The Eagle's Cry Read online

  A heavy weight slammed against his back as Critchley sprawled half over him and half out of the car. He was clutching his shoulder and blood spurted between his fingers.

  Butler gave a grunt and the clatter of his Breda stopped. Denton, thrown against the steering wheel, was winded. He took a deep breath, squirmed around and hauled Critchley up.

  “All right, Ian? Sergeant Butler, you O.K.?”

  They both grunted some incoherent reply. The Ghibli was coming in again. Butler, groaning with painful effort, swung the gun towards it and fired.

  Again tracer splashed against the cowling of the port engine.

  Without warning, a torrent of tracer fire ripped towards the Ghibli from four different directions: behind and to either side of them. The streams of coloured streaks coned onto the aeroplane and a red glow appeared around both its engines. It nosed down and hit the ground with a thump that made the scout car judder.

  There was no dramatic explosion or sheet of flame: only a crackling fire that spread rapidly and emitted dense, acrid smoke.

  Denton and his crew were dazed by the sudden and unexpected intervention. Before Denton could restart the engine a voice shouted “Arrendetesi! Surrender!”

  Both the Italian and English were spoken in an unmistakably English voice.

  Denton cupped his hands about his mouth. “We’re British ... why the hell d’you think the bloody Wops were shooting at us?”

  Headlights came on and four armoured cars in buff desert camouflage closed in on the scout car. They bore the red jerboa (desert rat) insignia of the 7th Armoured Division. Denton knew that the division’s armoured car regiment was the 11th Hussars.

  Men were jumping down from the armoured cars and approaching. The first to arrive was a foxy-faced, gingery captain.

  “Anyone hurt?”

  “We’ve all been hit.”

  Denton’s leg was beginning to throb. Critchley clutched his shoulder and grimaced with discomfort. Sergeant Butler was lying at the back, panting and moaning in the agony of his wounds. He had been hit in the side and the upper arm.

  Their rescuers worked deftly with disinfectants and dressings while the Hussar captain talked quietly to Denton.

  “What are you doing in an Italian scout car? When we saw an enemy plane shooting you up we thought you might be deserters coming over to us. We knew no other British patrols were out on this side of the wire.”

  Denton explained what had happened.

  The captain looked as impressed as a cavalry officer could permit himself to. “You’ve had rather a rough time, what?”

  “Good thing you came along. What are you doing here, anyway? Did we cross the frontier without knowing it?”

  “No, this is Libya. The frontier’s about five miles east. We’re on a recce behind the Italian lines. I’ll take you back to our leaguer and start out again.”

  “Sorry to hold you up. Can’t you send us back in one car while the others carry on?”

  “You’d be too uncomfortable and your sergeant’s losing a lot of blood as it is. We’ll put you in separate cars, for comfort. Anyway, I don’t want to carry on the recce understrength.”

  “Sorry to be a bore.” Denton’s wound was throbbing and he was becoming drowsy from lack of blood. His speech was slurred. “Won’t leave our trophy behind, will you? Need it, to shoot a line on the squadron.”

  “We’ll take it with us. Could come in useful.”

  Denton had a feeling he wouldn’t see the Italian scout car again. He didn’t begrudge it to the 11 th Hussars: God knew how they could have got through the wire without them. He abruptly lost interest in everything except getting back to Bir Sazara.

  Two

  While they were in hospital in Cairo, Denton and his crew heard that the bombing of El Adem and Tobruk was continuing, but the war in the Western Desert was making as slow a start as had the war in France nine months earlier. They felt that they were not missing much.

  The Regia Aeronautica, which had been full of bluster before Mussolini declared war, had not lived up to its threats. There had been an ineffectual raid on Sollum; and another on Mersa Matruh, where 12 Savoia Marchetti 79s managed to damage three trucks before some slow old Gladiator biplane fighters shooed them off. The Italian Air Force had also dropped some leaflets on various R.A.F. stations, which had caused only derision.

  It seemed that either the Italians were not going to launch an attack at all, or, if they did intend to, would wait until they had built up both their land and sea forces considerably. Denton told Critchley and Butler that they should all be back with the squadron before any real fighting started.

  They found being in Cairo, even in hospital, held a certain pleasure. It was a harlot city, materialistic and sly, but always fun. In Cairo one always felt that one was at the centre of events. The air pulsated with gossip, rumour and intrigue. It was a lively, galvanic place to be at that particular time.

  Irksome though Denton found it to be in hospital, it was amusing because of the many visitors who came to see them and other patients, bringing the latest news and scandal. There were also several attractive nurses, who were not only decorative but also a source of information and rumour. It was a civilian hospital and the whole crew was in one room. In a military hospital, Sergeant Butler would have been separated from the two officers.

  Denton had come to Egypt a year and ten months ago, as a pupil pilot at No. 4 Flying Training School, Abu Sueir. The East was already in his blood. He was born in India, where his father was in the Civil Service. His grandfather had served in the Indian Army. He was sent to boarding school in England at the age of seven, but retained clear memories of Delhi and Simla.

  When he was 15 his mother fell gravely ill. To provide her with a kinder climate and better medical attention than India offered, his father installed her in a house in Banstead. Thenceforth he would see his wife and son for six months every three years. An unusually strong attachment formed between Geoffrey Denton and his mother.

  His father had wanted Geoffrey to follow him to his own Oxford college, but when the boy reached 18 his mother was slowly dying and he chose to live at home and go daily by train to King’s College of London University, where he read French and German. When he came down with a good degree he joined a Surrey newspaper with the intention of working his way to Fleet Street as a foreign correspondent. At night school he learned Italian and Spanish.

  When he was 22, a year after leaving university, his mother died. His father, who was not due to retire for another five years, sold the house. He had already formed another attachment in India and announced his intention to remarry.

  Denton found the prospect of living in digs abhorrent. He was finding life on a small provincial paper irksome. It seemed obvious that Britain would soon have to go to war with the Nazis. His career would be interrupted, for he would certainly volunteer at once. It seemed good sense to make the change now and earn some seniority in one of the Services before thousands of others, volunteers and conscripts, came flooding in. The prospect of flying and of foreign travel appealed most, so he obtained a short service commission in the Royal Air Force in July 1938.

  The newspaper had just increased his wage from £4 a week to £5. As a pilot officer he would be paid £350 a year and after five years on the Active List would transfer to the Reserve with a bounty of £500. It was an attractive proposition: not least because of the good company and opportunity for sport that it offered.

  When he began training at the flying training school near the Suez Canal he found that pilotage was as pleasurable and satisfying as he had anticipated. He enjoyed every moment of it from his first dual sortie in a Tiger Moth. A year later he passed out with an assessment of “Average” and was delighted to be posted to a squadron at Heliopolis, on the outskirts of Cairo. The squadron was replacing its two-seater Hawker Hart biplanes with Blenheims, which had entered squadron service the previous year. With a top speed of 260 m.p.h., the Blenheim was faster than many fighters
. It had double the bomb load and two and a half times the range of the Hart.

  Ian Critchley was also a short service commission officer. He had joined six months after Denton, trained in England and come out to join the squadron in Egypt in April 1940. At that time there was no category of “navigator”. The term “observer” was still in use. Most observers were pilots who had done a long navigation course and flew as navigator and second pilot. Critchley was one of these.

  Denton had not thought much of Critchley at their first encounter. He looked at him, sitting up and playing patience in the adjacent hospital bed, and wished that he had learned to like him better. The fellow was too damn good-looking, a real Brylcream Boy: tall, broad-shouldered, with dark wavy hair and long eyelashes; swarthy, dark-eyed, with a loose mouth and flashing smile. His face was unusually mobile and reflected his moods. The better Denton knew him, the less natural Critchley’s expressions seemed; except for the extremes of pleasure and dejection, which Denton thought were genuine.

  He recalled their introduction to each other.

  “What were you doing before you joined the Service?”

  “I was an actor, old boy.” This statement was accompanied by a quirky grin and the lifting of an eyebrow, a touch of Errol Flynn or Ray Milland.

  He can’t have been making much of a living, Denton had thought, or he wouldn’t have wanted to swap a successful or promising stage career for the Mob.

  “Theatre?”

  “Well, no, actually. Apart from a year in rep, that is. Films, actually.”

  “Really?”

  Critchley had turned on his rueful look. “Mostly crowd work, actually. You know, extra.”

  “Did you like that better than being in rep?”

  A dashing grin came next. “I earned about the same but I got bags more crumpet. Marvellous variety, old boy. All the pretty girls want to be film stars and most of ’em have to start at the bottom as extras. My chums and I were poking night and day and never any need to bang the same bit of stuff twice.”

  “Did you go to a drama school?”

  “Rep’s the best training, old boy. Couldn’t stick it: marooned in some seedy provincial town for years. London’s the only place for me. Besides, every time you start something with some girl in the company, or in the town, they get so bloody intense. I used to get bored and it was a hell of a job shaking them off.”

  Denton had been reluctantly impressed. His own amorous adventures were nugatory in comparison: and Critchley was a whole year his junior. He had been initiated at 18 by a married friend of his mother’s, who seduced him in a fit of pique against her husband, whom she had caught out having an affair with his secretary. Denton’s liaison with her had lasted a month: until the secretary had been sent packing and her husband had had the biggest fright of his life.

  The experience had given Denton a taste for fornication which caused him many wakeful nights. His next escapade had been with a girl undergraduate at King’s. That had also ended on her initiative, with some humiliation. After a few weeks she had moved on to another fellow student and by the time she graduated she had acquired a reputation for such promiscuity that she was known throughout the college, and most of London University, as “The Rabbit”. He could hardly claim a conquest! There had been a solitary episode with a barmaid and another with a girl who worked in a shop which sold newspapers, tobacco and confectionery. Finally there had been a six-month relationship with a divorcee on the same newspaper.

  Denton had never been in love and he knew that none of the women with whom he had been to bed, or, in the instances of the barmaid and shop assistant, copulated in his Singer Nine sports car and cramped discomfort, had loved him. His first two partners had taken the initiative in starting and finishing their affairs. The next two had accepted his advances without passion and in return for several outings to restaurants and cinemas. The last had expressed genuine regret when he went off to the Air Force, but invited another young bachelor to move in with her a month later: as she took the pains to write and inform him.

  He had arrived in Egypt with a chip on his shoulder. He had a grudge against the Almighty, if there were one, or Fate, if that were the only influence over human affairs, for the long suffering his mother had endured and for her early death. He abhorred his father’s apparent callousness in turning so readily to another woman. He had never met his stepmother but he loathed and despised her. He resented sacrificing his place at Oxford, which he would have enjoyed much more than London and which would have launched him more prestigiously on a journalistic career. He felt bitterly unfulfilled by his love affairs.

  The extent and effect of his grievance against the way life had treated him was evident in his sports. In the summer he played water polo with a robustness that was conspicuous even in that rugged game. In the autumn and winter he boxed; and he was an exceedingly successful middleweight at school, university and in a leading club. He won more than half his fights on knockouts. He was aware that he was sublimating his many dissatisfactions in violence, for he was intelligent enough to have taken a first-class degree; and set about his opponents in the water or the ring with cold, deliberate passion. Since the declaration of war he had looked forward to directing the same intensity of feeling — he was loath to recognise it as mere venom — against the Germans. With the Italians’ entry into the fray he had set out on his first sortie with a kind of grim relish that he had never known before. He found it irksome to be in hospital when there were enemies out there waiting to be bombed and strafed. It was no satisfaction that so little was going on. If he had been uninjured, he would at least be taking part in whatever air operations were being flown.

  Before the war, most squadrons had few permanent crews. Observers, wireless operators and air gunners flew haphardly with different pilots according to the needs of each particular day. When the war started, home squadrons began to form regular crews around each aircraft captain. Overseas, the old ad hoc system continued for some time. Denton was never quite sure how he and Critchley had drifted together. Critchley had been detailed by their flight commander to fly with him on two successive days’ exercises and again a few days later.

  On this last occasion Critchley had given him a look from his extensive repertoire of facially registered emotions. He had also mimed brushing sweat from a worried brow.

  “Phew! Thank God for small mercies!” Denton could hear the exclamation marks.

  “What?”

  “Nearly peed in my pants a couple of days ago, flying with that clot.” Critchley had nodded towards a notoriously ham-handed sergeant pilot. “And yesterday, by God, with the C.O. I feel safe with you, old boy.”

  Denton had not felt as gratified as he might have by the compliment or flattery or whatever it was Critchley had intended. The sergeant pilot had scared most of the air crew on the squadron at sundry times. The commanding officer, Wing Commander Nash, awed the other pilots as well as unnerving them. He had been a famous high-speed pilot in the Schneider Trophy team and could do things with any type of aircraft which seemed, to others less gifted, to be almost indecent. Flying through a hangar with a bare few feet of clearance in each dimension was perhaps the least of his feats. The squadron still possessed one Hart and he had done just that on the day he took command. What was more, he had pulled up into a loop as he tore out of one end of the hangar, completed it and flown across the hangar floor again. The fact that he was not even sober when he did it had left an indelible impression on his fellow pilots. He had taken Critchley on a low-flying sortie during which the propeller tips had seemed never to be more than six inches from touching the ground or the water of the Bitter Lakes. Critchley said it had given him a glimpse of the hereafter that he had no wish to repeat.

  Wing Commander Teddie Nash had recently come from commanding a Whitley squadron in England and was the only member of his new squadron with any operational experience when Italy came in on Germany’s side.

  Denton was under• no illusions about C
ritchley’s attitude to him. He knew that Critchley regarded himself as God’s gift not only to women but also to aviation. Critchley made it plain that he thought navigation a waste of his ability as a pilot. Denton was in no doubt at all that Critchley considered himself the better pilot of the two of them. He probably was, Denton told himself. But he undoubtedly did not have the same amount of aggression; nobody on the squadron had, except the C.O. And he certainly did not have the same determination or stubbornness; as he would find out: and had, on their first operational sortie.

  Somehow, Squadron Leader Fry, their flight commander, had paired them off regularly: perhaps because he felt that their disparate natures would make them good partners. Denton had accepted Critchley as his navigator with the same self-reliant, self-contained indifference as he accepted all events. All he asked was that Critchley should be a good navigator.

  With Sergeant Butler, Denton’s association had been a matter of choice. Air gunnery before the war had not been a trade but a skill which tradesmen in various capacities could acquire if they wished. Some air gunners were armourers, others were wireless operators, technicians, or simply aircrafthands who were not tradesmen of any kind. If they volunteered, and passed the air crew medical, they went eventually, if lucky, on a short course at a gunnery school. Most of them picked up gunnery as and when the squadron could get hold of a target-towing aircraft and a target drogue. When qualified they wore a brass winged bullet on each sleeve and were paid an extra sixpence on each day they flew. With the war, they were embodied full-time and were also required to qualify as wireless operators. Wilfred Butler had joined as a wireless operator in the first place, at the age of 17. When, in December 1939, it was decreed that all non-commissioned aircrew would carry the rank of at least sergeant, he had gone overnight from aircraftman first class to senior N.C.O. and was still, six months later, somewhat self-conscious about membership of the sergeants’ mess: attainment of which had, such a short time ago, been many years distant.