‘Not on the ground, but the shadow on the underside of the plane. It strikes me that could be changed by putting a light on the aircraft.’ I was thinking quickly, if not all that appropriately. ‘One light in the belly of the plane, and a couple more along the leading edge of each lower wing. That would fix it. No more shadow, and you’d be difficult to see.’
Lieutenant Bartlett looked aghast. ‘Go into battle carrying lights?’ he said.
‘Well, yes.’
‘I think not.’
‘But if they—’
Embarrassed, I let the matter drop as suddenly as it had arisen. The challenge of solving a problem had carried me away, making me forget this was not just a technical issue, a puzzle to be solved, but involved the lives of these young men who were risking everything.
9
Lieutenant Bartlett turned away from me and walked across to where Astrum was pulling on his heavy leather flying jacket. They spoke quietly for a moment, with Simeon Bartlett looking back at me more than once. It was a moment of real impasse, which made me realize how serious the problems were, and that my foolish suggestion had probably undermined his confidence in me.
At that moment, to make me feel even worse, another officer came striding across the grass towards me. He was clearly more senior than any of the airmen I had so far met. The ground crew around me stiffened, and saluted.
He ignored them and came directly to me.
‘I want a word with you,’ he said to me without preamble, jabbing a finger aggressively.
‘Yes, sir,’ I said.
We stepped a distance away from Lieutenant Bartlett’s aircraft, and stood with our backs to the other men.
‘I think I know who you are, Mr Trent,’ he said, his voice an authoritarian treble. ‘You’re a civvy, I believe.’
‘Well, yes—’
‘I don’t know how you came to my station, or into my command, or what your orders are. But there’s no room for civilians on this base.’
‘I’m on a temporary commission, sir, and I am carrying written orders from the Admiral of the Fleet’s office at the Admiralty.’ I had the orders somewhere inside my luggage, and in fact I had transferred them from one bag to the other when I arrived. I realized I should have sought out this commanding officer as soon as I arrived and presented him with my orders. They had emphasized at the Admiralty that that was what I had to do, but Lieutenant Bartlett’s informal greeting at the station had made me overlook this service nicety. ‘I apologize, sir,’ I said inadequately. ‘This is my first posting. I have been sent as a special consultancy detachment.’
‘Not at my request.’
‘May I provide you with my orders, sir?’
‘Later. I only found out this morning you were here. Just do what you came here to do, don’t make a nuisance of yourself, then clear out. These boys are exposed to danger every day, and they don’t need to be distracted from their duties by some damned illusionist who thinks he can win the war single-handed. You clear on that? You understand?’
‘Yes, sir.’
But he was already striding across the grass, saluting in an absent-minded way as he passed other young pilot officers heading out to the airstrip, ready for the next sortie.
While this brief and unpleasant exchange was going on, Lieutenant Bartlett had climbed into the cockpit of his plane, with Astrum in the observer’s seat behind. They had pulled on their helmets. A mechanic stood by to swing the propeller, while two others waited for the order to remove the wheel chocks. I walked across to the aircraft. Simeon Bartlett inclined his head towards me.
‘We have to make a couple of circuits on a test flight – just checking a problem with the controls. Then I thought you might like to come up with me instead of Astrum here, and have a good close look at the German lines. See what we have to put up with.’
Something lurched horribly inside me. ‘Today? This morning?’
‘No time like the present. The need is urgent.’
‘Are you sure that would be all right with the commanding officer?’
‘What did Henry say to you?’
‘Henry?’
‘The C.O. – Lieutenant-Commander Montacute.’
‘He told me to make myself scarce. He said I was not welcome.’
‘Then he can hardly complain if I take you into the line of fire!’ Simeon Bartlett laughed cynically. ‘Don’t worry about what he said. I had a strip torn off me before you arrived yesterday, because he thought I had gone to the Admiralty behind his back. Well, in fact I did, because it was my Uncle Timothy who decided you should be brought out here. So I did go behind Henry’s back, or over his head, and he doesn’t like it. But because the Admiralty has already approved you there’s nothing he can do. Hand him your written orders as soon as possible and if he says anything more about it I’ll speak up for you. The simple fact is that I have family in the Navy and he hasn’t.’ He leaned away from me, peering along the cowl of the front-mounted engine. He shouted to the mechanic. ‘All right, Seaman Walters!’
The young man standing at the front pulled down hard on the two-bladed propeller, stepping back in the same instant. The prop went through half a turn, then bounced back with what sounded like a wheezing noise from the engine. The effort was repeated several times, until finally the engine took. With a great bursting cloud of blue smoke, pouring out from everywhere around the engine, the propeller began to spin.
Lieutenant Bartlett turned towards me again, just as I was about to back away.
‘Get yourself into a flying suit, sir!’ he shouted over the racket. ‘There are several in one of the huts over there. I’ll see you back here in about ten minutes, and I’ll take you for a good close look at the Germans.’
One of the mechanics stepped forward, and produced a hand-pistol with a thick barrel. He moved in front of Lieutenant Bartlett’s aircraft, looked around in all directions, then took the pistol in both hands. Pointing it into the sky he fired a single shot. A bright red light went shooting upwards, arcing through the sunshine. At the top of its flight it emitted a brilliant red flare, then began to fall slowly towards the ground.
The young man then went quickly to the side of Bartlett’s aircraft.
‘All clear, sir!’ he shouted.
Lieutenant Bartlett waved his hand to acknowledge. The engine note was rising from a slow clattering noise to a lusty roar. Around the plane the grass was pressed into rippling flatness by the stream of air. Lieutenant Bartlett shouted something to the men standing around, waving both his hands. Two of the seamen tugged away the wooden chocks which were restraining the wheels.
The plane started moving forward at once, bumping on the grassy surface of the field. The rudder at the back swung from side to side, as Simeon Bartlett tried to keep the plane heading in a straight line. He directed the plane towards the eastern edge, following the direction of the light wind. When they were about halfway towards the far side the plane turned back on itself and without a pause accelerated into the wind, bouncing and leaping on the uneven ground. As they passed our little group we could see that both men were hunched forward against the slipstream – Astrum’s gun was prodding above the cockpit edge, the barrel pointing skywards. The aircraft soon reached enough speed to take off and it rose steeply towards the clouds, leaving a trail of thin blue smoke in its wake.
As soon as it was against the sky the plane assumed the black silhouette I now knew was normal. Once again, the part of my mind that tried to manufacture mysteries knew that a certain amount of carefully angled lighting on the underside would change the apparent shape when viewed from the ground, and would probably confuse the enemy gunners at least long enough to get the crew past them in relative safety. But then of course I could not discount Simeon Bartlett’s total rejection of the idea. There had to be another way. I was learning about the limits of possibility in this war, but at least I had a few more ideas about adjacency and distraction.
Over the far end of the airfield Lieutenant B
artlett’s plane was turning steeply, heading back over the strip and climbing.
One of the ground crew standing with me suddenly yelled something, but I could not make out what he said. He was pointing upwards to Lieutenant Bartlett’s airplane. It had started climbing noticeably more steeply.
Someone else shouted, ‘There’s something wrong! He’ll stall if he doesn’t level out!’
The plane was now climbing almost vertically and was starting to rotate beneath its propeller. It was almost exactly above us. Everyone around me was staring up at the little plane, pointing, shouting, yelling for help.
‘He’ll over-choke it at that angle!’
‘Put the nose down!’
‘He’ll never make it!’
Puffs of dark black smoke appeared around the nose of the aircraft, instantly thrust away by the stream of air from the propeller. But the plane was floundering – it dropped backwards, and there was another burst of thick smoke from the engine. For a moment the plane looked normal, as the nose came down, seeming to correct the fall, but almost at once it began to spin. It was out of control, plummeting with ever-increasing speed towards the ground, the smoke forming a horrific black spiral behind it.
It was falling towards us. Everyone in our group began to run, stumbling frantically on the bumpy ground, trying to get clear, looking up and back.
Somehow the falling aircraft missed us. It hit the ground at an immense speed no more than twenty-five yards from where we had been standing. There was an immediate flash and a loud explosion. The pressure wave from it felt like a kick against my body. White, red and orange flames burst out in all directions. A huge cloud of smoke, streaked with flames, billowed up.
I ran towards the crashed plane with the other men, desperately trying to reach the wreckage before the fire took hold, but the closer we approached the more obvious it was that the fuel tank must have burst open on impact. Tongues of burning fuel ran out across the grass, brilliant orange in the daylight, crowned with a dense rush of smoke. The other airmen ran on but I came to a halt. I was stricken with terror, not of the burning, nor of the fear of a second explosion like the first, but because of a dread of what I might witness.
In fact a second explosion did follow, smaller than the first. The men who were running ahead of me took some of the heat blast. They fell or scrambled away from the inferno.
I, staring ahead in mute horror, saw through the smoke and flames a sight that I knew I would never be able to eradicate from my mind. I saw the shape of a man struggling to stand up and free himself from the broken remains of the aircraft. He was waving his arms in a frantic fashion, screaming with every breath, but I could see that most of the clothes he was wearing had already been blown or burnt from his body. His flesh was exposed, black and burning as I watched. He seemed molten, waxen, burnt not to a crisp but to a soft, pliable mass, melting down. I have no idea if the man I saw was Simeon Bartlett, or his crewman, Astrum.
He folded, bent, leaned forward, flowed downwards into the inferno.
I shrank away in horror as a third explosion occurred, the smallest of the three. I heard the sound of another engine and a fire appliance came bouncing and lurching over the grass. I sat down weakly, in the sun, in the light wind, with the smell of burning fuel and the highly flammable spirit that had been applied to the wings, and the crackle of burning wood and now the sound of water being pumped on the burning wreckage. Thick smoke billowed past me. The smell of it made me want to throw up.
I was still there, in the middle of the field, after the other men had dispersed. I watched the firemen working on extinguishing the rest of the fire. I turned away, not wanting to see as an ambulance crew came to collect what they could of the crewmen’s remains. They drove back towards the camp buildings, leaving the wreck a small, smouldering heap of indistinguishable shapes and spars.
Only when a young officer I had not met before walked across to me did I at last leave the scene of the accident. Speaking considerately and gently he told me I was in the centre of the airstrip path. Many more aircraft were waiting to take off on their next missions. Other planes were expected back at any time, and they would need to land.
The war was still going on.
10
So what was I to do?
I returned in a state of shock to the grim little room where I had passed my restless night, sat on the side of the bunk and tried to think. I had achieved nothing at all, and had only the vaguest, most provisional idea of what I could do to put that right. A glimmer of an idea about some kind of adjacency misdirection, a sleight of hand against the German Army, one of the best-led and most highly trained military forces in the world. I proposed to defeat them with legerdemain. What Lieutenant-Commander Montacute had said about an illusionist who thought he could win the war single-handed was some way from the truth but it had nonetheless hurt. All my ideas would probably have turned out to be unworkable. Even to try the simplest sleights would have required much friendly help and cooperation from the pilots of the RNAS, and of course I had been depending totally on my young friend Simeon Bartlett, the only one who appeared to have any faith at all in me. I hardly knew him, but his sudden and horrifying death was the worst blow I could imagine: he was so young, so full of energy and brimming with a loyal intent to fight a brave and honourable war. Gone.
Without him, my place on this airfield was, to say the least, uncertain. I already knew that the commanding officer wanted me off the place. With Simeon Bartlett dead the attitude of Lieutenant-Commander Montacute only reinforced my own sense of insecurity about the value of anything I might be able to offer.
So every nerve in my body urged me simply to pack my bags, get off this base, return home. But I had become a commissioned officer in the Royal Navy, acting under orders, in the midst of an aggressive war. How could I just walk away? Would I be treated as a deserter? Hunted, captured, court-martialled, shot?
After a few minutes of such worry about my own fate, a greater sadness grew in me. I thought of the waste of Simeon Bartlett’s life, and that of his crewman. The suddenness of the accident and my shock of witnessing it at such close quarters were reactions that were fading slightly, but they were more than replaced by a feeling of human loss. I started shaking, and did not know how to stop. To see two healthy, intelligent, highly trained and above all young men killed like that was more than I could cope with. I do not cry often, but I sat there inconsolably on the dismal bed in that dismal room, weeping without shame.
Beyond the window I could hear the sound of aero engines, starting, revving up, clattering down to silence. I did not look, could not face the idea of seeing any more planes taking off or landing.
When I had at last been able to compose myself I left the room, and bracing myself against another unpleasant interview I went in search of Lieutenant-Commander Montacute. I eventually discovered he was currently leading a mission.
I returned to my room. I located my written orders then penned a polite note to Lieutenant-Commander Montacute. In it I said that I was obeying his personal order to leave the base now that my work was complete, and that I would resign my temporary commission the moment I returned to London. I added a short tribute to the life of Simeon Bartlett as I knew him. I closed with what I hoped the commanding officer would accept as a courteous acknowledgement of the dangerous and worthwhile work he and his pilots were doing. I walked over to the C.O.’s office and left the papers in the charge of his orderly rating.
I packed my bags, having decided to be well away from the airfield by the time the C.O. returned. I found my way down to the guarded main gate, steeling myself for an interrogation about where I might be going and why, but the seaman on duty simply pushed open the barrier when he saw my uniform and stripes. We saluted each other.
Once in the road I turned and looked back. Behind the gate, facing out towards the road, a wooden sign had been erected. Across the top, in neatly printed formal letters, were the words: Royal Naval Air Service, Squadron N
o. 17, Béthune. Beneath was a rather well executed painting of a rural view: cows grazing in a lush field, surrounded by mature trees. Three tiny aircraft circled overhead. And at the bottom, again well printed but in a more informal style: La rue des bêtes. Beneath that, smaller still: Entrée interdite – s’il vous plaît rapportez à l’officier de service.
I strode down the road, determined, if necessary, to walk the whole way to Béthune, but after a few minutes an army truck appeared on the road and the driver stopped to offer me a lift. I tossed my bags into the back, then sat next to him in the cab as he drove along. He asked several innocent and therefore harmless questions about my war experiences, which I answered in as noncommittal a way as possible. He told me he was a sapper, involved in a difficult project to dig deep tunnels under the German lines, with the intention of placing huge mines beneath their trenches. He said they had never yet been able to detonate their explosives, because the lines of the trenches kept moving to and fro. They were currently working on a new tunnel, much longer and more ambitious, and –
I stared ahead at the rough surface of the road, thinking of war’s futility and the death of young men. I saw a flight of British warplanes heading east away from the airfield, holding a tight diamond formation. They flew beneath the high bright clouds, black against the early winter sky.
11
At Béthune I narrowly missed the Calais train and had to wait until the evening for the next. There were few signs of British military activity and the station had a reassuringly civilian look. There was even repair work being carried out on some of the buildings opposite the station – workmen were putting up scaffolding around the main station building. I was able to deposit my luggage in a lock-up in the station hall before I walked into the town to find a meal.
I went through the afternoon and evening in a state of suspense, holding on, waiting, eating a little, drinking a little. The only money I had on me was British, but the shopkeepers had become familiar with that and were willing to accept it, albeit at an outrageous exchange rate. My nerves were constantly on edge in case someone from the British command might notice me and ask what I was doing. I could not eradicate the idea that by walking away from the RNAS base I had become a deserter. The ambiguity of the contact I had had with the commanding officer was no help. Whenever I saw men in British military uniforms I tensed up with apprehension. However, no one seemed in the least interested in me.