Marked for Death (24 page)

The operating room was at the other end of the corridor, and the most serious cases were taken there mornings to have their wounds dressed. Their moans and cries, echoing and re-echoing along the hallway, froze my blood. There is a quality scarcely human in the screams of a man crying out in sheer animal terror and pain… Many a time I wished that politicians, munition makers, breeders and abettors of war of whatever sort, might be forced to make the rounds of such hospitals so that they might see with their own eyes the horrible suffering they had brought to pass.
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‘You ask yourself,’ went on Arthur Gould Lee, ‘what are fellows like these, and hundreds of thousands more, giving their lives for? I hope it’s not just to make England safe for bolt-holers, profiteers, strikers, fake conchies,
ponces and all the rest of the indispensables.’

This conviction of a radical difference between two worlds could even make home leave a very compromised experience for a lot of men. Perhaps the best description of the alienation felt by a man returning home from the front for a brief visit is still that of Paul Bäumer in Erich Maria Remarque’s classic
Im Westen nichts Neues
(
All Quiet on the Western Front
); but even if most servicemen were unable to express it so poignantly, the complex mixture of emotions still leaked out from time to time. For months on end nearly all men hugged an anxious yearning for home leave until it became almost the only thing that kept them going: aching to see again parents, girlfriends, wives and children, even the family dog and the local pub. But when longing at last turned into the reality of the khaki-packed cross-Channel steamer and train to Victoria Station, a few might begin to feel something so awful they dared not give it a name. The mere idea that home might after all
be an anticlimax was a kind of treason and could not be thought. The growing sense of disappointment gave rise to self-blame, later to baffled rage at being forced to acknowledge that it was not home that had changed but they themselves. Something in them had been destroyed. Stealthily, a malign restlessness had invaded to blight whatever was once so straightforwardly embracing. Familiar as it was in every detail, the bedroom with the boy’s treasures and trophies seemed now to belong to someone else. The street, the town, the conversations overheard in the local pub – everything was oddly shallow and insubstantial. Even parents and girlfriends seemed different and uncomprehending. He alone had moved on while everyone else was nailed to the past, whingeing about shortages of this and that.

Gradually it became clear: only comrades who had lived daily and vividly with death understood the deal and were fit company; civilians had no idea and it was pointless trying to explain to them. And suddenly the squadron back in France seemed the only place left that didn’t change, that alone made sense in its mad way. Rudolf Stark on leave sat drinking champagne with his fiancée and all he could think was that the upward streams of tiny bubbles in his glass reminded him of tracer bullets.

Why must I always be thinking of the war? I sit here stuffing myself and ought to be happy, and away in the distance the front is roaring. I can’t stay any longer, not even for your sake… The room is growing cold. When I say good-bye there is no return pressure from the hand that lies in mine. Home melts away into a cold night. The last emotion has fallen from me like a warm cloak. I understand nothing any more and have but a single longing – to return to the front.

My leave is behind me. The train starts… At last it stops in Cambrai. A car from my
Staffel
is waiting at the station; two comrades have come to meet me. Somewhere a bomb crashes down. I sit in the car with a radiant smile and feel I have nothing left to wish for. My companions badger me to tell them
about my leave. ‘It was good – but coming back is better. Best of all is getting back to the Staffel!’
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Stuart Wortley had similar feelings. ‘I must honestly confess,’ he wrote, ‘that I am glad to be back again in France. The whole atmosphere is so different from that in England, especially so in the RFC. Everyone here is so cheerful and jolly, and there is none of that pompous militarism which distinguishes “the back of the front”.’
116
Ultimately, of course, the experience of war was incommunicable to anyone who had not shared it. Rudolf Stark probably summed up the truth of the matter for them all: ‘We are young; we want to live, and tomorrow we shall be dead. We have nothing but the war. No women await our return, for the
Staffel
is our home.’

If an RFC squadron seemed a home that was a world away from Blighty, it also felt increasingly divorced from the Army. By the time the RFC officially became the RAF in April 1918 most airmen felt utterly at odds with the military’s khaki machine, as W. E. Johns experienced for himself:

The war-time pilot fought the war in his own way. If the authorities wanted to drag a lot of infantry into the affair, well, that was nothing to do with him. He spoke a language of his own, understandable only to his own kind. If he was hurt, he complained solely because it meant leaving the Squadron; if he was killed his friends drank themselves unconscious and never mentioned his name again.
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Nevertheless, if Stuart Wortley found squadron life chummy and jolly by comparison with life back home, it remained for many airmen an oddly superficial comradeship. Life was too short to risk more:

We seldom talk to each other about our private affairs. You seldom get to know much about a fellow’s background. His
accent, education, bank account, don’t matter, nor who his people are. You never ask. You don’t even want to know. The only thing that counts is whether a chap has guts and can shoot straight. You share the same risks every day. Some get shot down on the other side, and that’s the last you hear of them. Some go home and probably that’s the last you hear of them, too. Yet here, in France, we’re a sort of brotherhood. It’s a rum life.
118

By the spring of 1915 the Western European battlefront had more or less stabilised into a line stretching unbroken from the Channel to Switzerland. The British troops were largely deployed northwards of Amiens on the Somme, the line to the south being defended by the French. Since the British sector was mainly open farmland interspersed with woods and villages, airfields were quite easily established and vacated. Aircraft of that period needed no concrete runways so there were none to lay. Even a grass airstrip was inappropriate because it was directional. The whole point of an airfield or aerodrome was that aircraft could land and take off in any direction according to the wind. Nor were there any permanent metal hangars to erect. The French Bessonneau wood-framed canvas hangars (always known as ‘the sheds’) were portable and adequate for much of the time although vulnerable to fire and gales and offering little protection in winter.

Sometimes the conditions under which our mechanics had to work were deplorable. Imagine nine inches of snow on the ground, with icy wind blowing through many holes in the canvas walls, the feel of cold spanners and frozen oil, the making of delicate adjustments with hands numbed to the bone…
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A typical RFC or RNAS squadron required an array of professional specialists. Riggers and fitters, mechanics, armourers,
blacksmiths, carpenters, drivers, clerks and cooks: they all needed places to work, eat and sleep. Typically, the squadron’s administration offices, medical bay, armourer’s hut, officers’ mess, cookhouse and accommodation were draughty wooden sheds, but sometimes the men and even the officers were housed in tents in a temporary measure that could drag on for months of mud and damp. Not until August 1916 did the first Nissen huts begin to appear, the utility buildings designed by a Royal Engineer that were essentially a tunnel of corrugated iron with a semicircular brick wall at either end and made habitable by efficient Canadian stoves. Sometimes personnel were farmed out in ‘digs’ in the local village. Failing that, it was a lucky unit that was billeted somewhere with brick buildings, let alone in a requisitioned château with extensive grounds (as did occasionally happen). All that was needed then was to stick up a pole with a wind sock on it – jocularly known in the RFC as the ‘effel’ from the initials of ‘French letter’ – and they were in business.

It was from such lumpy fields, often dangerously ringed with trees, that aircraft on both sides took to the skies to do their armies’ bidding. Perhaps because the RFC’s commander Hugh Trenchard was himself a pilot and had so early been convinced that aircraft had a potential far beyond that of simple observation, he formulated his strategy of using the RFC to wage an aggressive war from the first. (Maybe after all he had read Douhet.) One consequence of this soon became apparent. Because of the prevailing westerlies it was easier for the British and the French to fly into German territory than it was for German airmen to cross the Allied front – itself an indication of how weak the early aircraft were, even in the autumn of 1917:

The Wing ordered a patrol this morning: at which I protested that the wind was too high, and that if we got mixed up in a fight over the lines we ran an excellent chance of losing the lot. GHQ insisted, so I took the patrol myself. I climbed to 15,000 feet dead into the eye of the wind (blowing from the
west, of course). The air speed indicator showed a steady 90 m.p.h., and I remained perfectly stationary over the hangars! Turned east and reached Arras in five minutes. Turned back at once and took 2½ hours to get home! Rang up the Wing to tell them all about it. They replied that they had since received a message from GHQ cancelling my patrol…
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Because of the prevailing winds Allied pilots, once over the lines, felt particularly vulnerable to damage, engine failure or simply running out of fuel. Being forced down on the wrong side would at best lead to internment for the duration and at worst to being attacked and even killed by angry civilians in retaliation for injuries the airman (or anybody else) had previously inflicted. Many RFC and RNAS pilots and observers flew with a pistol but also with a small pack containing a razor, a toothbrush, some money and, in the pre-Sidcot suit days (see page 212) of thigh-length sheepskin ‘fugs’, a pair of ordinary shoes. This practice was often frowned on by commanding officers (by Robert Smith-Barry, for example) because to the faithless military mind it looked as though airmen might be making preparations to fake a forced landing behind the lines in order to be safely interned for the remainder of the war.

Where Trenchard’s policy was one of taking the fight to the enemy, German pilots were more constrained. This was certainly true in 1915 with the introduction of Fokker’s new E.I monoplanes. As already noted, the fear was that they might be shot down on the wrong side of the lines and the secret of their synchronised machine guns be discovered. Thereafter this turned into something of a habit and in general German aircraft ventured over the lines comparatively rarely except for the odd raid and to attack observation balloons. Later in the war they would also night-bomb the occasional airfield. (The big bombers that blitzed London were based safely in German-occupied Belgium.) German pilots understood only too well how the prevailing wind usually made it harder for Allied aircraft to get back home. So
did their anti-aircraft gunners, who often craftily conserved their ammunition and disdained to fire at RFC machines crossing their lines when setting out on a sortie, preferring to wait for the machines’ return when they would be low on fuel and labouring against the wind. In general, German pilots were freer to choose when to attack, safe in the knowledge that if they were forced down it would usually be in friendly territory.

Obviously Trenchard knew this too, but as the war went on it did not deter him from sending his aircraft on varied missions ever deeper into hostile territory. His pilots mostly spent these lengthy shows in a state of high anxiety, their senses attuned more than ever to their engine’s note, alert for the faintest sign of trouble that might leave them stranded forty miles on the wrong side of the lines with a dud magneto. Since this strategy of carrying the war to the enemy involved greater risk, it naturally resulted in much higher casualties than if the RFC had just been deployed defensively. From time to time it was denounced in the House of Commons and by newspapers as a ‘murderous’ policy, but for all his genuine sympathy for his fellow pilots Trenchard knew what he was doing. Besides, he had the backing of Army generals who probably felt that if his nasty smelly machines had presumed to usurp the role of the cavalry then they ought also to emulate those gallant, pulse-quickening horseback recces deep into enemy territory that had gained so much useful information in previous wars. The strategy was vindicated by the fact that ever since, air power has primarily been used aggressively rather than defensively. It is the nature of the beast and Trenchard was among the first fully to understand and act on it.