Bomb mots
I had a letter recently from my old friend, Sir Arthur Bryant, the historian. Arthur is one of the kindest and nicest of men but alas, I fear, he committed an atrocity in the first War.
His friends and contemporaries said that he was undoubtedly the most inefficient pilot and navigator in the then RFC which towards the end of the first world war used to bomb the Rhine towns in Trenchard's long range air force. These crack fliers could fly fully 100 miles carrying the enormous weight of two 501b bombs.
When I was a young man I used to refresh my German by going every summer to Freibourg-im-Breisgau which I have always regarded as the most perfect example of a renaissance German town, as Rothenburg is of a mediaeval. I used to go for tremendous walks in the Black Forest. The thirty mile route to the Feldberg lay along the Guntherstal and some German friends of mine used to show me the ruins of a German girls' school where a British aviator had destroyed some thirty or more future good German Mothers in 1918. Subsequently I learned that this must have been Arthur. Twelve of Trenchard's planes took off. Twenty-two bombs fell on or near the marshalling yards at Freibourg, but two fell, three miles away, on the girls' school. His friends were convinced that this atrocity was undoubtedly due to Sir Arthur's incompetent navigation.
There was however, for Arthur personally; an unexpectedly pleasant sequel. After the war and at the height of the inflation he was staying at an hotel in Frankfurt. He fell into conversation with the waiter who told him that he had been in the flak defending the Rhine towns against the RAF. Arthur said that he must therefore often have shot at him. The waiter said, "Excuse me, I must go and get the head waiter."
Arthur was the only client in the hotel and, thinking that feeling was still running very high, was slightly apprehensive of being lynched. Not at all. The head waiter came back and said that he had some pre-war French champagne which had survived various occupations. Would the gracious gentleman accept a bottle with his compliments? He also had some superb French brandy and a few Havana cigars. The gniidige Herr could not understand why he Was the object of so much hospitality. It transpired however that the head waiter had had an aunt in Mannheim from whom he had considerable expectations but who enjoyed disgustingly good health until the day when an English aviator scored a direct hit on her. After that nothing was too good for any Englishman, particularly an English flier.
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