by Barry Sadler
Heights? What was he talking about? Casca looked about at the war-blasted landscape of the Marne River Valley. Any heights would certainly be far from this war zone.
The sergeant's tone became more aggressive. "Well then, who's it to be?" he shouted cheerily, clapping his hands together and pacing along the length of the assembled men.
Not even Cockney Dave muttered a witticism. To so much as wiggle a toe might be taken as willingness to undertake the assignment.
"Why doesn't he just volunteer some poor bastard, like always?" Casca mused to himself.
"Come on now, who's for it? Nice ride in a balloon. See the whole ruddy war from a new angle."
A ride in a balloon?
German balloons were over the lines daily, and Casca and his comrades fired at them from time to time. But the large, seemingly stationary, targets proved almost impossible to hit. The balloon was, in fact, always moving. Imperceptibly it drifted from moment to moment toward any point of the compass, up or down, or closer or farther away. And the windage effects at the height of the balloon were quite different from what they were on the ground and impossible to allow for. Casca still tried for one when an opportunity presented itself if he had plenty of ammo to spare, but he no longer expected to succeed in downing one of the huge targets.
Now a ride in one might be something worthwhile. And he certainly had a great desire to see for himself just what was going on in the enemy lines.
He stepped forward smartly.
"Blimey," was Cockey Dave's incredulous gasp. "You, a volunteer? 'ave you gone barmy?"
Within an hour Casca was standing beside a tethered balloon. An artillery captain climbed the ladder to the basket, and Casca followed. He was checking around inside the basket when the captain shouted, "Let go!"
Casca was knocked to the floor of the basket. His first attempt to rise was defeated by the rapid upward movement of the balloon, and he found himself sitting on the floor again. He tried once more, this time hauling himself erect on the side of the basket. He looked over the side.
And promptly wished he hadn't.
The ground was far away, so far away that Casca could scarcely believe it. The deep trenches, the high mounds of earth to their fronts, and the huge barbed-wire entanglements had all been flattened to one level; men inside the trenches disappeared into their shadow. Outside the trenches some tiny creatures moved about slowly and aimlessly like some stupid species of ant. From behind the lines of the trenches came puffs of gray smoke from artillery pieces that looked like children's toys.
Spread out below them was a featureless wasteland. Casca knew well enough that at close quarters no-man's-land was pitted with huge shell craters and strewn with abandoned rifles, steel helmets, packs, clothes, and here and there, arms, legs, a few heads, some whole corpses. But from the serene height that the balloon had reached, there was nothing to be seen but a dun-colored expanse of empty land.
Ahead were the German trenches, as indistinct and irrelevant as the British, the same tiny, ant-like figures moving about in an absurd, unorganized, disconnected fashion. And, beyond the trenches, some more toy guns emitting puffs of smoke.
Now and then Casca saw a sort of eruption near or on top of one of the trenches and guessed that it was a British shell exploding. But these shells had only the slightest comic effect on the ants below. A few of them would fall down, a few others would move a little more quickly for a second or two, and then it seemed they would all revert to their previous pointless, slow activity.
"Did you ever see such a stupid, boring, bloody waste of time in your life?" the officer beside him muttered. Then a little louder, "Take those glasses and see if you can make any sense of it, eh, private?" Casca took up the binoculars. They helped somewhat. He could see that the tiny animals were indeed men, and looking over the captain's shoulder, he could now see that the shape of the river below them approximated the wriggly line on the captain's map. And some rather straighter lines, he realized, were roads. The captain was busily dotting the map with new information – trench and gun positions and troop concentrations. He pointed to the biggest curve in the river on his map.
"Can you find this place on the ground?" he asked.
That was easy enough even without the glasses. And when Casca brought the binoculars to bear on the spot, he saw great numbers of men moving about with field pieces and wagons.
"Looks like they're setting up a large artillery emplacement," he said.
"Yes. Just as I thought." The captain's finger moved eastward away from the bow in the river. "And here, somewhere about here – what's going on there?"
Casca moved the glasses slowly, trying to approximate the line of the officer's finger. He saw a lot of men, many mules and wagons, and some large tents, a few of which were marked with red crosses.
"Looks like a field hospital," he finally answered.
"Oh, I thought it was more guns. Well, we'll leave them alone. Bad enough for the poor blighters being wounded, eh, without being shelled in their beds. But it certainly is a big hospital – must be getting ready for a major push, eh?" He handed Casca a tightly rolled paper on which he had noted the coordinates of what they had observed. "Break out one of those pigeons, will you, and send her off with this info."
Casca reached through the spring door into the pigeons' cage and brought out a bird. Placing the paper in the clip on its leg, he threw it over the side. The bird fell like a stone, but after a little way opened its wings and leveled out to sweep around in a wide circle. Then it headed for the British lines where it knew the bird handler was waiting with some tasty seeds, breadcrumbs, and affectionate pats.
The balloon was now squarely over the German lines, and Casca saw tiny puffs of smoke from the trenches as riflemen chanced their aim at the balloon. But he heard no gunshots or the whine of bullets passing anywhere near.
"Dumb krauts," the officer chuckled. "They don't realize we're moving all over the sky and even if they could get a good shot, the bullet's losing power every foot it climbs. By the time a round got up here, you could damn near catch it in your hand."
Casca had already caught all the hot lead he ever wished to and had no intention of trying this experiment. But he picked up his Lee Enfield and took careful aim at one of the tiny figures in an open area below. The man seemed to dance away out of the rifle sight, then back in a sort of irregular circle. Casca concentrated and managed to keep returning the tiny figure to the bead of the sight. When he squeezed the trigger he was gratified to see a tiny puff of dirt rise close to the German who turned and ran for the safety of a trench.
"Damn near got him, eh," the captain chuckled. "Curious, eh? We're so big and they're so small, but they make the better targets."
"If I had something like a Mills bomb," Casca answered, "and a way to aim it, I could hit a target down there."
"Yes," the officer pondered; "you're a pretty good marksman. Would you like to go lower and try a closer shot?"
Casca looked over the side at the tiny creatures. They looked so pathetic, their activity so pointless and random. Killing one of them would be like crushing an ant.
"No," he replied, "it's a waste of ammo, and one of them might get lucky and hit us."
The captain nodded and jerked at the line that ran through loops along the tether line, and a moment later Casca felt the balloon start to move back toward the British lines as the Tommies at the aeronaut station hauled them in.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The commanders on both sides remained cautious, the two forces sitting just out of sight of each other, separated by the gently rolling river plains of French farmland.
Casca's company was at breakfast when alarms sounded, and they raced for the trenches. But there were no troops rushing across the enlarged no-man's-land. The threat was in the air.
An enormous dirigible was maneuvering a few hundred yards toward the British lines and perhaps two hundred feet above the ground.
Officers were shouting orders. Men
were trying to tilt the machine guns in its direction. Casca and most of the infantrymen were firing their rifles at the gleaming ship. Although it was moving at about the speed of a motor car, perhaps fifty miles an hour, Casca considered that the huge ship made an easy target as it traveled in a straight line and stayed at the same height.
The Zeppelin made a number of passes back and forth and then dropped lower and cruised along directly above the trenches. Explosions erupted beneath it, and fires broke out in the trenches. As it approached Casca could see half a dozen bombs the size of pineapples falling toward his trench, and then he saw a much bigger bomb, the size of a large oil drum.
Every gun was now aimed at the giant airship, and thousands of rounds were being fired at it, the tracer rounds from the machine guns gleaming white in the sunlight. Either they were deflected from the huge metal frame, or they passed harmlessly through the hydrogen bags, but they seemed to have no effect.
The bombs crashed into the trench around the dog-leg where Casca crouched. There was a deafening roar and a great eruption of orange flame. The blast of hot air almost knocked Casca off his feet. Then one of the smaller bombs landed a few yards away, filling the trench with fire. Several men burst into flames where they stood and ran about the trench like screaming torches until they died on their feet. A second large bomb exploded on the ground beyond the trench.
As the ship passed overhead Casca could easily read the name in huge letters on its side: Graf Ferdinand von Zeppelin-L.3.
Casca estimated that the flying ship was at least five hundred feet long. German sailors were firing rifles from the gondola that hung below the balloon and at the rear Casca could see the three huge propellers that pushed the mighty ship through the air.
Somewhere some bullets took effect, probably the heat of a tracer ignited the hydrogen. There was a bright flash. The Germans in the gondola stopped shooting and started to run about in a panic. One of the great propellers stopped turning. The big ship turned sideways in the air and began to slip toward the ground.
It dropped closer and closer to the ground. The nose rose skyward as if it were trying to gain height, but the rear sagged more toward the ground as it passed away from the British trenches and back toward the ridge that concealed the German lines.
But it failed to clear the ridge. The propellers at the sagging rear fouled in the treetops, and the big ship came to a stop. There was a flash of bright flame, followed by a dull crash and then an explosion. Flames darted upward from the propeller area and played around the rigid casing of the balloon.
A great white flash tore the shell apart and a moment later the sound of an enormous explosion came to the watching Tommies. More flashes were followed by more explosions as one after another the hydrogen-filled compartments exploded.
The fire seemed to have started toward the rear of the gondola where the propellers were jammed in the treetops. Casca could see men leaping from the front of the gondola to the ground, but this part of the ship was still at least a hundred feet high, and none of the men moved after they hit the ground.
The flames spread as dead trees were set afire, and there were still more explosions as successive compartments of hydrogen ignited.
Slowly the nose of the ship came down, the gondola flattening its length among the dead trees. Now scores of men were leaping to the ground and running from the ship. The great rigid gas bag was collapsing over the wreck of the gondola.
Suddenly the whole ship disappeared in a great white flash. The running men burst into flames and fell writhing to the ground, and all around dead trees burst into flame.
Casca stood staring in the direction of the flames, reflecting that just yesterday he had been flying in a similar, though very much smaller balloon. And as he watched the Germans frying in their tracks, he thought grimly that, no doubt, he would soon be flying in one again.
CHAPTER NINE
Although the British Army had been using hydrogen and hot air balloons for observation purposes since 1884, when they had been introduced into the African campaigns, there was no organized system for utilization of the information that was gathered. Balloon observers identified objectives and passed the relevant map coordinates to gunners by carrier pigeon. The observers also spotted where artillery shells were falling and corrected the gunners' aim with pigeon-carried messages. Artillery officers, however, had little faith in such information and tended to vary it according to information from other sources or through their own intuition.
The difficulties of aerial navigation were considerable, particularly in terrain such as the rolling river valleys of this part of France. There were no dramatically significant landmarks. Farms, roads, rivers, villages, churches were all of similar size, and when viewed from a height were virtually identical.
The speed of a balloon in flight was almost impossible to calculate, so that, once out of sight of their own lines, balloon observers were forced to operate almost entirely by guesswork, although they called it dead reckoning.
Because of these problems, headquarters staff generally discounted or ignored strategic information supplied by the aeronauts on the basis that it could be dangerous to act on information that was of dubious accuracy. But Major Cartwright was convinced of the value of the aerial information and had come up with the idea that it could best be validated by the same observer walking over the ground and confirming or modifying the data.
So shortly after dark Casca found himself in company with six other men crossing no-man's-land, heading for the German lines which were now about five miles distant. Sergeant George was in charge of the party and, for once, was not wearing a kilt but a conventional uniform like the others. All of them were smeared from head to foot in black mud, their faces and hands blackened with soot. Cockney Dave and Hugh Edwards had volunteered to come along, and two more Welsh miners and a Highlander made up the team. For his new responsibilities and in recognition of his service, Casca was promoted to corporal.
There was a fine September moon and their progress was easy enough for the first mile or so. They made their way across the pockmarked landscape skirting shell craters and wading across numerous small streams. They came to the Vesle River at a point where it was crossed by a broad road running east to the city of Rheims. They were still more than a mile from the Aisne River and the troops that Casca had spotted from the air, but there was a large force of Germans on the bridge and, Casca guessed, other detachments patrolling the adjacent area.
Casca had easily persuaded Major Cartwright to open up the armory, and each man was well provided with ammunition and carrying half a dozen Mills bombs. They were also carrying several sticks of dynamite, and Sergeant George readily agreed that the bridge made a tempting target for demolition.
However, whether to take it or not was another matter.
Casca was irked by the lack of a specific objective. To blow up the bridge would certainly impede the German advance, and the surprise attack within their own lines would no doubt disturb and demoralize the German troops and confuse their high command. But this war was being run from London, and should Whitehall order a British attack, the destruction of the bridge would severely impede their own offensive.
After much discussion it was decided to plant the explosives while they had the opportunity and to postpone the demolition decision until their return.
Their first objective was to confirm the disposition of the large concentration of enemy troops that Casca had spotted from the air. So it was agreed that no matter what happened, Casca would continue in that direction, alone if necessary. The others split into two groups, Hugh and the two Welshmen to enter the riverbed to the east and work their way upstream to the foundation of the bridge while George and the other two moved beyond the bridge to come downstream to the northern end of the bridge. If either party were spotted, the other would create a diversion and then both would retreat for the British lines while Casca went on to reconnoiter alone.
"It's hardly high strategy," Ge
orge chuckled, "but it should serve the trick."
The early Autumn weather came to their assistance. The moon clouded over, a chill wind sprang up, and the men on duty on the bridge withdrew to their hut and fire on the north bank.
Both parties made it to the bridge undetected and planted their charges, running a fast-burning fuse up the southern bank. They also lashed Mills bombs to the charges and ran lines from these to the bank. They found Casca in the agreed spot on the far bank and resumed their movement northward toward the Aisne.
They had not gone very far before they heard movement ahead. They guessed a dozen or so Germans on a routine patrol and went to the ground in some of the abundant craters until the enemy had passed out of earshot. Sure that they were in safe territory, the Germans were making no attempt at concealment or any real effort to observe. They talked and joked as they moved and would have been easy pickings had not discretion been of much greater import.
The Tommies split up again, this time into three groups: George and the Highlander in the lead, Casca and Cockney Dave following, and Hugh Edwards and the others bringing up the rear.
More German patrols appeared, but they were easily avoided, and the Tommies were soon back together by a small knoll in a bend on the south bank of the Aisne.
Casca spread out a military map and ran over the information he had gathered from the air. Working from the bend in the river, he rattled off the various objectives, describing the field hospital, the artillery positions, trenches, and the places where he had seen the large numbers of men moving field pieces and mule wagons.
Each man took one of the objectives and in turn slipped off into the darkness to confirm its existence. Within an hour they were all back at the knoll except for Cockney Dave who had been told to find the hospital. They waited another half hour, then Casca proposed that he go look for him.
"You can't be spared, Cass," Sergeant George answered in a whisper. "You're the key to all this information."