Uwe stooped over her, sullen-faced. She was sitting down and she thought how unusual it was for him to be able to talk down to her, literally; and how gratifying it must be to him. She stood up and he had to tilt his head up to meet her eyes and his voice rose again in cadence with her standing and his straightening up.
He yelled, “Sometimes I wonder whose side you are on, Ilse. My God! If some people heard you, you would be shot for being a traitor.”
Frau Nauroth gave a loud howl and began to protest through her sobs that her daughter was overwrought and meant no harm.
“There... there isn’t a b-b-better girl in the whole of Fichtewald... or Schutzstadt... she means no harm, Uwe... she has been through so much... pay no attention...”
Ilse had a mocking look in her eyes. The very colour of those hazel eyes was enough to arouse Uwe’s lust, without their lighting up in mockery and without her flicking the bright pink tip of her tongue over her sensual lips and causing them to gleam damply as she parted them slowly and seemed to make a jocular offering of them to him.
He felt sweat start suddenly on his brow. He wiped it off and breathed, “Oh, Scheiss... and Scheiss again... and treble Scheiss. Women!”
Ilse and her mother were both watching him: the one fearfully, wondering where Ilse hoped to find another husband as good as this; the other calculatingly, curious to discover how far she could drive him without losing him altogether.
Neither heard his breathed obscenity but both heard him exclaim, “Women!” more loudly and each of them in her own way derived satisfaction from it.
Frau Nauroth knew that Ilse had not — yet — thrown away the chance of a good marriage. Ilse knew that Uwe would be back for more taunting and more sexual teasing. He might have shot down 28 enemy aeroplanes, but he was still, metaphorically, easy to shoot down if one had the right weapons.
*
A few days later, by which time Uwe Gratz had gone to join his new squadron, after a long farewell embrace which Ilse had wickedly tolerated and during which she had provoked the poor wretch to wild expectations by suddenly opening her mouth while he was kissing her, a proclamation appeared in the newspapers and posted on walls in every town and village in Germany.
At night, all lights must be screened from outside view.
2. The spreading of news concerning air raids, without official permission, is forbidden.
3. To be calm is the first duty of everyone. Panic causes greater dangers than an air raid.
4. Curiosity means death. Get off the streets. Seek cover in the nearest building. Keep away from windows and doors.
5. If you cannot shelter in a building, take cover in any recess or ditch.
6. Tie up horses.
7. Avoid inhaling gases. Hold the breath and cover mouth and nose with a damp cloth.
8. In the event of bombs falling, exploded or unexploded, a large surrounding area is to be evacuated at once and must be avoided, on account of the danger of poison gas or explosion. Touch nothing and send for the police immediately.
9. Telephones are to be used only in the event of fire, accidents and dangerous illness. Connection cannot be guaranteed.
10. At night, pay no attention to air raids.
Ilse, reading the final injunction, commented that the ordinance had manifestly been drawn up by people who had never been in an air raid at night.
“It would have made more sense,” she told her mother, “to enlist the opinions of veterans who have already survived two; and may have to undergo God knows how many more.”
“Do not tempt Providence by even mentioning such a thing,” her mother said tearfully.
Ilse had not seen her mother laugh, or even smile, since the night her father was killed and before the news had reached them. She remembered her mother giggling then over a shared joke, her eyes as bright as a girl’s.
The realisation brought a fresh flux of hatred for the enemy bombers and the men who flew them.
Chapter Twelve
The office door was made of cheap wood and stained dark brown. A grey wooden plaque was screwed to it at eye level. On this was lettered, in black, Lt. Col. RKStO Quinn DSO, RFC Commanding Officer.
One did not, however, necessarily have access to the Colonel through that entrance. Yardley knocked on the door of the wing adjutant’s office, went in, saluted and said, “Rollo wants to see me.”
He had made this flippant entrance with the intention of enjoying the adjutant’s predictable reaction. The adjutant was of much the same stamp as Brigadier-General Pollard’s staff captain, the egregious Ogilvy-Smith. He obliged Yardley by looking as though he had heard a blasphemy uttered by an archdeacon.
“Yes, Major. I’ll tell Colonel Quinn you’re here.”
He went to the intercommunicating door with a sheaf of papers in his hand and gave Yardley a sidelong look which implied that the Colonel would very likely want to look at them before admitting him.
Pimp, thought Yardley. It was time somebody put that little bugger back on flying. He’d had this safe job far too long. And how long was it since Quinn last got his arse off the ground: except to fly himself on a visit to HQ or some other wing, or to Paris for a spot of lech?
The wing adjutant reappeared, smirking.
“The Colonel will see you, sir.” He held the door open.
Obsequious little toad, thought Yardley. He was feeling crapulous. He had had a few beers before lunch. There had been a time when he quite liked the wing adjutant, who had played scrum-half for the Probables in an England trial. It was a facile passport to Yardley’s good books, but in wartime one had to make quick judgments about men. Nobody who played rugger of that class could be altogether a shit. That was what Yardley used to think. He had reservations now. Quinn and his adjutant seemed to make a fine pair.
Quinn glanced up, said, “You’d better sit” and went on reading a letter in his hand.
Yardley sat, took off his cap, crossed his knees and drummed his fingers on the cap’s crown; contemplating this man whom he loathed even more than he loathed von Richthofen, Immelmann, Voss or any of the other mass killers among enemy fighter pilots. He wondered, as usual, whether it would be possible to contrive, in the course of rowdy mess games, to spill petrol on Quinn’s moustache and set it alight. One of his own party tricks was to hold petrol in his mouth, eject it in a stream and ignite it. The problem was to direct the liquid jet onto the Wing Commander before striking a match. He was five-feet-ten and Quinn was six-feet-three. He could spit petrol onto Quinn’s tunic, but reaching his face was not easy. He would apply himself to it. He might need an accomplice to get Quinn to bend, unsuspecting. Harold Tearle was the chap for that.
Yardley was enjoying this line of speculation when Quinn looked up and said, as pleasantly as he was capable of speaking, “I’ve rather changed my opinion about night bombing.”
Yardley was momentarily dumbstruck by the cordiality and the statement, which was in fact an admission. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, he told himself. Tearle did not have a lien on thinking in clichés. When Tearle did so, it was because he was bone weary. With Yardley, it was an indication of bibulous indulgence.
“You think it should be done only by Fees and Handley Page Four-hundreds, Colonel?”
“No. That’s what I used to think. But I’ve come round to seeing there is a certain place for the DH Four.”
“Really!”
“Yes. I think the Handley Page is a fine aircraft for deep penetration into Germany and the Fee is useful for short-range work. But they’re both so damn slow. With your speed, your squadron should be able to evade enemy fighters, which Intelligence say are being considerably strengthened, and hit unpredictably and hard at targets which are too far for the Fees and too close to waste the HPs on.”
“Medium range, you mean?”
“Not only. You can fly almost half as fast again as the HPs and you have almost half their endurance: with an extra petrol tank, nearly two-thirds. You can go a long way into Germany
.”
“Hardly worth going anywhere if we have to leave one of our hundred-and-twelve-pounders behind on account of the extra tank.”
Yardley was almost contemptuously dismissive. Quinn gave him a hard stare but let it go.
“It depends on your task. It occurs to me that one of the most useful contributions your squadron can make to strategic bombing is to knock out the German anti-aircraft batteries along the heavy bombers’ route.” He paused and his upper lids came lower for a moment, until his pupils were only just visible. “The HPs have a rotten time, being compelled to fly at no more than eight thousand feet. I know you’re used to keeping out of Archie’s way at fifteen or sixteen thousand...”
“We’ll fly at whatever height the task needs: from nought feet to... to twenty-two thousand, if we can have the new Eagle Eight engine.” They were not safe at 15,000. Flak could, and did, shoot down aircraft at over 20,000 ft.
Quinn looked pleased. He knew how to touch the impetuous Yardley on the raw. He had counted on this aggressive acceptance of what amounted to a veiled dare. He remembered that Yardley, as a subaltern at Upavon, had accepted a dare from a naval pilot, a young sub-lieutenant, that he would not jump off the mess roof onto a mattress. Yardley had immediately gone outside and done it. After that, someone else had dared him to do a vertical bank between two of the Stonehenge upright stones. He had flown straight off and done that, too. The space was so narrow that he could just slide his starboard wings through it while his wheels almost brushed the top of one of the tall stones.
“All the replacements we get henceforth will have the Eagle Eight. That will give you a maximum speed of a hundred and forty-three miles an hour at sea-level.”
Yardley’s interest quickened. “In that case, we’d better do all our operations as near to sea-level as we can get, in future.”
“Which brings me back to my original point: the validity of low-level night sorties. Particularly clearing the way for the heavy bombers by knocking out anti-aircraft guns ahead of them.”
“We’ll find them more easily if we fly at the same speed as the HPs and spot them when they open fire.”
Quinn offered him what passed for a smile. There was neither humour nor kindness in it and his eyes remained cold. When Quinn smiled, it began with the habitual lifting of his upper lip to show his incisors, then spread to the corners of his mouth, which widened and turned down. It was a vulpine performance and usually boded no good for someone. The things that made him smile were not of the kind which other people regarded as amusing or pleasant.
“I’m sure you’ll be able to draw the Hun Archie’s fire yourselves, Yardley. A few of your own machines can do that by flying well above you.”
“That will deprive us of at least three machines which could join in attacking the gun sites.”
“You want jam on it, don’t you?”
Yardley stood up. “Is that all, sir?” he asked coldly.
“No, it isn’t. Sit down.”
Like most people in authority, Quinn rated some show of appreciation high on his list of desirable attributes when he dispensed what he thought or pretended was a favour. Whatever his ulterior motive, he had presented Yardley with a unique opportunity to embellish his reputation.
Yardley sat down again. Quinn’s voice, with its edge of sharpness and rebuke, declared the end of the truce he had appeared to offer a few minutes earlier. There was nothing, Yardley told himself, in his submission to discipline which committed him to putting up with rudeness and he never had. He stayed here unwillingly, never taking his eyes off Quinn’s.
“I’ve told the SIO to report here with a map showing the latest information on enemy ack-ack, searchlights and balloons. I’ll choose a suitable target for the Handley Pages and the route to it. It’ll be your task to deal with the defences along that route.”
If credit was going to be bestowed for this operation, Quinn was making sure that it would come his way. If HQ blamed anybody, it would be Yardley for failing to carry out the Wing Commander’s plan.
*
“You had the idea first,” Tearle said.
“More or less,” Yardley agreed.
They and Wotton were looking at a map spread on Yardley’s desk, a copy of the one the Senior Intelligence Officer had taken to Quinn’s office.
“What’s the target?” asked Wotton.
“An aero engine factory at Stuttgart building Mercedes engines for the Albatros D5.”
Yardley put his finger on a red circle about half as far again to the east as the railway yards at Fichtewald.
“It’s not a bad choice,” Tearle said grudgingly. “We’ve got a vested interest in knocking out the target, to start with. And we’ll be following a familiar route. I mean you’ll be following a route you already know. Crews whose navigation wasn’t good enough can correct their courses and check their compasses against the crews who did find Fichtewald.”
“Oh, yes,” Yardley said drily, “the Colonel has been shrewd enough about it. And we turn back fifteen miles east of Fichtewald. Anyone with bombs left over will drop them there on the way back, as a secondary target.”
“What, again?”
“Yes. The SIO had some new information on that score. So much damage has been done to the German railway system that they’ve had to form special Eisenbahn Truppen to repair bomb damage.”
“What are Eisenbahn Truppen?” Wotton asked.
“Railway units. The railways can’t deal with the damage themselves. They’re building branch lines night and day, to re-route trains around the worst hit places. I’m afraid they’ve patched up a lot of the damage we did at Fichtewald already. And there’s a new branch line which connects it with another main line in addition to the ones that already pass through the junction. The Hun appears to be really panicky. They’ve taken other measures as well. Trains have to leave main line stations within ten minutes of getting in, or they’re shunted into sidings. When there’s an air-raid warning, only troop-trains and expresses are allowed to keep going. All other trains have to stop.”
“So Fichtewald becomes a major railway target,” Wotton said.
“That’s right. And it’s right on the route to the main target, the Mercedes assembly plant.”
“No possible way around any of the defended areas, I suppose?” asked Tearle.
“None at all. Neither we nor the HPs have the endurance. Particularly if we meet the kind of winds we’ve been finding lately. It’s unfortunate that we don’t know much about upper wind speeds, but apparently at this time of year winds of thirty and forty m.p.h. at heights above ten thousand are common.”
They were all sharing the same thought: the prevailing wind blew from the west. They had its help on their way to Germany, but it was a headwind on the way back and many crews had been lost because of that. The performance of the wind was always capricious at high altitudes, especially in the winter. Even in daytime, when they could check their positions by landmarks and calculate a fairly accurate ground speed, they often found that the upper wind had increased by as much as 10 miles an hour by the time they turned for home.
Quinn, although he had never flown over Germany, knew that as well as anyone else.
“The SIO had one more titbit for us,” Yardley said. “A new home defence squadron of Albatros D Fives has been formed and based on a new ’drome on the eastern outskirts of Schutzstadt. They fly standing patrols all day along a ninety-mile patrol line and they’ve fanned down twenty-two machines from the day bomber squadrons in the past four days. Two nights ago, they began night patrols.”
“They won’t be able to see anything,” Wotton said dismissively. “They won’t even know where they are, themselves.”
Yardley gave him an ironical grin. “They’ll have a pretty good idea, Alec. There’s a chain of searchlights, beamed vertically, for them to fly between: it’s a sort of point-to-point patrol. And there are more searchlights to open up and look for the likes of us when the Hun knows we’re over the
re. Still, that’s nothing much to worry about: it’ll just add to the excitement, that’s all. It’s an Archie barrage that does the worst harm. And those blasted balloons.”
He had a dilemma to solve about the balloon barrage and the guns. If he flew with the high-flying machines which would draw the enemy’s fire, he would share one sort of risk. If he flew with the low-flyers who were going to attack the gun sites, he would share another sort of risk: that of hitting a balloon cable. He was trying to decide which was the greater risk, so that he could choose that one.
Wotton, watching his pilot thinking, knew exactly what was in his mind. So did Tearle. They exchanged a glance, both of them inscrutable, each reading the other’s thought. Tearle was wishing that the doctors would pass his wounded leg fit for operational flying, so that he could share the risks that the rest of the squadron ran. Wotton was doing mental arithmetic to try to calculate odds against him depending on Yardley’s decision. Tearle had always had a lot of sympathy for observers. Their fate was in the pilot’s hands and all they could do about it was resign themselves to acceptance.
*
The party in the mess that night brewed up in the way that the most riotous parties most often did.
To begin with, snow had started to fall in mid-morning and was several inches deep and still falling at sunset. All flying was cancelled. Even the day bombers had been unable to take off.
The FE2s and some of the HP O/400s had been detailed for an operation that night. Whenever ops were called off it was the custom to celebrate a tacit reprieve from possible death, wounding or capture.
As a further reason, some new crews had been posted in and it was customary to show them hospitality of the rowdiest kind on their first night in the mess.
If any more incitement were needed, there was Yardley’s frame of mind that day. It was he who was invariably at the centre of the noisiest and most active group and usually he was the instigator of the whole boisterous celebration.
When he went into the mess before dinner there was already an air of expectancy about the place. Knots of officers seated and standing about the anteroom watched him walk in and faces broke into smiles, heads turned in comment. Everyone knew when the signs were propitious, and tonight was one of those occasions. Yardley stood in the doorway, hands in pockets, looking around. He wore a quizzical look, as though seeking someone or something in particular. That was a sure sign of things to come: he was looking for kindred spirits with whom to incite some fun. Nobody was flying tonight, but some people had gone out to visit other messes or to dine in the local town. There were plenty of his cronies at hand, however.
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