Goshawk Squadron (25 page)

“If we had a house,” Margery said, “what would we call it?” She was frying eggs and bacon and mushrooms on a camp stove in Woolley's billet.

“Cléry-le-Grand.” Woolley was looking at a large-scale map, and drinking Guinness.

“What? Seriously.”

“Seriously, I can't think of anything more serious than Cléry-le-Grand. Right now it's just about the most serious little piss-pot of a frog pox-factory in the whole world.”

She glanced at the map, and went back to spooning hot fat over the eggs. “It depends what sort of house it is, I suppose, but what if it was a, you know, biggish place, in the country somewhere. Like Hampshire. What about that? What would we call it?”

“Dunromin. Taj Mahal. Justanook.” He rubbed a grimy thumb in his palm, collecting dirt off both surfaces. “Bide-a-wee. Cosycot. Cedar Lodge. The Moated Grange. The Station Hotel. The Bottom of the Barrel. The End of the Road. The Skin of our Teeth. The Broken Reed. Bottomsup.” He went back to the map. “Cléry-le-Grand.”

“We used to live in a house called The Nest.” She forked out the bacon, letting it drain before she arranged it around the plate. “We didn't give it that name, but all the same it made a difference. I mean, it wouldn't have been the same if it had been called something else.”

“We lived in hundred and ten Canal Row,” he said. “If it had been called hundred and twelve we'd have had our own lavatory.”

She slid the eggs, one by one, on to slices of toast in the middle of the plate. “It
does
matter,” she said. “You give names to the things that matter to you, and where you live matters.”

“As long as the postman puts the begging letters through the right door,” he said. He felt a throbbing strain at the outer corners of his eyes, and pressed them with his fingertips. Margery's face was hidden by her hair as she bent over the stove.

“I'd like to live somewhere nice, that was called something
nice,” she said. The mushrooms were being dotted around the eggs, bright and buttony. “What I want more than anything is to have somewhere I can look forward to.” She put the plate in front of him, and he began eating.

“I once had a week in a boarding-house called St. Monica's,” he said. “What I look forward to is never seeing it again.”

“Why don't you want to live somewhere nice, for God's sake?” she asked. “Haven't you ever wanted a home of your own?”

Woolley grimaced. “This bacon,” he said. “Bloody salty.”

She reached forward and overturned the plate so that it landed on his lap. Mushrooms bounced about the plank floor. He stared at her.

“You're an absolute bastard,” she said. The tears came, and rapidly dissolved her angry expression to one of utter despair. Woolley sat, knife and fork in hand, and tried to think what to do.

“Why do you have two watches on?” Jane asked. She held his wrist and smoothed the soft hairs on his arm.

“Extra precaution,” Killion said, “in case one goes wrong. Hey! That reminds me.” He jumped up and went to his tunic. “I brought something for you.”

He handed her his green silk scarf. “How beautiful!” she said. “You
are
kind.” She kissed him.

“Try it on,” he said. She put it around her neck and let the points fall between her breasts. “What a perfect day,” she whispered.

The following night Killion was awakened by the drumming of a loose pane of glass. He found his watch: 5
AM
. The window frame vibrated steadily, producing a buzz like a trapped fly. Killion got out of bed and went over and rested his brow on the cold glass. He heard a dull thunder that was not the blood in his ears. He opened the door and listened. From the east came the roar of ten thousand blast furnaces. Killion stood and let the cold air chill him, as a kind of left-handed penance for not being at the Front where all that pounding and pulverizing of flesh and bone and blood with steel and explosive was taking place.

Somebody walked past, and said: “Damn noisy, isn't it?” It was Dickinson.

Killion asked: “Is this it, d'you think?”

“No, no. They're just loosening up. The real barrage comes later.”

Killion got dressed and went to the mess. He saw some figures on the roof and climbed a ladder to them. “This is
definitely
worse than Passchendaele,” Rogers was saying. “I mean, just look at it.” The entire eastern horizon was red. “It's like the Great Fire of London, 1666.”

“I suppose it
is
the Hun, and not us,” said Finlayson gloomily.

“We don't have the guns to do a quarter of that damage,”
Dickinson said, “and in this weather it would take a week to bring them up. Good God Almighty!” A huge explosion bloomed and reverberated on the skyline. “Somebody holed out in an ammunition dump.”

As if this were a signal, the entire barrage magnified and intensified itself. Now the horizon was brighter, with little curling lights flaring into the glow. The battering clamor seemed to shake the air. “It's not possible,” Rogers muttered. “No one can live through that.”

“We kept it up for ten days before Passchendaele,” Finlayson said. “I wonder how long they'll do it for?”

“They don't have ten days to waste,” Dickinson told him. “I'll give you fifty to one the Jerry infantry is drinking its
Schnapps
in the front row of the stalls right now.”

Rogers produced a flask that had belonged to Church, and they circulated this while the appalling display went on.

“How far are we from there?” Killion asked.

“About twenty miles. Far enough,” Dickinson said. “Nobody's advanced twenty miles in this war since the soldiers settled down to do their gardening.”

A figure climbed on to the roof and came toward them. It was Gabriel. “What d'you think of
that
for hellfire?” Finlayson asked him sourly.

“The Lord shall smite thee with an extreme burning, and with the sword, and with blasting, and with mildew; and they shall pursue thee until thou perish,” Gabriel said firmly. “Thy carcass shall be meat unto all the fowls of the air, and unto the beasts of the earth.”

“It beats me why you want to fly with us at all, Gabriel,” Rogers said. “If that's the way you feel.”

“To me belongeth vengeance and recompense,” Gabriel told him. “Their foot shall slide in due time: for the day of their calamity is at hand, and the things that shall come upon them make haste.”

“Ah,” Rogers said. “Well, I suppose that's different, then.”

“The Lord will smite thee with the botch of Egypt, and with
the emerods, and with the scab, and with the itch, whereof thou canst not be healed.”

“How disgusting,” Dickinson declared. “I shall go and make them cook me some breakfast.” He climbed down the ladder. “The botch of Egypt, indeed! And the emerods …” His words were lost in the violent pounding from the east.

Rogers and Lambert took off at first light to see what was happening. More than three hours after it began, the German barrage was still going full blast. They heard it through the clatter of their engines, but they could not see its results. Dense fog covered the Line. Whatever war was being fought below them was taking place either at the long range of bombardment or the short range of a brawl. It was curious. Rogers had flown over the Front many times, and he thought of it as two huge armies entrenched against each other, launching and repelling attacks massively and obviously; but now, he supposed, the fog must have dissolved the armies into isolated soldiers, each fighting his own tiny battle, with no way of knowing whether his side was winning or losing.

Well, Rogers thought, it's the same for both sides. Our chaps can't see their chaps, but their chaps can't see ours. And our chaps will be ready for them.

Lambert, nervously watching a couple of single-seaters at height, thought: please God get me home, I don't want to land down there … His face was twitching; he tried to stop it, and failed; looked for Rogers and couldn't see him; lost track of position and direction and why he was up there at all. His brain moved with a mocking ponderousness, deliberately not helping. He panicked because he wasn't keeping a look-out. Found his flask, gulped from it. Nobody fired at him. Rogers was alongside. Slowly his panic faded.

The fog was still thick when they crossed the German Line, but it thinned out on higher ground. Rogers took advantage of the absence of flak to fly low. Everywhere that he saw ground, he saw troops moving up. The gray lines patterned the green-brown earth like odd bits of carpet. He turned
north and searched for more openings and found more troops. They hurried forward, ignoring the planes. Other patches revealed supply columns, horse-drawn wagons, ambulance units, strings of gun carriages. Then more troops, more troops. More. Hurrying forward with the absorbed attention of worker ants moving their colony. Hurrying toward the square miles of deafening battering that had been provided to smash open the British Line for their benefit.

After a while Lambert stopped looking. He had seen too many troops already. There was no point in measuring how much was too much.

The sun was shining at two thousand feet, but it did no more than lacquer the fog. Rogers gestured toward home. As they recrossed the submerged inferno, they saw other aircraft, Germans, further down the Line. Presumably the attack was not considered a secret anymore, for nobody made any move to intercept. In any case, there was nothing anyone could do about the men in the trenches until the fog lifted. And precious little after that.

“Like all bad ideas,” Woolley said, “this one is brilliantly simple.”

He sat on the big table in the mess, one bare foot tucked up, and cut his yellow toe-nails with heavy scissors. The pilots stood out of range of the parings.

“You will load your airplanes with TNT,” he said, “fly in line-astern to Corps HQ, and crash on to the roof of the Corps commander's château, in alphabetical order.”

Nobody laughed. Dickinson lit a cigarette, and they watched the match burn out.

“When you have done that,” Woolley said, “you will fly to Berlin, where you will stand to attention in your cockpits and piss on the Kaiser, thus ending the war.” He sheared laboriously through a horny overhang.

Lambert looked at his watch, and yawned.

“And after
that
,” Woolley said, “you will come back here
and stop the German air force from examining the hole which their artillery has just blown in the British Line, a hole about the size of Lancashire, and that will be the biggest waste of time of all, because the German Army found that hole an hour ago, and is now galloping through it as fast as its little legs will carry it, heading in the direction of …” he snipped the final toe-nail and straightened his leg to study the result “…
us
.”

Rogers had been looking out of a window. He started, and turned, pretending a well-bred confusion. “
Aw
fully sorry, sir,” he said. “Miles away, I'm afraid.
What
is it you want done, again?”

Woolley pulled on a sock. “Just get up there and fend them off,” he said. “Stay over the Jerry lines, and keep them busy, that's all.” He stamped his foot into his flying-boot. “Keep them away from the fighting until the poor bloody infantry gets a chance to stop running.”

“How long do you think that will be, sir?” Callaghan asked.

“About a week.”

They looked at him, but Woolley was serious.

“Well, that seems simple and straightforward enough,” Rogers said.

“You're simple,” Woolley told him. “The plan is utterly bloody impossible, but if you can't see that, you're probably better off.”

“I hope you told the Corps commander it was impossible,” Finlayson said sourly.

Woolley laughed through his nose. “On the contrary, you sickly convalescent,
he
told
me.
He doesn't expect us to succeed, but on the other hand he doesn't expect the German attack to succeed, either. He has to do something with us, we're on his ration strength. If you want his exact words, he said ‘Get up there and make bloody nuisances of yourselves until I tell you to come down.'”

“What a way to win a war,” Lambert said in disgust.

“Don't talk daft. You're not here to win the stupid war, you're here to help make sure nobody loses it. You're not
Henry the Fifth on a flying bloody charger, you know. You're a semi-skilled mechanic, just like the municipal ratcatcher, on piece-work. Keep your mind on your job, or some big gray bastard will bite you in the thumb.” A fitter rapped on the window. “They're ready. We'll fly in pairs. Shufflebotham, you come with me.”

Goshawk Squadron flew all that day, and came back from the patrols badly mauled. German aircraft crossed the Line in a constant stream: two-seater observation planes, single-seater scouts, twin-engine bombers, heavily escorted photographic planes. By noon all the squadron's reserve aircraft were in use, and the mechanics were sucking blood from cut fingers and grazed knuckles as they worked too fast on battered planes which had just creaked home with streaming canvas and smashed spars, or laboring engines, or cracked fuel lines, or crippled controls, or lopsided undercarriages. Half a mile away smoke still rose from Dangerfield's machine, where he had crash-landed on fire after stopping a burst of tracer in the wing. The fire had spread to the fuselage and reached the cockpit by the time he got the wheels on the ground and jumped out. He flew again within the hour, fat blisters coming up on his right hand and not much left of his eyebrows.