by Max Hennessy
The Victors
Cover
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
The Martin Falconer Thrillers
Copyright
Cover
Table of Contents
Start of Content
Chapter 1
I’d always thought of the King as a taller man, more imposing, more regal. Perhaps the impression came from the portraits I’d seen of him, those elongated flattering paintings which always made royalty look heroic. In fact, he was quite small and slight, but his eyes, those rather protuberant eyes Edward VII had also had, were shrewd and missed nothing.
‘We are grateful, Mr Falconer,’ he’d said.
The wound stripe on my sleeve wasn’t very big but he hadn’t missed it and he seemed to be watching me with fatherly concern.
‘And what do you propose to do now?’ he went on.
The words wouldn’t come at first. I was terrified. I was still only nineteen and though I’d shot at, and been shot by, the King’s enemies, it took all my courage to face the King himself, and I’d been in a sweat ever since they’d told me to attend the investiture.
Behind the King was Green Park and the trees, and a faint breeze ruffled the curtains and carried with it the noise of the traffic outside. I still couldn’t get the words to come but the King made no attempt to hurry me. I expect he’d had plenty of other young men in front of him, speechless with awe and the fear of doing something wrong, between August, 1914, and that February day in 1918.
The words came at last. ‘I expect I shall be going back to France, sir,’ I said.
‘Don’t you think you’ve done enough for a while?’ he asked. ‘I’m told that wound of yours was painful.’ He paused then looked up at me again with a smile. ‘I also understand it’s not the policy to allow escaped prisoners of war back to the front in case they’re captured again and made to suffer. Will they let you go?’
I wasn’t sure they would. After a tour over the trenches in 1916 on every kind of ancient box kite you could think of, and another in 1917 in Pups, that had ended abruptly with a forced landing behind the German lines, and my being taken prisoner and wounded as I’d scrambled back to freedom, they’d decided I’d had enough for the time being and could stay where I was in England.
All through hospital I’d been trying to reverse the decision. Ludo Sykes, who’d escaped with me and had a little influence here and there, had pulled a few strings and, if nothing else, at least now there were a few people listening with sympathetic ears. It wasn’t much but it was something to go on with, and was enough to enable me finally to make my reply with optimism.
‘I hope so, sir,’ I said.
At that moment there was nothing more I wanted in the world than to offer my life for that small, bearded, none-too-regal figure. Perhaps we were all too emotional, and patriotism during the war had been somewhat over-developed by the popular press, so that George V had become the symbol of the whole struggling war-weary country. But I was still barely out of the stage when I’d read Henty with enthusiasm, and derring-do and faithfulness to a cause were all important. I’d grown up a lot since I’d chased off to war in 1915 in a panic that it would be over before I got there, and I’d seen too much for the attitude to stick; my brother had been killed with many other men I’d admired, and by 1918 there wasn’t much left beyond cynicism and the wry self-deprecation at being caught that was the mark of all old soldiers. It said a lot for the King that he had the ability to reach beyond it to emotions I’d almost forgotten existed.
Afterwards, when it was all over and I was drawing relieved breaths outside, Charley appeared. Because my parents were involved with war work and hadn’t been able to come down from Norfolk, I’d invited Charley, who was nursing at the First London General at Camberwell. There hadn’t seemed to be anybody else, because Ludo Sykes, who in a way had filled my brother’s place, had been sent to the north of Scotland to organize a new training school. With him he’d taken Jane Widdows, who was the only other person left in Fynling village that I knew. They’d been married while I was still in hospital and it had been Sykes’ cousin, Charley – or to give her her full name, Charlotte Margaret Caroline Bartelott-Dyveton-Sykes, which was quite a mouthful and explained why she preferred plain Charley – who had stood nearby to hand me the crutches they’d insisted on me using, so I could be best man.
It seemed odd to think of Sykes, aloof, aristocratic, moneyed and confident, whom I’d admired since I’d first met him in 1915, married to Jane, whose hair I’d pulled and whom I’d taken fishing and taught to climb trees. But it had had the effect also when I went home of leaving me lost and empty and, like so many other young men on leave, with the unhappy feeling that home was no longer in England but in some obscure village in France. In four years, the place had changed. Jane’s father, who farmed the land round Fynling, was tired and too busy with the shortage of labour to stop and talk, my parents never seemed to be home, and my brother had been dead for two years, while Jane’s sister, Edith, whom he was once to have married, was married to a doctor now and in Northern Ireland. Even the pubs seemed to contain no one I knew, and the only thing the landlord seemed able to say was the usual ‘What! You on leave again?’
Fortunately, if Fynling and my world had changed, so also, thank God, had Charley. When I’d first met her the previous year she’d been seventeen, gay, brittle, fashionable and full of all the up-to-date things to do and say, and I’d spent several week-ends with her in London, going down by train from where we’d been stationed with those awful BE12s as part of the defence of the capital against Zeppelins. We’d gone to tea-dances a lot but, as I always danced like a man with two wooden legs, it was lucky for me that she had a sense of humour, and the cinema was always much more of a success. She’d been a giggler in those days and it had been her big moment when I’d first kissed her – because she said she’d never been kissed by a pilot – but everyone had grown up fast in 1917, with the slaughter of Passchendaele leaving its mark on almost every family in the land, and she’d finally gone off to be a nurse. Like most VADs of her class, she’d expected her job would be to hold the patients’ hands and smooth their pillows while the regular nurses, who came from a different strata of society, fetched and carried anything that looked or smelled unpleasant, and it was to her credit that when she found this wasn’t the case she stayed where she was. It had changed her quite a lot, though, and although she could if necessary still say all the bright up-to-date things that were expected of a girl from her background, which was Roedean and county shows, her work had sobered her and her giggles had turned instead to quiet and sometimes rueful laughter. Like Sykes himself, she could charm the ducks off the water when she tried, but this was a gift she kept only for flower-sellers who looked cold, London bobbies who were inclined to be awkward, and lonely elderly gentlemen who made passes at her. Mostly she was brisk, noisy and so full of all the latest ejaculations you’d have thought she hadn’t a brain in her head.
Because she only had the day off, we were a bit limited about how we could celebrate the medal they’d given me. Charley was unperturbed, however. She was one of nature’s optimists.
‘It doesn’t matter a bit, Martin,’ she said. ‘It’s spiffing to see you and I might not have got the day off, and you might have been dead, not just wounded.’
Which was quite a point.
There was one other thing that bothered me, and had been bothering me ever since they’d first allowed me out of hospital. Would they let me fly again?
/> Since 1915, flying had become so much a part of my life, I just couldn’t think what it would be like without the smell of petrol and burnt castor oil and dope and the sounds of the airfield I’d got to know so well – the tick of an engine as it cooled after being switched off, the tack-tack-tack of a machine gun being tested at the butts, and the distant bark of one of the dozens of dogs that always seemed to infest army camps. I couldn’t imagine life without them.
Charley broke in on my thoughts. She looked surprisingly pretty in her uniform – blue-eyed, blonde, as English as a cottage garden, and suddenly bewilderingly mature. Despite the ‘ups’ and ‘downs’ we’d had we’d never quite lost touch from the day we’d first met – not even when I’d gone back to France – and we’d exchanged quite a few letters in our time.
‘I suppose we ought to wet its head,’ she said. ‘After all, it isn’t every day a girl gets the chance to be seen walkin’ in London with a man with as many medals as you’ve managed to collect.’
‘They always give you something for escaping,’ I said. ‘“Ten for effort” sort of thing.’ I grinned. ‘And one of the others is a tidgy little thing the Belgians gave me because they happened to be visiting the aerodrome and they’d run out of people to give ’em to. I think they wanted to throw away the bag they were carrying ’em in.’
She stared at me, shocked. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. ‘And I think it calls for something.’
I hedged and she knew at once I had other things on my mind. ‘You’re shyin’ like a young mare faced with a new rider,’ she said. ‘Any minute now you’ll whinny and show the whites of your eyes.’
I laughed. ‘There’s something I have to do first.’
‘Find out when you can go back to battle, murder and sudden death?’ She said it with a smile but behind it there was the ancient wisdom of women that made me feel stupid and young and silly.
‘How did you know?’ I asked.
‘I always know there’s somethin’ behind your fate-worse-than-death act and, knowin’ you, it doesn’t take much to guess what it is. Sometimes, Martin Falconer, I think you’re probably not right in the head. You needn’t, you know. Not now.’
‘I know I needn’t. But I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try. Besides—’ I managed a sheepish grin ‘—I want to go on flying.’
‘It’s amazin’ how you go all starry-eyed about that,’ she said. ‘I think if you and Ludo were up in the air when the last trump sounded, you’d need a nudge to come down and face the music.’
‘What rot!’
‘It isn’t rot. Here I am eager to celebrate somethin’ excitin’ and brave and all you can produce is an attitude that’s uncooperative in the extreme. It’s enough to give a girl the pip.’ She shrugged and gave me an engaging grin. ‘What do I do? Sit in some draughty corridor at the fount of authority and wait?’
‘That’s it exactly.’
As good as her word, she took her seat on a bench by the porter’s desk and settled down with a cigarette. The cigarette made the porter blink a bit but all the girls had taken to smoking since the war so he had to accept it.
The man I went to see I’d met once or twice briefly during my career. He was a great deal senior to me but he was distantly connected with Ludo’s family and Charley’s family and he was very sympathetic. I laid my question smack on the desk in front of him.
‘Will they let me go back?’
He smiled, lit a cigarette and rubbed his nose while he considered. ‘It could be arranged,’ he said slowly, ‘though no one captured in France has so far ever been allowed to fly there again.’ He gestured. ‘If they captured you again, you see, they might just consider you were an enemy agent and, in any case, there’s always the serious probability of your being harshly treated.’
‘Perhaps they’ll not capture me.’
‘Nice thought, of course,’ he agreed. ‘But since the prevailing wind over the lines blows from our side to theirs, capture’s one of the things that’s most likely to happen to a pilot.’
Since he wore wings, I had to admit he probably knew what he was talking about.
‘However,’ he went on, ‘there are ways round all that. For instance, a paybook carried by you specially for flying could be made out in some fictitious name.’
‘Would they allow that?’
‘They might. After all, you’ve committed enough mayhem over the trenches for them to consider you might still be of some value to England. If only to show other people how to go about things.’
Like all the Sykeses, he was very languid but, also like the Sykeses, he was no fool. ‘What do I do, then?’ I asked.
‘You don’t,’ he smiled. ‘You’re due to be posted to a training squadron in Yorkshire.’
‘Training squadron!’ I exploded. ‘What for?’
‘Because you were a prisoner of war and all prisoners of war are considered to be out of touch on return.’
‘They only had me for two or three days.’
‘You were behind their lines longer than that.’
‘Two or three weeks.’
‘Things change fast.’
‘Not that fast,’ I said. ‘I don’t need training. I’ve been flying for three years, most of the time in action.’
He grinned. ‘Actually, it’s a mere formality and you’ll find yourself instructing within twenty-four hours. But the general trend is not to allow anyone to go back who’s been captured. So obviously the sensible thing to do is to be like Brer Rabbit, and lay low and say nothin’. Eventually, they’ll forget you and then you’ll probably find yourself smuggled through in a batch of pilots being sent out to squadrons. I promise you I’ll personally attend to it. But it’ll need time.’
And that’s how it had to stand.
Charley was sympathetic. ‘You look as if you’ve been orphaned,’ she said. ‘Never mind, though, I’ll get a posting up to Yorkshire, too, so you’ll have someone’s hand to hold when you come off duty in a bad temper.’
* * *
Settling down to instructing was easier said than done. Teaching raw pilots how to stay in formation after flying in France was like riding a bus into the city every day. It was repetitious and dull and we’d long since skimmed off the cream of the young men. These men I was teaching now were older, often married and sometimes with children, and they never quite knew how to treat me. It would be wrong to say they were all old enough to have been my father, but certainly they were often too old to be my contemporaries. And their attitude was one of deference because of the medals and the wound stripe I wore, the limp I’d acquired – and at times exaggerated a little for show – and the three years of active flying I had behind me. Yet it was also one of condescension because I was still not officially an adult and the moustache I’d grown to make myself look older only managed to make me look like a chicken with its first feathers – ‘You’ve got some dirt on your lip,’ Charley always said.
To be fair, sometimes I wasn’t sure myself which category I fitted into – war hero or schoolboy. It was fun sometimes to talk of battle and strain and exhaustion but that was really just stretching a line, because, to tell the truth, after hospital I didn’t feel in the slightest strained. I was young and resilient and I was full of life and itching to do the German air force more damage.
To my surprise, Charley was as good as her word and within three weeks of my arriving in Yorkshire I received a letter to say she was at the hospital at Harburton Bassett five miles away. I hadn’t really thought she’d meant it but, when I rang the hospital to make sure, she answered breezily and when I arranged to meet her in Harrogate that Sunday afternoon, she turned up as bright as a button. Her cheeks were pink with the nippy Yorkshire air and, looking a picture in her uniform, she flung her arms round me with a shriek of pleasure.
‘Told you I would,’ she said.
‘How did you manage it?’ I asked.
‘Easy. Told ’em my fiancé was stationed up here.’
My ja
w dropped. ‘Fiancé? Since when have you been engaged?’
‘I’m not, ass!’ She chuckled. ‘I gave your name and all that, and they checked that you existed. After three years of war, they’ve learned to be considerate because they know that a girl always has to have a strong male breast to weep on from time to time.’
I grinned. ‘You must be potty,’ I said. ‘Coming up to this draughty hole from the south.’
She gave me a funny look. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I must.’
In between formation flying I did a little testing. No one knew much about testing at that stage but a chap called Roderic Hill had started asking himself questions and the business of test pilot was becoming more professional, so that occasionally I was asked to give my opinion on some new machine which arrived on the station. Most of them were awful and for the most part it was the same old nagging routine of showing ham-fisted pilots how to operate. None of them were keen to learn. They’d all read in the papers how people like Ball and Bishop and McCudden had gone alone into the skies in France to stalk the King’s enemies – indeed, I’d tried it once or twice in the past myself – but times had changed since then, and we had to learn to fly in formation now. The old days of the lone wolves were over and no one could go anywhere these days without his friends tucked in behind him.
It wasn’t 1917 any longer. It was 1918 and flying had changed. The war had become more ruthless and cold-blooded, and patrolling over the lines these days demanded professionalism, technical skill – and teamwork; and the day of the enthusiast had given way to the day of the expert.
The war in the air had never been anything to go into raptures about, of course, because people always got killed, but even so something had gone from it with the massed formations the Germans had started. No one went out alone or even in single flights any more. They went out stacked one squadron above another until sometimes you couldn’t move for aeroplanes. 1914 had been the day of the rank amateur because no one knew a thing about war flying and 1915 hadn’t been much better because even after a year of war we were only just beginning to develop the machines that could make air fighting possible. 1916 had been the year of discovery when we’d really learned how to set about one another and 1917 had been the year of the sky gods when the names of the experts had emerged on both sides of the line, men we’d all got to know and, if they were German, did our best to avoid.
