Glory Boys. Harry Bingham

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       Part Five: Height and Speed

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       Epilogue

       Historical Note

       About the Author

       Other Works

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

      To begin with, it looked like nothing. A nick on the horizon. A moving dot. A speck of red and white against the smoky Georgian blue.

      Herb Johnson, standing bolt upright on his wagon, followed it with his eyes. The little plane was flying low, carving an unsteady course between the twisting hills. Every now and then it rose sharply upwards, before beginning a slow glide earthwards again.

      The town could boast four war heroes, but Herb Johnson was the only one to have seen the front line in France. Consequently, he was also the only guy in town to have seen an airplane. He wanted to hang on to the sight alone; be the only man in town to see it. He looked for a while, then sat back down on the wagon board and settled his hat back on his head.

      ‘Good God in the morning!’ he hollered. ‘Airplane! Airplane! Airplane!’

      Something was wrong.

      That much was obvious. The plane, now directly overhead, was gasping for breath. The engine would fire properly for a couple of beats, then choke, then fire again, then cut completely, then spurt back into temporary life.

      ‘That feller didn’t oughta stay up there,’ remarked Jeb Holling, with a considered tobacco-speckled spit on the ground. ‘That engine ain’t holding him up too good.’

      The machine was a biplane, with red wings, a red nose and a clean white fuselage that seemed too bright in the sun. When the plane banked a little, they could see the pilot, no more than a leather-helmeted head and a pair of shoulders. Some of the kids waved, but the pilot must have been a surly type, because he wouldn’t wave back, not even to say hi to a bunch of kids who’d never seen an airplane before, let alone right up close, floating over their town like a giant dragonfly.

      ‘Ain’t so easy,’ said Johnson, who had quickly and delightedly established himself as the town’s aviation expert. ‘Them planes need an air-eo-drome. In France…’

      The plane came back again, lower this time. They could see the pilot’s face better. They could see his lips moving, and he was waving this time, one leather-gauntleted hand gesticulating out of the cockpit, though in an angry kind of way, hardly the way to wave at kids. The engine was still bad and when it cut out, you could almost see the flashing propeller blades slow down.

      ‘Like to see it come down on my place,’ said one farmer from out of town. ‘Terraced fields like СКАЧАТЬ