BE2cs were slow and steady and they could be depended upon to stay in the air for two and a half hours or until they were shot up by enemy scouts or shot down by archie, whichever came sooner. When he joined the Corps, Piggott had flown a Quirk twice a day for a month. It was the Loos offensive, a bad, busy time when the generals demanded lots of artillery observation and photographic reconnaissance. Piggott soon came to hate the first and loathe the second.
Spotting for the guns meant hanging about in the same piece of sky, making random changes in height and direction to baffle the archie, you hoped. But the changes mustn’t be too violent or your Morse transmissions suffered. Taking photographs, on the other hand, meant flying absolutely dead straight and level and hoping the Hun gunners couldn’t believe their luck and therefore aimed somewhere else. In his four weeks with the squadron they lost sixteen BE2cs and their crews. Piggott was saved by a sliver of anti-aircraft shell. It chopped off the little finger of his left hand. When he left hospital he was posted to Hornet Squadron.
The Pfalz turned again, and again Piggott turned with it. “No imagination!” he said. “Try something different.” He searched the sky, slowly and thoroughly: nothing. He looked down just as a string of dense black blots created themselves a hundred yards to the right of the BE2c and immediately began to spread and fade. “Pathetic!” he said. “This could go on all day. I’m hungry.”
He considered climbing up to the Pfalz and making it fight or run away. Not a good idea. It could outclimb him, and the FE didn’t get better as it went higher. Besides, his job was to guard the BE2c, which (he saw) had just made the archie look silly again. Say ten shells a minute: that was nine hundred shells the enemy had wasted, not to mention the peril to their own men from the clatter of descending shrapnel on their heads. “Yah, yah!” Piggott chanted. “Can’t catch me!” And at that precise instant, seemingly in retaliation for the taunt, black shellbursts straddled the BE2c and flung its nose up as if it had walked into a punch.
Piggott stopped breathing until he saw the plane straighten out. He felt painfully ashamed. It wasn’t his fault; it was luck, or clever anticipation by the German battery commander; nevertheless his throat felt sick with a surge of self-disgust.
There was no way he could help but he had to do something so he shoved the stick forward and went down. The BE2c was a mess, but at least it was right-side up and the British lines were near. Something was falling, catching the light as it spun. It couldn’t be a parachute. No parachutes in the RFC, except for balloonists. It looked like half a wing. Christ Piggott thought, if they’ve lost half a wing, have they got any controh left? The BE2c was tipping into a gentle sideslip. It had no power. The propeller had stopped. Something else fell off and fluttered behind it. All the time, archie was staining the sky with blots, like someone flicking a loaded pen. One blot touched the BE2c and the story was over.
Piggott looked away. There was nothing worthwhile left, and what was not worthwhile he did not wish to see hit the ground. He levelled out and turned westward. Binns banged and pointed. The Pfalz had followed them down and was now circling lazily, five hundred feet above. The German pilot waved. Piggott waved back. Why not? It was just another day’s work, wasn’t it? Breakfast, that was what mattered now. Breakfast. Bacon, toast, maybe even some devilled kidneys. Breakfast. You had to keep your strength up for this kind of work. Breakfast. Breakfast. Great big breakfast.
Paxton took seriously his responsibilities as Orderly Officer. He wore his Sam Browne and carried his cane and walked around the camp. All was in order. The men he met gave him orderly salutes. After half an hour Paxton had found no hint of disorder. He grew bored with the camp and went to inspect the airfield. That too was in good shape. There was a black patch where his Quirk had burned but the wreckage had been carted away; the rest of the field was blamelessly green.
He walked along the tracks his Quirk had left in the grass and re-lived in reverse his disastrous landing: here was the strip where the plane slid on its belly, and beyond that the marks where the wheel-struts collapsed and gouged out turf, and further back still the spot where the plane first fell to earth and the wheels dented the grass. Now that the machine was destroyed he felt curiously proud of his arrival. A good landing, so one of his instructors had told him, was a landing you could walk away from. He sat on his heels and fingered the wheel-marks. It hadn’t been perfect but it was still a damn sight better than Wilkins had managed at Dover. Or Ross-Kennedy, doing cartwheels in a French field. Or Dexter, making a mess of that church. Damn fools. Nice chaps but rotten pilots. The hard-edged drone of an engine cut into his thoughts and he looked up. An FE2b sailed overhead, sinking softly, and touched down without a bounce. Paxton felt sick with envy. Two more planes landed during the next ten minutes. Each bounced a bit. The second bounced twice. Paxton felt better.
He went for a walk around the field, and then strolled into the mess to chat with the crews about their patrol; but the mess was empty.
“They’ve all gone swimming, sir,” a servant said. “Just ate breakfast and went.”
“Ah. They’ll be back for lunch, though?”
“No, sir. I think they go to an estaminet, sir.”
“You mean I’m the only officer on the camp?”
“Well, there’s the adjutant, sir. But he doesn’t usually take lunch.”
Paxton went to see the adjutant. Corporal Lacey’s gramophone was playing the César Franck symphonic variations, but Lacey stopped the record and received Paxton courteously. “I’m afraid Mr. Appleyard is resting in bed this morning,” he said. “A recurrence of an old Nigerian malady, I believe. The CO, of course, is at Brigade HQ all day.”
“Ah,” Paxton said. “Yes. Of course.” Nobody had told him the CO was at Brigade. You’d think the Orderly Officer ought to be told.
In the next room, a couple of typewriters chattered, starting and stopping as unpredictably as birdsong.
“If I may say so,” Lacey said,”it was uncommonly generous of you to take over Mr. Ogilvy’s duty as Orderly Officer.”
Paxton looked down. He found something of interest in an in-tray. It was a memo about disinfectant for the men’s latrines. “Oh well,” he said. “I wasn’t going anywhere.”
“Neither was Mr. Ogilvy. Now he’s splashing happily in the Somme.”
Rafters creaked as the heat baked the roof. Lacey sharpened a pencil, taking a long time to get it to a fine point. Paxton watched the tiny flakes fall and wished he knew how to drive. Then he could take an army car and whizz around the French countryside. There had been a chap at Sherborne who’d had a car. Lucky blighter. Sherborne had been a jolly good school. You got beaten, of course. Everyone got beaten, by masters, by prefects. Eventually you became a prefect and then you beat others. Didn’t do anyone any harm. On the contrary, it helped to develop the proper spirit. That was the great difference between us and the Boche. We had the proper spirit.
“Sinfully languid,” Lacey said. He was standing by a window, balancing the pencil on a fingertip by its point.
“What?”
“Don’t you find this weather almost sinfully languid?” The pencil wavered and he deftly caught it as it fell. “Idleness is a virtue on days like this. Unless one chooses to swim, and swimming is simply the most sensual of all indulgences. Don’t you think?” He had the pencil balanced again.