Fighter Heroes of WWI. Joshua Levine

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ I knew nobody in the Royal Flying Corps.

      Just a week before the Battle of Loos – we were resting behind the trenches – I went up to Auchel where I was watching the aircraft with envy. As I stood, watching the machines landing, a general emerged from the office. As he stepped into his car, acting on the spur of the moment, I said, ‘Please sir, may I speak?’ He looked round, astonished, and didn’t say anything. I pulled out my application papers and told him my story, the fact that I was a qualified pilot, that I wanted to join the Royal Flying Corps but had some difficulty getting anyone to apply for me, that I had replied and had heard nothing more about it. In a very deep voice, he told another officer, also a brass hat, ‘Make a note of that; make a note of that’ … and so on. He said, ‘I’ll see what we can do.’ In the meantime, he called to an airman and said ‘Is there a transport going back towards the trenches, to Béthune? If so, make sure this soldier gets a lift back.’ With that I saluted smartly and off he went. In the tender which took me back to Béthune, I asked the driver, ‘Who was I speaking to?’ ‘Blimey,’ he said, ‘You’ve got a nerve! That was General Trenchard. He’s in charge of the Royal Flying Corps!’

      After that, I went through the Battle of Loos, twice over the top. We had a pretty bad time. Each time, I was lucky to get away with it. At one point, there was only one other fellow left in my section. On 9 October, as I was coming out of the trenches, I was greeted by a telegram which said, ‘Report at once to the War Office.’ That night, not having slept for days, dirty and filthy, I was given a first-class warrant and I found myself back in London on a Sunday morning. I wasn’t feeling too good, and I was sent to a specialist, who pronounced that I needed three weeks’ rest. After that, I was in the Royal Flying Corps.

      Cecil King was a working-class boy who joined the Royal Flying Corps in 1913. He was to become a rigger and, ultimately, a flight sergeant:

      Originally, I was an apprentice to a wheelwright and coach builder in the country, but after I’d come through my apprenticeship, I came to London. I did roughly a year’s work in a London workshop, which was partially underground, and very depressing, and I wanted to get into a more open-air life. I cast about to see what I would do and one day, when I was walking in Kingston, I met two soldiers. They had an unusual badge, with the letters RFC, on their shoulders. I got into a conversation with them and they told me they were members of a new unit called the Royal Flying Corps, which had just started – and why didn’t I join?

      I’d never heard of the Royal Flying Corps, and I didn’t know there was a military regiment concerned with flying. Actually, I wasn’t bothered about that – I just knew it would be out in the open air and on big open fields. That’s what I wanted. I was interested in flying, though. In 1911, I’d seen Gustav Hamel flying at Hendon. I remember the announcer said, ‘This is Gustav Hamel on an aeroplane with a Gnome engine.’ The crowd thought he’d said, ‘No engine’ and there was quite a stir.

      But after I’d met these two members of the Royal Flying Corps, I went to a recruiting sergeant and asked him about it, and he said, ‘Yes, I think something like that has started, and if you’d like to join, I’ll find out for you.’ I decided I would go a bit further with it. I went to Kingston Barracks and made my final decision. I was sworn into the army there, and I expressed a desire to go in the RFC, so I was given a railway warrant and sent down to Aldershot. When I got there, I asked the first serviceman I saw, ‘Where are the barracks of the Royal Flying Corps?’ and he said, ‘Never heard of it.’

      But by inquiring once or twice more I finally found that the Royal Flying Corps shared barracks with the Black Watch so I reported there, and I was sent up to a small building on the aerodrome at Farnborough where all the further particulars of my enlistment were taken down. I was sent back to the barracks for my first night. And when I woke up in the morning I heard the trumpets from the South Camp – that was the cavalry – and the bugles from the North Camp; and I was delighted. I thought, ‘I’m really and truly in the army.’

      When war was declared on 4 August 1914, many of the men who were to fly were scattered across the globe. Charles Chabot was living in Bangkok:

      The European population of Bangkok at this time was absolutely minimal. A hundred would cover the entire European population of Siam. Nevertheless we had enough English people to rake up a rugby football team. The Germans had a rugby team as well. As the final game of the season, the Germans challenged us and this match was to be followed by dinner at the German club. So we played the game and we were beaten by the Germans and we congregated for the party after the match. We were all mixed up around the table – a German here, an Englishman here, next to him a German, next to him a Frenchman and so on. It began and it was like every other rugby football dinner since time immemorial. And then came a bang at the door and a runner came in from the French Embassy with the extraordinary news of the outbreak of war and he was quickly followed by another runner from the German Embassy. We’d never thought of other chaps in terms of war and we didn’t know what we ought to do, whether we ought to seize a knife off the table and plunge it into the next chap, or what. After a little bit of discussion, we decided that as far as we were concerned, the war was going to start tomorrow. The party proceeded and that was that.

      In Britain, the prevailing mood in August 1914 was euphoric. Leslie Kemp remembers:

      The war came and threw everything and everybody out of balance. The enthusiasm for the war was really fantastic. There were actresses singing, there were concerts in Trafalgar Square and, if you enlisted, you were given the ‘King’s Shilling’. It was entirely different to the atmosphere that prevailed at the start of the Second World War.

      Young men with romantic dreams of flying seized their opportunity. Charles Burne:

      When I went home and told my father that I wanted to join the Royal Naval Air Service, he signed the papers but he said, ‘Don’t start flying. It’s only damn fools and birds that fly.’

      At the beginning of the war, a man with specialist knowledge was a welcome addition to the flying services. William Richards, self-taught and highly motivated, was such a man:

      My father and my mother emigrated separately in the eighties, around 1884. My father was from Cornwall, at a time when the Cornish tin mines were in difficulty and closing down. And people concerned with that sort of work, at that time, were emigrating. At the age of twenty-one, he went to New Zealand. My mother’s was an agricultural family in Essex. When she was about fourteen, they moved to New Zealand. She was that much younger than my father.

      They met at Dougville, eight or nine years after arrival in New Zealand, and they fell in love, married, and there’s no doubt about it, it was a very happy and romantic marriage. She was a lovely person. I was born a year after their marriage on St George’s Day in 1893. They’d set up home in Auckland, in Queen Street, at that time, scarcely developed. They set up home in a kind of colonial style, and there’s no question that they were very happy. I have the photographs of myself as a baby, and they go to show that’s what it was – a happy home.

      My mother contracted some sort of tropical fever at the age of twenty-five, and when I was a year and ten months old, she was taken from us, leaving my father with me, more or less in arms, to cope with a tragic situation. Friends came to his help, and I was looked after for a time, but it was quite clear to him that he couldn’t carry on. It so happened that a relative in Cornwall had lost her first baby, and been told that she couldn’t have another, and she, knowing my father’s predicament, wrote to him, suggesting that if he cared to bring me to England, she would take care of me.

      So she became, in a way, my foster mother. We lived on a farm, very isolated. I had no contact with any other children excepting when I later went to a village school at St Neot. So I was mixing very freely with grown-ups, all of them occupied in agricultural work. My only playmate, as a matter of fact, was a sporting dog. And I СКАЧАТЬ