Louis de Bernières - The Dust That Falls From Dreams

It was intimidating enough trying out a DH2, because that had a natural spin, and the Sopwith Pup was unnervingly responsive at first, but he had got used to it. It was strange how each type of machine was so different from every other, and with each machine it was like learning to fly all over again. You could stall a Pup on purpose, but it was practically impossible with a DH2. You put the nose up, it stalled, the nose went down level. It climbed again, stalled, put its nose down level.

Nothing has prepared him for the Camel, however; he has already crashed one, and half of those training with him have been killed or injured.

The strain of flying it is appalling, because the torque of the engine means that it won’t do a left-hand spin, but puts it into a right-hand spin that is irretrievable on take-off. Most of the casualties are caused by right-hand spins. To stop it spinning you wrestle with the controls from the moment you begin to taxi, and you wrestle with them until your fuel runs out some two hours later. You are always on left rudder, but you use rudder as little as you can. The plane always wants to climb, and always wants to sideslip, to drift sideways, which turns out to be miracu-lously useful when there’s a Hun on your tail. He opens fire and you’re suddenly not there to be fired at. When you get home you are sometimes too weak to climb out, and all your limbs are shaking. How different is an SE5a, with its in-line engine! And how much more cosy and warm! You can set the controls for a distant destination, and arrive there without doing much else. You don’t make your kills in a dogfight, as you do with a Camel. You dive and zoom. A Camel fights like a cat, an SE5 fights like a shark.

The Camel pilots complain that the aircraft has a low ceiling, so you seldom have the advantage of height, the sine qua non of a conventional attack. It is useless above 15,000 feet, and it isn’t fast enough to chase and catch a fleeing enemy, and in any case you can’t go far over Hunland without worrying about not having sufficient fuel to batter back against the prevailing wind. God is perhaps on the Huns’ side, because the Huns have the wind to carry them home, and the Huns don’t stray over the lines anyway, so you are forced to go to them. Only at night do the Huns come over in their bombers, and then the night Camels go up, but Daniel doesn’t know who they are and doesn’t envy them either. It’s cold enough in the daytime.

Daniel knows better than to complain. McCudden has tinkered with his own engine and carburettor so brilliantly that he can get his SE5 up to 22,000 feet. One day Daniel visits 56 Squadron, and Mac lets him take his bus up. At 21,000 feet Daniel gets hypoxia so badly that he falls delirious, does something stupid and unaccountable with the controls, and nearly spins to earth. The cold is utterly unbearable and makes his bones ache to the marrow. When he comes down he has hypothermia and has to be collected in the squadron tender. When he returns two days later to collect his bus he says to McCudden, ‘Think I’ll stick to Camels. Don’t know how you do it.’ McCudden claps him on the shoulder, and says, ‘Well, old fruit, you wouldn’t catch me in a Camel. Each to his own. One day someone’ll come up with a better engine and you’ll be upstairs with us. Can’t you get hold of a Bentley?’

The Camel pilots complain of having to do too much ground-strafing, because they can’t ascend very high, but they are unaware that everyone else is also having to do it, including those who can get to 22,000 feet. Even the Dolphins are receiving the same unwelcome orders. It’s a far cry from the scouts’ original job, protecting their own two-seaters and destroying those of the enemy. Like everyone else, Daniel longs for the old days. It’s actually a relief to go into combat with an enemy you can see, to have a proper duel, after days of strafing. A curse on those who worked out that an aircraft can also be used for mowing down soldiers.

So Daniel is content to keep a watch on his back for Huns coming out of the sun, knowing that when he dives his wings almost certainly won’t fall off, and knowing that the moment a Hun attacker arrives, his machine guns popping and the tracer zinging past his ears, he can split-arse the Camel with such instantaneous virtuosity that he can turn twice for every once of the foe. Nothing will worry him until the Fokker DV11 arrives, too late to make enough of a difference, and the Fokker pilots themselves not realising for several months how good their new planes really are.

Now Daniel, having dropped his eggs on a transport column and somehow become separated from his flight, plays with the clouds. High above Albert he hits a heat bump and suddenly ascends vertically for four thousand feet. It is like going up in a lift, with exhilaration thrown in. He is stunting around the towers and chimneys and battlements of the cumulus. He pretends he is landing on the flat parts, and scoops his undercarriage through the vapour. It is sparklingly bright up there. Every detail he sees is in sharp and glistening focus. He zooms up a vertical wall and loops, blipping the engine when he sees the cloud beneath him again. He loops once more, half rolling at the top so that he is horizontal again. He dives until he is going faster than two hundred miles an hour, and the wires are singing. Here is a crevasse, a cathedral, a cave, a chimney, lilac shadow. He pulls back the joystick steadily and carefully, and he is level again. He has to pump the oil pressure up by hand, and switches to gravity for a moment. His compass spins, his ears are aching almost unbearably. Up he loops once more, and barrel-rolls at the top, straight over the gleaming summit of a cloud. He flies between the sun and the cloud, and looks at the exquisite double-rainbow nimbus around the shadow of his machine. He goes into a falling leaf, then centralises the controls and comes out of it. He goes into a spin, turns off the petrol, gets through that horrible moment when the controls go limp, pushes the joystick forward to convert it into a dive, and gets out of that too, Gosport fashion. He remembers the full horror of his first spin, and smiles grimly. It had happened because he had stalled in a loop, and for a few seconds he had foretasted the bitterness of doom. He sings loudly to himself: ‘If you want the sergeant major, we know where he is, we know where he is …’

He nips down into a valley of dove-grey shadow, and hurtles back out of it. He all but stalls the machine, it hangs on its propeller for a second, and then he drops it back down to follow the dunes and ridges. It is like tree-hopping and contour-chasing at altitude. The beauty and clarity is not of this earth. Nothing is more sublime and ineffable than this. He crashes through a white wall into greyness, and sees nothing until he emerges through the other side and realises that he is almost upside down. He goes fully upside down, and feels the straps straining against his shoulders. He holds hard onto the spade grip of the joystick, because he has no parachute, and no one really trusts the straps.

He pushes the stick over and then centralises it again so that he does a long vertical turn, like a loop on its side, and he watches the cloud and the visible patches of earth going round in a circle. He is so high above the devastation that he is beyond the distress of it. The Western Front is surprisingly narrow. It is a long scar of brown and yellow earth, cutting through verdant countryside. It’s the right-hand vertical turn that the Huns can’t cope with and can’t follow. Do it long enough and they have to give up in despair. The Camel is a damned swagger machine.

He remembers the occasion when he was stunting up in the cumulus, and came round a majestic stack of pink and golden vapour just as the sun was about to set, and beheld in front of him a whole flight of German Albatroses enjoying their own last bout of stunting before returning home. There is a rumour that the Germans are ordered to return home after a set number of minutes, which is why they often seem to abandon fights unexpectedly. These ones must have been using up their last minutes by having fun. He had decided to bank vertically into a pillar of cloud before they spotted him. He did not have enough fuel left to take them on, so he had let them have their fun. One of the odd things about the Germans is that they disapprove of looping the loop, so you never see them doing it.