Marked for Death (22 page)

For young men from a world that was apart even back in Britain, having to sleep in a hut with four or six others on a damp airfield in France was nothing new after ten years of freezing school dormitories, and mostly no great hardship. By the time airmen from the Dominions arrived in numbers a regime of squadron life had been established with a unique flavour of its own, one that in many respects ran counter to many of the regular Army’s most sacred tenets. Typical of this were matters of discipline and dress, for everyday life on an active squadron was often conducted in comparatively informal terms, depending on how much of a stickler the CO was for the proper military formalities. Visiting brass were often surprised and occasionally scandalised that RFC airmen might not only dispense with saluting but came and went on the airfield in a motley assortment of clothes. This commonly ranged from flying jackets black with the oil that rotary engines threw back to uniform trousers worn with tennis shoes. A visiting major from a cavalry regiment was reported to have almost fainted on discovering one of a squadron’s pilots wearing pyjama bottoms beneath his flying suit,
though exactly how he made this discovery is unfortunately not recorded.

*

The main locus of squadron life was undoubtedly the officers’ mess, and getting it suitably furnished and civilised was something of a priority whenever the unit moved and was billeted somewhere new. Unlike in films, where squadrons seem always to wind up living in a château with a seductive young
comtesse
in the offing, most inherited a group of ramshackle farm huts and outhouses that the men made habitable in an amazingly short time, mainly by begging, borrowing or stealing some basic furnishings. Once the rats had been banished, the worst of the draughts plugged, the roof made rain-proof and the stove installed, things began to look more civilised. With chairs and tables and the odd flea-market picture bought in the local town, an unpromising barn became the squadron’s mess, its walls hung with the familiar trophies brought from their previous station: shattered propellers and painted insignia on canvas cut from downed enemy machines.

Part of the filmic mythology surrounding the RFC involves riotous extroversion as though the mess was in a state of nightly mayhem. This was simply not so. In surviving memoirs there are plenty of vignettes of sudden flarings of temper over someone’s unconsciously whistling the same tune over and over again in one corner of a brooding room. Many aircrew were far too exhausted or tense after the day’s operations to stomach revelry. They would either go to bed, write a letter, or try to unwind in the armourer’s hut by carrying out some useful but monotonous task like loading gun belts with their preferred mix of ammunition for a dreaded balloon-strafing sortie the next day.
One tracer, five ball, one Buckingham; one tracer, five ball, one Buckingham; one tracer…

In its normal state the mess was a scene of endless card games such as poker, slippery Sam and Australian banker. Someone might have crafted a shove ha’penny board and had his mechanic
grind down one face of the coins with valve seating paste until they had a mirror finish and ‘floated’ silkily on the chalk-dusted board. A scene, in fact, much like a junior common room at university, except for a certain dark undercurrent and the wind-up gramophone from whose ornate but battered horn music hall numbers would blare tinnily. It was an unwritten law that men returning from home leave should bring with them new records of songs from the latest London shows. As V. M. Yeates observed, the function of this constant background noise was to block ‘the icy stare of eternity through chinks of silence’. Even so, the sound of aero engines being tested by mechanics in the sheds or someone taking off for gunnery practice or a patrol would regularly break in.

There were periods when squadron life became suspended: days of wash-out when bad weather made any flying out of the question. The men played desultory games in the mess or dutifully wrote home, their combat-tautened nerves unable to deal with enforced inertia. Now and then they itchily went outside to stand gazing upward in the chill gloom, cold mouths mumbling fog. Sounds of metal would come from the sheds as though through wool. The blood sang in their ears. Even the distant guns were silent, blinded as they were, their blank muzzles beaded with dew. It was as though all Europe held its breath, waiting for the cheerful sun to break through and announce that normal killing could resume.

Sometimes the squadron became subdued by loss, but more often tragedy was the signal for perverse celebration. Two American pilots who flew with French
escadrilles
described a mess dinner following the particularly grievous loss of a comrade:

Dinner that evening was a very noisy one. Everyone talked at once; Golasse cracked his funniest jokes and the squadron phonograph was never allowed to stop for a moment. I have never seen a more gallant or a less successful attempt to drown the eloquence of one empty chair.
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However, when the squadron had reason to celebrate a particular victory, somebody’s medal or simply a guest night, the celebratory ‘binge’ would usually be preceded by cocktails made by mixing together in a tureen as many of the local French drinks as possible, typically involving cognac, vermouth, cider, champagne,
pastis
and absinthe. Great quantities of wine would accompany the meal, after which there might be drunken speeches and a sing-song.

If there was a mess piano that had survived previous moves and dinners, and provided there was anyone left to play it, it might make a more or less harmonious contribution to the old favourites. These were often well-known tunes reset to cheerfully obscene or topical words. ‘We are Fred Karno’s army’ was one, set to the hymn tune of ‘The Church’s one foundation’. (Fred Karno was the stage name of an immensely popular music hall comedian of the day.)

We are Fred Karno’s army,

We are the RFC.

We cannot fight, we cannot shoot,

What blinking use are we?

But when we get to Berlin,

The Kaiser he will say:

Hoch! Hoch! Mein Gott!

What a jolly fine lot

Are the boys of the RFC!

Or it might be a ditty of many verses sung to the tune of ‘D’ye ken John Peel’ and full of the pessimism that cheers:

When you soar into the air in a Sopwith scout

And you’re scrapping with a Hun and your gun cuts out,

Well you stuff down your nose till your plugs fall out,

’Cos you haven’t got a hope in the morning.

Chorus
–

For the batman woke me from my bed,

I’d had a thick night and a very sore head,

And I said to myself, to myself I said:

‘Oh, we haven’t got a hope in the morning!’

Perhaps the most famous home-grown song was the ‘The Young Aviator’. This existed in many variants, much as rugger and drinking songs do. It emerged from RFC messes during the First World War in the way that folk songs start, almost by a process of osmosis when the pressure of sentiment filters through a semi-permeable membrane of alcohol. It varied from squadron to squadron and was still being sung in one form or another by a fresh generation of airmen in the Second World War. The first verse and the chorus were usually much the same:

The young aviator lay dying,

And as in the wreckage he lay,

To his comrades all gathered around him

These last parting words he did say:

Chorus
–

Take the pistons out of my kidneys,

The gudgeon pins out of my brain, my brain,

From the small of my back take the crankshaft,

And assemble the engine again.

Many lugubrious verses followed. But by far the bleakest song the airmen roared was one to words written by the nineteenth-century Irish-born poet Bartholomew Dowling, who reportedly had in mind some Indian Army officers who had been victims of a tropical plague. It coincided perfectly with the nihilistic feelings of many airmen in the later years of the war. Half the faces in the mess might be new each time it was sung, and the
ghosts of those no longer there clustered ever more thickly around the squadron’s trophies. Two verses are enough to give the flavour:

We meet ’neath the sounding rafter,

And the walls around are bare:

As they shout back our peals of laughter,

It seems as the dead were there.

Then stand to your glasses steady!

We drink ’fore our comrades’ eyes,

One cup to the dead already:

Hurrah for the next man that dies!

Who dreads to the dust returning?

Who shrinks from the sable shore

Where the high and haughty yearning

Of the soul can sting no more?

No! Stand to your glasses steady!

This world is a world of lies,

One cup to the dead already:

Hurrah for the next man that dies!

‘This world is a world of lies’ accorded perfectly with the conviction held by many airmen of all sides by 1918 that most of what they were told by officialdom was ‘hot air’, and almost everything said by politicians in Westminster, the Palais Bourbon or the Wilhelmstrasse was brazenly self-serving. It was in the spirit of such cynicism that the RFC’s official communiqués were known throughout the force as ‘Comic Cuts’, after the popular cartoon weekly. By this stage in the evening no-one would know or care if the tears in many eyes were the overflow of drink or token of something deeper. The singing was often followed by horseplay that involved the smashing of furniture and general scrimmaging. Some semblance of order might be temporarily restored with a parody of army discipline in the form of a
subaltern’s court martial. In this, an unlucky victim was charged under Section 40 of the Army Act with ‘conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline’.

The judgment of the Court was a foregone conclusion and the prisoner was condemned to be publicly de-bagged, and to be branded with the Censor’s stamp upon either side of his posterior. His advocate, who was adjudged by the Tribunal to have given voice to subversive doctrines, was awarded the same penalty. The execution of the sentence was carried out after a terrific struggle…

Anything involving de-bagging was, of course, a throwback to public schooldays in its purest form. The amazing thing is that, drunk as these airmen were by the time they staggered or were carried to their beds, they would be up again next morning after ‘a thick night’ and with ‘a very sore head’ to climb once more into their machines and face the prospect of a hideous death even before breakfast.

The question of drinking and flying evidently touched a raw nerve at the time since it was often vehemently denied that any airman would ever touch a drop. However, V. M. Yeates’s character Tom Cundall takes it as axiomatic that ‘no flying man could live in France and remain sober’, and gives a description of going on morning patrol with his comrades after an entire night’s carousing:

Climbed in all right, anyway. Felt better in cockpit. Comfortable. Couldn’t fall out. It’d be damn funny doing a blotto patrol. Wouldn’t be any Huns about so soon after rain. Contact. Giving her revs all right on the ground. Could see the rev-counter. Not so blotto. They were all pretty tight except Cross. Let’s go. Could he taxi? Yes, easy. Open fine adjustment. Throttle. Off we go. Hold her nose down then zoom. Up, up. Pulling nicely. Roll. Left stick and rudder.
Throttle back. Here’s the horizon coming straight. Stick and rudder central. Throttle open. God, trees. Just over. Near thing. What the hell, rolling at that height in formation. Bombs on too. Christ, he’d forgotten. No wonder he’d lost height. Tom, you’re blotto. Sit tight, you loon. You know you’re blotto, so don’t play the fool.
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Others stoutly maintained, most implausibly, that they had never known any man fly under the influence, that airmen were far too responsible and had too great a respect for the effects of alcohol on airmanship. That is as may be; but a case study by Dr Graeme Anderson somewhat belies this since it describes

an accomplished aviator who after a few drinks at a friendly aerodrome did a series of stunts and then made off home, a distance of thirty miles. He felt content but sleepy, made up his mind to do no more stunts in the air, and remembered coming down to land at his own aerodrome. Later he woke up in the sick bay with a doctor stitching a scalp wound. Although he had made up his mind to do no more stunts, onlookers saw him loop and roll the machine a number of times when coming down to land. There seems little doubt that the action of alcohol is accentuated in the air…
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There are simply too many descriptions of pilots hitting the bottle, like those W. E. Johns gave, for there to be any doubt that it was a recognised problem. As Biggles’s chum Mahoney told the station CO, Major Mullen:

Biggles is finished unless he takes a rest. He’s drinking whisky for his breakfast and you know what that means – he’s going fast. He drank half a bottle of whisky yesterday morning before daylight, and he walked up to the sheds as sober as I was. A fellow doesn’t get drunk when he’s in the state Biggles is in.… It’s a pity, but most of us go that way at the end I suppose.
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Plenty of pilots reached a stage of extreme stress when they could no longer fly sober. Like thousands of car drivers since, they were probably convinced they flew better that way and that their reactions were unimpaired. One or two of them may even have been right, but many more must have died without ever knowing how wrong they were.

Naturally, boisterous and boozy squadron guest nights were not peculiar to the RFC. It was the same in German
Staffeln
and French
escadrilles
, and to judge from letters and diaries left by American trainee pilots like John Grider and Elliott Springs who went on to fly in France, heavy drinking was practically a rite of passage. It is true that most of them were at that blessed age when bounce-back from a night’s carousing is remarkably fast, but not all of them were and some of the older men probably needed to be cautious. Yet squadron revels were by no means confined to boozing, and there were often quite elaborate satirical pantomimes and fancy dress parties with the sort of cross-dressing many would have remembered from school plays. These home-grown entertainments, as well as the rough-housing, were encouraged by perceptive officers like the neurologist James Birley, who in 1918 was a lieutenant-colonel in the RFC and had marked views on the importance of keeping airmen’s spirits up when on the ground. By that time he was not alone in this and other doctors had come to similar conclusions about the boys they were tending: