To the Last Man - Jeff Shaara [9]
He leads his cavalry on various missions, probing into Russian territory, and has several close brushes with units of Cossack cavalry that never amount to any significant action, neither side seeming to believe that they are actually supposed to fight. But the war finds him, and in mid-August, he is transferred to the northernmost sector of the Western Front. Richthofen is assigned to patrol a region of the Argonne Forest, and he leads fifteen men into an ambush by an alert patrol of French infantry. He loses ten men in the attack and barely escapes himself. The ambush is an embarrassment for the young lieutenant, but more, it convinces him that men on horseback have no place in this new, modern war. He is assigned to service in the Signal Corps, finds himself crawling through mud to lay telephone line between trenches. As he witnesses firsthand the men doing the actual fighting, Richthofen begins to feel as though the real war is passing him by.
While he sits dejectedly in a frozen dugout, waiting for the order to return to his command post, he hears a sound like none he has heard before, drawing his eye skyward. He has no idea what the black crosses on the wings signify, or what the mission of the aircraft is. But he realizes that if he is to join the war, he might have to volunteer for duty where opportunity is still available. In May 1915, his transfer is granted, and he is sent to Cologne, to the Air Service Replacement Center. There, he will learn to fly an aeroplane.
Imagine how thrilling it will be tomorrow marching toward the front with the noise of battle growing continually louder.
I go into action with the lightest of light hearts!
—ALAN SEEGER, American poet
French Foreign Legion, 1914
THE BRITISH LINES, NEAR YPRES, WESTERN BELGIUM—AUTUMN 1915
THE DARKNESS WAS COMPLETE, A SLOW MARCH INTO A BLACK, WET hell. He was the last man in the short column, one part of a line of twenty men, guided by the low sounds in front of him, soft thumps, boots on the sagging duckboards. There were voices, hard whispers, and, close to him, a hissing growl from the sergeant: “Keep together, you bloody laggards! No stopping!”
No one answered, no protests. Each man held himself tightly inside, the words of the sergeant swept aside by the voices in their own minds, a tight screaming fear, the only response they could have to this march into the black unknown.
They had come as so many had come, crossing the Channel on small steamers, filing through the chaos of the seaports, and after a few days, they had boarded the trains. There was singing, bands playing along the way, the raucous enthusiasm of young recruits. They had stared curiously at the French and Belgian countryside, returning the smiles of the people who greeted them at every stop, and few noticed that as the trains moved farther inland, closer to the vast desolation of the Western Front, the villagers were quieter, the faces more grim. Then the trains stopped, and the men were ordered out onto roads that had seen too much use, repaired and repaired again. They would march now only at night, hidden from the eyes in the air, the aeroplanes that sought out targets for German artillery. If the roads were bad, the small trails and pathways were worse, men stumbling in tight files, moving closer still to the front. The fire in the recruits was dampened now, by the weather, the ever-present mud, the soggy lowlands of Flanders. Then came the first sounds, low rumbles, louder as they marched forward. Even in the darkness, both sides threw a nightly