No Longer A Game (Innocents At War Series, Book 3) Page 13

  “How do you know France?”

  “Born here, sir. My parents lived on the coast in Brittany. I never did discover why they lived in exile, but it was clear that they felt they should never be seen in England. They were quite old, sir, when I was born, and died just before the outbreak of war, the pair in the same month. I preferred not to be conscripted in France – having dual nationality – and could not attain a commission in England and so volunteered for the RFC.”

  Tommy wondered just what the scandal might have been, but accepted that it was none of his business. These sleeping dogs were best left to lie.

  “Useful to have you here, in any event. What is your name?”

  “Devon, sir.”

  “Good. Do this for me with all of the requests as they come in, please. When we get the map, put a pin in for me, probably with a date as well. No sense attacking on out-of-date demands.”

  The map arrived, and was large enough to work with; they transferred the targets to it, discovered they had no list of airfields or of available machines.

  “Who would have that list, Sergeant Davies?”

  “I never heard there was one, sir.”

  “But, surely Brigadier Trenchard must know how many squadrons and pilots he has, and where and flying what!”

  “You might think so, sir.”

  “I shall chase Baring down. If he don’t know, no man does.”

  There was a problem, it seemed, inasmuch that pilots were sent out from London, appointed to whichever squadron seemed good to General Henderson’s people. Brigade, in France, commonly did not discover who had arrived and where until the squadron adjutant sent in their details.

  With aircraft, the problem was that the bulk of planes were sent to the Central Air Park at Amiens and were distributed to squadrons by the administration there, which commonly did not talk to Brigade, for having feuds with the officers.

  “As for location of the squadrons – that is a different matter again, Tommy. You see, because of the rapid expansion, many of the Commanding Officers are newly made majors and are used to being pilots, with all of the contempt for red tape that implies. They decide that their field is inadequate for some reason, or they hear of a place that is more comfortable, and they simply pick up their beds and walk – or fly, as it might be. If they can work the system and get their telephone lines installed, then we may not know they’ve gone until weeks after the event. More than once the Brigadier has gone out on a sudden inspection and arrived at an empty field. The effect is that we don’t always know where the squadrons are; we rarely know what and how many machines they have; and we never know their exact strength. It’s not unknown for the adjutant of a squadron to delay reporting to us the arrival of a green pilot, for not being worth the effort of filling in the forms for the first few days. I am quite certain that some unfortunate young men have been sent out to France and have simply disappeared – arrived at a squadron and died before they were written into its books and have gone into limbo. We occasionally receive messages from London – ‘advise location of Second Lt So-And-So, posted from training Friday 13th ult’, and we reply, ‘unknown – posted where’; a week later they give us a squadron number and we ask them and get the reply that they have no idea, they have had half a dozen odd bodies turn up, make a single flight and crash, dead before they knew them. It’s not impossible that some of these lads might still be sat in a transit Mess somewhere in France, waiting for orders – we don’t know.”

  “So… I could send out the order, ‘bombard Valenciennes yards, one-hundred pounders’, to a squadron which is still equipped with Parasols which cannot carry anything larger than twenty-pound bombs.”

  “That’s right, Tommy. That’s why we send the orders to Wing. They have two squadrons and know what they fly. Generally.”

  “Makes it simpler, sir. I recommend that you continue to send the targets to Wing, those that we accept. What we can do is talk to Army about the tactical targets which we can do nothing about. They are wasting their time, and lives perhaps, waiting for bombardments that don’t occur because we don’t hear of them for at least a day after the request is made. I have a typical example here, sir – a request from a company of something called Rajputs for the bombardment of a machine-gun nest that is blocking their advance. Request was timed at 0930 hours yesterday; we received it at 2100 hours and it came to me a few minutes ago. Thirty hours and more for the request to reach us! They must mark their targets for the benefit of machines patrolling the battlefield. Then they may get the help they need.”

  “Army has ordered them to put out white sheets, which they won’t do, as you know, Tommy.”

  “Then we can do nothing for them, sir.”

  “Agreed, but the Brigadier insists that we must.”

  “Simple of solution, sir. Send Brigadier Trenchard forward with one of these radio things and he can sit in the front line and put out his orders direct.”

  Baring smiled weakly, brain racing; he did not want trouble and Tommy’s mouth was liable to create uproar.

  “You have Sergeant Davies, do you not, running your office, and that strange man, Private Devon. Does it need a major?”

  “Not at all, sir. In fact, sir, it might well be best if I handed over to my junior officer and left Brigade immediately.”

  “I agree. You won’t be getting that mortality-prone lieutenant of Noah Arkwright’s, by the way. The Grim Reaper forestalled you.”

  “I tried. Bad luck. Put another boy in – you must have some pink-cheeked little staff officer to hand – there seems to be an adequate supply of them.”

  “All the way from Mayfair, Tommy – a never-ending stream of young men yearning for nothing more than to give their all for their country, provided only that they can do so at least thirty miles clear of the lines. Never say that the aristocracy does not fight for its country, Tommy; it is merely that the bulk of them choose to sacrifice themselves to the stern necessity of providing the Generals with an adequate staff. Who am I to speak? I do the same. I shall have transport for you inside the hour. Don’t fly until you can use that hand, Tommy. Please.”

  “I am posted back to my squadron immediately, Sergeant Davies. It seems I shall not be able to organise a way for you to join me.”

  “I fear not, sir. Such being the case, sir, farewell! And I shall do it myself; I should like to get a little closer to the line, see, sir. Can’t do it immediately, Rome not being built in a day and all that; I shall see you next week, sir. Would you have a place for Private Devon, as well? He would like to feel somewhat more useful, sir, on a squadron. I suspect he believes he could become an observer eventually, and actually play some part in the fighting, which is a pity, him being an intelligent man. Out of place here, of course, sir; one day he will laugh and a staff officer will notice and be just bright enough to realise that he is the butt of the joke, see?”

  “Let him come – he has a brain, which is dangerous for a private soldier. One day, I shall discover how and why this war is run, Sergeant Davies. For the while, I shall preserve my innocence. You appreciate, that I have no particular brain, and that means that I cannot always guard my tongue when I should – which is why I eschew headquarters of all sorts.”

  “Very wise, sir. I believe a Lieutenant Petersham is to replace you, sir. He was released from hospital in England a few days ago; a bullet through the belly that managed to miss everything important, I am told. Still a bit shaky on his pins, sir, and will benefit from a couple of months of flying a desk.”

  “Very good. Excellent, in fact. Give him my regards. There was an Australian nicknamed Drongo in his squadron. Do you know anything of him?”

  “I will send a message to you, sir, if I do hear. It should not be impossible to discover something about him. Was he on the squadron long enough to be paid, so you know, sir?”

  “Yes, I am sure he was.”

  “Pay Corps is the place to start, sir. If they are still putting money into his account, then he might be
alive still. Not proof positive, mind you, sir, for there might be a thieving little man in his adjutant’s office collecting pay for ghosts. Not at all uncommon, sir. If it is covered up by an officer, in exchange for a cut, then it becomes very difficult to detect, sir. If the Pay Corps thinks he is alive, then a telephone call to his squadron should be sufficient one way or the other, unless he is in a hospital – then he may be in France or somewhere in England and may have died of his wounds and the notification be on its way through channels.”

  Tommy stood back, unable entirely to comprehend all he had just learned.

  “What’s wrong with this bloody Army, Sergeant?”

  “It has grown some fifteen times over since August ’14, sir. It is so big, sir, it is like those old dinosaurs you hear of, that are supposed to have died out because they became so huge their brains could not control their whole body. The War Office was, I am told, half-way competent when it came to running the peace-time professional army, but it does not have the machinery to deal with the enormous monster it has created. The peace-time generals are lost, sir, and there hasn’t been time for the new senior officers created by the war to discover how to take charge. Give it another two years, sir, and if we haven’t lost the war, they will have worked out how to run an army.”

  A driver appeared, Tommy’s kit in his hand – easily done, for most of his possessions were still at the squadron.

  “Major Stark, sir. I am to take you back to your field, sir.”

  Tommy turned to go.

  “Thank you for your words of enlightenment, Sergeant Davies. I shall see you next week.”

  Thirty Squadron was glad to see him back and amazed that he had managed to escape the tentacles of Brigade. It was general opinion that when a man was once sucked into the maw, he never escaped.

  Tommy sat with Major Kite, outlining all he had learned of the way the Flying Corps worked, and expressing his amaze that it worked at all.

  “How do we ever get spares for the planes, sir?”

  “Make ‘em, if we can buy in the correct materials. Sometimes we can order them direct from the manufacturer in England, paying for them with Bills drawn on the Corps Quartermaster, who is, at the moment, so overrun by work that he is able to check nothing and simply sends them to his finance people to honour. One day, he is going to start asking questions, and, my word, won’t the shit fly then!”

  “Can’t we actually get them officially from the Quartermaster, sir?”

  “Yes. He will do his very best to meet our demands – but he lacks the experienced staff to know how to go about the necessary work. So we make an official requisition first, and next day go through our own channels. One day, both lots will turn up and we will actually be able to build up stocks. It’s killing the Engineer, you know – working most of his nights and all of his days just to keep up, and never getting ahead of himself to have a hope of rest in the future.”

  “I might be able to help, a little, sir. Next week we will have a Sergeant Davies reporting here, officially assigned to us. I don’t know how he is going to work it, but he’s tired of life at Brigade. I suspect that he could procure anything, anywhere. What I would suggest, sir, is that we make him up to Flight Sergeant and call him Flights Administrative Office, and give him leeway to recruit one or two men of his own, and then tell him we need spares and raw materials and new planes as well, and leave him to it. There may be a Private Devon as well, sir; I suspect he is the child of a Society divorce or elopement or some such thing, born to exiled parents and educated well, but out of England. Not a hope of a commission. He might like to become an observer, perhaps, and feel himself to be useful.”

  Major Kite simply nodded; this was the way things were done.

  “What about you, Tommy. What are you to do for the next few days?”

  “Assist Noah, as I can, sir. I would like, if possible, to take a machine out and behind the lines to have a look at the terrain. What have we sitting in idleness, as it were?”

  “Nothing at the moment? Why?”

  Tommy explained about the carrier pigeons and the proposal that he should land crates behind the lines for the use of Belgian civilians.

  “Good idea, sir, if I should have a look around – spot a few landmarks, get my own knowledge of the shape of the rivers and the railway lines.”

  “I can get hold of an experimental Morane N, Tommy. Set up with armoured steel wedges on the prop, and a Vickers to fire through. Four at least of our pilots are trying Garros’ trick. No word of any great success. I have heard it suggested that we have overdone the thickness of the wedges, slowed the plane as a result. It’s all at best semi-official. Take three or four days, maybe, before I can pull the right strings. You’ll be up to flying then, I suspect.”

  Idleness was actually pleasant for two or three days, rising late and doing very little other than hold court for the young pilots, answering their questions and bringing out their own ideas, and squashing their wilder suggestions.

  “Could we not gain greater accuracy by diving down on our targets, Tommy, and releasing the bombs on a direct trajectory from about one hundred feet?”

  “Why release them, Frank? You won’t pull out of a dive at one hundred – rip the wings off, for sure, so you might as well go along for the ride. Be more accurate that way, even if you wouldn’t exactly repeat the process – not what they call a learning experience.”

  “Could we not strengthen the wings to allow us to pull out?”

  “You could. Steel girders, I would imagine, and so heavy that you would never get off the ground.”

  “I shall give the proposal more thought, Tommy.”

  “Do that, Frank, but you will not attempt any experiment without first clearing with Noah or me. An order, Frank!”

  Frank was overheard later, complaining that his seniors had lost the spirit of adventure.

  Tommy cradled his pint and shook his head.

  “Less than three weeks ago, Noah, that lad was a sheltered pastor’s son, asking whether I thought he might try this beer stuff. Now he’s a hardened rip doing his best to kill himself. They are growing up fast!”

  Noah called for refills and agreed.

  “They have seen colleagues die, and have used their own machine-guns at close range, watched Germans fall to them. They have dropped bombs, knowing there were men underneath them. They are killers in unreliable machines that are never guaranteed to bring them home again. Eighteen and nineteen years old, most of them. Blue has been promoted already. The others will be within the year; most of them will be captains at the age of twenty. We have destroyed their youth, Tommy. We should have some replacements in the next few days; we will turn them into old men as well. I can do this now, Tommy, knowing that the war makes demands that I cannot resist; God knows how I shall sleep for memories and remorse when this killing business is over.”

  “Do not worry, dear boy! The probability is that we shall both be sleeping in wooden overcoats, assuming we do not experience cremation. Let the end of the war take care of itself.”

  They touched glasses and drank to the Grim Reaper.

  “Squadron toast, Tommy! Mrs Wyndham replied to my letter; must have been return of post!”

  “As I believe I may have said, Noah – I could not be more glad for you!”

  The Morane-Saulnier N landed and drew the eyes of the whole squadron, particularly when its delivery pilot was driven off to return by rail.

  It was a mid-wing monoplane, bracing wires anchored on a low pylon behind the cockpit. It used wing-warping and was at first glance remarkably similar to the Fokker E. The engineering officer explained that in fact the two machines had come off the same original drawings, Morane-Saulnier having sold some of their designs to Pfalz and Fokker having bought them second-hand, or possibly pirated them.

  “Almost identical engines, Tommy. Perhaps a mile or two faster, maybe one is more manoeuvrable than the other, but not by much. The wedges probably slow your machine, and I must imagine
that the repeated strikes on the prop cannot do the engine a lot of good. But that’s a problem for the ground people. When do you want her?”

  “Not tomorrow – Quack is going to pull the stitches on the finger in the morning. Sunday be right with you?”

  “The extra time will be handy. The armourer will want to strip the gun that’s fitted, and I don’t like the brackets over the engine. Add to that, I want to trace and test all of the wires in the wings. Sunday at eight o’clock, provided it ain’t raining.”

  Tommy sat back, wondering whether it might not be possible to stencil a pair of crosses onto the wings; he could give an unpleasant surprise to more than one Fokker, he was sure. He put the idea to the CO and was told, very stiffly, that the very thought was repugnant to any man of honour – and to bloody pilots as well.

  No Longer A Game

  Chapter Six

  “Filed every wedge clean, sir. The bullet strikes had left them ragged at the edges, sir. Setting up another spinner, sir, to fit over the propeller, using lighter material; changing the angle of incidence of the wedges as well. Reduce the impact of the rounds, sir – less of a kickback on the shaft, sir.”

  Tommy smiled and nodded enthusiastically – he was sure that the Sergeant Fitter was perfectly correct in his actions.

  The mechanic looked wearily at him: it was obvious that he had as well have addressed his pilot in Greek for all of the understanding he had attained.

  “Yes, sir. Once you’ve had your run out today, I’ll take the plane to the back of the hangars and finish the job, sir, and set it up level on trestles and fire the gun with the engine spinning and test how well it works, sir. Probably with a sheet set up to see the bullet strikes, sir. Should have it fully tested by next week sometime.”

  “Very good, sergeant!”

  The sergeant gave up, reflecting that if the man had had either intelligence or education then he would have had more sense than become a pilot.