Читать книгу: «Air Men o' War», страница 7
He flew on west, hardly for the moment daring to believe he had escaped, opening the throttle and starting to lift from his dangerous proximity to the ground mechanically, and with his mind hardly yet working properly. If he had not caught the Hun with that last handful of shots before his second gun jammed…
And then, almost before he had collected his wits enough to realise properly how close his escape had been, that same horrible clatter of machine-gun fire from the air above and behind him broke out, the same hiss and snap of bullets came streaming about him. For a moment he had a wild idea that his Hun had not actually crashed, but a glance round showed that it was no longer the brilliant red machine, but another, and again a fighting scout.
Exactly the old performance started all over again, but this time without even that slender chance he had used so well before of catching his enemy with the fire of his top gun. Again he went through the twisting and dodging and turning to avoid his relentless enemy and the fire that crackled about him. Again he dived into fields, skimmed the ground, hurdled over low bushes and hedges, used every flying trick and artifice he knew, but had never before dared try at less than thousands of feet height, to shake off his pursuer; and again as he flew he wriggled and worked at the jammed gun in front of him. For breathless minutes he worked, casting quick glances from the ground rushing under him to the gun mechanism, jockeying his machine with steady pressures or sharp kicks on the rudder-bar and one hand on the joy-stick, while the other fumbled and worked at the gun, and the bullets sang and cracked about him. By all the laws of chance, by all the rules of hazard, he should have been killed, shot down or driven down into a crash, a dozen times over in those few minutes; just as by all the limits of possibility he could never hope to clear a jammed gun while doing fancy flying at such a height. But against all chance and hazard and possibility – as pilots do oftener than most people outside themselves know – he flew on untouched, and … cleared his jamb. By now he was worked up to such a pitch of fear, frenzy, desperation, anger – it may have been any of them, it may have been something of all – that he took no further thought of manœuvring or tactics, whirled blindly and drove straight at his enemy, firing as he went, feeling a savage joy in the jar and bang of his spurting gun. To avoid that desperate rush and the streaming bullets, the Hun swerved wide and swooped out in a banking turn, a turn so hurriedly and blindly taken that, before he could properly see, he found himself whirling into the edge of a forest the chase had unwittingly skirted. Ailie saw him distinctly try to wrench round to clear the trees – but he was too near; to hoick up and over them – but he was too low. He crashed sideways on a tree-trunk, down headlong into the ground.
Again Ailie swung and flew straight towards the sun, switching on to the emergency tank, because by now his main petrol tank was almost empty. He continued to fly low and no more than 100 or 200 feet off the ground. At his speed it would take a good shot to hit him from the ground; higher up he would run more risk of Archie fire and of meeting Huns, and – this perhaps was the main determining factor, because by now he was almost exhausted with the fatigue of severe and prolonged strain – flying low would bring him quicker to the lines and safety.
One might have supposed that by now the grim gods of War had had sport enough of him. But he was not yet free of them. Within a mile he was attacked again, and this time by three hostile scout fighters. He made no attempt to dodge or out-manœuvre them. His cartridges were almost finished, his machine was badly shot about, his petrol was running out. He opened his engine out to its fullest and drove hard and headlong for the lines and the drifting smoke and winking fires that told of an artillery barrage. Close to the barrage he had to swerve and dodge a moment, because one of the Huns was fairly on top of him and hailing lead on him, but next instant he plunged at, into and through the barrage, his machine rocking and pitching and rolling in the turmoil of shell-torn air, his eyes blinded by the drifting smoke, his ears stunned by the rending crashes and cracks of the drum-fare explosions. He won through safely and alone, for his three enemies balked at facing that puffing, spurting, fire-winking inferno, turned back and left him.
Ailie, hardly daring to believe that he was actually clear and safe and free, steered for home. He skimmed his bullet-torn machine over the trenches, a machine holed and ripped and torn and cut with armour-piercing and explosive bullets, his guns jammed, his ammunition expended, his petrol at its last pints, he himself at almost the last point of exhaustion, dizzy from excitement, weak and faint from sheer strain.
Yet this was the man and the moment that those infantry in the trenches jeered, looking up as he passed over, his ripped fabric fluttering, his shot-through wires whipping and trailing, blessing the wildest luck that had left him alive, heart-thankful for the sight of khaki in the trenches below him.
It seems a pity those disgusted infantry could not have known the truth, of all he had come through, of those long danger-packed minutes, of those three crashed Huns scattered along his track – and of those bombs which would not drop on our lines, batteries, or billets that day.
X
THE FO-FUM'S REPUTATION
I am naturally anxious to avoid angering the Censor by naming any particular type or make of machine, but fear it is inevitable that anyone who knows anything of aeroplanes must recognise in reading this story the type concerned, although that may hardly matter, since the Hun knows the type well (and to his sorrow), and the tale more fully in the exact detail of his casualties than we do. And because this type, which we may call the "Fo-Fum 2," has for a full year previous to the date of this story's happenings been openly scoffed at and condemned in speech and print by the "experts" as slow, clumsy, obsolete, and generally useless, I also fear I may be accused of "leg-pulling" and impossibly romancing in crediting the Fo-Fums with such a startling fight performance. I may warn such critics in advance, however, that I can produce official records to prove a dozen shows almost or quite equally good to the credit of the Fo-Fums.
A Flight of six Fo-Fums went up and over Hunland one morning when a westerly wind and a strong hint of dirty weather in the air made it an abnormally risky patrol for anything but the best of pilots and the most reliable of machines and engines. But the Fo-Fums, whatever their other faults, have at least the admitted merit of reliability, and the quality of the pilots on this patrol is fairly shown by this story.
They were well over the lines and about 10,000 feet up when a circus of about twenty Huns hove in sight well above them. The Flight Leader saw them and, climbing a little as they went, he led the formation towards the hostiles, or, as he put it, "beetled off to have a look at 'em." The Huns evidently saw the Fo-Fums at the same time, and with natural willingness to indulge in a scrap with odds of more than three to one in their favour swooped up, "coming like stink," to quote the Flight Leader again, to the attack.
The Fo-Fums knew how the ball would almost certainly open under the circumstances – twenty Hun scouts with the advantage of superior speed, height and weather gauge, against six Fo-Fums – and quietly slid into a formation they had more than once proved useful in similar conditions.
The Huns, seeing no other enemies near enough to interfere, circled above, collected their formation into shape, and made their leisurely dispositions for the attack, while the Fo-Fums no less leisurely straightened out their wedge-shaped formation, swung the head of the line in a circle, which brought the leader round until he was following the last machine of the Flight, and so commenced a steady circling or – one can hardly refrain from quoting that expressive Flight Leader – "chasing each other's tails in a blessed ring-o'-roses giddy-go-round." The Huns drove up into a position which brought them between the Fo-Fums and the sun, thereby, of course, gaining the additional advantage of being able to aim and shoot with the sun in their backs while the Fo-Fums had the light in their eyes.
The Fo-Fum men were not greatly disturbed by this, for several reasons, because they were used to conceding the advantage in beginning a fight, because knowing the Huns had the wings of them it was no use trying to avoid it, and because they were contentedly sure that there were so many beastly Huns there they couldn't all keep "in the sun" and that each man would easily find a target sufficiently out of it. They continued their "giddy-go-round," and a dozen of the Huns at top speed, with engines full out and machine-guns rattling and ripping out a storm of tracer bullets in streaking pencil-lines of flame and blue smoke, came hurtling down like live thunderbolts. The sight alone might well have been a terrifying one to the Fo-Fum men, and the sharp, whip-like smacks and cracks about them of the explosive bullets which began to find their mark on fabric or frame would also have been upsetting to any but the steadiest nerves.
But the Fo-Fums showed not the slightest sign of panicky nerves. They held their fire until the diving Huns were within reasonable shoot-to-hit range, and met them with a sharp burst of fire from observers' or pilots' guns as the position of each machine in the circle gave a field of fire ahead or anywhere in a full half-circle round to port, stern, or starboard.
It may help matters to explain here – and again it tells nothing to the Hun that he doesn't already know well and to his sorrow – that the fighting Fo-Fum mounts three machine-guns – one, which the pilot handles, shooting ahead; another which the observer, sitting in front of the pilot and to the side of the pilot's gun, shoots anywhere outward in a half-circle round the bow and in any forward direction down or up; and a third placed on the top plane, which the observer also shoots by jumping up from his bow gun, standing almost man-high clear of the "gun'l" of the machine's body, and aiming up or level outward to either side and astern.
In meeting the attacking dive the observers stood up to their top guns, and if their position in the Flight's circle allowed them to bring their gun to bear on an enemy, they opened fire. If the machine was full bow on to the rush the pilot fired; or if she was in such a position that he could not see a target sufficiently ahead, or the observer see sufficiently to the side, he dodged the machine in or out of the circle enough to bring one of the guns to bear, and then wheeled her back into position.
These tactics may sound complicated, but really are – so the Fo-Fums say – beautifully simple when you know them and are used to them. What they amount to is merely the fact that all six machines were able to open fire within a second or two of one another, and that in some cases the pilot was able to get in a second burst from his bow gun by dipping his nose down after a hostile as she plunged past.
That they were effective tactics was promptly demonstrated to the Huns by one of their machines bursting into flames, another rolling over sideways and "dead-leafing" down in a series of side-to-side slips which ended in a crash on the ground below, and by another continuing his dive well down, changing it into a long glide to the eastward and out of the fight, evidently with machine or pilot out of action. Several of the Fo-Fums had bullet-holes in their machines, but nothing vital was touched, and they had just time to connect up nicely into their compact circle when the remainder of the Huns came tearing down on them in similar terrifying fashion.
But the Fo-Fums met them in their similar fashion, and when the Huns, instead of diving past and down as the first lot had done, curved up in an abrupt zoom, the observers swung their gun-muzzles up after them and pelted them out of range. One Hun lost control just on the point of his upward zoom, flung headlong out until he stalled and fell out of the fight for good. From the fact that his gun continued to fire at nothing until he was lost to notice it was evident either that his gear was damaged or the pilot hit and unconsciously gripping or hanging to the trigger or firing mechanism. A fourth Hun at the top of his zoom up lurched suddenly, fell away in a spinning nose dive, and also vanished from the proceedings – whether "crashed" or merely "out of control" was never known.
In a fight against this sort of odds, which our pilots so often have, the need of keeping an eye on active enemies rather than on the subsequent interesting fashion of an out-of-control's finish certainly reduces our air men's score a good deal, since it is the rule only to claim and record officially as a "crash" a machine which is actually seen (and confirmed) to have smashed on the ground, to have broken in air, or otherwise have made a sure and positive finish. Five Huns down and definitely out of action was a good beginning to the fight, especially as no Fo-Fum was damaged, and the odds were now reduced to fifteen against six – quite, according to the Fo-Fums, usual and reasonably sporting odds.
But the odds were to lengthen to such an extent that even the seasoned and daring fighters of No. Umpty Squadron began to look grave and feel concerned. Two Flights came looming up rapidly from eastward, and, occupied as the Fo-Fums were with the first brush, the new enemies were upon them almost the instant the second rush on them finished – before, in fact, the first Huns shot down and hit the ground. The newcomers converged on the fight and dashed straight at the Fo-Fum circle without a pause. There were twelve of them in one lot and eight in the other, and that, added to the twenty the Fo-Fums had counted at the beginning of the fight, made a total of forty machines against their six.
After this the tale of the fight can no longer be told as a whole. It developed into a series of rushes and dives on the part of the enemy in large or small numbers, swift leaps and turns and twists, and plunges and checks, repeated hot attacks and attempts by the Huns to break the Fo-Fums' steady circle, determined and fairly successful efforts of the Fo-Fums to foil the attempts. For long minute after minute the fight swayed and scattered, flung apart, out and down and up, climbed and fell and closed in again to point-blank quarters. It ran raging on and on in a constant fierce rattle and roll of machine-gun fire, a falling out, one fashion or another, of Hun after Hun, in occasional desperate fights of single Fo-Fums forced out of the circle and battling to return to it.
Some of these single-handed combats against odds are worthy subjects for an air saga, each to its individual self. There was, for instance, the Fo-Fum which was forced out of the circle, cut off, and fought a lone-hand battle against eleven enemies. The observer stood and shot over his top plane at one Hun who tried to cover himself behind the tail of the Fo-Fum. The pilot at the same instant was lifting the nose a little to bring his gun to bear on another Hun diving on him from ahead, and this sinking of the Fo-Fum's stern gave the observer a chance. He filled it with a quick burst from his machine-gun, and filled the Hun so effectively full of bullets that his nose dropped and he swooped under the Fo-Fum. The observer jumped down to his bow gun, swung the muzzle down, and caught the Hun passing under with a burst which finished him and sent him whirling down out of control.
The pilot's shooting at the same time was equally effective. The Hun who had dived on his right front was met by a quick turn which brought the bow gun to bear and a short burst of fire. The Hun continued to dive past and under, and both pilot and observer caught a flashing but clear-imprinted picture of the Hun pilot collapsed in a heap on his seat before he also fell helplessly rolling and spinning down out of the fight.
The observer, dropping his forward gun as he saw his shooting effective, scrambled quickly up to his top gun and was just in time to open on another Hun not more than twenty feet away and with his gun going "nineteen to the dozen, and rapping bullets all over the old bus till she's as full of holes as a Gruyère cheese," as the observer said. He only fired about a dozen rounds – the fight by now had been running long enough and hot enough to make economy of ammunition a consideration – but some of the dozen got home and sent another Hun plunging down and out.
The observer just lifted his eyes from watching the "late lamented" and trying to decide whether he was "outed" or "playing dead," in time to catch a glimpse of a black cross streaking past astern of him. He glued his eyes to the sights, jerked his muzzle round after the fresh enemy, and just as he swung in a steep bank "slapped a hatful of lead into him" and saw a strip of the hostile's cowling rip and lift and beat flailing back against the struts until the enemy shut off engine and glided out.
The pilot's gun was clattering again, and the observer, seeing all clear behind him, turned and half jumped, half fell, down into his cockpit as the Fo-Fum lay over on her beam-ends in a bank that brought her almost sheer on her wing-tip. He was just in time to see the pilot's fresh victim fall out of control, and dropping the bow gun he had grabbed he hoisted himself to his top gun again.
It sounds a little thing when one speaks of all this jumping down and scrambling up from one gun to another, but it is worth pausing to consider just what it means. The place the observer had to jump from at his top gun was about as scanty and precarious as a canary bird's perch; the space he had to jump or fall down into was little bigger than a respectable hip-bath; the floor and footholds on which he did these gymnastics were heaving, pitching, and tossing, tilting to and fro at anything between level, a slope as steep as a sharp-angled roof, and steeper still to near the perpendicular.
And all the time the machine which carried out the acrobatic performance was travelling at the speed of a record-breaking express train, and if the performer mis-jumped or over-reached the enclosing sides of his cockpit, sides little more than knee-high as he stood on the floor, not ankle-high as he stood at the top gun, he had a clear eight to ten thousand feet, a good mile and quarter, to fall before he hit the ground. And this particular Fo-Fum stood on her head or her tail, on one wing-tip or the other, dived and dodged, twisted and turned and wriggled and fought her way through, over, under, and about her eleven opponents, putting four well down and a fifth damaged in the process, and picked up her place in the shifting, breaking, and ragged, but always reforming, circle.
The fight flared on for full forty minutes, and still at the end of that time the Fo-Fums were all afloat and able to make home and a good landing, although some were so shot about and damaged that it was only by a marvel of piloting skill they were kept going – and, let it be added, as their crews never failed to add, because they were stout buses well and honestly built of good material by skilled and careful hands, driven by engines that were a credit to the shops they came from and would "keep running as strong as a railway locomotive, into Hell and out the other side, s'long's you fed oil and petrol to 'em."
One machine had the oil tank shot through, and yet the engine ran long enough without "seizing up" (melting the dry metal by friction to sticking point) to get home. There were other mechanical miracles – too technical for explanation here – that the pilots tell of with wonder and admiration, although they say little, or at most or no more than a mild "good man" or "sporting effort" of the equal or greater miracle of men enduring and keeping their wits and stout hearts, and carrying on, whole or wounded as some were – one observer to his death soon after landing – for that forty minutes' savage fight against odds. Full forty minutes, and at the end of that time there were only some score Huns left in the fight: and in the finish it was they who broke off the action, and slid out and away down wind.
"Y'see," as the Flight Leader said after when he was asked why he didn't pull out or battle his way out and home, "Y'see, the old Fo-Fums are pretty well known on this slice of front, and they've got a reputation for never chucking a scrap. I'd have hated to come plungin' home with a crowd of Huns hare-in' after us. The line 'ud think we'd been runnin' away from a scrap; and I wouldn't like my Flight to be letting down the old Fo-Fums' reputation like that."
Most people will admit that the Flight didn't let it down. There are even a good many who think it added a good-sized gilt-edged leaf to the Fo-Fums' and the Umpty Squadron's plentiful laurels.
