Another time Will had seen Jim screaming in the face of a young lad who had completely lost his bottle. He was cowering in a trench and crying hysterically, just before they were meant to go over the top. Jim had got him out with the rest of them when the whistle blew. The boy was caught by a machine gun a couple of minutes later.
‘He had to go with us. Redcaps would have done for him if he’d stayed in the trench,’ Jim told Will afterwards, when they were alone. During an attack, the Military Police combed the start lines just after Z-Hour. And all the troops had been made aware that any man who stayed behind would be shot on the spot.
Now Will’s stomach was rumbling and he began to wish he smoked. The others said it stopped you feeling hungry, but whenever he tried a cigarette he coughed his lungs out and the others would laugh and thump him on the back a bit too enthusiastically.
Will liked to stick with the older soldiers when he could. He felt safer with them and enjoyed their banter. He picked their slang up quick enough. ‘Cushy’ for easy, ‘char’ for tea – words they had brought back from colonial service in India. There was the newly minted slang from France too, like ‘boko’ for a lot, a comic pronunciation of beaucoup, and ‘San Fairy Anne’ – it doesn’t matter – from Ça ne fait rien. But he liked the English slang words the best – like ‘gasper’ for cigarette, and ‘bung’ for the tasteless cheese they had in their iron rations, because it was said to ‘bung you up’.
But he could sense their sneers when he used those words – he was trying too hard. And he was Sergeant Franklin’s brother. They were all right with Will, but he was never really going to be one of them.
He tried to sleep, but he could only doze. He knew they were somewhere near the town of Mons – the place where the British had fought with the German army in the first days of the war. It had taken them over four years to get back here. Four whole years.
In the four months he had been on the Western Front Will had advanced far enough through France and into Belgium to notice how the buildings had changed. Even in the shattered villages he could tell that the houses were more like pictures he had seen at school of Amsterdam or other Dutch places. He wondered what the buildings in Germany would look like.
The thought of entering Germany gave Will a glimmer of confidence but it didn’t take his mind off the fact that they were due to attack the town of Saint-Libert in the morning. First light didn’t feel too far away, and Will always felt a sickening pit-of-the-stomach fear when he knew he was going to have to fight. Some of the others said he was ‘windy’ and that it was stupid to worry about it.
‘Yer could get killed sitting at the side of the road having a cuppa,’ they said, ‘if a shell’s got yer name on it.’
Jim had taken him to one side and told him men like that were just bragging. ‘Everyone gets frightened before a battle, Will, even me,’ he whispered. ‘If yer not frightened, yer get careless. Being frightened is good. You make sure you’re frightened when we have to fight. You’ll stay alive that way.’
After another few minutes the cold overtook Will’s tiredness and he sat up. In the sky a parachute flare floated slowly down. It was too far away to cast any light over their own position but close enough to make him realise they could be in the thick of the fighting in less than an hour.
Another kind of noise reached him now. Far to the east he heard the metallic grind of wheels on tracks. He guessed they were troop trains – German reinforcements for their front line. Hearing the distant shunting and creaking brought back sudden memories of home. Sounds of trains in the night while he was tucked up snug in bed. He thought of his room back in Lancaster, in his family’s terraced house with its fine Minton tiles. He could almost taste the bread his mother baked every morning, and the comforting smell of the coal-fired range in the kitchen. What he’d give for a slice of that bread with butter and his mum’s home-made raspberry jam. His stomach lurched and gurgled.
He tried hard to steer his mind away from food, and thought instead of Alice. He carried a tatty photograph of her in his tunic pocket – wrapped in greaseproof paper to protect it from the damp. He was so familiar with it he did not often get it out to look at. She was staring stiffly into the camera, her face an enigma – neither smiling nor scowling. Will often wondered what she was thinking when that shot was taken.
He could picture her in Lancaster Royal Grammar School’s assembly hall, playing at the great black grand piano they had, after most of the boys had gone home. Will had been a pupil there, before all this. He often stayed late to work in the library. Alice was the headmaster’s daughter. He would listen to her play, lingering at the hall entrance so she wouldn’t notice him. She always stopped the minute she knew he was there.
A great thunderous explosion rent the night air – and a billowing flash lit up the sky. All of the men sat up at once. They reached for their rifles and anxiously scanned the surrounding area. ‘What’s Fritz up to?’ said Battersby.
A series of smaller explosions followed. Like lightning and thunder, they saw the flashes first; then the sound rolled over a few moments later.
Sergeant Franklin loomed out of the dark and told them all to stand down. ‘Nothing to worry about. Sounds like an ammunition dump or a supply train,’ he said. ‘Maybe Fritz got careless with a shell. Or maybe one of our pilot boys dropped a bomb on them.’ He gave a little chuckle. ‘That’ll keep ’em occupied for a while.’
After a while, Will heard the creaking and clanking of trains from the German lines start up again. There were men and boys over there, disembarking on to platforms or sidings. Maybe they were as frightened as he was. He hoped so.
CHAPTER 3
2.00 a.m. American Air Service airbase
Eddie Hertz slept in a plush feather bed in a farmhouse in Prouvy – close to the Belgian border. His squadron had moved forward from Doullens three weeks ago and he was settling in nicely.
His lodgings suited him well. It was right on the edge of his airbase and close enough for him to hear the empty shell case that hung by the operations room. When the duty officer hit that with an iron bar, they all had to rush over at once. The other flyboys in the American Air Service First Pursuit Group were having to make do with corrugated iron sheds or, even worse, tents, for their accommodation. Eddie had outbid his fellow flyers for the rent on this room. It was worth every franc. This was most definitely not the season for a tent, especially as the ground round here was so boggy.
Eddie had never been this close to the action before, but the war was moving at a rapid pace. The airbase at Doullens, which had been his home since he’d arrived in France in early 1918, was now too far away from the Front.
Despite the comfort of his lodgings, Eddie was having a restless night. His thoughts drifted to Céline – a dark-haired French girl he knew. Thinking about her made a pleasant change from the concerns that usually plagued his resting hours. Céline had been working at a field hospital close to Doullens and she and her fellow nurses were regular guests at the pilots’ mess. She’d also been posted forward, close to Eddie’s new base. He was sure fate was working in his favour. They talked about a bullet with your name on it. Céline had his name on her. He liked her a lot.
That night Eddie had told her the pilots all thought a scarf from a pretty girl was a sure-fire good-luck charm to keep them safe in the sky. How could she refuse? It was expensive too. Pure silk. She must like him, to give him that.
Now, as Eddie drifted on the edge of sleep, the room was suddenly illuminated by a great flash of light. Then the roar of a terrible explosion tore through the night.
He sat bolt upright, muttering, ‘What the hell was that?’
He rushed to the window, but outside was total darkness. He wondered if the Germans were mounting an attack, but dismissed the idea. If Fritz really was going on the offensive, there’d be more explosions. Eddie thought the Germans were a busted flush. There were hardly any Boche planes up these days. They were done. The war was almost over.
He wondered whether or not to get dressed and report to the briefing hut. He pulled on his trousers, then decided not to bother. No one was sounding the alarm, and his bed was more inviting than the cold air of this autumn night. He cursed himself for dithering. His old girlfriend in New York, Janie Holland, she was always changing her mind. This hat or that, this dress or that skirt. It drove him mad. It was a relief when her letter arrived at his airbase telling him she had met a US Navy captain and that was the end of Eddie and Janie. His parents adored her though – and their wealthy families were friends. ‘It’s good to marry money, Eddie,’ said his mother. ‘That way you know they’re not just marrying you for yours.’
The Hertz fortune was founded on electrical domestic appliances – toasters, kettles, hotplates, ovens – and had netted the Hertzes an apartment overlooking Central Park and the best education for Eddie, and his younger brother, Bobby, that money could buy.
It was only over the last few weeks he’d really fallen for Céline. She never asked him about his family or his money. Maybe he’d ask her to go to Paris with him. He’d been last month. It was beautiful, but unsettling. Full of old men. The only young ones he’d seen had missing limbs or other nasty wounds. And all those women in their widow’s black.
He tried to sleep, but it was impossible.
Last night a group of British flyers had joined them in the mess – a return visit from the airbase down in Monchaux-sur-Écaillon, where the American pilots had been invited the week before. It had been a great evening, until the British started singing their macabre songs. One of them went:
Take the cylinder out of my kidneys
The connecting rod out of my brain
From the small of my back take the camshaft
And assemble the engine again.
The other guys in the squadron roared with laughter, but Eddie could only muster a polite smile. Céline didn’t find it funny either and didn’t even pretend to be amused. They both agreed the British had a strange sense of humour. Actually the song made Eddie feel a bit queasy. He told himself it was the wine, but he’d sobered up a bit and the song still kept going round and round in his head.
He’d been in France nine months now, and he’d seen enough gruesome accidents to know exactly what happened to a flyer when fate deserted him. Three days ago, at around ten in the morning, he had landed his plane on a flat field behind the Allied lines where he had downed a Fokker triplane – his fourth kill.
As he ran towards the wreckage, he saw a crowd of soldiers, who he took to be British Tommies. They stood in a semicircle by the downed plane, which was still burning around its mangled engine.
The pilot had been thrown clear and the crowd was keeping a respectable distance from his lifeless body. He lay on his back, arms and legs flat on the ground, eyes open. Eddie could see he was a handsome fellow, even though his face was covered in sooty, greasy oil. A shock of dark hair, a strong jaw, not much older than him. They even looked quite alike. But his clothes were badly burned and half hanging off him.
Eddie had seen dead bodies before – some of them burned to a cinder and others so badly mutilated they were unrecognisable. This death was one he was personally responsible for and it had particularly touched him. The fellow he had shot down and killed could have been his kith and kin. If his parents’ families hadn’t left Germany for New York forty years before, that dead man could have been his comrade-in-arms. He could have been him.
Eddie had walked towards the body, unsettled by the stillness of death. He knew the man had had a terrible end. He had seen his body jerk forward when Eddie had fired into the plane. That hadn’t killed him – that would have been a merciful death. Instead, the fellow had struggled to put out the flames around his engine, beating at them with his gloved hands. The fire went out – more through luck than the efforts of the wounded pilot, Eddie suspected – but the engine had died and the man had made a gallant effort to guide his aircraft down to earth. He nearly made it, but the plane stalled close to the ground and crashed with a great grinding crump.
Eddie knelt over the body, unnerved by the man’s sightless gaze. He almost expected the eyes to follow him or for the pilot to suddenly cough or breathe.
He reached down and took the man’s identification tag from a chain on his neck. That was part of the flyer’s code – pilots took it upon themselves to notify their enemies who had died and who had been captured. They would drop the tags and a wreath on the nearest enemy airbase. Flyers on both sides did it. Then he closed the man’s eyes. He was still warm, of course. Ten minutes ago he was as alive as Eddie and all the others standing there gawping. Some of them were thawing themselves by the blazing machine. That annoyed Eddie. It seemed discourteous.
‘Hey, get away,’ he yelled at the soldiers. ‘That thing might go off again. Or the ammunition might ignite.’
‘You can piss off, Yank,’ came a voice from the other side of the plane, obscured by smoke. The others laughed. Eddie half recognised the accent – they certainly weren’t British – probably Australians or New Zealanders.
He had expected them to greet him as a hero. Instead, they looked on him as some sort of curiosity. ‘Off yer go, mate,’ said another soldier – a barrel of a man with sergeant stripes on his sleeves – and placed a firm hand on Eddie’s shoulder. As he turned to leave, the same fellow said, ‘Well done, but as yer soar off back into the sky, and then back to yer comfy little bed, spare a thought for the poor bloody infantry.’
Eddie got back into his aircraft and took off, feeling a little foolish. As he banked over the scene, none of the soldiers below paid him any attention. So much for all that ‘Knights of the Sky’ crap he had read about in the newspapers and magazines back home.
That dead man’s face haunted him now as he tried to get back to sleep. Eddie’s fourth victim. One more, if he lived that long, and he’d be an Ace. That would make his mother proud. He tried to turn his thoughts back to Céline. Her silk scarf hung over a chair, still with a hint of her perfume. He recognised it. Quelques Fleurs. The scent hung in the air like a ghost. Eddie rolled over and pulled the blankets over his head. ‘One day, when this is all over, I shall take her back to New York,’ he told himself. ‘One day I might even ask her to marry me!’
How could she refuse? A rich, handsome American – was there a more eligible man in the whole of France?
As Eddie drifted half a world away, his mother Else Hertz drew back a thick velvet curtain in the grand living room of their Upper East Side apartment so she could look down over Central Park. It was a cloudy night, but for a moment the moon came through and the trees were lit with a silver glow. A lone horse and cart clopped past, seven storeys below, the sound of hooves on asphalt almost drowned by the thrum of motorcars on still-crowded Fifth Avenue.
Walter, her husband, had gone to his room in a huff, and Bobby, their sixteen-year-old son, had been sent to bed in disgrace. The family had been dining at Delmonico’s, and Else and Walter had argued over how much wine Bobby should be allowed to drink. She had been right. One glass would have been quite sufficient for a boy his age. There’d been similar scenes with Eddie only a year or two before.
She reached for a copy of The New York Times and looked for a story she had read that morning.
YALE MAN DOWNS FOURTH HUN
Eddie Hertz, the nineteen-year-old heir to the Hertz family fortune, claimed his fourth kill over Flanders on Thursday. Showing the kind of grit that earned him a place on the Yale Bulldogs football team, the American Air Service First Pursuit Group flyer chased a Hun triplane for over an hour before he sent him crashing to the ground.
Else cut the piece from the page and placed it in an envelope addressed to her friend Mary Holland. Thin
gs had been a little cool between them since Mary’s daughter Janie had dropped Eddie for that sailor. Now Eddie was a war hero! This was the fourth time he’d made the papers this year.
She sealed her letter and left it in the tray for the maid. But when Else finally retired to bed an hour later, she felt uneasy. She wished Eddie could be doing nothing on a destroyer in the middle of the north Atlantic, like Janie’s new fellow, rather than taking to the skies over Flanders in one of those flying death traps. She looked wistfully at the photograph of her boy in his pilot uniform, taken the day before he boarded the troopship to England. He looked barely more than a child, and she’d give up everything she had just to see him again.
CHAPTER 4
3.00 a.m.
Despite his exhaustion, Will was not going to sleep again that night. He felt restless and couldn’t help dwelling on how he had ended up here at the Front, when he could easily have spent another two years at home.
It had been one of those warm spring days in early April and Alice’s father, Dr Hayworth, had invited Will out on a family picnic. Dr Hayworth knew he and Alice were sweethearts, but Will was forbidden to visit their house. Maybe, he thought, this invite was a sign that they were coming round to the idea.
They had driven out to the Lune Valley with another car containing Alice’s uncle and her cousins, along with their pet parrot. Will had never been in a car before and he felt light-headed with excitement. It seemed against the laws of nature to be able to drive along that fast, without a team of horses. Dr Hayworth took bends at alarming speed, and when he ground the gears and cursed under his breath Will and Alice caught each other’s eye and had a fit of the giggles.
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