Hornet’s Sting

by Derek Robinson

  * * *

  The squadron had been on stand-by from three in the morning. When the bombardment broke the silence of the night at three fifty, and the mess windows vibrated to the noise, everyone knew the infantry would be going over the top in a matter of minutes. Dawn came up, grey with rain, and no message arrived from Wing H.Q. Three hours later the crews were dozing in armchairs or eating a second breakfast or looking at the wet sky. Still no message. It was midday before orders arrived. Nine fighters – three from each flight – were to take off as soon as possible. The rain was heavier than ever; it was impossible to see across the aerodrome. Cleve-Cutler roused the crews and told them what was happening.

  “The battlefield is lousy with Hun machines,” he said. “Sooner or later they must fly home. Your task is to intercept them. Fly deep into enemy territory – at least twenty miles – and turn and patrol the area beyond the fighting at Wipers. With luck you’ll dodge their Archie and you’ll catch some Huns who are low on fuel and out of ammunition, and not expecting to be hit.”

  Forty minutes later the rain eased. The cockpits of the Biffs were soaked and slippery, but the engines had been covered and they fired willingly. Nine fighters climbed into a sky that flickered with lightning.

  Woolley led the patrol, with Paxton as his deputy. The Biffs flew in three arrowheads of three. Orders were to stay in formation whenever possible. After a scrap, re-form at once. “Let’s get a Hun if we can,” Woolley had told them. “Let’s get home if we can’t. Watch your tail. Watch the next man’s tail. And remember: a pint of pure water weighs a pound and a quarter, so have a good piss now.”

  He liked Wing’s plan. It allowed him to climb through the rain cloud, emerge into glorious sunlight with heart-warmingly clear visibility in all directions, and keep climbing to fourteen thousand feet. Nobody was above them. The sky was spotless and speckless and blue enough to drive an artist to drink. The only machines below were little pencilled crosses, crawling over the ragged cloud. And down below the cloud sat the enemy Archie, blinded and baffled.

  Woolley concentrated on navigation. It was a matter of dead reckoning: fly for so many minutes at this airspeed on that compass bearing, and you should arrive where you want. But speed through the air wasn’t necessarily the same as speed over the ground. The wind was blowing them northeast. How hard? Only the wind knew that. And the compass might play tricks too, especially on a day when there were thunderstorms about.

  Woolley looked on the map for a major road out of Wipers, and found one that went east for about twenty miles to Courtrai.

  Perfect. Courtrai was the meeting place of five big roads. It had a river and a railway. Should be easy to identify.

  Woolley wheeled the patrol north when he reckoned Arras was ten miles behind them. For the next thirty minutes they churned through crystalline air, sometimes gently rocking like boats in a harbour, enjoying what little warmth the sun gave at such a height. Then Woolley pointed down and they began the long slide to the clouds and through them.

  They emerged in grey light, streaked with thin rain, and saw the sea, dead ahead, ten or twelve miles away. The wind had blown them far north of Courtrai. Woolley had guessed wrong. Immediately he made a wide half-circle and flew south. There was no road in sight. And now the rain fell heavily. Within a couple of minutes it contained hail.

  There was half a gale in this storm, and its gusts shunted the Biffs like paper kites. The pilots opened out the formation until they were just blurred black shapes to each other. Hail battered against goggles. It was too dark to read the instrument panel, and in any case lightning glowed from time to time; so the compasses were probably thoroughly bewildered. The sky was full of traps and tripwires; Maddegan had to work hard with stick and rudder, so hard that he was sweating under his drenched flying kit. He couldn’t see the ground, or the horizon. The sun was just a memory. He was flying on hope and instinct, like the rest of them: a dangerous combination.

  The buffeting eased and within a minute they flew out of the storm, into a misty drizzle. The formation closed up again. Woolley saw a good, straight road off to his left. His map was soggy and unreadable. He took a chance and followed the road. Courtrai came in view so quickly that he couldn’t believe his luck. Five roads fed into it, the river Lys went through it and headed west towards Wipers, and just outside town was an aerodrome.

  Rising from it, like a hatch of flies leaving a pond, was an untidy parcel of German scouts. Woolley thought: Somebody saw us when we came out of cloud and turned south. Somebody got on the phone. The scouts tidied themselves up and made a box of eight, climbing hard. I bet they think we’re bombers. They think we’re easy meat. There was little Archie, and it was inaccurate: not easy to estimate height in wet weather.

  Sudden waving by his wingman, Maddegan. Vigorous pointing to the right. Woolley raised his goggles and searched and found two large specks, no bigger than baby moths, far away and far below. Now the drizzle thickened to rain and he lost them. When he found them again he found two more, half a mile further away, all heading for the aerodrome. Back from the battlefield, with empty guns.

  “Bunnies!” Woolley cried. “Rabbit stew tonight!” His gunner heard nothing over the Falcon’s roar. Woolley fired a red flare, sending it racing and falling towards the returning machines: the signal to attack. All nine Biffs tipped and dropped.

  The Huns were Halberstadt two-seaters. They did the only thing left to them: they dived for the aerodrome and the protection of its anti-aircraft guns. They were too late and too slow. Woolley’s arrowhead caught the first pair and chopped them down in one rush of fire, the spray of the Vickers followed by the hammer and slash of the Lewis. It was easy to destroy an undefended aeroplane. You could get as close as you liked. Maddegan got so close that he saw the rage on the German gunner’s face. The man actually flung an ammunition drum at the Biff. By then the Halberstadt was burning. Yellow flames as long as pennants were trying to lick the tail.

  Paxton led the second and third arrowheads against the other pair of Huns, who did the sensible thing and split up. It delayed their ends by a minute or so. Each Halberstadt was hounded and harassed by three Biffs until, inevitably, it dodged and swerved and flew into somebody’s gunsight. It wasn’t a fair fight. It wasn’t a fight of any kind. The Huns were shot while trying to escape.

  Woolley didn’t waste time trying to pull the formation together. The Biffs were scattered and someone on the ground was working a heavy machine gun or two: tracer kept nipping at the fighters’ heels. And by now the eight scouts from the aerodrome had made enough height. They were single-seat Albatroses: fast. The nearest was only five or six hundred yards away.

  They chased the Biffs towards the battlefield and although they failed to catch them they did not quit. It was a strange piece of highspeed stalemate. Exhausts were pumping streamers of blue smoke. The Biffs edged together. From time to time an Albatros fired a few hopeless rounds, and a Biff gunner did the same. Finally a fresh rainstorm blustered in from the west and stopped all their nonsense.

  The rain was so dense, and the wind flung it so savagely, that all aircraft, friend and foe alike, lost sight of each other. Now the real battle was between the thumping downforce of the rain and the engine’s power to keep dragging the wings through the air. There were storms within the storm, squalls that left propellers thrashing uselessly in air pockets or chewing at blasts that hit so hard the whole machine shuddered. Every crew member was banged and bruised. Some pilots found their strength being drained: the storm was so violent that their muscles ached from working the controls and the aeroplane flew crabwise, or nose-heavy, or worse. Some men were in tears of exhaustion. Some were close to despair.

  The storm ended as sharply as it began. The Biffs burst out of a lashing blackness into a grey and watery daylight. It was as beautiful as a reprieve at the scaffold. The Albatros scouts failed to appear: turned back by the storm, if they had any brains. Woolley fired a white flare. As the scattered fighters re-grou
ped, he counted them. Eight, including himself.

  The formation circled. Still no sign of the ninth Biff. One of Paxton’s wingmen was missing. Lefevre. Gunner’s name was Conway. Here comes Archie. No point in waiting. The battlefield was only a couple of miles ahead: he could see gunflashes and smoke, and the steely glint of light reflected on water. That was somebody else’s funeral. Woolley gave Lefevre and Conway another fifteen seconds. Archie found their height with a five-shot salvo, all in a straight line, the last burst a hundred yards away, yellow-brown with a hot red centre. When you could see the red it was time to go. Woolley waggled his wings and dived two hundred feet. He turned left and flew for ten seconds, just to upset the Hun gunners, and went up again at max revs and into the cloud. Half an hour later they were back at Gazeran. By six o’clock Lefevre and Conway were officially missing and unofficially dead: turned upside-down by the storm and crashed, was the general opinion. The adjutant summoned Lacey to pack their effects.

  * * *

  Conway had owned an air rifle. Mackenzie took it from Lacey, borrowed Lefevre’s raincoat, and walked to the far end of the aerodrome. It was evening, and crows were making hard work of settling down in the trees. The gusting wind sent them flapping and screeching, bits of black whirling against a sheet of grey. Mackenzie had shot three birds when Drinkwater joined him. “Watch out,” Mackenzie said. “I’m not very accurate. I might accidentally get you in the eye.”

  “You’d enjoy that, wouldn’t you?” This was not a challenge; it was a mild and reasonable suggestion. “You’re a very destructive person.”

  “I smell a sermon.” Mackenzie aimed at a crow, but the wind shook his body. “You stink of decency.”

  “What’s wrong with that? Isn’t it what we’re fighting for?” Mackenzie yawned and strolled on. Drinkwater followed. “Look: I’ve done you no harm,” he said. “I don’t see why you should treat me so badly.”

  “Badly?” Mackenzie almost laughed. “You get what you ask for. You act like a virgin. Virgins get raped. That’s what virgins are for, isn’t it?”

  Drinkwater watched Mackenzie aim, fire and miss. Crows scattered, clattering angrily. “Cobblers,” Mackenzie said.

  “You don’t know anything about me, so how can you say ...”

  “You walk like a bloody virgin. You walk as if you’re afraid you’ll drop something if you open your legs.”

  They moved on. Drinkwater felt aggrieved: his virginity was none of Mackenzie’s business. He let a little anger out. “You seem to take a keen interest in other chaps’ tackle,” he said.

  “So do you. So does everyone. The difference is, I’m not ashamed of it.”

  This idea made Drinkwater thoroughly uncomfortable. He looked for an escape and found the war. “When Woolley’s patrol landed, one of the chaps had blood on his goggles. Did you know?” Fifty yards away, a young rabbit paused outside its hole. Mackenzie shot it through the head. “Hun blood, presumably,” Drinkwater said. “They must have been extremely close.” He sucked his teeth. “I’d give a month’s pay to ...”

  “Oh, go to hell.” Mackenzie strode away. “You don’t want blood on your nice goggles!” he shouted. “You’d like the glory, but not the gore!”

  Drinkwater watched him go. Everyone talked about the wonderful comradeship in the R.F.C. He hadn’t found any. Chaps came, chaps went. The camp was like a railway station: lots of bustle, nobody to talk to. And now it was damn well raining again. “Oh, bugger,” he said, miserably, and felt fractionally better.

  * * *

  Rain fell all next day. It did not stop the squadron flying.

  There had been a short party the night before to celebrate the squadron’s four kills. Everyone was in bed by ten o’clock and up again at dawn. Breakfast was fuel rather than food. Nobody wanted to start a three-hour patrol with an empty stomach.

  O’Neill got off the telephone and told the flight commanders that the German Air Force was all over the battlefield like birds over the plough. The infantry assault had reached a critical point. “The Hun is doing a lot of trench-strafing,” he said. “Frankly, I suspect that ‘trench’ flatters what is more likely to be a scrape in the ground. The situation is fluid.”

  “We don’t need your bloody silly jokes,” Paxton said. “Rain isn’t funny.”

  “I wouldn’t waste my wit on you. The situation is fluid.”

  “That means you don’t know,” McWatters said. “If you don’t know, don’t guess.”

  “D’you want to do my job?” O’Neill demanded.

  “A child of six could do your job,” Paxton said.

  “I wouldn’t let you anywhere near a child of six.”

  “How touching. And I thought you preferred farm animals.”

  They stood and glared at each other.

  “Where I come from, we couldn’t afford sex,” Woolley said. “We made do with rhubarb. Not as exciting, but it goes better with custard.”

  “For God’s sake,” McWatters growled.

  “Where’s the damn fighting?” McWatters asked O’Neill. “Or don’t you know that either?”

  O’Neill unrolled a map and showed them a red line seven miles long that wandered uncertainly, less than a mile to the east of what had been the German trenches. “That’s where the damn fighting was yesterday. Satisfied?”

  “Christ ... The P.B.I. didn’t get far,” Paxton said.

  “There were counter-attacks. And I don’t suppose the weather helped.”

  “There you go again,” McWatters said. “Guessing.”

  The C.O. arrived, waving orders from Wing. “They’re very pleased with yesterday, so we’re to do it again, one flight at a time. I’ll lead A-Flight first. When I get back, Pax goes, then Mac. All clear?”

  “The Hun will be waiting for us, sir,” Paxton said.

  “That’s what we want. Every Hun machine on standing patrol is one less over the battlefield.”

  But the day did not work out as planned. Cloud reared much higher than the day before, and the wind blew at different strengths at different heights. Cleve-Cutler’s navigation was bad. When he brought his flight down into the gloom of rain, he was lost. They roamed about for twenty minutes, failing to find any land-marks, attracting sporadic Archie, while the C.O.’s faith in his compass evaporated. He was lucky to catch a glimpse of the North Sea. He led his flight over the Belgian beaches and turned left towards the English Channel, where they got briskly Archied by a couple of British destroyers. He found Dunkerque by the elementary method of flying so low that he could read the name on the railway station; followed the line south; and eventually reached Gazeran, drenched and cold and in a filthy temper. He’d used up his ration of two patrols per month and got nothing out of either.

  The squadron flew all day and had no luck. McWatters got so bored that he decided to descend on Courtrai aerodrome and strafe whatever was lying about. A storm of Archie chased his flight away; evidently Courtrai’s guns had been reinforced. Woolley, patrolling just below the cloudbase, was about to give up when he saw a stream of enemy aircraft leaving the area of the battlefield. They were low, very low, just skimming the ground. He waited, and saw more of the same. He took his flight home. “Intercepting Huns at ground level in this weather is a mug’s game, sir,” he told the C.O. “They all took the same route. I bet they’ve got machine guns posted, just waiting for us.”

  “So where’s their standing patrol?” Cleve-Cutler had a headache caused by his burning sinuses, or he wouldn’t have asked such a question.

  “Nowhere. Why play our game? They need all their strength at Wipers.”

  “Bastards.”

  Paxton was leading his second patrol of the day and thinking much the same thing. Wing H.Q. would soon take the squadron off this nonsense. Tomorrow it would be sent to Wipers, to help try to clear the sky above the troops: stop the strafing, chase away the Hun machines spotting for their artillery, do battle with the high-flying scouts that made possible the strafing and the spotting. Paxton wa
s not looking forward to it. Something went bang in the Rolls-Royce Falcon and at once his Biff was gliding down, its propeller slowing to a useless phut-phut-phut. He had just enough time to wave to his deputy leader, and then the flight was above him and thundering away. They knew the drill. If any machine went down, it went alone. There was nothing the others could do to save it.

  Paxton tried the likely things: changed the fuel tanks, changed the throttle setting and the mixture control, fiddled with the advance and retard lever. Nothing worked. He tried unlikely things: he worked the pressure pump, he switched back to the original tank. Nothing.

  “Must be the electrics,” said Griffiths, his gunner. Without the engine’s roar, they could talk quietly. “Bust ignition leads, probably.”

  “Probably.”

  In less than a minute, the other Biffs had receded into a small, dark pattern, blurred by rain. Paxton’s ears were adjusting to the strange quiet. He could hear the rain rattling on the wings. He could hear it sizzling on the exhaust pipe.

  They had a little time before they crashed. Might as well make the most of it. He ate some chocolate.

  * * *

  Sometimes an engine packed up and then, a minute later, started again. Bit of dirt in the fuel pipe, perhaps. Cleve-Cutler knew it could happen; it had happened to him. So he allowed an hour after B-Flight landed, and then another hour for luck, before he let the adjutant make the routine report that would result in a telegram boy knocking on a door somewhere in England next day. “And I want a mess party tonight,” he added. “Lots of Hornet’s Sting.”

  “Twice in two days?” Brazier said. “Is that wise?”

  “Round up some guests. Canadians and Australians. Tell the band to play ragtime. Get that Scotsman with his bagpipes. Eightsome reels are what we need.”

  Brazier delegated most of the work to the duty officer. He collected Sergeant Lacey and two umbrellas, and they walked along duckboards laid on paths made boggy by the rain. “I’m getting tired of this job,” the adjutant said. “It’s grubby work. It’s not becoming of an officer and a gentleman. It makes me feel like an assistant undertaker.”