Goshawk Squadron (32 page)

“I'm nineteen, sir,” Wallace said stiffly. “Without disrespect, sir, I'm ready for anything.”

“Shut up. Do as you're told. Just get back here in one piece, never mind the heroics. Leave the war to itself.”

“I take it we can open fire if any enemy plane comes within range, though, can't we, sir?” Cowie asked courteously.

“God help you if the enemy ever gets within range. Oh, Christ, I don't want to talk about it. Just shut up about it. We're all bloody cannibals here, we eat bloody death for bloody breakfast, it's what keeps us going. I didn't ask you to come here. Do you
want
to die? Christ, I don't.”

They all stared: Woolley sick with disgust, Wallace and Cowie startled and embarrassed. After a moment, Woolley looked away. A staff car was bumping over the airfield. He blew his nose, and waited.

Woodruffe, Gibbs and Colonel Hawthorn got out.

“Why aren't you on patrol, Woolley?” Hawthorn demanded. “I insist that you take off forthwith. It is imperative. Get your squadron in the air, man, and look lively.”

“Look … these two aren't ready to go,” Woolley said. “They're not trained, they have no experience, they won't be the slightest use to anyone. It's just throwing away lives and I won't do it.”

“Who are they?” Hawthorn asked the adjutant.

“Lieutenants Wallace and Cowie, sir,” Woodruffe said. “New replacement pilots. Came in this morning.”

“They look perfectly fit to me. This is an important attack, that's what you Flying-Corps wallahs don't appreciate. The Corps commander requires full support. Every pilot must fly. And that is an order.”

“Oh, bull,” Woolley said weakly. Hawthorn smiled with delight. “I expected that,” he said. “Major Gibbs: you will arrange court-martial proceedings against this officer on a charge of refusing to obey an order.” He thwacked his breeches with his cane.

“Sorry, sir,” said Gibbs hoarsely. He was ashen, and his eyes were pink and puffy. “Didn't quite follow … Is this for the French, or …” But Hawthorn was talking to Woolley. “There's no room for eccentrics in this war, Woolley,” he said briskly. “The whole Corps must move as one man. Like a machine. Irresistibly. Smashing forward. All striking at the same target, together.”

“That reminds me,” Woodruffe said. “This just came from Corps HQ.”

Woolley tore the envelope open. “The first patrol is canceled,” he said. “Change of plan.”

“Good,” Hawthorn said. “All the more for the second patrol.”

“If they come back.”

“That's not your responsibility.”

“No? They're my pilots.”

“Oh yes, of course. You're the one who keeps court-martialing them.”

“I should have put that bullet through your bloody head, not your hat.” Woolley was too defeated to be angry.

“Are you going on patrol, or shall I have you replaced here and now?”

“Bastard,” Woolley said. He looked at Gibbs. “B-A-S-T-A-R-D,” he said.

They got into the car.

Killion landed while the pilots were assembling to be briefed.

He flew in hurriedly, landed across wind, and taxied right up to the buildings before he got out. Hawthorn tapped Woolley with his cane. “We can't wait for the others,” he said. “This is extremely urgent.” Woolley ignored him and went to the door and shouted to Killion.

Even Hawthorn was silenced by the look on Killion's face. “We never even got there,” he said. “It was the most incredible thing.”

“The patrol was canceled anyway,” Woolley said. “It didn't matter.”

“We used that main road as a bearing. It runs dead straight, due east. It was full of our troops, packed with them, all moving up, packed solid. Anyway … we got halfway there, pretty low, about two hundred feet … Then Gabriel … for no reason at all … he went down after them.”

“Down after them?” Richards stared. “After who?”

“Our
blokes! He just went down and started strafing them! Just flew up and down the road and let fly. At the troops. He just cut them down, I mean he was slaughtering them. You see … they weren't expecting it, they were right out in the open, they didn't know what to do. I could see them standing looking up at him. They could see the roundels, they
knew
he was British.”

“Gabriel wouldn't do that,” Lambert said. He looked around. “Why would Gabriel do that?”

“But he did, he did. I saw it, they were lying all over the place—dozens, he just kept on firing, he must've emptied a drum by the time we caught him. Rogers got there first and chased him away. We didn't know what to do, we couldn't …”

“He will be court-martialed,” Colonel Hawthorn said firmly.

“Where has he gone now?” Richards asked.

“You see … we were too stunned … we just chased him away and looked at him … I mean, I suppose we both thought he'd made a mistake.”

“It could happen,” Lambert said.

“No, no, impossible. He
knew.
We saw him reload, he was going to go
back down
… So Rogers had a go at him, you know … tried to force him to land. But then he tried to kill Rogers, and finally they had the devil of a fight.”

“And?” Woolley said.

“Rogers shot him down. Only it wasn't like that. Gabriel's plane came to pieces, it just fell apart. I saw him fall, I saw it all happen. Everything.”

“Where's Rogers now?”

“Crashed,” Killion said. “I think he took a bullet and passed out. He must be dead, too.”

Woolley sat in his cockpit, tightening and loosening his straps. Engines roared around him; all except his own. His mechanic stood with both hands on the propeller, staring impassively at Woolley's face. They were all ready to go, all waiting for him to lead the squadron into the air. Only Killion stayed behind. Killion, who—Hawthorn had decided—was too valuable as a witness of Gabriel's massacre to be risked on patrol. Lucky Killion.

Surprisingly, here was Killion now, running across the airfield, still in his flying-clothes. Woolley waved him back but he came on. He reached the plane and stood panting, embarrassed but determined. “Just wanted to say,” he gasped, “sorry I'm not with you. And good luck. And so on. Sir.” His chest heaved; his cheeks were bright red.

Woolley tried to smile, but his face was the wrong shape for that. He pointed thankfully over Killion's shoulder. “Somebody wants you, Killion,” he said. Killion looked back. Jane Ashton was standing beside the adjutant, in front of Rogers' limousine. Killion was upset. “I didn't send for her, sir. Honest,” he said.

“I did. I sent Woody to pick her up. When I knew you wouldn't be flying.”

“Really? What for?” Killion looked between them in amazement.

“I don't know. Margery told me about her last night. Margery knows her. For Christ's sake, Killion. How many bloody reasons do you need?” He looked the other way, unable to face what he had done.

When he turned back, Killion was pounding across the field toward her. The girl walked forward. Woolley shouted at his mechanic. The engine fired first time, and he powered it savagely until the whole plane shuddered. When he looked again the two figures were standing together watching him.

Still Woolley waited. He searched the cockpit: this was home, more familiar than any tent or billet; he knew every scratch and dent, every stain and patch. It was home and he was trapped in it. He sat and hated the cockpit for its emptiness, hated himself for his indecision, hated Hawthorn for his war.

Woolley leaned his head back and looked at the sky. For the first time ever, he wanted not to go up there. The sky was for killing and he was sick of death. His brain stealthily surrendered to images of Margery. Margery waving from the wheel of an ambulance. Margery glistening with a sheen of sweat in the light of a pressure lamp. Margery weeping over what they would call their home. Margery stiff and angry outside the guardroom. Margery shivering and saying goodbye at dawn.

“Take off immediately.”
It was Colonel Hawthorn, standing beside the cockpit, shouting over the din.
“That is a direct order from the Corps Commander”
He waved a revolver at Woolley's head.

All the way to the Front, Woolley went through the routine of searching the sky, but the images of Margery persisted. The pleasure of her nagged at him, and the thought of them both, of being together, distracted his brain. Although his eyes looked they did not see, and his reactions were too slow when a flight of slim gray machines knifed down from the glare of the sun. The first burst wrecked his cockpit and the SE turned sharply on her back. Woolley fell out, and the last that Wallace and Cowie saw of him, before they sheered
away in fright, was his long brown flying-coat opening in the wind and checking his fall. For a moment it billowed out and let his smoking plane fall away; and then the coat collapsed, and Woolley dropped too.

 

 

In 1968, when the RAF was fifty years old, I read one of the many articles written to celebrate that jubilee. It contained some remarks by a former RFC pilot, Oliver Stewart. He said that, to be strictly honest about it, the objective of a fighter pilot in the First World War “was to sneak in unobserved close behind his opponent and then shoot him in the back.”

I was startled. I had grown up on Biggles, and that didn't sound like Biggies. Stewart went on, “Bar-room brawling, bicycle chains and broken bottles have a closer affinity to the early fighting in the air than the chivalrous, formalized, knightly encounters with lance and épée to which it has been likened.”

Much of that likening was first done by politicians, for purposes of propaganda. It was Lloyd George who called RFC squadrons “the cavalry of the clouds.” At that time it was customary to talk of knights of the air, of jousting circuses, of duels in the sky. All this was useful because trench warfare gave no such opportunity for images of glamour and chivalry. But the truth is that the air war was just as brutal, squalid and wasteful as the slaughter in the trenches. There is nothing romantic about getting shot in the back at ten thousand feet.

All this I discovered when I began reading the real history
of the 1914–18 air war—the story revealed by the diaries, letters and memoirs of the pilots themselves.
Goshawk Squadron
was based on those accounts. The characters were invented but their behavior, their attitudes and their activities were not. The broad structure of the story is true to the way the war went in 1918, and everything within that structure—training, tactics, aircraft performance, losses, and so on—is as authentic as I could make it.

When it first came out,
Goshawk Squadron
angered some veterans of the RFC. They felt it insulted the memories of their dead friends. I was saddened but not surprised. We all tend to forget the bad and remember only the good; and it must be especially tempting for survivors to believe that all the dead were heroes and that in any case victory justified their sacrifice. In fact we know that much of the slaughter was pointless. Courage was wasted along with everything else.

Some ex-pilots found
Goshawk Squadron
convincing. One, who flew in the RFC for two years and served in the RAF throughout the Second World War wrote, “A fair comment … If we are honest we must admit that this ‘all jolly good sports' legend about the RFC pilots and their opposite numbers in the German Air Force was, and is, a lot of bull—one either shot down or was shot down oneself.”

War is not sport. War is not fair. War in the sky, as Oliver Stewart remembered it, had to be unusually callous and cold-blooded. “To those who studied it closely enough,” he wrote, “the limitless open sky became as good a place to lie in wait for an unsuspecting passer-by as a darkened alley off a sleazy street, and the sudden act of violence, when it came, could be as deadly.” That—and not the myth of the cavalry of the clouds—is what
Goshawk Squadron
is about.