Authors: Paul Dowswell
Flying seemed such an extraordinary thing to him – to be able to take to the fresh blue sky and leave the squalor and the soggy cold behind, the trudging through mud, and the sleeping in barns or out in the open. What he would give to be able to go back to a base every night to sleep in a proper bed. Pilots seemed like mythical figures to Will. Earlier in the war, when he was still young enough to be taken in by those stories, he had read about the French ace Guynemer, who had flown so high he had been taken by the angels, or the English hero Albert Ball, who was said to have flown into a cloud and vanished. But Will had seen the burned-out skeletons of flying machines scattered around the battlefield, and occasionally the charred bodies of luckless pilots, and he remembered another story he’d been told at school, of Icarus the ancient Greek, flying too close to the sun, and he decided he might be safer down on the ground after all.
As the engine note faded and they began to delve further into the forest, Weale held up his hand for them to stop and listen. ‘Where are Binney and Moorhouse?’ he whispered.
‘I were just thinking that,’ said Jim. ‘Don’t tell me they’ve scarpered.’
The patrol retraced their steps. The two missing soldiers, who had been at the end of their line, were close by the plane, where they had all stopped to look. Binney lay on his side on the ground, as if asleep. Will noticed how smooth his face was. It was all too easy to imagine him as a young boy, waiting for his mother to come and kiss him goodnight.
Moorhouse was lying on his back. His eyes were open. He looked surprised.
They had both been shot through the head. Moorhouse was obviously dead, but Jim went over to Binney to check for a pulse. He shook his head. Weale knelt over Moorhouse’s body and closed his eyes. ‘Poor sod. Four years of this,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘Four years.’
All at once Will felt a knot tighten in his gut. ‘We never even heard anything.’
‘He must have timed his shots with the artillery barrage,’ whispered Jim. ‘Clever bastard. Well, he’s stirred up some trouble for himself.’
He gathered his patrol together. Will could see the others felt as shaken as he was. ‘There’s a sniper here who’s firing whenever the shells drop. When you hear a shell, dive for cover – that’s when he’s going to fire. And when he cocks it up – he’s bound to mistime one, then that’s when we’ll get him.’
Jim went over to the bodies again to collect the men’s identity tags. Then he said, ‘I’ll take point. Franklin, you take second.’ Will always took a moment to register when Jim called him by his surname. But he liked the idea of being behind Jim, peering through the forest, looking out for signs, protecting his older brother.
Sergeant Franklin’s courage had given the men heart. A single sniper and a patrol. The odds were in their favour. He was probably up a tree somewhere. Once they heard him they’d hunt him down.
9.30 a.m.
High in his evergreen perch, a sniper watches the patrol. Despite the cold morning fog, he is sticky with sweat. He calculates his chances. In the silence, there are too many to pick off in a quick brace of shots. At the first bullet they would scatter and hunt him down. He must wait for the shells to fall, and then he can strike. If there are no more shells, then he must come down from his eyrie and shoot from a position that allows him retreat. He has been doing this for six months now. Every day brings further peril. But he has convinced himself that if he is careful, he has a greater chance of surviving than an ordinary infantryman. Being a sniper lets him gauge his own risks and he alone is responsible for his actions. Unlike the infantry. If they are ordered to charge to almost certain death, then they have no option. He is a lone wolf. Picking off the stray sheep.
He waits another ten minutes. There are no more artillery barrages. He decides he must stalk the Tommies, rather than wait for them. Slowly, agonisingly slowly, he begins to descend from the treetop. There is a dip in the ground close to the eastern end of the forest – near his own lines. He will hide in there and kill as many of them as fate allows, then retreat.
He is fleet-footed and sure in his sense of direction. As the British soldiers comb through the northern side of the forest, he reaches the spot he remembers and quickly gathers together twigs, branches, brushwood, to hide his position and, most especially, the flash of his rifle.
He hears the patrol in the distance. They are good. They make barely a sound. But a group of men in a forest cannot help but give themselves away. The swish of feet in bracken. The crisp footfalls on dead leaves and brittle twigs. They are coming his way. The one in charge, the one with the great bristling moustache and the stripes on his tunic, he is at the front of the line. Perfect. Cut off the head and the body will cease to function. He studies them through the telescopic sight of his Mauser 98, waiting for them to come into range. Maybe he can get two shots off. The sergeant and the younger fellow behind him. They look similar enough to be related. Perhaps they are brothers. Is it right to deprive a mother of two sons in a single day? He thinks of his own mother, who lost her two youngest on the Marne, and his finger tightens on the trigger. On impulse he switches his target. The young one first, then as the older one turns he will kill him too. That way there will be less chance of detection. He studies his target. He is no more than a boy, but his two younger brothers were barely a year or so older. He breathes deeply, preparing for his shot, and shivers involuntarily as a cold wind blows over his position.
Something catches in his throat. He stifles the urge to cough. Too late he recognises the bitter taste. Gas, from an earlier bombardment. Most of it has dissipated, but a few pockets still linger in the hollows of the forest. The urge to cough is irresistible, and the more he coughs the more he breathes in – his lungs fill with chlorine. His eyes are streaming now, he is retching and bent double in breathless agony.
Sergeant Franklin hears the man and signals for Ogden and Weale to investigate. They run towards the sound and recognise their quarry in an instant. Blackened face, helmet and uniform covered in leaves and bracken. It is the sniper. He looks at them with desperate, pleading eyes, coughing blood and phlegm. Ogden levels his rifle to shoot, but Weale pulls on his arm and shakes his head. A shot might draw the attention of other snipers.
Poor dead Moorhouse has been his pal for the whole wretched war. Weale lunges forward, a livid rage coursing through his body, and clubs the choking man to death with the butt of his rifle.
9.30
a.m.
High above their heads Eddie Hertz checked his compass and settled into his flight path. This close to the Front you could expect to be attacked at any time after you took off. Or even as you were taking off. That was how he had got his second ‘kill’, three months ago. They were strafing a Hun aerodrome and this bright red Fokker was taking off. Just one on his own, the brave little bastard, coming up to meet the whole squadron. Eddie was flying over and the craft came into his line of fire – tail up, just ready to leave the ground. Eddie let off a long burst from his machine guns. He was close enough to see the pilot’s head jerk back as the bullets tore into him, and he swerved away as the Fokker leaped into the air. The pilot must have pulled the stick back when the bullets hit. The plane flew up twenty feet then stalled, crashing to the ground and bursting into flames. Eddie saw the pyre he had created and felt a fleeting elation. But that wore off quick enough. It wasn’t very ‘sporting’, was it, shooting a man as he tried to take off? It was too easy.
The next kill, three days later, was a damn sight more deserving. That was a day he was really proud of. The story had even made
The New York Times
. That had been back in August. Eddie and two of his squadron, Flight Commander Doyle Bridgman and Lieutenant Irvin Dwight, had been close to the Front when Bridgman had spotted a Hun observation plane low down on the horizon: a twin-engine Rumpler by the look of it, little more than a black dot skirting to and fro along the edge of the clouds. They had screamed down and made short work of the two-seater plane. Bridgman had fired the only shots needed to kill the crew and see the clumsy plane nosedive down to the pockmarked mud below.
But this was a short-lived victory. These observation planes were often there as bait, and as the patrol regained height Eddie suddenly heard the
rat-a-tat
of machine guns and saw glowing tracer bullets curve past his plane. At once they were surrounded by brightly coloured Fokkers. The four Hun fighter planes had come in straight out of the sun – just as American pilots had been warned in their training manuals. Eddie’s flight commander was in trouble. Bridgman had been wounded, that much was apparent, and his Camel was banking over to the right. Eddie could see him slumped against the side of his cockpit. He wondered if he was already dead. But then his engine caught and the man began to rouse himself, leaning forward in his cockpit to beat at the flames with one hand. Black smoke thickened, and he began to cough in great heaving spasms. The flying machine lurched sharply to the right and Eddie knew he would never see Doyle Bridgman again.
A Fokker screamed past him and Eddie immediately noticed bullet holes in the fabric of his right wing. Pushing his stick down, he wheeled his Camel into a tight right turn and searched the sky for his opponents. The odds were not good. Four Huns against him and Dwight. And this kind of Fokker, the D.VIII, was well matched with the Camels.
Eddie was too low. Too low to make an escape back to his own lines if his engine was hit and failed, too low to have any tactical advantage over his attackers. Pulling the Camel into a climb he desperately scanned the sky. He banked left, then right, but they were still nowhere to be seen. Irvin Dwight had vanished as well. Had they got him too?
The rattle of machine-gun fire and the spatter of bullets hitting canvas caught him by surprise. Even over the roar of the engine he could hear it. Two Fokkers screamed past again to his right. Eddie knew his luck was running out. Two passes, two hits on his machine. Next time, he was sure, he would be riddled with bullets. As he looked down, he saw both the Fokkers taking a tight right turn, in close formation. He jerked his control column and flew to meet them head on. This was a manoeuvre neither of the German pilots was expecting. Eddie started to fire, well before he was in effective range, but the sight of his tracer bullets hurtling towards them must have unnerved one of his opponents, because the right-hand plane immediately veered to the left. It was a disastrous move. Catching his fellow pilot on the wing, his propeller sheered off great chunks of wood and fabric, and both planes began to plummet to earth. Eddie pulled his stick back, climbing out of the path of the two aircraft.
The plane that had been hit was doomed. Its starboard wing now barely half its normal length, it dropped from the sky. The one that had crashed into it was luckier. Although its propeller had been lost, the plane was still airworthy, and the pilot put it in a steep dive to build up speed and enable him to glide to earth.
Eddie wondered if he should chase the blighter and finish him off. But there were other German planes to worry about. He decided to leave the man to his fate. If he survived, he would have to live with the shame of his clumsy manoeuvre.
Banking swiftly to port, Eddie could see two, no, three planes a thousand feet below. It was Dwight, he was sure of it, pursued by the two other Fokkers. The odds were even now. Eddie took his Camel into a steep downward curve and within moments he was close behind the two German planes. He kept expecting them to veer off, but neither pilot seemed to have noticed him. Maybe they had assumed their comrades had shot him down. They were closing in on Dwight, and certain of a kill. The lead Fokker began to fire his guns, and Eddie decided he could wait no longer. Although he was still out of effective range, he pressed the trigger on his two Vickers machine guns and sprayed the sky with bullets and tracer.
He had arrived too late to help Irvin Dwight. As he flew closer, Eddie could see Dwight’s plane peppered with bullets from nose to tail and the pilot slumped forward in his cockpit. Eddie changed his target, aiming now at the lead Fokker and cutting a long burst into the centre of the airplane. He guessed he had caught the pilot completely unawares because he took no evasive action. Eddie’s shots hit home, and the engine immediately caught. Within a few seconds the entire front was enveloped in flame. Eddie cried out in savage glee as the plane set into a deep dive, smearing the sky with oily black smoke. Now there were just two of them left. One to one.
The final Fokker had vanished again. Eddie hurriedly searched around and found him soon enough. He was climbing, maybe a quarter of a mile ahead. Eddie gave chase, the two planes circling in great wide arcs all alone in the vast blue canopy of the sky. There were few clouds in this sector, and Eddie was certain he would catch this fellow if he kept on his tail.
He looked around, anxious that he should not be jumped by more German fighters but there was no one else there. His opponent had made a fatal tactical error. The Camel and the D.VIII were well matched in speed and armament, but the Camel could go a couple of thousand feet higher. If the Fokker kept climbing, Eddie would eventually get above him and then the German pilot would be at his mercy.
Soon Eddie was flying at a height he rarely reached. His opponent was still there in front of him. Eddie steeled himself to keep his eyes firmly on the aircraft ahead and not become distracted by the great panorama below. He was so high now he could see past the wasteland of the Western Front, beyond the pockmarked mud, the livid scars of the trenches, to greener land beyond.