by John Wilson
I look at my watch—7:15. I swing over Beaumont-Hamel for a final glimpse before I head back up to five thousand feet. The village has been heavily shelled, and several of the buildings are ruined. Trenches around it are still recognizable but deserted. Time to head back up. As I take one last glance, a patch of ground in front of the village appears to bulge up toward me. With fascinating slowness, the bulge explodes into a mass of dirt and rock that expands impossibly high, hesitates for a moment and then falls back to the earth. The column of dirt doesn’t reach me, but the shock wave throws the Parasol to one side as if it’s a dry leaf in a fall breeze.
I fight for control of the bucking plane. Luckily, the explosion has thrown me up, so I have some altitude to work with. Eventually, I’m back in charge and flying level. I look at my watch. It’s only 7:23. The attack’s not supposed to start for another ten minutes. I scan around. I’m some distance behind the front line. I can see German trenches, but they’re the reserve lines. Behind me the artillery bombardment still engulfs the front lines.
As I begin to climb, the engine sounds rough and misfires a couple of times. I slow my climb to a series of gentle spirals. I’m almost back at five thousand feet when the Fokkers attack. There are four of them, coming from high and to the east. They have the advantage of position and speed. If I try to run, especially with a dodgy engine, I’m dead. I turn and fly straight at the lead plane.
With a combined speed of over one hundred miles an hour, we close quickly. I can see the flashes from his gun, but he’s firing too early and, head on, I’m a small target—I hope. The trick is to keep my nerve. The pilot who turns aside exposes his full profile to the enemy at close range. At least that’s what I’ve heard. I’ve never done this before.
I concentrate on flying straight. I clutch the handle of my Lewis gun and carefully hold my finger away from the trigger. The urge to pull out of this suicidal move is almost overwhelming, but if I do, I’m dead for sure. Finally, I slide my finger through the trigger guard and squeeze. At that instant, the other pilot dives beneath me. I see his windshield shatter and a line of holes appear down his fuselage, then he’s gone. I twist round to see the Fokker fall into a spin, a stream of dark smoke pouring from his engine.
I don’t have time to follow him down because there are three other Fokkers around me. I move the stick, kick the rudder and snap the Parasol round in a tight turn. My engine protests loudly. A Fokker flashes in front of me. Instinctively, my finger tightens on the trigger—but nothing happens. My gun’s jammed. I lean forward and hammer the side of the weapon, and as I do, I catch a glimpse of another Fokker coming at me and feel a splash of hot oil as a bullet thuds into my engine. I throw myself back into my seat and wrench the stick over to turn toward the attacker. The move surprises him and he flashes above me, but with a last protesting cough, my engine dies into silence.
That’s it. With no power, I can’t maneuver. If I go into a spin, I won’t be able to get out of it. The Fokkers have me at their mercy. All I can do is dive for home and prolong the process. I turn west and push the nose down, expecting to feel the bullets tearing into my back at any minute. Nothing happens. I twist back to see why. The three Fokkers aren’t following me because they are fully engaged in a twirling, twisting dogfight with two Parasols. Already one of the Fokkers is spiraling down in flames.
I ease out of the dive to maintain altitude. I fiddle with the controls and my engine kicks back into life, but it sounds horribly rough. I glance back over my shoulder. One of the Parasols is snaking and weaving, trying to throw off a Fokker clinging to his tail. The last Fokker is already running for home, and the second Parasol is closing in to help his mate. The uneven fight doesn’t last long; the Fokker’s wings fold and he drops.
The two Parasols catch me easily and fall into formation, one on either side. I look left to see Bowie beaming at me and giving the thumbs-up. I wave back.
I look right and see Mick staring determinedly ahead. I wave, but he doesn’t acknowledge me. Still, relief floods through me. I’m alive. I have enough height to make it over the lines, and I’m protected by the two best pilots in the squadron.
I laugh out loud and, even though he can’t hear me, shout over at Mick. “Cheer up! We’re alive, and we got three Fokkers.” As if in reply, Mick’s head slumps forward onto his chest and the Parasol’s nose lurches into a steep dive.
I twist round to see who’s attacking us, but the sky’s empty. I look down. Mick’s plane has gone into a wild spin. Bowie is following him down, but there’s nothing he can do. Mick must have been wounded in the fight and either died or passed out from loss of blood. I can’t watch him crash, so I concentrate on getting home.
I’m still over the German lines, so I throw out the two twenty-pound bombs to lighten the plane. The panorama below me has changed in the last hour. Now there are flashes of guns below me. German guns. The ones that our artillery was supposed to have destroyed. Our barrage is still firing, but the shell bursts are over the German reserve trenches, not their front lines. Does that mean the attack’s going according to plan?
I risk flying lower as I cross the German front lines. They’re badly battered, but there are men in them—ours or theirs? The helmets don’t look quite right, and some of the men shoot at me. I curse the sputtering engine that prevents me from maneuvering lower to be sure. I flash over the German wire, which is intact apart from occasional gaps. A few shells are exploding in no-man’s-land, but there’s no sign of life. All I see are dark hummocks spread through the grass. Most are scattered, but some lie in puzzling straight rows. What does it all mean?
Shells are also exploding over the British trenches, which are packed with soldiers preparing to go over the top. I fly over St. John’s Road and see the Newfoundlanders waiting too. Are Raleigh and Broughton down there? If so, what awaits them?
SOLDIERS EMERGING FROM THE TRENCHES.
CHAPTER 17
Tragedy—July 1, 1916
I don’t see Bowie again and assume he has resumed his work spotting the infantry advance. I’m able to land without incident, and Wally hurries over to see what happened. “Are you all right?” he asks.
I nod. “Engine’s gone, though.” As we walk over to the chateau, I tell him about Mick. Wally doesn’t say anything. “How’s the attack going?” I finally ask.
“As far as I can tell, well. One of the new pilots returned to tell me that he’d seen khaki uniforms in the German reserve trenches outside Beaumont-Hamel. I radioed it in to headquarters.”
I get a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. “I’m not sure that’s right,” I say. “I couldn’t get low enough to be certain, but I thought I saw Germans in their front line trenches. Their artillery is certainly shelling our trenches, and there are a lot of bodies in no-man’s-land, which must be ours. Why would Fritz be in no-man’s-land?”
Wally looks thoughtful. “I need more than ‘I thought I saw’ before I can radio in a report.”
“Is the pilot who reported still here?” I ask.
“Yes. That’s his Parasol being refueled over there. He must be in the chateau.”
We hurry over the grass. As we approach, the pilot comes out the main door.
“What did you see?” I shout at him.
He looks like a startled rabbit.
“When you flew over the lines,” I demand. “What did you see?”
“I saw men in the German trenches in front of Beaumont-Hamel.”
“Are you certain they were our men?” I’m standing in front of him now. He looks nervous.
“Yes,” he says, but his eyes don’t meet mine.
“What height were you flying at?” My voice is rising and the pilot’s shifting from foot to foot.
“Low,” he says.
“Five hundred feet?”
“A bit higher,” he says quietly.
“A thousand feet?” I’m almost screaming at him.
He says nothing and stares at his boots. I grab him by the lap
els and haul him forward until his face is inches from mine.
“A thousand feet?” I yell into his face.
“Higher,” he says, his voice barely audible.
I shove him away violently. “You can’t recognize uniforms from that height, especially when they’re in trenches and covered in mud. Those were German soldiers you saw!”
“You fool,” Wally says. “HQ is going to send the Newfoundlanders into no-man’s-land to support gains that haven’t been made. They’ll walk into German machine guns and unbroken wire!”
The boy looks as if he’s going to burst into tears, but I don’t care. I push him out of the way and run toward his machine, shoving the startled fitter away.
“Start her up,” I yell as I scramble into the cockpit.
“What are you going to do?” Wally asks.
“I don’t know. Anything I can.” The engine kicks into life and I taxi the Parasol to the end of the runway. I glance at my watch—almost 9 a.m. Has it been only two hours since I took off this morning?
I roar down the runway and barely clear the poplars along the road. I don’t bother climbing, heading east at treetop height. Men look up and horses buck with fright as I thunder over. There’s Beaumont-Hamel, sitting on its ridge with the mine crater in front of it and the smoke and debris from British shells swirling around it. Very gently—I can’t afford any mistakes at this altitude—I bank to the right. There’s St. John’s Road with the trench running beside it. The trench is still packed with soldiers, so the Newfoundlanders haven’t attacked yet. My sense of relief fades, though, as I get closer. The men are fitting bayonets onto their rifles.
I zoom along the trench, mere feet above the men’s heads. Some look up. An officer—Raleigh?—waves, looks at his watch and places a whistle to his mouth. I scream, “No! Stop!” but it’s no use. No one can hear me. All I can do is watch helplessly as the men clamber up the side of the trench.
The communication trenches that should cover them until they reach the front line are so packed with dead and wounded that the Newfoundlanders have to walk over open ground before they even get to no-man’s-land. As soon as they stand up, men begin to fall—not dramatically, they just seem to be tired and slump down. The rest lean forward as if walking into a strong wind. There’s no one attacking on either side of them and no supporting artillery barrage—just eight hundred Newfoundlanders taking on the whole German army.
German soldiers are climbing onto the lip of their trenches to kneel so that they can get a better aim. Screaming and cursing, I fly back and forth emptying my Lewis gun at them.
The Newfoundlanders have reached the British wire now. There, they bunch together to get through the gaps. They fall in heaps, and those coming behind have to climb over the bodies of their comrades. There are not many left by the time the survivors spread out in no-man’s-land, but they keep going. A handful make it to the solitary tree that I nearly hit. A few almost make it to the German wire before they are cut down.
Fifteen minutes after I arrived over St. John’s Road, the battlefield is silent. A few figures are trying to crawl back to the safety of their own lines, but most lie still.
I fly along the front one more time, tears flowing freely down my cheeks. The Germans don’t even bother to fire at me. Why should they? They’ve won.
I climb until the tragedy outside Beaumont-Hamel just looks like the rest of the world—up to where I am far from the death and destruction into the clean, cold air where birds soar, oblivious to what goes on below. This is where I want to be. This is why I learned to fly. This is what I thought flying in the war would be like. If only I could stay up here forever, free from the insanity below, but I know I can’t. Mick was right—you may not start a war, but once it’s begun, you fight to win. What he didn’t say was that the war begins to control you. I wipe my tears away and turn the Parasol for home. Wally will be wanting a report.
“Least Mick didn’t flame out,” Bowie says, slurring his words. He, Wally and I are sitting on the couch in the chateau discussing the day. Other pilots I don’t know, and don’t want to know, sit elsewhere around the room. We’re all exhausted and depressed. Bowie is drunk. He swears viciously under his breath. “Disaster,” he snarls.
“They say the French made some progress to the south,” Wally counters, but there’s no spirit in his voice.
Bowie and I each went up on three more sorties that day, but they were uneventful. The fighting below us petered out in the afternoon, and we were left staring at the sad lumps of khaki scattered across no-man’s-land. As far as we could tell, the German front lines were completely unbroken.
“Your friend okay?” Wally asks.
“Alec’s fine,” I reply. I have just returned from scrounging a ride over to the remnants of the Newfoundland Regiment to find Alec. He’s safe, but Raleigh’s dead—he didn’t even make it to the Newfoundland front line before the bullets found him—and Broughton is missing. “Only sixty-eight men answered roll call this afternoon. Sixty-eight out of nearly eight hundred.”
“It’s a catastrophe.” Bowie takes another swig of his drink.
“What happens next?” I ask Wally.
He shrugs. “We go on. We’ve orders to go up tomorrow and assess the situation.”
“Assess the situation!” Bowie shouts. “I’ll tell you what the situation is—those boys who ain’t dead in no-man’s-land are back exactly where they started at 7:30 this morning. We don’t need to fly to know that.”
“But we will,” Wally says calmly. “We have to go on. What’s the alternative? Surrender?”
Bowie slumps deeper into the couch, his anger spent. “The whole thing’s a fiasco,” he mumbles into his drink.
“I’ve got reports to finish,” Wally says, standing. “I suggest you two get some sleep.”
Bowie grunts, but I stand up and move over to my bunk. Even if I can’t sleep, bed is preferable to watching Bowie sink deeper into his alcoholic misery.
I listen to the tent flap mournfully in the breeze. Bowie’s right—the day has been a horrible disaster, and I have lost more friends. But I’m alive. It’s selfish, but I’m glad I’m not huddled in a damp hole in the wall of a trench or struggling in agony to drag my broken body across no-man’s-land to safety. I think back to my first magical flights with Horst, soaring through the blue above the empty prairie, the railway disappearing in both directions. It was wonderful, thrilling—and it was safe.
An odd thought pops into my mind. If a genie suddenly appeared and gave me a choice—tomorrow I could either spend the day in complete security, twisting and turning in the skies above Mortlach, Parkbeg and Moose Jaw, or stay here and go on endless patrols over the horrors of Beaumont-Hamel with Bowie and Wally—what would I do? I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I would choose here.
Is that normal? I don’t know, but this is my life now. Alec, Bowie and Wally are my friends; they’re as important to me as my family, living in blissful ignorance back in Saskatchewan. We’ve shared too much—the thrill of taking off into a dawn sky not knowing what’s ahead, the tension of watching for Fokkers diving out of the sun, the chaotic excitement of a swirling dogfight, the fear of knowing Fritz is on your tail, the relief at still being alive at the end of the day. Could I live without that? It’s not what I wanted or expected when I came to this war, but it’s what I am, and I cannot deny that.
Nearby, I hear Bowie snoring loudly on the couch. “Good night, Bowie,” I say into the darkness, before I drift off into a surprisingly peaceful sleep.
Author’s Note
While the main characters in Wings of War are fictional, the historical background is accurate. For example, the planes that Edward learns and fights in are the actual machines of that time, and Immelmann and his turn are real. Uncle Horst’s Berthas are fictional, although the early years of the twentieth century were a time when enthusiasts could, and did, build planes in their barns. There are even suggestions that some managed powered flight before the Wright
Brothers in 1903. As early as 1890, there are stories of a French inventor, Clement Ader, flying fifty metres in a bat-like plane powered by a steam engine. Most books on flying in WWI concentrate on 1917/18 and the well-known flyers like Billy Bishop and the Red Baron. I was intrigued by the earlier years, when flying was still a solitary pursuit and the pilots wrestled with a changing technology where a small advance, such as inventing a machine gun that could fire straight ahead through a plane’s propeller, could tilt the balance wildly in favour of one side or the other and mean life or death for a pilot. When WWI began, few people saw airplanes as anything other than a novelty that might have a minor use in helping the cavalry spot enemy movements. The idea that planes could be so big and fast that hundreds of them together could destroy a city was science fiction. In 1915, solitary planes, usually slow two-seaters, would go up and examine and photograph the enemy trenches. If they were protected at all, it was by a single scout plane, like Edward’s Morane Parasol. If fights broke out, they would be between individual flyers. By 1916, planes flew in groups of two or three and the idea of swirling, chaotic dogfights had taken hold. Planes were also being used for other purposes than simple reconnaissance. By the Battle of the Somme, they were communicating with troops, supporting them with machine-gun fire and even carrying small bombs to drop on concentrations of the enemy. This was still a far cry from the deadly Flying Circus of the Red Baron and the sleek, fast fighters and huge bombers of 1918, but it was an important step towards it. There are many books on flying in WWI, but the best that deals with the time in which Wings of War is set is Sagittarius Rising, the memoir of Cecil Arthur Lewis’s experiences in WWI. Lewis flew Morane Parasols and won the Military Cross over the Battle of the Somme in 1916. He actually did see huge shells passing his plane during the pre-battle bombardment. The movie Aces High is partly based on Lewis’s memoirs and has some wonderful dogfight scenes.