by Ray Ollis
‘To Hyde.’
‘To Hyde.’
Many messes had what was called a ‘chop fund’. Into this fund each man put one pound, and that pound was spent to drink him farewell whenever a member ‘got the chop’. It was a less brutal and more functional practice than most outsiders who heard of it imagined.
It was an inescapable fact that hardly a week could pass without most aircrew on an operational squadron losing one of their friends. This friend might be the chap who slept in the next bed or took out your girlfriend’s sister. He might be a new, casual friend or he might be a great friend of long standing. Perhaps it was fortunate that most of the closest friends were killed together.
No matter how recent or how dear a friend he may have been, however, it was obvious that his ghost must not be permitted to linger and torment the minds of the living. Only the utterly callous can gainsay death, and people who do are seldom pleasant folk to know, and never desirable. Yet it was also true that preoccupation with death would quickly unhinge minds that must constantly encounter it. Men should mourn their friends, but they must not go on mourning, piling grief upon grief, lamenting more and ever more dead comrades. That way madness lies: a madness that in war is suicide.
So necessity invented compromise. The close friends of a dead man would draw his pound from the chop fund and lament, drinking his health in the next world, for as long as the pound lasted. After that his name was never mentioned again. In theory, if somebody then said, ‘What will you always remember about Jack?’, his friends should answer; ‘Jack? Who’s Jack?’
The theory sounds brutal. In fact is seldom was brutal, and it worked. That was the big thing: it worked. It kept the dead at a decent distance and kept the living sane.
When Vincent put down his empty glass he should not have mentioned Hyde again. Hyde was dead. They had mourned him. Now he must vanish. But Hyde had been a great friend indeed; to some he had seemed a great man. Vincent could not force his mind to forget so overwhelming a memory; he could not snip off his thoughts: one yard of sorrow and not an inch more. Vincent spoke again of Hyde; ‘It was all so bloody useless. So pointless! They should never have sent him back on ops.’
‘He came back at an ill-fated moment,’ said H-H.
‘Duisburg, Duisburg, Wilhelmshaven,’ said Johnnie. ‘In thirty-six hours.’
‘He wasn’t ready for that pace,’ added Krink.
‘And then fog.’
‘Nürnberg all over again.’
‘At least the Germans didn’t get him. The Hun never lived who could beat Hyde.’
‘That’s just what infuriates me,’ said Vincent. ‘It wasn’t even the enemy he was fighting that killed him. I would accept it if he’d died gloriously. If he had died fighting the way we’ve seen him fight I could cheer and know his Irish spirit would out-shout me. But FIDO killed him. Stupidly. Killed him from behind. The whole story of his return is pitiful. His first day back in the air he wrecked Queenie, just as stupidly and wastefully. They should have taken him off flying then.’
‘And how would he have liked that?’ asked Jackal. ‘My bet is that he would’ve refused any job but ops.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Vincent softly. ‘Not from some of the doubts he expressed to me. He had changed and he knew it.’
For a few minutes nobody spoke. The unhappy men went on staring at their empty glasses. Suddenly Krink snapped them back. ‘Hey, cheer up. This is a farewell drink to Hyde. If he could see us now he’d think we’d lost the war. Make it a party: a farewell party. Let’s all put a quid in and give Hyde a farewell party.’
‘Isn’t that a bit, er, disrespectful?’
‘Drinking? Hyde never thought drinking was disrespectful. I sure hope no sentimental slob makes air-films after the war with unhappy endings. The sight of you mugs would make Hyde feel like hell, let alone a whole damp-eyed audience. It infuriates when a book or play or film ends with a they-died-that-we-might-live note. I’m sure real heroes don’t want gentlemen in England now abed to feel themselves accursed they were not here.’
‘Half their rotten luck,’ said Bill, and threw his pound on the counter.
Vincent threw his pound on the pile, saying, ‘So many big names have got the chop foolishly. Gibson flew into a hill. Cain pranged showing off; slow roll at zero feet. Bader tackled six Huns on his own and of course they got him. Finucane stopped one stray rifle-shot in a petrol lead and ditched. And what were his last words? ‘This is it, chaps!’. Not, ‘now I die gloriously’, or ‘tell them I’m a hero’, or ‘long live democracy’, but simply ‘this is it’. He didn’t make a song and dance. Why should we? Or why should some tear-jerking script writer? Hyde’s in good company for a farewell party.’1
Vincent piled all the notes into a pyramid and leant forward.
‘Barman! Fill these up again. And stick around …’
Had Joe been there he would have summed it up with, ‘Grog’s the shot.’
Squadron Leader Chiltern, after investigating her social and financial position, decided that he approved of Section Officer Wendy Marlborough-Jones. To him, that made it obvious that he should court her and it should follow as night the day that Wendy would succumb. He was an honourable man and an ambitious officer; he had dignity, breeding and a future, he assured her. What more could she ask? They had everything in common and, he said, shared a respectable mutual attraction.
‘But it’s more mutual for you than it is for me,’ thought Wendy. It might have saved further ado had she spoken her thought aloud. Chiltern would have read into such a rebuff stark stupidity on Wendy’s part, which would instantly have disqualified her as a possible Mrs Chiltern.
Instead, Wendy had remained silent in apparent agreement and Chiltern assumed he had advanced one more step towards winning her acceptance.
Within a few days of arriving at 101, Chiltern had noted and approved Wendy’s appearance and behaviour. Although he would have strenuously denied that there was anything carnal in his approval of her, he did admit frankly enough to himself that a beautiful and shapely wife, all other things being equal, was better than an ugly, angular one. Had not a wife often furthered her husband’s ambitions with her charm and beauty? Besides, handsome stock breeds better.
He had been prepared to approve of Wendy even before investigating her suitability; prepared, indeed, to overlook it should some trifling point come to light of which he did not approve. Provided, of course, it was a point he could avoid or alter to fit his rigid standards. He was delighted, therefore, when her record and background proved exemplary. The additional discovery that her mother’s family, though almost vulgarly wealthy, had never stooped to commerce and that one of her uncles was an Air Commodore, quite won his heart and kindled within him a feeling nearer to love than he had ever experienced before.
This did not, however, prevent him from decrying love. ‘Popular love in our day,’ he said, ‘is both frivolous and dangerous. It is no longer God’s love at all. Marriage should be based on respect and compatibility with unquestioning acceptance of the church’s bonds. Marriage is a contract and a dedication, forever, for better or worse, whether it bring joy or misery. If modern couples would accept that,’ Chiltern dictated, ‘divorces would never happen.’
‘Neither,’ thought Wendy, ‘would marriages.’ But once again she did not speak her thoughts.
Chiltern’s attentions bewildered Wendy; they left her questioning herself. She admired Chiltern. He was an honest, clean, honourable gentleman. He was many of the things she had told herself a suitor should be. Why, then, did she feel driven to oppose his arguments? Why, when he decried what he called ‘Hollywood love’ and spoke with scorn of any woman who would let the prospect of sexual enjoyment influence her choice of a husband, why, at such times, did her woman’s blood boil and her copper eyes spark with distaste?
Chiltern was saying, clearly and coldly, many things that she felt she had believed before. She wanted to understand her feelings but had never expr
essed them lucidly, even to herself. Now she heard her feelings defined and realised that these were emotions which she had been taught to accept before she was old enough to understand them. Seeing them exposed and bare, her warm heart rejected them as cold, hard, ruthless. Could it be that her feelings were really stronger than her teachings? Chiltern, striving to achieve the opposite, had softened Wendy’s attitude to the warmer emotions.
That had set Wendy looking for the real thing and, upon his return, she had looked to Hyde. In his new, more serious mood Hyde, who had always found Wendy herself attractive, then found her company more agreeable than ever before. Wendy, barely experienced enough to understand her own emotions, responded to the fundamental mother and nurse in her and wondered if this was love.
When Hyde was killed she felt sad and at a loss. But she was surprised that her sorrow was not deeper. She was sorry but her mind was not filled with it; she had to remind herself to keep being sorry or other thoughts would creep in. Was it that she was shallow or was it that she had never loved Hyde at all?
Or did she, perhaps, really love Chiltern? She tried to imagine how she would feel if Chiltern were lost. She reflected disinterestedly for a moment without any heartfelt response, then her mind stopped in an instant of panic as she realised that if Chiltern went, so would his crew—Hyde’s crew.
That thought stopped her heart beating and left her spine cold-tingling. Vincent and Magnetic, Johnnie and Joe: these she knew she would miss. She had been testing herself to see if she had loved Hyde, or if she loved Chiltern. What she discovered seemed to have nothing to do with love at all. Yet she knew it was the most intense emotion she had ever experienced.
It did not matter whether or not she could trust these wonderings; they were soon to face the real test.
The target was the German village of Groninberg2 where the Allies were still west of the Rhine. Powerful and efficient German forces could not be dislodged so Bomber Command were called in to help make the village less tenable.
At Ludford it was one of those daylight rush targets. The army never liked to call on the air force and once again they had left their call till the last minute. Briefing was rough and rapid. It was obvious that Intelligence knew little about the area except that the German army thereabouts was being altogether too stubborn and would not take ‘retreat’ for an order. It was brave of them because with the Rhine at their back, hurried retreat was not possible, and to lose one minor battle would mean capture or annihilation.
Bomber Command had no objection to that.
It was given as a close-support attack. The bomb-line (on the Allied side of which no bombs must fall) was only six hundred yards from the target. That meant an easy half-minute dash from friendly territory, then a fast about-turn and peaceful homeward flight.
The crews were surprised, therefore, to meet heavy flak twenty-five miles west of the target. Operational height was 9000 feet, visibility was perfect, so the German army gunners, always better shots than their civil counterpart, spoke terse defiance with every gun.
The Allied armies had either misplaced the bomb-line purposely to make sure no bombs fell near them, or else they had called the attack too late to stop a threatened German advance and the line had moved since briefing.
Perhaps some truth lay in both alternatives, and perhaps the target itself was already bare of German troops. But orders are orders and the bombers flew on towards Groninberg.
German army gunners wasted few shells. RAF crews had come to respect them as intelligent fighters. They did not maintain long, abortive chases across the sky. If three bursts failed to get a bomber they had selected, then they would move their sights to another. And they always tried with more likely success to make the first burst of each attack—the one bombers cannot see and therefore cannot evade—a crippling one. When flying over the German army, more than at any other time, the race was to the swift.
What Bill was thinking as they flew into the flak nobody knew. It was his first trip since he had been wounded, yet his voice sounded quite calm. A three-gun burst, which Chiltern must have seen, exploded near enough to their port bow to rock N-Nuts off course.
Crisply Bill ordered, ‘Dive port, go!’
Chiltern should have already started to ‘go’ before Bill spoke; certainly if he wanted to discuss how the order had been given or its wisdom he should have acted first and discussed it later.
Instead, in his most exasperated, raised-eyebrows tone of voice, Chiltern said, ‘Really, bomb aimer …’ when the next triangle of shells hit them and N-Nuts fluttered from the sky, wounded and on fire.
Seen from a distance, flak bursts appear as simultaneous explosions. For the men in N-Nuts, however, there were two distinct thumps; two direct hits a fraction of a second apart. There was no mighty, roaring explosion. Instead they heard two sharp cracks, felt the jabbing blast in their ears and then the sway and bump as N-Nuts seemed to bounce off something solid.
Two shells were bursting together; one just behind the port outer, the other on the port of the rear turret, instantly followed by a third which hit the starboard fuselage behind the Special’s position. Being daylight, the Special was lucky to be absent; his chair was shot to pieces.
The port outer engine puffed a cloud of steel-blue smoke and stopped dead. The rear turret tumbled in on top of Smiff, crushing his legs under his guns. The mid-upper turret shattered, showering hundreds of splinters of perspex over Yarpi, pricking his face and hands with dozens of tiny cuts.
Chiltern continued to admonish Bill after N-Nuts was hit, but nothing was heard; intercom was smashed. N-Nuts immediately filled with stinking smoke and rapidly lost height. Then Krink and Vincent saw the fire.
Flames criss-crossed the entrance to the rear turret as if it were a mystic cave whose secrets the Gods had entrusted fire to hide from human eyes. Oil, spraying from the burst hydraulics pipes which powered the turret, was burning in mid-air, tangling its flaming net to trap the wounded Smiff and thwart his rescuers.
Yarpi, his face black with cordite smoke and streaked with blood from his pin-cushion cuts, climbed down from his turret, groped in the smoke and fire for his parachute, then half-shuffled, half-stumbled forward.
Krink and Vincent rose from their seats together; Krink stood there undecided. Vincent moved aft to fight the fire.
Yarpi stopped him at the main spar, shouting, ‘Bale out, man, she’s had it. Bale out, man!’
All this happened within five seconds and, as Vincent looked, wide-eyed, while the fire spread aft, he inclined to accept Yarpi’s advice. If he thought of Smiff at all it was to assume that he would step from the flames any moment and bale out with them.
Krink and Vincent picked up their parachutes and turned forward, but as Krink clipped the ‘chute to his harness he saw that sparks had burnt through the cover and the silk was smouldering.
They had once seen a man bale out with his parachute on fire. It had opened as it should, and in the lovely white spread of silk one could have missed the red-rimmed hole that threw out tell-tale sparks. Then the hole had blossomed like a crimson bud, fanned by the wind spilling through it like invisible life-blood. The bud had flourished into a giant flower, and still it grew and through it the billowing air escaped. Faster and faster its screaming burden had fallen, begging the dead cloth to hold and the live fire be gone until he was plunging down, silken cords streaming behind him like a comet’s tail.
The ghastly memory flashed through all three minds as quickly as a dancing spark. Then Krink dived behind the Special’s radio. Krink produced the spare parachute with a smile which could accept any trouble Fate might offer, and the three men moved again—forward, away from the fire and towards the escape hatch.
Stumbling forward down the rocking, still sloping aircraft, Vincent saw Bill’s head looking back at them; looking up from the diving nose as he stood not so much on the floor as on the inside of the nose itself. Bill’s expression was not one of quiet calm but neither was it one of pani
c. He saw them stumbling forward with parachutes fixed, looked beyond them at the fire, then looked back at Vincent again questioningly.
In Vincent’s mind there was only one thing to do—bale out—and he indicated this to Bill by pointing down and miming to jump. With commendable alacrity, Bill spun around, jettisoned the escape hatch which comprised the entire floor of his bomb-aiming compartment, and tumbled out, knees up and head down in fine text-book style.
By this time—it was now ten seconds after being hit—the three men were grouped beside Chiltern, who was still grappling with the controls. They could not pass because Magnetic stood in the way, trying to quiet the port inner which had a runaway throttle. When Chiltern saw them standing there a bored, oh-what-is-it-now? expression crossed his face and he shouted, ‘Why are you still here?’
‘She’s on fire’, yelled Vincent.
‘She’s all right,’ Chiltern yelled back. ‘She’s still flying.’
‘The bomb bay’s on fire. She’ll blow up.’
‘Go back. Put it out. She’s still flying.’
‘The fire …’
‘Put it out.’
‘The bombs …’
‘Jettison. I can fly back. What’s a course for Juvincourt?’
Juvincourt was a RAF emergency field in France. Then Chiltern must have realised that Vincent could not simultaneously fight the fire, drop the bombs and plot a course because he added, ‘Never mind the course. I’ll fly a reciprocal. You jettison, the others fight the fire.’
Shouting above the gale that whistled through the open escape hatch left Chiltern parched and panting. He returned to the seemingly impossible job of keeping N-Nuts in the air. Hesitantly, the others returned to their tasks.
Smiff had never had a chance. He watched uncomprehendingly when his turret was blown sideways on to his legs. Automatically he turned the control to move the guns off him, but all that moved was a jet of oil from the broken hydraulics and, as it splashed across him he watched it catch fire.