Hope Takes Flight (12 page)

Baron Manfred von Richthofen did not know, at that moment, that he had become the most famous ace in the German Air Force, having earned the honor by shooting down Lanoe Hawker, the leading British ace. He looked around for other victims and, seeing none, allowed himself to look down at the fallen plane. His heart was pounding with excitement as it always did. There was no other feeling like it. He felt potency surging through his body, and waiting in his fingers to be used again.

Two of them had fought for the sky. One was the victor. He, Manfred von Richthofen, was the victor. Therefore, he owned the sky for as far as he could see and as far as his gun could reach.

He pulled gently back on the stick and aimed his Albatros toward a higher altitude where he could catch the wonderful wind that always carried him home. He thought the wind could carry him to heaven.

It was the eleventh time Baron Manfred von Richthofen had felt that way.

1
916—perhaps the bloodiest year Planet Earth had ever known. And it had all begun when General Erich von Falkenhayn, leader of Germany's armies, made the rash and unsound decision to attack his country's enemies full force. Germany, he pointed out to the Kaiser, could not win a long, drawn-out war because its manpower sources were too thin. Germany must launch a battle that would “bleed France white,” compel her to capitulation, and collapse the Alliance.

This was Falkenhayn's brief for staging the greatest battle in world history and doing it in the dead of winter, ignoring every lesson that had ever been taught about military strategy. Falkenhayn was convinced that if Germany would stage one battle so terrible in its dimensions, so shattering in its impact on both camps, then governments and peoples would be shocked into making peace with Germany, on terms barely short of ruin. This operation was given the code name
Gericht
—meaning, the place of execution. As Falkenhayn penned this in Berlin, carolers abroad were singing “peace on Earth.”

On February 21, 1916, the battle began—two days of full-scale bombardment—before the Shock Divisions were to reap the harvest of chaos. The German guns spoke until the crews dropped from exhaustion, expecting to create a zone of death where no Frenchman drew breath.

Early the next morning over a six-mile front, two million shells were thrown at that narrow triangle containing Verdun. There were ingenious fires, mixed shrapnel, high explosives, poison gas, and blockbusting projectiles that ripped the earth, shaking it. Ravines, forests, trenches were all worked over. Shells came down at the rate of 100,000 rounds per hour, and the French forward trenches were obliterated.

Just before dusk of the first day, the German infantry came forward. They expected to cross a passive field of mangled corpses and crazed derelicts. Instead, Frenchmen black as stokers, uniforms torn off, looking more like scarecrows than soldiers, stirred amid the desolation and pumped away with their rifles. The Germans should have known that artillery alone can never saturate and silence an entrenched resistance.

Before the month was out, the German army had advanced to a position within four miles of the city. During that time they captured 10,000 French prisoners and many machine guns and cannon. On February 24 they stormed the French secondary system of trenches. Always the bombardment moved ahead of them.

The one thing that the German leadership did not correctly estimate was the reckoning of the French will to resist. To stem the German tide at Verdun, France sent an unending column of men, youths of twenty going into the fiery furnace of battle. The real hero of Verdun was the
poilu
—the self-reliant veterans of the French army.

The war at Verdun came as close to hell as earth can get. One German soldier wrote: “Verdun transformed men's souls. Whoever floundered through the morass full of the shrieking and dying had passed the last frontier of life, and henceforth bore deep within him the leaden memory of a place that lies between life and death.”

Across the lines, a Jesuit priest echoed the grim sentiment: “Having despaired of living amid such horrors, we begged God to let us be dead.”

For ten months the soldiers of the two nations were locked in mortal combat, fighting with a savage intensity that made victory or defeat hollow terms. It seemed as if the battle would continue, one German predicted, “until the last German and the last Frenchman hobbled out of the trenches on crutches to exterminate each other with pocketknives or teeth or fingernails.”

The flawed planning and mistakes were not only in the German camp. General Douglas Haig, called “Whiskey Doug” by his troops because his family founded the Haig whiskey empire, made a blunder every bit as terrifying. He led the British army into the Somme.

The German line had been made impregnably strong overlooking the Allied trenches. Massively timbered dugouts, rebutted with concrete and equipped with electric lighting, were serviced with an underground reticulation of laundries, aid stations, repair shops, and arsenals. Life was relatively good there. The Germans didn't wish to be disturbed and felt it would be folly for the Allies to try.

It was.

But Haig set his jaw, convinced that the Somme was an open sesame to final victory. He would cut the German army in two, and do it in one day. He would have the Cavalry Corps under bit and ready to charge through the shell-cratered gap into the blue as proof of his intent to crush the enemy.

Britain's army for the attack on the Somme was shaped largely of new conscripts—half-formed soldiers who, never having seen action, truly believed in their first go over the top. They were bound for Berlin. But the more seasoned fighters noted that the earth-shaking bombardment that opened at dawn on June 24 still hadn't cut most of the enemy wire. There were some shrewd soldiers eyeing the preparations for the Somme.

There was also a muster of poets—Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, John Macefield, Edmund Blunden, and Mark Plowman. For what they heard and saw, there were no new songs to sing. “Armageddon is too immense for my solitary understanding!” cried Sassoon.

Haig ordered the opening of the battle and the earth churned, the landscape shriveled, the noise deafened, the fumes stifled. In that vast barrage, 1,508,000 artillery rounds were spent, and at the end of it the German works and wire were still intact.

At 7:28
A.M.
on July 1, the French and British infantry climbed up from their trenches and jumped off into the exploding unknown. Sir Douglas Haig, far to the rear, sent in encouraging reports; but all along the lines his soldiers were falling in droves to zeroed-in machine gun fire. It was a catastrophe. By day's end more than 60,000 soldiers of the British Empire were corpses littering the field, and dying men were trapped in the beaten zone. And not one plot of ground had been won.

Haig should have called off the Somme that night and cut his losses. But having failed, he was too bulldoggish to quit. In consequence, this hideous turmoil must be recorded as the most soulless battle in British annals.

America understood very little of how Europe bled and suffered during 1916. The shore was too distant. President Wilson ran again and was re-elected on the party slogan “He Kept Us Out of War.” But many of the more pugnacious sons of America were training in earnest in Plattsburg and other camps for command jobs in the conflict they knew lay ahead. A popular song took hold: “I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.”

A song—“There's a Long, Long Trail,” written by a Yale student for a college production—fired the imagination of the nation, and the British Infantry sang it while moving up to the trenches because it eased the pain in the hearts of men. For soldiers who had the luck to survive, there was no worse year in a war, nor one in a wretched memory.

But from the perspective of the years, 1916 was the nadir in the ordeal of men and nations. There were no electrifying changes. There was only slaughter, grim and great. The war looked so far from being won that, in their misery, people high and low despaired that any termination was possible.

Toward the end of that horrible year, Germany sent out peace feelers through various embassies. These preliminary overtures came to nothing because it was apparent that the Kaiser wanted peace on his own terms. This was rejected by the Allies, but neither set of generals had the foggiest idea of how the war could be won.

By now Gavin Stuart had become a good pilot. He had acclimated himself to the aerodrome, which had grown from a haphazard collection of tents and vans into a more permanent arrangement. The flying area was a smoothed-out field, rectangular in shape. Dugouts, topped by heavy timbers and sandbags, served as rain shelters.

Gavin had learned that there was a difference between nationalities even so far as food was concerned. Food in his own mess was poor unless they had a French cook, so they scoured the countryside for them. One Frenchman remembered the British cuisine as “everything boiled to death in live steam, then covered with a white sauce made of wallpaper paste.”

The French always ate well and usually looked the best. They were always impressive in their dress parades, and their fighting spirit was excellent. Everyone was aware that the Americans who joined the British and French Air Forces were the most reckless and innocent, spendthrifts with life. Gavin tried to explain it once to a French flyer: “We all grew up on Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show,” he said. “Then the early Bronco Billy films. We came from the frontier tradition where a man is a man. He walks right up and shoots it out. We saw this in our movies and read it in our books over and over again,” Gavin said. “Now we fight the same way in the air.”

It was true enough. Most Americans flew, ignoring science and advice, and their casualties were fearful until they simmered down. Some of them were college men or students living abroad—upper-middle-class sons, full of pictures of planes, confident it would be fun and romantic to fly in a war. Some of them were race car drivers, and it took time and tragedy before they became as accomplished as many flyers in the war. Gavin, on the other hand, seemed to be one of the more steady flyers. Perhaps because of this trait, he was selected to be one of three men to fly some bombers back to England, across the Channel.

His friend Bill Thaw came to him with the news one day after he had returned from a routine flight over the trenches. Thaw grinned broadly and slapped him on the back saying, “Well, believe it or not, some
good
news for a change.”

Gavin had flown missions every day for over a month and was worn thin. “Did the Kaiser drop dead?” he asked wearily.

“Not that good.” Thaw shrugged. “But you and I and Smith are going to get a little vacation over in England.”

Gavin listened as Thaw explained that three of the bombers that had been sent recently to fly missions into the enemy territory had developed problems. “We're flying them back so the factories can test them and work the bugs out. Then we'll bring them back.” He smiled gleefully. “It'll probably take at least a week! London, here we come!”

The American production of
Tonight's the Night
took London by storm. After the terrible battles of Verdun and the Somme, with their tragic casualty lists, the city needed some light comedy. They were also taken with the star of the show, Lylah Stuart. She did not have the raw colonial character seasoned theatergoers had become accustomed to in American actresses, but played her role in the more refined English manner.

Lylah had taken her final bow, smiling graciously at the audience. As soon as she left the stage and started for her dressing room, the smile left her face. She said nothing to Helen, who was waiting for her and accompanied her to the dressing room. But when the two women were inside and were taking off their stage makeup, Lylah said, “I asked that we not have any visitors tonight, Helen. I'm tired.”

Helen paused and looked over at Lylah, noting the lines of worry. There was compassion on her face as she replied, “You've been working too hard. You need some rest.”

Lylah shrugged wearily. “That's the trouble with being in a successful play. There
is
no rest. You have to keep going.” She ran her hand across her hair, then smiled up at Helen. “Here I am, complaining about success after working all my life to become a star. Now I'm jaded.”

“Maybe for Christmas you can go home with me again,” Helen suggested. “The manager said we might take a week off then, maybe two.”

A strange expression crossed Lylah's face as she thought of last Christmas, of her time in Germany at the home of Manfred von Richthofen. Shaking off the nostalgia that swept over her, she said, “Well, I'm not sure of—”

She was interrupted by a knock at the door. “I'll get it,” Helen said and opened the door. “Lylah, look who's here! I can't believe it!”

Lylah turned from the mirror, and, seeing Gavin standing there in his natty uniform with a broad smile on his face, jumped to her feet. Crying out his name, she ran and threw herself into his arms. She could not stop the tears that came, for almost daily she had expected a letter saying he had been killed.

“Hey, hey! Turn off the waterworks, will you, Sis?” Gavin protested, yet his voice was a little unsteady. He had not passed many days that year without thinking that each one might be his last. Now, as he stood there holding Lylah, he found himself unable to speak for a few moments. When he stepped back, the grin was back. “Well, now. This is like deja-vu, all over again, isn't it?” He grinned at Helen. “Picked up a little French since I've been here.”

Helen laughed and stepped forward. “I'm afraid you'll have to hug this old woman, too, Lieutenant. I've heard lots of good things about you since you became a famous flyer.” She pulled his head down, kissed him, and stepped back.

“What in the world are you doing here, Gavin?” Lylah asked, her hands fluttering over his shoulders. “How did you get here?”

Gavin explained briefly his mission, then said, “Enough of this. I don't want to waste a single minute. What I want to do is take two gorgeous women out to the best restaurant in London. Let's go.”

An hour later they were sitting together at the Hotel Elite, eating steaks. Gavin was in rare form, laughing and telling his experiences, making light of his own part in the air war over the trenches. But the two women knew better.

“I read in the paper that you've shot down four airplanes,” Lylah said. She glanced at Helen across the table, knowing they shared the same fear: Each time Gavin went up, there was a possibility that he would kill Helen's relative…or Lylah's lover.

“Oh, nothing big about that,” Gavin shrugged. “They were all observation planes. I haven't even been in a fight yet.” He shook his head sadly. “It's a shame we have to do it—shoot down those observation planes, I mean.” An odd look flashed into his eyes, and he added, “It's like shooting fish in a barrel. They have no chance at all. They've got a gun up in the top rear cockpit, most of them, but if you come in behind, they can't shoot at you because they'd blow their own tail off. So you just come in behind them, low, and hose 'em down with bullets.”