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

  “Be useful if we had dual controls, Tommy, and an override sort of affair, so that we could take back the control at any time.”

  “Might have saved poor old Jock last month. You’re right.”

  Jock had taken a recently soloed young gentleman up for familiarisation with the rotary-engined Avro; the boy had attempted a starboard turn at two hundred feet, had achieved a single full spin before hitting the ground.

  Noah lifted his tea cup, peering deeply into its contents.

  “You have it to do with young Banks, have you not, Tommy?”

  “This week. He’ll be in France next. They’re losing BEs by the dozen, they say.”

  “Exaggeration, surely, Tommy! How many have we got to lose?”

  “About one hundred and fifty planes and pilots, I think, flying over the trenches. No definite figure – they haven’t taken a full count, but it’s about that. Lost about one hundred pilots since the war started, mostly by accident, so two thirds of the lads are new replacements without a lot of experience. Most of the old hands are this side of the Channel at the moment, instructing or testing.”

  “And we lose at least a quarter of each intake to accidents, Tommy, and we reject another tenth or more. How the Hell are we to make the numbers up?”

  “Push them through even faster, Noah. More and more on an endless belt. There’s still a queue of boys wanting commissions with us. While they don’t know what the chances are, there will be enough.”

  “Dirty business, Tommy!”

  “Bloody rough, Noah. I’m tempted to get on the telephone to Airco, ask de Havilland if he needs a testing pilot. Cleaner than this!”

  “His DH2 has got itself a bad name, Tommy… Don’t tell me – it needs putting right by a good pilot, and you are the best. If you get across there, wangle a spot for me, will you? I’m close to sick of the instructing game.”

  Tommy begged a couple of days of leave to celebrate the birth but decided that he must deal with Banks first; it was only fair – he might otherwise be put on the ferry to Calais having never been up in a rotary.

  “Right, Mr Banks. Listen with great care. The Avro has a rotary engine. The whole weight of the engine rotates around its crankshaft, spinning rapidly to the right. The engine is continually throwing the plane to the right. As a result, a bank to port requires a firm hand, you must force the plane to go opposite to its normal inclination. A turn to starboard, however, is just what she wants to do, and so she will grab the controls and throw herself to the right, hard and fast and you are in a spin before you know it. A bank to starboard requires the most delicate of touches, gently and carefully controlled. I shall take you up first; then you will give me a little pleasure trip. Observe all I do, carefully! As well, get it firmly fixed in your head never to make a starboard turn under one thousand feet! Now, watch and learn and make a note about anything you want to ask me when we come down.”

  Half an hour and Tommy brought the Avro down and changed cockpits.

  “She is yours, Mr Banks. Any questions?”

  “How do you judge by just how much you should lift the nose into a turn, sir?”

  “Feel and experience; there is no rule book. Judge the wind speed and direction first, then ease her up and start your turn, feeling what she is doing and gently correcting all of the while.”

  Banks nodded; he was confident in his own ability, and sensible of his inexperience. The combination might well keep him alive.

  He lost nothing in his first turns to port and then ventured to starboard, dropping fifty feet in a forty-five degree turn and bank. He swore to himself, regained his height and then set the nose a fraction higher before turning again. Still not as clean as he wanted! He tried again, and again, was finally brought out of his concentration by a whistle down the voice pipe.

  “I say, Mr Banks, have you looked at your fuel gauge lately?”

  Embarrassed he set his course for the field, five miles away by now, and brought his mind to the procedure for landing.

  “Still a quarter of a tank, sir,” he ventured as they climbed down outside the hangar.

  “Perhaps. Sergeant Morgan, would you bring the measuring rod with you?”

  They watched as Sergeant Morgan dipped the fuel tank.

  “Maybe a gallon left, sir. Bit tight, if I may say so, sir!”

  “Don’t trust the gauge, Mr Banks, not never nohow! A quarter of a tank says that there is still some juice left in there, sufficient to rattle the float. It is not a precise measuring device. If you see the gauge registering a quarter and you are on the Hun side of the Lines, then get back quickly!”

  “Right, sir. Thank you. Do you think I shall be sent to France soon, sir?”

  “Probably. There’s a flap on and every qualified pilot will be called for, I suspect. You are a good pilot in the making, Mr Banks. You need another hundred hours, at least, before you can say that you know what you are doing. You are still green – keep learning. I hope to be back to France before too long; if I am, I shall count myself lucky if you are one of the young pilots in my Flight.”

  “Thank you, sir. I will remember all that you’ve told me! Oh, am I allowed to congratulate you on your daughter, sir? I am only a Second Lieutenant, after all!”

  “I suspect if we were Army then I should rebuke you for impertinence, Mr Banks – being RFC, thank you!”

  Banks was sent on leave that afternoon, ordered to take all of his kit with him; he would not be returning to the training field.

  “Pleasant lad, that one, Noah. Pity, ain’t it!”

  “A crying shame, Tommy. He’s jumped the first hurdle, surviving training. Now he’s got to live the first four weeks in France. With the new Fokker, his chances must be lower than ever.”

  “Only one half of new pilots survived their first month, before the Fokker. Accidents and Archie, almost all of them; now add the chance of being shot down – I doubt one in four will make it. Still, if they do get through, then they’re damned near fireproof, last at least six months more – or did, before the new Fokker.”

  “They should go to advanced training in England for a month; give them another sixty hours even and most of them would live, Tommy.”

  “One month with no supply of new pilots and the squadrons at the front would be effectively grounded – they would not be able to put the planes up to meet Army’s demands. We would need to borrow at least fifty experienced pilots for three months, to cover the gap while we trained new men; but the only people with that number of bodies are the Germans, and I doubt they would be willing to cooperate. I’m off for two days, Noah – celebrating at home. Glad I’m not in France – the squadron bash would leave me hungover for a week.”

  Instructors at the training fields were not so high spirited as the men in France; they faced a more determined enemy in the new trainees.

  No Longer A Game

  Chapter Two

  Squire, Lord Moncur, was present when Tommy reached Wilton. He had driven down from London and was able to stay overnight, having managed to squeeze twenty-four hours for his family out of his busy timetable.

  “Unbelievable, Tommy! I have had to put off two meetings and leave my secretary to produce and submit a report I wanted to have a look at. Reliable man, of course, one of these Double-First types from Oxford who inhabit the upper reaches of the Civil Service; even so, I like to know everything that goes out under my name. However, a first granddaughter has priority – bright little button, ain’t she? Not like that doughy pudding Lavinia and Monkton have produced; Monkton has put his name down for Eton – all the boy’s fit for, I expect!”

  “Eton and Sandhurst, sir – he will make a fine general, I have no doubt.”

  “Good Lord, Tommy – Monkton has already told me the boy will join the RFC, don’t you know – by far the coming service!”

  “Poor little chap! At least, that is one fate Elisabeth Jane will be spared. Though, thinking on it, I hope she might like flying, for pleasure, as it should be. We s
hall see, sir – it is a little early for that.”

  The Squire paused in his greetings, raised an eyebrow.

  “These Fokkers – very bad, Tommy?”

  “Not if we can get the DH2 and FE across to France, which depends on a supply of engines to put into ‘em. The Fokker itself is old – slow and stiff, naturally stable. Get another – almost any other – plane with a forward firing gun and the Fokkers will be neutralised. They ain’t very good, but they are the only one of their sort. The BEs haven’t got a hope against them. Get the engine industry going and there will be no problem, sir.”

  “And for the meanwhile?”

  “They will kill an extra dozen pilots a week, and as many observers, of course. Trouble is, we haven’t got a dozen pilots spare for them.”

  “A loss of one hundred trained men a month, Tommy.”

  “Fifty, sir. We don’t train observers. ‘Any old chap with a pair of eyes can be an observer, haw, haw’.”

  “Are we going to win this war, Tommy?”

  “Of course we are, sir. We – the British and French together, have ten million men to put into the lines, now that we have added the Indian Army. Germany has eight million, but better trained and equipped and fighting a defensive war. At the rate things are progressing, ten years from now the Germans will be down to their last ten thousand soldiers sat in a trench in Belgium, while we have a hundred thousand left to defeat them in the last big battle of the war. At the end, there will be no Germans, five thousand Allies and three planes, and we will have won a marvellous victory!”

  “And then the Americans will inherit the Earth, for lack of anyone else left.”

  “If they have had sense enough to keep out of our squabble, then good luck to them, sir.”

  Squire was able to add a little balance to Tommy’s gloomy picture.

  “The word in Whitehall is, in fact, Tommy, that we are to ratchet up the blockade on Germany, tightening controls on everything going to Holland. The North Sea is closed to Germany’s own merchant shipping; the Russians have control of the Black Sea – they are doing well there, although failing in Poland and around the Baltic; nothing can pass through the Mediterranean and up to the Austro-Hungarian ports while we have Gibraltar and Suez. Germany will be short of food by this winter, half-starved by the end of ’16, and there will be a shortage of petrol particularly. If we can’t beat their soldiers, we shall destroy their women and children.”

  “God bless Great Britain, sir! I was told earlier this year that we were fighting a war for Western civilisation; I suspect the gentleman was right – this sounds fairly typical of our way of doing things!”

  “I don’t like the idea of winning at all costs, Tommy; but I ain’t going to lose!”

  “Nor me, sir. Nor me. Let us join the ladies and take our proper second place to the infant – there is still something to celebrate.”

  They were delayed for a few minutes – Monkey had chosen to breast feed her daughter, and that was not to be performed in the presence of gentlemen.

  “Are you to stay in training, Tommy?”

  “Not if I can get out, sir. I would like to spend a while at Airco with de Havilland and see what needs be done with the DH2. If possible, taking Noah Arkwright with me – he’s a damned solid flier, sir.”

  “Explain, Tommy!”

  “I, sir, not exactly to blow my own trumpet, have flair and genius in the air. Noah offers painstaking, working skill; he cuts no corners and knows precisely what he is doing at every second. He is, as a result, a far more useful pilot to the manufacturer. I can stretch a new plane to its limits, and so far have got away with it. He will plot, inch by inch, exactly where those limits are. He is, in truth, a better pilot than me; he is one of the few instructors who knows how to teach a new man to fly. But he is not of the right sort, you know, and half of the boys refuse to listen to him.”

  “Made up from the ranks, was he not?”

  “He was, sir.”

  “And it is more important to fight the war between the classes than to go to battle against the Hun. There are times, Tommy, why I wonder just why we bother, you and I.”

  Squire stared out of the window, despairing, then suddenly brightened.

  “In fact, Tommy, I know just why. It is because this war is making me richer every day, simply through putting my money to work where it does most good. Your money, too. I have invested, with your trustees’ permission, the bulk of your spare funds in the States, in firms buying up wheat and canned beef, and shipping it to Britain under the American flag. There are German submarines out there, but they mostly are very chary about touching Americans. The real problem is that the Americans have got very few ocean-going ships – most of the Atlantic trade is British. Almost all of your profits made in America stay there, re-invested. We can do that because, of course, the President leans our way and turns a blind eye to the demands of the Neutrality Act. The shell-filling factories are in process of setting up now, all in rural areas – as we discussed. There will be a couple on Salisbury Plain that we have an interest in; they will be welcome there, for paying women a wage, and not a bad one at that.”

  “So, I am a war profiteer, sir.”

  “To an extent, yes, Tommy. By very definition, you are making a profit from the war. Not, perhaps, in the way that your so-called brother chose.”

  Squire explained about the blown cans of corned beef, and the recruits who had died of botulism just a few months before.

  “And he was not stood against a wall, sir? Not even sent to penal servitude for life?”

  “No. He was sent with a Purchasing Commission to the States, and is there making himself probably richer than me. He paid his bribes, you see, Tommy, and became untouchable.”

  Tommy was sickened, almost literally.

  “Mr Cecil, the local MP, one of the Salisbury clan, talked to me in France, a while back. He suggested I might change my name, you will remember. Should I?”

  “No. People would be inclined to ask why you had done so. It would create scandal where none was already.”

  “I wondered, sir. It would be disloyal to my father, as well.”

  “I agree. Your father was a fine gentleman, Tommy, and would quite probably have picked up his shotgun and gone hunting for the revolting, money-grubbing beast.”

  Squire sighed that the times should be so corrupt, so unpleasant, cheered up again as he had another thought.

  “Grace tells me that you have distinguished yourself again, Tommy. That is not quite the words she used, mark you, but it is effectively what she meant.”

  Tommy grinned – he was still awaiting the ‘discussion’ that Monkey had promised.

  “This Travers affair, sir; all part of the clean-up. The next Gazette will publish the citation. DSO, this time. That makes it very much the case that I should be out of training, of course, back in the thick of it. There will be men in the front line asking how it comes about that decorations are awarded to those safe in England.”

  Squire nodded – that was a reasonable question.

  “Quite a furore that Travers business caused. The boy lied to his father about the reason for his dismissal from the service – a coward to the end, it seems - and Mr Travers expressed his indignation at the mistreatment of his son in the highest quarters; it is not impossible that his words were heard in the Palace, friend of a friend sort of thing. Discovery of the truth was a humiliation to him, particularly as it could be said that he had misled the King; it caused him to issue an almost public retraction which he has followed by withdrawing from most aspects of public life. He still has his City offices, of course, but is almost reclusive in them. The young man has disappeared wholly, his whereabouts unknown; necessary, for he would have been given the cut direct had he been seen in London – all of his former acquaintances would have made a play of turning a shoulder and refusing to acknowledge his existence. That might well have led to little paragraphs in the gossip columns – you know the sort of thing, ‘a little b
ird tells me that the Honourable Miss Cecelia Whatsit has not invited a certain gentleman who was said to be a close friend to her Ball on Friday next’.”

  “Sickening stuff, sir. Does it matter?”

  “It can lead to talk, and the few in Society who do not know the story will be given the round tale, some of them in the presence of maids and footmen who have both ears and intelligence. The story will spread, and be exaggerated, and eventually one of the gutter newspapers – the Daily Mail, for example – will publish and ask why young men in high places can get away with treasonable cowardice when for ordinary mortals there would be a rapid, and well-deserved, firing squad. A cover up has to be thorough, Tommy.”

  “Simpler to shoot him out of hand, sir.”

  “Messy! Bodies have a habit of surfacing. They have land in Ireland and it is supposed that he has been banished there. What will eventually become of him is unknown, for he is the eldest.”

  “Presumably he will eventually inherit and reappear in ten years as a wealthy man, sir.”

  “It depends on just how hurt the father feels, Tommy. If there is an entail, the young man could be declared mentally incompetent, you know, and be debarred by court order from exercising any control of his inheritance. That would require that he be put away, in a barred and private hospital, his next brother to effectively take his place, acting as his guardian on his father’s demise. It demands a pair of doctors to sign a certificate of insanity; a visit to Harley Street will often find medical specialists who have a greater regard for their bank balance than for any Hippocratic Oath. Locked in an asylum he will not last long and his death will make all tidy with a public interment.”

  “Ruthless, sir.”

  “He should have been shot for cowardice, Tommy. He is lucky. Besides that, he has transgressed against the code – and we are unforgiving of those of ours who do that. Whatever shall happen, it must never take place in public.”

  “Did I tell you about George, sir, in the Bombardment Squadron?”