by Peter Rimmer
"Where are you from?" asked the German.
"My accent, I suppose… Africa. Rhodesia. You chaps killed my brother, or I'd still be over there."
When Harry looked round, Fishy Braithwaite was walking away in the opposite direction still wearing his goggles. Harry waited for the sergeant to escort the German to the mess. Then he walked across and picked up the gun, slipping it into his pocket. He did not think anyone had seen him. Then he began to shiver from the cold. And fear. If there had been a senior officer anywhere he knew he would have handed in the gun. What Fishy Braithwaite was going to do was murder in Harry's book. Even in time of war. As he walked to his room behind the officers' mess, the gun was heavy in his trouser pocket. Then he put on his army greatcoat and went for a walk in the rain. There was a pond half a mile away. Harry checked he was alone, took the pistol from his pocket and tossed it out into the water, where it sank out of sight. Fear, cold fear had a firm grip on the inside of Harry's stomach. He was no longer so sure he was coming out of this war alive.
The weather closed in again and it was unlikely they would fly the next day. The rain intensified. The airstrip was deeply waterlogged. Harry took himself off to the only bathroom in the old farmhouse and soaked in a hot bath. Fishy Braithwaite had gone off in his open sports car despite the rain. He was still wearing his flying goggles. The senior captain, still in his teens, a boy, gave the order to post machine-gun crews at each end of the runway, the guns mounted on stands so the gunners could fire up into the air.
Harry thought it should have been done before, as today had been the third attack on the makeshift aerodrome. Good officers planned ahead. Good officers out-thought the enemy. Heroics were one thing. Prevention was another.
Letting his mind drift, he went back into the comfort of the bush. Everything was simple in the bush. Dangerous but more predictable. One lion behaved much like another. Animals had their habits and rarely strayed. They drank from the same waterhole. Mostly emptied out yesterday's food at the same spot with the whole family. Birds nested every year at the same time. Trees flowered when they were meant to flower. The migration of birds happened every year. The bush was predictable. Nature was on time. Inside one lion's head was the same thoughts and instincts of any other lion. Unless the lion was sick. Had an abscess. Was in pain.
When it came to man, the worst thing to do was judge another person by what one would do oneself. Inside every man's head was a different set of thoughts. No man was quite certain what was in another man's head. To try to work out the next move of a rational man was hard enough and mostly a calculated guess. What was going on in the head of Fishy Braithwaite was beyond Harry's comprehension. In normal times, his ranting at the crashed German aircraft, heard by nearly everyone on the station, would have had him carted off to an asylum.
The fire in the room with the bar which had previously been the parlour of the French farmhouse and the most comfortable room in the house, was burning high, competing with the storm outside. The big guns were silent. The machine-gun and rifle fire from twenty miles away were muffled by the distance and the storm. The corporal who was now a private was still behind the bar doing the same job for less pay. If he had complained he might have been sent into the trenches.
After his third drink sitting alone silently at the bar, the senior captain sat down next to him on a bar stool. The barman was at the end of the bar.
"Did you pick it up again?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Do you have it?"
"No. Threw it in the pond…"
"Quite a tackle."
"What are you going to do?"
"Nothing… You knew him at Oxford. Did you ever call him 'Fishy' to his face?"
"All the time."
"Oh, dear God. No wonder he looks at you that way."
"It's worse. There's a woman. Once his fiancée. She thinks she's in love with me. Braithwaite knows. I think he is going to let me get myself killed. Where is the prisoner?"
"We sent him back straightaway."
"Look out. Our CO has just walked into the room… Don't worry about me. And no, I don't love the woman in question. Fact is, she's about as obsessed as Braithwaite."
Sara Wentworth received the letter the next day. It was still raining over most of France. All the casualties from the last hate had been sent back to the hospital in Calais. For the first time in a week, the tent was empty of wounded soldiers. Sara was smoking a cigarette, something she had taken up on arrival in France. The cigarettes calmed her nerves. The one doctor was also smoking, sitting in a canvas chair next to the bucket fire. Both of them were frozen at the back and warm in front from the fire. Inch wide holes let the heat from the coals warm her feet. She took the letter from the runner and recognised the handwriting. Her first instinct was to throw the whole thing in the fire. She kept it in her lap for when she was alone.
"Don't you read your mail?" said the doctor. He was sweet on her. She smiled at him now and turned the envelope on its face. To stop the doctor looking at her she pushed her index finger under the flap and crudely broke open the envelope.
My dear fiancée,
You will be pleased to hear your friend from Africa is now under my command. You should not have mentioned his name.
Your loving Mervyn.
The key to the safety-deposit box had fallen out onto her lap.
She slipped the key into the large front pocket of the white apron and threw the rest on the fire. Then she went outside the tent and was sick in the mud and the rain. Her feet were quickly icy cold.
Down the line towards Amiens the British guns started up again. There was a new exchange of heavy artillery. A new hate.
By the time they were able to fly again from the airfield it was the last day in January. It was the second time Harry had taken off to fly into action. They had waited until three o'clock in the afternoon. Only three aircraft took to the air, led by Major Braithwaite. They had not flown for five days. The leaden sky had gone. There were a few white fluffy clouds, with some blue high in the sky. The leftover water on the ground was already beginning to freeze. By the time they came back the mud would be hard frozen. If it wasn't, they would probably tip over on landing, with the front wheels stuck in the mud.
Harry had never taken off before in such conditions and twice taxied his plane around pools of water. He knew Fishy Braithwaite was looking at him, though he could not make out the man's expression behind the goggles. The third pilot was the senior captain who had ordered the machine guns to be placed at both ends of the runway.
They took off badly, Harry just clearing the mounted machine gun. Then they were up in the afternoon sun, dodging around the big clouds, making for the front line where the new hate had been going on for two days. With the weather clearing, the spotter balloons had been cranked up on their cables into the sky. Harry forgot the airfield he had left behind. All his instincts were concentrating on keeping alive, his head moving constantly as he searched the sky. He was flying his biplane thirty feet to the back and left of Fishy Braithwaite. Keeping his eye on the major as much as the sky. The British balloons below were halfway up to their spotting height, the ground crews laboriously cranking up steel cables. They flew for half an hour to the limit of their patrol line and turned, curving over the German front line at six thousand feet. Even if he had wanted to look down, Harry kept his eyes on the surrounding sky and his CO. There was now little wind at six thousand feet and the higher clouds had expanded, squeezing the pockets of blue sky.
At the moment his hair rose on the nape of his neck, Harry kicked left rudder, scudding his biplane to bring it round onto 'the belly of the leopard'. The German tracer passed harmlessly through the air where he had been flying. The Fokker triplanes had the same black tailplanes that had shot up the airfield earlier in the week. There were six of them. Gaining height as he had been taught, Harry flew into a cloud, flying blind for half a minute. When he came out he was alone in the sky. The s
un was down on the horizon, straight in his eyes. Shielding the sun with his gloved right hand, Harry found his bearings, much as he had done in the bush and headed for their airfield. He was the first to land on the hardened mud, the daylight almost gone.
The pilots and the ground crew waited on the ground, listening for the sound of the De Havilland engines. When the sound came the pilots cheered. The CO's plane landed first down the wheel line made by Harry during his landing. Only the top of the mud was hard. When the captain landed to the left of the CO it was too dark to see where he was landing and too dark to make a circuit and land in the CO's tracks. The biplane cartwheeled halfway down the field and burst into flame, the captain still strapped into a seat. The man burnt, screaming.
Harry was quite sure he was not going to make it through the war.
"Why did you run, Brigandshaw? First bit of action and you run for the cloud." Fishy Braithwaite was laughing. "Thought you big game hunters were tougher than that. You'd better keep on getting lucky or it'll be all over for you. The idea is to fight the Germans not run away. But you Rhodesians wouldn't understand that now would you? Colonials are all the same. Wrong backbone or they wouldn't have left the island in the first place… Maybe you will fight next time. We shall see. We can only hope."
"Would he have been your pilot choice if he had not sighted the machine guns at each end of the runway?" asked Harry.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"I hope not, Fishy, I really hope not."
"DON'T CALL ME FISHY," screamed Braithwaite.
"Sorry, sir. Just slipped out."
The pilot, now covered in foam, was still screaming, though he was lying on the ground. Harry was not sure if he wished for the captain to live or die.
Chapter 18: November 1916
Sallie Barker finished the newspaper article and wondered if there was any civilisation left in man. She questioned whether humanity learned anything from the journey out of the primeval slime.
She got up from her desk in the downtown business district of Johannesburg and looked out of her fourth floor window. In the distance she could see the yellow mine dumps, the tailings brought up from the bowels of the gold mines deep in the belly of the earth. A highveld wind was blowing loose soil in the clouds towards the city. Above, a bright blue sky, dotted with small white clouds belied the thunderstorm that wet Johannesburg most afternoons in November at around about four o'clock. The balance sheet she had been reading before her secretary brought in the Rand Daily Mail was covered by the discarded newspaper. The company, Serendipity Mining and Explosives, had increased profit by a multiple of ten throughout 1915. She was richer than she could ever have imagined.
The price of gold had risen the moment the war in Belgium and France bogged down into trench warfare. Albert Pringle's contact with Frederick St Clair had sent large quantities of fuses and percussion caps to India and the mining empire of Frederick's father-in-law. Benny Lightfoot, having returned to Johannesburg, now bought all his explosive supplies for his mines from Albert. The two of them had become friends. Tina, miffed, was usually left out of the conversation. But above everything else, the war and munitions had made them rich. Making shells to explode among Germans was where the money came from. Sallie shuddered. The battle of the Somme, generally regarded as finished by the journalist she had just read, had killed half a million British troops. Between the French battle at Verdun, and the British offensive on the Somme, both going on for months, two million young men on both sides of the war, the best of Europe, had perished. And very largely, according to the article Sallie put down in sickening disgust, the armies were in much the same place they started from.
Turning from her sightless stare out of the window, Sallie looked for the company profit and loss account which was attached to the balance sheet hidden under the morning newspaper. The small newsflash at the bottom of the front page caught her eyes.
'Rhodesian pilot receives second Military Cross in nine months. See page seven.'
Sallie turned the pages and on page seven, a man in flying gear looked back at her. He was somehow familiar. Forgetting what she had been looking for in the profit and loss account, she sat back in her chair and picked up the newspaper from her desk.
It was headed, Pilot's eighteenth confirmed kill in nine months. She began the article.
Son of well-known white hunter had turned the skills learned hunting lion and elephant in the African bush into hunting German aircraft in the sky. Harry Brigandshaw, son of famous hunter Sebastian Brigandshaw, who was killed by the Great Elephant, has now shot down more than any other Allied pilot in the first nine months of 1916. 33 Squadron, led by the legendary 'Mad' Major Braithwaite, has shot thirty-seven of the enemy out of the sky. There is talk in the Royal Flying Corps, soon to be renamed the Royal Air Force under General Trenchard, that the mad major and Captain Brigandshaw are racing each other for a Victoria Cross. The mad major has twenty-five kills, far less than Major Ball, VC. But if the war goes on long enough, and Braithwaite and Brigandshaw survive, they could both receive the supreme honour from the King. When Brigandshaw first joined Braithwaite's squadron in January of this year, Braithwaite had seventeen confirmed kills with the Military Cross and Bar. Brigandshaw is catching up. It is the stuff of men like this that will win us the war. This journalist salutes the both of them.
The article, Sallie read, had been copied with the permission from The Times of London. Taking a pair of scissors from her desk drawer she cut out the article to give to Albert Pringle. Then she thought again. In some ways it would be like giving him a white feather. And the last thing Sallie wanted was another rush of conscience and Albert running off to war. The Pringles had given enough sons to King and country.
Sallie carefully folded the article and put it in the drawer with the scissors. She remembered the name well from the SS King Emperor. Just the photograph had looked different. On the boat out from England, Harry had been a man shrouded in innocence. Now that had gone. She was now glad not to have had any brothers. Or a husband, she thought, thinking back to her first introduction to Harry on the boat. When they had both been innocent. When she had never ever heard of a whorehouse.
For the first time in months, Sallie thought of her mother. In her mother's hunt for a suitable husband for Sallie, she had found out something odd about Harry Brigandshaw's birth. That he was heir to far more than a farm in Rhodesia. After racking her brain for a few moments without success, she picked up the set of accounts and went back to work. They were sitting on far too much cash. Cash in the bank was good but idle. Money was made to invest.
With difficulty, she removed her mind from the immediacy of the war and thought how business would look when it was over. All wars came to an end. Even the hundred-year war in Europe. If this one lasted that long they would have killed the European race. Despite Benny Lightfoot's foreboding, America had at last come into the war to protect its investment in the British war effort. What could she do with an over-expanded explosive factory once the war came to an end?
She was still worrying and not finding an answer when her secretary knocked at her closed door. The door opened immediately and into the room was ushered Mrs Barker. Sallie had not seen her mother in nearly ten years. The woman looked dreadful. Rather like Lily White when she had arrived back at the end of her tether. Though where Lily White was as fat as a pig, Mrs Barker was as thin as a rake. Had thinking of her mother brought the devil through her door? For the second time Sallie shuddered.
"Hello, mother," Sallie said wearily, not getting up from her desk. There was no point in asking what she wanted. They all wanted the same. Money. It was the downside of being rich Sallie knew one day she would have to accept.
"Darling, how are you?" gushed Mrs Barker in her cheap clothes, trying her best.
It was hard for Sallie to imagine that once, in another world, she had suckled at this withered old woman's breasts. But she had. And the woman was still her
mother. Forcing away all her revulsion she got up and gave her mother a hug. Sensibly, the secretary had closed the door.
"So you work here?"
"No, mother, I own the place. With Albert Pringle. But I'm sure you know all about that."
The revulsion had washed over her in a drowning wave.
"We'd better go out and get some lunch," she said, pulling herself together.
"That would be nice, darling. Very nice."
"Do you have any luggage?"
"Not really, darling. But does that matter now?"
"No, it probably doesn't."
As she reached the door handle she had a brief flash of fat Herr Flugelhorne raping her as he farted, a picture she knew would never go away. The third shudder was the worst.
She took her mother to the main restaurant in the Grand, staring down the head waiter who sniffed at Mrs Barker's clothes. At the end of the meal she signed the bill adding ten per cent for the tip. The man was only doing his job. If every patron brought their destitute mothers to lunch the place would get a bad reputation. All through lunch she had let her mother tell the story of her humiliation. The Flugelhorne relations were never mentioned. Nothing else was mentioned other than how badly Mrs Barker had been done by. Starting with Sallie's father and ending with her last job as a housekeeper. The small severance pay from that job had paid the passage to Africa. Sallie was her mother's last chance.
With Lily White still ensconced in her house like a returning duchess, Sallie wondered what would become of her private life. But in a strange and true way, she owed both of them her life. They made her cross and she would have to bear them.
When they finally reached her home in Parktown it had begun to rain. Bill Hardcastle, who ran the house, helped Mrs Barker out of the open Bentley tourer. Then they all heard the thunder and went inside. By the time she was through the front door, it was clear Mrs Barker thought she owned the place.