by Max Hennessy
I wasn’t looking forward to what lay ahead. From what the major had told me it was going to be a desperate period of weariness but I had a feeling I could manage it for a bit longer if it was finally going to stop everything for good. Lloyd George had said we were fighting to make a land fit for heroes to live in but that hadn’t cut much ice with me. Lloyd George was a politician and, after such a war as we’d been through, I felt I’d never trust another politician as long as I lived. Too many men had died to satisfy other men’s political ambitions, and even while the Somme and Passchendaele had been going on all the politicians could do was squabble and manoeuvre to get the best they could for themselves and their stupid parties. Not very many of them had joined up either or even visited the front to see what it was like, so that Lloyd George’s slogans, clever as they were, didn’t mean much to me.
After a while the major appeared and then I realized that the mechanics had wheeled out his machine, too. This time, it seemed ‘every man’ really meant ‘every man’. I don’t know what other commanding officers were doing, but ours was the sort to whom the words meant just what they said.
We were all carrying bombs and nobody pretended it was going to be easy because the German airfield at Merck was among the targets and we all knew German airfields had more machine guns on them these days than aeroplanes. A few of the men were making bantering remarks about narrow squeaks but nobody was laughing much, I noticed, and I buckled my belt carefully and adjusted my helmet and scarf with a conscious deliberation because I felt that if I didn’t do it correctly, as I’d always done it, something might go wrong.
Munro appeared in front of me. He looked drawn and exhausted, his face taut and set like a drowning man clinging to some fragment of wreckage that preserved life. He’d been in France ever since 1915, first as an infantryman, and he’d served in the trenches and through the awful slaughter of the Somme. I wanted to say ‘You’ve done enough’ because I just didn’t dare think of anything happening to him. He’d become a symbol for me and I felt that if anything did happen to him it could happen to me, too.
‘Guid luck, Brat,’ he said.
‘Good luck, Jock.’
He frowned suddenly. ‘Ah’m gettin’ tae the stage when Ah feel Ah need a wee bitty luck,’ he said. ‘We’ve taken such a pastin’ lately, mon, it’s like some sort o’ stinkin’ rotten rope trick or somethin’ – one moment a feller’s there, the next he’s gone.’ He shrugged. ‘All the same, if it ends soon and we can all settle down tae nine-tae-fivers and feet up on the hearth, I reckon I might just pull oot the stops a few more times.’
Everybody climbed into their machines and there was the crackle of Clerget engines starting up and the roar as the propellers started to rotate, dust blowing from behind the aeroplanes, blue smoke coughing from the exhaust stubs. A Very light curved up into the sky and chocks were jerked away so that the machines started to move into the middle of the field and roll forward over the uneven ground, tails up, wings rocking.
Over the line the sky was full of aeroplanes, despite the clouds, and we plastered Merck with everything we’d got. Aeroplanes and lorries were left burning and a hangar was flattened so that I knew there’d be no flying from there for a day or two, but the ground fire was hellish and I watched narrow-eyed as a Camel carried straight on down, hit the top of a parked lorry with its wheels, smashed into the ground and went sliding sideways, scattering bits of wreckage, until it hit a Fokker just pulling out in an attempt to get into the air, and the lot went up in a flare of flame from which I knew nobody would ever escape.
As we lifted into the sky, the Fokkers dropped on us like wolves on a flock of sheep while we bolted at low level for home. The SEs who were giving us top protection came down, too, and before I knew what was happening the whole crazy lot of us were wheeling and twisting towards the lines, only a few hundred feet above the ground so that every time I went round I could see faces everywhere, all turned upwards to watch.
We must have all been mad because eventually we drifted into the area of the highest point in the arc of shells on their way to and fro over the lines and, as the thought occurred to me, I found myself praying I wouldn’t be hit by one of them as I’d once seen a BE hit in 1917 – just a flash and then a whole aeroplane and its crew splashed across the sky in falling fragments.
I saw a yellow Fokker fly into the ground at full speed, and rubbish and fragments of aeroplane hurtling into the air like the debris of an explosion, then an SE, far too low, went into a spin and was unable to pull out properly. It managed to level off but its wheels caught the wreckage of an old barn and it dropped into a shell hole and I saw the tail come up with a jerk.
Splinters flew from my centre section, and the Fokker I was firing at whirled away with smoke coming from under the cockpit, then I heard the usual crack-crack-crack of an enemy machine gun just behind me. In sheer terror I slithered sideways, just in time to see Munro’s Camel limping painfully away towards the British lines with Munro hammering at a jammed gun. A Fokker pounced on him at once and I saw its guns going and the Camel falter, then I smashed it away with pieces flying off the fuselage, just as I saw another from the corner of my eye coming round behind me and saw the smoke trails from his tracers going through the wings and heard the bullets hitting the engine cowling, and the clang as something went into the clockwork.
The engine note rose to a scream, then it began to grind as though everything inside was falling to pieces and getting chewed up, but for a moment I was safe and, glancing round for Munro, I saw his Camel just managing to float over what appeared to be the line, to hit the ground at a shallow angle. Skidding and sliding across the battered turf, it went first forwards, then sideways, then spun round to continue tail-first until it finally came to a rocking standstill, its wings and fuselage shredded, and as I levelled off I just had time to notice that Munro hadn’t climbed out.
My engine was still groaning and clattering but I turned my head to chance another look. Just then, however, my controls went sloppy and I became too involved in saving my own skin to see what had happened to Munro. Glancing backwards, I saw one of my elevators was hanging off and fluttering behind on a wire and I could only guess that one of the whirling Fokkers had hit me without me realizing it as I passed, or that a splinter from one of the shells bursting close beneath had ripped it loose.
There wasn’t much time to think about how it had happened, however, because I was fighting now to keep the machine from nose-diving. I was rapidly losing speed and as I nipped below a Fokker that came at me, I knew I wasn’t going to be flying much longer. Someone drove the Fokker away and the sky suddenly cleared. A ruined house appeared in front of me and I was startled to realize I was so low, but I staggered past by a miracle, though the wing tip knocked off the chimney pot. Wires were trailing loose now and I saw the fabric across the whole lower plane begin to wrinkle as though the wing were moving, but I got the nose up again somehow and was just thinking I’d got away with it, when the engine cut dead and I hit the ground.
There was a hideous noise of breaking and splintering. I was flung forward against the safety belt and my head hit the windscreen as the machine bounced and lifted – flying still, but without its undercarriage – until she hit the ground again, while all I could do was hang on with both hands without a hope of controlling it. One blade of the propeller had broken off and the engine was screaming and shuddering as though trying to tear itself loose from the airframe. Wires were clattering all round me and pieces of wing and fuselage were dropping off in a shower, then I hit the ground again, lifted once more as though I couldn’t stay down and, as my hands flickered over the knobs and switches, shutting off the engine and switching off the petrol and checking my safety belt, I hit the ground yet again, this time for good. The wings fell off and the engine dropped from its mountings then I hit the edge of a crater and the nose went down and the tail came up and over, and I found myself hanging upside-down in a blessed stillness.
The silence was bewildering as everything stopped moving and crashing and, with the blood rushing to my head, I could see that there seemed to be hardly anything left of the Camel beyond the piece I was sitting in. The wings had gone, the undercarriage and part of the tail had gone, and the engine had gone, too. How the remaining piece had stayed together to protect me I couldn’t imagine. Then I became aware of the bursting of shells and the tapping of a machine gun and, without thinking, I released the safety belt and fell out on my head into soft mud. If it hadn’t been soft I’d have broken my neck.
Two soldiers, their faces grimy with dirt, dragged me clear.
‘You got shot down, mate?’ one of them asked.
‘You ain’t bin out here long,’ the other one said sarcastically. ‘Y’oughta know they always land like that.’
I was in no mood to see the funny side of anything and, covered with shame at my fright, I cowered from the concussion of the shells. Then I remembered Munro and scrambled to my feet. Clambering to the edge of the shell-hole, I stared across the torn ground to where I could see his machine’s tail sticking up through the smoke. There was a group of soldiers round it, their heads in the cockpit, and I ran towards it in my heavy flying boots, dodging and flinching at the bursting of shells and sweating under the leather coat.
Munro looked ghastly. His face was grey and there seemed to be blood everywhere, vivid against the pallor of his skin. His nose was bent round and there was a cut over one eye and a hole in his chin, so that as one of the soldiers poured water into his mouth it all came out again and ran down his neck to join the blood dripping on to his chest.
I was quite certain that he was already dead but his eyes opened and he saw me. He tried to say something but couldn’t manage it and I felt helpless because I didn’t know what he was trying to convey, then the soldiers lifted him out and laid him on the ground. Someone started shouting ‘Stretcher bearers!’ and in no time at all the stretcher was there. They seem to have got the rescue business better organized since they’d carried me off the field the previous year. Then, I’d had to scramble back mostly on my own, clutching my leg, half-dragged, half-pushed by Sykes and a couple of Highlanders through the shell holes until I could flop down in a sheltered ditch. Now, though, they had Munro moving back at full speed, with me alongside, sick with worry and knowing that the soldiers would consider I had the wind up. I had.
We fell into a shattered trench that seemed to be full of old unspeakable bodies, white as parchment, scrambled out at the other side, dived under a barbed wire entanglement, scuttled bent-double along the base of a broken wall and finally ended up in a sunken road where – blessed relief! – the shells didn’t seem to be bursting. Behind a house, an ambulance was waiting, mud-spattered and grimy among a row of stretchers, its sides flecked by the marks of shell splinters. There was an infantry officer inside it who seemed to have stopped a machine-gun burst because there were small red patches all over his tunic and his breathing was swift and shallow.
A doctor examined Munro, then I saw him shake his head and a sergeant nodded at the stretcher bearers and they slid Munro into the ambulance. I was just about to climb in with him when the driver pushed me away. ‘Sorry, sir,’ he said. ‘This is for the wounded.’
I stood back and dumbly watched the sergeant pull the canvas flaps down, then the engine started and it began to jolt off across the uneven road, so that I wondered what the poor devils inside must be feeling as their wounds were jolted.
I turned to the doctor. ‘Will he be all right?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
‘Because I didn’t examine him.’
‘Well, why didn’t you examine him, you damn’ fool?’ I shrieked.
He stared at me for a moment then he put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Because I don’t have the time,’ he said. ‘That’s why.’ He indicated the stretchers lying all round him and it was only then that I realized how many there were. ‘I’ve rather got my hands full. Was he a friend of yours?’
I felt like weeping. ‘He’s the only one I’ve got left,’ I said numbly.
He patted my shoulder and turned away. A moment later he handed me a glass. ‘Better drink this,’ he said. ‘You look as though you’ve had a bit of a fright yourself.’
The drink was neat brandy and it almost took the top off my head, but it bucked me up. I handed back the glass, said ‘Thanks’ and managed a smile.
‘I decided the best thing I could do for him was get him away fast,’ the doctor went on. ‘Much better than keeping him here and trying to patch him up. It was touch and go and they’ve got more equipment back at base.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I understand now. Thanks. Sorry I made an ass of myself.’
He slapped my shoulder again and turned back to his work. An artillery officer from a nearby battery led me away and gave me a vast glass of whisky that made me choke after the brandy, then a big German cigar was stuck in my mouth and lit. I tried to say I didn’t smoke but I was still gagging on the whisky, and the drink, the cigar, the shock and the fright were just too much.
‘Excuse me,’ I said and went out to be sick.
When I returned, wiping my mouth, my eyes streaming, the artillery officer looked sympathetically at me. ‘Son,’ he said, ‘you look bloody awful.’
‘I feel bloody awful,’ I said. ‘And it doesn’t help when everybody keeps on calling me “son”.’
He didn’t seem to mind my rudeness and did all he could to help. Since there was nothing else to do but set off home, I trudged with the walking wounded through the mud and rubble and between the wreckage and the little clusters of bodies, until I reached brigade headquarters. Someone rang for a lorry and I was told to meet it at a village two miles further back. Someone offered me another drink but I shook my head and set off walking again. The lorry turned up eventually and I climbed in. The driver said nothing, probably guessing how I was feeling, and we jolted back to the squadron.
The adjutant was the first person I saw. Everybody was in the mess when I arrived, and he was just leaving his office.
‘Thank God you’ve turned up,’ he said. ‘You’d better get on the telephone.’
‘Why?’
‘The major didn’t come back. They say he flew into some parked aeroplanes.’
‘So that was the major,’ I said. ‘They got Munro as well, did you know?’
‘Yes. We thought they’d got you, too. Somebody said they saw you hit a house. There’s a new CO coming over in a couple of days but until then you’re running the show again.’
I nodded and began to walk towards the office. This was the fourth time I’d had temporary command of a squadron so it didn’t worry me because I knew what to do. I felt sorry about the major but with Munro it was different and I just couldn’t face the thought. Munro and I had done two tours together – three, if you counted the one in Bloody April when they’d sent us all home early because the squadron had been decimated.
I just couldn’t believe it. I felt numb and I didn’t feel like eating so I didn’t go near the mess and no one came near me. The other man in the hut, Jones’ replacement, was still a stranger; I had nothing to say to him and fortunately he didn’t try to start a conversation. Perhaps he guessed how I felt.
I felt a thousand years old and certain I’d never survive another day.
Chapter 10
As it happened, the weather was so awful the next day there was no flying at all, so I started ringing round the hospitals in the vicinity to find out if Munro had turned up. Nobody seemed to have heard of him and I could only imagine he’d died on the way back and they’d buried him somewhere alongside the road. In the end there was nothing for it but to break the news to Barbara Hatherley. I’d once promised I’d go personally but we were so far forward by this time it was impossible and even getting through to Charley by telephone took hours. I made it in the end, however, and she listened in silence while I told her, then I heard her m
ake a little hiccoughing noise. ‘Oh, Martin,’ she said, ‘how shall I do it?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said wretchedly. ‘But someone’s got to and you’d be the best.’
It left me feeling as if the world had ended. It was just as Munro himself had once said – we were like gladiators, killing without feeling because it was our business, risking our lives for someone else’s profit, doing it without emotion or pleasure or even excitement any longer. We’d been worn numb by fighting, and become stale with slaughter and soured by our trade.
Life had to go on, however, and in an effort to cheer us up, the next night the adjutant laid on a party in the mess on the flimsy excuse that the end of the war was near. It was the usual lunatic affair with crazy speeches and the behaviour of schoolboys afterwards. Someone started a rugby match with the adjutant’s hat and, with the squadron band playing Orpheus In The Underworld at top speed from the sidelines, more than a few bruises and black eyes were collected. Everybody felt better, however, because it let off a lot of steam and let loose a lot of the frustration everybody felt and, if the laughter was a little forced, as the drink flowed it gradually became more genuine and everybody stopped bothering to think. There was even someone who could play for a sing-song but, though he was red-hot on Chopin, he somehow hadn’t the verve that Munro had. I stayed to the end, determined like everyone else to dredge up every scrap of good cheer that was left, but I found when I reached my billet afterwards that I was stone-cold sober and curiously flattened in spirit.
It was November now and we knew the war couldn’t last much longer. But peace just didn’t seem possible after four long years, though it was being said now that the Germans had actually thrown in the towel at last and were asking for the fighting to stop, that the strikes in Germany were giving way even to mutiny in the fleet and that the soldiers were refusing to go to the front. I still found it hard to believe. There had been rumours of peace ever since the end of the Somme but nothing had ever come of them and, while it was obvious the Germans were beaten in France, I just didn’t think they’d start screaming for mercy before they’d reached their own frontier.