Читать книгу The Red Knight of Germany - Gibbons Floyd Phillips - Страница 5

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HISTORY will provide few examples of greater courageous self-sacrifice than that written into the annals of the World War by the daring spirits of all sides who followed their duties and found their fate in the air. They fought in an element new to war; they accepted and braved dangers unknown before; they were the young, the quick, and the keen of all who fought, and admiration for their deeds is non-partisan.

Into the strife they brought the high ideal of chivalry. Their solicitude for a fallen foe that had won their admiration was almost the same as for a fallen friend. Their deeds have won for them the respect of all who admire sterling valour.

They came from homes of all countries that participated in the struggle. From the French came Fonck, Guynemer, and Nungesser. From the British came Bishop, Ball, and Hawker. From America came Rickenbacker and his comrades who had succeeded him in the French and British services.

From our own ranks came Immelmann, Boelcke, and Richthofen, and to Germans their names will always remain dear as the names and deeds of French, British, and American flying aces will always stand out in the records at their own countries.

But bigger than the national fame that these heroes, friend and foe alike, won as patriots to conflicting causes is the growing international recognition of their achievements, not as partisans, but as men who gave to the world new and unprecedented examples of the highest form of physical and moral courage. Respect for human qualities of this high order knows no frontier.

(Signed) Gessler.

"To die a hero's death unnecessarily is stupid."

Two young fools once had this thought at the same moment. They believed the moment was their last. The thought flashed to them as they were falling three thousand feet into the fiery furnace of a burning town.

Below them was a sea of flames. Above and around them were dark billows of smoke which stung their eyes and choked them. The heated air through which they fell burned their cheeks and hands. They hurtled through showery clouds of sparks which dug at their leather flying jackets.

"What a fine pair of damned fools we are!"

The pair was in its early twenties. One was a baron and the other was a count. Both were German flying officers. The pilot count's name was Holck. The baron observer was Manfred von Richthofen. Both are dead now.

But they didn't die that day. The god of war and the fortune that favours fools were with them in their fall. One was saved to kill a hundred other men with his own hand before he went to the death that he had dealt to his victims.

The incident which was Richthofen's first brush with death in the air occurred in Russia in the autumn of 1915, when the man who was to become the ace of Germany's air fighters was still a humble observer with hardly a hundred hours in the air to his credit.

>From Gorlice to Brest-Litovsk and beyond, the Russians were retiring before the hammering blows of Mackensen's advance. Behind them, they left ruin in the wake of their retreat. Villages, fields, farmhouses, and bridges were ablaze. From the air, it seemed as though the whole countryside were burning. It was the terrible panorama of war.

Richthofen, from the forward observer's seat of his Albatross plane, looked down on the picture and called it "beautiful." His side was winning, advancing. The enemy was withdrawing. The signs of victory were good to see. He shot an exultant smile over his shoulder to Holck, who was working the controls in the pilot's nacelle behind him. That was the way the machines were constructed in those days.

The two were flying back to their lines after a successful reconnaissance flight over enemy territory. They had seen the columns of Russian infantry and artillery moving eastward along the roads, and they had ascertained the direction of the retreat.

Flying at an altitude of 4,500 feet they approached the burning town of Wicznice, over which an enormous column of smoke towered to a height of 6,000 feet. The column looked to be several miles in diameter. It writhed across their path like a great black phantom. To have flown over or around it would have meant five minutes out of their way.

Richthofen smiled to Holck, who returned the smile with a nod. Both were flushed with victory. Around the smoke cloud was safety; through it was danger, and nothing to be gained. The decision had been made in the silent exchange of smiles while the engine roared away merrily and they came closer and closer to the smoke pillar. The plane sped forward with open throttle. It penetrated the smoke volume like a needle disappearing into a black velvet cushion. From sunlight and cool fresh air the two fools found themselves suddenly in hot, suffocating darkness.

The horizon was blotted out: directions became jumbled up, down—right—left—forward—backward— How? Where? The three dimensions danced drunkenly. A sudden upward blast of almost withering heat, and the machine reeled, tipped, slipped. They coughed and choked. So did the motor.

Richthofen was almost thrown out of his seat, just saving himself by grasping a strut and hanging on. He could not see Holck behind him through the darkness. Out of control and seemingly helpless, they plunged downward. It was like falling down the working smokestack of a giant blast furnace. Then the darkness below them suddenly glowed red and the heat increased. They were looking into the flaming town.

Then came a sudden jolt which drove both of them downward into their seats with irresistible power. In a flash, their downward descent was changed by the plane catching itself and changing course from the perpendicular to the horizontal. In the next instant, it was shot through the wall of the smoke cylinder and was again in the cool air and light of day.

In the few seconds that had passed they had fallen 3,000 feet and were now 1,500 feet above the ground with smoke-choked motor which began to miss and bring the prospect of a new danger before their smoke-reddened eyes.

As the engine slowed down, they began to lose height, and at the same time bursts of machine-gun fire began to greet them from below. Russian infantry at that time was not noted for any fine feeling toward German aviators. The Russian regiments, many of them containing wild, bearded units from the Siberian steppes, had suffered greatly from the German flyers. Without a flying service of their own, and but very little and quite ineffectual anti-aircraft, the Russians had suffered the customary lot of the defenseless. German aviators falling into the hands of these desperate, hard-pressed mujiks could expect nothing but quick death—and a violent one.

"The motor is giving out!" shouted Holck. Motors with carburetor trouble have been fixed or adjusted in the air by flyers, but this was out of the question for Holck and Richthofen, both of whom, being from the cavalry school, were still ignorant of the simplest facts concerning the source of power upon which they had to depend while in the air. The situation reflects the pioneer stage of martial aviation at the time, and also detracts somewhat from the generally accepted idea of Germany's complete preparedness and the technical efficiency of her flyers.

With the weakened motor, the Albatross lost altitude steadily. Now, at less than a thousand feet above the ground, the Russian machine-gun fire from below increased, and bullets began popping through the fabric of the wings and hitting the taut wire braces. One strikes a vital part in the motor and the propeller, after a few slow revolutions, comes to a stop. They are gliding down without power.

Holck manages to keep the plane's nose up as they skim over the treetops of a small forest and reach a clearing on the other side. Richthofen recognizes it as a position that the Russians had occupied with artillery the day before, but now it appears to be abandoned. The guns are gone, but is the place still in the hands of the enemy infantry? There's neither answer to the question nor choice of selection. The plane comes to the ground, strips off its undercarriage, tips to one side, breaks a wing, and comes to a halt.

Richthofen and Holck jump out of the wreck and run to the shelter of the woods. Holck's little dog, which always flew with him, scampered after them, unmindful of the fears then running through its master's mind. The two flyers throw themselves flat on the ground at the edge of the trees and peer out across the clearing. Richthofen has a pistol and six cartridges. Holck is unarmed.

A man comes running across the clearing from the other side. The hidden pair see that he is in uniform, but they still cannot distinguish which uniform, and the German spiked helmet, then worn, is ominously absent. The man is wearing a cloth cap. Is he Russian or German? Are they in the enemy lines or their own?

Holck answers the question with a shout of joy as he recognizes the uniform as that of a grenadier of the Prussian Guard. These troops had stormed this part of the line that morning and had penetrated as far as the Russian artillery positions. The fugitives came out from their hiding place and learned from the soldier that a general advance all along the line was in progress.

By the narrowest margin of chance, the two young Uhlans who had dared to dive through the smoke column over the burning town had escaped death both in the flames and at the hands of the retreating Russians. For their luck, they received the congratulations of the German Prince Eitel Friedrich, who soon rode across the old Russian position with his staff officers. He supplied the stranded airmen with horses upon which they returned to their airdrome.

Before the end of August, 1915, aerial activity on the Russian front came to a temporary halt, and Richthofen's itch of restlessness was gratified with orders which took him back across Germany and into Belgium again, this time to the renowned seaside resort of Ostend, where pilots and aviators were being trained on the latest German model, the Grossfleugzeug, or "Big Fighting Machine," from which great results were expected.

These machines, owing to their bulk and weight, lacked speed and manoeuvring ability, which detracted greatly from their fighting capacity, with the result that their eventual utility was that of night bombers. In the slang of the air, Richthofen called it his "big apple barge."

Little Zeumer, the "lunger" who had been his first pilot in Russia, was again at the controls of his machine here, and Richthofen flew with him many times on bombing expeditions over Belgian towns occupied by the British forces.

Richthofen liked bombing, but he did not like the arrangements on his machine which prevented the observer from witnessing the burst of the bomb after it had landed.

This always made me wild [wrote the future ace], because one does not like to be deprived of one's amusement. If one hears a bang down below and sees the delightful grayish, whitish cloud of the explosion in the neighbourhood of the object aimed at, one is always pleased.

To the right and left of the observer's forward seat in which the bomb-aiming device and the release levers were located were the two whirring propellers. On one expedition—a daylight raid over a village in the vicinity of Dunkirk—Richthofen had just released his first bomb and was peering over the side to see how close it burst to its target. As usual, one of the plane's wings came between him and the object, wiping out his view. He quickly extended his left hand in a signal to Zeumer to turn to the left so that he could see.

In his eagerness he forgot the whirring propeller blades and lost the tip of his little finger. He confessed that the pain, while slight, deprived him of further amusement in bombing for that day, and that, after hurriedly dropping the remainder of his missiles, he returned to the airdrome and a seven-day spell in the hospital. It was his first tiny drop of blood for the Fatherland for which he was later to give his life.

The war was not too bad, those happy, sunny days in Ostend. It was fun to bathe in the surf and loll in bathrobes on the beach, with orderlies to serve coffee and drinks from the big Palace Hotel that the army had seized. One drawback, however, was that the Belgian girls shunned the beach during 1915, both from choice and from the fact that the naval gun batteries which the Germans had installed in emplacements along the sand dunes were forbidden areas to the civil population.

There came one day an interruption to the peaceful scene when bugles suddenly sounded, and the officers lounging on the beach hurriedly left their deck chairs and directed their field glasses seaward, where distant smudges of black smoke revealed the presence of a British naval squadron.

A tiny flash of light is seen against the black smoke, and in less than a minute a big shell arrives on the beach, sending up a geyser of sand, beach chairs, and striped parasols. Richthofen and a number of his fellow officers spent the remaining minutes of the fight in the deep dugouts which they laughingly called the "heroes' cellar."

Back in the air, on the next day, he and Zeumer tested out the auto-locking arrangements on the rudder of their twin motor machine, by which the plane could be made to hold a normal course if only one motor was working. The experiment took them far out over the English Channel, and, in the midst of it, Richthofen's keen eyes detected a submarine in the water beneath them.

The huge black hulk was travelling slowly under water when the two airmen caught sight of it. They went down to several hundred feet above the sea and flew back and forth across the spot.

Richthofen's face became tense and his hands reached for the levers on the bomb releases. Here was a battle to his liking—a new thrill: bird against fish—and this time with the bird having all the advantage of its blind adversary below.

The undersea boat was submerged too far to use its periscope, and yet it could be easily seen from the eyes in the air. But one thing could not be detected. That was the nationality of the submarine, and Richthofen had to suppress his destructive instinct through an inability to determine whether the craft was Allied or German.

His debate and regret over having to relinquish such easy prey was interrupted by warning heat from one of the motors, and a sudden realization that the water had disappeared from one of the radiators. They started for the coast at once with the auto- locking arrangement working on the rudder and thereby enabling them to reach land on the one working motor. It was just another close shave with trouble.

Stalking a submarine from the air offered greater possibilities for results than aerial combat in the fall of 1915, when the tactics of air fighting were still undeveloped. Hostile airmen were almost immune from danger from one another, because air armament and methods of attack were inadequate, if not totally lacking.

This was one of the reasons why the chivalry of the air at the commencement of war permitted the airmen of opposing sides to fly about their duties without molestation from one another. Airplanes were considered primarily for the purposes of observation, secondly for bombing. Actual fighting in midair was almost unheard of, and the airman's chief dread was from machine gun or shell fire from the ground.

This state of affairs did not last long. Pilots began to take up with them rifles, carbines, revolvers, and rifle grenades to attack one another. Air fighting commenced in that way, but with very little success. Machines moving past one another at several hundred miles an hour had little chance of winging one another with single shots. The machine-gun mounting had not been perfected.

Richthofen failed in his first air fight. It occurred in the month of September, 1915. Both he and Zeumer were impressed with the battling name of their machine, and both were eager to test its fighting capacity. Although they flew from five to six hours every day on bombing and reconnaissance flights, they had never encountered an enemy plane in the air. Their hopes materialized one day when they sighted a lone Farman plane with the British cockade, taking casual observations over the German lines.

Zeumer headed for the plane. Richthofen's heart beat faster and he gripped his repeating rifle. Neither had been in a fight before; neither had ever seen a combat between planes and neither of them had ever heard the first-hand account of an air battle. Both knew that they wanted to knock the other plane down out of the sky, but neither knew how it was to be done.

The planes approached from opposite directions, but before Richthofen knew what was happening, they had passed one another and were out of range. He had had time in the passing to fire four shots at the whizzing comet, but the only apparent result was to inform the English flyer of his intentions. The latter swung his plane around and attacked the German machine from the rear. The Englishman in the forward observer's seat fired a repeating rifle into the tail of the German plane.

Zeumer, trying to avoid the fire, flew around in a circle with the Englishman flying after him. After several minutes of this futility, both planes flew away. Zeumer and Richthofen landed at their airdrome and each blamed the other.

Zeumer held that Richthofen had shot badly. Richthofen charged Zeumer with not having manoeuvred the plane right so as to give him the chance for a good shot. The air relations between the pilot and observer became decidedly strained.

They tried it again the same day, but still with no result. Zeumer, who was considered one of the best pilots, regretted that he could discover no means of flying that would enable his observer to fire a fatal shot. Richthofen, who prided himself on his marksmanship, began to feel that he would never be able to bring down a hostile plane, no matter how many shots he had at it. Both were puzzled and discouraged, War in the air was young.

A month later, when activity commenced on the Champagne front, Richthofen and Zeumer and the "Apple barge" tried their luck again against the French but still without result. It was not until afterward, when Richthofen flew with Osteroth, another pilot who had a small machine, that his nature was able to exult with the feeling that he had shot down a human victim from the air.

Osteroth's machine was equipped with a machine gun that could be moved from one mounting to another on the two sides of the observer's cockpit which in this plane was behind the pilot. The French plane was a Farman two-seater, and, strange as it may seem, it does not appear that its two occupants had any hostile intentions toward the German plane, which they permitted to approach them from the rear and to fly along with them side by side.

Richthofen, with his machine gun mounted on the side facing the French plane, opened hostilities with a rapid burst of ten or twenty shots, which was stopped by the jamming of the weapon. None of the shots had struck the French plane, but the fire had been noticed, and the Frenchman began to fire back, also with a machine gun.

Richthofen worked at the jammed gun, and got it going again while Osteroth held the plane to its course. The two machines sailed along at equal altitudes like two rival cruisers, exchanging broadsides after the fashion of sea warfare. Both of the flyers ignored the manoeuvring possibilities of the third dimension.

With the gun working and Osteroth reducing the range by flying gradually closer to the Frenchman, Richthofen poured out the last of his hundred rounds of cartridges, firing all the time with the picture of the French observer across from him firing at him. Then it happened with a suddenness that surprised Richthofen. He said later that he could not believe his eyes when he saw the French plane begin to go down in a spiral.

Osteroth was busy with the controls, so Richthofen reached forward and tapped him on the head to call his attention to the adversary's descent. Richthofen's eyes never left his prey. Osteroth circled slowly downward, keeping the falling machine in view all time. They saw it land head first in a shell crater with its tail pointing to the sky.

Hurriedly, they located the spot on the flying map and marked it with a circle, noting that it was located three miles behind the French lines. Neither ever knew whether the two Frenchmen survived the descent. From the fact that the tail of the plane was still pointing skyward, the landing was not as bad as it might have been, and there is the possibility that the first two men that Richthofen shot down in the air may have survived.

But of particular regret to the future German ace at that time was the rule then prevailing in the German Air Corps, to the effect that planes brought down behind the enemy lines were not placed to the credit of the flyer or flyers who downed them. Richthofen was proud of his success, but never forgot that his record of officially credited victories, which amounted to eighty before his death, should have been one more.

His experience with Osteroth, and it was a happy one, convinced him that his chances of killing many adversaries in the air would not be great as long as his flying was confined to large two-seater planes, He realized early that these planes were too clumsy for manoeuvring, and that the small, speedy single- seater had every advantage in a combat with the bigger plane. It is to be noted from his record of victories after he became the pilot of a single-seater that almost three quarters of them were big double-seater planes.

Little Zeumer graduated to a Fokker single-seat monoplane as soon as this type reached the front, and Richthofen, still an observer, found himself shifted to another two-seater plane with another pilot. This hurt his pride. His restless spirit demanded action and progress. He wanted to become a pilot, and his desires gained their greatest impetus when, on October 1, 1915, he met for the first time the great Boelcke.

To Richthofen, Boelcke was the German air god. That day, in the fall of 1915, when he met the young and insignificant-looking little lieutenant in the dining car of a train, marked the birth of a new ambition in Richthofen. Boelcke had shot down four hostile airplanes, and he was the only man in the armies of the Central Powers who had accomplished such a feat. At that time, he was the greatest individual killer in the German Air Corps. His name had been mentioned in dispatches. His appearance was not impressive, but his successes in the air, then widely known, gripped the imagination of the young Uhlan.

"Tell me how you manage to shoot them down," Richthofen asked the idol as the two sat over a bottle of Rhine wine in the dining car.

Boelcke smiled.

"Well, it's quite simple," he said. "I fly close to my man, aim well, and then, of course, he falls down."

Richthofen, who had asked the question in all seriousness, reflected that he had followed somewhat the same method, but his opponents did not seem to come down so easily. He became more convinced than ever that the difference lay not so much with the flyer as with the plane he flew. He could not shoot them down in a "big fighting plane," but Boelcke could in a Fokker. He resolves to do two things: to cultivate Boelcke and to fly a Fokker.

Little Zeumer, his first pilot, came to his aid and flew with him in an old training machine, a two-seater which had dual controls, so that the student pilot in the observer's cockpit could operate the machine from that point, and any mistakes of his could be corrected immediately by the instructor in the pilot's cockpit. Richthofen hurled himself into the work with desperation and studied harder than he ever had in his life. Upon their landing after the twenty-fifth instruction in the air, Zeumer announced that the lessons were over and that the pupil was fit to take the plane into the air by himself, fly it, and return it safely to the ground.

It was in the stillness of a late October afternoon that the man who was to become the ace of all German airmen took a plane into the air alone for the first time. In spite of his long experience now as an observer and a student pilot, Richthofen had fears. He did not think he could fly and land safely. His fears were well grounded. He couldn't.

His head was buzzing with Zeumer's parting instructions when he climbed into the pilot's familiar cockpit, tested the controls as he had been taught, made his ignition contact, and felt the vibration of the plane as the motor started in response to a swing on the propeller by a mechanic.

The chocks were removed from the wheels—the plane moved off across the field into the wind and, with the motor full on, left the ground. Richthofen was in the air and with the knowledge now that his safe return to earth depended solely upon himself. His fears left him as the exhilarating tingle of motion stole over him. Acting under Zeumer's last instructions, he circled to the left, and flying over a ground mark, previously arranged, shut off his motor and headed the plane back for the landing field, as he had been told.

Now came the test—the landing. His actions were entirely mechanical. He followed instructions to the letter. He did exactly as he had been told to do, but he lacked the "feel" of the air and of his machine. His flying was by the book and not by instinct. He noticed that the plane's responses to his controls were different from what he had expected. Something was wrong. He was not on an even keel. The plane was approaching the ground at a high rate of speed.

CRASH!

Men came rushing across the field from the hangars as Richthofen, shaken but uninjured, extricated himself from the pile of splintered struts, twisted wire braces, and torn fabric. On his first solo flight he had failed.

Smarting under the gibes and jokes of his comrades, he returned to his quarters, and made a vow that nothing would stop his mastering the art of flying. He plunged passionately into studies and instructions, working days and nights on the machines, both in the air and on the ground. After two weeks' intensive cramming, he believed he had overcome his faults, and presented himself for his first examination.

This time he got off the ground well, circled left and right, described figure eights in the air several times, and landed evenly and easily. He repeated the demonstration several times, and glowed with pride when he brought the plane down safely on the final landing. He received the greatest disappointment of his life when the examining officer, who had witnessed his performance in the air, told him that his flying and landings were faulty, that he did not appear to be in full control of the machine, and that he had failed in his examination again.

Richthofen developed perseverance and grim determination in the weeks of hard study and training that followed. In spite of his failures, he persisted in his ambition to become a pilot. On the 15th of November, he flew as an observer in a big Gotha from the front to Doberitz, near Berlin, to make another effort toward mastering the pilot's controls.

For five weeks he and another young lieutenant, of the name of Lyncker, applied themselves entirely to the task. Both of them had the ambition to become pilots and fly single-seater Fokkers in a fighting squadron on the western front. Boelcke was their ideal, and no work was too hard that brought them any closer to walking in the footsteps of the great air fighter.

The life back from the front bored Richthofen. The killer instinct that surged within him demanded prey. The peaceful pursuits of the civilian population around him irritated him. His only diversions were nocturnal trips to a near-by forest where he and Lyncker would track and shoot wild pigs.

During the same period, his mother came to Berlin, and he spent several days with her. They walked together through the Tiergarten or down the Unter den Linden. One day, she mentioned to the son that, when she walked with his brother Lothar in uniform, more girls looked at Lothar than at him.

"I will make more of them look at me sometime," said Manfred. Lothar, his younger brother, was almost a head taller than Manfred. This and his failures in passing his pilot's examinations had renewed the brotherly jealousy which had its foundation in that fear that the younger brother would be the first to achieve distinction in the war. The thought spurred Richthofen on to even harder study and application. The possibility of the kid brother getting ahead of him actually hurt.

Christmas Day that year—1915—brought him the reward he craved. He was notified that he had passed his third examination and was now a pilot. Although he had been successful in the tests, it does not appear that his instructors had sufficient confidence in his ability to send him to the front. He chafed under the delay. Under date of January 11th, he wrote his mother from Berlin:

Since spending the New Year at Schwein, I have not flown once. It rains incessantly here, and we seem to be making no progress. I should love to be at the front right now. I think there is a lot going on there.

During spells of fair weather in January and the following months, he made practice flights about Germany, landing at Breslau and Luben, and once at his home in Schweidnitz. Another flight took him back to Schwerin, where he reduced somewhat his ignorance of gas motors by a study of the engines in the Fokker plant.

He arrived at the front as a pilot in March, 1916, being assigned to the so-called "Second Fighting Squadron" then stationed in the line behind Verdun. Richthofen was eager for combat. He wanted a fight in the air, with himself operating both the flying controls and the machine gun. Although he was a pilot, he had not yet achieved his ambition to fly a single-seater machine. He was still assigned to the heavier two-place planes and had to carry an observer with him.

As the planes were then constructed, this would have left all of the fighting to the observer and all of the flying to the pilot. This arrangement did not appeal to Richthofen. He had another machine gun built into his plane, so that he could operate it from the pilot's seat. The plane was an Albatross, with the observer sitting behind the pilot and operating a rear machine gun.

The forward machine-gun mounting was copied from that in use at the time on the French Nieuports. It was fixed above the upper plane in such a manner that it could be pointed upward or straight ahead in the direction of the machine. Other pilots rather ridiculed the idea, but Richthofen was proud of it and hoped for an early opportunity to test its practical value.

The chance came on the morning of April 26th, when Richthofen and his observer sighted a Nieuport machine wearing the French cockade. The two observed the enemy plane for some time and then flew toward it, although Richthofen had not made up his mind how he would attack the plane. It is apparent from the tactics that followed that the Frenchman was almost as much of a beginner as Richthofen, because, as the two planes approached, the Nieuport swerved and started to fly away.

This manoeuvre would have been safe had the German plane been equipped only with a rear machine gun. A gun so placed could not shoot forward at a pursued plane, but the pursued plane would be able to fire on the pursuer from its own rear gun. It is possible that the Frenchman did not observe the unusual mounting of the forward gun on the German two-seater.

Richthofen approached within sixty yards of the French plane. His disappointments in flying had been so great that he had small hopes of winging his prey, but he did want to reap the full benefits of practice. Sighting the machine gun on the tail of the plane directly in front of him, he fired a short burst of shots.

The Nieuport answered by zooming upward and side-slipping on one wing. The German plane shot by to one side, and Richthofen was surprised to see the French plane fall over and over in the air. He became wary immediately, suspecting that the Frenchman was manoeuvring his machine in this manner in an endeavour to trick the German plane into an unadvantageous position.

>From a safe distance they watched the descent of the Frenchman. It became apparent that the machine was completely out of control. It never righted itself once. The observer tapped Richthofen on the head.

"Congratulations!" he shouted, trying to make his voice heard above the idling motor. "He's falling! He's done for! You hit him."

The fluttering white machine crashed among the treetops of the thick forest behind Fort Douaumont. The Frenchman fell behind his own lines, and Richthofen never knew his fate.

The German plane flew back to its airdrome, where Richthofen proudly reported that he had had an aerial combat and had shot down a Nieuport. For that day the German war communiqué read:

Two hostile flying machines have been shot down in aerial fighting above Fleury, south and west of Douaumont.

Early next morning, Richthofen wrote his exultation to his mother in the following letter:

Before Verdun, April 27, 1916.

Liebe Mamma:

In haste—some gladsome news. Look at the communiqué of yesterday, April 26th. One of these planes was shot down by my machine gun and is to my credit.

Manfred.

He had brought down his prey—he had tasted nameless acknowledgment in the communiqué, but his craving for the credit for the kill was again thwarted by the army rule which ignored, in so far as the flyer's record was concerned, any planes brought down behind the enemy lines. His pride in his achievement was great, but he had a certain feeling of pique in being denied what he considered his just due, namely, a public acknowledgment of his victory over the unknown French flyer.