Hornet’s Sting (50 page)

“A shame about the rain,” Dabinett said.

“Yes. The aim is to smash through the muck as quickly as possible,” Quigley said. “We need to break out, and give the cavalry firm ground to operate on.”

“What's morale like?”

“In the tanks? First-rate. Keen as mustard.”

“How d'you reckon your chances?” Klagsburn asked.

“Zero. We'll bog down in less than a mile. We're not submarines. D'you play bridge? We've time to kill.”

At half-past three they were in a dugout not far from the Front Line. Outside, the communication trenches were packed with troops waiting to move up. The barrage had stopped long ago. The dugout was crammed: a major, a captain, two lieutenants, batmen, runners, signallers. The Americans and Quigley sat in a corner; the others were always on the move, talking, joking, drinking rum, singing a line or
two from a London show. The jokes were desperately poor, the singing was flat, and every minute somebody wanted to know the time. Far away, a solitary gun fired. It fired so regularly, about every third minute, that it was like a timepiece. Once, when the telephone rang, the major took the call and shouted for quiet. In the silence, the cracked music of a distant concertina trickled into the dugout. “Ours or theirs?” Dabinett whispered. Quigley just shrugged.

At three forty-five, Quigley said, “Jerry's unlikely to capture you now, so I can show you exactly where we are.” He opened a map and pointed to the northern part of the battlefront. “Just beyond the enemy lines is Pilckem village – doesn't really exist, of course – and running south from it is Pilckem Ridge. That's the first objective.”

“Can your tanks climb the ridge?” Klagsburn asked.

Quigley was amused. “It's not like Vimy,” he said. “It's only a few feet high. In fact
nothing
is more than a few feet high out there.”

“So what's beyond the ridge?”

“Just farms. The barrage got them long ago. Rubble, now. You couldn't hide a rat behind them. You can't even find them unless you know where to look.”

“So it's all just...”

“Mud. Our tanks navigate by compass. The tank commander takes a compass bearing and sets off into no-man's-land and hopes for the best. Come on, we'd better get outside.”

After the tobacco-fug of the dugout, the night air was cool and sweet. No stars. Heavy cloud. Quigley checked his watch. “Three forty-nine,” he whispered.

At precisely three fifty, the barrage erupted and three thousand Allied guns fired.

Dabinett stumbled, and a soldier grabbed his arm. He felt as if the noise had blown him over. It made every thunderclap he had heard seem like a doorslam. The roar pounded his ears and numbed his brain. He lost control of his body, his knees were shaking, his feet were trembling. Then his brain caught up with reality. The
ground
was shaking, and he was shaking with it.

Now Quigley seized his arm. “Climb up!” he shouted. “See better from the top. Jerry won't harm us.”

They went up a ladder. Shells were exploding all along the enemy trenches, making an unbroken line of spouting fire. Dabinett had to
brace himself against the gusting wind. He was puzzled: a minute ago the night had been calm. Then he understood: the wind was made by the displacement of a thousand shells, all blasting holes in the air. He heard the crack and bark of field batteries, and looked behind him. Beyond the batteries was a horizon of gun-flashes like an army of signallers working the shutters of their signal lamps.

Klagsburn said something, and Dabinett turned and looked again at the battlefield. It was an earthquake releasing a volcano. Miles of the enemy lines were a blaze of orange light. Above this, hundreds of shrapnel-bursts sparkled. Higher still, burning oil fell like yellow rain from the drums of Thermit flung by the artillery. And just to point up the magnificent, inhuman scale of the inferno, the enemy was sending up streams of delicate red and green rockets, his pleas for help.

“Look!” Quigley called, and gestured all around. The ground was moving, was running: rats were fleeing from the Lines. “Never seen that before,” he said. “What you might call an unsolicited testimonial.”

The barrage went on, devastating what it had already destroyed, but it made so much smoke and dust that soon it hid its own firework display. Now machine guns opened up, hundreds of guns, rattling like regiments of typewriters. It was a signal for the barrage to raise itself from anger to fury.

“Not long now,” Quigley said. “And Jerry knows it. See?” Enemy shells were bursting in no-man's-land.

They climbed down. The dugout was empty except for the major, his batman and a signaller. “Have some rum,” the major said. “They've gone over. Nothing we can do.”

“When will the barrage stop, sir?” Dabinett asked.

“Not for ages,” the major said. “Every four minutes, it lifts forward one hundred yards. In theory, the infantry just keep walking forward.”

“In theory?”

“Nobody's perfect. Gunners make little mistakes. Have some rum. What time is it?”

“Two minutes past four, sir,” Quigley said.

“Dawn in an hour. Full daylight in two. Then we'll know something. Maybe. Have some rum.”

They waited. The barrage lifted, and lifted again, until its noise was a distant thunder. Now Quigley reckoned it was safe to go to the Front Line. Stretcher-bearers trudged back up the communication
trench in an endless procession. Dawn was a red slash in the clouds; smoke from the barrage drifted across it. They reached the Front and climbed onto the parapet and looked across no-man's-land at where Pilckem Ridge was alleged to be.

“First objective taken,” Quigley said.

“Is it?” Klagsburn said. “It all looks kind of samey to me.”

The entire battlefront was a sea of craters. There were no paths or tracks; nobody walked in a straight line; men followed the rims of the craters. In daylight this was difficult; at night, with drifting smoke and bursting shrapnel, it must have been worse than a nightmare. Nightmares end. Men awake. Here, they could only plod on, from a world of mud and explosions into a world of mud and explosions.

“Jolly thorough lot, the gunners,” Quigley said.

Dabinett nodded. He could see a few tanks tipped sideways in craters too steep for them to climb, but he said nothing of that.

They each helped carry a stretcher up the communication trench to a regimental aid post. Because Klagsburn was so much shorter than the man carrying the other end, blood ran down the poles of his stretcher and made the handles slippery. He dropped them before he knew it and fell forward, on top of the casualty. When he got up there was blood all over his sleeves. “Sorry,” he said.

“Don't take it to heart, sir,” the other stretcher-bearer said. “That one's not feeling any pain.”

The Americans had breakfast. Then they took the film camera and went back to the battlefield.

* * *

At about the same time, O'Neill had a longer, much better breakfast. Then he returned to his hut and found it full of sheep. They were not as well-behaved as the horse. Droppings dotted the floor. He shouted for his servant.

“My compliments to Mr Paxton. Ask him to spare me a few minutes.”

Paxton arrived, but not through the door; instead he looked through a window. “Dash it all, O'Neill,” he said, “you really must curb this passion for farm animals. People are beginning to talk.”

“I'm a reasonable man,” O'Neill said, “and I'll make a reasonable
offer. Get your woolly friends out of here or I'll smash your face in.”

“I'd like to oblige you, but they're not my sheep.”

O'Neill snatched a cushion that a sheep was chewing.

“I expect they just wandered in,” Paxton said. “That one looks remarkably like you. Much cleverer, of course.” O'Neill cursed, and hurled the cushion. Paxton had gone.

He found the French shepherd and gave him ten francs. “Infinitely obliged,” Paxton said. “For a similar consideration, could you repeat the exercise, only this time with a small herd of goats?” The man grinned and nodded. “You are a prince amongst shepherds,” Paxton said.

* * *

The squadron had been on stand-by from three in the morning. When the bombardment broke the silence of the night at three fifty, and the mess windows vibrated to the noise, everyone knew the infantry would be going over the top in a matter of minutes. Dawn came up, grey with rain, and no message arrived from Wing H.Q. Three hours later the crews were dozing in armchairs or eating a second breakfast or looking at the wet sky. Still no message. It was midday before orders arrived. Nine fighters – three from each flight – were to take off as soon as possible. The rain was heavier than ever; it was impossible to see across the aerodrome. Cleve-Cutler roused the crews and told them what was happening.

“The battlefield is lousy with Hun machines,” he said. “Sooner or later they must fly home. Your task is to intercept them. Fly deep into enemy territory – at least twenty miles – and turn and patrol the area
beyond
the fighting at Wipers. With luck you'll dodge their Archie and you'll catch some Huns who are low on fuel and out of ammunition, and not expecting to be hit.”

Forty minutes later the rain eased. The cockpits of the Biffs were soaked and slippery, but the engines had been covered and they fired willingly. Nine fighters climbed into a sky that flickered with lightning.

Woolley led the patrol, with Paxton as his deputy. The Biffs flew in three arrowheads of three. Orders were to stay in formation whenever possible. After a scrap, re-form at once. “Let's get a Hun if we
can,” Woolley had told them. “Let's get home if we can't. Watch your tail. Watch the next man's tail. And remember: a pint of pure water weighs a pound and a quarter, so have a good piss now.”

He liked Wing's plan. It allowed him to climb through the rain cloud, emerge into glorious sunlight with heart-warmingly clear visibility in all directions, and keep climbing to fourteen thousand feet. Nobody was above them. The sky was spotless and speckless and blue enough to drive an artist to drink. The only machines below were little pencilled crosses, crawling over the ragged cloud. And down below the cloud sat the enemy Archie, blinded and baffled.

Woolley concentrated on navigation. It was a matter of dead reckoning: fly for so many minutes at this airspeed on that compass bearing, and you should arrive where you want. But speed through the air wasn't necessarily the same as speed over the ground. The wind was blowing them northeast. How hard? Only the wind knew that. And the compass might play tricks too, especially on a day when there were thunderstorms about.

Woolley looked on the map for a major road out of Wipers, and found one that went east for about twenty miles to Courtrai.

Perfect. Courtrai was the meeting place of five big roads. It had a river and a railway. Should be easy to identify.

Woolley wheeled the patrol north when he reckoned Arras was ten miles behind them. For the next thirty minutes they churned through crystalline air, sometimes gently rocking like boats in a harbour, enjoying what little warmth the sun gave at such a height. Then Woolley pointed down and they began the long slide to the clouds and through them.

They emerged in grey light, streaked with thin rain, and saw the sea, dead ahead, ten or twelve miles away. The wind had blown them far north of Courtrai. Woolley had guessed wrong. Immediately he made a wide half-circle and flew south. There was no road in sight. And now the rain fell heavily. Within a couple of minutes it contained hail.

There was half a gale in this storm, and its gusts shunted the Biffs like paper kites. The pilots opened out the formation until they were just blurred black shapes to each other. Hail battered against goggles. It was too dark to read the instrument panel, and in any case lightning glowed from time to time; so the compasses were probably thoroughly
bewildered. The sky was full of traps and tripwires; Maddegan had to work hard with stick and rudder, so hard that he was sweating under his drenched flying kit. He couldn't see the ground, or the horizon. The sun was just a memory. He was flying on hope and instinct, like the rest of them: a dangerous combination.

The buffeting eased and within a minute they flew out of the storm, into a misty drizzle. The formation closed up again. Woolley saw a good, straight road off to his left. His map was soggy and unreadable. He took a chance and followed the road. Courtrai came in view so quickly that he couldn't believe his luck. Five roads fed into it, the river Lys went through it and headed west towards Wipers, and just outside town was an aerodrome.

Rising from it, like a hatch of flies leaving a pond, was an untidy parcel of German scouts. Woolley thought: Somebody saw us when we came out of cloud and turned south. Somebody got on the phone. The scouts tidied themselves up and made a box of eight, climbing hard. I bet they think we're bombers. They think we're easy meat. There was little Archie, and it was inaccurate: not easy to estimate height in wet weather.

Sudden waving by his wingman, Maddegan. Vigorous pointing to the right. Woolley raised his goggles and searched and found two large specks, no bigger than baby moths, far away and far below. Now the drizzle thickened to rain and he lost them. When he found them again he found two more, half a mile further away, all heading for the aerodrome. Back from the battlefield, with empty guns.

“Bunnies!” Woolley cried. “Rabbit stew tonight!” His gunner heard nothing over the Falcon's roar. Woolley fired a red flare, sending it racing and falling towards the returning machines: the signal to attack. All nine Biffs tipped and dropped.

The Huns were Halberstadt two-seaters. They did the only thing left to them: they dived for the aerodrome and the protection of its anti-aircraft guns. They were too late and too slow. Woolley's arrowhead caught the first pair and chopped them down in one rush of fire, the spray of the Vickers followed by the hammer and slash of the Lewis. It was easy to destroy an undefended aeroplane. You could get as close as you liked. Maddegan got so close that he saw the rage on the German gunner's face. The man actually flung an ammunition
drum at the Biff. By then the Halberstadt was burning. Yellow flames as long as pennants were trying to lick the tail.