Locklear suddenly showed us the way. Soon, I prescribed to the postmen a new method of “collecting sacks at destination” that would singularly increase the speed of mail distribution.
On our orders, the landing of postal aircraft was henceforth authorized only at the terminal points of their itineraries; in the course of the flight they were to release their mailbags at a precise point. The localities overflown all possessed, close to their railways station, a target surmounted with metallic nets destined to deaden the shock of the bag riving on the ground. It was surrounded by a cordon of lights at night.
Every day, a chart was updated of the skill of all the postmen, recording both the number of the pilot and the cargo, and the zone, more or less distant from the center of the target, in which the sacks had fallen.
I installed an analogous system of delivery in our commercial dirigibles, at least for merchandise that could tolerate it: papers, curtains, underwear, etc.
The results were so brilliant that the Americans and the English were kind enough to congratulate me for having made such an original service practical, and they begged me to let them know the methods in order that they could apply them in their own territories.
The best recompenses that I could give my expert pilots always consisted of a twenty-four hour excursion to France, for useful purposes. Trips to France have formed German youth since time immemorial.
The Elite Intelligences that have deigned to follow me here will have divined that the slightest details of the machines employed in our civil aeronautics were submitted to the most severe checking by my engineers. The uniformity of the modes of attachment of postal sacks and bombs for example—their absolute identity—was one of the fundamental conditions of the rapid transformation of civil aircraft into military aircraft. In fact, the operation had to be facilitated to the extent that when the decisive moment came, it no longer consisted of anything but a simple change of merchandise, as I have already said. If ever standardization was rigorously applied to an item of machinery, I can affirm that it was to our no. 48 attachment hook and our no. 13 release mechanism!
BRILLIANT COMMERCE
One last stage of material preparation remained for me to complete: a redoubtable stage in which the German art of infiltration was to be affirmed in all its fecundity. Eternal glory to Heinrich Mannheim, Director General of Imperial Camouflage! All the work in this instance, is his! Without him, whose ideas are more abundant than the young eels that swim upstream from the mouths of our rivers and, like them, are able to slide between the most densely-packs stones, I would have been struck by impotence. In fact, the entire machination of my aircraft, all the skill of my pilots and all the discipline that solidly enveloped my work—the whole splendid dream—would have vanished if the fabrication of explosives and gases had remained prohibited to me by the Allies, if the bodies of the bombs and the detonators had been lacking on the day of our mobilization.
Your Majesty knows the slightest details of the miraculous conceptions of Heinrich Mannheim. I have asked him for permission not to reveal the details here, for, even if she is the Master of the Earth, Germany ought never to disarm, apprehensive of Mars and fearful of Venus. I shall only recall that the industry making pots of jam for export suddenly took on enormous proportions, that clockmaking received official encouragement, that immense cylindrical tanks were mounted in the flanks of the nacelles of our large transport dirigibles, for the delivery of soda and potash. I have said enough. Ah, God be praised again!
What does it matter if I do not reveal where the immense provisions that mechanics and chemistry poured out for us every day were dissimulated, crate by crate and drop by drop, all over the territory of the Reich? We were careful not to fall into the Romanticism of caverns, subterranean working and woods, which the Allied spies did not fail to visit, but simply to accumulate our reserves in proximity to our aviation camps and our Zeppelin hangars.
It was sufficient to deceive the Monitoring Committees. Heinrich Mannheim always had the genius to make them mistake chalk for cheese.
(His Excellency is seized by a fit of laughter, which even spreads to His Majesty himself, which the Court accompanies with a discreet tapping of feet.)
PETTY MANEUVERS
The Great Week was approaching. The Empire had just been restored. Your Powerful Majesty, resplendent with the Holy Spirit that descended thereinto, intended to show the Universe what a Hohenzollern can do when he allows his genius liberty. I, the humble servant of you will, the master of the hour when the Holy Flight would rise up above the Fatherland, was impatient finally to see the Orb of European domination surmounting your crows. The Holy Flight was about to make Your Majesty the Super-Emperor!
(An explosion of Hochs! resounds. The great dignitaries are all on their feet, their arms extended toward the Emperor. The ladies of the court bow down, placing their fans over their breasts. Several members of the audience cannot hold back their tears, as sweet as the honey that drips from the bread of children.)
But it was necessary to increase prudence and cunning even further before suddenly drawing the sword. It is at the moment that the athlete is about to leap the ditch that he measures its width most carefully. He makes sure of his feet so that they will not slip; he swings his arms several times as if to rehearse the leap. He bends his back to verify its flexibility. He searches for the ardor in the very fear that grips him. It was January 1924; the blow was to be delivered in April, at Easter. The gravest decisions had to be made to ensure the impact of our punch.
In fact, it became evident that the enormous secret could no longer be known solely to Your Majesty, the Director General of Camouflage and myself. The intervention of our ground troops, all linked to one another by threads invisible to the Allies, constituted a necessity, since, when France’s head was bloodied, it would be necessary the very next day to require our infantry and cavalry to tie up the prey. The Minister of War had, therefore, to commence an immediate secret mobilization.
Similarly, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was also necessarily about to play its role, since, a few days before we destroyed Paris, it was necessary for some diplomatic incident, no matter how slight, to give us the right to “riposte in advance of the attack.” It was important that we could once again show the eyes of the world the truth: the incorrigible militarism of France, the invariable honesty of Germany. Our own people would take a singular comfort in the demonstration thus made of our right and our virtue!
Finally, it was still necessary for me to extend a few poppy-fumes over Europe and America. While the Empire’s Chancellery, weaving the commencement of a diplomatic incident with its delicate fingers, assured the Earth yet again of our frantic enthusiasm for peace, and while the Social Democrats cried out to all the socialists of all the democracies that four million of our soldiers would go on strike before any declaration of war, I was careful to provoke myself, in our own aeronautics—and I confess, by my own hands—accidents so numerous that within a month it had lost all value in the eyes of the Allies. Honor to the proud children of Germany who were immolated in those diplomatic catastrophes!
Every morning, the newspapers of Paris and London were discussing our bankruptcy in the air and depicting Germany as their readers desired to see her—which is to say, deprived of a fleet by England, deprived of an army by France, and deprived of aeronautics by German stupidity!
Even in our dear Fatherland I strove to sow panic, disbelief in our serial effort, in order that the rare spies distributed on our soil could certify in good faith to our adversaries that Germany, demoralized, definitely had no more hope of recovery. I had it printed in all our dailies that the Minister of Aerial Transport was about to be summoned to appear before the Supreme Court.
How, in such circumstances, would pitiful Germany be able to think of a revenge?
(His Majesty smiles. The court laughs.)
WHY EGGS OUGHT TO BE SERVED AT EASTER
During the war of 1914-18, the French newspapers
repeated that the German people lacked psychology, that it would have won battles and sympathies if it had known how to analyze the mentality of other peoples. That was true. In that also, we have sinned.
But in the domain of the soul, too, we have understood the lessons of the war. We have learned to weigh henceforth the mental factors of our enemies. If we chose the festival of Easter as the date of the destruction of Paris, it was because two reasons of psychology commanded us to do so.
The first is that a solemn act is best accomplished on a day that is itself solemn. Easter is important in the minds of men, and they judge it quite natural that great events are accomplished at Easter. All of our aviators, departing for the assault on the French capital, heard that evening the Hosanna of the Resurrection singing within him! It was a stimulant that I could not have replaced by any other, and which cost our treasury nothing.
The second reason for the choice of Easter derived from the knowledge I have of the French character, as a result of having been, for six months before the war of 1914, the principal maître d’hôtel in a large Parisian restaurant. A Frenchman cannot admit that a day marked on the calendar as a “feast day” might be transformed into a day of misfortune by events. In his eyes, if it were otherwise, Destiny would be dishonest, and then it would simply be a farce—which is to say that the catastrophe would be delivered by tricksters.
I therefore had the certainty that in spite of the alert that had been given to France by the Schleswig Incident, and also by our preparations, which we had been unable to conceal completely, that it was on that important feast day that our enemy’s defensive services would be at their weakest. I knew that on Easter Day, at least half of her aviators would have obtained permission from their superiors “to visit their aged mother.”
WE HAVE GIVEN REINFORCEMENTS
TO ENGLISH DIPLOMACY
I have also been asked: “Why, on that glorious night, did you only employ 1,728 airplanes and 51 super-Zeppelins, when our forces amount in total to 4,650 airplanes and 186 super-Zeppelins? Why, at the same time as Paris, did you not strike London in its sensitive points, and even sink a part of the English fleet?”
First of all, if it is indispensable for a captain only to think in terms of great conceptions, he can only realize them by expelling from his mind the vertigo of the “immense project.” Today, the Colossal demands measure. To take on Paris and London simultaneously clearly constituted a reckless design; it was sufficient to succeed in Paris.
Furthermore, psychology itself forbade us to attack England, and events have proven it correct. When it was confirmed, at the end of April, that Paris no longer existed, England turned a somersault, which was translated by a few violent diplomatic notes, but her Labor Party soon lowered the tone. She has understood, has not budged, and a fortnight later has signed the Preliminaries of the Convention that respects her self esteem but in reality puts her entirely under our tutelage.
That was, therefore, a good strategy. Protect the formalism of England! A single bomb dropped on Regent Street, even if it had only chopped the tail off a small dog, would inevitably have drawn us into war with the Peevish Lady. How many months or years would that new struggle have lasted? For how many months or years would that little dog’s tail have been brandished in front of us like another “piece of paper”?53
It was highly preferable to confront England with an accomplished fact—a fact, furthermore, which could scarcely displease her. Since, the day after the armistice of 1918, the overly rapid recovery of France has been a continual subject of apprehension for England, have we not given the diplomacy of our insular neighbor a decisive boost by suppressing her former ally?
THE EMPEROR WEPT
The night of glory rose on the horizon, like the moon that slowly elevates her radiant face behind the hill in the darkness of summer.
It was Holy Thursday. Until my death I shall have the slightest details of that day engraved in my heart.
Your Majesty had just gathered us together in a High Council of War; it was a matter of finally fixing the great Star in the firmament.
For five hours I explained the enormous plan, the dispositions taken to ensure by aeronautics, at the same time as cutting the throat of Paris, the crushing of the Allied forces asleep on the banks of the Rhine, the sudden demolition of the great forts that, the day after the Holy Flight, might have prevented us from traversing France like a rectory garden and suddenly paralyzing all the great French centers that might have opposed come resistance to us once the blow had fallen.
Then the High Chancellor spoke. The news from Europe, America and Asia did not put any cloud in the sky. The diplomatic incident, whose exact tenor I have forgotten—something in Schleswig—was treated in half a column by the most widely read newspapers in Paris. The Eternal, until the end, was favoring us with his grace.
Then, Noble Dignitaries who are listening to me, before pronouncing the decisive word that was to precipitate the future, out Great Emperor bowed his head; for a few seconds he covered his eyes with his two hands.
Then, slowly, lowering his arms, his visage raised dolorously toward the heavens, he pronounced these words, which have marked until the end of time the revolution of worlds:
“Go! But God is my witness that I have not wanted this! Go! France must be killed!”
NACH PARIS!
The next day, that of Holy Friday, the German newspapers, on my orders, demonstrated that I had put the Fatherland itself on the Cross by inflicting upon her the dolors of the aeronautical passion. The most important demanded from public opinion the twelve bullets that ought to pay for my crime.
On Holy Saturday, however, I had orders given to four thousand selected pilots to go to their respective airfields the following day, and to await with their machines for the instructions of their superiors. The reason for the convocation was entirely indicated: to examine collectively the causes of the accidents that had so profoundly discouraged the public.
Crews of fitters had been summoned, and each of the officers had received instructions in a sealed envelope that he was not to open until ten o’clock in the morning.
At nine o’clock, troops tightly surrounded all the exits from all the airfields. For twelve hours it was forbidden to anyone, under any pretext, and under threat of being immediately put up against the palisade and shot, to attempt to go in or out.
At the appointed hour, and in all the airfields of the Empire, the Emperor’s message was read by the officers to all the pilots. The reports that have since been sent to me by each of the colonels of the airfields, established that on average it required two hours twenty minutes to equip a postal airplane as a bomber, and four hours seventeen minutes to make a passenger Zeppelin a transporter of Frankreichslieb.
In brief, at five o’clock in the evening on Easter Day, all our civil aviation pilots, transformed into well-trained combatants were ready to take to the air in machines of the most recent type, provided with the most powerful engines of destruction known to man.
Success could scarcely escape us, since we were proceeding by means of a surprise attack, and our aerial army was thus assured of the most important factor for the rigorous precision of its operations: quietude.
The holy squadrons were about to pounce on Paris, taking off from their respective airfields, and hence from locations that were naturally very distant from one another. They could not, therefore, all be given the signal to depart at the same time. We had taken care, throughout 1923, to exercise them, without them being aware of our plan, in aerial assemblies, which had permitted us to determine both their itineraries and their timetables.
There is no need to explain here the details of that discipline. I shall simply say that at seven o’clock in the evening on Easter Day, the aviators’ officers received a sealed envelope from their colonels bearing the words: Nach Paris—To Paris. Not to be opened until airborne. Maneuver no. 19.
The order was given to them to proceed to Paris, remaining at the head of
their squadron and without exceeding the speed that we had scrupulously determined for each unit. For each squadron had a very precise role to play, and it was important that the gravediggers did not arrive before the pallbearers...
German soldiers all, envy the good fortune of the aerial bombardier! He benefits from the supreme excitement of being conscious of the harm he is about to do! Each of his blows—every single one—will pulverize two or three large buildings and a hundred human beings! Successful, his four bombs will devastate an entire new quarter! How could he not operate with precision and with joy? How can anyone not aspire to his place and his feast?
(At that moment, the Minister of Aerial Transport interrupts himself. It is evident that emotion and fatigue are overtaking him. A chamberlain approaches, and signals to him that His Majesty has granted him a few moments’ rest. Five minutes later, His Excellency General Otto von Stick resumes speaking.)
Emotion is gripping my throat. At the recitation of so much prowess, I sense my nerves giving way. Need I say how Paris was killed?
The Engineer Von Satanas Page 30