Love and the Luftstreitkrafte

Part 1: The Meeting

Depending on how you count it, it was the third or fourth year into the end of the world when I fell desperately in love.

It was January 1917, and I had just turned 20. My old Wellingtonian friend Archie Fisk wanted us to celebrate at Murray's, and I reluctantly agreed.

I might not have gone if my birthday was in some other month, but I had already turned down his Yuletide and New Year party invitations, and I was conscious of being a stick-in-the-mud. I don't have many friends, so I try to keep the ones that I have.

Honestly, I didn't feel that there was much to celebrate. The perennial massacre had slowed for the winter, but as soon as the first sign of spring warmed the fields and trenches of France, they would be right back at it. My friend Rosalind, who knows about these things, said there were more that a hundred thousand dead just in last year's push for the Somme.

I often tried to imagine that—ranks upon ranks of young men, all riddled with bullets, blown apart by mines and shells, choked by gas, gutted with bayonets. How many of them would fit on a football field? Or a lecture hall? Or the dance floor at Murray's?

But it didn't really matter that I couldn't picture them all. Because one of them was my brother Charlie, and that was more than enough.

Archie had lost friends, too. But he was always the type to look on the sunny side. The gears of war had ground to a crawl, if only temporarily. And "we" were still alive and well, even if "we" were fewer than before. There was good food to be had, drinks to be drunk, and pretty ladies to chat up. For Archie, that was plenty of reason to celebrate.

One thing I can say about Murray's is that they had some good food, in spite of the recent shortages. I had seared salmon that was tender and buttery, a completely different animal from the chewy pink shreds I'd fold into sandwiches at home. I obliged Archie and his pilot pals, who insisted I have a birthday brandy before picking out a white wine to pair with my fish. I don't pretend to know what I'm talking about with wine or spirits, but I didn't dislike either, and started feeling pleasantly fuzzy. In fact, I felt almost chipper, for perhaps the first time since 1915.

Archie was telling us about one of the many close calls he'd had getting his 30 hours flight training, when he'd flown through a flock of geese and dipped his wheels in a pond trying to escape them, surprising some elderly fishermen.

"You see what you're missing, Brownie?" one of his pilot friends teased me. I was a 2nd Lieutenant in the RFC like most of them, but my official role was Observer, not Pilot.

"Brownie went up with me the other day!" Archie chimed in, like this was an accomplishment on his part.

"What did you think of it, Brownie?"

"I think I'd rather wait for the wings that come with the halo, like everybody else," I replied, getting a laugh from the pilots within earshot.

"Well, not everybody else," grunted Franklin the vicar's son.

Fortunately, before this sparked a religious debate, Walt came up to us with a few women in tow. I couldn't tell exactly how many. The room was packed, so one group bled into another, and if I started counting people beyond our little circle I'd start counting corpses.

"Gents!" Walt greeted us. "We have some young ladies in need of a dance, and I told them we'd be happy to oblige. This is my cousin Peggy, and her friend Miss Emmaline Whittle. Ladies, this is Oliver Brown and Archie Fisk."

Walt was a tall chap, and his cousin Peggy clearly came from the same stock. She was taller than me, so in ascending order we were: Emmaline, me, Peggy, Archie, Walt. I'm sure Peggy was a nice girl, but I was already self-conscious about dancing, and didn't want to look twice the fool dancing badly with a taller girl.