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  By the time that the last detail had landed and they were all gathered in the mess, Thorwald had achieved his objective. He knew something about the capabilities of each man who had not previously been known to him. Tomorrow would be time enough to talk to them individually and discuss the aspects of their flying that needed improvement. Meeting the girl of whom Schellman had spoken would have to wait until tomorrow, too.

  ***

  She was graceful, lithe and fair. She was what, in her own language, which by now Thorwald spoke well, was called petite. The poor wartime diet of a defeated race whose victors seized most of its country’s food products for export to the Fatherland had begun to mark her with a certain lack of lustre about her hair and a sallowness in her cheeks: but natural vivacity and cosmetics made some amends. Deprivation of vitamins had not changed the shapeliness of her legs, the neatness of her hands and feet, the generosity of her mouth or the pertness of her breasts.

  Whatever her momentary facial expression, mischief clearly lurked close beneath the surface. A lively and courageous spirit, with a sharp sense of humour, gave her an air of independence. A young woman in her early twenties needed courage, resilience and the determination to make her own decision in personal matters, in occupied France. She was not a traitor, she was a realist. She had been disillusioned by her country’s politicians since long before the war, indoctrinated by her dissatisfied parents and disaffected elder brothers. She was as much a product of her time as any young and active member of the Resistance, and for the present the climate of the new times favoured her while it threatened them.

  Even in the noisy, crowded place where they first met, Thorwald perceived her independent attitude, her honesty and her paradoxical demure boldness. He did not fail to notice her sexual attractions either. The thumping dance band, the clattering of cutlery and crockery, the laughter did not fog his perceptions or numb his erotic responses.

  There were half a dozen other girls with her; not enough to go round the entire Staffel pilot strength, but enough to provoke a healthy rivalry for their favours: except that Schellman had his own regular girl and it was clear that the little blonde Lucienne was for the C.O. That made the competition even tighter.

  Whose had she been before I happened along? Thorwald wondered. He had not asked and Schellman would not have said. It mattered not a jot. He had learned not to be concerned about the past; and only in the very immediate future. There were no convincing long-term prospects for anyone in his profession. He swaggered a trifle as Schellman made the informal introduction. Juergen Thorwald: not merely hero of the Fatherland and terror of the foe, but dispenser of social harmony, goodwill between the French and great German nations; virtuous harbinger, even, of the peace that every sane human being longed for: if only the stubborn British would admit that their continued resistance was a mere postponement of inevitable defeat.

  But it was not by any means resistance alone, it was mounting aggression. And now the Americans were in it. Not a threat to daunt the long-experienced Luftwaffe, Thorwald sneered; but a nuisance none the less, from sheer numbers. All the more for me ... for us ... to shoot down, then. The “me” came first: self-esteem intruded always, despite his devout belief in his Service, his country, his Fuehrer.

  Thorwald was gay with the immediate high voltage charge that came from the amused and slightly mocking, challenging and at the same time consenting, message of her eyes and the glee therein that was tinged with a certain brand of malice. It was one that he knew well. It said “Yes, you can have me ... eventually ... quite soon, perhaps. But on my terms and subject to no obligations ... and I’ll always be to some extent in charge ... never forget the literal meaning of “mistress”, my friend. Her touch stimulated another electrical tingle of excitement.

  “What do you do?”

  “I am employed in the town hall.”

  “You live with your family?”

  “Yes; but I am of age.” Her eyes twinkled. “If I am not home before the curfew, they are not alarmed.”

  “You have brothers?” (And have they been hauled off to be slave labourers in the Fatherland?) “Sisters?”

  “Two brothers. Both were second lieutenants in the infantry: neither of them has ever flirted with so-called liberal ideas. One is in Vichy, in the Government offices. The other is in Rome: he is a French Fascist Party liaison officer.”

  “Your family evidently has the right attitude to the realities of life and the future of Europe.”

  “Of the world, surely?” She said it with a shrug and a smile that left him to make his own interpretation.

  He could not be certain whether she was teasing him, mildly ridiculing perhaps, or being cynical.

  His face lost its look of tolerance and sexual interest, his voice turned a little cold. “I am not sure what you are implying, Mademoiselle.”

  “Simply, mon lieutenant ... mon cher lieutenant ... that when Germany and its allies win the war, National Socialism ... Nazism ... Facism, will dominate the world; not Communism.”

  With Moscow and Stalingrad apparently about to fall, it seemed a likely prophesy, a good bet, a sure finale to the years of fighting: even if many more must still lie ahead.

  “I like you, Lucienne,” Thorwald said, smiling down on her. He took her by the hand. “We came here to dance, didn’t we; not to talk politics all evening?”

  She returned his smile and the pressure of his clasp. “I just wanted you to be in no doubt.”

  “Of what?”

  She settled her cheek against his chest - she was not tall enough to reach his cheek - and pressed closely between his slowly moving legs on the crowded floor. “Of everything.”

  “There’s no hurry, then.”

  “I didn’t say that. I like you, too, Juergen ... very much.”

  “What a shame you don’t live alone. My quarters are barely comfortable.” He laughed quietly close to her ear. “The bed is hard and narrow.”

  “You’re welcome to come in, if you would be kind enough to see me home ... if we’re still here after curfew.”

  “But ... your people ...? Surely ...?”

  “We are not a conventional family, dear Juergen. Our minds are broad.” She chuckled up at him. “Like our beds, my dear.”

  Seven

  When Howard had returned from Norway and a week’s survivor’s leave, with his arm still in a sling, the gentleman farmer’s attractive blonde daughter had left home to join the W.A.A.F. It was a considerable disappointment. He had looked forward to her admiration for a wounded, or at least injured, hero.

  Someone else, whose departure he did not at all regret, was also missing. Wing Commander Northam had been posted to command another, just completed, fighter station in Essex. Monkston had become a group captain’s command and the new station commander was a welcome contrast with his predecessor. In his forties, with a fine record in the Great War, he was mildly spoken where Northam had been abrasive. He was avuncular, where Northam had behaved as though he were one of the most reprehensible characters in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. He had a leisurely manner, where Northam was overtly brisk.

  Northam had been a keen and exceptional pilot. The group captain, ten years older, flew even more frequently and with equal polish. “I’ve been flying a desk at Bentley Priory” (H. Q. Fighter Command) “for three years, lucky to get in a couple of hours a month on a training type or a Gladiator,” he said in his deprecating style. “I’m making up for lost time.” His flying did not give the impression that he was short of practice.

  Came the German invasion of Belgium, Holland and, soon after, France in May 1940: and the group captain’s personal Hurricane was seen almost every time one of the Monkston squadrons was airborne across the Channel. He did not impose his leadership in the air, but either flew ahead of a formation to try to sight the enemy for its leader, or astern to pick off any enemy aircraft the others had not shot down or driven off. He also observed the conduct of individual pilots with a closeness that their squad
ron commanders and immediate companions could not, being totally engaged in fighting. In early August, when large enemy formations of bombers heavily escorted by fighters appeared daily - weather permitting - over southern England, he assembled all his pilots in the conference room in Station H.Q.

  Although Howard had a clear conscience, what Group Captain Oakley had to say caused him a vicarious discomfiture that exceeded any embarrassment and, in a special way, fear, that he had ever felt before.

  Group Captain Oakley’s good-humoured, kindly expression was not on view. Although his voice was as quiet and unemphatic as usual, he looked as stern as a hanging judge.

  “I have noticed, when accompanying you on operations, a certain reluctance on the part of a very few of your number to make close contact with the enemy; or, when this is unavoidable, to show the tenacity in a fight that the Service expects of us all.

  “The guilty ones will know if they fall in either or both of these categories. I can assure them that I can identify them. My purpose in parading you now is to warn those people who are in the wrong occupation that I have never tolerated any shirking of duty. On any future occasion that I see anyone not wholeheartedly doing what he presumably joined the Royal Air Force to do, what he was trained to do, what his comrades rely on him to do, and what the survival of Britain demands that he must do ... I shall shoot him down myself.”

  There was a sickening quality about the ensuing silence. Howard, guiltless of cowardice, quaked with vicarious shame for those who must be inwardly convulsed with the knowledge of their disgrace.

  Group Captain Oakley said, before moving towards the door, “That would spare the humiliation of a court martial and cashiering or dismissal in ignominy; but I am confident, now that I have given fair warning, that I shall not have to do anything so drastic.” He paused. “If there is anyone who recognises that he has no stomach for a fighter pilot’s job, he need not hesitate to come and tell me so. Better to assess oneself, and, if found wanting, to be honest about it, than to maintain a pretence. In action, our lives are in one another’s hands. No squadron under my command is going to be endangered by the unreliability of any member.”

  The silence hung with a feeling of equal tension for a full minute after he had left the room. It was only then that the senior of the three squadron commanders made the first movement by rising and making wordlessly for the door.

  Howard, while despising the gutless, could understand why they were daunted. He did not despise, but felt pity for, those who had made a conscientious effort to keep their courage up and failed. Their behaviour was put in the same category as those who had been craven from the outset. The Service gave it the euphemism of “lack of moral fibre”: it meant cowardice. But there was a difference between those who were not brave enough to join battle and those who had done so too often and found their spirit broken by sheer tiredness and terror of a kind that many of those who condemned them had never had to face.

  It was all very well for a doctor, or a senior officer on the staff at Air Ministry, Command or Group Headquarters, or in command of a station, to carry out the action that King’s Regulations and Air Council Instructions laid down. But if he had not himself met the enemy in an air battle, he could not possibly conceive what it was like. Nobody who had not actually fought in a land or sea battle could really imagine what that was like either. No amount of literary description or filmed account, whether actual or fiction, could fully present it.

  If you had never been in a fight for your life against enemy gunfire, you could not by any means truly conjure up in your imagination the noise, the bewildering speed of events, the technicalities, the distortions of your senses and disorientation of all your points of reference; the way in which your weapons, your ship, tank or aircraft behaved. Firing a fighter’s guns when you were upside down or in a steeply banked turn, in a 400 m.p.h. dive or on a climb at the brink of a stall, was not like shooting at a towed target. Add the confusion, the din, the collision risk, the sight of aeroplanes all about you catching fire, exploding, falling from the sky; add the bullets and shells that were hurtling past you, some of them striking your wings, fuselage or engine: and you had a compendium of horrors that was enough to force the bravest, sanest man to turn his back on it and escape, or even drive him mad.

  Howard knew that no-one who had not endured these stresses was qualified to punish those who had and ultimately failed to cope with them.

  Restored to his own squadron after his detachment to another, he had only just been passed fit again for operations when the Battle of Britain began. The official period of that long battle was later decided to be from 10th July to 31st October 1940. He had barely tested himself again since Norway when Group Captain Oakley gave his solemn and chilly warning. He was grateful for it. Although he had no doubt of his own bravery, he admitted to himself that an air fight became no less frightening with the passage of time. In a way, the more often you were in combat the more fear preyed on you: because you saw more killing; and because you began to suspect that it was logical that the more times you fought, the less your prospects of survival became.

  On the contrary, however, he began to tell himself by the end of August, every battle that was added to his experience increased his skill and cunning: he flew better, his aim became surer and he learned more tricks. Once that idea took hold of him it was easier to push fear aside: and then came the danger of over confidence; but that was better than constant apprehension and the expectation that every combat must be the last.

  The moment when he broke the barrier between courage that overcame fear, and belief in his own superiority over his adversaries that banished fear – his confidence in his aircraft had always been total - came when the squadron had 48 hours’ respite from action to exchange its Hurricanes for Spitfires and familiarise itself with them. He flew a Spit into action for the first time on a clear sunny morning in mid-September when the whole squadron was scrambled to intercept a raid.

  “Bandits south-east of you, angels ten to twenty-five,” the controller in the Operations Room at Monkston told the squadron commander. “Lots of them.”

  This was before the days of G.C.I. stations, and the plots on the big table in the centre of the Ops Room, the general situation map, were at least two minutes out of date. In two minutes an enemy raid would move five or six miles. Sometimes the plots were even staler.

  “Message received and understood.” There was no “roger” (for R, meaning “received”) or wilco (meaning “I will comply with your instructions”) in 1940. Those terms were introduced late in 1942, after American fighter squadrons became operational in Britain and the R.A.F. adopted their terminology. “Message received and understood” and “O.K.” were both standard radio-telephone procedure until then. It was at the same time that the phonetic alphabet familiar from the Great War, “Ack, Beer, Cork, Don,” etc. became a confusing “Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog” and so on. And the strength of a wireless signal ceased to be graded from one to ten and changed to one to five.

  The controller’s “lots of them” looked to Howard, presently, like about sixty bombers and a couple of hundred fighters. There were twelve Spitfires in his formation, with twelve Hurricanes from the two Hurricane squadrons at Monkston, and he had heard before take-off that twenty-four Hurricanes from another station were also scrambling. Four or five to one against the Spits and Hurris were already familiar odds.

  Flying back to Monkston that day in May 1942 with Payne’s death fresh in his mind, Howard recalled how much easier it had been to spot the Me109s on that other day, in 1940, than it had been to spot the FW190s a short while ago.

  He remembered that particular interception of two years earlier because it was his first in a Spitfire and because it had been such a ferocious one. The enemy were stacked in clumps between ten and twenty-five thousand feet, and in such a way that there was not very much space between one main formation and another. Each small formation was stepped up from front to rear. The effect wa
s of a dense mass of great size. Certainly the size was great, by the standards of the day, but as the Spitfires and their enemies drew closer together, the latter began to look more penetrable.

  The scramble had come a little late, because the enemy had first launched a spoof raid and when this real one did appear on radar it was seen to change course. The Spitfires were climbing at maximum revolutions to reach the bombers before the Me109s could intervene. The sun was rather in the Germans’ favour, and they were already within a mile or two of the Kent coast.

  Howard, turning, momentarily had the sun in his eyes. When his vision cleared he saw a pair of 109s boring in on his right. He was leading a section of three. The leader of the German pair was at the same height and the Number Two was two hundred feet higher. Looking to his left he saw that another pair was coming in from that beam. His mirror showed two more of the enemy attacking from astern.

  “Break, Yellow Section.” He had barely given the order for each man to fight for himself, when the nearest 109 opened fire; directly at him, as he could see from its tracer.

  The Spitfire did not turn quite as tightly as a Hurricane, but its greater speed whipped him out of the 109’s cone of fire whereas his old Hurricane would probably have taken a few hits. In the hands of a good pilot, a Spitfire could turn well inside a 109: a feat which any Hurricane could perform comfortably. It was absurd to be dogmatic about radii of turn. Much depended on the condition of every individual aeroplane. A brand new one would perform better than an old one that had shaken a bit loose. Some aeroplanes, whether because of some factory worker’s ineptness or the inherent qualities of the particular batch of metal from which its airframe or engine had been built, left the factory with a performance inferior to the average.