“Yes, sir,” said the mechanic. “Oh, thank you, sir. Thanks very much, sir. Very kind of you, sir.”
The daft affair of Sergeant Harris and the mules had not been Major Cleve-Cutler’s fault but he felt the squadron had come out of it badly and he wanted to do something to make up for it. He asked Captain Brazier if he had any bright ideas.
“Well now, look here, I’m no airman,” Brazier, said.
“No, but you’re twice my size and twice my age and you’ve got ten times my experience of the British Army, so what would you do, if you wanted to score a few points at Wing and show them we’re not a bunch of drunks and delinquents?” Cleve-Cutler’s scars grinned at him.
“Not quite twice your age. Forty-nine this year.”
“My father’s only forty-seven.”
“Lucky chap. When I was forty-seven…” The adjutant rubbed the spot where his eyebrows met, and decided not to follow that thought.
“They think I’m old, you know, some of them. I’ve overheard them talking. ‘Not bad for his age.’ That sort of thing. Very patronising. God knows what they say about you.”
“Prehistoric,” the adjutant said. “Fossilized. What’s that doddering old fool doing around here? That’s the view of the intrepid aviator. Seen from ten thousand feet, I suppose I am prehistoric. And all those muddy fools at the Front must look like cavemen seen by eagles. Except that cavemen almost certainly had much more comfortable caves, and they didn’t have to keep their heads down all the time. I’m wittering on like this in the hope that you won’t notice I haven’t answered your question.”
“Forget it, adj. Not important.”
“I’ll give you a piece of advice, though. Attack the enemy’s strength, not his weakness. My very first CO taught me that.”
“Um.” Cleve-Cutler reviewed all his possible targets. “The toughest nut to crack is the German observation balloon, I suppose.”
“The tougher the nut, the sweeter the meat,” Brazier said.
Cleve-Cutler talked it over with his flight commanders. “The Hun wouldn’t defend his balloons so heavily unless they really mattered, would he?”
“Given a good telescope, a man in a balloon can see forty or fifty miles,” said Gerrish. “So they say.”
“I shall never sunbathe again,” Foster said.
“No future in just charging at the bloody things,” Piggott said. “You’d need an icebreaker to get through the archie.”
“Well, there has to be a way. This is not orders from the rear, you understand. I’d just like us to develop a reputation for something other than going on a binge.”
Various suggestions were made: fly high and bomb the balloon, fly not so high and set fire to it with incendiary parachutes, tow a grappling iron on the end of long thin cable and rip the thing open (a French pilot had actually attacked German planes like that, in the days before machine guns were carried). None of these ideas excited anybody. Cleve-Cutler told them to go away and think some more.
Foster held a meeting of ‘C’ Flight pilots. “Balloon-busting,” he said. “That’s this month’s fashion. You win a goldfish in a jar for every balloon you bust.” He was chewing his nails.
“I wish you’d stop doing that,” Yeo said. “It makes your fingers look pruned.”
Foster sat on his hands. “Spud?” he said.
“Well, there’s always the Milne Method,” Ogilvy suggested. “Bit expensive, I suppose. And what d’you do for an encore?”
“Don’t look at me,” Charlie Essex said. “I can’t spell balloon-busting. Can’t even say it.”
“It’s a matter of finding some way to baffle the archie, isn’t it?” Yeo said. “The problem’s not the balloon, it’s getting close enough to bust it.”
“Bloody archie,” Essex muttered. “I really hate the stinking stuff. It doesn’t fight fair.”
“Nobody’s invented the perfect weapon yet,” Foster said, chewing a thumbnail. Yeo sighed, and Foster sat on his hand again.
“We’re not going to find the answer here,” Ogilvy said. “Maybe if we go up and look…”
Nobody had a better suggestion. “All right,” Foster said. “Next time the weather’s right, James and I will study the problem from several angles.”
“Keep your heads down,” Essex said. “They can’t see you if you can’t see them. That’s a scientific fact.”
Pepriac was rarely silent. Engines were constantly being tested, and aircraft took off and landed all day. No matter how often he saw it, the act of take-off – the bellowing, bouncing charge across the grass, the instant of lift, the easy climb – never lost its magic for Paxton. He felt the cramp of envy, and a craving that no amount of tramping across the land of the Somme could diminish. He went to see Tim Piggott and asked to be allowed to fly again.
“It’s not my decision. I didn’t ground you.” Piggott’s rigger had extracted a ragged lump of shrapnel from his FE’s undercarriage and it lay on his desk. He poked at it with a pencil. “Besides, there’s no room for you. All the FEs are fully crewed.”
“There’s the Quirk.”
“If it was up to me you could take it and good riddance to you both.” Piggott frowned, hard. His left eyelid had started flickering again. He put a finger on it to make it stop. “The Hun loves chumps like you. Very sentimental, the Hun, very fond of children, he enjoys putting large lumps of red-hot metal through their stupid little heads.” The point of the pencil snapped against the piece of shrapnel. Piggott looked at it bleakly. “Buzz off,” he said.
Paxton told Kellaway about this exchange. “If you ask me,” he said,”it’s a clear case of professional jealousy. We knocked down a Hun and Piggott got hit by shrapnel.”
“Sorry to hear that,” Kellaway said. “Where was he hit?”
“Oh… I don’t know. At the Front somewhere.”
“A chest wound?”
“No, no, no. Piggott wasn’t touched. For God’s sake pay attention.”
“I’m getting one of my headaches,” Kellaway said. “I’d better go and lie down.”
Paxton was not discouraged by Piggott’s words. Sooner or later, he knew, the squadron would need a pilot. Every day there were forced landings because of engine failures – a cracked fuel line, a clogged-up carburettor, a broken electrical lead. The crew of a machine in ‘C’ Flight were lucky to survive when their propeller shattered and the fragments hacked through the control cables leading to the tail. The plane obligingly crashed into a small lake, the only stretch of water for miles around, and they waded ashore. Once, as an FE circled the aerodrome, smoke suddenly boiled out of the engine and Paxton thought his day had come; but this pilot deftly blew out the fire with a series of plunging sideslips, and he landed grinning. Another time, Paxton saw an officer fall out of a tree, and he sent a passing mechanic to get the ambulance. The officer turned out to be Douglas Goss (he had been looking for a lost cricket ball). He was a catalogue of pain and injury, but it was a walking catalogue, and he dismissed the ambulance and limped back to the mess. “Bloody branch broke,” he told Dando. “Typical shoddy frog tree.” Frank Foster picked a twig out of Goss’s hair, and said: “Anyone who goes up in one of those things must be mad, that’s my opinion.” Next day Goss was flying as usual.