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Arlon

Event ID: 95

Categories: 

Der rote Kampfflieger von Rittmeister Manfred Freiherrn von Richthofen, 1917, 351.000 - 400.000, Verlag Ullstein & Co, Berlin-Wien

15 August 1914

August 1914?
49.68375801221441, 5.814489300182639
near Arlon
Arlon

Source ID: 4

Der rote Kampfflieger von Rittmeister Manfred Freiherrn von Richthofen, 1917, 351.000 - 400.000, Verlag Ullstein & Co, Berlin-Wien p.  28 

‘We marched and marched, the patrols far ahead, until one fine day we were at Arlon. I had a funny feeling as I crossed the border for the second time. I had already heard dark rumours of franchisers and the like. I had once been ordered to liaise with my cavalry division. I rode no less than one hundred and ten kilometres that day with my entire patrol. Not one horse was broken, a brilliant performance by my animals. In Arlon I climbed the church tower in accordance with the principles of peacetime tactics, but of course I saw nothing, because the evil enemy was still far away. People were still pretty harmless back then. For example, I had left my patrol outside the town and cycled through the town to the church tower all by myself. When I came back down, I was surrounded by a grumbling and muttering crowd of hostile-looking youths. My bike had been stolen, of course, and I now had to walk for half an hour. But I enjoyed it. I would have loved a little scuffle like that. I felt incredibly safe with my gun in my hand. As I learnt later, the inhabitants had behaved very riotously both against our cavalry a few days earlier and later against our military hospitals, and a whole lot of these gentlemen had had to be put up against the wall. I reached my destination in the afternoon and learnt there that my only cousin Richthofen had been killed three days earlier, in the very vicinity of Arlon. I stayed with the cavalry division for the rest of the day, took part in a blind alarm there and arrived at my regiment late at night. You experienced and saw more than the others, you’d been around the enemy before, you’d had to deal with the enemy, you’d seen the traces of war and were envied by everyone with a different weapon. It was too good, probably my best time in the whole war. I would like to take part in the beginning of the war again.’

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