The Ghosts of the Eighth Attack by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788639927
Publisher: Canelo Digital Publishing Ltd
Published: 2020-02-18T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

The bad weather held its grip on Marshfield. A seemingly immovable low pressure area sat over the Western approaches, blanketing the south coast in mizzly rain and mist.

Flying Officer Simon Wetherby, the Station padre, looked out of his office window and was glad of it. Thirteen Squadron had made such a miserable start to its operations that any respite in them was a mercy. Hamstrung too by their lack of aircraft, it was bound to be a while before he would have to watch those Blenheims taking off, reassure some young girl who had formed an attachment with one or other of the crews, refuse as politely as possible Wing Commander Cavendish’s request that he wave off the bombers with a hand raised in blessing, and then wait like the rest of the Station to hear how many returned.

Worst of all, of course, was when they didn’t return. Already only a few weeks into his sojourn on an operational station, he was finding it hard to reconcile patriotism and the prosecution of all-out war with even his rather watered-down brand of Christianity.

Mercifully he had not had to conduct the funeral service over Bates and his crew. At their relatives’ requests, their coffins had been sent back to their homes for burial, with strict instructions to the local undertakers that they must, for security reasons, remain closed, filled as they were with sand and burned bones. But the padre had had to talk to the relatives on the telephone and those calls had tested his nerve and his conscience.

It was after them that he began to suspect he had made a mistake in joining up.

‘Why did you?’ His new-found friend, the Intelligence Officer Mark Pringle, asked him that same evening as they sat in the bar of the Stars and Stripes, the shabby thatched pub on the edge of the village. ‘Why did you join up in the first place?’

Simon Wetherby had been drawn to Mark by his air of quiet competence, and their friendship had progressed through a shared loneliness. Neither of them was a hard-drinking, press-on type. They drank the occasional half pint of beer together in a corner of the Mess bar while the hard drinkers and the young boys chug-a-lugged endless tankards, or walked upside down on the ceiling with blackened feet.

Mark, as Intelligence Officer, knew the crews well and was highly respected, but Simon Wetherby, with his flat feet, shambling gait and owlish spectacles, was not. Nevertheless, under Mark’s wing, he was tolerated.

‘Why did I join up?’ Simon Wetherby held his half-pint glass in both his hands and stared into it. ‘Munich, I suppose. I felt guilty about Munich. We had a treaty, we should have honoured it. Chamberlain was wrong. It wasn’t Peace with Honour. It was Peace with Dishonour. Besides,’ he shot his friend a naive, apologetic glance, ‘I didn’t like the parish I was in. And they didn’t like me!’

Mark Pringle laughed, and then his rather ascetic face clouded over. ‘I joined for less noble reasons.

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