Casca 21: The Trench Soldier Page 12

  The engine was starting to suffer from the same problem, but its coughings and splutterings scarcely registered in Casca's euphoria, and when it cut out completely, he was mightily pleased at the splendid silence. He lay back comfortably in his seat, the clear, sunlit blue sky his own private universe.

  "Never," he said to himself, "have I realized just how truly beautiful is the blue sky and these lovely clouds."

  Deprived of the lift of its motor, the plane fell out of its spiral and dipped toward the ground.

  "Interesting," Casca mumbled, observing that he was now looking once more through the propeller. He also dimly noticed that the propeller was moving much more slowly, so that he could see the circling blades which seemed to be vibrating ominously.

  "Shit!" he shouted, "the fucking thing is going to fall off! Well, what the fuck? Don't need it anymore anyway."

  He leaned back comfortably, stretched both legs out against the pedals, and folded his arms over the stick. The plane straightened out, its splendid aerodynamic design allowing it to glide gently on the currents of the mobile air.

  Casca was jerked back into wakefulness by the sudden re-firing of the motor as their descent once more brought them into oxygen-rich air. He stretched luxuriously like a man waking from pleasant dreams. As if still in dreamland, he blinked upward at the all-encompassing sky. He shrugged himself more erect in the seat and gazed serenely through the propeller at the distant horizon where the land met the sky.

  As his lungs filled with richer quantities of oxygen, vague memories stirred of takeoff, some sort of disturbance from the ground, some sort of problem – "Shit!"

  Suddenly Casca was wide awake – and sweating.

  He tried to stand up in the cockpit to get some better idea of what was going on. And quickly wished he didn't know. The ground was horribly far away, and at the same time, terrifyingly close. And getting closer every moment.

  The plane was almost on the ground, much too low to use the parachute that he was sitting on, even if he knew how. Nor was there any way to get his officer out of the rear cockpit.

  The plane was flying straight and level but progressively lowering toward the floor of the valley. Unless Casca did something drastic – and what could he do? – they were going to be on the ground in another few seconds. The ground was rushing past at a terrifying speed, much, much faster than Casca's brief experience with motorcars had ever provided.

  Lower and lower the biplane dropped until Casca could see individual stones amongst short grass. Goats were running in all directions, bucking and butting at the air in their panic.

  Now the ground was alongside him. The plane was still airborne, but the wheels were almost on the ground.

  "Ease off on the throttle," Wothering had said, "bring up the nose, and the bird'll do the rest herself."

  There was a bump, the plane rebounding into the air.

  Another bump. And another bounce into the air.

  Casca eased back a little farther on the stick, and closed the throttle more.

  He felt the wing stall and the plane settled and trundled along the ground as Casca shut off the throttle.

  They rolled to a standstill, but Casca still sat in the cockpit, luxuriating in his new experience – and in his relief to be back on the ground in one piece.

  A wave of exultation swept through him, and he climbed out of the cockpit onto the wing. His shout to the captain died in his throat. Wothering had slumped out of sight.

  Casca lifted him by the armpits. This provoked a flow of blood which at least reassured Casca that the pilot was alive. He got Wothering out of the plane and laid him on the grass. A bullet had torn through one buttock, missing all vital parts, but the large wound had bled profusely.

  As Casca finished dressing the wound and rolled the pilot onto his back, his eyes flickered open. He half sat up, saw the plane, then sank back to the ground.

  "Ah, got her down, eh? Stout fella," Wothering said as he lapsed back into unconsciousness.

  Casca sat beside the unconscious officer and dismally surveyed their situation.

  Almost certainly they were about out of gas. They had two canteens of water, and Wothering had a Webley .38 and maybe two dozen rounds. Casca had been told that as observer, he needed no arms, but had obstinately brought along what he had, his Lee Enfield .303 rifle and its bayonet. He also had all the ammunition he had been issued, twenty-five rounds, and another fifty he had managed to steal as well as a few Mills bombs.

  "Why do you give us guns if you don't want us to fire bullets?" he had testily demanded of the miserly quartermaster sergeant major.

  "Yer rifle is ter carry yer bayonet," the QSM had snarled, "which is all any decent British soldier should require." Casca climbed onto the wing and retrieved from the pilot's cockpit the blood-soaked map. He spread it on the grass beside Wothering. He noted the position of the British lines, the airstrip they had taken off from, the lines of the Germans who had fired at them. None of the information was what Casca wanted to see. Never, in almost two thousand years of poring over military maps, had he ever found what he wanted to see.

  "I know where the airfield is, where the British are, where the Germans are." He drew a deep breath and wailed to the heavens the same question he had asked so often over the centuries: "But where the fuck are we?"

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  To Casca's great relief, Captain Wothering came around. He tried to sit up, winced mightily as his weight pressed on his mangled buttock, and rolled onto his belly.

  "Ah, that's better. I say, old fella, you're a splendid medic. Damned good pilot, too. Where the fuck are we by the way?"

  Casca gestured to the map. "Can't pick out a local feature, sir. All I can see is goats and grass. I'm sure there's a farmhouse full of terrified Frogs somewhere over one of these little hills. Maybe some kraut troops too. But even a farm wouldn't help. There are farms dotted all over the map."

  "Aha, yes, usual problem. Well, we do know some things. For one it's a good bet we're down behind their lines. And if we're not, then we've nothing to worry about." He pointed one slim finger at a mark he had made. "This is where that Jerry machine gun nest is, the one that hit us. Do you know where that is from here?"

  "I'm afraid not, sir. I blacked out, and I banked and turned so much, I really have no idea..."

  "No matter," the officer airily dismissed the problem. "Let's see then. I bought it at just about eleven-fifty ack emma, and it's now twelve-ten pip emma. How long have we been down d'you think?"

  "Maybe ten minutes."

  "Excellent. Then you were flying for ten minutes. Did you circle?"

  "Yes, a couple of times. Quite a bit altogether. But I think I flew straight for some time, too."

  "Capital!" Wothering accepted the confusing information as the best available. "Let's say we were doing a hundred and twenty to make it easy. Ten minutes. Twenty miles, right? So the Jerries are something like, say, fifteen miles away in some direction or other. That's not so bad." He shook his head. "Not so good, either, means we've got to survey something like six hundred square miles. Wonder if we have enough gas. Well, let's get at it. We've got quite a few rivers and roads. Must be able to identify something."

  He pushed himself up off the ground – and promptly crashed back down on his face.

  "Damn," he muttered, "weak as a kitten. I say, corporal, can you help me to the plane, d'you think?"

  Casca lifted him erect, then lay him over his shoulder and carried him to the plane where he placed him feet-first in the rear cockpit. Wothering slumped into the seat, then screamed and came erect again, holding painfully to the sides of the cockpit, his face stark white and pouring sweat from the effort.

  "Damn. Won't do at all. Can't sit down with half my bloody arse shot off. I say, d'you expect to use that parachute?"

  "Don't even know how to, sir."

  "Well, perhaps you could lend it to me, eh?"

  With an enormous effort he hauled himself up while Casca stuffed
his chute and the remnants of Wothering's ruined one into one side of the cockpit, making a lopsided cushion to keep the officer's mangled butt clear of the seat.

  "Yes, I can manage this alright. But I'll leave most of the flying to you, and save the pressure on my busted arse."

  "But, sir, I can't fly."

  "Nonsense, you're a natural. Besides, the Jerries could be here any minute. Let's get going, shall we?"

  Casca walked to the propeller and cranked it around twice. Wothering closed the switch.

  "Contact!" he called and on the next turn the motor fired and the propeller became a fast moving blur. With considerable misgiving, but no real alternative, Casca climbed into the observer's seat. The plane was already moving forward. From behind him Casca heard the pilot's cheerful voice.

  "We've got about a quarter tank of gas. Plenty of room here for a good long run."

  As the plane gathered speed, Casca watched the grass and stones turn to a blur. Up ahead the grazing goats were once more racing about in terror. To Casca's astonishment he found that the pilot was right. Through the stick he could feel the wing surfaces of the plane being lifted by the fast moving air. He eased the stick back just a little, and the ground fell away beneath them.

  "Perfect, old bean. Jove, but you're a good flyer. Now I know we came east from our lines to where we spotted those Jerries," he groaned in pain. "Where they spotted us. So, I think we'll weave a sort of zigzag heading back west. Just weave over toward northwest for a bit, and then weave back to the southwest, eh?"

  Casca banked slightly, and the plane soared away along the chosen route.

  "See anything familiar?" Wothering shouted.

  "Farms," Casca answered.

  "Yes. It all looks pretty much the same, doesn't it? Let's try the other way for a little."

  The flying, Casca discovered, was a delight. He played about in the air like a bird, whooping like an excited schoolboy when a sudden air pocket dropped them toward the ground or a draft of hot air pushed them aloft.

  They made a number of passes back and forth, and Casca's anxiety about their petrol supply was beginning to build again when he saw something. He pointed and Wothering swivelled painfully to look.

  "Jove!" he exclaimed. "We've found our pot of gold."

  Casca wasn't too sure about that. What he had seen rapidly grew larger. This was no mere regiment's HQ, but a huge military encampment with a number of tents and even some timber buildings, a few trucks and ambulances, several large motorcars, half a dozen airplanes, and what was clearly a huge store of petrol, hundreds of barrels of the stuff. Beyond the petrol store there was another collection of squat cylindrical tanks, but Casca could not guess what they were.

  "Climb, then bank right." Wothering spoke just as Casca was thinking it might be time to get out of sight. As he responded he reflected that for the moment he had felt in command of the plane. The authority in Wothering's voice had reminded him that he was the driver.

  "They've probably seen us anyway," the captain said. "D'you have any of those Mills bombs with you? I hear you're a dab hand with them."

  Casca confirmed that, as usual, he had half a dozen.

  "Good, I'll take control. We'll come in low and level, and you select a target-pick something well ahead. We'll be going pretty fast, but otherwise it should be about the same as from a balloon. I'll make one recce pass and then two more as slow as I can."

  Casca roved his eyes over the landscape, but their maneuver to avoid detection had taken them too high to distinguish any of the few distinctive landmarks.

  "Let's get down now and take a look-see," Wothering shouted and turned the nose downward.

  The pilot skillfully lost altitude. And as they approached the camp, they were at about treetop level.

  Casca spotted an enormous parade; thousands, tens of thousands of men were drawn up in ranks, standing bareheaded in the sun. At the head of the parade a fat priest was waddling about before a field altar, celebrating holy Mass to call down from Heaven God's blessing on these troops who were, Casca guessed, to launch an offensive at dawn on the morrow. At that time the priest would, no doubt, be several miles away behind the lines, celebrating Mass for some nuns in a convent and looking forward to a nice breakfast of black sausage and sauerkraut.

  The plane swept over the massed soldiers who were staring up at the small aircraft. There were so many men, it would be impossible to miss. Casca decided not to wait for Wothering's slow pass and bit the pins from three grenades and dropped them in quick succession.

  He saw one fall among the praying men, scattering them in all directions, but it failed to explode. Then altar, priest, and tabernacle all disappeared in a flash of fire and a great cloud of dust. The third grenade exploded in the latrines beyond the parade ground, blowing into the air the broken timbers of the crude sheds along with various bits of the bodies of men who had been hiding there smoking.

  "Hey, I say," protested Wothering, "that's hardly cricket, bombing a church parade."

  "Judgment from heaven," the Eternal Mercenary said seriously. "If you come back to the right, I'll drop the others on that fuel dump."

  Wothering did as Casca asked. Again the first grenade was a dud, but Casca had the satisfaction of seeing the other two explode among the piles of fuel drums, and the high octane petrol burst into flames. As they roared away gaining altitude, Casca looked back and saw more explosions as the fire spread.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  "For sure all those men and equipment came along a main road," the pilot shouted. "I'm going to stay low and circle till we find it."

  It didn't take long. As Wothering had guessed there was a major road just to the north of the German encampment, and he quickly identified it on his map as Chemin des Dames. More German troops were marching east along the road, together with a number of artillery pieces drawn by mules.

  Wothering swooped low to inspect the moving army, attracting numerous bursts of rifle fire.

  The road ran past several burned-out villages. The slopes of the low hills were a maze of trenches dotted with large shell craters. German Army engineers had hastily thrown bridges across the streams alongside the blackened and broken remains of the old ones that had been dynamited by French army engineers in their withdrawal or destroyed by artillery fire.

  The only trees to be seen were charred stumps, and all the houses and barns were flattened ruins, the few standing walls riddled with rifle and machine gun fire. Casca could clearly see broken guns, ammunition carts and ambulances, the bloated bodies of dead horses rotting alongside them.

  And on the near hills were hastily dug cemeteries, hundreds and hundreds of little white crosses in rows like infantry on parade.

  Wothering climbed and set course for the British lines and handed the controls back to Casca announcing casually that he was going to take a little nap. His offhand manner didn't fool Casca who readily guessed that the demands of the brief flying action had reopened his wound and that he was once again faint from the loss of blood.

  Wherever he looked, from this height the French countryside all appeared the same. Tiny houses and barns and hay ricks were dotted about the gently undulating landscape. Here and there were small rivers and a few roads that passed through small villages each with a church or two and a town hall.

  At last, off to his left, he saw a larger town with bigger buildings. As he turned to shout to Wothering, he spotted a cathedral.

  But the pilot was unconscious. Casca unbuckled his harness and stood on his seat to reach into the back cockpit and wake the wounded officer. Wothering's pain-wracked eyes fluttered open, and he struggled upright in his seat. He gulped a mouthful of whisky from his flask and some color returned to his pallid face.

  "Ah yes, that'll be Rheims," he mumbled. Our lines are just a few miles south. Now ....” The rest of what he had to say was drowned out by an enormous backfire as the engine cut out.

  "Ah yes," Wothering muttered, "had to happen. Well, just set her down anywh
ere that looks pretty flat."

  For a moment Casca remained standing as he was, staring in amazement at the calm face of the British officer, then he realized that Wothering was about to pass out again, and he dropped back into his seat and turned his attention to seeking someplace that looked flat.

  The gently rolling landscape suddenly looked very different, a patchwork of steep hillsides and narrow valleys with scarcely a level patch to be seen – and then only plowed fields.

  He chose one and pointed it out.

  "Yes, it will have to do," came Wothering's tired voice. "Better buckle up, though. Could be rough on the undercart. Go around to the east and come back to land right into the northwest – I think that's where the wind is from."

  The Nieuport was gliding easily, and when Casca turned they were about forty feet above the ground.

  "Now, head for that haystack in the next field," Wothering shouted. "Perfect. Exactly right. Aim to set her down just over that first stone fence. If you can..."

  The voice died away, and Casca knew that the officer had lapsed back into unconsciousness.

  The stone fence was coming up, and Casca cleared it easily then brought up the nose for the stall, but the plane sailed on down the length of the field.

  Casca lifted the nose a little more. It seemed to him that he had the aircraft standing on its tail, but still they stayed airborne, moving down the length of the field like a rag blown on the wind. The stone fence at the farther end of the field was coming up fast. Then, at last, the Nieuport started to settle toward the ground. Too late. The fence was dead ahead.

  Casca hauled back on the stick.

  The Nieuport reared up and over the stone wall. The unpowered craft stalled, and the plane dived for the ground.

  Casca came to in the cockpit, blood streaming from a gashed forehead where he had struck the instrument panel. His back felt like it had been wrenched out of line and one wrist was certainly sprained if not broken. His head throbbed unmercifully, and there was a hell of a lot of blood.

  He unbuckled his harness and got groggily to his feet. The rear cockpit was empty. He climbed out onto the wing. The plane had sheared off the top half of the haystack, spreading it out over thirty yards, a large part of it pushed ahead of where the Nieuport had come to rest.