WAR

mid-summer 1916. Time for a quick gasp for breath between the hell of Verdun
and the Battle of the Somme. The armies were licking their wounds, exhausted.
Then they would fly at each other's throats again. In the air the pioneers went
down one by one. The new men, the young replacements, looked at the face of
war and said that no one had told them it would be like this. The aviators looked
down in fascination and horror as the infantry charged across no-man's-land
and, with bloody losses, captured a trench 60 yards away. Then they (the aviators)
looked up, looked ahead, and saw another trench 60 yards away, and another
beyond that, and another and another and another. Then they looked around to
see who else was in the air with them. No one—if
they were lucky. But too often
aviators would forget themselves in the torn and tortured scene below and a singleseater
would come out of the sun to send them down into the ground in a
burning aeroplane so that there was not even anything left to bury and if there
had been there was no way of knowing whether it was French, British, German,
American, Austrian, Italian, or Russian.
* * *
in the summer of 1916 the Belgian Ace Edmond Thieffry engaged a German
single-seater in an indecisive combat that lasted several minutes. Both pilots got
off long bursts without effect. Thieffry, flying a Nieuport Bebe, exhausted the ammunition
in the drum of his Lewis gun and extended his arm to pull back the gun
for reloading. The German pilot, apparently seeing the outstretched arm and
mistaking the gesture for a chivalrous salute, waved back, then flew away, leaving
Thieffry astonished and alone.
* * *
moments of chivalry and humanity stand out against the background of the
war like the poppies against the muddy fields of Flanders, but nothing in all the
world will
bring back one dead soldier.
* * *
the great walrus moustache was gone now, too. The man with the fierce regard
and soft heart, Commandant Tricornot de Rose went down at Verdun leading
the fighters he successfully organized for France.
Manfred von Richthofen secretly grieved for his friend, Count von Hoick.
They had celebrated von Richthofen's twenty-fourth birthday together only a few
days before von Hoick was killed. A few days after, von Richthofen expressed a
familiar disbelief in a letter to his mother when he said it was impossible to
imagine "that this strong, handsome, healthy man no longer exists."
The woodworkers in
the squadrons used to make crosses out of broken propellers
for the graves of airmen, friend or foe, whom they buried. One day the
Belgian Ace Jan Olieslagers walked into the hangar shop and found a mechanic
polishing a new propeller cross. There had been no recent losses, and Olieslagers
asked in surprise, "Who's that for"
The mechanic answered simply, "For the next one."
* * *
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