Tommy sat to his desk, beautifully empty, no more than half a dozen pieces of paper waiting his attention.
“The sergeants dealt with all of the routine between them, Tommy, Sergeant James handling the bulk,” George explained. “Some of it we needed, most of it was just bumf – put your signature on it and throw it away stuff. There are two promotions you need to know about – you have signed them off already; there is a notice that there are changes being made to bodies at Wing and Brigade and HQ; an Intelligence appreciation of the forces on the other side, which is mostly guesswork; a signature needed from you for the gunners about the field, the sergeants wanting to double-check that we really needed them. There could be a strong argument for a commission to Sergeant James – we could use an additional administrative officer, able to take decisions off his own bat.”
“I shall make the case to Wing – Colonel Sarratt might agree. We’ve got the pom-poms, George?”
“Twelve of ‘em now, Tommy. Horatio Moffat knew a bloke on the coastal gun sites, did a Gunnery course with him five years ago, somewhere called Whale Island, and kept in touch when he was pushed out of the Navy and given to us. They replaced all of their one-pound pom-poms with twos, it seems, and some of the old guns were written off as unusable and ended up here with a few thousand rounds as well, the way things are usually done. Picked up a bunch of elderly conscripts who had been sent out to the Trenches and had been found unfit to remain there – normal sort of thing – you can’t send an office worker in his forties out to live in the field – they can’t do it, no matter if they are willing to do their best. They can man the guns though, living in warm billets and fed enough, and kept dry; thankful to be looked after, most of them, and more than willing to learn the guns. When the attacks come, they’ll give Jerry a surprise, if you decide to keep them.”
“Good; they are staying. Jerry will come, George, almost of a certainty. All I heard in England says that if Kaiser Bill don’t win this summer, Germany will fall to bits over next winter, for starvation and red revolution. He has to attack and win in the spring.”
“He can’t, Tommy. Impossible to crack the trench lines, we have proved that sufficiently in the past three years. At most, five miles and then grind to a halt. Nothing to worry about. If he does attack, then he’s finished, because he will lose so many men that his own defences will be weakened when we come back at him.”
Tommy was sure he was right – the Germans themselves had demonstrated at the Somme that the trench-lines were impregnable when fully held.
“Agreed, George. No problem for us, we’re a good twenty miles back – no chance of being attacked except from the air. What are we doing with the pilots at the moment, George? Leave them idle and they’ll get into trouble of some sort.”
“Nothing to do with them, Tommy. They can’t fly, so they can’t do anything. They’re useless for anything but flying – Officer of the Day stretches their military capacity to its absolute.”
“Shooting? Can we get them to practice aiming off? All we tell them to do is get behind and shoot up Jerry’s tail, straight line stuff. Could we teach them, what do they call it, deflection?”
“Leading the target? Like game shooting with shotguns?”
“That’s right.”
“No. No way of doing it – we can’t practice with targets moving at a hundred miles an hour in one direction while we swan off at ninety or more in the other. We could let them play with their revolvers – one-handed like the cowboys do; that’s supposed to be good practice for snap-shooting.”
“Try it, George. Can we set up some sort of range? Some place where they can amuse themselves?”
“I’ll talk with Horatio, Tommy. We’ve got the brick silos which are used for nothing – might be able to rig one of them up as a pistol range.”
The pilots loved the new game, spent half their days taking turns on the range; some of them became competent shots with the heavy service revolvers and all of them learned at least to hit the back wall.
“Valueless in the air these days, of course, George, but it’s keeping them out of mischief. They’d be in the rear areas in their spare time otherwise, getting drunk in public view and frequenting the houses of ill-fame. No doubt they still will, but a lot less often, and with fewer ill-consequences for their health.”
“Tommy, you are a prig!”
“Comes of getting married at an early age, George – something I would recommend to the lads here, if they weren’t mostly terrified of respectable females.”
“They’ve never met any, Tommy. Too young to attend their local County Balls, or the dance halls in town for the less exalted, and protected in their boys’ schools – they don’t know girls of their own class. Nothing so frightening as the unknown, Tommy.”
“Nothing to be done for them in that way, not out here. No respectable French girl will have anything to do with English soldiers – which can only be regarded as very wise of them.”
Some of the pilots took healthy walks in the cold air; more slept in late, reducing the backlog of fatigue from the weeks or months of hard flying; the bulk sat and talked and started drinking early in the day, every day.
The weather suddenly changed in mid-January. There was a massive storm off the Atlantic, gale-force winds and a driving blizzard, followed within the day by southerly breezes from the Mediterranean which pushed the temperature well above the normal for mid-winter. The snow cover disappeared overnight and the mud on the airfield dried out inside another day. Suddenly, they were flying again, and very convenient timing as the weather was changing just as the remainder of the single men returned from their leave – some had returned much earlier, eager to get back to the squadron.
“Squadron patrols?”
Colonel Sarratt thought that to be wiser in the first instance; they must examine the Front, he said, to discover what, if anything, had changed in the weeks when they had been grounded.
“Very little, one must imagine, sir. Jerry will have been feeling the cold just as much as us, will have been huddled over his stoves and disinclined to poke his head out of doors, like us.”
“Hah! Never assume that a Prussian will behave like an ordinary mortal, Tommy. One never knows just what tricks they might have got up to unseen by us.”
Tommy could not imagine what they might have done in weather too cold for concrete or mortar to set without freezing and losing its integrity. They could have built nothing, emplaced no guns, created no new railway lines; even digging new trenches in soil frozen iron-hard would have been a near-impossible task. The most that could have happened was that extra aircraft might have been ferried to those fields with permanent hangars that could be kept warm. He had heard that Jerry sent the bulk of his new planes overland, fuselage, engines and wings separately, rebuilding them at the Front itself; they had no sea passage to interrupt the railway lines, could do the job conveniently that way. It would do away with the need for ferry pilots, skilled men kept out of the squadrons at the Front.
“Squadron patrols for today, sir. What should our policy be for the rest of the month?”
“The DH4s are to continue their harassment raids of the rear, Tommy. That means the Wing must put up the Camels to cover them, because Jerry must react, although the word is that the training schools in Germany are producing fewer pilots, due to shortages of aircraft and petrol. Sounds like wishful thinking to me – you know the sort of thing, Tommy – we know that the blockade is biting and that the Germans have less fuel, so they must be training fewer pilots. Believe it when we see it, that’s what I say.”
“It’s possible though, sir. But, as you say, when I see the Jastas coming up with gaps in their ranks for having too few men to fill the driving seats, then I will accept that it’s true. Nancy was saying something about ‘circuses’, sir?”
“Ah, yes… Again, it may be no more than Froggish nonsense; probably is, in my opinion. They say that Richthofen, and perhaps one or two others, have combined their squa
drons – Jastas, if you insist – to fly a whole Wing together in effect – dozens of ‘em, all at once. Good stuff, if you can command ‘em! Just how do you get forty or fifty aircraft to act together once they’re up?”
Tommy thought, decided that it was not entirely impossible, but would not be the way the RFC worked.
“You would have to have a set of plans, sir.” He waved his arms furiously to illustrate his point. “If you meet a squadron of us high and to the right, then Hermann will lead his planes here, and Lothar will take his there, while Manfred goes up the middle, that sort of thing; and another set for each of the other eventualities you can think of. Very disciplined. Rigid in its initial application, but there has to be a time when you just let them go and do whatever seems right to the individual. Don’t like it. Your pilots have to be soldiers – which most of ours ain’t. Our lads are not used to snapping to attention and obeying orders. Jerry might be, from all I have heard. I don’t think we could do it. I’m damned sure I don’t want to. That said, sir, we don’t plan enough. I want to take my lads up and give them some practice in a few basics.”
Tommy remembered attacking the Gotha a few months previously, and almost colliding with his own men for lack of a few simple instructions.
“Don’t need much, sir. Keep together in pairs where possible. When you break away, decide in advance which way you will turn, generally, that is. Sort of thing, sir, that if you make a diving attack, then expect to bank to starboard and to continue the dive for at least five hundred feet before pulling out. It might save a few necks that way.”
“That is entirely up to you, Tommy. How you train your pilots is your business. I do agree that it helps if every man has some idea of what the fellow next to him has in his mind, other than how soon he can get his next drink, that is. Don’t get too rigid, that’s all I would say, Tommy. Not orders, ‘you must do this’, ‘you may not do that’, sort of thing – let them keep their initiative – we are British, after all!”
Tommy wondered whether to point out that a substantial number were Australians, Canadians, South Africans and New Zealanders – he had even heard a rumour that one or two of them were Pacific Islanders, but did not know that as a fact. Perhaps being part of the Empire made a man ‘British’ – he might ask Drongo’s opinion on that, one day.
The sky was empty – Jerry had decided to stay at home for another day or two – possibly his fields had yet to dry out. According to Intelligence, the Germans had not built clinker strips on any of their airfields, they still used grass only. Whatever the reason, Tommy was able to devote the day to training and to light amusement: threatening balloons, bringing the squadron within half a mile and watching them furiously winching the Drachens down and then turning away just out of accurate range of their guns. In terms of practical effect, he realised, it was a worthwhile exercise, probably depriving the observers of an hour’s work at a time, more if they had been persuaded to take to their parachutes. He returned to St Rigobert in unusually thoughtful mood, circling to watch his pilots land, a careful eye out for Black Davenport, just to be certain that he was at least competent. He had a quiet word with the boy afterwards, reminding him that he must still watch the sky around him, even within a mile of his own field, just in case there was an intrusive Jerry where he had no right to be.
“Had a thought just now, Colonel.”
Colonel Sarratt made appropriate noises of amazement – he was learning. Nancy, accompanying Tommy to make his report on the patrol, smiled appreciatively – Sarratt was becoming an actual asset to the Wing.
“Balloons, sir. If we pretend to attack them every patrol, get within half a mile and look threatening, they will have to wind them down and we don’t lose any planes. After a few days they’ll get used to us crying wolf – or is it them crying wolf and us pretending to be sheepdogs, or something? Anyway, whatever it is don’t matter. What I mean is, in the end they’ll decide we are just playing silly buggers and leave the balloons up. Then we can kill them and have a good laugh too.”
Colonel Sarratt looked appealingly to Nancy, who was in a condition of near-hysteria, occasionally making barking noises and wolf howls.
“Ah… I am not entirely certain I follow your argument, Tommy…”
Nancy recovered his composure, suggested that Tommy had it in mind to pull the wool over the Germans’ eyes – hence the sheepdogs – and then take them by surprise, probably in a wolfpack.
“Ah! I see, possibly. What am I to do, Tommy?”
Very much on his dignity, which reduced Nancy to helpless laughter again, Tommy suggested that he had merely thought it might be a good idea to instruct the other squadrons to threaten every balloon they saw. Then, one day, they could actually complete an attack, taking Jerry by surprise and probably getting the observers still in their baskets.
“Ah, yes indeed. Far more important, I remember, to kill the observers rather than to merely flame a gasbag. I approve, Tommy. An excellent idea. You must explain about the wolves one day, old chap. But not just at the moment.”
“While we are talking about gasbags, sir,” Nancy interposed. “I am informed that there is to be a morale-boosting expedition to the Front by a number of senior and important National Figures, who are to meet the troops and all that. We may expect them to descend on us, being renowned as a successful squadron in a Wing that has attracted an amount of attention over the past year. They will wish to dish out gongs, I don’t doubt, while they are here. I think there will be a Royal Duke, or even the Prince of Wales again, and a general or two and the Minister for Something or the Other as well. Add to that ten car loads of photographers and all will be well. General Salmond will probably accompany them – he will have to, I suspect. Next week, I believe.”
Colonel Sarratt showed worried – if he lost half of his Wing to a poorly planned raid he might cause eyebrows to twitch, but if a Royal Personage made a disparaging comment then he would be instantly sacked.
“Can you give me the exact day, Nancy? I will order the Mess bars closed early the night before so that the pilots look half-way sober and don’t smell like a second-hand brewery, just for a change.”
Nancy knew as well that they must be on top line for the Visit – far more important an event than merely making war.
“Will do, sir. Tommy, you are due for something from the King of the Belgians, I believe – don’t look too surprised if they dish out a Star, or something like, on a sash to drape across your chest on Mess Nights.”
“Is that a joke, Nancy?”
“No. Kings don’t like being bombed – that’s something that should be reserved exclusively for the lower orders, you know, dear boy. They will tend to be a little excessive, positively vulgar in fact, in their response. Rather underbred the Belgian monarchy, as well – made millions out of killing the natives in the Congo, you will remember – poor taste, you know!”
Tommy had no idea what he was talking about, but Colonel Sarratt did, and shook his head in disapproval – Queen Victoria would not have engaged in such pursuits, he implied.
“Not to worry, Tommy – you merely have to stand to attention – you do remember how to do that? Good! Stand straight and let His Highness hook the medal on and then salute and look noble for the benefit of the cameras. You need say nothing – or nothing sensible, anyway - you’ll find that easy enough.”
They laughed – Colonel Sarratt was definitely fitting in.
“Afterwards, well, you know what to do for the reporters – smile and nod and agree. Good thing those scratches on your face healed so cleanly, only thin white lines – no lurid scarring that will show in a newspaper photograph. Nancy will be there and will answer any hard questions – you need only tell them your name; do make sure you get it right.”
“Thank you, sir. That settled, do you know where our Big Push is planned for this year? Any part of the Front which we should pay special attention to, or avoid?”
Colonel Sarratt shook his head; he did not know and much
suspected that no decision had been taken.
“The only word I have had, Tommy – very unofficial – is that Haig and Lloyd George are fighting it out at the moment. Haig wants an attack towards the French sector, again. The War Office has been pressured by the Navy and wants to run up the coast, as far as the Dutch frontier, if possible; a narrow front no more than ten miles inland, backed up by naval bombardments; the jolly tars are even willing to put some of their big ships to use, bringing them out of hiding in Scapa Flow for a few days. The aim, of course, being to take the submarine bases, Zeebrugge especially. Lloyd George wants no offensive at all this year, to wait until ’19 when the Americans can add their weight and we can pull another half a million out of India; but, if there must be a Push, he favours the coast. So, it’s the old fight again – Haig plus the House of Lords and most of the Conservative Party in the House of Commons and all of the newspapers on one side; Lloyd George on the other, backed by the Treasury and the Foreign Office particularly, and probably the bulk of the voters, but they don’t count of course.”
“Who will win?”
Tommy was openly puzzled – he did not understand the complexities of government. Nancy raised a supercilious eyebrow, said it was obvious.
“The Treasury always wins, Tommy. If Haig wants more soldiers, then he must persuade the Treasury to pay for them; if he requires a greater output of shells, then the Treasury must buy them. They backed him in ’16 and ’17, but they have run out of faith in him now. No Big Push this year, unless it becomes absolutely essential to keep the French in business, or the Americans insist, perhaps. Otherwise, only if Germany shows signs of collapse first, or if Austria-Hungary offers peace, or the Ottomans crumble; the hope is that Kaiser Bill will show sense and suggest an alliance against Russia.”
A Wretched Victory (Innocents At War Series, Book 6) Page 4