"He was lucky—the young Herr Captain," said Von Scheller—"luckier than his predecessor. A fortnight ago one of the enemy's flyers struck one of our balloons with a bomb and the gas envelope exploded. When the wreckage reached the earth there was nothing much left of the operator—poor fellow!—except the melted buttons on his coat. There are very few safe jobs in this army, but being a captive-balloon observer is one of the least safe of them all."
I had noted that the young captain wore in the second buttonhole of his tunic the black-and-white-striped ribbon and the black-and-white Maltese Cross; and now when I looked about me I saw that at least every third man of the present company likewise bore such a decoration. I knew the Iron Cross was given to a man only for gallant conduct in time of war at the peril of his life.
A desire to know a few details beset me. Humplmayer, the scholarly art dealer, was at my side. He had it too—the Iron Cross of the first class.
"You won that lately?" I began, touching the ribbon.
"Yes," he said; "only the other day I received it."
"And for what, might I ask?" said I, pressing my advantage.
"Oh," he said, "I've been out quite a bit in the night air lately. You know we Germans are desperately afraid of night air."
Later I learned—though not from Humplmayer—that he had for a period of weeks done scout work in an automobile in hostile territory; which meant that he rode in the darkness over the strange roads of an alien country, exposed every minute to the chances of ambuscade and barbed-wire mantraps and the like. I judge he earned his bauble.
I tried Von Theobald next—a lynx-faced, square-shouldered young man of the field guns. To him I put the question: "What have you done, now, to merit the bestowal of the Cross?"