It was a long time before Dicken was allowed to forget his “aggressive battle tactics”. Even Morton, the CO, smiled when he saw him and nothing was ever said about the loss of the Lewis gun.
For a while the Fokkers continued to rampage up and down the front, taking a terrible toll of the old British machines, then abruptly things changed. With the Italians now in the war on the Allied side and expected to start a third front against the Austrians north of Venice, a big battle was building up astride the River Somme in France and they set off south, men, airplanes, lorries and all the assorted dogs which had attached themselves to the squadron, to the new front in Picardy.
The whole area was alive with men, thousands upon thousands of them, from all corners of the Empire, with thousands of vehicles, thousands of horses, and thousands of guns. The land had not been fought over since 1914 and they were in green, flower-decked fields with thick woods, in direct contrast to the splintered trees and devastated acres of the north.
The battle was to be fought almost entirely by the new Kitchener battalions which had been raised since the beginning of the war. Handiside didn’t think much of the idea because he didn’t consider the Kitchener men experienced enough, and on July 1st, they learned just how right he was.
The newspapers that arrived from home told of immense advances and colossal areas of captured ground, but the men in France knew differently, the RFC best of all because they could actually see how far the advance had carried the army forward. It amounted to little more than a few hundred yards in most places – in some none at all – and the lines of ambulances and hospital trains passing the airdrome told of casualties greater than all the earlier battles put together.
In their own department there was a measure of relief, because 20 Squadron had arrived in their sector with FE2bs, strong machines with the propeller behind the crew in a structure of wooden booms that supported the tail and the gun firing forward with nothing in the way, and the command of the air had slipped from the Germans’ hands just as it had from the British the previous year. Toward the end of the month one of the FEs even got Immelmann, and there were yells of relief because Immelmann had been appearing in quite a few bad dreams, though they were tinged with a certain amount of regret, because Immelmann was a flying man as they were and took the same risks in the same sort of flimsy aircraft, frail and stinking of petrol, that could fall to bits if the slightest thing went wrong.
Despite the best efforts of the generals who, determined to keep the battle going, constantly came up with new ways of killing men, by the end of the year it had petered out in a sea of mud into nothing more than the normal bad temper and Dicken managed to get home on leave, his first since his arrival in France the previous year. The journey to the coast was bitterly cold and the train slower than a donkey cart. The Channel was at its most intransigent, and he was virtually carried ashore at Folkestone by an enormous Guardsman. As he sank down in a railway carriage, it occurred to him that perhaps it was a good job he hadn’t gone to sea, after all.
His mother was proud of his medal ribbons and couldn’t do enough for him, but she found it hard to understand that the only thing he wished to do was get out his bicycle and visit Deane.
“Mother,” he explained. “I’m nineteen now and I’ve begun to notice that girls are different.”
Zoë greeted him with a yelp of excitement and fingered his ribbons enthusiastically.
“Not one,” she said. “But two! Annys will be livid. Arthur Diplock’s not got any.”
For once, Dicken was on Diplock’s side. “They don’t come all that easily,” he said. “He’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
When she asked how he’d won them, he explained cautiously, leaving out the truth about the Russian medal and the lost Lewis gun. While they were talking Annys appeared. She seemed to think him mad to go flying.
“People get killed flying,” she said.
“People are getting rather summarily done to death in a variety of ways,” he pointed out.
“Arthur’s been transferred to the Service Corps,” she went on stiffly. “His job’s to see the front line troops are supplied with food and ammunition. It’s because he’s good at languages.”
She seemed more than normally chilly and it was Zoë who explained. “They’re getting engaged when he gets leave,” she said. “He’s a lieutenant now. He has the advantage over you all along the line, hasn’t he? Daddy has a motor car. You have a bike. He has two pips on his shoulder and these days sits in an office most of the time. You’ve got two stripes and risk your neck. He’s also taller.”
“And his ears,” Dicken said bitterly, “stick out like a Parasol’s wings. It’s an airplane,” he explained.
The description seemed to tickle Zoë. “You could always fall in love with me, Dicky boy,” she said. “I’ve always had a soft spot for you. At least you look like a man. Arthur looks like a piece of cold pudding. Besides, I shall be worth something one day. Father says he’ll leave the garage to me because Annys wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole in case she got her hands dirty. I can already strip an engine.”
“What on earth do you want to do that for?”
“Very useful accomplishment, as a matter of fact. We lost our only decent mechanic to the army and you’d be surprised what a demand for transport there is. There’s a new army camp just outside the village and the officers are always telephoning for me to take them into Brighton. I carry a heavy wrench for when they get fresh. I sent one home one night with a lump like an egg on his forehead.”
When his leave came to an end Dicken wasn’t sure whether it had been a success or not. Annys had had little time for him and Zoë was never a good substitute, though at least she was enthusiastic and, using her father’s car, they went to Eastbourne and London. Her father was proud of her skill as a driver and trusted her anywhere with the machine, which was new, large and roomy and an excellent place for clutching each other in the dark at the end of the day.
He arrived back in France, once more almost at death’s door with seasickness after a gale in the Channel, to find that Hudnutt was dead and that the squadron’s aircraft had been standardised under a new policy to make maintenance easier. The Moranes had gone and all three flights now had BE2s.
“Pity they can’t think of something a bit better,” he commented.
Handiside shrugged. “Things have changed, kid,” he said. “We’ve been hit by a blight. The Germans have got the edge on us again. We’d just got the better of ’em when they came up with a new one. Albatros. Looks like a shark with a tail like a spade and two machine guns firing through the propeller.”
“Two?”
“Why not?” Handiside asked. “If one can fire through the propeller, why not two? One of these days they’ll probably have four. Even eight, if they can find room for ’em. We were knocking seven sorts of hell out of ’em when you left but now they’ve started grouping all their scout machines together in one squadron and one’s arrived opposite. They’re swatting us down like flies.”
The new Albatroses and Halberstadts the Germans had brought out flew a staggering hundred miles an hour and it wasn’t hard to imagine what they’d been doing to the elderly BEs. Their pilots had been hand-picked from both the Western and Eastern Fronts and, flying as a group, were a formidable formation to bump into.
“Intensive course at single-seater scout schools in Germany,” Handiside explained. “Then more training on the squadron at the front. This chap Boelcke’s behind it all. Their morale’s sky-high. Ours, I reckon, is at worm-level.”
“What about Hatto?”
“Still around. But the captain’s gone home and two others just failed to return. The fellers they’re sending out now are only half-trained kids. I hope you’re good at jumping.”
The pilot to whom Dicken was assigned, a boy called MacTavish, didn’t appear to know much about flying. With only ten hours’ experience in England and so far only five in France, he was permanently frustrated by an aggressive spirit that was entirely wasted because he couldn’t handle his machine well. It left him in a perpetual state of fuming fury that troubled Dicken a great deal, because he suspected it would lead him into doing something silly.
The BE2e, which was now in use in the squadron, though still no fighter, was a vast improvement on the earlier 2c, but the politicians responsible for providing the machines for France still didn’t seem to have grasped what was needed. The Germans had awakened quickly to the possibilities of flying and were developing new airplanes and tactics that left the British way behind. In England all that had happened was that somebody had ordered BEs in thousands and seemed unable to stop production, while there was still no means of synchronising the gun to the engine and what British fighters there were, were either pushers or carried the gun on the top wing.
Because of the losses, reconnaissance machines were now only sent out with escorts of scout planes, first three, then, as this proved ineffective, six, and everybody had to start practising formation flying, a highly problematic business in those squadrons equipped with two or three different types of machines all flying at different speeds. They didn’t realise it, but the whole concept of aerial warfare was changing and the fact that the prevailing wind blew from the west to carry any unwary pilot beyond reach of his own lines began to make air fighting a dangerous game. Dicken had arrived back in France, he decided, at a decidedly unpleasant time.
Christmas passed and the New Year came in a smother of mist and rain that kept them grounded for days at a time, fretting at the thought of the indifference of the authorities at home to the good performance of their machines. Flying became an uncomfortable chore. The oil in the machine guns froze and there was always the risk of frostbite. Covering his face with vaseline and trying to muffle himself up to make sure no part of him was left exposed, Dicken succeeded only in making it virtually impossible to move quickly.
The more he flew, the more he fancied the idea of flying himself. The new pilots were sadly lacking in aerial knowledge and all too often had only the experience of their observers to keep them alive. In the first five days of a new offensive the Flying Corps lost seventy-five machines in fighting and another fifty-six in crashes on their own airdromes. The Germans, they heard, had lost Boelcke, but in his place they were said to have a new expert who was clawing the old BEs down in dozens with an all-red Albatros. Rumour suggested the pilot was a woman, because only a woman would go in for such a gaudy colour, and another rumour had it that a special squadron had been recruited among the best British pilots in France for the sole purpose of destroying it, even that a reward had been offered.
They got the truth eventually from a German pilot who had been shot down and appeared in the mess for a drink before departing for a prisoner of war camp. The pilot of the red machine was a man called Richthofen and he wasn’t the only one either, because there was another called Voss, who was believed to have shot down twenty British machines on his own in a matter of two months or so. The Germans, the prisoner said, were claiming four British machines for every one of their own they lost. Certainly the wreckage of BEs was scattered everywhere, both behind and in front of the enemy lines. Broken tails and torn wings, many of them put there by Richthofen or Voss, seemed to sprout from every curve and hollow of the ground. The year had started with the British operating twenty-eight miles behind the German lines; because of the casualties, the limit was now set at two.
“We don’t make it hard for ’em,” Handiside said. “Not using BEs.”
With flying a deadly serious business again, it was best not to use the imagination too much. The places at table of casualties were deliberately not left empty in case people began to dwell on them, and with everybody pretending they didn’t care, hairsbreadth escapes were ignored because they all knew there would be more in the future. If there was a future, of course. For the most part, the future didn’t exist, because the war stretched in a bloody blur across it, leaving a curious sense of emptiness and want.
Despite this, however, there was a tremendous element of daring among the young pilots, all of whom seemed to wish to emulate Albert Ball, a nineteen-year-old pilot who regarded the war as a crusade and was prepared to tackle any number of Germans at once. Unfortunately, most of them – MacTavish among them – had neither the machine he flew nor his skill, and it was as they were flying over the Scarpe at the end of the month that Dicken finally decided that MacTavish was a danger to the public and to Nicholas Dicken Quinney in particular. More than once he had wiped off his undercarriage, once he had turned the machine over, and once, in an attempt to get over the trees at the end of the airdrome, had lost so much height he had flown between them, shedding his wings en route, to make what was for him a reasonably good landing.
“A perfect three-point touchdown,” he had said, his young pink face creased into a grin. “Without wings, too.”
As he watched a German balloon hanging like a fat maggot, obscene and graceless over the river, it suddenly dawned on Dicken that they were approaching it in a particularly determined manner. The morning was cold with a west wind pushing scraps of low cloud before it, the front line marked by smoke streaming eastward like grey wool. High above was a layer of stratus, ice-white so that the sky seemed full of light, and Dicken knew that against it they were silhouetted perfectly and a wonderful target for the ground gunners.
MacTavish was obviously intending to attack the balloon and Dicken began to shake his head and wave his arms frantically to warn him not to. MacTavish merely grinned and pointed, something which made Dicken begin to dance with rage in the observer’s cockpit.
The balloon was beginning to descend now and Dicken could see men running to the guns with which it was circled. As they drew nearer, Archie started firing and the first burst exploded within feet of the starboard wing, tearing the fabric and rocking the machine.
Making frantic indications to MacTavish to turn away, Dicken finally decided that, since they were going to attack the balloon, he might as well shoot at it, but MacTavish’s skill was not equal to his determination and they hurtled past like a bus out of control on a hill. By this time the machine was being hit repeatedly but, since nothing vital seemed to be touched, MacTavish swung around to have another go.
As they approached for their second run, Dicken spluttering with rage, the air was full of shellbursts, tracer bullets and flaming onions – a particularly unpleasant form of missile in strings of white lights like chain shot and as big as tennis balls – that came up in a maddeningly leisurely way, then whipped past in a manner that made you realise how lethal they were.
It was as they swung away a second time, with the only damage inflicted done to their own machine, that Dicken turned around to implore MacTavish not to have another go and spotted a machine turning in beneath them.
With alarm he saw it had the sharklike fuselage and spadeshaped tail that Handiside had warned against and it had twice the speed of the old BE and two guns winking deadly orange flashes through the propeller. It was red and evil-looking and was doubtless controlled by one of the Germans’ special pilots with their extra training – probably Richthofen himself!
Hammering on the fuselage, Dicken pointed. Appearing to think he was telling him to have another go at the balloon, MacTavish grinned back and nodded. Making frantic signals, Dicken finally got him to understand, and glancing back, MacTavish’s expression changed abruptly to one of alarm. As he wrenched the BE violently aside, Dicken almost disappeared over the side and clung for a while, half-out of the cockpit, staring downward at a thousand feet of nothing until MacTavish righted the machine.
Pushing the nose down, he began to head for the British lines in a shallow dive to increase the speed. The Albatros came around beneath them once more, and the two machine guns seemed to be pointing straight down Dicken’s throat.
“Ess!” he screamed, making curving gestures with his hand. “For Christ’s sake, ess!”
It took some time for the idea to sink in but MacTavish finally swung the machine to one side – just in time – and the tracer lines went past the tip of their starboard wing.
“Keep essing!” Dicken yelled, heaving at the gun, and they went down, the tail swinging from right to left as MacTavish kicked at the rudder bar.
Small lines of grey smoke kept appearing beyond their wingtips and Dicken smelled the familiar smell of German tracers, then the Albatros bored in once more, showing its upper wings with their black Maltese crosses. Getting in a quick burst, Dicken managed to make it sheer away, but it came doggedly around again for yet another go.
By this time, they were almost on the ground and, as they crossed the German lines, it seemed that every German in France was shooting at them. Fabric began to flap in long streamers and the engine began to develop a loud knocking noise.
MacTavish was working like a madman to keep the machine in the air, but the rudder was hanging loose by this time and he had little control. The British trenches appeared, with another fusillade of shots, then Dicken saw faces turned upwards as they sailed over, the motor making a noise like a steam traction engine going uphill.
The torn brown earth was close beneath the wheels as the engine finally stopped and they continued in a silence that was broken only by the whistle of the wind through the flying wires. There was a twang as the wheels caught a coil of barbed wire and, looking back, Dicken saw they were trailing what appeared to be the whole of the British second line defences, wire, stakes and all.
Then abruptly, as the strain became too much, the BE’s nose dipped.
The propeller flew to pieces, one of the blades whipping through the wings in a shower of splinters and torn fabric, then the wheels dropped into a shellhole, and the machine turned upside down. Dicken found himself flying through the air to land on his face and almost immediately he became aware of machine gun bullets whack-whacking just above his head. Crawling through the mud, he dived for a shellhole almost on top of MacTavish who was sitting in the slime at the bottom, laughing. All the terror had gone from his expression and he seemed to be thoroughly enjoying himself.
“It’s bad enough when the Germans and the French shoot at us,” he said, “but when the British do it, it’s too much. I think I’ll complain to the general.”
Dicken stared at him as if he were mad. “Why in the name of God did you have to attack a bloody balloon?” he snarled.
MacTavish laughed. “Felt like giving the bastards a fright!”
“In a BE?”
“Got to scrag the Hun.”
“In any scragging between a balloon and a BE, the balloon’s bound to come off best. It’s much more dangerous.”
Dicken glared, wondering where and how MacTavish had been brought up. At his school – the sort of school which had bred the kind of officer who had fought the Fuzzy-Wuzzies in the last century, facing tremendous odds in front of the flag with blazing eyes and a smile on his lips – no doubt it had been taught that it was bad form not to stand up and face an enemy fair and square.
They obviously didn’t know much about war, Dicken decided, because a much more sensible maxim was the one about the man who ran away living to fight another day. It even seemed a good idea to hit your opponent below the belt when he wasn’t looking.
“I think you’re barmy,” he said disgustedly.
MacTavish gurgled with laughter and looked up at the wrecked BE above his head dripping petrol into the ground.
“Don’t know what you’re going on about,” he said. “They can’t kill me.”