The Dust That Falls from Dreams (21 page)

‘What happened?’

‘They didn’t know whether to shoot me or pat me on the back. In the end they lost the file, quite accidentally on purpose. I did turn out to be reasonably useful, I like to think. I don’t suppose that Archie will ever forgive me. I left him in the lurch in the middle of one of our amateur dramatic society productions. We were doing
Iolanthe
.’

‘You’ve got some medals,’ she said, looking at the row of ribbons on his chest.

‘One or two. Nothing very special. I’m thinking of leaving the air force now. Everyone says there are going to be huge opportunities in civil aviation. I’m looking into it, just sniffing around. Now that the show’s over we’re all going to have to look for something else.’

‘What does the “O” with a wing on it mean?’

‘That means I qualified as an observer. The one with the Lewis gun and the camera who has to try and land the plane if the pilot gets hit. You don’t get the O until you’ve survived an engagement.’

‘An engagement? I don’t follow. What’s being engaged got to do with it.’

‘An engagement with the enemy, not a marital contract.’

Rosie leaned forward, patted his arm and laughed. ‘I know. I was just being silly.’ She paused and said, ‘I was with the Voluntary Aid Detachment. That’s how I spent the war. And now it’s horrible having nothing to do after all those years of frantic hard work. I just find all the things I saw…and the sounds…going round and round in my mind, and I can’t get rid of them. I’m sure you know what I mean. I’m probably as mad as poor Mother is. Or soon will be. You must find the same, sometimes.’

‘I do. I have a bad dream that keeps coming back. Wakes me up in a sweat every time. It’s an endless parade of the dead.’

‘I keep hearing “Gilbert the Filbert”, and it won’t go away.’

‘So, you were a VAD?’

‘Yes, at Spikey.’

‘Spikey?’

‘That’s what we all called it. Spike Island. I don’t know why. Everyone else knows it as Netley.’

‘I know people who came through Netley. You must have known them too.’

‘Netley’s absolutely vast, so I probably didn’t. We had tens of thousands of patients.’

What about Edward George, from the Buffs? Got sent to 46 Squadron?’

‘No, I’m afraid not.’

‘He lost his legs. And he has to wear a mask when he’s out. Poor man. He’s back in Lincolnshire with his family now. He made a perfectly good landing, and then the undercarriage collapsed.’

Rosie hung her head and fell silent for a very long time. Suddenly she burst out, ‘It was so awful, I just had to do something. That’s why I went to Netley. Mother wouldn’t have let me go to France, and actually I didn’t want to go there either. I love it here. Going away is such a wrench. But I couldn’t do nothing, could I?’

She looked up, and he saw that she was trying to be cheerful. ‘Do you remember that day when you and Archie did that wonderful thing, at the coronation party?’

‘When I vaulted the wall and Archie did a somersault? Gracious me, we must have been utterly mad. I can’t imagine why my parents let us do it. The pole wasn’t even the real thing.’

‘You were brought up to be Spartan warriors,’ said Rosie, ‘and that’s what you became, really. It was at that party that Ash…’

‘Yes?’

‘That Ash…’

Daniel looked at her with concern. Her shoulders had started to heave, and she had put her face into her hands as she sobbed. He hesitated, and then knelt before her. She dropped her hands to her lap, and he took them in his, pressing them to his cheek and kissing them. As the tears flowed more freely in response to his sympathy, he felt that he ought to put his arms around her, but realised that it would not be appropriate. Then at last he decided to follow his instincts, and hugged her to his chest, murmuring, ‘My dear girl, my dear girl.’

A
month or so after their recovery from the Spanish influenza, and not two weeks after his reappearance in the lives of the McCosh family, Daniel came to tea, and found himself in the drawing room, making conversation whilst Millicent scurried in and out bearing drop scones, Eccles cakes, gingerbread, and refills of hot water for the pot. After so many years it felt strange to be back with these sisters and their eccentric mother, none of whom had really changed very much in the intervening years, except that Mrs McCosh was clearly becoming more ‘unusual’ with the passage of time. Daniel and Sophie soon realised that they had in fact seen each other occasionally, but without recognition. She had used to bring the Wing Commander on his regular visits to the airfield when she was a driver.

Conversation was relatively easy, because all the company were agog to hear of what it had really been like in the Royal Flying Corps on the Western Front. Daniel was quite used to this, and it seemed that he had to endure the same questions and conversations, over and over again, wherever he went. Most people just wanted to talk about the aces. He had to suppress his natural instinct to say, ‘What about all the rest?’ modestly forgetting that he too had won many more than five victories.

He also liked to put in a word for the PBI. He had never forgotten visiting the front line in the squadron tender, and seeing the legs of the dead protruding from the trench walls, still wearing puttees and boots. That was a far more vivid memory than the stench and the shell bursts. He remembered taking refuge with Ashbridge Pendennis’s unit after spending all day in a shell hole, and being astonished when Ash had pointed to the sky and said, ‘I don’t know how you do it. You wouldn’t catch me up there.’

‘Did you know Albert Ball?’ asked Ottilie.

‘I did know Albert Ball,’ he said. ‘He was utterly reckless, and apparently fearless. He had an SE 5 for going out with his flight, but he kept a little Nieuport for going out on his own. He’d charge a whole circus on his own and pepper the lot of them. Hawker was like that. His order was always “attack everything”. Arthur Rhys Davids was exactly the same. He was a classicist, you know, a wonderful boy. His hut was full of books. Ball was his flight commander for a while, so I suppose he got the madness from there. It was a lot to live up to. The strain steadily gets worse and worse, and one of the symptoms is recklessness, without a doubt. It’s the effect of incremental fear on a brave man. And there’s a part of you that would like to get it all over with, I think. It’s like a devil’s voice in your ear, you know, like in Hamlet’s soliloquy, where he wonders whether quietus might be the most desirable thing after all.

‘I knew McCudden too. He was the exact opposite to Ball and Rhys Davids. Meticulously careful, and scientific, and considered. Billy Bishop I met once. He was another Nieuport man. Raided an airfield on his own and got the VC for it.’

‘What about those French aces?’ asked Christabel. ‘You know…Guynemer…and Nungesser?’

‘No, I never knew Guynemer or Nungesser, or Rickenbacker. I expect you’ve heard of Mick Mannock. He was Irish. I never met him either, but I wish I had. He worked out how to do deflection shots, apparently, and that accounts for his tremendously high score. That’s when you work out how far to shoot ahead of an enemy so that he flies into your bullets. Most of us couldn’t do that. We just got on their tails and fired from point-blank.’

‘It’s a bit of a miracle you got right through the war, isn’t it?’ observed Ottilie. ‘Four years in the air. That must be a record.’

‘Well, in some ways I was lucky. I wasn’t there for the Fokker Scourge in ’15, I was on Home Establishment. Of course people remember Immelmann for that. And I missed Bloody April for the same reason. I was instructing.’

‘And what about the famous Red Baron?’ asked Christabel. ‘Was he really such a brilliant flyer?’

‘Hmm, I often think that the only German ace that anyone wants to talk about is von Richthofen. He was unquestionably a
great flyer – I came up against him a few times – but he did tend to attack in vast formations, always diving with his circus behind him, so he had lots of protection. He wasn’t a lone wolf like Ball. Funny thing is, when he was killed, the first rumour was that he’d been shot down by the observer of an RE8. That would have been an anticlimax, eh? Not remotely glamorous. Luckily they eventually decided it was a Camel, but a lot of us suspect that actually he was done for by machine-gun fire from the ground, like Mannock. One often doesn’t know who the real victor is, and the figures are all poppycock anyway. If four Brits got a victory between them they got a quarter each. We often used to draw cards for a victory, or toss a coin. The Americans and the French gave all of them one each. And then you have flyers of real genius, with masses of victories, that no one’s ever heard of, like Collinshaw. There was Fullard, Little, McElroy, Thompson, McKeever, Beauchamp-Proctor, and that’s missing out the Canadians, the Belgians and the Italians. I absolutely fail to understand why people have only ever heard of Albert Ball and von Richthofen. It’s tiresome, and all the other flyers feel the same. The Huns had just as many aces as us. Boelcke for example, and Müller and Bohme. And Udet.’

‘So who do you think was the very greatest,’ asked Mr McCosh, ‘if it wasn’t von Richthofen?’

‘Who was the greatest? Of the Huns? To my mind it was Voss. Flew a Fokker triplane like the Red Baron, but his wasn’t red of course. I had a scrap with him once. Six of us against one of him. Those little triplanes couldn’t dive because the wings came off, but they could go up like a lift. Every time we thought we had him he nipped upstairs and then came down on us again. He could have got away quite easily. I got a tight group of five in my empennage – Empennage? Oh, sorry, that’s the tailplane. We all got a few holes. He did things I’ve never seen before or since, things you can’t do with an aeroplane, things that aren’t in the manuals. It was perfectly astounding. Then some of his friends turned up and some of ours turned up, and it just turned into general chaos without any casualties, but I swear he was determined to kill all six of us on his own, and might well have pulled it off. To my mind there’s never been anyone to touch him. When
I heard he was dead I felt as if I’d swallowed stones. Rhys Davids was pretty sorry for pulling it off, as I understand.’

‘And was it really like being a knight of the air?’ asked Rosie. ‘Everyone made it sound so romantic.’

‘Ah, the chivalry! Well, there wasn’t as much as people think. It’s still cold-blooded murder much of the time. You dive on a two-seater out of the sun and down it goes, sometimes in flames, and you know you’re as guilty as Herod, and you’ve just got to face up to it and then go out and do it again. A flamerino makes you feel sick to the heart, and you just hope they were dead already. And let no one tell you that von Richthofen was chivalrous. He wasn’t. He followed Hawker down and shot him in the back of the head when he had to turn home after a long dogfight that had been honourable up to that point. And during Bloody April, twenty-one of his kills, or thereabouts, were defenceless and obsolete old two-seaters and wounded stragglers. He was doing his duty, and I’ve done the same, but it’s nothing to do with honour and chivalry. It’s plain old-fashioned murder. Every one of us has to live with the knowledge that we were murderers. It’s true! It’s true! And von Richthofen was a braggart who claimed kills that belonged to his pupils. Mannock did the exact opposite and gave his kills to his pupils. If you want a hero of the air, give me Mannock any day, but he was no knight either. I hear that he took to machine-gunning planes that were already down. After too much fighting, what with the tiredness and the strain of it, you can get more than a little mad. That’s when they send you home to be an instructor for a while. I had to do it twice, and that’s why I survived, thank God.

‘And something else. The Huns always had a defensive approach to war in the air. They didn’t come over our lines in daylight, so we always had to take the fight to them. It was against the rules of war to use dumdums and incendiaries on other planes. We didn’t use them. If we’d crash-landed on their side, and been caught with them, we’d have been court-martialled and shot. But as the Huns did always crash on their own side of the lines, they didn’t have to worry about being court-martialled and shot, so they used incendiaries against us. There’s no other explanation for why our planes caught fire so easily and theirs didn’t. There
was nothing that gave us the wind up more than the thought of being burned alive in a plane, and they knew it, because they were just as frightened of it themselves. So much for chivalry. Obviously one enjoys being thought of as a “knight of the air”, but I sometimes have to remind myself just how brutal it often was.’

‘So when you get a victory, does that mean a kill?’ asked Christabel. ‘I’ve often wondered.’

‘No, no, we counted victories, not kills. If you’ve got twenty or thirty victories, a lot of them will have been forced to land and so on. I killed hundreds of men by mowing them down in ground attacks, flying six feet above the ground and going straight at them, and I have no idea how many I killed with bombs. People don’t think about this, they only think about single combat, knight against knight. It comes from reading the papers. But yes, of course a little bit of chivalry occurred from time to time. We had a problem with jammed guns almost every time we went out. They said it was caused by deformed rounds that shouldn’t have passed inspection. We had to carry a hammer in the office – that’s the cockpit – and we’d spend half of every fight bashing the cocking levers with it. The frustration and rage was beyond imagining. I remember once my guns jammed in a dogfight and the pilot I was up against saw me struggling to clear them, so he flew alongside and waved and laughed at me whilst I hammered at the damned – I mean wretched levers…Anyway, I couldn’t clear them, and he just gave me a little wave and peeled off and flew away. That was a Fokker DV 11, and I was in a Camel. He could have got me with no bother at all. I always wish I’d had the chance to fly a DV 11. Once it happened again, and this time it was the Hun’s guns that jammed, so I repaid the favour, and let him go.’

‘Was it the same Hun?’ asked Christabel.

‘No, no. It wasn’t the same one. And then another time a courteous Hun waited for me to clear my guns and then he renewed the attack, so we had a good scrap, and I shot him down over Arras. I took him a bottle of cognac and some cigarettes in hospital, and we shook hands, but he got peritonitis, rather like poor Ashbridge, and died a few days later. I was very sorry about
that. I always felt less awful when I could force someone down intact.

‘And once I lost my flight, somehow, and then I saw them not far away, slipping into some light cloud, so I caught up and came out the other side, and lo and behold, I was flying in formation right next to a little posse of Pfalz. The Hun beside me caught my eye at exactly the second that I caught his, and after a moment of complete mutual amazement, he laughed and signalled to me to fall back and creep away, and that’s exactly what I did. Mind you, even a whole posse of Pfalz would have had a struggle against a Camel. Much faster, but too slow on the turn.

‘So there was a little bit of chivalry from time to time, yes, there was; but what I remember the most is mowing down those columns of men and horses, seeing them topple, and fall, and being thankful that I couldn’t hear them because of the engine. Once there was a platoon up to its neck in water, but keeping going. You could use water to test the accuracy of your guns, because of the splashes. I strafed them and then came back for another go, and the brown water had turned red.’

There followed a long silence as they reflected on the horror of this, and then Daniel said, ‘Lots of strange and inexplicable things happened. Once, when I was shot down between the lines and managed to get to our trenches after dark, I discovered that the PBI believed that there was a magnificently wild and fearless scout pilot who did the most amazing feats of acrobatics and daredevilry right over the lines, almost every day. The troops used to look out for him and watch him, and he never got shot down. They were full of wonder and admiration. They called him “the Mad Major”. He really bucked up the troops an awful lot, and they used to cheer him on. Lots of the boys used to go and stunt for the infantry, just to keep their peckers up. There was a Naval Air Service fellow called Christopher Draper, used to fly under bridges and so on, and so did Gwilym Lewis. I did it too, particularly after I found out where Ash and Albert and Sidney were, but I happen to know, and so does everyone else who has checked up on these sightings, that a great deal of the time there wasn’t, technically speaking, anyone there at all. In other words, according to all the logs there was sometimes nobody there when the Mad
Major was stunting above the lines. I have often wondered…well…do you suppose there can be ghosts who appear in the daytime? Was it…something like the Angels of Mons? Or can one be in two places at once, but unaware of it?

‘Shall we talk about something else?’