FRAGILE FALCONS 

FROM THE EARLY DAYS OF MILITARY AVIATION

"I spent so many lonely nights, aching to make love and when I came here, Harry,  you spoiled everything...
 and now that you're sober and randy, you expect me to follow at your beck and call -- I shan't do that -- I won't  come running like a silly school girl again."

 

THE SOMME VALLEY -- A PROLOGUE

 Late Summer  - 1916

          A rusty old steam engine, laboriously drawing a long tail of  battered freight carriages heavily laden with turnips and beets needed by famished refugees, chuffed and clattered through the seedy provincial city of Chipilly in Northwestern France.  The antique teakettle, resurrected from some bone yard for wartime service, rattled a third floor bedroom in the shabby Hotel de Ville.  The vibrations sent a water tumbler skittering across a marble topped night stand.  The featherbed, trembling in time with steel wheels thumping rhythmically over a broken cross tie, aroused Henry St. Martin.  Startled, the big American aviator rolled over.  With a swift move he snatched a slab-sided Colt .45 from under his pillow and lurched upright.  He jacked a round into the chamber before coming awake enough to recognize the rumble of a train.  A breeze fluttered the curtains at the windows, setting them dancing like ghosts in the half light of dawn.  Henry Lee St. Martin gulped in relief, breathing fast, annoyed that his heart was pounding and his gun hand shaking.  He was finding it harder and harder to control his nerves as the stresses of battle flying in the Royal Flying Corps took their toll.

"W - w - what's wrong, Harry?"

The ancient bed creaked beside St. Martin and Laura Grey's tousled strawberry blond head came up from her pillow.  

"What is it?"  Her voice had a querulous note to it.  

 Henry tried to conceal his own frustration with his soft Louisiana drawl.

"Only a freight train, Laura." He called her Loora in the English manner.   "What could possibly be wrong?  I've won three days leave for assassinating two teen age boys and I have a hellish thirst so everything's just hunky-dory with me."

He extracted the cartridge from his weapon, thumbed it back into the clip and inserted the magazine into the black pistols grip.  It clicked sharply in his hand.   He slid the Colt under his pillow and lay back with a hairy, muscular arm under his head. 

"The sun's coming up so Immaculate Jack must have my pilots over the Front  by now.  It really was generous of him to lead  C - Flight so we could have this weekend together.  You know, he does more than his share of flying while leading his own fellows and then, going out freelancing almost every day."

 Laura Grey hid her face in the pillow and muttered something he didn't understand.  He watched her cautiously,  having already learned that morning wasn't her best time.  In fact, he'd discovered she could be downright cranky until she had tea.  Only then did she become the charming English woman he loved.  He peered at the watch worn on the inside of his wrist, in the aviator fashion so he could calculate fuel consumption and flight time without lifting his hand from the fuel flow lever or the gun grip of his DeHavilland fighter aircraft.  He'd never seen a wrist watch until coming to Britain and joining the Royal Flying Corps.  Men in America still used pocket watches with chains and fobs, like the one his parents gave him after graduating from high school in Marksville. 

"Almost five o'clock."  He'd discovered that dawn came early this far north in Europe. 

The powerfully built St. Martin swung his legs to the edge of the bed.  He rested enormous bare feet on the threadbare carpet and brushed a shock of heavy black hair from ebony eyes.  Filling a tumbler with water from a stoneware pitcher, he drained it, feeling somewhat dizzy,  pouring another drink, wishing he'd been able to find a better place for Laura's visit to France.  He drank and only then remembered why he was so thirsty, how her visit had gone sour, that it was his fault they hadn't made love after anticipating this tryst for so long.  The bed creaked again and Laura leaned on an elbow to watch him drink from the smudged glass.  She drew a sheet over a bare shoulder and lost the battle in her attempt to keep the peace.   

"Are you finally sober, Harry?" She tugged the elegant silk gown she'd bought for this visit with her American lover over her breasts.

He set the glass down and turned to watch her directly, wondering how she could be placated, how he could keep the notorious Grey temper from flaring.  So stunningly beautiful, even when angry.  A thick twist of strawberry blond hair over one shoulder, large violet eyes and a peaches and cream country girl complexion that followed centuries in the soft mists of England.  And -- although she had come reluctantly because of her grief, in time she accepted his attention.  He yearned to gather her in his arms, to kiss away her frustration, to rest bosom to bosom as they had for a few weeks before he left London.  "Of course I'm sober."  He lay a hand on her hip, sliding the sheet down her leg.  She flinched and drew away. 

 

"You were as drunk as a sailor, Harry!  As if all the trouble I had getting accredited as a news correspondent and arranging transportation across the Channel to France meant nothing at all --  I spent so many nights aching to make love and when I come, you spoiled everything -- and now that you're sober and randy, you expect me to follow at your beck and call --  I shan't do that -- I won't come running like a silly school girl again." She jerked at the sheet again,  emphatically shutting him out.

 "Damnation!" St. Martin grunted.

 "Don't you swear at me, Henry St. Martin -- I won't stand for it!"  Laura rolled to the edge of the bed, her back rigid to him, snuffling and dabbing at her tears, angry with him and furious at herself for crying.  

"I wasn't swearing at you, Laura.  I was damning myself for my own stupidity."

 

"I'll know better next time.  Staggering up here as you did -- snoring half the night in a drunken stupor.  How could you be so thoughtless when Kate and I came so far for this weekend."

 "Oh, Laura!"  It was a wavering cry of anguish.  Almost as if he had tried to sabotage her visit.  He sighed, not that far from tears himself, wondering how he would explain his predicament to her when he didn't understand it himself.  How could she know what his life was like in France -- what a Jekyll and Hyde creature he had become since leaving England as her thoughtful lover?   London was a lifetime ago.  Everything was different now.  He had become another man  -- an entirely different kind of man.   Life was so complex and yet so simple in the most basic ways.  How could he explain his total dependence on George and Little Will, on Matt and Immaculate Jack?  Total trust that transcends loyalty as far as high noon surpasses midnight.  Men from all parts of the Empire -- boys actually except for George, Roger and himself.  Betting the farm, going for broke,  risking everything for prestige and glory in the deadly competition to become the Royal Flying Corps highest scoring assassin.  

The aviators flew and fought for Great Britain without hesitation but they also competed ferociously among themselves in the grandest game any young man could play.  Football and rugby, boxing and cricket paled into insignificance compared to their aerial contests, because the stakes were infinitely higher.  They caroused every night and brawled when tempers frayed from their anxieties but they did look after one another.  It simply wasn't sporting to win if one didn't play according to the rules learned at Eaton or Harrow.  Henry sighed.  How could he explain to Laura that his life was more about male pride and prestige than any of them cared to admit, that loyalty to England and patriotism was a cloak for something more sinister in their psyches.  Even the eighteen and nineteen year old lads had become dangerous men, were tough as old boots, cynical about military and political authority and deadly in a fight.   And yet, the ultimate game was played by a clearly understood code -- no one went for a victory if doing so put a comrade at risk.   All of the airmen had saved each other so often that they had long since lost count of who owed what to whom in their high, blue arena.  Of course, the medals, promotions and world wide fame came at a price beyond the obvious dangers of battle flying. 

 

An unexpected sound could make them cringe and swear.  A sentimental love song on the squadron's battered Victrola could bring tears to the eyes of hard bitten twenty year old assassins and a friendly hand clapped on a shoulder at the wrong time may trigger a wild rage and blows.  As for St. Martin; he had never seen flowers so brilliant and trees so beautiful.  He could sit against an ancient stone wall, writing a letter home, and find himself fingering the mosses and lichens as if they were precious jewels.  The song of a meadow lark could summon an ecstasy of delight.  Or a sad yearning for home and family.   He realized it was  the moods that washed over the pilots -- relief at having gone 'mano a mano' against an Albatross pilot and killing him,  guilt at losing  a chum because you couldn't get to him in time, nightmares of fire in the air and bowels leaking all night unless you drank yourself into a dreamless stupor.  But above all, the mood that kept the men keen in the hunt;  that made St. Martin so competitive,  was the raw elation when his victories mounted on the leader board in the officer's club and his face appeared in virtually every daily newspaper in Great Britain, France, Italy and America.    He sighed; how could he explain to Laura what goes on in a Quaker boy's soul to turn him into one of the Flying Corp's most successful  killers?  And why was he, who had spoken so glibly of love with so many girls on campus and when flying aerial exhibitions with Ely's Aerial Shows, completely mute when he ached to tell Laura he loved her beyond all reason?  Was he fearful of awakening the ghastly nightmare she had only just survived?  She couldn't be naive about his life expectancy, not after her husband's lingering agony following the Battle of  Mons.  Surely, he wasn't intimidated by her connections with the royal family.  Henry took a moment to organize his thoughts.

 

His flight from England to France a few months earlier,  with his Louisiana State University roommate Roger Springston and their nineteen year old English mentor,  Matt Ballard, was the very best kind.  It was, the airmen joked among themselves, uneventful.  They flew over the Channel without incident, even when they came within range of German fighters whose pilots gleefully hunted newcomers.   The three airmen landed their DeHavilland pusher biplanes briefly at the gigantic hospital complex at Etaples in northern France, near the Belgian frontier, topping off their tanks for the final hop to Chipilly, arriving at the primitive front line flying field in time to get settled into a hut before dinner.  The two Americans met the commander of Twenty-Four Squadron and were assigned to C - Flight.  They had brought small canvas bags with a change of uniforms and shaving supplies for their kits would follow later.  Or so they fervently hoped, for there was no guarantee their possessions wouldn't be rifled along the transport line that stretched by sea and rail from England.  So many British soldiers had been in France for so long,  as the bloody war went on and on, that some of them were looking out for themselves with anything they could steal and sell.  Major George Hawker greeted the Americans warmly, introduced them in the officers mess, offered some of his hard won wisdom about staying alive.  Then, because he was always short handed, rousted them out before daylight to fly the dawn patrol with their flight of four aircraft.  Henry wanted it no other way.

 

Under the tutelage of Ballard and Hawker, intelligent, competitive and energetic, St. Martin soon became one of  Twenty-Four Squadron's most successful hunters.  Within a week he'd stalked and shot down one Fokker Eindecker and sent another limping  home trailing a long plume of greasy black smoke. He flamed an armored D W F gunship two weeks later.  St. Martin continued to progress faster than Springston and just before dusk on Midsummer Day, was promoted to Captain and leadership of C - Flight by winning a wild confrontation with a rott of four Albatross D - 2 fighters.  He used less than two hundred rounds of .303 ammunition from his Lewis automatic rifle to shoot down three of the German machines over Ten Corps Headquarters.   It was the third hat trick of the war.  And now, just two days past, he dueled for forty minutes with one of Germany's top cannons and forced him to crash land behind German lines.  After four months of battle flying, his name was high on the leader board of the Royal Flying Corps' best fighter squadron.

 

St. Martin's increasing fame pleased greatly the ad hoc American Airmen Planning Group that met volunteers to save the Empire from collapse. Old Mother England was in danger of starving to death in a disaster that was clearly getting worse very quickly.  Without realizing he was the object of so much discussion at the Palace and in government offices at Whitehall, St. Martin's success was proving quite useful in their scheme to draw America into Great Britain's death struggle with Germany.  The planning group was disappointed that Roger Springston hadn't caught on as well as St. Martin.  He had made only one kill and according to Matthew Ballard seemed to be falling out of the hunt rather than becoming as skilled an assassin as his college friend.   

 

The crunch of hobnail boots came through the Hotel de Ville's window as a battalion of five hundred heavily armed men tramped along the cobblestone street.  Heading toward the trenches, Henry realized.  The companies and battalions never took as long to pass when they returned with their numbers greatly diminished after a week or two in the line.  Two lorries sputtered along, sending fumes into the room.  A man and woman paused on the sidewalk, quarreling vehemently in a language that was neither French nor English.  Possibly one of the Belgian tongues, he thought, since so many Walloons had fled south from the invading German hoards. 

 

"You are right, Laura.  I made a goddamned fool of myself and I regret it deeply."  Henry eased toward her and found the young widow trembling.  He slipped a powerful arm around her and caressed her face.  He struggled with it, a proud and stubborn man who found it difficult to admit to any weakness.  He plunged on, aware how much was at stake, that her frustrations could snatch her away from him.   For, while he'd shared her bed for a month and exchanged love letters several times each week, he realized he didn't understand the traditions of the English aristocracy all that well.  He hurried on.   "I won't disappoint you again.  No more boozing with Matt and the fellows until you are gone.  We'll have a great time, maybe find a front page story you can write for the Tribune while you are here."

 

They had dined in the Hotel de Ville's battered bistro the previous evening, with.  Matt Ballard and Catherine Howe, along with Immaculate Jack and Little Will and their French sweethearts.  The dark eyed sisters had grown up in one of the ancient chateaus near Chipilly.  The girls were thrilled that Henry could speak their language since their command of English was limited largely to pillow talk.  The young people dined on the best the chef could offer; stringy mutton, boiled beets with a thin truffle sauce, potatoes fried in lard and coarse rye bread.  Sugar and butter had vanished into the war machine but with the export market closed by German submarines, the limestone caves around the region were stuffed with millions of bottles of wine, brandy and cognac.  The local vintages were not as good as those from the sunny southern provinces but with even the best local wines costing but a few francs per bottle, none of the soldiers complained.   The evening began pleasantly but eventually turned rowdy when the airmen started drinking seriously.  Typically, Jack Pitcairn bellowed out some wicked Australian drinking songs while Henry accompanied him with his banjo.  After he had enough of the racket, the maitre'd objected to their annoying the other guests and after a progressively louder quarrel,  threw them out of his establishment.  The women were humiliated and the men incensed and soon after Henry and Laura climbed the stairs to his room, he fell into a sodden sleep.

 

Now, Henry decided to tell her all of it, to hold nothing back. He hesitated a moment more before speaking softly.  "You have to understand, Laura, we fellows are no longer normal way out here."  He spoke as if they were a thousand miles from London rather than a mere hundred or so.  "Nothing about us; about your cousin Matt or Roger or myself is what you remember.  You see,  you have come to a desperately strange land; a Golgotha inhabited by frightened and bitter men and women and terrified children.  Thousands of men are mangled and killed every week.  This is a ghastly land of fear and pain, of grief and doom.  We have become as mad as the Hatter, fragile travelers through this hellish place, shot at by men who hunt us by day and bedeviled by demons who haunt us at night.   We are no longer the gentlemen you knew.  Even the awkward and stammering schoolboys have become as dangerous as psychopaths.  Little Will is a charming killer who truly loves killing Germans.  We stalk and assassinate men for England, hunt them like rabbits, slaying boys who in another time and place would be having trouble getting to class on time.  And paying our own price as well.  The work is damned ugly.  Goddamned ugly!  We four jolly songsters who got into trouble last evening at dinner, are as cold blooded a band of cutthroats as you would find on the Singapore water front.  Oh,  the tales I could tell you about Little Will and Alf Ames would lift your hair on end -- and both of them only nineteen.  We do what it takes to survive and even then, many of us fail."

 

His voice had taken on such a sad note that Laura Elizabeth Grey roused up to peer into his face.  She examined him steadily, as if seeking some great life or death revelation in his eyes, seeing only regret.  She took his hands as he continued.  "But, it's not your problem that we've sold our souls as gunslingers.  I give you my word as a New Orleans gentleman; there shall be no more boozing with the fellows.  Not now -- I swear it."  His mood shifted and he grinned; a boyish expression crossed his face and he went silent and rolled over on his back.  He had done all he could to convince her his apology was sincere. 

 

Laura continued to watch him intently, his blunt words too unsettling to be ignored.  Never once, she admitted to herself, has Harry lied or been a bully to me.   A powerful man but he'd waited patiently until I was ready for him.   Didn't pretend to be in love when we went to bed.  She caught her breath in sudden fright.   What is this man doing? she asked herself abruptly.  Flying in harms way four or five times every day for England.  Risking his life on every throw of the dice.  Her mood softened.  Why is he here when America is neutral?  How can I compare my petty annoyance to that degree of commitment?    She could see his face more clearly as light crept into the room.  Not a callow youth but a grown man with a mind of his own. 

A university man, patient with me when I had trouble coping with a new chap in my life.  I'd become as obnoxious as Mama and he'd still support me.  She reasoned,  it wasn't as if the men she knew were teetotalers.  She had seen many drunken revels, some of them on England's oldest manors.  Lords and ladies alike.  And he is contrite about disappointing me, about frustrating both of us.  She touched his arm, caressing the black hair, recalling her breathless excitement when they made love.  So different from Maurrie's gentle persuasion -- even demanding at times.  Taking her to heights she'd never expected to reach again.  Henry's hands caressing insistently until the ecstasy overwhelmed her --  his powerful body against hers --  his arms pinning her helpless --  even enjoying his whiskers prickly against her face.  But --through it all, she had still ached for Maurice.  It was strange how the two faces seemed to merge at those times, how she clung to Harry, writhing in pleasure but sobbing her lost husband's name in a strange mixture of ecstasy and tears.  She also, she realized, was living with ghosts in a ghastly land.  She thought, this senseless war hangs over us like the sword of Damocles, but while soldiers like Jack and Little Will can do nothing to win except fight and die to end the madness,  perhaps I can.  Because I publish the Tribune, I have the voice to condemn political stupidity and change public opinion.   It would be painful,  for my open opposition to the war would alienate everyone from King George to the street sweepers in London.  Dare I defy the Crown -- even more crucial, dare I love another soldier?  But,  who else is there for me?  Everyone at home is either too old or too young.  The war,  the bloody, bloody war!  Raw school boys and dreary old men.  It was the war that brought Harry to me and now I fear what might happen if I love him.  If only it wasn't so dangerous to surrender one's heart in such terrible times.  If only I had someone to support me in calling for an armistice.  Time to stop deceiving yourself, Lizzy.  You really are in love with this America.  Don't be stupid, don't throw away this strong and courageous man.  Accept every hour with him as the precious jewel it might  become. 

 

Laura Grey reached for Henry, kissed his throat and tilted her face toward his lips.  Her eyes were innocent and her voice without any hint of guile.  "And how long is your shore leave, sailor?" She wriggled against him.  "Is that a knife I feel in your pocket when you hold me close or do you really-really like me?" 

Henry St. Martin burst into laughter.  "Oh, Laura!  You're a real electric spark."  He caught her face between his hands and they kissed, lingeringly and intimately.  She twisted to pull the gown over her head and smiled with a swift resurrection of hope.

"Caress me first, Harry," she whispered with her eyes closed, pressing a breast into his hand.   "Fondle me everywhere, everything you do so well -- send me into ecstasy three or four times and then we shall enjoy your go at me."  As they made love, long and lingeringly, with soft cries from the waves of joy breaking over them, Laura almost lost control to tell Henry how much she loved him.

 

The lovers eventually collapsed on their pillows, breathing hard, both feeling if this was to be the only intimacy of their tryst, the trip was worth it.  "My beautiful English girl, you are too precious for words."  He drew back from her, drinking in all of her flushed beauty, waited for his heart to slow.  He was going to confess his love when fate reached out to seize them.   

 

A heavy fist pounded at the door.  The hollow drumming tore Henry from Laura's arms.  He rose to his knees, snatched up the black Colt and fell across her in a single movement.  He crouched there, protecting her with his body, black and heavy hair hanging uncombed over his face.  The .45 was cocked and ready to fire.

"Harry!" Laura squealed.

 "Shhhh!"

 "Germans?" she whispered. 

 "Their intelligence squads never knock when kidnapping prisoners for information.  And they seldom come this far south during daylight hours."  He didn't lower the pistol. 

 "It could be something for me from the Tribune.  I left this address with my secretary.  Perhaps the desk clerk with a telegram."

 "The civilian wire from Calais is down from midnight to six.  Nothing comes in."

 The hammering started again.  Henry silently worked his way across the shabby carpet, the big bore pistol ready for any contingency.  He stood out of the line of fire, next to the wall,  glancing back at Laura.    She had found a weapon, was kneeling nude in the middle of the bed, holding the heavy pitcher ready for battle.  The sight tickled Henry and he grinned despite himself.  "Put your knickers on, Laura -- before you catch your death o' cold!"  He cleared his throat.  His voice was as harsh as an old crow's when he turned back to the door.  He growled,  "Captain St. Martin here!  Speak your piece and move on.  Any monkey business and I start blowing great big holes through this door."  

 

Four tiny DeHavilland pusher biplanes flew over the ugly, suppurating wound of the trench line as it leaped the Somme River close by the frontier between Belgium and France.  The fragile looking aircraft were flying in a tight stair-stepped formation as the sun edged over the eastern horizon.  They flew about fifty feet apart, close enough to use hand signals for communication but far enough to avoid tangling wingtips.  Although it had rained almost every day since July, this sunrise was cloudless except for a long, thin rampart of white a few miles to the west of the C - Flight's flight path. 

 

The four rattling, popping biplanes made up one fifth of George Hawker's famed Twenty-Four Squadron in the Royal Flying Corps.  George, the eldest of three brothers, had won the Victoria Cross from the hands of King George for his courage and skill as a battle aviator after he shot down a total of ten enemy aircraft in combat.  The airmen in the single seat machines were flying the dawn patrol to spy out what the Germans had done on the battle field during the night.  This patrol was their first of four daily sorties as the murderous Somme Campaign staggered through the spasm that began early in July. 

 

As they flew England's first fighter design, each airman in C - Flight understood that the average life expectancy in the hostile skies over France was a few weeks.  Like sailors at sea, airmen in this new arena soon learned that any ignorance or negligence was likely to be fatal.   And yet, boys were being sent into combat against seasoned German airmen with no more than twenty to thirty hours of flight time.  Nevertheless, each young man flying on patrol quietly thanked God for keeping him out of the flaming hell that stretched below them from horizon to horizon.   In the fury of infantry combat, in the face of artillery and countless machine guns, one's life expectancy often ran out within minutes.  Thirty thousand of Lord Kitchener's New Army volunteers had crumpled into the strange white mud of Flanders within an hour after their officers' whistles sent them toward the German barbed wire.  They were met by a withering storm of fire and steel that caused sixty thousand British casualties during the first day of the Somme Campaign.  It was so bad and the politicians became so fearful that the endless hospital trains crept into London after midnight when most  people were asleep. 

 

The aviators of C - Flight -- a bucktooth little psychopathic killer called Will Campbell from the Scottish Highlands, a shy Midlands squire called Brian Thompson and the American Roger Springston, were led by a scruffy twenty year old Australian flight captain sarcastically called Immaculate Jack Pitcairn by his mates.   Even among the rowdy  adolescent airmen, he had become a legend in his tattered uniforms.  After he'd won the Victoria Cross for heroism,  no one tried any longer to reform the superb combat aviator.  Jack was covering for St. Martin, was leading C - Flight in Henry's place.  

 

The young men flew at seven thousand feet.  Below them, where the earth was still rimmed in darkness, lethal red and yellow blossoms flared violently to the east and the west as far as they could see.  The trench line was almost five hundred miles long and each nation was swiftly going bankrupt of men and money while trying to avoid defeat.  When the little DH2s passed over the trench line to the German side, a line of  antiaircraft fire marked their passage through the morning sky.  Thick black bursts with yellow centers confirmed their German origin.  Because different chemicals were used in their manufacture, French and British shells burst with white smoke and red centers.

 

The airmen patrolled above a low, flat farmland dotted with thin clumps of poplars and elms.  The local farmers gave them grandiose names such as Delville Wood and Gommecourt Forest and harvested them for firewood.   The chalky and anemic soil had been the sea bottom for countless eons, running out past the white cliffs of Dover into the Atlantic depths west of Ireland.  The chalk, formed from minute sea animal skeletons, was thousands of feet thick.  Mile high ice mountains had come and gone and come and gone again, eventually ripping from the continent a cool green archipelago that long after, following many invasions,  became the British Isles.  England was at its heart.

 

The four airmen had taken off from the rough but permanent Chipilly Aerodrome with its wood frame and sheet metal hangers and huts. The aviators sat high on cushions despite the buffeting wind, with rotary LeRhone single valve engines whirling like dervishes at their backs. They searched the sky constantly, wary of  the Hun In The Sun as a poster in the officers' club put it, for their lives depended on seeing enemy aircraft before they came within gunnery range.    Every minute or so, each pilot shielded his eyes with the ball of a thumb against the red disc of the sun emerging from the smoky wrack below.  He peered into the sun's corona, looking for ominous black specks.  The entire formation zig-zagged ninety degrees right or left every two or three minutes before returning to the previous compass heading.  This change in direction exposed any enemy aircraft approaching through the blind spot formed by the engine and the tail structure of one's own aircraft.    

 

 The men also examined with suspicion the long cloud to the west.  Should a German attack come today, it would be from the blinding glare of the sun or from beyond the white rampart.  Ambuscades were frequent and often complex, for the airman who attacked without being seen by his enemy, had the advantage.  The DeHavillands soared and dipped in unison as the sun heated the earth, sending columns of air rising and falling in the crystal sea through which they cruised at eighty miles an hour.  Each aircraft followed behind and slightly above the preceding machine, in a stair stepped formation, so the pilot could see Immaculate Jack in the lead machine.  Twenty foot long cloth streamers, tied to his outer wing struts identified him as the flight leader.  Roger Springston checked to see that Brian Thompson and Little Will were in position behind Jack.   It was important that they stay tight,  for any lagging would force him further behind, leaving him more  exposed and vulnerable.  He touched his fuel flow lever with a feather's worth of pressure, adjusting his speed to slow slightly and not overrun Thompson.  He massaged his stomach which hurt constantly now.  Probably a duodenal ulcer, he reasoned.

 

Dear Jesus, Roger mouthed in the heavy, cottony silence as his hearing became saturated by engine noise.  I vow -- I swear on my mother's honor.  I'll give up whiskey, women and gambling if you'll get me out of France alive.  "Please, God; I don't want to die here."  Despite his anxiety, Springston wasn't so distracted that he forgot to search the blue bowl of the sky around   C - Flight.  It was only by seeing the aggressive and clever German airmen before they could get into position that he would survive.   Not only did he need caution, staying alive also required a good deal of luck.  His head swiveled right and left and he twisted in the cockpit to see directly behind him for it was his turn to fly the dangerous arse end Charlie position -- the one on which an enemy attack would first fall.  Roger's mood shifted and he grew angry.  "Damn Sir James!"  he shouted into the wind.  God damn him for recruiting us.  And God damn Henry for dragging me into this folly.  That tough guy relishes this fighting as much as I hate it but even he is getting ragged around the edges.  He examined the cloud rampart again as Jack led them west along the flaming trench line. Springston remained furious about the way he'd been tricked into battle flying.   

 

Against his better judgment he'd let Henry persuade him to postpone graduate school for a year so they could fly the swift and powerful new courier and observation aircraft for the British Army.  He had admitted that kind of flying sounded interesting after flying puddle jumpers for two years with Ely's Aerial Shows;  and no one expected the war to last more than a year or so.  It was technology that betrayed him.  Between the time he and Henry signed their enlistment papers with Sir James Harris at the  New Orleans British consulate and completed their officers training course in England, aircraft designers had found ways to attach machine guns to aircraft so the pilots could shoot at one another.  Instead of waving at each other as they had in the beginning, the airmen took the war into the air.  Rather than ferrying generals around or delivering messages as he expected to do, Roger was thrown into aerial combat with Harry.  It seemed strange as he thought about it later.   As if someone in the Flying Corps was conspiring to send them to their best fighting squadron.  Other Americans who came over with them were assigned behind the lines but he'd been shackled to Henry in some kind of fast track scheme.  And no matter where they went and what the two of them did, the glib Matt Ballard dogged their steps.  He cut red tape and opened doors that remained closed to other American volunteers.  Roger'd never been paranoid but there seemed to be a current washing them irreversibly toward Twenty-Four Squadron from the beginning.  No doubt, men were needed at the Front but he felt something he couldn't quite put his finger on, a subtle pressure that made no sense.  With so many soldiers coming and going, how could two American airmen make that much of a difference?  He would, he decided, talk this over with Henry when he got back from his  leave with Laura. 

 

A larger aircraft crossed their flight path in the curious skidding illusion flying machines produce when passing in the air.  It was a Sopwith Strutter painted with red, white and blue French rondelles on the fuselage and wings.   Out early, he thought, probably spotting for an artillery shoot.  Calling in targets with one of the new wireless sets that were too heavy and too slow to operate for fighters.  The French aviators waved as they passed.  The mutual distrust that soured cooperation between French and British officials seldom extended down to the sharp end of the military spear.  The fighting men were more than happy to get any help they could against the aggressive Germans, Austrians and Hungarians.   Springston blinked and the Sopwith vanished as if it had never existed.  

 

The lanky, blond American shoved his goggles up and rubbed his aching eyes.  God, he needed a drink!  Not only groggy from so many nightmares but his head was throbbing with a monumental hangover.   He was drinking more now and getting less relief from it.  How long could a man live on whiskey, cigarettes and coffee?  And he hadn't even smoked before coming to France!  Until his luck ran out -- finally and fatally.  Sand through a hourglass.  No one, he'd learned as airmen died from accidents caused by bad weather and limited piloting skills as well as from enemy attacks and faulty equipment, survived out here if he flew long enough.  Fate had become the hunter.  The war itself was his enemy, rather than the German airmen who were as exposed to disaster as he himself. 

 

Roger checked the Lewis automatic rifle mounted on the forward lip of his cockpit, assuring himself for the tenth time since takeoff that the fast firing weapon was loaded and cocked.  In his first combat patrol he had panicked while trying to fire at an Fokker Eindekker with the safety still locked.   He'd loved flying at  L S U and on the Ely tours, before coming to this hellish place, but aviation now was undiluted misery.  Unmitigated horror, he thought grimly, for despite his Reserves cavalry commission from Louisiana State University, he had soon discovered he was no blood thirsty soldier. 

 

The worst day was burned so deeply into his soul that he knew he would grieve over the images for the rest of his life.  So vivid and so terrible.  He could still hear the harsh rattle of the Lewis and smell the cordite smoke burning his nasal passages. He could see the thin line of golden incendiary rounds sprinting out toward two men he didn't even know.  He could feel himself seated stoically, death whistling and crackling through his cockpit from the twin Parabellum guns firing at him from the rear seat of the big Rumpler, death flashing over and around him, whining like the yellow wasps whose nest he had blundered into as a child playing in the hedges, hits through his fabric rattling like hail on a cedar roof,  before he shot away the control cables on the German aircraft. 

 

 The enemy biplane had wallowed on, pitching awkwardly as Roger throttled back to clamp a full ammunition pan on his weapon.  When he caught up, the enemy airmen had forgotten him as the lesser of several evils in their attempt to survive.  In his desperation,  the rear seat gunner had crawled out of his cockpit and was crouching in the slipstream between the port side wings.  He was swaying in an attempt to balance the large machine, using his weight to counter a steep starboard spiral that was threatening to become a tailspin.   Springston followed so close he could see the enemy airman was a boy no more than eighteen or twenty, the age of Campbell or Pitcairn.  He wore a light gray flight suit and no parachute.  He was straddling the middle set of wing struts, trying while swaying from side to side to balance the aircraft.  Some premonition came to him or perhaps his pilot shouted a warning.  He twisted to stare in horror at the DeHavilland no more than thirty feet behind him.  He froze, wide eyes gleaming like diamonds, open mouth a shrieking black hole.  The boy stretched out a hand to plead with the enemy he had been trying to kill a few minutes earlier. 

"Bitte -- bitte!" Springston could read his lips. The German's feet began a frantic little dance but had no place to run or hide.

 The American's hand fell from the gun grip.  He couldn't bring himself to fire, to murder the boy, the straight shooting enemy for whom he was now filled with compassion.  His horror was compounded with bile welling up in his throat as his act of mercy failed.  The German slipped on the curved wing surface and tumbled into the outer struts.  His weight overbalanced the wounded Rumpler toward the port side and it rolled over on its back.  It flew upside down for a mile or so, spraying fuel and coolant water from its tank vents, the boy clinging like a circus monkey, before it snapped into an inverted spin.   It seemed to Springston that the aircraft fell forever, the gray figure flung from the wing kicking and flailing like a convulsive ant until it merged into the earth's background far below.  The Rumpler cut a wound in the earth, as a razor would slash a finger,  beside a crossroads several miles behind the British lines.  The wreckage burst into flames, the funeral pyre sending a thick column of black smoke into the sky,  the boy a bloody bag of fertilizer, leaving the American with a filthy feeling he knew no amount of bathing would ever wash away.  He was still having nightmares about falling every night. 

 

Now, flying the dawn patrol, Roger was snatched from his thoughts by the sight of   C - Flight leaving him behind.   He looked past Campbell and Thompson to see Pitcairn frantically rocking his wings and waving toward the long white cloud.  He was gesturing toward a dozen or so brightly colored hawk like machines, an entire German staffel, slashing down in power dives from the long cloud.   Springston lurched upright cursing himself for being caught off guard.  "How,"  he shrieked, "has it finally come to this?" 

---

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