The Bright Blue Sky

by Max Hennessy

  No longer in danger and with time to look around, Dicken became aware of the immensity of the sky. It was clean and clear and fresh and, swept clean by the breeze every day, was devoid of the detritus of war that covered the earth. And he was part of it, a supreme being untouched by dirt, feeling the sun before it reached anyone else.

  Descending in a long glide over the trenches, they were fired on, entirely without success, by everyone in sight, and a few minutes later bumped gently across the turf, everything rattling and creaking as they came to a halt in front of the hangar. Still faraway-eyed, Dicken climbed to the ground, his ears full of the creak and tick of the cooling engine, and that night, wrapped in his blankets, he began to daydream again. Unfortunately, his dreams were cut short the following morning when he was told to report back to the battery with his course finished.

  “I suppose I couldn’t stay with the RFC, could I, Corp?” he asked Handiside.

  “’T’ ain’t anything to do with me,” Handiside said. “You’d have to put in an application for a transfer.”

  Half-hoping he’d be sent to another squadron, Dicken returned to the battery to find his job had been changed. Artillery spotting was now being done at ground level from as far out in No Man’s Land as they could get.

  “What about the aircraft?” he asked.

  “Trying to do without them,” he was told. “We haven’t been having much success with wireless.”

  “That,” Dicken said coldly, “is because nobody in the artillery knows anything about it.”

  The forward observation officer’s job was to sit in a shell hole ahead of the front line, connected by field telephone to the trench where a runner was waiting to carry messages to Dicken who crouched in a dug-out just to the rear with his aerial strung between the remains of two trees. The weather was wet and cheerless and the morning hate the Germans sent over sounded particularly spiteful. Almost at once messages began to come through asking for counter battery fire.

  The forward observation officer had never heard of the clock code and his instructions were vague and uncertain. Though the boom of the guns swelled to a jerky roar that was flung from horizon to horizon, to the disgusted Dicken it seemed to have no direction whatsoever and was merely the efforts of a totally ignorant and unco-ordinated organisation. From time to time, also, the set gave trouble as the aerial was loosened by the blast of exploding shells so that he had to slip out of the safety of the dugout and, with the aid of the two gunners who were with him, re-erect it under a whirring shower of red-hot steel splinters.

  It was noisy, smelly and squalid in the extreme, and not at all what he had expected of the war. He’d looked forward to heroism, flags, colour and not too much danger, and he found instead that he lived in constant expectation of the roof of the dugout, which trickled sand down his collar every time a shell burst, collapsing on top of him. Going outside to re-erect the aerial left his mouth dry and his body moist; and, despite his contempt for the artillery, he was certain the German Kaiser knew exactly where he was and was personally trying to hit him.

  After four hours’ transmitting, he noticed that the messages had stopped coming back, and he sent one of the gunners forward to find out why. He came back, flinching at the crashes and the shower of stones, to say that the infantry-men in the front line thought something had happened to the observation officer.

  Shutting down the set, Dicken headed along the communicating trench. Shells were dropping near the forward positions, showering the cringing occupants with dirt. A sergeant indicated the shellhole where the forward observation officer had been crouching and shook his head. Pulling his cap down, Dicken squirmed over the parapet and began to crawl forward, feeling as big as a house and terrified some German sniper opposite would spot him. But the Germans were also being forced by the shelling to keep their heads down and he wriggled safely toward the shellhole where the forward observation officer was supposed to be until, just as he reached it, a heavy shell landed close by with an iron clang and flung him over the lip to land on his head in a puddle of muddy water in the bottom.

  Sitting up, he dragged his cap from his eyes, to see the officer lying with his back against the sloping side of the shell- hole, his arms flung out, a red splodge where his right eye had been. The sergeant was twisted into an impossible position near his feet, his head beneath him and one knee up as though he had been about to start running. It didn’t take long to realise they were both dead.

  Just in front of the shellhole were abandoned packs, rifles and shovels, and unspeakable bodies from the previous winter, black, damp and decomposing, together with a dead mule, disembowelled by a shell, a man sitting with his back to it, bolt upright but headless.

  Nauseated, he turned away to find himself staring into the single dead eye of the forward observation officer, and at that moment he decided he didn’t like trench warfare.

  It seemed to be important to return and report the officer’s death but, as he clawed at the charred earth of the side of the shellhole, a new batch of shells came down and he had to cower against the pulverised soil as the shards of steel flew overhead. The shelling seemed to go on for ever and he couldn’t take his eyes off the two dead men. Then the barrage seemed to drop a little and he was just preparing to make a dash for it again when the stuttering sound of a motor came to his ears. Swinging around, reminded at once of the sound of Arnold Vickery’s airplane just before it had cut and plunged him into the Adur, he saw a BE coming toward him, lurching in the sky and obviously in difficulties. Strips of fabric fluttered at the wingtips and grey puffs were coming from the exhaust like the smoke from an overworked cigar.

  Fascinated, he watched it drop lower and lower. Just before it reached the shellhole where he sheltered, the undercarriage touched, the nose dug in and it turned over, whacking down on its back with a crunch that shattered the rudder and crumpled the wings.

  The pilot was hanging head-down from his straps and before he knew what he was doing, thinking only of the danger of fire, Dicken was out of the shellhole and running toward him. Aware of the whack-whack of bullets close by, he lowered the pilot to the ground. The observer was sprawled beneath the machine, covered with blood and, since he seemed to be the worse of the two, using the training he’d received in the Boy Scouts, Dicken took hold of him in a fireman’s lift and hefted him on to his shoulders.

  The smell of petrol was stronger as he went back for the pilot and there was a faint hissing sound coming from somewhere in the wreckage with a thin spiral of blue smoke. Heaving the pilot across his back, Dicken stumbled over the uneven ground until a tremendous “whoomph” behind him hit him in the back like the punch of a huge soft fist and threw him into the shellhole.

  As he sat up, he saw that the airplane had finally caught fire and was blazing furiously, sending a long spiral of thick black smoke coiling into the sky. Depressed, he watched it for a while then turned his attention to the two men he’d brought in. The observer was silent and still, his face grey, but the pilot had opened his eyes. For a second he stared at Dicken then reached up, took off his helmet and goggles, fished inside his leather coat and pulled out a monocle. Sticking it in his eye, he studied Dicken carefully.

  “Fancy meeting you,” he said.

  The observer was in a bad way. Dicken opened his coat and, his hands red and gory, struggled with his field dressing to stop the blood that was saturating his uniform. Hatto watched him unhappily, trying to help with an injured shoulder and ankle. The observer died within a quarter of an hour and Dicken lifted his scarf to cover his dead face.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “Anti-aircraft fire.” Hatto winced with pain. “Poor old George never saw what hit him.”

  Using Hatto’s scarf, Dicken made a sling and fastened his arm to his chest. By the time he’d finished, Hatto was almost fainting.

  “Great Ned,” he said as he flopped b
ack against the side of the crater. “I didn’t enjoy that one bit.”

  As they cowered and flinched from the bursting shells, they got to know a remarkable amount about each other.

  “William Wymarck Wombwell Hatto,” Hatto introduced himself. “Family calls me Willie. Youngest son of Lord Hooe. Irish title. Don’t mean much. Eton and Oxford. All the right things. Got a brother in the Navy, another in the Foreign Office and another in the Church. I was the stupidest so they put me in the army. Cavalry, of course. Unfortunately, you can’t argue with a machine gun with a horse and it’s difficult to crouch behind a wall. Then I remembered I could fly. I learned before the war because it was the only sport you could enjoy sitting down. So I transferred.”

  As he polished his eyeglass one-handed on his scarf and tucked it into his eye, Dicken watched, fascinated.

  “Do you wear it all the time?” he asked.

  “Helps to hold my eye in.” Hatto managed a smile. “Without it, it keeps dropping out and rolling on the floor.”

  They sat through the rest of the afternoon, listening to the Germans in the trench opposite shouting threats, Hatto by this time with his boot off because his foot was swollen like a balloon. As dusk began to fall, Dicken suggested they should try to make their way back to the British line. There was a little shouting back and forth until they established that nobody would shoot them for a German raiding party then they began to head for the British wire. Half-carrying, half-dragging his companion, Dicken was unhappily aware of the tap-tap of machine guns and several times, their hearts pounding, they had to lie flat as the bullets passed over them. They covered the last fifty yards with Dicken on his hands and knees and Hatto sprawled across his back.

  “Just the ticket,” Hatto whispered. “Perfect target. One up the backside and you get a china vase.”

  As they reached the wire, figures appeared in front of them in the dark, grabbed them and rushed them to the trench. As they fell inside it, a burly sergeant dragged Dicken to his feet.

  “You fuckin’ flyers,” he said. “You’re always ’avin’ to be fuckin’ rescued.”

  “How good it is,” Hatto murmured, “to hear some nice foul English language.”

  Dicken offered to wireless for a tender, but when they reached the dugout, they found the set, the aerial, the masts, and the two gunners had all disappeared.

  “They packed up and cleared off,” an infantryman offered. “They said you’d been killed.”

  Eventually the commanding officer arranged by field telephone for a tender to pick Hatto up and they stumbled rearwards in the dark. As they pushed him into the back of the Crossley, he turned to Dicken.

  “No end obliged, old fruit,” he said. “It might have been awkward for me if you hadn’t come along. If there’s anything I can do in return, just ask.”

  “Well, there is something,” Dicken blurted out.

  “Name it. My land? My fortune? The hand of my sister in marriage?”

  Awed by his own cheek, Dicken drew a deep breath. “You could wangle me a transfer to the RFC,” he said.

  Five

  With the death of his forward observation officer, the battery commander seemed to have given up his idea of ground spotting for a while and the following week, the sergeant appeared outside Dicken’s billet once more. “You’re for the RFC again,” he said. “Same squadron as last time. Take your kit with you. It’s a long stay.”

  His arm still strapped to his chest, Hatto greeted Dicken like an old friend. The work was the same as before but it no longer seemed to have much to do with the artillery and Dicken didn’t ask questions. After a week or two, Corporal Handiside appeared.

  “Get those artillery brasses off your shoulder,” he said. “And sew these Flying Corps tabs on. You’ve been transferred.”

  The weather was bitterly cold and wet so that the machines were only vague shapes in the misty greyness. The paths about the airdrome became puddled with water and the billets were damp and chilly.

  Despite the weather, however, flying continued, airplanes taking off in the intervals whenever possible. Hatto was still around but Dicken rarely met him and it was Handiside who answered all his demands to be made an observer.

  “It doesn’t come like that,” he said, snapping his fingers. “These things have to go through the proper channels. Just hold your water, lad. The war ain’t going to end tomorrow.”

  It was enough to set Dicken studying the art of artillery observing at every spare moment. He spent hours trying to identify aircraft and, since betting on their ability to see more planes in the air than the next man was a favourite pastime among the ground crews, he had plenty of opportunity. He had excellent eyesight and hoped it would stand him in good stead, because there were rumours around that the war in the air was about to be stepped up. The Germans, it seemed, had a new aircraft with an eighty-horsepower engine and a gun that, unbelievably, fired through the propeller.

  Just how this miracle had been achieved no one knew. A Frenchman called Garros had tried it with wedges attached to the propeller blades so that, when the gun fired, the wedges deflected any bullet that was likely to hit them, but unfortunately, it hadn’t worked very satisfactorily and, after his first successes, he was said to have shot himself down. The Germans had captured his machine and turned his idea over to a Dutchman called Fokker who was building airplanes for them and he’d come up with a much better idea which stopped the gun when the propeller blade was in front of it and fired it when it wasn’t. It was worrying the Flying Corps a great deal more than the casual indifference of its pilots suggested.

  Suddenly things had changed. For months they’d been flopping about the sky in an assortment of appallingly inflammable airplanes which had never been designed for fighting and, in their early twenties or even in their teens – the machines they flew even younger in years – very few of the flying crews understood how their imperfect but obviously potentially lethal weapons should be used. They were as wide-winged as dragonflies and not much more enduring and the thought of fighting in them seemed impossible, because even meeting another airplane in the wide expanse of the sky was an event.

  Because of this, no rules had ever been evolved, only what they’d discovered as they went along, and most people regarded the job with a mixture of high spirits, mock resignation, a curious belief in the superiority of the RFC and the air of cynical disillusionment and mocking self-deprecation that was the stock-in-trade of all British servicemen. Now, however, it seemed they were going to have to think about it more seriously because the rifles and revolvers which had taken the place of the bricks they’d originally carried to throw at the German machines weren’t enough and the BE2c was studied with rather more interest than usual. With the only gun tucked almost underneath the wing, it was unable to fire properly in any direction except backward, which made things very difficult because you could hardly be hostile while you were flying away from your enemy.

  They all knew how the game was played, of course. An airplane fixed the artillery on to its target, but as soon as the battery started firing an enemy airplane inevitably came across to locate it by its gun-flashes. When that happened, you sent your own airplane up to destroy it or drive it away, and so it went on, with the job of actually fighting the Germans given not to men with faster machines, because there weren’t any, but to those who were the least skilful at taking photographs or using the wireless.

  Now, however, since the Germans were reported to be issuing the new Fokkers to their squadrons in pairs, it was obvious there were going to be more casualties among the observation machines, and they were all getting a little worked up about it because the Fokker was said to be a fast, strongly-structured, highly manoeuvrable airplane, which the stately BE2c was not. For the first time Dicken realised there were snags to being in the Flying Corps. You could actually get killed – and not just by anti-aircraft gu
ns either. If Garros could shoot down a German machine in flames with his botched-up device, it seemed more than possible that the new Fokkers could do it even better.

  He was a little preoccupied when Handiside appeared and told him he was wanted in the CO’s office. His mind full of possibilities, Dicken hurried to the back kitchen of the farm where Morton worked. Hatto was there, his arm still strapped up, and as Dicken entered, Morton pushed back his chair, came around his desk and shook hands.

  “Congratulations, Quinney,” he said. “You’re the first non-flyer on the squadron to be awarded a decoration.”

  Dicken’s jaw dropped. “What for, sir?”

  “Me,” Hatto said. “And poor old George. You went out twice under fire to bring us in.”

  The news staggered Dicken. He’d thought only brave men won medals.

  “There’s another, too,” Morton said. “You’ve been given the Medal of St George by the Tsar of Russia.”

  “I beg your pardon, sir.”

  Morton laughed and gestured at Hatto. “Better explain, Willie,” he said.

  Hatto grinned. “One of the Tsar’s emissaries is touring France inspecting units,” he said. “Brothers-in-arms and all that. Had a bag full of medals to hand out. Asked if he could give one to the gallant ground staff. Decided it would have to be to you because you’re the only one who’s actually met the enemy face to face so to speak.”

  Dicken looked down at his chest, trying to imagine what it would be like to have two medal ribbons burning a hole there. He had a feeling that the Russian decoration was regarded as a bit of a lark, but it would look good, even so, if he ever went on leave. If nothing else, it ought to impress Annys Toshack. It might even detach her from Arthur Diplock.

  He was still in a daze when Morton spoke again. “Better go and organise a few of your friends,” he advised. “I suspect there’ll be a party in the village bistro tonight. I’ve posted you from the Wireless Section to C Flight for training as an observer.”