Death on the Ice
Authors: Robert Ryan
A Novel
Based on the Terra Nova Expedition
Robert Ryan
For Jonathan Futrell
‘What lots and lots I could tell you of this journey. How much better it has been than lounging in too great comfort at home … But what a price to pay!’
Robert Falcon Scott, 1912
The majority of temperatures are given in degrees Fahrenheit (except where noted) as used by Scott. In his journals, RFS talked about ‘degrees of frost’; this is how many degrees below freezing (32F) the temperature had fallen. So 52 degrees of frost is -20F. Distances are normally measured in geographical or nautical miles, which are 1.15 statute (land) miles.
‘Many a man’s reputation would not know his character if they met on the street’
Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)
L
IEUTENANT TEDDY GRANT SAW
the woman arrive at the Bellecamp airstrip from the corner of his eye, just as Doyle, his air mechanic, spun the prop. She was stepping out of a staff car that had pulled up next to the farmhouse, lowering herself delicately on to a hastily laid platform of duckboards. A visit by a female who wasn’t a nurse to a Royal Flying Corps frontline squadron was rare. Judging by her flamboyant hat, this one was certainly no Florence Nightingale. But Grant quickly dismissed her from his mind. His old friend Soldier used to say: ‘They drive all rational thought from your head, replacing it with feathers and ribbons.’ When you were charged with shooting down enemy balloons, feathers and ribbons were the last thing you needed fogging your concentration.
The engine caught on Doyle’s second attempt. They exchanged thumbs up. Grant was always slightly surprised to see that the Irishman still had all his digits after the hazardous manual start. The mechanic ducked under the wing and yanked the chocks from Grant’s wheels, then danced away as the plane immediately began to roll forward.
As usual, the Sopwith bucked, pulled and grumbled as Grant fought with it to keep the taxi line. The Camel was well christened. Like its namesake, it could be capricious and took careful handling. Front heavy, it would dive face first into the field given the slightest provocation. When the first of the models had arrived a few months previously, they had bent propellers at a prodigious rate. Subsequently, the squadron lost pilots and machines as the airmen struggled to master the snub-nosed scout’s many idiosyncrasies.
In time, though, Grant had discovered it shared other characteristics with the ship of the desert: it was tough, fast and, if treated right, might just keep its master alive.
He used the blip switch to kill the ignition and slowed the plane to let his wingman, Jeremy Thompson, slip into the forward position. The Yorkshireman raised a gloved hand in thanks.
The strike planners at Wing had specified a pair of veterans were to take out the German ‘sausages’. The squadron commander had a choice of two out of two: Thompson and Grant were the only flyers left worthy of the term.
The sun was barely clearing the spindly treetops and had not yet burned off the tendrils of mist, which lay over the whitened grass of the airfield like ribbons of chiffon. The night had brought the first hard frost of the season. The chilled air blasting into his Vaseline-smeared cheeks from the prop wash drove the blood from his face, leaving him waxen.
The cold didn’t bother him too much, though. Although he wasn’t as impervious to fifty-knot blasts of icy wind as his old colleague Birdie Bowers, Grant didn’t suffer unduly from the temperatures found in this part of Europe. He told the other pilots that this was because of the Ontario winters of his childhood, even though Grant had never actually been to Ontario.
The leading Sopwith swung on to the strip. The note of Thompson’s Clerget-Bentley engine changed, becoming angrier. Habit made Grant listen for the stutter of an incorrectly set fuel mixture, but there was none. Thompson accelerated along the strip, the plane bouncing over the frost-hardened soil. The ruts reminded Grant of miniature sastrugi, the wind-formed frozen waves on the Antarctic ice cap that confounded dogs, horses and men alike. Thompson’s Sopwith lifted smoothly from the earth and banked left, slow and stately, the nose rising as it did so.
Grant followed him on to the ad hoc runway and carefully checked his own fuel mixture and choke. The Camel had a lethal trick it liked to play if the settings weren’t to its liking: a stall at fifty or sixty feet after take-off. It had cost more than a few newcomers their lives.
Grant adjusted his goggles and slipped the trailing end of his leather helmet’s strap into his mouth, an improvised bite-strap to protect his tongue and teeth from the chattering caused by the furrows in the soil. He turned on the engine once more, feeling the torque twist and snatch at the airframe. With nothing to hold it back, the Sopwith lurched forward and the world blurred as the trees rushed towards him. He pulled back the stick, corrected the inevitable yaw, and followed Thompson skywards, relishing the smoothness after the juddering progress over the field.
The propeller bit confidently into the dense morning air, dragging the plane higher. Grant passed through a hundred feet and listened to the whine of an engine perfectly on song. He sat back to enjoy a few moments of satisfaction.
That morning’s sortie was an Army Artillery Coordination mission. Most flights involved offering protection for the slow FE2b photographic planes, which were highly vulnerable to the German scouts. This strike was to take down the tethered inflatables—the sausages—that were spotting Allied movements and calling the Hun artillery down on the infantry’s heads.
The kite balloons were fifteen miles to the east, according to the intelligence report. For the first few minutes the Sopwiths passed over deceptively normal French arable countryside. There were cows and sheep and even farmers driving teams of horses; old men who stopped and watched the biplanes climbing. One of them waved. It was hard to believe there was a three-year-old war being waged just over the horizon.
Soon buildings that had lost their roof tiles came into view. Further on, they were mostly reduced to charred skeletons. Some had been re-walled and re-roofed with olive-coloured canvas sheeting, suggesting that they had been resurrected as billets. The woodlands and fields became scarred by bonks, circular blast marks, like an outbreak of smallpox across the land. The first field hospitals appeared, doing their usual brisk business. Nearby were the clearing stations, the repositories of the dead. They, too, were rarely idle. Adjacent to them were mounds of turned earth, like a poorly planned allotment: the careless, makeshift cemeteries of the front.
As the scouts passed through at three thousand feet, they flew over artillery installations and columns of shuffling men, moving to or from the front line. The closely packed bodies made them appear as a continuous dark snake slithering along the poplar-lined roads. They halted or moved aside only for the muscular Suffolk Punches dragging munitions drays overloaded with shells, or the ambulances ferrying the dead and wounded.
Then, directly ahead, Grant saw the familiar corridor of brown muck. It was a three-mile-wide blemish, where the earth was churned by shellfire, scored by deep trenches and sutured together with rusting wire. As he approached, ponds of grey-green water winked prettily in the sun, although Grant knew they were, in reality, pits of slime filled with decomposing bodies. For a number of years his vision of hell had consisted of traversing a crevasse-filled glacier with a blizzard of ice crystals blasting into his face, while trying to drag a two-hundred-pound sledge through thick snow that clogged the runners and fouled his skis. Better a week in those conditions, he now thought, than a single day in the trenches.
There was little movement from either side in the conflict. No puffs of artillery or columns of dirt thrown up by detonations. No senseless charges at chattering machine-guns or rolling fogs of yellow gas, ready to turn a Tommy’s lungs to foam and blacken his eyes to coal. No man’s land was devoid of anything living. It was one of those days when the two sides took stock, like battered prizefighters in their respective corners.
Carefully, Grant scanned the junction of ruined earth and pristine sky. Two specks registered on his retina and he ran a glove over his goggles’ lenses to ensure they weren’t oil spots.
To his left, he saw Thompson wag his wings. He’d also caught sight of the observation balloons hoisted up above the German lines, floating about half a mile apart. That was unusually close, but it made for an easy division of duty. With a dip of his port wing, Thompson indicated he would take the one on the left. Grant raised a fist in agreement. They were travelling at over a hundred miles an hour now, and still climbing. They would swoop down on the two balloons and blow them out of the sky.