Piece of Cake

by Derek Robinson

  They returned to the mess for breakfast. Rex went straight to his office to call Rheims for more replacements. As the others sat down to eat, Mother Cox came in, looking sick. His forehead was purple and swollen, the result of yesterday’s crash-landing. “I saw it all,” he said. “I was up on the roof. Saw everything, start to finish.”

  “Congratulations,” Cattermole said. “Now kindly give the mustard a shove.”

  “I couldn’t believe it,” Cox said. “It made me feel ill just to watch.”

  “It makes me feel ill just to listen,” Gordon told him. “So shut up.”

  Cox sat and twiddled the mustard-spoon. His face was twisted. “But you just let them do it,” he said. Cattermole lost patience and grabbed the mustard, spilling the spoon. Cox stared at him, accusingly. “You just let them shoot those poor bastards down,” he said.

  Everyone stopped eating.

  “Let who?” Moran demanded. “Who shot them down?”

  “You mean they didn’t collide?” Gordon said.

  “You didn’t see the 109’s?” Cox asked. There was absolute silence inside the room. The remote rumble of artillery fire made a window-pane buzz. “Christ almighty,” he said. “You didn’t see the 109’s. You didn’t even see them.”

  Rex ate breakfast at his desk, phone in hand. At seven-thirty he sent for his flight commanders. “We’re moving,” he said. “Area HQ thinks this place is too hot, so we’re shifting west about sixty-seventy miles. Town called Mailly-le-Camp.”

  “Jesus,” Moran said. “Retreating already, sir?”

  “Regrouping,” Rex said firmly. “There’s a world of difference. Talking of regrouping, I’ve switched Patterson to ‘B’ flight and brought back Cox. That still leaves us light but we can pick up replacements at Mailly, I hope. All clear? Get the batmen to start packing. We’re off in an hour. That’s all.” He picked up his phone and jiggled the cradle impatiently. Moran and Barton did not move. “Problem?” he said.

  “Mother Cox says it wasn’t a collision,” Moran told him. “According to Mother, we got jumped by 109’s.”

  Rex banged the phone down. “Cox had concussion. He can’t see straight.”

  Barton said, “All the same, the chaps are a bit twitchy. They think Trevelyan must have been jumped too. Green Section’s getting a bad name. Nobody wants to be ass-end Charlie.”

  “Nobody wants …?” Rex scoffed. “By God, they’ll go where they’re put! What do they think this is? A fighter squadron or a bolshevik commune?” He hunched his shoulders and chanted, with a schoolgirl lisp, “Please sir, I don’t want to be in Green Section, sir, it’s not very nice in Green Section … Christ give me strength.” He grabbed the telephone again. “Get out and get cracking.”

  They moved slowly to the door.

  “There’s a lot of talk about back-armor, too,” Moran said.

  “Out of the question,” Rex snapped. “Get me Wing ops,” he told the operator, “and get your bloody finger out.”

  Gordon grabbed a car, picked up Fitzgerald and dashed down to the village. “I bet Nicole’s hopping mad,” he said. “She feels very strongly about foreigners invading France. She gave me hell about Joan of Arc, once.”

  “Joan of Arc? That was us, wasn’t it?”

  “So she says. Frankly I don’t know much about it, Fitz, but Nicole won’t hear a word said against the lady. Nicole’s a bit of a Joan herself, you know. Now and then I get the-feeling she thinks I don’t take the war seriously enough. She thinks I just use it as an excuse to have a good time with the boys.”

  “Mary’s not like that,” Fitzgerald said. “All she thinks of is the baby.”

  “Maybe Nicole’s jealous of her.” Gordon considered the idea gloomily. “I’ve done my best, God knows. The bloody thing’s worn down to a stub.”

  They found their wives in the schoolyard. Classes had not yet begun, and the din from screaming children was endless.

  “I heard you got bombed,” Mary said.

  “Just the grass.” Fitzgerald kissed her, and the children pointed and whooped. “Ought you to be here?” he asked. “This place is a bit sort of vulnerable, isn’t it?”

  “So is anywhere. You look tired. D’you want some coffee?”

  “No time, I’m afraid. We’re moving out.”

  “Today?”

  “Now. At once. Before Jerry comes back and does it for us.”

  “Oh dear.” She brushed his jaw with her finger. “It’s the first time I’ve seen you unshaven. It makes you look like a gangster. A nice gangster.”

  “Don’t you want to know where we’re going?”

  “I expect it’s a secret.”

  “It is, actually, but that doesn’t matter because—”

  “I don’t want to know, Fitz. I’ll only worry, and worry’s bad for the baby.”

  “Ah. Well, I wouldn’t want us to have an anxious infant.”

  Nicole and Flash had gone inside where it was quieter. “Show me on the map,” she ordered.

  “I haven’t got a map. What difference does it make? Look, I’ll be in touch as soon as we get settled. Everything depends—”

  “Non.” She led him into a classroom with a map of France on the wall.

  “It’s supposed to be a secret,” Gordon said. “What if the Germans found out?”

  “They won’t find out from me. You think I want to stay here? Twice the boche has taken this part of France, twice in seventy years. I don’t stay. I come with you, Flash. Now please show me where you go, and I go there too.”

  Gordon sighed, and looked for the place on the map. “Near Troyes,” he said. “Mailly something … Here it is: Mailly-le-Camp.”

  “Good.” She kissed him. “I meet you there. Tonight or tomorrow. It depends on the roads.”

  “Mailly looks awfully small. Why don’t you go and stay with your brother in Dijon? You’ll be perfectly safe there and—”

  “Perfectly safe and I never see you.” She squeezed his fingers. “Don’t worry about me.”

  “But I do worry, Nicole. Look at—”

  “No, it’s too late, it’s all decided. I don’t stay here. I go to Mailly and we fight the boche together.”

  Gordon had never seen her so vivacious. Not for the first time, he was amazed by the woman he had married. He hugged her. “I’d better go,” he said. “Take care.”

  The telephone was ringing when Rex walked into the only building at Mailly airfield: a wooden hut so new that the nail-heads were still shiny. The place smelt of raw timber and baked sunlight. He picked up the phone. “Paddington Station,” he said. “Platform three speaking.”

  “About time too,” someone said. “The ops officer wants a word. Hold on.”

  A different voice said: “How soon can you take off?”

  “We can’t. The groundcrews aren’t here yet. This is a bloody awful place, isn’t it?”

  “Look in the woods behind the hut: you’ll find a fuel dump. Get your kites topped-up and call me when you’re ready. I’ve got more plots on the board than I can count.”

  “Wait a minute. How can we start up? No mechanics, no starter-trolleys.”

  “There should be some starting handles in that hut somewhere. Try the cupboards.” He rang off.

  The fuel dump turned out to be a stack of four-gallon cans. After half an hour the Hornet pilots were wet with sweat. Their fingers ached, their arms felt drained of strength. Each can had to be carried two hundred yards, then pierced and tipped into a funnel. It was a sultry day, with a canvas-colored sky that seemed to hold down the heat. The fumes of spilled petrol shivered above the Hurricanes’ wings.

  While Rex went off to call Ops, the others stretched out on the grass. Sleep would have been wonderful, but the flies were a pest. There were fields full of pigs next to the aerodrome, and the flies arrived in quantity, eager to feast on human sweat. Mailly itself was nothing more than a succession of fields with the hedges grubbed out: bumpy, dusty, and tilted in two directions. “If Hitler’s
so fucking keen on territory,” Miller said, “he can have this bit.”

  Rex came back, waving starting handles. “We’re off,” he said. “Patrol Rheims-Verdun at twelve thousand. Knock out the bombers, forget the fighters. The sky’s supposed to be black with them.”

  They got up, slowly and stiffly. “Jesus, I’m hungry,” Gordon said.

  “Hit a Hun,” Rex told him, “and I’ll give you a bar of chocolate.”

  The conventional way to start a Hurricane was to pour a flood of electricity into the engine from a trolley-load of accumulator batteries until its twelve cylinders began to fire. Alternatively it was possible to insert a starting handle on each side and, by winding furiously, coax the engine into life. This was blistering toil. The flies danced delightedly around the pilots’ sweating heads. As each fighter poppled and crackled and finally roared, it was necessary for the pilot to nurse it until it would idle happily, then lock the brakes on, jump out, and go and help someone else. Quickly, before the first plane began to overheat.

  There was one great incentive in getting the propellors turning. They blew away those bastard, bloodsucking French flies.

  CH3 had not come back from a patrol when the squadron left Chateau St. Pierre. He was, in fact, overdue, but nobody had time to worry about that. Ten minutes after the Hurricanes took off, a pair of Ju-88’s streaked across the aerodrome at fifty feet, strafing vigorously. A petrol bowser went up like a firebomb. Several airmen got bumps and scrapes from diving into trenches but nobody was badly hurt. The 88’s vanished. Loading of spares and equipment resumed with a frantic fervor, while the bowser sent heat-waves throbbing into the sky.

  At that moment CH3 was sitting under a tree on the edge of Rouvres airfield, eating a sausage sandwich.

  His role of Reconnaissance Liaison had at last been put to good use. The system of reporting intruders over eastern France depended on ground observers, who were too few, and a communications system that was slow and erratic at the best of times, and the times were rapidly worsening. So Bletchley had had the bright idea of using CH3 as an airborne observer, reporting enemy aircraft—size, type, speed, course—direct to the ops room. The work was fairly dangerous: while he was snooping on one lot, another lot might be snooping on him.

  Mostly the intruders traveled in large numbers with large escorts and showed no interest in him; but there were odd little bunches of Me-109’s wandering about, freelancing for trade. Toward the end of his patrol he spent twenty minutes avoiding one such group, a section of three that kept trying to edge round between him and the sun. They were clever: sometimes they scattered and flew on different courses at varying heights, making it hard for him to keep track of them. In all that soaring brightness it was easy to search and search, and find a dot, and blink, and lose it again.

  In the end the contest was stalemate. The 109’s re-formed and turned away. CH3 turned for home. As he opened the throttle he glanced back, and behold: the Germans were diving steeply in line astern. He dipped a wing to clear his view. Three Blenheim bombers, far below, flying east to west: almost certainly returning from a mission: moving very slowly, like fish against a stiff current. CH3 went down too.

  It was a romantic act and it surprised him. There was no question of saving the Blenheims; that was impossible. What swayed him was the opening he knew the Messerschmitts would offer. They would dive, attack and climb steeply away to avoid the ground-fire. That was the opening. It was like playing tennis and pouncing on a volley and drilling it through a gap: no time to think: you took your chance because it would be a sin to waste it.

  The Germans aimed to attack on the flank. The Blenheims had seen them coming and had staggered their formation to give the gunners a better field of fire. All three bombers had been holed already by flak and the middle plane’s starboard prop was wind-milling. The gunners opened up when the first fighter was still five hundred yards away. CH3 watched admiringly as the German pilot dipped and skewered to baffle them: the 109 looked so right; those neat, small wings had an amazing grip on the air; that thrusting nose packed more power than a Hurricane’s. The German steadied and fired, aiming half a length ahead of the nearest Blenheim, which obligingly sailed into the shots and immediately wallowed. By then the 109 had missed the middle bomber, was battering the tail of the third, and went rocketing back into the sky as if climbing a ramp.

  That was the opening. CH3 had cut short his dive and flattened out well above the Blenheims. Now the 109 drifted into his sights in perfect plan-view: dark green camouflage on top, dove-gray sides, just visible, yellow spinner, square wingtips, square crosses, even the cockpit was square. The pilot’s head was twisted to the left, looking back and down. CH3 fired.

  It was like touching a trout. For an instant, hits sparkled all over the Messerschmitt’s engine cowling; then the plane leaped aside and vanished. CH3 banked hard the opposite way and opened his throttle wide. The encounter was over, he’d had his chance, it was time to go. But the other 109’s had seen him, had cut short their attack on the Blenheims, were after his blood. There followed several minutes of high-speed maneuvering while they chased and fired and he fled and worried about fuel; until abruptly they gave up. They were probably low on fuel too. He found the nearest airfield. It turned out to be Rouvres, and a shambles.

  There were so many craters and broken or burning aircraft around the control tower that he landed at the other end, a mile away, intending to taxi along the perimeter until he found a bowser. But he noticed a Bofors gun-crew under some trees, waving him back. He stopped and got out. A lieutenant came over. “Lots of nasty unexploded bombs over there, old boy.”

  “Is that right? I need fuel, you see. Any ideas?”

  “Well, we can offer you a nice sausage sandwich. With Daddies Sauce.”

  While CH3 was thinking, the air and the ground shook. “There you are, you see,” the lieutenant said, and pointed to a distant fountain of earth.

  They gave him a sausage sandwich and a mug of tea. He realized how hungry he was: he had been up for six hours, and had flown for more than two. Sitting against a tree, chewing the thick, crusty bread and looking at his parked Hurricane, he was surprised by an extraordinary sense of, if not happiness, then at least contentment. Now why, he asked himself, should that be? He was not accustomed to such a feeling. When he was younger he had known the pleasure of success, the gratification of beating a challenger, but that was artificial and shortlived, and anyway it depended upon applause, trophies, recognition. In one sense, true success had been denied him.

  He was a millionaire’s son. When his bobsled or his yacht was fastest, nobody had mentioned the dollars but everyone knew, they were there. Everyone conceded that a rich young idiot could easily lose, too; nevertheless victory had not been sweet enough for young Christopher Hart III.

  To escape from his family he had learned to fly: big deal, another expensive toy for the kid. So he ran away to Spain, which needed pilots. He might have been killed in Spain; lots of men were. All the same it proved nothing; it wasn’t a real war so much as a heroic losing battle. The fascists had it won as soon as they captured the harvest and controlled the main ports. He went home and shocked his father, a Republican who never read much beyond the financial pages and the sports section and who sincerely believed that the White House was turning the nation over to, the Bolsheviks. When his son began talking about the Spanish Republicans and their socialist ideals, Mr. Hart was appalled. Republicanism and socialism are fundamentally incompatible! he shouted.

  His son walked out of the house and bought a first-class ticket to China (since he was suffering from the capitalist system he might as well exploit it). The Chinese Air Force was glad to have him. Their Russian-built Polikarpov biplanes were getting combed out of the skies by the new Japanese monoplane fighters. He was shot down, twice; scorched in various parts of the body; and he cracked some ribs. This was another losing battle, only far less heroic than Spain. He began to realize that it didn’t take a hero to get kill
ed by a stronger, faster, nimbler enemy; any fool could do that. Before he had a chance to make a fool of himself the East caught up with him. He contracted dysentery.

  When he was fit again the Chinese Air Force scarcely existed. He made his way to Europe by the Trans-Siberian Railway. Later, when he applied to join the RAF, the interviewing officer regarded this journey with extreme suspicion.

  “Look at it this way, sir,” CH3 said. “If I were a Russian spy trying to infiltrate the RAF, would I tell you that I’d traveled across Russia?”

  “That sounds very clever,” the officer said; extreme cleverness was also suspect. “How do I know you’re not lying?”

  “All right, assume I am lying. In that case I haven’t traveled across Russia. Either way, sir, you have nothing to worry about.”

  “So you say, so you say. You could, of course, be lying about your own dishonesty.”

  “Sir, your attitude is offensive.” Travel had taught CH3 a lot about how to deal with officialdom. “If you intend to continue this line of questioning I must request that a superior officer be present and a written record kept.”

  The interviewing officer was silent for a moment as he re-read his notes. “What were you doing in China?”

  “Recovering from dysentery.”

  “And before that?”

  “Not much. I was in the US Olympics bobsled team.”

  “Ah! Were you really? Why didn’t you say so in the beginning? Any other sports?”

  CH3 finished his sausage sandwich. He lay with his head between the tree-roots, looking up at the kaleidoscope of leaves. That was a damn strange thing to do, he thought: carefully avoid three 109’s for twenty minutes and then on impulse pick a fight. Why do it? And the only answer he could find was: it felt right. The instant he saw them diving on the Blenheims, he knew he could surprise them. The risk was irresistible. A good fighter pilot took endless precautions, did nothing reckless, double-checked everything, put survival first—and then, suddenly and cheerfully, chucked it away and risked all. Hours and hours of patiently saving his skin for the sake of a quick dance with death. Crazy.