Like Father Like Son Ch. 02

So Phillip dressed and, leaving, he found he had left a little piece of his heart with Anne Marie.

*******************************

Back at Bertangles, the squadron was kept busy learning the new techniques of the ‘Contact Patrol.’ As preparations for the planned great new offensive gathered pace, they spent each available day in the air. Photographic sorties doubled and then quadrupled as Head Quarters demanded more and more maps and more and more reconnaissance missions. The German air force seemed subdued at this time and enemy aircraft seldom troubled them. Only the infamous ‘archie’ was a threat. Even so casualties on the squadron were light and morale was high.

On the days they were not out over the front, they were practicing new techniques of communication with ground forces. The plan was that the RFC could act as the ‘eyes’ of the battlefield commanders. Flying low over the lines, they would identify the positions of the troops on the ground. The troops were equipped with coloured flares and a signalling device that was like a large round Venetian blind. Shutters could be operated to show either black or white to a circling aircraft, allowing Morse signals to be flashed skywards. Messages would then be dropped on a white sheet at the appropriate headquarters. The airmen were given weighted message bags with streamers attached for this purpose.

The two aircraft with wireless equipment were much in demand for artillery spotting. Vast numbers of batteries were moved up behind the front under cover of darkness and put in camouflaged emplacements. One or two ranging shots would be fired and the RE8’s were on hand to report the fall of shot by Morse to the batteries. Phillip and Peter Riley flew sortie after sortie. Each night they collapsed on their beds utterly exhausted but rose each dawn to repeat the process.

Then, towards the end of June, the greatest preparatory bombardment the world has ever seen began. Phillip and Pinky Harris were flying at ten thousand feet over the lines. The noise was indescribable, drowning out even the rattling roar of their engine. It was impossible to make out individual explosions. The whole fourteen-mile front was leaping and shuddering under the impact of a million shells. They stared in disbelief at what they saw. Phillip swore he could hear the earth groaning under the assault. A haze of pulverised chalk hung over the German trenches to a height of two thousand feet and the air was redolent with the smell of damp soil even at the altitude they flew.

Just then, he caught something out of the corner of his eye. A black dot appeared for a second and then vanished. He blinked and looked away, convinced he was imagining things. Then he saw it again. He realised with horror that he was seeing the howitzer shells at the top of their trajectory. He and Pinky were flying through the bombardment! Once he had the trick, he could pick up a shell just as it reached its zenith and then follow its tumbling plunge to burst in the madness below. Once, their aircraft was rocked by some giant unseen hand. A shell had passed within six feet of them and they had experienced the disturbance created by its passage.

Day after day the guns thundered on. The bombardment could be heard in far-away England. The area behind the British front line was packed with troops, wagons, limbers, horses, ammunition dumps and the grimmer reminders of huge new canvas hospitals. The weather turned wet and the assault was postponed for three days and still the guns roared on.

On the morning of the 1st July, Phillip and Pinky were aloft over the Fricourt salient. The guns had risen to a new pitch of fury and the shock waves reverberated through the air like rolling thunder. Just when it seemed that the climax had been reached, two huge mines were detonated under the German positions. They watched awestruck as the earth beneath them opened up. Thousands of tons of TNT had been packed into the end of two deep tunnels dug out under no-man’s-land. The mines were set off to signal the start of the attack.

It looked to Phillip like a huge earthen tree had suddenly sprouted. It grew and rose towards them. Pinky Harris turned the plane away from the explosion so Phillip was afforded the amazing sight of thousands of tons of earth hurtling skywards to a height of ten thousand feet before slowly collapsing back onto what remained of the shattered defences, leaving a huge white crater. It was as if Earth’s bones had been exposed where the fierce explosion had flensed her mantle of flesh. The RE8 was whirled upwards by the spreading blast and threatened to come apart as it was tossed like a leaf in a storm. Shaken, they flew home.

Later that day they flew their first ‘Contact Patrols’ with little success. Despite all the practice before the attack, the infantry were reluctant to fire their signal flares, as doing so would provoke a storm of German artillery on their revealed positions. It was apparent that the attack had not succeeded everywhere. The fortified village of Fricourt still stood. Its garrison had endured the storm of steel hidden in deep concrete bunkers; the mine designed to destroy this position had been dug too short and left the position untouched.

Flying low over the battlefield, Phillip could see silent lines of khaki bundles lying where the machine guns had caught them. It brought to mind his own experiences at Loos and sadness mixed with a burning anger stabbed at him. Yet again, it seemed, the plans had been over optimistic. Tears prickled his eyes and he wept for the wastefulness of it all, for the carnage and the horror and the terrible, all-consuming fear.

The battle rumbled on, a mad Moloch with an insatiable appetite for yet more death, more bodies. One morning Phillip was up on an artillery-spotting sortie when he saw a yellowish fog begin to form along the line and creep out across no-mans-land. He realised with horror that he was witnessing a gas attack and he was moved by the terrible pain of pity. Pity for the Germans who would soon be coughing their lives away as their lungs melted and corroded; Pity for the British gas platoons who had to release such a fearsome, inhuman weapon and, most of all, pity for humanity that could find no better way to settle their differences.

By the 15th July, it was clear that the plan had failed. The British Line had pushed forward a couple of miles in places but there was no sign of the heralded break-through. The cavalry still waited, impotent and frustrated, to rush through a now-mythical gap and begin the process of rolling up the enemy rear. It wasn’t going to happen. Not this year. The War would roll on unabated. It was that morning that Phillip awoke with stinging eyes. He tried bathing them but he could see from the reddened image that stared back from his mirror that there was something wrong. He reported sick and the doctor diagnosed conjunctivitis.

“You’ll be ‘napoo’ for at least two weeks, old son. I’m sending you home on sick-leave, no use moping here!”

So off he went to catch the leave boat to Folkestone. He waved an envious Peter goodbye, stopped off to tell Pinky Harris and scrounged a lift in an old BE2 that was being ferried back to the depot at St Omer to be broken up. By that evening he was in London and luxuriating in a bath prior to arranging a slap-up dinner and enjoying his first night in a proper bed for over three months. Since the beginning of April he had flown over one hundred and twenty sorties. His promotion to Lieutenant had been gazetted and he had two glorious weeks at home ahead of him – what more could a man want?