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for themselves, believing it all the more firmly because the idea was their own.

While they were still thirty yards from the mess, a figure appeared in the doorway, a

square solid figure which Goering appeared to recognize, for he paused in his stride and said to

Becker, “That fellow there! Is that Lazarus?”

“That is Squadron-Leader Lazarus, sir. He has been in command here since Squadron-

Leader Fienburg left last week.”

Goering muttered something which the tactful Becker thought it wiser not to hear, and

walked on again. Becker dropped back a little and Lehmann joined him.

“Look out for squalls,” muttered Becker.

“Why?”

“Can’t stand each other. Always squalls.”

“Good evening, Goering,” said Lazarus from the doorstep.

“Evening, Lazarus,” said Goering, without attempting to salute. “Got any petrol in this

dump of yours?”

“You will address me as ‘sir,’” said Lazarus, his long nose reddening.

“Oh, suffering cats, they’ve started already,” said Becker under his breath.

“I asked, sir, whether, sir, you had any petrol, sir,” said Goering impertinently.

“What for?”

“To put into the tanks of my machines. Not to wash in, though to be sure it gets the

grease off,” said the Flight-Commander, staring at his superior’s rather oily complexion.

“A painful scene,” murmured Klaus sympathetically, to which Becker only replied, “You

wait.”

“I have no petrol,” said Lazarus, “and if I had you would not get it. Your machines are

grounded by order of the High Command.”

Goering stated what he considered to be the appropriate ultimate destination of the High

Command.

“I cannot hear this,” said Lazarus, who had the infuriating quality of becoming cooler as

the other became more heated. “Your agitation is understandable, Flight-Commander, though

your expression of it is unfortunate in the extreme. The Allied Commission is expected to arrive

here this afternoon—at any time now,” he added, glancing at his watch. “You will be good

enough to control yourself and not give the enemy an opportunity of saying that a German

officer does not know how to behave in defeat.”

“You lousy pig-faced Jew,” began Goering, but the doorway was empty. “Some day,”

promised Goering, “you shall pay for that.” He stalked in at the door, disregarding entirely his

enthralled audience behind. “Will they meet again inside?” asked Klaus.

“No. The skipper will go to his room, to await, with dignity, the Allied Commission.

Goering will go to the bar, to drown his sorrows. I suppose we ought to do what we can for these

other fellows,” said Becker, referring to Goering’s fellow pilots, who were coming up. “It is a

bad day for them, you know.”

“Can’t we get them away before the—the bonfire starts?” suggested Klaus, who was

beginning to feel that he had known Becker for years.

“Doubt if they’d go. Like all great performers, a trifle temperamental—all bar one, that

is.”

“Who’s that?”

“Udet. Sh, here they come.”

About an hour later the Commission arrived, to be received with the utmost formality by

Lazarus, while Goering and his men simmered in silence. The machines were taken over,

receipted, entered up in triplicate, and destroyed by fire, after which the Commission went its

way again in two staff cars and an Army lorry. Becker and Lehmann, united by the comradeship

which arises between strangers sheltering in the same doorway from the same storm, looked at

each other. “What happens now?”

“Heaven knows. I can’t stand a lot more,” said Becker, who looked white and shaken.

“Those machines—”

“I know,” said Klaus, and took him by the elbow. “A foul sight. Come and have a drink.”

They found the rest of the party in the bar, talking in quiet tones and covertly watching

Goering, who was sitting by himself on a high stool with his elbows on his knees, glowering at

everyone and drinking heavily.

“What are you going to do now, Kaspar?” one pilot asked another.

“Oh, go back to my bank, I suppose, that is if there’s any money left in it to count. Funny,

being a bank clerk again after all this. What about you?”

“Back to school, I expect, I was a schoolmaster in Berlin. I shall probably get a job

somewhere, money or no money there will always be small boys. What does it matter?”

One of them was evidently a good deal older than the others, a quiet man with resolution

in his manner. “Someone,” he said in low tones, “ought to speak to Goering. There will be a

frightful scene if he goes on drinking and brooding like that.”

“You do it, then,” said Kaspar. “Life isn’t particularly sweet just now, but I don’t want to

end it by being brained with a bottle by my Flight-Commander.”

The quiet man nodded, picked up his glass, strolled across to Hermann Goering, sitting

alone, and asked him if he had any orders for them.

“None,” said Goering sullenly. “You can go and take orders from the French now. They

might find you a job burning aircraft elsewhere, there are still a few left to destroy.”

His senior pilot continued to look at him calmly, without speaking, till Goering lifted his

head and his almost insane expression softened.

“I beg your pardon, Erich, I am beside myself to-night. No, I have no orders to give you

any more—at least, not yet.” He paused, and drew a long breath. “There will come a day when

we shall meet again, and there will be orders to give and men to carry them out and machines to

—to carry them out in.” He slipped from his stool and stood erect against the bar, a magnificent

figure of a man in those days, with his head thrown back, defiance replacing despair. “They think

they’ve got us down, but we shan’t stay down,” he cried. “Germany shall rise again and we with

her, we’ll have the greatest Air Force in the world. Then let them look out, these beastly little

people who burn aircraft they are unfit to fly!” He turned to find his glass and staggered. “Drink

to the new German Air Arm, invincible, innum—” he stumbled over the word—”innumerable,

unbeatable.
Hoch!
”

His men cheered him and Goering smiled once more. “We’ll have no Jews in it next time,

boys. No oily Hebrews for us. I’ll see to that, because I shall lead it myself. Then it’ll all be all

right. You’ll see.”

“Rather distressing, what?” said Becker to Lehmann while Goering was being helped to

bed. “I think he’ll probably pull it off, too, one of these days. I shall be too old to serve then, I

expect. I do dislike that braggart manner, though, don’t you?”

“A trifle hysterical, perhaps,” said Klaus. “One could not wonder if that were so.”

“No worse for him than for the rest of us, but Goering was always like that. One of those

get-out-of-my-way-blast-you fellows. Now, Udet is different. Udet—”

It was made plain to Klaus that Udet was something quite exceptional, but not all

Becker’s enthusiasm and friendliness could make Lehmann feel that the Air Force was where he

belonged. Perhaps Goering’s wild guess was correct, and he had belonged to German

Intelligence. If so, he had no idea what steps he could take to establish contact, it would be

necessary to wait until somebody recognized him and fell on his neck with ecstatic cries of “Ah!

The famous X37! We thought you were lost to us.” A pretty picture, if a trifle improbable. None

the less, he went to Berlin to look for his lost background.

Here he found for the first time people looking to the future instead of the past, which is a

pleasant way of saying that everyone was furiously-talking politics. This bored him unendurably

because he never got a clear idea of who was who and what they wanted, nor why they had split

into such violently opposing parties since they were all Socialists. He gathered by degrees that

one party was led by Ebert, the saddle-maker from Heidelberg, and they were moderate in tone,

not so much red as a hopeful shade of pink. Then there was Karl Liebknecht, who called himself

Spartacus, whose party was as red as raw beef and demanded a soviet republic immediately, a

working-class dictatorship with all necessary violence. Between these two came a rather

nebulous minority party who also wanted a soviet republic, but were prepared to be a little more

genial in their methods. Klaus’ private opinion was that they all made his head ache, but that

Ebert’s Social Democrats were faintly less offensive than the others. Klaus was addressed on the

subject one day early in January, by the elderly scarecrow from whom he bought his daily paper.

“That there Spartacus,” said the old man, “regular upsetting firebrand. Wants to turn

everything upside down as though they wasn’t bad enough already.”

“Just so,” said Klaus. “Him and his Rosa Luxembourg! Huh!”

“Oh, quite.”

“And them left-wing minority lot, neither soap nor cheese as they say. Minority’s all

they’ll ever be, in my opinion.”

“It sounds probable,” said Klaus, only deterred from walking away by the fact that he had

nowhere particular to walk to.

“Ebert’s the man for me,” said the paper-seller. “Parliamentary democracy on the votes

of the whole community. What could be fairer?”

“What indeed?”

“I only hope that when we has the elections at the end of the month they gets in with a

thumping majority. Show them rowdy Communists where they gets off, that will.”

“Yes, won’t it?”

“Something we’ve never had before, that is, parliamentary democracy on the votes of the

whole community. I says to my old woman—”

Klaus drifted off, for something had just occurred to him as strange. A democracy based

on universal suffrage was something Germany had never had before, yet to him it had seemed so

natural as to go without saying. Where, then, had he been brought up? Was it possible that he

was not a German after all? No, that was an absurd idea.

The next man he talked to, or rather, who talked to him, was a young workman waiting

for a tram, to whom Liebknecht was the builder of the New Jerusalem and Rosa Luxembourg a

greater Joan of Arc.

“I think I will go back to Aunt Ludmilla in Haspe for a little while,” thought Lehmann. “I

will if I don’t get that post office job,” for his money was running short and he was looking for

work.

Two days later the Spartacists revolted and there was savage fighting in the streets,

flaring up and passing, leaving crumpled bundles, which till that moment had been men and

women, lying in the road or crawling painfully to shelter. Ebert’s Government called up the

remnants of the old Imperial Army, and a fortnight of hideous terror followed in Berlin till the

revolt was put down with the strong hand. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg died at the

hands of the police on their way to prison. Klaus Lehmann’s headaches became so insupportable

that he could not have taken the post office appointment even if it had been offered to him, so he

went to Haspe again. Here the great news was that Hanna had become engaged to the postman,

and under the fallen leaves in the garden were snowdrops showing white. Here it was only as a

rumour of half-real happenings that Ebert won his elections and there was established the well-

intentioned Constitution of Weimar.

Eventually Klaus obtained a post teaching mathematics in a school at Dusseldorf, where

for a couple of years he was not unhappy. He was earning enough to keep himself and to take the

old lady presents when he went home—he had learned to call it home—to Haspe at week-ends

and in the holidays. Hanna married the postman, fat smiling Emilie took her place, and the world

was not too bad till the mark began to fall in value.

“I cannot understand it,” said Fräulein Rademeyer. “The price of everything is rising so

rapidly that one’s income cannot keep pace with it. I think it is very wicked of people to be so

greedy and charge so much.”

Klaus tried to explain that the currency was being inflated so that German goods might

sell more easily abroad, but the old lady would not have it.

“Nonsense. All I know is that once I was comfortably off on the money my dear father

left me, and now I am growing poorer every day. Now you tell me they are doing this so that the

foreigner may buy more cheaply. Why does the Government wish to benefit the foreigner at the

expense of its own people? Nonsense. They ought to be turned out of office.”

“Perhaps there will soon come a turn for the better,” said Klaus hopefully, but he was

wrong, for things went from bad to worse. Early in 1922 Fräulein Rademeyer’s income dwindled

to vanishing point, and she sold the white house in Haspe with most of its contents and moved

into Dusseldorf to share Klaus’ lodgings. The sale took place during the holidays, so Klaus was

at Haspe to see it through and to stand by Ludmilla Rademeyer as the auctioneer’s men carried

the old-fashioned furniture out on the lawn in the cruelly bright sunshine. The old lady sat very

upright in a chair under the verandah and watched proceedings, although Klaus begged her to

come away.

“I wish you wouldn’t stay here,” he said. “Come to the doctor’s house and rest there till it

is over, it will be too much for you.”

“I would rather stay, or these people will think I am a coward. Besides, what does it