million other people to die in order for you to enjoy it.”

I saw that the interview was now at an end: Mother Superior moved in to usher the man away, saying, “Please—you must not mind him—he old man, head not so good any more.” After he had left it was only my ad­vanced age which saved me from ten days’ solitary on bread and water.

A couple of months after this I happened to pick up a library book: The Traveller’s Guide to Northern Yugoslavia, published the previous year. Curious, I looked up the chapter on the Carso region. One paragraph caught my eye.

The lives of the people of mountain-Slovenia often take on the qual­ity of Greek tragedy, of something as stony and unyielding as the landscape itself. In one village where the entire male population was massacred in 1943 by the SS the women swore an oath that thereafter, as long as they lived, no man would ever enter the vil­lage again. Likewise in a village just outside Ajdovscina there lived until about 1975 an old woman who had once been the sweetheart of an Austrian airman, during the First World War when there was an airfield near by. He was posted missing over the Alps in 1917 and we were told that every day from then until her death she had walked into Ajdovscina to ask at the post office whether there was any news of him. We saw her in 1973, dressed in black from head to foot like a crow, quite mad as she hobbled along the dusty road in the midday heat.

“What was it like?” The question stuck in my mind, and now, eight years after I met that odious young man, I have tried to answer it for you, confident that you my listeners will have a maturer understanding of what it all meant—if indeed it meant anything at all, which I sometimes doubt. That war which we fought there above the Alps in those fragile, desperate aircraft with their unreliable engines and flimsy petrol tanks and no parachutes was not a light-hearted, boy’s-story-book adventure as some would have you believe. But neither was it remotely comparable to the monstrous butchery that was going on below us. The death rate was enormous—a good half of those who flew I should think—and of those deaths, the majority were by burning. But in all that war and all the years since I have never heard of anyone who ever applied to transfer back to the trenches. Likewise nearly all of those who flew in that war went on doing it afterwards, test-flying aeroplanes and mapping out the world’s air routes—like young Leutnant Szuborits of Flik 19F, who went to work for the French Breguet company after the war and disappeared without trace in 1925 while trying to fly across the Sahara.

And soon the memory of it will have vanished, now that the gorse and willow bushes have grown back over the rubble-filled trenches of the Isonzo and the last of the old men who saw it all are being carried one by one to their graves. May they rest in peace, those warriors of three- quarters of a century ago, gone now to join those who never came back. What was it all for, that so much blood should have been spilt for so little? I cannot say, only tell you what I saw and hope that you will know about it when I am no more: know about it, and perhaps understand better than we did.