The Mammoth Book of Fighter Pilots (24 page)

A flash of memory! I saw a dogfight at Lens. Two machines went for each other and collided head on. The fuselages went down in a ball of metal, fused together, and the wings continued on alone for quite a piece before they fluttered to the ground.

We come at each other like mad boars. If he keeps his nerve, we will both be lost!

Then, he turns off to avoid me. At this moment he is caught by my burst. His aircraft rears, turns on its back, and disappears in a gigantic crater. A fountain of earth, smoke. . . . Twice I circle around the impact area. Field gray shapes are standing below, waving at me, shouting.

I fly home, soaked through and through, and my nerves are still vibrating. At the same time, there is a dull, boring pain in my ears.

I have never thought about the opponents I have brought down. He who fights must not look at the wounds he makes. But this time I want to know who the other guy was. Toward evening, at dusk, I drive off. A field hospital is close to where I shot him down, and they will have probably brought him there.

I ask for the doctor. His white gown shines ghostly in the glaring light of the carbide lamp. The pilot had received a head shot and died instantaneously. The doctor hands me his wallet. Calling cards: Lieutenant Maasdorp, Ontario RFC 47.” A picture of an old woman and a letter. “You mustn’t fly so many sorties. Think of your father and me.”

A medic brings me the number of the aircraft. He had cut it out, and it is covered with a fine spray of blood flecks. I drive back to the
staffel.
One must not think about the fact that a mother will cry for every man one brings down.

During the following days, the ear pains become worse. It is as though one were chiseling and boring within my head. One April 6. I bring down another one. A Sopwith Camel taken out of the middle of an enemy gaggle. It is my twenty-fourth victory.

As I land, I am so overcome by pain I can hardly walk. Richthofen stands on the airstrip, and I stumble past him without salute toward the quarters.

We only have a hospital corpsman. The group has not yet been authorized a doctor. The corpsman is a nice, heavyset guy, but I don’t have too much faith in his medical competence. He digs around my ear with his instruments so I think he wants to saw open my head. “The back of the ear is filled with pus,” he finally pronounces.

The door opens, and the captain enters.

“Udet, what’s the matter with you?” he asks. The corpsman explains.

The captain pats me on the shoulder: “Now be gone with you, Udet.”

I protest: “Maybe it’ll go away.”

But he cuts me off: “You’ll take off tomorrow. Out here you have to be healthy.”

It is hard for me to leave my new
staffel
, to interrupt my success. He knows this, because we all more or less believe in the Rule of the Series.
¹²
Because of this he escorts me to the two-seater himself next morning. He stands on the airstrip and waves at me with his cap. His blond hair glistens in the sun.

The train arrives in Munich early in the morning. The city is still asleep, the streets are almost empty, the stores
closed, and only here or there the snarl of shades being drawn up. I amble along Kaufingerstrasse, past Stachus. “Home again,” I think, “back home.” But the feeling of home, the warm familiarity with the things about, still eludes me. A city at dawn is as remote as a person asleep.

I go into a cigarette shop and phone my father at his office. In spite of the early hour, he is already there. He holds much store in always being the first in the office.

“Ernie,” he says, and I hear him take a few deep breaths, “Ernie, you are here?”

Then we arrange not to let mother know and that I will call for him at the factory shortly before lunchtime. First, I want to see a doctor.

It is our old family doctor, and he receives me with a booming hello. With many, this may be a professional touch, but with him it comes from the bottom of his big generous heart. Then he examines me and becomes serious.

“Finished with flying, young man,” he says, “your eardrum is gone and the inner ear infected.”

“That’s impossible.” In spite of all efforts I can’t prevent my voice from shaking.

“Well,” he pats me on the shoulder, “perhaps Uncle Otto can patch this thing together again. It would be better if we would stay on the ground, though.”

The visit has depressed me. On the way to my father, I can’t shake my thoughts. No more flying – that can’t be so. This would be like putting black glasses on me, to let me wander around for the rest of my life. Then it’s better to see for a few more years and then be blind forever. I resolve to follow the advice of the doctor only so long as I decide it is best for me as far as I am concerned.

And then I meet my father. As soon as I step into his office, he comes out from behind his desk and toward me in big strides. “Boy, my dear boy,” he says and stretches both hands out to me. For a moment we stand and look at each other, and then he speaks, a bit breathlessly.

So Sergeant Barlet’s Winchester, a bit of booty, had reached him safely and he had already taken it hunting twice.

How simple it is for men in France. They know no embarrassment when they say hello or good-bye. They embrace and press bearded kisses into each other’s face, regardless of where they walk or stand. I have often observed this in railroad stations. We sit across from each other, separated by the desktop. “By the way, you wrote me the other day about a Caudron you couldn’t bring down. Maybe the machine was armored?”

I shake my head.

“But, yes, you wouldn’t know,” he continues intently. “I thought we should also armor our planes, at least the cockpit and the motor. Then the greatest danger for the pilot would be alleviated.”

I disagree. For the artillery “rabbits” this may be all right, but for a fighter it would be completely out of the question. With a crate thus armored, one certainly couldn’t climb above one thousand meters.

“That doesn’t matter. The main business is the safety of the pilot.”

“But Dad,” I say a bit loftily, “what strange ideas you have about flying.”

The enthusiastic zeal in his face flags. “Yes, you are probably right,” he says in a tired voice, and at the same moment I feel a rueful shame come up within me. How little I understood him. The armor had been forged in his heart to protect me, and I had tossed it onto the scrap heap without even looking at it.

“At Krupp’s they are supposedly trying out a new light metal that is bulletproof,” I say in an attempt to pick up the lost thread, but he waves me off: “Let it lie, son. Let’s call Mother to let her know I’m bringing a guest so she’ll set an extra place on the dinner table.”

And then we are home. Father walks into the room ahead of me. Mother is setting the table. I hear the clatter of the silver and then her voice: “Did you read the Army report? Our Ernie has shot down his twenty-fourth.”

I can no longer hold back. I run into the room. She throws the silver onto the table, and we are in each other’s arms. Then she takes hold of my head and holds me at arm’s length: “Sick, son?”

“Oh, only a little bit in the ears.”

She calms down immediately. This is singular about her: She is absolutely certain that nothing untoward is going to happen to me in this war, and she insists upon this with a certainty as though God had made her a personal promise, sealed with a handshake. Sometimes it makes me smile, sometimes I am touched by the innocent trust in her belief, but slowly her confidence crosses over to me, and I often believe myself that the bullet has not been cast for me this time.

We eat. In between she plies me with questions, and I answer with discretion. I don’t speak of my fight with Maasdorp. I don’t want to disquiet father, but I am also held back by an unaccountable aversion. Across sauerbraten and dumplings I cannot speak of a man who was all man with a hero’s heart and who fell through my doing.

Yes, now I am home. One is immersed into this feeling like a warm bath. Everything relaxes, one sleeps late, eats much, and gets spoiled. I rarely go to town during the first days. What should I do there? My buddies are in the Army, many already dead, and I don’t feel like strolling among strangers.

But I should really go see old Bergen. But I dread this visit. The old man is said to have become a depressive since he received the news of his son Otto’s crash. What can I say to console him? It is easier to fight than to stand by idly to look at the wounds wrought by the war.

I have to go to the doctor every day. He is not very happy with the healing process. I let him talk now; it no longer touches me like it did the first time. One morning, just as I return from one of my visits, I meet Lo
¹³
in the Hofgarten. We had known each other from the old days as youngsters know one another. We had danced together a few times and had been on picnics in company with others.

We walk along together. In her delicately patterned silk dress she looks as though she had blossomed just this morning. When one looks at her, one can hardly believe that there can be such a thing as war. But then she tells me that she is working as an auxiliary nurse in an Army hospital. In her station lies a man with a bullet in his spine who has been dying for months. Every few weeks, his relatives make a long trip to see him, take leave of him, and he continues to live on. But he must die, so all the doctors say.

She looks at me with surprise, as I interrupt her curtly: “Wouldn’t you rather talk about something else?”

For a while she is offended. She pushes out her lower lip and looks like a child who just had a chocolate bar taken away from it. In front of her house we make up and make a date for an evening at the Ratskeller.

In the afternoon I go to Bergen’s. The maid leads me into the living room where old Bergen sits behind a newspaper. He is all by himself. Hans and Claus are in the field, and his wife died a long time ago. He lets the paper sink and looks at me over his pince-nez. His face has become startlingly old and withered, his Van Dyke hangs like a snowy icicle.

How helpless is one before the pain of another. “I wanted to . . .” I stammer . . . “because of Otto . . .”

“Let it be, Ernst, you wanted to look up Otto once more.” He gets up and shakes my hand. “Come.”

He opens the door and precedes me up the stairs. We stand in Otto’s room, the little mansard Otto occupied as a student.

“So,” says old Bergen with a flitting wave of the hand, “you can see everything here.”

Then he turns around and walks out. His footfall diminishes down the stairs. I am alone with Otto.

In the little room, everything is as it was then. On the chest and on the book shelves stand model airplanes that Otto had built himself. They look beautiful, these models. All the types known at that time, reproduced to the most minute detail. But when they flew, they fell like stones. That was ten years ago.

I step up to the children’s desk with the green, ink-spotted cover and fold up the top. They are still there, the composition books, the diary of the Aero Club Munich, 1909. Its members were between ten and thirteen years old. Every Wednesday there was a model building group in our attic, every Saturday a big airplane meet by the Stadtbach or the Isar. Otto’s planes were always the most beautiful, but mine, ugly sparrows though they were, flew farthest. Somehow, I had the knack. And in his neat, child’s handwriting he had noted down everything in his capacity as secretary of the club. “the aviator,
Herr
Ernst Udet, was awarded first prize for the successful channel crossing of his model U-11” it says there, because my type had gotten across the Isar without accident.

Everything is so neatly placed, as though he had arranged everything before taking his final leave. There are letters, all the letters I had written to him, packed in small bundles and marked with the year they were written. On top is the last, unopened. In it, there is news that I have finally succeeded in getting him released for my
staffel.
The letter closes: “Hurrah, Otto!”

There are the drawings. He always did the right half, I the left. The photographs all are there, beginning with those from earliest childhood. He has even saved the ones from the “Meet at Niederschau.” I jumped with the first glider constructed by the Aero Club and cracked up. The bird broke its beak and Willi Goetz, our chairman, informed the people of Niederschau that the ground magnetism in the area was too strong for flying. Then, group shots from the first days of dancing school loves, then the war, motorcyclists, the first flying suits, after the first victory. Under each photo the date and in neat lettering the caption in white ink. He had lived my life with me.

There is something strange about the friendship of boys. We would have rather bitten our tongues than to admit even by a single word that we cared for each other. Only now do I see it all before me.

I close the desk and go down the stairs. Old Bergen again sits behind his paper. He gets up and shakes my hand; there is no pressure, no warmth.

“If you want some of Otto’s things, Ernst,” he says, “take what you like. He liked you most of all his friends.”

He turns away and begins to clean his pince-nez. I have none, and a few tears run across my face. I stand in the hallway for a while before I step out into the street.

I was twenty-one then, and Otto was my best friend.

In the evening I meet Lo at the Ratskeller. I wear “civvies” because I want to forget the war for an evening. But Lo feels hurt. I don’t look sufficiently heroic.

We eat tough, stringy veal and large, bluish potatoes that look as though they were anemic and had spent too much time in the water. Only the wine has ripe sweetness and gives no indication of the war.

An old lady comes by with roses. Lo glances sideways at the flowers. “Leave them be,” I say in a low voice, “they’re all wired anyhow.”

But the old one has heard me; she puts down her basket and plants herself squarely in front of us.

“This I like fine,” she shrieks in a broad Bavarian dialect and stems her arms into her hips. “Such a fine little snot sits around, all dolled up, and wants to take the bread out of the mouth of an old woman. In the trenches, that’s where you belong, young man, that much I tell you.”