The Victors

by Max Hennessy

  ‘It won’t. I’m not going west.’

  ‘That’s the sort of rot you all talk,’ she said sharply. ‘It’ll be the other chap. Never me! Is that what my brothers said? And your brother, and my cousins and all those others?’

  She looked scared and seemed to need jerking out of the mood. ‘Is there anywhere we can talk round here except in this damned public thoroughfare?’ I asked.

  ‘There’s a room where we’re allowed to meet boy friends. I doubt if there’d be even that but for the fact that some of us have brothers out here and the brothers began to kick up a fuss that they were never allowed to see their sisters.’

  ‘Matron’s fault?’

  ‘Not really. She’s as stiff as her starched hat but she’s fair and kind to dummies like me. It’s those awful hypocrites back home.’

  I gave a hoot of laughter. ‘You’re beginning to sound like an old soldier,’ I said. ‘You’ll soon begin to feel, like the rest of us, that this is home and England’s a foreign country.’

  The room they’d set aside was small but comfortable, but there were several other nurses there. Someone produced coffee and biscuits and Charley and I sat in a corner talking in low voices.

  ‘What are you going to do when the war ends, Martin?’ she asked.

  ‘Dunno,’ I said. ‘Go on flying I expect.’

  ‘How? They’ll disband the Flying Corps and the navy and the army, and everybody’ll be walking round looking for jobs.’

  ‘They might keep me on.’

  ‘Suppose they don’t?’

  ‘There’s bound to be a lot of old aeroplanes lying about that nobody wants. Perhaps I’ll buy one or two and set up a passenger service.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘France. Germany. Holland. Italy. You could fly there in two hops.’

  ‘Who’d want to travel in an aeroplane?’

  ‘I would, for one.’

  ‘Would anyone else?’

  ‘Why not? Aeroplanes are flying for hours at a time these days. Carrying bombs. Why shouldn’t they carry passengers?’

  She stared. ‘I never thought of that,’ she admitted.

  ‘They’ve developed enormously in the last two years,’ I pointed out. ‘When I first flew they were like box kites – old box kites. If they go on at the rate they are doing, they’ll be flying to America soon.’

  She grinned and I realized we’d managed to put the war behind us. ‘You’re pulling my leg!’

  ‘No, I’m not. Vimy bombers can carry a six-ton load at a hundred miles an hour for nearly twelve hours and I hear they’ve designed a new Handley-Page with four engines that can fly for seventeen. With extra tanks, buses like that could make it to the Azores, and probably even all the way to Newfoundland. Further still the other way with the wind behind ’em.’

  She stared at me, caught by my enthusiasm. ‘And you’d like to be among the first?’

  I grinned. ‘On second thoughts,’ I said, ‘the Atlantic’s pretty big and I’m not much of a swimmer. Perhaps I’ll stay in the service instead.’

  ‘What’s Ludo think?’

  ‘Ludo seems to think they might find a use for a chap with my experience. Especially as I’m young enough for them to get full value before I peg out. That is, providing I don’t get knocked off first.’

  As she looked up at me, her eyes were serious and I even thought they were damp. ‘Don’t talk rot, Martin,’ she said. As I rose to go she gave me a smile. ‘It would be all right to meet you during the day sometime,’ she said. ‘So long as there was someone else with me. Could you bring someone else?’

  I thought of Munro. ‘Yes, I could. He looks a bit funny, mind. He has to walk with two sticks.’

  ‘He sounds half-dead.’

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ I said. ‘Even with two stiff legs, Jock Munro’s more alive than most people are with two bendy ones.’

  * * *

  Munro was delighted at the chance of meeting a girl. He had no family and was a lonely man but he was far from tongue-tied. Charley’s friend was a girl from Bradford called Barbara Hatherley who had a marked northern accent, a bright cheerful face and a quick mind, and Munro was well on form so that the discussion over the meal became lively.

  ‘In France,’ Munro said, ‘even fried eiggs an’ chips has style wi’ it. English girls ha’e never measured up tae yon sort o’ thing. They havenae even lairned tae cook yet.’

  ‘And look at Englishmen,’ Barbara Hatherley retorted spiritedly. ‘Standing in corners sucking their pipes and talking about dogs.’ She turned to Charley. ‘They haven’t even found out yet how to make their houses draught-proof for us, have they, Sykes? What chance have girls in a man-made world?’

  Charley laughed. ‘Hatherley, what an ass you are!’

  ‘You ought to be a suffragette,’ I said. ‘Votes for women.’

  ‘I would have been,’ Charley said. ‘If I’d been older. If they don’t give us the vote after the war I probably still will be.’

  ‘Your chances are good,’ Barbara Hatherley said. ‘You see, when it’s all over the men’ll all come back like conquering heroes to take over where they left off, quite forgetting that we’ve been running the show while they’ve been away.’

  ‘I shan’t go back like that,’ I said. ‘I have no ill feelings about anything – except perhaps bully beef.’

  ‘You’re no’ normal,’ Munro pointed out witheringly. ‘Y’always did think the world was full o’ kind hearts an’ sweet natures. What you need, laddie, is a steady girl.’

  ‘He’s got one,’ Charley said at once. ‘I’m her.’

  Later as we walked back to the hospital she looked at me worriedly. ‘You didn’t mind me saying that, did you, Martin? I didn’t mean it.’

  I looked round, startled to find I was faintly disappointed. ‘You didn’t?’

  ‘No. I just thought it might be a bit difficult for you, that’s all. I thought you might have to start talkin’ about that other girl – what was her name?’

  ‘Marie-Ange?’ I frowned. ‘Charley, I find I can hardly remember her.’

  ‘Does it worry you?’

  ‘I feel it ought to.’

  ‘Suppose she—?’ She looked anxiously at me. ‘Did you ask her to marry you or something, Martin?’

  ‘Good Lord, no! It never entered my head.’

  ‘It probably did hers,’ she said dryly. ‘There’s nothin’ so explosive as the emotional life of a girl – except perhaps a hand grenade. What would you do if she did?’

  It seemed to need a little thinking about. ‘She risked her life for Ludo and me,’ I said slowly. ‘That’s all I know.’

  * * *

  Back at the field, as we were undressing by the light of the lamp, Munro sat on his bed and looked up at me. ‘Nice girl, yon Hatherley,’ he said. ‘Sykes’ cousin’s a nice girl, too. You fond o’ her?’

  I thought I must be but I didn’t know how much. ‘I suppose so,’ I said. ‘She’s a bit overpowering sometimes, mind – all that huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ stuff.’

  He gave me a shrewd look. ‘I shouldnae worry aboot that,’ he said. ‘That’s just a façade, laddie. She’s young an’ she’s no’ sure of herself yet. If it were me, Ah wouldnae let her go. She’s worth hangin’ on tae.’

  He was just about to blow out the candle when Bull appeared. ‘Full squadron show tomorrow,’ he said. ‘With bombs. Pressure all along the line to relieve the troops in the south. We’re trench-strafing, with the SEs up top to keep the Tripes off.’

  The klaxon woke us all up while it was still dark, and the hut became a chaos of scrambling men, all searching for equipment and clothes and getting in each other’s way.

  ‘Must be something big,’ Bull said.

  ‘Dinnae sound sae damned enthusiastic,’ Munro complained, staggering on his stiff legs to drag on a flying boot. ‘It’s a confounded nuisance havin’ tae wage war at this time o’ the morn.’ He put his head out of the door and withdrew it with moisture
on his hair. ‘Ceilin’ at nought feet,’ he said cheerfully. ‘They’ll call it off.’

  But they didn’t, and the squadron took off in three flights, with half an hour between each. We climbed in and out of the cloud, and almost immediately Milne had to turn back with a spluttering engine. There seemed to be a lot of two-seaters out artillery-spotting but no Germans and we dropped our bombs on the German front line. Little flags of canvas began to flap in my wings as bullets came up from the ground, but there seemed to be no damage and we pressed on. In the distance was what looked like a swarm of bees which I knew to be a dog fight, but by the time we reached the spot it had dispersed, leaving a single column of smoke to stain the sky where someone had gone down in flames.

  We climbed again towards Lille and passed a flight of SEs heading east looking for trouble, then over La Bassée we found a German two-seater, but it bolted into a cloud like a rat down a drain and we flew round and round like a lot of agitated terriers for a while, hoping for it to re-emerge. Growing bored with waiting, I spotted a group of Triplanes to the south and we climbed above them and, as we came down on them, I found myself on the tail of the leader. He banked steeply as I fired, gradually turned over on his back and dropped into a spin.

  Munro’s flight had been down some time when we got back and he was making out his report. He’d lost one man but a telephone call had come through from an artillery post to say he was safe but had wrecked his machine in landing.

  Another squadron patrol followed in the afternoon and Bull shot down an ancient Pfalz.

  ‘Send his name tae the VC department o’ the Daily Mail,’ Munro said. ‘But dinnae tell ’em that the Germans are so runnin’ oot o’ aeroplanes all they could put up for him tae knock doon was one o’ last year’s numbers.’

  The fact that the day had worked out well had done him good and when someone handed him a letter from Barbara Hatherley he began to play quietly on the piano.

  ‘If you were the only girl in the world

  And I were the only boy—’

  It was one of the sickly-sweet songs that were in vogue, which almost broke your heart when you were a long way from home and probably wouldn’t see the next day, the sort men bought records of when they went on leave to remind them of France and played over and over on the gramophone until wives or sisters or mothers broke them over their heads in desperation, unable to stand any longer the nostalgia they couldn’t comprehend.

  Bull threw a magazine at him. ‘Give us something more cheerful,’ he shouted. ‘Not that lovesick ballad.’

  Munro grinned and began to pound the piano again.

  ‘Hans vos mein name und a pilot vos I,

  Oot mit Von Karl I vent for a fly.

  Pilots o’ Kultur ve vos, dere’s nae doubt,

  Each o’ us flew in ein Albatros scout…’

  Delivered in a broad Scots accent, the mixture of dialects set everyone laughing.

  ‘Ve looked f’r BEs for tae strafe mit oor guns

  Ven last I saw Karl I knew he vos dones

  For right on his tail were two little Sops

  Hush-a-bye-baby, on the tree-tops.’

  The party grew riotous but at dinner there was a sudden dampening of the spirits as the major arrived, accompanied by an army brigadier with a toothbrush moustache and eyeballs that looked as though they’d been boiled. There was no surprise when orders contained the information that a local push was to start the next morning and, as soon as the major had finished, the brigadier got to his feet to say his little piece.

  ‘We’ve got to harry the Hun,’ he announced. ‘It’s up to you chaps with your bombs…’

  ‘Here we gae again,’ Munro snorted softly. ‘Same as last time – wi’ knobs on.’

  After dinner, the major called me into his office. The brigadier was there, jabbing his finger at a map and making the bold sweeps of an armchair warrior over the area of the lines. He nodded to me – not very enthusiastically because, I suppose, I was only small fry to a brigadier.

  ‘This is where we’re going forward,’ he said. ‘There’s bound to be some opposition just here but your bombs will easily deal with that, of course.’

  He seemed to be regarding the battle as if it were a football match and I saw red.

  ‘There’s no “of course” about it, sir,’ I said angrily and he lifted his head and turned his boiled blue eyes on me.

  ‘What’s that? What’s that?’

  ‘For us this isn’t just arrows on a map, sir,’ I said furiously. ‘At our level it’s men and some of ’em won’t be coming back.’

  ‘Won’t be coming back?’ He stared at me as though I’d told him something that had never occurred to him before. ‘You’re sure of yourself, young man, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, sir, I’m sure.’

  ‘Couldn’t be inefficiency, could it, I suppose?’

  It was quite clear there wasn’t much point in arguing with him. ‘No, sir, it couldn’t. I’ve been doing this sort of thing a long time.’

  He gave me a long hard stare and, changing the subject, stuck simply to what the plan was. He seemed less inclined to take anything for granted, though, after that, and when I went out, the major surreptitiously patted my back at the door.

  ‘Well said, Brat,’ he whispered.

  We were awake until midnight occupied with target maps or working at the hangars with the fitters and riggers to make sure the machines were ready. Munro seemed gloomy as we climbed into bed. ‘Ah think Ah’ve got the hump,’ he said. ‘Somethin’s goin’ tae happen tae me. Ah can feel it.’

  We were briefed to bomb batteries and troops on the move and, despite low cloud next morning, we took off and flew east, following the contours of the land. I passed over horsemen and infantry waiting by white arrows laid out on the ground, then swept over the barbed wire system of the German line. The area over which we flew was a featureless landscape pockmarked with shellholes crowded so close together they ran into each other. They seemed to be still filled with water from the winter, and the litter and debris of four years of fighting lay everywhere – smashed guns, aeroplanes, broken wire entanglements and shattered vehicles. Ypres, recognizable by its star-shaped citadel was away in the distance and there didn’t seem to be a single wall running north and south that had been left standing. Everywhere seemed to be as flat as a sheet with no houses, no trees, nothing.

  Seeing men in grey uniforms, we broke formation to drop the bombs. The earth seemed to be enveloped already in smoke and leaping flashes of flame, and we were whirling about in the smoke only yards from each other as we tried to place the bombs and turn out of the blast to zoom away.

  There wasn’t much hope of finding the target in the confusion and I dropped my bombs where I could. Climbing, I just missed the roof of a collapsed farmhouse and zoomed above the reek to catch my breath. A column of grey-clad men were marching towards me and, joining another Camel whose squadron insignia I couldn’t recognize, I swooped down on them, guns rattling. The column crumbled but fire came back from ditches and I saw splinters fly as I shot past in a wild rocking flight that was accompanied by lumps of wet mud from the explosions of the other Camel’s bombs. The other pilot must have been caught by the blast, however, because I saw his machine cartwheel into the running Germans and burst into a scattering of burning wreckage.

  Back at Puy everyone was artificially noisy because they were all still suffering from fright.

  ‘Those ground gunners are getting better,’ Milne said a little breathlessly.

  ‘No, mon,’ Munro pointed out. ‘It’s just that they’ve got a lot o’ targets.’

  The Camel I’d seen crash had obviously come from another squadron because everyone seemed to be back safe except for one man who’d had to force-land, and the machines that were undamaged took off again as soon as they’d been refuelled. The sky was still covered by unbroken cloud that kept us low and the fire from the ground was appalling. Since Cambrai the previous year when ground-strafing had first
come into its own, the Germans had learned a lot of tricks, and with batteries and trenches for targets, machines were returning with the remains of telephone wires round their undercarriages.

  ‘“Dear Mother, I am well”,’ Bull quoted grimly. ‘“But unless the staff let up a bit, I don’t expect to be for long”.’

  ‘The trouble,’ Milne said, ‘is that you can’t dodge.’

  Milne was right. Casualties usually came from new pilots who hadn’t acquired cunning, because at first you never saw what shot at you, and it took time to learn the trick. Aeroplanes had a habit of appearing and disappearing from nowhere, no matter how hard you watched, but in time you learned to see things, where to look, and what to do, and as you did so, your chances of surviving increased. With ground-strafing, however, skill and cunning acquired over months of service were no good at all because, as Milne said, you couldn’t dodge and all too often it was the men with experience who were prepared to go in a little closer, who were hit.

  We went out again in the glowing light of the early spring evening, the targets the same as before. I was more than glad to get rid of my bombs and climb up to where it was safe, but the German air force seemed to have wakened up at last and there were quite a lot of them about. Nearby, over Pilckem, an RE8 slogged past with a couple of Triplanes pecking away at it and, though I caught one and sent it into the ground in a shower of mud and scattered debris, even as the observer of the RE8 waved his thanks, his machine, more badly hit by the Tripes than he could have realized, began to break up. An aileron fluttered, came loose and dragged behind for a while before it fell away, then as it went the machine canted over on one wing and began a turn. Finally the wing itself began to crumble and I saw struts and wires come adrift, until finally it was only a tangle of wood and canvas twisting and turning towards the earth.

  Feeling sick and swearing aloud in terror, I climbed out of the area but, as I did so, an explosion underneath my tail almost made me lose control. Somehow the blast had stripped the whole left side of the machine of its fabric and, as I lost height, the engine began to sound like a can full of stones. There was machine gun on a cartwheel just below and in front and, as I sank lower, I saw it swing round and the flashes as it fired. Holes appeared in the port wing and a flying wire snapped with a twang like a double bass. Kicking frantically at the rudder bar to put the machine-gunners off their aim, I swung towards the west, but as I did so oil began to spray in my face, blinding me as it smeared across my goggles. Snatching them away, I could feel the whole aeroplane grinding and shaking and, though the air-speed indicator was smashed, I knew I was fast losing flying speed.