The Victors

by Max Hennessy

  ‘For God’s sake – sir,’ he said hoarsely, just managing to acknowledge that I was an officer and he wasn’t, ‘look what you’ve done!’

  ‘There’s gratitude for you!’ Munro pushed forward officiously. ‘Captain Falconer saved us all from gaein’ up in flames, mon!’

  Long-faced and horrified, the corporal couldn’t have cared less. His precious lists were so well and truly marked by my boot – because I’d been careful to make sure they were – they were in no state to be presented to anyone in authority.

  ‘Ma fault, corporal,’ Munro explained calmly. ‘Ma fault entirely. Ma match broke an’ dropped on it.’ He shook his head solemnly. ‘Actually, mon, you’re gey lucky. If it hadnae been for the captain ye’d ha’e lost the lot. Mebbe the whole office. Mebbe the whole building. Mebbe the whole camp even.’

  The corporal stared gloomily at the crumpled list, unimpressed by the suggestion that he’d only just been saved from death by incineration.

  ‘But it’s for the CO – sir – and it’s the only list I’ve got.’ His eyes were still shocked. ‘He’ll never accept it like that. I’ll have to do it all again, and I’ve another over there to do. In a quarter of an hour he’ll be in screaming for it!’

  ‘Och, mon!’ Munro was all eagerness now. ‘Yon’s nae bother at all. Ah can type fine. Ah used tae work in the borough engineer’s department in Aberdeen. Just gi’e us a wee bitty paper and ah’ll type it for ye while Captain Falconer reads the names oot. Mebbe ye have anither machine ye can use while we use this one?’

  The corporal looked as though he were going to burst into tears with gratitude and, while he disappeared to the next room to start work on another machine, Munro and I pulled up chairs. Munro rolled a new sheet of paper into the machine in front of him.

  ‘List o’ pilots,’ he said, as he began to tap the keys. ‘Pilots for single-seater fighters.’ He typed about as well as he played the piano but with the aid of a rubber, he was doing quite well. ‘Name, rank and number.’ He turned to me. ‘Noo, mon, fairst name.’

  ‘Munro,’ I said. ‘Captain Hector Horatio.’ I stared at him. ‘I never knew you were called that, Jock.’

  He shrugged, tapping away. ‘It’s somethin’ ah try verra harrd tae keep dark,’ he said. ‘Next.’

  ‘Falconer, Captain Martin.’

  He grinned, tapped a few more words out then peered at what he’d done before sitting back with a deep sigh of satisfaction.

  ‘Weel, weel,’ he said. ‘Just fancy that. If they havenae both been posted tae Captain Bull’s squadron at Pouleville!’

  Chapter 3

  As it happened, Munro had got it a little wrong. Bull was in the Bertangles area all right, but his squadron was at Hizay not Pouleville, and instead of flying SEs they were flying Sopwith Camels. The news didn’t worry us overmuch, however, because we’d both flown Camels before and liked them.

  As the tender carried us south and east we passed along straight tree-lined roads where the hedgerows were white and dusty. There were dozens of lorries, ambulances and staff cars and I noticed that, though horses were still in evidence, it had clearly become a mechanical war since I’d last seen it. There were still farm carts on the roads, however, and peasants in blue smocks and sabots in the fields, and women standing at back doors. The place looked the same as it always had, and I couldn’t believe it was six months since I’d been there. It was as though I’d left it only the day before and I decided that Berck was only an oasis that didn’t really belong in the war at all.

  The driver, like all drivers of Crossley tenders who ferried pilots about France, knew exactly where he was going and the location of every squadron in the area, no matter where it was tucked away up a country lane or behind a wood out of sight, and he expertly dropped the other pilots one by one along the road until there were only Munro and myself left.

  Then, unexpectedly, we passed a large contingent of troops marching along the main road and, though soldiers were common enough after nearly four years of war, there was such an unusual quality of vigour in the stride of these men that we found ourselves turning to stare at them again.

  They seemed taller than any soldiers I’d ever seen and I wondered if they were a new guards battalion because they were in marked contrast to the undersized armies of pale-faced recruits that were being called up now. All that had been best and finest in mankind had rushed to the colours in 1914, full of patriotism and eagerness to do their bit, and the men who were now being conscripted contained types who wouldn’t have been accepted then, many of them the stunted results of years of underfeeding in city slums. These men were different, and their uniforms seemed just too good and too well-fitting so that I wondered if they were officer-cadets or Australians or New Zealanders, because they moved with such excellent rhythm and such arrogant self-respect. But I’d got to know the Australians and New Zealanders only too well by that time, both groups turbulent and self-possessed, and even as it dawned on me who these well-disciplined men were the driver tossed aside his cigarette and cocked a thumb at them.

  ‘Yanks,’ he said.

  They waved at us as we roared by and we grinned back at them – overjoyed to see them because we’d been expecting them for so long. These were the men who were going to save Europe from the Germans and bring the war to an end. I was delighted to see so many of them.

  ‘Where’ve ye been?’ Munro yelled.

  We were so pleased to see them, we were in a state of enthusiastic confidence about the outcome of the war by the time we reached Hizay. We’d been waiting for them ever since the United States had joined the allies the previous year and, having seen them, having noted their strength and size and confidence, we felt able to sit back with the sure knowledge that the war was as good as won. It was only a matter of time.

  It was all the more startling when we arrived to find Hizay full of gloom. The commanding officer was at Bertangles next door and there were long faces all round as the Crossley tender dropped us. At first I thought something had gone wrong with the war because, although the German advance had been slowed down, they were still trying to push forward and were making a mess of a lot of allied plans. Behind the lines, though, there had been a sureness that for once they’d overdone it and that the minute their attacks died away, the great sweep forward that would win the war would begin, so that I couldn’t understand why everyone seemed so depressed.

  It was only when Bull appeared, big and square, his large heavy head down between his shoulders as though about to rush at someone, that we learned what it was all about.

  ‘They’ve got Richthofen,’ he announced.

  ‘Dead?’ Munro said.

  ‘Dead.’

  ‘They never did!’ Munro sounded shocked.

  ‘Yes.’ Bull seemed equally upset, as though something incredible and impossible had happened. ‘This morning. Chap from 209 Squadron.’

  ‘How do they know?’ We were still sceptical.

  ‘They’ve got his body,’ Bull said. ‘He was flying a red triplane and it came down near the Bray-Corbie road. There was the usual dust-up near Bertangles and a lot of machines flying round close to the ground. Some Australian machine-gunners claimed to have done it but they say it can only have been a Canadian called Brown. He did it from a naval Camel and they found the old Baron still sitting in the cockpit holding the controls. He must just have managed to slap her down before the candle went out. They dragged him away on a sheet of corrugated iron and they’ve got him lying in state now in a hangar at Bertangles.’

  ‘Are they sure?’ I asked.

  Bull shrugged. ‘Seems so,’ he said. ‘The machine’s been pulled to pieces by now, of course – everybody grabbing bits for souvenirs and good luck charms – but they found an identity disc and a gold watch on him marked with his initials. Papers, too – one of them a pilot’s certificate in the name of Manfred von Richthofen.’

  It was easy to see why there were so many long faces. Richthofen’s death probably meant
life to dozens of young men on our side of the line, but it was still something that seemed to make the war different and uncomfortable and somehow I knew a turning point had been reached. Although he’d fought for the other side, we’d all known him so well he’d seemed almost like one of us. A little distant, perhaps, but one of us, nevertheless, so that his death had a saddening effect on us, as if the day had suddenly grown colder. Because we’d known and feared him so long, the fact that he could be killed set us thinking that the war must have reached a new and dangerous phase and it might well be our turn next.

  ‘It started as a rumour,’ Bull said, ‘and it spread up and down the lines like wildfire. I thought the Hun was quiet today and when I got back I found out why. Some chap burst into the mess shouting “They’ve got the Bloody Red Baron”. Perhaps the Germans were in mourning.’

  ‘Well,’ Munro said in matter-of-fact tones, ‘Ah’m sorry for him o’ course, but after all it’s one less valley o’ death tae ride intae.’

  Bull laid on a tender and we all went over that afternoon. They’d cleared one of the flapping Bessoneau hangars and the body had been laid on a trestle-table dais, and when we arrived pilots, observers and ground crew were filing past, some merely out of curiosity, some to pay respect for a man who, whatever his nationality, had always been acknowledged as a great airman. There was no sense of triumph, though, and no jokes and a lot of men were even carrying wreaths and laying them on the growing pile round the bier.

  I must have been the only man in that hangar who’d had the privilege of seeing Richthofen at close quarters, other than as a leather-capped head in an enemy machine in the air. When I’d made a forced landing behind the German lines I’d talked with him and he’d flattered me because I’d worn medal ribbons, and I’d even spent the evening with his staffel who’d wined and dined me before sending me off into captivity. Having seen him alive, it was stranger still for me to see him lying there dead. He was half-smiling, his nose and jaw injured in the landing, and he seemed even smaller than I remembered him, so that I felt an intense wave of pity as I looked at him.

  Later that afternoon in the sunshine, with the light already changing to gold, six pilots of equal rank to Richthofen’s carried the black-stained coffin to an open army tender, and, headed by twelve Australian infantrymen with their rifles reversed, the cortège passed slowly down the main street of Bertangles beside the aerodrome. Machines were landing and taking off all the time over the grave, which had been dug in Bertangles cemetery near a hemlock tree, and the place was full of allied soldiers, Chinese labourers and a few French women and children who were clearly wondering what all the fuss was about over one of the hated Germans. As the volley rang out over the grave the pigeons burst from the trees with a clattering lift of wings over the headstone, a cross made from an old four-bladed propeller. Somebody had attached a round plate at the centre with the words ‘Cavalry Captain Manfred von Richthofen, aged twenty-two,’ which as it happened was wrong, because according to what I’d been told when I’d met him, he must have been twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Not that it mattered, anyway, because someone stole the plate soon afterwards as a souvenir.

  The next day someone flew over the lines to drop a photograph of the grave and a note to the Germans to say he was dead and had been buried with military honours. A few people in England objected to the fuss, claiming that Richthofen was only a German, after all, but flying men knew what it was all about. Richthofen had been a flyer and that had put him apart, because the war, despite its new ruthless code, still somehow in the air managed to retain a few traces of dignity. In the sky, the battlefield wasn’t the same sad waste of mud and wreckage it was on the ground. Up there it was swept clean after every fight and to the pilots filing past the grave, Richthofen was just a young man whose death was rousing the emotions they’d have felt for one of their own comrades.

  As we drove back, to my surprise Bull began to quote John Donne – the only bit of Donne I ever knew, in fact. ‘Any man’s death diminishes me,’ he said, ‘because I am involved in Mankinde; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’ Munro gave him an odd look, as though, he, too, had never suspected Bull capable of emotion. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Aye. That’s aboot it.’

  * * *

  The major was a man with a DSO and an MC and several foreign decorations. Before the war he’d been a history scholar at Oxford but had rushed to join the artillery without taking his degree. He’d soon transferred to the RFC and he’d done so well he’d decided not to go back to Oxford, because if the navy and the army allowed the new RAF to survive – which at that moment still seemed very unlikely – he was set for a rapid climb to seniority. He was a burly man with a heavy jaw, a sharp tongue when anyone showed any sign of moral disintegration after a disaster, and a quiet sureness about him that appealed to me.

  ‘You’ll take over “A” flight,’ he said, ‘as senior flight commander. Munro will have “B”. Bull’s already got “C”. It’ll take a bit of doing for us to get used to two new flight commanders at once but I expect we’ll manage it and I’ve heard a lot about you.’ He smiled. ‘As a matter of fact, I didn’t think you were quite so young.’

  ‘Perhaps we’re all a bit young these days, sir,’ I suggested and he nodded and lit a cigarette.

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘I think we’ve all grown a little old before our time.’ He gestured. ‘You’ll find things different these days. We tend to go out all together now. Richthofen started it with his big formations and we’ve had to follow suit. And until today his lot were doing very well. I think the chap you’re relieving’s glad to be out of it. That’s why the mess is so noisy tonight. I’m letting Bull lead tomorrow, of course. Normally it would be your job but I think it’ll do no harm to give you the chance to find your feet.’

  Bull didn’t seem to be looking forward to the job. He was low in spirits as though the episode in the hangar at Bertangles had affected him. ‘The fun’s gone out of the war,’ he said heavily.

  ‘I never noticed there was much hilarious aboot it,’ Munro said.

  ‘No,’ Bull agreed. ‘But something’s gone. It’s grown too big for individuals like us.’

  ‘Aye,’ Munro agreed. ‘It showed at Berck.’

  Bull managed a twisted grin. ‘I suppose that sort of thing’s what’ll win it in the end,’ he admitted. ‘But they’ve taken something away, too.’

  He was still puzzled about how we had both managed to get posted to the squadron and explained what had happened. ‘We only needed one flight commander until yesterday,’ he said. ‘We lost another last evening. Chap called Brady. He wasn’t popular with his last mob and even his best friend couldn’t have called him a thruster, and when the Old Man detailed him to lead a low raid on the aerodrome at Verq this morning he said he couldn’t do it. The CO told him it could mean a court martial, so he shot himself – behind the mess in the middle of the night.’ Bull shook his head. ‘Seems funny that a chap has the guts to kill himself but not to take a chance which might have come off and brought him a gong.’

  Munro shrugged. ‘It isnae so funny tae me,’ he said. ‘I’ve often felt like it masel’.’ He tapped the new ribbon the King had pinned on my chest. ‘Ye see that, Bullo, and ye ken what ye have tae do tae get ’em?’ He turned away. ‘As far as ah’m concerned, Bratty can keep it.’

  Bull nodded. ‘You’ve only to stay alive to get ’em these days,’ he grinned. ‘Especially now the thing to do is trench-strafing. It smashed up the German counter-attacks after Cambrai and they’re trying to work it now so that nothing on the German side of the lines will dare move after daylight. We spend most of our time these days below 1000 feet shooting at anything that moves.’

  ‘Charming!’ Munro said. ‘Bluidy charming!’

  ‘They think so much of it, in fact,’ Bull went on, ‘they’re turning out a special aeroplane for the job. Salamanders. With extra armour. They’re even training ground-strafing squadrons.’
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  ‘Aye,’ Munro said. ‘It’s a gey fine idea, mon, but I’m pleased I’m no’ in one.’

  ‘Except,’ Bull said with another grin, ‘that when the fun starts they set everybody at it and then you might well end up wishing you were.’

  * * *

  Orders came through at dinner that the squadron was to move north to Puy in Flanders the next day and, imagining it was to be a period of rest away from the fighting in the south, the mess combined the celebration with the send-off for the time-expired man I’d relieved and threw a lunatic party. It was clearly a well run squadron and the major had been careful to make sure that among his fitters and riggers and drivers and clerks there were men who could play instruments. The war seemed to wake up as they tried to lift the roof. It wasn’t anything patriotic like God Save The King or Land of Hope and Glory that they played but Dark Town Strutters’ Ball and all the latest hits from London, and Munro sat back and beamed at them. ‘Mon,’ he said. ‘Yon was a great idea the Major had.’

  Bull laughed. ‘Except that a few of the people we got rid of complained that he swopped them for a trumpeter and a packet of fags.’

  As the band blared on, a low roll of engines started above us and Bull looked up. Above the muttering I could hear distant explosions, then there was a tremendous crash that seemed to lift my feet from the floor. The hut fittings shook and a shower of dust fell from the cracks in the roof.

  ‘What’s yon?’ Munro demanded.

  Bull looked up. ‘Jerry bombers. Big ones. They come over every night these days. Ever since we formed the independent air force to raid Germany, they’ve been trying to get a bit of their own back. They don’t hit much but it makes sleep a bit more difficult.’

  Munro frowned. ‘Noo I know the war’s taken a turrn for the worrse,’ he said.