Or Heaven

Fretful, impatient, three Germans paced the Baldonnel Airdrome at Dublin, Ireland. Their plane was poised for flight, pointed westward, over the broad expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, toward America. Anxious, disappointed, obviously annoyed at delays, they waited for favorable weather reports, for they meant to be the first to fly successfully from the Old World to the New.

Some days previously, without a word even to their kin, the three had flown to Ireland from Berlin's great centre of aeronautics, Tempelhof. Thermos bottles filled with coffee and a loaded revolver formed their only baggage. . . . "We land on Mitchell Field or heaven."

Be there a cautious transatlantic flier, then his name is Capt. Hermann Koehl, pilot of this German expedition. In this same ship, the Bremen, he started for America late last summer, got over Ireland, found the hazards impossible to negotiate, and turned back home to try again some happier day.

Capt. Hermann Koehl is a veteran pilot of the War, shot down twice by the French, taken prisoner the second time only to escape from a prison camp and make a tortuous way back to Germany. He is 40, married but childless, is old for a pilot. "Blind flying," night flying so essential to a transatlantic pilot, is his specialty.

Baron Ehrenfried Gunther von Huenefeld, monocled Prussian aristocrat, is the backer and passenger of the flight. Seriously wounded in the War, he was invalided out of service and sent to Holland in the German consular service. A close friend of the former Crown Prince, he shared the first days of his dreary exile. He is 36, married, superstitious.

Arthur Spindler, a mechanic, no longer young, was Capt. Koehl's sergeant during the War and worships the air his master flies in.

The Bremen, a silver flash in the air, is a low-winged, single-motored Junkers machine similar to those used in passenger and freight service on the Lufthansa lines. She has a 310 h.p. motor and cruises best at a speed of 95 to 100 miles an hour.