by Richard Fox
“Yes, sir,” Manfred said, still ashamed.
“Don’t be so morose, Manfred. You did very well today and I expect more of the same from you every time we fly,” Boelcke slapped a meaty hand against Manfred’s shoulder.
A staff car pulled up beside the duo. Voss and Wolff in the backseat.
“Manfred! Come with us, we need proof of our victories too,” Wolff said. The slight man wore a sleeping cap on his head, the tail draped over a shoulder.
Manfred looked to Boelcke for approval.
“Go,” Boelcke said with a nod.
Manfred hurried after Wolff, the tassel of his sleeping cap bouncing in the air as he ran for a waiting car.
“Kurt, what on earth are you wearing?” Manfred asked.
“Huh? Oh,” Wolff snatched the cap from his head and shoved it into his tunic. “It’s for luck in the air. What do you take up?”
“I’m sorry, for luck?” Manfred asked.
Voss walked over and dangled a pocket watch from a gold chain. “It was my grandfather’s; he had it with him in the war with the Austrians. Four battles and not a scratch.”
The three officers piled into the car as their driver opened the hood to double-check the engine’s oil.
“Manfred, do you not have a lucky talisman?” Wolff looked at him like he was already a dead man. “Even Boelcke has that walking stick of his.”
“My jacket.” Manfred slapped at the leather jacket he’d bought after his first training flight. The fur coat he’d worn hadn’t been proof against the cold air of the skies. “Yes, this jacket.”
“I flew with one guy who took a stuffed bear up with him,” Voss said.
“I heard about some Gotha pilot that flew with a dachshund,” Wolff added.
“Now you’re just making stuff up,” Voss said.
The driver shut the engine hood and drove them away from the airfield.
Manfred followed Wolff as he bounded through a forest.
“He went down over here. I’m sure of it!” Wolff said.
“That’s the third time he’s said that,” Voss said. He and Manfred didn’t share Wolff’s enthusiasm for traipsing through undergrowth. They stayed near the edge of the woods while Wolff continued his search.
“You and Boelcke saw it happen; he’ll get credit for the victory,” Manfred said. The lessening light from the setting sun reflected Manfred’s level of enthusiasm for the search.
Voss lit a match and brought the flame to a cigarette in his mouth. He inhaled deeply and lifted his head to exhale the smoke away from Manfred’s face.
“Well I’ll be damned,” Voss said. He pointed to a plane’s tail and rudder suspended in the upper branches of an oak tree. The rest of the plane was hanging from the lower and thicker branches, both wings missing.
“Finally,” Manfred said.
He and Voss walked toward the wreckage and called to Wolff, who, by the distant sound of snapping branches, had moved deeper into the forest.
The Fee pilot was suspended from his seat belts, hanging upside down. His arms extended toward the ground, swaying in the breeze like branches. The gunner’s section had torn away in the crash, and there was no sign of the gunner.
“Shit, where is he?” Voss said as he drew his pistol from his holster. Some British didn’t know when to give up the fight.
“Don’t be paranoid,” Manfred said. He took a few steps into a tall spot of grass and looked around.
“There.” Manfred pointed to the head and shoulders of a dead British soldier lying in the grass.
Voss joined Manfred and holstered his weapon. “Wait…” Voss stepped closer to the body. He gagged and covered his mouth with the back of a sleeve. Voss pointed to the tail end with his other hand.
The gunner’s upper half was near where Manfred stood; the rest of his body lay next to wreckage on the ground.
Wolff crashed through the forest. “Ah ha!” he yelled. Wolff had cut the red and white rings around the blue dot that served as British insignia for their planes from one of the dismembered wings and held it in the air in triumph.
“Kurt. Wait!” Manfred said.
Wolff came around the tail, a puzzled look on his face. He stopped when his boots stepped onto a part of the forest that made an uncharacteristic squish.
Wolff looked down and found himself standing in the gunner’s entrails.
Wolff’s jaw dropped, a low moan escaping his slack jaw. Manfred pulled him from the remains and led him toward Voss. Wolff’s mouth snapped shut as he groaned.
“No, please don’t—” Voss said, his eyes widening in panic.
Wolff vomited all over Voss’s boots. Voss let loose a stream of expletives as he jumped away. Wolff heaved again as Manfred gave the man a few reassuring pats on the back.
“I’m so sorry, Werner,” Wolff said with a small voice.
Voss kept grumbling as he kicked his boots through the high grass, doing his best to clean them off.
Wolff spat into the grass, still hunched over.
“Can we go, please?” he said in a small voice.
Manfred pulled Wolff upright and helped the slight man back to the waiting staff car. Wolff tried to look back over his shoulder, but Manfred’s hand forced his head back toward the car.
“That’s enough,” Manfred said.
Voss threw his boots in the trunk and sat in the front next to the driver. Manfred and a pale Wolff sat in the back. The return trip to the airfield was silent while Voss smoked one cigarette after another.
Voss twisted around and nudged Wolff’s knee with the back of his hand.
“First time?”
Wolff, who’d been staring at the English colors, jerked up as if waking from a nap. “What?” Wolff said.
“Were they your first kills?” Voss asked.
Wolff nodded.
“It gets easier,” Voss said before looking to Manfred. “Right?”
Manfred considered the Frenchman he’d shot in the trenches, the pilot of the Farman and the two men he killed earlier that day. The deaths had stayed at the edge of his mind, phantasms that promised to visit in the future.
“It does,” he said. Manfred wasn’t convinced that what he said was true, but Wolff needed to hear differently.
“Better them than you, right Kurt?” Voss said.
Wolff nodded. A smile spread across his face. “Captain Boelcke will want to see this.” He gave the colors a pat.
Manfred opened the throttle on his Albatros D.II as it sped over the English trenches. Scattered cloud tops like thick dandelions floated between him and the antiaircraft artillery that sent rounds into the sky to meet him. Shells burst with a snap audible over his taxed engine, puffs of black smoke creeping closer and closer as the distant gunners reached for him.
Boelcke was several hundred yards ahead, on the tail of a smoking Nieuport, a French-designed plane flown by the English. Manfred scanned the air for threats to his commander as he closed. Crossing over the lines wasn’t something Boelcke was fond of; part of his mantra to his pilots was to always have a line of retreat ready. In the weeks that Manfred had flown with the squadron, they’d crossed over only twice, each time with detailed planning and with the wind blowing to the east.
The blast from a near miss kicked Manfred’s Albatros up and over, like a plate flipped from a table. His body strained against the belts that kept him from ejecting into the air. His plane still responded to the controls, quelling the panic that he might be on a one-way trip to the ground in a dead plane. Manfred rode out the blast and waited for gravity to pull the heavy metal engine earthward. He pulled out of the unforced dive before the airspeed could rip the wings off.
At some point the gunners would run out of shells, he hoped.
Boelcke was a few dozen yards from the Nieuport. A tracer round careened off the propeller and into the sky. The Nieuport made a desperate dive and landed hard on a dirt road running parallel to a line of telegraph poles.
The pilot unstrapped, jumped
from the smoking plane, and ran a dozen yards down the road. The pilot found Boelcke in the air and thrust his arms over his head toward Boelcke, brandishing that particular British gesture of holding two fingers up in a V. Boelcke didn’t pull back from his attack dive as Manfred watched on.
The pilot froze for a second, and then took off running down the road.
Boelcke fired; a line of bullets stitched the dirt road and overtook the pilot, who tumbled to the ground in a cloud of dirt. He laid still, arms and legs contorted.
Manfred looked on in shock. Boelcke killed that pilot after he was out of the fight, helpless. This wasn’t what he thought Boelcke, knight of the air and hero of Germany, would do.
Boelcke pulled into a loop and twisted into an Immelmann turn. He pointed to the east and toward safety as he passed Manfred. Manfred came about and followed. He took another glance at the pilot, who lay in the road.
Manfred remained silent during the after-action review, answering Boelcke’s direct questions and providing nothing else of the morning’s flight. Lieutenant Bohme, his black hair slicked against his Neanderthal-like skull from sweat, detailed his successful duel with another Nieuport, the equally unfortunate wingman of Boelcke’s victim.
“The air is thick with Englishmen today, boys. Have your planes refueled and rearmed immediately and stay suited up,” Boelcke said. The knot of pilots unraveled at Boelcke’s command.
“Sir,” Manfred said, “a moment, if you please.”
Boelcke motioned to Manfred and walked to a water cistern aside the headquarters. Boelcke lifted a tin ladle to his mouth to drink, he cocked up an eyebrow to the waiting Manfred.
“Sir, that pilot—he was out of the fight. His plane a wreck and—”
Boelcke slammed the ladle into the cistern with a bang. He took a step toward Manfred, hands balled in fists and his mouth twisted in a snarl.
“And what? Let him live? Hope his aristocratic sense of fair play made sure I got the same treatment if our situation were reversed?” Manfred didn’t answer. The airfield bustled around them as the standoff continued.
Boelcke took a deep breath and ran a trembling hand through his hair.
“How many do you have now, Manfred?”
“Six victories, sir,” he said. Fair weather and Boelcke’s instruction made the last month productive.
“Yes, that’s right,” Boelcke said. “That was my thirty-seventh. This isn’t a game, Manfred. It is life and death every single time,” Boelcke nodded his head slowly as if he’d found the answer to some old question. “We can’t afford to be innocent about these things.”
Boelcke’s eyes flashed with happiness. “I expect great things from you,” he said before disappearing into the headquarters.
Manfred relaxed, Boelcke’s words running through his mind. After all the killing, what innocence remained?
“Manfred,” Bohme said from behind. The big man motioned for Manfred to follow him behind the hangar.
Manfred found Bohme next to a crate of ammo, a crowbar in hand. A breeze ruffled through the fields of wheat surrounding the airfield, silent and peaceful compared to the men readying for battle on the other side of the wooden barn.
“What happened?” Bohme said. He’d been with Boelcke since the squadron formed; he was several victories ahead of the blue and the House Order of Hohenzollern medal at his breast, an award on par with the Pour Le Merite—depending on what part of Germany one hailed from—a testament to his skill. Manfred told Bohme everything but the details of what Boelcke said at the cistern. Bohme said nothing as he slammed the crowbar into the crate and pried the top open.
“You never met Schlechter. He was with us until a few days before you arrived. The day before he died, he shot up a Brit but didn’t bring him down. Plane had a golden lion painted on the side, and Schlechter escorted it back to their lines.” Bohme pulled a case of ammo from the crate and handed it to Manfred.
“Next day, a plane with that same golden lion sends Schlechter down in flames. I was there when Boelcke pulled him out of the wreck.” Bohme’s nose wrinkled at the memory. “He hasn’t been the same since.”
“Do you know why the English call us ‘Huns’? Because they think we act without honor,” Manfred said.
“There’s no honor in this war, friend. No honor in the trench and no honor in the air. Just us trying to survive.” Bohme pulled two belt magazines from the crate, each seemed pitifully small in his hands.
“I won’t be like that. Never,” Manfred said.
“Then I hope your sense of honor doesn’t get you killed, or me, or Boelcke.” Bohme tossed another drum of bullets to Manfred.
The clanging of a wrench against a brass bell sounded action for the squadron. The enemy had been spotted.
Manfred tightened his hands around the drum and ran for his plane.
After a fruitless hour in the air, Manfred thought the “action” bell was a misnomer. He checked his fuel gauge, which was closer to empty than he would have liked and gave it a tap with his finger.
He scanned a line of clouds in the distance, hoping the white background would provide a silhouette for the English squadron that was, supposedly, in the area. Nothing. He rapped his fingers on the control pane and regretted not taking the chance to relieve himself between sorties.
A yellow light shone from deep inside a cloud, a hint of the sun that was in a very different part of the sky. The light grew brighter until it fell through the bottom of the cloud. A German Gotha, one of the large bombers, hurtled to the earth aflame.
Manfred wagged his wings and waved to Bohme and Voss flying in formation with him. Voss was looking at Manfred, and pointing frantically toward the air above Manfred. Manfred shook his head—how could Voss miss the Gotha? Manfred pointed to the dying plane. Voss kept pointing, his shouts lost to the wind.
Manfred frowned, and then he looked to the sky. A shadow flickered in the sun. Manfred threw the Albatros on its side and banked so fast he heard the wooden wings groan from the stress. Bullets filled the air he’d just occupied and a D.H.2 roared past him. The D.H.2, resembled a Fee with its rear-mounted propeller, but it was built to win air-to-air combat. Its appearance on the Western Front ended the Germans’ technological superiority that came with the Fokker Eindecker, and was more than a match for Manfred’s Albatros.
Manfred craned his head to follow his foe and turned to meet the attack. The two planes crossed paths too quickly for Manfred to fire; he kept the plane in a turn and his eye on the D.H.2.
The D.H.2 stayed in its turn, equal in its maneuverability to Manfred’s Albatros. Neither plane could turn faster than the other as they circled beyond the reach of each other’s machine guns.
Manfred looked to the ground and spied a copse of trees, their tops swaying in the strong easterly wind. Nature was pushing the two planes farther into Germany territory.
The Albatros and D.H.2 circled closer as they lost altitude. Manfred ached to pull out of the turn and change up the fight, but the terrain was on his side. All he had to do was wait.
At a mere hundred yards above the ground, the D.H.2 pulled out and made a beeline for the English lines to the west. The pilot gave Manfred a quick wave as he passed by.
Manfred came about and lined up behind the D.H.2’s tail. He opened the throttle without a care for how much gas he had left; he could land in safety, and his opponent couldn’t. Manfred came to within fifty meters of his target, pressed his thumbs against the Spandau machine gun’s trigger, and fired.
The bolt on the Spandau shot forward with a metallic thump and didn’t move again. The bolt had jammed. Manfred let loose a stream of expletives that would have shamed his mother and took a hammer from a pocket inside cockpit. He struck the bolt handle with the hammer and nearly flew into an oak tree as he took his attention from flying.
After the fifth strike, the bolt slid home. Manfred reset the bolt and grasped the trigger. The D.H.2 was still ahead of him. He fired a quick burst, with no other effect than
a quick jink from the D.H.2. The D.H.2 started to swerve in the hope of fouling Manfred’s aim. A German trench line appeared on the horizon.
Manfred smiled at his good fortune. The D.H.2’s maneuvers robbed it of airspeed, allowing Manfred to get closer. Manfred fired; the vibration of the firing machine gun gripped the Albatros in a seizure before it clicked empty.
Manfred watched on, dismayed to see the D.H.2 continue on.
Then, the D.H.2 dipped to the ground, as if to land, and then it hit the ground hard enough to bounce into the air. It landed again, fishtailing wildly as it rolled across a field. It continued on before crashing into the gnarled trunk of a blasted tree.
Manfred laughed in triumph and looked to the skies. No one was there to witness his victory.
Manfred regained altitude and looked to the crashed D.H.2. What of the pilot? Was he wounded? About to run across no-man’s-land and take to the air tomorrow? He landed near the D.H.2, rolling to a stop. Boelcke would understand.
The D.H.2’s engine had broken loose from its moorings in the crash, falling to the ground in its side. The nubs of the shattered propellers twisted slowly as Manfred approached. The Lewis machine gun dangled in front of the cockpit. Spilled fuel mixed with oil under the wreck, as if the machine had bled out.
The pilot lay slumped against the control panel, the top of his head and shoulders visible to Manfred as he approached.
Manfred stepped onto the engine and steadied himself against the plane. There was no reaction from the pilot. Manfred put his hand on the man’s shoulder and gave him a gentle push.
The body flopped back against the cockpit. The head hinged back, casting sightless eye to the sky. His throat had been blown out; a red and black ruin the size of a baby’s fist oozed blood down the man’s chest. Blood soaked the front of his clothing and the glove of his left hand.
He’d been in his mid-twenties, a typically pale Englishman with light-green eyes. A rank pip marking him as a major peeked from under the collar of his flight suit.
