A Belgian

‘I learnt something from Manfred that is worth recording and perhaps has no equal in the history of the world war. In mid-July, Manfred had his airfield close to the town of Courtrai, where a lot of ‘unpleasant rich’ people (‘Lappenschlote’, as Manfred put it) lived together. English and French planes took a strange pleasure in bombing this town at night. The poor (or rather rich) Belgians suffered greatly at the hands of their allies. Curses poured from the skies. But the situation became more and more vicious. Manfred himself witnessed how a house he was standing next to collapsed like a house of cards due to a French bomb, burying 15 Belgians under its rubble. The population's bitterness towards the brothers of the Confederation rose to boiling point. The Red airmen did a good job of cleaning up the hated bombers. Manfred shot down one of them that had just wreaked havoc in the streets. One of the occupants of the biplane was dead, the other only slightly shot. He was sent to the Courtrai military hospital. Now the tragicomedy begins. It became known that the wounded man was neither English nor French, but Belgian - a citizen of the honourable, wealthy town of Courtrai. He had misused his local knowledge in a not very nice way against the rest of his own people. Popular anger snorted and sparkled. And so it was that the next day people appeared at the commandant's office, dressed in top hats and robes, their freshly shaven, well-fed faces flushed with indignation, and asked for the miscreant to be handed over to them for loving treatment. The man in question hid in bed, his teeth chattering as he saw himself hanging from the nearest lamppost. And now the punch line! Naturally, the German authorities refused to hand over the brute - so the roast skirts at least asked for the favour of being allowed to pay homage to their protector - namely Manfred - with a flag and a choral society. This wish of the bourgeois souls was not fulfilled either. The delegation of solemn men slipped away shaking their heads with rolled-up flags, saddened by the lack of understanding and inculcation of the German authorities... I have seldom seen Manfred as cheerful as he was now when he talked about this aberration of bourgeois morality.’