Andrew Wareham - The Balloonatics - A Tale of the Great War

Peter made a curling descent, circling the field and then lining up into the breeze. It made little difference but looked as if he was performing a deliberate manoeuvre, not lost and diving in hopefully.

“Aerial in.”

Griffiths wound in the trailing wire.

“Ready with the rope… Let go!”

The rope dropped and soldiers grabbed it and heaved mightily, pulling SS9 to the ground. Peter hopped out and supervised the process of mooring the ship to four anchor points, checking each was firm and secure. He spotted a lieutenant colonel, put his hat on and saluted.

“Commander Naseby and blimp SS9, sir. My second hand, Lieutenant Griffiths.”

“Jolly good show! Secombe-Askey, you know. Supposed to be running this business. Don’t know a damned thing about it. Just supplied the bodies. There’s one of your people here somewhere who actually knows what’s going on. Just happened to have a battalion back on rest and a couple of acres of flat ground, you know. Big, ain’t it, that balloon of yours! Thought they was smaller, from what I’d heard. Zeppelins supposed to be larger still, they say?”

“Far greater, sir. We have seventy thousand cubic feet of gas and they are supposed to run over the million. Bigger in every aspect than we are. Carry a ton of bombs to our one hundredweight.”

“But your small load was enough to sink a submarine, I gather.”

“Luck, sir. Got within a hundred feet and dropped smack on top of the sub.”

“You can call that luck, if you wish, Commander. I’ve got another word for it! No matter – here’s your own boss man.”

A rumpled-seeming lieutenant commander, apparently slept in his uniform, came running across.

“There you are, old chap. They said you would arrive at dawn.”

“No, take off at dawn. We don’t generally play games in the darkness, not with a bag of hydrogen over our heads.”

“Ha! H’m. Yes. Thinking on it, I wouldn’t wish to either. Good point, that man!”

“So I thought. What is the plan now?”

“Can you take off after dark, if you must?”

“Probably. Better to get into the air in the dusk and head off south for a slow hour before reversing course. Build four fires on the field in a square and we can come back and take a course from them.”

“How high?”

“Below the cloud. It’s a clear day, at the moment. Five thousand feet, if you want.”

“High enough not to be seen from the ground or heard. There’s always noise near the Front – convoys coming up with stores after dark and a bit of shellfire. We want you to go the better part of fifty miles north of here, on low ground within reach of Brussels for men on bicycles. They have to be out of sight before dawn, can’t have a landing ground closer to us. They will light paraffin lamps when they hear you coming, so you need to drop lower for the last few miles if you are to see them. Drop the bags over the side and get out quickly. If possible, try to get in for midnight – better that the people on the ground don’t have to hang around too long.”

“Make height and head back across the Lines. It will be difficult, almost impossible to find this landing ground before dawn.”

“Have you got the range to go straight home, to England?”

“Easily.”

“Do so. The less you hang about here, the smaller the chance of information getting back to Germany. We aren’t the only ones to have spies, you know. If they hear that we have been sending airships north then they will have another search for spies in Brussels. Best to keep all quiet.”

Griffiths sat down with the charts he was given

“Taking off at ten o’clock, sir, going south and then taking a heading almost due north at forty miles an hour will take us to the landing ground for one o’clock. To get there for midnight demands a nine o’clock start; its still not wholly dark then.”

“Makes taking off and setting a course easier. Means we will be able to get a better idea of the wind as well, being able to see our leeway. Take off at nine.”

Peter turned to the man from Intelligence, asked when the load would be put aboard.

“Can do that now, if you wish, Commander.”

The sooner the better, in case anything went wrong.

“Have you petrol for us?”

“Got some from the RNAS station near Dunkerque. Can top you up now. Do you want some Number One Grenades? Picked up a dozen in case you needed them.”

Peter had not seen the little grenades before. They seemed to be one pound bombs with a thick casing that would fragment and cause harm to groups of soldiers. There was a fusing string to pull before throwing them, or in this case dropping them over the side.

“Put them aboard, please. Odds are we shall have no use for them. Might come in handy, even so.”

“Better to have them and not need them than to need them and not have them, Commander.”

That was the sort of truism that sounded terribly profound, Peter thought. He smiled his kindest.

“We can feed you in the mess here, Commander. The Brigadier is located here so the food is pretty good. You can have a room after lunch to get your head down. Always spare rooms – battalions coming back from the Trenches to rest never have a full complement of officers. Dinner for seven o’clock and you can make ready to fly for nine.”

It seemed well organised.

Lunch was tasty and the room allocated was comfortable. Peter rose refreshed to go down to dinner.

“Happy with the course, Griffiths?”

“Yes, sir. There are canals and roads and railway lines to give checks, sir. Should not be too difficult. The bit that’s worrying me is spotting the landing ground. It’s all a bit vague. ‘Fifteen miles south of Brussels, on a road, by a railway line, close to the river to the left’. Paraffin lanterns in a pattern, not carbide bicycle lamps which cast a brighter beam. Should put out a fair bit of light even so. I hope not so much as to attract attention.”

“Let’s eat. Get a good meal in our bellies and the rest is in the lap of the gods. Don’t take too many glasses. Looks like a hard drinking mess.”

“Bracegirdle said they all were when they came out of the line, sir. They needed it to get rid of the memories so they could face going back up again.”

“The soldiers have got it hard from all I hear. Keep quiet about our job – they might not see sitting in a blimp as much like fighting.”

The balloon in fact made a topic of conversation during the meal. It was new and the soldiers without exception thought they were crazy to sit in a tiny cockpit suspended under tens of thousands of cubic feet of inflammable hydrogen and then to fly miles out over the sea.

“It will put the fire out if anything goes wrong, Major.”

They thought that was funny, and even crazier.

“You are the man who sunk a submarine, aren’t you, Commander?”

“Luck. We came out of cloud and it was there, pretty much underneath us.”

“The papers said you dropped the bomb from one hundred feet.”

“Didn’t want to miss. Only got the one to drop.”

The questioner said no more, lifting his glass in salute, joined by the rest of the table.

Peter felt acutely uncomfortable, certain they took greater risks every day up in the Trenches. He had been visible and his achievement had been more obvious. Nothing more than that, he was convinced.

“You are flying over the Lines, Commander?”

“Bit of an experiment. Seeing what is possible. Not convinced it’s a good idea. Not up to me to pass judgement on the orders I receive.”

That was obviously true. The orders might seem stupid and the men giving them certainly often were, and that mattered not at all. Until they became generals, they did as they were told. Even then, they suspected, there would be politicians to stand over them. The services obeyed orders; if they did not then England would become another banana republic with military dictators and that sort of nonsense.