Hope Takes Flight (9 page)
And so they had stayed. Each day Manfred took Lylah out, and each day they brought back proof of their hunting prowess. If the senior von Richthofens noticed anything strange about their companionship, they kept it to themselves.
Finally the day came when Lylah knew she must return to England, and she mentioned it to Manfred as they were getting ready for a hunt.
He was quiet for a moment, then said, “That will be a sad day, but I, too, must return to my unit, so we will both be busy.”
They went into the woods once again, and this time he took her farther than ever before. Another heavy snow had fallen. The trees were draped with heavy loads and sparkled like diamonds under the sun. They walked quietly, and Lylah realized that Manfred had taught her much about stalking animals. They spoke in normal tones until they got close to a small creek, where he said, “Quiet now. A stag may come to drink.”
They waited silently under the trees, under the blue sky that scrolled over them, dotted now and then by flights of wild geese. The only sound was the sound of the branches as they groaned beneath their loads and the far-off cry of some sort of animalâa wolf, perhaps.
“It's been wonderful to be here,” she whispered. “I'll remember it always.”
He started to answer her, then suddenly froze. Slowly he nodded, and Lylah followed his line of vision to see a beautiful doe stepping out of the woods and approaching the creek. The animal was nervous, sensing their presence, perhaps, yet unable to see them from its vantage point. The doe continued to the creek, delicately bent over and pawed at the thin skim of ice, breaking it, then taking a look around before dipping its head to drink.
As the deer's head lowered, Lylah felt Manfred's elbow nudging her. Slowly she turned her eyes toward him and saw him urging her to take the shot. She lifted her rifle and drew a bead on the animal, but she could not do it.
Manfred looked at her with surprise, and then with a shrug, swept his rifle to his shoulder and the shot rang out. The deer leapt into the air, took two staggering steps, and fell dead.
“Come!” Manfred shouted.
“No,” she replied, “I'll wait here.”
Lylah watched as he put his gun down, ran along the side of the creek until he got to the deer and then pulled out a knife and slit the animal's throat.
He returned to Lylah with blood on his hands, wiping it off with his handkerchief. His eyes were bright, and he was alive with the excitement of the kill. “A fine specimen.” He nodded in satisfaction. Then he asked curiously, “Why didn't you shoot?”
Lylah shrugged. “Oh, I don't know. She was so beautiful.”
The thought seemed to trouble von Richthofen. “Yes, she is beautiful. But deer are put here by God for us to use, are they not? Man has always hunted for his food.”
Lylah, half ashamed of her squeamishness, laughed. “Yes, you're right, of course. I'm just too fainthearted, I suppose.”
“Well, let's go home now,” he said. “I'll send a servant out to bring the animal in.”
They turned and walked back beside the creek for a long time. Finally Manfred said, “Let's stop and rest. You must be tired.”
They stood beside a huge fir tree, savoring the silence. Then Manfred began to speak. Lylah could tell he was troubled. Finally he came out with it. “What about the war? Do you hate all of us Germans?”
Lylah was startled. “No, of course not! Why would you say that?”
“It's a terrible war. Men on both sides are going to get killed.”
“I
am
afraid,” she confessed. “I have a brother in the French army and other brothers at home. They will probably enlist if America enters the war.”
They talked about the war, and Lylah could see that Manfred felt differently. And yet, he was not what she had expected a typical German soldier to be. She had seen the propaganda of the bull-throated Prussians with their bayonets drawn on women and children. But the days she had spent with him had revealed a side of Manfred von Richthofen that most people never saw. Deep down, in the heart of this hunter was a gentle spirit. She saw this in his obvious affection for his mother and for his brother, Lothar.
“I don't hate you,” she said. “How could I ever hate you?”
Manfred did not know what to say. During her visit, he had gone through some strange and traumatic experience. He was tremendously drawn to this woman, although she was older than he. He had never seen a woman so beautiful, yet so dynamic. She was not like German women, who were totally submissive and obedient to their husbands. This woman would be herself. She would maintain that flamelike spirit he admired in her. But he was confused.
Finally he said, “We cannot be lovers. We are on different sides.”
At his words, Lylah was shocked to find that she had even considered taking Manfred as a lover. Impulsively, she put her arms around him and kissed him passionately. He responded at once. Her hands clasped behind his head and the softness of her lips seemed to stir him, more than he had ever been stirred. He held her even closer, inhaling the sweet scent of her hair.
Finally he lifted his lips, and she drew back, whispering, “Love isn't a matter of politics, Manfred.”
He had not been drawn to the young women who swarmed around him from time to time. But there was something of his mother in this woman that moved him. He knew he would never find another like this one.
He put his arms around her once again and simply held her. Finally he said, “I have a feeling for things, Lylah. I always have. One thing I've always known is that I would be a great soldier. I know that, but I don't know
how
I know it.”
They clung to each other, and Lylah felt herself filled with a longing she had seldom known.
“Lylah, we're making a mistake to let ourselves be drawn together,” he whispered hoarsely.
Lylah drew back and gazed up into his eyes, tears gathering in her own. She had seen the yearning beneath the proud military bearing. “I know, my dear.” And then, with a shake of her head, she said, “I've been making mistakes all my lifeâ¦and I just can't seem to help it.” She drew his head down and pressed her lips to his.
As they kissed, a hawk flew over, surveying the scene before swooping down forty yards away to sink his talons into the quivering flesh of a small rabbit. But the German soldier and the American actress did not hear. They clung to one another, oblivious to the world about them, knowing only that something had come to them, and they would never be the same again.
T
HE
L
AFAYETTE
E
SCADRILLE
A Y
ANK IN THE
M
UD
A
lmost at the same instant his sister was embracing Manfred von Richthofen in Germany, Gavin Stuart was standing in a trench somewhere in France, up to his ankles in thick yellow mud. The shrimpy smell of the sea was in the air. It was raining again, a soft rain that tapped on his helmet, looking for a chance to trickle down inside his poncho. The duck boards along the bottom of the trench were awash in the fetid, mustard-colored water, and all but one of the men in the Third Platoon section of the Zig-Zag had pulled their boots up onto the fire step.
The only one who didn't mind was a rather plump farm boy from Nancy that somebody had nicknamed âGirly.' His smooth, girlish face wasn't really as pretty as all that. Sitting on the fire step with his feet in the water, his eyes fixed blearily on the other side of the trench, his mouth hanging open, he bore little resemblance to any girl or anyone elseâalive.
He'd been dead for some time, and the smell would have been noticeable by now if the water lapping at his puttees hadn't smelled far worse. Besides, Gavin and the others had learned to deaden their nostrils to all smellsâall except the warning odors of scorched garlic, crushed uranium leaves, or a sickeningly sweet version of the smell of new-mown hay. All this was very much like the poison gas the other side kept sending their way.
A star shell hissed into the rain-swept sky and became a brilliant ball of frozen lightning, dangling from a little paper parachute.
Down the line, a British infield cleared its throat nervously and was answered by the irritated woodpecker rattle of a German machine gun. As the gun fell silent, Gavin stood up straighter and gingerly raised the brim of his helmet about an inch above the sandbags of the parapet.
“See anything, Yank?” Sergeant Albert Moritz demanded. He was a thick man, in body and in face, almost like a cave man. “The Neanderthal,” they called him behind his back. Tough and crude, he'd been a dockworker in civilian life, and, some suspected, a petty criminal. Since Gavin had come to the Legion, Moritz had been the bane of his existence.
Gavin didn't answer for a moment, but continued to scan the eerily lit landscape between the opposing armies. There were six lines of rusted and badly tangled concertina wire between the sandbags in no-man's-land. A country inn and a tracked forest had once occupied part of that lunar landscape. The inn had been flattened in the first drum fire, but the stump of a fieldstone chimney still stood above the tortured earth a little to Gavin's right. Directly in front of his position, standing Pisa-like in defiance, was a single miraculously preserved toilet bowl. Its white porcelain was washed clean by the rain and, like the chimney, the porcelain commode was an important landmark to the Third Platoon. Everything else out there looked pretty much the same.
“Well!” Moritz demanded, his voice rising. “Do you see anything, you booby, or not?”
Startled, Gavin shook his head. “Not a thing, Sarge. Not nothing moving out there.”
He looked back again, peering into the darkness illuminated, from time to time, by shell fire, and by a moon that seemed cleaner in its pristine whiteness than anything Gavin had seen for a long time.
Mostly the landscaping of no-man's-land consisted of shell holes, all kinds of shell holesâfrom the convenient shelters excavated by Allied 75s and German Whiz-Bangs to the dangerously deep water-filled craters left by Howitzers, or the awesome house-swallowing pits torn out of the earth by the occasional big stuff hurled by railroad guns. Most of the area had been hit over and over again. Crater walls overlapped in a bewildering pattern of rain-soaked earth, shattered tree trunks, abandoned packs, rifles, helmets, and all the other trash the war had dropped in the long months since the balmy summer of 1914.
Thenâ¦there were the men. Soggy figures sprawled here and there in the chalky magnesium light. They were scattered across the wet mud like the discarded rag dolls of a very untidy little girl who didn't like to take care of her toys.
Gavin felt a movement and turned to see that Sergeant Moritz had stepped up beside him and was also peering into the darkness. “Go get some grub from the kitchen, Yank,” he said. His face looked blunt and lumpy, unlike most of the rest of them who had lost weight during the long siege. “And be sure you get something fit to eat. Don't let that swine of a cook give you any of that garbage like last time.”
“Right, Sarge,” Gavin said and jumped back into the sucking yellow mud with a squelching sound.
“Take somebody with you,” Moritz added. “Bring it back hot.”
“I'll go.” Marcel DeSpain got to his feet and looked around for a dry spot. Finding none, he placed the butt of his rifle in the middle of the trench. There was no way to keep anything clean in the trenches, and most of them had long ago given up, all except DeSpain and Gavin. “Let's go,” he said. “Maybe they'll have something fit to eat this time.”
DeSpain, a young man of twenty-five, was of medium height and very thin, with high cheekbones and fine gray eyes, sunken deep into his skull. His dark brown hair was lank and uncut, like the rest of them. He would have been a handsome young man if he had not been whittled to the bone by trench warfare.
“Let's go,” he shrugged. “Not that we'll do any good.”
The two soldiers made their way along the trench. Gavin thought how different war was than what he had imagined. Like most young men, he had envisioned racing across the field with the sun overhead, flags waving, drums beating, bugles blowing. But since the Battle of the Marne and especially since the first Battle of Ypres, the war on the Western Front had settled down to a system of trenches that stretched all the way from the Alps in Switzerland to the North Sea close to Dunkirk.
Dug into deep ditches four hundred miles long the two armies faced each other. These trenches had become almost like little cities. Each trench line had an alternate fire bay with bulkheads so that it twisted into zig-zag formations. Support trenches, one hundred or more yards back of the front line, were less pretentious.
Every conveniently sighted knob along the front was made a strong point, usually a thick-walled bunker or a concrete turret, housing weapons. Machine guns replaced the fire diagonally across the front so that one bullet swarm interlocked with another, splintering an attack with crossfire. Outposts were pushed forward into no-man's land to warn of night attacks or to ambush enemy patrols.
All too often, the front line rested on a marshy flat, and wherever the trench fell, it was shielded by a thicket of barbed wire strung in broad aprons, sometimes a hundred and fifty feet or more in depth. Soldiers called “Pioneers” trimmed the barricades by night, and enemy artillery tried to blast them apart by day. At times, the distance between the trenches was so close that the Germans and the Frenchmen fought within hearing range, often screaming at one another. At other times, the lines were more than a mile apart. The pattern followed no sensible plan that Gavin could see, but then nothing about this war made any sense.
Great gun duels would go on for hours, often, he knew, arising from nothing more significant than a nose-thumbing incident from a soldier. First, the small weapons would be put into play, followed by the complete orchestration. Where the opposing trenches were close, the soldiers were mutually immune to the big guns, but were vulnerable to grenades, mortars, automatic fires, and trench raids.
All this ran through Gavin's mind as he and his comrade made their way back through a diagonal trench until they reached the field kitchen. The cooks occupied a space underneath what was called a bomb-proofâwhich was nothing more than a hole in the ground, covered by sandbags. Inside, the half-naked cooks had their stoves going, and one of them looked up grumpily and asked a question in French. Marcel replied sharply, and the two men fell into some sort of argument. Finally, DeSpain seemed to have won the argument, for the cook began slamming pots and pans about. Ultimately, the two soldiers left the cookshack with four iron pots of food, enough for the whole squad.
When they made their way back through the trenches and reached their own sector, they called out, “Sarge! Here's the grub!”
Moritz nodded. “I'll keep watch. See that all the men are fed.”
Gavin and Marcel carried the food down the line. Each man had his own pan, and when they were all served, they found themselves a place and sat down to eat.
DeSpain stared into his tin plate and shook his head. “I wouldn't eat this slop if someone brought it to me in a restaurant,” he said moodily. “What is it, anyway?”
Gavin stared into his own plate and said, “Better not to know, I reckon. Just eat it and be glad it's hot.”
The two soldiers ate the tasteless stew slowly, pausing from time to time when a flare went off, waiting to see if a bigger shell would follow or if the sergeant would call out that an attack was forming out of the trenches. They finished and Gavin cleaned his plate as best he could with his filthy handkerchief, then stuck it back into his knapsack.
“Well, no dessert,” he said, and grinned at DeSpain. “If I was home, I'd be having apple pie or blackberry cobbler.”
“Blackberry what?” Marcel demanded.
“Cobbler! You pick blackberries, you make crust, and you put the blackberries in the crust with their juice, and when they're all bubbling up, you eat it! Gosh, I wish I had some right now!”
DeSpain stared with sunken eyes at his friend and shook his head sadly. “You're not likely to get any
coobler
around here,” he grunted. He was a gloomy young man, given to writing poetry which he was careful never to show to anyoneâ¦except once or twice to Gavin. Gavin had no literary taste at all, so he bragged on it enthusiastically.
DeSpain had been in the army since a week after war broke out in 1914. He had come in with high hopes, but like many others, he had seen so many men killed and so little accomplished that now he was completely stripped of any hope of victory, or even of an end to the hostilities.
As they sat there, he began explaining again his theories of war to Gavin. “You see, as long as armies are mobile,” he said, waving his hand around, “they can change positions. One can catch another from the flank, sneak around, and come in behind them.”
He glared around at the trench and continued, “But in a hole like thisâthese trenchesâthe enemy never moves and we never move. Nobody can catch anybody else by surprise.”
“Well, sometimes there's a surprise attack,” Gavin argued.
“Yes, there is.” Marcel laughed bitterly. “And what happens? Either they rush across into our machine gun fire and
they
all get killed, or we rush across into theirs and
we
all get killed. And the bodies pile up in no-man's-land out there.”
Gavin was still young enough and green enough to have some hope. “Well,” he said, “it'll have to end sometime, won't it? I mean, we can't keep on killing each other forever.”
“That's right, my friend,” Marcel nodded, disillusionment scarring his face. “It will end when everybody is dead. When the Germans are all dead and we Frenchmen are all dead and the English are all deadâ¦when you are dead and I am deadâ¦then it will all be over.”
The two young men went on arguing and finally Sergeant Moritz said, “All right, you two. Get up on the step. I want you to watch. I think I saw something moving out there.”
But there was nothing moving. Nor for the next two weeks did anything seem to move. By day, the artillery blasted the barbed wire, and by night the Pioneers laid it back, but nothing happened.
The only thing that gave Gavin any relief in the filthy trench was that from time to time during the day, he would look up and watch the planes fly over. Just by observation he had learned to tell the Allied planes from the German planes, and twice there had been a dogfight in the air over him, when he had almost been able to see the faces of the pilots. Unfortunately, the Germans had won both times, and the French planes went down somewhere behind his line. Once the victorious German had flown his plane over the trenches, waggling his wings. He was so close Gavin could see his goggled face.
Gavin dreamed about those planes. It was why he'd come to France in the first place. He would have sold his soul to be a pilot. But no matter how much he protested or attempted to transfer, his pleas were met with ridicule.
“You're a trench bug, Yank,” Sergeant Moritz would say with a short laugh. “You'll stay here 'til you're buried in the mud like all the rest of us. Now, get back to your place.”
Nevertheless, Gavin hoped that someday, something would change. This was no life at all; rather, it was like a living death. The new year came and went and still nothing changed. Twice his unit was called on to go over the top to charge the German machine guns. But the first time, the attack was called off before they got ten yards from their own trench.
The second time was not the same. Gavin crouched on the fire step, waiting for the signal. When it came, he threw himself over the top and ran clumsily toward the hole in the barbed wire that had been blown by their artillery. He looked around to see Marcel DeSpain running beside him, behind the rest of the squad.
Suddenly it became like a mad race to Gavin. He had to get to that trench, where those Germans poked their spiked helmets up, and kill them.
If I could do that
, somehow he reasoned,
the war would be over. And I could go home
.
The tremendous rattle of the machine guns addled his senses, and the jarring sounds of grenades exploding on both sides of him added to the nightmare. Still he ran forward, aware that others were falling like limp bundles into the mud. Some were caught on the barbed wire and began screaming at once. Sometimes the scream would be cut off abruptly as machine gun fire raked the body.