WAR

Boelckc returned to Douai in December. Ehrhardt von Teubern was sent
to Hamburg for a throat operation. After his convalescence, Ehrhardt served
for a time in Champagne, Bulgaria, and Macedonia, finally was transferred to
B Berlin, where he served the rest of the war as personnel director for observers
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in the office of the Inspector General for Aviation.
Air-to-air victories were still rare enough to make newspaper headlines
* and Boelcke and Immelmann were celebrities. Immelmann received 30 or 40 fan
Immelmann, February 1916.
His Pour le Merite portrait.
J
S
mail letters a day. By the end of the year he had scored his sixth and seventh
victories.
The New Year brought uncertain weather but the
at the aerodrome at Douai. At daybreak on January 12,
RFC took another crack
1916, word came through
that several flights of enemy machines had crossed the line at various places.
Immelmann took off in his Eindecker and climbed to 10,000 feet. Away to the
east he spotted shell bursts at about 8500 feet. The smoke puffs from antiaircraft
fire could be seen from a greater distance than aeroplanes and were
a sure indication that enemy machines were stooging around. Their color was
fairly characteristic—black for German, white for Allied—so the aeroplanes
whose presence they betrayed could be identified friend or foe before they
could themselves be seen. Their altitude and direction could also be judged
by watching the trails of smoke puffs walk across the sky.
Immelmann stalked his quarry for a time, but before he could launch his
attack, one machine turned abruptly toward him. He dodged aside and fired from
the flank. The machine, a British two-seater, turned toward him again and the
process was repeated. This time a flash of fire streamed from the two-seater's
engine and the pilot headed for the ground where he landed smoothly and
scrambled out of the blazing aeroplane. The gunner was dead, but the pilot was
unhurt, and once again Immelmann shook the hand of a defeated adversary.
Immelmann and Boelcke now had eight victories apiece. On January 13,
1916, both were awarded the Order Pour le Merite, the first aviators to be so
honored. The Order—literally "for merit"—was Germany's highest award, comparable
to the Legion d'Honneur or the Congressional Medal of Honor. It was
instituted by Frederick the Great and bore a French name because French had
always been the language of European court etiquette.
Immelmann's fan mail rose to 50 letters a day and his orderly became his
secretary. In the RFC it was supposed that the Eagle of Lille covered the entire
Front from Ypres to Valenciennes and could somehow stay in the air for a week
at
a time.
In February Boelcke returned to Metz and received a promotion to Oberleutnant.
During the spring of 1916 he shot down ten enemy aeroplanes at Verdun.
In May he was promoted to Hauptmonn, one of the youngest men in the German
Army to hold that rank and wear the Pour le Merite as well.
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