The Bloody Red Baron: 1918 ad-2

by Kim Newman

  He was running, tasting the powdery breeze. It was easy to imagine leaving the ground, and being swept up into the clouds, there to joust with the dark knights of the sky.

  He saw a wall of mottled sandbags, topped with swirls of barbed wire. He was moments away from the trenches.

  He thought of the score that he must live to even.

  Hurdling the wire with a new-found agility, he sailed over the lip of the trench and crashed down. He bent as he landed, coming down on his feet like a cat, and stood up straight.

  'Blimey,' said a startled Tommy.

  Winthrop handed over his bundle to the soldier, telling the warm man to take good care of it.

  'Now, if you would be so good as to guide me to a field telephone, I have a report which must be made.'

  The infantryman looked down at the bundle, which was trailing loose. A bony face was disclosed.

  'Blimey,' the Tommy reiterated. 'Blimey.'

  Part Three: Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man

  27

  The Red Battle Flier

  Richthofen kept him waiting well into the afternoon.

  There was no reason for the delay. It was simply the habit of junkers to have vassals loiter. Poe supposed the flier had little interest in their collaboration. He must co-operate because he had been so ordered by General Karnstein. For Kaiser and Vaterland, Manfred von Richthofen would consent to be made immortal by Edgar Poe. To a physical immortal, perhaps the prospect was insignificant.

  The Baron's private quarters were not quite spartan but hardly seemed the lair of a great warrior. There was an orderly desk where Richthofen sat to write terse, accurate, tedious reports of aerial exploits. In the last few days, Poe had examined numberless dreary documents. He understood why the Baron was not to be entrusted with the writing of his own memoirs.

  Without permission to sit, he paced the room. On the mantel was a row of shining cups. Poe was drawn to the bright things. Each trophy bore a tiny plate, engraved with a formulaic notation: a number, the details of an Allied aeroplane, another number, a date. 11. VICKERS. 1. 23.11.16. Each commemorated one of Richthofen's victories. The first number was the running total of the hunting bag, the second indicated how many had died in the downed aircraft. Every twentieth cup was double- sized.

  There were about sixty of them. That was incorrect. Richthofen's score stood at nearly eighty.

  'A silver shortage. The manufacturer made a special case for some months, but there was a tightening of regulations.'

  Richthofen had come into the room without Poe hearing him, no mean achievement. He stood in completely human shape, calm and compact. Poe would never have discerned godlike potential in this ordinary soldier but could not forget what he had seen in the tower. Inside the Baron nestled the leather angel of the skies, the perfected vampire form.

  'The tradesman offered pewter as a substitute but I took the opportunity to discontinue commemorating my kills with gaudy things. I know in myself my worth. Trophies have come to seem vulgar.'

  Poe touched a cup. His fingers stung.

  'Real silver?'

  'I should give up these baubles for scrap. I'd rather have silver bullets in my guns than silver cups in my den.'

  Few vampires cared to have silver around them. It showed daring. If Poe were to grip one of these trophies firmly, his hand would shrivel.

  Richthofen stood beside him and regarded the cups. Each marked one or more dead. Goring, the recording officer, impressed upon Poe the arcana of the 'score'. Strictly, only victories over aircraft counted, not the number of dead or downed. A flier could claim a victory by sending a vanquished pilot to a prisoner-of-war camp. Few of Richthofen's cups bore a zero. His victories were kills. Oswald Boelcke, who formulated the tactics of aerial combat, liked to aim for the enemy's engine and let the pilot live. Richthofen always went for the throat. For him, a bloodless victory was no victory at all. Only a kill counted.

  'They do not blur and become one. I remember each. I have made reports.'

  Boelcke was truly dead, though not in combat: his aeroplane had crashed in mid-air into one of his fellows' machines.

  The Baron sat at his desk, at attention even in repose, and indicated a chair. Poe folded himself into it. He was conscious of his shabbiness beside the correctness of the flier. Richthofen's uniform was pressed to perfection, knife-edge creases and drum- tight jacket ready for inspection. Poe's trousers were almost out at the knees. The buttons of his old waistcoat were mismatched.

  'So, it begins, Herr Poe. Your book.'

  'Our book, Baron.'

  Richthofen waved an indifferent hand. He had the short nails and stub fingers of a cowboy, not the languid extremities of an aristocratic idler.

  'I do not care much for writing. Or for writers. A cousin of mine has formed an unsuitable attachment with an English writer of repulsive reputation. A Mr Lawrence. Have you heard of him?'

  Poe had not.

  'By all accounts, he is a horrid fellow, dirty from coal mines and animal habits.'

  Where to begin? Perhaps it was time to borrow from that queer Jew, Freud. 'Tell me of your childhood, Baron.'

  Richthofen began a recitation, 'I was born on the second of May, 1892. My father was stationed in Breslau with his cavalry regiment. Our family seat is an estate at Schweidnitz. I was named Manfred Albrecht in honour of an uncle, an Imperial Guardsman. My father was Major Albrecht, Freiherr von Richthofen. My mother was the former Kunigunde von Schickfuss und Neudorff. I have brothers, Lothar and Karl Bolko, and a sister, Ilse ...'

  Poe interrupted, timidly. 'I have read your service records. Tell me about your childhood.'

  Richthofen seemed to have nothing to say. In the depths of his eyes, there was (almost entirely veiled) drowning bewilderment.

  'I do not understand what you want of me, Herr Poe.'

  Poe did not expect to feel pity for the merciless hero. The Baron, though he would never let it show, was lost. Something was missing in him.

  'What do you remember? A place, a pastime, a toy ... ?'

  'My father told me I was different from the boys of the peasants who worked the land. They were Slavs. Orientals inferior to Prussians. Our family was Teuton, among the first to establish themselves in Silesia.'

  'Did you feel different?'

  Poe remembered his own childhood, estrangement from his fellows as an American in England.

  Richthofen shook his head. 'No. I felt as I always have. I am myself. There has never been any need to question that.'

  His backbone was a straight as a ramrod.

  'What was your first passion?'

  'That of any boy. Hunting in the woods.'

  Richthofen was a hunter still. Was it too easy to deem him just a hunter, with no other light or dark to his soul?

  'With my rifle, I shot three of my grandmother's tame ducks. I pulled a feather from each as a trophy. When I presented these to my mother, she scolded me. But my grandmother understood and rewarded me.'

  'Like George Washington, you could not tell a lie?'

  'I was admitting nothing. I was claiming my kills.'

  'You saw no wrong in killing?'

  'No. Do you?'

  The drowning was gone from the Baron's eyes. There was a blue chill now. Poe thought of chips of ice in the streams of the Richthofen estate in Silesia.

  'You were educated in Berlin, at a military school?'

  Richthofen nodded curtly.'Wahlstatt. Its motto was "learn to obey that you may learn to command".'

  'Very German.'

  Not a smile.

  At West Point, Poe had been desperately unhappy, deprived by his stepfather of the funds he needed to keep up with comrades.

  'You must have loved Wahlstatt?'

  'On the contrary, I detested the school. It was built as a monastery and furnished like a jail. Not caring for the instruction I received, I did just enough work to pass. It would have been wrong to do more than just enough, so I worked as little as possible. Consequently, my teachers
did not think a great deal of me.'

  'But you learned to command?'

  'I learned to obey.' 'You command this jagdgeschwader.'

  'I pass on orders I am given. Karnstein is commandant.'

  It was like interrogating a prisoner of war. Richthofen would give away enough to pass, but no more. A lesson learned at Wahlstatt.

  'When you were a boy, did you want to turn?'

  'I was raised to know I would be turned in my eighteenth year. It is customary. Lothar, also, turned at that age. Karl Bolko, when he reaches manhood, will turn.'

  'How was it done?'

  'The usual way,' Richthofen said, brusquely.

  'Forgive me, Baron, you must make allowances for my ignorance,' Poe wheedled, damping irritation by recalling the awesome winged creature that lurked within the cold fish. 'I turned in another age, when the change from living man to vampire was a rare, painful thing. I have known the grave and have been shunned as a beast of the night.'

  'I did not die. My turning was hygienic. The results were satisfactory.'

  New-born vampires usually described their transformations in the half-proud, half-ashamed, entirely excited manner in which the young men of Poe's warmth talked of their first visit to a brothel. To Richthofen, this miraculous metamorphosis was an uneventful appointment with a painless dentist.

  'You turned in 1910. What is your bloodline?'

  'It is of the highest. My family retains an elder, Perle von Mauren. Her line has become ours.'

  This was a common arrangement. With Dracula established in Germany, the spread of vampirism was regulated. In theory, every vampire within the domains of Kaiser and King-Emperor was under the patronage of Dracula. A new-born could not be made without the Graf's permission. Vampirism was a condition to which the nobility were entitled by birth. Many aristocratic families made connections with elders of whom Dracula approved. Women like this Perle von Mauren were advisers, mistresses and governesses.

  'How do you feel about your mother-in-darkness?' 'Feel? Why should I feel?'

  'Your line is important.'

  'Strictly, I am not solely of her blood. Under the supervision of Professor Ten Brincken, I have taken another as my father by proxy. I am of the Dracula line.'

  He was not boasting but stating a fact.

  'Are you greatly changed?'

  'I am Manfred von Richthofen still. Most of those cups I won before I became a shape-shifter.'

  'You flew in an aeroplane then?'

  'An aeroplane is merely a gun with wings. Now I am my own weapon, my own instrument. Like the hunters of old.'

  'Do you regret not living longer before turning?'

  'I have never died.'

  'But there are aspects of warm life lost to us. You set them aside before you could truly have known them.'

  'War was coming. It was my duty to turn. Germany needed vampires of good lines.'

  Maybe this empty man was the daytime shell and the giant Poe had seen was the real Red Battle Flier. This interview was like trying with thick gloves to pick up pins from a marble floor. Whenever a possibility was touched, it skittered away under a chest of drawers.

  'After turning, you joined the lancers.'

  'The First Regiment of Uhlans. I saw combat in '14, but the lancers were finished. This war has no place for cavalry.'

  'So you exchanged your horse for an aeroplane?'

  'I transferred to the Signal Corps and entered the Imperial Air Service as an observer. I made the decision to become a pilot. The position offers more opportunities for honourable service.'

  'And sport?'

  Richthofen considered a moment and gave a single nod. In a few minutes of unexpressive talk, he had disposed of an entire life up to the point when he found the vocation that made him famous. Poe had the bald facts of official record and tiny chinks of illumination that suggested a strange human story. It might be possible to frame the life of Baron von Richthofen as a tragedy. That was not what Dr Mabuse wished of the book.

  'You spoke of dying, Herr Poe. As I said, I have never in truth been dead. But it seems to me now, looking back, that I was truly born not when I left my mother's womb, not when I drank Perle's vampire blood, but when I won my first victory. It was as an observer. I downed a Frenchman.'

  Poe looked at the trophies.

  'There is no cup. That aeroplane fell on the wrong side of the lines. The victory was not confirmed.'

  'Does that bother you?'

  Richthofen shrugged. 'One should receive credit that is one's due. An officer's word of honour should be accepted.'

  'Why did you become a pilot?'

  'So I could rely on myself. I lost kills because my pilot was not skilled enough to get me into position for a clean shot.'

  Early in the war, observers - who were responsible for the guns -were the hunters. Pilots were in the same class as chauffeurs or beaters. Only after Boelcke laid down his famous dicta did the special skills of the flying warrior become generally appreciated.

  'It is every man's dream to fly.'

  Again, Richthofen was unaffected. 'As I believe I mentioned, I do not dream.'

  'You are remarkably level-headed for a man on such intimate terms with the miraculous.'

  The Baron had no answer.

  'The world you were born into has changed beyond recognition. First, Dracula. Then, the war ...'

  'The world is beyond my control. I have only myself. I have not changed. I have only become more myself.'

  28

  The Moon also Rises

  'You're an angel, Miss Reed,' said Dr Arrowsmith, gently squeezing the hand-pump. 'I wish we had a dozen of you.'

  She was drowsy, as if slipping into vampire lassitude. The hollow needle in the crook of her elbow was an icy tick. Her already blurry vision dotted with smudges of grey fog. She could not feel her toes. Her fingers tingled. Her blood surged through rubber tubing, filled the valves of the pulsing pump, and disappeared into another tube, flowing into the patient's arm.

  Vampire donors were prized at the military hospital in Amiens. The restorative power of their blood was remarkable.

  Arrowsmith, a warm American whose face was prematurely scored with worry-lines, stroked her hair. He did not show he felt the chill in her but could not have failed to.

  'We have taken enough from you,' he said, ceasing to coax the pump. 'We must be wary of going back too often to the well.'

  Kate tried to tell him to go on. She wasn't even unconscious. Her body could regenerate its blood within an hour, especially if she fed.

  On the other cot, the patient - an American captain, Jake Barnes -was mummified in bandages. The only inch of his skin exposed was stuck with the transfusion needle. Barnes was a new-born, his power of regeneration not yet developed enough to heal the wounds he had sustained. Hung on the wire during a bombardment, he had been pelted with a hailstorm of bullets, lead and silver. There was little left of him to save.

  Her bloodstream connected with Barnes's, troubling her with flashes of his life. In her guts, she felt the stinging bites of silver bullets through a long night. It was hours before Barnes's comrades crept out to take him down. Despair had twisted his mind. She felt it like a poison.

  Arrowsmith carefully took the needle out of her arm and pressed the open vein with his thumb. Her tiny wound healed over in an instant. The doctor examined the spot.

  'Not a mark. A little miracle.'

  Arrowsmith had little experience with vampires. There were relatively few American undead. Barnes had been warm on the ship over, but turned in Paris. He thought the vampire state would better his chances of surviving the war. With distaste, Kate pictured the mindless can-can nymph who had turned him. Barnes might not be satisfied with the shape of his survival. His jaw was shattered, silver shrapnel embedded, spreading gangrene. He'd not be capable of feeding himself in the near future. He'd be dependent on medical transfusions. He was, in many senses, no longer a man.

  The doctor saw to his patient. Barnes
could not talk, of course. His eyes shone angry and pained through slits in his crisp white mask. From their communion, Kate knew Barnes yearned to be allowed true death. Should she pass on his wishes to the doctors striving to keep him alive?

  She tried to sit. Her head, a hundredweight of lead, dragged her to the pillow. She was weaker than she had thought. On the too-short canvas cot, feet stuck out beyond the sheet, she tried to summon her strength.

  Arrowsmith was concerned. 'Be careful, Miss Reed. You're not right, yet. Don't try to talk. Rest. You've done enough today. Because of you this man will live.'

  Her mouth opened and closed, but she had no words. Essentially, that was her problem. The war left her without words.

  She knew she should not allow herself to feel so, but something had broken off with Edwin Winthrop's death. They had not been close but they might have been. It was not the truncation of a past that bothered her but the curtailment of a future.

  Frustrated and exhausted, she had turned her body over to the Red Cross. As a bloodmilk cow, she was useful without having to take action, without having to think, without having to care.

  When the war began, the first fought with significant numbers of vampires on both sides, it was assumed the undead would make unvanquishable, all-conquering soldiers. In magazine serials, nosferatu hordes swept across Europe, establishing tyrannies of centuried elders. As armies mobilised and diplomats manoeuvred in the summer of 914, Saki's When Vlad Came, with its imaginary reoccupation of Britain by Dracula's vampire knights, was popular in railway station bookstalls. Hector Munro, 'Saki', was truly dead now, a Royal Fusilier shot by a German sniper.

  She looked at the high ceiling. It was a grubby white, lightly spattered with blood no one could reach to scrub away. Fizzing electric lights hung from brass chandeliers, wires wound round wax-crusted candle-sconces. Before the war, the hospital had been a government building.

  In the European stalemate, as the war of mobility turned to a face-off between entrenched positions, vampires did not prove all-conquering or invincible. But they survived injuries fatal to a warm soldier. It was an unappreciated curse of the undead. For a vampire, there were few 'Blighty' wounds, not mortal but dire enough to earn honourable discharge and a passage home. Aside from the odd Jake Barnes, a vampire who survived his wounds was liable to recover and be returned to active service. A good many preferred to stay warm and take their chances. The war was a plague of fire and silver. Its scythe swept away hundreds of thousands of new-borns along with their warm cousins.