Air Men o' War

V

A ROTTEN FORMATION

The Major lifted his head from the pile of papers he was reading and signing, and listened to the hum of an engine passing over the office and circling down to the 'drome. "One of ours," he said. "Flight coming down, I suppose. They're rather late."

An officer lounging on a blanket-covered truckle bed murmured something in reply and returned to the sixpenny magazine he was devouring. The noise of the engine droned down to the ground level, ceased, stuttered, and rose, sank again, and finally stopped. The C.O. hurried on with his papers, knowing the pilots of the Flight would be in presently to make their reports.

In three minutes the door banged open noisily, and the Flight Leader clumped heavily in. Such of his features as could be seen for a leather helmet coming low on his forehead and close round his cheeks, and a deep collar turned up about his chin, disclosed an expression of bad temper and dissatisfaction.

"Hullo, Blanky," said the Major cheerfully. "Made rather a long job of it, didn't you? Any Huns about?"

Now Blanky had an established and well-deserved reputation for bad language, and although usually a pilot is expected more or less to modify any pronounced features in language in addressing his C.O., there are times when he fails to do so, and times when the C.O. wisely ignores the failure. This apparently was one of the times, and the Major listened without remark to a stream of angry and sulphurous revilings of the luck, the Huns, the fight the Flight had just come through, and finally – or one might say firstly, at intervals throughout, and finally – the Flight itself.

"Three blessed quarters of a bloomin' hour we were scrappin'," said Blanky savagely, "and I suppose half the blistering machines in the blinking Flight are shot up to everlastin' glory. I know half the flamin' controls and flyin' wires are blanky well cut on my goldarn bus. And two confounded Huns' brimstone near got me, because the cock-eyed idiot who should have been watching my plurry tail went hare-in' off to heaven and the Hot Place. But no-dash-body watched any-darn-body's tail. Went split-armin' around the ruddy sky like a lot of runaway racin' million-horse-power comets. Flight! Dot, dash, asterisk! Formation! Stars, stripes, and spangles – "

He broke off with a gesture of despair and disgust. None of this harangue was very informing, except it made clear that the Flight had been in a fight, and that Blanky was not pleased with the result or the Flight. The Major questioned gently for further details, but hearing the note of another descending engine Blanky went off at a tangent again. Here one of them came … about half an hour after him … wait till he saw them … he'd tell them all about it … and so on.

"Did you down any Huns?" asked the Major, and Blanky told him No, not one single, solitary, stream-line Hun crashed, and couldn't even swear to any out of control. Before the Major could say more, the office door opened to admit a leather-clad pilot grinning cheerfully all over his face. Blanky whirled and burst out on him, calling him this, that, and the other, demanding to know what the, where the, why the, advising him to go'n learn to drive a beastly wheel-barrow, and buy a toy gun with a cork on a string to shoot with. The bewildered pilot strove to make some explanation, to get a word in edgeways, but he hadn't a hope until Blanky paused for breath. "I didn't break formation for more'n a minute – " he began, when Blanky interrupted explosively, "Break formation – no, 'cos there wasn't a frescoed formation left to break. It had gone to gilt-edged glory, and never came back. But I was there, and your purple place was behind me. Why the which did you leave there?"

"Because I'd winged the Hun that was sitting on your tail," said the other indignantly. "I had to go after him to get him."

"Get him," said Blanky contemptuously. "Well, why didn't you?"

"I did," said the pilot complacently. At that Blanky broke loose and cried aloud for the wrath to descend and annihilate any man who could stand there and deliberately murder the truth. "But I did get him. I watched him crash right enough," retorted the maligned one. Blanky was still yelling at him, when in came another couple talking eagerly and also with faces wreathed in smiles, and evidently well pleased with the world. "Hullo, Blanky," said the first. "Pretty good show, eh?"

Blanky wheeled and stared at him as if in dumb amazement. "Blanky doesn't think so," said the Major softly. "He's complaining a good deal that your formation wasn't very good."

"Good, Major," exploded Blanky again. "It was worse than very beastly bad. I never adverbed saw such an adjectived rank bad formation. It was a rotten formation. And then Billie tells me – has the crimson cheek to say he crashed a constellation Hun."

"Ask Tom there," said Billie. "Tom, didn't you see me put one down?"

Tom couldn't be sure. He'd been too busy with a Hun himself. He and the Diver had one fellow between them, and both shootin' like stink at him, and were watching after to see if he crashed —

"Crashed," burst in Blanky. "My sainted sacred aunt. Another fellow walking in his sleep and killing criss-cross Huns in his dithering dreams. Any imagining more of you get a fabulous freak Hun?"

The Diver said mildly, "Yes," he'd got one – not counting the one between him and Tom, which might have been either's. Blanky was beginning again, when the Major stopped him. "This is getting too complicated," he said. "Let's get the lot together – observers and all – and see if we can make anything of this business."

A babble of voices was heard outside, the door banged open, and in jostled another batch of pilots and observers talking at the pitch of their voices, laughing, shouting questioning, answering, trampling their heavy flying boots noisily on the bare wood floor, turning the little office hut into a regular bear-garden. Their leather coats were unbuttoned and flapping, their long boots hung wrinkled about their knees or were pulled thigh-high, scarves swathed their throats or dangled down their chests, enormous furry gauntletted gloves hid their hands. Some still wore their leather helmets with goggles pushed up over their foreheads; others had taken them off, and looked like some strange pantomime monsters with funnily disproportionate faces and heads emerging from the huge leather collars. For minutes the room was a hopeless bedlam of noise. Everyone talked at once: all, slightly deaf perhaps from the long-endured roar of the engines, and rush of the wind, talked their loudest. They compared notes of flashing incidents seen for a fraction of a second in the fighting, tried to piece together each others' seeings and doings, told what had happened to them and their engines and machines, asked questions, and, without waiting for an answer, asked another, or answered somebody else's.

The voice of Blanky haranguing some of the last-comers, calling down curses on their misdeeds, rose through any break in the hubbub. The Major sat for some minutes listening to the uproar, catching beginnings and middles and loose ends of sentences here and there from one or another: "Gave him a good half drum." … "Shot away my left aileron control." … "Went hare-ing off over Hunland at his hardest." … "Pulled everything in sight and pushed the others, but couldn't get her straightened." … "A two-inch tear in my radiator, an' spoutin' steam like an old steam laundry." … And then the voice of Blanky spitting oaths and "It was the rottenest formation I ever saw, abso-blanky-lutely rotten." His sentence was swamped again in the flood of talk and fragments of sentences. "Then it jammed – number three stoppage and" … "yellin' myself black in the face, but couldn't make him hear." … "I hate those filthy explosive bullets of theirs." … "Chucked her into a spin." … "Missing every other stroke, fizzing and spitting like a crazy Tom cat." … "I ask you now, I ask you what could I do?" … "Down flamin' like a disembowelled volcano."

The Major called, called again, raised his voice and shouted, and gradually the noise died down.

"Now, let's get to business," he said. "I want to know what happened. Blanky, let's hear you first."

Blanky told his story briefly. The formation of six machines had run into twenty-two Huns – four two-seaters, the rest fighting scouts – and had promptly closed with and engaged them. Blanky here threw in a few brief but pungent criticisms on the Flight's behaviour and "rotten formation" during the fight, mentioned baldly that they had scrapped for about three-quarters of an hour, and although there were certainly fewer Huns in at the finish than had begun, none, so far as he knew, had been crashed. All the Flight had returned, mostly with a good few minor damages to machines, but no casualties to men.

"Now," said the Major, "some of you claim Huns crashed, don't you? Let 'em alone, Blanky, to tell their own yarns."

The first pilot told of running fights, said he had sent at least one down out of control, and saw one crash. His observer corroborated the account; Blanky pooh-poohed it scornfully. He contradicted flatly and hotly another pilot who said he had crashed his Hun, and in the middle of the argument the last pilot came in.

"Here's Dicky. Ask him. He was close up, and saw me get 'im," said the denied victor.

"Dicky," cried Blanky, "I've been waiting for – here, you cock-eyed quirk, what in the Hot Place did you mean by bargin' across the nose of my bus when I'd just got a sanguinary Hun in my ensanguined sights. You blind, blithering no-good…"

"What's that, Blanky? What d'you say?" remarked Dicky cheerfully. "Wait a bit. My ears…" He gripped his nose and violently "blew through his ears" to remove the deafness that comes to a man who has descended too quickly from a height. "Didn't you see me get that Hun, Dicky?" demanded the Diver. "Why didn't you keep formation? Served you something well otherthing right if I'd shot you, blinding across under my gory prop…"

Dicky gripped his nose and blew again. "Wait a minute – can't hear right…"

The talk was boiling up all round them again, in claims of a kill, counter-claims, corroborations, and denials, and the Major sat back and let it run for a bit. Blanky, the Diver, and Dicky held a three-cornered duel, Blanky strafing wildly, the Diver demanding evidence of his kill and Dicky holding his nose and blowing, and returning utterly misfitting answers to both. He caught a word of Blanky's tirade at last, something about "silly yahoo bashing around," misinterpreted it evidently, and, still holding his nose, grinned cheerfully and nodded. "Did I crash a Hun?" he said. "Sure thing I did. Put 'im down in flames."

The Diver leaned close and yelled in Dicky's ear: "Didn't I crash – one – too?" Dicky blew again. "No, I didn't crash two," he said. "Only one, I saw, though there was another blighter – "

Blanky turned disgustedly to the Major. "They're crazy," he said. "I know I didn't see one single unholy Hun crashed in the whole sinful show."

"Between them they claim five," said the Major, "and you say none. What about yourself? Didn't you get any?"

"No," said Blanky shortly. "One or two down out of control, but I didn't watch 'em, and they probably straightened out lower down." (Blanky, it may be mentioned, has a record of never having claimed a single Hun crashed, but is credited, nevertheless, with a round dozen from entirely outside evidence.)

The Major spent another noisy three minutes trying to sift the tangled evidence and claims of crashes, then gave it up. "Write your reports," he said, "and we'll have to wait and see if any confirmation comes in of any crashes. You were near enough to the line for crashes to be seen, weren't you?"

"Near enough?" said Blanky. "Too disgustingly near. I suppose anyone that knows a bus from a banana would recognise the make of ours, and I'm rank ashamed to imagine what the whole blinking line must have thought of the Squadron and the paralysed performance."

The bir-r-r of the telephone bell cut sharply through the noisy talk, and the Major shouted for silence. He got it at last, and the room listened to the one-sided conversation that followed. Some of the men continued their talk in whispers, Blanky fumbled out and lit a cigarette, Dicky dropped on the bed beside the man with the book, who, through all the uproar, had kept his eyes glued to the magazine pages. "What you got there?" asked Dicky conversationally. "Any good?"

"Good enough for me to want to read," snapped the other. "But a man couldn't read in this row if he was stone deaf."

"Well, y'see, they're all a bit bucked with the scrap," said Dicky apologetically.

"Oh, bust the scrap," said the reader. "I'm sick of scraps and Huns. Do dry up and let me read," and he buried himself again in the fiction that to him at least was stranger than the naked truth that rioted about his unheeding ears.

The Major's end of the talk consisted at first of "Yes … yes … yes … oh, yes," and then, more intelligibly, "Yes, pretty good scrap evidently… No, they're all back, thanks… Thanks, I'm glad you think – what?.. Are you sure?.. Quite sure? Good. There's been rather an argument… Six? Quite certain?.. Thanks very much… I suppose you'll send a report confirming… Right. Thanks… Good-bye."

He put the receiver down on the stand and turned to Blanky with a smile twitching his lips. "Our Archies," he explained, "rang up to tell me they'd watched the whole show – " "Pretty sight, too," growled Blanky. The Major went on: "and to congratulate the Squadron on a first-class fight. And they positively confirm six crashes, Blanky; saw them hit the ground and smash. Some others seen low down out of control, and could hardly recover, but weren't seen actually to crash. So we only get six – and as the others only claim five, you must have got yours after all."

"Course he got it," struck in Blanky's observer; "only I knew he'd argue me down if I – "

"Oh, shut up," said Blanky. "How could you see? You were looking over the tail, anyway."

"Well, I knew I got mine," said Dicky.

"Me, too" … "And I was sure – " … "And I saw mine."

"For the love of Christmas, dry up," stormed Blanky. "If you could only fly as well as you can talk, you might make a half-baked blistering Flight. As it is you're more like a fat-headed flock o' incarnadined crows split-armin' over a furrow in a ploughed field. Of all the dazzling dud formations I ever saw – "

"Never mind, Blanky," said the Major. "You got six confirmed crashes amongst you, so it wasn't too dud a show."

"I don't care," said Blanky, tramping to the door and jerking it open. "I don't care a tuppenny tinker's dash what Huns we got." He swung through, and, turning in the doorway with his hand on the knob, shouted back with all the emphasis of last-word finality: "I tell you it was a ROTTEN formation, anyway."

Behind him the door slammed tremendously.

VI

QUICK WORK

It is difficult, if not indeed impossible, to convey in words what is perhaps the most breath-catching wonder of air-fighting work, the furious speed, the whirling rush, the sheer rapidity of movement of the fighting machines, and the incredible quickness of a pilot's brain, hand, and eye to handle and manœuvre a machine, and aim and shoot a gun under these speed conditions. I can only ask you to try to remember that a modern fast scout is capable of flying at well over a hundred miles an hour on the level, and at double that (one may not be too exact) in certain circumstances, and that in such a fight as I am going to try to describe here the machines were moving at anything between these speeds. If you can bear this in mind, or even realise it – I am speaking to the non-flying reader – you will begin to understand what air men-o'-war work is, to believe what a pilot once said of air fighting: "You don't get time to think. If you stop to think, you're dead."

When the Flight of half a dozen scout machines was getting ready to start on the usual "offensive patrol" over Hunland, one of the pilots, "Ricky-Ticky" by popular name, had some slight trouble with his engine. It was nothing much, a mere reluctance to start up easily, and since he did get her going before the Flight was ready to take off he naturally went up with it. He had a little more trouble in the upward climb to gain a height sufficient for the patrol when it crossed the line to stand the usual respectable chance of successfully dodging the usual Archie shells. Ricky, however, managed to nurse her up well enough to keep his place in the formation, and was still in place when they started across the lines. Before they were far over Hunland he knew that his engine was missing again occasionally and was not pulling as she ought to, and from a glance at his indicators and a figuring of speed, height, and engine revolutions was fairly certain that he was going almost full out to keep up with the other machines, which were flying easily and well within their speed.

This was where he would perhaps have been wise to have thrown up and returned to his 'drome. He hung on in the hope that the engine would pick up again – as engines have an unaccountable way of doing – and even when he found himself dropping back out of place in the formation he still stuck to it and followed on. He knew the risk of this, knew that the straggler, the lame duck, the unsupported machine, is just exactly what the Hun flyer is always on the look out for; knew, too, that his Flight Commander before they had started had warned him (seeing the trouble he was having to start up) that if he had any bother in the air or could not keep place in the formation to pull out and return. Altogether, then, the trouble that swooped down on him was his own fault, and you can blame him for it if you like. But if you do you'll have to blame a good many other pilots who carry on, and, in spite of the risk, do their best to put through the job they are on. He finally decided – he looked at the clock fixed in front of him to set a time and found it showed just over one minute to twelve – in one minute at noon exactly, if his engine had not steadied down to work, he would turn back for home.