waiting for hours, the stag cantilevered himself to his feet, a
smaller animal trotted right into the line of fire. Göring loosed
off one shot nonetheless, and the Prince’s reign was over. It was
the biggest beast the field marshal had ever killed, with twenty-
two points (worth . on the then-fashionable Nadler Scale).
All this masked the distant clatter of foreign armies girding
for war. In England gas masks were issued, slit trenches dug. For
one more day Göring lingered at Rominten, where he felled
three more stags, all of the “Reich master huntsman” category
(rating over points on the scale).
Before leaving these eastern territories, he watched several
aurochs, or European bison, being turned loose into the
Rominten Heath. The aurochs was a shy though noble animal
that had all but vanished from Europe centuries before. Göring
had nurtured these specimens in the Berlin Zoo and now they
stood there, proud Reich master huntsman and timid aurochs,
both species by rights extinct. They blinked at each other for
some time; then the shaggy, inoffensive animals shambled off
into the unfamiliar landscape while their master joined his train
to revert to his own habitat, the councils of war and industry in
Berlin.
The news there was disconcerting. At Godesberg, Hitler
had learned from the Forschungsamt intercepts that Czech
President Bene was not going to honor any obligations, and is-
sued an ultimatum. The intercepts fairly sizzled with obscene
Czech references to the wimpish British government. Göring
handed the whole red-hot sheaf of Brown Pages to the carna-
tioned British ambassador Henderson, hoping thus to hammer a
wedge between the British and the Czechs.
Göring now knew what Hitler probably did not, that his
air force was totally inadequate for war with Britain. On his tri-
umphant return from East Prussia, he was handed a shocking