‘No, no,’ interjected Rosie. ‘Can you translate it? My French isn’t terribly good.’
‘Oh, I see. Sorry. It says “Leaving his sweet Canadian girl, the fellow makes himself a soldier in the English army in France where the fighting is. When leaving he said softly to himself, ‘Canada, I will love you always, the woods, the rivers and the fields. But I also love the Canadian girl, faithful in the country where she waits for me.” ’
‘Oh dear,’ said Rosie, her eyes welling with tears. ‘Poor man. That was Corporal Larvière. He got septicaemia.’ She reached out her hand and took the book, flicking through it to find another passage. She handed it back and he saw ‘Chantons soldat chantons même si les blessures saignent…’ He translated: ‘ “Let’s sing soldier let’s sing even if our wounds bleed and if our voices have to rise higher than the highest torment louder than the cannons even if the wounds bleed and the heart breaks sing of hope and implacable hate by this beautiful autumn sun and the pride of remaining kind when vengeance would seem to us so good.”
‘That’s extraordinary,’ said Daniel. ‘No punctuation but it makes a beautiful kind of sense.’
‘He was called Georges,’ said Rosie.
‘Gone west?’
‘No, but there are things he’ll never be able to do. He would have been a wonderful father, I expect.’
‘This is a tremendous book,’ said Daniel. ‘I’d like to read all of it one of these days. Such lovely cartoons. All the cap badges and photographs, the silly rhymes, the fond messages. It’s a treasure.’
‘I’ve got three,’ said Rosie. ‘I look at them and it makes me think that those years of hard work really were worth it. Quite a lot of them say that they love me and will never forget. I mean love in the proper sense. I loved them too. They were my boys.’
‘Did you know that both my older brothers died in South Africa? Only just after my father?’
‘I see their memorial every time I go to St John’s,’ said Rosie. ‘What happened?’
‘Enteric fever got one and an ambush got the other. You can imagine how dreadful it all was for my poor mother after what happened to my father.’
‘I can imagine,’ said Rosie. ‘What regiment are you in? I’m not sure I recognise your uniform.’
‘This is the important bit,’ said Daniel, pointing to the wings above his left chest pocket. ‘Royal Air Force. Personally I preferred it when we were the Royal Flying Corps, but reorganising everything is a military passion, I’m afraid, and they decided to bung us together with the Royal Naval Air Service. We have completely incompatible habits and traditions, even in the manner of toasting the King. They sit and we stand. The rest of the uniform is Service Corps. Not very glamorous, but it’s what I could scrounge when I came over, and all my proper Royal Flying Corps stuff is being laundered, and we haven’t got our RAF ones yet. It’s a bit complicated. By the end of the war none of us was wearing anything that was related to the unit he was with. I had a wonderful Sikh uniform, but I left it behind. The soldiers at the trenches all looked like tramps, tied up with bailing twine and wearing captured hats. And boots without socks or puttees.’
‘I remember,’ said Rosie. ‘What did you mean by “came over”? From where?’
‘I was in India. North-West Frontier, busy with all those tribesmen who want to kill each other and us too. I was in Rattray’s Sikhs, but then I volunteered for the Frontier Scouts. My brother Archie was out there with me. I expect you remember him. He got in the papers once.’ She nodded, and he continued. ‘Anyway, I did a very disgraceful thing.’
‘Did you?’
‘Yes. I deserted.’
She put her hand to her mouth in horror.
‘I didn’t want to spend the war involved in some sideshow, so I deserted. We had three months’ leave per annum anyway, so I took ship home and immediately volunteered for the Flying Corps. By the time they caught up with me I was back in uniform and serving in France.’
‘What happened?’
‘They didn’t know whether to shoot me or pat me on the back. In the end they lost the file, quite accidentally on purpose. I did turn out to be reasonably useful, I like to think. I don’t suppose that Archie will ever forgive me. I left him in the lurch in the middle of one of our amateur dramatic society productions. We were doing Iolanthe.’
‘You’ve got some medals,’ she said, looking at the row of ribbons on his chest.
‘One or two. Nothing very special. I’m thinking of leaving the air force now. Everyone says there are going to be huge opportunities in civil aviation. I’m looking into it, just sniffing around. Now that the show’s over we’re all going to have to look for something else.’
‘What does the “O” with a wing on it mean?’
‘That means I qualified as an observer. The one with the Lewis gun and the camera who has to try and land the plane if the pilot gets hit. You don’t get the O until you’ve survived an engagement.’
‘An engagement? I don’t follow. What’s being engaged got to do with it.’
‘An engagement with the enemy, not a marital contract.’
Rosie leaned forward, patted his arm and laughed. ‘I know. I was just being silly.’ She paused and said, ‘I was with the Voluntary Aid Detachment. That’s how I spent the war. And now it’s horrible having nothing to do after all those years of frantic hard work. I just find all the things I saw…and the sounds…going round and round in my mind, and I can’t get rid of them. I’m sure you know what I mean. I’m probably as mad as poor Mother is. Or soon will be. You must find the same, sometimes.’
‘I do. I have a bad dream that keeps coming back. Wakes me up in a sweat every time. It’s an endless parade of the dead.’
‘I keep hearing “Gilbert the Filbert”, and it won’t go away.’
‘So, you were a VAD?’
‘Yes, at Spikey.’
‘Spikey?’
‘That’s what we all called it. Spike Island. I don’t know why. Everyone else knows it as Netley.’
‘I know people who came through Netley. You must have known them too.’
‘Netley’s absolutely vast, so I probably didn’t. We had tens of thousands of patients.’
What about Edward George, from the Buffs? Got sent to 46 Squadron?’
‘No, I’m afraid not.’
‘He lost his legs. And he has to wear a mask when he’s out. Poor man. He’s back in Lincolnshire with his family now. He made a perfectly good landing, and then the undercarriage collapsed.’
Rosie hung her head and fell silent for a very long time. Suddenly she burst out, ‘It was so awful, I just had to do something. That’s why I went to Netley. Mother wouldn’t have let me go to France, and actually I didn’t want to go there either. I love it here. Going away is such a wrench. But I couldn’t do nothing, could I?’
She looked up, and he saw that she was trying to be cheerful. ‘Do you remember that day when you and Archie did that wonderful thing, at the coronation party?’
‘When I vaulted the wall and Archie did a somersault? Gracious me, we must have been utterly mad. I can’t imagine why my parents let us do it. The pole wasn’t even the real thing.’
‘You were brought up to be Spartan warriors,’ said Rosie, ‘and that’s what you became, really. It was at that party that Ash…’
‘Yes?’
‘That Ash…’
Daniel looked at her with concern. Her shoulders had started to heave, and she had put her face into her hands as she sobbed. He hesitated, and then knelt before her. She dropped her hands to her lap, and he took them in his, pressing them to his cheek and kissing them. As the tears flowed more freely in response to his sympathy, he felt that he ought to put his arms around her, but realised that it would not be appropriate. Then at last he decided to follow his instincts, and hugged her to his chest, murmuring, ‘My dear girl, my dear girl.’
50
Daniel Makes an Impression
A month or so after their re
covery from the Spanish influenza, and not two weeks after his reappearance in the lives of the McCosh family, Daniel came to tea, and found himself in the drawing room, making conversation whilst Millicent scurried in and out bearing drop scones, Eccles cakes, gingerbread, and refills of hot water for the pot. After so many years it felt strange to be back with these sisters and their eccentric mother, none of whom had really changed very much in the intervening years, except that Mrs McCosh was clearly becoming more ‘unusual’ with the passage of time. Daniel and Sophie soon realised that they had in fact seen each other occasionally, but without recognition. She had used to bring the Wing Commander on his regular visits to the airfield when she was a driver.
Conversation was relatively easy, because all the company were agog to hear of what it had really been like in the Royal Flying Corps on the Western Front. Daniel was quite used to this, and it seemed that he had to endure the same questions and conversations, over and over again, wherever he went. Most people just wanted to talk about the aces. He had to suppress his natural instinct to say, ‘What about all the rest?’ modestly forgetting that he too had won many more than five victories.
He also liked to put in a word for the PBI. He had never forgotten visiting the front line in the squadron tender, and seeing the legs of the dead protruding from the trench walls, still wearing puttees and boots. That was a far more vivid memory than the stench and the shell bursts. He remembered taking refuge with Ashbridge Pendennis’s unit after spending all day in a shell hole, and being astonished when Ash had pointed to the sky and said, ‘I don’t know how you do it. You wouldn’t catch me up there.’
‘Did you know Albert Ball?’ asked Ottilie.
‘I did know Albert Ball,’ he said. ‘He was utterly reckless, and apparently fearless. He had an SE 5 for going out with his flight, but he kept a little Nieuport for going out on his own. He’d charge a whole circus on his own and pepper the lot of them. Hawker was like that. His order was always “attack everything”. Arthur Rhys Davids was exactly the same. He was a classicist, you know, a wonderful boy. His hut was full of books. Ball was his flight commander for a while, so I suppose he got the madness from there. It was a lot to live up to. The strain steadily gets worse and worse, and one of the symptoms is recklessness, without a doubt. It’s the effect of incremental fear on a brave man. And there’s a part of you that would like to get it all over with, I think. It’s like a devil’s voice in your ear, you know, like in Hamlet’s soliloquy, where he wonders whether quietus might be the most desirable thing after all.
‘I knew McCudden too. He was the exact opposite to Ball and Rhys Davids. Meticulously careful, and scientific, and considered. Billy Bishop I met once. He was another Nieuport man. Raided an airfield on his own and got the VC for it.’
‘What about those French aces?’ asked Christabel. ‘You know…Guynemer…and Nungesser?’
‘No, I never knew Guynemer or Nungesser, or Rickenbacker. I expect you’ve heard of Mick Mannock. He was Irish. I never met him either, but I wish I had. He worked out how to do deflection shots, apparently, and that accounts for his tremendously high score. That’s when you work out how far to shoot ahead of an enemy so that he flies into your bullets. Most of us couldn’t do that. We just got on their tails and fired from point-blank.’
‘It’s a bit of a miracle you got right through the war, isn’t it?’ observed Ottilie. ‘Four years in the air. That must be a record.’
‘Well, in some ways I was lucky. I wasn’t there for the Fokker Scourge in ’15, I was on Home Establishment. Of course people remember Immelmann for that. And I missed Bloody April for the same reason. I was instructing.’
‘And what about the famous Red Baron?’ asked Christabel. ‘Was he really such a brilliant flyer?’
‘Hmm, I often think that the only German ace that anyone wants to talk about is von Richthofen. He was unquestionably a great flyer – I came up against him a few times – but he did tend to attack in vast formations, always diving with his circus behind him, so he had lots of protection. He wasn’t a lone wolf like Ball. Funny thing is, when he was killed, the first rumour was that he’d been shot down by the observer of an RE8. That would have been an anticlimax, eh? Not remotely glamorous. Luckily they eventually decided it was a Camel, but a lot of us suspect that actually he was done for by machine-gun fire from the ground, like Mannock. One often doesn’t know who the real victor is, and the figures are all poppycock anyway. If four Brits got a victory between them they got a quarter each. We often used to draw cards for a victory, or toss a coin. The Americans and the French gave all of them one each. And then you have flyers of real genius, with masses of victories, that no one’s ever heard of, like Collinshaw. There was Fullard, Little, McElroy, Thompson, McKeever, Beauchamp-Proctor, and that’s missing out the Canadians, the Belgians and the Italians. I absolutely fail to understand why people have only ever heard of Albert Ball and von Richthofen. It’s tiresome, and all the other flyers feel the same. The Huns had just as many aces as us. Boelcke for example, and Müller and Bohme. And Udet.’
‘So who do you think was the very greatest,’ asked Mr McCosh, ‘if it wasn’t von Richthofen?’
‘Who was the greatest? Of the Huns? To my mind it was Voss. Flew a Fokker triplane like the Red Baron, but his wasn’t red of course. I had a scrap with him once. Six of us against one of him. Those little triplanes couldn’t dive because the wings came off, but they could go up like a lift. Every time we thought we had him he nipped upstairs and then came down on us again. He could have got away quite easily. I got a tight group of five in my empennage – Empennage? Oh, sorry, that’s the tailplane. We all got a few holes. He did things I’ve never seen before or since, things you can’t do with an aeroplane, things that aren’t in the manuals. It was perfectly astounding. Then some of his friends turned up and some of ours turned up, and it just turned into general chaos without any casualties, but I swear he was determined to kill all six of us on his own, and might well have pulled it off. To my mind there’s never been anyone to touch him. When I heard he was dead I felt as if I’d swallowed stones. Rhys Davids was pretty sorry for pulling it off, as I understand.’
‘And was it really like being a knight of the air?’ asked Rosie. ‘Everyone made it sound so romantic.’
‘Ah, the chivalry! Well, there wasn’t as much as people think. It’s still cold-blooded murder much of the time. You dive on a two-seater out of the sun and down it goes, sometimes in flames, and you know you’re as guilty as Herod, and you’ve just got to face up to it and then go out and do it again. A flamerino makes you feel sick to the heart, and you just hope they were dead already. And let no one tell you that von Richthofen was chivalrous. He wasn’t. He followed Hawker down and shot him in the back of the head when he had to turn home after a long dogfight that had been honourable up to that point. And during Bloody April, twenty-one of his kills, or thereabouts, were defenceless and obsolete old two-seaters and wounded stragglers. He was doing his duty, and I’ve done the same, but it’s nothing to do with honour and chivalry. It’s plain old-fashioned murder. Every one of us has to live with the knowledge that we were murderers. It’s true! It’s true! And von Richthofen was a braggart who claimed kills that belonged to his pupils. Mannock did the exact opposite and gave his kills to his pupils. If you want a hero of the air, give me Mannock any day, but he was no knight either. I hear that he took to machine-gunning planes that were already down. After too much fighting, what with the tiredness and the strain of it, you can get more than a little mad. That’s when they send you home to be an instructor for a while. I had to do it twice, and that’s why I survived, thank God.
‘And something else. The Huns always had a defensive approach to war in the air. They didn’t come over our lines in daylight, so we always had to take the fight to them. It was against the rules of war to use dumdums and incendiaries on other planes. We didn’t use them. If we’d crash-landed on their side, and been caught with them, we’d have be
en court-martialled and shot. But as the Huns did always crash on their own side of the lines, they didn’t have to worry about being court-martialled and shot, so they used incendiaries against us. There’s no other explanation for why our planes caught fire so easily and theirs didn’t. There was nothing that gave us the wind up more than the thought of being burned alive in a plane, and they knew it, because they were just as frightened of it themselves. So much for chivalry. Obviously one enjoys being thought of as a “knight of the air”, but I sometimes have to remind myself just how brutal it often was.’
‘So when you get a victory, does that mean a kill?’ asked Christabel. ‘I’ve often wondered.’
‘No, no, we counted victories, not kills. If you’ve got twenty or thirty victories, a lot of them will have been forced to land and so on. I killed hundreds of men by mowing them down in ground attacks, flying six feet above the ground and going straight at them, and I have no idea how many I killed with bombs. People don’t think about this, they only think about single combat, knight against knight. It comes from reading the papers. But yes, of course a little bit of chivalry occurred from time to time. We had a problem with jammed guns almost every time we went out. They said it was caused by deformed rounds that shouldn’t have passed inspection. We had to carry a hammer in the office – that’s the cockpit – and we’d spend half of every fight bashing the cocking levers with it. The frustration and rage was beyond imagining. I remember once my guns jammed in a dogfight and the pilot I was up against saw me struggling to clear them, so he flew alongside and waved and laughed at me whilst I hammered at the damned – I mean wretched levers…Anyway, I couldn’t clear them, and he just gave me a little wave and peeled off and flew away. That was a Fokker DV 11, and I was in a Camel. He could have got me with no bother at all. I always wish I’d had the chance to fly a DV 11. Once it happened again, and this time it was the Hun’s guns that jammed, so I repaid the favour, and let him go.’