The following day they passed through Verona and Castelfranco, which was packed with newly-arrived British troops, and pushed on to Treviso, where the weather changed abruptly. The train was unloaded in pouring rain and tenders trailed the Camels to the airfield at San Pelagio to be assembled.
The retreat from Caporetto had ended now but the last of the survivors were still coming back. They had fallen back seventy miles – an unbelievable distance in a war where advances were normally measured in hundreds of yards – leaving behind nearly 200,000 prisoners and 1500 lost guns. They had been forced to withdraw from the Isonzo River front through the mountain passes all the way to the River Piave, and a tremendous amount of territory had been given up, the enemy advance halted only by the flooding of the country between the Piave and Venice.
Broken regiments were still moving south to reform, exhausted men devoid of weapons, some of them only half-clothed, wearing ill-fitting grey uniforms and helmets that all seemed too big and came down over eyes and ears. Lorries full of wounded crawled past, the men inside looking like lolling rag dolls, the unwounded in shuffling streams, wet to the skin, their shoulders draped with blankets, their dark eyes hollow and sad, their faces grey with tiredness, their ears still cocked for the distant rumble of Austrian guns. Stumbling horses struggled to keep their feet among the columns of vehicles moving nose-to-tail, in one cart a group of frightened girls who had come from a soldiers’ brothel, the whole shambling mass moving like water from a burst dam, edging around obstacles in the road, and when the road became jammed, flooding into the muddy fields to rejoin the stream further along. It was possible to hear mutterings of “A basso ufficiali!” – Down with the officers! – and “Evviva la pace!” – Long live peace! The Italian soldiers were in a dangerous mood.
They were dirty, torn and unshaven, their transport a miscellaneous collection of unmilitary carts and wagons of all sizes, crammed with bedsteads, bedding, tin baths, chairs, trussed chickens and ducks. Domestic animals were intermingled with the straggling column and soldiers with their toes showing through broken boots led half-starved horses, a calf, a flock of sheep. Ahead, men were still fighting in the rain and mist, firing at enemies who appeared as shadows between the trees, and there was still the fear of another breakthrough.
Among the moving columns were British artillerymen who had arrived in Italy earlier in the year, like everybody else wet through, miserable and cold. The tractors which pulled their guns seemed to be giving them a great deal of trouble and with them were a lot of shellshock cases with staring eyes, jumping at every noise. The medical officer was in despair because there was no food, no medicaments and little transport.
The wretched streams of humanity were still filtering past as the Camels were tested for airworthiness. Since nobody had yet flown them in action, Morton insisted they should all get plenty of practice on them and, since they were always tricky, before any of them were allowed near the Austrians, they all had to take one up and spin it over the airdrome. The Camel’s fierceness suited Dicken, who had always been a heavy-handed pilot, but it was remorseless and there was always an imp of evil in it that allowed no one to take chances. One of the newer pilots held his spin too long, and as he realised his mistake and heaved on the stick there was a ridiculously harmless sound like a balloon bursting as the machine disintegrated. The fuselage, the engine still screaming in terror, dived straight into the ground with the crunching noise of someone treading on a matchbox, the tattered fragments of wings fluttering slowly to the earth behind in the appalling silence that followed.
The Italian front had claimed its first victim.
“1917 wasn’t much cop,” Foote observed grimly. “1918 doesn’t look as though it’s going to be all that promising either.”
Just before Christmas they were due to leave for a new airdrome being constructed at Issora on the Piave front but, just as they were about to take off, the weather broke and only Dicken and Foote got away before low cloud, fog, mist and rain came down to shut out the airfield. Finding themselves in the air, they had to fly by guesswork until they found the railway line that ran from Verona toward Trieste, and follow it at tree-top height until they came to an airfield which they guessed correctly was the one they wanted. Italy, it seemed, wasn’t all it was cracked up to be – especially in winter. The Venetian Plain was a maze of small soggy fields edged with willows and cut by deep drainage ditches which would make forced landings difficult. The weather changes appeared to be sudden, too, the sunshine vanishing abruptly and unexpectedly behind thick fogs which could extend upward to five hundred feet.
Issora airdrome took its name from a group of farm buildings black with the damp weather, and lay on a flat plain alongside a wide canal with raised banks edged with poplars. As Dicken and Foote climbed from their machines, an officer of an RE8 squadron also using Issora appeared with a bottle of Strega to welcome them. He was in high spirits because two pilots from 28 Squadron, deciding on an impromptu raid on an Austrian airdrome at Motta, ten miles over the lines, had dropped a large cardboard Christmas card wishing the Austrian Flying Corps a merry Christmas from the RFC, and had then proceeded to shoot up the hangars and any personnel they could see on the ground.
“Sounds as if we might be winning the war out here,” Foote said.
Since there was little in the way of living quarters at Issora, they found that, like the pilots of an Italian Hanriot squadron which was also flying from the field, they were to live for the time being in Capadolio, a small town that lay just beyond the canal, and to make transportation simpler, a spur line had been constructed from a queer little electric tramway that circled the outer fringes.
Capadolio had arcaded sidewalks full of medieval buildings, which made Dicken think of Shakespeare, a moat, a portcullis, and an ossuary full of the bones of soldiers of the Risorgimento. Its streets were muddy and filled with refugees, but it contained a galleria where you could buy anything from cigarettes to women and one good restaurant where they celebrated their arrival with dinner. Foote made sure of good service by announcing to the manager that Dicken was a very special individual. “Take care of him,” he said. “He’s the bastard son of the King of England.”
The restaurant was full of Italian officers wearing jackets so tight they looked like the chorus from an operetta. Their collars were coloured according to the corps, regiment or brigade to which they belonged, and they were quick to introduce themselves, standing stiffly upright at their tables to shake hands. Trying to describe the fighting in the mountains, they said that more Italians were killed by avalanches than by the Austrians.
Dicken’s billet was with the family of a junior British consular official called Aubrey, and since Foote was to live with a family who owned a bar, he decided Foote had got the best of the bargain. But Aubrey had a French wife who was as dark-eyed and good-looking as her husband and they had five daughters and two sons ranging from nineteen down to ten, each an exact replica of their parents and their brothers and sisters, and things began to look a little better because the eldest daughter was a beauty in the manner of Annys Toshack.
At breakfast the following morning, Dicken was surprised to find the whole family lined up to meet him.
“We thought,” Aubrey explained, “that the least we could do was offer a home to one of our soldiers until things are organised.”
“My father was also in the consular service,” Mrs Aubrey explained. “And I have a brother fighting with the brave French Army. He has a very dangerous job. He is a Railway Transport Officer at Dieppe.”
She was a full-busted woman, as French as the Eiffel Tower, and her conversation was larded with references to brave, loyal France and her courageous soldiers. The children were solemnly introduced – George, the elder of the two boys, who was due to go to university; Nicola, the eldest girl, pink-faced and beautiful; Bernadette; Marguerite; Mark; and two small ones, Cecilia and Marie-Gabrielle. The youngest, Marie-Gabrielle, pulled at Dicken’s hand. “Take some notice of me,” she said. “Nobody ever does.”
They shook hands in the French fashion and the children smiled and bobbed their heads, and Dicken wasn’t slow to notice that the eldest girl kept her eyes on him longer than she needed to.
“We have come to Capadolio,” Aubrey said, “because of the arrival of British troops. We’re here to look after the diplomatic side of the business. My French opposite number’s at Villaveria on the Trentino front.”
As breakfast finished and Aubrey vanished to his office and his wife to the back of the house to attend to her children, Dicken was delighted to find himself alone with the eldest daughter. With her mother she had joined the Red Cross and worked several days a week at the hospital in the town.
“There have been so many wounded since Caporetto,” she said. “And the men have to lie on the stone floor. They sleep like logs, they are so exhausted, and they’re terrified they’re going to be abandoned.”
The Italian soldiers, she said, had a dread of fresh air and when the ward sister’s back was turned, got out of bed and shut the windows she’d opened. Her own patients were mostly not wound cases but men suffering from trench feet, bronchitis, influenza, and typhoid from drinking water out of shellholes.
“They’re such babies,” she said. “A lot of them are country boys in contact with town diseases for the first time in their lives and they persist in dying of ordinary things like measles and mumps, and then we have to hurry to fetch the priest because they want absolution. We’re Catholics, too, of course. We came here from Rome after Caporetto.”
Because the house was in line with the airdrome, their conversation was constantly overlaid with the sound of air-craft taking off and landing.
“Sometimes,” she said, “they look as if they’re going to fly in through the window.”
She described the panic which had swept through the country after Caporetto. “The Italian army was accused of cowardice,” she explained. “It wasn’t true, of course. It was simply that the Germans massed for the attack without being seen, but Father says the Italian command should have known. When the attack came they lost their heads and now General Cadorna’s been replaced by General Diaz and a communiqué he issued blaming the Italian soldiers has been suppressed by the government. It’s said–” she dropped her voice “–that many soldiers were shot for running away. Officers, too. Many of them senior. Would you like some coffee? People here drink coffee all the time.”
Dicken was just coming to the conclusion that he was going to enjoy Italy when the sound of aircraft over the house grew louder, and he turned to the window with a frown. Outside, people were pointing and beginning to run, and he wondered if some idiot was in trouble. Then he heard the rattle of machine guns and, jamming his face against the glass, saw airplanes wheeling in the sky above the airfield outside the town. They were circling at a height of no more than two hundred feet, and he was just peering upward trying to identify them when he heard the crash of a bomb and felt the glass quiver against his cheek. Almost immediately, Nicola burst into the room again with the coffee, a look of alarm on her face. He pushed her against the wall at once.
“The glass might fall in,” he said. “Some fathead’s fooling about with bombs.”
Crossing to the window again, he saw now that there were at least a dozen machines over the airfield and, as he stared, one of them lifted away through a long column of brown smoke, and he saw Maltese crosses in the centre of yellow-painted wings decorated with red and white stripes.
“They’re Austrians!” he yelled. “It’s a raid on the airdrome!”
Running into the street, he stared toward the north and this time he identified the machines as Aviatiks, German bombers powered with Mercedes engines. Escorting them were a whole host of Albatros DIIIs, with one or two square-bodied small-tailed machines with a curious lattice-work strut formation that he recognised from the photographs and drawings they’d been studying on the way south as Hansa-Brandenburgs.
Aviatiks normally operated at a height of over 5000 feet but these were floating about close to the ground, milling around in every direction as though trying to commit suicide. As the air shuddered to another crash, the windows rattled and Dicken saw debris fly and a cloud of smoke lift up beyond the houses. Outside, the cries of surprise had changed to cries of alarm, and the people in the streets began to run for shelter. A car driven by an Italian soldier hurtled around a corner opposite to run into the rear end of a cart drawn by a panic-stricken mule lashed on by its peasant driver. The cart vanished to matchwood and the mule went galloping on, dragging the front pair of wheels, while the driver clung to the reins and was towed on his face through the mud behind.
The bombs were exploding one after the other now but the ground defences were beginning to answer with machine guns and anti-aircraft guns, which were filling the sky with puff-balls of smoke, white from the British, red from the Italian. From the town he could hear the wails of women, and from the back of the house Mrs Aubrey screaming at the children to go to the cellar. Nicola was watching from the steps.
He jerked a hand toward the north where snow-capped mountains showed above the orchards outside the town. “I’d better get out there,” he shouted above the din.
“God go with you!”
“He can go in my place if He likes,” Dicken said with a grin, then wished he hadn’t because she looked so startled he realised he had probably offended her.
Grabbing his coat, he ran from the house. There was no other means of getting to the field except by tram, but one was just rounding the corner, its sign reading Campo d’Aviazione. Just as he jumped on it, it clattered to a stop.
“Get it going!” he shrieked at the driver, but the Italian shrugged and pointed to the trolley bar.
“Elettricitá,” he shrieked back. “E chiusa la corrente. The electricity’s cut off!”
The tram was emptying rapidly and Dicken was just wondering what to do when an Italian Air Force tender filled with officers shot past. Among them was Foote and as he saw Dicken he pounded on the driver’s shoulder and the vehicle slid to a stop with locked wheels.
By the time they reached the field, one of the hangars was on fire together with two of the machines inside. Ammunition was exploding and bullets were spitting in all directions, but the Italians were manhandling the rest of the machines out, and more were being started up by mechanics ducking at the fusillades of exploding cartridges.
Every one of the British RE8s had been hit by splinters but the Austrian machines were lifting away now and bolting for the north, while Italian Hanriots, French-built single-seaters like Camels, were beginning to streak off the ground in all directions. Dicken’s Camel had been refuelled and, climbing into the cockpit, dressed just as he was, he gestured wildly at the Italian mechanics.
The engine started with a crackling roar, filling the air with blue smoke and the smell of castor oil, and as the chocks were dragged away he shot off, his tail up immediately. Lifting in a climbing turn, he was horrified to realise that every gun on the ground was shooting at him. In the excitement, no one was bothering to check the nationality of their target and as machine guns, rifles and even field guns joined in, he saw little flags of canvas start to flutter above the centre-section. Then, in the distance above him, he saw a patrol of Camels, their wings translucent against the sun, which he recognised as from 28 Squadron. They were heading south after a patrol, and as they spotted the Austrian machines, they dropped out of the sky one after the other.
Almost at once several of the two-seaters began to fall to earth. The DIIIs and the Brandenburgs seemed powerless to help and merely milled about the sky in a hamhanded fashion as if they didn’t know what to do. As Dicken bore down on the machine at the rear of the formation like an enraged farmer after an apple-stealer, he saw the Austrian observer trying to warn the pilot. As his guns rattled and jumped, a cloud of smoke burst from the Aviatik’s exhaust as the pilot opened the throttle, but he saw the wings had started to move as the outer struts broke loose and a cloud of steam had escaped from the engine. Then the port wing drifted free and the machine began to spin around what was left in a slow descent like a falling leaf. It hit the earth in a lopsided glide and, as its wheels touched, the tail lifted and the machine cartwheeled across the field, scattering wreckage until it came to rest in a clump of trees.
Circling over it, Dicken was startled at the speed and suddenness of the victory, then, since he was safely behind the Italian lines, he decided to go down and land alongside. To his surprise, the two Austrians were staggering about the field, one of them with a broken arm, the other with a badly cut face. At first he thought they were dazed and shocked, then it dawned on him they were befuddled with drink.
“Wein,” one of them said cheerfully. “Wein und Schnapps. Das Fest. Weinachten. Das Christfest. Nur zu vertraut. Too much. Too good.”
Gradually he made out that their squadron had been having a Christmas celebration when they had been un-expectedly ordered to avenge the shooting up of Motta airfield the previous day by 28 Squadron, and they hadn’t had time to sober up.
“Nun sehr nüchtern,” the Austrian said. “Vollkommen nüchtern. Very sober. Like a judge.”
The Italian pilots were excited by their success and invited Dicken and Foote to their mess to celebrate. They were a high-spirited lot, proud of the fact that it had been an Italian, Giulio Douhet, who had prophesied before the war that the air was about to become a battlefield. Their country had entered hostilities with only seventy-two pilots but, with a boundless enthusiasm and a hard conviction about the potentiality of the air, had poured money into aircraft production.
They had covered a long table with bottles and swept the RFC men inside with a yell of welcome. The two Austrians arrived soon afterward, bandaged and pale, for a few drinks before disappearing to a prisoner of war camp, and the Italians taught them all to sing “La Campana di San Giusta”, the song of the Italian Irredentists, and in return were taught the song of the dying airman by Foote.
“Take the cylinders out of my kidneys,
The connecting rod out of my brain. From the small of my back take the camshaft, And assemble the engine again.”
They were still singing when the shell case hanging outside as an air raid warning started to clatter. As they ran to the door, they saw another wave of machines approaching from the north, four large bombers escorted by five fighters.
“Gothas, by God,” Foote said in amazement. “The bastards sure are determined!”
Once again the Austrians were unlucky. An Italian patrol was just returning and the Austrian fighters bolted. As the Hanriots fell on the Gothas, one of them burst into flames and began to spiral downward.
“You know,” Foote said. “One way or another it looks like being quite a Christmas.”