The Price of Glory (34 page)

Arms and equipment were equally primitive. Radio was a late-comer, and for the most part artillery observation planes communicated with their batteries by dropping messages (generally in the form of marked-up maps) in capsules attached to a
banderole
, or long streamer. The ground forces in turn indicated targets by laying out markers on the ground, or letters composed of white canvas sheets six feet long. This was an activity not much favoured at Verdun, as it invariably attracted a tornado of enemy fire. When the first attempts had been made to adapt the Wright Brothers’ invention as a lethal instrument, pilots went aloft with steel darts and took pot shots at one another with service revolvers. Rifles had followed, then machine guns, but the biggest breakthrough of the whole war came
with Fokker’s introduction, in 1915, of a synchronising gear that enabled guns to be fired through the propellor. Here too the French lagged. The faults of their guns drove the French aces into a frenzy; in the air, they jammed at critical moments; on landing, they had a nasty habit of firing unexpectedly, often shooting up ground crews. While the German weapons could rattle off 1,000 rounds without re-loading, their own magazines only contained forty-seven. Changing a magazine in mid-air was a major act of skill and daring, which involved climbing half out of the cockpit while flying the plane with one’s knees clamped on the joystick; all the time with the enemy possibly circling for the kill.

In the combat tactics of the early days, however, the French shone, for this was a form of warfare ideally suited to their individualistic temperament (though, later, it was to be the cause of grievous losses). ‘We are the refuge,’ said a French airman, ‘of all those who fear too close a confinement of the spirit, the discipline of the corps of troops….’ Never since the Middle-Ages and the invention of the long-bow had the battlefields of Europe seen this kind of single combat. When the champions of either side met to fight spectacular duels in and out of the clouds, the rest of the war seemed forgotten; even the men in the trenches paused to watch as the hosts of Greece and Troy stood by when Hector and Achilles fought. Accompanying this personalised warfare, there returned a chivalry and a sporting instinct that had all but vanished with the advent of the army of the masses. A remarkable
cameraderie
grew between enemies. Once a German pilot dropped one of his expensive fur gloves during a raid over a French airfield. The next day he returned to drop the other; with a note begging the finder to keep it, as he had no use for only one glove. With medieval courtesy, the recipient dropped a thank-you note over the donor’s base. Fewer flyers took after the cold killer, von Richthofen, than after Boelcke and Navarre, who both hated killing and aimed whenever possible for the engine instead of the pilot. The death of a renowned foe usually brought mourning rather than triumph to the victorious camp; when Boelcke himself was killed (in collision with his best friend), planes from every British airfield within range dropped wreaths on his base, regardless of the risk involved. But though this sense of chivalry endured throughout the war, Verdun was to spell the end of the solitary ace and single combat. It was at Verdun that the word ‘
Airforce
’ first began to have a meaning.

In January 1916 Joffre and de Castelnau had given President Poincaré a vehement assurance as to the superiority of French aviation. Nevertheless, at Verdun when the battle began it had been outmatched — in numbers alone — by nearly five to one. In frustration the hard-pressed French infantry saw the skies above full of German Fokkers, roaming the battlefield unchallenged, precisely directing the hellish bombardment. But the French air service rallied with quite exceptional speed. Colonel Barés, its organisational head and a man with an outstanding grasp of air strategy, at once established his headquarters at Bar-le-Duc. Although the army, still sceptical of the new weapon and uncooperative, were unable to provide him with either maps or even straw for the pilots’ bunks, within a week he had installed on the Verdun front six out of France’s total of fifteen fighter squadrons, and a further eight reconnaissance squadrons; equalling 120 machines. It was a striking demonstration of air mobility. In command of this large force was a mere major, the Marquis de Rose, whose mission from Barés was simply to ‘sweep the skies’. A forty-year-old ex-cavalry officer described by Spears as a ‘gay and gallant spirit’ appearing to design his own uniforms, de Rose was killed in a flying accident in May; but by then his mission was all but accomplished.

De Rose had set about it by gathering together some sixty top pilots, a sparkling galaxy of stars, many of them banded together in the famous ‘
Groupe des Cigognes
(Storks).’ Few of the great names were absent. Over the span of the years their young faces (most of them were in their very early twenties), alert and clean-shaven in sharp contrast to the beards of the
poilus
and the fierce, straggly mustachios of their officers, seem to us like the faces of the future. There was the commander of the
Cigognes
, Captain Brocard, wounded during the first days of the fighting at Verdun, and relieved of his command the following year — because he simply could not adapt to the new conditions of air warfare the old form of single combat that had brought the
Cigognes
such renown in the early days. There was the astonishingly tough Lieutenant Nungesser. A boxer before the war, Charles Nungesser had been smashed up so badly that by the time of Verdun he had to be lifted bodily into the cockpit and could only use one leg on the rudder controls. Yet he was such a skilful flyer that to an American of the Lafayette Squadron it seemed as if a plane obeyed his thoughts rather than the controls, and at Verdun alone he shot down six German aircraft and a balloon. He
had an artificial jaw held together by a gold armature, and his twisted smile revealed two solid rows of gold teeth. Despite his injuries, he burned the candle furiously at both ends; often, after a heavy day’s fighting, he would roar up to Paris, 150 miles away, in his huge open sports car, then return after a night of carousal and heavy drinking to fly a dawn patrol. Though wounded seventeen times, he was one of the very few aces to survive the war. There was the handsome, twenty-year-old Warrant Officer Jean Navarre, who chalked up the
Cigognes
’ first victories at Verdun with a
right-and-a-left
over Fort Douaumont the day after its fall. The son of a wealthy paper manufacturer and something of a playboy, Navarre loathed killing and claimed he flew only because he had to. He took poorly even to relaxed airforce discipline; was incapable of keeping a log-book, and was at one time placed under arrest for disobedience. The men in the trenches adored him because when there was no enemy in the air he would ‘distract’ them by hurling his red plane (a colour scheme later appropriated by von Richthofen) into terrifying — and strictly forbidden — aerobatics over the front line. In all he fought 257 combats at Verdun, most of them against heavy odds, and shot down eleven planes. Wounded, he displayed violent bad temper in hospital; shook Paris by his wild debauches on convalescent leave; and finally ended the war in a mental home, suffering from chronic depression into which he had sunk after the death of his brother. In 1919, while preparing a stunt to fly under the Arc de Triomphe, he was killed in collision with telephone wires under circumstances that suggested suicide.

Above all, there was the great Guynemer. Aged twenty-one and just commissioned when the
Cigognes
moved to Verdun, he had first leapt to fame the previous summer when, as a Corporal, he had despatched three German planes in a morning. The Guynemers could trace courageous ancestors back to Charlemagne, but few heroes looked less the part than Georges, with his almost effeminate beauty and frail, spindly body that was three times rejected as unfit for military service. He dressed as foppishly as any staff officer, always wearing his medals in full ceremonial order. Fascinated as a youth by Colonel Driant’s imaginative writings about submarines and airships, he took both the war and flying as intensely earnest, and personal affairs. On leave, he showed no interest in the worshipping beauties who crowded to sleep with him, but spent his time in conversation with the aircraft designers. He knew every inch of the
three planes in his own private ‘stud’, and every day spent hours examining engine and guns. ‘My plane is nothing for me but a flying machine gun,’ he said, and he was a fantastic marksman. These were the secrets of how he lasted so long, for he had none of that cool meticulousness or subtlety in the air of those who, like René Fonck, Navarre and Nungesser, survived the war. Highly nervous, he rushed into combat like a wound-up spring, diving on his foe in the impetuous manner that cost the life of many an inexperienced young aviator. Again and again he was saved only by the uncanny accuracy of his shooting. According to his biographer, Henry Bordeaux, even when he landed he remained in a trance ‘as if electrified by the fluid still passing through his frame’. Though through so many dogfights he seemed to bear a charmed life, this kind of nervous impulsiveness seemed bound to lead to disaster. It very nearly did at Verdun. On the way to the front with the
Cigognes
, he despatched his eighth German. Then, on March 13th, he was tackled by two planes at once, firing at him from a range of ten yards. Two bullets hit him in the left arm, and numerous metal fragments flew into his face, including a piece in his jaw which could never be extracted. Half-blinded by blood from his cuts, he put the plane into a dive and somehow managed to land the right side up — despite the appearance of a third enemy plane which tried to polish him off on the way down. It was the end of his career at Verdun. On April 26th, his wound still unhealed, he escaped from hospital, but was returned from the front like a naughty boy. He was wounded eight times altogether, and on the last occasion he succeeded in getting into the air before the scars were properly healed. In September 1917, Guynemer disappeared into a cloud and all France mourned. He had accounted for fifty-four German planes.

At Verdun in February 1916 the Germans had achieved the greatest concentration of air power yet seen —168 planes, fourteen ‘
Drachen
’ balloons, four Zeppelins. However, by two grave tactical errors, they frittered away this supremacy without ever realising its value. The first of these errors lay in devoting their whole strength, defensively, to the ‘aerial barrage’ that was notionally to seal the air space above the German lines. To do this the Germans had divided the Verdun front into a number of very small sectors, each of which was to be patrolled twenty-four hours a day by two planes. Because of fuel problems each patrol could stay in the air no more than two hours, and only relatively slow and cumbersome two-seater
planes could be used. It is reckoned that, at the speed of 1916 aircraft, such a blockade of the air would have required a minimum of 720 planes, not 168, to have been in the least bit effective. In fact, it barely sufficed to keep out reconnaissance sorties by the handful of French planes which had been in Verdun at the outset. When the dashing
Cigognes
arrived they pounced with glee on the dispersed German planes flying up and down in the ‘barrage’, tearing through it with impunity to shoot up the
Drachen
balloons, the vital eyes of the German artillery. Within ten days the French by their verve and offensive spirit had wrested superiority in the air from the Germans, though still outnumbered and outclassed. Then Oswald Boelcke arrived.

The son of a Saxon clergyman turned schoolmaster, Boelcke was now twenty-five, had already shot down nine planes and was the youngest to win the ‘
Pour le Mérite’.
At the end of January 1916 he had been transferred in great secrecy from Douai to Jametz north of Verdun, to take part in the ‘aerial barrage’. To his intense disappointment he was taken to hospital with an internal disorder, and missed the opening of the battle. Nevertheless, he somehow bribed his way out of hospital to shoot down an impudent intruder strafing his base. By March 11th the German Air Command was distinctly worried and gave Boelcke, though a mere lieutenant, a
carte blanche
to carry the fight into the enemy camp. At once, he moved his base from Jametz, which — at about fourteen miles from the front — he claimed was too distant, to Sivry-sur-Meuse, six miles from the Mort Homme. (Owing to the very short range of the aircraft of the period, it was not an uncommon experience to land on one’s base actually under enemy shell-fire.) Within the first ten days, Boelcke personally added four more planes to his bag. Sore losses were inflicted upon the French; in the
Cigognes
alone its commander, Captain Brocard, Guynemer and several more of its top pilots had been rendered temporarily
hors de combat.
Once again the initiative passed to the Germans; artillery spotting improved, materially affecting the success of their attacks on the Left Bank at the end of March. On April 11th, Boelcke wrote gloomily: ‘Business gets worse every day. The French no longer come over us, they fly far behind their front.’

But measure and counter-measure follow each other with rapidity in air warfare. The French now took to flying in concentrated, though loosely controlled, groups. It was the first step away from the old gladiatorial techniques. Boelcke notes: ‘They were sending out
as many as twelve fighters to protect two observation machines. It was seldom that we could get through this protecting screen to reach the observation aircraft.’ Numerical superiority was also beginning to tell, for once, against the Germans. Through sheer organisational brilliance, Barés and de Rose had, by mid-April, built up the Verdun air strength to 226 machines; a concentration which Falkenhayn, with his policy of security-on-all-fronts was unable, or unwilling, to emulate. On May 7th, German troops massing at Thiaumont for an attack were suddenly blanketed by accurate air-directed artillery fire, and noted bitterly that, virtually for the first time, their fighters were unable to drive away the French observation planes. Later in the same month, French flyers, firing special rockets invented by a naval officer, in one day alone transformed five of the Crown Prince’s precious
Drachen
into searing bundles of flame. Boelcke, promoted captain after his eighteenth victory, now came out with the idea of creating a
Jagdstaffel
, or ‘hunting pack’ (later given the soubriquet of ‘Flying Circus’ by the Royal Flying Corps), a group of twelve planes divided into flights of three, and flying in closely interdependent formation. But before his ‘Flying Circus’ could be properly established at Verdun, there came the shattering news on June 18th of the death of Immelmann. Germany could not risk the loss of her other great air hero, and on the Kaiser’s personal order a frustrated Boelcke was grounded and sent on training tours of the Russian front.