by John Wilson
“Manon,” Amelie shouts as she approaches, “where have you been?”
“It’s a long story,” I say, grinning happily at the sight of my friend. “Is the plane at Koolkerke?”
“It is, but the pilot is nervous. He won’t wait long.”
“Cycle back as fast as you can and tell him that we’re coming. He has to wait.”
Amelie nods and pedals off.
“Just as well I grew up on a farm,” Albert says, increasing his pace. “Lots of practice pushing carts of animal feed around.”
I walk beside the cart holding Florien’s hand. He’s still unconscious, but his breathing is regular and he groans at every bump in the road. His face looks relaxed and young. I think about what I’ll do when we reach the plane, and about whether I’ve made the right decision. Should I have taken Florien straight to the hospital and sent Albert to the plane on his own? I couldn’t think of a way to explain how a bullet hole from a German pistol got in my brother, especially after a dead officer is dragged from the canal.
It’s light enough to see the silhouette of the plane by the time we reach Amelie at the side of the road. The machine is long and sleek with a rounded nose and two engines. The pilot is sitting in the open cockpit beneath the upper wing, and the gunners’ positions in the nose and behind the pilot are open. The engines are running.
A CAUDRON PLANE
“A Caudron,” Albert says. “A French machine. Good piece of work.” He’s breathing heavily from the effort of pushing Florien’s cart.
“We must hurry,” Amelie says as we reach her. “Manon, you climb in behind the pilot. Albert can go in the nose.”
“I’m not going,” I say.
She stares at me. “You must. It’s too dangerous for you to stay.”
“Everything is dangerous in war,” I say. “With a German bullet in him, Florien will be in much more danger if he stays. And he will get better medical attention in London. Albert saw as much as I did in the dockyard, and he can pass on my photographs.” I hand him my camera, which he accepts with a nod.
“You can’t—” Amelie wants to argue, but she stops when she sees how determined I am. “All right,” she agrees reluctantly.
The three of us lift Florien over the fence and carry him across the field. As we lift him into the position behind the pilot, his eyes flicker open.
“Where am I?” he asks.
“On your way home,” I say.
He nods weakly and smiles. “You’re a good sister.”
“I know,” I agree, leaning forward to kiss him on the cheek. “Just get better.”
“It’s almost full daylight,” the pilot shouts back from the cockpit. “We can’t hang around all day.”
I jump down as Albert climbs into the gunner’s position in the nose. “Thank you, Manon!” he yells.
I suddenly think of something and jump onto the nose wheel so I’m level with Albert.
“Do me a favor?”
Albert nods.
“Try to get a message to a tunneler I know. His name’s Alec Shorecross. Last I heard, he was in 169 Tunnelling Company. Tell him I’m all right and I miss him.”
Albert grins. “I’ll pass on your message. You look after yourself. And thank you.”
“Come on, come on,” the pilot urges.
I jump back down onto the grass. The engine note increases. On an impulse, I yell to Albert, “Tell Alec I love him.”
Albert laughs and gives me a thumbs-up. The plane begins to move and Amelie pulls me out of the way of the wing as it swings around. With a roar, the Caudron bounces across the field and drags itself into the air. There’s still a battle raging over Zeebrugge and I hope it will distract the Germans so much that they won’t notice a single plane flying west.
Amelie and I head back to the road and toward Damme. “I’m looking forward to hearing the story of your adventures last night,” she says. “Pieter will be interested as well. He’s been making contact with people he’s certain he can trust. He’ll have to get false identity papers and go underground, but everything should be ready for the next task.” She looks at me. “It was very brave of you to stay.”
I shrug and smile. “I knew you wouldn’t be able to manage on your own,” I say as we walk beside the canal. “There’s a lot of work to be done.”
While Manon, Pieter and Amelie are fictitious, the organization they worked for, La Dame Blanche, was real. Throughout the First World War, dozens of brave girls and women collected and passed the Allies information on German troop movements and activities in Belgium. The most famous member of the group was Gabrielle Petit, who, as Manon tells Albert, was executed in 1916, and whose statute now stands in the Place Saint-Jean in Brussels.
Several airfields in Belgium were used by the Germans to launch their zeppelin raids on Britain. The zeppelins were a terrifying sight, but they did little real damage, and by the middle of the war the British had developed effective ways to combat them. The German response was to turn to their Gotha bombers, which began raiding in May 1917. The Gothas were more effective, but the Germans never had enough of them to make a difference.
The giant bomber that Manon sees arriving at Gontrode on her first mission is a Zeppelin-Staaken R.VI. Some versions had five engines, a crew of seven and the wingspan of a B-29 Superfortress, the largest bomber in the Second World War. Only eighteen R.VIs were built, but they could carry enormous bombs and prefigured the massive bombing raids of the Second World War. They were used in Russia in the summer of 1917, and began raiding Britain in the fall of that same year. I have moved the arrival of an R.VI at Gontrode a bit forward in time so that Manon can see one.
The German U-boat campaign of 1917 came close to starving Britain out of the war, and numerous attempts to bomb the pens at Bruges or the canals that led from there to Zeebrugge and Ostend were carried out. Zeebrugge was heavily shelled on the morning on May 12, although the attack began two hours late and failed to destroy the locks. A more famous attempt in 1918, which included a landing party and sunken block ships, also failed. Eventually, the U-boat menace was undone by convoys, aircraft, depth charges and Q-ships.
There are very few books about spying in the First World War, and most of them focus on Mata Hari and spying in Britain. But an Internet search for Gabrielle Petit will bring up several biographies. Zeppelin Nights by Jerry White gives a good sense of life in London while the zeppelins and Gothas flew overhead.
Boche—A slang term for a German soldier or pilot.
Jan Breydel and Pieter de Coninck—The leaders of a fourteenth-century Belgian uprising against the French. There’s a statue to both men in the main square in Bruges.
Caudron—A successful three-seater French reconnaissance aircraft used in 1916 and 1917. The streamlined design of the Caudron R4 was ahead of its time.
Charlie Chaplin—A famous silent movie comedian who made dozens of immensely popular films from 1914 onward.
Dinant—A Belgian town where 674 civilians, including many women and children, were massacred when the Germans invaded on August 23 and 24, 1914.
Directorate of Military Intelligence—A war agency formed in 1916 from the British Secret Service. Department 6 (also called MI6) was in charge of collecting intelligence from agents overseas.
F.E.2b—A British fighter/bomber used throughout the First World War in various roles. Its engine was at the back, pushing the plane forward so that the gunner in the front had a clear line of fire.
Flare—A device producing a very bright flame, used to signal or to illuminate the landscape. Flares of many kinds and colors were used in the First World War.
Flemish Movement—A political movement dedicated to achieving greater rights and sometimes independence for the Flemish-speaking areas of Belgium. During the First World War, the German occupiers encouraged the Flemish Movement as a way of disrupting Belgian resistance to the invasion.
Fokker—A German aircraft manufacturer, famous for the Fokker Eindecker, which devastated the m
ore primitive British planes in 1915 and early 1916. This phase of the war is the setting for Wings of War, Book 1 of John Wilson’s Tales of War series.
Fritz—A slang term for a German soldier or pilot.
Front lines—The trenches closest to the enemy.
Gotha—A large twin-engine German bomber that was used in different variants throughout the First World War. In 1917, it largely took over the bombing of England from the vulnerable zeppelins.
Handley Page—The British equivalent of the Gotha bomber. It was used to bomb many German targets in Belgium during the First World War.
Hangar—A large shed used for storing aircraft.
Homing pigeons—Pigeons that have been trained to return home once released somewhere else. They were used extensively for sending messages in the First World War and even in the Second World War. Recently, the mummified remains of a Second World War homing pigeon, with the coded message still attached to its leg, was found in a chimney in England.
Max Immelmann—The first German flying ace (fifteen victories) in the war. He was shot down in June 1916 by an F.E.2b.
La Dame Blanche—The resistance and spy network in Belgium during the First World War. The White Lady took its name from an old legend that predicted the fall of the German monarchy would be announced by the appearance of a woman dressed all in white. By the end of the war, there were thirteen hundred agents in the network, many of them women and young girls.
Leuven—A Belgian town taken by the Germans in August 1914. German soldiers set fire to the town’s world-famous university library, destroying 230,000 books, at least a thousand of which had been printed before 1501. The library was rebuilt and restocked after the First World War, but it was again destroyed, with the loss of one million books, in the Second World War.
Lewis gun—A British machine gun with a drum of ammunition that clipped onto the top. It was light and simple enough to be mounted on early fighter planes.
Percheron—A breed of large draft horse. One legend has it that Percherons are descended from horses that were sent to reinforce Julius Caesar’s legions in Gaul more than two thousand years ago.
Q-ship—A merchant ship that was fitted with hidden guns so it could lure a submarine to the surface and then destroy it.
Red Cross—A humanitarian organization that was founded in 1863 in Switzerland and has won the Nobel Peace Prize three times. During the First World War, the Red Cross provided communication pathways between countries at war and supplied parcels of clothing and food to prisoners.
Royal Flying Corps (RFC)—The British air force in the First World War. It became the Royal Air Force (RAF) in 1918.
Somme—A huge Allied offensive that took place between July 1 and November 18, 1916.
Tunnelers—The men who dug tunnels and placed huge explosive mines beneath enemy trenches and strongpoints in the First World War. Alec, who is much in Manon’s thoughts, is a tunneler. His story is told in Dark Terror, Book 2 of John Wilson’s Tales of War series.
Tyburn—The site of public hangings outside London from 1196 to 1783.
U-boat—Short for Unterseeboot (“undersea boat”). This is the name given to all German submarines in both world wars.
Vest Pocket Kodak—The world’s first compact camera. It was 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) thick, 2.5 inches (6 centimeters) wide and only 4.75 inches (12 centimeters) high. Because it could easily fit in a uniform pocket, it became immensely popular with soldiers, who were not supposed to take cameras to war. Many of the surviving photographs of the war were taken with these extraordinary cameras.
Waterloo—The site, in Belgium, of an 1815 battle that ended the Napoleonic Wars. The British and Prussian armies—commanded by the Duke of Wellington and Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, respectively—defeated the French army, led by Napoleon.
Zeppelin—The huge airship that was used by the Germans as a bomber in the days before planes could carry enough weight. It was slow, vulnerable to being blown off course and easy to set fire to (since it was filled with flammable hydrogen). The Zeppelin company also built planes, including the giant bomber that Manon sees at Gontrode.
