Read By the Blood of Heroes for Free Online Page B

brainchild, but even he would admit that the program would have failed long ago if it hadn’t been for Eisenberg’s ruthless determination to succeed. It had taken months and literally thousands of test subjects before they had seen even the slightest success, but those days were far behind them now. In the next few weeks, they would reveal what they had been creating in the depths of the Verdun forests and the world would never be the same.
    The war had been mismanaged right from the start, in Richthofen’s view. Not wanting to fight on two fronts, the High Command had decided to strike west with overwhelming force in the hope of taking Paris from the French before their Russian allies to the east could mobilize. Seven field armies under the commands of von Kluck and von Bülow had marched into Belgium in August of 1914, completely confident that Paris would be theirs within six weeks. No one expected the Belgian army to put up such a fierce resistance, nor the series of poor decisions made by General Moltke in early September that had resulted in the German retreat following the Battle of the Marne and the loss of much of the ground they’d occupied. By October, both the British and the Russians had mobilized to help their French allies, and Germany had been faced with exactly what the plan had been designed to avoid in the first place—a war on multiple fronts.
    Still, it hadn’t been completely hopeless. Kaiser Wilhelm might have regained momentum at that point if he’d listened to those who called for a renewed push toward Paris with the help of a beefed-up Army Air Service, Richthofen’s mentor, Oswald Boelcke, among them. It had been Boelcke who had brought Richthofen into the kaiser’s inner circle, and from that point forward the German ace had seen for himself the indecision and fear that were a hallmark of all Wilhelm’s decisions.
    The stalemate might have continued indefinitely if it hadn’t been for the invention of the corpse gas in the spring of 1918. The massive influx of additional manpower had allowed them to push the Allied lines back almost all the way to Paris, and they might have even taken the city itself if the Americans hadn’t entered the war.
    A fresh influx of American troops, combined with tactical errors on behalf of several German commanders, had allowed the Allies to regain some of the ground they had recently lost. German forces retreated to a line bisecting France that ran from Ypres in the north to Nogent in the south, and there they had stayed for the last two years. Now, at last, they had a way of breaking the back of the American forces. All that was needed was a man with enough determination to see it through; Richthofen knew he was that man.
    The sight of Adler, and what he signified, mollified the Baron’s anger a bit and allowed him to appreciate what he had achieved that morning, ruined airplane or not.
    “Ya, a good patrol indeed. That stupid American, Freeman, has flown his last flight.”
    Richthofen stepped inside the tent, and Adler followed at a suitable distance. The interior was spartan, as befitted the warrior asceticism that Richthofen sought to cultivate amid the rest of the squadron’s pilots. The furniture consisted of a simple table, desk, and bed. The walls were covered with maps of the Western Front, many of them containing notes in Richthofen’s spidery hand. He took meticulous notes of every patrol, placing the most important of them directly onto the maps for future reference. This was the secret of his success, the very thing that had allowed him to rise from a lowly cavalry officer to the head of the most feared aerial fighter unit in all of Germany, the Flying Circus. Information was power, and power was something Richthofen had become very good at acquiring over the years.
    His days of freezing in the trenches and charging the front line atop a Prussian stallion were long over. The cavalry had effectively become extinct in the face of tank