by Janet Tanner
Laughing, Jack went back to the mess. Perhaps it wasn’t as cold yet as it would be, but that didn’t alter the fact that a warm drink would be more than welcome.
As he went through the door, someone called out to him. “ There’s some mail here for you, Jack! A letter from home!”
“Thanks.” He took it and knew from the handwriting it was from Charlotte. He was doing well for mail this week—yesterday there had been a letter from William Davies, keeping him up to date with all the news from his school and congratulating him on passing his Oxford Senior. Although it would be more of a surprise to me if you hadn’t passed, Mr Davies had written.
Now, as he walked through the mess, Jack slit open the envelope from home and glanced at it idly. Then he stopped short. “Fred?” he said aloud in a stunned voice. “Fred?”
“What’s up, then?” one of the older men asked, coming up behind him.
Jack turned, looking at him blankly. “My brother’s been killed,” he said in a flat, unemotional voice. Then he looked back at the letter, reading it again.
This will be shock to you, Jack as it is to us all, Charlotte had written in her heavily rounded hand. Fred had a bad dose of dysentery as you know and was, or so we thought, safe in hospital behind the lines. But the Germans shelled the hospital. There were twenty or thirty killed there, patients, nurses and doctors. Dr Scott was there, too, or so I heard in town today, but he was only hurt.
But our Fred was killed instantly. I didn’t telegraph you, Jack, there didn’t seem, any point. He’s been buried out there, and I didn’t want to worry you with a telegram. We’re all in an awful way here, you can imagine. Our Amy is beside herself—she made herself ill with crying and had to come home from Captain Fish’s. But like I told her, that won’t do any good. We’ve got to put a brave face on it.
Take care of yourself, my son, and try not to upset yourself too much. We shall all meet again one day, I know we shall. It’s just for now it’s hard. Write soon. Your ever loving Mam.
He stared at the letter, seeing for the moment, only blackness. Fred dead! And Mam writing about it in this newsy way as if it had nothing much to do with any of them! That was just a cover-up, of course. Beneath all the bravado, she would be shattered. Perhaps he should go to her—ask for leave and go home for a day or two. But she had plenty of people around her. There was nothing more he could do. But he felt strangely disembodied, now. His exhilaration and sense of achievement had been crushed, the hopelessness of it all swept over him.
“There’ll be no winners in this war,” he thought bitterly. “ By the time it’s over, we’ll all be losers, wait and see if we’re not!”
Yet, as the numbing shock became grief, he grew more and more determined to do his bit. Every time Charlotte wrote, it seemed, there were more deaths to report, boys he had known all his life. There was Billy Beck, who had been an errand-boy at Fords before his conscription; one of Farmer Brent’s boys; and a nephew of Reuben Tapper, the railway porter. And Peggy’s Colwyn was in a bad way, too. He had been hit in the head, and although he was still alive, Charlotte said he would never be the same again.
Then, in the summer of 1917, with the wedding fixed for September, Dolly’s Eric was killed, and for all her light-hearted approach to life, Dolly was devastated.
“She thought more of him than she ever let on,” Charlotte said to James, and to Jack, she wrote: It’s just one thing on top of another. The Lord only knows where it will all end. You’d think we’d be used to bad news by now, but every time it seems to hit worse. If it goes on much longer, I think I shall be ending up in the asylum.
As soon as he had learned to fly his aeroplane to the satisfaction of his instructor and been trained in bomb-dropping and the use of the Lewis gun, Jack had left Dover for Dunkirk, where he was flying with a force of light bombers and fighters, attacking the harbours, docks and submarine pens along the Belgian coast.
The news from home still disturbed him, but it seemed to be happening at a distance from him. As he flew dawn raids and night stunts, it was the emerald green flashes of the enemy range-finders and the following bursts of anti-aircraft fire that were real, and it was the mates that never came back to the mess who were truly dead—those who were caught in the anti-aircraft fire, or were killed by one of their own bombs that refused to be loosed in spite of frantic stunting over the sea. And the air raids, too, were real, heralded by “Wailing Winnie” and all the other sirens. Then, before their mournful sound had died away, the night would be torn apart by the exploding shells and bombs, and the answering roar of the angry air.
But for all the discomforts and dangers, a year and a half after he first took his Longhorn into the skies, Jack’s love affair with flying was as fresh as ever. For him, there was nothing still to compare with the magic of cloud-land, where an aircraft could twist and weave in the banks of soft white cotton wool, nothing to compare with the throb of engine power at take-off, and certainly nothing to compare with the satisfaction of bringing a plane in, bloody but unbowed, at the end of a mission. And sometimes he wondered if, when it was all over, he might stay in the RNAS and make flying his career instead of teaching.
Charlotte would be furious, of course, but after living this way he didn’t know if he could ever go back to the life of a schoolmaster, and an ordered routine. The danger and excitement had become too much a part of him—and the comradeship, too. For nothing seemed so bad when there was someone with whom to share it.
That was how it was that morning in January of 1918. There was nothing to warn him that today would be any different from any other. He had lived too long with danger, and had become hardened to it, and it seldom occurred to him now that tonight it might be his own face that was missing from the mess room.
It was a clear morning, frosty and bitterly cold—so cold that as they washed their faces the water froze on the sponges. But as the six bombers with their fighter escort of two took off in formation, everything but the mission ahead was pushed to the back of his mind.
The target this morning was an enemy aerodrome and dump. As they neared the lines, the anti-aircraft fire began, filling the air with shrapnel puffs and scorching holes in the fabric of their fuselage and wings. But none of the de Havillands was seriously damaged, and they dropped through the patchy cloud base to their target in perfect formation.
The line of hangars was there beneath them, grey and squat from this angle, but an easy target, and Jack thought that for a job like this, it should be possible to get a perfect aim even without the guidance of the string ‘reins’ the gun-layers used to help them.
The first wave of bombs were loosed and fell through the air like deathly rain. Two hangars erupted into balls of flame, thick black smoke billowing up from a third.
Jack pulled up to follow the formation, but Maurice Kelly, his gun-layer, signalled two bombs left, and reluctantly he turned to go in again. He didn’t want to take them home with him. Sitting in their honeycomb bomb racks beneath his wings they were potential death-traps, and there was an enemy aircraft in the middle of the tarmac runway, a sitting duck.
He swooped in, a small smile twisting the corners of his mouth as he saw black beetle-like people scuttling and diving on the ground beneath him. “ I’m not after you,” he whispered. “It’s your Albatros I want.” The enemy plane disappeared beneath his wingtips and the bombs had gone, one hitting the tarmac and sinking into it like a spoon in treacle, the other catching the Albatros smack on and shooting splintered wood and burning fabric into a hedgehog arc around the twisted frame.
As he glanced back at it, Kelly held up one thumb to him in a gesture of triumph and momentarily he released his tongue, held tight between his teeth in an effort of concentration throughout the operation. But at that very second they began firing at him from the ground, and his tongue flicked back again as he raised the nose of the de Havilland and pulled up, intent on catching the now straggled formation and tucking into position for a safe run back to base.
This, he thought, was the best part of any mission, the moment when you turned for home, relieved of your bombs, exhilarated by success, drawn by the thought of the warmth and comfort of the mess after the Arctic cold of the skies. Yet there was a tingling awareness, too, that at any moment your luck could run out. It was a thought that ran like a trickle of ice-cold water on skin clammy with sweat, and as it prickled at the back of his mind, Jack flexed his stiff fingers on the controls, consciously forcing himself to relax a little.
Ease up, ease out, and fall into formation. Stick together and you’re invincible. Almost. A dark line, goose-like in the sky. Tuck in, stay vigilant. Look strong, and you’ll be strong. And watch the sun. Too often they come out of the sun.
But he knew the formation was still too loose to be safe, and up ahead there was cloud that hadn’t been there on the way in, high cumulus, ivory towers in the sky, and the sun coming through like arrow shafts. It worried him, and his skin prickled with an awareness that should have warned him but somehow didn’t, until it was too late.
They came from nowhere, diving like hawks with folded wings, half a dozen Fokker biplanes with the vivid red fuselages of the Richthofen Circus. One moment the sky was clear, the next it seemed full of aircraft and tracers and spurts of orange flame that vied with the sun for brilliance. Two attached themselves to Jack’s tail, and another came at him head on.
Startled, he made to fire his guns—the twin Vickers that he so seldom had the chance to use—but the triplane fired first and a bullet straight through the propeller arc put paid to one Vickers. Jack zoomed, but not in time to avoid another bullet that passed through the fabric of his flying jacket, scratching his skin in a long, painful tear.
Breath whistled through his teeth, and he twisted the rudder this way and that, trying to dodge the tracers of the following enemy aircraft. Up ahead, he saw one of the de Havillands begin a downward spiral, black smoke pouring from its tail. Seconds later, a triplane exploded into a ball of fire.
Sweat stood out on his face in crystal beads and rolled down the neck of his jacket, but he hardly noticed. His breathing was shallow and ragged, his heart pumping blood around his body at twice the normal rate. For long, timeless minutes he twisted, climbed and dived, doing all he could to keep the triplanes from getting beneath his tail, and giving Kelly his best chance of getting the sights of his Lewis guns lined up for a hit. But one of the Fokkers broke away from the others, coming in at him broadside, spraying the side of his fuselage with bullets and then diving away to safety.
At first, Jack was too concerned about damage to the aircraft to realize he, himself, had been hit, then, looking down, he saw to his surprise that blood was gushing in a scarlet stream from his thigh. Instantly he tried to move his foot, but the muscles refused to answer his command.
The wound was bad, he knew it instinctively without even investigating the sticky mess beneath the torn cloth. But there was no time now for speculation. Time enough for that when they had got away from the biplanes—if they ever did.
A sudden blast hit the de Havilland from beneath, tossing the aircraft like a toy and sending shock waves up Jack’s spine so that the very core of him seemed to vibrate, his injured leg exploding into a furnace of pain. In that first surprised fragment of time the de Havilland’s nose dropped sharply, and she went into a spin, but the air rushing past his face and the sensation of the dreaded spin brought Jack to his senses, and he went into the levelling-out procedure taught at training school and practised on numerous occasions: stick forward to gain speed, full opposite rudder—and pray!
Just when he thought the spin would never come under control, he felt the plane begin to right itself, and as sky and ground took their proper places on the horizon he realized that the shells bursting around him came not from the biplanes, but from the ground.
So that was it! The dogfight had driven them back over enemy lines, and the shell that had exploded right under the de Havilland had come from the anti-aircraft guns. Now the triplanes had left, thinking that the men on the ground could finish what they had started, and not wishing themselves to be used as target practice by their own anti-aircraft fire.
Hope leaped in Jack, firing his reflexes anew, and he pulled on the joy-stick, raising the nose and climbing once more.
Those of his formation who had escaped were away now, scampering for home, and of the fighter escort, there was no sign.
So I’m on my own, Jack thought, and by way of comfort and reassurance of at least one friendly soul in this cruelly alien wasteland, he risked a look over his shoulder to catch Maurice Kelly’s eye. But what he saw horrified him. Kelly was slouched over his guns, his head lolling forward.
Sweating, he jerked his head round once more. He was alone, over enemy territory, in a damaged aircraft with a gun-layer who was either unconscious or dead, and he himself was bleeding badly. With no gun-layer to protect his vulnerable rear, he was a sitting target for any patrolling enemy aircraft who happened to spot him.
Dodging acrid bursts of high explosive and climbing higher, he tried to think.
Perhaps it would be better if he flew north to Holland rather than battle against the west wind all the way home. The people there would be friendly, he knew. But with his gun-layer unconscious, and his own leg badly injured it could be difficult for the peasants to hide them both as they had done other pilots in the past. And today, instead of friendly Dutch country people, he might find himself surrounded by German soldiers. Even leaving his wounded leg and poor old Kelly out of it, Jack had no wish to spend the rest of the war in a prison camp like Ted, and besides …
“I don’t believe I’ve got any matches to set light to the aircraft,” Jack said aloud, talking to himself to keep his mind off the pain. “I’m sure I didn’t put any in my pocket this morning. And I’m not leaving a de Havilland there as a showpiece for every Fritz within miles. They can find someone else to make them a present of an instructor’s exhibit.”
He gritted his teeth against the now-excruciating pain in his leg and climbed to five thousand feet. Then he set his nose for home. “You can make it, Jack,” he told himself. “ Dig your heels in and keep going. Every mile is a mile nearer. Every mile is a mile you won’t have to fly again.”
He ran into the cumulus again over enemy lines, and blessed it. Here, in the valleys between the towering cliffs of fluffy white cloud he was quite hidden from the anti-aircraft guns on the ground, and from enemy fighters. The problem was that they would be hidden from him, too. There could be any number of them just above him, waiting to pounce, and he would never know it.
Beads of sweat rolled down his face, and he curled his hands tightly round the controls, fighting the urge to go down and get beneath the cloud bank. That would be pointless, for he would then make a perfect target for any enemy fighter who chose to sit hidden in the edges of the cloud, watching for aircraft in the sky beneath.
He checked his compass and flew on, and after a while the cloud began to thin so that beneath him he could see patches of barren winter ground. His tongue was back between his teeth, and fierce concentration drove all else from his mind. Keep going. Just keep going. Maybe you’ll do it yet. Maybe …
The German fighter must have been hiding behind one of the last patches of cumulus. As he crossed the pool of clear sky it dived towards him, an Albatros with a tiger’s head emblazoned on its fuselage. For a moment it seemed to him that his heart had ceased beating and his throat and mouth had folded inwards, choking him.
This was it then, the end, and just as he had feared. An Albatros was coming in for the kill and he was defenceless, with one of his Vickers guns out of action and the gun-layer unable to fire the twin Lewis. The Albatros closed, its guns spitting orange fire. But as the planes passed, so did Jack’s moment of panic. Adrenaline burst like shell-fire in his veins, and he was filled with the fiercest determination he had ever known.
I don’t want to die, he thought—not here, not like this. And while t
here’s life in my body, I won’t give up.
The Albatros came closer, the sun flashing on its wings. As it dived, Jack pushed hard on the rudder, swinging round sharply, and the Albatros fell away beneath his starboard wing, out of range. It turned to come in again and so did he, so that they faced each other head-on. It was his only chance, Jack reckoned, to keep the German from getting behind him where he could shoot at his vulnerable, exposed rear. The Albatros came in, and Jack fired at him with his one remaining Vickers gun, but the shots went wide, scorching holes in the wing fabric but doing no real damage. The German’s shot was more accurate. As they swooped away from one another again, Jack saw his temperature gauge shoot up, and he knew his radiator had been holed. His heart sank, but still he refused to give up. In a situation like this, he had nothing to lose. He would probably die in the end, but at least he could try to take the German with him.
He turned again, but the Albatros was quicker. It banked hard, with full throttle, the pilot risking a spin in order to manoeuvre himself into a position behind and beneath Jack’s vulnerable tail. Jack sucked in his breath, trying to squirm out of danger, but although the Albatros was unable to get under him, it was now directly behind him, the very thing he had been so desperately trying to avoid.
He glanced over his shoulder. Yes, here it came. And the pilot was grinning, damn him. As clear as if he were sitting beside him on a bus, Jack saw the satisfied curl of his lips. Already, no doubt, he had counted the de Havilland as another notch on his wings. Again, but without much hope, Jack grasped the joy-stick, pulling it hard towards him, and as he did so, he heard the sharp crackle of gun-fire.
So this was it, he thought, waiting for the inevitable sickening fall or the smell of burning. He’s got me.
But instead the de Havilland rose at his bidding, coughing, protesting, but still obedient, and beneath him he saw to his amazement the spiralling wreck of the Albatros, trailing black smoke as it fell. Half bemused and weak from loss of blood, he watched it until it hit the ground and exploded into a mass of vivid flame.
