Pilots began turning back from sorties. Their commanding officer was brought down into a stand of young birches so that the joystick dislocated his jaw and perforated his palate. On the third sortie of a cold and rainy day, Allmenröder broke left into a purple rain cloud while Murnau broke right, tracers spiraling past their wings, and Murnau never saw him again.

He was disciplined after subsequent flights for continuing the search on his own, and was grounded as a disciplinary measure. Had they not been in such desperate need of experienced pilots, he would have been sacked.

There was a service. Murnau was asked to speak. When his turn came, he said only that it was as if the heavens hadn’t consented to return his friend to earth. Afterwards he was told that he’d been inspirational. His response initiated another disciplinary proceeding.

His Jasta was thrown into the attempt to stop a minor ground-offensive east of Verdun. Asked to fly protection flights and infantry-contact patrols, which meant essentially ground attack, he did so day after day without rest. No fancy acrobatics or stunt flying. Destruction was the goal.

The French troops were butchered. They hid from him the way the moles he caught as a boy and tossed into his garden disappeared, as if into water. While he machine-gunned, he continued to consider this new way of seeing. In his journal he wrote, I am an icy scientist, and for me their war is a laboratory experiment.

He crashed again, and again walked away from it. He pin-wheeled around a willow and ended on his head in a pile of sugar beets, branches and struts all around him. The control stick had ruptured his kidney.

He was back from the field hospital in four weeks, no longer passing blood. But urination involved doubling over in pain.

The aviators of Jagdstaffel 4 put on a New Year’s variety show. Participation was compulsory. Either because he was such an outsider or because they knew of his theatrical background, the officers of the mess listed him last on the program. He stayed in his quarters until summoned. The emcee introduced him as “That mixture of wandering Gypsy, total misanthrope, and cultivated gentleman, our own grandfather of the theater, Herr Lieutenant Dr. Murnau.”

He went around the room extinguishing candles, leaving only the light from the fireplace. Then he mounted the platform. He recited “The Pianist of Death.” The fire painted the young faces of his audience. He gave the poem a strange intonation, half pathetic and half sinister. His audience was captivated. Officers drummed their fingers in time to the trum trum trum of the refrain.

Outside it was dark and cold. For the poem’s final line he drew himself to his full height, stretched his arm toward the airfield, and cried, “There, on that bier, / Behold the last of my sons!”