No Wrath of Men Read online

  No Wrath of Men

  Richard Townsend Bickers

  © Richard Townsend Bickers 1983

  Richard Townsend Bickers has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1983 by Robert Hale.

  This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  No wrath of men, or rage of seas,

  Can shake a just man’s purposes;

  No threats of tyrants, or the grim

  Visage of them can alter him;

  But what he doth at first intend,

  That he holds firmly to the end.

  Robert Herrick

  One

  Codrington, Paxton, Stokoe and Baird. Respectively a major a captain and two lieutenants of the Royal Flying Corps, disparate in nationality and flying experience.

  Codrington was the Englishman: fairly tall, fairly slim, with straw-coloured hair, a neat, bristly moustache and a hesitant smile usually preceded by a questioning look.

  The wear and tear of three and a half years’ fighting had given his naturally pink complexion a sallow hue and his shoulders a tired slouch. Sometimes he felt so weary that he fell asleep wherever he happened to be: sitting in a Crossley tender jolting from the far end of the aerodrome where the Bristol Fighters were parked to the mess; standing at a bar in Amiens or Rouen; recumbent upon some ornament of the oldest profession in a house of ill-repute in Paris. Even in the cockpit at the end of a hard day’s fighting.

  Stokoe was the Australian: very tall, conspicuously broad, with a broken nose, a face that looked as though it had been stitched together from saddle leather, and an upper incisor missing. He had a habit of sucking and whistling through this central gap. Stokoe could drink anyone on the squadron, including the sergeants, under the table. In fact he could drink anyone on all the three squadrons which comprised the wing based at St. Sangsue into insensibility. He had also been known to fight four stalwart men simultaneously and knock them all out.

  He was Codrington’s observer and not one whit worried by his pilot’s occasional succumbing to slumber in flight. Pilot and observer shared a cockpit, back-to-back, in the Brisfit, and all Stokoe had to do was turn round and thump Codrington on the ear to wake him. No one had ever discerned any sign that Stokoe had any worries at all: except about how soon he could get back to Aussie and where the next drink or girl was coming from.

  Paxton was the Canadian, another pilot. In height he stood between Codrington and Stokoe. Where Codrington was athletically slender and Stokoe a wide mass of brawn, Paxton was meaty and inclined to be as plump as any man could be after living on wartime military rations for two years. He was round-faced and rubicund, with round, innocent brown eyes and dark hair, blunt features and a look of being perpetually on the brink of laughter: not that he smiled or grinned a lot, but he was a sparkly type of chap.

  Paxton was of an amiable disposition and he cheerfully fitted in with his friends’ moods and needs. If Codrington felt like holding forth about Impressionist art or the breeding of bulldogs, which were two of his major interests, Paxton made an accommodating listener. If Stokoe simply had to try to drink some bar dry or got himself into a fight with six or eight hefty opponents, Paxton would aid and abet and a useful drinking and fighting partner he was too.

  Baird was the South African, Paxton’s observer. He was stocky, blocky and had a ginger pelt that was almost as thick on his chest and the backs of his hands and on his forearms as it was on his short-cropped head. He had a flaring ginger moustache. Baird, like many men who would have liked to be taller, carried himself ramrod straight. He was a good boxer and what he called a “rrrugby playerrr, man”. A few years later people would have described him as looking like a gangster, but in the spring of 1918 the word was unknown. His naturally irregular features and large ears had been further distorted by the attentions of adversaries in the ring and on the rugger field.

  Baird had a booming laugh and a way of narrowing his eyes and looking with suspicion and a challenge at anyone whom his not very agile brain suspected of taking a rise out of him. This happened distressingly often and usually on false grounds. His freckled skin had been much weathered by the sun and wind of his native veldt and his close-set grey-green eyes looked startlingly bright against the gamboge shade of his cheeks.

  *

  Dupuis and Gabin were Frenchmen, both pilots in the Aviation Militaire, flying the Spad XIII.

  Capitaine Dupuis was of the same height as Codrington but thinner and gaunt-faced with a pale complexion smudged with bright red patches on his cheekbones and nose, caused by excessive wine-drinking. He had heavy eyebrows which met above his long, sharp nose. He looked like a man who was constantly thinking of something caustic to say. His liver caused him trouble, half of it imaginary, and he suffered from acute stomach pains because he had an ulcer but was unaware of it. He usually had a smouldering cigarette hanging from his lower lip. His black hair was cut like a lavatory brush.

  Lieutenant Gabin was squat and bow-legged, with a large square face, fleshy lips and a waxed moustache. His hair was as pale as bleached straw and he wore it as long as any man dared to in those days: it bunched thickly over his ears and fell in a thick swath almost to his collar.

  Gabin looked, and was, merry. He ate and drank as gluttonously as Dupuis, but did not suffer for it. Women flocked to him: he amused them, was a skilful and considerate lover; and came from a rich family, which enabled him to give them expensive jewellery. He chain-smoked like Dupuis, even in bed: anyone’s bed.

  They both wore medals on their chests, instead of merely the medal ribbons of the British. Each man had a Croix de Guerre, Médaille Militaire and Légion d’Honneur.

  There was a strong rivalry between them: stronger than the innate rivalry and disdain with which every Frenchman regards every other living soul, including his compatriots.

  *

  Baxter L. Kaczinski and Frodingham S. Andretti were lieutenants of the United States Air Service, which had not become operational in France until that spring of 1918: three and a half years after the British Empire and France had begun fighting the Germans, and with only a few months to go before the Allies won the war.

  Bax Kaczinski was a tall, heavy-set Chicagoan with crew-cut fair hair, blue eyes and a loose mouth. He chewed gum incessantly and drank whisky in increasing quantities as action loomed nearer. He had been a famous university football player and his father was a millionaire who spoiled him. He had huge feet and small, porcine, delphinium-blue eyes that changed from good humour to rage and from bogus kindness to viciousness in a split second: usually when someone said “no” to him, which was not a word his doting parents used.

  Frod Andretti was another tall young man, with a willowy grace. He was swarthy and black-eyed, with glossy raven hair and a ready smile which he had perfected in a looking-glass. His teeth were very white and his chin was dimpled. By lunch-time he usually looked as though he needed a shave. He wore two gold holy medals around his neck on a gold chain and devoted his time more or less equally to going to church and seducing women, and girls as close to sixteen years of age as he could find them.

  He came from San Francisco. His father owned a chain of restaurants and a hotel or two in California and supplied him liberally with money.

  Their squadron also flew Spad XIIIs.

  *

  The Germans were as skilful a
nd weary aviators as the members of the Royal Flying Corps and the Aviation Militaire and about ten times as much so as the new arrivals of the U.S.A.S.

  Hauptmann Rudel and Leutnant Weisbach were two of them. Each wore the Pour le Mérite, the Blue Max, awarded for at least sixteen victories, around his neck. They had flown, or flown in, the early reconnaissance machines, the Taube and D.F.W. B1, the later Rumpler G1. They had converted to Albatros fighters. Now they were on one of the new ground attack squadrons, a Schlachtstaffel or Schlasta, equipped with the Hannover CL3A.

  Rudel was a man of medium height but exceptional girth. Fatness ran in his family. He also had an enormous head and this was another hereditary feature. His head looked all the larger for his great mane of carroty hair, which he wore swept straight back from the forehead, and vast ears with pendulous lobes, standing at right-angles to his square skull.

  Rudel’s skin was the colour of suet and it looked as though it had the same consistency. You felt that if you prodded him anywhere with a forefinger, it would sink into that overabundant flesh right up to the knuckle. He waddled and his feet were splayed. He was one of the most jovial men on the Western Front: as well he might be; for, as he often said, with such a vast area at which to aim it must be a miracle that neither bullet nor shell splinter had finished him off.

  Weisbach was quite another cup of ersatz coffee. He was slight, trim and dainty, with handsome aquiline features and close-cropped dark, curly hair brushed to a high, pomaded gloss. The only characteristic — apart from skill and bravery — he shared with Rudel was a gay disposition. He was full of jokes and laughter, although in the Teutonic tradition his sense of humour was puerile and his jesting coarse.

  The Hannover was a two-seater and these two pilots each flew with an observer.

  Rudel’s observer was a sergeant called Ehrler and Weisbach’s was Sergeant Seeckt.

  There was a reversal of roles in the Schlastas from those in the earlier two-seat squadrons. Whereas in the old days it was the observer who was in command of the aircraft and the pilot was often an N.C.O., nowadays the pilot commanded and most of the observers were non-commissioned officers.

  Ehrler, who flew with Rudel, was a morose ex-schoolmaster with prematurely greying hair and a greyish skin. He was hunched and ugly and hag-ridden. He had seduced and impregnated the young sister of one of his pupils, and she had become an unforgiving shrew since their enforced marriage. If there was one thing Ehrler hated and feared more than enemy fire, it was going home on leave.

  Weisbach’s cockpit companion, Seeckt, was considered by many to be the stupidest man in the German Air Force. He was the epitome of the vacuous, grinning oaf: a farmer’s son, nearly two metres tall and hefty with it, shaven-headed and pendulous-lipped. He had led a lonely existence in an area where the farms were large and far apart, and his amorous experience had been limited to sheep and a favourite young heifer; until he joined the Army and saw a large town for the first time. At that time he had been thinking of trying a sow, but his conscription introduced him to a preferable type of mate: although, as he said, at least the beasts didn’t cost him a pfennig, whereas these city tarts ... well ...

  *

  These men were sucked into the maelstrom of total war from their various corners of the earth and they pursued their sundry ways with no suspicion that their paths were destined to converge, that they were part of the great universal design.

  For some of them, the ultimate climactic confrontation which fate had ordained for all of them would result from chance, from caprice or from perversity. For others it would be the direct result of a wilful decision or a carefully meditated action, a matter of choice rather than accident.

  Two

  The first decisive change of direction in Codrington’s life occurred when he was seventeen.

  His father, a major in the Indian Army, was — it was virtually obligatory — a keen big game shot. Major and Mrs. Codrington — she was as good a shot as he — were on a tiger hunt one morning as guests of a rajah. Instead of sitting on a machan — a platform rigged in a tree — to lie up for a tiger tempted by the bait of a tethered buffalo, they were doing this in style from the back of an elephant.

  It was quite a perilous way of shooting tiger. The elephants moved through long grass and undergrowth while beaters drove the quarry from the jungle and out of a rocky gully where they liked to hide. This method of shikar enraged the tiger, who showed their displeasure by aggression.

  One of the tigers which the beaters put up broke in the path of the elephant on which the Codringtons were riding. The tiger appeared suddenly from the six-foot-tall grass, saw the elephant and charged. It leaped for the elephant’s back. Major Codrington had time only for a snap shot. His bullet wounded the tiger which, in falling back from its spring, clawed the elephant.

  The elephant bolted.

  Major Codrington pitched out of the howdah and the tiger decapitated him with one swipe of its paw and one great gnash of its fangs.

  The jerk with which the elephant burst into a run flung Mrs. Codrington off its back also. She landed under its hind feet and the elephant squelched her as flat as a soggy muffin trodden on by a policeman’s boot.

  Codrington had been sent home from India at the age of seven and had thenceforward become accustomed to seeing his parents only once in every four years. Nonetheless, in a detached sort of way, he was fond of them. This gruesome orphaning set him against the career in the Indian Army which he had intended: following in his father’s footsteps, just as Major Codrington had followed in his father’s. He wanted never to set eyes on India again.

  He was left enough money to see him through another year of school and then on to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, with something left over to supplement his Army pay.

  Codrington joined a cavalry regiment and looked forward to soldiering at home. The regiment was warned for a tour in India. This made Codrington unhappy. It was 1913 and the Royal Flying Corps had just been founded. Codrington applied to transfer to it. A pre-requisite was possession of a pilot’s licence. He took a week’s leave, attended the flying school at Brooklands, and, with four hours in his flying logbook, returned to his unit as a qualified aviator.

  His transformation from groundling to airman had been made easier by virtue of the fact that he was a horseman. And indeed a professional one. Any candidate for the R.F.C. who confessed that he did not ride was turned down. War Office was convinced that one needed hands to fly an aeroplane — mettlesome, unpredictable machines, just like horses — and that only equestrians possessed the essential lightness of touch.

  At the Central Flying School on Salisbury Plain Codrington found the Farman Shorthorn far more capricious and dangerous than even the most vicious horse he had ever ridden. But he survived the course and, by the time war was declared, had a hundred and ten hours to his credit.

  His squadron was equipped with the BE2, a flimsy little two-seater with a top speed of 65 m.p.h. and a ceiling of 10,000 ft.

  Flying one to France in August 1914 was the most dangerous experience of his twenty-one years. Not many pilots had crossed the English Channel by then and looking down at the choppy grey water made him queasy with anxiety lest he be forced to descend on it and drown before rescue arrived.

  In the event, that was not the most perilous part of his flight. A few miles inland over France his engine cut, afflicted by one of the many defects that did stop engines without warning in those days, and Codrington crashed.

  *

  The major commanding Codrington’s squadron was less than cordial when he arrived at his destination.

  The Commanding Officer was an infantryman, which gave him an inferiority complex when dealing with the cavalry, who all needed rather larger private incomes than the footsloggers. He had persuaded the selection board that he had the necessary hands because he had a rich wife who kept hunters and he was thus able to ride to hounds. He tended to persecute cavalry officers who came under his command; which gave
him ample scope, as most of his pilots were what he called “donkey-wallopers”.

  “So you’ve finally condethended to join uth, Codrington.”

  “Sorry for the delay, sir.”

  “Out of twelve aeroplaneth, thikth crathed within five mileth of the French coatht and you and two otherth crathed again. In fact I believe you crathed three timeth?”

  “I theem ... seem to have rather a perverse machine, Major.”

  “If I could thpare you I’d thend you on an engine courthe, to learn how to treat your engine with more rethpect. But I need every pilot I can muthter.”

  Codrington had twice as many flying hours as his C.O., which rankled.

  Held up by two engine failures and one violent sudden storm between Calais and his destination near the Belgian frontier, Codrington had acquired cracked ribs, a sprained wrist and concussion, which had further delayed him: and earned him the nickname “Crasher”.

  “Crather Codrington” as his C.O. scathingly referred to him.

  The result of his late arrival and injuries was that the squadron Medical Officer did not pass him fit for operations against the enemy until early the following month.

  He had flown from England without a passenger, his small kit in the observer’s cockpit. Pilots and observers were not permanently paired and Codrington tried whenever he went on patrol to take, in the front cockpit, a corporal named, appropriately, Grazier, who had grown up on a farm with a shotgun or rook rifle under his arm and, in the Army, developed into a first class marksman with the .303 Lee Enfield.

  With Corporal Grazier’s rifle and Codrington’s .45 revolver, they occasionally exchanged shots with passing German aeroplanes. They also exchanged salutations: a wave of the arm or a hand touching the helmet.

  The squadron’s work was entirely reconnaissance and Codrington had a fine view of the Battle of the Marne in September 1914. When he saw cavalry moving to the Front and, later, charging with lances lowered and sabres flashing in the sun, he was deeply stirred and felt a longing to be among them. When he saw the ground littered with dead French troops in their Eighteenth Century red and blue uniforms, and when he saw the British and Germans digging the long, parallel ditches that would ultimately be elaborated into trench systems stretching 350 miles across France to the Channel coast, he felt grateful to be flying five thousand feet above the battlefield.