by Nevil Shute
The pilot said: “I don’t think she’s too bad, sir. The port wing got shot up, and then I hit it with a stump or something and finished it off.” He sat on the edge of the chair that Dobbie had given him, recounting the damage to the aircraft. He spoke nervously and with lack of self-assurance. He smoked very quickly as he spoke.
The Wing Commander helped him now and then with a question. Dobbie was thirty-two years old, a regular officer of the R.A.F. who had done two tours of Bomber Command in the early days of the war, followed by a year at Coastal; at Hartley he still flew occasionally on an operation, though he never served as captain of the aircraft. His work was now executive upon the ground. He had to run the station and control the crews; it was natural that the crews should be his first concern. They fluctuated in number between twenty and thirty-five, a hundred or a hundred and fifty flying personnel all told. He knew them all by name, and a great deal about each one of them; he did not know the ground staff nearly so well.
He had among his crews a few old stagers that formed a solid backbone of experience at Hartley. However many raw and callow young men came to him, so long as he had Lines and Johnson and Marshall and Davy, and Sergeant Pilot Nutter and Sergeant Pilot Cope, he felt that the Wing could play its part; the youngsters would learn from these men and absorb their knowledge imperceptibly. The casualties were all among the newcomers from the operational training schools. Nothing, it seemed, could really help these raw young men but to rub shoulders every day with the seasoned veterans of many raids. The loss of one such veteran crew was a very serious matter indeed to Wing Commander Dobbie, to be prevented at all costs. Those men were worth their weight in gold to him.
He heard about the damage to R for Robert. “Doesn’t sound too bad,” he said. “Morrison is speaking to them this morning; they should have finished the inspection by now.”
Marshall said: “I should think she’d take a week or ten days to repair.”
“That means three weeks.” The Wing Commander blew out a long cloud of smoke. “How did you come to land up at Whitsand, anyway?”
Marshall said miserably: “I had a bit of a balls-up with my navigator, sir, and the wrong course got on to the compass. I did it—it was my fault.”
“I did that once,” said Dobbie. “Bloody, isn’t it?”
“I can’t think how I came to do a thing like that,” said Marshall wearily.
“Tell me what happened from the start,” said Dobbie. “What time was it when you reached the target?”
Marshall told him the story of the flight, speaking in little bitter sentences. He took no pride in the fact that he had extricated the machine from a most difficult position over the North Sea and brought it safely back and landed more or less in one piece; his black depression was too great for him to recognise virtue in anything that he had done that night. The Wing Commander had to penetrate the veil of bitterness with which the pilot cloaked his account to see the fine airmanship that had got Robert down at all.
In the end Dobbie laughed. “I bet the pilot of that Lancaster had a fright,” he said boyishly.
“He was bloody rude,” said Marshall. “He was a sergeant.”
“I bet he was bloody rude,” said Dobbie. “I can’t think of anything much worse than to see another aircraft plump down on the runway right in front of you at night.”
There was a pause. “I suppose I’d have been mad if somebody had done that to me,” the pilot said at last.
There was another pause. The Wing Commander broke it. “I think you might as well get off on a spot of leave,” he said, “all the lot of you. A fortnight. It’ll be quite that before you can go up to Whitsand for Robert.” He glanced at the calendar. “Get off as soon as you like and come back on the nineteenth—Monday fortnight. You might pass the word to your crew, and tell them to come up for their passes.”
Marshall got to his feet. “Thanks, sir,” he said quietly. “I think that’d be a good thing. It’s been just one thing after another lately.”
Dobbie glanced at him. “In what way?”
The pilot said bitterly: “Everything I touch seems to go wrong these days.”
The Wing Commander felt as if a veil had been partially drawn aside revealing a familiar scene, a scene he did not care to look at very closely. He said: “I suppose that means you’ve had a spot of bother of some sort.”
“I suppose it does,” said Marshall. “I’d rather like to get away from here for a bit.”
“Okay,” said Dobbie casually. “See you again on Monday fortnight.”
The pilot went out of the office. Dobbie leaned back in his chair, staring thoughtfully at the calendar. It was a good calendar, adorned with a beautiful picture of a nude young woman, kneeling and attractive; in some obscure manner she was there as advertising for TAUTWING AERO DOPES. The Wing Commander muttered to himself: “I bet that’s it.”
He got up from his chair and opened the door communicating with the Administration office. Squadron Leader Chesterton was not in the room, but his secretary was there, a grey-haired and efficient W.A.A.F. sergeant. He said to her: “Sergeant Pilot Franck and Sergeant Cobbett and Sergeant Phillips will be coming in for leave warrants and ration cards. Make them out to the nineteenth. When they come, bring them in to me. I want to see each of that crew before they go on leave—not all together, one by one.”
He saw Sergeant Cobbett first, within half an hour. “Morning, Cobbett,” said the Wing Commander. “Sit down for a minute.” The sergeant sat a little nervously on the chair. “I’m sending you all off on leave for a fortnight. It’ll take quite that time to fix up your machine at Whitsand.”
Dobbie flipped over the pages of a little book he kept upon his desk. “I see this was your eighth operational flight—and you’ve been with Sergeant Pilot Dennison, and now for the last two with Flight Lieutenant Marshall.” He put down the book and looked over to the young man before him. “I may have to re-arrange the crews a bit while you’re away,” he said. “Is there anybody that you’d like to be with particularly?”
The flight engineer said: “I don’t know, sir. Couldn’t I stay with Flight Lieutenant Marshall?”
The Wing Commander said, as if reluctantly: “Yes, I suppose I could arrange that if you particularly want to stay with him. Would you rather do that?”
“I would, sir.”
“Why?”
The young man smiled awkwardly. “Well, sir—I always feel safe with Mr. Marshall. And I think that makes a difference, because you do your work better.”
“I wouldn’t say that you were any of you so safe last time,” said Dobbie dryly. “It’s a long way from here to Whitsand.”
The Sergeant protested: “But that was just a muck-up with the navigation, sir. What I mean is, Mr. Marshall knows how to nurse his motors, and he knows how to fly. I tell you, sir, you should have been with us at that landing up at Whitsand. He put her down a treat.”
“All right,” said Dobbie. “If you want to stay with Mr. Marshall I’ll see if we can fix it. You hit it off with him all right?”
The sergeant hesitated. “I like being with Mr. Marshall because he knows his job, sir. I wouldn’t say but that he’s been sharp with all of us lately, like as if he was worried or something. The others, they noticed it more because they’ve been with him longer. But I don’t want to change.”
Dobbie said: “All right, Cobbett—I’ll see if I can arrange things so that you stay with him. Now you can get off on your leave. Got your pass? All right. Have a good time.”
The sergeant went out and the Wing Commander sat thoughtfully at his desk for a few minutes. Presently he drew a sheet of notepaper towards him, got out his fountain-pen, and began to write a note to Corporal Leech.
It was his habit, whenever any of his flying personnel went into hospital whether for accident or casualty, to write a letter in his own handwriting. It was one of the little things that made him a good officer, one of the tiny cares that built up a good record of operational fl
ights from Hartley Magna. He wrote rather illegibly, in an irregular, boyish hand:
My dear Leech,
I was sorry to hear about your bad luck over Mannheim, and I hope you aren’t having too much trouble, and that you will be back with us before long. I have sent the rest of your crew off for a fortnight’s leave, and it may be three weeks or a month before they go out again. I will send a temporary operator with them till you come back if you want to go on with that crew, but if you specially want to be with some other captain, will you let me know? As you know, we do not like to make more changes than we can help, but this is an opportunity if you want a change.
If there is any difficulty over anything while you are in hospital, or if you want anything sent up from your quarters, let me know and I will do what I can.
Yours sincerely,
J. C. Dobbie, Wg. Cdr.
He sealed the letter and addressed it. The W.A.A.F. sergeant put her head in at the door as he tossed it into the OUT basket. “Sergeant Phillips is here, sir,” she said.
“All rights—send him in.”
He turned to the door. “Morning, Phillips,” he said. “You’ve seen Flight Lieutenant Marshall? We decided this morning that you’d all better get in a fortnight’s leave while your aircraft is put right.”
“Thank you, sir.”
The Wing Commander sat down at his desk and made the rear-gunner sit down. He turned to his little book and frowned. “You seem to have been with Mr. Marshall a long time,” he said. “Were you with him in his first tour?”
The gunner said: “That’s right, sir. I did eighteen operations with Mr. Marshall in his first turn; before that I did fourteen with Pilot Officer Hocking. You remember, sir—him that hit the gasometer.”
Dobbie remembered very well, and did not want to be reminded of that crash. “And then you went on with Mr. Marshall on his second tour, and you’ve done twenty-four more.”
“That’s right, sir. Fifty-six in all.”
“Quite a lot of operational flying,” said Dobbie. “Beginning to feel you’d like to stay on the ground?”
Phillips shook his head. “No, sir.” He enjoyed the relatively easy work of a rear-gunner, and he still felt a certain glamour in the job.
The Wing Commander said: “We shall have to make a change or two now. You’ll have to have a new wireless operator, for one thing. In fact, I may have to do a good bit of snuffling the crews around in the next week or two. Do you feel you’ve been with one captain long enough? Would you like a change?”
The rear-gunner stared at him. “No, sir. I don’t want any change.”
“You’re quite happy as you are, with Mr. Marshall?”
“Yes, sir. We’ve been together a long time. I wouldn’t want to start with anybody new.”
“You get on well together? I’m glad to hear it.”
Sergeant Phillips hesitated. “We have our little troubles now and then,” he said. “Like quarrels in a family, if you take me. But nothing to signify.”
The Wing Commander grinned. “I see. Been having one recently?”
“Well—you might say so. You know the way we register the graticule sight with the guns.” He launched into an involved technical explanation of the focus of his four Brownings. “The Armament Officer, Mr. Higgs, he said I could have it my way, sir, but then Flight Lieutenant Marshall come along and said it had to be like in the book, and got real nasty about it. Not that that troubled me,” he added quickly.
“I see,” said Dobbie. “That sounds rather unreasonable, on the face of it. Is he often like that?”
“No, sir. It’s just that he’s been worried recently, I think.”
“Do you know what he’s been worried about?”
Sergeant Phillips was not a very quick thinker, but he knew well enough when he was treading on thin ice. He said carefully: “I think somebody shot him down, sir.”
Involuntarily the Wing Commander glanced at TAUTWING AERO DOPES; his first guess had been a good one. “Somebody on the station?”
“I wouldn’t know that, sir.”
“I bet you do,” said Dobbie.
He had a duty in this matter to perform. One of his best and most reliable crews had suddenly deteriorated and had put up an extremely poor performance after Mannheim. It was his duty to try and get them back into their original state of efficiency, because the example of the old hands influenced the raw young crews that came to him from operational training. He had so few of the old stagers left, the men who knew all the angles, who had great experience. If one of them went wrong, it was his duty to do everything within his power to get the matter right.
“Do you know who it is?” he asked directly.
“No, sir, I don’t. I know who it might be.”
“Who?”
The sergeant hesitated, feeling most uncomfortable. “He asked once if I could find out the name of one of the section officers,” he said.
“Which one?”
“The one with black hair that does signals.”
“You mean Section Officer Robertson?”
“That’s right, sir.”
The Wing Commander glanced at the sergeant; he sensed resentment, and knew that Phillips felt these questions to be unfair. “A very nice girl,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry if she shot him down.”
He got to his feet; the sergeant got up in relief. “All right, Phillips,” he said. “Get off on your leave, and have a good time. I’ll try and fix it so that you stay with Mr. Marshall if you want to.”
“Thank you, sir. I wouldn’t want to start with anybody new.”
He went out; immediately the W.A.A.F. sergeant came in. “Sergeant Pilot Franck is waiting to see you, sir.”
“All right, show him in.” This was the last of them, this foreigner. He turned again to his little book, and was studying it when Gunnar Franck came in. The way this crew had stuck together!
He said to the big, red-faced young man: “Morning, Franck. I suppose Flight Lieutenant Marshall has told you that you’ve got a fortnight’s leave?”
The Dane said: “Yes, sir.”
“Sit down a minute.” Gunnar sat down on the chair. “I wanted to see you for a minute just to tell you that I know it wasn’t your fault your machine went off its course. I’ve had the whole thing from Mr. Marshall. He tells me that you passed him the correct course in writing, but that he set it on the compass wrong.”
The sergeant said: “I have thought that I am ver’ much to blame, sir. Always I look to see if the course is right upon the compass when there is a little time free. This time I did not look.”
“Why didn’t you look?”
There was a pause. Gunnar said at last: “I thought it might make Mr. Marshall angry if I look to see that he has done his work all right.”
“I see.” The Wing Commander thought for a minute. “I know that there has been some friction in your crew,” he said at last. He turned to the book before him. “You’ve been with Mr. Marshall a very long time,” he said. “You did most of your last tour of ops together and all this one. Do you feel that’s long enough? Would you like to go with some other captain for a change?”
The Dane said: “If Mr. Marshall wants me to stay in his crew, I would like to stay.”
Dobbie said: “Don’t think Marshall wants to get rid of you. This was my idea. I thought that if things had become difficult you might like a change yourself.”
Gunnar said: “I would like to stay with Mr. Marshall, sir.”
Dobbie stared at the red-faced young man before him thoughtfully. He knew Franck to be an intelligent, educated man, a medical student in his own country. He had a shrewd idea that this foreigner was really the backbone of the crew, the hard core of solid competence.
He leaned forward a little. “Look, Franck,” he said. “I know that you and Marshall have been together a long time, and you’ve done wonderfully well together. Now, as far as I can make it out, some friction has arisen and you don’t get on so well together as y
ou used to. Well, that’s nothing new, you know—it happens now and then, and I deal with it by shifting people round a bit. What I don’t quite understand is why you don’t want to be shifted.”
The young man said: “If Mr. Marshall wants me, I would like to stay with him. I do not think that it would be good for you to fuss him with a new navigator just now.”
The Wing Commander nodded; this was getting somewhere. “He’s worried over something, isn’t he?”
“For three weeks now, sir, he has been ver’ worried. I think it is that which has made him angry over little things that do not matter.”
“What sort of little things?”
The Dane smiled ruefully. “Always I make the figure seven with a cross, as we do at home. I cannot help it, sir—I try to make the English seven, and then I forget. Now for the first time Mr. Marshall has been angry that I make them so, and he goes on and on about my sevens, and I have been angry with him in turn. Last week I was coming to ask if I might become posted to another station, and then I did not.”
Dobbie said gravely: “I see. But why are you so set on staying with him now?”
“I think it is not the right time to go. When things are not so good, then one should stay and help to get them right again.”
The Wing Commander sat in silence for a moment. His first feeling was confirmed; here was the backbone of the crew. This foreigner meant that he was quite prepared to go out again as navigator to a pilot who had insulted him and had made at least one technical mistake that had put them all in danger. Old comradeship still held these men together.
He said: “What’s Marshall worried about?”
“I do not know, sir.”
Dobbie said: “Do you know Section Officer Robertson?”
Their eyes met. “I know Section Officer ver’ well,” said Gunnar. “I think she is a good young lady, but I think she has behaved ver’ silly.”
Dobbie thought of the wrecked aeroplane at Whitsand, of Leech in hospital, of the hour that he had spent that morning in unravelling the matter. “I couldn’t agree with you more!” he said explosively.