Free Ship of Force by Alan Evans Page A

pasting up there lately. Margaret was our fourth loss in ten days.”
    “Margaret?”
    “My RE8, sir.” A faint grin. “I called her after a girl I know.”
    Smith said, “I see. And you were the fourth?”
    “Fourth aircraft lost. Nobody at all came back from the others. Henry — er, Squadron Commander Dennis, that is — he’ll be glad I’m all right but he won’t be too pleased about Margaret. Because of the other three he wasn’t frightfully keen on my going but — orders is orders. Anyway. The other times they sent some cover, a flight of fighters, but that ended up in a dog-fight and more losses. So this time I thought: Why not try a bit of cunning? So we went without cover, flew off in the early evening, made a big circle out to sea and came in with the sun behind us.”
    He paused, sipped from the mug. Smith could smell the whisky, Brodie’s dram had been a hefty one. Morris went on, “It turned out there wasn’t much sun but the wheeze worked anyway, up to a point. We got in all right and I made a fast circle low over Ostende then ran inland and flew north. We ran right up to the north of De Haan, nearly up to Blankenberge and then we turned south along the coast.” He looked at Smith and explained. “You see, sir, they’ve been keeping a fighting patrol flying over De Haan permanently. There’s always one Albatros V-strutter in the air and they can whistle up a lot more in minutes.”
    Smith said, “Albatros what?”
    Morris explained, “Albatros V-strutter. Their lower wing is shorter and narrower than the upper so the struts come down to a point like a V. They’re hot stuff; two machine-guns. The Triplanes we’ve got at St. Pol can fight ’em because the ‘Tripe hound’ is more manoeuvrable an’ goes up like a rocket. But a Harry Tate hasn’t got much hope.”
    Smith nodded and Morris went on, “So the idea was to come at them from the north. See? Not from the direction of France. Anyway, all the way up Bill had the camera going like mad but he kept shaking his head and making ‘wash-out’ signs with his hands meaning he couldn’t see anything new. So then we turned south and ran back down the coast. Sneaking in like that we got away with it for a few minutes. The light was a bit dim by then; it had started to rain again. It’s been raining a lot. Bill and me, we’ve got a cricket side together in the squadron but we haven’t had a knock for days. Bloody weather…” Morris’s voice trailed off and he was silent for a few seconds. When he went on his voice was a little louder, a little clearer, more deliberately casual. “I’d taken her down as low as I dared and Bill was hanging over the side of the cockpit and I had my head poked out so what there was to see, we saw. And there was nothing. Nothing new, that is. Except when we were just south of De Haan. There’s a biggish wood runs inland from the coast and there were a lot of chaps on the beach there. They seemed to be bringing a boat up from the sea.”
    Smith broke in, “What kind of boat?”
    “Well, we were over and past in a second.” Morris screwed up his face, trying to remember, then shook his head. “Bill could have told you but I was trying to fly as well. Might have been a fishing-boat. Seemed sort of wide-ish, blunt-ish. A bit like a shoe-box, it was so square. No armament, though, that’s definite. I’d have noticed a gun. Bill was excited, seemed to think he could see something in the wood, had the camera going.”
    He took a swallow from the mug and Smith asked, “And that was all you saw?”
    Morris nodded. “After that, for one reason and another I thought we might as well go home.”
    “What reasons?”
    “The light was going bad on us, of course. On top of that we started to get a lot of Archie coming up from the wood.”
    Archie was anti-aircraft fire. Smith said quietly, “From the wood?”
    Morris nodded. “
That
was new. We didn’t know they had Archie hidden in the wood. It gave us a