The Victors

by Max Hennessy

  The lines disappeared beneath me and, seeing a gap in the smoke, I headed for it. Fields appeared and finally, after what seemed a couple of lifetimes, I saw what looked like an aerodrome. It had FEs on it so I guessed it must be a forward landing field for the independent force. Not that it mattered to me.

  I hadn’t enough height to get in properly and when I tried to fly between the trees the damned aeroplane wouldn’t do what I wanted and I hit them end-on. Down they went one after another like ninepins and there was a sound of splintering wood and twanging wires as the wings were ripped off to cling to the branches like a lot of dirty washing, then the fuselage, with me still inside it, bounced along the ground, the under-carriage gone, the tail unit flying behind like a flag on the end of a wire. What was left skidded into a ditch and, as the nose dropped, I banged my face violently on the cockpit surround and ended up hanging head-down inches from the stubble in the bottom of the ditch.

  Two men in overalls who looked like air mechanics dragged me clear.

  ‘You wounded, sir?’ one of them asked.

  ‘No,’ his friend said. ‘It’s only his nose that’s bleeding.’

  My face black with oil, I staggered to my feet, lights going on and off in front of my eyes and quite certain I’d broken my neck and probably fractured my skull as well. Half-crying with rage, fright and self-pity, I noticed a car come to a stop nearby, then I found myself staring up at an enormously tall figure with a moustache. Vaguely I sensed it was familiar and important and then a vast voice boomed at me. I could hear it even over the sound of a Fee taking off.

  ‘You all right, son?’ it demanded.

  I was still stumbling about, my eyes crossed, my knees giving way, unable to see properly for the wallop on my head, and the great rumbling voice seemed to rub a nerve raw.

  ‘What the hell’s it got to do with you?’ I demanded hotly. ‘And, anyway, since I’ve been flying out here ever since 1916, it’s about time people stopped calling me “son”.’

  The officer said nothing and I was led away, still dizzy. The man who held my arm was laughing.

  ‘What’s so damn’ funny?’ I demanded.

  ‘You,’ he said. ‘Telling him to go and boil his head.’

  ‘Why?’ I said. ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Only Trenchard. The man who built the air force. He was here on a flying visit. I expect you’ll be court martialled and shot.’

  The Fee squadron laid on a car and I saw the tall man they said was Trenchard telling the driver to go easy. He drove as though I were made of eggshells but I was still shaking when I got back to Puy. The mess was empty so I dug out the mess waiter and made him give me a brandy to steady myself. While I was sipping it, Munro came in, followed by a few others. He looked tired, depressed and angry, but he cheered up as he saw me.

  ‘Y’all right, Brat?’ he asked.

  ‘Just,’ I said.

  ‘I was a wee bitty worried, forbye. I didnae want tae have tae ring yon hospital.’

  ‘Look, Jock,’ I said. ‘If anything happens to me, go and see her, will you? Personally.’

  He nodded. ‘Aye, I’ll do that. If ye’ll do the same for me. Ah’ve never had o’er much time for gels, but yon Hatherley’s a bonnie lass.’

  Nobody was saying much and Munro lit his pipe with a scowl. ‘Ah suppose ye havenae haird,’ he said. ‘But Bullo’s gone.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ was all I could say.

  ‘Hit from the ground. He went on fire. What was that thing he was always quotin’? “Never send tae know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”’ He seemed to wince. ‘It did, mon, too. Ah was thinkin’ fine it was gaein’ tae be me, and all the time it was auld Bullo.’

  I don’t know how he felt but if it was anything like me he was feeling like nothing on God’s earth. He sat down at the piano and began to play and sing softly to himself.

  ‘Oh, mother mair

  Go mak’ ma bed

  Ma heart is sair wi’ sorrow

  Adoon the glen

  Lie seven dead men

  In dowry dens o’ yarrow…’

  Normally he only played popular tunes we could sing to or the roistering ditties that started after a mess party, and this was something new. His fingers seemed sure for once, too, and hit the keys well, as though he was more moved than he could say.

  ‘Bullo was a guid feller,’ he said.

  It was almost as though it were Bull’s epitaph because then he stopped and stared at the piano for a moment, before lifting his hands and bringing them down on the keys with a crash.

  ‘And when Ah tell them,’ he began to sing.

  ‘How wonderful y’ are

  They’ll never believe me—’

  In no time at all, as though they’d been waiting for it, there were two or three others round him, also singing, and as I left the mess they were roaring away.

  ‘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.’

  They were feeling better already. Bad as it had been, they were slowly recovering, and the songs were our way of equating death with life, the only way we had of bringing an accepted daily routine of hazard down to a ridiculous normality. They’d be all right again tomorrow.

  Chapter 5

  As it happened I didn’t notice tomorrow when it came. I woke up in the night with a splitting headache and spots before the eyes and I couldn’t even remember how I’d got that way. The next morning I was barely aware who I was and they decided I’d been severely concussed by the crash.

  ‘After all,’ the doctor said, ‘it was pretty spectacular and it’s going to cost the air force a fortune for those trees. You’d better stay in bed for a week.’

  Since I had an excuse and had knocked down about forty poplars without killing myself they didn’t shoot me for what I’d said to Trenchard. They didn’t even court martial me. Trenchard always had a soft spot for his pilots, even though he drove them hard, and what I’d told him became a standing joke in the squadron and ‘What the hell’s it got to do with you?’ became a sort of slogan around the aerodrome so that you could hear the fitters and riggers shouting it at the corporals whenever they were asked what job they were on. Munro made great capital of it and for a while I became known as the ‘What’s-It-Got-To-Do-With-You?’ man.

  The war seemed to have settled down and the German attacks seemed at last to have slowed. Still pushing ahead in the south, they had gobbled up an awful lot of land but suddenly it began to look as though they weren’t going to capture Paris after all or break through and curl round to the coast, and everybody began to feel more certain that they really were exhausting themselves and that if we could only hold on the war could well end in 1919.

  Things were looking so good in fact that the telegram that came for me was a shock. ‘Father dying. Can you get leave? Mother’ was all it said and it shook me because for three years I’d been thinking all the time it was me who was going to die.

  The major was sympathetic and, as leave had started again, he said I could have four days to get over the crash and attend to my father’s business. I was dubious, feeling it was unfair to leave the fighting to everyone else, but Munro had no doubts at all about what I should do.

  ‘Go, mon,’ he said.

  I’d decided to call on Charley to see if she had any messages to take home and Munro gave me an envelope for Barbara Hatherley. Rather unexpectedly he seemed to have got it rather badly and they were writing to each other every two or three days now and he was sneaking off to see her even when I wasn’t going to see Charley.

  ‘You beginning to fancy getting married?’ I asked.

  ‘Might be,’ he admitted.

  ‘Seems to be catching,’ I said. ‘Everybody’s at it. Must be the war.’

  He gave an embarrassed grin. ‘Thought I’d better make my mark before I was killed in the rush,’ he said. ‘Mind,
it’s somethin’ I never expected, but there y’are, the world doesnae stop turnin’ just because there’s a war on. Folk go on fallin’ for each other just as if everything were normal.’

  ‘And a damn’ good thing, too,’ I said.

  ‘Ye’ll mebbe give her my love and hand her this note,’ he said, though I knew it was no note but a long epistle he’d laboured over for hours.

  * * *

  Charley was tired and in low spirits. The hospitals were full after the German offensives and the allied counter-attacks, and she’d been on her feet for hours at a time. ‘There’s such a flood of them,’ she said despairingly, ‘and only a handful of us, and just when we drop on our beds to fall asleep the air raids start and they come and chase us into the shelters. As far as I’m concerned, I’d willingly take my chance but they seem to think we have to be looked after like a lot of infants just because we’re girls.’

  She was full of the high hurt rage of youth and pink with anger, and I put my arm around her. ‘Go on,’ I encouraged. ‘Cough it up. You can cry on my manly breast if you like.’

  She smiled at last. ‘That’s a situation that doesn’t arise very often,’ she said more cheerfully. ‘Perhaps I ought to exploit it to the full.’ She drew a deep breath. ‘Sorry for the emotional blood bath,’ she went on, ‘but we can’t let the patients see we’re tired or fed up and it’s nice to let your good resolutions go whistlin’ down the wind when there’s a sympathetic ear around.’ She stared at me and frowned. ‘I’m just cross, I suppose,’ she went on, ‘because some damn’ padre came along and had the gall to hold a service and submit po-faced dissertations on the fact that everyone still has to do their duty to God, King and Country.’ Her eyes blazed. ‘It’ll be better for this world when that damned trio are quietly tucked away in a box and forgotten.’ She gave a wry grin. ‘I think I’m getting war weary but it’s been so awful and I keep thinking of all those poor men in there.’

  ‘Tell you what,’ I said, trying to pull her leg as I always did in a sort of mock affection we’d always used and got used to. ‘Think of me instead.’

  She gave me a long cool stare. ‘What makes you think I don’t?’ she asked. ‘Because I do. All the damn’ time.’

  I was surprised by her intensity and tried to make everything all right again. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Never realized.’

  She sniffed and managed an uneven laugh. ‘Give my love to Norfolk,’ she said. ‘I wish I were comin’ with you. Your old flame Jane’s home, did you know? Ludo’s got a new job and he’s on leave, so you’ll be able to see them all.’

  ‘I’ll give them your love, Charley,’ I said, and then, without thinking about it, I kissed her properly – quite naturally and without any trace of embarrassment. Though I’d kissed her often enough before, there’d always been a faint feeling of dare-devilry about it as I’d thought what a dashing chap I was. This time it was natural and to comfort her because she was on edge, and it had the effect of calming her. She gave a big sigh and pushed me away.

  ‘Oh, go on, you silly ass,’ she said. ‘If anyone saw us, they’d send me home in disgrace!’

  ‘Court martial you,’ I said.

  She grinned. ‘And shoot you.’

  * * *

  England seemed as foreign as ever. Though the old exhortation to ‘Scrag The Hun’ had given way to the more dogged ‘Carry On, We’ll Beat Them Yet,’ there were still too many people around who hadn’t been in the slightest affected by the war. The newspapers were still full of stupid letters from aggressive civilians and what the correspondents at the front didn’t know they made up. None of them ever went far enough forward to learn what it was really like in the trenches, anyway, and their stories were all too often just sentimental rubbish about how the soldiers looked after their pets and how, though the barbaric Germans constantly fired deliberately at wayside crucifixes and often hit them, the figure of the suffering Christ was miraculously never touched. They were even still whining that the Germans didn’t play fair – as if it were a cricket match and the Germans were using spiked balls. It made me think of what Munro was in the habit of saying.

  ‘If it’s a case o’ playin’ dairty or not survivin’,’ he always insisted, ‘then Ah reckon we should hit him as quick as we can, as hard as we can, where it hurts most and when he isnae lookin’! An’, if we get a chance, boil him in oil too, so that next time he’ll keep clear of us. It might shorten the war.’

  Even so, to read what was being written about the Germans was enough to make your blood boil, especially since the few prisoners I’d talked to had all seemed to be ordinary young men like me with no particular hatred in their hearts, except for their own staff, profiteers and politicians, a factor which seemed to be common to British, French, Italians, and everyone else who was actually doing the fighting.

  In the train from London I remembered Charley. It was odd to think of her tired and low-spirited – lively, cheerful Charley, warm, happy, good-tempered Charley whom I’d always enjoyed seeing ever since the first day she’d made my hair stand on end with some unexpected and outrageous remark. She’d always made me feel I was interesting and important and had always greeted me with outflung arms and a yell of delight as though I were the one person she most wanted to see. Sykes had once asked me if she’d meant anything to me and I’d said no she hadn’t. But she was changing so fast, dropping her youthful affectations one after another so quickly, I was no longer sure and I had to keep reminding myself that I was still only nineteen and not old enough to be thinking this way, anyway. And then reminding myself also that in the last four years I’d grown older than many men of thirty, and generations older than those who’d never seen anything of the war.

  When I arrived at Fynling my father was being nursed night and day. He’d been overworking for some time and had had a stroke while doing army lecturing in Cambridge. They’d got him home with difficulty and it was clear he couldn’t last long. I still found it hard to understand that it was he and not I who had succumbed to the war.

  His face was wax-like and he was barely conscious but he was able to give me his instructions. ‘Just in case, Martin,’ he said. ‘You know what a feather-brain your mother’s always been with her painting.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re fussing about,’ I said, suddenly aware that overnight I’d become the man of the family, the strong shoulder on which the other members leaned, and that now he needed me in the way that I’d needed him as a boy. It startled me and frightened me a little with the responsibility.

  ‘You’ll be up and about before long,’ I said, but I knew he wouldn’t and I spent the whole day paying calls on family solicitors and bank officials and talking in dusty, file-filled rooms about what my father wished done. My mother seemed lost. She’d always been so immersed in her work she’d never really been completely with us and she seemed bewildered now to think her prop was going. She looked older, too, and there was a lot of white in her hair which had started to come when my brother was killed, but she seemed to understand that I needed to get out of the house and was quick to point out, like Charley, that Jane was home.

  I borrowed a bike and rode over, but even that fell oddly flat. Jane was there all right, prettier than I remembered her, with Sykes standing just behind her with his disarming smile, but while we all greeted each other with joy, it was tinged with a certain amount of sadness, too, because Jane’s father had also been working too long and too hard without assistance and he’d been told he’d got to stop or he’d kill himself. He’d sold the farm and was already installed in the house in Littlehampton where we’d always gone for holidays, being looked after by Jane’s elder sister, Edith, whose husband was now running a hospital in France.

  ‘I’m just helping mother to clear things up,’ Jane said, ‘and then we’ll join Edith while Ludo’s in France.’

  Sykes gave me a wry grin as she bustled off. ‘What a clearing away there’s been,’ he said. ‘Your father. Jane’s father. If we survive this war
, Brat, the world’ll be ours for the taking. Have you decided what you’re going to do?’

  ‘Survive,’ I said. ‘That’ll be enough for the time being. How about you?’

  ‘I’ve got a new job. Frightfully hush-hush.’

  ‘I meant after it’s over.’

  He paused, running his hand round the back of his neck where he’d been wounded in 1916.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘There’ll be Hathersett Hall to look after when it’s all over because my father’s no longer young, but I don’t want to give up flying. Perhaps I can combine the two. I expect we’ll finally have to sell the place, anyway, because by then the taxes’ll be too high and people like me will be as out of date as the dodo.’

  ‘Not on your life, Lulu,’ I said.

  ‘Out-moded aristocrats?’ His eyebrows lifted. ‘With the revolution in Russia? Probably all be guillotined, shouldn’t wonder.’

  He hadn’t changed much, just quietened down a little, probably because he was a bit older and was married now.

  ‘Still, you never know,’ he went on thoughtfully. ‘The British army’s a strange institution and it always seems able to find a place for people like me. Perhaps I’ll stay where I am.’

  ‘I should,’ I said. ‘The air force needs you. Hathersett needs you. The whole world needs people like you.’

  ‘My word,’ he said mildly. ‘You don’t half flatter a chap.’