Love for a Soldier

by Mary Jane Staples

  About the Book

  France, 1918

  Sophia, the rebellious daughter of a distinguished German general, is on her way to the town of Douai to elope with the man of her dreams – a young army officer – against her parents’ wishes. On her way, she witnesses a dramatic battle in the skies that leaves an English pilot without a plane and under the misapprehension that Sophia is on his side.

  She has no choice but to agree to assist him in his attempt to avoid capture, and he joins her in the family car she has stolen, trailed both by the German Army and a staff officer under strict instructions from Sophia’s father to bring her home.

  With their pursuers hot on their heels, how will Sophia explain her behaviour, protecting a man she is supposed to hate? And after sharing so many adventures, will she be able to turn the flying officer in when the time comes?

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  About the Author

  Also by Mary Jane Staples

  Copyright

  LOVE FOR

  A SOLDIER

  Mary Jane Staples

  To Wendy and Jeffery

  Chapter One

  IT WAS MARCH 1918, and in the heart of the agricultural countryside that lay between Valenciennes and Douai, an open black Bugatti car was moving steadily along a winding dirt road. Like other byways of its kind in this part of northern France, the road was of little importance except to farmers and their carts.

  At the wheel of the Bugatti was a young lady of exemplary background. The day was a challenge to her, the morning fine and cloudless, the sky blue, the air almost springlike after a crisp frost. From the west came the intermittent, murmuring rumble of guns; guns that had known few periods of silence since the far-off days of 1914. But apart from those uneasy murmurs of war, the countryside seemed placidly quiet. Fields patterned the landscapes. Some lay fallow, and some, richly furrowed, were hopefully awaiting the spring seed.

  The young lady had passed German Army vehicles earlier, on major roads, but since taking to the winding byways she had seen only the occasional farm cart. She wondered how far she was from Douai. Had she kept to the main roads, she would have been more certain of distances, but even so, and despite the wandering nature of her preferred rural course, she felt she could not be more than fifteen kilometres from the town. And the rural quietness was reassuring. It told her she was alone; that no one was in pursuit of her. She drove on.

  Then the quietness was broken by a sound from above. She heard a low, fretful noise that quickly turned into an urgent buzzing. She slowed down and stopped. She was very much alone, with no other human being in sight. She looked up. Something came out of the clear sky. The sun caught it, flashed light over it and etched it into shape. A plane. It was in steep descent. She stood up in the car to stare at it out of huge blue eyes.

  It was a machine of war, a biplane. And there above it, screaming down on it, was another. The two planes split the sky apart. The air vibrated and the grass in the fields rippled. A machine gun opened up, and the rat-a-tat of its fire reached the young lady’s ears like the cracks of a whip. Tracer bullets, streaming light, burst from one of the planes.

  A gasp escaped her. She realized the colour of the plane could only mean it was the war machine of the indestructible ace of the German Air Force, Baron von Richtofen. There was no one, friend or foe, who did not know that every Albatros in his squadron was painted predominantly red, but that he alone flew a machine wholly scarlet.

  Spellbound, she watched.

  She could hardly believe it was happening. That out of the tranquil sky had come two opposing machines of war, one in deadly pursuit of the other. Above her and to her left, the hunted plane, a British Sopwith Camel, seemed in its screaming descent to be aiming itself directly at the Bugatti. She froze. For one horrifying second she thought she and the car were going to be engulfed and obliterated.

  But a miracle happened. The Camel levelled, rushed, stood up on its tail and soared to execute a high backward arc of escape. The roaring, flame-spitting red Albatros swept under it and made a wide fast turn that brought it back between the Camel and its homeward route to the British lines in the west. The Camel veered, drifted, slipped and buzzed. Richtofen dropped from the sky above. Scarlet flashed as the Albatros screamed at the Camel. The machine gun opened up again. The Camel shot upwards on surging power. The captivated young lady, heart hammering, saw a puff of smoke dart from beneath its engine. She trembled. Richtofen had maimed it. His Albatros, coming out of a climbing turn, rolled its wings and went in new pursuit as the Camel roared away. The German machine, faster than the British, was on its tail in seconds. But the Camel, more manoeuvrable, deftly slipped under another zipping stream of tracer bullets.

  She felt for the British pilot, who needed every flying skill he possessed to escape Richtofen. Richtofen, she knew, was Germany’s hero of the skies, and every Allied fighter pilot acknowledged him as the supreme master of aerial combat. She felt there was little chance for the Camel. It buzzed, flipped and fell away from the path of the bright red Albatros. Flying low, it roared over her head, and the noise of its engine deafened her.

  The chase continued. The climbing Camel emitted another spurt of oily smoke. Its engine coughed and faded, and its wings dithered. Wide-eyed, the young lady stared in stricken pity at what she thought was its approaching destruction. Desperately, the pilot put the nose down and searched the pastures for a crash landing. But the engine picked up, and strongly, and the plane roared over the fields attempting another climb. The Albatros, securely stationed above and behind it, flew fast towards its tail. Again the Camel stood up, looped out of Richtofen’s gunsight, and turned westwards, climbing. As the Albatros came round once more, a long ragged plume of smoke belched from the Camel.

  She heard the roar of its engine die to a stutter. Her gloved hands tightened. The machine was crippled. It drifted out of its climb, wings faltering. The stuttering engine coughed, picked up once more, and the pilot straightened out to rush on a line parallel with the road. She saw it skimming fields and hedges, its shadow flying fast over the ground. And she saw the Albatros poised to strike, circling almost lazily above the crippled Camel. The oily smoke became thicker and blacker. The pilot sought height and landing space, but his machine began to cough itself to death. Its nose came down and the fields flew fast beneath it. The young lady saw it pass her, forty metres to her left, the helmeted head of the pilot visible. It was rolling and floundering, and he was fighting its urge to commit suicide. A tongue of flame darted out, licking at the engine. The plane flew crazily on, dipping and flipping above a high stone wall encrusted with briars. It dropped, disappearing from view, and came to grief in a field two hundred metres away. She shuddered and winced as she heard it crash.

  Richtofen’s Albatros rolled its wings and flew away.

  The young lady stood with her heart pounding. From beyond the screening hedge of stone and briar, she heard the Camel e
xplode. A sheet of flame ripped high and nauseating smoke billowed. She plunged down into her seat and set the Bugatti in frantic motion, crashing the gears hideously, something she rarely did. She drove fast until she reached a gate on her left. There she stopped, for she saw the Camel, standing on its nose and burning furiously. Flames scarred the earth and seared the air. Smoke polluted the bright morning. She felt the heat of fiery destruction, and her breath caught in her throat. Richtofen may have earned his victory, but the British pilot had fought desperately and bravely, and now the fierce, terrible flames were consuming him. There was no chance, none whatever. Everything was engulfed in fire and smoke. Nevertheless, she jumped from the car and opened the gate. From her left, inside the shelter of the roadside hedge, someone spoke in French.

  ‘C’est la guerre, mademoiselle.’

  Chapter Two

  Chateau St Alain, near Valenciennes, northern France, March 1918.

  AT THE CHATEAU, the headquarters of the 15th German Army Corps commanded by General Paul von Feldermann, a moment of confessional humiliation was taking place for Captain Erich Vorster.

  The general, having received the confession, placed his hands on his desk, leaned back and said, ‘You have managed to deliver to me the unbelievable.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Herr General.’ Captain Vorster stared fixedly at the portrait of the Kaiser that hung on the wall above the general’s head.

  ‘Sorry?’ General von Feldermann, noted for his self-control, a quality as inherent in a Junker as stoicism in a Spartan, was unusually close to raising his voice. ‘You’ve lost my daughter and you’re sorry?’

  ‘I did not expect Fräulein Sophia to be quite so agile.’

  The general eyed the unimaginative captain a little pityingly.

  ‘As I remember it,’ he said, ‘my orders contained the injunction to watch her with the utmost care.’

  ‘That is so, Sir, but there was a moment – a few moments – when of necessity she was out of sight.’

  ‘Necessity?’ The general’s blue eyes were bleak. ‘State precisely what happened.’

  ‘To ensure I had enough petrol for the journey, Herr General, I stopped at the 23rd Company Supply Headquarters to have the tank filled and to take extra cans aboard. At this juncture, Fräulein Sophia stated she wished to change her dress for a warmer one.’

  ‘You were taken in by that?’

  ‘She had begun to shiver, Sir.’

  ‘With a leather coat on, she had begun to shiver?’

  ‘Visibly, Sir,’ said the unhappy captain. ‘She—’ He stopped, for the general’s icy stare was numbing.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘She assured me that on no account was I to think she would not return.’

  ‘You did not suspect that her request and her assurance were in the nature of a deception?’

  ‘I did suspect that, yes,’ said Captain Vorster, ‘particularly in view of your warning. Therefore, I accompanied her to the officers’ quarters, where a suitable room was put at her disposal, and where I waited outside the door. I respectfully submit, Herr General, that I could do no more than that.’

  ‘What you are saying,’ the general said caustically, ‘is that despite my telling you not to take your eyes off her, almost the first thing you did was to allow her to place a door between the two of you.’

  ‘But the situation, Sir. Her need of privacy—’

  ‘The situation was one you should not have permitted. I imagine I know the rest. Using what you call her unexpected agility, she climbed out of a window and disappeared.’

  Captain Vorster cleared his throat.

  ‘With the car, Sir,’ he said.

  General von Feldermann sighed.

  ‘I see,’ he said. ‘She made her promised return to it and drove off while you were still waiting outside the door in the officers’ quarters. Is that it?’

  ‘Unfortunately, yes, Sir.’

  ‘Very unfortunately,’ said the general, although for a moment a little gleam of paternal pride brightened his eyes. His spirited daughter’s penchant for the audacious and unconventional commended itself to him, if not to his wife. His wife would be furious. She had mapped out Sophia’s life from birth, and nowhere along the chosen path was Sophia scheduled to run off and marry a young flying officer who was a middle-class anonymity. The general had met the young man and thought him likeable, but quite without the character or background that would make him an acceptable suitor for Sophia. Sophia’s infatuation was undoubtedly born of a perverse defiance of her ordained role. She had been only too ready to fall for a handsome face and dashing uniform. To her, Captain Fritz Gerder, as a flying officer with Richtofen’s squadron, was irresistibly dashing, and quite different from the men her mother recommended. She was making a mistake, of course. Marriage to Captain Gerder would be a disaster. Within six months, if he survived the war in the air, she would discover his appeal to be that of an irresponsible youth. At twenty-three, he was too young for her, for she herself would soon be twenty-one. Wayward, she needed a man of strong character, not a callow boy, however well he handled a fighter plane.

  Baron von Richtofen’s squadron was stationed near Douai, and Sophia would almost certainly head for there. She had made it quite plain that if Fritz proposed she would accept him, and in two weeks or so she would be twenty-one. It was imperative to return her to her mother.

  ‘Herr General,’ ventured Captain Vorster, ‘may I suggest I notify various units to keep an eye open for the car?’

  ‘Out of the question. Every unit in this area is committed to General Ludendorff’s new offensive, due to be launched very soon. You know that. Captain Vorster, having lost my daughter, yours is the responsibility for finding her. Take a car and go after her.’

  ‘Yes, Sir,’ said the young officer. ‘But where?’ he asked.

  General von Feldermann sighed again. After almost four years of crippling conflict, Germany was not only short of manpower, it was short of the right kind of field officers and staff officers. Men of flair and imagination were harder to come by. Captain Vorster was keen and competently methodical, but had few inspired moments.

  ‘I imagine that there will be people who’ve seen the car and its driver. Answers to commonsense questions should help you find the route she’s taking. I think you’ll find most of the answers will point you towards Douai.’

  ‘Douai? That’s only about twenty-five kilometres from our front lines, sir.’

  ‘So?’ The caustic note was there again. ‘My daughter won’t be intimidated by that. Find her, Captain Vorster, and carry out my original request to escort her home to her mother. One more thing. On no account are you to divulge to anyone, anyone at all, the identity of the young lady you’re looking for. I don’t want the larger part of the 15th Army Corps to know that its commander has lost his daughter.’ The general’s little dig did not escape the uncomfortable captain. ‘Do you understand?’

  ‘Perfectly, Herr General. But my work—’

  ‘Ah, your work, yes. It’s important, of course, but not as important as mine. General Ludendorff expects something more of me than running around in search of Sophia myself. Therefore, I must ask you to do so. Start at once. The morning is still young. Keep me informed, but not directly. Through Major Kirsten.’

  ‘Very good, Sir.’

  Captain Vorster departed in haste, though without relishing his assignment. General von Feldermann sat in thought for a few moments. With Ludendorff’s well-planned offensive due to begin in a few days, he had worries enough and could have done without the personal problems posed by Sophia’s waywardness. He must telephone his wife and give her the news of Sophia’s disappearance. On the other hand, if Captain Vorster succeeded in finding her fairly quickly, nothing need be said, except to Major Josef Kirsten, a trusted confidante.

  He summoned the major, an executive officer and aide of distinction. Major Kirsten, as a casualty of the Somme, had lost his left arm and his empty sleeve was tucked neatly in his ja
cket pocket. A further wound caused by a small but red-hot piece of shrapnel had left a scar puckering the skin of his temple, close to his right eye. It slightly distorted the eyelid, giving the impression of a squint. He was iron-grey though not yet forty. He listened to the general outlining a purely domestic problem.

  ‘One has to admire Sophia’s initiative,’ he said. ‘Are you expecting results from Captain Vorster?’

  ‘I’m hoping,’ said the general.

  Major Kirsten, who knew Sophia quite well, said, ‘Are you sure she’ll go to Douai?’

  ‘I’m sure she’ll head straight for the arms of Captain Gerder, and Douai is their most convenient meeting place.’

  ‘Allow me, Herr General, to contact Colonel Hoffner, the commandant at Douai,’ said Major Kirsten. ‘He’s an old colleague of mine. I’ll describe Sophia to him and ask for some of his men to keep an eye open for her. I shan’t tell him she’s your daughter, merely that for certain reasons I’d like to be advised if she’s spotted. Allow me to also contact the young flying officer, Captain Gerder.’

  ‘Is that wise?’ The general frowned.

  ‘I think,’ said Major Kirsten, ‘that if Sophia does land in his arms, I must persuade him to persuade her to return to her mother.’

  ‘If you can do that, I’d be grateful,’ said von Feldermann, who had a mountain of work to get through. ‘Go about it in your own way, Josef.’

  Returning to his office, Major Kirsten got through to Colonel Hoffner in Douai. The colonel, advised that the major was interested in the whereabouts of a certain young lady, took down details of her appearance. The major said she was not to be apprehended, only located. The colonel promised to do what he could and to call the major back the moment he had any information to impart.

  Major Kirsten then telephoned Richtofen’s squadron headquarters and asked to speak to Captain Fritz Gerder. He was told that the captain was in Douai; his plane had been shot up two days ago and he had crash-landed. He had suffered no real injury, apart from some bruises, but was badly shaken up. He had spent a day in hospital and was now on a week’s rest in a Douai hotel. He would be recalled at the end of the week, when a new machine would be available.