Blake’s reply was a rueful shrug. “First, you hung there like a balloon. If I hadn’t seen you, I wouldn’t believe it. Then all of a sudden you were coming at me like something out of a cannon. I got to admit you had me scared. I never saw anything move like that thing of yours. By the time I got turned around you were out of sight. If we’d been dogfighting, you could of put a string of bullets through me from end to end, and I couldn’t of got a shot off.”
A shadow intruded onto the table between them. They looked up. “Indeed, M’sieu Farman,” Deveraux said, “your machine’s speed gives it the ability to attack without the risk of being attacked itself. I will not pretend to understand how it can fly with such small wings, nor how it can rise directly into the air, but I have seen it do these things. That is enough. I must apologize that we could not be here to applaud you when you landed.”
So he’d made an impression after all. “Where’d you go? I thought you didn’t have any patrols scheduled until this afternoon.”
Deveraux pulled out a chair and sat down beside Blake. With delicate care, he placed a half-full wineglass in front of him. “That is true, M’sieu. But we heard the sound of big guns at the front, and our duty is to be in the air at such times, until the matter is clarified, doing such things as will assist our men in the trenches.”
“I didn’t hear any guns,” Farman said. “When I got back here, it was as quiet as a bar mitzvah in Cairo.”
He realized almost at once, seeing their faces, the metaphor had no meaning for them. Well, they hadn’t heard of Social Security, either.
“It is curious,” Deveraux said. “When we are come to the front, it is as you say—most quiet. The guns have stopped, and we see no aircraft but our own. We search for fifty kilometers along the front. There is no evidence of even small actions. When we come back, I message to commanders at the front, and they tell me there has been no action. Nor have guns in their sectors been made use of—theirs or the Boche—though it is curious … some do say that they have heard guns being used in other sectors. And you can see …” He pointed to the window—the clear sky. “It could not have been thunder.”
He said it all with the innocent mystification of a small boy, still not sure of all the things in the universe. Farman suddenly laughed and Deveraux blinked, startled. “Sorry,” Farman said. “I just realized. It wasn’t guns you heard. It was me.”
“You, M’sieu? What jest is this?”
“No joke. What you heard was my plane. It makes a shock wave in the air, just like an explosion’s.” He looked at their faces. “You don’t believe me.” Deveraux’s wineglass was empty. Blake stood up, empty brandy glass in hand. He reached for Deveraux’s glass, but the Frenchman put his hand in the way. Blake went to the bar with only his own glass. Farman nursed his drink.
“I do not pretend to understand this aeroplane of yours,” Deveraux said. “But now that you have shown its abilities …”
“Some of them,” Farman said. They’d only seen an iceberg tip of what Pika-Don could do.
“Yes. But now we have seen,” Deveraux said. “I will agree, it is possible your machine could outmatch Bruno Keyserling.”
“I know she can,” Farman said.
“Perhaps,” Deveraux said with a small smile, but very firm. “But I agree—it should be tried. If you will tell us where to mount the guns on your machine …”
“I don’t need guns,” Farman said. “Don’t want them.”
“But M’sieu, an aeroplane must have guns. Without guns, it is like a tiger without teeth and claws.”
The thought of machine guns stuck on Pika-Don’s prow was a horror. “I’ve got my own weapons,” Farman said. Blake came back, sat down heavily. His glass slopped a little on the table. “Machine guns would … they’d destroy her aerodynamic integrity. They’d … she probably couldn’t even fly with them sticking out in the wind.”
“Aerody … what integrity?” Blake snorted. “What are you talking about?”
Farman leaned forward. “Look. You’ve seen my plane. All right. Now—you’ve seen those overlapping strips along her belly, between the ports the skids retract into?”
“I have noticed,” Deveraux said.
“There’s a rocket under each one of them,” Farman said. “Just one of those can wipe out a whole squadron.”
“Ah? How many rockets? Eight?”
“Six,” Farman said. “How many squadrons have the Germans got in this sector?”
“Two jagdstaffelsDeveraux said. “They are quite enough.” He shook his head. “But M’seiu, the men who planned the equipping of your aeroplane did not understand the needs of combat. It is assuming a marksman’s skill beyond human abilities to believe that with only six of these rockets you could expect to be effective against enemy aircraft. One must remember, they are not motionless targets, like balloons. It is difficult enough to strike a balloon with rockets—balloons do not move—but to destroy an aeroplane … that cannot be done. Often I have expended all my ammunition—hundreds of rounds—without so much as touching my opponent. That you would imagine going into combat with a mere six possibilities of striking your target… this is folly. It is not worth the effort.”
“They’re not just things I shoot off,” Farman said. Did he have to explain everything? “In fact, my plane’s so fast any weapons system that depends on human senses couldn’t possibly work. My rockets find their targets themselves. They are…”
He saw the utter disbelief on their faces. “Look,” he said, “I’ve shown you my plane can do everything I told you it could. It flies faster and climbs faster than anything you ever saw. Now, if you’ll give me enough fuel to take her up against Keyserling, I’ll show you what my rockets can do. They’ll wipe him out of the sky like a blob of smoke in a high wind.”
“Bruno Keyserling is a very skilled and deadly man,” Deveraux said. “A man impossible to kill. We have tried—all of us. He has killed many of our men, and he will send more of us down in flames before this war ends. I would suggest you be I not so confident of yourself and your equipment.”
“Just give me enough kerosine for a mission,” Farman said. “One mission. Let me worry about the rest of it.” He wasn’t worried at all. A dogfight between World War I model planes and something from 1975 would be like a wrestling match between a man and a gorilla. ‘
“But M’sieu, you have the paraffin,” Deveraux said, mildly puzzled. “You have almost two thousand liters.”
Farman shook his head. “I burned that. There’s just about enough left to fill that glass of yours.”
Deveraux looked down at his empty wineglass. “M’sieu, you must be joking.”
“No joke,” Farman said. “Pika-Don flies fast and climbs like a rocket, but you don’t get something for nothing—law of conservation of energy, if you know what that is. She drinks fuel like a sewer.”
There was a silence—a silence, Farman realized, not only at their own table, but all through the shack. Maybe these fliers understood more English than he thought. Blake downed a large swallow of brandy.
“How much do you need for a mission?” he asked.
“Ten thousand gallons will do for a short one,” Farman said. “An hour—hour and a half.”
There was another long silence. “M’sieuDeveraux said at last, “I have wide discretion in the requisition of the usual materials. I am trying to balance in my mind the possible destruction of Bruno Keyserling—which is a thing we all desire—against the difficulty I must expect in explaining my request for so much kitchen fuel. And I remain in doubt you will be able to accomplish as successful as you claim. So I must ask—have I your word of honor as an American that you must have this paraffin to fly your machine?”
“You’ve got it, on a stack of Bibles.”
“The good old U.S.A. is alive with con men,” Blake said.
“M’sieu Blake,” Deveraux said reproachfully, “we must not assume that a man tell lies because he claims ability to do a thing we canno
t do ourselves. He is optimistic, yes. But that is a fault of almost all the young men who come to us. If we do not put him to the test, we shall not know if he could do the thing he claims or not.”
Blake made a sour twist of his mouth. “All right. But how are you going to explain wanting forty thousand liters of kerosine?”
Deveraux cocked his head to one side, as if listening to a voice no one else could hear. “I think I shall merely tell a part of the truth. That we wish to try a weapon suggested by one of our men, a weapon which makes use of paraffin.”
“Such as?” Blake asked.
“If they want details,” Farman said, leaning forward, “tell them you’re putting it in old winebottles and cramming a rag in the neck. And before you drop the bottle on the Germans you set fire to the rag. The bottle breaks when it hits, and spills burning kerosine over everything.”
Blake and Deveraux looked at each other. Delight animated their faces. “Now that’s something I think might work,” Blake said, rubbing his jaw. “Why didn’t somebody think of it before?”
It was the first time Farman had heard him enthusiastic about something. This, at least, was a weapon they could understand. “It might work,” he said. “But gasoline does it better. It’s called a Molotov cocktail.”
“M’sieu Farman,” Deveraux said, “I think we shall try that, also.” He stood up, wineglass in hand. “Henri!” he called. “More wine!”
Early that afternoon, two men came to the airfield fresh from training school. Boys, really; neither could have been more than seventeen. They were eager to get into the war—looked disconsolate as they came away from reporting to Deveraux. “They’ll have to spend a day or two learning their way around,” Blake said, a twisty smile curling his mouth. “Some guys just can’t wait to get killed.”
Their Nieuports were straight from the factory, new as pennies. The smell of dope and varnish surrounded them like an aura. Blake worked his way around them, a point by point inspection. The new men would be assigned to his flight. He peered intently at struts and wires and fabric surfaces. “Good aeroplanes,” he said finally. Then it was time for him to go out on patrol. Three other men went with him. Farman watched them take off. They disappeared eastward. He went back and saw about readying his jerrybuilt filtration plant for the job of turning ten thousand gallons of cooking oil into aviation fuel.
At first light next morning, the new men stood beside their planes and watched the escadrille fly out on dawn patrol. They looked like children not invited to play. Farman went and checked Pika-Don; there was sign of a gummy deposit in her tailpipes, but a close inspection of her compressor blades showed they were clean, and none of the fuel injectors were fouled. He buttoned her up again and headed for the drinking shack. Until he got a shipment of kerosine, he’d have nothing to do.
The escadrille came back three hours later. If there’d been any Germans in the sky that morning, they’d made themselves hard to find. There’d been no action. Six planes refueled at once and went out again. Deveraux took the new men out on an orientation flight. In the afternoon, Blake and another pilot took the new men out for a mock dogfight. When they came back, Farman was waiting at the edge of the field; he’d had an idea he felt foolish for not having thought of sooner—to make a start on the long kerosine-upgrading job by borrowing a barrel or two of the raw material from the mess hall. He needed Blake to translate and haggle for him.
As Blake taxied up onto the hardstand, Farman saw the tattered fabric fluttering from the right upper wing. He ran over as Blake cut the motor. “Hey! You’ve been in a fight!”
Blake dropped down from the cockpit. He stripped off helmet and goggles and gloves. Farman repeated his question. Blake grinned and pointed to his ears and shook his head. Farman pointed at the shredded wing.
“Yeh. I’ve been in a fight,” he said, his voice loud as if he was trying to talk through the noise his motor had made.
Farman looked out at the other planes taxiing in from the field. “They’re all right,” Blake said. “We jumped a Pfalz—what he was doing way off there behind the lines, don’t ask me. I got the observer interested in me”—he nodded at the damaged wing—“and Jacques moved in and put a few in the engine. Simple enough.”
The other planes of the flight came up on the hardstand, and the mechanics moved in to turn them around and chock the wheels. The pilots climbed out, and the new men crowded around the other veteran—Jacques, Farman assumed. They pumped his arm and slapped his back and jabbered jubilantly. Jacques managed to break free of them long enough to reach Blake. He grabbed both Blake’s arms and spoke with a warm grin. Blake looked a little embarrassed by the attention and managed, finally, to shrug Jacques’s hands without offending. By then the new men had closed in again. A rapid four-way conversation broke out.
Blake got loose again after a minute. “They never saw an aeroplane shot down before.” He grinned. “Wasn’t much of a shoot-down, really. Jacques put a few in the engine, and it just sort of went into a glide.” He nodded at the three men; they were still talking energetically. “I guess they liked the show, even if they don’t understand some of it. They’re wanting to know why we didn’t go on shooting after Jacques got their engine.”
It sounded like a reasonable thing to ask. “Well, why didn’t you?” He remembered to speak loud.
Blake shrugged. “Why kill ’em? There’s enough people getting killed. They were out of the war as soon as their propeller stopped.”
“Well, yes. Sure. But …”
“Oh, we made sure they landed close to a convoy on the road, so they’d be captured all right,” Blake said. “Didn’t want a pair of Huns running loose behind the lines.”
“But they were Germans. The enemy.”
Blake punched a finger into Farman’s ribs. “Once Jacques got their engine, they were just a couple of poor guys in an aeroplane that couldn’t fly any more. We got no fight with guys like that. It’s the man they worked for we’re against. The Kaiser. Besides, that guy in the rear cockpit still had a lot of bullets in his machine gun, and he was sort of mad at us. I figure we were smart to keep our distance.”
The new men had a few more training flights the next day, and the day after that they went out with the dawn patrol. The patrol met a flight of German machines led by Keyserling’s white-trimmed purple Albatross. It was a fast, cruel scrap. Only one of the new men came back.
“We shouldn’t of put ’em on service so quick,” Blake said, nodding across the shack toward where the survivor was slowly drinking himself into numbness; he’d been in shock ever since he climbed out of his cockpit. “But we’ve got to have men. It takes three months to train a man enough so he’s got a chance in the air—and Keyserling and his circus kill ’em in five minutes. Like swatting a fly.” He picked up his brandy and downed it whole.
Deveraux came and put a hand on Blake’s shoulder. “It is true,” he said. “One might wish we did not so desperately need men to fight. But we fight a war to preserve civilization, and for that it is necessary that some good men die. And so we have lost one man today. And one other machine is damaged. Do not forget, Keyserling has lost two men in this morning’s battle, and three of his aeroplanes will need considerable work before they fly again. We have done well, this day.”
“Yeh. Sure. But he was just a kid,” Blake said. His open hand banged on the table. Glasses rattled. “A poor, dumb kid. As green as—”
“To keep a civilization is worth a few lives, M’sieu Blake.” Deveraux squeezed Blake’s shoulder, held the grip a moment, let his hand slip away. He moved off to talk with the men at another table.
“Civilization,” Blake muttered.
“Stick around,” Farman said. If he lived long enough, Blake would know of Dachau, Bataan, Hiroshima, and the bloody mess France herself would make of her African colonies. And lots more.
“You haven’t seen anything yet,” Farman said.
The kerosine began to come two days later. It came spasmodically
, in odd-sized lots: one day a demijohn arrived, the next—half a lorry load. Kerosine wasn’t, to these people, a strategically vital petrochemical; it was a fluid used in lamps and stoves. It couldn’t just be commanded up from the nearest supply dump in anything like the quantities a supersonic jet had to have. Genghis Khan’s army might have been similarly inept at meeting a sudden, inexplicable demand for a few thousand pounds of gunpowder.
June became July. The summer sun burned warm. There was talk of heavy fighting to the north, in a place called Bois de Belleau. Farman worked at the makeshift filters day after day. The smell of warm kerosine was a weight in his lungs, an ache in his brain. Some evenings, he was too sickened to eat.
The weeks blended into each other. He didn’t have much idle time; there was always more kerosine to be poured into the system, or a filter to be changed and the clogged filter to be scraped and scrubbed and carefully examined for flaws before being used again. After a while, he stopped looking up when he heard the sound of airplane motors.
But in that time he saw airplanes lose power as they left the ground, stall, and nose stiffly into the turf. Their wings snapped like jackstraws. He saw a tattered plane coming back from a dogfight; it fell apart over the field and its pilot died in the wreck. He saw a man bring his plane down, taxi off the field, and die from loss of blood with the engine still running. And there were many times when he saw men watch the sky, searching for planes that would not come back, ever.
Some nights, he heard the big guns thunder at the front, like a grumbling storm just beyond the horizon. Muzzle flash and shellburst blazed in the sky.
Several days came when no new loads of kerosine arrived. He used that time to learn what he could about the Germans—their tactics, their formations, the capabilities of their planes. Not much of the information was useful—he’d expected that; matched against Pika-Don, they’d be almost motionless targets. But with only ten thousand gallons to fly on, it would be a good idea to know where he’d be most likely to find them. He wouldn’t have much more time in the air than just enough to lift off, aim and launch rockets, and return to base. He started planning the mission.
War and Peace Page 23
