Read i 16b0d473103b6aa5 for Free Online Page A

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