Oh, my poor little Taube! Would it had not happened exactly on the third day of the mobilization! I felt quite hopeless. Yet, without entirely losing courage, I carried the debris to the hangar. Luckily I had received some reserve propellers and planes from home. My only hope was that the motor had escaped! I did not possess any spares, and it would have been impossible to procure them. I made my way towards the boxes in which the spares were kept, and first opened those which contained the planes. But, oh, horrors! A foul smell of decay was wafted into our faces, and, fearing the worst, we prised open the inner zinc lining. The sight which met our eyes was perfectly horrible. The box was full of mouldy lumber. The covering of the planes had rotted. The wing ribs and the different wooden parts, which had been carefully packed, lay in a disorderly heap and were covered with a coat of mildew. It was a sad spectacle. We now opened the case in which were the propellers, where we found the same conditions. The five propellers had simply ceased to exist, and had shrunk to such an extent that they could no longer be of any use. It was a hard nut to crack! But, without losing courage, my splendid rigger, Stüben, the chief mechanic, tackled the job, and the same afternoon I sat with Stüben, my two stokers, Frinks and Scholl, and eight Chinese from the dockyards, hard at work on the wings. Thereafter I took the least damaged propeller to the wharf, and was helped out of my quandary, thanks to the excellent patternmaker K. who, with the Chinese, constructed a new propeller. This was a real masterpiece, for it was hewn out of seven thick oak planks which had been glued together with ordinary carpenter’s glue. The Chinese used their axes, and fashioned a perfect propeller, copying a model which K. had set up for them. Though done by hand, their work showed the utmost care and precision. It is this propeller I used for all my flights during the siege of Kiao-Chow. But we had not remained idle in our sheds. We worked day and night with the utmost energy, and already, on the ninth day after my accident, my little Taube stood ready to run out on the aviation field at sunrise. It is not difficult, though, to understand that my expectations of a successful flight were not very high. My planes had been reconstructed from a mass of musty material, and we had to rig them the best we could, as we had no flat spaces. I have described the erection of the propeller, which, by the way, made about a hundred revolutions less than it should have. Besides this, the conditions for flying on this particular aerodrome were so unfavourable that the choice lay between a clean start and an irremediable fall. But I had no business to think of that. We were in the midst of war. I was the only aviator and had to carry on. And I had luck!