Kellaway’s trust lasted only three minutes. It was more than enough. Ever since they got above the cloud, a brisk wind had been shoving them eastward. When Kellaway went down to find a landmark he emerged above the German trenches.
Paxton was delighted. He leaped from side to side of his cockpit, shaking the plane with his eagerness to enjoy this magnificent view of modern war. Trenches, endless zigzag lines of trenches, a vast pattern of black lines rimmed with white chalk in green fields splattered with shell-holes, all repeating itself into the distance. Like tapestry, Paxton thought. No, more like a colossal snakeskin, one of those snakes with a pattern down their backs, only this was a mile wide and hundreds of miles long. Spiffing! If only I had a camera. Or a bomb!
Kellaway was too shocked and startled to know what to do for the best. Those must be the Lines down there. But whose Lines? He tried to work it out. If he was flying south they would be the British Lines, so he should turn right for Pepriac. But if he was flying north they had to be the German Lines and turning right would be the worst thing to do. Meanwhile he wandered northward, just below the cloud base, as clear as a fly on a ceiling. It took the German antiaircraft batteries fifteen seconds to find him, estimate his height, fuse the shells, load, aim and fire.
Out of nothing, as cleverly as the act of a music-hall magician, a string of black woolly balls appeared to the left of the BE2c. Instantly, they started to fade and unravel. Kellaway heard the woof-woof and said aloud: “That’s archie.” But it took him a couple of seconds to realise that it was archie aimed at him, and then he banked smartly away from it and drove up into the cloud, shutting his eyes at the moment of impact, opening them again when nothing bad happened. Damp gloom streamed past. Abruptly he popped into dazzling sunlight. The plane was shaking; the joystick flickered in his gloved hand. Too many revs! He throttled back, but still everything shook. What was broken? Kellaway held his breath to listen for the sound of damage and heard his heart stampeding. The plane wasn’t shaking. He was.
The sun, by great good luck, was behind them so he knew they were going home, more or less. And the compass seemed to have mended itself. He steered west, skimming along a hundred feet above the cloud, which didn’t scare him now and which was a handy refuge in time of trouble.
Paxton was pleased with himself: he had seen the fighting, he had heard shots fired in anger. He played some more with his Lewis gun, shifting it from one candlestick mounting to another and shutting his left eye while he swung the sights onto an imagined Fokker or Albatros storming in to attack. Thus he failed to see a very real Albatros biplane steadily overhauling them in a long flat dive.
Kellaway did not feel well. His stomach suffered spasms as if it wanted to throw up some more. His legs and feet trembled, his head throbbed, and from time to time his eyes went out of focus. He thought perhaps he had caught influenza. All he wanted was to go home and go to bed for ever and ever. A large bump of cloud came towards him and he slammed straight through it. “See if I care,” he said feebly, and immediately regretted it because the plane started making breakingup noises.
Paxton heard them too: crackings and hangings. Holes appeared in the wings; then more holes, and flying splinters and strips of fabric. He stood up to get a better view, leaning into the rush of air, and from the corner of his eye saw a flicker of tiny flame and with it heard the whizz of bullets and sat down with a wallop that broke the seat. The Lewis gun, miraculously, was on the right mounting. The enemy machine was above and to the right of their tail, not much of a target, just a purple silhouette. Paxton cocked and fired. The gun made a wonderful high-speed battering sound so he kept on firing, hugging the Lewis so as to share its power. At last he paused, and looked for his victim. Not there. Nowhere. Yes: on the left now, and curling in for another attack. Paxton yanked the Lewis off its pin just as Kellaway came out of his state of shock and thrust the Quirk into as steep a dive as possible. Paxton stumbled. His finger was still on the trigger and he put a dozen rounds through the upper wing. Then he was on the floor, tangled in his straps, hearing the whipcrack of bullets all around. Then the cloud rushed up and saved them.
Kellaway loved this cloud. He wanted to live in it for the rest of his life, or at least for an hour. As the dank greyness raced past he knew that he would soon fall out of the bottom, so he hauled back on the stick. Too much. Now he was climbing. Or was he? It felt like climbing. It might still be diving. He couldn’t read the speed in this gloom. He might stall and spin. The engine sounded under strain. He might pop out of the top and get shot to blazes. Oh God, Kellaway prayed, Oh God, what should I do? No answer came. He did a little of everything: middled the stick, opened the throttle, worked the rudder pedals once each way for luck. It worked. Or maybe it made no difference, maybe he was doing the right thing in the first place; anyway the cloud was still doing its merciful job half a minute later. And when at last the BE2c slid out of the bottom, crabwise, right wing down, the Albatros was not behind it. The Albatros was half a mile in front and coming towards them, zigzagging through a field of white puffballs: British archie.
Kellaway saw none of this. He had his head down and he was trying to make sense of his restless compass. Paxton saw it, saw black Maltese crosses on the wings, guessed that the German was heading for home. He shouted: “There’s our Hun! There’s our blasted Hun!” The words were blown away and when Kellaway looked up, all he saw was delight on Paxton’s face, and his outflung arm. It must point towards home, to Pepriac. Now Kellaway knew he was going to live, and the day seemed golden. In fact as he turned onto Paxton’s course it was golden: sunlight had broken through the clouds! Kellaway felt saved. When Paxton pointed left, he steered left. Paxton waved downwards; he pushed the plane into a gentle dive. Paxton spiked the Lewis gun onto a forward mounting and changed the drum. Kellaway looked where the gun was pointing and shut his eyes.
The Albatros was apparently laying its own carpet of white archie, fresh puffballs always appearing ahead, old ones dying behind. Paxton, aiming out and down, fired a long burst as the paths of the two planes crossed until he lost it beneath the BE2c. By the time he had dismounted the Lewis and slung it across the cockpit the Albatros was on fire and nearly out of range. He blasted off more shots. Its tail broke off and blew away. Kellaway got a glimpse of the pilot, seemingly unhurt, throwing up his hands in rage or despair. The archie was everywhere, endlessly grunting. The Albatros fell, nose down, as if desperate to escape. A wing peeled back, clung to the side of the fuselage, snapped its roots, fluttered free. The guns stopped.
“I thought it was like driving a car,” said a captain in the Gordon Highlanders. “I thought you had a sort of a steeringwheel and when you wanted to go fast you put your foot down.”
“No, no,” Piggott said. “Completely different.”
Five officers of the Gordon Highlanders had been the first guests to arrive for Milne’s party; and as Milne himself hadn’t returned, Piggott was looking after them. They peered into the aeroplanes, touched them and sniffed them with a mixture of amazement and amusement. Piggott hid his feelings, but he was not amused. “You’ve seen an aeroplane before?” he said.
“Oh, to be sure. But not one like this.”
“Perhaps if you thought of it as a boat. There is the rudder, on the tail. Here is the propeller, which drives it forward. The propeller’s in the middle of the machine because that gives the observer a clear field of fire at the enemy in front.”