“He just disappeared,” Moskons said, who had sat in silence during the meeting.
“Indeed he did,” said Arno. “Mysterious man, to sum him up.”
“He’s your soul scout and guardian angel, spirit guide and conductor,” Moskons told him gravely.
Then the feast in the castle continued. The sapphire wine flowed, beautiful ladies sparkled, musicians played and minstrels sang.
This was what Arno experienced in Dreamland that night. When he awoke he thought about the Badger and what he had said, about the I Am-impulse and about meeting again. For some reason Arno felt a bit uneasy at this, he didn’t know why. Well, you always have to say “I Am,” Arno told himself, and this he did even now when he woke up in the platoon’s basic quarters, saying “I Am” to himself. And so he was ready for anything.
He had woken up in his barn, sleeping on a pile of last year’s straw. He got to his feet and thought, today it’s marching off-time. They were being redeployed.
He got to his feet, the battalion gathering its belongings and getting ready to go. Eventually they were loaded onto a train, heading west through the land which had once been western Poland. You could see the clouds gliding in the sky à la majestique, see a peculiar light fall over everything and hear the Tune of Your Life playing over woods, gorges and sunken roads. They stopped at a certain station; the platoon leaders were shown to a warehouse where they received a briefing from the company commander. Among other things Wistinghausen informed them that they would be garrisoned for now next to the Pomeranian town Grafenburg. Then it was food distribution – pea soup. If you had pea soup one day and lentil soup the other you could count yourself lucky. Sometimes you even had meat soup or goulash.
After a further train ride, 8th Company duly found itself deployed in a forest near the Oder River. It was next to Grafenburg, an East Pomeranian town on the border with East Brandenburg. They bivouacked next to an air base with Junkers Ju 88s well camouflaged under the trees.
The Grafenburg bivouac is of no importance to this story – but – a plane ride Arno made from this air base, is. It was like this: Arno, who had no formal leadership education, was ordered on October 28 to attend NCO school in Hanover. So after formalities he took his stuff, said farewell to the company and to the men of his platoon and headed for the air base where he would get a ride with a Junkers 88. His liaison was a Luftwaffe Captain.
October 28 was the very next day after they had arrived in Grafenburg. This day, having paid his respects, Arno headed off through the pine forest, in Going Out Order (= no weapons except for a 9 mm pistol, and without helmet and Sturmgepäck) with a rucksack on his back and a tatty cheap suitcase in hand. The weather was mild and dry; the trees had mostly shed their leaves, although winter was still some way off.
Having left the woods he strolled two kilometres along a dirt track, crossed a stream on a wooden bridge, came to an open field, saw the fence that surrounded the air base, found a path along the fence and eventually approached a gate. There was a guard house. He walked up to the window hatch and showed his orders to the guard.
He was escorted to the HQ building where he was met by a pilot, a Captain Nietsky, wearing light brown overalls. He shook hands and offered Arno a cup of Ersatz coffee in the mess. The room was large, having spartan furnishings with wooden chairs and wooden tables. The walls were unpainted masonry. They talked about the coming flight, a subject that fascinated Arno, the flight enthusiast who had only flown once.
They would fly to Hanover, where Arno would attend NCO school. The course would start on November 2. Coffee finished, Nietsky took his gun holster and his leather helmet and went out on the field, Arno picking up his bags and following. The field was suddenly completely engulfed in fog. A sudden autumn temperature drop had made the moisture in the air condense.
Walking through the fog Arno said to the pilot:
“Some dense fog, eh? Can you really take off in this?”
The pilot said brusquely that he would, that they had countermeasures for this. Arno refrained from asking what those means were. They continued through the fog, the dense veil of water vapour. You could say that they were in a cloud, a cloud that had touched the ground.
An enigmatic machine took shape through the veil as they approached it. It was about 15 metres long and had a wingspan of 20 metres. Arno thought that it was a giant, a veritable revelation, a creature from another dimension.
It was a machine, a flying machine – a Junkers 88, a twin-engine plane. The type was versatile, something of a Luftwaffe workhorse. It served variously as a heavy fighter, night fighter, bomber, dive bomber, torpedo bomber and reconnaissance aircraft, as well as part of the Mistletoe system. In this concept an unmanned, bomb-laden Ju 88 A was directed towards its goal by a fighter plane that was mounted on the back. At the target area the bomber was released, to be controlled remotely the last distance to the target. The fighter plane could then return to base.
They approached the plane. This was no Mistletoe, just an ordinary medium bomber. Arno admired the sober camouflage: grey spots on a white background.
“Winter camouflage?” he asked.
Nietsky nodded. “Rather attractive, isn’t it…?”
At this very moment a booming sound was heard over the field. It was the antidote to fog. Gas pipes lined both sides of the field, pipes with a multitude of inline orifices which, once lit, created a system of flames and a microclimate. This raised the temperature and wiped away the fog, as if by magic. Even as Arno and the pilot boarded the machine and took their seats in the cockpit, the surroundings switched to clear visibility. The wide grass field became visible along with the surrounding trees, the control tower, hangars and service buildings.
The pilot started the machine. Arno manned the rear machine guns in the cabin. There were two separate pieces. Captain Nietsky had gestured at them: “Sit there. All yours. Keep your eyes peeled.” A man of few words. Arno quickly worked out that, if it came to shooting he would have stand up, but until then he sat down on a folding seat. Before that he had inspected the weapons, familiar MG 34s. They were clean, loaded and belt-fed, everything OK.
The Junkers 88 taxied out to the grass-grown runway, the pilot communicating with the tower. Arno could listen in because he, too, wore a flying helmet with earphones.
Shortly they got starting clearance. The bomber set off along the runway, trundling alone at first but quickly picking up speed. Then, with a lurch that dropped Arno’s stomach and renewed all over the wonder he had felt on his previous flight, the monster lifted from the ground and rose into the sky. Soon, they were in the clouds again. And after five minutes they burst through them and into bright sunshine. 4,000 metres altitude.
Junkers was a renowned aircraft manufacturer. Besides this machine, it had built the Stuka that had supported Arno’s units in the battle of Kamenets-Podolsky, in the cityscape proper, and in several other battles. It had also built the Junkers 86, the Swedish B3 Arno had seen flying over Karlstad in 1938, the epoch-making revelation which told him that war was approaching. And now, in October, 1944, he was deep in that war, in a Junkers machine heading west for his initiation in the formalities of being an NCO. The training would give him an official stamp on his status as a Feldwebel. He wondered idly if it could teach him anything about combat, then realised his time would be better spent watching for enemy fighters.
The bomber droned on through the western skies. It was warm in the cabin, the interior heat system being just like a car’s: hot coolant from the engines was channeled to the flight deck and made life there pleasant. He blinked his eyes and struggled to stay alert. What if…?