Marked for Death (21 page)

These improved standards still represented an average daily toll of four crashes of various kinds, with a death every other day. Yet spread out over a wing it was an impressive advance and a tribute to the courage of a one-time ‘awful little boy’ in speaking out to his seniors.

Even so, for much of the war the slipshod and unsystematic manner in which Britain trained its aircrew was patently a false economy, given the expense and shortage of pilots and aircraft. Although the chaotic urgencies of wartime explain much, it is sometimes hard not to invoke that always-questionable category of national character. The over-valuation of the amateurish, the perennial excuse of the country having been ‘caught on the hop’, the lack of proper planning from the first, the improvising, cutting corners and doing everything on a shoestring all seem grimly familiar to this author. So, too, does the ability to turn ‘muddling through’ into an indomitable British virtue, even when muddling through in training led to the reckless squandering of so many young lives.

Another aspect of the same cavalier attitude will become evident in a later chapter where it needs to be explained why it took well over two years of German air raids on London before the authorities were at last moved by public rioting and political uproar to institute a properly co-ordinated system of home defence.

1*
There is a discrepancy here. No. 2113 is listed as a B.E.2c

Enough has been said in previous chapters to suggest that from its inception the RFC was never going to be like any other corps in the British Army. The experience of flying, like the physical skill itself, was too different from anything else. Once in the air, a man metaphorically left the Army and reverted to being a lone individual largely free to go where he wanted and act on his own initiative. True, on a particular mission he might be ordered to fly in formation, but even so he was a free agent within the constraints of rapidly changing circumstances such as weather, engine failure or enemy attack.

Yet there was another important way in which the airman differed from the infantryman. In all but the most granitically unimaginative, a pilot’s aerial viewpoint could at unexpected moments become almost philosophically detached, even lordly. Contemporary letters, diaries and memoirs are full of passages like this:

I explore the vast emptiness in which I am a proud but insignificant speck, look up into the violet of the furthest heavens, into the infinite zenith, and blink at the glaring sun, then gaze around me to the faraway horizons, apparently on my level. There comes an awesome feeling of loneliness. I and my companions are utterly remote from our mundane existence on the earth which we cannot even see. The three of us are as one, seemingly stationary, with no sensation of speed, just placed here for always in the void. Everything is still. The
engine is soundless. The leader’s fluttering pennants are petrified movement. Even time is at a standstill. There is nothing between us and eternity, in space, in time.

Almost in wonder, I realize that I am one of the few thousand human beings in the history of mankind who have been chosen to experience this celestial vision. Compared with ordinary earthbound mortals I am an Olympian god, enthroned high in the heavens, free, serene, uninvolved. Compared with the wretched millions locked in earthly combat, I and my companions are a winged aristocracy among warriors, looking down on the invisible trenches below in pity and amazement.
91

‘Winged aristocracy’ says it all. This is hardly the ideal soldier as promulgated in the various handbooks and manuals of the British, German or French armies, where unquestioning obedience rather than aloof detachment was constantly stressed. The whole idea of being ‘in the ranks’ was that you were not isolated – least of all in the British ranks of the Pals’ Brigades where your morale was boosted by being with men from your own town or even street. By contrast, as Leutnant Rudolf Stark observed in June 1918 when he was leading a German fighter squadron,
Jagdstaffel
35,

We fliers live in fearful and splendid isolation. We cannot do without this isolation and have no desire to. Isolation changes a man’s nature, and so many other things have changed for us, too: battle, life and death. Nations wage war on one another and down on the ground beneath us men tear each other to pieces. We play a part in this war, and yet it seems that everything that happens below is alien to us. We hover between heaven and earth. We have not attained heaven, and yet we no longer belong to the earth. We are alone.
92

It is easy to see how this concept of the alienated loner could later lead to its being over-romanticised for ideological reasons.
The groundwork for this had already been well laid by poets like Gabriele d’Annunzio and F. T. Marinetti in their pre-war celebration of Futurism and the idea of young warriors cleansed by the new violence conferred on them by machines. The writings of the French airman Antoine de Saint-Exupéry were later to tend in much the same direction. Mussolini himself proved susceptible to the twin spells of d’Annunzio and aircraft and in 1920 he took flying lessons near Milan under the instruction of Cesare Redaelli. In 1935 Guido Mattioli drew an explicit parallel between aviation and Fascism in an admiring book about the Italian dictator, who by then had his pilot’s
brevetto
. In the book’s jacket design the initial ‘M’ of Mussolini takes wing and is graphically transformed into a scarlet bird of prey. ‘No machine requires so much human concentration of soul and willpower as an aircraft does to make it fly well. A pilot truly understands the meaning of the word “control”. There therefore seems to be an intimate spiritual link between Fascism and flying. Every airman is a born Fascist.’
93

This, however, was not yet the meaning any airman in the First World War would have attached to finding himself serenely remote at 15,000 feet above a world that was ‘one map of wastening war unrolled’.
94
It was still too early in the history of aviation for the experience to have jelled into anything like an ideology, still less a political agenda. On the other hand it was quite distinctive enough to give airmen a profound sense of their collective identity, one that was clearly separated from that of the terrestrial army – the ‘poor bloody infantry’ or PBI. This was true even for men who had transferred from the trenches in order to fly. Only after the severe British troop losses of late autumn 1914 was there any attempted movement in the other direction, when some airmen applied to leave the RFC and return to their battalions because so many officers had been killed. Permission was refused because they were too valuable where they were. That was a time – not to be repeated until the Germans’
Kaiserschlacht
, the great Spring Offensive in 1918
– when the front was moving so fast it was possible to take off on a sortie and return after a couple of hours only to find your home airfield now in enemy hands.

Stuart Wortley became profoundly aware of the difference between the lives of airmen and those of the infantry when his CO gave him a rest from flying during the Battle of the Somme in July 1916. He had recently flown so many shows he was dog-tired. Curious to see how the other half lived and died he arranged to visit the trenches he had so often flown over and was given a guided tour by a battalion transport officer. One of the things about life in the British trenches that many visitors commented on was what sometimes looked like the troops’ heroic light-heartedness in the face of unremitting death, rats, boredom, privation and danger. This was normally glossed over as evidence of the British Tommy’s true fighting spirit and indomitable morale. It may well have been; but there was an additional possibility that visitors of the officer class preferred not to consider. This was that conditions in the trenches were often little worse – and in some respects actually better – than they were in an industrial slum back home. Plenty of Tommies had grown up with rats and privation; they were equally used to boredom with the possibility of maiming and even death while working in factories. Now, out of the blue had come the prospect of escape from slums, poverty and drudgery by means of foreign travel (however restricted) at government expense, plus regular free meals and medical treatment. This, together with excitement and youth’s conviction of its own immortality, could for a while have made the experience something of a lark and explain the puzzling high spirits that visitors found so touching.

Stuart Wortley was alternately shocked, humbled and simply baffled by what he saw and heard on his own tour of the trenches, as also by his escort’s casual acceptance of things.

Suddenly I felt we two were poles apart. We were both fighting the same enemy – he on the ground and I a few hundred
feet above his head. But those few hundred feet constituted an abyss almost unbridgeable. We had not the remotest notion of each other’s feelings. I wish it could be arranged that infantry officers should be attached to RFC units and vice versa…
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German pilots were naturally no different, and expressions of a complicated mixture of guilt, pity and wistfulness were common among those who had left the infantry to become airmen.

Many a man in the course of his duty up in the sky thought with shame of his own warm quarters as he watched those thin lines beneath him where our troops, beset by cold and rain, faced attack by forces ten times as strong, and longed to be with his old friends once more and join in their struggle.
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A recurring motif in airmen’s memoirs is their consciousness of how infinitely more comfortable their lives were than those of the infantry in the trenches. Much of the time they were decently billeted on an airfield with proper sleeping accommodation and a mess with reasonable eating and drinking. Except when actually flying there was time off from the war each day – even for several days if dud weather kept the aircraft grounded. Depending on how near the airfield was to a village or town, and the opportunity to scrounge a lift, there were possibilities for visiting bars and restaurants and chatting up the owners’ daughters. There are numerous descriptions of airmen in France spending languorous summer days swimming in a nearby river, writing letters or just horsing around, almost the only reminder of the war being the irritable dialogue of the big guns just over the horizon maintaining a rumble that could even be felt through the earth if one lay with one ear pressed to the ground.

Gradually, almost out of nowhere, a tradition assembled itself and grew. Because of the plurality of the men’s origins it couldn’t celebrate a particular county like an infantry regiment. Instead
it emphasised the uniqueness of each squadron, together with its crest and motto. Since in the first two years of the war so many RFC officers were ex-public school men, much of the shape that squadron life and attitudes took was unconsciously modelled on the peculiar philistine ethos of Britain’s fee-paying private schools. A school’s honour morphed easily into the squadron’s honour, the largely good-natured rivalries with neighbouring squadrons often being competitively based on sports fixtures as well as on combat successes, especially if they were flying the same type of aircraft. Squadrons in a particular sector might compete to see which would be the one to destroy an observation balloon that had recently appeared behind the enemy lines. It was a mission everybody knew was quite likely to be fatal but the challenge was, well,
sporting
. Cecil Lewis, who with a friend had defected from Oundle School in 1915 at the age of sixteen in order to join the RFC, wrote in 1936:

The RFC attracted the adventurous spirits, the devil-may-care young bloods of England, the fast livers, the furious drivers – men who were not happy unless they were taking risks. This invested the Corps with a certain style (not always admirable): we had the sense of being the last word in warfare, the advance guard of wars to come, and felt, I suppose, that we could afford to be a little extravagant.
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If there is a suggestion here of arrogance it was surely not misplaced. ‘Flying was still something of a miracle. We who practiced it were thought very brave, very daring, very gallant: we belonged to a world apart,’ Lewis added. Identical sentiments were expressed in the RNAS and, come to that, in all the other combatants’ air forces.

The RFC quickly acquired its own language that even trainee pilots soon picked up. A conversation between two such students was recorded by a
Daily Mail
correspondent identified as ‘W.A.B’, writing on 19th July 1917:

First ‘Hun’
: Did you see old Cole’s zoom on a Quirk this morning?

Second ‘Hun’
: No, what happened?

First ‘Hun’
: Oh, nothing to write home about… Stalled his bus and pancaked thirty feet… crashed completely… put a vertical gust up me... just as I was starting my solo flip in a Rumpty.

A ‘Quirk’ was standard slang for the despised B.E.2c. As always, the point of such jargon was to emphasise the exclusiveness of their world, while the nonchalance was a useful way of dealing with its mortal threat. It was all very much in the public school spirit. To describe oneself as having got the wind up was unthinkable; but to have a vertical gust up was permissible because ostensibly comic.