Читать книгу The Red Knight of Germany - Gibbons Floyd Phillips - Страница 4

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ON the morning of August 3,1914, the inhabitants of the little Russian village of Kielce, located just a few miles east of the German frontier, awoke to find a troop of German Uhlans patrolling the main street and occupying points of vantage on the road leading in and out of the village.

A twenty-two-year-old second lieutenant swung from his horse in front of a low building of weather-stained clapboards. His hair was blond; his cheeks were pink, his uniform was natty. With the handle of his riding crop he rapped on the wooden door, which was opened by the village priest, a tall man in black robes, whose pallid face was framed above by long black hair and below by a full red beard.

"Father," said the boy officer with heels together as though on parade, "it is my painful duty to inform you that war has been declared between Germany and your country and that your village is now occupied and surrounded by my men. I must notify you that you are my prisoner. My name is Manfred von Richthofen, Second Lieutenant of the First Regiment of Uhlans."

The formal speech didn't even sound real to the youngster who spoke it. Even less real it seemed to the cleric, who received it with a smile and folded hands, quite after the fashion he always employed in receiving visitors to the village. What nonsense was the boy talking? War? Troops? Prisoners? What sort of fun-making was this?

Two normally peacefully inclined humans, neither of whom had ever seriously thought of harming each other, much less of war, faced each other with smiles of equal strangeness on the opening day of a struggle that was to last through four long years, spread ruin among hundreds of millions, bring a continent to the brink of destruction, devastate thousands of square miles of peaceful countryside, wipe out millions of lives, and rock civilization.

The prisoner priest fades into the background, but the boy who took him captive captured the undefended town without firing a shot, and then found difficulty in convincing the villagers that they were prisoners—that boy became the national hero of his country and the greatest air fighter that the German war machine ever sent aloft. The incident, now lost in the reek and wallow of all that followed, was the first hostile act of the youth who became the ace of German aces in the air. In the act itself the boy became the man of war.

To make the peaceful villagers realize that they were prisoners, young Richthofen wrapped himself in sternness and locked the priest in the tower of the church.

"At the first sign of hostility from your villagers, you will be executed," Richthofen assured him, in a properly forbidding manner. "And I shall take such other measures as are necessary for the protection of the men under my command and the proper pacification of the inhabitants."

To insure against the priest's escape, Richthofen next removed the ladder leading to the belfry, and placed a sentry there, both to guard the priest and to watch the approaches to the town.

Then he reported in ponderous peacetime military fashion, writing long accounts of his mission and sending off couriers to either flank and to the rear. The frontier was a small river, and he, at the head of his patrol, had crossed it stealthily in the darkness. The young lieutenant and his men, all keyed up to the high pitch of the moment, expected to encounter resistance on the international line; and their surprise was beyond words when they passed over the little rustic bridge and found themselves on Russian soil without the firing of a shot. They had thought there was something funny about this war, after all. Maybe the order for hostilities had been recalled, maybe it was all a mistake, but there was nothing for them to do but to carry out orders until other instructions were received.

In five quiet, uneventful days young Richthofen's little patrol had dwindled to himself and two men; the rest had been sent off as dispatch carriers and as yet had not found their way back. It was quiet in the captured village—so quiet that the lieutenant released the priest with apologies from his belfry confinement and told him to return to his house. The villagers were not only peaceful and docile—they appeared to be helpful to the invaders. To Richthofen's primitive instincts of the hunt, transferred and made applicable to war, it didn't seem according to the rules of the game. How could a huntsman show his prowess when no one questioned or resisted him?

Puzzled, he went to sleep on the fifth night of the occupation and was awakened shortly after midnight by a tug at his shoulder. It was the sentry he had left posted on the belfry.

"The Cossacks are here," he whispered in a husky voice. He also was young. He had seen the enemy for the first time. His voice betrayed not fear but the thrill which comes with quickened heartbeats when fighting males approach contact with their adversaries.

Jumping out from his blankets, Richthofen became the hunter— or the quarry—he knew not which. Senses alert and keen, he stepped out into the night. There was a fine mist of rain falling and the darkness was complete. Under this covering he and his men led their three horses through a break in the churchyard wall and into an open field.

Trailing a carbine beside him, Richthofen returned through the churchyard and, keeping under cover of the wall, they came to the village street. It was filled with men and horses. He recognized them immediately as Cossacks. He estimated their number at thirty. Some of them carried lanterns. They were noisy and raucous as they questioned the villagers. Seeing the leader of the newcomers in conversation with the priest, the young Uhlan doubled his caution.

He crossed the churchyard, leaped the opposite wall, and joined his two men with the horses in the field. They led the animals in silence across the open field and took to the shelter of the near-by woods. In the gray light of early morning, they saw the Cossacks ride out of the village, but they did not return to their old quarters, realizing that an outpost had been left to receive them. Funny war! No shooting—no hunting; just a schoolboy game of "robbers and policemen."

Unshaven, mud-splashed, and wrinkled from a week without removing their clothes, the trio returned to the garrison town on the seventh day after their departure, and were received as ghosts. Richthofen had been reported dead in a brush with Cossacks, and his mother had received condolences from friends far and near. An unmerited obituary is the best of jokes to vibrant youth at twenty-two.

His "return from the dead" netted him an ovation in the little garrison town, but this first sample of hero worship was short- lived, because, within twenty-hour hours, the regiment had entrained and was off for destination unknown but guessed to be France. Day and night the troop train sped westward across Silesia and Saxony in the general direction of Metz.

Richthofen and four young second lieutenants, with all of their bags and equipment, were quartered in one second class compartment. They had a table between them, and it was loaded down with bottles—bottles that were replenished at every stop, where cheering crowds awaited them.

The regiment was known. The First Uhlans and the One Hundred and Fifty-fifth Regiment of Infantry had been mentioned in the first official German communiqué as having taken the Russian town of Kalisch. They were greeted as heroes, and this greeting was not hard to take when accompanied by the flashing eyes and admiring glances of girls who offered them kisses and flowers and wine.

As neither Richthofen nor the three other officers had been in the Kalisch engagement, the celebration galled a bit at first, but as it was repeated at every place where the train stopped, they soon became used to it and liked it. It felt good to be taken as heroes. Why deny it? They stopped explanations.

Further than that, they invented wild tales of their encounters with the ferocious Russians, and one of the party, who had brought with him the sword of a Russian policeman, exhibited the weapon as first-hand evidence of the fierce combat in which it had been wrested from the grasp of a Cossack, and then sheathed in his own blood. Certain rust stains on the blade further bore out this tale.

The officers' compartment was crowded and hot, and blue with tobacco smoke. Fresh bottles succeeded the empty ones, which were sent out of the window at convenient targets. They sang and joked and laughed and made up more tales for the next enthusiastic throng that was to receive them.

Once the revelry was brought to an end with an incident which might have proved tragic. The train stopped suddenly in a long dark tunnel, and those on board were not aware of the reason, Bombs—wrecks—attacks flashed through their minds in the darkness. The silence increased the tension. Then a shot was fired, and immediately hundreds of rifles protruded from windows and were discharged. Bullets hitting the stone walls of the tunnel, richocheted in all directions, The excitement was intense. That no one was wounded seemed a miracle. The incident served to show however, that the German military machine was not entirely the nerveless thing of ironclad discipline and precision that it was supposed to be.

Richthofen rode with his regiment across Luxemburg without incident other than his ill-advised capture of a Luxemburg policeman, whom he finally decided to release, inasmuch as Luxemburg had not opened hostilities or resisted the German invasion of its frontiers, and the policeman had not interfered with his march or his men.

Approaching the fortified towns on the Belgian frontier, the cavalry division rode as though on manoeuvres. With this division Richthofen crossed his second enemy frontier in the vicinity of Arlon, in which town he climbed the church steeple for observation purposes but learned nothing more than that the surrounding country appeared to be free of Belgian or French forces.

The townspeople were bitter, and the young Uhlan was forced to use all of his diplomacy and reserve to get out of the town alone and join his troop on the outskirts. Later he wrote that it had become necessary subsequently to execute some of the citizens for sniping on troops passing through the main street.

His daring, which could also be called his lack of caution, did not mark him for any great success as a cavalry officer. The characteristics which later made him such a redoubtable foe in the air almost cost him his life, and did cost him the lives of most of his troop in his first armed encounter with the enemy. For all his years of military training, the young Uhlan officer fell victim to the simplest in mounted manoeuvres. He allowed himself and his troop to be ambushed and almost annihilated.

It was on August 21st, in the little Belgian village of Etalle, twenty miles from the frontier, that Richthofen received orders to make a mounted reconnaissance toward the south in the direction of a little town called Meix-devant-Virton. His duty it was to discover the strength of French cavalry supposed to be occupying a large forest. With the war less than two weeks old, movement marked the efforts of the opposing forces to get into advantageous contact with one another.

>From the height of a hilltop, Richthofen looked over the forest with his binoculars. The dew on the treetops sparkled in the brilliant morning sun. The scene was one of peace and quiet, and the Uhlan patrol of fourteen men felt itself off again on an objectless ride which would bring it back to camp late at night with nothing but fatigue and aching bones to pay for a long day's march. It was soon to have a rude awakening from such blissfulness.

After his two advance men had trotted into the forest without encountering resistance, Richthofen advanced with his patrol to the edge of the trees and easily discovered from the ground that a large number of horsemen had passed that way shortly before. The hoof marks were fresh in the damp soil. Here was the chance for action at last. Young blood tingled.

"In my mind's eye, I saw myself at last at the head of my little troop, sabring a hostile squadron," Richthofen wrote afterward. "I was quite intoxicated with excitement, and I saw the eyes of my young Uhlans sparkle."

They took up the trail immediately and advanced through the darkness of the forest at a sharp trot. At first they rode with the regulation caution of advance and rearguards, but, after twenty minutes, in which nothing was encountered, the entire patrol became bunched together, and eagerness increased the pace.

In thirty minutes, the first riders, making a turn in a leafy glade, were brought to a sudden stop by the presence of a barrier of felled trees lying across the road. On the left there was a small rivulet, and beyond that a small meadow fifty yards wide. To the right rose a steep, stony slope. In all other directions, the darkness of the forest pressed in with menacing shadows on the sunlight of the small clearing. There was no other sound than the snorts and breathing of the sweating horses and the rattle of equipment.

Richthofen galloped up to the barrier and raised his binoculars. On that instant a volley of rifle fire blazed out on the little patrol from three sides. Trapped! A mounted force of French cuirassiers (light cavalry), estimated at one hundred men, had them at their mercy.

The carbines banged away. Horses reared and men fell to the ground, some to lie quite still, and some to struggle with the reins of their terror-stricken animals.

The path ahead was blocked by the felled trees. The river stopped a charge to the left. The rocky hill on the right barred progress in that direction.

Lifting his hand in signal for hasty retreat, Richthofen put spurs into his horse and dashed backward, but the Uhlans behind had mistaken his signal and had galloped up to his assistance. Bunched together in the sunlit clearing, they offered an excellent target for the cracking carbines.

Richthofen later described the exploit which reflected so sadly on his long years of cavalry schooling:

As we were on a narrow forest path running across the clearing, one may easily imagine the muddle that followed. The horses of two men ran away in a panic because the noise of every shot was increased tenfold by the echoes of the forest. The last I saw of them they were leaping the barricade. I never heard again from the men, and presume they were taken prisoners. My orderly rode at my side. Suddenly his horse was hit and fell. As he was slightly in advance, I had to jump both of them. Other horses were rolling on the ground. In short, it was wild disorder.

In his first clash with the enemy, Second Lieutenant Richthofen had lost ten out of his small force of fourteen men. He himself escaped unscathed. In a letter to his mother, written that night upon his return, he described his escape as a miracle. He credited his French foemen with having surprised him "beautifully."

His defeat at the hands of the French hurt his pride. He had expected greater of himself. His injured pride, however, did not permit him to excuse himself. He acknowledged his fault. His code, as he applied it to himself, was as stern as when he applied it to others. His pride would not permit him to be dishonest with himself even to save his pride. Admitting his error as an officer still permitted him to retain his pride in himself as a man who valued courage above all. With his set of principles, an alibi would have cost him the pride he held in his courage. To Richthofen, a liar and a coward were the same.

Pride, truthfulness, and the little glimmer of jealousy are the characteristics revealed in his letters at that time to his mother. He wanted the trophies of the brave—decorations for valour. These baubles appealed to him tremendously, and he did not attempt to hide his ambition to win badges of credit for himself. To his mother he wrote of his frequent assignments on reconnoitring duty, with the addition, "I am trying hard to win the Iron Cross."

He knew the intrepid qualities of his younger brother, and he lived in the fear that Lothar would see more action than he did, or would have the first opportunity to distinguish himself.

Unfortunately, we Uhlans have been attached to the Infantry [he wrote to "Liebe Mamma"]. I write "unfortunately" because I feel certain that Lothar has already been in big cavalry charges such as we will probably never ride in here.

This feeling extended even to a fear that the war would end before he was given the chance to win the coveted decorations. It made him restless and ill at ease during the intervals of inactivity that became longer as the fighting front solidified itself in the west and the war of attrition began. Transferred from Belgium to Verdun, he grew to despise himself as a "base hog" because the duties assigned to him seldom allowed him to go within a mile of the frontline trenches.

He saw the day of the cavalryman disappear. Trenches and barbed wire spelled their finish in the World War. He saw the infantry lay down their rifles and take up the lowly spade and pick. His cherished picture of war—waving standards, flashing sabres, the charge, the mêlée—slowly erased itself, and in its stead came a loathsome reality of muddy shell holes, water-filled ditches, damp, unclean dugouts, and bombproofs. Where was the glory of war?

I hear that a cavalry division stands on the approaches to Paris [Richthofen wrote in September, 1914], and I nearly believe that Lothar [his young brother] is lucky enough to be there. But apart from that, he must certainly have seen more than I have here before Verdun.

The army of the Crown Prince is investing Verdun from the north, and we must wait till the fortress surrenders. Its huge fortifications being what they are, any attempt to storm them would cost more in men and munitions than the strategic value of the position would justify. Only, it's unfortunate that we Uhlans are tied up here by these considerations, and that presumably we will have to end the war here.

The battle of Verdun is very severe, and day after day a vast number of lives are sacrificed. Only yesterday, eight officers of the Seventh Grenadiers were killed in one attack.

One of the most decisive battles in the war is going on; thousands of men are being killed, but Richthofen is on the side lines and not in it. The war is quite unsatisfactory to him. His duties are almost clerical, to his mind. Early in the morning, as a communications officer, he approaches the front lines through filthy trenches. He returns at noon to his deep dugout behind the lines and directs the telephone lines for a sector. A fine job for "us Uhlans," and all the time his younger brother, for all he knows, may be taking Paris single-handed and winning the first Iron Cross in the Richthofen family.

He demanded action. On his hurried front-line visits, he would borrow a rifle and take a pot shot now and then at the opposing trenches. In places where the lines approached within ten yards of each other, he would "stir things up a bit" by tossing a hand grenade over among the French holding the opposing position.

Two or three similar presents usually came back, and one must presume that these little diversions of the visiting "base hog" did not increase his popularity with the men he visited.

His hunter instincts could not be denied. War was "killing time," and he was not in on the killing. After twelve hours' trudging duty through the trenches and in the foul air of the telephone dugout, he would spend the night tramping the woods back of the front in search of prey for his rifle. If they would not let him shoot at men, he must find other game.

Full moonlight nights, with the light snow of late fall, came to his assistance, and he followed the tracks of wild pigs through the dark forest of La Chaussée. With much effort he and an orderly built a shelter seat in a tree, and there he waited, night after night, for his quarry. Morning frequently found him cramped and stiff and almost frozen, but these hardships were like food to the craving within him.

One night there came a sow which swam the little woodland lake in the bright moonlight and broke into a potato field on the other side. Several miles away, the guns of Verdun boomed, and their flashes sometimes sent flickers of light across the night sky. From his tree nest, Richthofen awaited the return of the sow and sent a bullet into her body as she swam back across the lake from her midnight foraging. She was only wounded, and the hunter, descending from the seat, plunged into the cold water, bringing his victim out by the hind leg and finishing her life with a trench knife.

At another time, it was a boar that he faced, rifle in hand, at twenty yards, and sent a bullet crashing through its mighty head—a head which was carefully salvaged, skinned, cleaned, cured, stuffed, and mounted and forwarded, even in wartime, to the little bedroom in Schweidnitz, where one sees it today on the trophy wall. If not the Iron Cross, then some other trophy, but symbol there must always be for the craving of the primitive.

At last the Iron Cross came—his first decoration, awarded in recognition of his repeated trips along the front line under heavy fire. It was his first trophy of the war, and he hastened to register it with his mother. In his dugout the following night, he wrote:

Dear Mamma:

I come with glad tidings. Yesterday I was decorated with the Iron Cross.

How are matters around Lemberg? Let me give you some sound advice. If the Russians should come, bury everything you want to see again deep down in the garden, or elsewhere. Whatever you leave behind you will never see again.

You wonder why I save so much money, but don't forget that, after the war, I must re-equip myself from head to foot. Everything I took with me is gone, lost, burned, torn—not even excluding my saddle. If I should come out of this war alive, I will have more luck than brains.

The Iron Cross helped: it brought some gratification to the pride after the tediousness of his unaccustomed duties as an infantryman, but there were long months ahead in which the accumulated boresomeness of the unchanging and never-ending battle of Verdun was to drive the restless young Uhlan to an act which approached insubordination. He stuck it out, but with little spirit.

There was excitement, but not of the kind he craved. He was helping to kill, but he was unable to see the foe he slew. His competitive spirit had no opportunity for expression. His individualism was lost in the great machine of which he had become a cog. Although he never put the thought in words, his desire was to come to close contact with the enemy, to cross swords face to face with an adversary, to kill him or be killed.

In October, he was almost killed. Death passed him by a hair's breadth. He was riding back of the front. A French shell came crashing through the trees and landed ten yards in front of him. With the explosion, the air was filled with earth, stones, pieces of wood, and shell splinters. One sliver of steel struck the saddle on which he was seated. His horse dropped beneath him with another splinter through the brain. Three other horses were killed, but the only harm to Richthofen was a hole in his overcoat and the destruction of his equipment and the contents of his saddlebags.

But where was the glory in such a death? An unseen, unknown Frenchman pulled the lanyard on an unseen fieldpiece thousands of yards away and sent forth an engine of destruction to deal death. An unseen, unknown, impersonal target received the charge and died. What a death! It was not Richthofen's idea of war. He wanted the personal element. He wanted to attack a man and kill him.

I must spend every other twenty-four hours in the trenches [he wrote his mother from Verdun]. We, the First Uhlans, unfortunately, have no chance to do anything else in this war unless the plague descends on Verdun. Lothar has the lion's share of the fighting in Russia, and I really envy him. He is not in the same part of Russia where I rode the first ten days of the war. I would like so much to earn the First Class Order of the Iron Cross, but there is no possible chance here unless I penetrate Verdun in a French uniform and blow up an armoured tower.

Verdun bored Richthofen. Lying in the mud almost motionless for twenty-four hours became a dull, uninviting affair. Occasionally the whistle of a shell overhead; occasionally a hit close at hand, and some more human wreckage to be carried back to the first-aid stations, but always the monotony of no movement. It became unbearable.

Three months of this stagnation without change and Christmas approached—the first Christmas of the war and the first one Richthofen had ever spent away from his mother's home. He wrote her continually that he was sick of the work assigned to him, and that he envied his younger brother, who, at least, was still a cavalryman and had the chance at any time to come into actual contact with the enemies of the Fatherland.

With the new year came a slight change when he was appointed Ordnance Officer of an infantry brigade, but the endless inspections and unending paper work brought to him the deeper realization that war was by no means what he thought it was going to be, and with this growing disappointment came disgust. Only when there are prospects of movement is he lifted from the gloom of depression into which the stalemate of 1915 had thrown him.

In February of that year, before Avillers, Allied pressure increased, and there was the possibility of a break through. There were frequent night alarms in which the brigade staffs were called upon to put all reserves in readiness to fill a breach in the line, but always it was the same. The break never came, and after each attempt life settled down to what it had been before.

The French and the English and the others who are infesting the western front have been getting rather uppish lately [he wrote home]. Probably they think it an opportune moment for an attack because we have transferred large numbers to the east. As far as that goes, they figure correctly.

Only the killing of wild game seemed to lift him to a new interest in life. Through his letters there runs a note of joy when there is a prospect of a hunt in which he can bag new victims for his trophy wall and feed the craving which even war, so far as he then knew it, had failed to gratify. He wrote in the month of March:

Dear Mamma:/p>

At last I have found a sufficient outlet for my energies. On the days free from trench duty, I go hunting. I am rather proud of my bag of three wild boars. The details of these hunting excursions, I am writing to Papa.

Three days ago, we had a veritable offensive for wild pigs with thirty drivers and five hunters. I myself was the host of the party. The drivers stirred up eight pigs, but everyone of us missed his game. The affair lasted from eight in the morning till seven in the evening. In three days we will have another try, and in ten days, with a full moon, I am expecting confidently to bag a wild boar.

At times he would give serious consideration to his own chances of being "bagged" in the game of war. He believed in his luck and liked the axiom that "He who hesitates is lost." He frequently made a mistake, but he never shunned a decision.

In the same month of the hunting party, his schoolboy friend, Hugo Frei of the Fourth Dragoons, was killed, but his death made only a passing impression on Richthofen. He admired Hugo. Hugo was dead. Well, the best ones are always the first to go. "Weeds don't perish" was his comment on his own salvation when his comrades had been killed on both sides of him and he was as yet untouched by an enemy bullet.

But how long could he go on unscathed? That depended upon how long the war went on. Here it was April, and the conflict had raged for nine months, and there was no prospect of its abatement. Richthofen was not the only German, or for that matter the only Allied combatant, who was surprised at the duration.

Who would ever have thought that the war could continue so long [he wrote to a friend at home]? Everyone believes that we will win, but no one knows when that will be. Consequently, we have to struggle on.

"Struggling on" was not Richthofen's strong point. He could sit up in a tree throughout a winter night and keep his eyes open watching through the hours for the approach of game. He could track a quarry hour after hour through a forest and never give up the hunt. But he could not play at the war of waiting. It broke his spirit.

So it was that toward the 1st of May, he received instructions to prepare himself for another duty in the service of supply, still farther back from the front lines. Strong as army discipline was in him, he exploded, and the day after that the Commanding General of his Division received one of the shocks of his life when he read the following unmilitary communication from the restless Uhlan:

My Dear Excellency:

I have not gone to war in order to collect cheese and eggs, but for another purpose.

The rest of the letter was an official application for his transfer to the Flying Service. Richthofen's constructive work in either the infantry, the signal service, or the supply department seems to have been on a par with his failure as a cavalryman, and it is not recorded that his departure from the old services was accompanied by any great regret on the part of his superiors. His uncivil letter gained his end and his wish. At the end of May, 1915, he was transferred to the flying service and sent to Cologne for training.

With the old cavalryman's contempt for the gas engine, he knew nothing of what was under the hood of an automobile. He was a horseman, and he had held, with other horsemen, that the cavalry would never have to resort to rubber tires and smelly exhaust pipes. This pardonable ignorance, inherited from the proud spirit of his branch of the service, stood him in bad stead when he began his training for the air. It almost barred him from the pilot's seat.

His conscious inclination was not toward flying as a sport. To him, it offered an opportunity to get in touch with his enemies— to see the man he wanted to kill. At the front he had seen the few military planes then flying, but he had considered them only fads. He was not aware that the legend of his corps as "the eye of the army" had passed forever to another service.

He had watched the airmen aloft with not sufficient interest to learn the different markings that distinguished Allied flyers from German. In the fall of '14, his men had fired their carbines on all planes that passed over them, being unable to distinguish foe from friend, and also being unable to resist the temptation offered by so excellent a human target.

It never occurred to me to be a pilot [he wrote]. I was anxious to get into the air at the front as quickly as possible. I began to fear that I might get there too late; that the World War would be over before I could really get into it. To become a pilot would have required three months' training, and by that time peace might have been concluded.

It was upon his cavalry training, if not experience, that he depended to fit himself for an aerial observer, and at the airdrome in Cologne there was competition to stimulate him. He was in a class of thirty young officers, from which the most successful ones were to be selected and assigned to squadron duty. The others would be given the opportunity of taking the course a second time, and then, in case of a second failure, would be returned to the trenches. Richthofen had had enough of the trenches.

But even his cavalry training for reconnaissance duty failed him that morning in June, 1915, when he went up into the air for the first time. His sense of direction left him, and in his new world of three dimensions he was completely lost. The sensation is not new to anyone who recalls his first flight, but it pained Richthofen and deprived him of the fullest enjoyment of the sensation of flying, which he began to love from that moment.

He had gone to bed early the night before to be in the best possible condition for the early morning flight. He took his seat in a plane for the first time, and encountered the customary discomfort from the propeller's blast, which whipped the muffler from his neck and blew his helmet off before he had time to fasten it. His gloves blew from his hands, and the noise from the engine drowned his voice so that he could not communicate with the pilot in front of him.

In the dash across the flying field, he gripped the sides of his seat and tightened his muscles at every jolt. The machine finally left the ground, slid into the air like a knife blade, wheeled first to the right and then to the left, and then straightened out on a level course 800 feet above the ground. The future ace of all German flying men clutched the sides of the fuselage and peered over and downward. He wrote later that he was much surprised to find that he was lost over his own airdrome.

But there was glory in the motion. The wind tore at the buttons on his jacket and gave him the sensation of speed. Here was movement, here was the stimulation, the intoxication that he had felt taking the jumps on the hunting field. No sign of sickness or dizziness—just speed and exhilaration. He wanted to sing. His eyes sparkled and his nerves tingled. Here was a steed worthy of a man hunt—with a machine like this beneath him, a man could fight and see what he was fighting.

Richthofen was drunk with enthusiasm when he landed. In the long glide to the landing field, he had been impressed by the heavy silence that followed the heavy noise when the motor slowed down and the plane skimmed over the ground at express-train speed. But he felt that he could know no fear in the air. It was all so simple, all so clean, and God! how he hated the mud of the trenches.

He won his brevet, and after two weeks' daily flights was sent to the Russian front, where Mackensen was hammering his way through the Russian lines at Gorlice. His pleasure was complete. Action at last—burning towns and fields and the forward and backward sway of battle, all unrolled below him every day like some great unnatural spectacle staged to tingle the craving in his heart. The uplifting effect of actually seeing carnage reflected itself in his first letters to his mother.

July 20, 1915.

20 kilometres south of Cholm.

Liebe Mamma:

I hope you are receiving the letters I am sending. I am here with the Mackensen army and am attached to the Sixth Austrian Corps. Now we are again in the full war of movement. Nearly every day I fly over the enemy and report. I reported the retreat of the Russians three days ago. It gives me great fun—at least, more than when I had to play at being an orderly officer. We all live in tents. The houses are nearly all burned down, and the remaining ones are so filled with vermin that no human can enter them.

I am so pleased that I can help here just at the most important sector of the front. In all probability, matters will come to a decision here shortly. I have been flying here now for a fortnight. The period of training lasted for four weeks only. Of my fellow students, I was the first to be sent to a field flying formation.

To Richthofen, those months of June, July, and August, 1915, when he flew against the Russians, constituted a new freedom after the muddy drudgery of the trenches. His experience of and distaste for the filth and discomforts of land fighting gave him a new respect and admiration for the million weary ones who plodded on through the mud and grime throughout the war.

The air was clean and free and belonged to the brave, and he was glad to count himself among that carefree company that carried the war closer to God's heaven. To him it was like the war life he had expected to experience in the cavalry.

Morning and afternoon, he sallied forth on reconnaissance flights over the enemy lines and far into the rear, bombing railway stations and bridges, machine-gunning columns of troops on the roads, but most important of all, bringing back the information upon which Mackensen made his plans for new blows against his poorly equipped and none too well organized foes.

His first pilot was Zeumer—little Zeumer, the "lunger." Zeumer was a first lieutenant and one of Germany's earliest pilots. He was considered one of the aces of the Sixty-ninth Squadron, and his daring was a thing that officers and men alike talked about when out of the little fellow's hearing. Zeumer did not like them to talk about it in his presence.

He thought they suspected the reason for his daring. His eyes had a feverish light in them and his sallow skin was drawn tight over his cheek bones and temples. His voice was dry and weak, seeming to come from a mouth that lacked moisture. He frequently wet his lips with his tongue, and sometimes in the upper air he struggled vainly to suppress fits of violent coughing which shook his skinny shoulders and made it difficult for him to keep his fine, thin-skinned, birdlike hands on the flying controls.

Zeumer was dying. Beneath his shrunken chest, slow death gnawed. But his eyes were young and clear, his heart was stout and good, his mind was keen and quick. In the air he was as good as any pair of spotless lungs—yes, better, because he could dare with less to lose and more to gain. He would disprove the charge that war took the best and left the weak.

He would match his few remaining months against the full life span of any healthy human machine that wore the colours of the enemy. If he lost, he lost less in life than his adversary would. And if he lost, he gained that which was dear to him in his doomed silence. To meet quick death in the air as a fighting man would be a victory over the slow death that was gradually killing him from within.

Richthofen gained new lessons in fearlessness in those days when he flew with a dying man. Zeumer's flying was a race with the "bugs," and his goal was the hope of cheating them, His natural instincts of self-preservation had gone out in rasping exhalations. He courted any end other than the one that death had marked for him. Old flying officers shook their heads when they saw the chances he took in the air.

But the race was long. Death in the air evaded him, and the "bugs" gained daily. A year later, he was shot down near Verdun by a French flyer. He arose from the crash with only a few flesh wounds from glancing bullets. Three days later with his growing weakness, he fell from the pilot's seat of a new machine while it was in the hangar and went into the hospital with a broken thigh. But the dying man's determination knit the bone with the heat of desperation. A month later, he limped out a cripple, but went aloft again trying to catch up his lost laps on the "bugs."

Another year, and it is June again, and France. The story was simple—several lines in a letter from Richthofen to his mother. They read:

Yesterday, Zeumer was killed in air combat. It was the best that could have happened to him. He knew he had not much longer to live. Such an excellent and noble fellow. How he would have hated to have to drag himself on toward the inevitable end. For him it would have been tragic. As it is, he died a heroic death before the enemy. Within the next few days, his body will be brought home.

Little Zeumer had won his race. Richthofen's was still to be decided.