The Bright Blue Sky

by Max Hennessy

  The first few days on C Flight were spent on the machine gun range. Dicken was already well above an average shot with a rifle and he proved so skilful with a Lewis gun, Handiside began to call him Dead Shot Dicken.

  Like himself, many of the other observers were men transferred from the infantry or the artillery who were skilled in photography, wireless and artillery observation, and it was only as he talked to them that he realised just how much he’d put his life in jeopardy by joining their ranks. Since airplanes didn’t have dual control, if the pilot were killed there was nothing they could do except sit and calculate how far they had to fall, and nobody took so much notice when a new pilot joined the squadron as the observer who would have to fly with him.

  The weather became very stormy and, with the rain pouring in torrents, the wind howling like a demon and all the hangars level with the ground, nobody was very cheerful. To catch the water, deep ditches were dug around the hangars and there were regular splashes and loud curses as someone fell in. With insufficient cover, machines that stood out all night became sodden with rain and, carrying a passenger and a full war load, took some getting off the ground. To combat the sticky conditions, twelve tons of cinders arrived every day to give the take-off area some solidity.

  Toward the end of the year they were co-operating with batteries to the north and south of the La Bassée Canal and every morning in favourable weather a tender loaded with petrol, tool boxes, Very lights, a day’s rations and white strips to make a landing T went off to an advanced field near the Béthune road.

  “Your turn,” Handiside told Dicken as November changed to December. “There’s a machine landing there about mid-day.”

  “I’m supposed to be flying, Corp,” Dicken pointed out. “In the Morane.”

  “Well, now you’re not. The CO wants one of the new boys to do the job for a bit of experience.”

  The Morane was being loaded with melinite bombs outside C Flight hangar, the new observer and one of his friends having the workings explained to them. Dropping bombs from airplanes was still virtually a new sport. Few machines were powerful enough to get off the ground with the extra weight of bombs on top of that of the crew and their machine gun, but a few bolder spirits had tried, one of them Hatto, who had found spotting and aerial photography far too unaggressive and, with Handiside’s co-operation, had devised a contraption which, screwed to the side of his machine, would hold half a dozen bombs made from stick grenades of the sort you fused by pulling a tape before hurling them at the enemy.

  “All you have to do,” Handiside had said, “is pull this wire here to fuse them, then pull that wire there to drop them.”

  Their enthusiasm had been greater than their expertise and Hatto had barely crossed the boundary of the field when there was a tremendous flash beneath the machine which promptly went into a dive and landed three fields away in a cloud of steam and flung debris. The rest of the squadron had arrived panting to find Hatto and his observer staggering about unharmed except for scorched and tattered flying clothes.

  “I caught the bloody wire with the button of my coat,” the observer said. “We’ll have to do a sight better than that.”

  Since then the bombs and the methods of dropping them had improved; but they were still tricky things to handle and nobody liked them very much, and the tender had just passed when there was a quick double explosion that seemed to strip the flesh from Dicken’s bones. As the tender screeched to a stop, he saw the Morane was on fire from wingtip to wingtip.

  He began to run. There were several men lying around the wreckage, all badly injured and, with the Morane blazing and still more bombs waiting to explode, they were dragged clear without ceremony. They had just got the last man to a safe distance when the remaining bombs went up, and they were showered with wooden fragments, pieces of metal, bent wheels, scraps of wire and glittering pieces of burning fabric that eddied about in the air like fiery bats.

  It seemed that, as in Hatto’s case, a safety wire had been pulled accidentally during the loading of the bombs, and as Dicken sat in his tent that evening trying to set his feelings down on paper for the benefit of Zoë Toshack, Corporal Handiside appeared.

  “You can shove up your observer’s wing,” he said. “CO’s orders. We lost two today so you’ve been pushed ahead. You fly with Mr Hudnutt.”

  Trips to the line began to come regularly. Hudnutt was a sound pilot who made good landings, didn’t take foolish risks, and believed in growing old.

  This last seemed a very good idea to Dicken, because the BE was far from being a wonder-airplane. It was steady, reliable, and easy to handle, but while the dihedral on the main planes made it so stable it was perfect for photography, it was also hard to dodge if you were shot at, while most of the time the observer had to kneel on his seat to keep a sharp look-out over the quivering tail, with little else to do but freeze in the blast from the propeller and contemplate the emptiness beneath him.

  Despite the fact that both sides had dozens of machines over the lines, it was some time before Dicken saw his first German airplane in the air. It was a day of cream and gold and blue with large masses of cumulus catching the sun, and he caught sight of the German as a mere speck in the sky at the same height, moving backward and forward in an easterly and westerly direction, spotting for artillery.

  Hudnutt immediately turned toward it but when they were within half a mile of it, the German airplane swung away east so they turned back toward their own target area. Identifiable by the shape of its old fortifications, Lille passed under the wing, apparently empty of life, but a shellburst among the ruined houses and a puff of red-brown dust and smoke drifting eastward made Dicken realise there were troops there.

  He was still watching the ground when he noticed Hudnutt shouting at him over the sound of the engine. He had been trying for some time to attract his attention and was beating on the fuselage between the two cockpits with the flat of his hand. As Dicken lifted his head, he jerked a thumb and, looking upward, over the top wing Dicken saw another minute speck in the sky, glittering in the rays of the sun. It looked like a thin line with a dot in the centre and it dawned on him that it was an airplane and that he’d been studying pictures of it for some time.

  “Fokker!” he yelled in a panic.

  Despite what the newspapers and the staff said, it wasn’t bravery and determination that brought success in the air but the simple fact of aircraft performance. The Fokker was good and the BE wasn’t.

  They were in a shallow dive now and as the speed rose the BE began to shake and rattle ominously. Dicken was trying to make up his mind how to get at his enemy. The arrangements for firing a machine gun from a BE were farcical. He had four fixed mountings to work from, one behind him to protect the rear, one on either side and another in front, with a wire stretched between the centre section struts so that he couldn’t shoot away the propeller blades. During a skirmish with the enemy, the weapon had to be changed from one mounting to another and it had been discovered many times that it took so long and aircraft moved so quickly the new one was always the wrong one.

  Still trying to make up his mind, he was watching the approaching Fokker when Hudnutt wrenched the BE round so violently, he had to make a convulsive clutch at the side of the cockpit to avoid being thrown over the side. Straightening up, his chest hollow with fear, he set the gun at “safe” and began to manhandle it from the right position to the left. The straight line with its centre dot was still hovering across their route home and he felt his throat constrict. Immelmann, he thought. Or Oswald Boelcke. He’d heard of both German pilots; they had been taking such a toll of slow British reconnaissance airplanes with their new machines, they’d become known in RFC messes as “the Fokker scourge”.

  He had the gun pointing now in the narrow arc between the propeller and the main spar where he could safely fire without removing the wing. The line that was the Fokker
grew thicker and the dot seemed to slide forward along it so that he knew the German pilot had turned aside and was preparing to attack from astern. The BE’s nose was still down, the wires whining in the wind, the whole machine shuddering with its speed, and he watched dry-mouthed as the German pilot drew closer.

  Giving him a couple of bursts to frighten him away, as Hudnutt swung the BE to give the German a difficult deflection shot he got in a further burst as the Fokker flashed beneath. It swung upward into the first part of a loop, then fell off sideways and came back to take a quick shot at the unprotected belly of the BE.

  It was so close, it seemed to Dicken it was impossible for him to miss, but the BE’s wing got in the way at the last moment and, in a fury at being unable to fire, he yanked the gun from the rear socket, and, without thinking, rested it on the side of the cockpit and let go with a burst.

  He had reckoned without the recoil and the gun jerked out of his grasp at once. Hudnutt’s face wore a look of horror that matched the one on Dicken’s face as it clattered against the fuselage and went end-over-end to sail downward in the direction of the Fokker. The German pilot saw it coming and wrenched his machine away as if he thought the gun was going to hit him, standing it on one wingtip, a small neat airplane with a cowling that looked like the hand-hammered pewter teapot Dicken’s mother used. It was close enough to see that the pilot wasn’t wearing a flying coat, helmet or goggles, only a grey tunic with a yellow collar, and that his head was lifted to the BE with an expression on his face of startled amazement. Then his head turned as he watched the Lewis dropping away below them both and, swinging around in a tight turn, he stared again at the BE as if he expected something else even bigger and more dangerous to come sailing in his direction, before abruptly putting the Fokker’s nose down and disappearing below them. Dicken watched helplessly, wondering what he could do without a gun to fire, but the German machine kept on going down until it became a mere dot and eventually disappeared against the patchwork greens and browns of the ground. Turning to eye Hudnutt, wondering what was going to happen to him, Dicken could see the observer’s wing he had sewn so proudly on his tunic disappearing even before the stitches had grown cold.

  Hudnutt’s expression was hidden by his goggles and the scarf around his mouth. On the way home, he slipped the machine from side to side in case of another attack and Dicken watched the sky anxiously. The lines passed beneath them and the field came up under the nose. Drifting in to land, the machine rumbled to a stop near the hangars and, red-faced with shame and wondering what sort of ticking off he was about to receive, Dicken waited until Hudnutt had climbed out. As the officer turned by the wingtip, he gestured.

  “See me in the office,” he said.

  There was no escaping the consequences. Dicken had not only left his machine defenceless in the air but, through his clumsiness, had also lost a perfectly good Lewis gun, and the army’s method with lost articles was to charge you the value of what you’d lost and the value of the article that had to replace it. He could see himself not only being court-martialled but in debt for the rest of his life.

  Hudnutt was sitting in the office, his leather coat and helmet still on, just finishing his report. He looked up as Dicken entered and held out the sheet. “You’d better read it, too,” he said.

  Dicken read the report carefully, hardly able to concentrate in his nervousness. It was very straightforward.

  “…We were then attacked by an enemy aircraft over Lille, which was identified as one of the new Fokkers. There was a brief skirmish and Air Mechanic Quinney, having used all his available ammunition, frightened the EA away by throwing the gun at it.”

  Dicken looked up, Hudnutt had unwound his scarf and was grinning. Seeing the look on Dicken’s face, he burst out laughing.

  “You can say you’ve invented a new form of battle tactics,” he said.

  “But I didn’t throw the gun, sir, I dropped it.”

  Hudnutt guffawed. “I know that, you ass. Your face was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.” He laughed again. “What a pity you didn’t hit him. We could have put you in for another gong.”

  Six

  It was a long time before Dicken was allowed to forget his “aggressive battle tactics”. Even Morton, the CO, smiled when he saw him and nothing was ever said about the loss of the Lewis gun.

  For a while the Fokkers continued to rampage up and down the front, taking a terrible toll of the old British machines, then abruptly things changed. With the Italians now in the war on the Allied side and expected to start a third front against the Austrians north of Venice, a big battle was building up astride the River Somme in France and they set off south, men, airplanes, lorries and all the assorted dogs which had attached themselves to the squadron, to the new front in Picardy.

  The whole area was alive with men, thousands upon thousands of them, from all corners of the Empire, with thousands of vehicles, thousands of horses, and thousands of guns. The land had not been fought over since 1914 and they were in green, flower-decked fields with thick woods, in direct contrast to the splintered trees and devastated acres of the north.

  The battle was to be fought almost entirely by the new Kitchener battalions which had been raised since the beginning of the war. Handiside didn’t think much of the idea because he didn’t consider the Kitchener men experienced enough, and on July 1st, they learned just how right he was.

  The newspapers that arrived from home told of immense advances and colossal areas of captured ground, but the men in France knew differently, the RFC best of all because they could actually see how far the advance had carried the army forward. It amounted to little more than a few hundred yards in most places – in some none at all – and the lines of ambulances and hospital trains passing the airdrome told of casualties greater than all the earlier battles put together.

  In their own department there was a measure of relief, because 20 Squadron had arrived in their sector with FE2bs, strong machines with the propeller behind the crew in a structure of wooden booms that supported the tail and the gun firing forward with nothing in the way, and the command of the air had slipped from the Germans’ hands just as it had from the British the previous year. Toward the end of the month one of the FEs even got Immelmann, and there were yells of relief because Immelmann had been appearing in quite a few bad dreams, though they were tinged with a certain amount of regret, because Immelmann was a flying man as they were and took the same risks in the same sort of flimsy aircraft, frail and stinking of petrol, that could fall to bits if the slightest thing went wrong.

  Despite the best efforts of the generals who, determined to keep the battle going, constantly came up with new ways of killing men, by the end of the year it had petered out in a sea of mud into nothing more than the normal bad temper and Dicken managed to get home on leave, his first since his arrival in France the previous year. The journey to the coast was bitterly cold and the train slower than a donkey cart. The Channel was at its most intransigent, and he was virtually carried ashore at Folkestone by an enormous Guardsman. As he sank down in a railway carriage, it occurred to him that perhaps it was a good job he hadn’t gone to sea, after all.

  His mother was proud of his medal ribbons and couldn’t do enough for him, but she found it hard to understand that the only thing he wished to do was get out his bicycle and visit Deane.

  “Mother,” he explained. “I’m nineteen now and I’ve begun to notice that girls are different.”

  Zoë greeted him with a yelp of excitement and fingered his ribbons enthusiastically.

  “Not one,” she said. “But two! Annys will be livid. Arthur Diplock’s not got any.”

  For once, Dicken was on Diplock’s side. “They don’t come all that easily,” he said. “He’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  When she asked how he’d won them, he explained cautiously, leaving out the truth about the Russian m
edal and the lost Lewis gun. While they were talking Annys appeared. She seemed to think him mad to go flying.

  “People get killed flying,” she said.

  “People are getting rather summarily done to death in a variety of ways,” he pointed out.

  “Arthur’s been transferred to the Service Corps,” she went on stiffly. “His job’s to see the front line troops are supplied with food and ammunition. It’s because he’s good at languages.”

  She seemed more than normally chilly and it was Zoë who explained. “They’re getting engaged when he gets leave,” she said. “He’s a lieutenant now. He has the advantage over you all along the line, hasn’t he? Daddy has a motor car. You have a bike. He has two pips on his shoulder and these days sits in an office most of the time. You’ve got two stripes and risk your neck. He’s also taller.”

  “And his ears,” Dicken said bitterly, “stick out like a Parasol’s wings. It’s an airplane,” he explained.

  The description seemed to tickle Zoë. “You could always fall in love with me, Dicky boy,” she said. “I’ve always had a soft spot for you. At least you look like a man. Arthur looks like a piece of cold pudding. Besides, I shall be worth something one day. Father says he’ll leave the garage to me because Annys wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole in case she got her hands dirty. I can already strip an engine.”

  “What on earth do you want to do that for?”

  “Very useful accomplishment, as a matter of fact. We lost our only decent mechanic to the army and you’d be surprised what a demand for transport there is. There’s a new army camp just outside the village and the officers are always telephoning for me to take them into Brighton. I carry a heavy wrench for when they get fresh. I sent one home one night with a lump like an egg on his forehead.”