War Wounds

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  Another near miss brought a gush of hot air slamming down on it, and it fell as if it had hit a deep vacuum. Yet a third tipped one wingtip up violently and made Templer bite his tongue.

  The guns ceased fire.

  They must be right on the patrol line now.

  Templer restlessly scanned the sky.

  Ice had formed on his goggles. He had constantly to scrape it off with the fingertips of his gloves. The gauntlets were stiff, rimed with frost. The lenses were streaked with ice, and clear spaces which were made opaque by granules of ice and by his breath, which froze on them. His vision was much obscured. To add to his irritation, his nose had begun to run with cold and the mucus had frozen.

  A skein of cirrus smeared the sky a couple of thousand feet overhead and to the north-east.

  From behind its nearest fringe, a dozen familiar shapes emerged. The sight of a formation of Fokker Triplanes struck fear into the crews of many types of Allied aircraft; but the Triplanes were not as fast as the DH4. They did, however, have the advantage, this time, of height which would give them some 30 m.p.h. added speed in a dive; and of being in a position to cut across the bombers’ path.

  Templer rocked his wings and pointed at the enemy.

  Liversedge had seen the Triplanes some seconds before his pilot, but had waited before warning him. Templer’s moods were uncertain and there were times when he resented an implication that he had been slow to notice danger.

  After 20 months at the Front, Liversedge still felt a spasmodic tightening of his scrotum and a queasiness in his intestines each time he made contact with the enemy. He had often thought it odd that his first nervous reaction should be below the belt. He had decided that he must suffer from a subconscious particular fear of emasculation. He wondered now what physical sensations Templer was feeling.

  Templer, in fact, was making calculations. He was a highly methodical man. He believed that there was a formula to fit most military situations. Some of these had been worked out by pilots who were now instructing at flying schools in England and were passing on their wisdom to their pupils. Air fighting was in its infancy, so fresh problems kept occurring. In the days when Templer had learned to fly, it was about as much as any instructor could do to teach a novice how to avoid fatally mishandling his aeroplane. Battle experience was scanty; and most of the best-experienced pilots were kept in France or had been killed. He had had to work everything out for himself.

  Liversedge was also figuring out angles and lines of sight. He knew pretty well what to expect of his pilot. They had developed several standard drills. He had shot down 11 German aircraft; and been shot down himself once, when the squadron still flew the FE2b, a pusher type in which the observer sat in front of the pilot. A burst of Fokker machine-gun fire had carried away his pilot’s head. Liversedge had looked round and seen a decapitated torso, eerily giving the impression of flying the machine; while a fountain of blood leaped from the severed neck and was swept back in the slipstream. The well trimmed FE2b had held its gentle dive towards the British lines. Liversedge had been momentarily immobilised by horror. The Fokker pilot had performed a loop around the FE and given him a wave before turning away. Liversedge could never decide whether he had been spared because the German felt he had done enough in killing the pilot or because his gun had either jammed or run out of ammunition. He had slotted home the emergency joystick carried in the front cockpit and contrived to land without crashing.

  This experience always came to his mind when he made fresh contact with the enemy.

  It made him sweat: not only because of the horrifying memory of the headless body and the spurting blood, but also because the FE2 was a dangerous brute to land. If it crashed, the rear-mounted engine tore loose and thrust its whole weight forward. Scores of pilots had been crushed. Landed heavily by a mere observer, the aircraft could have been splintered by the heavy engine; and he would have been mangled to death.

  All this filled Liversedge’s thoughts.

  Templer, making his assessment of the enemy’s probable mode of attack, and the options open to him in countering it, felt no distress; only elation. He was being given the chance to kill some more Huns.

  He was contemptuous of the Fokker Triplane, because it was a mere attempt to emulate the hugely successful Sopwith Triplane that had swept the Boche out of the sky in 1917. The Sopwith had blazed out of nowhere like a tornado striking some part of the globe where no more than a light gale had ever been known before. With its vivid rate of climb — 13,000 feet in 15 minutes — and dazzling manoeuvrability, it had shocked, as well as lacerated, the enemy. With stolid Teutonic lack of imagination, the Imperial German Military Aviation Service had ordered Anthony Fokker, their Dutch designer, to copy it.

  Fokker had designed a triplane that would climb to 13,000 feet in a quarter of an hour and had the same maximum speed as the Sopwith “Tripehound”; and, having three wings, was equally nimble. But careless workmanship and haste in assembly resulted in a fatal weakness: the Fokker Triplane’s wings kept being wrenched off in violent manoeuvres. By the time the faults had been rectified, the Royal Flying Corps had a new fighter, the SE5; and the Aviation Militaire had the new Spad 8: both superior in every way to this Hunnish travesty in imitation of a brilliant British invention.

  German scout — or fighter, as they were beginning to be called — tactics had been developed in 1915 and remained unchanged: a dive into an Allied formation, or at a single aeroplane, shooting from 200 yards; then a zoom up from the bottom of the dive, below the target, and a burst of fire into its belly. It was an excellent method of attack. The British and French had adopted it. With the aeroplanes and machine-guns of the period, there was little scope for a variant. Templer awaited the dive from 2,000 ft above, on his starboard bow — two-o’clock — with pleasure.

  Both he and Liversedge were watching the 12 Triplanes. Both, from the corner of an eye, caught the glow of a red Verey cartridge fired from somewhere astern.

  Liversedge instantly swung his gun around and his whole body with it. Templer turned his head to gaze back over his shoulder.

  Eight Fokker Triplanes were already diving, from the shelter of a fat, flocky cumulus cloud, onto the rear of the British formation.

  This could never happen to those blighters who fly Handley Page 0/400s, thought Templer.

  Liversedge echoed it: Oh, those lucky devils who fly at night.

  The squadron was sandwiched, neatly trapped. To hold formation would give it the benefit of mutually protective fire: but with 20 attackers and 12 defenders, the former were bound to score the most hits; and if the squadron did not break formation immediately after the first swoop — those who survived it — it would be defencelessly vulnerable against the belly attack that would follow.

  Templer kept turning his head, watching both enemy formations. The rear one was about 500 ft lower than the one in front. He waited until he judged that 300 yards separated A Flight, at the rear, from the eight Triplanes. Before the latter could open fire, he sent up a white Verey light followed at once by a red one, and rocked his wings.

  A Flight broke. Templer saw the enemy’s tracer sparkling harmlessly through the airspace that the DH4s had just vacated. In an instant, the enemy had broken too and bombers and fighters were whirling around each other. The odds of eight to five were not bad.

  The other 12 Triplanes were boring down, still some 400 yards distant. Eight to twelve: pretty good odds; and the Boches must be confused by my tactics, Templer told himself. He let them come to within 300 yards, guessing that they would open fire at longer than their usual range, anticipating another break.

  When he fired a single white Verey cartridge, the signal to hold formation when behind enemy lines, the Fokker pilots fell for the trick. They broke violently, steepening their dives and scattering to cut out individual targets when the DH4s also broke. Templer watched their premature manoeuvre with contempt. Liversedge and the observer in the aircraft immediately on his right began shoot
ing together at the nearest Fokker. A tongue of flame licked out from its petrol tank, a plume of smoke billowed around it. It plunged vertically towards the ground.

  Astern, a DH4 emitted a series of small flames from its engine. The wind swept them over the pilot. Templer glanced away, making a tight climbing turn. When he looked that way again, the fire had reached the petrol tank. A violence of flames, smoke and debris erupted. The roar of the explosion reached Templer and Liversedge above the noise of their engine.

  The Fokkers were too agile for the DH4s: both Liversedge and his pilot saw tracer hitting a German machine here and there, but never for long enough to put it out of the fight.

  The DH4s were nimble enough and well enough flown to evade most of the enemy’s bullets. One more green Verey light coloured the sky as one of them, from B Flight, Templer thought, dived out of the battle, its engine dead.

  Templer hoped that it would be left alone. The pilot would have to land in enemy territory. There was no point in killing him and his observer; but some greedy Hun after the score of kills necessary to earn him the Pour le Mérite, the Blue Max, might be tempted. With the passage of time, all enemy airmen acquired the characteristics of greed and cruelty, in Templer’s view.

  Despite having broken formation, the bombers managed slowly to move in the direction of their ultimate target. Circling, diving, climbing, each full circle they described in evasion had its centre a little further to the north-east. There was still time to rejoin and continue their way; if the enemy did not stay and force them to turn back.

  A red-on-red flare stained the undersides of the clouds. Templer knew its meaning, and he took his eyes off the enemy to scan the scene and count his force. He could find only ten: one had gone down without his knowledge. The enemy were all heading for their base, forced to abandon combat.

  The Fokkers must have been at the end of their patrol and running short of petrol. He looked at his fuel gauge: there was not enough to spare for a climb back to 14,000 feet. He was at 11,500 and would have to stay there. A few of his pilots had managed to stay as high or even a little higher. Most of them had lost about 4,000 feet and would have to climb up to him. He compromised, fired a red flare and began a gentle descent to 11,000 feet. Those above him followed suit; those below put their aircraft into an economical climb. Ten minutes later they had formed up again. C Flight had lost one, B and C two each. Templer’s anger burned steadily.

  How many more would they lose, now that they would be much more vulnerable to Archie, at the lower altitude? But there was a compensation: they could bomb more accurately from down there.

  Accuracy, in those days of crude bombsights, was a relative term: in this instance, it meant that the number of bombs to hit the target may amount to as much as 40 percent instead of 30. This did not mean that only so few fell within the target area, but that only those percentages, on average, burst where they could do worthwhile damage.

  Liversedge shared these thoughts. If bombing was at all effective, it was because it was a new and peculiarly frightening way of making war. The random falling of bombs terrified the civilian population; when they hit their target, their effect was severe: wherever they fell, they made people feel vulnerable and powerless to protect themselves. He and Templer had both done some night bombing, in 1916 and 1917, and it was easy to imagine the feelings of those, civilian or military, who heard the drone of aero engines overhead and had no way of telling where and when the enemy would drop his bombs. The strays were even more terrifying than the accurately aimed ones. It was not true, he reflected sourly, that people could not defend themselves against bombs: the reverse had just been demonstrated by the Triplanes; and anti-aircraft batteries awaited the DH4s.

  For a while he hoped that Templer would decide that they lacked the petrol to reach Mannheim with an adequate margin to ensure a return to base, and would divert to the secondary target. The emotion passed as defiance took the place of fear. Damn the Boche; he couldn’t stop them.

  Mannheim announced itself by its barrage balloons. Templer and his observer hated them equally: they looked so smug; fat, swaying lazily in the wind; and so cheerfully innocent, the sun reflected from their skins imparting a silver sheen. They were a tempting target to Allied scout pilots: shooting one down was accounted equivalent to destroying an aeroplane, because they were surrounded by machine-guns. There was nothing cheerful or innocent about those bloody Hildas: just like the Hun to give them such a name; they did look like stout Hausfrauen.

  Mannheim’s next manifestation of discouragement appeared in the sky at a greater altitude than the balloons. Black puffs of lazily dissolving smoke began to pock the sky. Templer started to switchback and zigzag: but he had to be temperate with both manoeuvres, which could consume more petrol than they had to spare. He led the squadron up, down and to left and right irregularly; often combining movements in two dimensions: climb and turn to port, dive and turn to starboard; sometimes, to confuse the enemy’s predictors as much as possible, he would make the same move twice in succession: diving turn to port…level flight…another port dive.

  The shellbursts became thicker. They made the air turbulent. All the DHs rocked and yawed, swayed from side to side in involuntary quarter-rolls, side-slipped.

  A boom rolled through the formation, accompanied by a surge of air. Liversedge felt as though he had been dealt a furious box on each ear. His ears rang, his senses reeled. The noise dulled his brain. The aircraft was lifted as though on a Pacific roller. It was tilted almost onto its left wingtip.

  Close behind, where there had been a C Flight machine, there was a pall of smoke. From it, pieces of the aeroplane and its crew were hurled, spinning.

  Now there were nine. Nine green bottles hanging on the wall, thought Liversedge.

  A moment later there were eight: another incandescent glow astern, followed by a hot blast of air and a thunderclap of sound, left another patch of air space empty. Beneath it, the remains of a DH4 that had been hit by white-hot shell fragments were dropping in a smoke-wreathed clump of fire. Both its pilot and observer had been flung out, intact. They emerged from the bonfire in high, arching trajectories, then began falling earthward, spreadeagled. The clothes of both men were alight and began to burn more strongly as the breeze of their fall fanned the fires.

  Templer looked round, then made a sweeping gesture with his right arm. The seven other survivors shuffled about until the eight aircraft constituted two diamond-shaped boxes of four.

  The target was in view. Liversedge abandoned his gun and concentrated on the bomb sight. From time to time he made hand signals to his pilot, who turned right and left accordingly, flying straight and level. The factory began to slide through the glass of the viewing frame. For the time being, Liversedge was oblivious of the anti-aircraft shells. The centre of the group of buildings travelled along the parallel wires that crossed the bomb sight. He toggled the two 230-pounders away. He and Templer felt the aeroplane rise as it cast its burden.

  Templer put it into a steep left-hand turn. Both men looked down, watching their bombs until lost from view. They stared at the ground. The smoke and debris of two explosions coiled up from the factory. Templer put the aircraft straight and level while Liversedge took a photograph.

  They watched the others bomb, before setting course for base.

  On the way home, one had to make a forced landing with a stopped engine: but they were over Allied-held ground, and the machine and its crew would be picked up and fetched home in a few hours.

  *

  By late afternoon the photographs had been developed and printed.

  “Good show, Templer.”

  Templer held Major Bentinck’s eyes for a moment, then looked down at the photographs again. A good show, when ten lives had been lost; in achieving what two HP 0/400s could have done, and would probably have been unscathed? Ten good Britons dead, in exchange for the wreckage of bricks and mortar, the possible ruin of some machinery that could soon be replaced, and the proba
ble extinction of a handful of Boche factory workers?

  Liversedge, watching Templer, knew what was going on in his mind; and concurred.

  “Decent photograph, Liversedge.” The C.O’s praise aroused no pleasure.

  “Better than the last few I’ve managed to take, sir. There wasn’t much smoke or dust to obscure it.”

  “No. But still, the hits look clean and the damage looks satisfactory.”

  Put that in your letters to the bereaved next-of-kin, Templer thought.

  “Yes, sir,” Liversedge said. I wish I could sound more pleased about it, he thought.

  “The HPs will finish the job tonight.” The Major sounded breezy.

  Templer looked hard at him. “They could have done the whole job with four machines, Major.”

  “Perhaps. One never knows where the Boche night patrols are going to be; and their Archie and search-lights get stronger every week.”

  As you know only from hearsay, Templer reflected. Not your fault that you’re forbidden to cross Hun lines…but it would sound better to the rest of us if you didn’t air these observations in quite that tone of voice…as though you knew all about it at first hand. He said nothing.

  He had very little to say for the rest of the day. Liversedge found him in the mess when he went in at 6.30, sitting in an armchair, ostensibly reading Punch, in front of the empty fireplace, a glass of whisky and soda in his hand: the latest of several, Liversedge supposed. There was a flush over Templer’s cheek-bones.

  Liversedge took the chair next to him. Templer glanced briefly at him, then at a mess servant.

  “Whisky for Mr Liversedge.” Templer’s gaze, angry now, was focused intensely on his observer. “What about going into Nancy for a bite?”

  “If you like. But I rather think the Major’s planning a squadron beat-up.”

  “And I’m rather planning a C Flight beat-up. We can join the others later.”