all respect, Herr Oberleutnant,’ said Kokke, ‘next year might be too late.’
‘By next year we shall all be on the East Front,’ said Beer. He helped himself to bread and cherry jam. A wasp was buzzing round the table and Beer shooed it away nervously.
‘You’re a miserable bastard,’ said Kokke. ‘When shall I ever hear you say a cheerful word?’
‘Well, I don’t say defeatist things like you do,’ said Beer. He smiled thinly as he said it, but there was more than a trace of accusation in his voice.
‘What did I say?’ Kokke reached for Löwenherz’s Börsen-Zeitung and swatted the wasp with a loud crack.
‘The war in the east was like a travelling circus and a travelling zoo battling in a wilderness to decide which should put on a show.’
‘Are you sure you didn’t just make that up?’ asked Kokke.
‘Oh, shut up,’ said Beer angrily.
‘More coffee, Herr Oberleutnant?’
‘Thank you, Kokke,’ said Löwenherz. He watched the bearded man handling the coffee cups. Those were a musician’s hands. Kokke had wanted to be a professional pianist until the war had interrupted his studies. By now a career of the sort he’d once hoped for was impossible. He had only to touch the Mess piano to know how much skill had slipped away from him. Kokke poured coffee for Löwenherz and grinned at him provocatively. Some people said the young Berliner was an agent provocateur in the pay of the Gestapo. Löwenherz suspected that to be a story Kokke himself had circulated to provide an excuse for constant criticism of the régime and its methods and equipment.
‘Here’s to our Knight’s Crosses,’ toasted Löwenherz with coffee.
‘I’ll not drink to yours,’ said Kokke smiling. ‘If the bloody thing isn’t on its way by now, it must be because they’ve decided to stop awarding them.’
Löwenherz bowed gratefully at the compliment. He had gained more than enough victories for the coveted Knight’s Cross to be at his neck. His seniority and experience deserved a promotion but the Führer’s birthday, a traditional date for promotions to be announced, had come and gone.
The pilots drank their coffee in silence, and Löwenherz held his napkin carefully in his free hand lest a drip of coffee fall upon his gleaming white summer jacket. Somehow Löwenherz always had the answer and the technical data to back it up. It was amazing how he found time to handle the office routine and paperwork that fell to him as Staffel Leader, as well as reading and remembering all the intelligence reports, doing the same blind-flying minimum that he had ordered for his Staffel, consistently winning the clay-pigeon stakes as well as maintaining a string of girlfriends from Brussels to Wilhelmshafen.
Finally it was little Beer who spoke. ‘The Knight’s Cross is always conferred by Hermann Göring in person?’
‘A visit to Karinhall’ – Löwenherz nodded. ‘And the cauliflower for the Knight’s Cross means an audience with the Führer.’
‘With the knives and forks they give you a two-bedroom apartment at Berchtesgaden,’ said Kokke mischievously.
‘It’s all right for you two to talk of Oak-leaves and swords,’ said Beer. ‘You, Herr Oberleutnant, have twenty-eight confirmed victories, and Kokke has twelve, but as yet I have none and might never get one.’
‘Cheer up,’ said Kokke. ‘We all have the Iron Cross on our pocket.’
‘That makes it even worse,’ said Beer. ‘How do I explain that mine was awarded for doing twenty flights without ever catching sight of a Tommi?’
‘Perhaps you’ll get a chance tonight if the weather clears,’ said Löwenherz.
Beer pinched his face and refused to be cheered up. ‘Each night the controller sends up his most successful crews first. They get the first crack at the Englishmen while the rest of us spend all day practising instrument-flying and all night playing chess.’
‘It’s necessary for the defence of the homeland that the best crews are put into battle as soon as the first radar contact is made,’ said Löwenherz.
‘Beer thinks the war has been arranged solely for his sport,’ said Kokke.
‘You must remember that these bombers are tearing the hearts out of our cities,’ said Löwenherz. ‘Ask Kokke if he prefers the best crews to go up first when it’s his town of Berlin that’s being bombed, or ask poor old Oberfeldwebel Krugelheim, my chief mechanic, whose wife was killed in Stuttgart last April.’
Kokke added, ‘Or Leutnant Klimke, my radar man, whose wife and three children were killed in a bombing raid on Duisburg last Christmas, one day before he went on leave.’
‘All I want to do,’ protested Beer, ‘is help shoot the murdering bastards out of the sky.’
‘Don’t be downhearted,’ said Löwenherz. ‘You will soon have your opportunity.’ He finished his coffee and wiped his mouth carefully with his napkin. He stood up and after nodding a good day to them he eyed Beer’s black leather zipper-jacket, breeches and high boots.
‘You’re not thinking of flying in those boots, Leutnant Beer?’
‘No, sir,’ said Beer.
‘Good. There is a regulation about it. The Luftwaffe medical service has informed High Command that foot injuries are very difficult to attend to if the injured crewman is wearing close-fitting high boots.’
‘I read your memo, sir.’
‘Excellent, then that’s clear. Good morning, gentlemen.’ He looked at his newspaper with the remains of the wasp spattered across the headline in ugly brown stains. He didn’t pick it up.
They both nodded goodbye to him.
‘Kaffeeklatsch,’ said Beer; ‘patronizing bastard.’
‘May I quote you?’ said Kokke.
‘It’s all right for a Krautjunker like him,’ said Beer. ‘Son of a baron, enormous estates in East Prussia well out of the reach of the RAF …’
‘That’s why he’s worried about those Russian aeroplanes,’ said Kokke. ‘You know, the mechanics across on Staffel number three have got a nice fiddle going. When the long-range Aunty Jus fly in with spares, the crews bring tins of caviar from Odessa to swap for bottles of Dutch schnapps. They say that that tall Oberfeldwebel with the motorcycle is making a fortune out of it. The other day the mechanics opened a tin of caviar out there on the dispersal apron. They were sitting around in the sun eating it, when Löwenherz walks up. The Oberfeldwebel gives him a big salute and spreads a great heap of caviar on a biscuit and offers it to him. “Beluga caviar, sir,” he says. Löwenherz looks down his nose at it and says, “Never mind what kind of caviar it is, Oberfeldwebel. Have you washed your hands?”’
Kokke laughed heartily at his own story but Beer didn’t. ‘Prussian bastard,’ said Beer. ‘And that damned white jacket he wears as though this was a peacetime training school. Did you notice him looking at your dirty shirt? I bet there’ll be another reminder about officers’ appearance
