War Story (2 page)

It was sixty or seventy yards to his left, about a length behind him and slightly above. He recognised the type at once. A squadron of them had assembled at Shoreham en route to France. It was an FE2b, a tough-looking two-seater biplane with the engine behind the pilot and no fuselage to speak of, just a naked framework holding the tail in position. The engine was a pusher, so the pilot and his observer sat in a pod ahead of the wings. This arrangement gave them a marvellous view. Right now they were watching Paxton staggering and stumbling about the sky. After a while he noticed that they were waving, gesturing downwards very vigorously. He was sick of being messed about by this stupid Quirk, so he took their advice.

There was only one way to overcome the machine's mindless desire to climb, and that was by falling into a series of sideslips. So Paxton descended, like a bad skier stumbling down an icy mountain. The FE2b spiralled behind him, at a safe distance. At five hundred feet it levelled out and flew east. Paxton followed, climbing hard. After five miles he saw the aerodrome. It looked shockingly small. It looked about one quarter the size of the field at Shoreham. Nevertheless the FE landed easily enough.

It took Paxton half an hour of sweaty experiment at sideslip and climb, sideslip and climb, sideslip and climb, before he entered a final sideslip that sent the Quirk low over the edge of the aerodrome. He let the slide continue. The field kept rising sideways. Now he could see the grass shimmering. This was going to be the most awful crash. He shut his eyes, counted to three, then stirred the joystick vigorously, pedalled the rudder bar, and gave the engine full power. The first bounce of the Quirk jarred his spine and opened his eyes. He snatched at the throttle. The Quirk bounced again, and again. People watching said it bounced seven times before the tailskid touched, and four times after that, until a tyre burst and the machine slewed to a halt. Paxton wasn't counting. Paxton was down, and that was memorable enough.

*

By the time he had unstrapped and got out, a couple of mechanics had arrived at a brisk trot and were examining the wheel. Behind them came a burly young man on a bicycle. He wore neither cap nor tunic but from his khaki tie and slacks Paxton guessed he was an officer. He rode unhurriedly, and the bicycle wandered as it hit lumps and ruts. A few yards from Paxton he let it drift almost to a halt, and then stood on the pedals, concentrating on keeping it upright, as if in a slow-bicycle race. “You damn near hit me with your damn sandbags, you know,” he said, not looking. All his attention was on his front wheel.

Paxton was taken aback. He had expected a sort of welcome and this sounded like an accusation. Or was it meant as a joke? He said: “Are you sure it was me?” That sounded awfully lame.

“Of course I'm sure. You're Dexter, aren't you? I'm Goss. The old man sent me up to find you, and that was easy enough…” He broke off as the bicycle almost toppled and he was forced to work the pedals.

“Actually, I'm Paxton, not Dexter.”

Goss wasn't listening. “You were dancing and prancing all over the sky. Didn't want to see me, though. Too busy chucking your rotten sandbags about.”

Suddenly Paxton understood. He walked over to the Quirk and looked into the observer's cockpit. Empty. Oh my god. At that moment his stomach felt just as empty.

“See what you nearly did to me?” Goss demanded. Now he had abandoned the slow-bicycle race and was riding in figures-of-eight near the tail. He pointed, and Paxton went over to look. The leading edges of the tailplanes were damaged, cracked, bent downwards. No wonder the Quirk had insisted on climbing. What an idiot he'd been! What a chump! Remorse seized him, and he patted the fuselage, as if it were a big dog whose tail he had trodden on.“Don't make it any worse,” Goss said. Paxton flinched and took his hand away. “Joke,” Goss said sadly.“Come on. You've missed lunch but you might get a sandwich, I suppose.”

They headed for a cluster of wooden sheds. Elsewhere Paxton saw a windsock, a couple of FE2bs parked outside canvas hangars, a few lorries. It didn't look much. He actually
had his mouth open to ask the name of the aerodrome when he saved himself. “So this is Pepriac, then,” he said.

“Well, it's not Frinton-on-Sea. Look, I'm getting cramp. I'II go ahead and stir up the cookhouse.” Goss raced away, making the bicycle swing briskly from side to side. When he was halfway to the camp he looked back and shouted something. The words were blurred. Paxton called:”What?” Goss, still pedalling, still looking back, pointed. His rear wheel bucked and he went flying over the handlebars like an athlete over a vaulting-horse.

Paxton ran as fast as his flying boots allowed and reached Goss as he was getting up. “It's nothing,” Goss said peevishly. “I'm perfectly all right.” But Paxton could see that he was not. His right arm hung loosely, like an empty sleeve with the hand tacked on the end.

“You've done something to your arm,” Paxton said.

“Thanks very much. And I thought it was gallstones.”

They walked in silence, Paxton pushing the bicycle, to a shed where an ambulance stood alongside. Goss pointed to another hut, the biggest of all. “Mess,” he said grimly. “Make them give you something to eat. If they argue, throw sandbags. The old man says he wants to see you in half an hour.” He went inside.

The old man was twenty-four: not an unusual age for a squadron commander in the Royal Flying Corps.

Major Milne had been christened Rufus because his infant hair was bright red. Within a year it faded to a mild sandy colour, and this was the first of many disappointments for his father, a commander in the Royal Navy.

Ever since Trafalgar, all the Milne sons had gone into the Navy. When Rufus was five, his father took him dinghy-sailing on a sheltered lake. There was a soft, steady breeze, not enough to make a chop, and Rufus was sick throughout the trip. The next time they went out he began to throw up before the boat left the landing-stage. The third and fourth attempts were no better. “Nil desperandum,” his father said. “The great Horatio Nelson was seasick in Portsmouth harbour, so they say.” The fifth time they went to the lake, Rufus was standing on the shore, putting on his little lifejacket,
when he started to vomit. His father wanted to persist, and Rufus was ready to do as he was told, but the boy had lost eight pounds in a week and his mother was alarmed by his gauntness.

“Sorry, old chap,” his father said. “I'm afraid it's shore duty for you until that rumblegut of yours changes its tune.” Rufus, chomping his way through a second helping of scrambled eggs on toast, nodded bravely.

The tune never changed. Rufus went from short to long trousers, his voice broke, he turned sixteen and started shaving, but whenever he stepped into a boat his stomach emptied itself with an energy his father had never seen matched, not even during storms in the China Seas. The risk was too great. Milne senior wasn't going to disgrace the family name with a naval cadet who might well throw up at the mention of the word “dreadnought”. In due course he pulled strings and got his son a commission in a decent regiment, the Green Howards. That was in 1910.

In 1912 Rufus took private flying lessons from a Frenchman at Brooklands aerodrome. His father felt cheated when he learned that flying did not make Rufus sick, and his mother felt relieved when he got his certificate. She thought it was all over then. But he kept on flying and in 1914, six weeks after the war began, he transferred to the Royal Flying Corps. Rear-admiral Milne (now retired) gave up. The Green Howards weren't the real thing, they weren't the Navy, but at least they were a proper lot, a decent outfit, a
regiment.
What was the RFC? A bag of tricks, a joke, and not even a funny joke that you could tell your neighbours. So be it. The admiral had nephews in the Navy and he had a younger, non-vomiting son who would follow them soon. He tried not to think about Rufus.

Rufus Milne had long since stopped thinking about his father, who existed in his memory as a gruff and discontented figure pruning roses very hard, as if he suspected mutiny below. Rufus enjoyed flying, he was proud of his rank, and he liked commanding a squadron; but he had grown up in such an atmosphere of suppressed disapproval and disappointment that even now, after six years in the army and two years in France, he hid his feelings behind a wall of disarming habits
and mannerisms. He spoke in a drawl that suggested nothing was as important as it seemed; he rarely looked people in the eye, preferring to let his gaze wander past the left ear while he nodded and blinked at what they said; he slouched as he walked; and he had several chunky, short-stemmed pipes that demanded a lot of attention. He often seemed vague, and vaguely elsewhere. Sometimes, when people met him for the first time, they wondered how on earth he got to be a major, let alone a squadron commander. That was what Paxton wondered as he sat opposite him.
Fellow looks half-asleep
, he thought.

“Weren't we expecting you ….urn…. rather earlier than this?” Milne asked, so softly that Paxton leaned forward.

“Yes, sir. Five days ago, sir:”

“Five days, eh? As much as that…”

“I'm afraid we ran into a spot of bother on the way. Several spots, in fact.”

“Ah …” Milne slumped in his chair and squinted at the sunlight. “Spots of
bother
, you say.” He seemed to be trying, not very hard, to remember what
bother
was like. Far away, thunder rumbled. The sound rolled like a slow avalanche until it made a window shiver. Milne glanced at his wrist-watch. Paxton waited, upright and alert. The door was slightly open. A fly wandered in, as if looking for a friend, and Milne watched it until it wandered out again. “Suppose you tell me,” he suggested.

“Yes, sir. The first thing that happened, sir, was the weather turned rather nasty soon after we took off from Shoreham. You see I'd planned to fly due east, that is, straight across the Channel, and reach the French coast at Boulogne but some pretty stormy squalls hit us, and what with the cloud and the wind and the rain the other chaps simply couldn't keep formation on me. I was leading, you see. So it looked too dangerous to fly straight to Boulogne – not that we could fly straight if we wanted to, the wind was chucking us about so much – but anyway I knew it was at least sixty miles to Boulogne, mostly out of sight of land, and I decided we ought to follow the coast to Dover instead and then make the short crossing to Cap Griz Nez.”

Paxton paused. The CO smiled encouragingly at the empty air beside his left ear, so he went on.

“Well, as I said, it was dreadfully stormy when I changed course, sir, and although three of the other chaps saw what I was up to, unfortunately the fourth man didn't. I remember a very large black cloud. We went one side of it and he went the other, and I'm afraid I never saw him again. Lieutenant Kellaway, sir … Anyway, the rest of us managed to stagger along to Dover, getting thoroughly soaked in the process, and I could see that a couple of our engines weren't too jolly – you know, coughing and spluttering – so down we all went and landed at the ‘drome there. I mean that was the
idea
, sir. We all did our best but one chap's engine simply conked out before he could reach the ‘drome and he went slap into a tree. Awfully bad luck. Chap called Wilkins.”

“Then there were three.” Milne took a pipe from his desk and began scratching his head with the stem.

“That was on Friday. Wilkins broke lots of legs and things, sir, and his BE2c was smashed-up altogether. Well, on Saturday our engines were okay and I led the chaps across the water, aiming for the depot at St. Omer via Boulogne. By then I think the wind must have changed or something, sir, because what I thought was Boulogne turned out to be Calais, only I didn't know that at the time. So of course St. Omer wasn't where we thought it would be, although we flew around for hours and hours looking for it. In the end we had to land any-old-where before we ran out of fuel. And that's how we came to spend the night at a Royal Naval Air Service place called St. Rambert.”

Milne nodded, or perhaps he was now scratching his head against the stem.

“The naval types were jolly friendly, sir, and they asked us to a party. Frankly, I don't think Ross-Kennedy was used to strong drink, sir. He was frightfully ill next morning. That was Sunday. I made him take a cold bath and drink lots of black coffee, which I must say didn't seem to do him a lot of good, but by the afternoon I really couldn't wait any longer. We all took off and I wanted to get to St. Omer so I could send a message here, sir, in case you were worrying. Then Ross-Kennedy started flying round and round in circles. I could see him being sick over the side of the cockpit. I made all sorts of signals to him to buck up, but I don't think he saw
me. In the end he went round and round and down and down until he tried to land his machine in a field and he overturned. Did a sort of cartwheel. Dexter and I flew on to St. Omer. We spent the rest of Sunday and all Monday morning driving around the country in a tender, but we never found the BE or Ross-Kennedy. Dexter thought it might have caught fire.”

“Then there were two,” Milne said.

“After lunch on Monday we took off and I honestly thought we'd be here by teatime, sir, and we would have been, definitely, if Dexter's propeller hadn't bust. It just went all to pieces. He was jolly lucky to get down at Treizennes, sir, but of course they only fly DH2s there so they had to send back to St. Omer for a spare. We got off again at six o'clock, sir, and the next thing that hit us was fog. Really awful, thick, clammy stuff, sir. My compass was worse than useless – it kept whizzing around like mad – and we flew above the fog as long as possible, but eventually we had to come down into it, and then of course we lost each other. I made a forced landing in a field and bent the undercarriage. Miles from anywhere. Slept in a barn. Next morning – that was Tuesday, yesterday -I walked for hours until I found a village. They phoned the nearest ‘drome, which was Beauvois. A tender came out and collected me and together we found the BE2c. They patched up the undercarriage and put in some petrol and I managed to take off and get to Beauvois. Then they mended it properly. That's where I heard about poor old Dexter. Hit a church. Then today I set off once more, sir. They told me to keep Amiens cathedral on my right and I couldn't miss Pepriac but … I don't know … Anyway, here I am. I'm sorry about the other four, sir, and I'm really frightfully sorry I'm so late, because I know how frightfully keen you are to get your hands on these Quirks.”