War & Peace Quote by Manfred von Richthofen

Of course no one thought of anything except of attacking the enemy. The line lands with the breezy certainty of someone describing the weather, not a decision that gets people killed. Richthofen is writing as an ace and a symbol, but he’s also doing something more calculated: converting chaotic modern war into a story of clean instinct and automatic courage.

The key word is "instinct". It’s a moral alibi disguised as anthropology. If attacking is innate - if it "lies in" every German - then hesitation becomes unnatural, even shameful. Richthofen wraps aggression in identity, turning a tactical choice into a national reflex. That’s propaganda-grade framing, whether or not he intended it as such: the soldier doesn’t deliberate, he behaves as his blood requires.

The "of course" does similar work. It preemptively mocks any alternative (caution, regrouping, even strategy) as unimaginable. This is the voice of an elite combatant smoothing away fear with certainty, the way pilots and officers often do in memoirs: confidence as a survival mechanism and as a performance for readers back home.

Then there’s the almost quaint specificity: "particularly if he meets hostile cavalry". In an airman’s mouth, cavalry evokes an older, more romantic war - sabers, charges, clear enemies. World War I was industrial slaughter; invoking cavalry lets Richthofen borrow chivalric imagery and retrofit meaning onto mechanized killing. The subtext is nostalgia plus superiority: even in the air, he narrates combat as a timeless hunt, and Germans as the species built to charge.