Followed by:
Two weeks after being given his ‘wings’, Albert was posted to France. Unbeknown to him, he had arrived during one of the darkest hours for the RFC, yet he survived his first months, and his aggressiveness quickly led him to becoming an established fighter pilot with an increasing number of ‘kills’. Stories of his successes soon began to spread and the British press began to take notice of this new ‘hero of the air’. However, his letters home and the memoirs of officers who knew him show a much darker side. His younger brother, Cyril, eager to follow in his brother’s footsteps, had expressed an interest in joining the RFC. In a letter home Albert pleads:
I find this incredibly moving – perhaps because I too have younger brothers, but also because of his apparent resignation to his fate. He goes on to say:
Like most airmen of the First World War, Albert understood that it was only a matter of time before he too fell victim. Mick Manock, another fighter ace, was once asked what he intended to do after the war. He simply replied that there would be no ‘after the war’ for a fighter pilot.
As the weeks went by, the constant strain began to tell on Albert. This was before the effects of post-traumatic stress were understood, and reading his letters, you can see Albert beginning to show some very odd behaviour. There is a photo of him building what looks like a makeshift garden shed. In fact, Albert had decided that instead of living in billets with the other pilots, he would build and live in a hut next to his aeroplane, preferring to live in solitude and in a constant state of readiness. This solitude was not just limited to his time on the ground; Albert refused to fly with wingmen, preferring ‘lone wolf’ missions. There are accounts of him circling over German airfields, goading the enemy fighters to come up to meet him. On one occasion, twelve enemy aircraft came up to ward off the lone fighter, but Albert was undeterred by numerical odds. In the battle that followed, his ignition leads were slashed by enemy fire and his engine seized; refusing to surrender, he kept firing until his guns went silent. With a dead engine and no ammunition, Albert pulled out his Colt automatic pistol and, in his frustration, emptied a full clip at his opponents. After a similar escapade, the recording officer describes Albert’s return to the squadron.
It’s easy to forget that Albert was still only twenty years old. Knowing that his nerves were on the brink of snapping and in desperate need of rest, he requested leave to go home. The leave was granted, but it was far from the rest he so desperately needed. Albert’s success had come at a time when the British public were still reeling from the losses on the Somme. The British government needed a distraction, a symbol of hope they could exploit to raise morale on the Home Front. Unwittingly, Albert had become that symbol: a whirlwind of photographers and newspaper journalists greeted him at his front door. He found he couldn’t walk down the street without people stopping him, and soon took to wearing his civilian clothes to try and reclaim some anonymity. His ‘restful’ leave was filled with a blur of formal events, including one at Buckingham Palace to receive his Military Cross and DSO. Reading his letters, I believe it was this exploitation when home on leave that finally pushed Albert over the edge. During one event he is said to have whispered to his father, ‘I’d sooner face a Hun in the air than all this.’
Albert secured a posting back to France, but he appeared to know that he would be leaving for the last time. During his last visit home, he slipped quietly up to his room, carefully wrapped all his belongings and private papers, and left them in neat piles. Finally, he left a note to his mother with instructions on how his personal affairs should be handled.
Deprived of his rest, Albert arrived back in France. He is said to have complained to his CO that he was ‘Taking unnecessary risks of late.’ One diary entry simply says:
At the time Albert had a total of thirty-eight victories, and his CO agreed that when he reached forty he would be granted another period’s leave. He explains as much that night in the last letter he would ever write to his father. He finishes with:
I find these last lines particularly poignant. Perhaps I read too much into them, but I like to think that they show some premonition.
Albert would be killed the following day.
He reached his total of forty kills on the morning of 7 May 1917. Due to leave for home in a matter of days, he tended the small garden he had dug next to his hut before taking off with the rest of his flight for a scheduled photographic reconnaissance mission. Unknown to Albert, in his absence, the squadron major was busy putting together Albert’s recommendation for a Victoria Cross.
Crossing the German lines, the squadron soon ran into enemy planes, and Albert became locked in a dogfight with a particularly skilled German pilot. Little did he know that the enemy squadron was that of the famous Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen, and the pilot he was facing was the Baron’s own brother, Lothar von Richthofen. In the fight that followed, one of Albert’s bullets pierced Lothar’s fuel tank and he was forced to make an emergency landing in a field below. Albert’s squadron-mate Cecil Crowe then watched as Albert zoomed up, victorious, into a dark thundercloud before appearing again seconds later, upside-down, with a dead prop; he crashed into the ground below.
A local farm girl, Mademoiselle Cécile Deloffre, was the first on the scene. She lifted him, unconscious but still breathing, out of the broken wreckage of his machine, and held him. Albert lived only a few minutes, opening his eyes just once.
Richthofen was credited with shooting Albert down, but to this day the real reasons for his death are unknown. On inspection, there was no damage to himself or his machine from enemy fire, and with Ball’s experience it’s hard to believe it was pilot error. After the war his grief-stricken father, desperate for answers, travelled to interview a Belgian nurse who had worked in the field hospital where Albert’s body had been taken. She told him that Albert had died from a heart attack just prior to crashing into the ground. Albert’s father chose to believe her, and subsequently refused to hear any other explanation.
The Germans, who dubbed Albert ‘the English Richthofen’, gave him a funeral with full military honours, a rare sign of respect at this stage in the war. Over the grave they inscribed the words:
FALLEN IN AIR COMBAT FOR HIS FATHERLAND ENGLISH PILOT CAPTAIN ALBERT BALL
Back home in England, a memorial service was held for the fallen hero and Albert was posthumously awarded the VC. Large crowds lined the streets of his native Nottingham, yet his mother, overcome with grief, could not face attending. A fellow pilot who flew with him on his last flight commented, ‘I see they have given him the VC. Of course he won it a dozen times over – the whole squadron knows that.’
His parents left his room exactly as it was for ten years, just in case.
BEN ELTON – Comedian, author, actor and director
From the time of its first publication in 1929, All Quiet on the Western Front has been described as an ‘anti-war novel’. But all its author, Erich Maria Remarque, ever hoped to do was give a true picture of the experiences of an ordinary soldier in the trenches. He does this so well, and those experiences were so appalling, that the result could scarcely be seen as anything other than ‘anti’ war.
But it’s not all grim. The book is also a wonderfully human story filled with warm, compelling characters and vividly descriptive passages showing not just the horror of life at the front but also its tender, and even funny, side. I read the book in my teens, and forty years later still recall the brilliant scene where Remarque describes the curious peace and comradely conviviality of a platoon communal smoke and crap.
Apart from life in the trenches, the other principal theme of the book is how alien soldiers felt when on leave, and how impossible they found it to convey anything of what they were going through to the people back home. This is a very common theme of Great War writing. All the sabre-rattling and jingoism took place amongst civilians and armchair warriors; there was almost none of it at the front.
All Quiet on the Western F
ront is a German book, and perhaps I feel drawn to it because one of my grandfathers was a German soldier from 1914 to 1918; he even won an Iron Cross (third class)! His story is a good illustration of the irony and futility of war because, as a Jew, this decorated German veteran was later forced to flee Nazi Germany. He was lucky; many of his relatives were murdered.
Perhaps the best recommendation of all I can make for All Quiet on the Western Front is that the Nazis hated it. It was one of the first books they banned and publicly burned after seizing power. Read it for that reason alone!
PREFACE TO ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT
This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.
Erich Maria Remarque
CAROLINE WYATT – Journalist
All Quiet on the Western Front is a book that I first read when I was seventeen, just a little bit younger than the novel’s narrator, Paul. I was studying German at school, and living in West Berlin at the time, and it helped me understand the First World War from a German soldier’s point of view.
It was also the book that I took with me when, many years later, in 2007, I went to Helmand in Afghanistan as a reporter, to embed with British troops that Christmas. I read it while staying at a cold forward operating base with my BBC cameraman, Chris Parkinson. We were filming with British forces who were the same age as Paul, and who were daily going out on patrol, even on Christmas Day, in hostile territory, doubtless feeling some of the same sort of fear, yet having to confront it and overcome it every single day.
Talking to the young Royal Marines and filming with them during the day, and then reading the book late at night by torchlight as I tried to get to sleep, shivering in my sleeping bag, gave the novel a whole new meaning and resonance for me, as well as proof of the timeless truths that it tells about war – any war – and the strange mixture of fear, boredom, terror – and unexpected laughter, jokes and the love of life that accompany armed conflict.
Whatever the year, and whatever the conflict, the soldiers who fight or die or are wounded will probably all feel the emotions that this young German soldier expresses in the novel – from occasional exhilaration to sheer paralysing terror. And perhaps, like Paul, soldiers today still find courage within themselves to conquer their fears – not by following orders or ideals, but thanks to their comrades.
I thought of the book again when we talked a few years later to a young infantryman, James McKie, who was awarded a medal for his bravery in Helmand. He saved the lives of several of his comrades when he picked up a hand grenade – thrown by the Taliban – which had landed on the roof they were on. He picked it up and threw it back at the insurgents seconds before it went off. When I asked him whether he’d been scared, he just said that he hadn’t had time – all he could think of was making sure that his mates were all right.
In this extract, Paul has come back from leave; on his first patrol since his return, he is petrified and hides in a trench. But then he hears the voices of his comrades.
FROM ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT
I am fighting a crazy, confused battle. I want to get out of my hollow in the ground and I keep on slipping back in; I say to myself, ‘You’ve got to, it’s to do with your mates, not some stupid order,’ and straight after that: ‘So what? I’ve only got the one life to lose.’
Suddenly a surprising warmth comes over me. Those voices, those few soft words, those footsteps in the trench behind me tear me with a jolt away from the terrible feeling of isolation that goes with the fear of death, to which I nearly succumbed. Those voices mean more than my life, more than mothering and fear, they are the strongest and most protective thing that there is: they are the voices of my pals.
I’m no longer a shivering scrap of humanity alone in the dark – I belong to them and they to me, we all share the same fear and the same life, and we are bound to each other in a strong and simple way. I want to press my face into them, those voices, those few words that saved me, and which will be my support.
Erich Maria Remarque
CATHY NEWMAN – Journalist
In 1915, twenty-year-old journalist Dorothy Lawrence fulfilled her ambition to see action on the Western Front – by pretending to be a man. It was the only way she could do it.
Frustrated by her editor’s refusal to employ her as a war correspondent, Lawrence travelled to Paris, where two soldiers she met in a café helped her by smuggling out items of uniform with their washing. Having darkened her skin with furniture polish and bulked out her shoulders with sacking, she made her way towards the front with faked papers identifying her as Denis Smith, 1st Battalion Leicestershire Regiment.
The plan worked well – until, quite suddenly, it didn’t. Lawrence befriended a soldier called Tom Dunn, who risked court martial by smuggling her into the trenches. Lawrence worked alongside Dunn laying mines in no man’s land, a few hundred yards from the German trenches. But the stress of the job triggered panic attacks and fainting fits, and after ten days she gave herself up, worried that by staying she might unwittingly endanger her colleagues.
The First World War might have been a ‘total war’, but in Britain at least that didn’t extend to women being allowed to fight. For the most part they ‘kept the home fires burning’, working in munitions factories or, at the other end of the spectrum, knitting socks for soldiers. In one sense, Lawrence’s story was a bit of a setback for feminism – she gave up, after all. But imagine the extra stress of having to conceal your true identity under those conditions. Without that burden, there’s every reason to suppose Lawrence would have been as capable as the men – especially when you consider what women did, with the government’s blessing, on the Western Front.
Which brings me to my chosen extract, from Helen Zenna Smith’s brilliant, horrifying Not So Quiet – one of my favourite books about the war.
Helen Zenna Smith was the pen-name of a journalist called Evadne Price. Asked by a publisher to write a parody of Erich Remarque’s famous 1929 novel All Quiet on the Western Front, Price decided she would rather write a serious work which gave an honest account of the role women had played in the Great War. (All Quiet . . . was, she thought, a ‘wonderful book’ which ‘anybody would be mad to make fun of’.)
To make her novel as realistic as possible, she used as her starting point the diary of a real-life ambulance-driver in France, Winifred Constance Young. Young had wanted to publish a memoir of her experiences, but worried about embarrassing her family, who didn’t want to hear about the awful things she had endured. Price turned Young’s writing into a work of fiction – and it was a great success.
Published in 1930, it was a bestseller and won the Prix Séverigne as ‘the novel most calculated to promote international peace’.
In 1914, women who wanted to join the services had limited options. If they were over twenty-three, they could be Voluntary Aid Detachments (VADs) – semi-trained assistant nurses, of whom there were 38,000 by the time the war ended. Otherwise they could, like the heroines of Not So Quiet, be FANYs: members of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry – ambulance-drivers who ferried the wounded from the front line to field hospitals.
The extract I’ve chosen makes quite clear what grim work this was: ‘The foulest and most disgusting job it is possible to imagine.’
And bear in mind, the ‘FANYs’ were usually well-to-do women who in many cases had never left the family home before. What they found in France must have shocked them to the core. The cramped, filthy conditions, awful food and lack of sleep were hard enough to bear; but add to that the sight (and sound, and smell) of dying men with unimaginably damaged bodies. But they had to simply get on with it – ‘no time for squeamishness’.
Amid the horror, though, there is camaraderie. Firm friendships are made, and Price captures the off-duty mome
nts of levity frankly and with fantastic wit.
FROM NOT SO QUIET
Cleaning an ambulance is the foulest and most disgusting job it is possible to imagine. We are unanimous on this point. Even yet we hardened old-timers cannot manage it without ‘catting’ on exceptionally bad mornings. We do not mind cleaning the engines, doing repairs and keeping the outsides presentable – it is dealing with the insides we hate.
The stench that comes out as we open the doors each morning nearly knocks us down. Pools of stale vomit from the poor wretches we have carried the night before, corners the sitters have turned into temporary lavatories for all purposes, blood and mud and vermin and the stale stench of stinking trench feet and gangrenous wounds. Poor souls, they cannot help it. No one blames them. Half the time they are unconscious of what they are doing, wracked with pain and jolted about on the rough roads, for, try as we may – and the cases all agree that women drivers are ten times more thoughtful than the men drivers – we cannot altogether evade the snow-covered stones and potholes.
How we dread the morning clean-out of the insides of our cars, we gently-bred, educated women they insist on so rigidly for this work that apparently cannot be done by women incapable of speaking English with a public-school accent!
‘Our ambulance women take entire control of their cars, doing all running repairs and all cleaning.’
Only Remembered Page 4
