by Jim Shepard
The next day he resumed his duties. A legend grew up around his reception of the news. It was repeated to the new men, at times when Murnau was within earshot. According to the story, he’d been in his dugout when the message came. Practicing the stoicism he preached, he’d read the dispatch twice, nodded in private meditation, folded it into a pocket, and then had busied himself at his work, saying nothing about it to anyone, then or afterwards. He was supposed to have responded to the captain’s consolatory visit with the comment “My friend still lives as our model.”
Both his fellow lieutenant from the dugout and the captain allowed the story to circulate, he assumed because of its inspirational value.
He wanted to write his father and tell him that his son had finally become everyone’s model Prussian.
By September he began petitioning for transfer to the Flying Corps.
The decision would take months. In the meantime his unit held a stalemated part of the line.
In October, Herr Ehrenbaum died. Murnau received a note from Mary Degele.
In November, he was able to visit her on a three-day leave.
She came out onto the front walk to greet him. Inside, they hung on each other and sobbed like children. She fed him some sausage and then they fell asleep, exhausted.
He awoke with her at his bedside. They spoke as if he were the one convalescing. She had recently had a visit from Lasker-Schüler, who was currently obsessed with a Pole named von Twardowski. Paul seemed inconsolable, devastated by the news about Hans.
She’d received condolence letters from everyone. Some from boys Murnau knew: Conrad Veidt; that other boy with the weight problem; Walter Spiess from that Baltic family.
They shared a pot of tea and some fruit. She sat Indian-style on the bed. The lines of her throat were still beautiful. Her eyes seemed to be fighting against smoke. She worried about Lasker-Schüler’s plans for a memorial evening, and hoped he would have a talk with the woman. The New Youth Group was helping to fund it.
She worried about his health. She urged him to try to transfer to civil duty.
He asked after her health. Her heart difficulties had started up again.
She said that she hoped he would come live with her, after the war. She said that it was what Hans would have wanted.
The offer set him off on a weeping fit despite himself. She waited and then let herself out.
Around dawn, she came back to his bedroom, and lay down beside him. He kissed her. She was crying. He held her in his arms. They were unable to speak, but together under the covers, they fell back to sleep.
When they woke, they lay together like lovers. She asked how he went on. He told her that ambition was at least something; and that he now lived animalistically and had shut off everything spiritual. She said she was sure that wasn’t true.
At the end of his leave he tucked her in for a nap. She was too demoralized by his leaving to see him off. In his last few minutes in the house, he stripped, and then remade, the bed in Hans’s room.
Before he left her, he was only able to say, “This was all my fault.” She shushed him, crying. She kissed him again. He left the house. Back out on the street, he murmured, Dixi et salvi animam meam. I have spoken and saved my soul. But he hadn’t.
The memorial evening came off six months later, at the Secession Hall in Charlottenburg. In the meantime he’d been granted his petition to join the Air Force. He arranged his transfer to coincide with the memorial, which turned out to be dedicated to two poets, Hans and Georg Trakl, a suicide. Lasker-Schüler delivered the eulogy, which he found disappointing. Afterwards Hans’s publisher talked to him about bringing out a new edition of the poems now, rather than waiting until the end of the war, since it was clear the war would never end.
A few weeks after leaving Mary Degele, he had seen his first military airplane, a Fokker Eindekker. The prewar flying machines, once considered so wondrous, were by that point everyday transportation. Mechanics drifted back and forth, bored, while the Fokkers’ engines turned over. He stood transfixed, as if by the noise and power of a hundred lions. This was good news, since what he needed most of all was to rediscover the possibility of joy. Joy was the equivalent of strength. Men who lived without it were corpses.
The required medical tests were less than severe, due to the mounting casualty rate among pilots and observers. So lenient was the medical establishment in its quest for bodies that during his eye test at Halberstadt, his examiner said, “The second line, third letter: I see a ‘B.’ What do you see?”
His early training was a similar joke. The technique was that of governesses teaching toddlers to swim. The novices perched in the noses of old Taubes while the instructors ran up the engines and shouted incomprehensible things into the slipstream.
The Taubes had dual controls. Verbal instructions were impossible. The pupil rested his hands and feet on the joystick and rudder bars, as if palpating a sunburn, while the instructor flew. The theory was to allow the pupil to feel the instructor’s instincts.
Eventually, if they hadn’t killed themselves, they were shipped as flying pupils to the Aviation Replacement Section at Johannisthal. There they trained in LVG two-seaters.
Wherever he went, his peers found him hard to get along with. He was a fastidious introvert. His attitudes toward women seemed puritanical. He spent his off-duty hours with his correspondence.
But his grief refused to dissipate, and flooded everything. What he responded to in flying was the way that all that was important and distinctive on the ground was of no consequence to the aviator. The aviator soared above the catastrophe, his eyes elsewhere.
Murnau soloed after fifty-four dual flights, and nine days later passed his preliminary certification. He was moved to replacement section Number 2, at Adlershof, for advanced training. There he survived a minor crash. For his final tests, he made two flights to Döberitz and a long cross-country flight. He graduated in early February and awaited orders. He began active service a week later at Rethel, flying mail and spare parts to the front.
He was assigned to an observation squadron based near Tellancourt that flew Aviatiks. They were quartered in a beautiful and disintegrating château abandoned by its owners. It was the dead of winter. He was given one of the smallest rooms in the back, with a faulty stove. He flew across the lines every day the weather allowed, then moved on to artillery spotting.
After cocoa and biscuits at 4:30 a.m., he climbed into his flying suit with Hans a part of his thoughts each bitterly cold morning. Once he and his observer finished dressing, they were bundled like bears in fur, their faces below their goggles greased for protection against the wind. The airfield was a cinder runway cut through acres of beet and kale.
When the engine turned over, warm oil misted back and they were constantly wiping their goggles. With any sideslips, great blasts of air buffeted around the windscreen. At altitude they occasionally found themselves in the trajectories of the big shells. The plane rocked like a canoe whenever one went by. Their anti-aircraft fire used black cordite, which lingered after the fighting had passed over. Traversing a belt of it during a calm stretch produced an uneasiness he couldn’t locate until later, when he smelled his flying clothes.
At six thousand meters, the entire western front from the Alps to the North Sea was visible. They had the sky to themselves.
Where were the French planes? They didn’t know. They studied the great Boelcke’s discourse on the techniques of air fighting. After his death, the order had been given that every airman should be able to repeat it verbatim. At the funeral it was said that Richthofen himself had pledged, “I will be a Boelcke.”
They were not Boelckes. They knew only a few things.
Murnau’s first enemy plane was a light blue Caudron, lumbering along against the wind. He and his observer came across it when straggling back alone after a cannister-drop. It looked like a flying wire entanglement. They approached to within a hundred yards and did nothing, staring at the two mini
ature humans in their French birdcage. Why kill them? Why even shoot at them?
The French observer suffered no such inhibitions, and splintered Murnau’s observer’s goggles. After they landed, the observer was carried off to a field hospital and never seen again.
The French fighters arrived soon afterwards. Murnau came to realize that the reconnaissance pilot who survived six weeks was blessed with rare ability and luck. At altitude he enjoyed the illusion he was moving at a respectable pace until some Frenchman came speeding at him in a Nieuport. At that point he was the cornered stag; he sweated, panic kicked at his stomach, and he could only stay his easterly course home and summon every trick he knew to shun the fusillade of bullets. Each time, he had no idea how he survived. Sometimes the attacker was exceptionally unskilled or else his fuel ran low, or his guns jammed, or his ammunition gave out. Sometimes, after they rolled to a stop back at the airfield, their machine shot to pieces, he had no explanation.
And combat maneuvering was more dangerous than enemy bullets: simple banks sheared away wing struts or tore out stay wires at their roots. He watched a friend’s machine during one maneuver break up in the sky as if dispersing into its component parts.
He put in for transfer to a fighter squadron. In his petition, he pointed out that he’d bring to his new task a special cunning. The former reconnaissance pilot understood his victims’ plight, and could anticipate their thinking. It was no coincidence that so many aces were ex-reconnaissance men, since only the fittest had lived to pilot single-seaters in the first place.
In the meantime his unit tried every formation: the line, the echelon, the vee. One observer carried a carbine with a gramophone nailed to the stock in the hopes of terrifying the enemy. In their mess they collected the sheared propeller blades from their own wrecks. They carved the walnut and mahogany into tobacco jars or mounts for clocks. Observers got the shivering fits, and there was a great deal of drunkenness. A pilot was found outside the mechanics’ quarters before dawn, drunkenly shouting, “Give me an airplane! I can’t stay on this earth any longer!”
And yet when his transfer came through and he was asked by his commanding officer if he was ready to fly alone, he wanted to answer, “I’m too afraid.” But standing there, he swallowed one kind of cowardice so that he could avoid another.
He was assigned to Jagdstaffel 4, outside Sivry. He’d be flying an Albatros D of a very advanced design. The fuselage was of semi-monocoque construction covered in plywood instead of fabric, for reinforced strength. It had a shark’s profile. It was outfitted with a 160-horsepower water-cooled Mercedes engine. He took it up for some trial spins and was exhilarated.
Everyone had started to paint their machines in individual ways. Murnau had his finished a midnight blue, top and bottom. The Jasta symbol on the fuselage was a fanged serpent. Behind it he had painted H. E.-D.
Verdun was eight kilometers to the south. From the air he could see the emplacements for the twelve-inch naval cannon and the 420mm siege mortars imported the year before for the great battle. They stretched on for thirty miles.
The day he arrived, he met Allmenröder squelching around in the frozen mud directing the unpacking of a new aircraft. He’d come to aviation from the cavalry, the Second Westphalian(!) Hussars with whom he’d seen action in the east. His unit had once counterattacked with Hans’s Fusiliers. He’d also started in an Aviatik. He had deep-set eyes and a sad, tremulous expression when he joked. He considered his most prominent feature to be his ears, which he kept tucked under his flying-cap. He’d lately celebrated his twentieth birthday. When Murnau met him, he already had two kills.
He was another loner, forever tinkering with his machine. He’d flown in the Battle of the Somme and every single man he’d begun with had since been killed. In his room he had as a single decoration a page torn from a book of Persian miniatures. The page featured warrior companions.
They became a world unto themselves. What they enjoyed was not so much intimacy as shared isolation. Their mates gave them a wide berth. For a week their Jasta huddled around stoves while freezing rain poured down. The hangars sprang great leaks.
They talked about flying. Because Allmenröder had also flown a two-seater, he referred to those crews as Poor Devils, and always aimed only to down the machine. He also fiddled with inventions. He showed Murnau the new gunsight he’d constructed to his own specifications: two concentric circles etched on a lens, their diameters covering one meter and ten meters at a distance of a hundred meters. Thus when he had sighted on an airplane and knew the wingspan or fuselage length, he could precisely evaluate range and judge the moment to fire.
Since Murnau was nine years older, Allmenröder called him Grandfather, and began schooling Grandfather in the hopes of keeping him alive. He demanded knowledge of the machine, tired of young cavalry officers who knew nothing about the internal combustion engine; they went off on long screaming pursuit dives and in the process allowed revolutions to build to the point of engine failure. Try talking to some of those Hussars about oil temperature or compression ratios or valve overlap! They thought such matters were best left to the troops, meaning their mechanics, whom they treated like grooms.
He showed Murnau why tactical skills were composed of many things: awareness of clouds and wind, nerves and reaction speed, sensitivity to the aircraft. And vision, as a function of experience and intuition—a manner of focusing that allowed aircrews to notice the minute and menacing details on which everything depended.
Talking with Allmenröder, he began to understand flight itself as a new manner of perception: whereas the old way had been to look from a stationary point at objects before you, here you moved through and swept across the image. The act of taking aim was itself a geometrification of seeing, by technically aligning ocular perception along an imaginary axis. The French called it ligne de foi—the faith line. What sort of image could the photographer record with such an advantage? What sort of image could a motion picture record?
When the weather let up, they took off in the pre-dawn murk for patrols over enemy territory. Allmenröder stuffed his pockets with cake, which he ate aloft by the handfuls. On sunset patrols, Allmenröder and Murnau were always the last to land.
While everyone else was safe on the ground, they climbed to six thousand meters above their airfield to view the spectacle. The russet and violet spread in great streams across the sky, north, south, east, and west. Thousands of square miles of cloud plain were luminous with the setting sun. No explorer of the Poles had seen such a breathtaking and unbroken expanse. It was Reinhardt’s Kuppelhorizont. Allmenröder and Murnau in their rackety little machines saw and touched that kind of happiness. Murnau thought, We’re not only actors in a bloody conflict; we’re also the first spectators of this magic, pyrotechnic fairy-play.
Eventually he told Allmenröder about Hans’s death. Allmenröder had assumed something of that sort. He’d had a special friend, too, whom he could not bring himself to name.
They began to notice on their patrols a few lone aircraft who kept an eye on them but turned and ran if approached. They had names for them, based on their markings: Skull and Crossbones, or Blue Fin, or Yellow Wheels. They had particular affection for a clumsy two-seater they called the Flying Pig. Its crew was so incompetent that they refrained from shooting at it. Frightening the crew was, however, considered fair sport. Whenever approached, the poor Frenchmen began a series of spastic turns and maneuvers, opening fire from absurdly long range.
On leave in Cologne, they had a card made at a printer’s that they could hand out when cornered:
PLEASE!!!
Do not ask us anything about flying.
You will find the usual queries answered below:
1. Yes, we are part of a pursuit squadron.
2. Sometimes it’s dangerous, sometimes it’s not.
3. The higher we fly, the colder it is.
4. We notice that by freezing when it’s colder.
5. Flying height, 2000
–7000 meters.
6. Yes, we can see things at that height, though not so well.
7. We can’t see through a telescope because it shakes.
8. Yes, we’ve dropped bombs.
9. Yes, we’ve downed enemy aircraft.
10. Yes, we’ve seen the loss of many friends.
In early April on a sunset patrol, seven Nieuports howled down at them from out of a cloudbank. They had no chance to outrun them. On the first pass, tracers speared out in all directions, and everyone broke up or down, right or left, whipping around to bring guns to bear. He lost track of Allmenröder. No one held a straight course or steady bank for more than a second. His ears grew accustomed to such noise that he ceased to hear it; he flew in a deafening silence.
He was singled out for special attention by a silver aircraft with a black bat behind its roundel on the fuselage. They chased each other’s tails, losing height, whirling like the cups of an anemometer, their wings banked almost all the way over, craning their necks at each other across a diameter of a few hundred feet.
Finally, with his superior horsepower, Murnau closed the circle. They continued to turn in a near-vertical bank. Each time, the Frenchman’s skill in throttling back allowed his craft to sideslip out of the gunsight. With each turn they lost altitude. Finally they soared between two tall trees. The Frenchman had nowhere to go. He pulled back completely on his stick. His lower wings sheared off and his Nieuport folded and tumbled forward end over end into the roof of a barn. Murnau flew through the explosion and a piece of debris holed his upper wing.
The sky around him was empty as he ascended, the fighting having moved off in another direction. There was cloud cover to the west.
He flew home alone, watching for pursuit. One hand was shaking. He didn’t know how to feel. It was as though a boy with whom he’d been playing had killed himself on a dare.
