The Green Gauntlet by R. F. Delderfield Page B

to pay the same address to the scientific aspects of aerial warfare. With Stevie, at least up to the moment he flew a bomber on operations, the war in the air had been little more than a lark. Technicalities bored him, even though he never had much difficulty in absorbing enough of them to make him an average pilot, but Andy soon outgrew their initial approach to flying and became deeply interested in the slow build-up of tactical skills as opposed to the hit-and-miss approach of the dashing amateurs who filled the gaps made in professional cadres by the Battle of France and the Battle of Britain. With the development of this more objective attitude some of the natural exuberance left over from his youth departed, enabling him, to an extent, to regard the extravagances of the R.A.F. façade in much the same light as his down-to-earth sister-in-law. He did not crumple his cap. He did not use much slang. And he had no personal animosity against the enemy, thinking of him as he had once thought of schoolmasters and rival scrap dealers, people there to be outwitted, targets for his ingenuity and daring.
    When fighter aircraft became more sophisticated his appetite for concerted and preconceived action grew with every sortie. He operated less and less as a well-mounted buck in the hunting field and more and more like a seasoned boxer, fighting his way towards a world title. He was in line for promotion now and, as he himself would have put it, intended to keep his nose clean. As a squadron-leader he would have some sort of say in tactics and could progress from the dogsbody stage to ranks where he might be given a chance to put some of his theories to work.
    Out here, in the Western Desert, the tempo of the aerial war was very different from the comparative slapdash days of British-based operations in 1940 and early ’41. Squadron scores and squadron casualties were more moderate and combats were by no means as frequent as over the Kentish Weald and the Channel. To an extent, despite the ceaseless sway of armies between the Qattara Depression and Benghazi, the contest had settled down. Andy, based in the region of the Ruweisat Ridge, east of Alexandria, was now flying every day, escorting coastal convoys or, once Rommel had launched his May offensive, the Blenheim bombers raiding enemy supply dumps and occasionally he tangled with a Stuka. In June of that year he got his first confirmed kill, a JU 88 lumbering into Tobruk after its surrender. Two days after that he shot out of the sun and killed a Stuka. He watched, impersonally, as the maimed aircraft hurtled down in wide circles to explode on the brown emptied landscape below and then made for base, unable to try his luck at strafing lorries crawling along the coastal road because his ammunition supply was exhausted.
    All through the final eastward heave of the Afrika Korps towards Egypt he was happily engaged in this kind of ploy, peeling off and following his leader down to shoot up transport, tanks and self-propelled 80 mm guns. The overall progress of the war, or even the campaign, did not concern him. He concentrated on the immediate task and gave hardly a thought to his wife, to his brother Stevie, or to the future once this fascinating period of his life should end. He did not contemplate death either, despite the occasional failure of a messmate to return from a sweep across the great blue and white bowl of the sky enclosing this featureless desert. Sometimes, when he was alone up there he would give expression to the sheer exhilaration of flying by mouthing some dance tune of the past, when he, Stevie and their wives had zoomed about Britain and the Continent in one or other of their many fast cars and although he could not hear himself sing, the rhythm of a ’thirties tune would conjure up a fleeting picture of Margaret’s chubby face puckered with laughter. The thing that sometimes puzzled him was that he no longer felt a physical need for women and he had once