Goshawk Squadron (27 page)

“She doesn't hate you.”

“She hates the fact that I've lost nothing and she's lost everything.”

“Oh. Well. Yes. I see. Well, I suppose we needn't get married, need we?”

Jane slid on to his lap and kissed him on the mouth. “My lovely Jack … We would make a perfectly rotten married couple.”

“But lovely lovers.”

“Lovely.”

She groped underneath and found something angular in his tunic pocket. “Are you carrying a gun, just like the cowboys?”

“It's for you.” He dragged out a beautiful, silver-backed hairbrush. “Sorry about the monogram. I won it off a chap at poker.”

“What was his name?” She fingered the lettering J.T.D.

“Dangerfield.”

“It's beautiful. Won't he need it?”

“No. He got posted.”

“Poor Dangerfield.”

“Poor me. I nearly got court-martialed tonight.”

“Why? Because you were gambling?”

“No, no. It's all to do with the CO. He wanted to court-martial me, only I heard them trying to find me so I hid in the latrines and I don't know what happened in the end. I think they gave up on me and started looking for Finlayson instead. Maybe the old man decided to court-martial old Finlayson instead …”

Jane was not listening; she was unbuttoning his tunic, and then his shirt. “Shall I undress you?” she whispered; and Killion nodded. Away in the east the barrage had begun again, but as they lay in front of the fire it was remote and harmless. Nothing could touch them now.

Next day the German attack repeated itself with meticulous Prussian efficiency. The bombardment chewed the British defenses as savagely; the dawn advance was cloaked in the same white mist of invisibility; within hours the storm troopers had overrun the new Front and the retreat was on again.

Woolley had the squadron in the air very early. They crossed the booming fog-bank, shapeless and lethal like some fungoid growth, and patrolled behind the German lines in flights of two or three.

For an hour and a half no German aircraft came near. The flak was heavy, relentless as hounds chasing a cornered stag up and down high ground. Rogers was flying with Lambert. They droned about, surrounded by the black, dissolving snorts of high explosive. As they climbed so the flak followed them; as they dived so it came down to harry them. They dodged and doubled back between ten and twelve thousand feet, where the gunners were not accurate; but the chance of flying into a burst was always there.

The changes of height and course became automatic after a while. Rogers was thinking about a cricket match in which he had made a good score, reliving the running between the wickets, as he bucketed about between the shell-bursts. He braced himself to clout the ball, and watched it race away, like a round of tracer …

He started, sweating guiltily: he hadn't been checking the sky. The flak cracked on, bad-temperedly, puffs of charcoal, sharp-edged in the cold sunlight. Two miles below, the mist was thinning, revealing God knew what disasters. Rogers waggled his wings and they turned for home.

Within minutes they met another flight: Richards and Gabriel. The flak tailed off, mercifully, and Dickinson and Finlayson angled across from the north to join them. In this formation half the squadron, with guns unfired, intercepted a solitary German two-seater heading eastward. Almost certainly it had been on camera-reconnaissance, photographing the British reserves being rushed up. Where was its escort? Perhaps the Germans thought it would be less conspicuous on its own. Perhaps they hoped that it would be able to hide in the fog. But now the fog was collapsing, evaporating, dying.

Rogers and Lambert dived ahead of the two-seater and turned it. The machine seemed to maneuver heavily, as if
pregnant. The other four Goshawk aircraft came down in an angled line which allowed each gun to rake the target from nose to tail in a continuous devastation of bullets. The teamwork was superfluous, because the pilot was dead before the second burst hit him, his plane was on fire before the third burst cut it apart, and the fourth simply knocked sideways a wreck which had only to fall to the ground.

Finlayson found Major Gibbs and the adjutant waiting for him.

“I know you have a lot going on,” Woodruffe said, “but Major Gibbs says it's absolutely essential that you be charged properly, according to King's Regulations.”

“Oh Christ,” said Finlayson. He sat down on an oil drum. “Is the old man still playing that game? I thought that was last night's bad joke.”

“We must have something to show the French,” Gibbs said. “A formality, and some documents. Something they can see and feel, and be impressed by, and tell all their pals in the Ministry of Justice about.”

“Let them squeeze the old man's balls, then. They're about the biggest thing in this squadron.”

“Quite. But at the moment, I suggest we adjourn to the adjutant's office. The French lawyers are waiting there now, and I'd like them to hear the CO actually make the charge.”

“So would I,” said Finlayson bitterly. “I'd like to know exactly where and when I deserted in the face of the enemy.”

“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” Gibbs said. “That's all been changed. He's decided to make it cowardice now.”

“Cowardice?” Woodruffe frowned. “Are you sure? He told me he was going to make it incompetence.”

“Good God, I hope not. I can't change everything at this stage. It'll
have
to be cowardice.”

The two French civil servants shook hands with everybody. They seemed competent and satisfied. Woolley was making a long telephone call. The line was bad and he kept shouting. Gabriel sat by a window, reading his Bible.
Woodruffe saw Finlayson looking at him. “Gabriel has agreed to defend you after all,” the adjutant said.

“I don't want the silly bastard!” Finlayson exclaimed. Gabriel turned a page.

“I'm afraid you must,” Gibbs said. “Everyone else is liable to court-martial too, and you must be represented.”

Woolley shouted: “Nonsense!” and hung up. “Get on with it,” he told Gibbs. “We're off again in ten minutes.”

Finlayson and Gabriel stood up. The Frenchmen watched carefully. Woolley picked his teeth with a matchstick. Gibbs read out the charge: there was a great deal of florid preambling, all about the defense of the realm, and the jurisdiction of the provost-marshal, and the patriotic obligations of the King's subjects to defend the royal allies against the common enemy, most of which Gibbs and Woodruffe had cooked up to impress the French. The charge itself was brief. Lieutenant George Yates Finlayson had displayed cowardice in the face of the enemy all the previous week. Signed, Stanley Woolley, Major.

Despite the transparent nonsense of it all, Finlayson felt his guts tighten at the word
cowardice.
His head was half-bent; he looked up at Woolley, stiff with disgust and hate; and saw Woolley watching him coolly, almost curiously.

“Jolly good,” Woodruffe said. “Now, what I propose is, I propose a week's adjournment before we fix the date of the hearing, if that suits the defending officer.”

Gabriel took his Bible from under his arm as if it were loaded, and opened it. “And if ye will not for all this hearken unto me, but walk contrary unto me,” he read out, “then will I walk contrary unto you also in fury; and I, even I, will chastise you seven times for your sins. And ye shall eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters shall ye eat.” He closed the book and nodded to Finlayson and Woodruffe.

“Time to fly,” Woolley said. To Finlayson's surprise, he took him by the elbow and steered him, quite gently, to the door. When they were outside and walking toward the
aircraft, Woolley said: “The French make such a fuss, you see. And we need their reinforcements, or something.”

“Yes. Woody explained.”

“I could have made it something piddling, like embezzling the mess funds, but I thought it might as well be, you know, melodramatic.”

“I see.”

“The frogs like melodrama. Besides, Goshawk Squadron has never been known for doing things half-heartedly, has it?”

“No.”

“I knew you'd understand. I didn't want it to get you down. After all, it's not going to make any difference, is it?”

Finlayson watched Woolley's face for a trace of sarcasm and found none. “Why should it?” he said.

“You're right,” Woolley said warmly. “Nothing's going to make any difference.” They parted.

Finlayson met Rogers. “I think the old man's cracking up,” he said. “I think he's finally out to lunch. I've never seen him like this before. He's just been
nice
to me.”

“I thought he was going to charge you—”

“Yes, yes, he did all that. But
nicely,
as if it didn't matter.”

“Oh.”

They looked uneasily toward Woolley. He was leaning against his machine, arms resting on the upper wing, head resting on his arms, eyes closed.

“Odd,” said Rogers.

It was the third day of the German assault.

Dickinson was in the hospital with bullet wounds in the leg. Three replacement pilots had arrived the night before, straight from England, none having flown more than twenty hours. Woolley refused to see them; he had retired to his hut and practiced the accordion.

In the morning he put one replacement and two experienced men in each flight. Their mission was less ambitious than the day before: just to clear the air over the battlefield. Attack any and every German plane, stay over the fighting, use up left-over ammunition on German troops. The replacements listened carefully and tried not to show their excitement. “A special instruction for our newcomers,” Woolley said heavily. “Don't get shot down, but if you do get shot down, try and ram a Hun on the way.” That made them blink.

Rogers, Lambert and an eighteen-year-old called King took off together. The front was nearer now, and Rogers climbed to five thousand feet over the airfield before he turned east. King was clumsy with the aircraft, never having flown an SE before, and Lambert watched nervously. It was a gusty morning.

The sky over the Front was dotted with wheeling, plunging, dodging aircraft. From a distance they looked like
birds; there were no formations, and the movements seemed random and pointless. Then one of the specks flared with a sudden, intense brightness that lasted as long as a struck match, before it dropped. A smear of smoke was all that was left, and it rapidly grew ragged and thin. The other machines went on circling and dodging as before. As the Goshawk flight got closer they could see the flickering crisscross of tracer.

Rogers held off until they had climbed to twelve thousand, then prowled about, searching for an easy target. Everything was tangled and confused and fast-changing. Lambert fired a couple of rounds to attract his attention. Six Fokker D VIIs were diving from fifteen thousand feet. Rogers put his nose down and they escaped into the chaos below.

For the first thousand feet there was nothing; then a couple of private duels; then a sprawling mêlée of about twenty aircraft spread over half a mile of sky. Rogers hoped that King would go off and look for his own target, and not stick close to him. He saw a shaky-looking Halberstadt turn eastward and went after it. Now he could smell the burned-phosphorus of tracer in the air.

He glanced at Lambert and saw him blaze at a green-and-yellow plane, then bank hard away as tracer scorched past. Rogers' Halberstadt came looming up, its observer firing steadily: bright dashes which seemed to bend toward Rogers' machine. He jinked and tried a burst at long range, but the Halberstadt was diving hard now and pulling away. He zoomed to save height, heard the crackle of machine guns, skidded round in a savage, 180-degree turn, and instinctively ducked as a bright blue Pfalz hurtled over his head. By the time he had recovered it was gone.

Quite suddenly the whole battle had moved far away. Individual skirmishes flickered and stuttered in the distance. Rogers checked above and behind: no sign of Lambert, but King came wobbling by, grinning and waving. Rogers acknowledged. King pointed downward and waved goodbye. He side-slipped neatly; he was getting the hang of the thing.
Rogers saw the left wing start to buckle in the center. It fluttered for a moment and then folded right back against the fuselage, like a roosting bird. A strut had failed; collapsed, for no reason at all.

Rogers dipped a wing so that he could watch the airplane tumble away, lopsided, dwindling to a gray-brown fragment that flickered in the early sunlight. King did not jump, not that it would have made any difference if he had. Perhaps he couldn't get his straps undone. Perhaps he didn't want to. Perhaps he didn't know what the hell was happening to him. The SE hit the ground in a cluster of shell-holes.

Rogers felt relieved: at least it hadn't been a flamer. And now they wouldn't have to worry about collision on the way home. He went off to find Lambert.