Blood and Thunder (44 page)

The Royal Flying Corps was formed in the spring of 1912 whilst Eric was at Oxford. The first squadron to be fully up and running at Larkhill was No.3 and a number of Etonians were connected with it. The adjutant was Major Basil Barrington-Kennett, or ‘BK', and he vowed that the new RFC should combine the smartness of a Guards regiment such as his own with the efficiency of the Royal Engineers from which they had been born
1
. Another OE was present from the beginning and instrumental in the development of this embryonic outfit. The creative spirit of the Royal Engineers was imperative in fostering this exciting new technology but it was a former Rifle Brigade man who could argue that few in the RFC had done more than he to develop the military potential of the aeroplane.

Reginald Cholmondeley was the son of an army man from Oxfordshire. He had left Eton in 1907 to go into the army, transferred into the Royal Flying Corps as soon as he could, and got his pilot's license in August 1912. He became the first RFC pilot to attempt a night flight the following year. Early in 1914, 3 Squadron was engaged in such diverse pursuits as perfecting forced landings, communications between air and ground, firing guns from aeroplanes, range finding using signalling lamps and using flares to relay artillery observations. Reginald took off on 10 March 1914 again on a night flight. At the time, with no proper lighting in the cockpit and none on the ground to guide him home, it was a perilous mission. Helped along by a full moon at 2,000ft he could see the lights of Andover and Salisbury but he had lost sight of home and had he not been fully aware of his surroundings then he would have found it very difficult to find his way back.

By midnight on 5 August 1914 Reginald's squadron had been mobilised with its twelve war-worthy machines and a week later they departed to the front. Once in France they painted Union Jacks on the underside of the wings. This early in the war they were fired at indiscriminately by overexcited men on the ground, whether friend or foe. The Fletcher brothers saw their machines differently. As an artillery officer, Regie had reason to hate them, and he passed time on the Aisne trying to exact revenge for the hostile shells that the German machines directed on to him. ‘Spent rather a pleasant afternoon sniping stray aeroplanes with a rifle,' he wrote in his diary. ‘Blazed about 40 rounds at one, but with no visible effect.' He was finally stopped by an order from the major who insisted that he give up. In the trenches George was simply enchanted by them. ‘They come out just like butterflies on a fine day, and the air is full of the humming of their engines.'

In the early war of movement, the RFC's objective was reconnaissance, acting like airborne cavalry. No. 3 Squadron spied large numbers of German troops converging on Mons before the retreat put an incredible strain on the Royal Flying Corps. They were forced to pack up and move several times. The aeroplanes suffered from being left out in the open. Transports sped away numerous times, leaving the machines with overworked mechanics who had insufficient tools and equipment to look after them properly. At night they would have to guard the aeroplanes, sleeping under the wings in deteriorating weather as the Germans approached.

It stood to reason that the German Army would not want the Allied machines to fulfil their reconnaissance objectives and vice versa. Both sides began to look at arming their machines. Early attempts were comical. Pilots stuffed revolvers in their pockets; they took grenades up with them with the intention of dropping them over the sides. In October 1914 came one of the first instances of aerial combat. Then on 12 October Reginald Cholmondeley took off from St Omer in a Sopwith Scout, one of the best machines available, and took on an enemy machine. He had had a rifle fitted to one side of his cockpit so that he could try to fly and shoot at the same time, and a carbine on the other, both pointing upwards to avoid his propeller. Not surprisingly he failed to put his opponent out of the sky.

Experimenting with armaments would prove to be Reginald's downfall. On March 12 1915 he was bombing railways during the battle of Neuve Chapelle. Reginald was sitting in his machine whilst it was being loaded with six volatile, converted French shells. One of the bombs exploded, setting off another, and the aeroplane went up in flames. Reginald Cholmondeley never stood a chance of getting out alive. The 25-year-old was buried at Chocques Military Cemetery with the other victims of the accident.

Eric Lubbock had never expressed an interest in anything military, but the instant that war was declared he was eager to play his part. He had been interested in motoring since 1910 and on 6 August 1914 he delivered himself to the Royal Automobile Club in London to volunteer for foreign service. His sister's husband, an officer in the Black Watch, urged him not to enlist. England, he said, would be crying out for young officers soon enough and he was concerned about the experience Eric might have of serving in the ranks. Eric went up to Oxford but as he was not a member of the OTC they could not help him at that stage. Frustrated, he joined a long queue of men waiting to enlist. He was not at all impressed with the doctor who saw him. ‘He looked stupid, threw a tape measure around my collar bone and said I was unfit.' Eric was furious. ‘Nonsense, said I. I rowed in Trial Eights, surely I'm fit enough.' His chest was apparently too small by 1in.

He remained unperturbed. He had spied an advertisement by the Wolesley Motor Co. and now wanted to drive ambulances. They didn't seem to be overly concerned about the size of his chest but they shared his brother-in-law's concern about him serving in the ranks, ‘that it would mean living with the roughest of men and that he could never stand it'. Eventually a form was produced; an application to drive a lorry. Eric did not want to drive a transport lorry. The recruiters at their offices told him that it was the same thing. ‘No spider has ever ensnared a fly more successfully than they caught me there,' he said wryly later. Thus he joined the Army Service Corps.

Eric Lubbock was one of only a handful of Etonians who served in the ranks at some point in the war. Despite everybody else's reservations he didn't have any particular problems amongst his fellow soldiers, although it was a culture shock for someone who had experienced such a privileged upbringing. On the crossing he was crammed into the hull of a transport and it was the only time he ever regretted enlisting and envied the officers. He had a terrible headache and the smell was nauseating. He felt so weak when they disembarked that he claimed he could have quite happily drowned himself at the quay. Once in France the 22 year old shared a tent with thirty other men and discovered how limited his vocabulary was, even if he wasn't inclined to follow his fellow soldiers' colourful lead.

His service in the Army Service Corps was only to last for a few months. Eric had always been great friends with Eric Powell, one of the two masters that ran off to war with George Fletcher. He had by now abandoned his intelligence role and joined the Royal Flying Corps as an observer. Eric Lubbock ran into him at the front and by December wrote home to tell his worried mother that he wanted a commission in the RFC himself. It took him a further six months to send another letter home telling her that he was about to be attached to the flying services. ‘I am most awfully excited,' he told her. He was, however, constantly mindful of the anguish that his service caused her and fully aware that the idea of his feet leaving the ground would not help her to relax at all.

Nonetheless his RFC career began on 25 July 1915 when he was sent along to headquarters, ‘an odd place with apparently lots of doors leading to nowhere'. Lost, Eric was pondering his next move when an officer looked out of a window with some sarcastic advice. ‘If you can't find a door come in by a window.' Eric was bemused. ‘It seemed quite the thing for a budding airman to do so I did it.'

His record of interesting recruitment experiences continued. He had submitted two recommendations, one from Sir John French who allegedly claimed that Eric had a nose like a pelican and therefore would be good at flying. He also had a similar one from Kitchener apparently saying that he had big feet like a bird, which again showed promise. But it was his motoring background that saw him through. Any sporting prowess, horsemanship or mechanical know-how was jumped on by the flying authorities. Was his eyesight good? ‘Good enough to see through you,' he responded. How much did he weigh? ‘Ten stone before breakfast.'

His interview concluded, Eric joined a lengthy waiting list to become an observer in the RFC. His mother was resigned to it. She remembered how he had fallen in love with aeroplanes at Eton several years earlier and didn't see what good it was trying to stop him from becoming airborne himself. It didn't stop him from feeling guilty. His father had sadly passed away in 1913 and she bore her anxiety as a lone parent. ‘Mum bears it all so well but I cannot imagine what she suffers. She doesn't sleep well and somehow it is too awful to think of her suffering. I owe her so much more than I can ever give and yet I give her pain.'

Eric finally received a summons to join the RFC at the beginning of September 1915 and reported to 5 Squadron near Poperinghe as an observer. He was bombarded with things to learn and it was perhaps a blessing that bad weather denied him his first trip in the air and gave him time to settle down to learning things like Morse and aircraft recognition. There were two other Etonians learning with him, both of them rowers, and so he was feeling quite at home. He finally got up in the air for his maiden flight on 4 September. Cruising over Poperinghe, Vlamertinghe and towards Ypres and back again, he began counting trains, observing troop movements, even sketching trench lines. But methods of communication with the ground were his overriding concern. ‘I can send messages by Morse now fairly accurately though very slowly, but can't read yet … My head was never made for dots and dashes!' Aerial photography had really shown its worth at the battle of Neuve Chapelle in March and he was introduced to large box cameras. Pilots and observers had captured the whole ground in front of the 1st Army and then carefully traced the trenches on to skeleton maps. Some 1,500 copies had been produced, which turned out to be massively useful.

Lewis guns had begun arriving for fitting on to machines but whilst arming aeroplanes was being rapidly developed so were methods for destroying them outright from the ground. Nicknamed ‘Archie,' Archibald James, another young Etonian in the RFC, shared a nickname with this anti-aircraft fire but it didn't help him get used to it any quicker. He jumped every time a shell went off; ‘a nasty big bang and crack'. He was flying a sensitive scout at the time and every time his hand jogged the plane lurched about. Slowly he got over this nervousness and managed to fly normally whilst being harassed.

Thomas McKenny Hughes had left Mr Impey's house at Eton in 1902 where he had been a contemporary of Ego Charteris. Having transferred to the RFC to become an observer he
was with 1 Squadron operating out of Bailleul; where the
aerodrome was overlooked by the local lunatic asylum. He was constantly harassed when going about his work by a ‘beastly hooligan' of an anti-aircraft gun living in between Lille and Roubaix. It was, he said, ‘very difficult to give one's undivided attention when in the middle of an elaborate calculation of the number of trains one had a terrific explosion apparently a few yards away and that horrid whistling “ping” of the bits passing.' On another occasion he spoke of trying to count trains under fire. A piece of shell flew into the petrol tank and fuel started pouring out. ‘I made a few ineffectual and tardy attempts to stop it with my fingers … the Huns did not stop shooting at us. What a terrible thing it must be to be a pheasant.' The pilot was adamant that they were doomed but the engine miraculously jumped back to life and took them home.

Flying was certainly not for the faint-hearted. Eric had already been present when his pilot suffered a crashed. They were 40ft from the ground when the engine stopped. ‘I thought we were going to land,' he wrote. ‘Then she back-fired, and the nose went absolutely straight down. I thought, “we're going to crash.” I had no time to think more. I felt myself being hurled down on to that ploughed field for destruction.'

It would not please his mother, as she was simultaneously lamenting the departure of his brother for the Dardanelles, but Eric had solemnly promised to tell her everything. He had felt something strike his head. ‘I was thrown clear as we hit the ground and should not have been touched only the front sight of the machine gun just cut my leg … Loraine the pilot was not hurt … but our lovely machine was in pieces! The gun stuck in the ground and the camera flew about 50 yards.' Eric finally got up some 30 yards away from the wrecked machine, collected the camera and plates and walked back. ‘I must have looked very funny as I landed perfectly upside down in a very soft plough and got up with my head covered and my mouth and nose absolutely full of earth!'

Accidents and mechanical failures were a common feature of life as an airman and few Etonians escaped a smash at one time or another. Henry ‘Deighton' Simpson was born in New York State in January 1896. Having been sent to school in England with his younger brother, he left Le Neve Foster's house at Eton in the summer of 1914, hopping aboard the RMS
Olympic
with his family the day after war was declared. His parents wanted him home and he was to fulfil their ambitions for him to go to Harvard, thus being kept far away from the conflict in Europe. ‘But his heart was with his schoolfellows' and in November 1914, travelling steerage on SS
Campania
, the 18 year old ran away to enlist in the British Army.

Henry wrote to his parents from the ship declaring his intentions. His father was flustered but confident that his son could be dragged back across the Atlantic. He was more concerned about the future of Henry's education and wrote to Harvard to gain some assurance that when they got Deighton home he would be able to continue his studies. ‘He is an exceedingly sensitive young man,' he explained to the authorities. ‘Long residence at Eton College has made him quite the Englishman with all the bitter prejudice against the Germans … The whole thing is really laughable, a tempest in a tea pot.'