The Challenging Heights by Max Hennessy Page A

down planes. But he hates the kudos it gives him. He pretends he’s forgotten all about it and says his reputation will rattle after him for ever like a chain.’
    Suddenly, beyond the smoky atmosphere of the night club, Dicken saw heavens reddened by the evening sun and a whole sky full of Fokkers, Albatrosses, Triplanes, Pfalzes, everything, it seemed, that the German Air Force had possessed, with one Fokker DVII – outstanding among them for the skill of its pilot – with red and white stripes painted like a sunburst on the top wing, the words ‘Du doch nicht!’ – Certainly not you – on the tail surfaces, and letters, LO, on the fuselage.
    ‘I’d like to meet him,’ he said.
    ‘He’s too busy by the look of him.’
    ‘He’ll meet me,’ Dicken said.
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Because he once damn near killed me. That’s why.’
    Udet was a small man with a broad grin and he shook Dicken’s hand warmly. He spoke good English but with a marked accent.
    ‘Quinney! I hear of you. How are you? I thought ve had killed you in the var. And I was damned sorry too. You frightened us to death – all forty-two of us – before we downed you. You got two of my boys. Only liddle kids. They were so young they cried for their mother in their first fights. You forced another to land mit his engine stopped and another had to take to his parachute. He kill himself two months after the Armistice, flying into an electric cable, so it doesn’t do him much good. They said that evening that you also knock down a Rumpler. How about you? I was sure we hit you.’
    ‘You did,’ Dicken said. ‘Four times.’
    Udet grasped his arm. ‘Und now?’
    ‘Recovered.’
    ‘Wunderbar! Wunderbar! Killing’s no pastime for a decent man even if flying is.’ Udet seemed to have forgotten his companions, his motor cycle and his juggling, and took over a table in a corner. ‘Here we can talk,’ he said. Janzi Lechner joined them with Udet’s wife and one or two other men and girls but Udet seemed not to notice them.
    ‘Dicken – I call you Dicken, hein?’ Udet smiled. ‘Call me Knägges. Everybody calls me Knägges. It means Titch. I’m not exactly a giant, you see. Come to that, neither are you. What are you doing now? Still flying?’
    ‘Private pilot to a newspaper proprietor.’ It sounded better than aerial transport driver. ‘Are you still flying?’
    ‘Displays at Oberwiesenfeld in Munich. Sometimes mit Robi von Greim. He also flies in the war. How did you come out of the fighting?’
    ‘Alive!’
    ‘I mean medals. They make it worthwhile?’
    ‘I got a few. So did you, I heard.’
    Udet grinned and patted his wife’s arm. ‘When they give me the Pour le Mérite, Lo here make me walk her past the home of the King of Bavaria because the guard there always has to turn out for any man mit the Blue Max. She make me do it again und again.’ Udet’s face grew sombre. ‘But there are a lot whose crosses are only made of wood. Broken propellers in a grafeyard mit their names on them. Richthofen – the Rittmeister himself. Wolff. Löwenhardt. Voss. Boelcke. Immelmann. Many of your friends, too.’
    Dicken’s mind flew back. Finding the carpenter in the hangar working on such a headpiece on his return from leave, he had asked, ‘Who’s it for?’ and got the laconic answer, ‘The next one.’ It had seemed to sum up the inevitability of the whole tragedy of war. If it wasn’t today it would be tomorrow.
    ‘These people’ – Udet’s hand gestured at the other people in the night club ‘ – they haf not seen the same things. Once when I am flying I see a man fall out of the clouds above my head, legs and arms going. Yet there is no sign of a falling aeroplane, or a fight, or any wreckage. He must haf been thinking of what it was going to be like when he hits the ground every bit of the way down.’ He frowned. ‘Once I shoot down a Bristol und the observer’s map wraps itself round one of my struts and stays mit me all