Derek Robinson - War Story

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.