The Bloody Red Baron: Anno Dracula 1918

by Kim Newman

  Then empty your drum into its nose and pray. Because there'll be a Hun behind a pair of Spandaus with exactly the same idea.'

  'Where's the camera lever?'

  Courtney tapped a toggle.

  'I'll tell you when I'm taking pictures so you can steady the aeroplane.'

  'You can tell me what you like but I doubt I'll hear a thing. It's noisy up there.'

  He remembered his Channel flights. Even on a still day, the rush of wind was a roar. And even in mid-summer, the thermometer quickly fell below freezing. Recalling the stabs of colicky abdominal pain that had made a howling misery of his first flight, he summoned a mighty burp. At height, intestinal gases swelled to double their volume on the ground. Courtney did not pass comment on the big belch, but looked a fraction less worried about Winthrop.

  'How's our new ace?' Cundall asked. The flight commander, helmet in hand, was looking over the RE8.

  'He'll be the Hawker of 1918.'

  The pilot was ragging him. In November 1916, Major Lanoe Hawker, VC, DSO, was Britain's highest-scoring pilot. Shot down and killed by Manfred von Richthofen, he was the Red Baron's eleventh victory.

  'Just look after him, Courtney.'

  'Not a hair on his head will be harmed. This I pledge on the honour of Cundall's Condors.'

  'I'm a lost cause then.'

  Winthrop no more truly felt brittle bravado than Courtney. It was how pilots were supposed to act, so they all did their best.

  Courtney ducked under the wing and dropped into the forward cockpit, jostling the stick. The movable feast of Winthrop's Lewis was augmented by the pilot's fixed Vickers.

  Winthrop found himself facing backwards, but twisted in the cockpit to follow Courtney's procedure. The pilot checked his Aldis sight and the engine gauges, humming 'Up in a Balloon, Boys' to himself. After tapping the compass to see if the needle moved freely, he confirmed that the height indicator was set to zero and the bubble was central in the spirit-level that showed if the machine was flying on an even keel. When Courtney slipped goggles over his eyes, Winthrop followed suit.

  The Snipes taxied down the field in arrow formation, Cundall at the point. Courtney turned his engine a couple of times to check its air-worthiness, then let the petrol flood in. Most machine failure in the air was due to interruption of the flow of fuel. A ground man clunkily spun the RE8's propeller

  'Contact, sir?' the mechanic asked.

  'Contact, Jiggs,' Courtney agreed, flicking switches as the groundman gave the propeller a whirl. The air-cooled Daimler engine caught at once, belching black smoke and raising a slipstream whirlwind that tore at Jiggs's hair and whipped everyone standing within fifty yards. The pilot advanced the throttle for two minutes, upping the revolutions, as mechanics got a hold on the strings attached to the wooden chocks jammed under the RE8's wheels.

  Satisfied with the engine sound, Courtney waved his hand like a swimming fish. The mechanics pulled the chocks free and Jiggs gave the pilot a smart salute. Courtney replied with a wave and manoeuvred the ungainly aircraft into formation with the fighters, which were taking off at intervals of about a minute. All the Snipes were aloft by the time the RE8 got under way.

  There was a lurch and Winthrop was forced to turn round by the rush of wind. A cold blast shot straight down the back of his neck, icy air ballooning inside his Sidcot. He looked down the field at Dravot and the ground crew, their long shadows stretched in front of them. He remembered to clamp his jaw shut to avoid biting his tongue. The RE8 bumped a couple of times on the iron-hard field, then lifted off.

  The jogging shudder stopped and he was excited by the smoothness of the ride. There were no pot-holes in the air. He felt a thrill in his water as Courtney gunned the engine and the machine picked up speed and gained altitude.

  The farmhouse and the people on the field receded. The sun was not yet down and stretches of unmelted snow shone grey. Hat, dreary ground sped by below them. Despite the wrapping, Winthrop was completely chilled. If he relaxed his jaw muscles a fraction, his teeth would chatter forever.

  He moved steadily, swivelling his seat inside his cockpit, bringing the Lewis round with him. The gun was fixed to a scarf-ring, a rail rimming the hole in the fuselage. He wanted to see where they were going. Up ahead, Cundall's Snipe was a fixed point, streamers on his struts marking him as squadron leader. The other machines flew in perfect formation to either side. Ball and Bigglesworth were at the extremes of the arrowhead, flying only a little forward of Courtney. It must be a trial to keep the nippy little fighters in pace with the lumbering Harry Tate.

  He got more used to the cold. Flying was easier for vampires but a warm man could bear it. The exhilaration was undeniable. In this century, the skies would call to the adventurous as the sea had to their forefathers. It was a shame such romance was wasted in war.

  Down below, in a wasteland where there had been a country lane, a sexless figure leaned on a bicycle and waved up. An unknown friend, though somehow familiar. Winthrop felt kindly towards the anonymous bundle and tried to get an arm out of the cockpit to wave back. The wind fell on his arm like a blow.

  They passed a deep scar across the landscape. He realised it was the Allied lines. They were over No Man's Land. The ground below was pocked and ravaged as if a dozen earthquakes had struck at once, just as a hundred volcanoes were erupting and a thousand meteors pounding the landscape. Tons of shells had fallen on every square yard. After another scar, the German trenches, they were in enemy territory, Hunland.

  17

  A Solitary Cyclist

  She had to pedal at speed so her greatcoat's tails would not flap into the spokes. Given the state of the roads near the lines, she came off her bicycle at least once an hour. With vampire resilience, she felt hardly anything from her tumbles. Most bruises faded inside a minute. Kate would have enjoyed the rush if the air here had not tasted of ash and death. When life passes, blood spoils instantly like milk left in the sun. The stench of rancid blood hung miasma-like.

  The lanes were narrow and shell-holed. She wove from side to side, skirting cavities. The old signposts were mainly blasted to splinters and replaced by sheets of painted tin wired to bushes. If further bombardment disturbed the bushes, the makeshift signs wound up pointing in wrong directions. Pre-war maps no longer resembled reality. Old routes were buried under rubble, new ones driven through fields. The courses of rivers were altered by the random landscaping of a million tons of shelling.

  Still dogging Edwin, she looked for Maranique. Her reporter's sense, sometimes finer even than her vampire senses, twitched.

  As the sun went down, a flight of aeroplanes passed over. She was on the right road: the machines came from the direction where she had guessed the airfield was.

  The war in the air was changing. That was the story she had scented. Mata Hari had inclined her to look to the skies. Edwin had confirmed the insight.

  She braked and touched one boot to the ground, then looked up through her thick glasses, afraid she would see black crosses °n the undersides of wings. The blue, white and red roundels of the Royal Flying Corps (soon to be reconstituted as the Royal Air Force) told her she was at least not completely lost.

  Pilots called their aeroplanes 'kites' or 'birds'. The wire and canvas contraptions were pitifully frail, ready to fly apart in a stiff crosswind let alone heavy fire. She was not convinced the things were safe even for peacetime use. At RFC flying schools, pupils were called 'Huns' because they wrecked more aeroplanes than the enemy. Half as many pilots were killed in training accidents as in combat. Wilbur and Orville Wright had much to answer for. Then again, her father had been certain bicycling would be the death of her.

  She waved up but could not see any of the pilots return the greeting. It was possible this patrol was to do with the story. Once she lit on something, everything suddenly seemed connected, a dozen chance remarks and incidents forming a pattern.

  The popular press in which Kate Reed was not published, typified by that fathead as
s Horatio Bottomley's bloodthirstily patriotic witterings in John Bull, invariably called Allied pilots 'gallant' and 'dauntless'. Watching them soar away to probable death, it was hard to disagree. There was such a spirit in the fighting men. It was a crime the planners and the propagandists were so intent on wasting it with sheer carnage.

  The patrol flew towards the lines in a neat arrow like a flight of ducks heading south for the winter.

  Her position was not without risk. A reporter who seeks the truth is easily mistaken for a spy. GHQ concealed its blunders from press and public as keenly as it concealed its stratagems from the enemy. Like Mata Hari, Kate was forced to use her wiles, to cultivate friendly officers, to snoop where she was not wanted, to winnow out the germane from the gossip. General Mireau, for one, would be happy to see her go to the stake. She wondered if he still had his Jesuit after her. She would have to be wary: holy water and rattling rosaries were a joke, but silver bullets would be impossible to laugh off.

  She wore the arm-band of an ambulance driver, which won her admittance to most military facilities. This close to the front, men were so pleased to see a female, even one whose attractions were as meagre as hers, that she could pass unquestioned in a mess-hall or a field hospital.

  To the east, star-shells exploded, casting jagged shadows. Night-fighting had been fierce the last few weeks. The Germans did not want to give the Allies time to think. The patrol was over No Man's Land. She wished them well and pedalled on.

  Maranique was home to Condor Squadron, which was an instrument of the Diogenes Club. Kate had gleaned that much from a canny interpretation of official releases before she even sneaked a look at Edwin's orders. She had spent an evening in the Paris HQ of the General Quartermasters' Staff, tracing requisitions and transfers, inferring a history of the squadron through the assembly of men and materiel. Charles Beauregard was often found in the paper trail. She was not surprised to learn how often he got what he wanted, even against the wishes of distinguished officers.

  The road ahead was utterly devastated, hedgerows blasted, fields madly ploughed. Duckboards had been put down but most of them were smashed too. She got off her bicycle and hefted it easily on her shoulders. She hardly remembered being warm and weak, though she usually avoided ostentatious public displays of vampire strength. She stepped on to the impossible ground and waded on. Within a few steps, she was up to her puttees in grainy mud, extricating her feet with obscene sucking sounds.

  All the aces joined Condor Squadron, but it was a sidestep in many a glamorous career. Considering their combined tallies before this assignment, Cundall's Condors logged comparatively few individual victories. For glory-hounds - it was naive to think no Allied pilot was as intent on racking up a score as Baron von Richthofen - it must be frustrating. The squadron must be engaged on work of such paramount military importance that the propaganda value of medal-laden valour had to be set aside.

  She again found something resembling a road and got back on her old Hoopdriver. It was a man's bicycle, supposedly too big for her, but she was comfortable with it. Her first journalism had been published in the cycling press, back in the '80s. She was sometimes nostalgic for her warm days, when the right of women to wear bloomers on bicycle excursions was a fiercely contested issue. It was ridiculous to think of the period before the Terror as a sunlit idyll, but there had been something of comfort in trivialities now lost.

  She came upon a sign ordering those without the relevant papers to turn back. The only paper in her voluminous pocket was wrapped around a package of blood sherbet. She kept notes in her head, where no one could get at them.

  The road was marked with poles that reminded her of the stakes of which Count Dracula was so fond. They were mostly surmounted not with fleshless skulls but with battered German helmets. Another sign, in French and English (but not German), said, 'Unauthorised persons will be taken as spies and shot'. Kate was sure they meant it. Bottomley said journalists who criticised the conduct of the war should be executed as traitors.

  One of Kate's sources, Colonel Nicholson, had been given the duty last September of escorting the great bloodsucking Bottomley on a tour of the front. He said the temptation to suggest the editor perch on the firing step and put his head in the way of a silver bullet was nigh irresistible. Having come as near as four thousand yards to the fight, Bottomley returned to the warmth of London and loudly trumpeted his own bravery at sharing the condition of 'our glorious lads' in the trenches. She remembered his article with a stomach-deep sickness: 'SOMEWHERE IN - HELL! What I have Seen - What I have Done -What I have Learned - The War is Won!' Most 'glorious lads' would cheerfully slip a bayonet into his belly rather than read another article full of sentiments like 'from Field Marshal Commander-in-Chief, right down to the rawest Tommy in the trenches, there is but one spirit - that of absolute optimism and confidence'. Nicholson told her, 'We put him into a gasmask for the purpose of a photograph and for a moment I had hopes that he would die of apoplexy.'

  Laid over the war between the Allies and the Central Powers was a war between the old men and the young, between the politicians and tub-thumpers on both sides and the soldiers sent out to die. Kate had better cause than most to despise Dracula and recognised the need to check his ambitions, but many as bad held high office in Britain. That men like Charles Beauregard and Edwin Winthrop still served King Victor was fragile cause for hope.

  She had thought a great deal of Edwin since their wager. They had made some contact she still did not quite understand. She wondered if he ever thought of her.

  Coming upon a weary sentry, she meekly said 'Red Cross' to him as if it were the password of the day. He saluted and let her through without asking to see her fabled papers. Given the hell- raising disposition pilots were rumoured to have, women far more questionable than she must be coming on and off the field at all hours.

  She found a shed and leaned her bicycle against it. Mud had spattered her entirely and was inches thick on the tops of her boots. Even her glasses were speckled with brown liquid. She was scarcely in a condition to beguile secrets from tight-lipped heroes.

  The airfield still looked like a farm. Barns augmented by corrugated metal structures served as hangars. Just after nightfall, there were quite a few personnel milling about. In what had been a stableyard, two mechanics toiled on a Sopwith Pup which was leaking oil in a steady gush.

  Kate walked past purposefully as if on important business, as indeed she was. One man whistled, testimony to the length of time he had spent away from home. She smiled back, hiding teeth.

  She found the field itself. The patrol she had seen would have taken off from here. A knot of men stood near the farmhouse that must be their billet, watching the night skies.

  It hit her that this must be dreadful, waiting and knowing the odds were bad. She had heard it was possible to become accustomed to the steady attrition as men you served with were killed off. It must take a fearful toll on anyone's sanity.

  The group gradually broke up. First one man drifted off, then another, then all of them. They looked self-consciously at the ground, trying to fight the compulsion to gaze forever at the sky. Then they kicked a bit, muttered with mock cheer, and slipped back into the house. A gramophone croaked out 'Poor Butterfly'.

  She felt, as she rarely did, that she was intruding, and wondered if she should get back to her ambulance unit. When she wasn't snooping, she helped with the wounded. The sobering duty reminded her why it was important to find and tell the truth.

  'Miss,' said a deep voice. 'Should you be here?'

  He had come up behind her without making a sound audible even to her bat-sharp ears. That marked him as a professional creeper. It was Sergeant Dravot, the hatchet man of the Diogenes Club.

  She spread her hands in surrender and tried a mousy smile.

  'I'm waiting for my soldier boy to come home,' she said, trying to sound like a tart.

  Dravot looked up at the sky and, without a trace of expression, said, 'So am I.'
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  18

  Hell's Angels

  Something exploded quite near. Winthrop felt a brief thrash of hot air. The RE8 whizzed past blossoming black cloud. Archie. The spotter climbed sharply, faster than his stomach could manage. An unmeasurable distance below was a carpet of black bursts. The draught of explosions tossed the machine higher. Courtney rode the blast, keeping steady.

  The RE8 was at its peak at 6,500 feet but its operational ceiling was 13,500 feet. Archie rarely got above 4,000. The weight of the shells dragged, thank God.

  It suddenly occurred to him that they might not have the sky to themselves. In the circumstances, he was not best employed looking down. Most downed aeroplanes were shot from behind or above. He swivelled from side to side, turning through three- quarters of a circle. Nothing seemed to be creeping up on them.

  They flew east, away from the sunset. The sky was red, darkness crowding around.

  The RE8 tilted as Courtney executed a textbook aerial turn, following Cundall's lead. They were angling towards Malinbois.

  The air whipped like a storm of fish-hooks. He tried to let go of the Lewis grips, but found his fingers wouldn't move. Biting on frustration, he forced his hands to work.

  He fumbled for the camera toggle. He would have to sight the camera accurately, yet keep any spare eyes out for hostile fliers. Even by day, an enemy aircraft could seem the tiniest gnat in an unpeopled expanse of sky a couple of seconds before it was close enough to get in a killing shot. He needed a head like a multi-faceted sphere, with a compound eye on each facet. He wondered if there were vampires like that.

  He turned round to his extreme right and saw the back of Courtney's helmet. The pilot held up his gloved hand, thumb up.

  Beyond Courtney, the Snipes flew. Beyond them was shadow. The flight descended through thin cloud. A towered shape rose above the landscape. It was familiar from drawings and photographs as the Château du Malinbois.