Chapter Forty-One
Boom’s Eyes
“Are we having fun yet?” Boom’s eyes twinkled from across the desk.
The others were silent. Salmond had his arms crossed. Admiral Keyes sat straight up and rigid.
The others seemed more neutral.
“Trust me, I know what I’m doing.” I assured the crowd of bigwigs.
This time it wasn’t army generals, this time it was the Air Ministry and the Navy and the politicians.
“We plan to continue going after high-value targets, gentlemen.” I told the group. “This is the only proper way to run a war.”
It was preferable to bombing and strafing ground troops. There were millions of them, and quite honestly that’s what artillery is for. A big shell costs five pounds and if you put it in the right place it can kill a hundred men and a hundred horses.
“Who else could do it so well?” Murmured Keyes, who was angry about something.
“No deficit for the righteous.” He added somewhat obscurely.
Doddering old fool. He’s going senile. And the remark was more for the benefit of his colleagues.
“I don’t like this big funeral they gave him.” I patiently explained. “You should have let him rot in that field.”
“Why is that?” Barked Salmond.
Winnie glowered. He looked really pissed off. That’s the only way anyone ever got him to shut up.
“They’ve made some kind of symbol out of him.” I said. “I have my reasons. Don’t glorify him. There’s a million men missing, and what makes him so special? That was a mistake, to pay him any more attention than some old widow who starved to death. You shouldn’t have made a big fucking ceremony out of it.”
Boom.
“You have no respect.” Shot Winnie. “It’s not your concern.”
“Promise you won’t make a fucking symbol out of me, okay?” I glowered right back.
The bigger the target, the harder they fall. It’s good propaganda to shine it up a little.
Here they were, glorifying our enemy. For Christ’s sakes. Ah, but he was nobility—
He was just another pilot, in the final analysis.
But to glorify Manfred glorified us by reflection.
“I don’t give a fuck about your cartoon religion.” I told him reasonably enough.
I was getting sick of these guys.
Trying to break the ice, or thaw out the room a little, I joked. “Did you hear Mrs. O’Reilly hasn’t been feeling herself lately?”
“Oh, really?” Asked Keyes.
“No. O’Reilly.” I responded.
Trenchard was laughing into his cupped hand, faking a little cough, eyes glinting out of the middle of his strong-looking features. In spite of that dry little moustache he’s got, he’s not such a fuddy-duddy as compared to a couple of the others.
“I didn’t come here to be insulted.” Said Effingtass-Dinglebob-Plunkett.
“Sure you did.” I assured him. “You serve no other function.”
Everyone giggled except he and I. We just glared at each other.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen, you can’t fight in here.” Said the Adj. “I’m trying to make a long-distance call.”
He was busy over by the communications gear.
“This is the command tent, after all. We’re trying to fight a fuckin’ war, here.” He muttered away to himself.
“I don’t like to be a piece of meat.” I told Winnie. “Make it look wounded and wiggle it around.”
He flushed at that.
“The mission is not over.” Trenchard reassured us.
What’s the difference? Because it didn’t feel the same anymore. The last couple of days were something of a let-down. Really anticlimactic. Maybe this time we’re the ones who need a spark to the old morale.
“When a wolf kills an elk, it feeds a dozen other species.” I told Winnie.
“What do you mean, Tucker?” Winnie asked in spite of his anger.
Gotcha, motherfucker.
“He feeds the crows, the foxes, the worms and the vultures.”
The lisping little bugger looked like he was going to have a heart attack, but Boom raised a palm and I let him calm me down, in order that he might demonstrate authority over me. I’ve been reading some psychology books. Do I have regrets? Yes and no.
“We are the damned, to be accursed with what we must do.”
Who the hell was that? One of the anonymous aides-de-camp.
“To follow through on what we have started, out of a sense of duty, or maybe it is some mistaken, forlorn way of accepting responsibility.” He concluded dramatically.
Or guilt, maybe. A kind of shame we cannot acknowledge. All we could do was to share it silently, or better yet, quietly.
“Count your blessings.” Said Howard-Smythe. “Something wonderful is going to happen.”
He looked at me absolutely deadpan.
Good one. I owe you, buddy.
“…and it was a nasty, filthy habit she had, too.” He added.
“Who did? Who did?” quavered Keyes. “Frankly, you lost me somewhere, old boy.”
That’s one down.
“Mrs. O’Reilly.” I said in a being-patient-to-the-old-folks-voice. “You remember.”
“So you put an interrupter on the 504?” Muttered Boom in annoyance. “That’s a waste of time”
“I don’t honestly…” Give a fuck what you think.
Sir. He can be a little intimidating. When he tries, and turns on them blazing eyes.
“So you plan to continue the mission.” Effingtass-Dinglebob-Plunkett brought us back to the discussion. “But you won’t listen to us, you don’t take orders from anyone, and you want to write your own ticket?”
“That pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it?” Muttered Trenchard.
“You catch on fast.” I told Sir Effingtass-et cetera. “Perhaps you’re not as stupid as you make yourself out to be.”
His face reddened, as he snarled, “I am so very happy that I don’t have your nerve in my tooth.”
He said this with some heat. Huh. Nice one. I have to admit I was impressed, as we held each other’s eye for a half a mo’.
Buddy, when it comes to dirty cracks, you’ve got them all licked.
I kept that one to myself, but I’m sure he got the gist of my thinking.
He’s probably everything he pretends to be.
A pair of aircraft roared overhead, very low.
With a little advance notice, we had made some arrangements. It was truly annoying after a while. Any kind of an edge, when dealing with the intelligentsia. At least two of them were gritting their teeth as we waited for relative peace and quiet to return.
“By the way, the high-altitude experiments are going well.” Put in the Adj. “And the anti-gravity results are very interesting.”
“Oh, really?” Noted Boom. “What are we talking about?”
“Normally a person of average health, totally unprepared, would black out at about five and a half times the force of gravity,” I told Trenchard. “We can regularly get six and seven out of our planes, if only briefly. Maybe even more, but it doesn’t last long.”
Boom was clearly wanting more data.
“We bleed off speed in a turn, so we really haven’t gotten much farther than that.” I explained. “Our instruments aren’t very accurate either, but it’s food for thought.”
We hadn’t attempted any power dives and pull-outs yet, I reported, grateful for a bit of a smokescreen.
“We have requested parachutes, but haven’t yet received them.” I reminded them all.
“You wish to continue the mission, Lieutenant-Colonel Tucker?” Asked Winnie.
“Yes.” I said.
“Then why are we here?” Belched Keyes.
Silly old fart, but he had a point. Keyes is an Admiral, not to be confused with Keynes, the economist, who has also traipsed through this volume. I think he has. I’ve kind of lost track. It’s a big long book, after all.
Oh, yeah. He was at Bernie’s house—not sure if I pointed him out.
“The key thing is to apportion the glory.” I told him kindly. “Otherwise some people might feel short-changed. Also, they would like to put in some of their cronies…”
“Who? Where?” He asked in confusion.
“Here. My job,” I explained to the room. “Their little school buddies get a month, maybe a month and a half in command. They get to borrow some credibility from our exemplary service record. They get a knighthood, or a baronetcy. Then they get to sit in the House of Lords. They’re politically reliable and very impressionable. And they’re always looking for fucking approval from their new-found friends.”
Poor old Winnie was glaring at me now, boy. But he didn’t wish to dignify it with a response either, especially since I was half-right.
‘If you can smell a rat, you’re often half-right,’ as my dear old Uncle Fred used to say.
“They could ram a half a dozen through here in the next six months, or a year or so.” I went on baldly.
It sounded just outrageous enough to be true.
“That’s the real purpose of giving some carefully-selected person a fucking Military Fucking Cross, or a Goddamned Knight of the Fucking Garter.”
You can’t lie to Will Tucker. That took them up a bit, though.
For some reason they think the working classes are blind, or stupid, or both.
“We all know this war is in the bag. Now the politicians, and the power-broker elite are trying to figure out how to make out like bandits after the war.” I told Keyes.
He didn’t seem so senile now, and he slowly nodded, once, twice.
“To the victor go the spoils.” I added.
“I see, young man.” He said soberly. “I see.”
The set-up takes a long time, whether it’s hockey or football or rugger.
But the spike is over in an instant. Trenchard was sitting there like a man who just won a thousand pounds on some kind of wager, eyeballing Keyes with a vengeance. Salmond, Sir John, looks like a man who just lost a thousand pounds on a wager but remains philosophical.
Not too hard done by, as it were.
“Will there be anything else, gentlemen?” I asked, rising from my desk.
“I don’t like your attitude.” Sir Effingtass-Dinglebob-Plunkett said in no uncertain terms.
“The day I need your opinion in order to determine my self-esteem, that will be a cold day in fuckin’ hell.” I said equably.
In no way mollified, he got up and headed for the door without looking back to see if anyone followed.
“Cock-a-snook, eh, old boy?” Chortled Keyes. “Cock-a-snook. Haw. Haw. Haw.”
He seemed much happier, now that he’s figured out which side I’m on.
“That man is about as useful as a pair of tits on a bicycle.” He told us, and then he got up too.
The Navy, they have a colorful way of speaking from time to time. Hemming and hawing, the rest of them finally left.
So that’s why they were here. They couldn’t decide whether or not to replace me. I seem to have survived on sheer surrealism.
“I’ve said it for years, that man is unstable.” Winnie complained on his way out the door.
I refrained from kicking him in the ass.
Presumably he was talking about me, but it might have been one of the others.
Anyway, that’s what I call my ‘shock treatment,’ which I use in dealing with pudgy-faced armchair warriors and paper-pushers and office-seekers. Rude but effective.
And that was the end of the matter.
***
When you get really old, your memories will become all mixed up like a dog’s breakfast.
A kaleidoscope of pictures, a kaliapede of sounds. One image is me, at age five on a pair of roller skates. But do I really remember that incident? Or is it the fact that my folks had a photograph in the family album, a picture to show me?
A little boy, seated on papa’s lap.
“See? This is you.” He might say.
I don’t remember skating. I remember the picture—a look at myself from another perspective. A look from the outside in. You pretty much have to take his word for it. There are lots of things in life, that we take people’s word for.
Still, a few things stick in my mind. That first trench strafing, way back when, the first time I flew as pilot instead of observer. That sort of thing.
It happened like this. My observer had just dispatched a pursuing enemy scout. Rather badly handled, in retrospect. We were winging along at about a hundred feet—not too swift of me, but there you go. We all make mistakes.
And there he was, this poor little dispatch runner. We must have been about a mile and a half or so behind their lines, and going east, to boot. I throttled back, figuring on bagging him. I didn’t have much to talk about as a pilot at that point, that’s the only reason I can think of. Wanton cruelty, at some level. Young men of a certain age group have no empathy whatsoever.
That’s especially true in war.
I lined him up and let him have a squirt, and then pulled back on the stick, careful not to stall. I just wanted to slow her down. My bullets went to the left of him. Another little burst. My bullets went to the right of him. Actually, it was about this time that I realized my shooting wasn’t very good, and later on I practiced a lot. The next burst went ahead of him. My frustration mounted. It was a dangerous place to be, behind enemy lines.
I knew it was dumb, but gave in to the temptation.
A quick glance in the mirror. No one back there but the gunner, looking unperturbed by my antics. I fired again, and this time they went right up the bed of the trench the poor little fucker was running in, creeping up on him in the most inexorable fashion.
He came to the end of that particular traverse, bounced off the wall, and took off like a scared jackrabbit, running to the left down the next trench. Missed.
“Holy fuck. That guy’s lucky.” I heard through the speaking-tube.
It was an impulse. Our morning briefing indicated that this was the 16th Reserve Bavarian Infantry Regiment, and I had a personal score to settle with one or two of them guys. No-good bastards that they were. Especially the ones in the first company.
They’re the ones that got little Paul. Some fanatical little sniper crawled out into the muck and filth and shot him dead. Right in the ear. The top of his head popped off. We had to put it in his helmet so the stretcher bearers could take it away with the rest of him.
I puked my guts out.
So anyways, I pulled up, put in rudder, and tried again. It looked like a corporal, as I caught a glimpse from a very low-level stall turn. Some kind of goofy mustache. Just an impression. Darting black eyes, with a lock of hair, hanging down and no doubt soaked with sweat. A corporal.
My shooting was really bad that day. I mean, it sucked. My finger hit the button again.
This time it went to the right, and then in front of him, then behind.
Now skittering over to the left of the trench again. Nice, short little bursts of firing, concentrating on my sights and my target. The fact was, I couldn’t hit the broad side of a God-damned barn.
Trying to focus on my flying, sweat running into one eye. I ripped off the goggles, pulled down the mask, and it fell into my lap. Forget it. Grab the hanky, a quick rub at the eyes…where is he? Did I hit him?
Pulled up to a hundred feet again. There he is. Fly off to the end of the traverse, wait, pull back again. I fired a few more shots at the guy, just five or six rounds at a time.
The bullets all scattered here and there. If I’m going to hit anything, I’d better learn to just hose it down.
Look at that fucker go. I had to admire that guy. He had a lot of courage. And that man could run. As I turned for home, I kept parallel to the trench, and had a look as I went by.
Sure enough, he was trotting along, neither looking to right nor left, but grimly holding onto the brown leather dispatch case. Stubborn. I would have slid into a hole in the wall and maybe even tried to shoot back. He had a pistol at his belt.
The unique thought came, that he was determined not to show any fear.
He’d had enough. He probably thought he was going to die at any moment, and just didn’t care anymore. It’s a kind of defiance of life and death at the same time. I felt a moment of sympathy, and a jolt of something in the guts. Understanding. Or adrenalin.
Guilt. Something weird.
Maybe it was a sense of shame. Something unfamiliar at the time.
He just wasn’t going to give in. That was it. A fucked-up kind of pride, and I also recognized some of that within me. Perhaps in all of us.
I should have killed him. (Far right.)
Just then, his head snapped around and I swear he looked me right in the eye. He gave me a snappy, funny kind of salute, and then the running little bastard went on his merry way.
The war was a kind of schizophrenic thing, sometimes.
I swear to God, he clicked his heels at us as we flew by, still giving that crazy, half wave, half salute.
The poor fucker was probably scarred for life. If he survived the war. He must have had deep, un-healable psychological scars. Like me. Probably turned into a paranoid, raving lunatic. A lot of us did. I wondered how he would make out as a civilian, when it was all over. Hope I didn’t turn him into a power-mad psychopath or something. Bet he was neurotic, at the very least.
When we got back, my gunner told me, “You should have killed him, you should have gone around again.”
He was right, of course. Otherwise, why bother? Why shoot in the first place?
The real problem was my gunnery, but I didn’t tell him that. Firing a gun on a mount was one thing, but actually flying the gun, that took a while. Being the gun. That took a while.
***
Ultimately heroes are not born, not made, but manufactured. I won the Military Medal at Ypres. April 22, 1915. I was one of the few left standing with a rifle in my hand when relieved. Almost everyone else was dead, wounded, missing, or simply ran away.
Can’t say as I blamed them. I wish I had run myself.
I recall standing on the parapet, looking through our set of periscope binoculars.
The horror sticks in your mind forever. It’s a gift that keeps on giving. Having joined the Royal Army, and finally transferred back into the Canadian Army, having finally gotten into a good unit, the strange thing was that I was somehow comfortable.
The Brits are all right, don’t get me wrong, but it was good to be back with Canadians.
We had a different outlook. There wasn’t such a great gulf between officers and enlisted men. Having discovered incompetent officers in every army, ultimately, what difference does it make?
A competent officer is quite a rarity.
My platoon was fortunate enough to occupy a very small rise in the earth. We were close to the French Colonial troops, who were on the left. When we heard a lot of yelling and shouting, we looked up and over the edge of the trench to see what was what.
And there it was, the first gas attack in history.
A sickly, greenish, yellowish cloud, a hundred yards high, and a half a mile long. It was slowly pushed forward by the light breeze. It was coming towards us. The Germans had waited a long time for the wind to be just right. At first, there was only an uneasy feeling. It just seemed to spring up out of the ground, over on the enemy side of the lines. Long, thin streamers merging into one hellish, foul fog.
While it was far from benevolent looking, there was little sense of dread. At least at first.
We kind of wondered, ‘What’s the big deal? Smoke is just smoke.’
Dread, fear of the unknown, a queasy, sinking feeling. A watery, gassy feeling in the guts.
Firing reached a crescendo as the rising cloud of bilious, horrid gas rolled over the French, and the Canadians on our left. The tops of heads were bobbing along in a traverse behind us and to our left.
“Where the fuck are they going?” Someone (Lenny?) asked even as the sound of shouting, screaming, and yelling came to us, and more of that terrifying cloud obscured our view.
Darker now, blocking out the sky, cutting off the light. Behind us.
Confusion. Had they been ordered to retreat? What were our orders? We began to shoot into the front of the cloud as it rolled onwards, coming inexorably towards us.
A faint smell…like a public swimming pool? Household cleaner? One horrible moment of recognition. That’s not a smoke-screen. We are all about to die. Like a hammer in the guts. Heart pounds, out of control. A smell like really bad medicine.
The sounds of rifle and machine gun fire beside us reached a peak, then rapidly diminished. Nowadays, just doing a little house-cleaning can bring back that day in a strange, fragmented clarity.
There was a huge, great silence to our left, as our own fire slackened.
Whoever was retreating along that trench, they were screaming in mad panic now.
A sense of dread.
Fifty yards.
French Colonial troops...
Certain death loomed before us, we knew that now.
The man beside me dropped his rifle. There was still shooting, quite far away.
He got up, and tore at his straps. The nearest escape trench was only five yards away.
He took off down the trench, and I stared at his back, bemused by this strange and bizarre sight. Coughing, off to the left. A half a dozen black troops, in their colorful kepi or fez hats, the bright uniforms, staggering along, clutching, tearing at their throats.
They shouldn’t have come this far into our area. Were they lost? I remember that thought.
A couple more guys got up and ran, but took their guns with them. The black men were literally falling down in the trench twenty yards, fifteen yards, now only ten yards from my position. Eyes bugging out, choking, coughing, retching, and the smell was stronger. A wisp of foggy, dense vapor. The view to the left was blocked, and thank God.
In those few short seconds, I saw more than enough to last a lifetime. A lifetime of nightmares.
Our Colonel was shouting something incoherent.
I don’t really remember going there, but I found myself with a half a dozen other men in a field, shooting into the flank of the German advance. Huge clogs, bulky gobs of mud made it hard to run. My feet felt like lead. My heart pounded in my throat. It was hard to get enough air. Fear almost overwhelmed me. I had no thoughts but one.
The sheer horror of the unknown.
No one knew how to die from gas.
No one had ever done it before.
I have no idea how I survived that day. The gas must have been thinner near us. I only gagged once or twice, feeling the sharp tang in my throat. Holding my breath, I just tried to sidestep around the wispy patches as they passed through our little clump of men, busy loading and firing, loading and firing. Some guy beside me, hoarse with fear.
A man I had never seen before, but wearing my unit’s patches, falling down.
Writhing in agony, again the tearing at the throat.
The look, as he stares into my eyes. He reached out in desperation with a clutching hand. He wants me to help him, help him, and there was nothing I could do, just load and fire, load and fire. A cloud enveloped us, and I staggered out of it, eyes running with tears, nose and mouth burning…I puked. It was all over me. I don’t think it was so much the gas. It was sheer horror, the fear of breathing.
I have never known anything like it, before or since.
Cursing, as my shaking hand rams another clip into place…my left arm was so tired the rifle kept lowering itself against my will.
Firing down into Germans…must have been another little piece of high ground, this time about twenty of us. Load and fire, load and fire…the Boche scream and shout and we just ignore the pleas and keep on firing…it wasn’t hatred. It’s just what we were doing that day.
I have no idea of how I survived that day.
I have no idea why they gave me that fucking medal.
But I will say this. Don’t use our pain to justify your modern Canadian moral degeneracy. Don’t defile our graves with your peacock posturing, and don’t use our sacrifice to back up your lying, mealy-mouthed fucking hypocrisy.
I heard a man say once, ‘The press takes a photo of a burning village, and it gives ‘destruction’ a bad name…’
The press is not entirely useless, it seems.
Some men led me to a rear area. They pried the gun out of my hands.
They cut the clothes from my body, led me to a field shower, and scrubbed me with rough brushes in the bitterly cold water. There was pain as the dried shit pulled off some of the hair on my legs. Then they put me on a stretcher. Someone gave me an injection. I was asleep before he pulled the needle out.
I guess I’d had enough for one day.
END
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