Eleven Eleven - By Paul Dowswell Page 0,30

the ground and killing the pilot? Should he do it? Two kills in one day. That would impress the girls back home, and the stuffed shirts at Yale. Eddie decided he would do it. Hell, all was fair in love and war, they kept saying. Maybe this bastard would have done the same to him, and two of his pals had just slaughtered Bridgman and Dwight. He turned the Camel into a tight curve, feeling himself pressed hard into his seat, and flew low towards his target. As he approached, he could see the Hun nimbly leaping from the cockpit. Eddie thought he was going to run for his life. Good. Then he could destroy the machine at least, and claim his kill. But the pilot didn’t run; he stood there by the wing, stiffly to attention, and saluted. You won, he seemed to be saying, and I respect you. That was it. Eddie pulled back the control stick and waggled his wings as he flew over. He wasn’t going to kill a man like that.

As he climbed into the sky, he noticed the scar of the Western Front to the west. It was time to head for home.

He landed to a hero’s welcome – the squadron carrying him back to the mess on their shoulders, but not before his aircrew had told him his Camel had fifty-eight bullet holes in it. One of them had almost severed a control wire to his ailerons. The steel wire was barely held by a thread. If that had gone, then he would have lost control of his plane and almost certainly plunged into a fatal spiral.

‘We thought you’d bought it with Dwight and Bridgman,’ said his erk. ‘We’d heard about them already. Bridgman crashed behind the British lines. Dwight came down just inside Hunland. And reports on the ground say you got three Huns.’

Eddie couldn’t lie. When he presented his flight report and claimed his kill, he told his squadron leader that two of the Fokkers had crashed into each other, and one had definitely gone down. The fourth had escaped with a dead-stick landing.

‘Bad luck, Hertz,’ he said. ‘As your commanding officer, I’m duty bound to tell you I would have polished him off on the way down,’ he said with a wink, ‘or got him on the ground, but I suppose your guns jammed, eh?’

Eddie nodded and laughed. He wasn’t going to tell his CO the story about the saluting pilot. But he wondered again if he should have shot him and destroyed the plane.

That night in the mess, as they celebrated his return and his third victory with a bottle of champagne, Eddie raised a glass to propose a toast to his absent friends Dwight and Bridgman, and felt a pang of admiration for the German pilot he had outwitted. He wished all aerial combat could end like that.

Since then he had mainly flown infantry support missions – shooting up the Huns on the ground as they fled before the might of the Allies, who seemed unstoppable now. All the way to Berlin. The landscapes had changed. When he first arrived, it was all bombed-out farmhouses and villages, great pockmarked landscapes and charcoal trees. Now the Germans were retreating through fresh countryside which had been untouched by war for four years.

And that sort of action didn’t seem very sporting either. Eddie knew some of the pilots thought it was funny to shoot at fleeing men. When they boasted about it in the officer’s mess, they would imitate the actions of terrified soldiers, running here and there in blind panic, and laugh. Those sorts of men loved to shoot up troop trains too – watch the locomotive explode in a great geyser of compressed steam, and all the carriages career off the lines. It was a cold-blooded business, and a single plane could destroy the lives of hundreds of men, with a well-placed bomb or a long burst of machine-gun fire. Shooting down planes was far better. Each man had a chance, not like the poor bastards trapped inside a train carriage or a cattle car. Eddie couldn’t stomach this kind of boasting.

Eddie checked his watch. An hour had passed. Clearly the Huns were not sending any of their men up this autumnal morning. He felt his chances ebbing away. Four Huns. It wasn’t enough. Then he remembered the attack on Aulnois and took a quick look at his map. The village was a couple of kilometres away from the