by W E Johns
The pilots of the other machines were on his tail instantly, but their gunners, being unable to fire forward, could do nothing. Moreover, they had to act warily, for to overtake their mark meant diving into the ground. Biggles did not remain on the same course for more than a few seconds at a time, but swerved from side to side, leaping over obstructions like a steeplechaser.
More than one officer came home in the same way during the war; in fact, it was a recognised course of procedure in desperate circumstances, although in the case of a single-seater it had this disadvantage—the pilot had to accept the enemy’s fire, without being able to return it.
Yet, although it went against the grain to run away, to stay and fight against such hopeless odds could have only one ending. Biggles knew it, and checking the temptation to turn he held on his way, twisting and turning like a snipe. More than one bullet hit the machine, yet no serious damage was done.
He shot across the back area enemy trenches, a mark for hundreds of rifles, yet he had done too much trench strafing to be seriously concerned about them. All the same, he breathed a sigh of relief as he tore across the British lines to safety.
Then, as he sat back, limp from reaction, but satisfied that he had nothing more to fear, a shell, fired from a field gun, burst with a crash that nearly shattered his eardrums and almost turned the Camel over. The engine kept going, but a cloud of smoke and hot oil spurted back over the windscreen from the engine, and he knew it had been damaged.
The revolution counter began to swing back, and although he hung on long enough to get within sight of the aerodrome, he was finally forced to land, much to his disgust, in a convenient field about half a mile away.
The Camel finished its run about twenty yards from the hedge which bordered the road at the spot, and near where some Tommies were working.
“Have any of you fellows got any water in your water-bottles?” he asked. “My word, I am dry!”
“Yes, sir—here you are!” cried several of them willingly.
He accepted the first water-bottle and had a long drink. “That’s better!” he declared, and whistling, walked home.
[Back to Contents]
THE PILOT WHO LOST HIS WAY
An incident from Biggles’ career when he was a member of No. 169 (F.E.) Squadron. The F.E.s were 2-seater “pusher” types.
WITH HIS hands thrust deep into the pockets of his slacks Biggles stood at the mess window and eyed the desolate expanse of aerodrome despondently. He felt depressed. The weather was, to use his own expression, “foul”. There was no wind, but from a leaden, moisture-laden sky alternate drizzle, hail, sleet and fine snow precipitated itself and obliterated the French landscape.
The dawn patrol had taken off as usual, but the machines had returned independently within an hour, each pilot reporting that the weather conditions were impossible, even for wartime, when weather conditions were seldom taken into consideration. Visibility was absolutely nil, and no good purpose could be served by remaining in the air.
“It seems a pity,” he observed to Mark Way, his gunner, who was gazing blankly at the dismal spectacle of the deserted hangars from another window, “that wars cannot be arranged to take place in a more salubrious climate, or at a more comfortable time of the year. Oh, well, there’ll be no more flying today, so let’s make the most of it here!”
They turned towards the far side of the room, where a score of officers were clustered round the fire, but a sound from outside brought them to a halt. Silence fell upon the laughing, chattering group at the fire so that the musical hum of the wind in the wires of an approaching aeroplane could be heard distinctly.
“Suffering snowballs!” muttered Mark. “Who the dickens is up in this muck?”
“By all that’s wonderful!” exclaimed Biggles, watching through the window a Spad, bearing the red, white and blue cockades of the French Flying Corps, emerge from the mist and settle down clumsily on the aerodrome. Without waiting for the machine to finish its run its pilot swung round and taxied quickly towards the mess.
“I’d say he’s lost,” declared Marriot, who, with the others, had hurried to the window to watch the newcomer. “I’ll bet that the first thing he asks is where he is—and, what’s more, he’ll be mighty glad to see our uniforms. He’d be lucky to know where he is to within twenty miles in this weather, and, for all he knows, this might be a Boche dump. Here he comes—look at him staring! I bet he’d jump if anyone fired a pistol.”
“Don’t you try anything like that!” snapped Captain Mapleton. “Whether he is lost or not he’s our guest while he’s here, and I hope no one will forget it.”
“I was only joking,” replied Marriot, a trifle shamefaced, watching the lone pilot, who had flung open his leather flying-coat revealing the blue uniform of a French officer, stride towards the door.
Mabs flung it open and greeted the visitor on the threshold.
“Come in!” he said. “You are courageous to fly in such terrible weather!”
“Thank you,” replied the Frenchman, in English, shaking the water from his flying helmet. “I am lost— how do you say—lost to the wide world?”
“Have some coffee?” suggested Mabs. “It’s still hot.”
“Thanks. The air makes cold today, is it not?”
“You’re right, it does,” grinned McAngus, who had been on the dawn patrol. “You must be jolly keen to wander about in such weather.”
The Frenchman shrugged his shoulders.
“It was not so impossible at the early hour,” he protested. “My Escadrille flies always in all weathers, but this time we are lost. I am separate. I fly, and fly, but always there is the fog. There is no earth. Ten times I come down to land, but each time I see only the Allemands—how do you say? The Germans—the Boche. They shoot, rat-tat-tat—so! I despair; I abandon hope. The petrol, it is finished almost. When it is finished I can no longer pour the sauce.1 Then I see your field d’aviation—is it Boche? Is it Français or Anglais? I do not know, but I must land. Voilà! It is the good Anglais. I am saved!”
The French officer swallowed the remainder of his coffee and glanced round the room, smiling.
“What squadron do you come from?” asked Mabs. “If the weather clears up a bit you may still be able to get back today—if you haven’t too far to go.”
“The Spad Escadrille Fifty-eight, at Soyons des Dames.”
“Phew! You’re a long way off. This is St. Pielle, and we must be the best part of fifty miles farther north.”
“Sacré! I was lost indeed. But it matters nothing— we are among friends,” observed the Frenchman genially.
“Well, well, make yourself at home,” said Mabs, placing a chair near the fire for their guest. “I hope you will stay and have lunch with us?”
“Merci; mille thanks!”
The door leading into the dining-room opened and Major Paynter, the C.O., entered the room.
Now Biggles had been watching the Frenchman with amused interest, and up to that moment it had not for one instant occurred to him to suspect that the Spad pilot was anything but what he pretended to be. But as the door opened and Major Paynter came into the room, the Frenchman glanced up, and for one fleeting second his expression revealed something more than the whimsical smile he had worn ever since he had joined them.
Biggles happened to be looking directly at his face, and he distinctly saw the pupils of his eyes dilate and then return to normal. For a fraction of an instant it seemed as if Biggles saw, through that mask of assumed gaiety, a cold deliberateness that did not reconcile itself to the man’s manner.
Not a muscle of the Spad pilot’s face had moved, yet the effect on Biggles was as if someone had poured a cup of cold water down his back. He passed his hand over his face, and then looked back at the Frenchman, who had sunk down in an easy-chair and had thrust his feet towards the blaze.
The talk turned, as it always does when airmen meet, to flying, and for some minutes Biggles watched intently for a repetition
of the expression that he alone, of all officers in the room, seemed to have noticed. Major Paynter had joined the group, and was ragging the French lieutenant about losing his way.
“I shall have to send you back in a tender,” he said.
“But no!” cried the Frenchman. “It is not necessaire. A pilote de chasse return to his aerodrome foot to earth? Never!”
“Just as you like,” agreed the major. “But hadn’t I better ring up your people and tell them you are here?”
“I will ring up my good friend Boulenger, if I may have the permission to speak on the telephone,” said the Frenchman.
“You sit still and have some coffee,” the major told him. “I’ll ring up.”
But the Frenchman had sprung to his feet and was half way across the room.
“No, no! No, no!” he cried. “I have a special message about tonight,” he added, with a sly wink. “My good friend Boulenger and I were going to Rouen—mademoiselle will be waiting.”
There was a general laugh in which Biggles stepped forward and directed their guest to the telephone in the hall.
“Yes, yes,” he heard him say, “the Escadrille Fifty-eight. It is Marcel Vouvray, pilote de chasse, who speaks.”
The conversation that followed—or as much as Biggles could hear of it—seemed perfectly natural to him, and he watched the man’s return to the room with mixed feelings. Then an idea struck him, and he stepped forward.
“I called on the Escadrille Fifty-eight the other day, on my way back from seeing a friend in twenty-seven squadron, at Auchez,” he said. “I got a bit off my course, and seeing the aerodrome, I dropped in to ask the way.”
He paused to let the words sink in, aware that Major Paynter had turned a curious eye on him.
“I met a very charming officer there,” he continued. “He went out of his way to do all he could for me. His name was Jacques Fabrier—Sous-lieutenant Jaques Fabrier. You would know him, of course?”
The French officer did not turn to meet Biggles’ eyes, but he let out a hearty laugh.
“Of course!” he cried. “My old friend Jacques, the little son of a cabbage. He is a great one—yes?”
“A topping fellow. I thought you would know him,” replied Biggles warmly. But inwardly his heart was anything but warm, for the man was lying. Biggles had never been near Soyons des Dames, and he had invented the name Jacques Fabrier on the spur of the moment.
He had used it to bait his trap, and the Frenchman had fallen into it. That he was not the man he claimed to be was now certain. Yet why should he lie? What object could he have in thus deliberately misrepresenting himself?
There was only one answer to the question. The man was a spy. Even as the words rose unbidden to his lips, Biggles knew that the thought had been in the back of his mind from the moment he had glimpsed the man’s real character behind the face that laughed and the eyes that did not.
Biggles walked over to the window and stared with unseeing eyes across the vista of wintry desolation. Was he fancying things? Was he letting his imagination run away with him? It was one thing for an officer to drop into the mess and tell an untruth, but quite another matter to condemn him as a spy on that account. What was the sum total of his evidence?
Simply the matter of that one queer look when the Major came in, and the one deliberate lie he had told. Biggles realised that this was all very flimsy, yet he could find no satisfactory reason to explain why the man, a French officer, should claim to belong to an Escadrille which events suggested was not his squadron at all.
Biggles felt that his reasoning was going round in circles, yet he could not rid himself of the uneasy feeling that something was wrong somewhere. Once more he returned to the fireside circle, where the conversation had now turned to the relative performances of British and French aeroplanes. If the French officer was a spy, then he was gathering important information with a vengeance, thought Biggles.
He noticed that the man seldom spoke, and when he did it was to ask a question rather than impart information.
Biggles gazed thoughtfully into the fire, wondering what he could do to prove whether or not his suspicions were correct. The C.O. had left the room to attend a conference at Wing Headquarters, or he would have found him and told him what he suspected.
What had the man said his name was over the telephone? Marcel Vouvray. Could he verify that? Not by using the telephone in the hall, for his conversation would be overheard by the officers in the room. Could he telephone from the squadron office? That would make the Recording Officer curious, and he naturally hesitated to take the risk of making a fool of himself.
In any case his French was not good enough to undertake a conversation with officers who might not know a word of English. There was no time to fly to Soyons des Dames, even if the weather improved, because the Frenchman would certainly have taken his departure before he could get back. No, that would not do.
He thought hard for a few minutes, and then, with a nod and an inclination of his head to Mark, he left the room.
Mark followed him wonderingly. “What’s the matter?” he asked, looking at Biggles’ tense face, when they were in the hall.
“Listen, Mark,” whispered Biggles earnestly. “I may be making a mountain out of a molehill, but that fellow in there is not what he pretends to be. I believe he’s a spy.”
“A sp—”
Biggles clapped his hand over Mark’s mouth before he could say the word.
“Quietly!” he hissed. “Do you want him to hear you? You remember me telling him that yarn about Jacques Fabrier—he said he knew him? Well, there’s no such person—at least, not that I’m aware of. That makes him out a liar, if nothing else. And have we any proof that he is what he says he is? What could be easier than for a Hun to slip across the Lines in this soup”—he indicated the lowering clouds with a jab of his thumb—“in a captured French machine and in a French uniform? Why, it would be as easy as A B C —and there are those fellows in there telling him all there is to know about our new equipment. That information is worth the lives of a hundred spies to Germany!”
“What are you going to do about it?” asked Mark, a trifle breathlessly. “Arrest him?”
“And then find I’ve made a mistake,” retorted Biggles. “A pretty mess that would be.”
“What then?”
“I can only think of one thing to do. The moment these clouds lift he’ll be off, you mark my words, and we shall never see him again; nor will anyone else this side of the Line. He says he is going to Soyons des Dames, and I’m thundering well going to see that he does go there!”
“How?”
“You watch me, and play up when I give you the cue. I’m going to fly him to Soyons in the front seat of my machine. If he is genuine, he can’t object to being taken home; if he isn’t, well, I’ve got him. Somehow or other I’m going to get him into the air, and the moment we are off the ground I want you to ring up Wing—or get Toddy to do it—and tell them what I suspect. Ask them to tell the C.O. of French Escadrille Fifty-eight that one of his pilots, named Marcel Vouvray, has reported here, and we are bringing him home. If there is no pilot of that name in the squadron they’ll say so, and then we can tell them to have an escort ready on the aerodrome to meet us when we land.”
“But how are you going to get him into the F.E.?”
“Wait and see. I haven’t time to explain now. The clouds are lifting, I believe, so I’ve no time to lose. I’m going up to the sheds now, where I can keep an eye on his Spad. I feel better now that you know about this; you can watch how things pan out.”
“I will,” agreed Mark.
Biggles took his flying-coat, cap, and goggles from their peg in the hall, then slipped along to his room. He opened a drawer, took out his automatic, which he did not normally carry, slipped it into his pocket, and walked quickly to the hangars.
“Sergeant Hopkins!” he called sharply, as he reached “A” Flight sheds.
“Here, sir!” The sergean
t climbed down from an engine on which he had been working, and came towards him.
“Sergeant,” went on Biggles quickly, “something funny is going on. I can’t tell you what it is, but I’m just mentioning this so that if you think my behaviour is odd you will know I haven’t gone crazy. Take no notice; you may understand later on. First of all, the Spad.” He walked over to where the French machine was standing in the centre of a group of interested mechanics. “Dismiss the men,” he said quietly.
“All right, get back to your work all of you—don’t stand gaping here!” roared the N.C.O. “Get and wash down 4391, some of you.”
The mechanics departed at the double.
Biggles eyed the Spad thoughtfully. “I’ve got to put this machine out of action for a bit,” he muttered, “but it must be something that you can repair easily. What is the best thing I can do?”
“Puncture a tyre, I should think, sir, would be easiest.”
“Then lend me that screwdriver of yours a minute.” Biggles took the tool and drove it with all his force into the tyre. There was a sharp hiss of escaping air as he withdrew it.
“That’s that!” he said, with satisfaction. “Now get the tyre off as quickly as you can, but don’t hurry about repairing it unless the weather starts to improve. If the French officer comes along, what I want you to say is that you’ve only just discovered the puncture, so you thought you’d better see about repairing it right away. Got that? Good. Now see about getting my machine out. Get it on the tarmac with the engine ticking over, just as if I was going to take it up for a test flight. Look alive, the clouds are lifting fast, and the French officer may be along here any minute.”
“I get you, sir,” replied the N.C.O. briskly. Then, turning and raising his voice: “Casey—Bright— Williams—Field—get 4391 outside and started up. Brown—Courtenay—start getting the tyre off this Spad. Come on!”
