Declarations of War, page 14
‘Believe me, sir,’ he said, ‘riot control in our cities, police actions against guerrillas or some tiny satellite nation on the far side of the world is one thing; this is another. We are going to come face to face with the finest soldiers they can select. They’ll have modern weapons and good leadership. I don’t think we’ll be able to stop them.’
I’d never heard him talk like this. I realized that his brash and belligerent manner concealed a dark despair.
‘They’re not supermen,’ I said with a smile. ‘They’re just a mixture of nationalities from every corner of the world.’
‘Like us?’ he smiled.
‘Exactly.’ He was always talking about race and nationality, which made me wonder what his own origins were: German, perhaps.
The scream cut through the air like a spurt of blood. Three of our men, their uniforms mud-spattered and torn, were running as fast as Olympic champions. Behind them there was a fourth. He was holding his side as he ran, leaving a trail of red spots, each one bigger than the last. The whole unit broke formation as the three men of the advance party ran past them without even a glance at their comrades. The fourth man was level with me now, and I stepped out to stand in his path. He stopped. His eyes were huge and full of tears. ‘You said they were men!’ he accused. ‘You said we’d be fighting men!’ His voice was shrill to the point of hysteria. His helmet was askew, but the spider of blood on his jaw told me that it was the boy I’d spoken with. I grabbed his arm but he broke away from me with a surprising force. I looked down and found that my tunic was smeared with fresh shiny blood from the youngster’s wounds. I watched him as he followed the others down a steep incline, dodging between the rocky outcrops. ‘Come back!’ I shouted. The wind snatched my voice away. I cupped my hands round my mouth. ‘Come back at once! I’ll have you executed!’
It was no use. The rest of them had sniffed the scent of panic and were scrambling down the hillside too. Only a few of the hardiest old campaigners remained in the roadway looking the way the four men had come. For a moment I had hope, but then they saw the sight that the others had seen and they too gibbered with fear.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ I said, ‘don’t be afraid. I’ve seen them before. They are large, but they are controlled by men no better than us.’
Two of my senior sergeants then prostrated themselves on the roadway, screaming a mixture of prayers and oaths that betrayed a mankind for whom witchcraft lay just under the skin of science.
Other soldiers were ripping their hands and legs on the rocks and stony ledges below me as they half-ran and half-fell towards the sheltered basin in which we had camped the previous night. ‘Alive!’ my soldiers were shouting. ‘They are alive! They are alive!’
They would not escape. There was no escape from here. Already some of the men who had fallen were not able to regain their feet. A thousand feet below me were men who could have got there only by throwing themselves bodily from the narrow crevasse. Wearily, I turned back to where my second-in-command was standing. He’d not moved.
‘Who could have believed it?’ I asked, as I stood there with the bald officer: just two of us between the invaders and the rich, lush land of Italy. ‘Who could have believed that Hannibal would bring elephants over the Alps?’
Adagio
Flying Officer Woodhall put a hand to the gunsight and switched it on. A circle glowed orange in the centre of his bullet-proof windscreen. He adjusted the sight, narrowing the bars to the correct setting for a Heinkel 111. Woodhall was a Cranwell man, professional pilot and regular officer. He’d commanded B Flight since the beginning of July when David disappeared during a mix-up over the Estuary. The rest of his flight were tight behind him: a vic three, and then another vic three – red section – led by ‘Happy’ Hogg. It was a stupid formation with which to attack enemy bombers. Only the silly bastards at the Air Ministry could have invented such a pattern. It probably looked rather good as a coloured diagram on a sheet of card. Already some squadrons – auxiliary squadrons, he suspected – had unofficially abandoned the vic. They were doing it like the Huns: pairs in sections of four. Rotte, the Huns called the pair. Flying like that you could weave constantly, looking over your shoulder to make sure you were not about to be bounced. Some of the pilots had still not got into the habit of looking over their shoulder. In the Gauntlet open-cockpit biplanes that they had so recently flown it had been a certain way of losing your goggles in the slipstream. Woodhall glanced at the tiny mirror. He could see the other section following him. Woodhall might try the new formation next week, if he survived, but disobeying even stupid orders did not come easily to Cranwell men.
His hand moved to the microphone on his face mask and switched it on. ‘Blue leader here. Tally ho! I’ve got them, about fifty bandits: heavy jobs, Heinkel one one ones. Vector three five five…’
The Hurricane was a good climber, but on the straight and level it was slow. Obviously one should get above the bogeys and come out of the sun, but if one spent too much time manoeuvring the Huns might bomb before being attacked. Group got very nasty when that happened. David got a stupendous rocket when three Dorniers plastered Manston, even though they had put paid to all three within a couple of minutes.
Just a shade more up-sun. There was no ground target worth bombing under their track. He looked at the map on his knee, running his finger under the expected path of the bombers. The second finger of his glove was chewed at the tip where he always pulled it off with his teeth. He looked at the left-hand glove; it was exactly the same. He turned his hand to see the gold watch that he wore on the inner side of his wrist: 12.15 precisely. Forty-five minutes until lunchtime. Fuel for another thirty-five minutes. At a rough guess, three runs through this mob before their fighter escort mix it. Then five minutes’ grab-arse with the 109s, and home-james, with enough juice to stooge across to the satellite field if they’ve done it on the doorstep meanwhile.
The Hurricane was inferior to the Messerschmitt Bf 109, and that was no secret that must be guarded from the enemy. That’s why the controllers sent Hurricane squadrons to intercept the bombers while the Spitfires climbed and climbed towards the fighters that waited up there at thirty thousand feet, stacked up like rush-hour crowds on a vast moving staircase.
Flying Officer Woodhall turned the safety ring to ‘fire’ and let his eyes relax to provide him with a view through the sight, as well as glimpse the lumbering formation of Heinkels at which he was now flying at something not too far removed from 400 m.p.h. The ugly great bombers sailed on, indifferent to any interruption. He inched the stick forward and as usual heard the carburettors miss a pulse-beat as the centrifugal force starved them of fuel.
Only the new boys complained of having no time, just as inexperienced drivers could never find the time to change gear. For Woodhall there was never a hurry. Always as the formations rushed together time slowed. Now, every inch of forward movement seemed to take two or three minutes. He had enough time to look left and see the curve of the Kentish coast lost in a grey mist near Margate. Beyond it the sea sparkled in the sunlight, as warm and inviting as the railway posters always portrayed it. High above, the enemy’s fighter escort had not even begun to turn. Unless they did so soon, the Spitfires would have enough height to come out of the sun at them. The Spitfire formations were upon the horizon, and given that fixed point Woodhall could persuade himself that they were the only moving component of this transfixed world.
Hours ago he had chosen which one of them was to be his. The angle of the dive would already have confirmed it to the others, and each of them would now be choosing one of the plump green whales for himself. Woodhall would have the leader. He always attacked the leader. That gave the others maximum room for manoeuvre in lining up their own victims. He looked at his instruments: oil pressure and temperature, boost, revs, turn and bank, air-speed, altitude. It was idle curiosity, really; he knew the Hurricane was behaving perfectly. If any of the clocks had shown any reading but the one he expected it would have meant that the instrument was faulty. It would simply be something to report to his basher after landing. His hand was resting on the throttle. He moved it. He wouldn’t throttle back until they were way out the other side and reforming. These gloves had been very good. His mother had bought them for him when he got his wings. What was that, ’thirty-seven? No, earlier; nineteen thirty-six. My God, how time passed sometimes. Going at the fingertips. His gloves always went there; perhaps his fingers were longer than average. He must stop that habit of tugging the fingertips, for that would split any gloves, even a pair like this from Harrods. That was nerves.
Damn well made, these Heinkels. He could see every rivet on this one. They weren’t as hastily put in as the rivets on his own aircraft. He looked out to see the riveting on his own mainplane. Just as he’d remembered, there was a line of them unevenly placed with a couple of extra ones punched to one side.
To his left he could see Sergeant Patch. He was the fat boy of the squadron. No Mess charges in the Sergeants’ Mess and the food was almost exactly the same as the officers’. Better, sometimes; they’d got on to some black-market johnny who let them have things cheaply. Conscience, probably. It was miraculous how Patch fitted into the narrow pilot seat. Woodhall was slim and there was scarcely enough room for him to twist his bottom when he got cramp. He moved his weight now. The metal buckles of his parachute harness bit into a thigh. Better perhaps to be Patch and be self-upholstered. He could see the fierce concentration of Patch in spite of the goggles and face mask. The set of his shoulders was exactly as it was during the poker games in the dispersal hut. Woodhall grinned. There was no chance of attracting the Sergeant’s attention now. Nothing existed for Sergeant Patch except his gunsight inside which the enemy bomber was expanding almost too fast for Patch to calculate the deflection.
Woodhall saw the ailerons move on the Heinkel to the left of him. There was a hesitation before the airflow took effect upon the altered aerofoil. Then the wing lifted and the pilot corrected as the bomber nosed in tighter to its leader like a frightened animal. Woodhall felt hot under the rubber face mask. He unclipped the mask, and knocked his nose with the back of his gloved hand. It was another nervous habit. They all had them. They were all tired. The day before yesterday – Woodhall wasn’t sure whether that would be Tuesday or Wednesday – A-Flight commander had taxied to the dispersal and made no attempt to even slide back the cover or open the flap-door. They all thought he was badly shot-up. Woodhall feared he would be dead – Baxter was a bloody good bloke, the last of the Cranwell chaps in the Squadron – but when they got there, Baxter wasn’t dead. Baxter was sound asleep.
The Spitfires were above the skyline now. Except for a straggler who was falling farther and farther behind. Carburettor, probably; even the Spits still had carburettors. The Bf 109 had fuel injection. You could throw those crates, around the sky without a hiccup. All the Heinkels were drawing closer together. As they did so they wallowed in the air like a convoy on a heavy sea. The A.A. guns still hadn’t stopped firing. In a clear piece of air in front of Woodhall’s Heinkel a yellow flash turned orange. Then its centre became red and the air rippled with a shock wave and distorted the neat green fields. A thin film of dust formed behind the shock wave and built up particle upon particle until a soft billowing cloud of smoke was cut in two by the Heinkel’s wing. The Heinkel had buffeted fiercely. The pilot was fighting the controls. The upper Rear Gunner released his grip on the machine-gun and grabbed at the Perspex edge of his screen. The nose gun tilted too, and Woodhall guessed that its gunner had been thrown into a heap by the sudden movement.
Woodhall could picture the pilot. Leading a formation of this size would be a Major or even an Oberstleutnant. A tough old bastard with a tic at his eye and highly polished top-boots. Woodhall had seen such a man under escort at Waterloo Station last month.
The Hurricanes were flattening the curve of their attack. Each passing second Woodhall moved the stick the merest fraction back. Here comes the shock wave, he thought, as the control column put pressure upon his hand and made him tense his wrist until it was Indian-wrestling with him. Suddenly the pressure was gone, so that his stick fell forward – or would have, if he had not been prepared for the shock wave to pass as abruptly as it had come.
For the third time in the last twelve seconds Woodhall pressed the throttle. It was as far forward as it could go. Again he noticed his glove. Again he pressed it against his nose. This time however he reclipped his face mask. It had been open for only as much time as it took him to run the tip of his tongue along his dry lips.
High above them in the dome of the sky, where it was at its bluest, a dozen tiny scratches crawled towards the Messerschmitts. The Spitfires had gone too high in trying to get above the fighter escort. Now they would be spotted. The Messerschmitts had not changed their course by even a fraction of a degree. Within seconds they must decide whether to turn and face the Spitfires or come down here and get into the brawl.
‘…I’ll take the leader, Happy take the bugger with the coloured tail.’ Woodhall finished the message. It seemed so long ago that he’d begun to speak that he scarcely remembered the whole thing. Yet the others had scarcely noticed the pause as he wet his lips. He corrected the rudder and took another look at Sergeant Patch. Then he said, ‘Out,’ to complete the message and switched the microphone off. The speed was making the Hurricane vibrate, and even through his flying boots he felt the rudder bar shuddering.
In the earphones he heard Happy say, ‘The guns, Christ, the guns!’ and could scarcely believe that it had taken the others so long to see the explosion. The length of their reaction time worried him. It was like being behind some driver at the traffic lights and waiting ages before he reacted to the green. Already ahead of the Heinkel he could see the faint yellowish sparkle that was the beginning of another explosion. The gun’s predictor was working well today. ‘…they are firing, Woody.’ The voice was deep and wobbly, like a recording played at the wrong speed.
In June, Winston had said that the Battle of Britain was about to begin. Had he meant an invasion, or had he meant this fighting in the air? Already some of the B.B.C. chaps were talking about the R.A.F. fighting the Battle of Britain. The other night in the Mess, even the old station master had used the same expression. Mind you, it wasn’t the sort of thing one would say in front of civvies. It would seem too much like line-shooting. But here alone up in the sky, moving on to this formation of Heinkels as fast as they could go, it was perhaps permissible to think of himself as a warrior taking part in a mighty battle. A battle as wide as England and as high as the stratosphere, a battle like no other in the history of the world: the Battle of Britain.
‘…Over,’ said Happy. Well, that meant he was expecting some sort of reply. The gunfire had alarmed him because it was unexpected. It was not on orders. He was a good fellow – Pilot Officer Happy Hogg – and he was in for a gong: two Dorniers in one day as well as half a Stuka the month before. There were no more Stukas coming this way nowadays. What could a chap do if he found himself fighting a war in a Stuka or a Defiant or a Blenheim? What chance did any of those chaps stand up against a modern plane? The Hurribird was inferior to the Spit, but only by a narrow margin, and it had a couple of advantages, too. But those Stukas were a catastrophe looking for a convenient place to occur. In a way, these bomber johnnies were in the same position. Who’d want to fight a war piloting a barge like that. Or even worse, as a gunner or an observer in it, not even the master of one’s own fate. That was Woodhall’s idea of purgatory. His parents could never see it like that. They couldn’t see that a fighter pilot is privileged to fight in his own way.
Woodhall reached again to his microphone. The second anti-aircraft shell was a jagged red flash. ‘Blue Leader here…’ He really must cut out this affected drawl he’d acquired from Baxter. It was bad R/T procedure for one thing, and some of the chaps found it irritating. Yesterday he’d heard his rigger say, ‘Here comes Lord Haw-Haw.’ It wasn’t meant in any spiteful way, but it had decided him to do something about it. He made his voice higher and brisk. ‘…the gunfire is friendly, chaps. Don’t be fright,’ he chided them. He saw Sergeant Patch turn to look at him and knew he would be giving a girlish giggle. The flash turned to smoke and floated past the Heinkel but this time the shock wave affected neither aircraft. ‘…Out.’
The Heinkel had been in the upper section of his cockpit cover but now it was oozing into the toughened glass. Its Rear Upper Gunner brought his machine-gun round. It twisted as the barrel poked out into the violent slipstream. The Heinkel on the left – Sergeant Patch’s target – began to fire. The traces curved away before they were anywhere near Patch. He was nervous, that Gunner. Not so the fellow who was creeping towards Woodhall’s optical sight. The leader was bound to have the finest crewmen he could get. In the same way Woodhall kept Sergeant Patch as his wingman. He wasn’t an imaginative fellow but he’d chalked up nine hundred hours and he’d hang on like grim death. If Woodhall flew through a railway tunnel, Patch would still be wing-tip to wing-tip as they came out the other end.
Woodhall made the slightest of corrections to his line of flight. The others would all be tight against him. If he flew in with the correct deflection then there was a good chance that the others would have theirs correct, too. The body of the Heinkel moved round the gunsight rings like the sweep-second hand of a watch: enough. He corrected and held it steady.
The deflection was right, now he had only to wait while the Heinkel got bigger in his gunsight. The waiting was the worst part of it. If the airspeed needle wasn’t fixed at 380 m.p.h. Woodhall could have believed that the Heinkel was towing him.
He remembered a joke about the theory of relativity: a chap spending three minutes in a dentist’s chair thinks it’s an hour. A chap spending an hour in bed with the blonde WAAF from Met. thinks it’s three minutes. The punch line was something about – And for this they made this bloke Einstein a professor! When you come to think about it, the fact behind the joke is that time goes slower when you hate what’s happening. Well, Woodhall didn’t hate this combat, nor did he have the pain that he’d felt in a dentist’s chair, and yet the time crept past as slowly as in a nightmare. It was then Woodhall decided that the slowness was fear. How curious that he had never realized that before. Someone had described a bad motor-car accident as all happening in slow motion. They too had been afraid without knowing it. The Doc was an interesting chap; perhaps he’d take it up with him. My God, no! If he said anything like that to a quack they’d think it was the first sign of a crack-up. Perhaps it was the first sign of a crack-up. They all knew that opening fire too early was something that newly arrived sprogs did. But it was also a thing that chaps did when they were overtired. Baxter opened fire too soon on Monday. No, tell a lie: Tuesday, it was, with Dorniers at Gravesend. This gunner shooting at Patch might be scared. The reasoning was that a chap could get everything over more quickly if one opened fire. Fallacious reasoning, but it was easy to see how it might seem correct.
