Race the Atlantic Wind E-Book

Oisin McGann

• Herausgeber: The O'Brien Press
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

In the spring of 1919, after the end of the First World War, teams of pilots and navigators begin to gather on the North American island of Newfoundland. They are attempting what many believe to be impossible – to fly non-stop across the Atlantic Ocean. Equipped with machines made mostly from wood, fabric and wire, they intend to fly the 1,800 miles to Ireland, in the face of the merciless North Atlantic weather. John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown are late to arrive. Competing against some of Europe's most famous pilots, these two British war veterans are considered rank outsiders. Maggie McRory is a sixteen-year-old girl who sees the gathering of all these aircraft and their crews as a chance to escape her narrow existence. Her war-scarred uncle, however, views them as a threat to the island and his way of life. This absurdly dangerous contest is going to change the world . . .

Leseprobe

Dedication

For my father, Dr Brendan McGann, who explored the world and the mind and passed that curiosity on to his children

Contents

Title PageDedicationIntroduction 12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031323334353637 AcknowledgementsAbout the AuthorCopyright

Introduction

I first heard of Alcock and Brown from my father. Given how passionate he was about flying, it’s remarkable that my brothers, sisters and I never caught the bug, but by the time we were born, psychology had taken over as his main obsession. In that previous life before he got married, however, he had logged 6000 hours in the air, first serving as a navigator for eight years in the Royal Canadian Air Force, then with Canadian Pacific Airlines and Aer Lingus.

He owed a debt to those early fliers – we all do. The Wright brothers, Alcock and Brown, Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart … these are names I associate with a childhood influenced by his interests. Hours spent looking at photos of old aircraft, reading about them in books and comics and staying up late building models. I was too young at the time to understand just how experimental – and downright dangerous – flying was in the time of these pioneers, but I did love the stories. In the end, it was stories, not flying, that would become my obsession.

John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown’s story has been shamefully neglected, as has that of the Navy-Curtiss flying boats, both overshadowed by Lindbergh’s solo flight. The huge risk they took is really only appreciated now by historians and by flying enthusiasts like my dad. And yet the story of the flights from Newfoundland is an absolute thriller of a tale. Alcock and Brown, and others like them, were to make an all-or-nothing attempt at something many at the time believed to be impossible: to fly non-stop across the Atlantic Ocean.

Let me lay out how insanely difficult this challenge was.

I’ve flown across the North Atlantic four times. Like millions of others who make the trip each year, I was a passenger in an airliner. Apart from the take-offs and landings, and the odd bit of turbulence that knock the plane around, it’s like riding in a bus – safe and comfortable, a smooth ride. These birds can fly higher than 30,000 feet, above the worst of the winds. You’re riding in a craft whose internal air pressure and temperature is carefully controlled, a vehicle built with space-age materials and carried through the sky by powerful jet engines. You can read, sleep, play games or watch films while you fly.

The pilots have computers to help control the plane and plot their course. They use radio beacons and satellites to keep track of their position. Modern communications keep them in contact with air traffic control all over the world. Their mind-boggling array of instruments tell them everything they need to know about the state of their aircraft, how fast they are flying and at what altitude, what weather they are flying into, and what other aircraft are in the skies around them.

Now let’s move more than half a century back through time. When my dad started flying in 1958, many of these technologies didn’t exist, or were only being developed. He made regular flights between North America and Europe, serving as a navigator in planes like the Lockheed Hercules, the Douglas DC-8 and the Boeing 720 and 707. Aircraft from that era would be considered antiques now, but compared to the craft that Alcock and Brown flew in, they were like spaceships.

Navigation, however, was a different matter. Though they had far better instruments than the first pioneers of flight, Dad’s generation flew without the help of computers or satellites, often using a technique known as ‘dead reckoning’, just as those early fliers did. With scant information about weather out over the oceans, often flying blind through cloud or over a featureless expanse of water, he still had to use basic instruments like paper charts and a compass. He’d use a drift sight to look down at the sea to judge how much they were being blown off course, and a bubble sextant to judge their position using the stars.

Imagine flying in a jet aircraft, and yet still having to peer through an eyepiece at the stars to find your route – essentially the same technique used by sailors centuries before. Even at this stage in the development of flight, bad weather, poor visibility or a simple miscalculation could easily cause you to lose your way over the ocean.

But at least you were in an enclosed, protected cockpit, you had a good radio, accurate instruments, a sturdy aircraft and powerful, reliable engines. In 1919, when the teams of aviators gathered in Newfoundland to attempt the first non-stop crossing of the Atlantic, their aircraft were utterly different. The Wright brothers had achieved the first ever powered flight less than sixteen years before. The two brothers made their living from manufacturing bicycles. The development of flying machines had progressed quickly during the First World War, but apart from the engines, aircraft were constructed with thin metal frames, wood, fabric and wire. Their cockpits had no roofs or canopies, so the crew were exposed to the elements.

The flight from Newfoundland to Ireland was over 1800 miles; no airplane had ever flown this distance over land, never mind over the ocean. Few could even carry the amount of fuel needed for such a journey. Aerial navigation, for the most part, still relied on being able to see the ground, following the roads, rivers and railway lines marked on maps. It was very common for fliers to get lost in cloud or fog, even over familiar territory. Very few pilots were experienced at flying at night. To fly over the sea, the first aerial navigators like Arthur Whitten Brown were having to learn their skills from sailors.

The development of engines was still in its early stages. Aircraft fell from the skies on a fairly regular basis, due to engine failure or fires. Any fire would spread quickly across the wooden and highly flammable, doped fabric structures. Early wireless could provide communication, but these radios were heavy, bulky, unreliable, used Morse Code and demanded that the flier trail a long wire from their aircraft as an aerial. Flying instruments were incredibly basic, typically measuring only height, speed, fuel and oil. A compass for direction, and perhaps a spirit level, in case the pilot couldn’t see their horizon to keep the machine level.

The route Alcock and Brown and the other teams planned to take, from Newfoundland to Ireland, was the shortest one possible, but it was over freezing water dotted with icebergs in a region not known for its good weather. There was no reliable way of forecasting that weather. They were not prepared for the violence of the cold and winds they could face over the Atlantic, conditions their machines couldn’t fly high enough to escape.

This flight would be an all-or-nothing attempt. Once they passed the point in the journey where they didn’t have enough fuel to return, they would have to reach land or come down in the sea. Bad weather, mechanical failure, pilot error or a small mistake in navigation could doom their flight.

This was a dark time. Most of these fliers were veterans who had survived the horrors of the First World War. The Spanish flu had claimed even more lives than that terrible conflict. Whole nations were recovering from trauma, grief and financial ruin. People needed hope for a better future. Those pioneer pilots were like astronauts in the early days of space-flight, glamorous figures, going where no one had gone before. Instead of seeking out a safer existence after the war, they chose to take on an awe-inspiring challenge, one that would change the lives of future generations. And yet we learn very little about them these days. For a long time after my dad first told me about the fliers who took on the Atlantic, I heard next to nothing about them from anywhere else. I have vague memories of the basic facts of Alcock and Brown’s flight, an image of that most famous photograph – of the crashed plane.

When the O’Brien Press asked me to take on this project, it lit a spark, bringing to mind that thrilling story, one which demands to be told again; a tale of hope, courage, intelligence, tragedy, a spirit of adventure, and a belief in a more open, more united world.

I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I have.

1

They were going to crash into the sea, and there was nothing he could do about it. Lieutenant John Alcock’s frozen fingers gripped the wheel, his hands cramping as the aircraft wallowed clumsily through the sky, wrestling with him for control. His eyes flicked constantly between the faint horizon bordering the night sky and the compass situated behind and to the left of the wheel, illuminated by a dim electric light. The muscles of his arms and back ached and his clothes beneath the heavy leather flying suit were soaked in sweat.

The Handley Page O/100 bomber had two engines for a reason: an aircraft this size couldn’t fly on just one. He glanced bitterlypast his companion at the port engine, the broken remains of its four-bladed propellor spinning uselessly in the wind, no longer under power.

Aird, the navigator, sat to Alcock’s left in their cramped, exposed cockpit. The two men’s only protection from the slipstream was the low Pyralin windscreen, and between the noise of the starboard engine and the wind, conversation had to be shouted back and forth. Not that there was much to say. In the gunner’s cockpit, right out on the nose in front of them, Wise was huddled behind his twin Lewis machine guns. Even more exposed to the wind, the engineer and gunner was unable to communicate with the two men behind him without standing up and bellowing over the windscreen. They had passed over the coast just minutes earlier, and Wise was desperately scanning the darkness of the open sea for a glimpse of a British ship. It was their one hope of escaping the enemy, who might be hunting this wounded bird even now.

The wind hummed through the wires and struts that held the upper and lower wings together, the aircraft rocking and bouncing in the turbulence. The big Handley Page was normally more stable than the smaller scout aircraft that Alcock also flew for the Navy, but now she was barely going fast enough to stay aloft. Her light wood-and-metal frame, covered in green painted fabric and plywood, trembled like a weakened, dying beast. Alcock could feel the vibrations through his hands and feet and back. She didn’t have much left in her.

How many times had this craft flown successfully over the anti-aircraft batteries that protected the Turkish coast, as the shells exploded around them? Just recently, Alcock had flown a record 600 miles on one raiding flight.

This was the most advanced aircraft of its day, the British Navy’s secret weapon. It was the ‘The Bloody Paralyser’, the first long-range bomber to operate over the Aegean Sea. The Turks and the German Navy had been taken completely by surprise by the first attacks, in September 1917. They had sent out their own aircraft to find the bomber’s base, but they didn’t suspect it was all the way out on the Greek island of Lemnos, far off the coast of Gallipoli. Here was proof that the Royal Naval Air Service was a new and powerful force of war.

And now Alcock and his crew were about to fall from the sky because of a busted bloody propeller.

Aird’s lean face was partially covered by his goggles and leather flying helmet, and yet there was no hiding his fear. He glanced at Alcock every now and then, waiting for the decision that only the pilot could make. Their mission was over before it had properly begun; they had already dropped all their bombs to lighten their load. It only remained to be seen if they would survive the night.

‘You’ve done your best, old chap!’ Aird called out. ‘But she’s had it! We’ll have to ditch!’

Alcock shook his head, his teeth bared as he worked his feet on the rudder bar and hauled on the wheel to pull the port wing up yet again. They had managed to fly sixty miles back towards home. Not enough. Not nearly enough.

‘Not yet!’ he barked back. ‘We can get closer still!’

The responsibility he felt for his crew weighed on him like the heaving motion of the aircraft. It was his job to see them home safely.

‘Archie’, the anti-aircraft guns, had got them over Gallipoli, on the Turkish coast. They had only been ninety minutes out from their aerodrome at Mudros, the port on the island of Lemnos – still a long way from the railway stations they were supposed to bomb near Constantinople. An Archie battery had taken pot shots at them. Though it was unlikely they could be seen in the dark sky, the gunners had probably heard the engines. Most of the fire had been hopelessly wide, harmless-looking puffs of smoke in the gloom. Then one stray shell had burst ahead of them, close enough that they could feel it in the air, and shrapnel had struck the port propeller, splintering the blades.

Alcock had cut power to the port engine to prevent further damage. He managed to keep the machine in the air, and turned her about to head for home. But the biplane was one of the largest aircraft ever built – over 9,000 pounds of sprawling frame, with a wingspan of a hundred feet. As the engine between the wings to his right struggled to maintain the craft’s speed, the motor on the left was dead weight. That whole half of the aircraft dragged, trying to pull them into a spin that would send them spiralling into the sea. It was taking all his skill and strength to keep them in the air, but they were losing height and speed the whole time.

Any minute now, they’d slow to stalling speed, the wings would lose their grip on the air and that would be that. A tumbling plunge to their deaths. He had to put her in the drink while he could still control their descent, and yet he put it off for another minute … and another.

This had been a good day – one of his best. That morning, three seaplanes had appeared over the aerodrome at Mudros. Thankfully, the Handley Page was out of sight, under the cover of its hangar. Alcock had been the first to take off, in his Sopwith Camel, the first to engage the enemy. The dogfight had been brief and ruthless, the Ottoman Navy aircraft unable to match the Sopwith’s agility. Within minutes, two of them had smashed into the sea, and the appearance of his fellow fliers had scared the other one off. Alcock had been sure he’d escaped death for the day.

The aeroplane lurched and he almost lost control of it, levelling it out with all the strength he had left. They were very close to stalling. If their speed dropped any further, the wings would slip down through the air instead of gliding across it, and they’d be done for. He had to put her down now, while the decision was still his to make.

He motioned to Aird, who unbuckled, stood up and reached out to slap the wooden side of the cockpit. Wise looked around and Aird pointed downwards. Wise gave a grim thumbs up and nodded, then braced himself in his own small cubbyhole, readying himself for what was to come. As Aird sat down again, he checked on the flare pistol clipped to the wall near his knee. They’d need the Very lights to signal for help.

The three men loosened their seatbelts, for fear of being dragged under the water if the machine should start sinking as soon as they were down. Alcock turned into the wind, got the aircraft as level as he could and throttled back, cutting the starboard engine. Thankfully, the sky was clear enough that they had a bit of moon and some starlight. There was enough of a breeze at sea level that he could see the ruffled white caps of the waves, but no major swell. That would help. Now routine took over, as he tilted the nose down into a glide, the strain on the aircraft easing as gravity added speed. Actually landing would be another matter entirely.

He watched his height on the altimeter until he was too low for it to be accurate. Then he looked out to the dark horizon and down, trying to gauge exactly where the sea’s rippled surface was in the blackness below. Alcock’s timing would have to be perfect. If he misjudged the moment they hit the water, he could smash in too hard or dig the nose in – or drop the tail in first – and flip the whole machine over. If he didn’t keep the wings level, he could gouge the surface with a wingtip and send them spinning.

As the sea’s surface rose to meet them, he pulled the nose up for those last few moments and felt that floating sensation as the wings caught more air, trying to soften the blow. His technique was good, he had timed it well …

The water was rougher than it had appeared. They hit the top of a wave, and the first impact was a shocking jolt that tore off the undercarriage.

Spray smacked against the windscreen as the aircraft bounced violently, and Alcock jammed his feet hard against the rudder bar and locked his arms to hold himself in place. There was a crack of wood and the sharp, guitar twang of wires snapping. The machine came down again, this time smashing full force into the water, snapping off the lower left wing, which took the port engine went with it. Beside Alcock, the starboard engine wrenched free with a scream from its mounts. Thrown upwards, it caught on some wire and punched a hole in the leading edge of the upper wing. The propellor shattered as the engine swung back down and gouged a wound in the wall near Alcock’s feet, some of the prop’s fragments shooting through the cockpit like shrapnel, one piece narrowly missing his face. The aircraft’s nose plunged into the water, drowning Wise’s cockpit. The tail came apart, and a section of the rudder flew overhead, the broken pieces of spruce and linen catching on the upper wing and spinning crazily off to the side. The aircraft ploughed to a halt, the force of its sudden deceleration buckling the fuselage, splitting its frame and skin. The cold sea rushed in around Alcock’s legs, rising quickly to his waist.

With frantic movements, he pulled himself up over the seat onto the leather-padded back edge of the cockpit. Aird clambered up beside him with the flare pistol. Their eyes were already casting forwards to Wise’s cockpit, where they could see the bulge of his head in the flooded hollow of the nose. Then he burst upwards, sucking in a desperate breath with a chest tightened by the chill of the water. He scrambled up the nose, over the windscreen and into their cockpit, their hands then grasping him and hauling him up onto the flat top of the fuselage.

The aircraft was slumped low in the water, but she wasn’t sinking. She’d held together enough that the fuel tanks, even though they were mostly full, were keeping her afloat. The machine was a wreck, but they were alive.

The three men looked all around, hoping for some sign of a British ship they could signal to with the Very lights. There was nothing. Aird fired one off anyway, on the slim chance some unseen, blacked-out vessel might see it. There was no response from the darkness. They pulled off their goggles, flying helmets and boots. Torn between wanting to keep their leather flying suits on for warmth and knowing they’d have difficulty swimming in them, they struggled out of the bulky garments, but stayed wrapped in them for as long as they could remain on top of the fuselage. The machine wouldn’t stay afloat forever.

Despite the suntans they’d picked up from their time on Lemnos, they all looked pale and shaken. Wise had blood running down his craggy face from a shallow wound on the forehead. He’d injured his ribs too – cracked, perhaps broken. He cursed and flexed a sore knee.

‘Where are we?’ he asked. ‘Close enough to the coast, I think?’

‘Further north than I’d like,’ Aird replied. ‘The Gulf of Xeros, a few miles from Suvla Bay. Though we’re still within reach of our destroyers, I’d say.’

‘Only if they come out this way,’ said Alcock, stroking water from his ginger-brown hair, his usual good humour finding its way back to his broad, blunt features. ‘Otherwise, we’re sunk. I say we swim for it. It’s southeast to the nearest bit of coast. Any idea which way the current is flowing?’

‘Towards the coast, I think,’ Aird told them. ‘Let’s hold on here. Help might come yet.’

Help did not come. Though Alcock did his best to keep the others’ spirits up, chatting and cracking jokes, they all knew they were in a tight spot. Alcock thought of the strangeness of their situation. He had started out as a mechanic in Manchester, working on bicycles, cars and motorcycles – and eventually working his way up to the races in Brooklands in Surrey. At that time, the purpose-built race track was already being used as an aerodrome by those early aviators in their experimental aeroplanes. His skill had led to work on aircraft engines, and then to becoming a pilot himself – not something that would ever have been expected of a Mancunian working-class lad.

Now here he was, only a few years later, in the middle of a war, floating on a wrecked aeroplane off the coast of Turkey.

After nearly two hours, having fired off their few flares, the three men finally decided to swim for the coast. They were shivering with the cold and aching from the crash, now that the adrenaline had worn off, but there was nothing else for it. Alcock was nervous. The difficult flight had worn him out. Land was just in sight, a black sliver against the horizon when they were lifted higher by the waves. But there was a fair swell and he wasn’t much of a swimmer. Apart from larking around in Manchester’s canals as a lad, he’d spent much of his youth in garages and workshops; there hadn’t been much call for swimming long distances.

Still in their tunics and trousers, the men slipped into the chilly water, thankful that this was the Aegean, and not the freezing waters of the Atlantic or the North Sea. Aird led the way, the strongest swimmer and the one with the best idea of where they were. Alcock cast one last look at the sinking bomber and then turned and struck out for the shore.

It seemed to take forever, and there were times when they felt the current was pulling them backwards faster than they could swim forwards. Eventually, however, they dragged themselves onto the beach. Alcock groaned as he felt solid ground under his feet, sand between his fingers. He stood on wobbling legs and waded the last few yards to the shore, exhausted but relieved. Dropping to his hands and knees, he gazed around him. There were high banks of grass ahead, bordering the beach, and the first of the dawn light was beginning to pick out the gold of the sand.

Their relief didn’t last long. A group of figures was running along the beach to their right. Turkish soldiers in light-brown uniforms and German-style helmets. One stopped, raised a rifle and fired. Now the others did the same, and the three British fliers, in bare feet and still dressed in their uniform tunics and trousers, ran for cover as bullets threw up gouts of sand around their legs. They ducked down behind some rocks, the whine of rounds flying over their heads, with more smacking the rocks around them.

The shooting stopped, and Alcock cautiously peered out. The men were Arabic looking, rugged and hardened by combat. One, who appeared to be an officer, called out to the fliers. He was calm, a man who knew he was in control. And though he spoke Turkish, his meaning was clear: ‘If you make us come in there, we’ll come in shooting.’ They would need little excuse to kill the men who had bombed their towns and cities.

Alcock looked to his companions, and with sour resignation, they came to the decision together. He raised his hands and stood up, and they followed suit.

This was it. The war was over for Lieutenant John Alcock.

2

Arthur Whitten Brown screamed in his sleep. The confusion of battle surrounded him; some part of his brain tried to make sense of it, while another part knew this could not be real. He was in the trenches during a bombardment, crouched shin-deep in mud, artillery shells detonating around him like God roaring in his ears, trying to make his head burst. Where was he – Ypres? The Somme? He couldn’t even remember any more. The world was filled with the noise of bombs and the screeches of the dying around him, men bursting apart. The dust and debris of the pulverised British defences assaulted his eyes and nose and ears, mingling with the stench of smoke.

Then a cool wind blew across his face and, lifting his head in puzzlement, he realised he could look over the top of the trench without climbing a ladder. He was sitting down, the mud was gone and there was a leather-covered, wooden rim around him at shoulder height, a tiny rectangle of windshield in front of him. This was wrong … this was nearly a year later, after he’d transferred to the Royal Flying Corps. He was in the observer’s cockpit of a BE2C. They were flying over the enemy trenches, photographing them, as he had done so many times. The pilot behind him – Lewis? No, Henry Medlicott – was struggling to keep them on their course, the light biplane lurching awkwardly in strong winds and the shockwaves of anti-aircraft blasts; Archie was piling it on. Despite the fact that it made them an easier target, they had to fly in a straight line so that Brown could get accurate pictures of the enemy trenches below.

His body worked on reflex. He peered down through the eyepiece at the cratered landscape, snapped another photograph and went to change the plate. Archie’s shells were bursting around them, machine gun rounds zipping past. A line of bullets drilled the fuselage; one punctured the fuel tank. He knew what was coming. No … Oh no. Not this again. The engine failed as Medlicott threw them into a banking turn away from the enemy fire. The machine stalled and they began to fall. As they spiralled madly, Brown was pressed back and to the side by the force of the motion. Medlicott fought desperately to bring the aircraft under control. He managed to straighten out, and level them off, but they were coming down too hard, too fast – and straight towards the enemy positions. The nose crunched into the ground, breaking the machine’s back, and Brown’s cockpit folded in on him, crushing his left leg. Blood sprayed across his face as broken bone split the top of his thigh. He shrieked, fighting with the hands that gripped him, shaking him, shaking him. He opened his eyes, but it was dark now. Half-awake, he saw the faces of the dead again, some talking or laughing, some grey-skinned, disfigured by wounds. What was happening? Why couldn’t he think? His leg was in such intense pain it felt as if it was being burned off …

‘Arthur, you must wake up!’ the voice was saying. ‘Arthur … Teddy, wake up! It’s all right, you’re having the nightmares again. Wake up!’

As he rose into a befuddled consciousness, the agony of his leg was still there, but muted, hurting because he’d been thrashing around on the hard bed again. It had been nearly two years now, since he’d been injured.

‘Henry?’ he croaked, blinking in the gloom, the face above him in deep shadow.

‘No, Teddy, it’s Marchand. You’re having a nightmare.’

Not Henry Medlicott … of course not. This man had a French accent. Arthur Whitten Brown, known to his friends as ‘Teddy’, finally remembered where he was. He was a prisoner in Germany. Henry was here too, though he was currently locked away in solitary after another escape attempt. A French pilot named Marchand was clutching his hand now, trying to bring him back to his senses.

Brown groaned, rubbing the old wound in his thigh with his free hand. He and Henry had been shot down over Valenciennes, near Lille. Henry had done well to get the machine to the ground in one piece, for it was full of holes, the petrol tank ruptured. Brown’s left leg had been shattered in the crash, which had also dislocated his hip and both his knees, and knocked out a few of his teeth.

Though the doctors at the hospital in Aix-le-Chapelle had done their best, his leg was as healed as it would ever get. He had been months recovering from his injuries, his pain eased with blessed morphine, before they’d transferred him to the prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. He would be walking with the help of a cane for the rest of his life. Lying here now, he felt so utterly exhausted. He never seemed to be able to sleep through the night any more.

Teddy looked around the shed where the officers were held. A few others peered blearily at him before turning over and going back to sleep. The officers had better quarters than the enlisted men – even a decent stove – but the place was still a hovel, with beds that were little more than wooden racks, musty straw mattresses and threadbare blankets. Despite the cold, the skin of his face, back and chest were coated in sweat. He shivered, wiped a sleeve across his brow, and tucked his blanket tighter around him.

‘I’m all right, thank you,’ he said to Marchand. His own accent was that of an educated Manchester man, with a hint of his parents’ American twang. ‘Sorry I woke you. Heaven knows, it’s hard enough to sleep in this place without me raising a ruckus.’

‘You’re not the only one who gets nightmares, Teddy,’ Marchand replied softly.

Taking a slim silver hip flask from his pocket, Marchand offered it to Brown, who gratefully unscrewed the cap. It was brandy, warm and soothing. He only had a few sips, for he could tell there wasn’t much left. It was precious stuff in here.

The French pilot had also been captured after being shot down. Like Brown, he had served in the trenches before becoming an aviator – transferring to the Aéronautique Militaire, the French army’s flying corps. Like Brown, he considered himself a lucky man. They had made it out alive, when many had not.

Marchand squeezed Brown’s hand, patted his shoulder and returned to his own bunk. Looking at his watch, Teddy saw that it was four o’clock in the morning. There would be no more sleep for him now, so he took a small tunneler’s torch from under the jacket he used as a pillow and switched it on. There was a pile of books under his bed, and he pulled out the one on the top. Most of these had come into the camp in Red Cross parcels, sent to the prisoners, which he’d traded for, though he’d managed to do some deals with the guards too.

All of the books in his little library dealt with navigation. Opening this latest one at the page he’d marked, he began reading.

The war had gone on long enough for doctors across Europe to recognise what was happening to those involved in the fighting for any length of time. What had once been considered ‘a lack of moral fibre’ was now understood as shell shock – a man could be physically unharmed, but emotionally and mentally destroyed by the brutality of war. Brown was a highly intelligent man, who valued his keen mind. He was determined not to lose it to the horrors he’d seen. The nightmares were a constant reminder that he might well be up and walking, but he was far from recovered.

Distractions helped. He needed something to occupy him, to challenge him. He was disabled now. His gammy leg meant that, even if he managed to get back to the Royal Flying Corps, he could not train as a pilot as he’d intended. He was confident he could fly any of the machines he’d been up in, but the Corps demanded that its pilots be in peak physical condition.

The sky had become a crucial battlefield. Some of the other chaps in the hut with him, who had been captured more recently, told him that new pilots in the Royal Flying Corps were being thrown into action after only a few hours’ flight training. It was madness. Being able to control your aircraft was only the half of it. A fresh recruit lasted an average of three weeks, easy meat for any ace flier who caught them in the air.

Brown was an engineer by education, and had been a competent mechanic by the age of seventeen. He understood these flying machines, and yet he was looking further into the future. When you flew across the lines of battle, you needed to know the landscape below you. But the features pilots relied on to find their way – roads, buildings, railway lines – could be there one day, obliterated by shelling the next. And that was assuming you didn’t have fog or cloud obscuring your vision, which was often the case, or that you weren’t being thrown around in bad weather.

It made a man humble, to gaze down on the ground far below and realise how insignificant humans were in that vast land. How many lives had been taken so cruelly for a few yards of ground this way or that?

War was an absurd waste, but it had transformed aircraft engineering. Once an oddball pursuit, confined to a few innovators, it was now an industrial process. As aircraft flew faster and farther, they were beginning to outpace their pilots’ ability to navigate this new, wider world. Finding your path along roads as a car did, or plotting a course across the sea, at the plodding pace of a ship, could not compare with the speed and unpredictability of flight. Humans had found their way into the sky. Now they had to learn to find their way through it.

Huddled in his bed in that miserable prison camp, Brown leafed through the pages, continuing his study of the stars. He had seen the world from the air, had seen how much bigger it was out there, and it had changed him.

And he wanted more of it.