Goshawk Squadron

by Derek Robinson

  The bitter wind swung veils of rain across the range, blurring the targets. The shooting was poor: only odd bullets nicked the soggy cardboard, and none smashed through the nine-inch white circle that marked the heart. The gunners’ teeth chattered, their legs trembled, and their boots attracted pools of rain which seeped inside and sucked the warmth from their feet.

  Down in the butts the target men crouched, splay-footed to stay upright, and sucked the water from their upper lips. Bullets cracked overhead, chasing each other like mating hornets.

  Woolley rang his handbell. All firing stopped. There was a clinking of safety-catches, and the target men splashed out of the trench, to change places with the gunners. Woolley trudged down and stood looking at the targets. The rain made an oily sheen on his skin. He took a bottle of Guinness from his pocket and sucked at it until the new men arrived.

  “These targets are wrong,” he said. “Look at the hearts. When do you see a heart on your right-hand side?” They stood, shoulders bowed, like cattle in stockyards. “When you face him, you sodding musketeers, you rat-faced gang of stinking honor …” The words fell cold and flat, discarded, worthless. “But we do not face the enemy. We do not fly up to him and slap him with our glove. We shoot the bugger in the back while he’s picking his nose.”

  Finlayson sneezed. Woolley went toward him. “The man you kill has his heart on your left,” he announced. “You fire at his back, so you aim to the left. Paint a new heart on the other side.”

  While they got on with it, Woolley stood above Finlayson and sucked noisily at his stout. Finlayson fumbled with the target, his eyes nervously sneaking back to Woolley’s feet. After a while Woolley went away. Finlayson took a deep breath. “I could do with a tot,” he muttered to Killion.

  “Finlayson!” bawled Woolley. Finlayson hurled himself flat. The bottle skimmed Killion’s head and skidded along the trench. By the time Finlayson got up, fingering mud from his eyes, Woolley was gone, trudging back to the dripping gunners.

  They fired for another hour. Woolley squatted under his potato sack and broke wind at regular intervals, while the pilots blasted away at increasingly difficult targets. Finally a sergeant-mechanic arrived and reported to Woolley. He clanged his handbell and they all went back to camp.

  The ground crews had built two box kites, eight feet by five, painted gray. Each kite-string led to the back of a truck. Behind the trucks were two canvas-topped trucks from which the canvas had been removed, leaving the metal hoops. Clamped to the hoops were three Lewis guns, mounted on swivels. The whole outfit waited on the edge of the airfield.

  The pilots stood with their hands in their pockets, trying to shrink their freezing bodies inside their icy clothes, and regarded the column without enthusiasm.

  “The mechanics will tow the kites,” Woolley shouted above the gusting wind. “You lot take the trucks with the guns. One man drives, three men on the guns. Let the kites get up to about two hundred feet, then start shooting. Right, get on with it.”

  Nobody moved, except the mechanics.

  “Rogers, Richards, Church, Lambert.” Woolley pointed a muddy boot at one truck. “Gabriel, Finlayson, Killion, Mackenzie.” Three men lumbered to the other truck. Woolley stared at the remainder. “All right, then, you,” Woolley shouted at Kimberley. Engines roared. Woolley went up to the cabs. Lambert and Killion were settling behind the wheels. “Drive backward,” he ordered.

  “Backward?” Killion said, “I d-d-don’t know h-h-how to d-d-drive f-f-f-f-f—”

  “Backward!”

  The trucks moved off, skidding on the sopping turf, and the mechanics paid out the kites. The wind grabbed them and they soared away at an angle, forced up by their forward speed. Lambert clumsily put his truck into reverse and set off in pursuit. Killion followed, zigzagging wildly. As they headed into the field they began to lurch and jolt: on Woolley’s orders one tire had been made flat.

  The gunners clung to the hoops and tried to line up the heavy guns on a kite. As the drivers worked their speed up, and the flat tires pounded brutally on the grass, so the zigzagging got more violent. The guns wavered, fired wild bursts, missed hopelessly. The gray kites flitted about the gray sky like bats at dusk.

  At the end of the field, the tow trucks made wide, fast turns. On the return trip the gunners had more wind in their faces, they were half-blinded by rain, and the pounding jolt of the flat tires made it impossible to aim steadily. Nobody hit the kites.

  “Get out and change crews,” Woolley ordered. “Change crews every lap until the kites are hit.”

  After forty minutes one of the kites took a lucky burst, but it still flew. The other was intact. Briefly, the rain gave way to hail. The trucks pounded up and down, roaring in and out of their wheel marks. It seemed impossible that so many rounds could have been sprayed into the sky to such small effect.

  After an hour one of the kite-strings broke. Woolley ordered its repair. During the delay he had all the vehicles refueled. The pilots huddled together and tried to thaw their freezing hands. Woolley sat on the only gasoline drum and opened another Guinness. Finlayson edged away.

  After seventy minutes the wind dropped, and Dickinson found a kite flying absolutely stiffly and steadily on his quarter. He fired with a spiraling action, blasting bullets all over the corner of the sky until he saw the kite kick. The truck swerved, and his fire swung wide. He raked the gun back and waited, blinking the rain from his eyes. He poured in a second circular volley. The kite fell to pieces.

  Lambert said: “God help the Hun if he ever comes at us with kites. We’ll murder him. Given time.”

  The wind rose again and the remaining kite thrashed all over the sky. It took another twenty minutes to shoot it down. Nobody knew who hit it. They were all still blazing away when the tow truck stopped.

  Woolley stood up without a word and headed for the mess tent. The others trailed after him.

  Dangerfield slouched along with masochistic slowness. “All I’ve learned today,” he said, “is that we’ve been shooting at the wrong bloody target.” He was looking at Woolley’s sack-clad figure, up ahead.

  “Yes,” said Church, trembling.

  They drank soup and chewed bread. Nobody talked. Woolley sat in the middle, impervious to the rage and resentment that stained the air. Once he looked up and caught Kimberley’s eyes. Kimberley glared. He became aware that Woolley was analyzing his glare, rating it, giving it marks out of ten. He looked down.

  When they had finished their soup, Woolley stood up. “Back to the butts,” he said.

  Behind the trench was a mound of earth, over ten feet high. This formed the actual butts, the barrier that stopped the bullets. Woolley led the pilots up on top of it.

  Below, four mechanics stood around a large, primitive seesaw, about five feet off the ground. A small wooden keg, the kind used for storing nails, sat on one end of the plank. A step ladder stood next to the other end.

  “Right,” Woolley bawled.

  A mechanic climbed the ladder, balanced, and jumped on to the seesaw. It crashed down, catapulting the keg up and over their heads. They watched it land on the other side of the butts. At once a group of armorers moved forward with the Lewis guns and began setting them up where the keg had landed.

  “Hit the little barrels,” Woolley said, “before they hit you.” He slid down the bank and went over to the catapult.

  The pilots trooped gloomily across to the guns. “Farce upon farce,” Lambert said. He squatted on a camp stool and leaned wearily against his gun. The rain plastered his hair over his forehead like weed on a rock. They heard a muffled crash, and the first keg soared over the butts, hung, and began tumbling down. Lambert just managed to jump sideways before it thumped to earth and rolled behind him. “Bugger me,” he breathed; and then the massive blast of machine-gun fire drowned his voice. Another keg was on its way, and another.

  As Lambert got to his feet and wiped the muck from his hands, the first keg exploded behind him. He staggered away,
his ears ringing, and was surprised to find himself unhurt. Gray smoke drifted up, acrid and chemical. Another keg went off, further down the line. A new delivery smacked into the mud less than ten feet away. Lambert woke up and ran to his gun.

  Beyond the butts Woolley lit a thunderflash, dropped it inside a keg, closed the lid and stood the missile on the catapult. A mechanic stepped off the ladder and another took his place on top. The catapult righted itself. Woolley loaded it, the man jumped. Each discharge shifted the catapult’s position, so that the next keg followed a different course. At intervals, over the steady chatter of gunfire, muffled explosions could be heard.

  It lasted for ten minutes, until he ran out of thunder-flashes. “Keep going with the empty kegs,” he told the gasping mechanics. “Those buggers won’t know the difference, anyway.”

  He walked around the end of the butts and watched the performance. The kill-rate was high: three kegs out of five were blasted in midair. The guns had divided themselves into two batteries, left and right. They took alternate kegs, and this extra time allowed them to aim better. One gun was not firing. A man lay stretched out behind it; as Woolley watched, a keg bounced right over him. Woolley made no move until the last keg soared over the butts and was destroyed.

  The casualty turned out to be Gabriel. A keg had clipped the side of his head. “As long as it didn’t hit anything important,” Woolley said. They all stood around and watched. Gabriel groaned. “Why don’t you do something for him?” Woolley asked.

  “Why don’t you?” Kimberley demanded.

  The armorers were unloading the guns and taking them away. “I thought we might all go for a five-mile run after tea,” Woolley said. “That would only leave arms-drill and community hymn singing before bed-time.” Gabriel rolled on to his side and felt his head.

  “Here comes the ambulance, sir,” called an armorer.

  Woolley turned. It was indeed an ambulance: a field ambulance, boldly red-crossed, lumbering down the track. A couple of men put their arms around Gabriel and helped him up. Woolley stared at the ambulance, took a couple of paces, stopped and stared again. The ambulance blipped its klaxon. He broke into a run. As it slowed and turned, the woman driver leaned out and waved. She revved the ambulance into a U-turn, and Woolley jumped on to the running-board. She changed up and accelerated away. The men holding Gabriel put him down again.

  “In bloody credible,” Lambert said.

  “How long for?” Woolley shouted.

  “Two days.”

  “Bring any Guinness?”

  “Case in the back.”

  “I love you.” He leaned inside and kissed her. “Do you love me?”

  “No.”

  “That’s right. Killed anyone lately?”

  “Three last night. Are you all right?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “You sounded bad, on the phone that night.”

  “Nothing you can’t cure.”

  Her name was Margery, and she was a nurse. Woolley met her in a Belgian hospital, in the summer of 1916, after he had broken both ankles in a forced landing. Since then she had followed Goshawk Squadron up and down the Line, moving from hospital to hospital. An uncle in the War Office managed the transfers for her. At first she told him that she wanted to be near her cousin Freddy, in the Engineers. Then Freddy got blown up and drowned in a shell crater, and all the time Margery was in a hotel two hundred miles away, putting Woolley to bed, dead drunk after a promotion. That was the first time she heard him mention Mackenzie. He seemed to wake with a cry that was half a snort. “Hah!” he said, and stared at her. “Where’s Mackenzie?”

  “Go back to sleep.”

  He blinked. “I want Mackenzie,” he ordered. “I must have Mackenzie.”

  “All right,” she said.

  He stared for a few more seconds and let his head fall back. Soon he was asleep. Next day he remembered nothing of it. She asked if there was a Mackenzie in his squadron, but he refused to talk about the war, which suited her.

  Conversation between them had been a problem in the hospital where they first met, right up to the night when she pushed his cot into an empty room, locked the door, took off her uniform and climbed in beside him. “I realize we have nothing in common,” she told him then.

  “Not true,” he said. “We have our lust for each other and our disgust for everyone else.” They made love, clumsily because of the plaster casts on his legs, while somewhere a patient shouted in delirium. Afterward she walked her fingers up his ribs. “Why is your body so dirty?” she asked.

  “I was a miner,” he said. “It got forced in.”

  “That’s not true. Tell me the truth.”

  “Listen, I’ll make you a bargain. I’ll never tell the truth, if you’ll never tell lies.” He was serious.

  “All right. Only what good will that do?”

  “It’ll show us the best side of each other.”

  Margery usually talked about her family, which was like Margery herself: ample and affectionate, in a critical sort of way. They expected everyone to do something, and then expected to tell them how it could be done better. They approved of her becoming a nurse and going to France, but they told her she should have done it sooner. “You’ve left it awfully late,” her father told her in January 1916. Even then, at twenty, she was beginning to look matronly, and of course she had always been good with animals. Everybody else was in France, and she was afraid that if she stayed at home she might fall in love with some disabled veteran and marry him.

  The first few months horrified her. Her experience of suffering had been limited to rabbits in traps. Now she spent her days amongst men with holes blown through them, and every night some died. By the time Woolley arrived in her ward she was turning into a slaughterhouse attendant: she no longer saw them as men but as damaged stock; if they screamed it was not a sign of pain but a signal to fetch a doctor. Blood was part of the job, like spilled paint to a house-painter. She could not help them, so she began to hate them for the waste they brought into the hospital. Everything was waste. Her life was waste. Normally you tried to make things better; here you tried to stop them getting worse. The waste-factory that produced these defective goods roared day and night. It was making a scrap-merchant of her.

  Woolley stopped all that.

  He came into the hospital with six cases of Guinness, and a shepherd’s crook. He had the bottles placed under his bed, and when the ward sister tried to interfere he fended her off with the crook while he produced medical certificates, all signed by Army doctors, stating his need for regular supplies of the stuff. She rejected them. He appealed to her in several languages, including German. She ignored his appeals and began to move the cases. He placed her under arrest. She turned white and rang for a doctor. Woolley placed her under close arrest for mutiny. When the doctor arrived Woolley was lying on the floor, apparently semi-conscious. “She hit me with my own stick, Doctor,” he whispered, displaying the scrapes and cuts received in his flying accident. “I was trying to save some of the Guinness for you, but she hit me with my own stick. I—I must have passed out.”

  The doctor felt his pulse, then took a bottle from the nearest case and examined it.

  “He was ranting and raving at me,” the ward sister said, “in German.”

  Woolley cringed. “Don’t let her hit me,” he pleaded. The doctor opened the bottle and sniffed it. “All right, Sister,” he said. When she had gone he helped Woolley to his feet. “You have a bloody nerve,” he said.

  “I paid two quid for those certificates,” Woolley said.

  “They’re all valid, you know. You might as well drink that now you’ve opened it. You don’t want it to go flat.”

  “It’s the real thing, all right,” the doctor said. He sighed. “All right. Keep the stuff out of sight. And I want a dozen bottles for myself.”

  “Leeches,” Woolley said. “Bleeding leeches.”

  He was soon the center of scandal and unrest. Anybody with anything ju
icy to report went to Woolley for an audience and a bottle of stout. He ran a sweepstake, supposedly based on the intake and discharge of patients; actually the winning number was the daily total of deaths in the hospital. He got a key to the blanket store and rented it out to randy nurses and hungry walking-wounded, many of whom he had introduced in the first place. For a sensational week he published a news-sheet which libeled everyone from the governor’s wife to the assistant chaplain, including both together. He won a piano accordion at cards and taught himself to play sea-shanties. He circulated two new rumors a day: cholera was sweeping Paris; the Kaiser was in Rome looking for a divorce; the kitchen was putting aphrodisiacs in the gravy; Lloyd George had been charged with rape; Switzerland had invaded Germany. Nurse Jenkins was pregnant. The hospital was about to be moved underground. The Czar was going to visit the wards at 10 AM next day and everyone would get a medal.

  At first Margery hated him for always showing off, and for mocking others who were suffering; above all, for attacking the harsh and humorless atmosphere of her scrap-body factory. But his outrageous irreverence was a relief; eventually she had to admit to herself that she looked forward to hearing what Lieutenant Woolley had done now. He lifted some of the curse from that place of death. She went out of her way to pass near him, and he went out of his way to insult her. He disturbed her, because he was not handsome, he was ugly; he was not gallant, he was cynical; he was not worth-while at all, and yet inescapably she was in love with him.

  Woolley’s tent was hot. He had spread a tarpaulin over the duckboards, and on top of it they dumped blankets from the ambulance. The door was tightly laced and a pressure lamp burned whitely. They sat, naked, and ate the food she had brought. Margery sweated slightly.

  “We always do the same thing, don’t we?” she said.

  “Practice makes perfect,” Woolley said. “Never change a winning team. When in doubt, remove all clothing.”

  “It’s not really the same thing, I suppose. Every time it’s different. But it’s always … like this.”

  “Why chop and change?” Woolley said. “Look at the dinosaurs. They were happy.”