The Bright Blue Sky

by Max Hennessy

  On the last day of the month, the Strutters were called on to do low reconnaissance work over the German trenches. It consisted largely of diving to fire the front gun then zooming upwards so that the observer could use his Lewis. It was a job for which the slow Strutters were quite unsuited and two disappeared in two days.

  “This war,” Foote announced portentously, “is growing goddamn dangerous.”

  The next day, Dicken flew with five others on a distant offensive patrol, crawling across the lines at 8000 feet. Archie plastered the sky on either side of them, but Dunne led them on, disregarding the fire until the lane of bursting shells through which they flew grew narrow enough to be dangerous. One of the Strutters began to lag behind with engine trouble and an Albatros appeared from nowhere toward its tail. Swinging around, Dicken fired a burst at it to drive it away and, as it swung off-course, held the Strutter steady so that the observer could have a steady aim. The Albatros appeared to go down out of control.

  Soon afterward, a second Strutter had to leave the formation but the rest flew steadily on below a layer of cloud. Despite the fact that they must have shown up clearly against the whiteness, the anti-aircraft guns had become silent and the silence put Dicken on the alert because silence usually meant danger. Staring about him, his eyes narrowed, some instinct told him Germans were about, despite the empty heavens. But nothing happened, and they were just about to turn toward home when a Camel fell out of the cloud directly in front of them, followed by a red and grey Albatros, the pilot swinging it from side to side and pumping bullets into the Camel whenever he could.

  Suspecting there might be other Germans about, the Strutters began to circle, each machine covered from front and rear by the guns of the rest. The Camel pilot dived beneath them, the German still on his tail, then tried to climb back toward them, still followed by the Albatros. As they passed, Dicken tried a snap shot and the German flew right through the stream of bullets which raked it from nose to tail. Fragments broke from the fuselage as it disappeared beneath them. Swinging around, Dicken saw it going down almost vertically in a curious uneven flicking turn, but the Camel was also going down a mile away in the same sort of uneven spiral. Close to the ground, a tiny spot of flame came from the Albatros and it began to trail smoke, then it seemed to level out and pass beneath them until finally it vanished into a patch of woodland.

  Confirmation on the crashed German came through within minutes of landing. With halves and odd portions he had shared with other pilots, Dicken’s score now amounted to three and a half. It wasn’t much and didn’t match Hatto’s score of nine but at least he was paying his way.

  He had achieved some skill and some success, but there had been no fiery meteor across the sky. He had started in the lowliest of jobs and it had taken a long, long time, much of it saddened by the deaths of friends. While the old men sat safely at home making the machines of war, finding the money – and making it, too! – and formulating the plans, it was the young who were being destroyed. He supposed it was always so. In the beginning it had worried him but now, older, tougher, wiser, more fatalistic, he had come to terms with it, so that only occasionally, as when Hatto had vanished, did he feel a sense of hopelessness and anguish.

  They were just celebrating the crashed Albatros when news came in that leave was on again and, as Dicken’s name was top of the list, he was told he could go with Foote the following morning.

  “My kid brother’s arrived in England,” Foote said. “I’ll get to see him, I guess. They’re training in Norfolk somewhere.”

  The London papers were full of a big defeat in Italy where the Austrians, who had been facing the Italians in the Trentino, had been reinforced by the Germans and what had been a quiet area had suddenly flared up into a disastrous battle on the Isonzo which had forced the Italians to start a retreat from Caporetto. The entire Italian front appeared to have collapsed and for the first time in three years the war had become one of movement again. It seemed to have taken even the Germans by surprise and there was a great danger of Italy being knocked out of the war.

  It didn’t seem to have affected London much, however. It was full of strange uniforms and it was hard to celebrate being home because there seemed to be nothing to drink, and only the reserves of an American captain they met saved them from dying of thirst. Dicken’s mother seemed pleased to see him but she couldn’t understand why he wanted to spend part of his leave with Foote in London, and it was hard to explain that England felt like a foreign country and Foote was part of the real life he lived in France.

  Together, they looked up Hatto. He was still limping a little but was in high spirits because he’d pulled strings to get himself put on Bristols.

  “You’ve got to get us on to Bristols, too, Willie,” Dicken said. “People get killed in Strutters.”

  A group of Americans led by Foote’s brother were holding a party at a house they’d rented near the West End and Foote dragged Dicken along. His brother was a junior edition of himself, tall, shambling, always smiling, with the same good looks and crisp curling blond hair, but he seemed centuries younger and Dicken put it down to the fact that Walt Foote had seen too much of the war.

  The party was a wild affair and Dicken woke the following morning on the settee, with a girl’s silk stocking round his neck. Low mutterings were coming from the bedroom as he dressed.

  The rest of the leave followed much the same pattern. His mother was called to look after a sick relative in the Midlands, so he took her north and spent two days with her before heading back to London to rejoin Foote. Growing bored with parties, he decided he’d better return home for the last day or two. Annys Toshack no longer meant much to him but he decided Zoë might be willing to spend an evening with him and might be fun.

  There was an official-looking letter awaiting him when he arrived. To his surprise it instructed him not to return to France at the end of his leave but to report to Upavon in Wiltshire. He had no idea what it meant but he regarded it as offering him a little more life to live. Nothing could be worse than 1½-Strutters, and Upavon was a long way from Richthofen and his circus.

  A few enquiries by telephone revealed that virtually every kind of airplane made was available at Upavon, even a few captured German ones which had been flown to England for evaluation, and he automatically connected the good news with the battle going on in Italy and assumed that he was part of a big move-around of units and personnel brought about by the disaster. Whichever way he looked at it, it remained good news and he decided to celebrate by asking Zoë out to dinner, though he guiltily wondered if it was because he wished to see her or because she had access to her father’s motor. To his surprise he found her sewing and in no mood to go anywhere.

  “No time,” she said sharply. “I’ve got to finish this.”

  “I expected to see you in the garage under a motor,” he said. “What’s going on?”

  She glared at him. “Wedding,” she said shortly.

  “Yours?”

  “No, you ass! Annys’. She’s getting married to Arthur Diplock.”

  “Is he home?”

  “Shouldn’t he be?”

  “My God, he works fast!” He explained how little operational flying Diplock had done.

  “He must have done more than that,” Zoë said. “He’s got a DSO.”

  “He’s got what?” Dicken was furious. “My God, what it is to be at the seat of power. They tell me that at headquarters they play snakes and ladders for ’em.”

  Gradually she wormed out of him what had happened. “Well,” she said. “You’d better get over it because you’ll be invited to the wedding.”

  “To hell with the wedding!”

  “I’d like to say the same. With the war, you can’t get anyone to do anything for you because everybody’s making fortunes in factories, so we’ve got to do it all ourselves, and I can’t touch a car
in case I get grease on my fingers and it gets on the dress.” She looked at Dicken. “For God’s sake, Dicky boy, if you’re asked, come. Arthur Diplock’s family’s claimed all the seats in the church because we’re a bit short of relatives and we shall need a little support.” She jabbed her finger and swore. “These bloody needles and cottons!” she said bitterly. “Why the hell can’t Annys get married in something I can fasten on with nuts and bolts? Women always get themselves up like Christmas puddings so their males can look on them as sacrificial offerings – all soft and clinging and virginal.”

  Dicken laughed. “Wouldn’t you get dressed up like that if you were getting married?”

  “Not on your life! I’m not having the Rector mooing over me about eternal love and till death us do part, for ever and ever, amen. Statistics show that only about ten per cent of all marriages are happy, ten per cent are murderous, and the other eighty per cent are just boredom. Marriage’s just something invented by human beings to make sure of a cosy old age. I’m a liberated woman, and the liberated woman’s coming, Dicky boy. I told you she would.”

  “What is a liberated woman, anyway?”

  “One of them works at the airdrome at Shoreham. They gave her a fortnight off to help with the wedding.”

  “What are you doing there? Typing?”

  “Typing?” She gave him a disgusted look. “Engines. I’m an inspector. The foreman was having a hard time with the girls so someone had the bright idea of placing a woman in charge. As there aren’t many who know anything about engines, I got the job.”

  “Doesn’t it involve some odd hours?”

  “I’ve taken a flat in Worthing, and I’ve got a runabout to get to and fro.”

  “Don’t you share it with anybody?”

  “Why should I? Mother doesn’t think much of it but Father’s with the army at Brighton now and he’s supposed to keep an eye on me. As a matter of fact, I think he’s got a girl friend and I’ve never seen him since the first week or so. Mother doesn’t know, of course. She thinks he comes around regularly.”

  It seemed to suggest all sorts of dangers and reminded Dicken of something Diplock had said.

  “Who’s this Canadian I hear you’re going about with?” he asked.

  She gave him a quick look. “Who told you that? Arthur Diplock?”

  “Yes. Is it true?”

  “It’s Casey Harman. He came over here to learn to fly and got a job with Sopwiths. He’s got more money than he knows what to do with and after the war he’s going in for building airplanes himself.”

  She didn’t volunteer any further information and he wondered what there was between them, and if the Canadian were liberated too.

  Five

  When Dicken arrived at Pewsey, the station for Upavon, Foote was also there, standing on the platform waiting for a tender to pick him up and take him to the airdrome.

  “Willie, I guess,” he grinned. “Pulling strings. I must get him to pull a few for the kid brother.”

  Their duties turned out to be very vague. Upavon was a bleak, windswept, inhospitable place and their attachment seemed to be very uncertain and very temporary. They were given a job checking machines for design and appearance, the way they handled, their suitability, comfort, and areas of vision, but it occupied very little of their time and they slipped in and out of the camp as they pleased. It wasn’t far to Sussex and, buying from a local doctor going into the army a small wheezy two-seater known as One-Lung, Dicken was able to get home easily, putting Foote en route on the train for London, where his brother was learning to fly.

  Most of the pilots at Upavon had seen hard service in France and many of them were itching to get back. They didn’t like the atmosphere in England where the civilians tended to regard the war as if it were a rather rougher type of football match, and they didn’t like the way men who had never heard a shot fired in anger were picking up rewards. However, the disaster in Italy had started a panic around the home stations where comfortably-established officers began to reflect the politicians’ alarm by imagining, not for the first time since 1914, that the war was about to be decided in Germany’s favour. To their great alarm, some were even snatched from what they had considered secure jobs and sent to France to replace those hurriedly dispatched to help the Italians, and it came as no surprise to Dicken and Foote to learn they were not going back on 1½-Strutters.

  “Experienced men are being kept at home,” they were told, “to give their knowledge to new squadrons which are being formed. Some of you will be given flights. Some will be given squadrons. You’re to do all the flying you can. On Bristols.”

  There was a saying that an airplane that was good to look at was also good to fly, and the Bristol looked good. Fitted with a Rolls Royce engine, because of its size it looked like a fighter and Dicken studied it like a man buying a horse. It had a businesslike air about it and, while the pilot, boxed in between the upper and lower wings, was virtually blind above, the observer had a good arc of fire.

  Hatto turned up at Upavon soon afterward and, deciding it would be pleasant if they could all go to the same squadron, they began to play poker to decide who should have command of the squadron and who should have command of the flights.

  “I guess we should give Willie the squadron,” Foote decided. “After all, the guy’s been in this goddamn war since the beginning but he doesn’t seem to progress much.”

  “Lieutenant to lieutenant in three years,” Hatto smiled. “What a career.”

  “Comes of getting wounded so much,” Dicken said.

  “And making so many enemies. Careless all around.”

  There was still no sign of them moving and the war didn’t change much. Hatto appeared to have a direct line to the War Office and came up every day with the name of someone else they knew who had been killed – Dunne had flown into a house and Friedmann had been killed by a student pilot he was instructing – but, despite the casualties, despite Italy, in England there remained a strange offhand attitude to the war. The politicians seemed to be giving more of their time to their party squabbles than to beating the Germans and there was a lack of realism among the people who provided the new airplanes. Even the SE5, a well-built fighter sturdy enough to stand up to the rough and tumble of air fighting, appeared to be badly undergunned.

  “Why in God’s name stick one gun on the upper wing?” Dicken asked. “If you tried to reload it, the slipstream would slap the ammunition drum into your face like a soup plate in a gale. I bet no pilot thought of that.”

  “Some chap like Parasol Percy, shouldn’t wonder,” Hatto said. “Hear he’s no longer the colonel’s pilot, by the way. Aide now. His languages, y’see. Sits in an office and tells people what to do and where they’re posted. Getting married they tell me.”

  “I’ve got an invitation to the wedding,” Dicken said. “He’s marrying my girl friend’s sister.”

  Diplock himself turned up later that week. The Wing colonel had been posted home and brought him with him. They arrived by car.

  “At least a car’s safe to fly,” Foote said as they watched them climb out. “Never leaves the ground.”

  Diplock was at the bar when they arrived in the mess and, finding himself face-to-face with them, he seemed at a loss. They were an anarchical trio and he was unsure how to deal with them. “Have a drink?” he suggested nervously.

  Dicken was on the point of refusing when Hatto nodded.

  “Jolly decent of you,” he said. “After all, when a chap’s getting married, he has to push the old boat out a bit, doesn’t he?”

  “What the hell did you do that for?” Dicken demanded later. “I didn’t want to drink with the bastard.”

  “Peace, child,” Hatto said calmly. “Leave it all to your Uncle Willie, who’s a devious, conniving, calculating sort of cove always known to have something up his sleeve for
gadgets such as Diplock.”

  It almost started a quarrel between them but that afternoon a Camel flew in and everybody wanted to try it.

  “Shouldn’t be difficult,” Hatto said. “Same engine as a Strutter so you don’t have to learn any new tricks.”

  In fact, there were a lot of new tricks to learn because, after the Strutter, flying a Camel was like flying a wild animal. All the other Sopwiths Dicken had flown had been stable, well-behaved and smooth to handle, but the Camel had to be held back all the time because it seemed eager to wrench itself free. Handled with confidence and intelligence, it was a superlative machine but it was always quick to take advantage of stupidity or nervousness. Because of its short fuselage and stubby wings, the big rotary engine tended to force the nose down in a right-hand turn and it didn’t take Dicken long to discover that to avoid losing height he had to apply left rudder the minute the manoeuvre began and hold it on hard. Then the Camel would turn on a sixpence.

  “She’ll never catch anything by surprise, though,” he admitted. “She’s not fast enough. So all you can do is sit up high and go down like a stone. Still, when you’ve gone down, all you do is pull the stick back and she goes straight up again like a lift.”

  “I like nice comfortable airplanes,” Foote said.

  “Nice comfortable airplanes get shot down,” Dicken insisted. “I reckon I could enjoy flying Camels. I’d be hard to hit, and that counts more for me than being nice and steady. Besides, you can recognise ’em a mile away and the Huns’ll probably think twice before going for ’em. They know Camels waltz their way out of anything.”

  At the weekend Hatto announced he was going to Diplock’s wedding.

  “Not as a guest, of course,” he pointed out hastily. “Not invited. Just to the reception. Drink the bride’s health.”

  “You won’t catch me drinking his health,” Dicken said.

  “Didn’t say we were going to,” Hatto said mysteriously. “Just the bride’s.”