The Professionals

by Max Hennessy

  Even as I stared at them, the next shell burst with an almighty crack just ahead of us and almost immediately I saw Catlow swing nervously away. He was several hundred yards off to the right as I waved him back again, furious with him, and I changed course towards him, partly to put the anti-aircraft gunners off their target and partly to let him catch up. The proportion of casualties from anti-aircraft fire was always small but I’d once seen a direct hit on an old slow-flying BE – just a flash and a puff of smoke, then fragments of wood and fluttering fabric and two dark shapes twisting and turning as they fell. It could happen and I never treated anti-aircraft fire with contempt, but the best thing was not to change direction so much as to change height, a thing that wasn’t so noticeable from below.

  The puff balls fell behind and I flew north towards Lens then turned south without crossing the line and headed over the misty ponds of the River Scarpe, constantly watching Catlow and changing course and height from time to time to put the gunners off. Finally I turned west into the wind towards Rochy-le-Moutrou. I’d seen a few aeroplanes about – a small group up near the sun and one or two small sliding spots low over the clouds, and the flash of wings in the east as the sun caught the varnished surface of a banking aeroplane – but none of them had approached us, and I’d kept well clear of them. Catlow, Peckett and Bull needed time to get acclimatized.

  Back on the ground, already feeling the burning sensation of frostbite on my cheeks, I told Catlow what I thought of him. As usual, he was surly and rude. ‘There were no Huns about,’ he muttered. ‘The sky was empty.’

  ‘If that’s what you think,’ I pointed out, ‘then you’re dafter than I thought. I saw plenty.’

  He shrugged. ‘Not that it matters. I don’t expect to be here long. I’ll be away before the month’s out.’

  So that was it. His panic call for help had clearly brought results and his plans were made and he felt he could afford to be casual. I hoped he was right. As I turned away I heard him muttering to Peckett. ‘Blasted ribbon-hunters,’ he was saying contemptuously. ‘I think he was drawing it out a bit, personally.’

  The mess was in a farmhouse and was comfortable enough, but it was in a gloomy mood that evening and it seemed to me that they’d got the wind-up. They’d lost a few men in the past few weeks and nobody had done much to snap them out of their mood. Latta was obviously past his best, and the flight commanders, Orgill, Porteous and Le Petit, were no better. They were all in need of a rest, all of them pale-faced and wearing a stricken look that was a mixture of strain and outrage, which I guessed had come from seeing too many of their men disappear and having too little encouragement from Latta. The whole atmosphere of the mess was heavy, and the only member who seemed to have any life left in him was a little Scot called Munro with an accent you could cut with a knife. He was only about five feet two with a great bony beak of a nose, but he seemed to have the guts of a lion. He’d been in France since 1914 and had to walk with two sticks because of wounds suffered as an infantryman, but his spirit was by no means impaired, and he was contemptuous of the others.

  ‘Yon lot hae got the willies, laddie,’ he told me. ‘They see bogeys everywhere.’

  ‘Are there bogeys everywhere?’ I asked.

  He grinned. ‘Och, aye,’ he said. ‘Sure there are! The Circus, we call ’em. Painted like a lot o’ harlots and led by a laddie in a red machine. The Bloody Red Baron we call him.’

  ‘Are they good?’

  He grinned again, clearly undisturbed. ‘Hae they no’ got the new Albatros?’ he said. ‘If ye see a machine wi’ a V-shaped strut, laddie, watch out. It’s yon new DIII. They’ve got two guns firing through the propeller against our one, so ye’ll need to be gey careful wi’ ’em.’

  ‘Like you?’

  He gave me a wan smile that suddenly betrayed a host of unspoken, fought-down fears. ‘Aye, like me,’ he said. ‘Ah’m that careful these days, laddie, it hurts. Ah’ve been oot a long time, ye see, and Ah want tae gae hame tae Aberdeen eventually.’

  The meal was eaten almost in silence. Munro made a few attempts at conversation but he got nowhere and almost everyone at the table seemed afflicted by deafness.

  ‘It’s no’ just the Navy that’s called the Silent Service,’ he whispered.

  It was a dreary meal, and the mess eventually lapsed into complete silence. Bull was eating dourly with his head down, while Catlow picked at his vegetables as though he’d found a worm in them.

  ‘Pass the sauce, please,’ Munro said suddenly in a loud voice and I swore I saw Le Petit jump.

  ‘Ye’ve got tae mak’ yersel’ haird,’ Munro said cheerfully to me, with a wink. ‘Otherwise ye dinnae get noticed in the chatter.’

  Le Petit, a gloomy-looking Guernseyman, glowered at him but Munro was unmoved.

  While we were eating, Latta appeared to give out the orders for the next day. A and B flights were to furnish the duty patrols, with A doing the first and last and B the afternoon flight. I was to fly with Porteous and another man called Howarth while Bull, Peckett and Catlow were to spend their time improving their landings and in shooting at a target in the next field.

  Munro was orderly officer the next morning and he was at breakfast in the ghostly half-lit mess when we appeared. ‘Hard-boiled eggs again,’ he snorted. ‘They always gi’e me indigestion. They’re an awfu’ thing tae gae tae war on, mon.’

  Snowflakes were whirling round us as we trudged to the hangars, wrapping scarves round our necks and fastening buckles and buttons in a faint morning light that was beginning to outline trees and farm buildings. The ground crew, swaddled and padded in balaclavas, mufflers, dungarees and mittens, broke into a shuffling run over the frozen turf to heave at wings and tail units with blue hands and split fingertips. They’d been up ages heating the oil in drums over stoves to pour into the engines so they’d start up when they were wanted.

  ‘Watch yon Porteous, laddie,’ Munro had whispered as I’d left the mess. ‘He’s so scared, he thinks he’s got to show he’s not. It makes things a wee bitty dangerous.’

  I wasn’t sure what he meant but as the engines started with bursts of blue smoke and we climbed into the sun that laid a brilliant orange stain over the Scarpe, I decided I’d be twice as alert. I wasn’t nervous, only frozen. I’d done it all before and I knew I was no mug as a pilot by this time.

  Bullecourt and Feuchy came up beneath us, shabby-looking and frosted in the early-morning sunshine. It was shining directly into our eyes now and picked up two FEs so that they looked like tinselled birdcages as they drifted over the lines. Just to the south I could see a BE2C doing an artillery shoot and I was thankful that I wasn’t in it.

  The inevitable snarl of anti-aircraft shells made me jump as it always did, but it made me sit up, too, more alert than before, with my eyes all round the sky, because the German gunners sometimes fired to indicate our position to their friends higher up or in the eye of the sun.

  Porteous didn’t seem to show any interest and it only served to make me more concerned. Whatever Porteous might or might not see, I was determined I wasn’t going to miss anything, and I watched the rising sun keenly for any early-flying German who might be hiding down there.

  Groups of clouds like cotton wool edged with gold lay in the distance, with brighter banks of cumulus behind them slab-sided and solid-looking. Porteous changed course and another BE drifted past below us, moving sideways in that crablike manner of all aeroplanes on a different course. We were at 15,000 feet now and I was petrified and wretched with the cold but I was still wishing that Porteous would try to get a little higher.

  Near La Bassee, as another slow-flying BE drifted past, I saw the sun flash on a varnished wing to the east and knew there were aeroplanes there. Then I saw them heading for the BE below – just as Porteous began to rock his wings and point to them. Somehow it seemed too easy and I glanced upwards again. Sure enough there were four small dots above us, silver-grey and almost invisible against the upper sky.

>   But Porteous had already started down, firing far too soon so that the Germans below broke away in plenty of time. They were the new Albatroses, and the V-strut, spade tail and swept-back wings were clearly visible as they swung outwards. Instead of sticking together, both Porteous and Howarth swung out after them, and with the lighter wing-loading of the Pups which made them better than the Albatroses only at height, it seemed to me a stupid thing to do. But we were committed now, and a moment later we were really committed because I saw an all-red machine flash past me and caught the acrid smell of tracer bullets going through the wings. It hadn’t taken me long to meet Munro’s friend, the Bloody Red Baron.

  Another red Albatros, this time sporting a green tail, swung in front of me, sliding sideways, it seemed, but as I lined up the gun on him, I hit his slipstream and the Pup rocked violently. By the time I had corrected the Albatros had vanished. I found him again almost immediately and fired, but the gun jammed and while I was banging away at the cocking handle, almost apoplectic with rage, I saw the green-tailed German swing round in a tight bank, and hurriedly stopped worrying about the gun and gave my full attention to keeping out of his way.

  I seemed to be surrounded by Albatroses, swinging in on me like a pack of sharks closing in for the kill. Porteous and Howarth had vanished somewhere and, stuck in a tight turn, flat against the sky, the blood draining from my cheeks, I was almost choked by the thudding of my heart and furious with Porteous for landing me in this mess. The green-tailed Albatros was swinging round with me now, and I was shocked at his easy superiority. He was clearly gaining on me, his turns so tight I could look across the intervening space into the opposite cockpit. He seemed so close I felt I could have thrown a spanner at him.

  Tracers flashed past the wingtip of the Pup but I knew they were not intended to hit me, only to frighten me into changing course so that I would set myself up as a target, and I clung grimly to the tight turns. Then there was a bang in front of my nose that made me nearly jump out of the cockpit in fright as a bullet hit the altimeter and it fell apart.

  Talking to myself in a nauseating fret of fear, I still somehow remained intelligent enough to do all the right things. Sykes had once told me that going into a fight was a bit like stepping into an ice-cold shower. The first shock took your breath away but after that you seemed to recover. I was beginning to recover now and it seemed to me that the only thing I could do was get down to the ground because I felt I was far too young to start dying. Flopping around at a height where the Albatroses had all the advantages seemed stupid, and I thrust the stick forward and fell out of the sky like a stone. As I did so I almost hit one of the Albatroses as it swung past in front of me. It was so close I could see its yellow spinner and the oil smears on the engine and automatically I pressed the trigger. To my surprise, because a moment before it had been jammed, the gun fired and I saw fragments fly off the Albatros and it dipped away with an abrupt jerking movement and fell out of the sky with me.

  The needle of the air speed indicator was jammed against the stop now and the controls had grown stiff with the violence of the dive. Behind me I could still hear the crackle of shots and I was crouching lower and lower in the cockpit in the instinctive wish to hide myself. Made of wood and fabric, it wouldn’t have helped much but my brain was almost numb with fear. The wires were screaming now and I was expecting the wings to fold back one after the other at any moment. But with the crackle of shots still behind me I daren’t pull back on the stick and just had to take the chance of digging my own grave with the speed of my fall.

  After a while I realized the shooting had died away and began to ease out of the dive. I had a splitting headache from the change of altitude but the Germans seemed to have gone. Lifting myself in the seat as the machine levelled off, I saw an Albatros curving away just to my right and, even as I glanced at it, it suddenly dropped through a patch of cloud, and I wondered if it were the one I’d shot at.

  When I got back to Rochy, the flight-sergeant greeted me with a tremendous grin. ‘Nice to see you back, sir. We heard you’d gone down like a stone, with a pack of Huns on your tail.’

  ‘I did,’ I said. ‘That’s why I’m back.’

  He glanced at the machine. ‘Looks like you’ve been through a mincing machine,’ he observed.

  I climbed out of the cockpit, stiff and cold and still angry with Porteous. ‘What about the others?’

  ‘Not back yet, sir.’

  Howarth put in an appearance after lunch. He had crashed just behind the trenches and written off his machine, and his stricken look had intensified.

  ‘What about Porteous?’ Munro asked.

  ‘I saw his wing come off,’ he said. ‘He went down like a stone near Grenay.’

  That evening Latta appeared to ask if anyone had shot down an Albatros with a yellow spinner and to detail Catlow, Peckett and Bull, as the newest arrivals, as pallbearers at Porteous’s funeral.

  ‘Not what you’d call a cheerful introduction to the war,’ Bull muttered.

  When I went down to the hangars I was surprised to find no one working on my machine.

  ‘Where are they all?’ I demanded.

  The flight-sergeant was apologetic. ‘Getting ready for the cross-country run, sir.’

  ‘Cross-country what?’

  ‘Run, sir. C.O.’s orders. He’s keen on physical training.’

  ‘Physical training! I thought this was a technical corps and that our job was to shorten the war! Fetch ’em back here and get ’em to work.’

  I went storming to Latta’s office and there was a long and heated exchange. It was colossal cheek on my part – a nineteen-year-old hostilities-only officer telling a thirty-odd-year-old Regular how to run his squadron. But I was livid that two experienced technical men who ought to have been putting right the damage to my machine should be expected to go haring round the countryside in boots and braces just because Latta had a fixation about physical exercise.

  It seemed to startle Latta and for a moment he said nothing, then he went for me bull-headed. But he must have known he was in the wrong because in the end, after promising several times to court martial me, he backed down and said that my mechanic and fitter would be excused the runs, though he made no promises for any of the others. Outside again, I leaned against the wall of the hut to cool off, horrified at the things I’d said and aware for the first time that I’d come perilously close to being kicked out of the Flying Corps or something. It seemed safer for the future to be like Brer Rabbit and ‘lie low and say nuffin,’ until I’d got the measure of Latta more.

  The evening patrol took off already nervous after the disaster of the morning, and we were all down on the field to watch them return. Even Munro seemed a little downcast. ‘Tae me,’ he said, ‘it seems daft tae carry the war over the German lines as we do. Sure, we’re best wi’ yon offensive speerit they’re always talking aboot but Ah always thought that when ye were hard-pressed ye did a bit o’ retreating, and consolidated until ye could hit back.’

  ‘It makes sense,’ I said.

  ‘Oor generals were a’ brought up on the Charge of the Light Brigade, though,’ he growled. ‘They gae bull-heided at everything. It was just the same in the trenches. Keep on hittin’ ’em hard, they told us. They didnae seem tae notice that we were sufferin’ more casualties than the Hun.’

  As he finished speaking, one of the mechanics stood up and began to walk forward, and then we became aware of a hum in the air.

  ‘Over to the left, sir,’ the flight-sergeant said. ‘Down low.’

  Latta appeared and stared into the last of the light. ‘How many?’ he demanded nervously.

  ‘Two, sir,’ the flight-sergeant said. ‘No, three! They’re all there.’

  Latta turned and headed for the office and as he passed me I heard him say ‘Thank God for that.’

  As the three Pups came in over the trees, it was obvious they’d been in a fight. Wires were trailing and one of them bounced badly and did a ground loop
. As we all went running out to it, the pilot jumped out of the cockpit and then we saw that one of his tyres had been burst by a bullet. The fabric of the machine was covered with little flags of fabric that had flapped loose in the slipstream.

  ‘The Bloody Red Baron?’ Munro asked.

  The other man gave him a wan smile. ‘I saw no Bloody Red Baron,’ he said. ‘But it was the same lot all right.’

  * * *

  That night the farmer and his wife appeared with a small bouquet of the first spring flowers. There was a card attached to it with a ribbon – ‘Felicitations au Lieutenant Falconer’ – and Munro told me they’d found out about the machine I’d shot down. It was a pathetic little tribute that left me red-faced and mumbling.

  ‘They havenae had many tae celebrate,’ Munro explained.

  He set out to start a celebration but somehow it never got going and Latta’s news at dinner shocked the mess. Catlow was pushed at once on to A Flight duty roster to take the place of Porteous and I was given the command. Catlow, Bull and Peckett were going to have to take their chances over the line earlier than normal, because the replacements were not coming through as fast as the casualties.

  Munro was undaunted and began to pound the mess piano. ‘Goodbyee,’ he sang, looking at Catlow. ‘Don’t cryee! Wipe the tear, baby dear, from your eyee!’

  Catlow gave him a dirty look and joined Peckett and one or two others in a gloomy game of vingt-et-un.

  The next few days were quiet, however, and I wasn’t sorry. It stayed bitterly cold with sleet showers and even snow and I was uncomfortable and half-frozen in a tent and not very happy. I had sent off a letter to Sykes begging him to put in a request for me, but I’d heard nothing from him and had to accept that perhaps his squadron was as busy as ours was. A couple of replacements called Winton and Smart turned up but they looked wetter behind the ears than Catlow and Bull and Peckett had been when I’d first seen them and a lot wetter than I’d been when I’d first arrived in France the previous year.