Night Raiders

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  He spotted Colonel Quinn standing by the fire and holding court, being affable to some of the newly joined crews. Yardley crossed the room. Quinn, who must have seen him come in, pretended not to be aware of his presence.

  Yardley halted in front of him and some of the group made way deferentially.

  “Good evening, Colonel.”

  Quinn gave him a quick frown. He had been holding forth and this was a sign of displeasure at being interrupted.

  “Good evening, Yardley.”

  The newly arrived pilots and observers from the other two squadrons stared. So this was the famous Eric Yardley. His own new officers looked at him proudly.

  “May I get you a drink, Colonel?”

  “Thank you.”

  Yardley turned to the waiter who was standing near the group.

  “Bring a round, will you.” There was no need to stipulate his own drink. All he had to do was to raise a finger to one of the mess waiters and he was fetched a large whisky.

  Tearle and Wotton had dutifully made their way over to the fireplace to join him.

  Quinn resumed his discourse but had lost the attention of his audience. The youngest among them made a polite show of listening to him but their interest had shifted to Yardley; whose personality radiated a galvanic current even when he was silent. It was not long before his fixed stare and courteous pretence of attention made Quinn dry up and drain his glass.

  He turned to his wing adjutant, who was at his elbow, and said, “Tell my driver to bring my car round. I’m going into Hauteville to dine.” He looked over everyone’s heads and beckoned to the major in charge of the Intelligence section, then to the Senior Medical Officer. They both came to see what he wanted. “You’re coming to dinner with me in Hauteville.” He beckoned a waiter. “Ask these officers what they want to drink.” He stalked out.

  Yardley felt unholy elation. It delighted him to make Quinn uncomfortable.

  Three hours later the windows were rattling with the shouts of partisans urging their squadron comrades on as they piled on top of members of another squadron in a back-breaking game of High Cockalorum.

  Yardley, hair tousled and face flushed, emerged from the midst of the heap of bodies and ordered “Schooner race.” Two rows of filled pint tankards were placed parallel on a table and eight men, from Yardley’s squadron and the Fee squadron, lined up facing each other. A referee from the Handley Page squadron shouted “Go!” and the first man on each side raised the tankard in front of him and drained it. As soon as he slammed it back on the table, the next man, crouching with his hand around, but not touching, the handle, lifted his tankard and so on down the line. Then Yardley’s squadron, the winners thanks largely to his ability to sink a pint in under five seconds, “played” the HP squadron; and lost.

  So they then took on their vanquishers in a tug-of-war: two teams sitting on the floor, each man holding the one in front around the waist, the front man on each team gripping a broomstick. Yardley was the gripper for his team and nothing could break his hold. They won two straight pulls out of three.

  Are you there, Moriarty? gave some of them a breather, while two contestants, blindfolded, lay face-down on the floor and, at arms’ length, gripped each other’s left hand. Each in his right hand held a thick roll of newspapers and magazines. In turn they shouted, “Are you there, Moriarty?” and, when the other replied, “Yes” and rolled away from where his voice had come, aimed a blow at him; which, if it landed on the head, could half-stun.

  When several Moriartys had been suitably belaboured, it was time to clamber round the anteroom without touching the floor. Furniture, door and window frames and the chimneypiece provided precarious perches. Anyone who fell had to down a pint of beer.

  Chairs were brought in from the dining room and wooden spoons and a potato from the kitchen. Two teams straddled the chairs, facing the backs, and a game of polo raged up and down the room. Chairs were broken; players tipped off and ridden over, more drinks were consumed. Someone fell into the fire; his shirt-sleeve caught alight and had to be extinguished with a soda siphon.

  A rugger ball was fetched and two people were concussed in a high-scoring game.

  After more refreshment, sofas and chairs were lined up in opposing forces for a tank battle fought out with well-aimed siphons.

  Yardley filled his mouth with petrol and squirted it out in a thin stream, to which Wotton set fire: it streaked most satisfactorily across several feet of anteroom space and scattered some of the new crews who had never seen this feat before.

  The newcomers were made to take off their shoes and socks and anoint the soles of their feet with ink. They were then hoisted up, upside down, to plant their feet on the ceiling and take several steps across it. Only one man was dropped during this process. He was very heavy and fell on his head, knocking himself out for several interesting and speculative minutes, during which the junior medical officers showed decent, if inebriated, concern.

  They drank to the health of Cardinal Puff and various initiates who could not complete the actions correctly drank so many forfeits that they fell into a stupor.

  They sang about the Muffin Man Who Lived Down Drury Lane, balancing tankards of beer on their heads, and more of them got drenched with beer and fell down intoxicated.

  Yardley insisted on a final inter-squadron slaughter at High Cockalorum and when he and the two other Squadron Commanders finally cleared the mess there were a good dozen of its members who had to be carried to bed. Some of them were ferried by friends who could scarcely walk themselves and were consequently repeatedly dropped in the snow.

  The three Squadron Commanders, downing a final whisky, agreed that it had not been at all a bad show; and all the better for the absence of the Colonel.

  It was a fine night. The snow had stopped. Tomorrow promised to be a good flying day, which probably presaged a good flying night. It looked as though tonight’s fun and games would have to last them for quite a while.

  Chapter Thirteen

  A cold clear day augured well for Colonel Quinn’s ambitious operational plan. Clear skies as far as one could see from the ground, however, were no guarantee of favourable weather over Germany. There was, in fact, no guarantee about the weather at all, anywhere: meteorological science had not advanced far enough, information from Germany was unobtainable.

  In mid-morning Yardley and Wotton took off to have a look for themselves. They had both become weather-wise over the years at the Front and could read the portents over Flanders with fair accuracy. Germany was another matter, but although there were hills and the area with which they were concerned was farther inland, there were no significant topographical features to make what they had learned about eastern France, where they now were, invalid. There were no mountain ranges, large lakes or inland seas. Just the hills and a few broad rivers.

  They stumped across to their aircraft muffled to the ears and emitting great gouts of milky vapour from mouth and nostrils. Their soft-soled sheepskin boots crunched agreeably on the firm, crusty snow. A runway had been cleared by fatigue parties wielding shovels. It enabled aircraft to take off and land into the prevailing wind; and when the wind changed, unless it blew directly beam-on, it caused no great problem, even to the Handley Pages. The buoyant biplanes of the era needed only a short run at comparatively low speed to become airborne and could land with a remarkably short run as well.

  Wotton had broached the matter of marching-boots hesitantly and was surprised when Yardley had endorsed his suggestion.

  “I thought you’d laugh at me for being a defeatist,” Wotton had said.

  “Even Rolls-Royce engines have been known to fail, old boy, and anyone can have a spot of bad luck and be hit by Archie. We must have had scores of chaps taken prisoner because they couldn’t walk home in fug boots. Bally good idea, by Jove.”

  They carried a pair of boots now: Wotton’s, heavy black issue boots with hobnails which he had worn as a sergeant pilot; Yardley’s, more lightly cleated br
own officers’ pattern, legacy of his infantry days.

  “We’re more likely to get fanned down in broad daylight than at night,” Yardley had remarked cheerfully.

  It was pleasant to be setting out on a long flight by day. The sun, though weak, was a cheerful reminder that spring would return in another couple of months’ time; even to this war-ravaged landscape.

  To the north they could see, as they climbed, the Allied lines. One-street villages with many tumbled buildings that had been destroyed or damaged by artillery fire when the enemy positions were further south, before repeated thrusts over the years had managed to drive them back a few miles, lay halfway between the aerodrome and the frontline trenches. These villages were in the rest area.

  Then there were the support trenches, black stripes on the snow. The snow hid much of the squalor of mud, shattered guns, waterlogged shell holes, dead men, rusty barbed wire, abandoned equipment, in no-man’s-land beyond.

  There were woods which had been reduced to leafless trees, many of them mere trunks, the branches all stripped off by shellfire. There were more fallen trees than standing. There were scattered farm buildings, all in ruin, all roofless, none with walls still standing more than eight feet high.

  They could make out the line of the German wire and the dark gash of the enemy first line trenches. Beyond, they could see the continual flash of enemy artillery. Much closer, the Allies’ guns flamed and smoked; it seemed, all day and all night. It was not really like that, but there was a barrage being fired now and when one saw the big guns in action one forgot that there were ever times when one could not hear, if not see, them. The heavy rumble of field guns had been everyone’s background noise for so long that most of them imagined it was present even when there was a lull. Their ears were more attuned to incessant bombardment than to silence.

  They climbed to 16,000 ft before they levelled off and by then they were over enemy-occupied France. But Yardley was steering a course that did not follow their night path to Germany, so for a while they were not molested by anti-aircraft fire. There was no need to fly along their accustomed operational track: the purpose of the sortie was to observe the weather over as large an area as they could.

  The Rhine shimmered brightly between snowbound banks, the red roofs of villages and small towns looked homely and inoffensive. A Christmas peacefulness seemed to linger, a month after, over Germany.

  Wotton could hear, through the inefficient voice-pipe, Yardley bellowing into his oxygen mask the obscene song about the two German officers who crossed the Rhine to do unmentionable things to the women and drink the wine, Mademoiselle from Armentières, parlez-vous?

  “Ruddy waste of oxygen,” he muttered, laughing to himself.

  It was more than that: it was lack of oxygen supply. This was intermittent and inadequate even when the crude equipment was working at its best. This morning there was a leak and Yardley was getting even less than usual.

  It was not long before Yardley saw the landscape beneath him shift and three tree-clad hills fuse into one. Then he saw a train running along a valley and presently it started to climb into the sky, leaving a long trail of smoke behind it. He blinked and looked elsewhere. A large formation of aeroplanes was coming towards him, tier upon tier of them. Some were Albatroses and some were Fokker Triplanes. And some... hold on half a mo’... some of them were the old original parasol-type Fokker monoplanes he hadn’t seen since they dominated the Western Front nearly two years ago. Damned odd.

  He turned his head to search the rest of the sky and when he looked back towards the great air fleet it had gone.

  Where?

  Before he could find the answer to that, he saw Father Christmas dashing across the sky, standing on a huge sledge pulled by dozens of pairs of reindeer. Then they disappeared, too.

  He banked and turned and for a while something happened to improve the oxygen supply, for his head cleared a bit. But he recalled the Albatroses and the Fokkers and began to seek them again; but could not find them.

  It gave him a feeling of great discomfort. Dazedly he told himself that it was time the doctors did something about improving oxygen supply. This was quickly followed by another fall in the quantity of oxygen that was reaching him and he drifted into a rosy euphoria, forgot all about the other times when he had suffered from similar delusions, and flew on.

  Until he began to feel consciousness slipping; and Wotton, in the rear cockpit, felt a sharp thrust of alarm and fear as the DH4’s nose dipped and it began to accelerate. The howl of the wind increased, the altimeter unwound crazily, the dive steepened. Wotton tried to raise himself so that he could see more of his pilot than just the back of his head, but the wind pressure forced him back into his seat.

  He wondered whether to use his duplicate controls and throttle back, to insert the control stick in its slot and pull the nose up.

  Slowly the aircraft’s nose began to rise, the speed fell off and presently Yardley’s voice came faintly through the speaking-tube. He must have been shouting, to be heard at all above the engine roar, but he sounded drowsy.

  “Alec... can... you... hear... me?”

  “Yes. Are you all right?”

  “All... right... bloody oxygen... sorry... you all right?”

  “Yes, fine.”

  “Stay... down... here.”

  They had descended to just over 10,000 ft. Wotton welcomed the news!

  Yardley swung round in a long wheel to the north and west. As far as they could see in every direction there were no signs of bad weather building up. There was high cloud, but none of it stormy.

  Neither he nor Wotton had fully recovered from the anoxia they had been suffering: the pilot’s worse than the observer’s, but Wotton quite badly affected too.

  They were still a trifle muzzy when Yardley thought he saw a pair of Albatroses outlined against the clear sky to the north-west. The sun was behind him and showed them up well. They were above him by a few thousand feet. He did not believe it.

  “Alec... can you see anything... one o’clock and well above?”

  Wotton searched, thought he saw a couple of Albatroses, blinked, still saw them, and doubted his vision.

  “Thought I could see something.”

  “What?”

  “Couple of Albatri.”

  “Odd. So did I.”

  A stream of tracer bullets rushed between the upper and lower wings on the port side, coming from astern. Wotton leaped up and grabbed his Lewis gun.

  The two enemy aircraft they had first seen were still where they had been: on the starboard bow and far out of range. Decoys. In their oxygen-starved condition, neither he nor Yardley had seen the other pair creep up from behind.

  Here’s a fine how-d’you-do, Wotton thought. Four Boches, and us about forty minutes from base. Not a speck of cloud cover closer than ten miles. Good thing we brought our marching-boots.

  He and Yardley had had many fights with the Albatros when they were on the Western Front. It was not the most equal kind of contest. The Albatros had the advantage.

  To start with, the DH4 was a heavy machine: it weighed 3,212 lb. The Albatros tipped the scale at 2,000 lb, which made it greatly more manoeuvrable; apart from the fact that it was designed as a fighter and manoeuvrability of shape was its quintessence.

  The Albatros could climb to 20,500 ft, which meant that it should always be able to dive on the DH4, which could go up to only 16,000 ft. That did not matter much in this instance, for the enemy already had a height advantage when the fight started.

  The Albatros’s two Spandau guns gave it a heavier firepower than the DH4’s one Vickers and one Lewis.

  The latter, however, could shoot to the rear and had an all-round field of fire. And the DH4 could achieve 130 m.p.h. at 10,000 ft, compared with the Albatros’s 117 at 3,500 ft. As they were at about 10,000 ft now, this was significant.

  Yardley and Wotton had taken on two, three and even four Albatroses at a time more than once. Neither of them was particu
larly disturbed by this encounter. The usual tactic, when alone, was to scoot home. Its worst feature was that they had been caught napping and were very far from home. In the end, nearly every air battle came down to the quality of the pilots and gunners involved. In that respect, there was not a more confident pair than Yardley and Wotton in any air force, anywhere.

  Wotton swung his Lewis gun as Yardley turned to port, and opened fire.

  He saw strikes on the fuselage of the nearer Albatros; there was a second one above it and to its right. So they had a fight with four on their hands. He had no doubt at all that the decoys would not stay out of range for long. They must all have been part of the standing patrol system of which Intelligence had recently given warning.

  Yardley held his turn until he saw the Albatros which had first fired at them about to cross his bows from left to right. He heard Wotton shooting at its companion. He turned to starboard, not banking, skidding flat, putting the Germans off their aim while holding one of them in his ring sight. He throttled back slightly so as not to lead the target by too much, bringing the stick back a trifle to keep his nose up. He fired a burst from the Vickers and saw bullets smash into the enemy’s engine cowling.

  Tracer flashed across a few inches in front of him from starboard to port and he glanced up to his right; to see the pair which had first attracted his attention now only 300 yards off and still above but diving.