Declarations of War. Len Deighton
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the aerodrome here. These scouts are new to me.’
‘Did you see anything at Cambrai yesterday?’
‘Anti-aircraft gunfire.’
Winter interrupted. ‘Let’s see if we can’t do better than that for you today, sonny.’ He leaned close to the boy and asked in his most winning voice, ‘Think you could down a couple before lunch?’
The boy didn’t answer. Winter winked at Ginger and buttoned his fur coat. The other motors had started, so Winter shouted, ‘That’s it, sonny. Don’t try to be a hero. Don’t try to be an ace in the first week you’re out here. Just keep under my stinking armpit. Just keep close. Close, you understand? Bloody damn close.’ Winter flicked his cigarette end on to the canvas floor of the tent and put his heel on it. He coughed and growled, ‘Hurry up,’ although he could see that the others were waiting for him.
From the far side of the wind-swept tarmac, Major Winter’s Sergeant fitter saw a flash of greenish light as the Mess tent flap opened and the duty pilots emerged. Winter came towards him out of the darkness, walking slowly because of his thick woollen underwear and thigh-length fleece boots. His hands were tucked into his sleeves for warmth, and his head was sunk into the high collar that stood up around his ears like a cowl. Exactly like a monk, thought the Sergeant, not for the first time. Perhaps Winter cultivated this resemblance. He’d outlived all the pilots who had been here when he arrived, to become as high in rank as scout pilots ever became. Yet his moody introspective manner and his off-hand attitude to high and low had prevented him from becoming the commanding officer. So Winter remained a taciturn misanthrope, without any close companions, except for Ginger who had the same skills of survival and responded equally coldly to overtures of friendship from younger pilots.
The Sergeant fitter – Pops – had been here even longer than the Bear. He’d always looked after his aeroplane, right from his first patrol when Winter was the same sort of noisy friendly fool as the kid doing his first patrol this morning. Aeroplanes, he should have said: the Bear had written off seven of them. Pops spat as the fumes from the engine collected in his lungs. It was a bad business, watching these kids vanish one by one. Last year it had been considered lucky to touch Pops’s bald head before take-off. For twelve months the fitter had refused leave, knowing that the pilots were truly anxious about their joke. But Pops’s bald head had proved as fallible as all the other talismans. One after another the faces had been replaced by similar faces until they were all the same pink-faced smiling boy.
Pops spat again, then cut the motor and climbed out of the cockpit. The other planes were also silent. From the main road came the noise of an army convoy hurrying to get to its destination before daylight made it vulnerable to attack. Any moment now artillery observers would be climbing into the balloons that enabled them to see far across no-man’s-land.
‘Good morning, Major.’
‘Morning, Pops.’
‘The old firm, eh, sir?’
‘Yes, you, me and Ginger,’ said Winter, laughing in a way that he’d not done in the Mess tent. ‘Sometimes I think we are fighting this war all on our own, Pops.’
‘We are,’ chuckled Pops. This was the way the Bear used to laugh. ‘The rest of them are just part-timers, sir.’
‘I’m afraid they are, Pops,’ said Winter. He climbed stiffly into the cramped cockpit and pulled the fur coat round him. There was hardly enough room to move his elbows and the tiny seat creaked under his weight. The instruments were simple: compass, altimeter, speedometer and rev counter. The workmanship was crude and the finish was hasty, like a toy car put together by a bungling father. ‘Switches off,’ said Pops. Winter looked at the brass switches and then pressed them as if not sure of his vision. ‘Switches off,’ he said.
‘Fuel on,’ said Pops.
‘Fuel on.’
‘Suck in.’
‘Suck in.’
Pops cuddled the polished wooden prop blade to his ear. It was cold against his face. He walked it round to prime the cylinders. That was the thing Pops liked about Winter: when he said off, you knew it was off. Pops waited while Winter pulled on his close-fitting flying helmet; its fur trimmed a tonsure of leather that had faded to the colour of flesh.
‘Contact.’
‘Contact.’ Pops stretched high into the dark night and brought the blade down with a graceful sweep of his hands. Like brass and percussion responding to a conductor, the engine began its performance with a blinding sheet of yellow flame and a drum roll. Winter throttled back, slowing the drum and changing the shape and colour of the flame to a gaseous feather of blue that danced around the exhaust pipes and made his face swell and contract as the shadows exploded and died. Winter held a blue flickering hand above his head. He felt the wheels lurch forward as the chocks were removed and he dabbed at the rudder bar so that he could see around the aircraft’s nose. There was no brake or pitch adjustment and Winter let her gather speed while keeping the tail skid tight down upon the ground.
They took off in a vic three, bumping across frozen ruts in the balding field with only the glare of the exhausts to light their going. It was easy for Winter; as formation leader he relied on the others to watch his engine and formate on him accordingly. At full screaming throttle they climbed over the trees at the south end of the airfield. A gusty crosswind hit them. Winter banked a wing-tip dangerously close to the tree tops rather than slew into the boy’s line of flight. Ginger did the same to avoid his Major. The boy, unused to these heavy operational machines with high-compression engines, found his aircraft almost wrenched from his grasp. He yawed across the trees, a hundred yards from the others, before he put her nose up to regain his position in formation. Close, he must keep close. Winter spared him only a brief glance over the shoulder between searching the sombre sky for the minuscule dots of other aeroplanes. For by now the black lid of night had tilted and an orange wedge prised open the eastern horizon. Winter led the way to the front lines, the others tight against his tailplane.
The first light of the sun revealed a land covered by a grey eiderdown of mist, except where a loose thread of river matched the silver of the sky. Over the front line they turned south. Winter glanced eastwards, where the undersides of some low clouds were leaking dribbles of gold paint on to the earth. As the world awakened stoves were lit and villages were marked by dirty smoke that trailed southwards.
Major Winter noted the north wind and glanced back to see Ginger’s aeroplane catch the first light of the sun as it bent far enough over the horizon to reach them at fifteen thousand feet above the earth. The propeller blades made a perfect circle of yellow gauze, through which reflections from the polished-metal cowling winked and wavered as the aeroplanes rose and sank gently on the clear morning air.
Here, on the Arras section of the front, the German and French lines could be clearly seen as careless scrawls in the livid chalk. Near the River Scarpe at Feuchy, Winter saw a constant flicker of artillery shells exploding: ‘the morning hate’. Pinheads of pink, only just visible through the mist. Counter-battery fire he guessed, from its concentration some way behind the lines.
He pulled his fur collar as high round his face as it could go, then raised his goggles. The icy wind made his eyes water, but not before he had scanned the entire horizon and banked enough to see below him. He pulled the goggles down again. It was more comfortable, but they acted like blinkers. Already ice had formed in the crevices of his eyes and he felt its pin-pricks like daggers. His nose was numb and he let go of the stick to massage it.
The cavalry officer – Willy, they called him – was staring anxiously at the other two aeroplanes. He probably thought that the banking search was a wing-rocking signal that the enemy was sighted. They read too many cheap magazines, these kids; but then so had Winter before his first posting out here: ‘Ace of the Black Cross’, ‘Flying Dare-Devils’, ‘True War Stories’.
Well, now Winter knew true war stories. When old men decided to barter young men for pride and profit, the transaction was called war. It was another Richard Winter who had come to war. An eighteen-year-old