“I need all my steam, too,” Pug said. “More than Ted does.”
“I’m tired of abstemious heroes. I shall find myself a cowardly sot.”
Gallard was having his second helping of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding—he was eating enormously, saying that he had lost almost a stone in three weeks and proposed to make it up in three days—when the headwaiter came to him with a written note. Gallard crumpled it up, wiped a napkin across his mouth, and excused himself. He returned in a few minutes, smiled at them, and resumed eating.
“Pam, there’s been a change,” he abruptly said when his plate was empty. “Our squadron’s rest off ops is cancelled. We’ll get it when the weather’s a little cooler.” He smiled at Victor Henry and drummed ten fingers on the table. “I don’t mind. One gets fidgety, knowing the thing’s still going on full blast and one’s out of it.”
In the silence at the little table, Victor Henry thought that the ominousness of this summons went much beyond the riskiness of recalling and sending up a fatigued, edgy pilot. It signalled that the RAF was coming to the end of its rope.
Pamela said, “When do you have to go back? Tomorrow?”
“Oh, I’m supposed to be on my way now, but I was damned well going to enjoy this company, and my beef.”
“I shall drive you to Biggin Hill.”
“Well, actually, they’re digging the chaps out of various pubs and places of lesser repute, Pam. We’ll be going up together. Those of us they can find.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ll be cracking off soon, but the evening’s young. No reason for you not to go on to that Noel Coward show. I’ve heard it’s very funny.”
Quickly Pug said, “I think now’s the time for me to leave you both.”
The RAF pilot looked him straight in the eye. “Why? Don’t you think you could bear Pamela’s drunken chatter for another little while? Don’t go. Here she is all tarted up for the first time in weeks.”
“All right,” Pug said. “I think I can bear it.”
The pilot and the girl stood. Pamela said, “So soon? Well, we shall have a nice long stroll through the lobby.”
As Pug got up and offered his hand, Ted Gallard said, “Good luck to you, Captain Henry, and to that son of yours in the Dauntless dive bomber. Tell him I recommend orange squash. Come and see us at Biggin Hill aerodrome.”
Left alone at the table, Pug sat and wiped his right hand with a napkin. Gallard’s palm had been very wet.
He did visit Ted Gallard’s squadron, one afternoon a few days later. Biggin Hill lay southeast of London, squarely in the path of incoming German bombers from the nearest airfields across the Channel. The Luftwaffe was persisting in a fierce effort to knock out Biggin Hill, and the aerodrome was a melancholy scene: wrecked aircraft, burned-out roofless hangars, smashed runways, everywhere the inevitable stinks of burned wood, broken drains, blown-up earth, and smashed plaster. But bulldozers were snorting here and there, patching the runways, and a couple of planes landed as Pug arrived. On stubby fighters dispersed all over the field, mechanics in coveralls were climbing and tinkering, with much loud cheerful profanity. The aerodrome was very much in business.
Gallard looked very worn, yet happier than he had been in the Savoy Grill. In the dispersal hut he introduced Pug Henry to a dozen or so hollow-eyed, dishevelled lads in wrinkled uniforms, fleece-lined boots and yellow lifejackets, lounging about on chairs and iron cots, either bareheaded or with narrow blue caps tilted over one eye. The arrival of an American Navy captain in mufti dried up the talk, and for a while the radio played jazz in the awkward silence. Then one pink-cheeked flier, who looked as though he had never shaved, offered Pug a mug of bitter tea, with a friendly insult about the uselessness of navies. He had been shot down by a British destroyer in the Channel, he said, and so might be slightly prejudiced. Pug said that speaking for the honor of navies, he regretted the idiocy; but as a friend of England, he approved the marksmanship. That brought a laugh, and they began talking about flying again, self-consciously for a while, but then forgetting the visitor. Some of the slang baffled him, but the picture was clear enough: everlasting alert, almost no sleep, too many airplanes lost in accidents as well as combat, far too many German fighters, and desperate, proud, nervous high spirits in the much reduced squadron. Pug gathered that almost half the pilots that had started the war were dead.
When the six o’clock news came on, the talk stopped and all huddled around the radio. It had been a day of minor combat, but again the Luftwaffe had come off second best in planes shot down, at a rate of about three to two. The fliers made thumbs-up gestures to each other, boyishly grinning.
“They’re fine lads,” Gallard said, walking Victor Henry back to his car. “Of course, for your benefit they cut the talk about girls. I’m the middle-aged man of the squadron, and I get left out of it too, pretty much. When they’re not flying, these chaps have the most amazing experiences.” He gave Pug a knowing grin. “One wonders how they manage to climb into their cockpits, but they do, they do.”
“It’s a good time to be alive and young,” Pug said.
“Yes. You asked me about morale. Now you’ve seen it.” At the car, as they shook hands, Gallard said diffidently, “I owe you thanks.”
“You do? Whatever for?”
“Pamela’s coming back to England. She told me that when they met you by chance in Washington, she was trying to make up her mind. She decided to ask you about it, and was much impressed by what you said.”
“Well, I’m flattered. I believe I was right. I’m sure her father’s surviving nicely without her.”
“Talky? He’ll survive us all.”
“It’s not going well,” General Tillet said, maneuvering his car through a beetle-cluster of wet black taxicabs at Marble Arch. The weather had lapsed into rain and fog; pearl-gray murk veiled a warm, sticky, unwarlike London. Umbrella humps crowded the sidewalks. The tall red omnibuses glistened wetly; so did the rubber ponchos of the bobbies. The miraculous summer weather had given the air battle an exalting radiance, but today London wore a dreary peacetime morning face.
“The spirit at Biggin Hill is damned good,” Pug said.
“Oh, were you there? Yes, no question about spirit! It’s the arithmetic that’s bad. Maybe the Fat Boy’s getting low on fighter pilots, too. We are, that’s flat. Perilously low. One doesn’t know the situation on the other side of the hill. One hangs on and hopes.”
The rain trailed off as they drove. After a while the sun hazily shone out on wet endless rows of identical grimy red houses, and sunlight shafted into the car. Tillet said, “Well, our meteorology blokes are on top of their job. They said the bad weather wouldn’t hold, and that Jerry would probably be flying today. Strange, the only decent English summer in a century, and it comes along in the year the Hun attacks from the sky.”
“Is that a good or bad break?”
“It’s to his advantage for locating his target and dropping his bombs. But our interceptors have a better chance of finding him and shooting him down. Given the choice, our chaps would have asked for clear skies.”
He talked of Napoleon’s luck with weather, and cited battles of Charles XII and Wallenstein that had turned on freak storms. Pug enjoyed Tillet’s erudition. He was in no position to challenge any of it, and wondered who was. Tillet appeared to have total knowledge of every battle ever fought, and he could get as annoyed with Xerxes or Caesar for tactical stupidity, as he was with Hermann Göring. About an hour later they came to a town, drove along a canal of very dirty water, and turned off to a compound of sooty buildings surrounded by a high wire fence. A soldier at the gate saluted and let them pass. Pug said, “Where are we?”
“Uxbridge. I believe you wanted to have a look at Group Operations, Number Eleven Fighter Group,” said Tillet.
“Oh, yes.” In three weeks, Tillet had never once mentioned the request and Victor Henry had never repeated it.
A flight lieutenant with a pleasant chubby round face met them. He was
a lord, but Tillet clicked the long name out too crisply for Pug to catch it. His lordship conducted them out of the bright sunshine, down and down a long turning stairway into the ground. “One rather expects to encounter a white rabbit, doesn’t one, Captain?” he fluted in Oxonian tones. “Hurrying by consulting its pocket watch, and all that. Nothing here that interesting, I’m afraid.”
They entered a shallow balcony in a small strange theatre. In place of the stage and curtain stood a black wall full of columns of electric bulbs, white except for a single line of red lamps near the top. At the side of the wall was a column of RAF terms for stages of readiness. On the floor below, twenty or so girls in uniform, some wearing headphones on long lines, worked around a large-scale table map of southern England. On either wall, in glassed boxes like radio control booths, men with head-phones scrawled at desks. The place had an underground, earth-and-cement smell, and it was quiet and cool.
“Burne-Wilke, here’s your American visitor,” said Tillet.
The blond officer sitting in the middle of the balcony turned, smiling. “Hullo there! Frightfully glad to hear you were coming. Here, sit by me, won’t you?” He shook hands with them. “Nothing much doing yet, but there will be soon. The bad weather’s drifting clear of the Channel, and Jerry’s getting airborne.” Burne-Wilke rubbed his bony pink chin with one hand, giving Pug a quizzical glance. “I say, those aeroplanes you rounded up have proven ever so useful.”
“They can’t play in this league,” Pug said.
“They’re excellent on patrol. They’ve done some smart punishing of invasion barges. The pilots are keen on them.” Burne-Wilke looked him in the eye. “See here, could you have produced those planes in two days?”
Pug only grinned.
Burne-Wilke shook his head and caressed his wavy hair. “I was sorely tempted to take you up. But you struck me as a chap who might just bring it off, and then we’d have looked proper fools. Hullo, there’s a mutual friend. Didn’t I first meet you with the Tudsburys, in a sweaty Washington receiving line?”
Pamela was walking in to take the place of another girl. She looked up, threw Victor Henry a smile, then got to work, and did not glance his way again.
“This is all fairly clear, isn’t it?” said Burne-Wilke, gesturing toward the map and the wall. “Fighter Command at Stanmore is responsible for air defense, but it lets each group run its own show. Our beat is southeast England. It’s the hot spot, closest to the Germans, and London’s here.” He swept one lean arm toward the wall, straight up and down. “Those six columns of lamps stand for our group’s six fighter control stations. Each vertical row of lights stands for one fighter squadron. All in all, twenty-two squadrons. In theory, we dispose of more than five hundred fighter pilots.” Burne-Wilke wrinkled his lips. “In theory. Just now we’re borrowing pilots from other groups. Even so, we’re way under. However…” He gestured toward the bottom part of the black wall, where white lights burned in a ragged pattern. “Going up the wall, you step up in readiness, till you get to AIRBORNE, ENEMY IN SIGHT, and of course ENGAGED. That’s the red row of lamps. Our six substations talk to us and to the pilots. Here we put together the whole picture. If things warm up enough, the air vice-marshal may come in and run the show.—Oh, yes. Those poor devils under glass on the left collect reports from our ground observer corps, on the right from our anti-aircraft. So all the information about German planes in our air will show up here fairly fast.”
Pug was not quite as surprised as he had been at Ventnor. He knew of the system’s existence; but this close view awed him. “Sir, aren’t you talking about a couple of hundred thousand miles of telephone cable? Thousands of lines, a forest of equipment? When did all this spring into being?”
“Oh, we had the plan two years ago. The politicians were aghast at the money, and balked. Right after Munich we got our budget. It’s an ill wind, eh? Hullo, here we go. I believe Jerry’s on his way.”
On the black wall, white lights were starting to jump upward. The young lord at Burne-Wilke’s elbow gave him a telephone. Burne-Wilke talked brisk RAF abracadabra, his eyes moving from the wall to the map table. Then he handed back the telephone. “Yes. Chain Home at Ventnor now reports several attacks forming up or orbiting. Two of them are forty-plus, one sixty-plus.”
Tillet said, “Göring’s been an abysmal donkey, hasn’t he, not to knock out our Chain Home stations? It will prove his historic mistake.”
“Oh, he has tried,” Burne-Wilke said. “It isn’t so easy. Unless one hits a steel tower dead on and blows it to bits, it just whips about like a palm tree in a storm, then steadies down.”
“Well, he should have gone on trying.”
White lights kept moving up the board. An air of business was settling over the operations room, but nobody moved in an excited way, and the hum of voices was low. The air vice-marshal appeared, a spare stern sparse-moustached man, with a sort of family resemblance to General Tillet. He ignored the visitors for a while as he paced, then said hello to Tillet with a surprising warm smile that made him look kind and harmless.
The first lights that leaped to red were in the column of the Biggin Hill control station. Victor Henry saw Pamela glance up at these lights. On the table, where she busily continued to lay arrows and numbered discs with the other girls, a clear picture was forming of four flights of attackers, moving over southern England on different courses. The reports of the telephone talkers on the floor merged into a steady subdued buzz. There was not much chatting in the balcony. Henry sat overwhelmed with spectator-sport fascination, as one by one the red lamps began to come on. Within twenty minutes or so, half the squadrons on the board were blinking red.
“That’s about it,” Burne-Wilke said offhandedly, breaking away from giving rapid orders. “We’ve got almost two hundred planes engaged. The others stand by to cover, when these land to refuel and rearm.”
“Have you ever had red lights across the board?”
Burne-Wilke wrinkled his mouth. “Now and then. It’s not the situation of choice. We have to call on other fighter groups then to cover for us, and just now there’s not much left in reserve.”
Far away and high in the blue sky, thought Pug, forcing himself to picture it, planes were now darting and twisting in and out of clouds in a machine joust to the death of German kids and British kids, youngsters like Warren and Byron. Pamela’s pudgy actor, cold sober on orange squash, was up there in his yellow life jacket, flying at several hundred miles an hour, watching his rearview mirror for a square white nose, or squirting his guns at an onrushing airplane with a black cross on it.
Two of the Biggin Hill lights moved up to white: RETURNING BASE.
“These things seldom last longer than an hour or so from the time Jerry starts,” said Burne-Wilke. “He runs dry rather fast and has to head back. They keep falling in the sea like exhausted bats. Prisoners say that the Luftwaffe has given the Channel an impolite name—roughly equivalent to your American ‘shit creek.’”
Within a few minutes, the red lights blinked off one by one. The air vice-marshal left. Below, the girls began clearing markers off the table. Lord Burne-Wilke spoke on the telephone, collecting reports. He put slender, hairy hands over his face and rubbed hard, then turned to Pug, his eyes reddened. “Wouldn’t you like to say hello to Pamela Tudsbury?”
“Very much. How did it go?”
With a weary shrug, Burne-Wilke said, “One can’t stop every bomber. I’m afraid quite a number got through and did their work. Often once the fires are out, things don’t look so bad. We lost a number of planes. So did they. The count takes a day or so to firm up. I think we did all right.”
As Pug went out with the young lord, leaving Tillet conversing with the slumped senior officer, he glanced back at the theatre. On the wall, all lights were burning at or near the bottom again. The room was very quiet, the earth smell strong. The staircase to the surface seemed very long and steep. Pug felt drained of energy, though he had done nothing but sit and wat
ch. He puffed and panted and was glad to see the daylight. Pamela stood in the sun outside in a blue uniform. “Well, you made it, but not on the best day. Ted’s down.” Her voice was calm, even chatty, but she gave his hand a nervous squeeze in two ice-cold hands.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. He may have parachuted, but his plane dove into the sea. Two of his squadron mates reported it. He’s down.” She clung to his hand, looking into his face with glistening eyes.
“Pam, as you’ve said, they often climb out of the water, and go right back to work.”
“Oh, certainly. Leave that to Ted. I’ve asked for a special pass. I think I shall come to London this evening. Would you buy me a dinner?”
A week passed, and another, and Gallard did not return. Pamela came several times to London. Once Victor Henry remarked that she appeared to be fighting the war only when it suited her. “I am behaving shockingly,” she said, “using every trick I know, presuming on everybody’s sympathy and good nature, and pushing them all much too far. I shall soon be confined to camp until further notice. By then you’ll be gone. Meantime you’re here.”
It became a settled thing among the Americans that Pug Henry had found himself a young WAAF. To cheer her up, he took her often to Fred Fearing’s apartment on Belgrave Square, the center for the partying American-British crowd. Shortly after the Christmas night row with Rhoda, the Germans had expelled Fearing for telling the truth about some bomb damage in Hamburg. Fearing was having such a good time with the London girls that, as he put it, he often arrived at the broadcasting studio on his hands and knees. His thrilling and touching word pictures of England at war were stirring up so much sympathy in the United States that isolationists were claiming he was obviously in the pay of the British.