Fighter Heroes of WWI by Joshua Levine

Author:Joshua Levine [Joshua Levine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2008-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

8

Over the Top

Bernard Rice was an officer with 8 Squadron who wrote a series of vivid letters home to his father in 1916 and 1917. In one undated letter (which was never finished and never sent) he decided to offer his father a share of the observer’s seat during an artillery observation:

If you like to squash yourself very small, and hop in alongside o’ me when nobody’s looking, and have a decent box of gaspers behind you when you get out, you can come out with us, and do an artillery show. The machine you are getting into is exactly the same as those they are building at the old works. You get into the forward seat, and just mind where you’re putting that foot, you clumsy old beggar! We don’t want a hole through the fabric just yet, they will come on their own later on!

‘Switch off, petrol on, suck in!’ That is ‘Wind Up’, our pilot. Not a bad lad, but he’s a nasty lust for Hun scrapping. Don’t believe in looking for trouble myself.

‘Contact, please, sir,’ – ‘Contact’ – Whirrrr – Pleasant here isn’t it? Just keep under the cowl, and you won’t get your teeth blown out. Bit bumpy getting off, eh? Now we’re off the ground. Feel your insides trickling out of your boots? It will take us twenty minutes to get our height, and more if you hang out like that! Keep under the cowl ‘till we’re up, man! Plenty of time to admire the country then.

‘Hulloah!’ – that is my speaking tube to the pilot. ‘Have you let out the aerial yet?’ ‘Thank you.’ Now look out for the acknowledging letter in white cloth strip on the aerodrome. No! No! Not out there! Underneath, look! On that patch of green, the size of a penny. Got it? Our wireless is working now and we can turn off to the lines.

Rather quaint to see the clouds underneath, isn’t it? Sun is nice and bright though, isn’t it? Cold outside the cowl. Those patches of molten lead? Oh, they’re lakes. If you look again, you’ll see that most of them are complete with chateaux, gardens, drive, and trees. Of course you can’t see people, unless they are in bunches. It all looks exactly like that Daily Mail map, don’t you think? The roads twisting about, the villages and towns. It isn’t hard to find where you are, is it, by noting the road ‘shapes’ on the map?

Yes. That is the line. I thought you would know it when you saw it. Everyone does. The trenches show up well – all white and black lines – don’t they? Good Lord, no! Those aren’t all ours. You will notice there is a narrow strip of brown unbroken earth winding down nearly the centre of all that conglomeration of trenches. That is the ‘no-man’s-land’. You see it is almost a continuous front line, those bits going back are communication, support, and second line trenches. All that muddled looking lot of trenches behind are the foundations which carry that thin front line.

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