A month or so after I arrived, we had a visitor to the base. He flew in on another Anson and descended, stiff-legged and walking with a stick — dressed in a neat new Wing Commander’s uniform. But the fingers clutching the stick were like claws. And his face was like nothing I had ever seen.
A clown-face as though cut from pink rubber, ridged with scar-tissue. One eye under a puckered eyelid, the other covered with a black patch; the nose jutting out and fresh with stitches. The mouth was a slit between thin crooked lips, and when he took his cap off his pink ridged scalp showed little tufts of hair; eyebrow’s looking like smudge-marks of charcoal.
A face destroyed by fire.
He was Jingo’s former Blue Section leader, Loring Derwent de Chandos, younger son of a duke, bloodline stretching back to the Norman Conquest. His family had lost four sons in World War One; this war, one at Dunkirk, one at El Alamein, third at the D-Day landings. Then a Jerry incendiary cannon-shell hits bang-on — and the fighter cockpit becomes a blast furnace.
So, Loring Derwent de Chandos, whose family goes back that thousand years, manages to bale out. But not before the searing flames have licked the flesh greedily from his body. He was being patchworked back together with skin grafts, but there was a limit to what they could do. So he pulled his upper-class connections to get back and visit us.
Tales were told, and there was laughter, but there was a hollow note to the merriment.
It was nearly midnight when Loring left, and most of us broke up — dawn patrol at 5 a.m. Jingo slouched back at a table, so I turned again, sensing that all was not well. He had a cup of cold coffee in his hands and sat there looking at it.
‘Up at sparrow-fart tomorrow morning, Jingo.’
He nodded for me to sit down. ‘You lay off the sauce, Gus, I notice. Good thinking. All those buggers thinking one more beer doesn’t matter — it will tomorrow, up at ceiling and a second longer to react.’
He sipped the cold coffee and grimaced. ‘Know the first kite I ever flew? — and I don’t mean the bloody awful Bristols I trained on.’
I didn’t of course. The mess was nearly empty, Linus quietly finishing a tune on his harmonica. He slipped it into his pocket and walked out. A sudden roar from outside and I judged the boys had caught Nessie and, from the outraged yells, were debagging him. He would find his trousers tomorrow in the usual place, flying from the flagpole.
‘Hurricanes.’ Jingo seemed not to have heard the noise. ‘Nice enough kite, eight 303 pop-guns and outclassed by the ME-109s. Early models had one real problem, know what it was?’
‘No, Jingo.’
‘Want me to tell you?’
‘Sure.’
Although I wasn’t sure what this was leading to. Jingo seldom talked about the early days, flying outclassed fighters against the best Jerry had to offer.
‘One real problem the Hurricane had, tended to catch fire easily. You know those linen patches on the gun-muzzles — get blown off when they fire, right? Well, the wing tanks weren’t sealed off to the main body. So — sometimes — those patches are set alight, slipstream sucks them back into the muzzle, petrol tank lights and the cockpit becomes a blowtorch.’
‘Sounds horrible.’
‘Only three seconds to bale out, of course it took longer. Happened to a good mate of mine, Pat Rudd, hit the ground like a slab of roast meat. Like poor Loring but worse. Pat had no face — no eyes and I funked going to see him. Started carrying a gun after that.’
‘A gun?’
Jingo nodded. There was a final roar from outside and Nessie’s frenzied cursing died away. ‘I had nightmares about being burned. Rather blow my brains out.’
I tried to joke, to lighten this, and stifled a yawn. It was bloody cold and I was tired. ‘Maybe I should carry one.’
‘Maybe, Gus. Go on, hit the sack.’
He remained there, lost in thought, not even responding to my ‘good night’. Sometimes he sat up all night: four years of war would carry a lot of bad dreams. So I thought about carrying a gun. When you’re young, you don’t think about those things — till you see someone like Loring and then it comes home.
And a gun did come into my life. And that changed the rest of my life forever.
Jingo had taken a sort of liking to me; maybe since the time I helped him at the gun-emplacement on that first day. Then I became his wingman and learned to think as quickly as him. So that made us a good team.
Anyway, come this time in midwinter when he was called up to the front-line to check out a crashed Jerry fighter; intelligence people thought it had some new features. So we took a jeep up because Jingo wanted me along: ‘You’re not that bright Gus, but you might spot something’ — which in Jingo-speak was almost a compliment. He used a sort of jocular rudeness to keep people at a distance.
And right now, the front-line was unmoving because winter froze everything solid. On the way, we passed huddled men in gunpits, their breath in frosty streams around them. I waved once or twice but they did not wave back.
The forward headquarters was a farmhouse, one end smashed open and the windows boarded up. Near it a strange humped shape with two white projections: a deep-frozen cow with snow-covered horns.
A red-faced sergeant, breathing icy clouds, came out. His cold breath stinking of alcohol, a blanket wrapped over his greatcoat, his head wrapped in a woollen balaclava helmet and scarf, steel helmet perched on top. He jerks a thumb onward.
‘Half a mile up, better to walk, Jerry’s got a Forty-three on the road somewhere.’ A Riegel 43 road-mine. Riegel 43s are for taking out tanks, they’re about a metre long and a few centimetres thick.
‘Jeeze,’ grunts Jingo, ‘run over that and they won’t find the soles of our shoes.’
So we decided to walk.
We had our greatcoats on, thick sweaters and thick wool underwear. But the cold struck through like a sword; it even hurt to breathe because ice-needles stabbed at our throats. Slogging up the road, the icy slush filling our boots. Jingo tripped and cursed, kicking at something long and muddy in the slush — a frozen arm.
‘There’ll be a hell of a stink here when the thaw sets in,’ he grunted. ‘Bodies, guts, limbs everywhere.’
The Germans pushed through here last month. The Ardennes offensive, so-called ‘Battle of the Bulge’. Hitler’s last big push west — although we didn’t know it then. Our generals had left this sector ‘lightly manned’, then six Jerry divisions burst through. Result: some nine thousand Allied dead and sixteen thousand prisoners, one Yank regiment surrendering en masse. One fighter squadron losing nearly all its planes, hit at take-off.
So lots of bodies here now, waiting for the Spring thaw. We walked on and when I tripped on something in the icy mud, I did not look down. We were at a line of dugouts now. Soldiers there, sheltering and not looking up as we passed. They were listening to the dull distant sound of artillery fire and sudden whine of an oncoming shell. Even winter did not freeze out that menace.
These weren’t the cheerful troops of the newsreels, beating the cold, wrapped in nice and warm and clutching big tin mugs of steaming hot coffee. Their mittened hands clutching weapons, clear-eyed and ready for Jerry. These were real soldiers: their layers of clothing filthy and crawling with lice, not changed for weeks. Sheltering in dugouts or slit trenches, chipped from the frozen soil.
What we were looking for is just ahead and over in a field. A Focke-Wulf 190, shot and crashed the previous night.
No pilot likes seeing a crashed aircraft — it brings the reality of fighting too damned close. This one lay broken-winged, the long mottled snout pushing into a pile of snow, propeller blades snapped off at the impact. Jingo spat and walked around the fighter, his bootprints marking a deep brown in the white snow. He spat again and shook his head.
‘Just another long-nosed job. Take a look inside, Gus: log book, maps.’
I didn’t expect to find any. We even empty our pockets before a flight. So I jumped up onto the wing, my feet skidding. The canopy was smashed open and one look inside was enough. The pilot was still there, his head — what was left of it — smashed into the control panel.
I felt in the side-pockets of the cockpit. My fingers touched something hard and I pulled it out, scrambled off the wing, feeling sick. That unknown German pilot would add his stink to the spring thaw too. I held out what I had found to Jingo: a long-barrelled German automatic in its holster.
Jingo’s eyes gleamed. ‘Hey, this is a collector’s item.’ As he pulled it out of the holster, a little black-covered book came away too. ‘Parabellum 8mm Luger with a wooden grip. Yours now, Gus.’
I stuck the pistol away in my layers of clothing. Jingo was looking at the little book, a diary of sorts. ‘So. His name was Erlich Knopf, aged thirty, wife and two kids, quantity surveyor before the war, lived in Heidelberg. His wife is Gerda — rather his widow. She’ll have got her nice little card by now.’
Erlich the quantity surveyor would sit in his cockpit until spring. What was left of him would end up in some hastily-dug common grave. Jingo flicked the little book back into the cockpit and we set off back to headquarters. Giving that body a name and a family made him uncomfortably close to us. Neither of us talked.
Back at the airfield, Jingo borrowed the Luger and returned it a day later. He’d carved my name in the wooden butt, the ‘s’ of Gus scored like the German S.S. rune. He gave a savage little chuckle as he did.
‘Might bring you luck, old son.’
It would bring me luck — of a kind. I was lucky not to see a month or so ahead. Or the rest of my life, for that matter.