“Where has he gone now?” Richards asked.
“You see … we were too stunned … we just chased him away and looked at him … I mean, I suppose we both thought he’d made a mistake.”
“It could happen,” Lambert said.
“No, no, impossible. He knew. We saw him reload, he was going to go back down … So Rogers had a go at him, you know … tried to force him to land. But then he tried to kill Rogers, and finally they had the devil of a fight.”
“And?” Woolley said.
“Rogers shot him down. Only it wasn’t like that. Gabriel’s plane came to pieces, it just fell apart. I saw him fall, I saw it all happen. Everything.”
“Where’s Rogers now?”
“Crashed,” Killion said. “I think he took a bullet and passed out. He must be dead, too.”
Woolley sat in his cockpit, tightening and loosening his straps. Engines roared around him; all except his own. His mechanic stood with both hands on the propeller, staring impassively at Woolley’s face. They were all ready to go, all waiting for him to lead the squadron into the air. Only Killion stayed behind. Killion, who—Hawthorn had decided—was too valuable as a witness of Gabriel’s massacre to be risked on patrol. Lucky Killion.
Surprisingly, here was Killion now, running across the airfield, still in his flying-clothes. Woolley waved him back but he came on. He reached the plane and stood panting, embarrassed but determined. “Just wanted to say,” he gasped, “sorry I’m not with you. And good luck. And so on. Sir.” His chest heaved; his cheeks were bright red.
Woolley tried to smile, but his face was the wrong shape for that. He pointed thankfully over Killion’s shoulder. “Somebody wants you, Killion,” he said. Killion looked back. Jane Ashton was standing beside the adjutant, in front of Rogers’ limousine. Killion was upset. “I didn’t send for her, sir. Honest,” he said.
“I did. I sent Woody to pick her up. When I knew you wouldn’t be flying.”
“Really? What for?” Killion looked between them in amazement.
“I don’t know. Margery told me about her last night. Margery knows her. For Christ’s sake, Killion. How many bloody reasons do you need?” He looked the other way, unable to face what he had done.
When he turned back, Killion was pounding across the field toward her. The girl walked forward. Woolley shouted at his mechanic. The engine fired first time, and he powered it savagely until the whole plane shuddered. When he looked again the two figures were standing together watching him.
Still Woolley waited. He searched the cockpit: this was home, more familiar than any tent or billet; he knew every scratch and dent, every stain and patch. It was home and he was trapped in it. He sat and hated the cockpit for its emptiness, hated himself for his indecision, hated Hawthorn for his war.
Woolley leaned his head back and looked at the sky. For the first time ever, he wanted not to go up there. The sky was for killing and he was sick of death. His brain stealthily surrendered to images of Margery. Margery waving from the wheel of an ambulance. Margery glistening with a sheen of sweat in the light of a pressure lamp. Margery weeping over what they would call their home. Margery stiff and angry outside the guardroom. Margery shivering and saying goodbye at dawn.
“Take off immediately.” It was Colonel Hawthorn, standing beside the cockpit, shouting over the din. “That is a direct order from the Corps Commander” He waved a revolver at Woolley’s head.
All the way to the Front, Woolley went through the routine of searching the sky, but the images of Margery persisted. The pleasure of her nagged at him, and the thought of them both, of being together, distracted his brain. Although his eyes looked they did not see, and his reactions were too slow when a flight of slim gray machines knifed down from the glare of the sun. The first burst wrecked his cockpit and the SE turned sharply on her back. Woolley fell out, and the last that Wallace and Cowie saw of him, before they sheered away in fright, was his long brown flying-coat opening in the wind and checking his fall. For a moment it billowed out and let his smoking plane fall away; and then the coat collapsed, and Woolley dropped too.
Afterword
In 1968, when the RAF was fifty years old, I read one of the many articles written to celebrate that jubilee. It contained some remarks by a former RFC pilot, Oliver Stewart. He said that, to be strictly honest about it, the objective of a fighter pilot in the First World War “was to sneak in unobserved close behind his opponent and then shoot him in the back.”
I was startled. I had grown up on Biggles, and that didn’t sound like Biggies. Stewart went on, “Bar-room brawling, bicycle chains and broken bottles have a closer affinity to the early fighting in the air than the chivalrous, formalized, knightly encounters with lance and épée to which it has been likened.”
Much of that likening was first done by politicians, for purposes of propaganda. It was Lloyd George who called RFC squadrons “the cavalry of the clouds.” At that time it was customary to talk of knights of the air, of jousting circuses, of duels in the sky. All this was useful because trench warfare gave no such opportunity for images of glamour and chivalry. But the truth is that the air war was just as brutal, squalid and wasteful as the slaughter in the trenches. There is nothing romantic about getting shot in the back at ten thousand feet.
All this I discovered when I began reading the real history of the 1914–18 air war—the story revealed by the diaries, letters and memoirs of the pilots themselves. Goshawk Squadron was based on those accounts. The characters were invented but their behavior, their attitudes and their activities were not. The broad structure of the story is true to the way the war went in 1918, and everything within that structure—training, tactics, aircraft performance, losses, and so on—is as authentic as I could make it.
When it first came out, Goshawk Squadron angered some veterans of the RFC. They felt it insulted the memories of their dead friends. I was saddened but not surprised. We all tend to forget the bad and remember only the good; and it must be especially tempting for survivors to believe that all the dead were heroes and that in any case victory justified their sacrifice. In fact we know that much of the slaughter was pointless. Courage was wasted along with everything else.
Some ex-pilots found Goshawk Squadron convincing. One, who flew in the RFC for two years and served in the RAF throughout the Second World War wrote, “A fair comment … If we are honest we must admit that this ‘all jolly good sports’ legend about the RFC pilots and their opposite numbers in the German Air Force was, and is, a lot of bull—one either shot down or was shot down oneself.”
War is not sport. War is not fair. War in the sky, as Oliver Stewart remembered it, had to be unusually callous and cold-blooded. “To those who studied it closely enough,” he wrote, “the limitless open sky became as good a place to lie in wait for an unsuspecting passer-by as a darkened alley off a sleazy street, and the sudden act of violence, when it came, could be as deadly.” That—and not the myth of the cavalry of the clouds—is what Goshawk Squadron is about.
D.R.
Also by Derek Robinson
Goshawk Squadron is the last book in a trilogy. The other two in the series are also available as ebook from Quercus.
War Story
The first novel in the trilogy sees naïve young patriot Oliver Paxton, fresh out of public school, entering the Royal Flying Corps in 1916. Pompous, foolish and enthusiastic, he is determined to prove himself to king and country.
Two months in the skies over the Somme changes all that. The reality of combat, combined with the lax morals and casual cruelty of his fellow pilots, slowly takes its toll. Gradually the idealistic Paxton becomes as disillusioned as those who surround him.
Hornet’s Sting
By 1917, and as the trilogy continues, some of the pilots of Hornet Squadron are beginning to believe that the war on the Western Front will last for decades. For Woolley and the others there are only two things which can take their minds off the tedious brutality of war: the nurses, and a potent bre
w invented by the C.O. called “Hornet’s Sting.” But as the big summer offensives of 1917 begin, not even these can provide any comfort.
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