The Bright Blue Sky

by Max Hennessy

  Then came the news of the Marne. The French, charging blindly forward to a prearranged plan, had suffered enormous casualties and the Germans were actually drawing near to Paris when the situation had been saved by a British airman who had spotted the German army sweeping around the British rear. The small British air corps, part of the Royal Engineers, less than fifty strong and mostly consisting of elderly French Farmans and Blériots marked by Union Jacks sewn on the fuselage by their crews, had made their presence felt.

  The war had even forced a change of mind on Dicken’s mother. Knowing inevitably that he would disappear eventually, she had withdrawn her objections to him going to sea for the simple reason that she couldn’t imagine him being in any danger on a vast Cunarder, and, getting his first class certificate in November, he applied again at Cunard only to be told there was no ship available and that he’d be informed when there was. He could now send and receive messages in Morse at twenty-two words a minute, and was taking a course in the building and maintenance of wireless stations. Christmas came with the battles in France stabilised into a static front with trenches running all the way from the sea to Switzerland, and the Toshacks held a party on Boxing Day to which Dicken was invited – by Zoë, he noticed, not Annys. There were several young men in stiff board-like khaki uniforms, because Mons had changed everything and everybody was volunteering now, if only to avoid the white feathers that were being handed out if you didn’t. Arthur Diplock wore the Sam Browne belt of a Yeomanry second-lieutenant.

  “He couldn’t get into the real cavalry,” Zoë whispered.

  Annys seemed to have got over her rage at Dicken and Zoë confided that she was thinking of becoming engaged to Diplock.

  “Bowed down with a broken heart?” she asked.

  “Doesn’t worry me now,” Dicken boasted and, to his surprise, he found it didn’t.

  “You could always get engaged to me,” Zoë said. “Except that Mother still regards me as a baby.”

  She wasn’t such a baby that she didn’t manage to get Dicken into the summer house for a torrid session in each other’s arms.

  “I’ll wait for you,” she offered. “Two more years. Then I’ll be nearly nineteen. Unfortunately, by then you’ll probably be on some wretched ship in the middle of the Atlantic sending a message that some rotten submarine’s torpedoed you.”

  The course in wireless maintenance took Dicken to London and, since he was still waiting to be called to the Cunard office, he was beginning to wonder if he shouldn’t try some other steamship line. He had already passed his first technical examination and was almost ready for the final when, as he was walking down Whitehall, he was pulled up by a recruiting sergeant, an enormous man with beery eyes and long waxed moustachios. His vast chest was crossed by a red sash and red, white and blue ribbons fluttered at the side of his cap. He reminded Dicken of a Shire horse at the May Day parade in Willys Green.

  “Don’t you know there’s a war on, young feller?” he said. “You ought to be in uniform.”

  “When I tried in August,” Dicken retorted hotly, “you lot wouldn’t touch me with a barge pole. In any case, I’m waiting to go to sea. I’m a wireless operator.”

  “You are?” The sergeant’s eyes widened. “Why didn’t you say, lad? We have wireless operators in the army, too, these days, y’know.”

  “You do?” It was something that had never occurred to Dicken.

  “O’ course, we do. Just the type for the artillery, I’d say. Not as big as they like ’em, of course, but wireless operators is different. There’s quick promotion for anybody who can do that. You could become an officer.”

  Thoughts of appearing on the Toshacks’ doorstep in khaki riding breeches and Sam Browne belt ran through Dicken’s head. It was an alluring prospect.

  “An officer?”

  “If you’re prepared to wait,” the sergeant said. “A hell of a long time,” he added under his breath. He looked Dicken up and down and smiled. It looked like the smile of a man-eating tiger.

  “I reckon,” he said, “that you’re just the man they’re looking for.”

  Four

  Dicken’s first nights as a soldier were spent under canvas, fidgeting in frozen fitful dozes until the trembling call of Reveille proclaimed the beginning of a new day.

  His service with the Royal Garrison Artillery, which was what he discovered he had joined, started with three weeks pounding the square at Aldershot, boring hours peeling potatoes on cookhouse fatigues, and trying to ignore the agony of feet blistered by new ammunition boots. There was no mention of commissions.

  “Part of the horrors of war,” he wrote to Zoë. “Like bully beef.”

  Things improved when he was sent on a wireless course. Compared with what he’d trained on, the army wireless set was crude. It consisted chiefly of a crystal, a cat’s whisker and a simple inductance coil, all enclosed in a wooden box. The aerial was a sixty-foot length of wire slung between two masts and the whole apparatus was intended for use with an artillery spotting plane of the Royal Flying Corps.

  Eventually he found himself part of a newly-formed Kitchener Army battery, mostly composed of Londoners. There was little glamour attached to the big guns, however. Unlike those of the field artillery, they were not moved to dangerous points in the fighting by horses at the gallop, but were laboriously towed into position well behind the line by lorries or caterpillar tractors, while wireless reports were mere informal messages with little form or pattern.

  When the battery was sent to France, Dicken was with the advance party. The officer went ahead with the sergeant searching for billets and left the rest of them to find their own way forward. At midday they stopped at a village called Ruy which had never had British soldiers through it before and the Maire and his officials turned out wearing tricolour sashes, while the villagers greeted them with the “Marseillaise”, to which they replied with a song of their own.

  “I don’t want to be a soldier

  I don’t want to go to war

  I’d rather hang around

  Piccadilly Underground

  Living on the earnings of a high-born lady.”

  “Are we down-hearted?” somebody at the back yelled.

  “No-o-o!”

  The French seemed to think it was part of the National Anthem and stood in silence with their heads uncovered.

  It took them three days to reach their base near Armentières. As they rumbled in lorries along the interminably straight French roads through lines of poplars in full leaf, the officer turned up again to lead them to a farm where one of the Cockney gunners promptly helped himself to a chicken.

  “It’s not looting,” Dicken grinned. “It attacked us and we had to kill it in self-defence.”

  They cooked it after dark on a fire built with wood from a nearby copse where nightingales were singing – “Them bloody sparrers,” someone said disgustedly – and Dicken was just making himself comfortable in a loft above the cow byre when he heard his name called.

  “Pack your kit,” the sergeant told him.

  “We’ve only just arrived, Sarge!”

  “Well, now you’re on your way again. You’re going to work with the Flying Corps.”

  Dicken’s heart leaped. It had never been with the great guns. “To fly?” he asked.

  The sergeant gave him a cold look. “Who the hell do you think you are?” he said. “You’re going for a course in battery and aircraft communication. They’re developing a new system.”

  He arrived at the squadron at around midnight and was given a space in a tent. The following morning he was wakened by the dull rumble of an idling engine and, to his astonishment found the wingtip of an airplane trembling within three feet of the tent flap. It seemed enormous, powerful and tremendously strong and he decided he had never seen such a frightening contrivance in his life. He c
ouldn’t imagine for a minute that it was tuned with a tuning fork or could be overbalanced by any sudden movement of its crew.

  It didn’t take him long to discover how different the RFC was from the rest of the army. The artillery men had been chosen for their ability to lift huge shells and haul guns around, and, despite the fact that the battery was composed almost entirely of Hostilities Only men like Dicken, its officers, mostly ex-Regulars dragged out of retirement, tried hard to fit it into the regulations of the old army. It appeared to be impossible to be efficient without being polished to within an inch of your life, and it was important to stand like a ramrod to salute, to ask permission to speak, even, it seemed to Dicken, to breathe.

  The RFC had no traditions at all. Its men were all craftsmen – riggers, fitters, mechanics, wireless operators, even foundrymen, blacksmiths, carpenters and tailors – and were recruited for no other reason than to repair damaged aircraft. They were streets ahead of the rest of the army for intelligence, and spit and polish were considered the least important of their duties. They were there to keep the airplanes flying and nothing else, and seemed totally unconcerned that the commandeered vans that had carried their equipment to France still bore on their sides the advertisements of their former owners – Lazenby’s Sauce, Peek Frean’s Biscuits, Stephens’ Ink. It was as if they were openly showing their indifference to the rest of the uniformed world.

  The airplanes operated from a field full of cows which had to be driven to one side when they wanted to take off, and they were already a vast improvement on the fragile contraptions which had landed in France the previous year, many of them put together from parts of differing machines and with top speeds that varied from stalling by no more than a few miles an hour.

  One flight consisted of Morane two-seaters, waspish-looking machines, short-tempered and dangerous, with a speed that made them invulnerable to enemy attack. A second flight had Parasols, treacherous, unstable, high-winged monoplanes of bad design, whose diminutive tails made their natural position in the air a vertical nose-dive.

  The third flight was equipped with BE2cs, narrow-bodied aircraft whose fuselages were so slender the tails seemed to be detached and following on behind. They were tall and wide-winged, their motors mounted outside, and were not very popular because, with the propeller, the tanks and the motor all in the way, it was impossible to see where you were going. Their maximum altitude was no more than 6000 feet and the only offensive weapons they carried were the revolvers worn by pilots and observers. To Dicken they seemed modern enough to be straight out of Jules Verne or H G Wells.

  As far as wireless was concerned, the RFC was streets ahead of the army both in equipment and the way they used it. The artillery’s happy-go-lucky manner of sending and receiving had been whittled down to the effective clock code, a system that was graphic and flexible and depended on unvarying values that were impossible to misinterpret. The target was considered to be the centre of a clock on which true north was twelve o’ clock, and imaginary circles drawn around the target represented different ranges and were identified by code letters so that it was possible to state where a shot had landed in a few Morse letters and numbers.

  It involved Dicken in short flights to see what battery firing looked like. The calibrated maps were explained to him and, clad in overcoat and borrowed crash helmet, he even sent messages from the air, using a battery-powered transmitter in the observer’s cockpit.

  As he worked, he began to wonder why he hadn’t joined the RFC and all his ideas of going to sea sank without trace with his ambition of a commission in the artillery. All he could think of now was soaring over the enemy trenches amid a storm of anti-aircraft fire to send back the all-important message which would result in winning the war.

  For the first time since he had put on khaki he found himself enjoying himself. The RFC men were proud of their skill, and the officers seemed human, happily discussing rigging and engines with their men on easy terms. Even Morton, the captain in command, was not above getting into a discussion on the merits of an airplane, and in his pigheaded tenacity, Dicken started daydreaming of becoming an observer.

  The corporal in charge of the wireless section was a genial Regular called Handiside who had arrived in the Flying Corps from the Engineers, and his attitude was benevolent.

  “How about wangling me a flight, Corp?” Dicken said.

  “You’ve had a flight.”

  “I mean a real flight. I once flew forty miles from Southampton to Shoreham.”

  Handiside frowned. “What the hell are you doing in the artillery then?” He studied Dicken for a moment or two, his eyes almost fatherly. “I must say you know more about wireless than a lot of the observers. They’re mostly just ex-cavalry blokes who’ve had a quick course in Morse. Hang around tomorrow morning and I’ll see what I can do.”

  Sleep, breakfast and early morning parade were hard to endure and Dicken was at the hangar the following morning, pretending to adjust wireless sets but all the time watching Handiside’s movements. When the pilots began to arrive, he saw him speak to one of them and his heart began to thump. The officer turned and studied him.

  He was a tall, lean young second-lieutenant called Hatto, not much older than Dicken. He wore a monocle, dashing leather patches on his sleeves and, as an ex-cavalry man, wore a stock and canvas leggings and carried a riding whip. “Tell me you fancy a flight?” he said. “Hear you’ve been up with Arnold Vickery. I’ve heard of him.” His face broke into a smile that seemed to light up the hangar with its charm. “Couldn’t turn corners, I heard.”

  “That’s right, sir. I helped fish him out of the Adur when he crashed. He’d had too much champagne, I think.”

  Hatto laughed. “And why you? Why did he pick you for a passenger?”

  “I was the lightest person he could think of. Besides–” Dicken hesitated “–I got to know him through a girl he knew.”

  “Cherchez la femme, eh? Right, I’m about to do a test flight, so report to stores and draw an observer’s kit and nip into that machine over there.”

  Racing to the stores, Dicken drew a leather coat, helmet and long flying boots and waddled out to the machine. As he climbed into the cockpit among the fumes of petrol and hot oil, a sergeant appeared alongside.

  “CO’s compliments, sir,” he yelled to Hatto above the throbbing engine. “If she’s all right, you’re to do an artillery observation. Number 213 Battery. Same as yesterday.”

  Hatto looked at Dicken. “That’s sunk us,” he observed.

  “No, sir.” Dicken was in a panic he’d be left behind. “I know what to do. I’ve done it more than once.”

  Hatto studied him for a moment, then he made up his mind. “Right,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  Sitting under the quivering wings with the tall stacks of the exhausts in front of him, Dicken held his breath as the aircraft rolled across the grass and lifted into the air. His coat was too big and in his haste he had buttoned it wrongly; his scarf was too tight; and his helmet, caught by the blast from the propeller, showed a distressing tendency to take off on its own. But he was breathless with excitement as they circled the airdrome and, leaning over the side, watched fascinated as the patchwork of fields unrolled beneath. He had never been so high before. On his earlier flights he had not been above a hundred or so feet; now he could see men looking like ants and all around him only the limitless blue space of the sky.

  Hatto lifted his goggles. “All right?” he mouthed.

  Dicken stuck up his thumb in the way he’d seen other observers signal their readiness and began to tap out a message to the ground station. “Are you receiving me?”

  Watching with his heart in his mouth, he could see no sign of acknowledgement below and he stared panic-stricken at his equipment, wondering what he’d done wrong. Then, far below, a tiny figure ran out of the wireless hut and laid strips of white
on the grass in the form of an L to indicate the message had arrived. Flushed with success, he signalled to Hatto and the machine turned eastward, the wide wings catching the watery sun.

  At 3000 feet Hatto swung on to course for the target, an intersection of trenches near a German fortification known as the Hohenzollern Redoubt. Just to the north Dicken could see a canal running south-east then curving around to head south-west in a dead straight line, overgrown and out of use for a lot of its length, its broken banks marked with shell craters and littered with debris. Then he saw a snake of brown, turned earth running alongside it that he guessed was a trench and realised they had reached the front line. Ahead of them was German territory and everybody below him now was watching him and wondering how to kill him.

  It gave him a tremendous feeling of involvement. The land beneath, already battered and soured by the war, looked ancient, every building smashed, every wall that ran north and south broken by shelling. There wasn’t a fence for miles and it dawned on him they had all been removed by the chilled troops for fires. Even the trees had been blasted to stark stumps. The land had been scoured clean, its occupants hiding like moles beneath its surface, and it dawned on him that he was one of the reasons why; with aircraft crews able to see beyond the front line, it had suddenly become important to show no sign of what was going on.

  Hatto was pointing to the watery sun. “Keep a look-out up there,” he shouted above the roar of the engine. “That’s where they come from. It’s a new dodge they’ve thought up.”

  As Dicken turned his eyes upward, there was a violent crack nearby and the machine lurched sickeningly.

  “Archie,” Hatto shouted cheerfully. “Anti-aircraft fire.”

  The aircraft rocked as a puff of black smoke the size of a haystack drifted past beyond the end of the wing. A hole appeared in the fabric but Hatto seemed quite unperturbed. Alarmed, Dicken watched the battery’s shells land and signalled back. After ten rounds, Hatto swung the airplane toward home.