Also on the walls were souvenirs of the aerial action that had accompanied the grinding, slogging American advance through southern Ontario toward-but, all plans aside, not yet to-Toronto: blue, white, and red roundels cut from the canvas of destroyed enemy machines. Some were from British aeroplanes, with all three colors being circles, others from native Canadian aircraft, where the red in the center was painted in the shape of a maple leaf.
Along with the roundels were a couple of two-bladed wooden propellers, also spoils of war. Seeing the souvenirs-or rather, noticing them-made Jonathan Moss proud for a moment. But his mood swung with whiskey- driven speed. “I wonder how many canvas eagles the Canucks and the limeys have in their officers’ clubs,” he said.
“Too damn many,” Zach Whitby said. “Even one would be too damn many.”
“We might as well enjoy ourselves,” Dud Dudley said, “because we aren’t going to live through the damned war any which way.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Innis said, and did.
The door to the officers’ club opened. Captain Shelby Pruitt, the squadron commander, walked in. With him came a blast of cold Ontario air. Some of the smoke in the big room escaped, though not enough to do much good.
“I want to tell you miserable drunks something,” Pruitt said loudly, and waited till he got something approaching quiet before going on, “Word from the weathermen in Manitoba is that they’ve had a couple of days of clear weather, and it’s heading our way. We may be flying tomorrow. You don’t want to drink yourselves altogether blind.”
“Who says we don’t?” Tom Innis demanded.
“I say so,” Pruitt answered mildly, and Innis nodded, all at once meek as a child. The squadron commander hadn’t earned his nickname of “Hardshell” by breathing fire every chance he found, but he expected obedience-and got it. Like Moss’ previous CO, he not only commanded the squadron but also flew with it, and he’d knocked down four enemy aeroplanes on his own, even if he was, by the standards of the men who flew fighting scouts, somewhere between middle-aged and downright doddering.
Zach Whitby waved to the bartender. “Coffee!” he called. “I got to sober me up. We run into any limeys up there, I don’t want to do anything stupid.”
“Hell with coffee,” Innis said. “Hell with sobering up too much, too. I’d rather fly with a hangover-it makes me mean.”
“I’ll have my coffee in the morning, and some aspirin to go with it,” Moss said. “If I load up on java now, I won’t sleep for beans tonight. We go up there, we ought to be in the best shape we can.” Dudley nodded. Moss had noticed that he and his flight leader often thought alike.
Under Hardshell Pruitt’s inexorable stare, the officers’ lounge emptied. Fliers scrawled their names on bar chits and strode, or sometimes lurched, off to their cots. Pruitt sped them to their rest with a suggestion that struck Moss as downright sadistic: “Here’s hoping Canuck bombing planes don’t come over tonight.”
His was not the only groan rising into the chilly night. The thought of enduring a bombing raid while hung over was not one to inspire delight. As things were…“The groundcrew will be cleaning puke off somebody’s control panel tomorrow,” he predicted.
“Puke is one thing,” Dudley answered. “Getting blood out of a cockpit is a whole different business. But you know about that, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I know about that.” Moss remembered Percy Stone, his observer. He remembered how much blood had splashed Stone’s cockpit after he’d been wounded. He’d heard Stone had lived, but the photographer still hadn’t returned to duty.
Enough thick wool blankets stood on Moss’ cot to have denuded half the sheep in Canada. Living under canvas in Canada wasn’t easy half the year. It was, however, a hell of a lot easier than living in the trenches. Aviators who groused too much about how tough they had it sometimes got handed a Springfield, which did wonders for shutting them up.
He took off his boots, burrowed under the blankets like a mole, and fell asleep. Waking up in gray twilight the next morning was something he would sooner have skipped. He gulped coffee and aspirin tablets and began to feel human, in a somber sort of way. Tom Innis’morning preparation consisted of brandy and a raw egg, then coffee. One way probably worked about as well as the other.
Sure enough, the day dawned clear. The pilots swaddled themselves in the leather and fur of their flying suits. It was cold at altitude even in scorching midsummer; during the worst of winter, the flying suits rarely came off. Moving slowly-bending your knees wasn’t easy with all that padding around them-they went out to their aeroplanes.
Groundcrew men had already removed the canvas covers from the Martin one-deckers: U.S. copies of a German design. Also copied from the Fokker monoplane was the interrupter gear that let a forward-facing machine gun fire through the spinning propeller without shooting it off and sending the machine down in a long, helpless glide…or that let the machine gun shoot through the prop most of the time, anyhow.
Clumsily, Moss climbed into the cockpit. A couple of bullet holes in the side of the fuselage from his most recent encounter with an enemy aeroplane had been neatly patched. The machine could take punishment. Had the bullets torn through his soft, vulnerable flesh, he would have spent much longer in the shop.
He nodded to a mechanic standing by the propeller. The fellow, his breath smoking in the cold morning air, spun the two-bladed wooden prop. After a couple of tries, the engine caught. Moss studied his instruments. He had plenty of gas and oil, and the pumps for both seemed to be working well. He tapped his compass to make sure the needle hadn’t frozen to its case.
When he was satisfied, he waved. The airstrip was full of the growl of motors turning over. Dud Dudley looked around to make sure everyone in his flight had a functioning machine, then taxied across the field-ruts through gray-brown dead grass. Moss followed, watching his ground speed. He pulled back on the joystick, lifting the fighting scout’s nose. The aeroplane bounced a couple of more times. After the second bounce, it didn’t come down.
He climbed as quickly as he could, going into formation behind his flight leader and to his left. Zach Whitby held the same place relative to him as he did to Dudley. On the right, Tom Innis flew alone.
Down in the trenches, men huddled against cold and mud and frost. The line ran from southeast to northwest between Lake Ontario and Lake Huron. Behind it, on land the United States had had to fight to win, everything had been wrecked by stubborn Canadian and British defense and equally stubborn American attacks. On the other side, the terrain still showed what a fine country this was.
Machine guns spat fire at the aeroplanes from the enemy’s trenches. That was futile; machine-gun bullets reached only a couple of thousand feet, and the Martin single-deckers flew a good deal higher. But soon Canadian and British Archibald-or Archie, as he was more familiarly known-would start putting antiaircraft shells all around them. A lucky hit could bring down an aeroplane. Moss knew that, as he knew of a thousand other ways he could die up here. He did his best to forget what he knew.
Dud Dudley wagged his wings to draw the flight’s attention. He pointed to the south. The enemy was in the air, too. There, buzzing along contentedly, as if without a care in the world, was a Canadian-or perhaps a British- two-seater, an old Avro no longer fit for front-line combat but still good enough to take a photographer over the American lines to see what he could see.
As Moss swung into a turn toward the enemy reconnaissance aircraft, he glanced in the rearview mirror, then up and back over his shoulder. Were scouts lurking up there, waiting to pounce when the Americans attacked the Avro? Keeping an eye peeled for such was really Zach Whitby’s job, but you didn’t get to go back to the officers’ lounge and have more drinks if you took too seriously the notion that you didn’t have to worry about something because someone else would.
On flew the Avro, straight as if on a string. That meant the observer was taking his pictures, and the pilot, a
