No Wrath of Men

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  The Bairds had relations in England and, on leaves, Baird made the acquaintance of a pretty seventeen-year-old cousin once removed and fell in love with her. She gave every sign of reciprocating his admiration and affection, despite his rough appearance. His hirsuteness enabled him to grow a moustache as soon as he put on uniform. This, together with his square, rugged face, made him look older than his eighteen years. His pretty cousin told him, alternately giggly and solemn, that the saying that kissing a man without a moustache was like eating an egg without salt was perfectly true. This inflamed Baird’s jealousy, but the fact was that she had been kissed only by callow boys, who needed mistletoe as an excuse to heighten their courage.

  “God verdoemen, if I catch any schelm trying to kiss you, I’ll break his neck.”

  “Just take care you don’t break yours, dear, in one of those dreadful flying machines.” She shuddered and clung to him; feeling very grown-up and thrilled at the idea of having a beau of her own who was off to the Front.

  Baird went to France with a framed photograph of his pretty cousin in his kit. He had had a strict religious upbringing and was resolved to eschew the debaucheries of which his comrades talked and to which they looked forward to indulging in France: for her sake.

  He arrived on a Bristol Fighter squadron at about the same time as Stokoe.

  An observer’s prime function was as an air gunner. Gunnery practice on the training course had been scanty: but Baird had had an airgun in his hands since the age of four, at eleven he was shooting rooks and pigeons on the wing with a .22 air rifle and at fourteen was able to bring down a kudu or a galloping zebra with a sporting rifle. He had shot lion and buffalo, wildebeest and springbok.

  On his first afternoon with the squadron he was on patrol in a formation of four Brisfits when they met nine Albatros DIIIs. He was flying with the flight commander, who led his formation up in a spiral climb to try to gain a height advantage before joining battle.

  The Albatroses did the same, keeping pace with the Bristol Fighters. Baird knew that the British aircraft had a service ceiling of sixteen thousand feet and the German of eighteen thousand. He wondered why the flight commander was doing this.

  The Albatroses were making their spiral tight whereas the Bristols were describing large circles: which gradually carried them closer to the enemy.

  When the two formations were about two hundred yards apart and at more or less the same altitude, Baird’s pilot made a hand signal and all the Bristols turned towards the Germans and opened fire. This put the Germans in some disorder, for they were stolidly continuing to climb, knowing that eventually they would go higher than the British.

  As soon as the Albatroses had emerged from their surprise and wheeled round to face the Bristols, the Bristols turned about; and, a moment later, pitched into a short, steep dive.

  Baird had unfastened his safety belt in order to stand and traverse and raise or lower his Lewis gun. The unexpected plunge had lifted him off his feet and tossed him out of the cockpit, wrenching his hands from his gun. A couple of seconds later the pilot snapped the aircraft up in as steep a climb. Baird felt himself slapped down hard, spreadeagled face-down on the fuselage behind the cockpit. His feet encountered nothing. He guessed that they were over the cockpit coaming. He spread his legs and they both encountered the curved racks of the mounting between which the Lewis gun could be swung up and down. He hooked his feet round them.

  The top of the Brisfit was flat and by spreading his arms he was able to get some sort of grip on its flat sides. Luckily for him his arms were disproportionately long. They contributed to his apelike appearance and had enabled him to box other middleweights much taller than himself without disadvantage in reach.

  He clung there with the wind howling past him and the cold biting through his clothing.

  Bullets whistled past and some thudded into the sides of the aircraft close to his arms.

  He gave up all hope of survival. Either he would be shot or he would fall off. One more violent manoeuvre would probably dislodge him. His hands were numb with cold.

  Baird could not turn his head and look beyond his feet, so he did not see his pilot look round in exasperation to see why his observer was not shooting.

  When the pilot saw what had happened he instantly dived the aeroplane. Baird slid feet-first towards the cockpit. The fuselage widened and his grip became even more precarious. He could not wriggle between the notched racks of the mounting. In his bulky clothes he found himself jambed tightly between them.

  The flight commander held his dive and the sound of firing diminished as he left the other aeroplanes astern. When he was down to less than a hundred feet he eased out into level flight. By now Baird was only semi-conscious. He was conscious enough to hear and see German machine-guns shooting at the Brisfit as it swept over the enemy lines.

  The last burst of fire put a bullet through his right forearm and, in great pain, he had to watch blood trickling from it for the next few minutes until the aircraft landed.

  His flight commander looked up at him with a scowl as he lay wedged on top of the fuselage.

  “Careless ass. We missed a glorious chance to fan down a couple of Albatri. And you upset the trim of the aeroplane quite drastically. We might have crashed. And if we had I’d have been the one to get killed, in the front seat. Don’t let it happen again.”

  The observers had a song, to the tune of “A Bachelor Gay”, which Baird henceforth sang with deep feeling. It was known as The P.B.O’s (poor bloody observer) Lament.

  We all of us know the case

  When the pilot came home alone.

  No doubt it was only a slight mistake,

  But his attitude’s clearly shown.

  He shoved his joystick down

  As far as it would go.

  “Hullo, you seem to have gone,” he said,

  “I fear you must be somewhat dead,

  “But you’re only a P.B.O., yes, you’re only a P.B.O.”

  When you’re doing an escort stunt

  And the Huns get on your tail,

  You start the fight with a cheerful sight

  And the beggars go down like hail.

  Alas! The pilot’s jealous scorn

  Is a thing we learn to know.

  You may get umpteen Huns in flames,

  But don’t think they’ll believe your claims,

  You’re only a P.B.O., yes, you’re only a P.B.O.

  The chorus went:-

  At seventeen, he’s firing rather badly

  At a Hun of tender blue.

  At fifteen thou., you seem him point out sadly

  Some Huns of a different hue.

  At ten or twelve, you find him shooting madly

  With six or eight more.

  When he fancies he is past hope,

  Fires a long burst as a last hope,

  And a Tripe spins down on fire to the floor.

  A “Tripe” was a Fokker Triplane, which had not yet quite made its appearance in combat. By the time it did, a couple of months later, and the P.B.O’s Lament was composed and became popular, Baird felt eminently qualified to sing it; and to contribute a verse of his own.

  But, for the time being, his flight commander’s admonition stung badly enough: worse than the wound in his arm.

  Three

  Capitaine Dupuis had embraced a military career in accordance with the tradition established by his progenitors on his father’s side for four generations and his mother’s for three.

  His father was in command of a regiment of cavalry when France went to war with Germany, and was quickly promoted to Général de Brigade. His mother was the daughter of a former commanding officer of the family regiment and there were many who were of the opinion that she would have made as effective a commandant as her father or husband.

  It was not only tradition that led Dupuis into the Army. He was also a historian and had a strong sense of France’s Divine destiny as leader of the European nations in all things. Fr
ance was supreme in culture, intelligence, logic and courage. France was the most loyal of all to Holy Mother Church. France had the greatest respect for its precise and elegant language.

  The opening of hostilities found him a lieutenant of hussars stationed in Lorraine, with a morbid fear of damnation engendered by a Jesuit boarding school, an addiction to the wines of Burgundy and the embraces of a mandatory mistress in Paris, the young wife — yet ten years his elder — of a Député.

  Dupuis leaped to horse with ardour when the first trumpet sounded and rode into action with an exhilarating sense of fulfilment. France had never forgotten her war with Germany in 1870-71 and every French officer smarted with the shame of Napoleon III’s surrender at Sedan and the siege of Paris. Successive generations of Dupuis’s family had lived for the day when they could recover the territory of Alsace lost to the Prussians. Fate had smiled on him.

  In his first charge, before he had the chance to lay sabre-blade on a Boche, one of them — and, infuriatingly, a mere trooper, at that — outreached him with his lance and lifted him clear out of his saddle with a puncture through the right side of his body. That he did not bleed to death before stretcher-bearers picked him up he owed to the fact that the lance point had rammed a considerably quantity of his thick tunic into the great wound, which effectively acted as a plug.

  Dupuis was out of action for four months. By then, the Allies and the Germans were both entrenched for a long static war and the knell had sounded for cavalry operations.

  After discussion with his father — now a brigadier general — and his mistress’s husband — who tacitly ignored the relationship and with whom he was on excellent terms — he decided on a change of arm.

  To transfer to the infantry or artillery would be an unthinkable degradation. None of them thought much of the Aviation Militaire either. It attracted some raffish and eccentric numéros. But at least it had a certain usefulness, now denied to the cavalry, bestowed by its mobility. And, as it was a new arm, one could reasonably pretend that it was even superior, rather than inferior, to the cavalry. It was, after all, the most modern and therefore had a certain unique brand of chic.

  Dupuis approached his pilot training with disdain. He approached everything with disdain; but in this instance it was based on a distaste for the noisy engine, stinking of hot castor oil, and the assumption that there could be no spiritual rapport between man and machine as there was between a man and his horse.

  It was a revelation to him, once he had accustomed himself to almost perpetual diarrhoea resulting from the daily inhalation of castor oil fumes, that an aeroplane was as temperamental as a charger and that individual machines of the same type had differing characteristics which distinguished them from each other as clearly as a bold mount from a timid one, a docile from a fractious, a good jumper from a bad.

  An escadrille which flew two-seaters comprised six aircraft. Single-seater escadrilles had four.

  Dupuis had his sights set on single-seaters: and, what with Papa a general and his lady friend’s husband in Parliament, he got what he wanted.

  His arrival on his squadron coincided with a highly significant development in air fighting. Roland Garros, a celebrated aerobatic — known as “stunt” — pilot, a lieutenant in the air force, had devised a way of fitting a Hotchkiss machine-gun to the front of his Morane-Saulnier monoplane so that it could be fired without damaging the two-bladed propeller. His crude but effective expedient was to have steel wedges fitted to the blades to deflect any of those bullets which must inevitably hit it.

  Garros’s machine was ready at the end of March and in the ensuing two weeks he shot down five enemy aircraft: a stupendous feat at any time, but contemporarily as awesome as a miracle.

  From the start of his operational career, therefore, Dupuis was in the fortunate position of flying an agile little aeroplane fitted with a machine-gun which he could aim and fire directly at a target in front.

  Unfortunately, Garros was in turn shot down on 19th April by rifle and machine-gun fire, while attacking German troops marching along a road. Both Garros and his aircraft were captured. The Germans instantly perceived his clever device and within little over twenty-four hours had delivered his machine to Anthony Fokker, the Dutch aircraft designer and builder. Holland was neutral and Fokker had, at the outbreak of war, offered his services to the British; who had turned him down. He had then offered them to the Germans, who had accepted.

  Fokker was a genius. In consequence he had, within a month, invented and made an interrupter gear which enabled the rate of fire of a Parabellum machine-gun to be synchronized with the speed of rotation of an airscrew. Henceforth, German aircraft were thus equipped.

  As Dupuis was about to find out.

  *

  Gabin arrived in a pilot’s cockpit by a different route.

  His family manufactured silk, was rich, but lacked influence in political or military circles. At the age of seventeen he began driving in motor races. By the time the war began he was twenty and well-known. Having done his military service, he was called up in the Engineers. He found the life dull and his companions, in comparison with his dashing motor-racing friends, boring beyond tolerance.

  He volunteered for the Aviation Militaire in the early weeks of the war and was sent for training as an observer, although he passionately wished to be a pilot. In January 1915 he was posted, as a corporal, to a squadron flying Voisin biplanes in which the pilot and observer sat side by side. It was a pusher type. The crew sat well forward in the nose of the nacelle and a Hotchkiss was mounted behind them, in front of the leadings edges of the planes, on a clumsy mounting.

  Reconnaissance was not at all to Gabin’s taste and putting his life in the hands of another man, after having driven cars at high speeds, was even less so.

  For six months he flew over and behind the German lines, noting enemy movements and taking photographs of troop concentrations, supply dumps and fortifications.

  In compensation for the lack of excitement in this kind of flying, he conducted several vigorous amours. The escadrille was based near Rheims and complaisant women were plentiful. He paid court to actresses and dancers and wives of men who were in the trenches or at sea; or, if civilians, absent on business trips.

  With whatever diversions he amused himself, however, the determination to become a pilot never left his mind.

  He was on reconnaissance one day in July when a solitary Fokker EI monoplane, which had just gone into service, came in sight. The Germans had equipped eleven of these machines with synchronising gear and a forward-firing Parabellum. This was one of them. But, of course, neither Gabin nor his pilot had any means of knowing that.

  Gabin, whose eyesight was exceptionally good and who, anyway, was able to keep more constant all-round observation than the pilot, spotted the Fokker. He pointed and shouted into his companion’s ear.

  “There, Sergeant. There’s a Boche and he’s headed this way.”

  The sergeant looked.

  “I’ll turn left a bit and give you a decent shot at him when he comes close enough.”

  Gabin stood up and swung the machine-gun round towards the enemy, which was flying a trifle higher than the Voisin. He felt impatient, as usual, and fired a trial burst at the Fokker’s underside.

  Both he and the pilot were astonished when a stream of bullets poured from the Fokker’s nose and spattered against their wings.

  The pilot said “Merde, alors” and banked into a turn, which nearly tipped Voisin out.

  Voisin, in his turn, exclaimed “Merde”, regained his balance and, traversing the Hotchkiss, fired again.

  The German turned and fired simultaneously. His bullets hit the French pilot in the chest and hurled him hard against the back of his seat with blood spurting through a score of holes in his torso for the few seconds that his heart continued beating.

  The Voisin began to descend and sideslip, which spoiled the German’s aim.

  Gabin, hanging on to the gun mounting w
ith one hand, fired bullets into the Fokker and it suddenly burst into flames.

  He slumped back into his seat, reached across the dead pilot and stabilised the machine. Holding the stick with one hand, he wriggled and heaved to shift the body out of its seat and into his, and himself into the pilot’s position.

  The Voisin yawed, switchbacked and swayed, but Gabin finally managed it. He knew the theory of pilotage and had always watched his pilots closely. He turned for base, circled it once when he arrived there, and put the machine down creditably.

  A month after that, he was at Pau on a pilot’s course.

  *

  On 6th April 1917 the United States of America entered the war on the Allied side.

  Baxter L. Kaczinski, Princeton graduate and all-Conference quarterback (and, his father’s senior employees maintained, all-time halfwit), drove with his father in the chauffeured maroon Marmon from his father’s meat-packing plant, where he worked — or, at least, filled a well-paid post — to the Drake Hotel for lunch.

  They joined a group of other beefy men in the bar. The elders were like Bax’s pop (which they pronounced “pahp”): puce-faced or doughy-complexioned, according to whether they suffered from high blood pressure or cardiac disease, pot-bellied, loud-voiced, sporting lurid neckties and enormous brogues, each with a cigar between his lips. The youngers were all pretty much (not so pretty, really) like Baxter L.: tall from the protein-and-vitamin-packed diet their immediate forbears from Poland, Germany, Italy, Ireland and Russia had never known; stomachs already bulging over trouser-tops; high-complexioned, loud in voice and dress, hearty; their vast feet encased in brogues even more monstrous than their fathers’, each with one of pop’s cigars in his hand.

  The air was thick with smoke, the fumes of alcohol, and encomia, with sentimental declarations and patriotic fervour.