Goshawk Squadron (3 page)

Richards flushed, but held his gaze. “I should hope to be all those, at least in part,” he said, “sir.”

Woolley let the bottle of Guinness fall, and stretched out in his chair. He looked long at Richards, but Richards was a well-made, handsome fellow accustomed to having people looking at him; so he said nothing. Then he realized that Woolley, although still looking at him, was not thinking of him. “Sir?” he said politely. Woolley blinked.

“Why did you join the bloody old RFC, Richards?”

“Well, sir, I was in the cavalry—21st Lancers—and frankly it was getting rather dreary. I mean, we never seemed to go into action. So after a while it occurred to me that this wasn't going to be a good cavalry war at all. It's all those trenches, you see, sir. First there's ours, then there's theirs, and nothing in between but shell-holes. Hopeless riding country. So it occurred to me, sir, that you chaps in airplanes were having rather a better time of it. Sort of cavalry of the air, that kind of thing. So I decided to have a stab at that, sir. And here I am.”

“Here you are.”

“Yes, sir.”

Woolley went back to his flying-boots. “And what are you going to do next?”

“Next, sir? Well, anything you say, sir. Go up and sort of start shooting down Germans, I hope.”

“Why?”

“Why, sir?” Richard stared curiously. “Well, to help win the war, I suppose.”

“How?”

“How?” Richards felt his right hand start to tremble. He held his breeches between his fingers. Woolley, with his gamekeeper's manners and his trade-unionist voice, upset him. “Well … in the obvious way, sir, I suppose. By killing Germans. Sir.”

“One at a time?”

Richards said nothing.

“That's the way they come, up there. One plane, one German.” Woolley's voice was flat as slate. “If you're lucky you might get a two-seater and double your victory effort. Were you thinking of going after two-seaters especially, Richards?”

Miserably, Richards muttered: “No, sir.” Even the drill sergeants had never spoken to him with such drab contempt.

“No. Albert Ball only got forty-four, you know. Guynemer only got fifty-three. Even God Almighty himself, Mr. Richthofen, has only gotten sixty-odd.” Woolley stopped work, and stared at Richards anxiously. “That last one is on the
other
side, you know.
He
shoots at
us
.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.” Work resumed. “Are you as good as Ball, Richards? Are you as good as—say—Bishop? Who is still, astonishingly, with us?”

“I doubt it, sir. I shouldn't think so.”

“No. The way you landed yesterday, kangarooing that poor old airplane in bloody great
leaps
and
bounds,
I don't think you're fit to wipe Bishop's bottom. Are you, Richards?”

“No, sir. Probably not.”

“Not what?”

“Not … fit to—to wipe Mr. Bishop's bottom, sir.” Richards' father owned a length of Curzon Street, a chunk of Yorkshire, and the warm respect of all mankind. He had raised his son in a tradition of service and self-sacrifice,
meaning command over others. Now Woolley's coarse assessment bewildered Richards. His fingers curled with revulsion at the thought. His common sense told him that Woolley was merely using a figure of speech, but the man's face, his attitude—like a professional gambler living on fools' money—reduced everything to a stony unpleasantness. Richards was accustomed to finding at least a little pleasure in everything. Woolley upset him. The man had gone back to his blasted boots. He was spitting on them again.

“If you really want to kill more Germans than Ball, or Bishop, or … or even
me
,” Woolley spread his arms in a humility which humiliated only Richards, “well, that can certainly be arranged. If that's what you want, I'll put you in a machine-gun battalion on the most active part of the Front we can find, and with luck the Hun will attack and you can kill scores of them. People have been known to kill hundreds with one machine gun, Richards. I myself have seen it done. You sit behind your machine gun, and the enemy climb out of their trenches and advance. Some may run, but most walk. The mud, you see, and the shell-holes, and the wire. They walk toward you, and you shoot your machine gun at them. It's on a sort of swivel-thing, and you swing it from side to side. You don't aim, not in this war. The enemy walks into your line of fire, you see, so you just keep on scything away at them. That's what it's called, ‘scything.' If you do it properly they fall down in rows, hundreds and hundreds at a time. Sixty thousand in one hour, I think that was the record, but of course somebody may have beaten that, I couldn't say, I don't read the papers. That was
their
machine guns, of course, and we supplied the sixty thousand, but the principle is exactly the same. So if you do really honestly want to kill more Germans than any other pilot in the RFC, I can have you transferred. Yes or no?”

“No, sir,” Richards said huskily. Tears of shame and fury pressed at his eyes. He had never met anyone so utterly despicable and seedy and rotten and not worth fighting for in his whole life.

“You don't think you would contribute toward victory behind a machine gun in the trenches, killing hundreds of Germans.”

Richards said nothing.

“It's not a very valiant way to fight, I agree. Nothing dashing, chivalrous, gallant or plucky about it.” Woolley guzzled more Guinness. “What do you want to do?”

Richards clenched his teeth and forced his head to stay up. He kept tasting something hot and foul in the back of his throat. This was what he imagined rape felt like. He found that he was shaking his head. “I don't know, sir,” he said.

“Then thank God, because that's the first sensible thing you've said! You don't know a bloody thing, lad. You're like a Boy Scout on a new bicycle. The first Hun you met would cut you in half without even taking the sausage sandwich out of his mouth. You know nothing—
nothing.
So what are you going to do?”

“Going to learn, sir.”

“How?”

“I expect … you'll teach me, sir.”

Woolley finished his boots and pulled them on. “Wear plenty of warm woollies,” he said. “It's cold up there.”

At twelve thousand feet Richards could no longer feel his feet. The passive misery of freezing in the cockpit overlaid all memories of Woolley's tent. It was wearying just to sit there and keep flexing every muscle, and climb and climb and climb, with the engine clattering ahead and the wires whistling all around …

Abruptly he realized that Woolley was blaring at him on a klaxon horn fitted to his cockpit. Richards raised an arm stiffly, and Woolley waved him back to line-astern position.

The instant Richards was ready Woolley began the lesson. First, simple banks and turns and easy dives; then faster banks, and tighter turns, and steeper dives. As soon as Richards straightened out from one maneuver Woolley led him into another. The pressure increased. When Woolley
fell away in a side-slip, it was sharper and deeper than Richards thought safe; but Richards followed as closely as his icy feet and sweating hands allowed.

Woolley dropped into a dive, let Richards join him and pointed to the right. He flattened the dive and threw the plane into a tight right-hand turn, skidding its wings across the thin air. Richards tried to follow and missed by a mile. His turn was soft at the start, and when he tried to compress it the correction was violent, and the aircraft lurched into a sideways waddle. He lost speed, the controls were sluggish, the engine bellowed resentfully. Cursing and sweating, rigid and heavy handed, he laboriously straightened up.

Woolley charged him from the right, above and a fraction behind, klaxon blaring like a maniac. He drove in so hard that to Richards' shocked eyes all that could be seen was the head-on profile, violently magnifying itself until with a sickening, diminishing howl Woolley lifted and skimmed over Richards' cockpit, and droned away.

Richards sucked breath into his lungs. He felt disgraced.
If that had been a German,
he thought,
I should be dead.

Woolley came back and flew alongside and looked at him. He signaled Richards to get back into line-astern. For the next ten minutes they flew in ever-tighter circles, first one way, then the next, until Richards expected the plane to come to pieces under the grinding strain of chasing its own tail.

By now the blood was back in his feet, his body was wet to the neck, and his nerves sensed every vibration of the machine as if it were a live thing. He realized that its limits were his limits, its abilities his abilities. This he had never felt when driving a tubby Avro 504 over Salisbury Plain. This was a different life.

Woolley broke off the tail-chasing and they practiced Immelmann turns: diving into a loop and rolling out of the top of it to emerge right-side up. Richards was so slow that Woolley completed a second Immelmann and dived over him as he came out of his first. They did Immelmanns for a quarter of an hour.

By now Richards was very tired. The manual labor of working the controls, the wasted tension of uncertainty, the draining fatigue of concentration, left him limp. He wanted nothing more than to sit in a soft chair in a quiet room with a good cup of tea.

Next Woolley led him in ten minutes' miscellaneous spinning. At the end of it Richards' hands were trembling inside his gloves, his forearms were stiff with effort, and he had been sick over the floor.

Woolley turned for home and Richards trailed behind him, lamb-like. He had to brace himself with one hand on the rim of the cockpit in order to hold the controls steady. His feet slithered on the freezing vomit.

Woolley changed his mind and took them back up to eight thousand feet, where he led Richards in a series of power dives. Each time, he made the dive a little steeper, held it a little longer, until Richards saw the French fields held up like a backdrop before him, and heard the wing-roots creak and felt the fuselage judder under the rising speed. He watched Woolley out of the corner of his eye and saw the tearing air pressure begin to bend the wingtips back; and he repeated the same stableboys' obscenity over and over again until Woolley smoothly pulled out and sent the SE soaring up the other side of the invisible hill until it lost its impetus and lazily toppled forward into level flight.

Richards followed, shakily, and at a thousand feet Woolley led him over the edge again, only this time the plunge was vertical. Richards clenched the stick in both hands as if it were a tiller in a storm. The air shrieked; he could see hedges and trees and things moving. He was acutely conscious of a harmless skim of oil, drifting back on the top of his engine cowling.

There was a field with a haystack in it, dead ahead, and he made a tiny, pointless adjustment to miss the haystack. At five hundred feet a strip of fabric ripped off his lower wing with a bang and cracked itself to shreds. He was aware of a small satisfaction: this would be the end of Woolley, too. Then Woolley eased his nose up and carved a long, luxurious
curve that left them racing across the countryside at twice treetop height. Woolley gave Richards a couple of minutes to recover his breath, his vision and what was left of his nerve, and then hooted on the klaxon. They went down low and hedge-hopped all the way home. The first Richards knew about their landing-ground was when they jumped over some trees and he saw the planes parked around the edge of the airfield.

Woolley met him as he got out of the cockpit. The bulky coat and helmet made Woolley's face look even thinner. A smear of oil darkened his patchy complexion, and where the goggles had been his eyes looked raw.

“What did you see in the sky?” Woolley asked.

Richards stumbled and hung on to the wing. He shook his head.

“You didn't see anything in the sky?”

Richards tried to make his mouth work but the muscles had locked.

“You must be bloody blind, then. I counted sixteen aircraft, and I wasn't even looking.” Richards blinked at Woolley's boots and tried to stop his head trembling. “What did you see on the ground? Anything worth reporting, if you'd been an enemy pilot?”

Richards forced himself to look up. His ears roared with the negative bellow of silence and the uncertain surge of blood; the landing-ground felt unsteady, as if it might tilt and fall away without warning.
Had
he seen anything on the ground? Only a haystack. Only a haystack. “I … didn't have much time to look,” he said.

“You had all the damn time there was,” Woolley told him. “You didn't see the French camp at Conty? We flew around it long enough. No tanks on the road from Beauvais to Breteuil? No artillery on railway trucks near Poix?”

“No, sir.” Richards' lips were rubbery. Speaking was a monstrous effort. He wanted only to be allowed to go away and never have to say another word to anyone, ever.

“If you didn't
see
anything, what the hell were you doing up there? You obviously weren't paying much attention to flying the airplane. Joan of Arc in full armor could have flown better than you did. And don't go up in those boots again, they're too pretentious. Get something thick and heavy, and wear plenty of socks. You had cold feet up there, didn't you? Bloody tramping on that poor bastard rudder bar. You can't make it go by kicking it, you know.”

Woolley left him and ambled over to the cockpit. For a moment Richards was afraid he might look inside, but he only patted the fuselage and spat on the hot exhaust pipe, which sizzled. “Poor old cow,” he said. “Who's your mechanic?”

“Fairbrother,” Richards said.

“Get him now, tell him to fix that fabric and everything else, and refuel. Then find Rogers and Lambert and practice close-formation stuff. They'll explain.” He ambled off.

When he was thirty yards away he looked back. Richards was wiping his face with a handkerchief. Woolley put his hands on his hips. Richards dropped the handkerchief and lurched away from the airplane. “Fairbrother!” he shouted weakly. “Corporal Fairbrother!” A man came running.