Piece of Cake

by Derek Robinson

  “He flew under the bridge.”

  “Pas complètement. Not …” He snapped his fingers, hunting the word. “Not altogether. Yes?” He beamed happily.

  “Definitely not altogether. Harpo Marx!”

  “Popeye!” said the one-armed captain. They toasted each other.

  “Where is this bridge?” Cattermole asked.

  “Oh, it is on the Moselle,” said the other officer. “At Thionville. But since Jacques, nobody must do it. Trop dangereux.”

  “Toujours l’audace,” Cattermole said.

  That silenced them for a moment. He realized that he had said the wrong thing.

  “Your spectacle at Nancy was very exciting, I believe,” the officer said. “People say you fly very close.”

  Cattermole made a wry face. “Au contraire,” he said. “Very far apart. Very boring. I went to sleep several times.”

  The officer translated. The others laughed, and made comments. “They do not believe it is so easy,” he said.

  “Piece of cake, old boy,” Cattermole said.

  “Morceau de gateau” the officer told them, and they laughed again.

  “Betty Grable!” Cattermole said. “Marlene Dietrich!” said the one-armed captain. They drank to each other. “Thionville,” said Cattermole. “That’s the other side of Metz, isn’t it?”

  At dinner, Dicky Starr found himself sitting next to a tall, thin colonel who was slightly morose with drink. “Jolly good kite, that Potez,” Starr said brightly. “Bon … um … avion … um … avec … um …”

  “Do not fatigue yourself,” the colonel said. “Yes, you are right, the Potez is an excellent machine, of course.”

  “Fast.”

  “Extremely rapid. Today that is more important than ever. It is why we have the Potez constructed very light. The more light, the more fast.”

  “I bet the pilots like that.”

  “Of course. They wish more armor and more guns but that makes heavy, so …”

  “You can’t have everything,” Starr said.

  “However one hundred kilos of bomb is not much, I think,” the colonel said, examining his fingernails.

  “It is if you drop it in the right place,” Starr assured him. “And I bet your chaps—”

  “Do we need really three men?” The colonel turned down the corners of his mouth. “Why not a crew of two? One must ask these questions.”

  “Two would certainly be lighter. And faster.”

  The colonel studied Starr’s face. He nodded thoughtfully. “It is a question of getting the most out of the machine. Suppose now we remove one man …”

  “Make faster,” Starr said. “Yes.”

  “And we add one bomb.”

  “Ah! Well, now …”

  “Bigger hit,” the colonel pointed out. “More explosion.”

  “True. But more heavy, more slow.” Starr was beginning to wave his arms about.

  “Not more slow. Not more heavy.” The colonel wagged his forefinger. “One man out, one bomb in.”

  “I see what you mean,” Starr conceded. “Swings and roundabouts. Not make slower. I mean, make not slower. Make not faster either, come to that.” The words were beginning to sound jumbled. He took a swig of wine to clear his head. “It’s as broad as it’s long, isn’t it?”

  The colonel was silent for a while. “No,” he said. “It is two meters more broad.”

  “Anyway, it’s a jolly good plane,” Starr said, “and I bet you’re glad you’ve got it.”

  “Of course. The Potez is simply the best machine we have, an excellent machine, superb, incomparable. You have no machine like it, I believe.”

  “Heavens, no!” Starr said.

  The colonel nodded glumly. He picked up a spoon and looked at his upside-down reflection. “Anyway, it is not for long,” he said. “Soon we get the new Bloch 174 which is a greatly more excellent machine.”

  “Really? Even better than the Potez?”

  The colonel shook his head: a tiny, unambitious gesture. “Better in every conceivable way,” he said sadly.

  The dinner was long and lavish. As it approached the dessert stage, the adjutant leaned across to Rex and murmured: “One of them is bound to make a speech, you know.” Rex nodded. “The trouble is,” Kellaway said, “half their lot don’t speak English, and hardly any of our lot speak French.” Rex nodded. “Oh well,” Kellaway said.

  In the event the hosts made three speeches. The first, by an old general, all in French, all very stirring, was incomprehensible to Hornet squadron. Then the commandant made a safe, orthodox speech in French. Then he made it all over again in English. He sat down to polite applause.

  Everyone looked at Rex. Some of the looks were rather weary. Four speeches on a full stomach was asking a lot.

  Rex stood. He held a bundle of notes. “Mon president, messieurs” he began confidently. “Mes amis, les enfants du paradis, mademoiselle d’Armentières, Athos, Porthos et d’Armagnac.”

  A ripple of laughter. He glanced at his notes, thumbed through them, tore them in half and tossed the bits over his shoulder. “My français is pretty bloody terrible” he said, “and some of your anglais is a crime passionnel. Nevertheless, grâce à Dieu, I’m sure that entre nous we have enough savoir faire to make our bonhomie and camaraderie continue long après this tête-à-tête.”

  General appaluse.

  “What, you may ask, is the raison d’être de Hornet squadron? Well, nous sommes ici to help you donner le coup de grâce to that sale boche Adolf Hitler.”

  Rumble of approval.

  “Pour nous, this is both an affaire d’honneur and an affaire d’amour,” Rex said. That went down well. “Ensemble we shall give Hermann Goering and his Luftwaffe a very mauvais quart d’heure! It will be a tour de force that will leave him hors de combat! France and Britain will turn the boche into pomme de terre purée!” Hearty cheering. “They talk about donner and blitzen!” Rex cried. “We say to them: rien ne va plusl” Tumult.

  When the noise died down, he said: “Tout le monde in England is au fait with the glorious French Armee de l’Air. The crème de la crème. You are chevaliers of the sky, sans peur et sans reproche.” The Hornet pilots thumped the table; the Frenchmen smiled modestly. “We say to you, merci bien for this …” Rex gestured widely. “… this pièce de résistance.” More table-thumping. Rex fingered an empty wine-bottle. “Enough. Après moi,” he said, glancing in the direction of the lavatories, “le déluge.” That was hilarious; they literally fell about laughing. “Enfin I say to you,” he declared, “Bonne chance, au revoir and … vive la France!”

  The applause was intense; Rex had to stand again and acknowledge it. Then the French sang their squadron songs, and in reply Hornet squadron performed their Seven Dwarfs Special. Fifteen minutes later, knees aching, they took off and flew home.

  Kellaway and Skull discussed Rex’s speech as they drove back to Château St. Pierre.

  “It was all balls, of course,” Kellaway said, “but it certainly rang the bell, didn’t it?”

  “He has the right touch. It’s something nobody can learn: either you have it or you don’t.”

  “He knows he’s good, you see,” Kellaway said, “and that gives him confidence. He’s a bit arrogant, in fact. The chaps like that. They trust him, they respect him.”

  “And sometimes he frightens them.”

  “Does he?” The adjutant thought it over. “Maybe he does. But then, they like being scared, don’t they? Otherwise they wouldn’t be where they are.”

  The bomber slid out of a bank of cloud like a heavy trout leaving a stretch of weed.

  “Got him,” said Rex. “Three o’clock low.” His voice was lightened by altitude and radio-transmission. “Right, let’s make a clean kill,” he said.

  Hornet squadron was heading north; the bomber was a thousand feet below, flying eastward. The morning was fine and clear. There were occasional patches of dazzling white cloud; between these patçhes, the hills of the Vosges co
uld be seen a long way below, dark green with pinewoods, light green with pastureland: all as casual and comfortable as a rumpled bedspread. The rivers were ribbons, the roads were threads; the castles on the peaks were tassels. Nothing moved down there. It was a picture, not a country.

  The squadron was echeloned to starboard. “Sections close astern, flights echelon starboard,” Rex ordered. “Go.”

  He watched the bomber. It was still boring steadily toward Germany, same speed, same course. When he looked up, Green Section was tucked behind Blue. He knew that Yellow Section must be following Red.

  “Aircraft, line astern, go,” he said.

  He studied the bomber again, gauging its speed: 140 or 150 mph.

  Two lengths to his right, “B” flight was nose-to-tail. Slipstream turbulence jostled them slightly.

  “Here we go, then. Number three attack, Number three attack. Turning starboard—go.”

  Rex banked right. The bomber disappeared under the Hurricane’s nose. He straightened up, glanced back to make sure everyone had done the same, and said: “Aircraft, form vic, go.”

  The sections obediently rearranged themselves in arrowheads. The bomber was about a mile ahead. In the vastness of the sky it looked as small as a bird.

  “Good. Now, Blue and Green Sections orbit here. Blue and Green only, turning starboard, go.” “B” flight banked and swung away. “Going down,” Rex said. Red section nosed into a gentle dive. Yellow Section throttled back slightly and followed a few hundred yards behind.

  “Red Section, fire, go,” said Rex.

  The target expanded steadily until its lumbering bulk filled his reflector sight. Rex braced himself. “Tatta-tatta-tat” he said under his breath, and immediately ordered: “Red Section, break starboard, go.”

  Moggy Cattermole, flying as Red Three, broke starboard and yawned. They had been doing these practice interceptions for nearly forty minutes, each attack as precise and well-drilled as classical ballet, each theoretically ending in success, each bloody boring. He stretched his neck and worked his shoulder-muscles, and watched the bomber trudge along. Yellow Section broke off its mock-attack, and “B” flight descended. The bomber was French, a Bloch 200, thick and hulking, with slabby wings and a fuselage as boxy as a cattletruck. The front gunner sat in a turret like a glass dustbin stuck on the nose. Cattermole could see him clearly. The man was reading a book.

  “B” flight closed, and swung away. The squadron re-formed. The Bloch turned north. Rex would let it escape and then he would find it again. Boring. Bloody boring.

  Cattermole checked the bank of dials in front of him, searching for trouble. Airspeed indicator, artificial horizon, rate-of-climb indicator, all normal. Engine RPM, boost gauge, fuel pressure, oil pressure, oil temperature, radiator temperature. Nothing wrong there. Fuel gauges. Magnetic compass. Turn-and-bank indicator. Everything working perfectly.

  “Bloody awful British workmanship,” he muttered. He leaned forward and rapped the oil-temperature gauge. The Hurricane wobbled slightly but the needle on the gauge remained steady. “Shoddy,” he said. He sat back and turned the transmission switch on his oxygen mask. “Red Leader from Red Three,” he said. “I’ve got a hot engine.”

  “Check oil temperature, Red Three.”

  Cattermole counted silently to three and said: “Boiling oil, Leader.”

  He saw Rex looking at him, searching for evidence of failure. “Okay, Red Three, buzz off home,” Rex said.

  Immediately Cattermole let his left wing drop to the vertical and he fell away in a long and luxurious plunge. The squadron was high above him, and his airspeed had built to a howling three hundred and fifty miles an hour before he started hauling back on the stick. The controls were stiff against the rush of air, air that resisted them like floodwater, but soon the nose came up and up, and up still more as he held the stick against his stomach, investing all that momentum in a loop. It wasn’t the kind of thing you did with an overheating engine, but nobody was likely to notice: Hurricane pilots could see very little directly below them.

  Upside down in the top of the loop, Cattermole saw the gloomy forests of Germany floating in the far distance like dark green clouds. Faintly he heard Rex say: “Aircraft, line astern, go.” Then his plane fell out of the loop. He half-rolled and flattened out, and headed northwest. The radio in his Hurricane was tunable. He lost Rex and found some dance music: Anything Goes. He joined in, not knowing the words but pom-pom-ing happily.

  The bridge over the Moselle at Thionville turned out to be a nasty piece of work. It was modern and concrete, broad enough to carry four lanes of traffic, and not very high. Cattermole circled the town at a thousand feet and studied the central span. It was by far the widest but the curve of the arch was low: the gap seemed as flat as a fried egg. Also there was traffic on the river: barges and things. Straight away Cattermole decided it was impossible. Damn-fool frogs! No wonder they got their bloody arms chopped off. Serve ’em right.

  All the same, having come this far … Might as well stooge down and beat up the place, just to show the frogs who was boss.

  Cattermole flew upstream for about a mile and turned. At this angle the bridge looked more like a dam, with no light visible through its spans. He nudged the throttle and eased the stick forward. The Merlin’s growl jumped to a roar. He felt a firm shove in the back, and the world below began to rise up and race by, full of living detail: trees that waved, trucks and cars buzzing along the road by the river, smoke blowing from chimneys, swans on the river. The river was ridged with ripples that never moved; it looked as hard as marble. He leveled out at twenty feet and flashed under some power cables almost before he saw them. With four hundred yards to go, the bridge looked very different: light now showed clearly beneath it and the center span reached wide. Without consciously deciding, Cattermole made his decision; damn it all, that’s what bridges were for, wasn’t it? Especially big ones. With astonishing suddenness the bridge rushed at him, its gray-white bulk turning black against the sky, and it swallowed him. The plane was off-center. He corrected with rudder and stick; but too late: as the bridge spat him out from its racketing gloom his starboard wingtip missed the concrete arch by inches. He rocketed into daylight with his mouth wide open, his eyes staring, a surge of sweat all over his body. A motorised barge was heading straight at him. Both hands snatched the stick into his stomach. The Hurricane seemed to bounce on air and vault over the vessel’s masts with a jolt that left his guts seeking his stomach. Cattermole rammed the throttle forward and climbed for safety and sanity and peace, and kept climbing until his mouth had stopped gasping. When he looked down, the barge was still there, angled to the current. It seemed to have collided with the bridge. “That was a remarkably stupid thing to do,” he told it. “People like you shouldn’t be allowed out.”

  Fifteen minutes later he was making a circuit of the field at Château St. Pierre. He closed the Hurricane’s radiator before his final approach and by the time he touched down the engine-temperature gauge was climbing nicely. A few healthy bursts of power while he was taxiing pushed it up several more degrees. He opened the radiator before his groundcrew reached him and kept the engine running so that they could see the gauge too. It was hot as hell.

  The rest of the squadron hadn’t returned yet. Cattermole went off to the mess for a beer. He felt he’d earned it.

  The mess servants were drawing the heavy velvet curtains in the billiard room, and Rex was chalking his cue. Patterson sprawled on one of the buttoned-leather couches; Stickwell stood in front of the log fire, hands in pockets, toasting his backside. They were all watching Cattermole.

  “Blue in the center,” Cattermole said. He stooped and lined up the shot, blinking as he changed focus. There was a neat click of ivory; the blue departed like a faithful messenger and fell obediently into the pocket. “Brilliant,” Cattermole said. He raised his eyes. Micky Marriott, the engineer officer, had come in and was watching. “Tradesmen around the back,” Cattermole said.


  “There’s nothing wrong with your engine,” Marriott said.

  Cattermole walked around the table, extracted the blue and placed it on its spot.

  “Your fitter checked it, and the flight sergeant checked it, and then I checked it,” Marriott said. “There’s no overheating.”

  Cattermole leaned far over the table and casually potted a long red. “Must be a faulty gauge, then,” he said.

  “The gauge works perfectly,” Marriott said.

  “I think … the pink,” Cattermole decided. But the pink refused to go down. “Thank you very much indeed,” he said to Marriott, not looking at him. “I couldn’t have missed it without you.”

  Rex came forward and examined the set-up on the table. “Is this something urgent, Micky?” he asked.

  “It’s not the first time it’s happened, sir, that’s all. And I take exception to having my lads waste the whole afternoon checking out faults that don’t exist.”

  Rex selected the red he fancied and sank it with a quick, clean blow. “Funny creatures, airplanes,” he said. “They’ll do one thing on the ground and another thing altogether in the sky.”

  “Just like women,” Stickwell said. “Princess in the parlor, baggage in the bedroom.” He rattled his small change in his pocket. “True,” he said.

  “Have you tested my machine at twelve thousand feet?” Cattermole asked Marriott.

  “You know damn well I haven’t.”

  “Ah, well then.” Cattermole leaned his cue against Stickwell, strolled away, and sat on the couch, thus sitting on Patterson, who let out a yelp of pain. “That’s where it was overheating, you see, at twelve thousand. I never said it was overheating in your tatty hangar, did I? Frankly, old boy, what you and your grimy assistants get up to at ground level is neither here nor there. It’s what happens in the wide blue yonder that concerns me.” He put a cushion on Patterson’s face to stifle the groans.

  There was a pause while Rex potted the black.

  “Nothing’s been changed in your engine,” Marriott said. “It’s exactly as it was when you reported it duff. I’ll bet you a week’s pay it doesn’t overheat when you take it up tomorrow.”