Up Front

Thirty-three kills.

Eight years after the Armistice, thousands of vets — even police officers like myself, who still had charge of firearms — were able to go weeks or months at a time without thinking about soldiering. There were so many newer things to think about — sheiks and flappers, insulin and contract bridge, the radio-relayed voices of Al Jolson and Binnie Hale. Not to mention feats of aviation. Alcock and Brown’s crossing of the Atlantic, Alan Cobham’s flight to Australia, and the exploits of Christopher “Kip” Whitehead.

But for me, with Kip it was different. He hadn’t let his war record define him, but even to say as much was to bring that record to mind.

Unlike so many ace fighter pilots, Whitehead hadn’t let peace throw him into a tailspin. Not that I was on intimate terms with the man. I’d only met him at Remembrance Day observances — plus that one time when as investigating officer I’d helped him recover a rather costly stolen car. But as far as I could see he’d mastered the art of taking orders from bureaucrats untried in battle. No one who’d partied with him suggested he was either boozy or quarrelsome. Much as he’d taken to combat, Kip appeared not to have brought back to this side of the Atlantic any surplus aggressive spirit that could injure his countrymen, his loved ones, or himself.

Aggressive spirit he’d had in spades in wartime, the measure of it trumpeted in every news story. Thirty-three Austro-Hungarian pilots machine-gunned or driven down out of control. Or burned alive in their machines. Even allowing for some padding of the numbers, that’s a toll to make you think. In peacetime, the only man to match it would be the public hangman. I’m not calling Whitehead an executioner. He was a pilot; we were at war. Where he sat, it was kill or be killed. But to wear that number for the rest of your life...? I’m not sure how I’d have borne up.

We in the infantry didn’t especially keep track, neither I nor the soldiers I led. Sometimes you just didn’t know if the bullet or bomb you sent off found its man. And then the targets were less valuable. In the air, every kill meant the destruction of a plane worth upwards of £5,000. Every enemy pilot was an officer, an asset in whom specialized training had been invested. Can you compare those prizes with the conscript private in his first trench, his few, cheap weapons to be stripped from his corpse for reuse by the next to die?

I’m not saying Kip’s conquests were any cause for regret. I admired them. As a fighter on the same side (albeit on a different front), I was grateful for them. At the same time, mention of his name tended to prepare my ear for sounds of battle.

Be they ever so faint.