To the Last Man - Jeff Shaara [222]
“Did anyone see . . . who it was?”
He forced himself to follow them, saw one man running toward them, hands waving. “It was a Boche! A Boche!”
He kept moving, automatic steps, the ice in his chest giving way. Now the cheering began, a flood of men emerging from the hangars all down the field. He heard another shout, a man in front of him suddenly stopping.
“My God! There’s another one!”
Lufbery looked up, saw the black crosses on the crumpling wing, no fire this time, something inside of him opening up, thank God.
The German plane made a short weak spin, straightened out slightly, the pilot fighting to hold it up, the plane dropping just over the tree line. The gathering crowd parted, some moving toward the closer plane, others plunging into the thicket, toward the column of black smoke. He stopped, heard the sound of motors, saw two Nieuports emerging from the foggy skies, circling low around the field. The men were gathering at the fallen planes, and Lufbery waited for his pilots to land, pushed the image of the fiery crash out of his mind. He began to walk out into the field, watched the planes coming in, could see one pilot raising a hand in the air already, thought, No, get her on the ground first. There will be time for celebrating later. The Nieuports rolled in side by side, and Lufbery felt a smile, the nervous father now gleefully proud of his boys, sharing the perfect moment they would always carry with them. There would be no controversy, no haggling with the French over confirmation. Campbell and Winslow had scored the Ninety-fourth Aero Squadron’s first kills. And they had done it right on their own doorstep.
LECHELLE, FRANCE—APRIL 1918
HE HAD RELOCATED JG-1 TO THE NEW AERODROME SELECTED BY von Hoeppner, keeping the fighters close behind the advance of the German infantry. They had stopped first at Lechelle, a field that had belonged to the British, the airfield abandoned quickly by soldiers and flyers alike in front of the unstoppable wave of Ludendorff’s spring offensive. The pilots of JG-1 slept now where their enemy had slept. But there was no luxury, no grand château. The villages were charred ruins, few houses left standing, and Richthofen ordered his men to occupy the simple accommodations that the British had abandoned. The men slept in large round tents pitched over makeshift wooden floors. Their planes were housed in great flimsy tent hangars, enormous flaps of thin cloth suspended by cables and tall poles. It was a surprise to him that the British bases had been so temporary, so lacking in any kind of comforts for the men who flew the Camels. But now, with his own pilots moving westward, everything was temporary. If the German offensive continued to push the British toward the sea, JG-1 would move again.
He had spent a quiet winter enduring the consistently dismal weather, passing much of the time performing duties at the request of the High Command. He made visits to various aircraft manufacturers, often little more than ceremonial appearances for the benefit of the ever-present photographers. But his visit to the Fokker plant was kept mostly private, conferring with officers of the Air Service and frantic Fokker engineers, who were making every effort to cure the structural problems with their triplanes. Richthofen could offer nothing constructive, and he was soon bored with the rest of the ceremonial routines. In early January, he was surprised to receive an invitation to go to Brest-Litovsk, a fortress city east of Warsaw, where German negotiators were hammering out the terms of the peace treaty with the new Russian government. His host was Prince Leopold of Bavaria, who had commanded the German forces that now controlled what remained of the Russian front. Richthofen had no good reason for being there, but the invitation was a strangely appealing diversion. Upon