The Bright Blue Sky

by Max Hennessy

  “I took Maud home.”

  “And stayed?” Hatto’s wan expression cheered up. “I ought to have warned you. She’s rather hot stuff.” He looked at Dicken’s alarmed visage. “Is it the first time?”

  “Yes.”

  “No need to blush. Comes to us all in the end. I think we ought to be getting back.”

  They drove slowly to Brooklands, Hatto with his jaw clenched and his eyes narrow as though his head hurt. Diplock met them in the mess.

  “Postings are through,” he said.

  Hatto and Dicken eyed each other, then they made a dash for the notice board. “France,” Hatto said. “Ste Marie-le-Petit.” He slapped Dicken on the shoulder. “What are they flying there?”

  After the names of the squadrons there was a code of symbols with the answers to it below.

  “Says Sopwiths. Must be Camels.”

  “No, they’re not,” Diplock said. “They’re One-and-a-half Strutters. Two-seaters. I’m going there, too.”

  Dicken and Hatto stared at each other.

  “Two-seaters?” Dicken said. “You said we were going on to fighters.”

  Hatto frowned. “Something must have gone wrong. Hang on, I’ll find out what happened.”

  He disappeared into one of the offices where he bribed the clerk with half-a-crown to let him use the telephone. He returned looking shaken.

  “It’s true,” he said. “We were all to have gone to single-seaters, but it seems they’ve been losing two-seater crews so fast in France, they had to change their minds.”

  Two

  The airdrome was close to the cluster of one story houses that formed the village of Ste Marie-le-Petit. There was a church, a mairie, two farms and a public washplace, whose approach was a sea of mud tinted grey with the curdled suds that escaped from a huge stone sink.

  Almost the first person Dicken saw as the tender stopped was Handiside, now a sergeant.

  “Hello,” Dicken said. “I see you’ve got your third.”

  “And I see they’ve made you into a gentleman at last, sir.” They grinned together. “They can give a man a pip any time, sir, but it takes time to become a sergeant.”

  The landing area was a square field surrounded by every imaginable obstacle to getting in safely, though the hedges had been cut away at the ends so that if an airplane overshot it could run through into the next field. Bessoneau hangars ballooned in a strong wind from the east alongside a road to the front, which was being strengthened and widened by a regiment of pioneers who dug and hacked along its length, accompanied by rumbling lorries and puffing steamrollers. The grass was scored by wheels and the marks of tail skids, and outside the hangars a line of graceful machines stood, quivering in the wind. A hammer clanked on metal, drowned occasionally by the hissing crackle of a radial engine being tested at the other side of the end hangar.

  The squadron offices and buildings consisted entirely of Nissen huts, tents and square wooden boxes that looked like chicken houses, and the mess was an ugly shed like a portable stable with a stove that rattled every time the guns near the lines fired. As they took their places for their first meal, Dicken was conscious of the gloomy silence. A firm believer in evading boredom, Hatto made a few attempts at conversation, but they were not sustained by anyone else.

  “Petrifaction’s set in,” he whispered.

  The dish was some sort of stew and he peered at it suspiciously, poking at the lumps of meat with his fork.

  “Wonder if it was dead before it got in,” he murmured. “Or whether the stew killed it.”

  Halfway through the meal, the squadron commander, a major called Rivers, arrived. He wore the DSO and had been badly injured in a crash in 1915. He limped heavily and had a stiff arm, so that Dicken wondered if, when the war was over, there’d be anything left but wreckage – wreckage of buildings, wreckage of machinery, and wreckage of human beings. As he made for the empty chair at the head of the table everybody rose but he waved without a word to them to be seated. The Recording Officer introduced Hatto and Dicken.

  “You one of the Northamptonshire Hattos?” the Major asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Knew your father. Senior to me in the Lancers.”

  That was all. He barely looked at Dicken.

  “Hardly the type to halt moral disintegration after a disaster,” Hatto murmured as they returned to their seats. “As inspiring, in fact, as if he’d said it was a wet day.”

  An observer called Almonde explained. “Doesn’t like sending people up to get killed,” he said. “Especially as he’s been grounded.”

  Diplock had not arrived with them. He had slipped climbing from the Avro on the last day of their stay at the flying school and sprained his ankle, and it meant that Hatto and Dicken moved into a small room in one of the Nissen huts with a man called Walter Calthrop Foote. Over his bed Dicken hung a picture of that Lady Maud he’d taken to bed in London when he’d been too much under the influence of drink to appreciate the fact. It was a studio portrait she’d sent him and she looked serene with a tranquillity he hadn’t noticed when he’d been with her.

  Foote was a tall man with crisp curling blond hair, a transatlantic accent, and a wide friendly smile.

  “You Canadian?” Hatto asked.

  Foote grinned. “Officially. Actually I’m from Boston. I crossed the border, told ’em I was born in Toronto, and I was in before you could say ‘Jack Robinson’.”

  “Why don’t you join your own air force?” Dicken asked. “America’s in the war now.”

  Foote grinned. “Not likely,” he said. “There are guys back home who talk of making the skies of Europe black with American planes. They haven’t got a one yet. For once, we’re years behind Europe.”

  “They’d probably make you a colonel.”

  Foote laughed. “The guys they’re making colonels back home have been sitting behind desks so long the ass of their pants is shiny.”

  It seemed that Foote had a younger brother who also wanted to join the RFC.

  “How many Feete are there in your family?” Hatto asked.

  Foote grinned. “Three kids. I’ve got an older sister, May, who married a newspaper proprietor. We call her Foote Print. Then there’s me and my brother Albert. He’s left-handed and I’m right-handed, so May calls us Right Foote and Left Foote. I think he’s crazy. I’ve told him to stay out of the war where it’s safe but he won’t listen. Rats, I keep telling him there’s already one of the family laying his neck on the line; it doesn’t need two. Strutters are hardly God’s gift to an airman.” He shrugged. “They’re supposed to be fighters and have the same engines as Camels but they’re bigger and carry two men and don’t have the same performance. Be careful of the brakes.”

  “Brakes? They’ve got brakes?”

  Foote smiled again. “To slow you down as you come in to land. There’s a wheel on the left of the cockpit and if you turn it, it lifts a set of surfaces on the lower wing. They’re supposed to make landing safer but actually they cause so much turbulence over the tail it’s safer to forget ’em. So you either approach very slowly, or arrive at normal speed and swish your tail about. But you’ve got to be pretty expert, because the undercarriage’s been specially designed to collapse at the earliest opportunity.”

  “You seem to know all about ’em,” Hatto said. “How long have you been flying ’em?”

  “Just long enough to tell you about ’em. I came out last week.”

  The mess was no more cheerful when the evening meal came around.

  “Is it always like this?” Hatto asked.

  “I guess so,” Foote murmured. “The major fractured his skull badly, and had to be trepanned. Mebbe the pan’s rusty.”

  Dicken was looking about him. “I think they’re all tired,” he said.

  “Mebbe
they are,” Foote agreed. “Tired of each other. Tired of the war. Tired of flying Strutters.”

  After the meal the mess settled into the same gloom as before, but eventually Foote produced a gramophone, new, up-to-date and with all the latest gadgets. It was his own and he guarded it jealously. He had a whole pile of records which included all the sickly-sweet nostalgic songs they played over and over again to remind them of home and, though they were a little scratched through being around too long, at least they drowned the silence.

  There was also an impromptu band consisting of three men who could play a fiddle, a trombone and a piano, and they actually managed to lift the mood a little with “Chu Chin Chow” and “Maid of the Mountains” and a few of the dolefully humorous songs like “The Dying Airman’s Lament” and “The Ballad of R Suppards”.

  Finally Hatto found his way to the piano and got everybody yelling “If You Were the Only Girl in the World”, “They Wouldn’t Believe Me” and songs from the London shows.

  “Well brought up,” he explained. “Paint, play an instrument, and ride a horse.”

  Toward the end of the evening, Dicken was informed by a pale-faced captain called Dunne that he was in A Flight and was taken out to the hangar where the mechanics were still working on the machines by the light of hurricane lamps. His experience as an observer made Dunne wary of him. He didn’t have to be shown the ropes, had learned a few of the tricks of the trade, and couldn’t be fobbed off with untruths.

  “Better get some practice,” Dunne advised. “Strutters need careful handling. They’re out of date and underpowered and we haven’t a chance against the new German fighters.”

  During the next few days, in a sky busy with airplanes, Dicken went up several times to familiarise himself with the area. When he was turned loose on his own, the observers came out to watch, but his landings didn’t seem to impress them very much, especially when he broke a few wires and bent an axle. Told to land more slowly, he floated over the squadron office and a Strutter parked in front and was just congratulating himself that he’d done it right for a change when he was called to the CO’s office.

  “I don’t mind you risking your own machine,” he was told sharply. “But it’s too much when you’re likely to damage not only other machines but my office as well.”

  The squadron didn’t seem a particularly resilient one. Under the regulations which prohibited squadron com-manders flying over the line, Rivers, who was a reserved type at best, was thoroughly unhappy, and his unhappiness found its way down through the other ranks.

  Handiside added to the gloom. “They’ve got a new fighter over there,” he pointed out, cocking a thumb toward the east. “Albatros.”

  “That’s not new,” Dicken said.

  “This one is. It’s an improved version with V-struts. If you see one, watch out for yourself. We’ve been having a lot of casualties.”

  The first of these occurred a week after Dicken arrived. The 110-horsepower Clerget engines in the 1-Strutters could produce a top speed of no more than 95 miles an hour and at 10,000 feet no more than 80 miles an hour. In addition, they’d been heavily overworked and were in the habit of developing minor troubles during flight, which left the crews without the comforting thought that they could rely on them in an emergency. Valve springs, valve rockers and ignition wires broke regularly; oil pumps were often defective and there had even been a rash of blown cylinders. When a man called Hanover failed with his observer to return after a patrol, with Hatto as his companion, Hatto let it be known quite clearly that he hadn’t been shot down but had been forced to land behind the German lines because he’d been let down by the people in England who had given him a 1½-Strutter to fly.

  “Rivers seemed to think I was uttering a blasphemy,” he told Dicken as he appeared in the hut with a flea in his ear.

  There was another casualty three days later. One of the machines came in with flying and aileron balance wires shot away, both tires punctured, a longeron cut almost in half, wings and fuselage badly holed, the pilot’s flying cap ripped by a bullet and a dead observer in the rear cockpit. His eyes stricken and shuddering with shock, the pilot said he’d been attacked by Siemens-Schuckerts.

  “They looked like bloody Nieuports,” he said, almost weeping with rage. “I didn’t bother to take evasive action. It was only when the bastards swung away that I saw they had crosses on the wings. By that time, the bloody machine was like a colander and poor old—” he stopped, choking “–he was dead.”

  The following week yet another airplane failed to return and as the new pilots appeared Dicken found himself accepted as an old hand. But, looking around him at the grave wisdom in the young-old faces, he already found it hard to distinguish the old hands from the recent newcomers.

  Patrols were divided into offensive, defensive and line patrols. Offensive patrols operated ten miles beyond the German lines, defensive patrols four miles beyond, and line patrols directly above. As they became absorbed into the squadron, he and Hatto were allocated regular observers. Dicken’s was an ex-cavalryman called Slattery, who was like a stage Irishman with his wildness, his uproarious behaviour, his strong accent, and the strangled Irish tenor he liked to use in the mess. On only the third trip they flew together, Dicken was aware of a feeling of foreboding even before they set off. During the previous day, he had broken his mirror and, though he tried hard to convince himself the didn’t believe in omens, nothing could alter the fact that it was 1917 and he was still alive when a lot of his friends were dead.

  They crossed the lines near Lille at 6000 feet beneath high cirro-cumulus that looked like a fan, and flew through the normal anti-aircraft barrage over Quesnoy until they reached 10,000 feet. In the east there was a pyramid of cumulus, clear and creamy-white as an iceberg in the sun, and, deafened by the hissing crackle of the engine, Dicken slipped between the clefts and gorges, caught by the beauty about him. The sky seemed empty, without a German aircraft to be seen, and after two hours they turned toward the British lines. As they swung back they saw the white puffs of British anti-aircraft shells in the sky which indicated that somewhere in the vicinity there were German machines.

  Underpowered and obsolescent, the 1½-Strutter laboured upward until near Messines Slattery pointed and Dicken saw a German two-seater approaching above the shellbursts. Because the Strutter was already at the limit of its power, it was impossible to lift the nose and the only alternative was to fly beneath the German so that Slattery could use the rear Lewis.

  Expecting the anti-aircraft gunners to stop firing as usual when a British machine moved to the attack, they ignored the shellbursts, but the gunners obviously considered they could do better than a man in an airplane and, even as Slattery lined up his gun and fired a long burst, Dicken felt the machine shudder and saw the white smoke of a British shell drifting away alongside.

  He was glaring over the side of the fuselage at the ground as if he could indicate his annoyance to the gunners when it dawned on him that the machine was no longer completely under control. It was swooping down in a long curving dive and he heard Slattery yelling with fright. Swinging around, wondering what had happened, he saw the German machine they had attacked falling away, trailing fragments of broken wing, and Slattery, his jaw hanging open, pointing toward their tail.

  Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that one of the elevators was hanging off and fluttering behind on a length of control wire. The shell which had just burst above them had torn it off, leaving him with little control. As he struggled to pull the machine out of its dive, a second shell removed what was left.

  As he fought to bring the machine’s nose up, it slowly began to turn, then fell over into another dive. Slattery had stopped shouting and, wondering what had happened to him, Dicken saw him clinging on with both hands, his eyes wide, his mouth hanging open, his cheeks ballooned by the wind. Shot down by their own bloody artillery! Great
bloody Ned, what a fine way to go to war!

  They were still falling, neither of them hurt but both hanging on like grim death to avoid falling out.

  “Do something,” Slattery was shrieking above the wailing of the wind through the wires.

  The machine steered its erratic course downward toward the clouds and they found themselves surrounded by grey mist that fled past them like smoke. The string that Dicken had tied on the centre section struts, to indicate the plane’s attitude when he couldn’t see the horizon for mist, was standing out at right angles to the fuselage so that he knew the machine was in a side-slip. As she levelled off on her own there was a bang near the tail that jerked his head around.

  “Ammunition drums,” Slattery shrieked. “They’ve rolled down inside the fuselage.”

  With the engine silent it was possible to shout to each other over the whine of the wires and the one thing that stood out in Dicken’s mind was the fact that for the first time they could hold a conversation but that the only thing it concerned was their approaching end. Slattery’s burst of profanity reached lyrical proportions.

  How long they had been falling, Dicken had no idea, but as they burst out of the cloud the gunners opened up again immediately.

  “The stupid bastards must think we’re a Hun,” Slattery yelled.

  His heart in his mouth, still wrestling with the controls in the hope that somehow they would knit together and they could creep home, Dicken found himself calmly wondering how much longer they could expect to survive.

  Then, at two hundred feet the Strutter’s nose lifted without any effort from Dicken. She stalled, then swooped into another dive and, as the earth rushed up, Dicken braced himself. But, just as they were about to hit the ground, the nose lifted again entirely of its own accord and she was almost level when the wheels struck a hedge. There was a crash as the machine stood on its nose then it flopped back to a horizontal position, the wings crumpled around it.