WAR

withdrew the negative, storing it in the rear of the camera, slid a new plate into
position and shot again. He exposed several plates, then tapped the pilot on the
shoulder to signal that they could go home.
On landing at the field near Slonim, Theobald turned the camera and
plates over to the sergeant in charge of the processing laboratory and awaited
results in the Kasino, washing down a roll with a small glass of vermouth.
The lab sergeant ran in excitedly and said, "Herr Leutnant, I think you really
hit something here," and ran out. Theobald raised his eyebrows and shrugged.
It wasn't long before he was advised that Hauptmann Bohnstedt wanted
to see him. He reported to the C.O.'s office and took his cue from the Hauptmann
himself, who was regarding him with half-concealed amusement. "I thought that
something there looked funny, Herr Hauptmann, so I decided to hit it instead."
Theobald was shooting a transparent line and he knew the CO. knew it.
Bohnstedt
pushed a photograph across his desk. Theobald picked up the print and looked
at it, but for several seconds had no idea what he was looking at. Then slowly it
became clear. He spotted the bomb bursts, gray cotton puffs a mile from the
switchyard. There must have been a strong cross-wind near the ground—missing
by a mile was a bit
too much even without a bombsight. The smoke and dust of
the explosions formed a cloud that was roughly circular when seen from the
overhead as in the photograph, but reaching out from the cloud was a long thin
shadow that stretched over the ground across buildings, railroad tracks and into
the countryside. It was from a column of smoke that must have been a thousand
feet tall, and the morning sun had caused the extraordinary shadow that gave
the only evidence as to what had happened. Theobald's lucky miss had blown
up an ammunition dump.
The end of September 1917, Fl. Abt. 31 received a few machines of the
new Albatros two-seater model, the C XII. The C XII had a plywood-covered
fuselage and fabric-covered wings like the Albatros fighters and was powered
by a 260-horsepower Mercedes D IVa engine. It was the most elegant twoseater
of the time; its performance was excellent and dependable after a few
teething troubles had been eliminated.
One of these troubles was the susceptibility of the carburetor to freezing
at high altitudes, and one of the victims of this unfortunate tendency was Leutnant
Theobald von Zastrow.
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