War Story (24 page)

“I think Jerry's trying to bore us to death,” Gerrish said.

“Then stir him up. You're supposed to be flying offensive patrols, so be more offensive. Be downright bloody disgusting.”

“I couldn't do that,” Foster said. “Nanny made me promise. However,” he added as he saw Cleve-Cutler's expression, “I suppose I could always shoot Nanny first.”

“And don't be so damned cocky,” Cleve-Cutler said. “Remember what happened to that chap Dobson or Hobson or whatever his name was, at Lagnicourt last month.” The meeting broke up in silence. Hobson had crashed in flames,
caught by a low-flying enemy machine which shot him down when he was only fifty feet off the ground, thinking his patrol was over, probably thinking the other plane (if he saw it) must be British. Nobody knew what Hobson had thought. Nobody caught the other plane, either.

Flying offensive patrols was a wearying grind. There were the physical demands of going from ground level to the same height as the top of a small Alp and sitting there for an hour or more in a Force 10 gale. Do it twice a day for a week and your body starts to complain: the head throbs, or the sinuses burn, or the ears develop a persistent buzz. But that was trivial. The great strain was the search, and it grew worse when there was nothing to find. The sky became achingly empty. Impossibly empty. Some pilots and observers lost faith in their own eyes. The less they found the more they worried. After all, they were up there to kill someone. Where was the bastard? Stealing into their blind spot? About to kill with the shot the victim never hears? So they searched, and worried. A man would have to be crazy not to worry. On the other hand, worry was exhausting. Worry too much and you might end up too tired to search. It was something to worry about, was worry.

Little of this showed on the ground. They had the elasticity of youth, and in any case it wasn't the done thing to reveal one's emotions except on the subject of sport, or perhaps dogs. The squadron had a good spirit, better than it had had under Milne. The mess was much improved now that Appleyard had gone: better food in more variety, no more damn mutton, some decent wine and even occasionally a few crates of real English ale. A new cricket bat appeared, thought to be a gift from Paxton which was only right since he'd made Tim Piggott break the old one. The mess got a piano. It had three bullet-holes in the front and a dead pigeon deep inside, but it was a piano, even if the G below middle C made a twang like a departing arrow. Corporal Lacey had bought it with some of Paxton's cigars. Paxton also got part of the credit for two sofas and a set of cane chairs, none new but none badly broken. “I see the new boy has been making himself useful,” Foster said to Piggott as they went in to dinner.

“Up to a point. Lacey wangled the stuff with his cigars.
Lacey can get anything. Paxton couldn't get wet in a rainstorm.”

“I wouldn't mind a French virgin. Can Lacey get me a guaranteed French virgin?”

“I believe there's one left. Six years old, very ugly. Ten cigars.”

“I'll think about it. Ten is a bit steep.”

After dinner most officers took their coffee in the anteroom. Boy Binns could pick out a tune on the battered piano, after a fashion, and a group of singers and saboteurs clustered around him. Paxton sat by a window and watched the sunset. Others sprawled in chairs and read yesterday's newspapers. The adjutant sat in a corner and smoked a stubby briar pipe while he fed bits of cheese to the dog Brutus.

Eventually, inevitably, there was a fight between the singers and the saboteurs, and the piano swayed violently. Boy Binns quit. The fighters chased each other around the room until they made themselves so unpopular that they took their fight outside and the anteroom became almost silent.

Thus everyone heard Spud Ogilvy's grunt of surprise. He was reading his mail. “This'll interest you, adj,” he said. Captain Brazier tossed a fragment of cheese. It was like a token opening bid with a poor poker hand. Ogilvy said:”Old friend of mine, chap I was in the trenches with, says he served under you. He says ‘I hear you've got our old CO, the amazing Basher Brazier, fastest gun on the Western Front'. Did they really call you Basher?”

“It was a corruption of ‘pasha'. That's what the Egyptians used to call me.”

“Then he says: ‘Too bad about the blue blood, but how can you tell what colour it is unless you make a few holes in the bag?' What on earth does that mean?”

“Can't imagine.”

“And he ends with a bit of verse. ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, if Jerry don't get you then Basher must'.”

“It rhymes,” Brazier said, getting up. “Not much else to be said for it.” He clicked his fingers and Brutus obediently followed him out.

“My word,” Ogilvy said. “I must write and ask him what he meant.”

“Another thrilling episode of this gripping yarn next week,” Foster said. “Be sure to place an order with your newsagent.”

Paxton paid a mechanic to make the hinges on his trunk tamper-proof. Next day he found the lock and the hinges intact, but the trunk was nailed to the floor. He had to borrow a crowbar, all the time wondering how O'Neill could possibly have got inside it again. He saw the answer when he prised it free. O'Neill had got under the floorboards and driven the nails upwards. Paxton, grim with determination, paid again to have the trunk encased in sheet steel. He had not known he was capable of such rage and loathing. He dreamed of doing things to O'Neill's helpless, squirming body of such a mounting ferocity that he startled himself. But when he saw the armoured trunk he felt a rush of glee. “That's the stuff!” he said. “That's the answer!”

“Yes, sir,” said the mechanic. “Oh, thank you, sir. Thanks very much, sir. Very kind of you, sir.”

The daft affair of Sergeant Harris and the mules had not been Major Cleve-Cutler's fault but he felt the squadron had come out of it badly and he wanted to do something to make up for it. He asked Captain Brazier if he had any bright ideas.

“Well now, look here, I'm no airman,” Brazier, said.

“No, but you're twice my size and twice my age and you've got ten times my experience of the British Army, so what would you do, if you wanted to score a few points at Wing and show them we're not a bunch of drunks and delinquents?” Cleve-Cutler's scars grinned at him.

“Not
quite
twice your age. Forty-nine this year.”

“My father's only forty-seven.”

“Lucky chap. When I was forty-seven …” The adjutant rubbed the spot where his eyebrows met, and decided not to follow that thought.

“They think
I'm
old, you know, some of them. I've overheard them talking. ‘Not bad for his age.' That sort of thing. Very patronising. God knows what they say about you.”

“Prehistoric,” the adjutant said. “Fossilized. What's that doddering old fool doing around here? That's the view of the
intrepid aviator. Seen from ten thousand feet, I suppose I am prehistoric. And all those muddy fools at the Front must look like cavemen seen by eagles. Except that cavemen almost certainly had much more comfortable caves, and they didn't have to keep their heads down all the time. I'm wittering on like this in the hope that you won't notice I haven't answered your question.”

“Forget it, adj. Not important.”

“I'll give you a piece of advice, though. Attack the enemy's strength, not his weakness. My very first CO taught me that.”

“Um.” Cleve-Cutler reviewed all his possible targets. “The toughest nut to crack is the German observation balloon, I suppose.”

“The tougher the nut, the sweeter the meat,” Brazier said.

Cleve-Cutler talked it over with his flight commanders. “The Hun wouldn't defend his balloons so heavily unless they really mattered, would he?”

“Given a good telescope, a man in a balloon can see forty or fifty miles,” said Gerrish. “So they say.”

“I shall never sunbathe again,” Foster said.

“No future in just charging at the bloody things,” Piggott said. “You'd need an icebreaker to get through the archie.”

“Well, there has to be a way. This is not orders from the rear, you understand. I'd just like us to develop a reputation for something other than going on a binge.”

Various suggestions were made: fly high and bomb the balloon, fly not so high and set fire to it with incendiary parachutes, tow a grappling iron on the end of long thin cable and rip the thing open (a French pilot had actually attacked German planes like that, in the days before machine guns were carried). None of these ideas excited anybody. Cleve-Cutler told them to go away and think some more.

Foster held a meeting of ‘C' Flight pilots. “Balloon-busting,” he said. “That's this month's fashion. You win a goldfish in a jar for every balloon you bust.” He was chewing his nails.

“I wish you'd stop doing that,” Yeo said. “It makes your fingers look pruned.”

Foster sat on his hands. “Spud?” he said.

“Well, there's always the Milne Method,” Ogilvy suggested.
“Bit expensive, I suppose. And what d'you do for an encore?”

“Don't look at me,” Charlie Essex said. “I can't spell balloon-busting. Can't even say it.”

“It's a matter of finding some way to baffle the archie, isn't it?” Yeo said. “The problem's not the balloon, it's getting close enough to bust it.”

“Bloody archie,” Essex muttered. “I really hate the stinking stuff. It doesn't fight fair.”

“Nobody's invented the perfect weapon yet,” Foster said, chewing a thumbnail. Yeo sighed, and Foster sat on his hand again.

“We're not going to find the answer here,” Ogilvy said. “Maybe if we go up and look …”

Nobody had a better suggestion. “All right,” Foster said. “Next time the weather's right, James and I will study the problem from several angles.”

“Keep your heads down,” Essex said. “They can't see you if you can't see them. That's a scientific fact.”

Pepriac was rarely silent. Engines were constantly being tested, and aircraft took off and landed all day. No matter how often he saw it, the act of take-off – the bellowing, bouncing charge across the grass, the instant of lift, the easy climb – never lost its magic for Paxton. He felt the cramp of envy, and a craving that no amount of tramping across the land of the Somme could diminish. He went to see Tim Piggott and asked to be allowed to fly again.

“It's not my decision. I didn't ground you.” Piggott's rigger had extracted a ragged lump of shrapnel from his FE's undercarriage and it lay on his desk. He poked at it with a pencil. “Besides, there's no room for you. All the FEs are fully crewed.”

“There's the Quirk.”

“If it was up to me you could take it and good riddance to you both.” Piggott frowned, hard. His left eyelid had started flickering again. He put a finger on it to make it stop. “The Hun loves chumps like you. Very sentimental, the Hun, very fond of children, he enjoys putting large lumps of red-hot metal through their stupid little heads.” The point of the
pencil snapped against the piece of shrapnel. Piggott looked at it bleakly. “Buzz off,” he said.

Paxton told Kellaway about this exchange. “If you ask me,” he said,”it's a clear case of professional jealousy. We knocked down a Hun and Piggott got hit by shrapnel.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Kellaway said. “Where was he hit?”

“Oh … I don't know. At the Front somewhere.”

“A chest wound?”

“No, no, no. Piggott wasn't touched. For God's sake pay attention.”

“I'm getting one of my headaches,” Kellaway said. “I'd better go and lie down.”

Paxton was not discouraged by Piggott's words. Sooner or later, he knew, the squadron would need a pilot. Every day there were forced landings because of engine failures – a cracked fuel line, a clogged-up carburettor, a broken electrical lead. The crew of a machine in ‘C' Flight were lucky to survive when their propeller shattered and the fragments hacked through the control cables leading to the tail. The plane obligingly crashed into a small lake, the only stretch of water for miles around, and they waded ashore. Once, as an FE circled the aerodrome, smoke suddenly boiled out of the engine and Paxton thought his day had come; but this pilot deftly blew out the fire with a series of plunging sideslips, and he landed grinning. Another time, Paxton saw an officer fall out of a tree, and he sent a passing mechanic to get the ambulance. The officer turned out to be Douglas Goss (he had been looking for a lost cricket ball). He was a catalogue of pain and injury, but it was a walking catalogue, and he dismissed the ambulance and limped back to the mess. “Bloody branch broke,” he told Dando. “Typical shoddy frog tree.” Frank Foster picked a twig out of Goss's hair, and said: “Anyone who goes up in one of those things must be mad, that's my opinion.” Next day Goss was flying as usual.

Paxton borrowed a motorcycle and explored the more northerly parts of the Somme. He found a fresh kaleidoscope of regiments, with more units arriving daily. It excited him to know he was part of the most brilliant battle-force the world had ever seen, he was in the prime of his life, and he was about to demonstrate his dash and prove his courage in the
mightiest clash of arms ever known. And – most splendid part of all –
Britain was going to win!
Patriotism glowed in him like plum brandy.

The roads were dense with military traffic, endless supply columns feeding the infantry its meat and drink, its bullets and bags of mail and boots, and so Paxton often rode his motorcycle across country. It was a sign of the changing times that he was stopped by a military policeman at the entrance to a field, and made to prove his identity.

“If you wouldn't mind keeping to the side of the field, sir,” the man said. “There's manoeuvres going on in the middle.”