That Quiet Earth: A First World War Tale

127 Pages·2014·0.761 MB·English

by  Fellows, Bruce

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
PEN & SWORD FICTION
An imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
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South Yorkshire
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Copyright © Bruce Fellows, 2014
ISBN 978 1 78383 180 7
eISBN 9781473837638
The right of Bruce Fellows to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by
him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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This book is for
SUE BRIERLEY
I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the
heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered
how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine

One
The great lime at the end of the garden is begnning to shed its leaves. They swoop and
pirouette in the breeze like carefree souls until they end their brief careers in stillness on
the grass. They fill me with a strange foreboding. On the table at my side is a three-line
item from The Times. It stopped me short the other day and hurled me back, as vividly as
if it were yesterday, to the clear sky over France on that evening in November 1918 when
I led the day’s final patrol.
The sky was a blue parasol above. The earth from so high was slightly curved at the
horizon. England was a low smudge faintly visible far away west. A deafening roar from
the engine filled my head. A leather helmet gave little protection against it. Obeying
Mitch’s precepts and using the only sense useful to me in the icy cold of eighteen
thousand feet, I constantly scanned the sky in front and below, but especially behind and
above. I was seeking the enemy I was supposed to kill but particularly searching for those
who might want to kill me. I was conscious above all of my responsibility towards the
men who followed me that no enemy should surprise us.
Just behind me, twenty yards away on either side, rising and falling as if on a gentle
invisible swell were two olive drab SE5s identical to mine. Their pilots, Zin Zan and
Telfer, togged up like me in fur helmet, goggles and face mask, also quartered the sky.
From time to time their wings would rock and glint sunshine at me from taut canvas
surfaces.
Then to the east, a thousand feet below and perhaps three miles distant, I picked out
dots against the sky. I rocked my wings and turned away, raising the nose to climb. Three
minutes later and a thousand feet higher, I slowly edged back towards the dots. The sun
was safely behind us as the dots slowly became aeroplanes and their top wing extensions
became obvious. A group of six Fokker DVIIs was flying two thousand feet below. I
checked obsessively behind and all around, cocked both guns, and prepared for my
stomach to rise into my chest and the pain to start in my ears as I put the nose down.
The dive would have taken thirty or forty seconds. Our speed reached a hundred and
sixty perhaps. That was time enough to see the dark shapes beneath us grow, take colour
and become swaying, bobbing, almost living things hanging nearly motionless in relation
to us, as they flew seventeen thousand feet above the grey-green patchwork far below.
I chose the leader. His tailplane was painted dragonfly blue. The straight black crosses
on the upper wings were outlined in white on the pink, purple and green of the camouflage
the Germans habitually used. I put my face to the Aldis sight and watched him fill it. I
fired Vickers and Lewis guns together. Their chatter rose above the engine’s roar. I smelt
the cordite and saw my tracers converge on the fuselage and spray around the cockpit. The
machine below me at once turned to the right. I thought I’d missed and the pilot was
warned but instantly the machine turned again and then again and was spinning, making a
spiral of the smoke that was pouring from the engine. The pilot was wounded or dead, and
the spin was involuntary or a hopeless attempt to escape despite having a smoking engine
three miles up.
I dived on down, screaming from the pain in my ears but also from bestial triumph. I
was too fast to turn and we’d tracked the Huns till almost the end of our patrol. As I pulled
out, I looked behind and saw only the other SEs following. Two trails of smoke had
formed behind us, marking against the celestial blue the killings that we fled homewards
from.
For some reason it was that fight of many that the article in The Times brought to my
mind. Perhaps because that was when I fulfilled my ambition to dive on a Fokker and send
it down, as we had wanted to, Billy and I, and as he already had. I read the article over and
over.
The Victoria Cross won in September 1918 by 2nd Lieut. William Love RAF, has been sold
in auction at Sotheby’s for a record £65,000 by Love’s elderly niece.
“Love’s elderly niece” could only be Pippa, a six year old elf when I first saw her.
The article occupied my thoughts all through that day and so clouded my sleep that I
dreamt that night that Jessica returned to me. Her face had the look it had that ravishing
day that Billy and I passed through the archway, luscious with the scent of honeysuckle,
and crossed the lawn towards her in the sun. At his call, she started up from the rose she
was kneeling at and, turning, bathed us in her sudden joyful smile.
I woke at once, damp with anxious sweat, and got out of bed. At ninety-seven, that
has become a very slow and precarious business. I went to the cane chair by the window
and sat with a blanket around me, watching the sun appear and banish shadows from the
garden. I spent those first hours of the day composing a letter for the small girl to whom, if
youth had the wisdom of old age, I would perhaps have been stepfather. It was a letter full
of memories and some regret, which Pippa answered on the telephone.
“How wonderful that you should write,” she shouted, we are both a little deaf, and
how wonderful that we should still both be alive, she might have added. “Mother passed
on twenty years ago.” I hadn’t really feared a centenarian’s reproaches and I felt a pang
that I had missed Constance.
“For years,” Pippa said, “you were like a legend to me, half-remembered, and I used
to wonder why your name was mud. Later of course, I came to realise why from things
that mother said. I used to see your name at the flicks just before the director’s, ‘written by
George Bridge’, and I’d wonder if it was you. I knew you’d gone to America you see.
Then I learnt it was you and you grew still more glamorous in my eyes. Was Carole
Lombard as lovely in the flesh?”
She was of course but it was at Myrna Loy’s house on a St Patrick’s Day in the late
thirties, after the premiere of Seven Deadly Sinners, which I’d written for her, that
someone sang ‘Danny Boy’ and wartime ghosts thronged in. They drew such weeping
from me that I was packed off in Miss Loy’s limousine to come to later amid empty
bottles and the remains of smashed up furniture in my rented apartment. After that I was
able to admit to my mind again memories I’d repressed for many years, though all my life
I’ve never learnt to master them.
“I’ll send my great-grandson, David,” Pippa said. “He won’t mind. I sold it for him.
To buy a partnership. It’s too far for me. I’ve got a funny hip. How undignified old age is.
Dear George, though I was so young, I remember knowing I was in love with you