The Dawn Patrol Read online

  Chapter Four

  Sun is shining, over England, sky is calling, the Dawn Patrol. Such great beauty, may be the last time, that I ever, see dawn again.

  The words of the simple song sung to self are hummed from the grey drape mist-covered edge of an airfield, nowhere in particular, yet everywhere scattered throughout England like rose petals with deadly thorns, as the die is cast and the cast assembles to act out lines spoken at meetings on Downing street and draped across the countryside on telegraph poles, and lapping upon the eardrum shore to roll up into the mind in waves as grim eyes look on sleeping pilots, growing weary and wearier still they will become, propped up, carried along the rushing rapid moments of adrenalin, in the air and back again to collapse or be taken into hospitals or buried in the underground of earth or stone or ocean, there to join the dreaming kings in otherworlds of oak and ash and alder.

  And everywhere, the tousled hair that mothers yearn to touch again, as once she did upon a time her son that suckled at her breast and wished upon a star.

  The Nazi warlord Hermann Goering breathed in the excitement of nearing the very edge of the coast, the westernmost bulwark of the Fatherland’s embrace of Europe. He was high as a kite, but he felt that he managed himself well after nearly two decades of taking morphine.

  “What a glorious morning!” he exclaimed, jumping out of the car and looking out upon all the assembled soldiers before him.

  “Heil Hitler!” he yelled, and it echoed back from a thousand voices. He gazed with lingering adoration before him, appreciating the symmetry of the soldiers, thinking back to the toy soldiers he had played with as a boy, never imagining that the Teutonic legends would come alive before him, and under his command.

  He put his hand out for a pair of binoculars, and greedily looked out across the English Channel, and found himself actually salivating.

  “Ich werde Luftwaffe sehen! Schnell!” and he leapt back into the staff car, which sped immediately along the heavily fortified rim of France, past castles of concrete and impenetrable defenses, that sprung up in Goering’s mind and dotted the maps at Berchtesgaden, the Eyrie in the mountains that he would return to when it was finished.

  “All in good time,” he muttered, reminding himself out of habit to return to the present, well beyond remembering what it was like to think without morphine in his system, or how painful the injury in 1923 had been.

  “No matter, it’s a fine day for hunting!” and he slapped the car with an enthusiasm that made his attending officer jump, afraid at any moment to trigger the wrath of the leader of the Luftwaffe, the German air force that had devastated Europe, the gathered storm that was poised to move over England and take the final plot of land in Europe that stubbornly, stupidly opposed the Fuhrer.

  Hermann barely noticed the bumps in the road, but he gleefully counted the wrecked military equipment that England had left behind; the wreckage of planes and trucks and ammunition. And then he tired of counting and did the math over again in his mind, with the latest estimates of the 4:1 majority the Luftwaffe had over the weakling Royal Air Force.

  He calmed a bit and composed himself as they pulled up to the forward base of the Luftwaffe, where more soldiers and especially the officers of the Luftwaffe gathered at attention, barely concealing their smiling proud strength, having destroyed all Europe and reached the edge of France with blinding speed.

  “Ah” Hermann said, loud enough for his pilots to hear, as they stood stock still. “My eagles, my falcons, my striking force! At ease.” and the gathering relaxed, and Ernst Grunen felt so weary that he could barely stand, and smile at the Fuehrer’s right hand man, shaking his hand, and marveling that Goering had survived World War One, flying in the same fabric planes that he and Cousin Rudy had seen at the county fair in America.

  Ernst managed to stay upright through the rest of the occasion, answering occasional questions, and feeling a momentary sense of hatred for Rudolf Jodl, who seemed so full of energy standing there, only because of the Pervitin he was taking, a powerful methamphetamine, which had helped to fuel the entire Blitzkrieg.

  Ernst reached inside his mouth and felt his gums, glad that he still had his teeth. He had taken Pervitin for a long time, and then found that he couldn’t function well without it, and eventually stopped taking it when he made some serious errors, and when he felt his teeth actually weaken in their sockets. He shuddered, remembering asking a doctor to tie him up for a week so he could clear his system, and then begging and pleading for more Pervitin, and eventually cursing like a common criminal, in the rage of an offended body deprived of its energy. But now Ernst was clear again, and he wondered how much the drug would affect pilots and soldiers on either side of the Atlantic.

  “Better stick with coffee” he muttered, as he stumbled back in a groggy stupor to his quarters there on the edge of France, ignoring Goering, knowing that he could ignore Goering, because he was the top ace of the Luftwaffe, and had 23 kills painted on the fuselage of his airplane.

  Ernst ached with the pain of months of sleep deprivation, of vibration and relentless progress, and as he sank down into the stone solid comfort of a cot and blanket, he wondered if anyone in the Royal Air Force was as tired as he was. “If they aren’t” he groaned to himself, “they will be soon,” and he drifted off as the ocean waves crashed not far away on the beaches of Normandy.

  --

  George Wallace sat at the small white table in Hastings by the Sea, watching the sleepy town incredulously make its own version of preparations for war. He shook his head as he always did, and shielded his pipe to light it and take in the tobacco and sea salted air in the same breath, and puff away minutes until he decided to read the paper.

  Sometimes he looked East across the ocean towards France, and wondered why he was here in England and not buried in Passchendaele or the Somme, with a million other men he left thankfully behind. But generally he just shrugged inwardly, kept himself to himself, and got on with life, thankful for his wife, and how their son Eric had grown up as a fine young man.

  George took a sip from his pint of ale, and decided it was time to open the letter from Eric, who had been stationed at an airbase somewhere on the Isle, but owing to secrecy, the exact location not to be revealed. George grunted belligerently. “As if they’d take me for a bleedin spy!” and he opened the letter, proud of his son and hoping against hope that they could keep England from falling into the hands of the bloody Nazis.

  Dear Father,

  Things are going well at training. I’ve been building up some hours in Hurricanes. You’d never credit the way that a Hurricane can dive down from the commanding heights where the sun shines – that’s a bit of strategy for you –

  George grunted, nodding, “I’ll be keeping that in mind, I will”

  . . . and we do some practice of diving down at a great speed – I’m not supposed to say exactly how fast, but I guarantee you – it’s fast. And we do what training we can, getting the feel of the planes, but there’s just not enough hours in them before one has to go up in the sky. One lad had a crash – it happens. And no one knows for sure when the first contact will happen, but my bones tell me it will be soon.

  “My bones tell me the same thing, lad.” said George.

  I can’t say I understand why Chamberlain or anyone in government could seriously consider making a negotiated peace, but there’s talk, almost a fear, that there will be some kind of negotiated peace, that we won’t get to meet the enemy and show our mettle. You know, father, I have no thirst for glory – I’m just doing my bit as you did. But I just can’t imagine how they could let Hitler get away with taking Europe, and then promising to leave us alone, and expect him not to break a promise.

  “No son, Hitler is not so good at keeping promises.” Muttered George.

  But I’ve heard that Winston Churchill is putting up a resistance to Chamberlain, and word is going around about that. I don’t hope for war, but I don’t see how avoiding it will help either. I’v
e no other thoughts for now. Godspeed, Eric.

  “And Godspeed to you, my son,” said George, and breathed a deep breath, accepting the fact that he may hear again from his son, or never again, that a war may start, and end, or never end, or never begin.

  George peered at a shopkeeper, who was carefully laying tape in criss cross patterns on the shop’s glass windows, obscuring the toy airplanes that hung in the window on strings. George recalled from his training that the tape was to help prevent shards of glass from flying everywhere in the event of a bomb attack. He remembered Verdun, seeing entire mountains of earth heave suddenly in the air, when neither side had made real progress in the war with millions of lives lost, and resorting to digging tunnels and leaving large amounts of explosives to try and blow the enemy kingdom come from beneath. He shuddered, and peered up at the sky.

  “I don’t know as a bit of tape is going to do much good,” but he accepted that a bomb may not take you out of your misery directly, but might land on a neighbor’s house, and why would you want to be walking around with splinters of glass sticking out of you?

  And George folded his paper and the letter, and went to get some proper tape for doing up the windows on their home, walking down the cobbled streets of Hastings to their home, and up the steps, where Mrs. Wallace was deadheading some blooming flowers.

  “Ah, there you are, now give me that letter from Eric” she said, zeroing in on the envelope and the handwriting she knew so well, and reaching out. George passed the letter to her, and sized her up.

  “Now I’m off to the back to put some tape up on the windows, and then I’ll be taking car down to the corner to blacken it all down” he said, sighing. “I don’t fancy having my headlights reduced to slits or the windows neither, but I guess that keeping the lights down as low as possible will take the fun out of things for the Nazi bombers if they come our way.”

  George gave her a kiss on the cheek and ambled off.

  Elicia Wallace savored the kiss, as much as she had the kiss of her son, and breathed a deep breath, and carried the letter into their home into the kitchen, and set it down on the kitchen table next to the stove. She picked a tin of her special Ceylon tea from the shelf, and treasured the sugar that was soon likely to be rationed, carefully pouring a bit into the porcelain cup her mother had given her. The stove piped up grandly and rose to the occasion of boiling water, and the tea was strong, just the right flavor. She would make an afternoon and evening of it, first with the letter and then maybe a bit of the wireless, some music, a novel from her treasure trove, and then maybe a bit of knitting on the sweater for Eric.