The Dust That Falls from Dreams (15 page)

‘R
upert Brooke’s died,’ said Ottilie.

‘Oh,’ said Rosie, ‘he hasn’t, has he? Why? I mean, how?’ They were sitting in the tea room of a hotel on North Street, Chichester, having met halfway between Brighton and Southampton on an afternoon off. They were waiting for Christabel, who was coming down by train. Outside, a light rain pattered on windows that overlooked a garden that was coming to life as if there wasn’t a war on.

‘He wasn’t shot or anything. It was an infected mosquito bite, somewhere near the Dardanelles. I think he got bitten in Egypt.’

‘What a thing to die of! You’d think that God would’ve been kind enough to let him die of something else. Something more glorious.’

‘I don’t know how you’ve clung to your faith,’ said Ottilie.

‘Why?’ said Rosie. ‘Haven’t you?’

Ottilie looked straight ahead and said, ‘It doesn’t come naturally any more.’

‘I couldn’t live without it,’ said Rosie. ‘I would die of the horror and loneliness.’

‘I do know what you mean.’

‘There’s a VAD at Netley,’ said Rosie. ‘She can see the souls of the dead as they leave their bodies. She discovered it by accident, and she says that after the war she’s going to be a medium.’

Ottilie looked at her sister sceptically.

‘She isn’t mad,’ said Rosie. ‘She’s quite normal. She says that when you die there are people who come to fetch you away, sometimes one, or two, or three. And there was a soldier who told me that on the battlefield there are hundreds of angels collecting the souls of the dead. He said that lots of people see them.’

‘I’ve heard soldiers say all sorts of things,’ said Ottilie.

‘I’ve watched a lot of men die,’ said Rosie. ‘You have too. You know what it’s like. The moment they go, they don’t even look like themselves any more. You can tell the body’s uninhabited, that’s someone’s left it behind. It’s just discarded.’

‘I’ve noticed that too, but, Rosie, it doesn’t tell you anything about God, does it? They could be leaving to go on to something else, but it doesn’t mean there’s a God at all. If there’s an afterlife, it might be like going to stay in Hastings or something.’

‘How can you have an afterlife without God?’

‘Well, why can’t you?’

Rosie was stuck. This possibility had never occurred to her before. ‘All I know,’ she said at length, ‘is that God looks after me and answers me.’

They looked out over the lawn again. It all seemed too peaceful. ‘I am worried about Mama and Papa when the Zeppelins and Gothas come over,’ said Ottilie. ‘Mind you, they seem to be bombing anything and anywhere, don’t they? It could just as easily be us.’ She looked sideways and saw that her sister was crying silently. ‘Oh, Rosie, whatever is the matter? Is it Ash?’

Rosie hung her head and wept, her thin shoulders heaving. ‘I’m just so tired,’ she said. ‘I’m so exhausted. I could sleep for a year. I only wish I could.’

‘I know what it’s like,’ said Ottilie, ‘I really do.’

‘They work us so hard,’ said Rosie. ‘We get up so early and we aren’t allowed to sit down all day, and we work so late, and I’m still in a tent because there’s no accommodation, and one of the other women snores, and it’s so cold that when you undress all you actually do is take your shoes off, and I never seem to get a decent wash, and the trained nurses are so horrible to us and call us amateurs and pretend nurses, and say that we’re undermining their profession, and the doctors treat us like vermin, and I’m spending all my time polishing brasses and sweeping floors when I want to be helping properly. Ottilie, it’s just too awful, and you see all those beautiful boys mutilated and dying or going mad, and they’ve got a whole ward for men with syphilis and everyone calls it “Hell” because it really is hell. And I got into big trouble because I said to the matron that officers and men shouldn’t be treated separately, but they shouldn’t, should they?’

‘The Pavilion is quite nice,’ said Ottilie, ‘but everything’s governed by caste and religion. It drives you mad. We have to have lots of separate kitchens – we’ve got nine of them – and separate water for Hindus and Mahommedans, and different loos, and the notices have to be in Hindi and Urdu and Gurmukhi, and all the laundry’s done by untouchables who have to live in a tent on the lawn. If it worries you separating the officers and men at Netley, you can’t possibly imagine what it’s like for us in the Pavilion. One has to have the expertise of an anthropologist. Do you know what the worst thing is?’

‘No.’

‘It’s the Mahommedans. They think that they can’t get to Paradise if they’re missing a limb. If you have to do an amputation the grief and hysterics are quite dreadful to cope with.’

‘How very silly,’ said Rosie, ‘to think that God would care about a missing leg.’

‘They get over it,’ said Ottilie. ‘In the end they’re grateful to have a bit more life.’ She paused, and added, ‘And the Hindus think they can’t go to Heaven until they’ve had a son, so if they haven’t got one yet, they positively refuse to die, even when it’s absolutely inevitable. They die in a kind of spiritual agony. It’s dreadful.’

‘We’ve got ghats at Netley, for burning the Hindus. You know what the best thing is?’ said Rosie. ‘Do you know why I couldn’t give it up, no matter how awful it is? It’s the gratitude of the men. It makes me want to cry every time I think of it. When they leave they write messages in my scrapbook, and poems, and then they write me letters.’

Ottilie nodded, and they looked out over the lawn again. Christabel came in, throwing her bag down and collapsing theatrically on one of the chairs. She closed her eyes and said, ‘My darlings, I’m absolutely fagged.’

‘Too much snapping?’ asked Rosie.

‘In the last few days I’ve been all over London and to Guildford and Petworth and Reading and every town and village known to man. I can’t tell you how many buses and trams I must have got in and out of. Why can’t they come up with lighter cameras? What about papier mâché? I swear my shoulders are getting a permanent sag.’

‘But you must meet lots of nice people,’ said Ottilie.

‘Everyone’s nice,’ replied Christabel. ‘They’re always so grateful.’

‘We were just saying that,’ said Rosie. ‘It keeps you going, doesn’t it?’

‘The sad thing is that by the time the photographs get to the front line, a lot of the recipients are probably dead already.’

‘Oh, don’t say that!’

‘It’s true, though.’

‘The soldiers at Netley love their snaps more than practically anything else,’ said Rosie. ‘And another thing, even the ones who aren’t Catholics have rosaries and pictures of saints.’

‘Do your Indian soldiers have photographs?’ asked Christabel.

‘No, they don’t. I can’t think of any.’

‘Shall I come along to Brighton and take some snaps for them to send home?’

Ottilie put her hands together eagerly. ‘Oh, wouldn’t that be wonderful? We’d have to ask the matron, or someone.’ She paused. ‘You’d absolutely love Brighton. The Pavilion’s a hoot. They put all the Indian soldiers in it because they thought the architecture would make them feel more at home! Can you believe it? Most of them grew up in villages, in huts! When they come to the Pavilion they think they’ve all become maharajas.’

‘I wonder how one would light them,’ said Christabel. ‘I’ve only ever done pallid folk like us before. Any news of Sophie?’

‘Just a cheery message from somewhere near Amiens, saying that she got shelled and had to change a tyre, and suddenly crowds of men emerged from nowhere and changed it for her. She says she’s driving French officers around on liaison missions and has become quite the interrupter.’

‘Good old Sophie. Have you heard her latest Sophieism?’

‘No,’ said Rosie. ‘Do tell.’

‘She wrote and said that the number of women working in France was expanding excrementally!’

The sisters laughed, and Ottilie remarked, ‘I never really know if she does it on purpose.’

‘Well, of course she does,’ replied Christabel. ‘And did you know that Papa’s gone to Leeds?’

‘Leeds? What on earth for?’

‘He heard about a certain Honorary Colonel Professor Smithells at the university who’s come up with some new ideas for an anti-gas respirator, so he got in touch and off he went. Apparently Professor Smithells is the government’s chief adviser on chemical warfare.’

‘Papa’s fabulous, isn’t he?’ said Rosie. ‘He helps mankind by helping himself. It’s quite a knack. He’s making parts for Sopwith’s now.’

‘Guess what!’ said Christabel.

‘What?’ echoed the sisters.

‘Millicent got another letter from Hutch. I had to read some of it for her. Hutch has got terrible writing, and Millicent isn’t as good at reading and writing as she thinks she is. I helped her a little with replying.’

‘How sweet,’ said Ottilie. ‘I just hope that he gets through, that’s all.’

‘Send him a snap of Millicent,’ suggested Rosie.

Christabel started laughing to herself, and Ottilie said, ‘Do tell us!’

‘Oh, it was something that happened yesterday. It was too funny. I needed a few pennies to pay the cats’ meat man, and I thought Cookie might have some, so I shouted down the stairs, ‘Have you got any coppers down there?’ and Millicent’s little voice came back up: ‘There’s three, Miss Christabel, but it’s all right ’cause they’re all my cousins except the one what’s my brother.’ It turns out that we are quite the little staging post for weary peelers on the beat. No wonder we’re always running out of tea and sugar.’

‘It’s been going on for ages,’ said Rosie. ‘I’ve been dreading Mama finding out.’

‘It couldn’t have happened when we had a footman,’ observed Ottilie.

‘Yes, it could,’ said Christabel. ‘Servants just adore getting into conspiracies and seeing what they can get away with.’

That night a dud bomb fell through the roof of Swan & Edgar, and the McCosh conservatory was destroyed by a small Zeppelin bomb that fell on the lawn and sucked all the glass from the windows. It remained a veranda until 1919, and in the interim Mr and Mrs Pendennis next door adopted the few surviving
plants. Mr McCosh toyed with the idea of converting the crater into a fishpond, but was overruled by his daughters, who wanted the lawn to revert to being a tennis court after the war. ‘After the war’ was a phrase on everybody’s lips, especially those of lovers. Millicent and Hutch wrote letters to each other in which it seemed to be repeated in every sentence…after the war…after the war…after the war…after the war. It was a phrase that went well with ‘forever’. I’ll love you forever, after the war.

D
own below in Bailleul lie the sodden bones of Ashbridge Pendennis and his two brothers, entombed in mud and marked with wooden crosses made from the slats of ammunition boxes. High above them, oblivious, Daniel Crawford Pitt hurls his Sopwith Camel around the sky for the sheer exhilaration and joy and love of it.

Having survived many months at the front as an observer, and having brought down several enemy aircraft, he has won his ticket at the Central Flying School in Upavon, and has gone on to win the wings that are now sewn onto the breast of his tunic. He has kept the winged ‘O’, however, as he is proud of it, and no one has told him to remove it from his upper left arm, where he has sewn it without permission. He has learned to fly in a ‘Sociable’, the kind invented for Winston Churchill personally, and flown an Avro 504, and even the Flying Coffin (otherwise known as the Clockwork Mouse), and some other types too. He has flown the delightful Sopwith Pup as a pilot, and now he is mastering the Camel, which was terrifyingly unflyable at first, but has become an extension of his body and his spirit. It is August 1917, and Bloody April is receding into memory. Down below, the French are just about to break the German line at Verdun, and the British are about to gain a few hundred yards of mud at the third battle of Ypres. On this day, twelve German aircraft and twelve British ones have been lost. In Russia the new government is at war with the Bolsheviks, and the Tsar and his family are rumoured to have been sent to Siberia.

It was intimidating enough trying out a DH2, because that had a natural spin, and the Sopwith Pup was unnervingly responsive at first, but he had got used to it. It was strange how each type of machine was so different from every other, and with each machine it was like learning to fly all over again. You could stall
a Pup on purpose, but it was practically impossible with a DH2. You put the nose up, it stalled, the nose went down level. It climbed again, stalled, put its nose down level.

Nothing has prepared him for the Camel, however; he has already crashed one, and half of those training with him have been killed or injured.

The strain of flying it is appalling, because the torque of the engine means that it won’t do a left-hand spin, but puts it into a right-hand spin that is irretrievable on take-off. Most of the casualties are caused by right-hand spins. To stop it spinning you wrestle with the controls from the moment you begin to taxi, and you wrestle with them until your fuel runs out some two hours later. You are always on left rudder, but you use rudder as little as you can. The plane always wants to climb, and always wants to sideslip, to drift sideways, which turns out to be miraculously useful when there’s a Hun on your tail. He opens fire and you’re suddenly not there to be fired at. When you get home you are sometimes too weak to climb out, and all your limbs are shaking. How different is an SE5a, with its in-line engine! And how much more cosy and warm! You can set the controls for a distant destination, and arrive there without doing much else. You don’t make your kills in a dogfight, as you do with a Camel. You dive and zoom. A Camel fights like a cat, an SE5 fights like a shark.

The Camel pilots complain that the aircraft has a low ceiling, so you seldom have the advantage of height, the
sine qua non
of a conventional attack. It is useless above 15,000 feet, and it isn’t fast enough to chase and catch a fleeing enemy, and in any case you can’t go far over Hunland without worrying about not having sufficient fuel to batter back against the prevailing wind. God is perhaps on the Huns’ side, because the Huns have the wind to carry them home, and the Huns don’t stray over the lines anyway, so you are forced to go to them. Only at night do the Huns come over in their bombers, and then the night Camels go up, but Daniel doesn’t know who they are and doesn’t envy them either. It’s cold enough in the daytime.

Daniel knows better than to complain. McCudden has tinkered with his own engine and carburettor so brilliantly that he can
get his SE5 up to 22,000 feet. One day Daniel visits 56 Squadron, and Mac lets him take his bus up. At 21,000 feet Daniel gets hypoxia so badly that he falls delirious, does something stupid and unaccountable with the controls, and nearly spins to earth. The cold is utterly unbearable and makes his bones ache to the marrow. When he comes down he has hypothermia and has to be collected in the squadron tender. When he returns two days later to collect his bus he says to McCudden, ‘Think I’ll stick to Camels. Don’t know how you do it.’ McCudden claps him on the shoulder, and says, ‘Well, old fruit, you wouldn’t catch me in a Camel. Each to his own. One day someone’ll come up with a better engine and you’ll be upstairs with us. Can’t you get hold of a Bentley?’

The Camel pilots complain of having to do too much ground-strafing, because they can’t ascend very high, but they are unaware that everyone else is also having to do it, including those who can get to 22,000 feet. Even the Dolphins are receiving the same unwelcome orders. It’s a far cry from the scouts’ original job, protecting their own two-seaters and destroying those of the enemy. Like everyone else, Daniel longs for the old days. It’s actually a relief to go into combat with an enemy you can see, to have a proper duel, after days of strafing. A curse on those who worked out that an aircraft can also be used for mowing down soldiers.

So Daniel is content to keep a watch on his back for Huns coming out of the sun, knowing that when he dives his wings almost certainly won’t fall off, and knowing that the moment a Hun attacker arrives, his machine guns popping and the tracer zinging past his ears, he can split-arse the Camel with such instantaneous virtuosity that he can turn twice for every once of the foe. Nothing will worry him until the Fokker DV 11 arrives, too late to make enough of a difference, and the Fokker pilots themselves not realising for several months how good their new planes really are.

Now Daniel, having dropped his eggs on a transport column and somehow become separated from his flight, plays with the clouds. High above Albert he hits a heat bump and suddenly ascends vertically for four thousand feet. It is like going up in a
lift, with exhilaration thrown in. He is stunting around the towers and chimneys and battlements of the cumulus. He pretends he is landing on the flat parts, and scoops his undercarriage through the vapour. It is sparklingly bright up there. Every detail he sees is in sharp and glistening focus. He zooms up a vertical wall and loops, blipping the engine when he sees the cloud beneath him again. He loops once more, half rolling at the top so that he is horizontal again. He dives until he is going faster than two hundred miles an hour, and the wires are singing. Here is a crevasse, a cathedral, a cave, a chimney, lilac shadow. He pulls back the joystick steadily and carefully, and he is level again. He has to pump the oil pressure up by hand, and switches to gravity for a moment. His compass spins, his ears are aching almost unbearably. Up he loops once more, and barrel-rolls at the top, straight over the gleaming summit of a cloud. He flies between the sun and the cloud, and looks at the exquisite double-rainbow nimbus around the shadow of his machine. He goes into a falling leaf, then centralises the controls and comes out of it. He goes into a spin, turns off the petrol, gets through that horrible moment when the controls go limp, pushes the joystick forward to convert it into a dive, and gets out of that too, Gosport fashion. He remembers the full horror of his first spin, and smiles grimly. It had happened because he had stalled in a loop, and for a few seconds he had foretasted the bitterness of doom. He sings loudly to himself: ‘If you want the sergeant major, we know where he is, we know where he is…’

He nips down into a valley of dove-grey shadow, and hurtles back out of it. He all but stalls the machine, it hangs on its propeller for a second, and then he drops it back down to follow the dunes and ridges. It is like tree-hopping and contour-chasing at altitude. The beauty and clarity is not of this earth. Nothing is more sublime and ineffable than this. He crashes through a white wall into greyness, and sees nothing until he emerges through the other side and realises that he is almost upside down. He goes fully upside down, and feels the straps straining against his shoulders. He holds hard onto the spade grip of the joystick, because he has no parachute, and no one really trusts the straps.

He pushes the stick over and then centralises it again so that
he does a long vertical turn, like a loop on its side, and he watches the cloud and the visible patches of earth going round in a circle. He is so high above the devastation that he is beyond the distress of it. The Western Front is surprisingly narrow. It is a long scar of brown and yellow earth, cutting through verdant countryside. It’s the right-hand vertical turn that the Huns can’t cope with and can’t follow. Do it long enough and they have to give up in despair. The Camel is a damned swagger machine.

He remembers the occasion when he was stunting up in the cumulus, and came round a majestic stack of pink and golden vapour just as the sun was about to set, and beheld in front of him a whole flight of German Albatroses enjoying their own last bout of stunting before returning home. There is a rumour that the Germans are ordered to return home after a set number of minutes, which is why they often seem to abandon fights unexpectedly. These ones must have been using up their last minutes by having fun. He had decided to bank vertically into a pillar of cloud before they spotted him. He did not have enough fuel left to take them on, so he had let them have their fun. One of the odd things about the Germans is that they disapprove of looping the loop, so you never see them doing it.

He rolls one and a half, pretends he has an enemy on his tail, and immelmanns. He gets on the tail of his enemy and then waggles his wings in wild exaggeration. He banks and follows the contours of a feathered canyon. An SE5 appears out of nowhere, and he realises that it is McCudden. They play hide-and-seek for a while, dipping in and out of the gaps between the clouds, chasing each other round and round a funnel, and then McCudden waves and disappears.

At this point Daniel realises that his voice has gone hoarse from too much gleeful shouting and singing, and that he has no idea where he is. He descends in a shallow dive. He once had his engine stop in a cloud, because of moisture in the jet, and ever since he has worried that it will happen again. You have to come out cautiously too, because you do not know what might be underneath, and without a horizon you can easily end up flying upside down. At forty-five degrees the rudder becomes the elevator and vice versa. You can make horrendous mistakes. He
cuts the engine with the button switch and glides down through the cloud, keeping an eye on the bubble of the spirit level, listening excitedly to the harmony of the wires rising in pitch and volume as his speed increases. You can tell how fast you are going, because of the harmony of the wires. These wires were made originally for pianos. And ploughshares shall be beaten into swords. The pristine white clouds are wisps of drifting and swirling ghostly greyness inside. It is one of life’s small disappointments. He notices that, as always seems to happen with Camels, his right foot is drenched in engine oil.

Underneath, to his absolute chagrin, he spots an enemy two-seater, taking photographs over Poelcapelle. It is a Roland Walfisch, which once upon a time had been Daniel’s favourite German aircraft. It is dumpy, with a window on either side for the observer, and has the upper wing lying across the top of the fuselage, just as the Dolphin does. If you turn it over, you support the entire weight of the aircraft with your head.

It is obsolete, and Daniel has not seen one for months. It occurs to him that this might be the last one left in service. He feels a bitter contempt for whoever it was that ordered this machine out on a mission. Then he suspects a trap. He switches his engine on.

He turns and blots out the sun with his thumb. He sees nothing. He glances around for the flash of wings, for tiny silhouettes in the distance, and again sees nothing. The British archie notices him and stops firing at the Roland, so now the crew of the German aircraft know that there must be an Allied craft nearby. The observer spots him and cocks his Parabellum. He taps the pilot on the shoulder, the pilot looks round and up, puts the nose down and streaks for home.

He hasn’t got a chance, however, because Daniel has the advantage of height and can dive at whatever speed he likes. Even on the flat he can outrun a Walfisch. He curses. Who is this demon who throws a spanner in the works when you’re just out harmlessly stunting in the clouds? He is not in the mood for killing after so much fun.

Nor is he in the mood for being killed. A scout should not attack a two-seater on its own, even an obsolescent one, unless it can surprise it by coming up from underneath. For a good
observer, a scout coming from above is a sitting duck. Daniel thinks of breaking away. If he has the wind up, it is the rational wind up.

He opens fire from a hundred yards, too far away to be effective. The observer fires a short burst, and Daniel sees the streaks of tracer passing between his wings on the starboard side. ‘Damn, damn, damn,’ he says between gritted teeth, as he presses on.

The tracer stops, and he is within killing range when he sees that the observer is struggling with his machine gun, which has jammed. The observer is in a rage of panic and frustration. Daniel is only a few yards away and is certain of an easy kill. The observer thumps the gun with his fist, and then, amazingly, furiously wrenches it from its mounting and hurls it overboard.

Like an executioner testing the edge of his axe, Daniel does not open fire as he easily follows the weaving and diving of the Roland. Daniel notes that this is the kind of Walfisch that has no forward-firing gun. He draws alongside, and the pilot looks at him wonderingly. Daniel stabs his finger at him and puts his own arms up briefly to signify that he is demanding surrender. You don’t take your hands off a Camel’s controls for any longer than you have to.