Death in the Silent Places

by Peter Hathaway Capstick

  Bell was almost out of the bay when he was hailed by some Belgian askaris, waving a letter from the fort. Turning back, he remained a few yards off the beach with a black paddler while the men came down. The paddler was apprehensive, so Bell was on his guard. The askaris came up, and when the one with the letter jumped to hold the canoe, Bell smashed him over the head with his heavy paddle. The shout went up to seize the white man; Bell’s man pushed off as the Belgian troops cocked their rifles and started to aim. Bell shot one of them through the arm; the rest fired a blast and ran. Although the range was no more than ten yards, they all missed.

  Tempted to kill them, the Scot refrained and paddled hard to get out of range. From the fort, he could tell that somebody was using a sporter rifle, and he actually had the man in his sights but again declined. Shortly, out of rifle range, the fort opened fire with a Nordenfelt cannon, an accurate gun in poor hands that dropped its shells no closer than one hundred yards from the easy target of the canoe. Although Bell felt that even a pair of decent riflemen could have taken the place, he was not anxious for an international incident and so paddled to the British side. Two days later, his men arrived. When the firing had broken out on the beach, everybody in the place except for the prisoners had run to the parapets, including the guards. Bell’s men had simply walked out and disappeared into the bush, with the exception of one idiot who had run for the beach and had been shot dead.

  Reoutfitting his lost equipment, Bell stayed in the enclave for nine months, hunting largely in the area of Mt. Schwein-furth, where he completed his bag of 210 jumbos, which averaged twenty-seven pounds per tusk. Allowing for the usual 10 percent one-tuskers, this would indicate that the net result of the trip was better than five tons of ivory.

  From the Lado Enclave, the growing legend that was now known as “Karamojo” Bell went to Liberia, where he hunted the year of 1911 with moderate success, moving the following year to French Equatoria, where he “jumped off” from Bangui on the Ubangi River. The whole river basin was excellent elephant country, although hitherto difficult to reach. But Bell had solved the problem by ordering a thirty-five-foot-long steam launch from England, which was assembled in sections of about 150 pounds each. It was the perfect boat for hunting the many islands in the Ubangi, as it burned abundant wood for fuel and had a very shallow draught. Bell developed a technique of driving the herds of elephant on the bigger islands into an ambush, using his men to push them ahead and into his rifle. It was immensely profitable shooting but dried up when the animals left the islands at the beginning of the rains. At this point, Bell calculated that he had walked more than 60,000 miles, entirely on foot, in actual elephant hunting and walking to and from hunting areas. This does not count mechanized or animal-back trips.

  Heading to the Chari-Chad watershed, Bell continued to add to his bag from the convenience of the steamer, until, one day in 1914, a letter from the commandant of a nearby military outpost mentioned in postscript that war had broken out between Great Britain and her allies and Germany. At once, Bell went back to Bangui, where he sold everything and got passage to London via Bordeaux on a French ship.

  Although a rather long-in-the-tooth thirty-four, the elephant hunter was anxious to join the infant Royal Flying Corps as a fighter pilot. He obtained an interview with an “expert” who was to determine his qualification, and when Bell assured him that he knew how to ride a bicycle, he was placed on a list for flight school. After quite a while, and such adventures as a dead-stick landing on a sewage farm (always the hunter, Bell noted the presence of a large number of snipe), he got his solo credentials, and then his official “wings” by landing without engine so short of the permitted mark that he almost hit his commanding officer.

  Expecting to go to France, Bell was pleasantly surprised to find himself posted to East Africa under General Jan Smuts. Before he realized it, he was at an airfield nestled beneath Mt. Kilimanjaro, feeling very much at home. His squadron was equipped with B.E.2.C’s and Henri Farman fighters, very early and tricky machines which had to be assembled at the field. When they were ready, Bell was chosen to test the first plane, which he did in direct violation of his orders by putting it through a full series of loops and spins that his superiors did not believe possible under unknown tropical air conditions. When he landed, the squadron commander was foaming at the mouth, and Bell found himself having achieved the distinction of being the first pilot to be grounded in the East African campaign.

  Miffed, he applied to be posted to ground intelligence, who were delighted to have him with his knowledge of the bush and African languages. For some time, he operated behind enemy lines as a scout and on one occasion met P.J. Pretorius, Smuts’s chief scout. The Boer and another man came into Bell’s camp with all appearances of having been dropped from an airplane without a parachute—covered with bruises and blood, dirty and with torn clothes. Bell asked them in astonishment what the Hun had been doing to them. With a snort of disgust, Pretorius replied, “Hun, nothing. It was a bloody rhino!”

  During this period, Bell was probably the only man in the campaign to have a semiautomatic rifle. A friend of the inventor, Colonel Farquharson, he had gotten one of the prototypes and was out scouting with it one day when he discovered a small detachment of native troops on a river. In perfect position to beat them up pretty badly with the semiauto, Bell was confused by their uniform, which was of a design different from any he had ever seen before. Tempted to open fire, he decided to let them go on the chance that there had been some kind of new uniform issued to friendly troops.

  When he made his intelligence report, headquarters went into a mighty flap. The soldiers could not have been friendly. Also, the implication seemed to Second Lieutenant Bell, who was not consulted by the General Staff on the highest matters, that this meant that somehow fresh supplies had gotten through the Allied blockade. Air reconnaissance was indicated, but the R.F.C. had packed up for the rains and granted leave to its pilots. Bell’s senior asked for his advice. Karamojo knew of a place nearby that would be a perfect field with a bit of alteration. Requesting an aircraft and four mechanics with a tender, Bell proposed to set himself up with his own private air force, volunteering to fly various intelligence missions. As might be expected, his old commander and the R.F.C. were universally furious, but General Smuts pushed the deal through. With his own personal airplane, ground crew and field, detached from control of his squadron with only Intelligence to answer to, Bell was having the time of his life. From here, he flew all over the front, until a big push was made. Much to his annoyance, his old squadron took over his field, and he was reattached. However, his superiors had now changed their mind about him, and he was welcomed back into the fold.

  Bell had a lovely time the next few months, tearing along at a dizzy sixty to seventy miles per hour, dropping ineffective bombs on enemy columns and dodging very accurate return fire while not having either armor plate or a parachute. But even this began to dull in his mind. The Germans had no aircraft in East Africa, so there was no aerial fighting, just “recon” flights and the bombing. Anxious for some action, the hunter put in for a transfer, going first to Egypt and then to the Balkan front, where he was stationed at Salonika. Here, Bell and his observer had great fun strafing enemy airfields, pouring in a couple of drums of Lewis machine-gun bullets through the hangars and beating it for home.

  Shortly after Bell had been issued a single-seat fighter, with a belt-fed Vickers gun firing through the propeller blades (using the interrupter gear developed by Dutch designer Anthony Fokker for the Germans), he had his first brush with the enemy in the sky. On his maiden flight with this fighter, he brought along a pair of twenty-five-pound bombs, more or less for the hell of it, and climbed to 10,000 feet over the enemy lines. Inaccurate puffs of antiaircraft flack began to appear, and Bell threw the bombs overboard. To his surprise, the firing stopped, and he wondered if, by some impossible chance, he had hit the battery of guns. The next moment, a brilliantly painted Albatross scout wit
h black German crosses tore past him—the reason the enemy had stopped their antiaircraft fire. On some account, the Hun forward gun was not shooting, which indicated that the pilot had a jam or stoppage. Bell slipped his plane quickly into line and saw the rear observer open up with his Spandau, brown tracer rounds streaking smokily all about the British plane. The Scot had no sights and had to aim by looking down the engine housing and lining up a row of tappets. Hitting the firing cable, the Vickers erupted smoothly, and, after only twenty rounds, Bell saw that the Albatross seemed hit. To his speechless delight, the enemy ship turned over onto its back and both German aviators fell out, almost two miles over the battlefield below. Bell was now worried that his first victory might have gone unnoticed and that he would not receive credit for the kill. He needn’t have been concerned. At least two men would never forget being unwilling witnesses.

  At the time of the combat, 7,000 feet below the fight, a British pilot and his observer were registering heavy artillery fire from friendly lines. Showing up at the field just after Bell landed, they climbed down and demanded a drink. Quite shaken, they had been loafing along, spotting for the artillery battery and adjusting fire, when, without warning, two human bodies whizzed right past them, very close by. They had seen nothing of the planes above them and, convinced they were hallucinating, called off their mission, orders or no!

  The combat had also been seen from the front-line trenches, and both the corpses and the enemy plane had fallen in no-man’s-land, where there was a good fight over them that night, the British winning out. Each of the Germans had been shot neatly through the head. Bell makes no comment on the reason for the dead men to have fallen suddenly out of their cockpits, and it seems a mystery to me. Surely they would not have gone into combat without their seat belts fastened. Perhaps the “G” forces of the plane turning over were sufficient to break them.

  It had been bothering Bell that there was something about the fight that wasn’t quite right. As he went over each second in his mind, he realized what it was: when he fired, his makeshift sights were not in proper position to hit the German, who was curving away as Bell fired at him. He remembered having to apply a lot of rudder, too much, in fact, to line up the gun correctly. There was only one conclusion he could reach. The enemy had been hit by accident, because the gun was not properly sighted in. He couldn’t have hit the Albatross if the alignment had been correct. When he had the tail of the plane jacked up to test the machine gun, he found that it shot nowhere near the point of aim. His first kill had been sheer luck!

  Following his victory, Karamojo, now a captain, decided to take two weeks’ leave, as he had been flying steadily for two and a half years. Along with him went a friend who had gotten his plane cut in two by an enemy propeller while attacking a German scout. Amazingly, the Irish pilot, Pat, survived the 11,000-foot fall in one half of the plane, landing without injury in friendly territory, where he was picked up smoking a cigarette when the rescue car arrived. There was one odd aspect to him, though; probably through centrifugal force, blood had been forced completely through the whites of his eyes, giving him a demoniacal appearance with the contrast of the pale blue iris. Of course, it was unnerving for anybody looking at him, and he absolutely loved it.

  Taking a navy ship for transport, Karamojo and Pat were torpedoed in the Aegean, their 10,000-ton vessel sinking on an even keel within five minutes of being hit. They, together with sixty-eight other men, had a tricky time of it in a small boat marked for forty-five people, until making land at an island where they were rescued. Shortly after this, Bell was transferred to flying combat in France, where he almost certainly became the first, if not the only, pilot credited with destroying an enemy plane with a single machine-gun bullet. It was quite an extraordinary affair, earning a reluctant Walter Bell a bar to his Military Cross, no small award.

  Bell was patrolling over the front lines when he and a German Halberstadt fighter saw each other at the same time. Charging head-on like aerial knights, neither plane was able to get its guns to fire, despite the later sworn testimony of the troops below that they could hear the machine guns “roaring” at each other. After the first pass, it broke up into a dog fight, each trying to get into firing position on the other’s tail, both working like mad to unjam their guns. Bell got his Vickers in order first and attacked the Halberstadt. In range, he opened up, only to have the gun fire a single shot and again jam. He thought he was seeing things when the German immediately started diving for a piece of flat ground between the lines, instead of heading for his own territory which was just as close. As Bell followed him down, the pilot landed, jumped out and ran hell-for-leather for his own lines, just getting clear before the French “75” cannons tore the German plane apart.

  A baffled Bell flew home and filled out his combat report, to the effect that he had attacked an enemy aircraft which broke off the fight after Bell’s gun jammed on the first shot. He thought no more about the matter, until later his commanding officer came up to him with a telegram from the French which offered congratulations on the gallant victory. Bell’s superior had then telephoned the French battery that had shelled the Halberstadt on the ground, and they, too, insisted on having witnessed the fight, complete with the “roaring” machine guns.

  Asked what he had to say to that information, Bell told the officer again what had happened, and the C.O. blew his top! “Claims” were very important for the prestige of a squadron, and he wasn’t about to give away a confirmed kill. Bell would get the credit, whether he liked it or not. “What, with one shot, sir?” he asked incredulously.

  “Yes, and be damned to you!” snapped back the officer, stalking away.

  One must suspect that that single bullet may have gotten the undivided attention of the enemy pilot, possibly even nicking him, or striking near enough to convince him that he was in a real spot with his own gun useless. Else, why would he not have flown to his own territory before putting down, instead of taking the terrible chance of landing in no-man’s -land? Since he was not captured and the plane was destroyed, it’s academic. Yet it still remains that he capitulated immediately after that one shot was fired, and, thus, Bell was the direct cause of the destruction of an enemy plane.

  I have been unable to discover what number of enemy aircraft Bell shot down in World War I, and he only discusses unusual and “fluke” events in his writings. He does admit to having won the Military Cross twice, and one of his nephews advises that he was five times mentioned in dispatches, a great distinction among the British military establishment. With such recognition, he possibly might have made “ace,” with five or more confirmed aerial victories, although in fact he did not. He did have one very interesting victory in the air though which, to Bell’s great good luck, did not become part of his record … .

  When he was stationed at Salonika, the Germans used to send over a daily reconnaissance flight to take pictures of the shipping movements in the harbor. Called the “Iron Cross” flight by the British, it was rumored that anybody making the trip three times was automatically awarded that decoration. Certainly, all the British and Allied flyers were hot to chew a chunk off the taunting machine, but nobody had managed to reach the 20,000-foot altitude at which the Hun invariably flew.

  The French contingent was especially keen to knock down the “Iron Cross” plane and had especially brought over one of the newest of their fighters, the Spad. Tripling the firepower of the sharp little ship by jury-rigging an extra machine gun on each wing along with the Lewis gun that fired through the prop, they picked their best pilot and, under perfect conditions, sent him up to intercept the German flight. Bell and his pal, Wynne Eyton, who later hunted Africa with him, were already high above, hoping for a shot themselves, their planes moping sluggishly along at their ceiling of 15,000 feet.

  From a seemingly clear sky, Bell was startled to hear a chatter of automatic fire behind him and saw a fighter streak by on the tail end of its firing pass. In a blink, he was after it, his Vickers s
moothly spitting out short, accurate bursts, Eyton right along with him, also firing hard. It looked as if the “Iron Cross” flight was about to be canceled. As the Vickers slugs swarmed home, a piece of the target plane fell off, and the two R.F.C. men followed the crippled plane down. The fighter crash-landed inside Allied lines, and, knowing that the trophy would be stripped within minutes by foot soldiers, the two landed close by and ran over to the downed plane. As they got there, they were startled when a burst of machine-gun fire streamed from one of the wings. Behind the gun was “a fierce-looking little man, evidently in a state of great excitement.” Hopping mad, the pilot jumped from the wreckage, screeching French. They had shot down the top French pilot in the supposedly invincible Spad! Retiring quickly, Bell and Eyton took off and feigned complete ignorance of the incident upon their return. Tongue in cheek, Bell remarked that his only souvenir was a cluster of bullet holes in his plane from the Frenchman’s first pass.

  I don’t believe a poll has ever been conducted on the subject, but I suspect that such would show Bell, even today, enjoying the reputation as the greatest elephant hunter of all time. Even his detractors don’t tend to minimize his success at collecting ivory but concentrate their attacks on his small-bore techniques. In the context that Bell was an adventurer second to being a commercial ivory hunter, the number of elephants he killed and the size of their ivory must be the primary consideration toward the term “great,” as it would be in baseball for the man with the greatest number of hits and home runs. Bell killed over 1,000 bull elephants in his travels, perhaps a shade more. John “Pondoro” Taylor, an Irishman who died recently, was a professional hunter for thirty years, mostly in southeast Africa, and the author of some very authoritative books on rifles and African hunting. Probably the last actual ivory hunter, Taylor states that Bell killed 1,011 bull jumbo (not including the six or seven shot by his staff). I have no idea where this precise figure originated but suspect that it is low, because Taylor says that 800 of these were killed with the .275 Rigby and 200 with the .303 cartridge. In fact, some of Bell’s bag was taken with the .256, and a large number with the .318, which was not developed until 1910.