KillKick: переводы

→As for us, our only chance of getting at him would be if he came up to periscope depth and lay there, dimly visible from above like a pike lurking just below the surface of a pond. In that case we had him: prismatic periscopes to search the sky for aircraft were still well into the future in 1916, and if our luck was in, the first that he would know of our presence would be the crash of a bomb alongside and the sudden rush of water as the hull plating blew in.

→I tried to work out what I would do as a U-Boat commander if I thought that an aeroplane was prowling above me: probably idle around at a couple of knots about ten metres below the surface, conserving batteries as much as possible and hoping that the aeroplane would run low on fuel and patience after about an hour and go home.

→We arrived in the search area about 8:30. The cloud had lifted somewhat, but occasional curtains of drizzle still drifted slowly across the winter sea. For over an hour we quartered and requartered the twentykilometre square where I thought the submarine might be lurking, having first circled it several times to make sure that the thing was not trying to escape on the surface, where its speed would be much higher.

→As Nechledil warmed up the engine I turned quickly to check the four antisubmarine bombs slung beneath the wings just behind the cockpit. They were 20kg contact-fuse bombs, but with an additional calcium fuse which would detonate them at about four metres’ depth if the submarine had dived by the time they hit the water. One of them exploding alongside would be quite enough to do for any submarine afloat.

→Well, we were bombed-up and ready for submarine hunting, so what were we waiting for? I doubted very much whether we would catch the prowler, who would certainly have sighted the Pola aeroplane and turned around if he had any sense at all. But this promised to be a welcome break from the monotony of circling endlessly above a flock of worn-out merchant steamers. Submarines, I knew from experience, had a way of turning out to be floating logs or dolphins or upturned lifeboats; but there was always just a slim chance that one day it might be the real thing.

→Long, long after all the other warring nations had realised that aircraft would be built in production runs of thousands at a time—and would often be obsolete almost as soon as they rolled out of the factory—Fischamend still clung obstinately to its pre-1914 belief that aeroplanes would be ordered individually like ships and that, like ships, they would last for a quarter century. Even in 1915 Austrian aircraft were still being given individual names.

→The Cardinal Archbishop was there in full canonicals to sprinkle them with holy water from an enamel bucket and to assure them that they were off to take part in a God-sanctioned crusade against Tsarist tyranny and Orthodox heresy. The train disappeared around the bend, he said—then promptly reappeared, steaming backwards into the station, where the whole patriotic effect was somewhat undermined, to say the least, as the entire complement disembarked on to the crowded platforms.

→A cousin in Cracow—where enthusiasm for a war against the hated Muscovites bordered on the hysterical—told me years later of the scene as a flower-bedecked trainload of Polish reservists had left the Hauptbahnhof for the front one morning early that August: how the soldiers had climbed into the bunting-draped carriages laden down with presents of tobacco and chocolate, then steamed out of the station before a wildly cheering crowd as the band played the “Gott Erhalte” and the Polish national anthem.

→What the plans had failed to take account of however was the possibility of a war on two fronts. The result was a month or more of indescribable chaos as the two plans ran foul of one another: of trains of cattle trucks rattling past empty while exhausted soldiers trudged along beside the railway tracks laden down with their entire kit and supplies; of gunners being sent to Serbia while their guns went to Poland and their ammunition to the Tyrol; of troop-trains clanking day after day across the sweltering Hungarian plain at eight kilometres per hour—then burning out their axle boxes as they tried to storm the Carpathian passes at express-train speeds.

→“Well Prohaska, I have to welcome you to Fliegerkompagnie 19F. I think that you will find it, though but recently established, to be one of the more efficient air units of the Imperial and Royal Army. And I can assure you that it is my intention to make it the most efficient. Tell me, Prohaska, at what time did you arrive at Fliegerfeld Caprovizza?”

→As for the man inside this get-up, he had more the air of a rising deputy bank manager than of a military officer: pale, sleek and bespectacled, with neatly manicured little hands which looked far more accustomed to wielding a pen than a stick-grenade or a pair of wire cutters. I saw also, as he turned to face me, that although he wore the balloon-badge of the Fliegertruppe on his collar patches behind the captain’s three stars, he had neither the wings of a pilot nor those of an officer-observer. He brushed the eraser-crumbs carefully off his tunic before speaking.

→Not that he was deficient in military smartness: rather that there was too much of it. Although he was kitted out in the standard field-grey service tunic I noticed that this was immaculately brushed, and entirely free of the patches and darns that were increasingly widespread among front-officers now that we were approaching the third year of the war. I also observed that instead of the breeches and puttees which were de rigueur nowadays, he wore pre-war salonhosen of the General Staff pattern, dark grey with a double red stripe, impeccably pressed, and leather shoes rather than field-boots like the rest of us.

→I put down my bags on one of the two camp-beds—the soldier obediently reported that I would be sharing the tent with a certain Oberleutnant Schraffl—then washed and brushed the dust off my clothes as best I could, combed my hair and straightened my bow-tie before making for the mess tent. I found it to be deserted except for one officer in flying kit smoking a pipe with his back turned to me. The mess cook reported that dinner had finished half an hour past and that the Herren Offiziere had all gone to rest in the shade of the cypress trees on the other side of the field. As for food, there was only some tinned meat with cold potatoes and some warmed-over mehlspeis. I took this as courteously as I could and sat down at one of the trestle tables.

→When I was at last able to find some peace back in my compartment I looked down once more at the decoration pinned to the left breast of my jacket. It seemed a small enough thing to be making such a fuss about, I thought as I gazed at it lying in the palm of my hand: a small white-enamelled gold cross with a little red-white-red medallion in the middle, encircled by the word fort itudini. Such a small thing, yet within a few hours it had turned my life upside-down to a degree where I was already beginning to suspect that malignant fairies had substituted someone else for me while I slept.

→But even as we clanked southwards through Graz and Marburg I was not to be left in peace. As I made my way along the corridor to the meagre wartime buffet car, brother-officers had jostled to shake my hand and slap me on the back and wish me well in my new career now that (according to the Vienna newspapers) command of a U-Boat had become too humdrum for me and I had volunteered for flying duties, “. . . as the only field left in which he may provide fresh evidences of his matchless valour in the service of Emperor and Fatherland.”

→And to be honest I was finding it more than a little hard to get used to my sudden fame and elevation to noble rank. I had tried to leave Vienna quietly the previous evening—not least because I had got married only two days before. But quiet farewells to my wife had not been possible, not with the crowds which had somehow gathered ahead of me at the Südbahnhof, and the autograph hunters, and the popping magnesium flashes and the children being held up on their fathers’ shoulders to get a look at me. In the end, unused to such celebrity, I was heartily glad when the train steamed out of the station.

→Soon I too, like perhaps thirty million others, would become a subject of that new state which had been carved out of the body of Europe over the past eighteen months: the Front, that strange linear kingdom hundreds of kilometres long, but sometimes only metres wide, which now snaked across northern France and through the marshes of Volhynia and along the crest of the Alps—a curious country, where the inhabitants were exclusively male and, although mostly under twenty-five, suffered a mortality rate so high that the population could be kept up only by constant immigration; a strange topsy-turvy land where men lived underground, worked by night and slept by day, and courted instant death if they appeared in the open for a couple of seconds. It was a hungry land as well, one that produced nothing whatever but which consumed so prodigally that the entire economic life of the world was now devoted to feeding it. Soon I too would cross its borders and become one of its subjects. For how long exactly remained to be seen.

→It told me—as if there should have been any doubt on the matter—that we were getting near the war zone. For this was the last week of July 1916, and only a few score kilometres away, along the valley of the River Isonzo, the Italian armies were preparing for their next assault on the lines guarding the south-western frontier of our great multi-national empire. I was now approaching the zone of the armies, which began just beyond Adelsberg.

→ I hope that these yarns of mine may at least entertain you, and perhaps give you some idea as well of what it was like to go up in an aeroplane in those few brief years when men took to the air wearing the two-headed-eagle emblem of the Holy Roman Empire.

→Many of the memories were distressing—in fact are painful to me even now, a lifetime after the events. And to tell you the truth, I very much doubted whether anyone would be at all interested. But young Kevin and Sister Elgbieta tell me that I am now one of the very few left who remember it all.