Eleven Eleven (10 page)

It was getting really cold now, and Eddie noticed how deeply he was having to breathe. His engine was struggling too, beginning to splutter. He was finding it difficult to stay focused on his quarry. He wondered if the Hun pilot was having the same problem with lack of oxygen at this altitude. He adjusted his fuel mixture and hoped his Camel would not let him down.

Perhaps it was a momentary loss of concentration, or even consciousness, but all at once Eddie could no longer see his enemy. Willing himself to raise his body up and further into the freezing slipstream, he leaned over his cockpit and spotted him. The Fokker was making a steep dive towards the German lines. Eddie waited until his opponent was slightly below his height, then turned his Camel and pulled his throttle to its full extent. The engine screamed in its housing, and the struts began to sing as the small plane strained against the forces of momentum and gravity. Eddie worried that the bullet holes in his wing might have fatally damaged the canvas, but his erks had done a good maintenance job. As far as he could tell, there was no tearing of fabric, and the Camel’s airframe seemed to be holding up to this punishing treatment.

As he closed in on the Fokker, Eddie prepared to fire his guns. He was low on ammunition now, he reckoned, so this time he would wait until he was well within range.

The German pilot was certainly not making it easy for him. Whenever Eddie lined up for a shot, the Fokker veered off to the left or right. It took four attempts for Eddie to finally get close enough to the German plane to be able to follow him into his turns and dives, and by then the altimeter told him they were down to five thousand feet.

Eddie was level behind the Fokker when he unleashed his bullets. The tracer shots showed him he had found his target and immediately he had to veer sharply right to avoid being hit by debris peeling off the stricken plane. The Fokker slowed down as its engine spluttered and stopped, and Eddie sped ahead, fearing he might fly in front of his foe and allow him to fire his own guns. But the pilot had enough on his mind.

The Fokker’s nose dropped and it dived towards the ground. Once more above his opponent, Eddie followed him down. There was no smoke, no flames. He wondered whether to fire again, but he couldn’t see the point. The Fokker was gliding now. He could see its stationary propeller. His opponent would be lucky to survive his landing.

Eddie could see hedgerows and lanes below, and the German pilot was trying to line up his machine to land on a straight empty road through the middle of a field. Eddie circled, wondering where they were. He guessed they were several miles behind the German lines – certainly somewhere as yet untouched by fighting.

The Hun was going to do it – he was flying above the road, and gently placed his Fokker down, coasting for a couple of hundred yards or so as the powerless machine lost momentum. In a flash Eddie realised he had missed his ‘kill’. Once the engine had been repaired the machine would still be flight-worthy. The pilot might have been injured, but he couldn’t have been that badly hurt to execute such a good dead-stick landing.

What was stopping him strafing the plane on the ground and killing the pilot? Should he do it? Two kills in one day. That would impress the girls back home, and the stuffed shirts at Yale. Eddie decided he would do it. Hell, all was fair in love and war, they kept saying. Maybe this bastard would have done the same to him, and two of his pals had just slaughtered Bridgman and Dwight. He turned the Camel into a tight curve, feeling himself pressed hard into his seat, and flew low towards his target. As he approached, he could see the Hun nimbly leaping from the cockpit. Eddie thought he was going to run for his life. Good. Then he could destroy the machine at least, and claim his kill. But the pilot didn’t run; he stood there by the wing, stiffly to attention, and saluted. You won, he seemed to be saying, and I respect you. That was it. Eddie pulled back the control stick and waggled his wings as he flew over. He wasn’t going to kill a man like that.

As he climbed into the sky, he noticed the scar of the Western Front to the west. It was time to head for home.

He landed to a hero’s welcome – the squadron carrying him back to the mess on their shoulders, but not before his aircrew had told him his Camel had fifty-eight bullet holes in it. One of them had almost severed a control wire to his ailerons. The steel wire was barely held by a thread. If that had gone, then he would have lost control of his plane and almost certainly plunged into a fatal spiral.

‘We thought you’d bought it with Dwight and Bridgman,’ said his erk. ‘We’d heard about them already. Bridgman crashed behind the British lines. Dwight came down just inside Hunland. And reports on the ground say you got three Huns.’

Eddie couldn’t lie. When he presented his flight report and claimed his kill, he told his squadron leader that two of the Fokkers had crashed into each other, and one had definitely gone down. The fourth had escaped with a dead-stick landing.

‘Bad luck, Hertz,’ he said. ‘As your commanding officer, I’m duty bound to tell you I would have polished him off on the way down,’ he said with a wink, ‘or got him on the ground, but I suppose your guns jammed, eh?’

Eddie nodded and laughed. He wasn’t going to tell his CO the story about the saluting pilot. But he wondered again if he should have shot him and destroyed the plane.

That night in the mess, as they celebrated his return and his third victory with a bottle of champagne, Eddie raised a glass to propose a toast to his absent friends Dwight and Bridgman, and felt a pang of admiration for the German pilot he had outwitted. He wished all aerial combat could end like that.

Since then he had mainly flown infantry support missions – shooting up the Huns on the ground as they fled before the might of the Allies, who seemed unstoppable now. All the way to Berlin. The landscapes had changed. When he first arrived, it was all bombed-out farmhouses and villages, great pockmarked landscapes and charcoal trees. Now the Germans were retreating through fresh countryside which had been untouched by war for four years.

And that sort of action didn’t seem very sporting either. Eddie knew some of the pilots thought it was funny to shoot at fleeing men. When they boasted about it in the officer’s mess, they would imitate the actions of terrified soldiers, running here and there in blind panic, and laugh. Those sorts of men loved to shoot up troop trains too – watch the locomotive explode in a great geyser of compressed steam, and all the carriages career off the lines. It was a cold-blooded business, and a single plane could destroy the lives of hundreds of men, with a well-placed bomb or a long burst of machine-gun fire. Shooting down planes was far better. Each man had a chance, not like the poor bastards trapped inside a train carriage or a cattle car. Eddie couldn’t stomach this kind of boasting.

Eddie checked his watch. An hour had passed. Clearly the Huns were not sending any of their men up this autumnal morning. He felt his chances ebbing away. Four Huns. It wasn’t enough. Then he remembered the attack on Aulnois and took a quick look at his map. The village was a couple of kilometres away from the town of Saint-Libert and just south of a dense forest. He was sure he had flown over that earlier. It would be easy enough to spot, even on a day like this.

He dived away from the blue vista back through the clouds and into the gloom of a dismal November day. Eddie had a good sense of place and direction and quickly spotted the forest and the church tower close by. He looked at his watch. 09.55. The attack was due at any moment.

A short burst of artillery fire blossomed on the ground beneath him, and he wondered about the wisdom of flying too close to that. What an ignominious end – to be hit by your own artillery on the last day of the war. Plenty of pilots he knew had been shot down by their own side in the previous few months.

The bombardment around the village had stopped now and Eddie could see tiny ant-like figures emerging from an embankment to the west. He swerved down, determined to come in alongside them, and when he discovered where the Germans were entrenched, he would fly in low and drop his eggs. He smirked at the term – another British colloquialism his squadron had picked up.

He put his Camel into a steep dive, and felt the familiar surge of excitement that came with the manoeuvre. His speedometer was touching two hundred miles per hour. A Camel could barely make one hundred twenty five in level flight, so diving like this was as fast as anyone could go. It was amazing. At this speed you could get from New York to Boston in an hour . . . it was even faster than a train.

Eddie levelled off behind the first wave of American soldiers, searching the horizon for any sign of the enemy. He was surprised to hear his engine stutter, and was startled to see a trail of black smoke emerge from the left-hand exhaust vents. Had his own soldiers been firing at him?

Whatever had caused that black smoke had come and gone. Maybe it was a faulty fuel mix, a misfiring valve – it could be lots of things. The engine roared on without interruption – no hint of distress in its insistent thrum, and the stick still felt responsive in his hand. The Camel was flying fine; he should just press on. He felt lucky. Maybe there would be a Hun plane up here for him after all, and maybe he would bag his fifth yet.

But there was still the attack below to attend to. His CO was going to wonder what the hell he was doing up here this morning. The troop-support role would give him an excuse even if it was directly against the regulations to take off like that. Eddie wasn’t that worried about the CO – especially if the war really was going to end. He could imagine the fuss the New York papers would kick up if he was court-martialled:
Gutsy Flyboy Cashiered for Fighting Hun
.

Checking around in case there were any other aircraft close by, he was disappointed to find himself still alone in the sky and dived down towards the German lines.

Chapter 13

9.45 a.m.

Axel Meyer had grown tired of squinting into the dull horizon. He was sure the Americans would be coming sometime that morning, but they were taking their time about it. His new friend Erich told him that he’d heard the Yanks usually attacked at first light. Well, it was long past that. Then shells began to fall in front of him, far enough away to watch them blossom and dissolve without feeling in immediate danger. He nudged Erich and realised he was fast asleep again. So far he had been lucky, but he was sure that soon the
Feldwebel
would find out. And he was equally sure he’d cut Erich’s ears off. ‘Hey, look out, we’ve got shells coming in,’ he said.

Erich jolted awake and peered over the crenulated wall of the church tower. A blinding flash erupted fifty metres in front of them, and a hot piece of shrapnel shot through the air, rapping sharply on the oversized helmet that sat uncomfortably on Erich’s head. ‘
Jesus
,’ he exclaimed, examining the dent. ‘That could have gone straight through.’

‘Put it back on, you
Dummkopf
?,?’ said Axel.

Two more shells fell around the first crater. ‘They’re getting our range,’ said Axel. He sounded half excited and half terrified. Their tower was such an obvious target for artillery.

‘
Feldwebel
,’ he shouted between explosions, ‘can we come down? The shells are coming closer.’

The
Feldwebel
unleashed a torrent of curses. They were so colourful some of the other soldiers even sniggered. Axel felt a bright red blush flush across his cheeks.

‘The
Schwein
,’ said Erich. ‘He’s sent us up here because we’re expendable. He doesn’t mind us getting killed, as long as we tell him what we can see first.’ He grabbed his rifle and pack. ‘I’m going down.’

Axel grabbed his arm. ‘Don’t be stupid, Erich. They’ll shoot you. Cowardice in the face of the enemy. Look. You stay here, we might get killed . . .’ Another shell exploded close enough to drown the words in Axel’s mouth. Soil, roots, stones and hot metal fragments rained down on them like a torrential downpour. Axel’s mouth filled with the taste of earth. He reached for his water bottle to rinse it away. ‘Go down there, you’re dead for sure.’

Erich saw sense. He sat down, his back to the parapet.

‘You know what I heard,’ he said. ‘Last night in the barn one of the older soldiers said these Americans we’re expecting to attack us, they’re the 370th Regiment. The 370th! I don’t like the sound of that. Where are the other 369 regiments? Are they in France too? That’s a hell of a lot of men.’

Axel nodded but said nothing. He had a horrible sinking feeling about the Americans. He hoped the
Feldwebel
was right about them being soft.

His stomach lurched and gurgled. He would give anything for a fried egg and a big hunk of bread. Erich heard and laughed. ‘I’m starving too. I wonder if these Americans are as hungry as we are.’

Both of them knew in their hearts they wouldn’t be. America was the land of plenty. They had all read about it before the war, and watched the newsreels in picture houses: skyscrapers; endless fields of corn and cattle; those great factories churning out everything from motor cars to refrigerators . . .

He thought about everything they had all been asked to give in the hope of a German victory. First it had been their pots and pans. Then iron railings and door handles. Only last year the church bells at Wansdorf were melted down for vital war materials.