Declarations of War

Thirty years ago it was, when I came closest to meeting my maker. Father Franco nodded, he’d heard the story before, as Father James well knew, but Compline was done and the evening still light. Here in the shadowy corner of the great hall the stories that he told seemed from another world. And yet Father James was not the only cleric who had been a professional soldier, and the things of which he spoke had taken place not many miles away from where the cliff-like monastery caught the harsh sunshine and tolled the hours of ceaseless prayer.

‘I’d have put you in for an M.M., Wool, but I had no idea of who you were.’

Wool was not impressed. ‘It’s all good and nice, you saying that now. I never got a medal, and what good would it do me, anyway? Frankly, I’m more interested in Munchy outlets.’

‘You saved twenty or more lives that night. Drove off an armoured attack, single handed. There’s not many men who can say that.’

Wool was scarcely listening. ‘She was a lovely bus, Cindy Four. Lucky tank, too. All four of us went through fifteen months without a scratch. Bert Floyd – the loader originally – copped it three days after being recrewed. It was only the gear-box that ever gave trouble, and I could handle that. I knew the smell of her: lovely. That night as I strapped tight into the seat and grabbed the sticks I could smell the leather and the oil that the sun had warmed during the day. The Betty Grable pin-up was still next to the visor, and so was the red-painted ammo box from Sicily where Andy kept his bottled beer and a pair of carpet slippers.’ Wool laughed. ‘If we’d ever had to abandon, Andy would have been dancing about a battlefield in slippers. And when she started – beautiful!

‘It broke my heart when they re-equipped us with Comets. I took Cindy back to the depot myself. I got special permission from the C.O. He said they were going for training, but the R.S.M. at the depot said they were to be sold for scrap. If I’d have had the money I’d have bought her. We tried to have a whip round but none of us had enough to even start. A bloody rotten shame,’ said Wool bitterly, ‘those Chevvy five by sixes were every bit as good as the V-8 jobs.’ He plucked Pelling’s sleeve and whispered, ‘I had to do for her myself.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘At the depot,’ said Wool. ‘I poured sand into her and pushed her up to full revs. She stalled, horrible. I’d brought the sand in my small pack. The boys all agreed with me. No one could get on with that gear-box except me, and Wilson’s turret had a lot of funny little ways that no one else would have understood.’

‘I wish I’d seen her,’ said Pelling quietly.

‘To you she would have looked just like any other Sherman.’

‘Oh, no,’ protested Pelling. ‘I understand what…’

‘You, you, you…’ spluttered Wool, ‘you thought she was a Churchill. It was you went there to blow her up!’

‘I didn’t know,’ said Pelling.

‘I couldn’t get you a job,’ said Wool. He sniffed loudly and wiped the back of his hand across his eyes. ‘So don’t build your hopes on me.’

There was no more to say. Wool started the car even before Pelling scrambled out. He accelerated so that the gravel rattled against the pumps and he swung out of the forecourt on to the main road with an agonized squeal of tyres.

Pelling waved, but Wool didn’t look back. He watched the car as it grew smaller upon the long straight road south.

Winter’s Morning (#ulink_e083c661-59f5-52f5-b63d-0cc7c1fdf046)

Major Richard Winter was a tall man with hard black eyes, a large nose and close-cropped hair. He hated getting out of bed, especially when assigned to dawn patrols on a cold morning. As he always said – and by now the whole Officers’ Mess could chant it in unison – ‘If there must be dawn patrols in winter, let there be no Winter in the dawn patrols.’

Winter believed that if they stopped flying them, the enemy would also stop. In 1914, the front-line soldiers of both armies had decided to live and let live for a few weeks. So now, during the coldest weather, some squadrons had allowed the dawn patrol to become a token couple of scouts hurrying over the frosty wire of no-man’s-land after breakfast. The warm spirit of humanity that Christmas 1914 conjured had given way to the cold reality of self-preservation. Those wiser squadrons kept the major offensive patrol until last light, when the sun was mellow and the air less turbulent. At St Antoine Farm airfield, however, dawn patrol was still a gruelling obligation that none could escape.

‘Oatmeal, toast, eggs and sausage, sir.’ Like everyone else in the Mess tent – except Winter – the waiter spoke in a soft whisper that befitted the small hours. Winter preferred his normal booming voice. ‘Just coffee,’ he said. ‘But hot, really hot.’

‘Very good, Major Winter, sir.’

The wind blew with enough force to make the canvas flap and roar, as though at any moment the whole tent would blow away. From outside they heard the sound of tent pegs being hammered more firmly into the hard chalky soil.

A young Lieutenant sitting opposite offered his cigarette case, but Winter waved it aside in favour of a dented tin from which he took cheap dark tobacco and a paper to fashion a misshapen cigarette. The young officer did not light one of his own in the hope that he would be invited to share in this ritual. But Winter lit up, blew the noxious smoke across the table, coughed twice and pushed the tin back into his pocket.

Each time someone entered through the flap there was a clatter of canvas and ropes and a gust of cold air, but Winter looked in vain for a triangle of grey sky. The only light came from six acetylene lamps that were placed along the breakfast table. The pump of one of them was faulty; its light was dull and it left a smell of mould on the air. The other lamps hissed loudly and their eerie greenish light shone upon the Mess silver, folded linen and empty plates. The table had been set the previous night for the regular squadron breakfast at 8 a.m., and the Mess servants were anxious that these three early-duty pilots shouldn’t disarrange it too much.

Everyone stiffened as they heard the clang of the engine cylinder and con. rod that hung outside for use as a gas warning. Winter laughed when Ginger, the tallest pilot on the squadron, emerged from the darkness rubbing his head and scowling in pain. Ginger walked over to the ancient piano and pulled back the edge of the tarpaulin that protected it from damp. He played a silly melody with one finger.

‘Hot coffee, sir.’ The waiter emphasized the word ‘hot’, and the liquid spluttered as it poured over the metal spout. Winter clamped his cold hands round the pot like a drowning man clinging to flotsam. He twisted his head to see Ginger’s watch. Six twenty-five. What a time to be having breakfast: it was still night.

Winter yawned and wrapped his ankle-length fur coat round his legs. New pilots thought that his fur overcoat had earned him his nickname of ‘the Bear’, but that had come months before the coat.

The others kept a few seats between themselves and Winter. They spoke only when he addressed them, and then answered only in brief formalities.

‘You flying with me, Lieutenant?’

The young ex-cavalry officer looked around the table. Ginger was munching his bread and jam, and gave no sign of having heard.

‘Yes, sir,’ said the young man.

‘How many hours?’

Always the same question. Everyone here was graded solely by flying time, though few cared whether the hours had been spent stunting, fighting or just hiding in the clouds. ‘Twenty-eight and a half, solo, sir.’

‘Twenty-eight and a half,’ nodded Winter. ‘Twenty-eight and a half! Solo! Did you hear that, Lieutenant?’ The question was addressed to Ginger, who was paying unusually close attention to the sugar bowl. Winter turned back to the new young pilot. ‘You’d better watch yourself.’

Winter divided new pilots into assets and liabilities at either side of seventy hours. Assets sometimes became true friends and close comrades. Assets might even be told your misgivings. The demise of assets could spread grief through the whole Mess. This boy would be dead within a month, Winter decided. He looked at him: handsome, in the pallid, aristocratic manner of such youngsters. His tender skin was chapped by the rain and there were cold sores on his lip. His blond hair was too long for Winter’s taste, and his eyebrows girlish. This boy’s kit had never known a quartermaster’s shelf. It had come from an expensive tailor: a cavalry tunic fashionably nipped at the waist, tight trousers and boots as supple as velvet. The ensemble was supplemented by accessories from the big department stores. His cigarette case was the sort that, it was advertised, could stop a bullet.

The young man returned Richard Winter’s close examination with interest. So this rude fellow, so proud of his chauffeur’s fur coat, was the famous Bear Winter who had twenty-nine enemy aircraft to his credit. He was a blotchy-faced devil, with bloodshot eyes and a fierce twitching eyebrow that he sometimes rubbed self-consciously, as if he knew that it undid his carefully contrived aplomb. The youngster wondered whether he would end up looking like this: dirty shirt, long finger-nails, unshaven jaw and a cauliflower-knobbly head, shaved razor-close to avoid lice. Except for his quick eyes and occasional wry smile Winter looked like the archetypal Prussian Schweinhund.

Major Richard Winter had been flying in action for nearly two years without a leave. He was a natural pilot who’d flown every type of plane the makers could provide, and some enemy planes too. He could dismantle and assemble an engine as well as any squadron fitter, and as a precaution against jams he personally supervised the loading of every bullet he would use. Why must he be so rude to young pilots who hero-worshipped him, and would follow him to hell itself? And yet that too was part of the legend.

The young officer swallowed. ‘May I ask, sir, where you bought your magnificent fur coat?’

Winter gulped the rest of his coffee and got to his feet as he heard the first of the scout’s engines start. ‘Came off a mug I shot down in September,’ he bellowed. ‘It’s from a fashionable shop, I’m told. Never travelled much myself, except here to France.’ Winter poked his fingers through four holes in the front. Did the boy go a shade paler, or had he imagined it in the glare of the gas lights? ‘Don’t let some smart bastard get your overcoat, sonny.’

‘No, sir,’ said the boy. Behind him Ginger grinned. The Bear was behaving true to form. Ginger dug his knife into a tin of butter he’d scrounged from the kitchen and then offered it to the cavalry officer. The boy sniffed the tin doubtfully. It smelled rancid but he scraped a little on to his bread and swamped it with jam to hide the taste.

‘This your first patrol?’ asked Ginger.

‘No, sir. Yesterday one of the chaps took me as far as Cambrai to see the lie of the land. Before that I did a few hours around 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.’