So Disdained (5 page)

He stared reflectively into the fire. "Kieff's a good town," he said. "It must have been better before the Revolution, but it's a good spot still. They put us out beyond Pechersk, with the aerodrome about a mile from the river. Not much to do away from the aerodrome. You can go into the town—they lend us a car whenever we want it—and eat a heavy meal with the Germans. Or you can go toying with Amaryllis—there's any amount of that to be had for the asking. Or you can go to the cinema and see Douglas Fairbanks and Norma Talmadge and Mack Sennett pretty well as soon as you can see 'em in London, with Russian sub-titles. And eat crystallised fruits. I tell you, there's a glut of crystallised fruits in that town. You can't get a proper cigarette for love or money, but you can get those damn things pretty well chucked at you. It's a local industry, or something."

He went on to talk for a long time about the type of machine that they had out there, and the ability of the Russian pilots. He was of the opinion that the best pilots were the Cossacks, and he said that the Russians were concentrating on trying to turn the best of their cavalry into fighting pilots. He thought that that was sound, and he had a very high opinion of their ability. The
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trouble was that they were so illiterate. Everyone coming to that course was supposed to be able to read and write; in actual fact their best pilots could do neither with any accuracy. Many of them had their horses with them; there were horse-lines along one side of the aerodrome.

"They fly into a fight . . . like riding a horse. No theory about it; but they're good. They've got a feel for the machine from the very first. It's a natural genius for the game. And they've got any amount of guts."

There was a very long silence then. He sat there in that chair before the fire, staring at the coals, his hands outstretched upon the bolstered arms, his long black hair falling down over his forehead in the half-light. I thought that he was shivering a little as I watched him.

"That went on till about six weeks ago," he said at last. "I had a pretty good time of it out there, taking it all round. My pay comes regularly, and I send a good bit of it back to England. I arranged that before I signed the contract, and they stuck to their side of it. The money gets through all right. And I like the work. I'd have been there still, but for this job."

I leaned forward and knocked my pipe out slowly against the palm of my hand over the grate. I knew that we were coming to the root of it now.

"This is for them?" I asked.

He didn't answer that at once. "They've grown to trust me pretty well out there," he said. "More than the others. They came along one day about the middle of last month, and made me an offer. They wanted a long night flight, or rather a series of night flights, done outside Russia. They offered me a thousand pounds sterling, with all expenses, as a fee for doing it."

He paused, irresolute.

"Where'd you got to fly to?" I asked.

"Portsmouth," he said laconically.

I had guessed something of the sort, I suppose. At all events, it didn't come as much of a surprise.

He went on without looking at me. "I'm getting to the end of my time out there. I've saved a bit, of course—about a couple
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of hundred pounds. But that's not capital. It wouldn't go any way if I was out of a job. I tell you, half a dozen times in the last three years I'd have been on my feet if I could have raked up a thousand or so. Dawson wanted me to go in with him in that show of his in Penang, you know." I didn't know, but I was silent. "And I couldn't, and he sold out to the Dutch as a going concern at three hundred per cent. And then Sam Robertson gave me a chance of going in with him on the Argentine Survey, and he's doing damn well, I hear. And I'd have liked to have been with Sam again. . . ."

I cut him short. "Why did they choose an Englishman?"

He laughed. "Bar the English and the Germans, I don't suppose there's a pilot in Russia that can lay a course properly, night flying. Not to call a pilot.

"They wanted a set of flashlight photographs taken from the air," he said. "Of Portsmouth."

The scheme, as they put it to him, was worth the thousand as a pilot's fee alone. There was the devil of a lot of risk about it. He was to take a machine from Kieff and fly by night across Poland and Germany to a place near Hamburg, where he was to land and wait during the day. On the next night he was to fly to Portsmouth, do his job, and return to Hamburg before dawn. The following night he was to return to Kieff.

If anything went wrong he was to land and burn the machine, and get away back to Russia with the plates by land.

I stared at him incredulously. "I never heard of night flying like that," I said. "It's absolutely crazy. Do you mean to say you took it on?"

He smiled a little bitterly. "I wanted that thousand. You see, I'm getting towards the end of my time out there. Yes, I took it on. I made damn sure about the money, though. I had it paid into my bank at Croydon by the Trade Delegation, and I wouldn't stir a finger till I had a letter from the manager about it in his own handwriting. That made it as certain as it could be—and when I got that I carried on with the preparations."

He began upon a long, technical description of the machine and its equipment for this flight. It was many years since I had
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had to do with aeroplanes, and much of what he told me passed over my head. I was afraid to put him off his tale by asking questions. He said that they had several of those Breguets in the school at Kieff, and he chose one of them for the job. And he told me, in a mass of technicalities, that they had a propeller for that machine which at slow speeds was very quiet.

Now half the noise of an aeroplane comes from the propeller. Virtually they had washed that out; they set to work then and built a silencer for the exhaust of the engine. They made the machine into a single-seater, and fitted her with fuel tanks for about fifteen hours' flight. By the time they'd finished with her they had a machine which would fly from Hamburg to Portsmouth and back in a night, and would keep in the air without losing height . . . silently.

"We did two machines like that," he said. "One for a reserve, in case anything happened to mine. We fixed it that old Keumer should fly the reserve one if it was necessary. By the time we'd done with mine she'd fly at about eighty so quietly that you could hear the rustle of a map as you unfolded it in the cockpit. It gave me a queer start the first time I heard that. And they couldn't hear her on the ground at all when she was a couple of hundred metres up."

They had one or two rehearsals of the photography, using a parachute flare, and then they were ready.

"What day's this?" he asked suddenly.

"Thursday," I said. "Or I suppose it's Friday by this time."

He thought for a little. "We were all ready last week. I started for Germany on Sunday night."

The landing-place in Germany was between Lubeck and Elmshorn, a little to the north of Hamburg. The flight, by the route he took, was about seven hundred and fifty miles; he took about six and three-quarter hours to do it. He left Kieff with a full load of fuel at about five o'clock in the afternoon, mid-Europe time, and set a compass course for the Baltic. It was a very dark night, and the ground was covered with snow. He said that it was very cold.

He flew most of the way at about five thousand feet. The
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Breguet wasn't a silent machine at her cruising speed by any means, and he didn't want to wake the Poles up down below. Between Kieff and Danzig he didn't check his course at all. He just sat there watching his compass and trying to fight the miseries of cold, and when he had been in the air for four hours he came down to about a couple of hundred feet to see where he was.

He saw the lights of a village on the snow, and he nearly hit a hill in trying to get down lower to see the sort of country he was over. Upon that he went up again and carried on for another twenty minutes. At the end of that time he found that he was over sea.

He thought it out, and came to the conclusion that he must be to the east of his course, since there was a westerly wind blowing and he had seen no sign of Danzig on the coast. Accordingly he swung round and set a course south-west by south to hit the coast again, and in a few minutes he had picked up the lighthouse at Putzig.

That gave him his position, and he set to flying along the coast towards Rügen, about a hundred and twenty miles farther on. There was a stiffish wind against him, and that leg of the course took him an hour and a quarter. The darkness and the intense cold, together with the strain, were making him sleepy. He had several drinks out of his flask, he said, and presently he picked up a lighthouse on Rügen.

After that he was pretty well home. He passed over Rostock and Lubeck, and then set about looking for his landing-ground. The Russians had secured a great country house that stood in the middle of that marshy land; he said that it was all shut up except for three rooms that they lived in. He said he didn't ask many questions about the place.

"Anyway," he said, "they'd done their part of it all right. The arrangement was that they'd have the devil of a great bonfire lighted half-way between Elmshorn and Lubeck, and three miles south of that I'd find the landing lights laid out on the ground for me to land by, inconspicuous-like. Well, I picked up the bonfire all right. They'd given a beano to some village
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there, and supplied the wood and the drink and everything. It was a good fire, that. The flames must have been getting on for fifty feet high at times. I saw it twenty miles away, and gave it a pretty good berth. It was easy then. I circled round a bit and found the landing, and put the Breguet down on to the grass along the line of lights."

He said that it had been a very cold flight. "Living in England, you don't know what it's like. I was all sort of cramped and stiffened in the one position. I tried to get out of the machine when she stopped, but I had to sit there till they came and climbed up on to the fuselage to help me out. I've never been like that before. The usual crowd of Jew Boys, but they were damn good to me that night. They had hot soup all ready, and a fire, and as soon as I was thawed out a bit and had a quart or so of soup inside me, I fell asleep where I was, pretty well standing up."

He slept till noon the next day, and spent the afternoon with a mechanic, overhauling the machine for the flight to Portsmouth.

"That was Monday afternoon," he said. "I started at about six in the evening, with fifteen hours' fuel on board. That flight should take about eleven hours for the return journey, allowing a bit for head winds and for about a quarter of an hour over Portsmouth."

He took a compass course over Holland, passing pretty well inland. He said he was afraid of getting mixed up with the Zuyder Zee. He came out on the coast near Ostend, and took a departure from there for Dover, flying at about three thousand feet. Finally he came to the Island at about half-past eleven. He picked up the Nab lighthouse first, and from there he followed straight along in through Spithead.

He took up the poker absently, and scraped a little of the ash from the bars of the grate. The fire was glowing very red into his face.

"I throttled down at the Nab," he said, "and then we went creeping in, doing about eighty, and so quiet that I might have heard my watch ticking if I'd put it to my ear. I had the parachute
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flare all ready, with a little stick to poke it down the tube with. It was the entrance to the harbour that I had to take—the narrow part."

My pipe was out, but I was afraid to interrupt his narrative by stirring to relight it.

"It was easy enough. The lights from the town—the streetlamps—showed on both sides of the water, so that the entrance looked like a great streak of black between the lights. I cruised round a bit before I set off the flare and dropped off a little height, so that I finished up at about two thousand five hundred feet. Eight hundred metres was the height that we'd fixed for the focus of the camera, you see."

He paused. "I could see that there was something funny going on before I set off the flare," he said. "There was a string of green lights stretching right across the entrance from side to side, near the mouth. Like a barrier to stop vessels coming in. And about half a mile inside from that there was a sort of faint glow in the middle of the harbour. Like a couple of floodlights running a bit dim. You couldn't see anything from the air but just that there was light there—in the middle of the water. Not like the lights of a ship, either. More like a quay."

He laid down the poker and glanced across at me. "Well, I was all ready. I went over to the Gosport side to start the fun. It was a westerly wind, you see, and I wanted to place the flare so that it would drift over the target. I turned her beyond the town and came back again down wind towards the entrance. And when the target bore about thirty degrees from the vertical with me, I made contact and shoved the flare down through the tube. It burst about thirty feet below me, and I had time for a quick glance round before the sights came on."

He relapsed into a long silence. I knew that having got so far he would finish the story in his own time, and I left him to think it over. Looking back upon it now, I think he may have been reluctant to tell what he had seen to any living person. I think that may have been one of the reasons for his pause.

"Was there much going on?" I asked at last.

He raised his head and eyed me steadily. "I don't know what
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it was," he said, "and that's the truth. I've never seen anything like it before. There was some damn great thing out there in the middle of the harbour—it wasn't a ship, and it wasn't a barge. I don't know what it was. There were three or four vessels standing by it, and there was a sort of thick black line of something running from it to the Gosport shore. That's what I saw—it's all I had time to see, because the sights began to bear and I got busy. It stood out pretty well as clear as daylight, the shadows all black and sharp. That flare was a corker of a thing."