The Victors

by Max Hennessy

  The staff were still pushing for absolute command in the air. At long last someone had realized that the air force had a part in the scheme of things and that, without command up above, no one would ever have command down below, and the long hours of daylight and perfect weather with no days off brought increased casualties, so that Munro looked worriedly at me more often, as I did at him, and we both began to wonder if we’d outlived our luck. Over to the east the whole countryside seemed to be falling apart under the bombardment and still the staff demanded more, and more, and more.

  It was August now and at last the French had regained Soissons and were still moving forward. But, though you had to go twenty miles behind the German lines to find anything, Wing still insisted on us going to look.

  Munro was baffled. ‘What yon Germans think they’re defendin’ there Ah cannae imagine,’ he said. ‘But ye can always trust yon oily beggars o’ the staff tae send us after ’em.’

  He was looking exhausted now, his face pale and his eyes sore with too much flying. And at night he was muttering in his sleep so that he woke Jones and me. When we stirred him out of his nightmares, he looked at us shamefacedly. ‘Ah keep dreamin’ Ah’m on fire,’ he said.

  He could still bang on the piano, though, and get the sing-songs going, which was as much as anyone wanted these days. None of us had the energy to leave the aerodrome and indignant letters came to me from Charley demanding to know what she’d done and why I hadn’t been to see her. She’d done nothing; in fact she was the one person I wanted to see just then more than anyone else, but I couldn’t drag myself off my bed or out of an armchair once I’d fallen into it. Energy seemed to have gone and her cries grew more indignant, so that I’d just decided I’d better do something about it when orders arrived for us to leave Puy and move east out of reach to a new field at L’Escoril.

  * * *

  With the advance going well, we weren’t allowed to waste the good weather just in moving house and we flew a patrol on the way. The new field was empty and comfortless and we settled into our new quarters aware of the absence of the familiar things we’d had to leave behind which, though they’d never been luxury, at least had made the place feel like home.

  I was sleeping badly myself by this time but Munro was having the most awful nightmares now and kept jumping out of bed, sometimes half-a-dozen times a night. Taffy Jones and I kept stuffing him back and he kept apologizing until the hut was full of self-deprecation.

  ‘I cannae help it,’ he kept saying miserably. ‘I keep dreamin’ I’m on fire so I jump.’

  ‘We could always tie you in by yere, boy,’ Jones suggested, indicating the bed spring.

  ‘Oh, aye,’ Munro said. ‘That’d be marvellous. I’d break ma neck just fine.’

  ‘No, no! Just loosely, you understand, so you’d feel the tug of the string as you tried to get out and wake yourself up.’

  Munro gave a twisted grin. ‘That’s it!’ he said. ‘Taffy, mon, ye’ve got it!’

  That night he secured himself to the bed spring with the cord of his pyjamas. It didn’t help much, however, because as he jumped out it dragged his trousers down his legs and held his feet fast so that he came down with a thump on the floor on his chin and knocked himself unconscious.

  Jones stared down at him from his own bed. ‘There’s daft for you, boy,’ he said mildly.

  We picked him up gently and stuffed him back again. ‘How about asking the Doc for a sleeping draught or something?’ I suggested.

  ‘A sleeping draught!’ Munro was just coming round and he was indignant. ‘There’s only one sleepin’ draught tae a Scot, mon, and yon’s a large Scotch whisky.’

  He was putting on a good show of indifference but his nerves were clearly in rags. Three tours in France was a lot, because every time you grew tired more quickly than the last.

  Then news came that Mannock had been killed. ‘Flew into the ground while ground-strafing,’ Munro said. Then, of all people, McCudden, one of the safest men in the business, who, it seemed, had lost his engine on take-off. They’d both become legends in their own time, like Ball and Bishop and Richthofen and Voss and Guynemer, and the realization that men of such ability could be killed shook the confidence out of us again. I’d known McCudden personally. He’d been around since the first days of the war when he’d gone to France as a mechanic, and he’d risen step by difficult step through the ranks to major through sheer courage and ability. He was probably one of the greatest of all, cool-headed, calculating, a regular who picked his victims and never took risks. Mannock was just the opposite, never an individualist, but a born leader who inspired his men and hated the Germans with a genuine loathing.

  That night Munro had another of his nightmares.

  ‘Ah reckon Ah’m dyin’ o’ funk,’ he said.

  But it wasn’t funk. It was flu. It was spreading all over Europe suddenly and was supposed to be killing the half-starved people in Germany in thousands. It was also rife among the troops, the worst hit always the oldest soldiers, the ones who were most likely to be exhausted and least able to resist.

  Munro seemed thankful it wasn’t anything worse. ‘Ah thought mebbe it was mange,’ he said.

  ‘Shouldn’t let it worry you,’ the doctor said cheerfully. ‘Half the army’ll be down with it before long. Pyrexia of unknown origin, some people call it. Personally I think it’s just plain damn’ war weariness.’

  We spent the whole night watching Munro alternately shaking as though with ague and sweating violently in a temperature. By the next day six other men had gone down with it, too, and what with the disease and the sheer weariness of the ones who were left, the mess was pretty quiet for a long time because there were only enough of us left to work two flights on alternate patrols.

  ‘There’s cunning for you, man,’ Jones said, shaking his head solemnly over Munro. ‘Earmarking the worst time of the war to be ill.’

  ‘Look you, inteet to gootness, ye silly Welsh fatheid,’ Munro hooted. ‘Ah didnae earmark it, it earmarked me! How’s the war goin’ anyway?’

  ‘We’re due for another move forward any minute,’ I said. ‘Before long we’ll be taking over old German fields.’

  ‘I hope they leave us some Rhine wine, boy,’ Jones said.

  ‘They say it’s the beginning of the general offensive to win the war,’ I pointed out.

  ‘This year?’ Munro asked.

  ‘Next.’

  ‘How aboot the flyin’?’

  ‘Mostly at sparrow altitudes.’

  ‘It’s daft that staff is,’ Jones snorted. ‘I don’t like flying through wet grass, boyo, and there are so many aeroplanes about these days, bach, it’s like Piccadilly Circus. You can almost spit in their eyes as they go past. I nearly did today.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘I don’t know. They come and go so fast you don’t get time to know ’em. We’ve lost Smyth and Duckworth and that new youngster – what was his name now? – and that feller who stayed so short a time, indeed I never did learn what he was called.’

  Munro managed a weak grin. ‘So long as you don’t go, Taffy,’ he said. ‘You and Brat here.’

  It was true we rarely flew much higher than two thousand feet these days, tearing along in a new kind of war down the roads, fired at by machine guns, and smashing through the ground fire to shoot and bomb anything that moved. I was finding it all very wearing and wishing even that I could have a comfortable dose of flu and retire to bed.

  To add to the work, the major also went down and, being senior flight commander, I had to take the squadron over until he recovered. Twice I’d run a squadron for short periods, but this time the trivia of reports, returns, records and the problems of repairs, the worries of the NCOs and armourers, fitters and riggers, and the shock of casualties and the problem of replacements who knew so little about flying they couldn’t possibly have been sent over the lines without practice all seemed worse than before. It was because I was growing tired. I’d never thought I
could grow tired like this. I’d been weary at the end of my first stint in France but this time the worries seemed insurmountable and the work was a dead weight round my neck.

  I hardly seemed to have time to breathe and one evening when I’d got through the office routine early and was heading for the mess, Munro, who was just beginning to make his shaky way about the field, caught me by the arm and led me off to the hangars with some query about spares he could quite easily have handled himself. I decided in a fury that the flu had gone to his head and, leaving him cold to deal with it, headed back to the mess. This time it was Jones.

  ‘Transport,’ he said.

  ‘What about transport?’

  ‘It’s got to be settled,’ he said, and delivered a lengthy dissertation about the need for more vehicles that didn’t seem to make sense, while every time I tried to interrupt, he went off into another flood of high Welsh oratory.

  ‘For God’s sake, see to it yourself!’ I said in a rage.

  As I left him, the adjutant touched my arm and, before I knew what was happening, I was up to my neck in what appeared to be a complaint from the other ranks on the subject of leave.

  ‘Has everybody gone barmy round here?’ I said wildly, but just at that moment Munro, who, as I’d pushed him aside, had done a quick dot-and-carry-one to the mess with his walking sticks working overtime, stuck his head out of the door and shouted.

  ‘It’s all richt the noo,’ he yelled. ‘Wheel him in!’

  Whereupon the adjutant and Jones grabbed me by the arms and hurried me to the mess so fast my feet hardly touched the ground.

  I couldn’t believe my eyes, and saw at once what they’d all been up to, because, while they’d kept me busy, the rest of the squadron had been decorating the place from floor to ceiling with flags – union jacks, RAF flags, naval flags, signal flags, Belgian and French flags they’d borrowed, and even one or two German ones they’d turned up. Someone had lit candles all over the place, too, and with everybody standing grinning round a large birthday cake, above the bar I saw a sign, ‘Happy Birthday.’

  ‘Whose birthday is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Yours, ye damn’ fuil,’ Munro said and, as I remembered that it was, they all started singing.

  ‘I’m twenty-one today.

  I’m twenty-one today.

  I’ve got the key of the door—’

  Grinning, I pushed them away. ‘I’m not twenty-one,’ I said. ‘I’m twenty.’

  ‘Och, dinnae fash yersel’ aboot that,’ Munro shouted. ‘We’ll none of us ever live another year, mon, and it isnae every squadron at the front that’s got an infant as acting CO.’

  He went round with a feeding bottle full of wine, sloshing it into glasses, and shouted for a toast.

  ‘To the baby terror of the skies,’ he said. ‘Brat Falconer! Claims tae be only twenty but from the time he’s been flyin’ oot here he must be as old as Methuselah.’

  It turned into a wild party with Munro holding a mock investiture to give me a birthday present of a huge medal they’d made, which consisted of what looked like the cog wheel off one of the lorries’ gear boxes, painted like an RAF rondel and suspended on a foot wide ‘ribbon’ made of canvas and daubed in all the colours of the rainbow.

  ‘Tae gae wi’ the others,’ he said. ‘Well done, thou guid an’ faithful sairvant,’ and there were cheers and shouting and pieces of bread flying round. I don’t think I ever enjoyed a birthday so much in my life.

  As the major recovered and I found myself in the air again, the problem of survival took its place once more in the scheme of things. My generation was one which had almost forgotten what it was like for people to die peacefully, and faces were coming and going so fast I couldn’t remember half of them. Things had changed in another direction, too, because for the first time comradeship began to wane. With the Germans reeling eastwards, everybody was making plans for after the war and their minds all seemed to be full of their families and their jobs. A few of us, however, hadn’t been old enough to have jobs and to us the future was just a void because we couldn’t conceive what it would be like or even whether we’d ever be able to settle to a steady workaday chore. The break-up of the whole world seemed to be near because the only thing I could remember was squadron life and, afraid suddenly, I clung closer to Munro who, although he was older than I was, at least seemed to belong to both worlds – the new world of careers and the old world of last year.

  * * *

  The sound of guns to the east nowadays came almost continuously, and with the Americans beginning to appear in greater numbers every day, none of us expected the war to go on longer than 1919. The spring offensives then ought to put paid to the Germans for good, we felt, and I just hoped I’d still be around to celebrate.

  As the autumn arrived in cooler days and greyer skies, places we’d been trying to capture for four years fell at last and our job now seemed to consist only of chivvying the German infantry wherever they tried to stand, flying low into the murk of the greenish smoke of gas shells, dropping bombs and machine-gunning until I was sick of the narrow escapes and sick of the killing.

  ‘Ah thought we were supposed tae be “birdmen”,’ Munro grumbled. ‘Knights o’ the air. That sort o’ stuff. Most o’ the time these days we’re so low Ah’m looking up at the trees.’

  Flying had become a cheerless chore far too close to the tainted earth, pouring our machines in and out of the valleys and lifting them over the rises in the land, dodging trees and houses and telegraph poles so that your heart spent most of its time in the region of your throat, choking you with a fright that was even worse when you were down and had time to think about it. It didn’t make for sound sleep but a comforting worm of hope told me I might see it through, though the sight of Munro’s haggard face was no help. A short spell of leave after his flu had convinced him it was time he got married and he’d actually got as far as popping the question. He’d returned in a seventh heaven of delight because Barbara Hatherley had said ‘yes’ to him, but he was terrified now that he’d never live to meet her at the altar.

  ‘Thank heaven it’ll soon be over,’ he kept muttering.

  Then I discovered to my horror that there were grey hairs in my head and I was so afraid it would all drop out and leave me bald I felt I had to write and tell Charley. She took a long time to answer because it seemed she, too, had been down with flu, but her letter was brisk and as cheerful as ever.

  ‘My heart bleeds for you,’ she wrote. ‘But, though I’ve got some dark recesses in my soul, they’ve never been so dark I’d turn my back on a man just because he looked like a boiled egg.’

  It made me hoot with laughter and, feeling nothing would ever change her, I decided she was the most wonderful girl in the world. She’d never pushed herself, never tried feminine wiles on me or made special demands. She was just amusing, full of courage, desperately alive and shiningly honest.

  Then I thought again of Marie-Ange and as I wondered what had happened to her I began to wish I could get it all sorted out because I somehow didn’t feel I was playing fair with Charley. She’d always been careful in her letters to avoid seriousness but sometimes the care was so careful it seemed to show through, and I knew that occasionally she needed me around to cheer her up as I did her.

  Again I decided I’d try to get a couple of days off to go to see her but again it didn’t work out that way, because we were ordered further east once more, and from that time on we never seemed to stop. The Germans were moving backwards faster than we could move forward, because they were retreating into the clean undamaged land, while we were advancing across the battlefields and all the soiled, smashed countryside which they were booby-trapping and systematically destroying to delay us.

  As we moved on, we never seemed to stop long enough to unpack properly, so that we lived in acute discomfort most of the time. Sleeping and eating arrangements were always bad, and the mess was never quite as it had been and certainly never as messes had been in 1917 an
d 1916. We were always short of men because half-trained youngsters straight from school kept coming out, some of, it seemed to me, with the look of death already on their faces, and after their first half-dozen trips were either dead or dead lucky and thanking God they’d lived long enough to learn something. Because we moved so fast replacements never seemed to come up, while the depot never seemed able to get spares and new machines to us when we needed them.

  The long horror of the trenches seemed to have come to an end at last, though, and the armies were really on the move now. Tanks were pushing forward like ugly grey beetles, followed as often as not by cavalry, those solid phalanxes of lancers and swordsmen the generals had put their faith in ever since 1914 and never been able to use because they were hopeless in the mud or against barbed wire and machine guns. You felt you could almost see the smiles of satisfaction on the faces of the staff as they clattered past on the pavé, steel-helmeted Britishers and blue-turbanned Indians.

  As we moved forward we began to come across the wreckage of machines lost months before, blackened and charred or simply stark silent debris with flags of fluttering fabric on the shattered wings. As often as not there was a grave beside them, sometimes even with a name that someone knew, and one day, as we set up shop near Meulebeke, a farmer came with an identity disc and a few personal possessions that belonged to Milne. His machine had fallen into the river, it seemed, and two days before some farmhand, trying for fish, had found his body in the reeds. Munro and I went to claim it, and while it was not recognizable as Milne it couldn’t have been anybody else.

  There were troops all round the aerodrome now, thousands of them: American and British; New Zealanders, Australians, South Africans, Canadians and Indians, the whole weight of the Empire, all moving forward, all flushed and excited at the possibility of victory. Occasionally the German bombers came, their unsynchronized Mercedes engines drumming, the crashes in the distance shaking the huts and making sleep impossible.