was almost over and he would wait no longer. By special train he
set out with Körner, Udet, and Loerzer for the Alt Sternberg
Hunting Ground. His chief foresters, sent on ahead, met him
with news that they had seen “royal” stags, including one that
came so regularly to the same meadow, where he sat on his
haunches and bayed, that they called him “the Fountain Statue.”
The mustachioed Czar Boris of Bulgaria joined them, and
for three days they waited for this stag each dawn and twilight;
but it was not until the final evening that the Fountain Statue, a
magnificent beast with towering, powerful antlers, strutted out
of the undergrowth onto the broad meadow to join his herd. At
a range of three hundred yards Göring dropped him with a
shot through the heart.
There was one peculiar incident on September , still un-
explained. At ten-thirty that morning the Forschungsamt inter-
cepted a message from Prague to Mastny in Berlin reporting
that Eisenlöhr’s legation there was being stormed by a Czech
mob. Göring actually prepared to bomb Prague, but twenty
minutes later the intercept was formally withdrawn. Had some-
body triggered a fake “incident” too soon, or were the Germans
testing the machinery, or was it more psychological warfare, de-
signed to intensify the war of nerves?
Late the next day Göring’s party traveled on to Rominten
in East Prussia. The rutting here was just beginning, bringing
the excited hunters to their own sweaty climax of anticipation.
Throughout the afternoon of the twenty-fourth, as Hitler and
Chamberlain still locked horns at Godesberg, Göring stalked the
legendary stag the Prince. Nobody knew how big he really was,
but many claimed to have seen him. But then, as though he
knew that the Reich master huntsman himself had come for
him, the Prince strolled proudly forth and cheekily sat down
just as Göring took aim. When finally, after Göring had been