Night Raiders

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  “I can’t believe that.”

  The shocked tone of voice was not assumed.

  “There you go again, just like the rest of them: taking me — and all women — for granted. Why should we all, ipso facto, like children or want to be mothers? Tell me that.”

  “It’s natural...”

  “Men jump to the conclusion that it’s natural.”

  He smiled at her and she wished she had to look up at him. She was wearing her highest heels, deliberately, and overtopped him this afternoon.

  “You are a thoroughly contrary girl.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And I like it. I admire you for the strength of your opinions.”

  That had not been the idea at all.

  He contrived to hustle her into an empty compartment and as soon as the train had puffed away from the platform he made a grab for her and kissed her.

  She let him get on with it, her lips unresponsive. His mouth felt like a slab of liver and his breath was tainted with beer and cigars.

  She was about to shove him away, for a moment her hand went up to box his ear; but she was suddenly assailed by fright. He was hugging her like a bear and there was no knowing how he might react.

  Instead, she twisted her head away and said, “Don’t make me untidy, now.”

  He sat close to her, holding her hand tightly and breathing hard.

  I hope I’m not going to have trouble, she was thinking. It’s a long, dark walk at night from the station. I hope there are others on the train coming home, who’ll be walking the same way.

  He put his thick, short fingers under her chin to raise it.

  He thinks he’s being gentle and romantic, she told herself, but he nearly dislocated my neck and I’ll bet he’s bruised my skin.

  He pressed his mouth gently to hers and she endured another kiss.

  “Tell me, Uwe, why do you assume that I have no sense of smell?”

  She had to mumble: as she tried to free her mouth, he tried to keep his on it.

  “What do you mean?” he mumbled back.

  “Taking things for granted again.”

  “What things?”

  “It never entered your head, I suppose, that the stench of beer and nicotine may not figure high on my list of favourite odours?”

  He released her and sat back, pale with anger.

  “Then why did you agree to come out with me?”

  “Because if I had stayed in the house one more evening alone with my mother I would have rushed out to the hen-coop or the pigsty for more congenial company.”

  “I can’t believe it!”

  “You ought to try spending an evening alone with her.”

  “You have taken leave of your senses, Ilse.”

  “I love my mother. I am full of compassion for her terrible affliction. I know she hasn’t the strength to sustain my father’s death; especially the way it happened. But that does not make her incessant weeping and wailing and her nagging at me, her scolding, any easier to bear.”

  He attempted a weak smile, his look full of uncertainty.

  “Why take it out on me? Or, if you must, why hurt my feelings? You know how fond of you I am.”

  She sighed and turned away to look out of the window.

  “You are too fond of me, dear Uwe; that is the trouble.”

  “I am sorry if I am too insistent. I should be patient with you.”

  “Yes, Uwe, please be patient. I don’t like being mauled, for one thing.”

  He looked angry again.

  “Mauled? Is that how you think of it? How else can I show my love for you?”

  She smiled.

  “You said it yourself: by being patient.”

  She welcomed the approach to the Schutzstadt station. From now on she would not be alone with him. They would ride in a crowded tram to the concert-hall. She was looking forward to the music. She would take good care not to be hustled into an empty carriage on the way back. She would make sure they walked from the station to her house in company with acquaintances. When she saw him off after supper she would have to submit to a goodnight kiss, but she could hold her breath and stiffen her lips.

  In the concert-hall she saw a young officer in the same row as Uwe and herself. He was tall, saturnine, with a well shaped head and good, refined manners.

  She sighed, glanced at Uwe and turned quickly back to covertly watching the attractive young officer and envying the pretty girl at his side.

  *

  Many hours later she lay sleepless, the music she had heard that evening playing again in her mind.

  She slowly became aware of an intrusive noise and presently recognised the sound of aeroplane engines. She sat up with a start, the music gone, listening fearfully.

  The engines droned on and by the volume of sound she knew there were many more aeroplanes than she had heard the last time. They seemed to be flying lower, also.

  When they were overhead she began to shiver with fear and plunged back under the bedclothes, pulling them over her head, putting her hands to her ears.

  After a while she put her head out of the smothering sheets and blankets and listened. The noise was diminishing.

  The enemy was bound for somewhere else, she told herself.

  To her astonishment she found herself thinking of Uwe. She had some idea of what an Albatros looked like, from pictures in the papers; and she had seen one in the air occasionally. Uwe, of course, had flown over his home village a couple of times to show off his prowess at looping the loop and rolling.

  She imagined him in the night sky, firing those two Spandau he was so proud of, bringing an enemy aeroplane down with flames blazing all over it.

  But Uwe was at home in his bed, on leave. No doubt there would be others hunting for those insolent Englishmen.

  Anyway, why bother? They had flown past Fichtewald, so let others worry about their destination.

  Ilse fell asleep.

  It was half past two when she woke with a start to the sound of bursting bombs and when she scrambled from bed to look out of the window she saw the same hideous white glare in the sky she remembered from the last time.

  Her mother was awake and calling for her plaintively. These days her every utterance was plaintive.

  Ilse ran to her mother’s room and into bed beside her, trying to comfort her while her own fear made her tremble from head to foot.

  She thought of the handsome young officer she had seen that evening. She wished he — or someone like him — were here to cuddle up to and reassure her.

  Chapter Nine

  Above the clouds, Yardley wondered how the HP O/400s which had taken off before them were getting on down at 7,000 ft, on their way to bomb Stuttgart. They belonged to a different wing and their mission had been notified to his own wing under the new system of co-ordination and with as much regard for aircraft safety as for operational efficiency.

  They would be passing over Fichtewald an hour before his DH4s were due there. He didn’t envy them., Their size made them a much easier target than the DH4, which had only a 42 ft wingspan and was only 30 ft long. Their speed was too slow for his taste, on this kind of operation.

  He had his ears cocked all the time for sounds of protest in his engine. Climbing, he had kept adjusting the mixture and the spark, the radiator shutter. With so few instruments, it was hard to learn all that he needed to know. An engine temperature gauge would have been a boon. Pilots had to rely on their experience and the feel they eventually acquired, if they were good enough.

  Navigation was a constant worry and he kept looking at his airspeed indicator and his clock. Before he set off he had been given an estimated wind speed, but speed and direction both changed with distance and height and there was no adequate system of meteorological information to provide the pilots with really useful information. Weather forecasting was crude.

  The wind shrieked in the wires and struts, the engine flung back a smell of hot oil and warm metal. The din of the engine and
the threshing propeller had become hypnotic. The stars looked near enough to touch, the moon shimmered on the clouds beneath. To right and left of him he could discern the other two machines in his section.

  He wondered if there were still 18 of them altogether.

  He had turned on the oxygen, but by the time he did so he was feeling muzzy and three times on the way up to 16,000 ft he had had the illusion that another aircraft was flying across his path or diving towards him.

  He wondered how Alec was getting on in the rear cockpit. They had not yet had time to devise and fit the means of communication that Alec had suggested. Meanwhile, Alec carried a torch with which to attract his attention, and they tried to talk coherently through the speaking-tube. He had a torch too, now he came to think of it, and could flash it back at Alec. Dammit, he was feeling muzzy again despite the oxygen.

  It was so peaceful up here. Hard to realise they were on their way to destroy and kill: kill civilians, if they were unlucky.

  What was it that fellow Churchill had written, butting in on strategy in his capacity of Minister of Munitions?

  “It is not reasonable to speak of an air offensive as if it were going to finish the war by itself. It is improbable that any terrorisation of the civil population which could be achieved by air attack would compel the government of a great nation to surrender.”

  He’d memorised that and was pleased that he was able to recall it now, with lack of oxygen making his thought process slow.

  He agreed with Churchill, who had gone on to say, “Our air offensive should consistently be directed at striking at the bases and communications upon whose structure the fighting power of his armies and his fleets of the sea and of the air depends. Any injury which comes to the civil population in this process of attack must be regarded as incidental and inevitable.”

  Yardley disliked the idea of killing and injuring civilians, and there was no thought in him of revenge for what the enemy had done to the civilian population of England with bombs dropped from Zeppelins. But he was not going to grieve for any death or injury his bombs might cause by falling where he did not intend them to.

  Bomb-aiming was a haphazard business and the Hun civilians must take their chance, just as the British had to.

  He was flying over a break in the clouds and at once searchlights came spearing up to find them while fireflies twinkled far beneath where anti-aircraft batteries were opening fire. Shells burst on either side, but too far away to be heard.

  The engine coughed and as Yardley’s eyes went to the airspeed indicator he saw the needle swing back and felt the nose of the aircraft dip. The engine picked up and he climbed gently back to his proper height. His anxiety about the engine’s health increased. He tried a slight change in mixture and provoked another cough, a splutter, a sharp fall in speed, a loss of height. He corrected and once more climbed back to where he should be.

  He consulted his map at length and then began to search beneath him, looking for the broad sheen of the Rhine.

  He held his torch above his shoulder, pointing back at Wotton, and flashed it three times. Then he shouted into the tube.

  “Crossing the Rhine. See if you can spot the lake.”

  “The what? The lake?”

  “Yes, the lake.”

  “I’m looking.”

  The small lake east of the Rhine was an important pinpoint on their track. They should pass five miles south of it, if they had crossed the river on course.

  Yardley shifted uneasily in his hard seat, peering down from time to time. If compass error or wind had blown them badly off course, they had little fuel in hand to make a search for any landmarks.

  He heard Wotton’s muffled call.

  “I can see it. We’re too far south.”

  Yardley looked again and in the distance he could see a faint shimmer of moonlight on water. Or was it another delusion caused by lack of oxygen?

  He turned to port to verify the sighting.

  There was something else to catch his eye. At first he thought he was seeing some strange celestial manifestation like a cluster of shooting stars or meteorites. Several flashes of light seemed to be suspended high above the ground and flickering as he watched.

  His eyes must have been strained. He had been looking too long at the instruments and the lighted compass, and the change of focus was difficult to accommodate. He blinked, looked up and around for a moment, then down again.

  The cluster of scintillating flecks was still there.

  He knew what they must be. Balloons, fat silver globules swaying in the breeze. A nasty sight. He wondered how high they were. They could be at any altitude between a few hundred feet and just over seven thousand. He thought they must be up as high as possible.

  Hope there are none waiting for us, he thought.

  He would have to reduce altitude before he could bomb. He glanced down at the negative-lens bomb sight between his feet. It was eight inches by six inches in dimensions and made no allowance for wind drift. When he found his target he would have to fly up or down-wind; preferably the latter, which would give him extra speed while he had to fly straight and level and present the easiest target to Archie. A rough and ready system of calibration provided for bombing from 6,000 ft at 90 m.p.h., 10,000 ft at 80 m.p.h. or 15,000 ft at 70 m.p.h.

  When the time came, he intended to attack from the lowest of these altitudes: to have the best chance of putting his eggs where he wanted to and to fly through the flak as fast as possible.

  Even determining up and down wind was going to be tricky. He usually relied on drifting smoke from shell bursts; but that had been in the days when he was day bombing on the Western Front, when he could see smoke easily and there was plenty of it around.

  Twenty minutes later he was searching for another checkpoint. This time, when he tried to speak to Wotton, the tube was blocked by ice which had formed from the moisture which always found its way into it, and after much yelling he had to give up. He would have to rely on his eyes unaided, although he knew that Wotton would guess what he had wanted, and, from his own map, be checking their progress. So Wotton would be searching as well, even without being told to.

  It was a long search.

  He was seeking a hill of distinctive shape, an almost perfect cone with a truncated summit. It rose 300 ft above a ridge running roughly north and south, it was tree-clad and a railway line ran along the foot of the ridge. The rails showed up well on a bright night, shining like burnished silver and visible for some miles in each direction from 10,000 ft. All this could be seen even from much greater heights. Tonight, however, the clouds were closing to obscure them.

  There was only one thing for it. He would have to go down prematurely.

  He picked a gap in the clouds, the last one he could see, and fired off a Verey light. Then he stuffed the machine’s nose down steeply and whistled down before the gap closed.

  Yardley wondered how many of his companions were still in a position to follow him down.

  For a while he was engulfed in drifting vapour, then he came out of it into clear sky and levelled off. Nine thousand feet.

  He switched off the oxygen, glad to be able to do so.

  Now, where was that bally hill?

  He tried the speaking-tube again, but it was still iced up.

  There were gentle hills and valleys on all sides, but no conspicuous ridge, no conical hill. He searched for railway lines and at last he found what looked like a narrow strip of metal which gave back the moonlight as it broke fitfully through the clouds.

  Ten minutes later he found the landmark. He had been badly off course and now he made a mental adjustment for the wind direction although he could only guess at a probable wind speed.

  Another attempt to use the tube was more successful.

  “Can you hear me, Alec?”

  “Yes, sir, just about.”

  “We will have to stay at this height and I’ll go down to six thousand for our bombing run.”

  “Six tho
usand?”

  “Yes, six thousand.”

  Half a dozen brilliant spheres of light came twisting up at them, whirling in a crazy pattern through the darkness. Yardley had never seen flaming onions before, but he had heard all about them. He watched them with interest. He knew they were missiles fired from rifled rocket tubes. Everyone said they were inaccurate. He hoped that was right. The flaming onions whirled past fifty yards away. He felt reassured.

  The machines to port and starboard of him were still there. From time to time Wotton, when he could, had given him reports on such others, astern, as he had been able to glimpse.

  Wotton’s torch flashed and his voice came, faintly, through the tube.

  “Green Verey far behind us. Can’t see... can’t guess... who.”

  That was the first one, but how many others had there been during the times when they had been forced to fly in cloud?

  Five minutes to target now. They had been forced down to this height sooner than anticipated. Yardley began a gentle dive to 6,000 ft and a few seconds later the flak opened up.

  The railway junction at Fichtewald was in view, a web of shiny metal scattered with pinpricks of red and green lights from signals. Sparks from four shunting engines rose in fountains like fireworks. Yardley could see the cherry-red glow in the cabs of locomotives as stokers piled coal onto their fires.

  Searchlights swept the sky and the air began to boil with the explosion of near misses.

  Yardley spared one last glance to left and right for his two wing men, then, watching the smoke and steam from one of the engines, clear in the light of flares Wotton had dropped, he judged the wind direction and banked around to make his attack with the wind behind him.

  He intended to toggle his four 112 lb bombs free one at a time.

  Eyes on the crude bomb sight, he held the machine straight and level and felt it bucking under the blast of exploding shells.

  He lined up a locomotive hauling more than a dozen trucks and toggled his first bomb. On this heading, the station itself was in his path. If he dropped a bomb between any two of the platforms, the blast would do immense damage as it was funnelled between the walls of buildings. He aimed for the centre of the station and let another bomb go.