Hope Takes Flight (22 page)

The letter was signed simply, “Helen,” and Lylah sat there reading and rereading it until darkness closed around the cottage. Still she sat there, all other thoughts far from her mind. She got up and began to pace, then built a small fire, and sat, gazing into it until long after midnight, seemingly trying to see in the flames some indication of what she should do.

At last she made up her mind. “I will go to Germany!” And the decision somehow banished the strain. She knew it would be difficult; she would have to find some way to cross an enemy border, to travel in an alien land. But she was resourceful, and she had friends who could help.

Early in the morning, she stepped outside in the frigid air and looked at the stars, which shone coldly, like pinpoints of frozen light. “I will probably regret it,” she said aloud, “but then I've regretted most things I've done in my life. Still, I must see him!”

“Oh, it's good to be back in Schweidnitz again, Manfred!” Lylah was walking hand in hand with Manfred through the woods, and the crisp air and the seared leaves that had turned glorious shades of red, yellow and orange scored the gray September sky. She had arrived three days earlier, after great difficulties in passing through the German borders, and had caught the wounded flyer completely off guard.

He smiled at her now. “I'm glad you're here, Lylah.”

Manfred was vastly different from the man Lylah remembered. He looked thirty-five instead of twenty-five, and had become much quieter. He was prone, she discovered, to fall into long silences and she could not enter that part of his life.

Nevertheless, she had managed to lift his spirits a little, for as Helen had said, “You will be better for him than any medicine those doctors from the hospital have given him.”

Helen had also filled Lylah in on some of the details of Manfred's accident. “When he crashed,” she had said, “he was thrown into a thornbush, and some of the thorns penetrated his scalp. When they shaved his head, they shaved off parts of the thorns, leaving smaller ones embedded. It was only after Manfred complained of violent headaches that they discovered what had happened and removed them.”

“Look!” Lylah exclaimed, pointing suddenly at a stag who had stepped out from behind a thick stand of trees.

Von Richthofen glanced up, then shrugged indifferently. He had not brought his gun; indeed, since coming home, he had said nothing at all about hunting, which puzzled his family.

His father was troubled over the changes in his eldest son. “Something is wrong with Manfred,” he told his wife. “He's lost his hunting edge.”

Lylah had noticed this as well, but it did not displease her. She stood watching the stag, then reached for Manfred's hand again and squeezed it. “I'm so glad you're better,” she said. “I was so worried when I heard you went down. I didn't sleep for days.”

He turned to face her and put his arms around her in an unexpected gesture of affection. Lylah was surprised, for his lovemaking was usually confined to the privacy of her room. She was almost certain now that both his parents suspected that the two of them were lovers, though neither of them had ever said a word. Now she surrendered to his embrace, and held him tightly in return.

Always before, he had been the hunter and she, the quarry. But this visit had been different. Lylah had held Manfred in her arms for hours, as if he were a child, and it had been a surprisingly joyful experience for her. She had discovered that, as she suspected, he had given up all hope of winning the war, and now he spoke of losing everything, even Schweidnitz. His titles would mean nothing when Germany lost the war. “I'll probably be out digging potatoes with the rest of the serfs,” he had said listlessly.

Now as she held him, she felt a fierce maternal emotion such as she had never known.
I want to protect him
, she thought.
I want to just hold him and keep him safe. He's sick, and tired, but I could make him young again.
She pulled his head down and kissed him with a lingering caress. “Come on. Let's walk some more. I want to see the pond where we saw the wolf last year.”

This idyllic interlude lasted for two weeks, and then it ended, as she had known it must. They kissed good-bye at the same railroad station where he had brought her the last time. They had said their farewells in private. Somehow, as he gazed down at her, unable to make a public display, she felt a frightening sense of loss. “Good-bye, my dear,” he said quietly. “God be with you.”

Manfred had never mentioned God to her before; or at least, not with any certainty. Now she saw the doubt in his eyes. She wanted to hold him, to comfort him. She wanted to do anything except leave, but the conductor was there, waiting for her. She put out her hand, taking Manfred's, which felt very thin and weak. “Good-bye,” she whispered. “Good-bye. Oh, God be with you!” Then she turned and stepped aboard the train as it moved slowly away from Germany and away from the only love she had ever known.

A
s Owen Stuart marched along the streets of Paris, he felt a sudden surge of pride. His outfit, the First Division, was marching along through a crowd that was unbelievable. They pushed forward until it was difficult for the lines of marching soldiers to make their way along the streets.

Owen, of course, could not understand much of what was being shouted from the streets, but some shreds of English came to him. “Long live the United States! God bless General Pershing!”

Owen had come to this war reluctantly, but now that he was here he was determined to do his best. Looking up, he saw the confetti falling from the buildings, but he also noticed that among those who cheered the American newcomers, there were many who were weeping. Some of them were women dressed in black, and Owen suspected these were the widows of those who had already fallen while fighting in the trenches.

After what seemed like a long time, the army was drawn up and there were many speeches. General Pershing himself was there, and Owen watched with the rest of his fellow soldiers as the general put a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. He straightened up and cried with a loud voice, “Lafayette, we are here!”

There were speeches and music, but afterwards Owen found his way to the barracks just outside of Paris with the rest of his company. Eddy began to pester Sergeant Mack Stone. “Hey, Sarge, what about getting a little leave? After all we're war heroes, ain't we?”

Stone glared at Eddy with a baleful eye. “Wait'll you win a few medals, Eddy, then we'll see about that leave.”

Owen grinned at Eddy's eagerness. He himself felt less certain. “What comes next, Sergeant? Will we be going up pretty soon?”

“Nah, you boys ain't tough enough yet. We gotta make soldiers out of you first.” A cry of protest went up from many, but Stone was adamant. “You'll get your shot, don't you worry. But first you're going to have to learn how to fight in the trenches. It ain't like huntin' pheasants in Texas.”

Owen listened as Stone talked about the difficulty and the times that lay ahead of them, and he thought about what a bad year 1917 had been for the Allies. Nothing, it seemed, had gone right. The Communists had overthrown the Russian Government, and the French had mounted a massive attack that cost a hundred and twenty thousand men in just five days. The British had done no better. They had attacked at Passchendaele Ridge deep in Belgium and had lost three hundred and forty thousand men.

Owen looked around at his fellow soldiers and a grim thought touched him.
Some of these fellows won't be on earth too long. I've got to let them know about Jesus as well as I can.
It was hard going. He had already discovered that most of the soldiers, if they were not already believers, had pretty hard hearts. But he knew that God had put him here for a reason.

Two days after the parade, the unit was crammed into freight cars that stank terribly. They were crowded in so that the stench got into their clothes, but finally they reached the Vosges where they disembarked.

If the men had been hoping for an easier time, they were disappointed. There were no barracks so they slept in barns, unused buildings, or even outside. It was impossible to keep clean. As for the food, it was simply terrible.

They got along well enough with the French civilians. The French were amazed at the phenomena of gum chewing, which they had not seen before. There was a certain amount of trouble over the Yanks and the young French women that were overly eager to fraternize, but the sergeants kept close watch on that.

Their training was hard, and one of the most difficult things was to maintain discipline. Most of Owen's fellow soldiers had little regard for the French soldiers. After all, they hadn't won the war, had they? But many of them changed their mind after a group known as the Blue Devils came to help with their training. They were as tough as any men Owen had ever seen. They could walk the Americans into the ground even carrying fifty-pound packs. Danger to them seemed to be a mere form of entertainment. One favorite trick they had was juggling three live hand grenades, which gave Owen a great deal of concern. He always watched the phenomena from a safe distance.

As for the training itself, there was no more drilling with wooden guns, which they had had to endure back in the States. Everything was as real as their officers could make it. Owen and the others crawled under barbed wire with machine gun bullets singing over their heads. This was training such as they had not dreamed of, and Owen knew at least five Americans that died during the process.

Finally the training was complete, and Owen was relieved to hear that the unit would be placed in a relatively quiet sector. He understood that this was to give the men some feeling for battle before the actual event.

The trenches were filthy and, after a rain, filled with mud. It was absolutely impossible to find any comfort in them. He was surprised, however, to discover that there were at least some elements of humanity between the two armies. He discovered that if a German and an American patrol met during certain periods, the men of both armies kept moving, ignoring the enemy. He could not understand this, but he was told by a French sergeant that the rules had developed to make the war at least endurable.

The Americans, of course, had no understanding of this. They knew that they had come over to kill Germans, and to them, at least at this stage in the game, war was nothing but a game. The toys were guns and machine guns and large artillery weapons. Things were quiet enough so that they began to depreciate the fighting skills of the German soldiers.

At nightfall on November 1, 1917, Eddy Castellano and Kayo Pulaski were on night duty in the trench. They had been warned by the French sergeant not to shoot at everything, but at two o'clock in the morning, when Eddy saw movement, he whispered, “Hey, look, Kayo! There's a bunch of them Krauts!”

Pulaski peered through the darkness and grinned. “You're right! Let's give it to 'em, Eddy!” The two men immediately opened fire with their rifles, yelling and whooping when they saw at least two of the men go down.

The French sergeant appeared at once, cursing them soundly. But Eddy said rashly, “Shut up, Frog! I'm here to shoot Germans, and I'm shootin' 'em wherever I can find 'em!”

The two men wasted no time in boasting about the number of Germans they had killed. But at nightfall the next evening, a 250-man company of
Stosstruppen
—the German version of the Blue Devils—filed into the trenches near where the First lay crouched in its trench. At 3:00
A.M.
, gunflashes lit the eastern sky. Tons of explosives left fountains of earth and stone leaping skyward.

“Barrage! Barrage!” the noncoms shouted, and the shells began to fall in the pattern of a hollow square, or box. The box crept slowly forward, deliberately searching out its objective. At last it fell around Owen's platoon, and fifty-eight men were isolated within the walls of death. There was no escape. It was Pulaski who began screaming in fear.

Eddy, however, slapped him across the mouth. “Shut up, stupid! You can dish it out, but you can't take it!”

Owen pulled Tyler Ashland into a small crevice when he found the boy just standing, paralyzed, staring blankly across the lines. The air was filled with the sound of bursting shells, and Owen was sure that the next volley would wipe out the whole platoon.

Suddenly the explosions on one side of the box stopped, and gray-uniformed men, wearing helmets that came down over their ears and necks, came rushing in.

“There they are! The Krauts!” yelled Eddy Castellano, jumping to his feet. “C'mon, you guys! Let's get 'em!”

Most of the men leapt up and ran to meet the wave of German soldiers, who dashed toward them, bayonets extended. There was a clash as Eddy engaged the leader. He slipped the German's bayonet aside, reversed his own rifle, and smashed the face of the storm trooper with the butt. As the man fell helplessly, Eddy ran his bayonet through the man's body, screaming as he did so.

The rest of the men, seeing this, entered the fray. The Germans were amazed at their reception. Instead of panicking, as they had expected, the outnumbered Yanks fought back with everything that came to hand—rifles, grenades, knives, chunks of wood, fists.

Back at the edge of the box, Owen found he could not move. The screams of the dying smote his ears, and he knew his job was to join those who had already entered the fight. He tried to get to his feet, but for some reason discovered that he could not. He could not think clearly, but one thing was certain. He himself was not afraid of death, but for the first time Owen was actually seeing men die, and it shocked him in a way he had not expected. He knelt beside Ashland, who made no attempt to get up, but covered his head with his hands.

I've got to go!
Owen thought.
I've got to help the men!
Yet still he could not seem to move. The idea of killing a man was one thing; he thought he had prepared himself for that. But as he watched Eddy cutting down the storm troopers, screaming and yelling, and the others joining in, he suddenly could not bear the thought of taking another human life. He thought he had settled this long ago, but thought,
An idea is one thing! But the reality of blood and death is something else again!

Finally he forced himself to his feet and moved slowly toward the battle zone, the racket beginning to subside as the Germans retreated. Reaching one of the wounded German soldiers who looked up in fear, no doubt expecting to be bayoneted or shot, Owen moved by, leaving the man in shock that his life had been spared.

By this time the doughboys had reached a place of safety and were laying down heavy fire. “Okay, you guys!” Eddy shouted. “Let 'em go!”

As the last of the retreating Germans disappeared from sight, Eddy came back and found Owen standing in front of the wounded man. Seeing that the German was alive, he lifted his bayonet. Owen caught the barrel of the gun, and the two men struggled for a while.

Ripping his rifle out of Owen's grasp, Eddy spat out, “What's the matter with you? Kill that Kraut!”

“He's a prisoner,” Owen said. “We can't kill him.”

There was battle madness in Castellano's eyes. “Maybe you can't!” He stopped suddenly, regarding Owen with distrust. “Where were you when all the fightin' was goin' on? Last I saw, you were in a trench holdin' that baby's hand!”

Owen could not answer even though he could see that the others were waiting to see what he had to say. Eddy studied him, then a sneer curled his thin lips. “I knew you couldn't be any good…no preacher is!” He whirled away and said, “C'mon, you guys! Let's get these prisoners back! And Tom's taken a pretty bad cut. He needs to get back to the field hospital.”

As the men scurried around, moving out the wounded and rounding up the prisoners, Owen stood looking on helplessly. As they left, he found himself completely alone. His hands were trembling. In the eyes of his friends and fellow soldiers, he had just been labeled a coward. Even worse, perhaps, was the nagging doubt in his own mind. Was he a coward? He tried to tell himself that he had never really been afraid. As a fighter, he had fought some of the toughest men in the country, but he knew that wasn't the same thing.

Slowly he retraced his steps, and when he finally got back to headquarters, he noticed that even Sergeant Stone was studying him with a peculiar look in his light blue eyes. “Pretty rough out there, Owen?” he asked. When Owen did not answer, he said, “Well, sometimes the first gunfire gives a man buck fever. You just sort of freeze up.” He slapped Owen on the back. “You'll be okay, Owen. Next time. Next time you'll show 'em!”

But as Owen turned away, he knew it wasn't over, and he was not at all sure that next time would be any different.