Authors: Paul Dowswell
‘Hey, Eddie,’ he shouted over. ‘Guess what I’ve been up to!’ He looked exceedingly pleased with himself.
‘Another notch on the propeller, huh?’ said Eddie. ‘Was it a Fokker? What does your cat think about that?’
‘Better than that, pal! I got one of those ammunition trains. About two in the morning. Saw it coming into this little town near to Mons. The smoke in the moonlight gave it away – so I came in low and dropped a couple of twenty-five-pounders. I’d like to tell you it was my skill and judgement –’ he winked, a habit Eddie was beginning to find irritating – ‘but I got lucky. Very lucky. The bombs had their usual delay, and as I was flying away I heard an explosion, then about ten seconds later the whole thing erupted like a volcano. The crate felt like it had been picked up by a wave. If I’d been just above, I’d have been fried along with all the Huns below.
‘Course, I circled around to check out the damage. Bright as day it was for a while. Then some of the Huns started on me with machine guns so I got out of there pretty damn quick.’
‘So you’re the one who disturbed my good night’s sleep,’ said Eddie.
Their conversation was interrupted by another airman, who burst into the mess with a delighted expression on his face. ‘Hold the front page, fellas. I got the scoop of the century!’
Biederbeck and Eddie looked at him expectantly. ‘War’s over!’ he announced breathlessly. ‘The whole shooting match ends at eleven o’clock this morning. Ceasefire!’
The mess erupted in a great cheer. ‘We’re done, boys. We’re all going to live,’ said one of the pilots.
Eddie cheered along with the rest of them. But something was bothering him. As he ate his bacon and scrambled eggs, he felt a twinge of disappointment. He’d got four Huns. You needed five to call yourself an ace. He’d love to go back home and have his picture in the paper:
Eddie Hertz – fighter ace
. That would make Janie Holland wish she hadn’t dumped him.
‘I’m going out to bag myself a Hun,’ he told Biederbeck.
‘Squadron leader won’t allow it, Eddie. There’s no operations now for the rest of the day.’
Another pilot leaned over from the next table. ‘That attack they told us about at yesterday’s briefing – Colonel Miller’s 91st Division. Going in at Aulnois this morning.’
Eddie looked blank. Then he remembered. ‘Ten o’clock, isn’t it?’
‘I’d guess they could do with some air support,’ said the pilot.
‘They’ll call that assault off surely,’ said Eddie, suddenly feeling deflated.
The pilot shook his head. ‘Not if I know that bastard Miller. He’ll be wanting to milk every last chance he’s got to chase the Hun. Those men will fight right up to the last minute.’
Eddie nodded. ‘I’m gonna get my erks to fuel her up and I’m going out. They can throw the book at me when I get back.’ ‘Erk’ was bit of slang they’d picked up from the Royal Flying Corps. It was an abbreviation of sorts, of ‘aircraftman’ – the mechanics that kept a plane airworthy.
He ran over to the barn that served as a temporary hangar for three of the squadron’s Sopwith Camels. ‘Hey, fellas,’ he shouted over to a couple of men in overalls who sat playing cards in the corner. ‘Get her fuelled up. I’m going out in fifteen.’
The ground crew leaped to their feet. They had heard there would be no more flying that morning. But Eddie was the boss. If he said he was going up, he was going up.
Eddie hurried to the farmhouse, grabbed his flying jacket and Céline’s scarf and hurriedly pulled on his calf-length brown boots. His flying helmet and leather gloves were waiting for him on the seat of his Camel. He looked out at the overcast grey sky and quickly pulled on a thick woollen sweater. It was going to be cold up there.
Leaving without so much as a final glance, he ran towards the Camel. The ground crew were finishing off the fuelling. ‘Give us five more minutes, boss. Then she’s ready to go.’
Whenever Eddie climbed into the wicker seat of his Camel, he had the strangest mixture of feelings. Always excitement – that, at least, had never left him, but fear too – a queasy nausea whenever he smelled the oil and gasoline and polished metal of the engine. That magnificent piece of gleaming machinery that whirred and popped and hammered with such precision right in front of his eyes, this extraordinary device that lifted him above the clouds, could also deliver him to a horrible burning death or crush his flesh and bones if he crashed to the ground. Flying was a Faustian pact. You had the chance to go up into the air and soar like a bird – but you also faced the fate that British song so vividly promised.
The drill for take-off was so ingrained Eddie ran through it without really thinking what he was doing. Engine checks, machine gun checks, two twenty-five-pound bombs right underneath him on the underside of the fuselage. Eddie didn’t like having those things on board. If he crashed on take-off, or got hit, who could say they wouldn’t go off?
‘OK, let’s get her off. Contact!’ said Eddie, and the mechanic swung the varnished wooden propeller. The engine spluttered into life with a spurt of blue exhaust, and his nostrils filled with the smell of petrol. And as it usually did on the first time, the prop came to an abrupt halt and had to be spun again. As it usually did, this time the rotary engine fired on all nine of its cylinders and Eddie felt an intoxicating power judder through the small biplane. It was like a great beast pulling on a leash.
That engine had terrified him when he first flew these Camels. The way it spun on its housing – this great lump of gleaming steel whizzing around at 1,500 revolutions per minute. It was like a great big gyroscope and it perpetually tugged the flimsy, wood-and-canvas plane off to the right. If you weren’t careful, that engine would be the death of you. And Eddie was convinced that crashing with the thing spinning around like that was far more dangerous than crashing with a stationary in-line engine.
But without it, the Camel wouldn’t be half the plane it was. Nothing did a right turn as quickly as a Camel, as many a German pilot had found out to their cost. Left turns were slower – laborious really. But the aircraft was agile, and that was what made it so formidable in a dogfight. If you could cope with its limitations – sluggish above 12,000 feet, slow compared to the latest German Fokkers – you were lucky to have one.
Take-off was the most dangerous time. A full fuel tank added to the forward weight of the craft and Eddie always felt anxious until the wheels left the ground and the shaking stopped. He gunned the engine, feeling it straining on its housing.
‘Chocks away,’ shouted Eddie, and made the usual gesture. He didn’t know why he even shouted. The noise drowned everything out. The ground crew spun the Camel on its spindly wheels, holding on to its tail, safely away from that roaring engine. The machine emerged from the barn and Eddie began to trundle along the bumpy grass to the runway.
Checking wind direction, and making sure he had maximum length for take-off, Eddie gave the engine a final gunning and then began his run. The wind started to sing in the struts and he could feel the terrific power of the machine at his fingertips.
This manoeuvre required supreme concentration, working the ailerons, elevators and rudder with hands and feet, and pushing the throttle just so. The torque was phenomenal. As Eddie gained speed, the whole aircraft was wrenched to the right. He set the stick and the pedals to counteract that swing and pulled back the throttle.
If he got this wrong, he could easily find himself in a high-speed collision with a tree, and then they really would have to take the cylinder out of his kidneys, and all the other grisly things from that song. Eddie had seen enough Camels leap in the air, only to stall and land with a sickening explosion, or worst of all tip forward, shattering the propeller and engine housing and mangling the pilot . . . it was all too easy to do.
He felt the tail lift. This was the trickiest part. Keeping her level for a few seconds more. His eyes darted down to the speedometer. It was at 70 mph. He pulled back the stick and the jolting stopped as he parted company with the ground. Immediately, his anxiety vanished. He climbed to the low cloud base, keen to break out into the vast blue domain above. He could feel the moisture of the heavy clouds in his throat and sensed their clammy coldness on his face.
Five minutes later he was through and basking in brilliant sunshine. The thrill of that never left him. Those mere mortals down on the ground – they had to put up with whatever weather the heavens decreed. A pilot could enjoy the sunshine whenever he took to the sky.
And the clouds up there. Some of them were as big as mountains – with craggy promontories and great gullies. And when you got really high up, you could see the cloud fields stretch to the horizon. You could even see the curve of the Earth.
Being able to do that made Eddie feel like a god. And the girls loved him. Even in New York, in the week before he left, they had flocked to hear his news. All the most glamorous girls went for the flyboys – especially the fighter pilots. They were the princes of the sky. Eddie enjoyed the attention, but he was wise enough to know how shallow it all was.
Now he had reached 1,000 feet, just above the cloud base. He turned the nose of his Camel to the east and the enemy.
8.45 a.m.
‘No talking,’ whispered Sergeant Franklin, ‘and watch where you step. I don’t want any falling over and giving us away to a sniper. You never know who might be in here. Hosking, you stay on point for now; I’ll be right behind you.’
Will watched the others respond. With some of the other sergeants and corporals the men would exchange glances, even look askance at their orders. Jim’s commands were met only by stern nods and brief murmurs of agreement. He noticed how the men would often bunch around Jim, as if being close to their sergeant offered them extra protection.
Jim checked in his pocket and brought out a small compass. ‘Any of you got one of these?’ he asked. ‘No? Then make sure you keep with me. It’s very easy to lose your direction in a wood, especially where it’s dense.’
Hosking took the lead without a word and the nine of them began to advance into the great green-and-brown shelter of the forest. The evergreens and deciduous trees made for a beautiful mixture. Some of the deciduous ones had shed now, with only a few tattered leaves remaining. But the evergreens offered dense cover for anyone who might be watching.
One by one they were swallowed by the forest, and Will immediately felt a chill as he moved into its shadow. How strange, he thought, that such a place of natural beauty should suddenly become so sinister. Will loved the woods back home in the Lune Valley – he’d spent half his childhood playing in them. He and his mates had built dens in the dense vegetation or hollowed-out tree trunks, and even camped out for the night. Being here, in such similar terrain, filled him with a sadness he could not immediately understand.
The early-morning mist had turned to a dank fog, which hung around the lower branches. There was a strange smell too, which Will recognised as gas. Not the intense, choking smell that came from a recently fallen shell, but the faint remains of an earlier attack. Will hated that mixture – fog and gas. From a distance it was difficult to tell, but the closer you got, the more you could make out the green tendrils in the grey fog.
Now the cold was getting to him. He began to fantasise about a proper breakfast. Bacon, eggs, sausages, two lovely crisp fried eggs done in butter. He was never going to eat porridge again in his life. His stomach gave a gurgle, so loud Ogden looked around and winked at him. But as he did so he tripped and fell to the ground with a clatter of belt buckles, rifle strap and rustling brown leaves.
Sergeant Franklin looked round with cold disapproval. Ogden would be on latrine duty as soon as they got back.
As they ventured further into the dark depths, an enormous shape loomed out of the trees, making Will shudder. A German warplane had crashed, and hung nose down in the bare branches of a great oak. It had been there for a few months now, by the look of it. The canvas fuselage was starting to decay, and green moss was growing along the bare wooden struts where the fabric had been torn away. Will looked at the cockpit and was relieved to see it was empty. He’d seen pilots leap from burning machines, preferring a crushing fall to a fiery death. This machine was burned up, with black soot and charred fabric around the engine and along the side of the cockpit. Maybe that’s what had happened here.
Even in its derelict state the machine still had a fascinating beauty. The propeller hub, with the splintered stubs of its blades, was painted with a bright red spiral, which matched the colour of the fuselage. Great black crosses adorned the wings and tail. British warplanes were never so gaudy. But now it looked like an immense bird of prey that had been hung upside down as a trophy.
The men all stared at this extraordinary sight. In the middle distance a bombardment started – shells falling in the far end of the forest at regular intervals, blue flashes filtering through the dense vegetation. The explosions seemed muffled, but they were still close enough to feel through the ground.
‘If they’re ours, someone needs a right bollocking,’ said Jim under his breath. ‘If they’re Fritz’s, then it means there’s none of their men in the forest. If they start falling any closer, we’ll move out.’
As they left the great carcass of the warplane, another sound disturbed them. Will looked up to see a plane flying overhead, so close he could clearly make out the white discs on the wheels of the undercarriage. It was a Yank. Will suppressed an urge to wave; he would never see him under the thick canopy of the wood.