Flames over France (6 page)

He climbed between the sheets and prepared to blow out the candle, then decided to leave it lit so that Le Roy could find his way around the room without tripping over anything. An instant later, as though someone had turned a switch, he was asleep.

Armstrong slept the sleep of the drugged. He did not hear Le Roy come in, nor did he hear the Frenchman leave again, early the next morning. The curtains were still closed when he awoke, but their thickness could not conceal the fact that it was broad daylight outside.

He got out of bed and opened the curtains, then looked at his watch; it was seven-thirty. He struggled for a moment to remember what day it was, then realised that it must be Saturday. Saturday, the eleventh of May. Turning back to the interior of the bedroom, he saw to his surprise and delight that his shirt and underclothing had been laundered and had been arranged in a neat pile on top of a chest of drawers. His uniform, too, had been brushed and pressed and was on a hanger behind the door. Madame Bessodes, he told himself, must have been up and about until the small hours. There was also a razor, placed next to his laundry. He fingered his chin, feeling the rough stubble, and decided that a shave was going to be his first priority, but the washing bowl was missing. He was wondering what to do about that when there was a rap on the door.

Realising that he was stark naked, he hurriedly dived back into bed before calling “
Entrez
!’ A moment later Madame Bessodes came in, bearing the missing bowl; it had steam rising from it. She bade him good morning as she placed the bowl on the washstand, and asked him if he had slept well. He told her that he had, and tried to thank her for washing his clothing. She waved his thanks aside and, fishing in her apron pocket, produced a note which she handed to him, explaining that it was from Captain Le Roy. “I will provide breakfast for you in twenty minutes,
monsieur
,” she told Armstrong, in a tone that suggested she would brook no excuse for lateness.

Armstrong read the note, which was an instruction to make himself known to the
adjutant
— the rank corresponded roughly with the RAF’s warrant officer — who was in charge of running the airfield’s administration. There was, the note stressed, no hurry at all to report in. Nevertheless, Armstrong shaved quickly and then washed himself from head to foot; it wasn’t as good as a bath, but it was better than nothing at all. He allowed himself the luxury of soaking his feet in the bowl for a few moments, then dried himself off and got dressed.

There was no sign of the innkeeper downstairs, but Madame Bessodes made the pilot sit down at one of the tables and, to his astonishment, brought him a plateful of eggs and cold slices of ham, along with a bowl of very milky tea. “
Voilà
,” she said, “
le
petit
dejeuner
Anglais
pour
vous
.” It was not exactly an English breakfast, as she claimed, but he realised that she had made a considerable effort to please him and he expressed his gratitude as best he could. To his even greater amazement, she smiled at him and patted him lightly on the shoulder before disappearing into the kitchen.

A few moments later she returned, carrying a framed photograph which she showed to him hesitantly. A round-faced young man in French naval uniform stared out at him. “My son,” she explained. “He will be about the same age as you … He is in the Mediterranean and safe from the war, I pray. He serves on a great battleship, the
Bretagne
, at a place called Mers-el-Kebir. Better for him to be there than here, I think.”

Armstrong murmured something and handed the photograph back to her. She gave a sigh, and returned to her chores. Strange, the pilot thought, how war and danger compels people to confide details of their private affairs to total strangers … the little things that are their pride.

He finished his breakfast and carried the utensils into the kitchen, placing them on a table. Madame Bessodes was busying herself at the sink, her back to him, and he sensed that she was crying. So as not to embarrass her, he left without a word.

The morning was bright and clear and filled with birdsong, and Armstrong found himself whistling as he made his way through the woods towards the airfield. Two sentries challenged him as he reached the gate, and although he had left his identity documents in England — a standard procedure before flying on operations, as each aircrew member had his identity disc around his neck by way of identification — the guards were satisfied by Le Roy’s note and one of them escorted Armstrong to the
adjutant’s
office in one of the wooden buildings.

The
adjutant
, a much-decorated veteran of the last war, greeted Armstrong affably enough and gave him some coffee, but seemed at a loss when it came to finding the RAF pilot something to do. All the reconnaissance aircraft and their escorting fighters — except one, which had been undergoing repair — were airborne, and it would be some time before they returned. Then the
adjutant
had a brainwave; would the RAF
capitaine
care to inspect the Curtiss Hawk that was still on the ground? The mechanics, he assured Armstrong, would be happy to show him the cockpit.

He led the pilot out to the aircraft, which stood in a clearing facing outwards on to the airstrip. The repairs to the engine had been completed and the mechanics were about to run-up the motor to see if everything worked.

The Hawk, Armstrong found, was already armed and almost fully fuelled; its pilot had already taken off on a mission the previous day when engine trouble had forced him to turn back. This morning, in another aircraft, he was somewhere over the Maginot Line.

Armstrong stood on the Hawk’s wing and peered into the cockpit as the mechanic who was already sitting inside, ready to start the big Pratt and Whitney Twin Wasp radial engine, showed him where all the switches were. The cockpit, Armstrong noted, wasn’t much different from that of a Spitfire or Hurricane, except that it was roomier and the guns — two.50 and two.30 calibre weapons — were tired by triggers rather than a button. The flap and undercarriage levers, he saw, were a little too close together for comfort; it would be very easy to mistake one for the other.

The mechanic signalled that he was going to start the motor. Armstrong nodded and jumped down off the wing, wandering out of the trees into the sunlight. Behind him, the engine gave a couple of bangs and then burst into life, emitting a cloud of blue smoke. It roared throatily for a minute as the mechanic opened the throttle to clear excess oil from the plugs, then the noise died away to a steady rumble as the man brought the throttle setting to ‘idle’ while he checked the engine instruments.

A shadow rippled over the grass of the airstrip. Armstrong looked round, peering into the eastern sky, squinting into the sun which was now high above the treetops. A moment later, a twin-engined aircraft roared low over the aerodrome, the sound bringing personnel tumbling out of the buildings. There were black crosses under the aircraft’s wings; it was a Dornier 17.

Something fell from the Dornier’s belly and hit the ground right in the centre of the airfield. There was a thud and a cloud of bright yellow smoke burst from the object, billowing upwards in the still air. Still keeping low, the Dornier sped away from the field, pursued by some ineffectual bursts of machine-gun fire. Armstrong saw it turn steeply in the distance, coming round in a circle that would keep it well clear of any defensive fire, but at the same time enable its crew to keep the smoke marker in sight and guide the bombers that must be following directly on to it.

Armstrong did not pause to think. Turning on his heel, he dashed back into the clearing, thrusting aside the startled ground crew and leaping onto the wing of the Hawk. The man in the cockpit, who had heard nothing above the noise of the engine, looked at Armstrong as though he had gone mad.

“
Vite
,
vite
!” the RAF pilot yelled at him, pointing at the sky. “Get out, quick! The Germans are here!”

Suddenly white-faced, the man scrambled from the cockpit and dropped from the wing onto the ground. Armstrong looked inside for a second; there was no parachute, just a cushion of some sort which the mechanic had placed in the seat pan where the parachute normally fitted. There was no time to worry about that now.

Settling himself into the cockpit, he strapped himself in quickly, fumbling with the unfamiliar harness. He released the brakes and, holding the stick back, opened the throttle slowly. The Hawk began to move, its speed increasing, and left the shelter of the trees. A figure came running towards it, gesticulating wildly, and Armstrong recognised the
adjutant
. The pilot took no notice of him and taxied on, opening the throttle wider. As the speed built up he relaxed the backward pressure on the stick, allowing the tail to lift off the ground. He now had a clear view ahead past the big radial engine.

Armstrong risked a glance back over his shoulder; as yet, there was no sign of the incoming bombers. He opened the throttle to its fullest extent and the Hawk gathered speed, bouncing across the grass past the yellow smoke marker. With no wind to shorten its take-off run, the aircraft remained firmly glued to the ground. The airfield boundary was looming up ahead of it. With the throttle hard up against the stops, Armstrong seized the flap lever and pulled it. The big flaps went down and the Hawk suddenly bounded into the air. With relief, Armstrong saw the airspeed beginning to build up. He pulled up the flaps and raised the undercarriage, hauling the fighter round in a steep climbing turn. The cockpit canopy was still open and he decided to leave it that way for the time being, so as to provide an unobstructed all-round view.

Armstrong brought the aircraft round through 180 degrees, still climbing, and wished that he was in a Spitfire; the Hawk climbed like a brick, the altimeter needle, calibrated in metres, creeping round the dial with painful slowness. Squinting into the sun, he saw the enemy bombers; they were Dorniers, like the one that had dropped the marker, and he counted six of them, flying in two tight ‘vics’ of three, one behind the other. They were flying at about 3,000, half a mile from the airfield.

Armstrong levelled out at the Dorniers’ altitude and went head-on for the middle bomber in the first flight. The Curtiss was fitted with an old ring-and-bead gunsight and the bomber grew larger in it with frightening speed. Armstrong unconsciously crouched lower in the cockpit, making himself as inconspicuous as possible, and squeezed both triggers on the control column.

The Hawk shuddered as all four machine-guns opened up and the rapidly expanding silhouette of the Dornier trembled in the windscreen. Grey smoke trails speared out towards it, converging on it. In the bomber’s glasshouse nose, a light twinkled; the German gunner was returning fire. Then the nose fragmented and shattered as Armstrong’s bullets found their mark.

There was no time to see the end result of his shooting. A collision was a hair’s breadth away. Pulling back frantically on the stick, he leapfrogged over the German aircraft, catching a glimpse of its upper-surface camouflage: angular patches of dark and light green, forming a pattern like splinters of broken glass.

Then he was bearing down on the second flight of Dorniers, guns hammering again as he repeated his attack. The leading bomber pulled up suddenly in a climb, exposing its pale blue belly. Its companions on either side broke away sharply to left and right and Armstrong saw his bullets hit the Dornier’s underside in a series of sparkling flashes. Then the sky ahead of him was filled with a great fiery balloon of red and black, surrounded by whirling debris, as the Dornier’s bomb load exploded.

He shut his eyes and flew straight into the inferno. There was a moment’s consciousness of searing heat and of choking, oily fumes mingled with the acrid smell of explosives. Something struck his aircraft with a thud. Then he was through into clear sky, coughing violently.

He opened his eyes and looked outside. The first thing he saw was a dark, sticky mass, glued to his left wing root by the airflow. It took him seconds before he realised that he was looking at a man’s entrails.

Armstrong’s stomach rose into his mouth and he stuck his head out of the other side of the cockpit. Madame Bessodes’ egg breakfast whirled away in the slipstream. Shaking violently, Armstrong risked another look; the glutinous mass was still there. He remembered reading an account of the battle of Trafalgar, when sailors on Nelson’s flagship, the
Victory
, had used shovels to prise the remains of men off the bulwarks …Still trembling, he forced himself to concentrate on the job in hand and turned, heading back towards the airfield. Smoke was rising from it, and from clumps of debris that lay in a field just short of it, the remnants of the Dornier he had destroyed.

There was no sign of the other bombers. Armstrong looked behind him to make sure that there was nothing sinister on his tail, then throttled back and began his descent towards the aerodrome. Lowering his undercarriage and flaps, he looked ahead and saw to his surprise that the smoke was coming from a crashed aircraft, its tail sticking out from a clump of trees some distance away. From its twin fins he identified it as one of the Dorniers, presumably the first one he had fired at.

He landed safely between a scattering of fresh bomb craters and taxied in, coming to a stop close to his original dispersal. Wearily, still feeling queasy, he switched off the engine and climbed unsteadily from the cockpit, carefully keeping to the starboard side to avoid the mess on the port wing.