In the waning days of the Habsburg Empire a little initiative can have unintended repercussions . . .

For Lieutenant Otto Prohaska of the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Navy, life can be awkward to say the least. As a submarine captain of the largest land-locked empire in history, Otto faces a host of unlikely circumstances from petrol poisoning to exploding lavatories and an angry dromedary. Things scarcely improve on land where he finds himself the target of trigger-happy Turks and angry relatives with Medieval mindsets. All signs point to total collapse of the bloated empire he serves, but Otto refuses to abandoned the Habsburgs in their hour of need.

With clever writing and a wry sense of irony, John Biggins shows us an unlikely empire on the wane and a well-meaning man caught on the brink of World War and the end of an era. Otto Prohaska speaks seven of the empire's eleven languages, but in a Navy hampered by nationalist sentiments and undermined by the very bureaucracy it defends, communication is an unlikely occurrence.