Dusk Patrol

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  He remembered the self-confidence that his long experience of trench warfare had given him, and how respectfully newly-arrived subalterns used to ask him for tips, listen to his advice, look at him with wonder that he had survived more than a year of continuous action without even a wound; when an infantry lieutenant’s life expectancy was numbered in weeks. He was uncomfortably aware of his rawness as an airman, in contrast. Wise in the ways of trench life, he had matured into what the Germans called an old front-hog. In this new element he was still feeling his way. Fighting on the ground, he had learned how to react automatically to any danger or emergency. More than 3,000 feet above the earth, he knew that he was not even fully the master of his aircraft. He still dreaded getting into a spin.

  The enemy tactic was, as it had been since the earliest days of the war, to stay behind their own lines and lure the British there; or the French, in their sector to the east and south. Only when they had established that there were no Allied aircraft in the vicinity did they venture over the Allied line itself; or behind it to attack observation balloons.

  Boyd wore knitted woollen gloves under leather gauntlets, and still his hands were icy. Holt had been right about his puttees: he had wound them too tightly for comfort. The earlier flights they had made since coming to France had been later in the day, when it was warmer. He had worn puttees then, and they had caused him no bother. But this morning he was colder than he had ever been in his life and wished he had worn riding-boots with his breeches so that his blood circulation were not impeded. He was beginning to get cramp in his calves and could not feel his toes at all.

  They crossed the German front line a few seconds after their own: from that altitude it was not possible to tell the exact moment of overflying any given point. Boyd saw flashes of yellow flame touched with red in several places along the German trench: heavy machine-guns having a go. They were guessing at the height of the British scouts, and not doing it well; at above 2,000 feet they were wasting their ammunition.

  Boyd heard four successive ‘crumps’, dull thuds accompanied by the blossoming of black smoke puffballs. ‘Archibald, Certainly Not!’ he sang to himself: the song that had given rise to the term ‘Archie’ for anti-aircraft fire. There were more crumps and, as he flew on, he smelt the lingering odour of the Germans’ black cordite still fouling the air after the wraiths of smoke had dispersed.

  The three little aircraft tossed about in the disturbed air, up, down and sideways. The nearest shellburst was thirty yards away as Chandler led them in a series of turns to left and right, upsetting the enemy gunners’ prediction.

  Boyd was uneasy. Veterans of air fighting all emphasised the importance of trying to get up-sun, where the enemy could not easily see you; and they were flying into the rising sun. He was keyed up, peering ahead for some sign of an enemy aircraft.

  The flight commander suddenly lifted a hand, then rocked his aeroplane laterally: up, down, up again; the signal to climb. They made for a big gap in the lowest cloud layer. It grew colder by the minute. His altimeter showed 5,000 feet ... 6,000 feet ... Their take-off had been delayed by the mist and it was now long past dawn. The sun was well up.

  Still climbing, Chandler rocked his scout right ... left ... right and pointed. On the starboard bow, six black shapes seemed to be hanging motionless in the space between the DH2s’ present height and the next layer of broken cloud at about 9,000 feet.

  Fokkers? Boyd wondered, his heart thumping, his mind a little sluggish in the numbing cold and from unaccustomed lack of oxygen.

  The stench of castor oil from his engine was making him feel bilious. Was that the only cause? He tried to be honest with himself.

  He estimated that the enemy were 1,000 feet above and two miles away. They showed up as clear black silhouettes against the silvery under-surfaces of the clouds in the light of the rapidly-rising sun. Chandler held his climb, waving his two wing men in closer. Boyd, looking towards Holt, could see him grinning back, enjoying himself. Well, he had come 6,000 miles from his parents’ ranch near Phoenix, Arizona, just for this. He was pleased to have his first sight of the Hun. Boyd, on the other hand, found himself wishing that he were leading a raiding party with a grenade in his hand and several more in his haversack, instead of sitting 7,000 feet up, where God surely had never intended him to be, defying the law of gravity and seated behind a Lewis gun about which he had the profoundest doubts. If the Lewis felt as cold as he did, its oil must have frozen the mechanism. He felt distinctly unhappy.

  Then he recalled what his flight commander had told him: “When on a head-on collision course with an enemy aircraft, hold steady right down to forty or fifty yards; the Hun will be the first to break away: and that will give you the chance to whip round on to his tail. If the enemy aircraft is a tractor type, firing through the prop. blades, like a Fokker Eindecker, its rate of fire will be halved; because, of course, of the interruption caused by the blades. Thus its chances of hitting you will be halved. Also, in a dive or climb, it is difficult to avoid aiming error, because both attacker’s and target’s angle have to be estimated. If you apply rudder only, you will skid without the enemy being aware of it: to him, you will appear to be flying in a straight line. Finally, it is very difficult to judge distance at over 200 yards: most pilots and observers open fire at twice that range, at which they can do no damage.”

  Good, cheering stuff. But the six Fokkers were becoming abominably large as they drew nearer. Three of them, though, had levelled off: suspecting a trap, no doubt. The other three were diving steeply. In level flight they were capable of eighty-seven miles an hour, compared with the DH2s’ seventy-seven. In their dive they must be reaching a good hundred; and the climbing DH2s were down to sixty.

  Flames at the noses of the three diving Fokkers now. Boyd no longer noticed that his feet and hands were cold.

  He saw Chandler dive suddenly and thought he had been hit. The leading Fokker flew straight on. Chandler’s nose went up and he swung steeply to the left in a perfectly timed vertical bank and turn that brought him out fifty yards astern of the German and directly in the same line of descent. Boyd just had time to see Chandler open fire and the German pilot fall forward and sideways, his head lolling on his chest. Then Boyd’s own adversary was uncomfortably close.

  Boyd kicked on right rudder and skidded out of the line of the Fokker’s fire, bullets just clipping the tip of his port upper wing. The Fokker shifted aim. Boyd skidded to the left. Only a hundred yards separated them and Boyd was aware of the cold again; this time his whole body felt frozen; and not just with frost.

  At fifty yards the German broke to his right. Boyd applied hard left rudder and bank. The DH2’s engine rotated anti-clockwise, which gave it some port torque and helped it to turn in that direction with more agility than to starboard. In four seconds Boyd had the enemy in his sights; still diving, but they were on converging courses: if they had the same speed he would now be able to fire at his target directly, without needing to allow any deflection. Calculating deflection accurately was the greatest difficulty in air firing. But the Fokker was ten miles an hour faster than the DH2, so Boyd aimed half the diameter of his ring sight ahead. He saw bullet holes in the Fokker’s nose. He fired again, and the Fokker’s own superior speed carried the pilot right into the cone of Boyd’s bullets. A fountain of blood leaped up from the cockpit and was hurled back by the slipstream. The German pilot’s head came off his shoulders, and after bouncing once against the fuselage behind the cockpit, struck the tail fin, denting it, and tumbled back towards Boyd in the wash from the Fokker’s propeller. Boyd saw it spin past under his wing, sunlight glinting on the goggles.

  Chandler was several hundred feet beneath him now, in a steep dive. Boyd looked around for Holt. A third Fokker, in flames, was cartwheeling down the sky. Holt was diving after Chandler, a hundred yards to his left now that they had all turned.

  Boyd, following them, screwed his neck round from side to side in search of the three other enemy aircra
ft. They had been left more than 1,000 feet above and too far behind to catch up.

  Chandler had throttled back and was spiralling gently down, waiting for his wing men to rejoin him. Boyd and Holt slipped into position to left and right of him, and this time when Holt looked across at Boyd he was laughing and Boyd laughed back.

  The sun had broken through now and Boyd no longer felt cold, either from the temperature or from fear. He had a good appetite for the breakfast that awaited him.

  He thought of the headless enemy pilot, all the blood in his body pumping straight up into the air through his severed carotid arteries and jugular vein, spraying back over his aeroplane while his head tumbled down 5,000 feet to make a hole in the ground.

  He was not yet twenty-two years old and he still had his sharp appetite. Fourteen months in the trenches had left him less sensitive in the matter of death and how it arrived than the majority of new pilots.

  Two

  The road that led Boyd to the cockpit of a fighting scout had begun two years before the war when he joined the Territorial Army in the ranks of the Inns Of Court Regiment. Articled to a firm of solicitors when he left school, intending, like his brother, to follow their father into the family law firm when he qualified, he felt imprisoned by his dull, respectable round. Family life in a large Victorian house in one of the tree-lined roads leading from Wimbledon Common was comfortable and happy. He was fond of his parents; on good terms with his brother, three years older and also articled to a solicitor, in Gray’s Inn; close to his sister, who was two years his junior and still with a year of school ahead. He was going to play rugger and cricket for local clubs but missed the fellowship of school life. The Territorials seemed to be the answer. His brother was in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve: joining the RNVR himself would throw them together just a bit too much.

  He enjoyed soldiering: an evening or two a week, a weekend now and again, two weeks at camp in the summer, were no hardship and made him a lot of friends.

  Within a month of war being declared, he and most of his comrades were commissioned into regular regiments. A week after he received his officer’s uniforms from his tailor he was in France.

  Flying had always interested him, and if he could have spared the time and the money he would have taken lessons: one could obtain a Royal Aero Club certificate of proficiency with two or three hours’ instruction. He had heard of a Gunner captain called Hugh Dowding who, at the age of thirty-one, had done it in one hour and forty minutes.

  Boyd saw an aeroplane for the first time at close quarters in 1914, at Territorial summer camp on Salisbury Plain. A Farman biplane, a contraption that looked like a flying birdcage, had taken part in field days, doing reconnaissance: the only role for which aircraft were at first considered suitable. Then, in 1915, when his battalion was resting near an aerodrome from which No 2 Squadron of the RFC were flying their BE2 two-seaters, a friendly pilot had taken him up for half an hour: and from that moment life on the ground had seemed intolerably dull.

  On No 2 Squadron he met Lieutenant Rhodes-Moorhouse, who, two months later, was mortally wounded dropping a 100-pound bomb on a railway junction at Courtrai; and refused medical aid until he had written his report. He was awarded the RFC’s first Victoria Cross. Boyd remembered the unassuming, good-humoured, slim young pilot well. He wanted no Victoria Cross for himself, least of all a posthumous one, but flying seemed to offer a more individualistic and satisfying way of fighting than any other.

  To ask for a transfer to the Royal Flying Corps before he had served long enough with his regiment to share a full measure of its hardships seemed to him dishonourable, and ungrateful for having been accepted by it in the first place.

  To satisfy himself, he would have to earn the right to fly. He did that and more with tour after tour in the front line and month after month of heavy fighting.

  Then he was awarded a Military Cross for his consistent bravery and effectiveness, and felt he must return due service to the regiment for this recognition.

  Eventually, in November 1915, he returned to England to begin learning to fly.

  *

  Elliot Holt followed a porter along the Victoria platform. The Brighton train seemed already to be full and overflowing. Men in uniform leaned from almost every window, most of them saying goodbye to friends and relatives or making cheery advances to any passing young woman. Even though their sons, brothers, nephews, cousins, husbands or sweethearts were going no farther than fifty miles, people in 1915 had formed the habit of seeing them off. One never knew when their next leave would be or when they might be whisked away to France, Gallipoli or Mesopotamia.

  Holt saw his trunk and suitcase safely stowed in the guard’s van. The porter found him a corner seat in a smoker in the last first-class carriage towards the front of the train; helped Holt off with his greatcoat and put it in the luggage rack; accepted a shilling gratefully, saluted and left him to contemplate the only other occupant of the compartment.

  Holt had been warned that the British did not talk at breakfast or to strangers in trains, but his natural American friendliness overcame caution. Also, he was just a mite excited.

  He looked across at the slim, dark-haired, shy-looking young second lieutenant in the opposite corner, who had put down his Strand Magazine to watch the platform. Holt wore the high-necked double-breasted ‘maternity jacket’ RFC tunic with riding breeches and field boots. He noticed that the other was in a conventional tunic, collar and tie, with riding breeches and boots, but black buttons and badges. He wondered what that meant.

  Holt leaned forward. “Good morning. How’re you doing? My name’s Elliot Holt.”

  The other officer turned his head away from the window with a mildly startled expression in his eyes. “Good morning. How d’you do?”

  “Just fine, I guess.” Holt extended a large hand.

  The Englishman looked momentarily puzzled, then somewhat hesitantly returned a firm handshake. This guy was OK, Holt decided: no flabby mitt there. He said again, “I’m Elliot Holt,” and looked expectantly across.

  “Oh! My name’s Boyd. You’re a Canadian?”

  “Glad to know you ... American ... I’m from Phoenix, Arizona.”

  Boyd smiled and in his quiet way replied “You’ve come a long way; but I shouldn’t wonder if you’re just about to undergo the worst part of your whole journey: I’m afraid our trains are rather crowded and sometimes delayed, these days.”

  Holt laughed. He liked this guy. “They’re OK. I had a good ride up to London from Southampton when I landed six weeks ago. Say, what’s your first name?”

  “Well ... Nicholas ... but I’m usually called Nick.”

  “Are you going all the way to Brighton, Nick?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Swell.” Holt drew in his long legs and large feet to allow two Gunner subalterns and a tall, slender cavalry captain to push their way in. When they moved past he leaned over again and said, lowering his voice, “Are you permanently in that area?”

  “No, I’m going on a course.”

  “Gee, so am I.” Holt’s eyes brightened as he added: “I’m going to qualify for my military aviator’s wings at the Royal Flying Corps school at Shoreham.”

  A faint smile from Boyd and a reflection of Holt’s enthusiasm in his eyes. “As a matter of fact, I’m going to the Reserve Air Squadron at Shoreham to learn to fly, too.”

  “No kidding?” Holt’s loud expression of pleasure drew a frown from the captain and a long look from the two lieutenants of artillery. “But you’re not in the Flying Corps?”

  “Fiftieth Rifles. I’m seconding.”

  “Do you have your civilian ticket already?”

  “Only been up for half an hour in my whole life: in France, last February.”

  “France? You were in France?”

  The other three occupants of the carriage were staring at Holt and Boyd with frank interest now and Boyd stared back at them in discomfort. Then he looked at Holt again and s
aid “Yes.”

  Boyd nodded at the white-violet-white striped ribbon on Boyd’s left breast. “I guess that’s for serving in the trenches.” He wondered why Boyd blushed.

  “Er ... yes ...”

  The captain of Lancers in the corner diagonally opposite to Holt unexpectedly guffawed loudly and bayed: “That’s a Military Crorse.” His moustache quivered with amusement and he shook so much that ash fell off the Egyptian cigarette he was smoking in an amber and gold holder, and he leaped up, swearing thunderously as he flicked it off his immaculate breeches.

  The two subalterns giggled.

  “Gee, I’m sorry ... I’ve got a lot to learn ... Why, you must have been to Buckingham Palace to get that from the King!”

  “Oh, priceless!” the captain roared, slapping his thigh with a beautifully manicured hand.

  Holt blushed now, and stood up. He glared aggressively at the cavalryman. “Say, Captain ... do you want to come out in the corridor? I want to punch you on the nose ... I said I was sorry to Nick.”

  The captain dropped his cigarette and holder on the floor and his mouth sagged open. His colour rose as well and he said, after a moment: “Anything to oblige, my jolly old Yankee; but I should warn you I won my weight at Harrow every year and boxed for Oxford.”

  “Good,” said Holt. “Then maybe I won’t feel so bad about flattening you.”

  Boyd rose and pushed himself between the two of them. “Sit down, Holt ... er ... Elliot. Officers don’t knock each other about, here: anyway, you’ll do better to save your aggression for the Hun.”

  Holt subsided into his seat, saying indignantly, “He called me a damn Yankee. Let me tell you, Captain, my grandfather was a colonel in the Confederate Army.”