War Story

by Derek Robinson

Genres: World War I; Black Humor; War & Military

Synopsis

Fresh from school in June 1916, Lieutenant Oliver Paxton's first solo flight is to lead a formation of biplanes across the Channel to join Hornet Squadron in France. Five days later, he crash-lands at his destination, having lost his map, his ballast and every single plane in his charge. To his C.O. he's an idiot, to everyone else - especially the tormenting Australian who shares his billet - a pompous bastard. This is 1916, the year of the Somme, giving Paxton precious little time to grow from innocent to veteran.

Release date: July 1, 2011

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Print pages: 329

Sample

On the map it was about 160 miles from the aerodrome at Shoreham, across the English Channel and down through France to Pepriac, a scruffy little crossroads village some way south of Arras.

That was on the map. In the air, and flying a BE2c, which meant crabbing against the wind and dodging the bigger clouds, the distance would be more like 200 miles. Allowing for a stop at the St. Omer depot near Boulogne to have lunch and a pee, Second-Lieutenant Paxton had guessed that the trip should take about four hours. Five at the very most.

Now, five days after leaving Shoreham, Paxton was still in the air and still searching for Pepriac. Honestly (he kept saying to himself), this simply isn’t good enough. And to make matters worse he had lost the four other BE2cs placed under his temporary command. Or they had lost him.

Either way, he was now on his own, three thousand feet above France, four days late for the war and utterly fed-up. His bottom ached and he was hungry. Also he hadn’t been able to change his underwear since Shoreham and he itched in several places that he couldn’t scratch without upsetting the machine so that it slewed off-course. One of the things the instructors had failed to teach him was how to fly and scratch at the same time.

Not that BE2cs were temperamental; quite the reverse. The RFC had nicknamed them ‘Quirks’, but Paxton took that to be typical upside-down Service slang: there was nothing quirky about their performance. After training on docile Avro 504s, not to mention Longhorns and Shorthorns-more like motorised kites than aeroplanes – he found the Quirk a delight to fly. Paxton had coveted one as soon as he saw it land. It was a biplane with staggered wings, the upper ahead of the lower. Angled struts gave it a thrusting, sporty look. The wings tilted upwards too: like a hawk hanging on the wind, Paxton thought. The fuselage tapered quite daringly before it flared into a long and elegant tail. The propeller had four blades and was a work of art in itself. Ninety horsepower in the engine. Properly tuned and going flat out, with no wind to help or hinder, the Quirk would do eighty. At least that’s what its owner told him when Paxton strolled over and asked. Paxton flicked the taut, smooth canvas. It vibrated like a drumskin. “Nice little bus,” he said. He walked away before too much excitement showed in his eyes. He was, after all, eighteen; and at eighteen an Englishman was not a schoolboy who went about with his emotional shirt-tails hanging out. Paxton’s housemaster at Sherborne had made a point of that.“Feelings are meant to be felt,” he had said, “not placed on exhibition like prize dahlias. Don’t you agree?”

At the time, Paxton was seized by a passion for a much younger boy at the school. “Suppose one felt especially strongly about a certain dahlia, sir,” he suggested. “Mightn’t one show it? A bit?”

“Now you’re being tedious.”

“Yes, sir,” Paxton said, not really understanding.

Soon the younger boy got a series of boils on the back of his neck and lost his charm. At about the same time Paxton realised that the war was not, after all, going to end by Christmas 1915 (as some people had said when the Gallipoli show began, and later when the French attacked in Champagne, and later still when the British launched an offensive at Loos). For his eighteenth birthday, on 20th December, his father gave him a motorbike. There was a Royal Flying Corps aerodrome nearby and every day during the Christmas holidays he rode over and watched.

The more he saw, the more he knew he was not going back to Sherborne. He also knew he was not going to squelch about in the trenches or make deafening noises with the artillery. He grew a small moustache. In January 1916 an elderly colonel interviewed him at the War Office; he was interested in Paxton’s ability at ball games, especially lawn tennis and fives. After that, the Royal Flying Corps was gratifyingly keen to get its hands on him. In April 1916 he was commissioned second-lieutenant; in May he was awarded his wings.

He had flown eighteen hours solo, two of them in Quirks, when the CO at Shoreham sent for him and told him that the squadron at Pepriac – they found the place on the map after a bit of a search – needed five new BE2cs, urgently. Paxton was the tallest of the new pilots awaiting postings, so the CO put him in charge.

“Don’t let anyone go skylarking about,” he warned.“Those machines came straight from the factory. They’re crying out for them in France.”

Paxton ducked his head out of the slipstream and, one-handed, pulled off his goggles. They were speckled with oil. He tried to wipe them on his sleeve but his gauntlet was so clumsy that it was hard to do a decent job. Putting the goggles on again one-handed turned out to be impossible. He stuffed them in a pocket. You didn’t need goggles to see Amiens. Everyone said it had a tremendous great cathedral. He looked everywhere and couldn’t see a cathedral, large or small. He couldn’t see anything except fields and roads, fields and roads. The fields were different shades of green but all had square corners. The roads were invariably straight. Everything looked like everything else. It was all pattern and no shape. What had happened to Amiens?

Paxton gripped the joystick between his knees and took another squint at the map. Then he looked over the side again. There was nothing down there that was remotely like the pattern shown on the map. Maybe he’d flown too far. He unfolded the next section of map and noticed an area that seemed vaguely familiar, right at the top, so he opened the top section too, in case it added anything useful. Yes, definitely something familiar… He twisted his body to get a different view of the map. His knees and feet moved and the controls shifted. The BE2c lurched and sidled. A gale of wind rushed into the cockpit, plucked the map from Paxton’s hands and blew it away. “Blast!” he shouted. That was the worst word he knew, and he felt it wasn’t nearly bad enough.

No cathedral, no clean underwear, and now no map. That took the biscuit, that did. Quite suddenly, Paxton had had enough. For five days he had been ferrying this blasted Quirk from A to B, and where had it got him? Nowhere. Or, if you liked, everywhere. Or if you wanted to split hairs it had got him somewhere but that somewhere could be anywhere, so it might as well be nowhere, mightn’t it? Anyway, Paxton had had enough. He decided to enjoy himself. He was going to loop the loop. After that, he would find blasted Amiens. And then, with luck, blasted Pepriac.

Paxton had never looped an aeroplane but he had seen it done, once, by some sport in a Sopwith Tabloid who had made it look easy: first you put the nose down, then you put it up, and over she went like a garden swing. The Tabloid was a single-seater whereas the BE2c was built for two, but Paxton didn’t think that would make much difference because his front cockpit was packed with sandbags which ought to balance the whole thing properly. He opened the throttle and put the nose down.

The engine seemed to take a deep breath and shriek. Paxton had never dived at full power before, and the noise startled him. A tremor built up until the whole machine was shuddering. The flat French landscape rose into view but everything was blurred by vibration. Paxton leaned forward to get a better look at the gauge. Eighty-five miles an hour, edging towards ninety. Was that enough? The shriek had become a scream and the aeroplane was in the grip of a fever. Ninety at last. Surely something must snap? Paxton couldn’t stand the racket any longer. He pulled back the stick. France quickly drained away, blue skies filled his view, a firm but friendly force pushed him back into his seat, and the shuddering ceased. The BE2c raced up an invisible wall that grew steeper and steeper until it reached the vertical and that was where the aeroplane gave up. Paxton felt all momentum cease. The Quirk was standing on its tail and going nowhere. Then it dropped.

It fell two thousand feet before he got it under control, and even then he wasn’t absolutely sure how he did it, except that the engine was making such a hideous din that he throttled back almost to nothing, which seemed to help matters.

As he climbed again to three thousand he tested the controls and had a good look around. Nothing seemed broken or bent.

That proved one thing. Ninety wasn’t fast enough.

The next time, he made the dive a little steeper and held it a lot longer. He was prepared for the screaming and shaking: when it got too bad he shut his eyes and clenched his jaws. Oddly enough, doing that made a difference. The vibration eased a bit. He opened his eyes. Yes, definitely easier. Ninety-five, but the needle was jumping about so much it could be a hundred. This was insane. But great fun. A hundred, a hundred and five! Paxton’s ears popped. He took that as a signal, and hauled the stick into his stomach. The BE2c soared, the horizon came and went, the sky rolled past yet there was always more sky. Paxton wondered if he was completely upside-down yet. How did one tell? There really was an amazing quantity of sky, it just went on and on. At last he glimpsed the horizon, wrong-side up this time, and he knew-with a spasm of joy – that he had done it. He had looped the loop! Then the sandbags fell out.

They tumbled from the observer’s cockpit in a steady brown stream that went whirling away over Paxton’s head so fast that he did not recognize them.

He was mystified. Was the plane coming apart? He swivelled his head, but already they were just dots. Most extraordinary! The engine was still howling. He looked for the horizon: gone. Instead the landscape of France appeared, swinging as if on pivots. He was well over the top and starting another power-dive. He throttled back in a hurry.

The BE2c came out of the loop but she was an unhappy aeroplane: tail-heavy, nose-high, unbalanced, demanding to be flown every inch of the way. Paxton found himself climbing when he didn’t want to climb. He tried to stop that, almost stalled, panicked, did something original with his hands and feet, got into an enormous sideslip, panicked again, kicked the aeroplane hard, got out of the sideslip he knew not how and in desperation whacked the throttle wide open. The machine trembled as if it had struck a storm and started climbing again. Paxton looked around in despair and saw another aeroplane watching him.

It was sixty or seventy yards to his left, about a length behind him and slightly above. He recognised the type at once. A squadron of them had assembled at Shoreham en route to France. It was an FE2b, a tough-looking two-seater biplane with the engine behind the pilot and no fuselage to speak of, just a naked framework holding the tail in position. The engine was a pusher, so the pilot and his observer sat in a pod ahead of the wings. This arrangement gave them a marvellous view. Right now they were watching Paxton staggering and stumbling about the sky. After a while he noticed that they were waving, gesturing downwards very vigorously. He was sick of being messed about by this stupid Quirk, so he took their advice.

There was only one way to overcome the machine’s mindless desire to climb, and that was by falling into a series of sideslips. So Paxton descended, like a bad skier stumbling down an icy mountain. The FE2b spiralled behind him, at a safe distance. At five hundred feet it levelled out and flew east. Paxton followed, climbing hard. After five miles he saw the aerodrome. It looked shockingly small. It looked about one quarter the size of the field at Shoreham. Nevertheless the FE landed easily enough.

It took Paxton half an hour of sweaty experiment at sideslip and climb, sideslip and climb, sideslip and climb, before he entered a final sideslip that sent the Quirk low over the edge of the aerodrome. He let the slide continue. The field kept rising sideways. Now he could see the grass shimmering. This was going to be the most awful crash. He shut his eyes, counted to three, then stirred the joystick vigorously, pedalled the rudder bar, and gave the engine full power. The first bounce of the Quirk jarred his spine and opened his eyes. He snatched at the throttle. The Quirk bounced again, and again. People watching said it bounced seven times before the tailskid touched, and four times after that, until a tyre burst and the machine slewed to a halt. Paxton wasn’t counting. Paxton was down, and that was memorable enough.

*

By the time he had unstrapped and got out, a couple of mechanics had arrived at a brisk trot and were examining the wheel. Behind them came a burly young man on a bicycle. He wore neither cap nor tunic but from his khaki tie and slacks Paxton guessed he was an officer. He rode unhurriedly, and the bicycle wandered as it hit lumps and ruts. A few yards from Paxton he let it drift almost to a halt, and then stood on the pedals, concentrating on keeping it upright, as if in a slow-bicycle race. “You damn near hit me with your damn sandbags, you know,” he said, not looking. All his attention was on his front wheel.

Paxton was taken aback. He had expected a sort of welcome and this sounded like an accusation. Or was it meant as a joke? He said: “Are you sure it was me?” That sounded awfully lame.

“Of course I’m sure. You’re Dexter, aren’t you? I’m Goss. The old man sent me up to find you, and that was easy enough…” He broke off as the bicycle almost toppled and he was forced to work the pedals.

“Actually, I’m Paxton, not Dexter.”

Goss wasn’t listening. “You were dancing and prancing all over the sky. Didn’t want to see me, though. Too busy chucking your rotten sandbags about.”

Suddenly Paxton understood. He walked over to the Quirk and looked into the observer’s cockpit. Empty. Oh my god. At that moment his stomach felt just as empty.

“See what you nearly did to me?” Goss demanded. Now he had abandoned the slow-bicycle race and was riding in figures-of-eight near the tail. He pointed, and Paxton went over to look. The leading edges of the tailplanes were damaged, cracked, bent downwards. No wonder the Quirk had insisted on climbing. What an idiot he’d been! What a chump! Remorse seized him, and he patted the fuselage, as if it were a big dog whose tail he had trodden on.“Don’t make it any worse,” Goss said. Paxton flinched and took his hand away. “Joke,” Goss said sadly.“Come on. You’ve missed lunch but you might get a sandwich, I suppose.”

They headed for a cluster of wooden sheds. Elsewhere Paxton saw a windsock, a couple of FE2bs parked outside canvas hangars, a few lorries. It didn’t look much. He actually had his mouth open to ask the name of the aerodrome when he saved himself. “So this is Pepriac, then,” he said.

“Well, it’s not Frinton-on-Sea. Look, I’m getting cramp. I’II go ahead and stir up the cookhouse.” Goss raced away, making the bicycle swing briskly from side to side. When he was halfway to the camp he looked back and shouted something. The words were blurred. Paxton called:”What?” Goss, still pedalling, still looking back, pointed. His rear wheel bucked and he went flying over the handlebars like an athlete over a vaulting-horse.

Paxton ran as fast as his flying boots allowed and reached Goss as he was getting up. “It’s nothing,” Goss said peevishly. “I’m perfectly all right.” But Paxton could see that he was not. His right arm hung loosely, like an empty sleeve with the hand tacked on the end.

“You’ve done something to your arm,” Paxton said.

“Thanks very much. And I thought it was gallstones.”

They walked in silence, Paxton pushing the bicycle, to a shed where an ambulance stood alongside. Goss pointed to another hut, the biggest of all. “Mess,” he said grimly. “Make them give you something to eat. If they argue, throw sandbags. The old man says he wants to see you in half an hour.” He went inside.

The old man was twenty-four: not an unusual age for a squadron commander in the Royal Flying Corps.

Major Milne had been christened Rufus because his infant hair was bright red. Within a year it faded to a mild sandy colour, and this was the first of many disappointments for his father, a commander in the Royal Navy.

Ever since Trafalgar, all the Milne sons had gone into the Navy. When Rufus was five, his father took him dinghy-sailing on a sheltered lake. There was a soft, steady breeze, not enough to make a chop, and Rufus was sick throughout the trip. The next time they went out he began to throw up before the boat left the landing-stage. The third and fourth attempts were no better. “Nil desperandum,” his father said. “The great Horatio Nelson was seasick in Portsmouth harbour, so they say.” The fifth time they went to the lake, Rufus was standing on the shore, putting on his little lifejacket, when he started to vomit. His father wanted to persist, and Rufus was ready to do as he was told, but the boy had lost eight pounds in a week and his mother was alarmed by his gauntness.

“Sorry, old chap,” his father said. “I’m afraid it’s shore duty for you until that rumblegut of yours changes its tune.” Rufus, chomping his way through a second helping of scrambled eggs on toast, nodded bravely.

The tune never changed. Rufus went from short to long trousers, his voice broke, he turned sixteen and started shaving, but whenever he stepped into a boat his stomach emptied itself with an energy his father had never seen matched, not even during storms in the China Seas. The risk was too great. Milne senior wasn’t going to disgrace the family name with a naval cadet who might well throw up at the mention of the word “dreadnought”. In due course he pulled strings and got his son a commission in a decent regiment, the Green Howards. That was in 1910.

In 1912 Rufus took private flying lessons from a Frenchman at Brooklands aerodrome. His father felt cheated when he learned that flying did not make Rufus sick, and his mother felt relieved when he got his certificate. She thought it was all over then. But he kept on flying and in 1914, six weeks after the war began, he transferred to the Royal Flying Corps. Rear-admiral Milne (now retired) gave up. The Green Howards weren’t the real thing, they weren’t the Navy, but at least they were a proper lot, a decent outfit, a regiment. What was the RFC? A bag of tricks, a joke, and not even a funny joke that you could tell your neighbours. So be it. The admiral had nephews in the Navy and he had a younger, non-vomiting son who would follow them soon. He tried not to think about Rufus.

Rufus Milne had long since stopped thinking about his father, who existed in his memory as a gruff and discontented figure pruning roses very hard, as if he suspected mutiny below. Rufus enjoyed flying, he was proud of his rank, and he liked commanding a squadron; but he had grown up in such an atmosphere of suppressed disapproval and disappointment that even now, after six years in the army and two years in France, he hid his feelings behind a wall of disarming habits and mannerisms. He spoke in a drawl that suggested nothing was as important as it seemed; he rarely looked people in the eye, preferring to let his gaze wander past the left ear while he nodded and blinked at what they said; he slouched as he walked; and he had several chunky, short-stemmed pipes that demanded a lot of attention. He often seemed vague, and vaguely elsewhere. Sometimes, when people met him for the first time, they wondered how on earth he got to be a major, let alone a squadron commander. That was what Paxton wondered as he sat opposite him. Fellow looks half-asleep, he thought.

“Weren’t we expecting you ….urn…. rather earlier than this?” Milne asked, so softly that Paxton leaned forward.

“Yes, sir. Five days ago, sir:”

“Five days, eh? As much as that…”

“I’m afraid we ran into a spot of bother on the way. Several spots, in fact.”

“Ah …” Milne slumped in his chair and squinted at the sunlight. “Spots of bother, you say.” He seemed to be trying, not very hard, to remember what bother was like. Far away, thunder rumbled. The sound rolled like a slow avalanche until it made a window shiver. Milne glanced at his wrist-watch. Paxton waited, upright and alert. The door was slightly open. A fly wandered in, as if looking for a friend, and Milne watched it until it wandered out again. “Suppose you tell me,” he suggested.

“Yes, sir. The first thing that happened, sir, was the weather turned rather nasty soon after we took off from Shoreham. You see I’d planned to fly due east, that is, straight across the Channel, and reach the French coast at Boulogne but some pretty stormy squalls hit us, and what with the cloud and the wind and the rain the other chaps simply couldn’t keep formation on me. I was leading, you see. So it looked too dangerous to fly straight to Boulogne – not that we could fly straight if we wanted to, the wind was chucking us about so much – but anyway I knew it was at least sixty miles to Boulogne, mostly out of sight of land, and I decided we ought to follow the coast to Dover instead and then make the short crossing to Cap Griz Nez.”

Paxton paused. The CO smiled encouragingly at the empty air beside his left ear, so he went on.

“Well, as I said, it was dreadfully stormy when I changed course, sir, and although three of the other chaps saw what I was up to, unfortunately the fourth man didn’t. I remember a very large black cloud. We went one side of it and he went the other, and I’m afraid I never saw him again. Lieutenant Kellaway, sir … Anyway, the rest of us managed to stagger along to Dover, getting thoroughly soaked in the process, and I could see that a couple of our engines weren’t too jolly – you know, coughing and spluttering – so down we all went and landed at the ‘drome there. I mean that was the idea, sir. We all did our best but one chap’s engine simply conked out before he could reach the ‘drome and he went slap into a tree. Awfully bad luck. Chap called Wilkins.”

“Then there were three.” Milne took a pipe from his desk and began scratching his head with the stem.

“That was on Friday. Wilkins broke lots of legs and things, sir, and his BE2c was smashed-up altogether. Well, on Saturday our engines were okay and I led the chaps across the water, aiming for the depot at St. Omer via Boulogne. By then I think the wind must have changed or something, sir, because what I thought was Boulogne turned out to be Calais, only I didn’t know that at the time. So of course St. Omer wasn’t where we thought it would be, although we flew around for hours and hours looking for it. In the end we had to land any-old-where before we ran out of fuel. And that’s how we came to spend the night at a Royal Naval Air Service place called St. Rambert.”

Milne nodded, or perhaps he was now scratching his head against the stem.

“The naval types were jolly friendly, sir, and they asked us to a party. Frankly, I don’t think Ross-Kennedy was used to strong drink, sir. He was frightfully ill next morning. That was Sunday. I made him take a cold bath and drink lots of black coffee, which I must say didn’t seem to do him a lot of good, but by the afternoon I really couldn’t wait any longer. We all took off and I wanted to get to St. Omer so I could send a message here, sir, in case you were worrying. Then Ross-Kennedy started flying round and round in circles. I could see him being sick over the side of the cockpit. I made all sorts of signals to him to buck up, but I don’t think he saw me. In the end he went round and round and down and down until he tried to land his machine in a field and he overturned. Did a sort of cartwheel. Dexter and I flew on to St. Omer. We spent the rest of Sunday and all Monday morning driving around the country in a tender, but we never found the BE or Ross-Kennedy. Dexter thought it might have caught fire.”

“Then there were two,” Milne said.

“After lunch on Monday we took off and I honestly thought we’d be here by teatime, sir, and we would have been, definitely, if Dexter’s propeller hadn’t bust. It just went all to pieces. He was jolly lucky to get down at Treizennes, sir, but of course they only fly DH2s there so they had to send back to St. Omer for a spare. We got off again at six o’clock, sir, and the next thing that hit us was fog. Really awful, thick, clammy stuff, sir. My compass was worse than useless – it kept whizzing around like mad – and we flew above the fog as long as possible, but eventually we had to come down into it, and then of course we lost each other. I made a forced landing in a field and bent the undercarriage. Miles from anywhere. Slept in a barn. Next morning – that was Tuesday, yesterday -I walked for hours until I found a village. They phoned the nearest ‘drome, which was Beauvois. A tender came out and collected me and together we found the BE2c. They patched up the undercarriage and put in some petrol and I managed to take off and get to Beauvois. Then they mended it properly. That’s where I heard about poor old Dexter. Hit a church. Then today I set off once more, sir. They told me to keep Amiens cathedral on my right and I couldn’t miss Pepriac but … I don’t know … Anyway, here I am. I’m sorry about the other four, sir, and I’m really frightfully sorry I’m so late, because I know how frightfully keen you are to get your hands on these Quirks.”

The fly had come back in. Milne stood up and waved his hat at it, meaning no harm.

“Let’s go and take a look at what you’ve brought us, anyway,” he said.

They strolled across the grass towards the hangars. It was mid-afternoon, and skylarks sang as if in celebration of the sunlight and the giant blue sky.

“All of ‘A’ Flight are away on leave this week,” Milne said.”‘B’ Flight are up on patrol at the moment, and ‘C’ Flight have gone swimming. Nice to have a bit of peace and quiet, isn’t it? Damned traffic never stops, of course.”

Paxton saw the tops of vehicles moving on the other side of a distant fence and heard the grumble of engines. “Are we getting ready for a Push, sir?”

Milne smiled. “I expect so,” he said. “We usually are.”

The flat tyre had been replaced. The damaged tailplane had been restored to shape, and the canvas patches were getting a final coat of dope. Paxton was amazed by the speed of the repair, and said so. “They’ve probably done it before,” Milne said. “That stuff should dry quickly in this weather. Tell you what: when it’s ready, why don’t you take off and spend a couple of hours getting to know the landmarks around here. Arras is more or less north-east of us. Pick up the main road that runs south-west from Arras and follow it to Doullens, then pick up the road south to Amiens. After Amiens go north-east towards Albert, then cut back north to Pepriac. You can’t miss it.”

“Yes, sir,” said Faxton. He had been expecting a hot bath and a change of clothes.

“And while you’re up,” Milne said lazily,”after you’ve gone round the houses a couple of times, you might as well finish off with … what shall we say … six practice landings? And let’s see you do the last one from … oh … three thousand feet with a dead engine. Suit you?”

“Yes sir,” said Paxton. The day was very warm and he desperately wanted to scratch his armpits and his crotch, but he dared not. “I don’t suppose there’s the chance of a cup of tea before I go, sir?”

“Listen to those birds!” Milne said, and strolled away.

“Bugger the birds,” said a fitter when the CO was out of earshot,”begging your pardon, sir. Let’s have a listen to this engine.”

They listened, and the fitter wrinkled his nose. All the plugs had to be changed. While that was being done, someone took a blowtorch and a dixie behind the hangar and made a quick brew-up. They gave Paxton a pint of sweet, milky tea. He drank it with such obvious enjoyment that they gave him a refill. The Quirk sounded much healthier with new plugs. He flung the dregs of his tea onto the grass and clambered into the cockpit.

‘A’ Flight came back as Paxton took off. Milne heard the fading buzz of the Quirk being absorbed by the deepening drone of four Beardmore engines. He opened his office window, perched his backside on the sill, and watched the tiny pattern of dots grow into a neat diamond formation. The FEs were no more than a hundred feet up as they passed. Milne knew the flight leader was watching him, so he raised an arm, and got half a wave of a gloved hand in return. That meant: quiet patrol; nothing doing. He watched the flight curl away and lose formation. FEs in the air reminded him of dragonflies. Not from the way they moved, which was hardworking rather than brilliant, rather like a London taxi; but from the way they were put together. Just like a dragonfly, everything important was clustered at the front, the machine was all wings and nose, with a few long bare poles reaching back to keep the tail in place. Milne closed one eye and half shut the other. He ignored the pusher propeller spinning behind the wings and the tricycle wheels hanging down and the Lewis gun poking up and the struts and the wires and the British markings, and all he saw was a khaki blur in the sky. But when he opened his eyes it still reminded him of a dragonfly.

The grub is Okay specially if you like bully beef but what I wouldn’t give for a pint of mild at the Dukes Head as the froggeys got no ide