Andrew Wareham

by When Empires Collide (Innocents At War Series 1)

  “That must be a difficulty for some of the lads, Smivvels. Those, what d’you call ‘em, Elementary Schools, don’t always do much in the way of Mathematics, they tell me.”

  “They got a Worker’s school in the evenings, in town, sir, and some of the keen lads goes there, sir. Bit Red, sir, some of they teachers there, but they learns what they needs so they puts up with it. Mind you, some of them comes out a bit Red themselves, but it don’t do no harm and they needs the education, sir.”

  Tommy was not so sure it was a good idea, but if senior officers were aware of the problem – if problem it was – then it was not his business, and he had learned sufficient about the Army not to seek grief.

  “Are all of the observers sergeants, Smivvels?”

  “Yes, sir. You gets one or two officers sometimes, so I’m told, sir, in other squadrons, but the major says, sir, that we only goin’ to ‘ave sergeants because of when we goes to war we can train them up to be pilots, because there ain’t enough of pilots. That’s another reason, sir, why they all wants to be observers down in the hangars, sir, because they reckons they can make up to flying officer, sir, and they can use that to better ‘emselves after the war.”

  “Will there be a war?”

  Tommy was interested to hear the ordinary man’s perception, possibly because he had almost never talked at length to one before.

  “Major reckons so, sir. Always a war somewhere, ain’t there, sir. I been in the Army ten years now, sir, and there’s always been fightin’ somewhere in Africa or India or China or one of them sorts of places.”

  “What about in Europe?”

  “No different, sir. All Wogs over there, ain’t they? Frogs and Wops and Dagoes and Kikes and Proossians and Russkis and suchlikes. Ain’t nothin’ to worry about there, sir!”

  Tommy had not heard that point of view expressed in that particular fashion before, but when he considered it, there was little difference in Squire’s conviction that the British were the race chosen of God to rule the Earth, for the benefit of all of its other inhabitants.

  “You’re sure of that, Smivvels?”

  “Yes, sir. Read it in the Daily Mail, sir.”

  “Then it must be true, of course, Smivvels. Thank you.”

  Tommy changed out of his civilian suit of clothes and into working dress, reflecting on Smivvels’ words. Perhaps there was an expectation of easy victory; perhaps there was overconfidence in eventual success – but certainly there was not the least acceptance even of the possibility of defeat. Was blind optimism preferable to balanced truth? Probably not, but reality had hurt in the Boer War and might frighten the politicians in the one coming, if it came.

  Not to worry; all he had to do was fight the damned thing.

  He proceeded down to the hangars, to see what his immediate future held.

  A collection of miscellaneous aircraft, the bulk of them worthy of consignment to the municipal tip, if it would take them. There were Box Kites and Bleriots and Longhorns, and Shorthorns as well, tucked away at the rear of the hangars. To the front there were three of early BE2s and two RE5s, one of them of an unusual configuration – its wings were wrong somehow. Tommy walked to the side, saw that the wings were at least a yard longer than normal; an experimental model, it would seem.

  “Good morning, sir!”

  A saluting warrant officer, one of only two on the squadron’s establishment, and therefore an important figure. Tommy returned the salute with some precision.

  “Good morning. I am Stark, newly appointed to the squadron.”

  “Knight, sir, engineering.”

  “A pleasure, Mr Knight. The RE5 here has had its wings extended, I see.”

  “High altitude experiment, sir. In excess of seven thousand feet, sir. It is a reconnaissance machine and there is a wish to discover if it is possible to take photographs from such a height, sir. There was some discussion of whether it would be possible to accurately focus a camera, sir, and then of whether the images would be large enough to be interpreted, sir. The question is yet to be wholly solved, sir.”

  “Just five of modern aircraft, Mr Knight?”

  “We are promised one or two of the BE2cs, sir, and expect them within the month. For the while we train our observers using the Bleriot two-seater, sir.”

  “Badly under-powered, that machine.”

  “Within reason well behaved, sir.”

  “We are told that there is reason in all things, Mr Knight. What is our general programme of flying?”

  “Training of observers, sir. The major requires twelve by the end of May. There are displays given over the seaside towns, sir, to encourage the people to think of the air, sir. As well, sir, we occasionally take part in air races and such activities.”

  “A fun-filled existence, it would seem. Have we attempted to familiarise ourselves with any foreign machines, Mr Knight? Do we have any knowledge of the French, for example?”

  “I believe not, sir. The major will discuss all such matters, of course, sir.”

  “So he will, Mr Knight. Are you senior on the engineering side?”

  “There is no permanent Engineering Officer as yet, sir, though it is believed that an appointment will be made within a few days.”

  “Good. An officer may make representations that will be listened to. A Warrant Officer saying the same words will too often be ignored.”

  Knight agreed, wholeheartedly.

  “I have not flown the RE5, Mr Knight. Anything I should look out for, from your side of things?”

  “Only the normal, sir – engine overheating. When you start up you need to warm up, and then you have to get in the air very quickly to get a flow of air over the radiator to prevent the engine seizing up! Never try to take off within three minutes of first turning the engine over, sir, and do your best to be off the ground inside four minutes!”

  “Weight saving again, Mr Knight? Do better with another couple of gallons of water, but they don’t want to heave extra off the ground.”

  Knight nodded – it was a compromise.

  “Yes, sir. Only a bit more than sixteen pounds, but it means a smaller radiator as well and lets them shave off a little more elsewhere and then add the extra to the petrol tank to give us greater range. They’re trying out hollow steel tubing in place of solid wooden spars, in the hope that’ll give the same strength for less weight in the fuselage. I hear tell, sir, they’re working on something they call monocoque, which uses formed plywood for the bulk of the fuselage and is strong in itself so it don’t need spars and stringers at all. Something new all the time, sir. Some of the ideas work as well, sir.”

  “And some don’t, despite looking very pretty on paper, Mr Knight. I flew a couple of that sort myself. I’m a Farnborough man, lived a very few miles away until recently and did a bit of testing at Brooklands when I was younger and weighed less.”

  “Yes, sir. We was told you were the younger Mr Stark. The only one now, of course, sir. They did say you had done some altitude work, sir?”

  “Tried it for my father, with his second design. Got five and a half thousand feet out of it, but she flew like a pig, Mr Knight. Same problem as always with my father’s machines – he was convinced that a fin was unnecessary, that one could hold a machine steady using a larger rudder which would also give better manoeuvring. He was half right, of course.”

  “Was it that which led to his crash, sir?”

  “No. Engine failure and he turned back, Mr Knight.”

  Knight said nothing; turning back had killed too many good pilots who had reacted, presumably, out of instinct rather than thought.

  They stared silently at the RE5, hands clasped behind their backs.

  “Mr Knight, the front cockpit is positioned directly under the wing, which means it is over the lower wing, of course. The pilot sits in the rear, does he not?”

  “Yes, sir. That is where the controls are, sir. The observer’s cockpit is very cleverly placed exactly over the centre of gravity, sir, so t
hat the machine may be flown without the observer with no effect on its handling.”

  Tommy shook his head, in time with Mr Knight, a pair of nodding dolls to any watcher at a distance.

  “And just how does the observer actually see anything, Mr Knight?”

  “Not very easily, sir, though he can look to his front quite well. It has been discovered, sir, that if the machine is banked quite steeply, so as to fly in a tight circle over any point of interest, then the observer can see much that is below him.”

  “And was there to be a man on the ground with a machine-gun, then he would have a very handy target, Mr Knight.”

  Mr Knight made no further comment – he was not a pilot, after all.

  “Perhaps the use of a camera may partially solve the problem, Mr Knight.”

  “All things are possible, sir. Would you like to meet some of the observers, sir? The bulk of them will be in their mess now and would, I am sure, be very willing to come out to meet you.”

  “Good idea, Mr Knight. I believe there are three men in training as well?”

  “There are, sir, and four more besides who wish to take the next chance of flying, sir. Good lads all and probably very able to make a success of it.”

  Tommy spent much of the afternoon talking with the sergeants and the trainees, listening to their opinion of the training process and getting some idea of them as individuals. Young men, all of them, only a few even into their early twenties, and all enthusiasts for the new age of aviation.

  It took a little while to discount their accents and accept that although they had their own dialects, different from that espoused by the middle classes, they were not stupid. Tommy had not attended public school or University and so was to an extent free of the arrogance of the King’s English users, but even he knew what a gentleman should sound like. These men were not gentlemen, but they showed themselves intelligent and practically minded and would mostly make competent fliers; it was very difficult. The Flying Corps tended to attract the maverick Army officer, so there was a good chance that many would tolerate the presence of officers who were not born to the gentry, but not all would do so; that problem would be worsened if a system of direct recruiting into the RFC was brought in, because inevitably the youths who were accepted would have come strutting from their public schools, arrogant, ignorant and intolerant.

  Tommy changed his working uniform for Mess dress and made the acquaintance of his colleagues. The Commanding Officer had returned from London, was sat talking with the adjutant and his pilots.

  “Tommy! Take a seat! India Pale Ale, for you?”

  Major Becke, recently transferred from the Flying School to the squadron, signalled to the Mess Waiter.

  “Don’t tell me, Tommy – you have spent the afternoon down in the hangars, talking with Mr Knight and the observers and inspecting our machines!”

  “Yes, sir – I have not been near an aeroplane for a week, sir – could not keep away.”

  “Flying last week, were you?”

  “Borrowed one of Mr Sopwith’s Tabloids, major, took it up to Yorkshire to Charlie Petersham’s place for a few days. Handles well, could be very snappy as a single-seater.”

  “What does one do with a single-seater, Tommy? Not much use without an observer.”

  “Stick a gun on the upper wing, sir, with a string attached to the trigger, firing above the propeller. Fixed, of course. Might be difficult to learn the aim, but it could give an enemy a shock, sir.”

  “Geoffrey de Havilland has devised a mounting for a rifle, usable by the pilot, firing out at about thirty degrees. Need to be close so as to aim off, but it could be handy, Tommy. Enough of shop, now, I have not introduced you to the rest of the squadron.”

  Tommy had the advantage that they all knew the name Stark and some had heard of him as a testing pilot. Three of them were Army officers who had picked up a civilian licence, at their own expense at seventy-five pounds, no small sum - and had transferred in their own ranks to the RFC. Two were Flying Officers, again civilian pilots, who had joined from the Yeomanry – cavalry territorials – and had been awarded what were in effect temporary commissions; on leaving the RFC they would become civilians. Tommy had a permanent commission and in theory would, if he was too much injured ever to fly again, be transferred ‘back’ to the Hampshire Regiment, which would have a very uncertain welcome for him; in practice, he would be retained as an administrative officer, probably an adjutant in one of the squadrons, a penguin, an officer with wings who did not fly.

  “Tommy, you know that the RFC will repay you the cost of your licence on appointment to a squadron?”

  “I did not, major. Hardly right, though – I have had that licence for four years now. I cannot see it as equitable that I should demand that money of the Corps, particularly as my father, now dead, actually laid it out.”

  The five pilots were suitably awed, which had no doubt been Major Becke’s intention. Tommy was youngest and newest of the pilots, but he should not automatically be the least.

  “Four years, Tommy?” Captain John Harris asked in an amused tone. “That must make you twenty-two at least.”

  “My service record shows that to be the case, John. I was born in Nevada, in the States, while my father was mining there, and they have not quite gotten, as they say, round to reliable birth certificates yet – in fact, I possess none such!”

  “Then obviously, Tommy, you are exactly as old as you say you are.”

  “Just that, John. This is a very good bottle of pale ale, you know. Would anyone care to join me in another?”

  All drank up happily; it was right that the new man should buy a round.

  Tommy joined the club – for two months he flew most days, occasionally taking a machine down to Bournemouth or across to the Sussex beaches to be seen at low level by the holidaymakers performing daring banks and turns and coming back thoroughly bored. He flew the RE5 and managed to push it over six thousand feet and then held it level while an observer endeavoured to use a camera; then he peered at the photographs and agreed that they were fuzzy and out of focus.

  “Fix the camera in a mounting, sir. Hand-held don’t work.”

  “They sent a mounting down with the camera. Mr Stark. It weighs forty pounds.”

  “What did they make it from? Cast-iron? Talk to Mr Knight, sir, see what he can do with aluminium and a bit of string.”

  “The camera costs eighty-three pounds sterling, Mr Stark. We cannot afford to drop them from six thousand feet!”

  “Two bits of string, sir?”

  “Go away, Mr Stark!”

  The experiment concluded with the official decision that a new sort of camera must be devised, one that would take better photographs from a height; until then, the RFC must be content to fly at two thousand feet, at which level the existing camera worked perfectly.

  “Take one battalion of riflemen firing five rounds apiece at a distance of two thousand feet, gentlemen; how many rounds would you expect to strike home? I am no infantryman; I do not know what performance would be expected of the men.”

  Captain Peter Baker and Lieutenant George Smythe were both infantry officers and gave the opinion that rapid fire at six or seven hundred yards was ‘practical’; they would have expected their own men to fire not less than twenty aimed rounds in a minute at that range, the bulk of them to hit a man-sized target.

  “Moving at sixty or seventy miles an hour, Tommy? Say three thousand rounds fired as the machine passed across the battalion. I would not expect to come away unscathed, that is for sure. French and German infantry practice is to pay less attention to musketry, because it is seen as a defensive skill and they believe firmly in the offensive. Nothing more offensive than a Frenchman after a dinner full of garlic, you know!”

  They applauded Peter’s wit.

  “So… seriously speaking, for a change, even less trained riflemen would be expected to do some damage. Were they to be machine-gunners, then the situation would be even more inter
esting.”

  The squadron sent a report containing their conclusions to Corps headquarters. It was ignored. The function of the Royal Flying Corps was to provide reconnaissance, and they would perform their duty.

  They flew, they honed their skills in the air, and they drank too much – it was rather an enjoyable existence.

  Tommy managed to get away almost every weekend and towards the end of May drove Squire and his lady and Monkey across to the village of Wilton, not so far from Salisbury, once an important, if small, town, now decayed from its ancient grandeur and a pleasant rural backwater.

  There was a house, until recently the life-long home of a spinster lady, now deceased, and her heir a remote cousin living in Bristol and with no intention of ruralising. It was for sale, relatively cheaply for having seen no improvements in fifty years. The solicitor who was waiting to show them round was ruefully frank.

  “The roof, Mr Stark, is tiled, was replaced as recently as 1890, and does not leak. That is one of the better points of the house, I must say. There is no supply of electricity, of course, and town gas has not reached Wilton. Nor is there piped water, though mains do exist, merely not connected to this dwelling.”

  Neither a bathroom nor water-closets was the concomitant of that last statement.

  “On the positive side, we have eight bedrooms, six reception rooms on the ground floor, a large kitchen and pantries and other offices, an attractive hallway and a fine wooden stair. Outside, lies the chief attraction of the house – some three acres of garden sweeping down thirty feet of valley side to the river. Willows lining the banks, lawns as well, and a number of rose beds, the late owner enjoying pottering in her garden. Not so far away is open downland, excellent riding country. There is a small stables block and carriage shed to the side, of course.”

  “Then there is a need to redecorate in slightly less Victorian taste, sir; to install a generator; to build bathrooms and proper sanitary facilities; to connect a water supply; finally, to convert part of the stable block to a garage to hold the cars. The costs cannot be small.”