Conquerors of the Sky by Thomas Fleming Page A

could believe
It devours clouds
Consumes cities and rivers
Challenges the sun
With its growling shadow?

    Frank called Penelope his priestess and accepted the celibacy she imposed on him. Although they saw themselves as citizens of the new century it was a very Victorian love. Pound was their high priest, weaving a spell of beauty, a promise of triumphant art, around their lives. For three months Frank Buchanan, soaring in planes and poetry, was a happy young man.
    But history was rumbling toward them on the continent. The Great Powers, as the newspapers called them, had devoted millions to building huge armies while their frantic diplomats devoted hundreds of hours to weaving intricate alliances to maintain a balance of power that was supposed to make war impossible. When a Serbian anarchist assassinated the crown prince of Austria, the illusion of peace evaporated. Austria threatened Serbia, Russia warned Austria, Germany threatened Russia. France warned Germany.
    On August 4, 1914, Frank Buchanan awoke in his Hendon rooming house.
Guy Chapman, his fellow junior designer, was pounding on his door. “Frank, Frank!” he was shouting. “It’s the bloody war. It’s started!”
    Frank stumbled out of bed and found Chapman clutching a copy of the London Times. GERMANS INVADE BELGIUM roared the headline. England had warned Germany that if they violated Belgium’s neutrality to attack France, Britain would declare war. At the Aircraft Manufacturing Company, chaos reigned. Geoffrey de Havilland and several other key people had been drafted by the Royal Flying Corps. Frank and Guy Chapman were the only designers still on the job.
    Over the next year, Frank watched the airplane turn into a weapon of war. From the scout the generals had envisioned it became a fighter plane, when a Dutch designer named Anthony Fokker taught the Germans how to synchronize a machine gun to fire through the propeller. Then it became a bomber as more and more powerful motors created larger and larger planes capable of carrying as much as a thousand pounds of high explosives.
    Penelope Foster’s first reaction to the war was exultation. She was sure Germany would be smashed in a matter of weeks. As dozens of her friends and relatives, including her older brother, were killed by German machine guns and artillery in France, rage became her dominant emotion. She changed from a cool, detached imagist poet to a ranting, chanting writer of patriotic verse in the Kipling tradition. She shouted her poems from platforms to intimidate men into enlisting in the British army.
    At night, in her Kensington flat, Penelope wrote more bad poetry to the heroic dead, and abused Frank Buchanan. She still refused to let him touch her. “Where are your heroic countrymen?” she hissed. “Why aren’t they here, fighting for civilization? The barbarians are at the gates!”
    Frank tried to defend President Woodrow Wilson’s neutrality. He portrayed America as the one nation that could negotiate a just peace between the warring powers before they destroyed each other. Penelope called him a coward and a fool.
    One terrible night at Pound’s flat, after one of the best imagist poets, T. H. Hulme, was killed in Flanders, Penelope reviled Pound for not fighting beside him. Her diatribe was a paradigm of the way the war annihilated Pound’s dream of a civilization redeemed by art. He began to sneer at the idea of patriotism, to see literature and art, not as a vortex transforming the world, but as a refuge from a world gone mad.
    When German zeppelins and Gotha bombers appeared over London, smashing churches and homes, killing hundreds of people, Pound mocked Frank’s vision of the plane annihilating frontiers. Its new goal was the annihilation of the countries behind the frontiers.
    â€œI can hardly wait for them to bomb you American cowards,” Penelope raged. She glared at Frank, her Pre-Raphaelite face livid