Hope Takes Flight (15 page)

“I didn't know you would be here,” Lylah said. She felt strangely out of place and hastened to explain. “You've heard about Helen?” When he shook his head, she continued quickly, “She had to leave England. The anti-German feeling was growing. It got so bad she almost grew ill.”

Manfred stared at Lylah. “I tried to get her to come home long ago, but she would not. How is she?”

“Not well, I'm afraid. She caught a cold and it got worse, so when she decided to come home after the play closed, she needed someone with her on the trip. It's not easy getting to Germany from England these days.”

Manfred nodded earnestly. “I should think not, but what about you? How did
you
cross the lines?”

“Oh, Americans aren't bothered much. Germany is very respectful of America, hoping we won't get into the war, I suppose.” She did not move, but stood there remembering their intimacy and wondering what was behind the silence he was manifesting. Finally she said quietly, “I've missed you, Manfred.”

Von Richthofen looked at her, taking in the classic beauty of her face and the slimness of her figure, and once again, as he had done hundreds of times before, he let his mind dwell on those golden days they had known. The days of love that he had never thought would come to him.

“I have never forgotten,” he said quickly and stepped forward and took her in his arms. He kissed her hungrily, and she responded, pressing close to him, holding him tightly. So caught up were they in one another that neither gave a thought to the possibility someone might enter through the door and find them kissing.

Finally Lylah broke away, putting her hands on his chest. “Oh, Manfred, I've been so afraid! Every day I would read the newspapers, dreading to find your name there!”

Manfred shook his head. “No, you will not find my name there. Not yet, anyway. I know it.”

Lylah stared at him, her eyes large and moist. “I pray not. How long will you be here?”

“For a week. And you?”

A smile softened Lylah's lips, and she whispered, “For as long as you're here.” Then she hesitated. “It isn't right; it's mad, you know! What can we possibly gain from this, with things the way they are? My country and yours will be at war soon! What then? It's madness!” she repeated.

Manfred von Richthofen was a man of iron will. By sheer determination he had brought himself into a place of prominence. But he had discovered that, if there was one area of his life that did not seem to be in keeping with his rigid discipline, it was where Lylah Stuart was concerned.

Night after night he had lain on his bed and thought of the softness of her lips, the eagerness of her love, and had marveled that a man such as himself could be stirred by these feelings. He was, in a way, ashamed of them, seeing them as a weakness, and wondered why he alone of all the men in his squadron did not take advantage of the many adoring young women who pressed themselves forward, offering nights of love to the German airmen. He had kept himself aloof, saying that he did not have time for such things, but that was not the reason. He knew it now.

“I could not forget you, Lylah,” he said. “And I do not understand it. When the others are grabbing at any woman that comes by, I find myself thinking of you. And I have not been able to put you out of my mind.”

“Have you tried? Do you want to forget me?” Lylah whispered.

“No…yes…oh, I don't know.” He rubbed his forehead with a nervous gesture and looked at Lylah in confusion. “I worry about you. I've said that I don't want to get married because I might make some girl a widow.”

He turned to her, took her hand and traced with one finger the fine blue veins on the back, then raised it to his lips and kissed it. He put his arms around her and held her close. “Yes,” he said, his voice almost harsh, “it is madness. We both know it, but whatever this madness is that's drawn us together, I cannot pull away from it, my dear. I never will.”

The two stood there, holding one another, wanting each other more than either had thought possible and knowing that there was no way happiness could come out of it.

All week they tried to forget about the war. Manfred was already sick of it and, even though he was the hero of the hour, he had confided to Lylah that Germany could not win, in his opinion.

“There are too many of them,” he said grimly. “And when the Americans come in, it'll all be over.”

But they did not talk of the war very much. They spent their days hunting, or at least roaming the woods. More often than not, when it came time to make the kill, Lylah would hold his arm and whisper, “Let them go,” and he did.

On the last night, he came to her room, as he had every other night. They held on to each other with a sense of loss. Lylah finally broke into tears, something that had never happened to her before. “This may be the last time we'll be together,” she whispered miserably. “I can't bear the thought of it.”

Baron Manfred von Richthofen had the same fear, but he could not stand to see her weep. So he held her and tried to bring some cheer into the moment. “This isn't the last time,” he said. “Not for us. It can't end like this. I feel it too strongly.” He reached up and brushed the hair back from her forehead and then traced her cheek with his finger. “I've told you I see things. I know, somehow, that I am going on to greater things than I've already known.” He laughed lightly, saying, “You've fallen in love with a fortune-teller.” Lylah laughed with him, but there was no real joy in her.

The next day, he put her on the train. They stood stiffly, shaking hands as his mother and the servants looked on.

Manfred's mother kissed Lylah on the cheek. Something in her expression told Lylah she knew what had been going on. She was a very wise woman, Lylah knew, and although she had not said a word, Lylah suddenly understood that she had been aware of their love from the beginning. The baroness said nothing now, but held Lylah close. “You must come back…you and Manfred.”

Then Lylah turned away, tears filling her eyes, and found her seat on the train. As the train pulled away, a darkness fell across her spirit—a heaviness that seemed to weigh upon her more than anything she had ever known. All the way across Germany to the coast, where she boarded a neutral ship bound for England, she felt it.

And when she set foot on English soil once again, she knew that things would never again be the same.

W
hen Manfred von Richthofen returned to his base at Douai and assumed command of Jasta 11, he announced that a competition would begin at once. The Boelcke squadron, Jasta 2, was ahead of his group by one hundred kills, and von Richthofen coldly put it to his pilots that they would have to try harder.

Manfred embraced the war, chasing Englishmen and immortality in his scarlet scout, wearing his country's highest military decorations even under his flying suit, ordering more silver cups, sending serial numbers and other souvenirs back to Schweidnitz as he molded Jasta 11 into his own image.

But while he himself was successful, the General Staff was smarting under the massive beatings at Verdun and the Somme and were beginning to wonder if the war could ever be won on land. The final answer was given by Admiral von Holtzendorff, Chief of the Naval Staff, who maintained that five months of unrestricted U-boat attacks would finish Britain. Hindenburg telegraphed an ultimatum to the Kaiser, who signed a formal order on January 31 for his U-boats to be launched the following day, despite warnings that such a thing would bring the United States into the war. Immediately 111 U-boats put to sea in search of almost anything to torpedo.

In addition to the U-boat warfare, the Germans pulled back to what was called “the Hindenburg position,” a zone between the existing and proposed front lines, twenty feet deep and sixty-five miles long. So far as possible, it was to be made into a wasteland—every village destroyed, every well polluted or filled in, every tree and other obstacle cut down, and every resident removed. The area was to be turned into a flat exposed belt of devastation that could be easily watched and heavily bombarded.

But although the army might be on the defensive, von Richthofen was not. During the first two weeks of February, 1917, while he was developing Jasta 11, he became a tyrant. His pale face was frozen into a mask as he commanded that any pilot returning with holes in his tail must have a good explanation. They had begun to call him “Der Rote Kampfflieger,” or “The Red Battle Flyer,” sometimes shortened to simply “The Red Baron.” He scored his twentieth and twenty-first kills on February 14, and that night ordered a regular trophy cup and a second double-sized one.

More than two weeks passed before he scored again, but when he did, on March 3, it was the beginning of his greatest string of victories. Kills that were largely responsible for the Royal Flying Corps' term for the following month—“Bloody April.” It was the happiest, and by air war standards, the most productive month of von Richthofen's life.

In spite of unusually heavy rains and even a late snowfall, the British kept coming, and von Richthofen shot down twenty-one of them, including four in one day. Around Easter, he was promoted to
Rittmeister
, or Cavalry Captain, and by the end of the month, had surpassed Boelcke's forty victories to become the leading ace of the war and his country's paramount hero. General Ludendorff was to proclaim that The Red Battle Flyer was worth two whole divisions, and while the effect of the remark on the infantry can only be imagined, it did wonders for the morale of the Air Service.

As he strolled down the streets of Paris on a sunny April afternoon, Gavin Stuart was blissfully unaware of the fiery trial into which the Royal Air Force was about to be plunged. He could not know that 151 Allied planes would soon be shot down in flames, while the German Air Force would lose only thirty.

But Gavin had left behind at the base all thoughts of the patrols he had been making almost daily and was concerned primarily with having a good time and seeing the city. Already, on his first day in Paris, he had walked the streets until his legs were tired. Pausing to rest, he watched the passing parade of people and thought, with a streak of wry humor,
I should have been in the infantry. I've forgotten how to walk!

He had been given an unexpected reprieve in the form of a three-day leave when an epidemic of problems developed among the aircraft. So many were backed up for repairs that there was simply nothing for him to fly.

But when Captain Thenault had told him to take a three-day leave, Gavin had been ribbed by his fellow pilots. “Stay away from those girlies, young fella,” Bill Thaw had warned. “They'll do you in!”

Now as he stood there he suddenly realized that he had three days and nothing to do. He knew no one in Paris. His whole life had been taken up with his squadron, and now, as he looked up at the tall buildings and ambled down the wide streets, he wondered just what to do with himself. He knew full well what the other members of the squadron would do. They would head for the saloons and bars, where, according to their reports, plenty of women were available for all sorts of entertainment. But Gavin did not feel inclined to throw himself into the fleshpots of the great city.

As early as it was, several ladies of the evening had already approached him with bright phony smiles, speaking one sentence in the only English they knew, as far as he could tell: “You vant to have a good time, soldier?” He had been embarrassed by these encounters, for his time in the army had not yet been sufficient to free him from the inhibitions he had brought with him all the way from his childhood in Arkansas.

The city amazed him, and all morning and most of the afternoon he walked down side streets, stopping to taste the wares at the fruit stands and to listen to the music of strolling accordion players that evoked memories of home. He recognized one of the songs—“There's a Long, Long Trail A-Winding.” He had heard it sung in English. The song had a sad, plaintive melody and a rather macabre message that, sooner or later, we're all going to die. But this time a short, stocky Frenchman was singing it with a happy lilt, pumping at the accordion with all of his might.

Gavin took a note out of his pocket and gave it to the street singer, who smiled and began singing it again. But Gavin had heard enough and, with a wave, he moved on down the street.

At noon he went into a café and ordered a sandwich. He was joined at the table by the proprietor, Louis Cerdan, a veteran of Verdun, with one arm missing and three medals pinned to his shirt.

“Tell me about that war up in the sky,” Louis said. “What's it like up there away from the mud and the blood?” His Gaelic face grew stern. “All I saw was the trenches.”

Gavin nodded in acknowledgment. “I was in a few of those myself in the Legion. Transferred to the air war, though.” He leaned back and sipped the wine the proprietor kept pouring into his glass and thought about it. “Well, it's better up there. There are no rats to nibble at a man's face while he's asleep, and it doesn't smell bad either.”

He looked off into the distance, recalling the rush of air, humming through the struts and the wires, that turned into a scream when one went into a dive. He thought about the moistness of the clouds as one dived through them, and how he had occasionally flown out of a cloud to find himself right in the middle of a German formation, dropping suddenly to avoid their fighter planes.

“It's…clean up there, too. And one thing about it, you either get them or they get you. It's a quick death, anyway.”

After a while Gavin looked out the window. “Well, it's getting dark. I think I'll take another little stroll.”

Louis glanced keenly at the young man. “You have no one in Paris? No friends?”

“No, I don't know anybody.”

Louis said quickly, “Then you must join our family for the evening. Our house is small,
mon ami,
but we will be happy to have you stay with us.”

Gavin was touched by the offer. “I'll take you up on it…and thanks.”

He took his meal that night in Louis's home. Gavin enjoyed being with the four children ranging in ages from three to ten. They were amazed when he got down on the floor and played games with them just as if he were one of them. Louis and his wife looked on, beaming, and finally when the children were sent to bed, Louis said, “You Americans are odd people. Odd people, indeed.”

Gavin laughed. “I guess everybody thinks everybody else is odd, Louis.”

He went to bed and slept well, except for once when he was startled awake by a nightmare. In the dream, Gavin was being machine-gunned by a huge fighter plane, spewing bullets at him by the thousands. He was burning up—his gas tank exploding, throwing fire into his face—when he woke up in a cold sweat.

Gavin sat up in bed and wiped his forehead. He sat there until the tremors running through him began to subside. Then he laughed and said out loud, “You're going crackers, Gavin Stuart! You can fly right through real bullets and never flinch, but go to sleep in a bed and nearly die of a heart attack over a bad dream!”

He slept fitfully the rest of the night, got up early the next morning, and had breakfast with his host. Insistent on leaving, Gavin tried to pay for his night's lodging, but saw that it would be in poor taste. He left with Louis's invitation ringing in his ears: “Come back, come back anytime! Our house is yours!”

Once again Gavin roamed the streets, enjoying the relative quiet of the morning air and the stillness of the city, which seemed to be much like a giant, barely stirring as he struggled to wake up.

By noon, however, Gavin was tired of just watching and was seriously considering finding some sort of female companionship. The thought displeased him, however. He had seen some of the women his fellow pilots had met—hard-eyed women with bright but artificial smiles, hanging on to the flyers. It appeared to Gavin that as soon as those men were out of the way, the predatory females would once again be looking for new victims.
Victims
, he thought.
That's how they see us. I don't think I need that
.

He had stopped for a glass of cool juice at a stand when he looked up and saw, to his surprise, a building that looked familiar. At first he thought he had walked by it in his wanderings of the previous day, but then he realized that it was the hospital where he and Bill Thaw had been taken after Thaw had been shot down and wounded.

At once he thought of the nurse—Heather Spencer—and the memories came flooding back of the last time he had seen her, of the gentle smile that had been on her lips. He had thought of her often, sometimes in the middle of the night after a terrifying dream of conflict in the air, when his nerves had been jangled and shaken. Knowing he would lie awake for hours, reliving the combat, he had sought desperately to distract his mind, usually going back in his memory to the farm in Arkansas, thinking of the innocent days he had spent there a long time ago, halcyon days. But more than once his thoughts had strayed to times he had talked to the English nurse. Something about her manner had been different from other young women—a calmness and quietness and certainty about her, and a gentleness that he found attractive. And now as he stood looking at the hospital, he suddenly decided he had to see her again.

He walked across the street to the graystone building and found a sour-faced woman in a nurse's uniform seated at a desk in the foyer. “I'd like to see Nurse Spencer, please.”

Looking up at him, the dour nurse asked sharply, “Why do you wish to see her?”

“Why…uh…she was kind to a friend of mine,” Gavin stammered. “And I got to know her a little bit while I was here with him. Can't I see her?”

“No, you cannot.”

Her manner irritated Gavin and he snapped, “Why not? We're on the same side in this war, aren't we? Do you think I'm a German spy?”

The nurse had eyes like steel marbles. “No, you're not a spy, I can see that. But she's not here. She's off duty for the week.”

Her answer deflated Gavin. “Oh, well, I guess in that case—”

He had turned and was walking away when a voice behind him spoke up, “You'd like to see Heather?”

Gavin turned and found one of the nurses had come up to walk beside him. She was a short woman with black eyes and black hair peeping out from under her cap. “I can tell you where she lives,” she went on. “She's a friend of mine.”

“I'd appreciate it,” Gavin said quickly, and then added honestly, “We don't know each other very well. A friend of mine was brought in wounded, and I came with him. But I got to know her a little while I was here.”

“You're the American, aren't you? Heather's mentioned you several times.”

“She has?” Gavin was amazed that the aristocratic Englishwoman would even remember him, much less speak of him. “I–I didn't think she would even remember me,” he said.

“Oh, yes. She remembers you very well. I'll give you her address. I think she'd be very put out with me if I didn't.” She got a pencil from one of her pockets, found a scrap of paper and scrawled something on it, then handed it to Gavin. “You'll have to hire a taxi; it's too far to walk.” Her eyes crinkled. “Tell her if she doesn't want you, that I'll take you.”

Gavin blinked in astonishment, and then he grinned at the nurse. She was very plain, but she had merry eyes. “Hey, I may take you up on that,” he grinned. “Thanks a lot.”

He left the hospital, hailed a cab, and looked at the writing. “Do you know where this is?” he asked, and handed the slip to the driver, a tall thin man with a sallow complexion and a pair of muddy brown eyes.

The driver glanced at the paper and said, “
Certainement!
” in an insulted tone. He tossed the paper aside and sent the cab careening away from the curb with a display of carefree and rather hazardous driving manners. Weaving a path through the streets of Paris, he managed to avoid the horses, the carriages, and the loud cabs. The journey took so long that Gavin began to think he was being cheated. He'd heard of taxi drivers who would drive people all over the city to get to an address that was only one block away, but he had put himself in the man's care and said nothing.