Verdun was eight kilometers to the south. From the air he could see the emplacements for the twelve-inch naval cannon and the 420mm siege mortars imported the year before for the great battle. They stretched on for thirty miles.

The day he arrived, he met Allmenröder squelching around in the frozen mud directing the unpacking of a new aircraft. He’d come to aviation from the cavalry, the Second Westphalian(!) Hussars with whom he’d seen action in the east. His unit had once counterattacked with Hans’s Fusiliers. He’d also started in an Aviatik. He had deep-set eyes and a sad, tremulous expression when he joked. He considered his most prominent feature to be his ears, which he kept tucked under his flying-cap. He’d lately celebrated his twentieth birthday. When Murnau met him, he already had two kills.

He was another loner, forever tinkering with his machine. He’d flown in the Battle of the Somme and every single man he’d begun with had since been killed. In his room he had as a single decoration a page torn from a book of Persian miniatures. The page featured warrior companions.

They became a world unto themselves. What they enjoyed was not so much intimacy as shared isolation. Their mates gave them a wide berth. For a week their Jasta huddled around stoves while freezing rain poured down. The hangars sprang great leaks.

They talked about flying. Because Allmenröder had also flown a two-seater, he referred to those crews as Poor Devils, and always aimed only to down the machine. He also fiddled with inventions. He showed Murnau the new gunsight he’d constructed to his own specifications: two concentric circles etched on a lens, their diameters covering one meter and ten meters at a distance of a hundred meters. Thus when he had sighted on an airplane and knew the wingspan or fuselage length, he could precisely evaluate range and judge the moment to fire.

Since Murnau was nine years older, Allmenröder called him Grandfather, and began schooling Grandfather in the hopes of keeping him alive. He demanded knowledge of the machine, tired of young cavalry officers who knew nothing about the internal combustion engine; they went off on long screaming pursuit dives and in the process allowed revolutions to build to the point of engine failure. Try talking to some of those Hussars about oil temperature or compression ratios or valve overlap! They thought such matters were best left to the troops, meaning their mechanics, whom they treated like grooms.

He showed Murnau why tactical skills were composed of many things: awareness of clouds and wind, nerves and reaction speed, sensitivity to the aircraft. And vision, as a function of experience and intuition—a manner of focusing that allowed aircrews to notice the minute and menacing details on which everything depended.