Louis de Bernières - The Dust That Falls From Dreams

A MONTH OR so after their recovery from the Spanish influenza, and not two weeks after his reappearance in the lives of the McCosh family, Daniel came to tea, and found himself in the drawing room, making conversation whilst Millicent scurried in and out bearing drop scones, Eccles cakes, gingerbread, and refills of hot water for the pot. After so many years it felt strange to be back with these sisters and their eccentric mother, none of whom had really changed very much in the intervening years, except that Mrs McCosh was clearly becoming more ‘unusual’ with the passage of time. Daniel and Sophie soon realised that they had in fact seen each other occasionally, but without recognition. She had used to bring the Wing Commander on his regular visits to the airfield when she was a driver.

Conversation was relatively easy, because all the company were agog to hear of what it had really been like in the Royal Flying Corps on the Western Front. Daniel was quite used to this, and it seemed that he had to endure the same questions and conversations, over and over again, wherever he went. Most people just wanted to talk about the aces. He had to suppress his natural instinct to say, ‘What about all the rest?’ modestly forgetting that he too had won many more than five victories.

He also liked to put in a word for the PBI. He had never forgotten visiting the front line in the squadron tender, and seeing the legs of the dead protruding from the trench walls, still wearing puttees and boots. That was a far more vivid memory than the stench and the shell bursts. He remembered taking refuge with Ashbridge Pendennis’s unit after spending all day in a shell hole, and being astonished when Ash had pointed to the sky and said, ‘I don’t know how you do it. You wouldn’t catch me up there.’

‘Did you know Albert Ball?’ asked Ottilie.

‘I did know Albert Ball,’ he said. ‘He was utterly reckless, and apparently fearless. He had an SE5 for going out with his flight, but he kept a little Nieuport for going out on his own. He’d charge a whole circus on his own and pepper the lot of them. Hawker was like that. His order was always “attack everything”. Arthur Rhys Davids was exactly the same. He was a classicist, you know, a wonderful boy. His hut was full of books. Ball was his flight commander for a while, so I suppose he got the madness from there. It was a lot to live up to. The strain steadily gets worse and worse, and one of the symptoms is recklessness, without a doubt. It’s the effect of incremental fear on a brave man. And there’s a part of you that would like to get it all over with, I think. It’s like a devil’s voice in your ear, you know, like in Hamlet’s soliloquy, where he wonders whether quietus might be the most desirable thing after all.

‘I knew McCudden too. He was the exact opposite to Ball and Rhys Davids. Meticulously careful, and scientific, and considered. Billy Bishop I met once. He was another Nieuport man. Raided an airfield on his own and got the VC for it.’

‘What about those French aces?’ asked Christabel. ‘You know … Guynemer … and Nungesser?’

‘No, I never knew Guynemer or Nungesser, or Rickenbacker. I expect you’ve heard of Mick Mannock. He was Irish. I never met him either, but I wish I had. He worked out how to do deflection shots, apparently, and that accounts for his tremendously high score. That’s when you work out how far to shoot ahead of an enemy so that he flies into your bullets. Most of us couldn’t do that. We just got on their tails and fired from point-blank.’

‘It’s a bit of a miracle you got right through the war, isn’t it?’ observed Ottilie. ‘Four years in the air. That must be a record.’

‘Well, in some ways I was lucky. I wasn’t there for the Fokker Scourge in ’15, I was on Home Establishment. Of course people remember Immelmann for that. And I missed Bloody April for the same reason. I was instructing.’

‘And what about the famous Red Baron?’ asked Christabel. ‘Was he really such a brilliant flyer?’

‘Hmm, I often think that the only German ace that anyone wants to talk about is von Richthofen. He was unquestionably a great flyer — I came up against him a few times — but he did tend to attack in vast formations, always diving with his circus behind him, so he had lots of protection. He wasn’t a lone wolf like Ball. Funny thing is, when he was killed, the first rumour was that he’d been shot down by the observer of an RE8. That would have been an anticlimax, eh? Not remotely glamorous. Luckily they eventually decided it was a Camel, but a lot of us suspect that actually he was done for by machine-gun fire from the ground, like Mannock. One often doesn’t know who the real victor is, and the figures are all poppycock anyway. If four Brits got a victory between them they got a quarter each. We often used to draw cards for a victory, or toss a coin. The Americans and the French gave all of them one each. And then you have flyers of real genius, with masses of victories, that no one’s ever heard of, like Collinshaw. There was Fullard, Little, McElroy, Thompson, McKeever, Beauchamp-Proctor, and that’s missing out the Canadians, the Belgians and the Italians. I absolutely fail to understand why people have only ever heard of Albert Ball and von Richthofen. It’s tiresome, and all the other flyers feel the same. The Huns had just as many aces as us. Boelcke for example, and Müller and Bohme. And Udet.’

‘So who do you think was the very greatest,’ asked Mr McCosh, ‘if it wasn’t von Richthofen?’

‘Who was the greatest? Of the Huns? To my mind it was Voss. Flew a Fokker triplane like the Red Baron, but his wasn’t red of course. I had a scrap with him once. Six of us against one of him. Those little triplanes couldn’t dive because the wings came off, but they could go up like a lift. Every time we thought we had him he nipped upstairs and then came down on us again. He could have got away quite easily. I got a tight group of five in my empennage — Empennage? Oh, sorry, that’s the tailplane. We all got a few holes. He did things I’ve never seen before or since, things you can’t do with an aeroplane, things that aren’t in the manuals. It was perfectly astounding. Then some of his friends turned up and some of ours turned up, and it just turned into general chaos without any casualties, but I swear he was determined to kill all six of us on his own, and might well have pulled it off. To my mind there’s never been anyone to touch him. When I heard he was dead I felt as if I’d swallowed stones. Rhys Davids was pretty sorry for pulling it off, as I understand.’

‘And was it really like being a knight of the air?’ asked Rosie. ‘Everyone made it sound so romantic.’

‘Ah, the chivalry! Well, there wasn’t as much as people think. It’s still cold-blooded murder much of the time. You dive on a two-seater out of the sun and down it goes, sometimes in flames, and you know you’re as guilty as Herod, and you’ve just got to face up to it and then go out and do it again. A flamerino makes you feel sick to the heart, and you just hope they were dead already. And let no one tell you that von Richthofen was chivalrous. He wasn’t. He followed Hawker down and shot him in the back of the head when he had to turn home after a long dogfight that had been honourable up to that point. And during Bloody April, twenty-one of his kills, or thereabouts, were defenceless and obsolete old two-seaters and wounded stragglers. He was doing his duty, and I’ve done the same, but it’s nothing to do with honour and chivalry. It’s plain old-fashioned murder. Every one of us has to live with the knowledge that we were murderers. It’s true! It’s true! And von Richthofen was a braggart who claimed kills that belonged to his pupils. Mannock did the exact opposite and gave his kills to his pupils. If you want a hero of the air, give me Mannock any day, but he was no knight either. I hear that he took to machine-gunning planes that were already down. After too much fighting, what with the tiredness and the strain of it, you can get more than a little mad. That’s when they send you home to be an instructor for a while. I had to do it twice, and that’s why I survived, thank God.