Thereafter, on these escapades, Weisbach took care to become too drunk to be able to take any interest in women and thus escape embarrassment. In this way he built up a reputation as a reckless drinker and a sly dog: for he used occasionally to go off on his own to find the sort of company he really enjoyed: and his comrades naturally assumed that he was pursuing girls he had met in the dance halls.
The outbreak of war found the German Air Force equipped with 246 aeroplanes, of which about half were the Taube, or Dove. It was to a Taube Feldfliegerabteilung, a field flight section, that Weisbach had been posted and with which he moved to Belgium in the wake of the invading Army. He had hoped for a posting to one of the seven Festungsfliegerabteilungen, fortress flight sections, which guarded the principal fortress cities on the Franco- and Belgo-German frontier.
The Tauben were used for reconnaissance and for dropping small hand-held bombs over the side of the cockpit. They operated singly, which suited Weisbach well. He was not a courageous man and did not wish any companion to witness his method of operating.
He kept well clear of all enemy machines and was more concerned with avoiding them than with observing enemy movements, dispositions and construction on the ground. When it came to bombing, he either sneaked in very low, just above the trees, so that he flashed through the arc of fire of rifles and machine-guns too fast for anyone to aim accurately, or dropped his missiles from such an altitude that he was well above small arms fire and machine-gun lethality.
In this cautious manner he survived the first twelve months’ fighting. He also survived the sorties into Brussels and Lille into which his fellow pilots pressed him, without betraying his terror of the female sex.
It was only then, after the Taube had been replaced by the D.F.W. and the boisterous Rudel, with his stout physique and huge skull with its abundance of carroty hair, was posted to the squadron that he began to reconcile himself to his peculiar isolation among this host of males and to the exigencies of operational flying.
From the first moment he set eyes on Rudel, Weisbach was more impressed than he had ever been and flew him whenever possible. Rudel, although he did not reciprocate one shred of Weisbach’s sentiments, and was, anyway, unaware of them, admired his flying skill and was always glad to have him in the front cockpit.
Weisbach greatly admired Rudel’s bravery and his many wounds, seeing in him the sort of man he himself would like to be. As they were both merry fellows by nature, they got along very well and Rudel appreciated Weisbach’s even temperament and sense of humour as much as his polish as a pilot. Also, after Weisbach had, as Rudel put it, softened up some attractive girl and then become too tight to do anything about it, Rudel took over and reaped the ultimate benefit.
Rudel often slapped Weisbach on the back and roared “By God, Weisie, we are as lethal a combination on the ground as in the air. But you don’t know what you’re missing.”
Weisbach knew very well what he was missing and he intended to keep it that way. He was content to weave fantasies about himself and the fat observer who brought his heart into his mouth every time they flew together by making him take chances which were bound to lead to disaster.
*
Ehrler was thirty-two years old when he was called to the colours shortly before the Germans marched into Belgium.
He had done his military service in the Engineers and was now transferred to the Military Aviation Service.
Going to war held no fears for him. He was safe in a job which carried none of the dangers faced by the infantry, cavalry or artillery; or the field engineers, who often had to do their work under fire.
Ehrler left his wife and three children thankfully. His wife was a scrawny, ratty little creature; very much like himself. That was why she had let him seduce her. She would never have had a man otherwise and he would never have had a pretty girl.
He had not suspected that she had such a viperish disposition. She had given no signs of it until after she became pregnant. He had not suspected either that her innocuous-looking henpecked father and her two elder brothers would threaten him with crippling violence if he failed to marry her.
Not the most foul-mouthed or brutal sergeant could create conditions as unpleasant as those he had endured at home for the past six years. He looked forward to a long war.
Because he was over thirty and married and had three children, he was posted to a fortress flight section from which he could occasionally go home on a one- or two-day pass. He did not take advantage of this for the first six months. His wife found out that such short leaves were offered to those like himself and wrote him an angry letter. When he did go home for forty-eight hours she blacked his eye by hurling a saucepan at his face and cut his scalp by smashing a milk jug on his head.
Ehrler applied for a posting to a field flight section, which an understanding Medical Officer recommended.
In the spring of 1915 he joined the squadron on which Weisbach was serving, as an airframe fitter.
*
Seeckt enlisted on the outbreak of war because a recruiting sergeant came to his village one Saturday and his friends made him so drunk at midday that he scarcely knew what he was doing.
With his great height, his expectation of life as an infantryman was short. By the time he had finished his basic training and was posted to a regiment, trench warfare was established. His back ached permanently from having to bend low in order to keep his head below the parapet whenever he moved about and from never having the headroom to stand upright in a dugout.
It was inevitable that sooner or later he would be hit in the upper part of his body. And so it happened. A bullet from the French trenches carried away his left ear. He had not long been back in the line after treatment in a field hospital when a burst from a Hotchkiss smashed his right collarbone and tore his right deltoid muscle.
The doctors did not do very well by him and he emerged from hospital with a disability of the right arm which made it painful (about which the Army did not care) and difficult for him to fire a rifle.
Next he contracted trench feet and it was discovered that his feet were also flat. He had suffered a lot from marching, but in the usual way of armies everywhere had been suspected of skrimshanking and ordered to carry on.
This time, for some reason, perhaps because some Medical Officer took pity on his simplicity and lack of intelligence, he was transferred from the infantry to the air force.
A few weeks after Ehrler had found his way to Weisbach’s squadron, Seeckt joined it as a general dogsbody. Not being a skilled tradesmen he was set to washing the aeroplanes and helping to keep the camp tidy, in company with the other non-craftsmen.
Seeckt was thrilled and delighted. He had blossomed considerably since getting into uniform. He had discovered women; he had travelled more than ten kilometres from his parents’ farm, which had been the limit of his travels; he had seen two foreign countries, Belgium and France. Now he was intimately associated with that most modern of inventions, the flying machine. And nobody was shooting at him. Private Seeckt was probably the most contented man on the Western Front. To fill his cup, the Army of the Fatherland thoughtfully provided houses of call staffed by professional ladies culled from the seediest quarters of the cities of France and Belgium, where, after queuing for not more than an hour in the street, he could, for a modest outlay, gratify himself twice a week. Most of his comrade privates could afford only one weekly visit. But aerodromes were far enough behind the lines to be near working farms. The men had been hauled off to the war. Seeckt was a skilled farm labourer and he loved agriculture. He hired himself out for a fair wage during his off-duty time during daylight hours.
Seeckt had never enjoyed life so much. He made the mistake of thinking that he would never have to put his life in danger again. He had not reckoned with Rudel.
Four
When Codrington returned to his squadron after being wounded for the first time, he found that nearly all the other pilots had surpassed him in total
flying hours.
His C.O. greeted him equivocally.
“I trutht you have come back refrethed after your retht in hothpital. You have thome catching up to do.”
Codrington had strongly taken against the practice of flying a machine armed only with a rifle. Corporal Grazier was an exceptional shot and unique on the squadron. Even he missed more often than he hit. Codrington was not looking forward to hours and hours of quartering the sky without something to show for it.
It was clear that his flight commander would not stand in the way of his trying to catch up the others in flying hours. Aeroplanes were difficult to hit. Balloons were a big target and even an indifferent marksman should be able to hit them from long range. They were beginning to increase in numbers and were a great nuisance to the ground troops, in particular the artillery.
Codrington cogitated. Everyone kept trying various devices for increasing the fire power of the BE2. He had been a rowing man at school and he recollected how rowlocks and outriggers were constructed.
He invited the armament sergeant and the sergeant airframe fitter to share a couple of bottles of wine with him in an estaminet and produced some sketches.
Within two days the workshops had fashioned an outrigger for him, like a racing boat’s, with a swivelling rest at the end in which a rifle could be held by a bar which closed the rowlock-type rest. Since, with six pilots and four aeroplanes, Codrington did not have a personal aircraft, the outrigger was attached to a plate which could be fastened to the cockpit rim by clamps.
Codrington took off with a newly arrived second lieutenant as observer, each of them armed with a rifle; Codrington’s held in his new gadget.
The observation balloons on both sides of the line usually flew at between four and five thousand feet. Codrington could see several British and German during the twenty-five minutes it took the BE2 to climb to five thousand.
He set course for the German trenches and made as if to fly past the last German balloon in the clutch which floated on their cables at this end of the sector. He could see no enemy machines close enough to be able to interfere with him. Instead of flying on and beyond the last balloon, he made a sharp turn to the left about a hundred yards before he reached it. It had been a couple of hundred yards to his left before he turned. It was now on his right. As soon as it appeared to be at an angle of forty-five degrees from the BE2 and some hundred and fifty yards distant, he fired a shot at it. He and his observer each emptied a whole clip of five bullets. They could see the fabric of the gasbag dimple as each one hit.
The German in the basket hanging from the balloon was giving signs of much agitation. The balloon was going down rapidly, hauled by its winch.
Codrington flew on to the second one but it began to go down as soon as he approached. He dived the BE2 and he and his observer shot at it. Aiming was more difficult this time, but they scored a few strikes.
Major Fotheringay-Brown was unenthusiastic.
“Now you’ve put the cat among the pigeonth. Fritth will thtart haraththing our baloonth. My brother ith a baloon obtherver, damn it all.”
He’ll just have to lump it and take his chance like the rest of us, thought Codrington.
He went up four times that day and flew to different parts of the Front. Each time, whichever observer accompanied him, they both put most of their bullets into their targets and forced down several balloons.
On his last sortie, in fading light, Codrington tried a new tactic. He flew three hundred feet lower than the balloon as he passed it. His observer fired up at it. As the balloon came down, they had time for the observer to fire off three clips and Codrington two.
The balloon split suddenly at the moment that the occupant of the basket was scrambling out, taking to his parachute. The torn fabric collapsed on top of him and the whole mass went down most gratifyingly.
“Rather unthporting, don’t you think, Codrington?”
Thcrew you, thought Codrington.
For three days, low cloud kept the balloons on the ground and artillery spotting and the reporting of troop movements and other events along the Front was carried out by aeroplanes from both sides, which kept Codrington fully occupied.
The weather cleared. Codrington set off to fetch down some more balloons. As observer he had, once again, the sharpshooting Corporal Grazier.
The Front was quiet. An occasional flash of small arms fire showed in the trenches and now and again there was the sparkle of tracer from a machine-gun. An occasional optimist pointed a Spandau up at the BE2 and its occupants watched with derision as the tracer arched well beneath them.
The first target offered itself, fat, complacent and silvery in the thin winter sunlight. Codrington, pleased with the success of his stratagem the last time, made a pass at it from below.
Corporal Grazier pumped off five rapid rounds.
The Germans had not been idle during the past few days. They had re-sited some of their anti-aircraft guns. Four, positioned around the balloon, opened up.
The air around the BE2 was full of exploding shells. Puffs of black smoke with bright red hearts were followed by shock waves of disturbed air.
The BE2 bounced and bumped and rocked and bucked. The smoke drifted over it and filled the noses of pilot and observer with an acrid stench. Shell splinters pattered against the fuselage and planes. The fabric tore, bracing wires snapped, struts cracked.
A shell splinter clipped the starboard tip of the upper mainplane, which sagged and threw the aircraft onto its side in a steep sideslip.
More canvas ripped off and a chunk of the tail fin was torn off. The aircraft began to waggle its tail violently from side to side.
Codrington, the starboard wings canted at an angle of thirty degrees and the stick held hard to port to try to correct this, turned for home.
The BE2 slid down the sky, making jerky progress towards the British lines, its tail swinging hard from port to starboard through a twenty-degree arc. It hit the ground a hundred and fifty yards from the German front line and fifty yards from the British, in a patch of no-man’s-land pocked with shell craters.
It caught fire while Codrington and Corporal Grazier were scrambling out. Bullets cracked past them but the dense smoke from the burning BE2 made an effective screen. They ran towards the British parapet, stumbling and tripping. They both tumbled into a waterlogged shellhole and the muddy water was not only cold but it also stank from the decomposing bodies floating in it.
They scrambled out and pelted on until they reached the British wire. Two men were already there with wire-cutters, making a gap to let them through. The barbs snagged on their bulky clothing. They swore and struggled free. Hands hauled them over the parapet.
It was not until he was safely in the trench that Codrington became fully aware of the fact that he had a sharp pain in his right side that made certain movements agonising.
Corporal Grazier had two things to say.
The first was “Cor! You’ve got a bullet hole in the back of your coat, sir ... Blimey! There’s two of ’em.”
The second was “Do you think I could get on a pilots’ course, sir? Something tells me it could be a lot safer to fly meself than go on being flown by every pilot on the flight.”
Two random shots fired blindly through the smoke of his burning aircraft had struck home and when Codrington was taken to a regimental aid post it was found that both bullets had torn through his flesh between shoulder and hip.
Corporal Grazier applied for pilot training as soon as he arrived back at camp. Major Fotheringay-Brown did not recommend him. The major visited Codrington in the field hospital where he had to spend a few days.
“Dug two bullet-th out of you, they tell me. Ith thith juth a way of getting convalethent leave in Parith? You thpend more time away from the thquadron than with it. And, thankth to you, the Hun hath tharpened up hith Archie defentheth round all hith balloonth. He thart-th thooting ath thoon ath anyone get-th within five hundred yardth of one.”
&nb
sp; *
Dupuis, with so much influence behind him, had been posted to a squadron which was privileged to fly the Nieuport X, a machine which had notable advantages over other contemporary French scouts. In 1911, Nieuport had designed and built a racing monoplane which had achieved the then amazing speed of 100 m.p.h. When he set about designing an aeroplane for the 1914 Gordon Bennett air race, he found that one of the requirements was that all entrants had to be capable of very slow flight as well as high speed.
He accordingly designed a biplane with a variable-incidence lower plane, the Nieuport X. Fitted with an 80 h.p. engine, this was capable of 90 m.p.h. The outbreak of war meant cancellation of the race. The Nieuport X went into production, however. Some were modified as two-seater scouts. Others had the front cockpit removed and went into service as single-seaters.
It was to a single-seater Nieuport X unit that Brigadier General Dupuis made certain his son was sent; with some further stringpulling by the husband of Dupuis’s mistress.
The Allies were about to make a concerted attempt to penetrate the German positions and carry the enemy back. The attack was to be spread from near the Channel coast all the way to Champagne. The French Tenth Army was ordered to advance on Vimy Ridge, north of Arras, in what became known as the Battle of Artois.
In this area both the French and German air forces supported the ground forces with reconnaissance missions and the scouts defended the reconnoitring aircraft.
Dupuis, who had been a whole week on the squadron and already considered that he knew all there was to know about air fighting, took off with two others to protect a Voisin from which its observer, leaning over the side with a large camera, hoped to take photographs of the German defences.
Dupuis considered himself the natural successor to Roland Garros and looked on the Fokker E1 with contempt. It could not, after all, be the equal of a Nieuport. It was true that the Fokker’s top speed was only 83 m.p.h.: but it was not this which prompted Dupuis’s contempt. He did not know what the Fokker’s top speed was; he was innately contemptuous of everything that was not French.
No Wrath of Men Page 5