"I love this cool boring and gnawing at the heart until suddenly the full recognition of the danger sets in, almost like the salamander of a dagger. Slowly and uncannily it causes the soul, which weighs horror and delight on a precise scale, to grow pale. They are moments of extreme tension and even deathlike stillness, unforgettable external monments in which one's entire life crystallizes in a tiny point, a luminous nothingness. They occurr in almost every air battle, but also while trying out some sort of new aerobatic figures which the machine might not withstand.
I am convinced that these moments constitute the secret love of most flyers, at least the most daring of them. And even those who do not want to admit it, or really do not know what puzzling paths their tendencies tread, are proud of the mysterious exhalations of beauty and danger which surrounds their profession.
... I do not know who I should admire more, the tenacity of the defender who does not give up or the blind doggedness of the attacker who does not let his victim out of his clutches as long as he still has a round in his gun and a drop of blood in his heart. One of the two must fall... Both are conscious of their ability and wrest the last measure of performance from their machines."
~ Lt. Otto Fuchs, Royal Prussian Jagdstaffel 30, October 1917
