WAR

commandant was on his neck immediately. "What the devil were you trying
to do, von Zastrow, wreck that machine" For answer, Hellmuth pointed to the
jammed altimeter. According to it, he was still six hundred feet off the ground.
There was a spring of ironic humor in Hellmuth that bubbled to the
surface during the cruel years of the war. Possibly Hellmuth was already thinking
about a project that was to become very much a part of him, an expression of a
sense he shared with Scaramouche "that the
world was mad." The project was a
series of poems, parodies of the verse of Christian Morgenstern, whose logical
improbabilities seem to widen rather than bridge the gap between the romantic
nineteenth and the incredible twentieth century.
In the spring of 1915 Hellmuth had little time for reading, and the project
waited a year before he was able to devote any time to it. In May 1915 he was
transferred to Champagne in France where he served as a pilot in
Fliegerabteilung
60 attached to the Crown Prince's Fifth Army.
A few months earlier, another young officer had been transferred from the
Eastern to the Western Front to serve in the Fifth Army, but that young officer
At Schneidemiihl, October 1914.
v>J.\%