The old Vikings would have said that Modahl and the ensign were the lucky ones.
In the years that have passed since I flew in the Sea Witch the world has continued to turn, the seasons have come and gone, babies have been born and old people have passed away. The earth continues as before.
As I get older I have learned that the ensign spoke the truth: The fate of individuals matters very little. We are dust on the wind.
The 17th Day
“What’s a Yank doing in the bleedin’ RFC anyway, I’d like to know,” Nigel Cook asked between slurps of tea. “As if the bleedin’ RFC didn’t have troubles enough, eh, with the Diggers and Canucks and provincials from all over. Wouldn’t the Frogs take you for that Lafayette outfit?”
Paul Hyde had had more than enough of Nigel Cook the last two weeks. Two weeks and two days. Sixteen days of fun and games since he’d reported to the squadron in France. “I don’t speak Frog,” he muttered at Cook, because he had to say something. After all, Cook was the squadron pilot with the most service-time at the front.
Cook thought Hyde’s retort screamingly funny. He elbowed the pilot next to him at the breakfast table and giggled soundlessly. Finally he regained control of himself and managed, “Doesn’t speak Frog.” Then he succumbed to another silent giggling fit.
“Looks like ol’ Cook’s nerves are about shot,” Robert MacDonald murmured to Hyde.
“Has he really been in the squadron a whole year?”
“A week short. He should go home any day now.”
Hyde chewed his toast mechanically, sipped at strong, black tea. Down the table, Cook was pouring brandy into his tea and still giggling. He wiped tears from his eyes, managed to get a cigarette going.
“They ought to have sent him home months ago,” Hyde whispered to MacDonald.
“No doubt, Tex, old man. No doubt.” The Brits all called Hyde “Tex,” although he was from Boston and had never been west of the Hudson. Mac motored on: “Cook isn’t much good to us now, I’m afraid. Has the wind up rather badly.”
Having the wind up was an occupational hazard, Hyde had learned. He grunted in reply.
“But we’ve got you and those two virgins who arrived yesterday, so we’ll give the ol’ Hun a bloody good go today, eh?”
“Yeah.”
“Today you go over the hump, I believe.”
“Today is my seventeenth day,” Hyde acknowledged, and finished up the last of his toast. Seventeen days was the average life expectancy of a British aviator at the front, according to army statistics compiled during the grim days of 1915 and 1916.
“We’ve got better machines now, thank God,” Mac said cheerfully. He had two months at the front under his belt and liked to play the role of veteran warrior. “If a chap learns the trade, stays fit and reasonably sober, snipes his Huns only after a careful look all about, why, I think he could grow old and gray in this business. It’s the new men getting potted who ruin the averages.”
“Quite so,” said Paul Hyde. He had fallen in love with these meaningless little phrases of conversational British and salted them around at every opportunity.
“After all, the average was made up of a few old birds who’d grown positively senile and a lot of young ducks who couldn’t see a Hun until he opened fire.”
“So they say.”
“Why, some of the new fools they send us these days get potted on their very first snipe.”
“Not very cricket, that,” Hyde said, as British as he could.
“Enough philosophy.” Robert MacDonald slapped the table. “They tell me you’re going up with me this morning. Keep your eyes peeled, don’t go swanning off on your own. We’ve got a push on and the Huns will be quite curious. The old man will be most unhappy if I come back without you.”
“I should hope.”
“Let’s not be overly keen, Tex. Not good form. Watch for Huns, obey my signals, don’t get the wind up.”
“Righto,” said Paul Hyde. As he left the table he saw Nigel Cook nipping brandy straight from the flask.
Rain had fallen the previous night. In the hour before dawn the cool, invigorating June air had a tangible substance and a pungent, earthy scent. Dew covered everything. Wisps of fog drifted through the circles of light.
“Bugger fog,” Mac said.
“Getting down through this stuff will be a little chancy, don’t you think, Mac?”
“The general staff isn’t going to call off the war. Might as well do our bit for the king, hadn’t we? Maybe this lot will burn off by the time we come back to land.”
“I was wondering about the getting off. Perhaps we should get off separately, then get together on top. What do you think, Mac?”
“Quite sound, that. I’ll go first, of course.”
They walked to the planes, which were already parked in the takeoff position.
The sky in the east was turning pink when Paul Hyde completed his preflight inspection. The mechanics seemed quite proud of the bullet-hole patches they had completed overnight. Hyde mouthed a compliment, fastened the collar of his leather flying coat tightly, and automatically held his hand a few inches from the exhaust pipe, which ran along each side of the cockpit and ended just behind it. The pipe was cool this morning, of course, but Hyde always checked. He put his left foot in the stirrup on the fuselage and swung his right leg into the cockpit, as if he were mounting a horse. When that exhaust pipe was hot, getting in or out of an S.E.5 was a task for a careful man. Hyde’s first burn, on the inside of his left thigh, was still tender.
Seated, strapped in, Hyde looked around carefully in the predawn gloom. The glow of a nearby light mounted on a pole behind him helped.
The S.E.5A had two guns, an air-cooled Lewis on a Foster mount on the top wing, which fired over the propeller arc, and a synchronized water-cooled Vickers mounted in front of the pilot, slightly to the left of the aircraft’s centerline. The Lewis used a 97-round drum that mounted on top of the weapon, the Vickers was belt-fed. Both guns were .303 caliber.
The Lewis was an anachronism, mounted above the top wing in the S.E.5A because it rode there in the Nieuport-17, a rotary-engined scout now obsolete. At the full forward position on the Foster mount, the gun fired above the prop arc along the axis of the aircraft. To clear a jam or change the drum, the pilot pulled the gun backwards and down on the mount. Flying the plane with his knees and fighting the 100-mph slipstream, he cleared the jam or wrested the empty drum off and replaced it with a full one. While still in the retracted position, the weapon could be swiveled through a limited arc and fired upward into the unprotected belly of another aircraft.
Sitting in the pilot’s seat, Hyde checked the circular drum magazine of the Lewis, made sure the cocking mechanism was lubricated and moved easily, made sure the trigger cable was properly rigged, and pushed the gun forward on the circular mount until it latched. An extra drum was carried in a case above the instrument panel.
Then he turned his attention to the fixed Vickers, which was much easier to reach. The Vickers was dependent upon the proper functioning of the Constantinesco synchronization gear. If the hydraulic gear developed a leak that hand pumping couldn’t overcome, the weapon was useless.
The cockpit in which he sat had been modified by the squadron. The armored seat had been removed and a wooden bench installed that allowed the pilot to sit much lower in the cockpit. The original huge windscreen was gone; in its place on this particular machine was a small, flat piece of glass that deflected the slipstream over the pilot’s head.
One of the mechanics leaned in and shone an electric torch on the instrument panel. Hyde studied the levers, dials, and switches in front of him. On the seventeenth day, they seemed like old friends. Mounted on the panel were an airspeed indicator, altimeter, compass, tachometer, switch and booster mag, and petrol shutoff. Gauges informed him of oil and air pressure and the temperature of the radiator coolant.
The mixture and throttle controls were on the right side of the panel. For
reasons no one could explain, they worked exactly opposite of each other. The throttle lever was full forward for full throttle, but full rich required that the mixture control be all the way aft.
A fuel pump was on the left of the panel, and a hand pump for the synchronization gear was between his knees.
The control stick had a ring mounted vertically on the top of it, hence its nickname of “spade handle.” In the center on the ring were two toggle switches, one for each machine gun.
Hyde thanked the mech, who moved away. Hyde didn’t need the light; he knew where everything was.
He turned on the petrol, made sure the switch and booster mag were off.
“Gas on, mag off,” he called.
The linesman took the prop and moved it back and forth several times. Finally fuel began running out of the carburetor.
“Contact,” the linesman called.
“Contact,” Hyde echoed and turned on the mag switch.
The linesman seized the prop and gave it a mighty heave. As he did, Hyde rotated the booster mag handle and the engine started with a gentle rumble. It ticked over nicely at 500 RPM, the tach needle barely twitching at the bottom of its range.
The 200-HP liquid-cooled Hispano-Suiza engine took a while to warm up. On Hyde’s right the linesmen were trying to get Mac’s engine started. They pulled it through repeatedly.
Hyde settled himself into his seat, stirred the controls around, and visually checked the ailerons, elevator, and rudder. All okay.
The Hisso rumbling sweetly in the false dawn. The fog stirred by the spinning propeller, the smell of the earth, the waiting sky, life pungent and rich and mysterious — Paul Hyde had dropped out of college for this. Took a train to Montreal and joined the Canadian armed forces. In England he had wrangled a transfer to the Royal Flying Corps, which was looking for volunteers for pilot training. The whole thing was a grand adventure, or so he had assured himself at least a thousand times. Friends had died in accidents, some before his eyes, and the Germans had killed both the young pilots who’d accompanied him to France just weeks ago.
An adventure … the word stuck in his throat now. If by some miracle he lived through this …
The truth was, he probably wouldn’t. Hyde knew that, and yet …
The best way was to take it a day at a time. Live through Day One, Day Two, etc. He was up to Day Seventeen now. If he made it through today, he had beaten the odds. If he made it through today — who knows? — he just might pull it off, live through the whole obscene bloody mess. Well, there was a chance, anyway. But first, make it through today.
The radiator thermometer indicated that the engine was warming nicely. In the cool, saturated morning air a thin ribbon of cloud developed at the tips of the slowly swinging prop and swirled back around the fuselage of the plane. The windsock hung limp.
To Hyde’s dismay, as the dawn progressed, the fog seemed to be thickening.
Mac’s engine was not going to start anytime soon. The sweating mechanics pulled it through a dozen times while Nigel Cook and one of the new puppies charged into the fog and got airborne. Finally Mac climbed from the cockpit in disgust and threw his leather flying helmet on the ground. He stomped over to Hyde’s plane, leaned in to make himself heard.
“Bloody Frog motor won’t start. Take a few minutes to set right, the fitters say. You go on and I’ll meet you in our sector.”
Hyde nodded.
“Wish we still had our Nieuports,” Mac added savagely.
Hyde didn’t share that opinion. The squadron had reequipped with the new S.E.5A’s only two weeks before Hyde arrived, and in truth, the S.E. was a better plane in every way — faster, easier to fly, more maneuverable, with two guns …. The only weak point was the S.E.’s geared French engine. The Hissos were temperamental. Worse, the metallurgy was substandard and quality control poor.
Now the linesmen waved Hyde off, so with his right hand he fed in throttle as he enriched the mixture and with his left he shoved the spade handle stick forward. The S.E. began to roll. Almost immediately the tail came up. Flames twinkled from the exhaust pipes on both sides of the plane and illuminated the underside of the top wings with a ghostly yellow glare.
There, tail up, accelerating, bumping along over the uneven grass as the engine’s song rose to a promising growl, not too loud. The prop turned so slowly on takeoff — only 1,500 RPM — that almost no right rudder was required.
After a bit over three hundred feet of run, Paul Hyde gave a gentle tug on the stick and the nose came off the ground.
He concentrated fiercely on flying the plane. If he lost contact with the earth or the dawn in this poor visibility, he was a dead man. And if the engine stopped for any reason — he had mentally prepared himself — he was landing straight ahead regardless. Just last week an old dog died trying to turn back to the field with the motor popping, barely turning over.
When he was safely above the fog layer, Paul Hyde looked back into the gloom. And saw nothing: The field had disappeared.
The dawn’s glow would be his reference this morning, for the compass was impossible to read in the dark cockpit. Hyde flew north, parallel to the trenches, with the dawn off his right wing as he climbed.
Mainly he looked for other aircraft, but he also scanned the gauzy sea below for landmarks. Here and there were towering pillars of cumulus cloud, monsters half hidden amid the patchy stratus. Hyde steered around these. In the east the sky was yellow and gold — in just moments the sun would appear.
German observation planes would be along when the light improved. Hyde’s mission was to prevent German crews from photographing the front, and, if possible, to shoot them down. The job sounded straightforward enough, but it wasn’t. When they weren’t taking pictures, German observers could give a good account of themselves with machine guns. And there were often enemy scouts perched above the two-seaters, ready to pounce on any British mice attracted to the cheese.
This morning the air was dead calm, without a bounce or burble of any kind. The engine ran sweetly and the ship obeyed Hyde’s every whim. The slightest twitch of the stick or rudders brought forth a gentle response.
Hyde charged each gun and fired a short burst. Everything was ready.
The plane swam upward past various layers of pink and gold patchy cloud, turning gently from time to time to avoid the cumulus buildups. Swatches of open sky were visible to the north and east.
The eastern sky drew Hyde’s attention. It was quite bright now as the rising sun chased away the night.
Hyde was searching for specks, little black specks in the bright sky that moved slowly this way and that. Those specks would be airplanes.
Finally he remembered to search the gloom in all the other directions. The Huns could be anywhere.
The altimeter recorded his upward progress. After about sixteen minutes of flight he passed fourteen thousand feet. Further progress upward would be much slower. Hyde wanted to be as high as possible, so he kept climbing.
Below he could occasionally catch a glimpse of the ground. Once he saw the ugly brown smear of trenches.
He was near Grommecourt, he thought, but nothing was certain. He couldn’t see enough of the earth to be sure. He must be careful this morning not to let the wind that must be at altitude push him too deep behind enemy lines.
He swung west, let the ship climb into the prevailing westerlies. There was enough light to easily see the altimeter now, which was moving very slowly upward. The temperature in the radiator was rising, so Hyde opened the radiator shutters to let more air through. Up, up, up as the minutes ticked past and the engine hummed sweetly. He leaned the fuel/air mixture, tightened his collar against the cold.
He was breathing shallowly now, and rapidly. The air here was thin. He must make no sudden movements, make no serious demands upon his body or his body would rebel from the lack of oxygen.
At seventeen thousand feet he let the nose come down a degree or two. The plane was slow, sluggish on the controls, and h
e was a touch light-headed.
He let the left wing drop a few degrees, let the nose track slowly around the horizon until he was again flying east. The sun was up now, filling the eastern sky. All the clouds were below him.
God, it was cold up here! He checked his watch. He had been airborne for forty minutes.
He put his hand over the sun, looked left and right, above and below. Out to the left, the right, behind, below, even above. His eyes never stopped moving.
Another quarter hour passed. The day was fully here, the sun a brilliant orb climbing the sky.
There, a speck against a cloud. No, two. Two specks. To his left and down a thousand feet or so.
He turned in that direction.
Definitely two planes. Flying south. Hyde was approaching them from their right front quarter, so he turned almost north, let them go past at about a mile, hoping they didn’t see him. As the specks passed behind his right wing, he turned toward them and lowered the nose a tad.
Two. One alone would have been more than enough, but Hyde wasn’t going to let the Hun strut about unmolested just because he had brought a friend.
At least there were no enemy scouts above. He looked carefully and saw only empty sky.
He was going fast now, the wires keening, the motor thundering again at full cry, coming down in the right rear quarter of those two planes. The distance closed nicely.
He fingered the trigger levers inside the round stick handle.
The victims flew on straight, seemingly oblivious to his ambush.
At three hundred yards he realized what they were: S.E.5’s.
He turned to cross behind them. If the pilots had seen him, they gave no indication.
Perhaps he should have flown alongside, waved. But they would rag him in the mess, say that he thought they were Germans and had come to pot them. All of which would be true and hard to laugh off, so he turned behind them to sneak away.
He kept the turn in.
There! Just off the nose! A plane coming in almost head-on.
He was so surprised he forgot to do anything.
The Sea Witch Page 8
