The Bright Blue Sky

by Max Hennessy

  He was subdued when he landed and in no mood to celebrate. “It comes no easier to see men die,” he admitted. “I wanted like hell for him to get down safely.”

  Two days later, he caught the Aviatik that so troubled the Italian artillery. He had flown a patrol with Foote’s brother but, separated by a skirmish with three Albatroses, he was heading home alone along the Piave when his eye caught a movement beneath him and he realised he was looking down on the checkered machine flying over the pebbled patches of the river. Swinging into a gentle glide, he dropped down on it, firing as soon as he was within range. As the Aviatik swung violently southward, he followed and its manoeuvres grew more desperate. As he forced it closer and closer to the steep sides of the Montello, the pilot, realising he was losing space to manoeuvre, tried to climb away but the machine hit the side of the hill and, as wings and spars crumpled, it slid along the ground on its belly, crashing through a stone wall and finally standing on its nose in a rainwater gully.

  During the afternoon an artillery officer arrived in a car with a soldier carrying a large bunch of flowers which was handed over with a great many smiles and kisses on the cheek to indicate their gratitude. During the evening a colonel from Wing arrived and, a little like a conjuror producing a rabbit from a hat, Diplock produced the pilot of the Aviatik. He was a Hungarian called Ferenc who had got away with nothing more than a broken arm, though his observer had died in the crash. He seemed relieved to be alive but, as nobody could speak his language, the meeting produced very little, though the colonel seemed suitably impressed.

  “Five in two days,” Diplock told him. “Nobody can say we aren’t pulling our weight.”

  The news had reached the Aubreys when Dicken went to see them that Sunday. They were about to leave for church and Aubrey was standing in the hall brushing his top hat with his sleeve.

  “My dear boy,” he said. “I’ve heard you’ve been risking your life again. Five in two days I hear. The fiancé of our maid works at the airfield and he brings the news.”

  As they talked, the children crowded around, yelling to be noticed, and Marie-Gabrielle swung on Dicken’s arm.

  “Nicola saw you coming,” she said. “She’s gone upstairs to put stuff on her face. They say you’ve killed a lot of Austrians. Is it difficult?”

  “Not really. You just point the airplane at them and pull the trigger and they fall down.”

  “Could you make one fall outside our house so we could see?”

  Dicken frowned. “I don’t think you’d like it very much if you did.”

  “Our father says he wouldn’t either. And so does Nicola. But she’s a bit soppy. Are you going to marry her?”

  “I hadn’t thought of it.”

  “If you don’t marry her, will you marry me?”

  Dicken grinned down at the pair of huge dark eyes staring up at him. “I’ll make a note of it for when you’re old enough.”

  “How old do you have to be?”

  “A bit older than you.”

  Marie-Gabrielle considered. “I suppose I could wait a bit,” she said.

  Mrs Aubrey arrived with a rush, to embrace him and kiss him on both cheeks and a moment later, Nicola appeared, wearing the blue outfit made for the parade.

  “You were wearing green a minute ago,” Marie-Gabrielle accused.

  “Sssh!” Mrs Aubrey shooed her away with the others but she clung to the door as she was dragged outside.

  “If you’re going to church with Nicola,” she asked, “can I sit behind and watch what happens?”

  “Dick doesn’t go to church with us,” Nicola said shortly. “We’re Catholic and he’s not.”

  “I shouldn’t think God would mind, would he?” Dicken chided gently.

  “Protestants can’t take Communion with us. And that’s important, especially when my brother’s to become a priest.”

  Dicken was disappointed. He could think of nothing pleasanter than sitting alongside Nicola in a quiet church, letting himself be absorbed into the ancient ritual. The fact that it wasn’t his church or his ritual seemed to matter very little.

  “Still,” she smiled at him, “I’d be happy if you’d walk there with us.”

  They spoke very little as they headed along the street between the old brown houses, surrounded by Italian women in the inevitable black. Aubrey and his wife walked behind with the other children in a small crocodile.

  As Dicken sat on a bench alongside the church, Italian soldiers tramped northward past him, with here and there small groups of lorries, mule carts and wagons piled with hay, lumber, wine casks, flour, shells, barbed wire and ammunition. The weather had changed and the sun was warm as he sat smoking. Overhead he could hear an airplane droning away in the distance beyond the acacias.

  Marie-Gabrielle was the first to reappear, hurtling out of the church like something shot from a gun to fling herself into Dicken’s arms.

  “I pretended I felt sick,” she said.

  “And did you?”

  “Not really. Our father says I take a lot of looking after. I’m delicate, you see.”

  “You look as tough as an old seaboot.”

  “I’ve got a wasting disease. Listen.” She coughed energetically. “Here’s Nicola. She was praying for you. I heard her.”

  Being prayed for was a new sensation to Dicken. He assumed his mother prayed for him but he couldn’t somehow imagine Zoë doing it. She probably didn’t even believe in God.

  As they walked back to the house – “In formation,” Dicken said – with the family just ahead, Nicola slipped a small packet into his hand.

  “What is it?”

  “You wear it around your neck. Promise you will. It’s a St Anthony medal. To keep you safe.”

  “Even though I’m not a Catholic?”

  He was teasing but there was a hurt look in her eyes and later in the garden she asked him if Protestants ever thought of becoming Catholics.

  “I’ve never thought of it,” he said honestly.

  “It would make things more easy if they did.”

  “What sort of things?”

  She blushed. “I don’t think mother approves of Catholics marrying non-Catholics.”

  Dicken smiled. “Who’s going to get married?”

  She blushed and stumbled lamely over an excuse, trying to pretend it concerned a cousin of hers. It was transparent, however, and she’d clearly been entertaining private hopes. When he considered the idea, it didn’t seem a bad one. Because of the war and the life a pilot lived, girls seemed especially important, gentle and tender and twice as precious despite all the smutty talk in the mess, and this one was the beauty of the family.

  He looked at Nicola with new interest, conscious of her naïvety and innocence. He’d been aware from the moment he’d first met her of her interest in him, but this was something different. Marriage had never crossed his mind and he’d regarded her just as part of a warm-hearted, friendly family, but the idea had begun to take root by the time he returned to camp and was given an extra fillip by the fact that mail had arrived and there were several letters on his bed from England. One was from Zoë and announced that she was learning to fly.

  “Casey takes me up on the pretence of testing,” she wrote, “and lets me handle the controls. He says I’m a natural pilot.”

  The letter bubbled over with excitement and it was impossible not to feel her enthusiasm.

  “The sky’s so big and so blue,” she said. “I feel when I’m up there that I’m like Columbus journeying into the unknown.”

  Her delight made him smile, but when he looked at the letter again, he realised it was remarkably short of affection and barely mentioned him.

  Two

  It was growing apparent that the Austrians were preparing for an offensive. Since everybody who arrived
from France said the Germans were preparing for an offensive there, too, it was probable the two would start together so that allied reserves could not be moved from one front to the other.

  The number of aircraft opposite increased and, as they grew more aggressive, Diplock’s visits to the line to watch his patrols at work noticeably grew less frequent and he made a great deal of the amount of paperwork which kept him chained to his desk. As the days grew longer, continuous air cover was ordered with more patrols but, since they couldn’t increase their strength, they could only increase the number of patrols by reducing the number of aircraft flying together.

  Hatto’s flight was having a bad time. Because the Bristol Fighter had proved itself a redoubtable aircraft, they were expected to fly without escort and, sent out singly, had lost several, so that Camels finally had to be provided to see them safely to and from their targets. Just when they were growing a little desperate, however, more machines arrived and they became a two-flight squadron, still under Diplock’s general command, and began to provide their own escorts.

  The increased activity set Foote worrying about his brother. Like all newcomers, young Foote had been hot-headed, eager to win the war and inclined to do foolish things and, though the attack on the power station at Lugagnano had shaken him, he still seemed to consider it his duty to do better than his brother and was always coming back with his machine shot full of holes.

  “Look, you crazy kid,” Foote stormed at him. “Why don’t you listen to what a guy with experience tells you? The war isn’t going to end tomorrow! Beginners don’t see things the same way the old hands do. Get some flying hours in first. Give yourself time to get used to things.”

  Young Foote smiled bleakly and slapped his brother on the back. It was obvious he thought he was slow and unaggressive.

  “I reckon you’re nuts,” Foote said. “I’m going to have a word with Parasol Percy not to use you on the long patrols.”

  “Don’t you goddam dare!”

  Foote’s good-natured face was troubled as he watched his brother walk away, his shoulders stiff with hurt pride. “Aw, hell,” he said unconvincingly. “The guy’s old enough to take care of himself.”

  Another attempt was made to bomb the Lugagnano power station, this time by the Bristols, and with the same results as before. Three failed to return.

  “Don’t those bloody people at Wing ever come and see for themselves what’s going on?” Hatto said.

  The next day, in a sky vivid with thousands of little clouds like puffy dumplings which would burn off as the sun grew stronger, Dicken led his five Camels over the line. Catching a faint movement against the checkered ground below him, like insects moving in long grass, he realised it was caused by ten camouflaged DVs escorting three Aviatik two-seaters along the river where they were taking photographs of the Italian positions.

  With an Austrian push just in the future, every reconnaissance machine shot down meant one more small item of information unfurnished, one more portion of the line not surveyed; and, to Dicken, people like young Foote, who considered it unsporting to attack slow two-seaters when there were fast and dangerous fighters about, had got it all wrong. Falling out of the sun, he drove for the centre of the formation so that the Austrian machines were obliged to leap apart like a flock of startled birds. As they scattered, he headed for the nearest of the two-seaters and, firing a burst, saw it lift upward then stall and fall over to one side in a flop-winged dive.

  The other two-seaters had dived away, escorted by two of the DVs, and were trying to continue their reconnaissance further west. Wrenching the Camel round in a tight bank, so that the blood drained from his face, he overhauled the rearmost of them near Roda. The Aviatik went down in a dive, a thin plume of escaping petrol trailing behind. A minute red glow appeared underneath the fuselage, gradually changing to smoke which grew thicker to become a black banner curving through the air behind the stricken machine. There was a flash of flame and he saw the pilot’s mouth open in a cry of fear and pain, and the airplane, a mass of flames from wingtip to wingtip, fell away, small burning fragments of canvas detaching themselves as it went. Catching a whiff of oily smoke, he watched it fall to pieces, the burning front half separating from the tail and falling like a bright spark across the sky.

  For a second, he stared at the drifting smoke with narrowed eyes, then one of the DVs flashed past him and dived away north at full speed. As he followed it up the valley and took up a position behind it, it began to manoeuvre wildly, trying to lift out of what was rapidly becoming a trap. But, with Dicken sitting above it, it had to dive away again and again until it finally flew into the rising ground.

  Diplock was over the moon, and the Wing colonel appeared at dinner again that night. Congratulating Dicken, he told him he’d put him in for a medal and that the Italians had awarded him the Croce di Guerra for his earlier victories.

  “With all that metal hanging on your chest,” Foote said, “you’ll jangle like a goddam Clerget with a broken ball race.”

  The Wing colonel also told them that the Russians, torn by revolution and with the Tsar a Bolshevik prisoner, had signed surrender terms at Brest-Litovsk. There were long faces at once, because it meant the Germans had not only secured access to new supplies of oil and food and cleared the way to Central Asia so that they could join up with the Turks and threaten India, but had also disposed of the dangerous Eastern Front and could transfer troops to France for a new drive to the sea.

  “The bloody war will probably go on for ever,” Foote said.

  “One did once,” Dicken pointed out. “The Hundred Years War.”

  “Hundred Years War?” Foote looked shocked. “I bet business went down a bit. What were they fighting about?”

  “I think they forgot long before it finished. If this one goes on for a hundred years, we’ll be flying airplanes at three hundred miles an hour.”

  “They couldn’t make airplanes to go that fast. They’d fall apart.”

  Hatto smiled. “They once said,” he pointed out, “that motor cars couldn’t go faster than twelve miles an hour.”

  The following week news reached them of a massive German offensive in France. Helped by fog, the Germans had broken through the British lines and had split the allied armies in two.

  “Here we go,” Foote said. “Year one of the new Hundred Years War.”

  By the end of the week they’d heard that half the ground captured with such sacrifice in 1916 had been lost and that the Germans were almost back to the positions they had held in 1914.

  “It makes you wonder what all the last three years were for,” Hatto said.

  When Dicken visited the Aubreys that night, they had lost a lot of their gaiety and Nicola was in a sombre mood. She’d just come from the hospital and was still wearing her uniform. Because of the impending Austrian offensive, they had been told to prepare wards for the arrival of wounded.

  Sitting in the music room in front of the piano, she played for a while, her expression blank, while Dicken turned the sheets over, then she dropped her hands in her lap and looked at him.

  “Shall we ever defeat the Germans?” she asked.

  “Bound to.” Dicken entered the argument briskly, though he honestly didn’t believe what he said. He had long since come to the conclusion that the war would go on for ever and that he and Foote and Hatto and all the others would never live to see the end of it. The thought lay like a spectre at the back of all his waking hours but it was something they none of them ever mentioned and he tried to sound enthusiastic and confident. “In the end,” he said, “we can’t fail. The Americans are arriving in France in their thousands. It’s bound to make a difference.”

  She sat silently for a little while and he leaned over and kissed her cheek.

  “Are you in love with me, Dick?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

&nbs
p; “And I with you. It’s very difficult.”

  He stared at her in frustration. His own views on religion were vague. To him God was a sort of benign Wing colonel who not only didn’t expect his subjects to go out and get killed but actually looked after them. He decided it was time to take a firmer grip on the situation and without a word he leaned forward and kissed her on the mouth. Up to that moment, his kisses had all been decorous salutations on the cheek and for a second she stared back at him, her eyes huge. Then, impulsively, she reached out for him and kissed him back. He put his arms around her and she clung to him, warm and trembling and feminine, and he wondered what he had ever seen in Zoë, with her brash manner and liberated approach to life.

  Then he saw her eyes were full of tears. As they spilled over and ran down her cheek, her expression became lost and a little afraid so that he wanted only to bring happiness back to it.

  “What are you crying about?” he asked. “Your mother and father don’t seem to mind me being a non-Catholic.”

  “They’re very broadminded.”