Dicken’s first nights as a soldier were spent under canvas, fidgeting in frozen fitful dozes until the trembling call of Reveille proclaimed the beginning of a new day.
His service with the Royal Garrison Artillery, which was what he discovered he had joined, started with three weeks pounding the square at Aldershot, boring hours peeling potatoes on cookhouse fatigues, and trying to ignore the agony of feet blistered by new ammunition boots. There was no mention of commissions.
“Part of the horrors of war,” he wrote to Zoë. “Like bully beef.”
Things improved when he was sent on a wireless course. Compared with what he’d trained on, the army wireless set was crude. It consisted chiefly of a crystal, a cat’s whisker and a simple inductance coil, all enclosed in a wooden box. The aerial was a sixty-foot length of wire slung between two masts and the whole apparatus was intended for use with an artillery spotting plane of the Royal Flying Corps.
Eventually he found himself part of a newly-formed Kitchener Army battery, mostly composed of Londoners. There was little glamour attached to the big guns, however. Unlike those of the field artillery, they were not moved to dangerous points in the fighting by horses at the gallop, but were laboriously towed into position well behind the line by lorries or caterpillar tractors, while wireless reports were mere informal messages with little form or pattern.
When the battery was sent to France, Dicken was with the advance party. The officer went ahead with the sergeant searching for billets and left the rest of them to find their own way forward. At midday they stopped at a village called Ruy which had never had British soldiers through it before and the Maire and his officials turned out wearing tricolour sashes, while the villagers greeted them with the “Marseillaise”, to which they replied with a song of their own.
“I don’t want to be a soldier
I don’t want to go to war
I’d rather hang around
Piccadilly Underground
Living on the earnings of a high-born lady.”
“Are we down-hearted?” somebody at the back yelled.
“No-o-o!”
The French seemed to think it was part of the National Anthem and stood in silence with their heads uncovered.
It took them three days to reach their base near Armentières. As they rumbled in lorries along the interminably straight French roads through lines of poplars in full leaf, the officer turned up again to lead them to a farm where one of the Cockney gunners promptly helped himself to a chicken.
“It’s not looting,” Dicken grinned. “It attacked us and we had to kill it in self-defence.”
They cooked it after dark on a fire built with wood from a nearby copse where nightingales were singing – “Them bloody sparrers,” someone said disgustedly – and Dicken was just making himself comfortable in a loft above the cow byre when he heard his name called.
“Pack your kit,” the sergeant told him.
“We’ve only just arrived, Sarge!”
“Well, now you’re on your way again. You’re going to work with the Flying Corps.”
Dicken’s heart leaped. It had never been with the great guns. “To fly?” he asked.
The sergeant gave him a cold look. “Who the hell do you think you are?” he said. “You’re going for a course in battery and aircraft communication. They’re developing a new system.”
He arrived at the squadron at around midnight and was given a space in a tent. The following morning he was wakened by the dull rumble of an idling engine and, to his astonishment found the wingtip of an airplane trembling within three feet of the tent flap. It seemed enormous, powerful and tremendously strong and he decided he had never seen such a frightening contrivance in his life. He couldn’t imagine for a minute that it was tuned with a tuning fork or could be overbalanced by any sudden movement of its crew.
It didn’t take him long to discover how different the RFC was from the rest of the army. The artillery men had been chosen for their ability to lift huge shells and haul guns around, and, despite the fact that the battery was composed almost entirely of Hostilities Only men like Dicken, its officers, mostly ex-Regulars dragged out of retirement, tried hard to fit it into the regulations of the old army. It appeared to be impossible to be efficient without being polished to within an inch of your life, and it was important to stand like a ramrod to salute, to ask permission to speak, even, it seemed to Dicken, to breathe.
The RFC had no traditions at all. Its men were all craftsmen – riggers, fitters, mechanics, wireless operators, even foundrymen, blacksmiths, carpenters and tailors – and were recruited for no other reason than to repair damaged aircraft. They were streets ahead of the rest of the army for intelligence, and spit and polish were considered the least important of their duties. They were there to keep the airplanes flying and nothing else, and seemed totally unconcerned that the commandeered vans that had carried their equipment to France still bore on their sides the advertisements of their former owners – Lazenby’s Sauce, Peek Frean’s Biscuits, Stephens’ Ink. It was as if they were openly showing their indifference to the rest of the uniformed world.
The airplanes operated from a field full of cows which had to be driven to one side when they wanted to take off, and they were already a vast improvement on the fragile contraptions which had landed in France the previous year, many of them put together from parts of differing machines and with top speeds that varied from stalling by no more than a few miles an hour.
One flight consisted of Morane two-seaters, waspish-looking machines, short-tempered and dangerous, with a speed that made them invulnerable to enemy attack. A second flight had Parasols, treacherous, unstable, high-winged monoplanes of bad design, whose diminutive tails made their natural position in the air a vertical nose-dive.
The third flight was equipped with BE2cs, narrow-bodied aircraft whose fuselages were so slender the tails seemed to be detached and following on behind. They were tall and wide-winged, their motors mounted outside, and were not very popular because, with the propeller, the tanks and the motor all in the way, it was impossible to see where you were going. Their maximum altitude was no more than 6000 feet and the only offensive weapons they carried were the revolvers worn by pilots and observers. To Dicken they seemed modern enough to be straight out of Jules Verne or H G Wells.
As far as wireless was concerned, the RFC was streets ahead of the army both in equipment and the way they used it. The artillery’s happy-go-lucky manner of sending and receiving had been whittled down to the effective clock code, a system that was graphic and flexible and depended on unvarying values that were impossible to misinterpret. The target was considered to be the centre of a clock on which true north was twelve o’ clock, and imaginary circles drawn around the target represented different ranges and were identified by code letters so that it was possible to state where a shot had landed in a few Morse letters and numbers.
It involved Dicken in short flights to see what battery firing looked like. The calibrated maps were explained to him and, clad in overcoat and borrowed crash helmet, he even sent messages from the air, using a battery-powered transmitter in the observer’s cockpit.
As he worked, he began to wonder why he hadn’t joined the RFC and all his ideas of going to sea sank without trace with his ambition of a commission in the artillery. All he could think of now was soaring over the enemy trenches amid a storm of anti-aircraft fire to send back the all-important message which would result in winning the war.
For the first time since he had put on khaki he found himself enjoying himself. The RFC men were proud of their skill, and the officers seemed human, happily discussing rigging and engines with their men on easy terms. Even Morton, the captain in command, was not above getting into a discussion on the merits of an airplane, and in his pigheaded tenacity, Dicken started daydreaming of becoming an observer.
The corporal in charge of the wireless section was a genial Regular called Handiside who had arrived in the Flying Corps from the Engineers, and his attitude was benevolent.
“How about wangling me a flight, Corp?” Dicken said.
“You’ve had a flight.”
“I mean a real flight. I once flew forty miles from Southampton to Shoreham.”
Handiside frowned. “What the hell are you doing in the artillery then?” He studied Dicken for a moment or two, his eyes almost fatherly. “I must say you know more about wireless than a lot of the observers. They’re mostly just ex-cavalry blokes who’ve had a quick course in Morse. Hang around tomorrow morning and I’ll see what I can do.”
Sleep, breakfast and early morning parade were hard to endure and Dicken was at the hangar the following morning, pretending to adjust wireless sets but all the time watching Handiside’s movements. When the pilots began to arrive, he saw him speak to one of them and his heart began to thump. The officer turned and studied him.
He was a tall, lean young second-lieutenant called Hatto, not much older than Dicken. He wore a monocle, dashing leather patches on his sleeves and, as an ex-cavalry man, wore a stock and canvas leggings and carried a riding whip. “Tell me you fancy a flight?” he said. “Hear you’ve been up with Arnold Vickery. I’ve heard of him.” His face broke into a smile that seemed to light up the hangar with its charm. “Couldn’t turn corners, I heard.”
“That’s right, sir. I helped fish him out of the Adur when he crashed. He’d had too much champagne, I think.”
Hatto laughed. “And why you? Why did he pick you for a passenger?”
“I was the lightest person he could think of. Besides–” Dicken hesitated “–I got to know him through a girl he knew.”
“Cherchez la femme, eh? Right, I’m about to do a test flight, so report to stores and draw an observer’s kit and nip into that machine over there.”
Racing to the stores, Dicken drew a leather coat, helmet and long flying boots and waddled out to the machine. As he climbed into the cockpit among the fumes of petrol and hot oil, a sergeant appeared alongside.
“CO’s compliments, sir,” he yelled to Hatto above the throbbing engine. “If she’s all right, you’re to do an artillery observation. Number 213 Battery. Same as yesterday.”
Hatto looked at Dicken. “That’s sunk us,” he observed.
“No, sir.” Dicken was in a panic he’d be left behind. “I know what to do. I’ve done it more than once.”
Hatto studied him for a moment, then he made up his mind. “Right,” he said. “Let’s go.”
Sitting under the quivering wings with the tall stacks of the exhausts in front of him, Dicken held his breath as the aircraft rolled across the grass and lifted into the air. His coat was too big and in his haste he had buttoned it wrongly; his scarf was too tight; and his helmet, caught by the blast from the propeller, showed a distressing tendency to take off on its own. But he was breathless with excitement as they circled the airdrome and, leaning over the side, watched fascinated as the patchwork of fields unrolled beneath. He had never been so high before. On his earlier flights he had not been above a hundred or so feet; now he could see men looking like ants and all around him only the limitless blue space of the sky.
Hatto lifted his goggles. “All right?” he mouthed.
Dicken stuck up his thumb in the way he’d seen other observers signal their readiness and began to tap out a message to the ground station. “Are you receiving me?”
Watching with his heart in his mouth, he could see no sign of acknowledgement below and he stared panic-stricken at his equipment, wondering what he’d done wrong. Then, far below, a tiny figure ran out of the wireless hut and laid strips of white on the grass in the form of an L to indicate the message had arrived. Flushed with success, he signalled to Hatto and the machine turned eastward, the wide wings catching the watery sun.
At 3000 feet Hatto swung on to course for the target, an intersection of trenches near a German fortification known as the Hohenzollern Redoubt. Just to the north Dicken could see a canal running south-east then curving around to head south-west in a dead straight line, overgrown and out of use for a lot of its length, its broken banks marked with shell craters and littered with debris. Then he saw a snake of brown, turned earth running alongside it that he guessed was a trench and realised they had reached the front line. Ahead of them was German territory and everybody below him now was watching him and wondering how to kill him.
It gave him a tremendous feeling of involvement. The land beneath, already battered and soured by the war, looked ancient, every building smashed, every wall that ran north and south broken by shelling. There wasn’t a fence for miles and it dawned on him they had all been removed by the chilled troops for fires. Even the trees had been blasted to stark stumps. The land had been scoured clean, its occupants hiding like moles beneath its surface, and it dawned on him that he was one of the reasons why; with aircraft crews able to see beyond the front line, it had suddenly become important to show no sign of what was going on.
Hatto was pointing to the watery sun. “Keep a look-out up there,” he shouted above the roar of the engine. “That’s where they come from. It’s a new dodge they’ve thought up.”
As Dicken turned his eyes upward, there was a violent crack nearby and the machine lurched sickeningly.
“Archie,” Hatto shouted cheerfully. “Anti-aircraft fire.”
The aircraft rocked as a puff of black smoke the size of a haystack drifted past beyond the end of the wing. A hole appeared in the fabric but Hatto seemed quite unperturbed. Alarmed, Dicken watched the battery’s shells land and signalled back. After ten rounds, Hatto swung the airplane toward home.
No longer in danger and with time to look around, Dicken became aware of the immensity of the sky. It was clean and clear and fresh and, swept clean by the breeze every day, was devoid of the detritus of war that covered the earth. And he was part of it, a supreme being untouched by dirt, feeling the sun before it reached anyone else.
Descending in a long glide over the trenches, they were fired on, entirely without success, by everyone in sight, and a few minutes later bumped gently across the turf, everything rattling and creaking as they came to a halt in front of the hangar. Still faraway-eyed, Dicken climbed to the ground, his ears full of the creak and tick of the cooling engine, and that night, wrapped in his blankets, he began to daydream again. Unfortunately, his dreams were cut short the following morning when he was told to report back to the battery with his course finished.
“I suppose I couldn’t stay with the RFC, could I, Corp?” he asked Handiside.
“’T’ ain’t anything to do with me,” Handiside said. “You’d have to put in an application for a transfer.”
Half-hoping he’d be sent to another squadron, Dicken returned to the battery to find his job had been changed. Artillery spotting was now being done at ground level from as far out in No Man’s Land as they could get.
“What about the aircraft?” he asked.
“Trying to do without them,” he was told. “We haven’t been having much success with wireless.”
“That,” Dicken said coldly, “is because nobody in the artillery knows anything about it.”
The forward observation officer’s job was to sit in a shell hole ahead of the front line, connected by field telephone to the trench where a runner was waiting to carry messages to Dicken who crouched in a dug-out just to the rear with his aerial strung between the remains of two trees. The weather was wet and cheerless and the morning hate the Germans sent over sounded particularly spiteful. Almost at once messages began to come through asking for counter battery fire.
The forward observation officer had never heard of the clock code and his instructions were vague and uncertain. Though the boom of the guns swelled to a jerky roar that was flung from horizon to horizon, to the disgusted Dicken it seemed to have no direction whatsoever and was merely the efforts of a totally ignorant and unco-ordinated organisation. From time to time, also, the set gave trouble as the aerial was loosened by the blast of exploding shells so that he had to slip out of the safety of the dugout and, with the aid of the two gunners who were with him, re-erect it under a whirring shower of red-hot steel splinters.
It was noisy, smelly and squalid in the extreme, and not at all what he had expected of the war. He’d looked forward to heroism, flags, colour and not too much danger, and he found instead that he lived in constant expectation of the roof of the dugout, which trickled sand down his collar every time a shell burst, collapsing on top of him. Going outside to re-erect the aerial left his mouth dry and his body moist; and, despite his contempt for the artillery, he was certain the German Kaiser knew exactly where he was and was personally trying to hit him.
After four hours’ transmitting, he noticed that the messages had stopped coming back, and he sent one of the gunners forward to find out why. He came back, flinching at the crashes and the shower of stones, to say that the infantry-men in the front line thought something had happened to the observation officer.
Shutting down the set, Dicken headed along the communicating trench. Shells were dropping near the forward positions, showering the cringing occupants with dirt. A sergeant indicated the shellhole where the forward observation officer had been crouching and shook his head. Pulling his cap down, Dicken squirmed over the parapet and began to crawl forward, feeling as big as a house and terrified some German sniper opposite would spot him. But the Germans were also being forced by the shelling to keep their heads down and he wriggled safely toward the shellhole where the forward observation officer was supposed to be until, just as he reached it, a heavy shell landed close by with an iron clang and flung him over the lip to land on his head in a puddle of muddy water in the bottom.
Sitting up, he dragged his cap from his eyes, to see the officer lying with his back against the sloping side of the shell- hole, his arms flung out, a red splodge where his right eye had been. The sergeant was twisted into an impossible position near his feet, his head beneath him and one knee up as though he had been about to start running. It didn’t take long to realise they were both dead.
Just in front of the shellhole were abandoned packs, rifles and shovels, and unspeakable bodies from the previous winter, black, damp and decomposing, together with a dead mule, disembowelled by a shell, a man sitting with his back to it, bolt upright but headless.
Nauseated, he turned away to find himself staring into the single dead eye of the forward observation officer, and at that moment he decided he didn’t like trench warfare.
It seemed to be important to return and report the officer’s death but, as he clawed at the charred earth of the side of the shellhole, a new batch of shells came down and he had to cower against the pulverised soil as the shards of steel flew overhead. The shelling seemed to go on for ever and he couldn’t take his eyes off the two dead men. Then the barrage seemed to drop a little and he was just preparing to make a dash for it again when the stuttering sound of a motor came to his ears. Swinging around, reminded at once of the sound of Arnold Vickery’s airplane just before it had cut and plunged him into the Adur, he saw a BE coming toward him, lurching in the sky and obviously in difficulties. Strips of fabric fluttered at the wingtips and grey puffs were coming from the exhaust like the smoke from an overworked cigar.
Fascinated, he watched it drop lower and lower. Just before it reached the shellhole where he sheltered, the undercarriage touched, the nose dug in and it turned over, whacking down on its back with a crunch that shattered the rudder and crumpled the wings.
The pilot was hanging head-down from his straps and before he knew what he was doing, thinking only of the danger of fire, Dicken was out of the shellhole and running toward him. Aware of the whack-whack of bullets close by, he lowered the pilot to the ground. The observer was sprawled beneath the machine, covered with blood and, since he seemed to be the worse of the two, using the training he’d received in the Boy Scouts, Dicken took hold of him in a fireman’s lift and hefted him on to his shoulders.
The smell of petrol was stronger as he went back for the pilot and there was a faint hissing sound coming from somewhere in the wreckage with a thin spiral of blue smoke. Heaving the pilot across his back, Dicken stumbled over the uneven ground until a tremendous “whoomph” behind him hit him in the back like the punch of a huge soft fist and threw him into the shellhole.
As he sat up, he saw that the airplane had finally caught fire and was blazing furiously, sending a long spiral of thick black smoke coiling into the sky. Depressed, he watched it for a while then turned his attention to the two men he’d brought in. The observer was silent and still, his face grey, but the pilot had opened his eyes. For a second he stared at Dicken then reached up, took off his helmet and goggles, fished inside his leather coat and pulled out a monocle. Sticking it in his eye, he studied Dicken carefully.
“Fancy meeting you,” he said.
The observer was in a bad way. Dicken opened his coat and, his hands red and gory, struggled with his field dressing to stop the blood that was saturating his uniform. Hatto watched him unhappily, trying to help with an injured shoulder and ankle. The observer died within a quarter of an hour and Dicken lifted his scarf to cover his dead face.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Anti-aircraft fire.” Hatto winced with pain. “Poor old George never saw what hit him.”
Using Hatto’s scarf, Dicken made a sling and fastened his arm to his chest. By the time he’d finished, Hatto was almost fainting.
“Great Ned,” he said as he flopped back against the side of the crater. “I didn’t enjoy that one bit.”
As they cowered and flinched from the bursting shells, they got to know a remarkable amount about each other.
“William Wymarck Wombwell Hatto,” Hatto introduced himself. “Family calls me Willie. Youngest son of Lord Hooe. Irish title. Don’t mean much. Eton and Oxford. All the right things. Got a brother in the Navy, another in the Foreign Office and another in the Church. I was the stupidest so they put me in the army. Cavalry, of course. Unfortunately, you can’t argue with a machine gun with a horse and it’s difficult to crouch behind a wall. Then I remembered I could fly. I learned before the war because it was the only sport you could enjoy sitting down. So I transferred.”
As he polished his eyeglass one-handed on his scarf and tucked it into his eye, Dicken watched, fascinated.
“Do you wear it all the time?” he asked.
“Helps to hold my eye in.” Hatto managed a smile. “Without it, it keeps dropping out and rolling on the floor.”
They sat through the rest of the afternoon, listening to the Germans in the trench opposite shouting threats, Hatto by this time with his boot off because his foot was swollen like a balloon. As dusk began to fall, Dicken suggested they should try to make their way back to the British line. There was a little shouting back and forth until they established that nobody would shoot them for a German raiding party then they began to head for the British wire. Half-carrying, half-dragging his companion, Dicken was unhappily aware of the tap-tap of machine guns and several times, their hearts pounding, they had to lie flat as the bullets passed over them. They covered the last fifty yards with Dicken on his hands and knees and Hatto sprawled across his back.
“Just the ticket,” Hatto whispered. “Perfect target. One up the backside and you get a china vase.”
As they reached the wire, figures appeared in front of them in the dark, grabbed them and rushed them to the trench. As they fell inside it, a burly sergeant dragged Dicken to his feet.
“You fuckin’ flyers,” he said. “You’re always ’avin’ to be fuckin’ rescued.”
“How good it is,” Hatto murmured, “to hear some nice foul English language.”
Dicken offered to wireless for a tender, but when they reached the dugout, they found the set, the aerial, the masts, and the two gunners had all disappeared.
“They packed up and cleared off,” an infantryman offered. “They said you’d been killed.”
Eventually the commanding officer arranged by field telephone for a tender to pick Hatto up and they stumbled rearwards in the dark. As they pushed him into the back of the Crossley, he turned to Dicken.
“No end obliged, old fruit,” he said. “It might have been awkward for me if you hadn’t come along. If there’s anything I can do in return, just ask.”
“Well, there is something,” Dicken blurted out.
“Name it. My land? My fortune? The hand of my sister in marriage?”
Awed by his own cheek, Dicken drew a deep breath. “You could wangle me a transfer to the RFC,” he said.