"Manfred! Manfred!" Lothar cried as he came into the room. Manfred was in a dressing gown, sitting limply in a chair, a wet cloth over his eyes. It had been a bad morning. He couldn't get any medicine for it, there was a shortage of everything.
He lifted a corner of the cloth and looked at his brother. "What is it?"
"The American pilots, the American pilots! They made their way here!"
He put the cloth back. "I'm sure they'll enjoy making small talk with you. You can practice your English."
"But Manfred -- one of them speaks German! And he is the Americans' best ace!"
Now that was interesting. "Let me get dressed," he said.
The American pilot had brought a friend or two, but as he was the only German speaker, too much of the burden of conversation was on him. He was in the drawing room, sipping wine and making small talk with Mother, who as always dominated the scene from her chair, the image of proper German domesticity. The sound of footsteps behind him made him turn around and get up.
"Herr von Richthofen! How good to meet you," he said. "Though we've already met."
Manfred blinked. "Excuse me?"
Mother said, "How rude, Edvard, introduce yourself. Manfred, this is the American Herr Rickenbacher, the pilot."
"Rickenbacker," he said. "Like I said, we've met, but this is the first time in person. You remember, it was that time at the end of October. By God, it was a hell of a fight! And then, on the Armistice Day. You are so easy to pick out in that red plane of yours." He was a big, raw-boned sort of person, with rough homely features -- like a Red Indian out of Karl May.
Manfred held out his hand. "I am pleased to meet you -- in person, I mean, Herr Rickenbacker. Thank you, Mama, for entertaining our guests. I'm afraid we're going to be talking flyer matters for a while."
Freifrau von Richthofen got to her feet. "Very well, boys. Father is resting himself but may come down shortly. I will inform the servants that we will be having Herr Rickenbacher -- Rickenbacker and his friends for dinner." And on that note she left.
They began talking flight then. They compared the Spad and the Fokker D.VIII, the supply of fuel and food, and the comparative virtues for rest and recreation facilities of Paris and Berlin. Rickenbacker had to translate when they hit a technical patch, and sometimes the poor fellow was overwhelmed.
He was getting exhausted obviously, and in an attempt to escape said, "I understand you have a trophy room. Can we see it?"
Manfred was a little surprised. "But it will be your friends there. Are you sure?" They were sure. He looked at Lothar, who shook his head.
So he alone took them upstairs, unlocked the door, and let them see the colorful swathes of fabric with the serial numbers of his victims, the pictures of his planes and his men, and the cups. For some reason they seemed particularly taken with the silver cups. "I thought you had more kills than that," one of them said.
"I do, a hundred two. But silver is impossible to get now. There is a shortage of everything. There should be more items when my boxes finally get here, all the things from the past few months."
Then it came back to him. "There is one thing in those boxes that I suppose should go to someone's relatives. The pilot of yours -- "Balloon-Buster" he was called -- Herr Luke? I have his identification." And he told them about the death of the pilot and the funeral.
They were silent for a moment. Then one of them said, respectfully, "My God."
They spoke among themselves more quickly now and then Rickenbacker said, "You did that for an enemy!?"
"Him today . . . it might have been me tomorrow. He deserved --"
Being hugged by American pilots was most embarrassing.
CHAPTER 2
Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, United States of America, Thursday, December 25, 1919
"Heer Praetorius" the young Dutchman had a private room. The doctors had pronounced the operation to clear up that problem with that old skull fracture a success. They understood, they knew how the War had made even the Dutch people suffer and it was small wonder that Mr. Praetorius had not been able to get decent care there.
It had begun back in September, when that letter from Rickenbacker had finally made its way to Schweidnitz. And not a moment too soon, either. Manfred had been spending days on end in bed, blinded by the pain. At least it kept the eager old soldiers wishing to have the blessing of the Red Battle-Flyer on their private armies from getting it.
The arrangements would take some doing. But at least they had kept the Albatros -- the government, or governments, had had better things to do than look after every last obsolete plane. Lothar had taken first seat, much to his brother's disliking, but he realized that he could not rely on his own skills. And Lothar had just got married himself, last summer, to Doris von Keyserlingk, and she was already expecting.
They flew from Silesia to Ostfriesland and landed outside a small town near the Dutch border. Armed with a satchel of cash, Manfred Praetorius (and how, if three centuries ago, Johann had decided not to add "high court" to the name, it might have been that) took the train to Amsterdam, and thence by ship to New York, and train again to this town in the middle of America. (Was it him or were prices going higher than he had ever gone?)
A telegram had preceded him, of course, so the Ace of Aces had been able to explain that his friend Mr. Manfred Praetorius from Holland would be coming in. He had spent the ocean voyage in his cabin, and for the railroad trip had wrapped up his face in scarves. If any of the doctors, nurses, and so on had recognized him they hadn't mentioned it.
He was beginning to fully understand and even speak English as it was spoken by the Americans now. He would take the papers, read the captions under the pictures, and try to make sense of what was going on. He had stammered out, "If there German paper here . . . can read little German" and been given one, along with a lecture on how America was trying to get rid of the Hun in its blood. The news from home was still bad, the new government was having trouble holding on, but were the Reds any better? In spite of the end of pain, he slept poorly, being eaten up with worry.
Today, though, he had a visitor. "Heer Rickenbacker to see you, Heer Praetorius," the nurse had said, in a mix of Dutch and German. Oh well.
"Hello, Eddie. How are you? I am fine," he had said, in his careful English.
Rickenbacker had smiled, and said "Keep up the good work, Manfred. Can you leave us for a moment?" The change of target befuddled them both for a moment until the nurse realized that she was the one being addressed and left.
Then he had launched into his proposal. "There's a lot of pilots on the market now, and not so many jobs. Some of them are performing, what we call in English 'barnstorming'. There were some people I saw with an idea about backing me and when I told them what we could do they jumped for it . . ."
"I'll have to think about it."
Rickenbacker looked at him crossways. "It's real flying. Better than pretending to be a movie hero."
Then Manfred realised what he was thinking. This was for Rickenbacker, not so much for him -- and Rickenbacker really needed the work. "Yes, let me think about it. Would tomorrow be fine?"
In the night he had concerns about huckstering, about the degradation of going into trade. The world had turned upside down since his days in the Cadet Corps, though. Perhaps he could get across his side of the story. And in the morning, when Rickenbacker came back, he was satisfied with the answer.
Afterward, he noted wryly, the airplane was something of a fake; it had been built from the remnants of three Dr. I and worse yet had an American engine, a "Liberty" they called it. But as it stood there in the Florida sun, bright and new in its shiny red paint, his heart paused for a moment, and memories of those who had passed on filled his mind. Then he looked at the side, under the rim of the cockpit, and sure enough it said "MANFRED V. RICHTHOFEN". The Spad next to it said, of course, "EDWARD V. RICKENBACKER".
"I figured I needed a middle name. The 'V.' is for Vernon," Rickenbacker said.
"And here I thought you were an Adelmann!" he had replied.
Rickenbacker laughed at that sally, that presumption of nobility. "Oh my God!" he finally said once he could speak again. "During my racing days, there was this story, that I was really the Baron von Rickenbacher, a Prussian nobleman from the Uhlans, cut off by his father for going into racing.
"No, we're just ordinary Swiss folks. You have to meet my mother some day, since I've met yours. Now come on and let's fly."
When they started the engine, the smell of fuel and lubricant that washed over him from it blew some of the miasma out of his soul. He tried the controls, taxied to the head of the strip, looked down it, and then gunned the engine. It didn't quite react the way he was used to, but he had matters under control, and when the plane lifted into the sky it lifted a burden from his heart.
He flew a loop around the field, getting his bearings. Then, a glance upwards, and there was a Spad! Old reflexes kicked in. He turned tightly and got on the man's rear. Before he could get into a firing position the American twisted away and he had to dodge. Turning, he lined up . . .
Twenty minutes later, when he finally broke off, thinking, I would have broken off long since, if there had been ground fire, he made his approach, lined up with the strip, flared out, and brought the Dr. I in for a landing. The fight had exhausted him. He sat with his head against the control panel for a moment, breathing heavily, then began lifting himself out of the cockpit.
What was that sound? They were applauding!
Rickenbacker had already landed, now he was striding over to him. "Damn, but that was one hell of a fight!" he said. "I'm glad we were only playing at it! Here, let's go see the ground crews!"
The ground crews seemed willing to spare them the trouble. In a moment they were surrounded by men, pounding Rickenbacker on the back, lining up to shake his hand, and just gawping at the great pilots. And God in Heaven, there were some Luftstreitkräfte people! From other units, looked like, but "Herr Major, I had a cousin here who sponsored me," or "I worked my way over here on a merchant ship, and when I heard of this I had to join."
The Americans were mostly from their Air Service, too. "I heard what you done for Frank Luke, sir, and that was a Christian thing to do," one man said.
Shortly thereafter his career as a mountebank began. The planes were too fragile, really, to fly around from place to place, and so it would be a matter of loading them onto flatcars and taking the train. Someone would have to ride with the planes, to make sure no little boys pushed pencils through the fabric. Then they would get to their next booking, which was usually some sort of fair. Sometimes there would be horses and he would have a chance to look, to ask, and even occasionally to ride. And there was that one dead week, where something had fallen through, and he went out hunting. Now that was a rest, and the American hills of North Carolina were beautiful, if nothing like home. It was a refreshing break, and his bag had been quaintly reassuring; he had found a land rich in worthy targets. Except for the time he had been rushed away from one. "Fer Gawd's sake, Mr. Red Baron, don't shoot that thang! Hit's a polecat! Ye'll smell wuss 'n a dead dawg!" the guide (if you could call him that) shouted as he dragged Richthofen away from the little black-and-white striped animal he had in his sights. So that was the cause of that unpleasantly sweetish smell in the woods!
At least the guide had believed he was who he was. There was that one time in Tuscaloosa when the reporter had asked Rickenbacker, "Who's the actor playing the 'Red Baron'?"
Rickenbacker had stared at the man, incredulously. "And who's the actor playing 'Cap'n Eddie Rickenbacker'?" he had said, finally.
"What kind of a joke is that?"
Even the presentation of a German passport, an identity card, and several letters all made out or addressed to "Manfred Frhr. v. Richthofen" (thus the new style mandated by the new order of things) did not quite seem to convince the reporter. On the other hand, the little boys always seemed to know who he was and some of them could, it seemed, describe every one of his victories in almost mind-numbing detail. He signed a lot of picture postcards; himself, or the two of them with the platitude, "Foes in War -- Friends in Peace". Or some other things, there had been that little boy in New Haven . . .
The two airplanes taxied out, took off, and went to their corners, so to speak. Below, the announcer bellowed, "America's Ace of Aces, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, and Germany's Red Baron, Rittmeister Manfred von Richthofen, will now reenact for our viewing pleasure their famous, thrilling Halloween Duel!" The demotion had at first seemed odd. He had been promoted. So had Rickenbacker, who said, "I don't feel I earned it properly, and besides, everyone knows me as 'Captain Eddie' -- just as everyone knows you as 'Rittmeister'." So captain he was, though they were both majors.
They were keeping score. So far it was even, if you ignored the huge number of draws. At night Manfred thought of long words such as "asymmetric forces", in the daytime he thought "the Spad is faster, the Fokker is more maneuverable," and in the air he reacted too fast to really think. Today was another draw.
They landed and went to the stands to press the flesh, as Rickenbacker put it. Manfred remembered youth groups, discontented workers, adoring women, and soldiers trying to get their minds off the misery of the Front. If not so extreme, it was still the same here. Women tried to kiss him. He was accustomed to being the true love of every German woman able to walk, and the attention embarrassed him. Men wanted to shake his hand, be photographed with him. And boys, of course, made sounds like machine guns. Those boys in Tennessee, for example . . .
But here was one boy who did not run around, make gun sounds, and get into firing position. He sat on the front row of the bleachers, a pad on his lap, and an empty trouser leg dangling to the ground. His face was set in concentration as he wrote -- no, sketched!
Manfred was accustomed to maimed men. All too often, in the streets of Schweidnitz, he would pass some truncated man, in the tunic of the old Army and a nether garment made to fit over his legless torso, begging for sustenance. He had tried to always have a hundred-mark note with him for such circumstances, but by the time he had left even a hundred marks would not go far enough.
Maimed men were bad. But this was a little boy.
An older man with that certain sort of family resemblance stood beside him. "Alfred, look up now, here they are," he said.
The boy put down his pencil as they approached. "Hallo," he said. "Sorry but I can't get up." It was German -- not quite, that dialect the Jews spoke? The ones in Poland, at least.
"Hello," he said, and Rickenbacker echoed him.
"Sign my picture?" the boy said, and turned towards them his drawing. Drawings. He had shown each one in his cockpit, twisting and turning to catch the other, with absurdly-rendered bullets blazing by. Oh, to be a boy . . . He inscribed his name below the painstakingly rendered MANFRED VON RICHTHOFEN under the one picture, and then Rickenbacker did the same for EDWARD V. RICKENBACKER.
"Are you going to be an artist when you grow up, master . . . master?" Manfred said.
The older man broke the veil, "Caplin," he said. "Alfred, say thanks to Cap'n Eddie and the Red Baron for signing your drawing."
"Thank you," the boy said. "Danke schaen."
"Well, you look more like a cartoonist to me," Rickenbacker said.
The boy said solemnly and seriously, "Oh, no, I've higher ambitions. I want to go to Paris and have a wild time and do some loose living and look down on the common folks." Then he grinned and said, "Right!!!"
Manfred wasn't even sure the boy knew what loose living was.
That was one of the more memorable incidents of the year. As the autumn turned to winter, the fairs and other exhibits became rarer and rarer. It was bad enough he had been unable to attend Father's funeral. He had not flown the day he got the news. Rickenbacker announced it, and offered refunds. Hardly anybody took any, and when he got up the next morning there was a wreath outside the door of his room, and a pile of sympat
hy cards by it.
The grind took them from town to town, across the breadth of this enormous nation. The more of it he saw, the more convinced Manfred was that the last thing they should ever have done was to provoke them into conflict. The resources of America were enormous; not the least of them being the people. There were so many Germans, almost as many as in the Reich! He would sit with Eddie on long train rides across the country and talk of the future. Those might be airplane rides some day; they imagined soaring above the cinders and the dust, seeing the land below without having the feeling of killing or being killed.
They wrapped up with an exhibition in Dayton, where the Wrights lived. Or one of them, anyhow. There was a base of American airmen and soldiers there, which meant the spectators were many and knowledgable; Manfred's hand grew tired signing autographs. But Herr Wright, the surviving Herr Wright, did not come. He felt grieved that his invention was an invention of war.
It was a pity. Herr Wright had flown the Kronprinz, in the days before the war, and Manfred had wanted to return the favor.
He said his goodbyes to Eddie until next year, and took the train to New York, where he could catch a ship for England. He'd miss Christmas with the family, the first Christmas without Father, but New Year's would make up for it. And besides, he could finally fulfill the other promise he had made.
"Mr. President, the King!"
The guest of honour was exempted from drinking that toast, on the grounds of not bearing allegiance to said monarch. All the rest of the Royal Air Force officers gleefully drank the Loyal Toast, then sat down.
The mess was bright and cheery. The war was over, they had won, they had shown the Hun a thing or two, outside Britain was building a land fit for heroes such as they themselves. Small wonder they could have plum pudding and roast beef, a giant turkey, mince and spices of quince, fresh filet of flounder, stewed asparagus, and of course sherry and port. It was a Christmas dinner to remember, even if they hadn't had that particular guest of honour.
A Man and a Plane: An Alternate Germany Page 3