With that we were pushed down the narrow companionway and shoved into the Captain’s cabin. The door was locked behind us. We found ourselves packed into the tiny steel cubicle with five other men: the ship’s captain, a Seefahnrich and three NCOs who had remained loyal when the ship had been taken over. The Captain was a fellow called Klemmer whom I knew vaguely from the Marine Academy. He was in a bad way, shot through the left lung and coughing blood. They had bandaged him with a torn bedsheet and laid him out on a bunk. We gathered that Tb14 had been operating with the 5th Torpedo Boat Division at Sebenico, en­gaged day-in, day-out for the past ten months on convoy escort along the Dalmatian coast. Working-hours had been long, leave minimal and the food increasingly poor. Likewise the First Officer, one Strnadl, had been very unpopular, combining tyranny with incompetence in about equal measure. Yet no one had suspected anything until just before eight bells that morning off Premuda, when the Captain had suddenly found himself barricaded into his cabin just as he was about to relieve Strnadl on the forenoon watch. He had finally managed to lever the cabin door open with a chair-leg, but had emerged on deck pistol in hand only to be knocked over by a rifle-shot from Eichler on a conning tower. Our fellow prisoners said that, so far as they knew, Eichler and Vackar had taken an equal part in organising the mutiny. Both had been heard talking some days before about a Czech Legion which was being formed among Austrian prisoners in Italy. Quite clearly the boat was bound for Ancona to surrender.

As for the rest of the eighteen-man crew, they thought that most were undecided about the mutiny: a few of the South Slavs disposed to join it, others probably against and the engine-room crew wavering. No one knew what had happened to Fregattenleutnant Strnadl. He might have been locked up in the fo’c’sle, but shots had been heard and it seemed more likely that he had gone overboard with a bullet through his head.

It looked then as if, having been generously released from French captivity, I was now on my way to become a prisoner of the Italians after all. That was a matter for regret to be sure, and for acute shame on behalf of my service in view of the circumstances in which it had happened, but at least it cast no slur upon either my loyalty or my professional compe­tence. As for poor Nechledil though, I sensed that he would gladly accept life imprisonment in a cesspit with scorpions for company and bread and water to eat in exchange for his present predicament. His father had been condemned for treason, his brother was a deserter and his relatives were sitting in Austrian internment camps on suspicion of Czech nationalist subversion. And now he found himself through no fault of his own aboard a warship about to desert to the enemy after having fallen victim to a Czech-led mutiny. He was in a pretty mess and no mistake. What would happen if Tb14 were captured before nightfall by Austrian ships? What would happen to his mother and brother when he arrived in Italy and the news got back via the Red Cross? Suppose that Italy finally lost the war and Austrian deserters were handed over? I could vouch for his loyalty, but who would listen to me? I was a Czech myself after all, and already under investigation for various breaches of military discipline. Something had to be done.

I knew the Tb1-class torpedo-boats quite well from having served aboard one as second-in-command back in 1909; not only served aboard her, but worked on her in the shipyard where she was being built. In or­der to get the Hungarian parliamentary deputation to vote money for them, half of the Tb1-class orders had been placed with the Kingdom of Hungary’s only salt-water shipyard, the Ganz-Danubius AG in Fiume. Although only set up a couple of years before, Ganz-Danubius had already established a formidable reputation for poor design and shoddy workman­ship. The Danubius Tb1 boats were no exceptions to this unhappy rule. Long, narrow steel canoes driven by a single propeller, they were unstable and top-heavy at the best of times. But Danubius had managed to make the basic design even worse by taking no account whatever of the enor­mous torque-effect from the propeller. The result on speed-trials had been a list to starboard which grew more alarming with every knot, until I had been obliged to have men hanging on to the port rails to trim ship and the crew below moving every available piece of gear over to the port side. The boats had been refused acceptance by the Navy and had returned to the yard for months of modifications.

I had been at the Danubius yard throughout those alterations. And now, seven years later, I was sitting in the captain’s cabin of one of these boats with a pencil and sheet of paper, trying to remember what had been done. At last I had it: below the cabin a certain lubricating-oil tank had been taken out and moved to the other side of the ship. So far as I could remember the holes in the frames had never been plated in because there was no need for it. It was worth a try. I pulled open the door of the captain’s locker on the starboard side, up against the forward bulkhead, and dragged out a couple of suitcases, then ripped up a sheet of linoleum from the steel deck beneath. Yes, there was an inspection plate as I had expected: a removable section of deck to allow workmen to look inside the ship’s bottom during a major refit and find any sprung rivets before recoat­ing the bilges with rust-proofing compound. It might just be possible . . . I rummaged in the drawer of the captain’s desk and found a clasp-knife with a screwdriver of sorts then returned to the wardrobe floor and got to work on the counter-sunk screws holding the plate in position. They were well rusted in, but after half an hour or so of exertion we had wormed them out and levered up the plate. I lowered my head inside the hole and struck a match. Yes, there was a hole through the bulkhead, about the size of a largish dinner plate. A thin man with very narrow shoulders might just be able to wriggle through into the next compartment of the boat’s bilges, which happened to be below the vestibule at the bottom of the companion ladder where a sentry was now standing to keep guard on us. The vestibule contained several lockers in addition to the officers’ lavatory. If he could then force open the floor of one of the lockers . . . But who would under­take the task? He would need to be a circus contortionist or a human eel. I looked around. Franz Nechledil was the obvious choice: tall, but so thin that he was difficult to see when he stood sideways.

As for Nechledil, in his present predicament he would cheerfully have volunteered to jump into a vat of boiling acid to prove his loyalty to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. But it was still going to be extremely tricky.

He would have to go down into the bilges head-first, we decided, then worm his way through the hole and bend in the middle to come up on the other side. In the end he had to strip himself naked while we smeared him with the contents of a large pot of cold-cream which Klemmer had been taking home to Pola as a present for his wife. Then we lashed a bedsheet about his ankles in order to haul him up if he fainted. He took a pocket torch, and down into the musty blackness he went.

Just as Nechledil’s feet disappeared the key sounded in the lock and the door swung open. Two armed ratings entered and laid hold of me to drag me out to Vackar, who was waiting on deck. Fortunately they were in such a hurry that they failed to notice that they were one prisoner short. Was this it, I thought to myself as they hustled me up the ladder? Was I due to be shot and dumped overboard in order to impress the others? When we were on deck I shook off my captors and stood as straight as I could, rearranging my disordered clothes as I did so.