The Ghosts of August by Peter Watt

Author:Peter Watt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2024-09-23T21:34:55+00:00

TWENTY-TWO

Ben always felt a thrill at seeing the fragile low-flying biplanes overhead, as the idea of a man aloft in the sky navigating across the vast arid lands appealed to him. He envied how the pilots of the flying machines could look down on humanity engaged in vicious close-quarter killing where the opponent was all too real in the exchange of blood for blood. From above, a man was a mere object to destroy with machine gun and bomb; the horrific intimacy of close-quarter fighting did not concern the man in the flying machine.

Overhead a British fighter plane circled and dived low to the ground before gracefully climbing back into the clear, blue sky. It then turned to fly away, leaving the mounted patrol of thirty men below to continue with their mission.

‘Those buggers have it good,’ a trooper riding beside Ben grunted. ‘Home for a bang-up breakfast while the poor bloody mounted infantry slog it out under a blazing sun, sucking in dust and riding until they get saddle sores . . .’

The trooper paused in his reflections when they ascended a low dune to gaze down on the remains of a crashed biplane, wisps of smoke marking its last moments. Ben could see that it was a German twin-seater that they had been informed might have been downed the day before after a skirmish between German and British aircraft on reconnaissance patrols.

The patrol could see the remains of two aviators, one inside the German aircraft and one on the ground nearby. Both had been burned to a charred and blackened state, and the body outside the aircraft had an arm missing. The figure was lying on his back with his one remaining arm pointing at the sky with a clenched fist. It appeared that his body had been burning as the aircraft plummeted to the earth, and the man had crawled from the wreckage minus an arm to die an agonising death.

Ben had heard stories of Australian aviators who ensured that they had a pistol within easy reach in the event that their aircraft might be set alight in a dogfight and they faced the inevitable slow death of burning in the flames. The two choices were to bail out and die from a fall, or to put a bullet in their own head for a quick death. Parachutes were forbidden to military pilots and observers to discourage the aviators from deserting their aircraft through so-called cowardice in action.

The members of Ben’s troop dismounted, and a nominated section examined the crash site for anything of value. They found very little in the crumpled and burnt wreckage. Even the machine guns had been destroyed due to the heat of the fire, so all that was left to do was bury the charred corpses nearby. They had no idea who the two dead German aviators were, so they marked the graves with a few stones as a small cairn in the vastness of the desert.

‘Still think that flying in one

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