Wings of War (15 page)

“A bit higher,” he says quietly.

“A thousand feet?” I’m almost screaming at him.

He says nothing and stares at his boots. I grab him by the lapels and haul him forward until his face is inches from mine.

“A thousand feet?” I yell into his face.

“Higher,” he says, his voice barely audible.

I shove him away violently. “You can’t recognize uniforms from that height, especially when they’re in trenches and covered in mud. Those were German soldiers you saw!”

“You fool,” Wally says. “HQ is going to send the Newfoundlanders into no-man’s-land to support gains that haven’t been made. They’ll walk into German machine guns and unbroken wire!”

The boy looks as if he’s going to burst into tears, but I don’t care. I push him out of the way and run toward his machine, shoving the startled fitter away.

“Start her up,” I yell as I scramble into the cockpit.

“What are you going to do?” Wally asks.

“I don’t know. Anything I can.” The engine kicks into life and I taxi the Parasol to the end of the runway. I glance at my watch—almost 9 a.m. Has it been only two hours since I took off this morning?

I roar down the runway and barely clear the poplars along the road. I don’t bother climbing, heading east
at treetop height. Men look up and horses buck with fright as I thunder over. There’s Beaumont-Hamel, sitting on its ridge with the mine crater in front of it and the smoke and debris from British shells swirling around it. Very gently—I can’t afford any mistakes at this altitude—I bank to the right. There’s St. John’s Road with the trench running beside it. The trench is still packed with soldiers, so the Newfoundlanders haven’t attacked yet. My sense of relief fades, though, as I get closer. The men are fitting bayonets onto their rifles.

I zoom along the trench, mere feet above the men’s heads. Some look up. An officer—Raleigh?—waves, looks at his watch and places a whistle to his mouth. I scream, “No! Stop!” but it’s no use. No one can hear me. All I can do is watch helplessly as the men clamber up the side of the trench.

The communication trenches that should cover them until they reach the front line are so packed with dead and wounded that the Newfoundlanders have to walk over open ground before they even get to no-man’s-land. As soon as they stand up, men begin to fall—not dramatically, they just seem to be tired and slump down. The rest lean forward as if walking into a strong wind. There’s no one attacking on either side of them and no supporting artillery barrage—just eight hundred Newfoundlanders taking on the whole German army.

German soldiers are climbing onto the lip of their trenches to kneel so that they can get a better aim. Screaming and cursing, I fly back and forth emptying my Lewis gun at them.

The Newfoundlanders have reached the British wire now. There, they bunch together to get through the gaps. They fall in heaps, and those coming behind have to climb over the bodies of their comrades. There are not many left by the time the survivors spread out in no-man’s-land, but they keep going. A handful make it to the solitary tree that I nearly hit. A few almost make it to the German wire before they are cut down.

Fifteen minutes after I arrived over St. John’s Road, the battlefield is silent. A few figures are trying to crawl back to the safety of their own lines, but most lie still.

I fly along the front one more time, tears flowing freely down my cheeks. The Germans don’t even bother to fire at me. Why should they? They’ve won.

I climb until the tragedy outside Beaumont-Hamel just looks like the rest of the world—up to where I am far from the death and destruction into the clean, cold air where birds soar, oblivious to what goes on below. This is where I want to be. This is why I learned to fly. This is what I thought flying in the war would be like. If only I could stay up here forever, free from the insanity below, but I know I can’t. Mick was right—you may
not start a war, but once it’s begun, you fight to win. What he didn’t say was that the war begins to control you. I wipe my tears away and turn the Parasol for home. Wally will be wanting a report.

“Least Mick didn’t flame out,” Bowie says, slurring his words. He, Wally and I are sitting on the couch in the chateau discussing the day. Other pilots I don’t know, and don’t want to know, sit elsewhere around the room. We’re all exhausted and depressed. Bowie is drunk. He swears viciously under his breath. “Disaster,” he snarls.

“They say the French made some progress to the south,” Wally counters, but there’s no spirit in his voice.

Bowie and I each went up on three more sorties that day, but they were uneventful. The fighting below us petered out in the afternoon, and we were left staring at the sad lumps of khaki scattered across no-man’s-land. As far as we could tell, the German front lines were completely unbroken.

“Your friend okay?” Wally asks.

“Alec’s fine,” I reply. I have just returned from scrounging a ride over to the remnants of the Newfoundland Regiment to find Alec. He’s safe, but Raleigh’s dead—he didn’t even make it to the Newfoundland front line before the bullets found him—and Broughton is missing.
“Only sixty-eight men answered roll call this afternoon. Sixty-eight out of nearly eight hundred.”

“It’s a catastrophe.” Bowie takes another swig of his drink.

“What happens next?” I ask Wally.

He shrugs. “We go on. We’ve orders to go up tomorrow and assess the situation.”

“Assess the situation!” Bowie shouts. “I’ll tell you what the situation is—those boys who ain’t dead in no-man’s-land are back exactly where they started at 7:30 this morning. We don’t need to fly to know that.”

“But we will,” Wally says calmly. “We have to go on. What’s the alternative? Surrender?”

Bowie slumps deeper into the couch, his anger spent. “The whole thing’s a fiasco,” he mumbles into his drink.

“I’ve got reports to finish,” Wally says, standing. “I suggest you two get some sleep.”

Bowie grunts, but I stand up and move over to my bunk. Even if I can’t sleep, bed is preferable to watching Bowie sink deeper into his alcoholic misery.

I listen to the tent flap mournfully in the breeze. Bowie’s right—the day has been a horrible disaster, and I have lost more friends. But I’m alive. It’s selfish, but I’m glad I’m not huddled in a damp hole in the wall of a trench or struggling in agony to drag my broken body across no-man’s-land to safety. I think back to my first magical
flights with Horst, soaring through the blue above the empty prairie, the railway disappearing in both directions. It was wonderful, thrilling—and it was safe.

An odd thought pops into my mind. If a genie suddenly appeared and gave me a choice—tomorrow I could either spend the day in complete security, twisting and turning in the skies above Mortlach, Parkbeg and Moose Jaw, or stay here and go on endless patrols over the horrors of Beaumont-Hamel with Bowie and Wally—what would I do? I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I would choose here.

Is that normal? I don’t know, but this is my life now. Alec, Bowie and Wally are my friends; they’re as important to me as my family, living in blissful ignorance back in Saskatchewan. We’ve shared too much—the thrill of taking off into a dawn sky not knowing what’s ahead, the tension of watching for Fokkers diving out of the sun, the chaotic excitement of a swirling dogfight, the fear of knowing Fritz is on your tail, the relief at still being alive at the end of the day. Could I live without that? It’s not what I wanted or expected when I came to this war, but it’s what I am, and I cannot deny that.

Nearby, I hear Bowie snoring loudly on the couch. “Good night, Bowie,” I say into the darkness, before I drift off into a surprisingly peaceful sleep.

While the main characters in
Wings of War
are fictional, the historical background is accurate. For example, the planes that Edward learns and fights in are the actual machines of that time, and Immelmann and his turn are real. Uncle Horst’s Berthas are fictional, although the early years of the twentieth century were a time when enthusiasts could, and did, build planes in their barns. There are even suggestions that some managed powered flight before the Wright Brothers in 1903. As early as 1890, there are stories of a French inventor, Clement Ader, flying fifty metres in a bat-like plane
powered by a steam engine. Most books on flying in WWI concentrate on 1917/18 and the well-known flyers like Billy Bishop and the Red Baron. I was intrigued by the earlier years, when flying was still a solitary pursuit and the pilots wrestled with a changing technology where a small advance, such as inventing a machine gun that could fire straight ahead through a plane’s propeller, could tilt the balance wildly in favour of one side or the other and mean life or death for a pilot. When WWI began, few people saw airplanes as anything other than a novelty that might have a minor use in helping the cavalry spot enemy movements. The idea that planes could be so big and fast that hundreds of them together could destroy a city was science fiction. In 1915, solitary planes, usually slow two-seaters, would go up and examine and photograph the enemy trenches. If they were protected at all, it was by a single scout plane, like Edward’s Morane Parasol. If fights broke out, they would be between individual flyers. By 1916, planes flew in groups of two or three and the idea of swirling, chaotic dogfights had taken hold. Planes were also being used for other purposes than simple reconnaissance. By the Battle of the Somme, they were communicating with troops, supporting them with machine-gun fire and even carrying small bombs to drop on concentrations of the enemy. This was still a
far cry from the deadly Flying Circus of the Red Baron and the sleek, fast fighters and huge bombers of 1918, but it was an important step towards it. There are many books on flying in WWI, but the best that deals with the time in which
Wings of War
is set is
Sagittarius Rising
, the memoir of Cecil Arthur Lewis’s experiences in WWI. Lewis flew Morane Parasols and won the Military Cross over the Battle of the Somme in 1916. He actually did see huge shells passing his plane during the pre-battle bombardment. The movie
Aces High
is partly based on Lewis’s memoirs and has some wonderful dogfight scenes.

Ace
—In the Royal Flying Corps, a pilot who has shot down five enemy planes.

Amiens
—A town in northern France, far enough from the front lines that it was a safe place to recover from a wound.

Archie
—Pilot slang for anti-aircraft fire from the ground.

Beaumont-Hamel
—A town that was fortified by the Germans and formed part of the front lines that
were attacked by the Newfoundland Regiment on July 1, 1916. Beaumont-Hamel was not captured until November 1916.

Berlin, Ontario
—The name of Kitchener, Ontario, before it was changed in 1916.

Biplane
—A plane with two layers of wings, most often one above and one below the pilot. This was the most common type of plane in the First World War.