by John Masters
Guy dared not look at his mother. His father’s adjutant was an older man called Archie Campbell, who told him he had been a painter. He must be the man who had been his mother’s lover …
She said, ‘When he got a commission he could have applied for any of the Highland regiments. In this war, even the Camerons would have taken him. He must have applied for the Wealds. It’s too much of a coincidence otherwise, with sixty regiments to choose from, not to mention the gunners, sappers, A.S.C. … And now he’s Quentin’s adjutant! His closest, personal staff officer!’
‘He can’t have applied for that,’ Guy said. ‘Daddy must have chosen him.’
She said, ‘I don’t understand any of it … I don’t understand men. And the war’s made them all worse, stranger.’
Guy said cautiously, ‘Do you think Daddy knows, or suspects, that he’s, the man you wanted to go away to?’
She shook her head, ‘I never told Quentin his name … If he’s killed, he’ll come back to me …’
Guy thought, she means, if Daddy is killed; but what if Campbell is the one who is killed?
It came out of the clouds seven thousand feet above Peronne … biplane, two struts each side, big white numeral 16 painted on the fuselage, body green with patches of brown … camouflage paint … yellow wing tips outside the black, cross, spinner and wheels painted yellow … an Albatros D II – Werner von Rackow. A trail of black smoke spiralling down the sky behind him marked the funeral course of Guy’s last opponent, another D II … A learner pilot? No, a woman … a girl! He’d killed a girl, blown her head in two with the stream of his machine gun bullets from a hundred feet above and behind … Crash! Flames spreading like red blossom down there, like a cancer, over the trenches, the towns, the railway lines, in the fleeting winter sun … heavy shells rumbling by …von Rackow was circling wide, closing in, but still out of range. He waited. The Pup only had one gun but it could turn inside a D II … The hairs on his neck crept and he kicked the Pup into a tight climbing turn. A stream of tracer bullets passed close over his head, and into the fabric of the wings.
Two D IIs streaked by below and disappeared into the vast silence, no sound of his own engine, von Rackow had turned sharply and was coming at him, guns flickering. Guy swung inside, tight, tighter, the blood pounding in his head… the D II was sliding into his sights now … now! His thumb closed on the button …
His scream still echoed in the room. Sweat was running down his face, and his pyjamas were soaked. It was dark. He switched on the light and went out. His mother was in the passage, her hands to her cheeks – ‘Guy, darling! What’s… ?’
‘I’m all right, Mummy,’ he said, and went into the drawing room, took a bottle of brandy out of the sideboard and drank deep direct from the bottle, then went back to bed, past his mother, and waited, a long time, for sleep to come.
Guy sat in Probyn Gorse’s cottage while the old man mended rabbit nets at the table and the Woman washed and gutted a rabbit in the sink. ‘Don’t know what’s going to happen to us all, the way things are going,’ Probyn growled. ‘Squire’s had to sell Lower Bohun, so now Shearer don’t own it any more than he did before, nor does Squire – the bank does.’
‘Why did Uncle Christopher have to sell?’ Guy asked.
‘Get more cash, to keep up the other farms, pay taxes … Shearer’s going to have to cut down half his hops … and he’ll be paying the bank more interest on the loan and mortgage than he was paying rent to Squire. What’s wrong with being a tenant, tell me that!’
Guy drank some of the beer he had brought from Walstone’s smaller pub, the Goat & Compasses, as he passed, riding a hired motor cycle. He said, ‘Well, the, ah, game preservation must be going well.’
‘Naow! Too easy!’ Probyn snorted. ‘Rabbits swarming, ’cos there’s a shortage of cartridges … gamekeepers gone off to the Army …’ He glanced up, ‘What are you now, Mister Guy? Captain? Major?’
Guy laughed, ‘A plain lieutenant.’
‘See any pheasants out there?’
Guy nodded, ‘Plenty, but they’re very wary with all the noise. The earth rumbles and the trees shake and they don’t understand it … How’s Florinda? That’s her stage name, isn’t it? Just “Florinda”?’
‘Dunno. Ain’t seen her for two, three months.’
‘Does she write?’
‘No. She’ll come down one day and tell me what she’s been up to.’
‘Fletcher?’
‘In the barracks, down there. Only he’s called Whitman now. Don’t know when he’ll be going to France, but he’s rare fed up with them barracks, I can tell you that.’
‘Have you had any more contacts with Lord Swanwick, or his pheasants?’
Probyn put down the net and looked at Guy. He said earnestly, ‘Lord Swanwick’s fallen on hard times, Mr Guy. His keepers have all gone now, all the old ones. He has one man, don’t know a pheasant from a badger, and afraid to go out at night in case he catches cold … the birds are going to be very poor next year, ’cos no one knows how to look after them … Lord Swanwick’s trying to pretend everything’s the same – inviting lords and ladies down for a shoot every other weekend … still Master of the Hounds, but they’re no better than a pack of mongrels now … farmers shooting foxes in front of his eyes … I’m right sorry for him … ’cos it ain’t his fault, see? Things are changing too fast … too fast for him and too fast for me. I don’t like to see women working the ploughs, that I don’t. Or driving the bakers’ vans … brewers’ drays, even … taking tickets at the station … and the noise, aeroplanes, motor cars stinking the roads, and frightening the cows out of their milk … and sometimes, the earth shaking …the earth!’
Guy said nothing for a long while, then he said, ‘Let’s hope it’s over soon, Probyn.’
He rode the motor cycle to the front door, swung round with a jab of the brake, and stopped in a sideswiping shower of gravel. The door opened and a disapproving old housemaid appeared, saying sharply, ‘Now, young man …’
A small figure with thick glasses and a jutting thatch of grey eyebrows pushed past her, his hand out – ‘I never thought I’d welcome the sound of one of those infernal machines …’
‘It’s a…’ Guy began.
Rudyard Kipling raised a hand, ‘It’s a Triumph Model H – the military model – 550 c.c., three-speed Sturmey Archer gearbox, side valve, belt driven, of course … What’s that leather cylinder on the rear mudguard?’
‘There’s a spare driving belt in it, sir. The Royal Engineers said they had to have it for their despatch riders.’
‘Well, come on in, my boy. I know you have to go after lunch, so we mustn’t waste time. Let’s have a look at you … lieutenant … D.S.O. … M.C., those wings look good … Your father must be so proud of you. I suppose he’s out there?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Guy followed Kipling into Bateman’s, the famous author’s refuge from fame and, since September 1915, from the world. At the end of that month, in the Battle of Loos, Ensign John Kipling of the Irish Guards, a contemporary and friend of Guy’s at Wellington, and just past his eighteenth birthday, had been posted as ‘missing believed killed’; nothing more had been heard of him. He was Rudyard and Carrie Kipling’s only son.
Then Kipling took him into the book-lined, paper-strewn study and said, ‘Tell me, Guy … I’ve been out there, of course, but I am still far from understanding, it, as I felt the North West Frontier, and somehow I must learn what John learned. He could have told me.’
‘He could have tried, sir,’ Guy said slowly. ‘But I don’t know whether he or I or anyone else can succeed.’
Kipling reached out with both hands, ‘Try, my boy, try … Dear God, I must understand, somehow.’
Guy sat by the fire in his Uncle Tom’s flat, thinking. He had had a good breakfast and Jones had just gone; but he had not slept well. Things he had seen haunted him – barefooted, hungry children begging in Piccadilly; and the faces of women mobbing him outsi
de the stage door of His Majesty’s, because he was a hero of the R.F.C. They were hungry, not loving … He remembered Florinda Gorse, when he was ten; she’d loved him, and showed it in those big green eyes … He might go down to Aldershot later this morning, and take Virginia out again. She’d probably be excused duty because of his wings and the ribbon of the D.S.O. That ribbon would accomplish wonders, as he had been finding out ever since he left the squadron.
And from Aldershot he could go over to the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough and get some mysterious tool that Frank wanted – swore he would never be able to tune the engine of the Pup properly without it … Well, how did the other riggers tune theirs then?
Frank had said earnestly, ‘Ah, they’re tuned all right for them, Mr Guy … as well as they can be without the micrometer … but not well enough for you.’
He’d laughed, glad that the C.O. hadn’t heard that. Major Sugden, like the R.F.C. in general, did not believe in the star or ace system: and nor did Guy … But he was having phenomenal luck; already there was only one pilot in the squadron with more kills. The Germans knew it, and recognized him as an ace, even if the R.F.C., Sulphuric Sugden, and Guy himself refused to.
His eye fell on the name John Rowland in the paper and he started. He was looking at the Letters to the Editor. This one read:
Sir: We have now been at war for twenty-eight months. We have lost two hundred and twenty thousand of our young men, killed. Another one million have suffered wounds. The same is true in differing proportions and numbers, of France, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Turkey, and every other warring nation. Yet what has been achieved? Nothing. The question must now be asked, what do we hope to achieve? The dead – and those yet to be sacrificed – demand to know what they died, or will die, for. In the name of common sense, let all thinking men call upon all governments, including our own, to make a clear and unequivocal statement of their war aims.
Yours etc
John Rowland
High Staining, Walstone, Kent.
Guy put the paper down thoughtfully. Someone had helped Uncle John write that. It was too forceful and direct for him, words did not come that easily to him. The letter made sense, yet he was surprised that the Telegraph had published it, for it was saying slow, stop, let’s search our minds and find what we really want out of this war, and what the other fellow really wants, then perhaps we can work out a compromise. But the war was going full blast, full steam ahead now, and would not be stopped.
He’d like to go to the theatre again, but not in uniform… He couldn’t face that again. He looked at the list of shows … The Bing Boys Are Here, The Happy Day … pantomimes – Charley’s Aunt, The Thief of Baghdad, Jack and the Beanstalk … The Merry Widow, The Second Mrs Tanqueray, The Boy; a revue, Stand Up and Sing with Miss Evelyn Laye, Tom Walls, Ralph Lynn, and Florinda … Florinda! That settled it. He’d go tonight … but dash it, tonight he’d promised to dine with Naomi at her Group’s big house in Belgravia. It would have to be tomorrow, after he’d come back from Hedlington.
Guy sat in the draughting office of the Hedlington Aircraft Company, his feet on the edge of a table, a huge sheet of thick drawing paper spread on his lap. His R.F.C. side cap hung on a hook behind the door. Beyond the window, its panes streaming with rain, the airfield was a dull green grey, marked with deep brown ruts where aeroplanes had been landing and taking off until the field controller closed it to prevent more such damage to the surface.
Guy glanced up from the diagram and siad, ‘Have you worked out the stress on each wheel of the landing gear?’
Betty Merritt, standing behind him, said, ‘2.376 tons – when she’s standing still.’
‘The landing stress would be much more than that … depending how softly the pilot can put her down.’
Ginger Keble-Palmer said earnestly, ‘I know. One day we’re going to have some sort of hard, permanent runways for heavy bombers … but these’re going to fly from Norfolk and Lincoln, where it’s usually dry.’
Betty said, ‘Aircraft are getting heavier all the time. The Handley Page 0/100 is 13,974 pounds, just a little more than our Lion. I agree with you about hard runways, because the R.F.C.’s not going to accept that their machines can’t fly because of anything – nor will the ordinary Army generals accept it. They must be able to fly by night, and in all weathers. That means better instruments, but it also means permanent hard runways!’
‘They’ll be a long time coming,’ Ginger said. ‘Think of the expense!’
Guy returned his attention to the designs. What he was looking at was the first conception of the idea, which would one day, after a thousand hours more work in this draughting office, and then in the machine tool shops and the wood shaping shops, become a four-engined bomber, designed to fly non-stop from East Anglia to Berlin and back, with a payload of 7,500 pounds of bombs.
Betty said, ‘I went to Cricklewood, and Handley Page confirm that they have a plan for a four-engined bomber, too. They’re no farther forward with it than we are with this. What are we going to call it? Handley Page will use some austere set of numbers, but … us?’
‘Elephant?’ Ginger suggested.
Guy said, ‘We already have one … everyone’s nicknamed the Martinsyde G. 100 the “Elephant,” because it’s so big for a single seater. What about Buffalo? They’re big, strong animals.’
‘That would be nice,’ Betty exclaimed. ‘We love the buffalo in America.’
‘That is a bison,’ Guy said. ‘You Americans can’t tell one bird or beast from another. Johnny used to talk to me about robins, which turned out to be thrushes with orange breasts … and lions, which turned out to be pumas. Now buffaloes …’
‘Oh, Guy!’ she exclaimed in exasperation, ‘one day you’ll go to America and they’ll take you down a peg or two.’
Guy said, ‘I’ll look forward to it … Four machine guns is pretty good. But I think you’re badly going to need another in the tail … here.’ He put his finger on the tail assembly. ‘Can you extend the fuselage say four feet behind the stabilizers? And put in a little cockpit, with twin machine guns on a Scarffing, so that the gunner can take on enemy attacking from straight astern – that’s where they’ll come from, mostly, you know. It’ll do awful things to the centre of gravity, but perhaps that could be worked out.’
Ginger said, ‘I wonder. Extra structure, two guns, with ammunition and mountings and a gunner, puts up the weight by at least 500 pounds, and we’re already up to twelve and a half tons, 29,900 pounds. The centre of gravity will be moved aft, the wrong way.’
‘Then instead of lengthening the fuselage, could you move the stabilizer and fins four feet forward? That wouldn’t add so much to the structure weight … the only extra would be the cockpit seat, gun ring, and the guns … and the gunner. He’s going to be very lonely out there, but I do think it would make a great improvement to the fighting power of the machine.’
Ginger said, ‘It changes a lot of the aerodynamics, and you’d still have some C of G problem. We must work it out. We might get away with one gun. We have time. We’ll get all we can out of the Leopard and Lion series … then we’ll show the War Office the design for the Buffalo.’
Betty said, ‘And Handley Page will show them the design for their VG/1700/X.’
Guy rolled up the paper and handed it to Ginger. Ginger said, ‘I’ve got to go out for a few minutes. Back soon.’
Guy stood up, stretching, and turned to Betty. ‘Johnny still working as hard as ever?’
‘Yes. Between you and me I think he leaves Stella alone too much. She doesn’t look well – very listless, yawny.’
Guy shot a look at her but said nothing. He said, ‘Family all right?’
‘Yes. My Aunt Isabel comes down to spend a weekend at Walstone Manor at least twice a month. It makes me very sad.’ Guy nodded; that problem did not need explanation. ‘My father’s well, he writes. He’s still hoping Mr Wilson can keep us out of the war. I hoped the opposite
until this summer. But I don’t know how we could take something like the battles this year.’
Guy nodded again. He could still see in his mind’s eye the abomination of desolation that was the infantry’s front – the slimy slopes of earth, the seas of mud and urine and excreta in which men waded and wallowed, and slept – the look in their eyes.
‘And you?’ he asked. ‘How many pursuiters have you got now?’
She did not laugh or turn off the joke with another. She said slowly, ‘I think I’m falling in love, Guy.’
He said, as seriously, ‘That’s good, isn’t it?’
She said, ‘Johnny told me so much about you before I came over that I expected to fall for you … You won’t approve … It’s Fletcher Gorse. A member of your British lower classes.’
Guy said, ‘Poets are hors classe. And I’ve, er, had close personal relations with his sister.’
‘Guy! How long ago was this? Wasn’t everyone terribly shocked?’
‘Ten years. And as to shock, it mostly happened while I was spending some of my hols at the Manor. Mrs Cate never noticed what I did or who I went out with.’
Betty laughed. ‘Well, Fletcher’s a private in the Wealds, in Hedlington – under a false name. It’s too complicated to go into, but he’s here, and I see him most Sundays, when he can get a few hours’ leave. He’s eager to get to France.’
‘So Probyn told me.’
Betty said, ‘He’s a great poet! I’ve read some of his work, and it’s good, it really is …’
‘I’m sure it is,’ Guy said, patting her on the shoulder. ‘And I wish you both all the luck in the world – especially him … I’m seeing Florinda tonight. She’s the star of Stand Up and Sing.’
Betty stared, open-mouthed. Then she said, ‘She’s not the star. Evelyn Laye is.’
‘Ah well.’ Guy put his cap on the side of his head. The right eye was like blue ice in his head, the left brown, warm and melting – ‘Let the generals clasp the stars to their bosoms, we subalterns have to content ourselves with the ladies of the chorus, or thereabouts.’
He saluted Betty formally, then blew her a kiss and went out.