by Richard Fox
The serial numbers nearly covered a whole wall. The tricolor bull’s-eye from his twentieth victory hung in a gilded frame next to a picture of him sitting in a cockpit, his head covered by a cowl. A glass case held sixty silver cups. Each bore an inscription detailing a victory: date, location, and the defeated type of aircraft. Every tenth victory cup as large as the Ehrenbecher that was the genesis for the collection.
“Manfred,” his mother said. Manfred crossed his arms across his chest to stifle his grasping hands and grunted a reply.
“Manfred, that was very—” Her stern tone shifted. “Would you please be a little more polite to guests?”
“I came out here to rest, not to be an exhibit,” he said.
“I’ll ask that no one else comes to bother you, tell them you need to rest.”
“It’s not a ‘bother,’ Mother. It’s just…thank you. I’ll be ready for guests soon.”
“Baroness,” Katy said from the doorway. “Time to change his bandages.”
Manfred walked from the dispensary, fresh bandages gleaming in the sunlight. A handful of well-wishers intercepted him before he could make it to the car Metzger had waiting. He signed Sanke cards and shook hands with starry-eyed civilians before he could slip into the backseat. After word got out that he went to the dispensary each day for fresh bandages, Manfred was sure the entire town of Schweidnitz had something signed by him.
Katy got in the car a moment later. “Can we please go to the dispensary at Schlesien, or Waldenburg tomorrow? This mob is getting old.”
Metzger drove on. “Sorry, ma’am. The gas ration is only enough to get us to here and back to the house.”
“You could change my bandages at home?” Manfred asked.
“Of course. That doctor insists on bringing you in only so he can brag about how he’s treated you for so many days. His head nurse told me as much,” Katy said.
“Metzger, save the gas ration for a few days. We’ll go to Waldenburg next, break up the pattern,” Manfred said.
Metzger opened his mouth to protest, then closed his mouth with a click of teeth.
“In fact, let me out once we pass the railway station. I’ll walk the rest of the way home,” Manfred said.
“Manfred, are you sure?” Katy said. He hadn’t had any exercise since the day he was shot.
“Join me?”
Metzger stopped at the station, and Manfred got out and opened the door for Katy. She left the car without taking Manfred’s proffered hand.
“What will the knitting circles think if they see you and me walking about?” she asked.
“I will introduce you as my fiancée and discourage all the young women who insist on taking a detour past my house,” Manfred said.
“Don’t you dare.” Katy waved to Metzger, but he was too far away to stop and pick her back up.
Manfred took her through a wooded trail, refusing any conversation, as his hunter’s instincts demanded stealth. Katy kept her eyes to the ground, mindful of the mud puddles that threatened the hem of her dress. She stepped around a wet patch and bumped into Manfred.
He stood stock still, his body half-hidden behind a tree. He held up a fist, his eyes locked on something moving through the forest.
“What is it?” she said.
Leaves rustled in the distance and a four-point buck emerged into a clearing. The deer raised its nose in the air, sniffing for predators. Manfred raised an imaginary rifle to his shoulder, and followed the deer as it moved closer.
The deer turned, exposing its heart to Manfred’s faux weapon. Manfred mimicked a slight recoil, and then clicked his tongue twice. The deer froze, then bounded into the forest.
“If you had a rifle, would you have shot it?” Katy asked.
“No, I wouldn’t have shot him. I took a twelve-point buck before the war. Inferior trophies don’t interest me,” he said, returning to the trail.
“I imagine no animal could top what you have in your trophy room,” Katy said.
“Nonsense, I have always wanted to go on safari to Africa. Great cats, elephants—there’s this giant creature called a hippopotamus that is quite deadly in the water,” he said.
“No, Manfred, the airplanes.”
“Those,” Manfred continued through the shortcut, the second floor of his home obscured by branches shifting in the wind, “those aren’t trophies. They are evidence. I don’t expect you to understand. Pilots have to prove they make their kills; otherwise, there’s no credit. No credit, no awards. No awards, no glory.”
“That’s why you do it? For the glory?”
Manfred cut around the bushes marking the perimeter of the house, and led her into a rose garden.
“Once, yes. Now I do it out of habit, the higher-ups expect me to do it. Because I do it, my men do it.”
“What about the glory?”
Manfred cupped a rose and took a deep breath of its fragrance. He walked past a plot of cucumbers and tomatoes, plants that his mother would never have grown before the war.
“Would you believe me if I told you there was no glory? After my first battle, my heart knew that men bleeding and dying wasn’t glorious. All those years at the academy and in the cavalry preparing for that glorious charge into the enemy lines, and it never happened. My ego wanted to find it in the air, prove that what I believed wasn’t a lie.”
He ran a hand over his bandaged skull. “Look what I found.”
His mouth opened to say something more, but his jaw went slack as his eyes stared off into the distance. His hands reached out to either side of him. His knees buckled and he stumbled forward.
“No, no, no, your bandages” Katy caught Manfred as he collapsed. She fell back onto her seat and held Manfred against her on his way down.
He lay with his head in her lap, staring into the sky. Katy had one hand on his chest, the other cupped his head.
“At least I missed the thorns this time,” he said.
“What happened?”
“I just got dizzy and now I’m…” he looked up at her face and tried to sit up. Katy pushed him back against her lap. “Still dizzy,” he said.
“Stay still. You’ll fall into the dirt and ruin all that doctor’s hard work. Just stay here for a moment.”
Manfred’s face went red. “Katy, this is…compromising.”
“What—your mother never caught you with a girl?”
“That’s not what this is. But no. Lothar, yes.”
“Then this isn’t ‘compromising,’ then relax,” Katy said. They stayed there for a few minutes more. Katy ran the tips of her fingers down the side of Manfred’s bandages once, then closed her hand into a fist before she could do it again. The sound of wind moving through trees mingled with lark calls.
Manfred pulled at the grass under his left hand, and brought up a red poppy. He twirled one of the flowers in his hand, then plucked away the little bit of soil clinging to its stem.
“These grow at the Front.” He tucked the flower between the fingers of Katy’s hand. “I miss it,” Manfred said. “The noise, the artillery, machine guns, the constant sound of soldiers talking, working.”
“Hush. Enjoy some peace and quiet.”
Manfred grabbed her hand from his chest, and pushed it away. He sat up, tested his balance and stood up. He helped Katy back to her feet.
“There’s no peace for me, Katy. Not anymore.”
“There he is, Momma!” a child’s voice rang out from the road leading past his home.
Manfred saw the top of a boy’s head peeking over the manicured bushes, a woman in mourning black, her face hidden by a veil, held the boy’s hand.
“Must be friendlier,” Manfred said. He flashed a smile and walked to the gate.
The boy was five or six, difficult to gauge, considering how skinny he was. The boy’s knees were almost bulbous below his shorts, bright blue eyes were large in his shrunken face. His bare feet shifted in the gray dust of the road.
“I told you he would come!” the boy squ
ealed.
“I’m sorry, sir, he was so excited to see you,” the veiled woman said. Shoes made of cardboard peeked out from beneath the tattered hem of her dress.
Manfred opened the gate and knelt on a knee in front of the boy. “No problem, miss. What’s your name?”
“Joachim Schwehr. Do you remember my Papa?” Joachim asked.
Schwehr. Manfred found it familiar, but couldn’t place it.
The memory of Sergeant Schwehr came back. One of the cavalrymen he lost during his baptism by fire. He remembered Schwehr thrown from a wounded horse, then felled by French bullets.
“I remember your father. Of course I do,” Manfred said.
“Momma said he died saving you in France.” The boy jerked his hand away from his mother. Twig-like fingers reached out and touched the Pour Le Merite at Manfred’s collar. “Because he died you got to win all these medals. Said that the Kaiser man says you’re a big hero. That makes it OK that Papa died.”
“Sir, I’m sorry. We’ll go now. Didn’t mean to disturb you.” She reached for the boy, who wiggled from her grasp.
Manfred reached out and grasped the boy by his arms, they felt like little more than skin and bones beneath his shirt. “Your Papa was a very brave man. He saved my life.” Manfred undid a button on his tunic and reached inside to unsnap the pin behind his Iron Cross.
“But, I would give all these awards back so that he could still be with you,” Manfred handed the Iron Cross to Joachim. Joachim took the medal, then hugged his arms around Manfred’s neck.
“I miss him,” the little boy said.
Manfred returned the hug. “I miss him too.”
“Joachim, we have to go,” his mother said.
“Wait, let me get you something,” Manfred turned back to his house, and found his mother waiting for him. She held a pack of wrapped summer sausage and a tin of soft cheese. Since Manfred’s return, guests had brought gifts of food. The kitchen larder was almost overflowing with sausage.
Manfred took the food and gave it to the widow, who didn’t protest too much against the gift. Joachim waved to Manfred as his mother led him away.
“How did you know I’d give them food?” he asked Kunigunde.
“I didn’t. It just pains me to see the little ones suffer like that,” Kunigunde looked at her son’s dirty pants.
“Katy is dirty too. Something you want to tell me?”
“No, nothing.” Manfred walked back into the house.
“Manfred.”
“Nothing.”
Voss.
Wolff.
Manfred sat in the trophy room, a pair of telegrams in hand. He’d found the telegrams in the stack delivered to his house each morning. The death notices mixed in with wishes for a speedy recovery from the King of Bavaria and a wedding invitation from some noble in Pomerania that claimed a distant kinship.
Voss had tangled with four of the new British S.E.5 fighters over the Belgian countryside, alone, and come out the loser. If there was any pilot who might have triumphed against such odds, Manfred would have bet on Voss.
Wolff went down trying to ambush a flight of Allied bombers.
Voss and Wolff. Both were fine pilots, brave fighters, disciples of Boelcke and winners of the Pour Le Merite; just like him. Manfred wasn’t surprised at their deaths. Death was an accepted part of flying and war, not a thing that could be avoided in the course of duty. It would be easy to give in to despair, as Bohme had almost done. After three years of war, he was inured to loss. At least he could claim vengeance against the English, if he could fly.
But what if he’d been there? Would he have spotted an error in Wolff’s attack and vetoed the battle? If he’d flown beside Voss, they would have emerged victorious.
He’d sent Metzger to the army telegraph station in town to get more details. Nothing could be done for Voss and Wolff, but he craved details.
Manfred loathed himself. Here he was, far from the war, nursing a wound born from a lucky shot while his friends fought on. Fought without his leadership and skill to aid them. Fought without him there to make a difference.
He stood up and wiped tears away from his face with his sleeve. Tinnitus rang in his ears and he felt the pain vise tighten around his skull. Would he ever heal? He’d demanded a transfer into the air corps because he wanted to fight; now he was even more useless than when he’d sat at a communications desk far from the Front.
“Manfred? Breakfast is ready,” his mother said from behind him.
Kunigunde opened her cupboard and reached deep inside. Past the jarred pickles and beets, her fingers found tiny cardboard box. She pulled the box out and kept it against her chest, hidden from her son.
Her Manfred sat at a round table they kept in the kitchen for informal meals. He poked at the cooked sausage and powdered eggs on his plate, his face long and mind far away.
Kunigunde poured the beans into the hopper of her coffee crusher and cranked the handle.
“Did you hear that your cousin Wolfram is at pilot’s training?” she asked.
Manfred shrugged his shoulders.
She put the ground beans into a filter and poured piping hot water over the grounds.
He’d changed so much since the war began. She could still see the boy who loved to laugh, whose ready smile could melt any girl’s heart, but those qualities were smothered by the weight of whatever Manfred carried inside him. His face was lined, his jaw constantly worked with some nervous tick. He looked far beyond his twenty-five years, as if an acid had worn him down from the inside out.
She brought the steaming cup of coffee to the table and placed it in front of her son. Manfred grabbed the cup without looking at it and brought it to his mouth. His eyes opened wide as the smell hit his nose.
“Mother, is this real coffee?”
Kunigunde smiled and nodded with pride. “I’ve been saving up beans for whenever you or your brother came back to visit.”
Manfred took a small sip, his eyes closed. He took a second sip, then opened his eyes. He extended the cup toward her.
“Have it. You always loved coffee more than I did,” he said.
“No, darling, it’s all yours,” she left him to his drink and went to find the photo album she kept in her study. By the time she brought it back to the kitchen, the coffee cup and Manfred’s breakfast plate were empty. The smell of coffee lingered in the air as she sat across from her son.
She opened the album and picked up some loose photos from between the pages. “There are so many photos of you. I don’t want you to end up like your father, clueless as to who’s in all of his old pictures.”
She slid over a picture of her son and half a dozen pilots in formal attire.
“Who’s the one on the left?” she asked. Manfred looked at the photo and what little life he’d had inside of him seemed to shrivel away into nothing.
“Bohme, dead over Verdun.”
“Oh, what about the man next to him?”
“Voss. Dead.”
“And—”
Manfred pushed himself away from the table and turned away. He put his hands on a windowsill; his head hung low between his shoulders.
“Dead.” His voice went ragged. “Do not ask anymore. They are all dead.”
She looked back at the photo, Manfred was there. His face smiling with pride.
“Manfred, don’t talk like that. You aren’t…you’re just a little hurt.”
She could see his head shaking in the reflection of the window.
“It doesn’t matter what happens to me.”
“Of course it does!” She slammed the album shut. She choked back her fear and anger, keeping her emotions in check with her wounded son in front of her was almost too much to bear. “Manfred, I…I want you to stop flying.”
Manfred turned to face her. “Would it please you if I were somewhere safe? Resting on my laurels while others take my place?”
“Yes, yes, it would. You’ve done more than enough for the war and your inju
ry…I spoke to the doctors and they aren’t sure how bad it really is.”
“What if every officer, every leader, escaped from the war? There would be no one left but the soldiers. The war would fall apart. All our sacrifice for nothing.”
“You aren’t the entire war, Manfred. You’re my son. Don’t condemn me for being selfish and wanting you to be safe.”
“I don’t. It is my duty to lead, to fight.”
“Are you doing this for the medals? Don’t you have enough?” she pleaded.
A smile came to her son’s lips, and for a moment she saw the old Manfred shine through. “I don’t care for the medals anymore. Do you know what makes it all worthwhile? When I fly over the trenches, the soldiers will climb out and shout for me, wave their rifles in the air. I see their gray faces, worn from hunger and sleeplessness and battle, and something rejoices within me. That is my reward, Mother, my greatest reward.”
He reached out and rested a hand on her shoulder. “I have nothing to worry about while I’m in the air. I’m ready for them. The worst thing that can happen is that I land behind enemy lines.”
The bandages covering the gash across his skull spoke louder than he did, but Kunigunde decided to play along. Let her son think she could tolerate his continued role in the war. He had enough to worry about.
“You think they would treat you well? After all the men you’ve—after everything you’ve done?”
“I believe so.”
The sound of clicking heels announced Metzger’s arrival. The orderly walked up to Manfred and handed him a telegram, his face stoic.
Manfred’s mouth tightened into a thin line. He looked at his mother.
“Lothar is wounded,” he said, and Kunigunde’s heart skipped a beat, “but not badly.” He handed the telegraph back to Metzger.
“Pack our things. I’m going back.”
Chapter 12— “All This Time”
There were new faces in his squadron. As a commander and the preeminent pilot in Germany, he was spoiled for choice when it came time to fill out his roster. He knew the new men, Brauneck and Gussman by reputation and record, but not by face. Only he and Reinhard remained from the day he took command of Squadron 11.
