The Curse
Now heaven be praised
That in that hour that most imperiled her,
Menaced her liberty who foremost raised
Europe’s bright flag of freedom, some there were
Who, not unmindful of the antique debt,
Came back the generous path of Lafayette.
-Alan Seeger-
He hadn’t heard me, he hadn’t seen me, and with a squeeze of my finger, he would fall from the sky.
Sweat beaded under my leather flight helmet. I’d trained for these moments. A German single-seat pursuit plane, sitting defenseless under my nose, and the new Vickers twin machine guns rested in front of my cockpit, just offset, begging to be put to use.
Pull the trigger a quarter of an inch—that was all it took—and I’d open my scorecard at long last. The boys on the ground would welcome me back a hero.Â
But I had never killed a man, even after two years at war. I was cursed.
At first, it was natural. Every soldier enters the war without a kill, and each man looked forward to the day, macabre and twisted as it may sound. Some, the foolish ones, looked forward to it like a birthday or a ballgame. Others looked forward to it with dread like a trip to the dentist, but we all looked forward to it in some way.Â
Because we all wondered. The questions were relentless: Will I freeze up? How will I do it? What will it feel like when I stick a bayonet through a German and save the world?
Precious few of us wondered whether we’d be the ones left dying slowly in a trench or trying to crawl from a ravaged tank or burning fuselage.Â
And now, with a pull of my trigger, I could wonder no longer. I only had to bring myself to squeeze my finger a quarter inch.
After a time, it got awkward for those of us still unsullied. New boys coming over to the war would ask how long we’d been out here—then inevitably for our number. This was especially true among pilots, who reveled in their records of downed planes. Every pilot knew two numbers: their confirmed kills and the true number of their kills.
My two numbers were the same. Zero.
I shifted my hands nervously on the joystick. Come on, Marcus. Take the shot, already.
Soon, the other soldiers talked about me as if I had the influenza, and each had their own prescription for me to bag my first Boche. Lead your gun to take distance and speed into account. A swig of bourbon didn’t do any harm. Wait to shoot until you’re sure your rounds will strike the kill box on the enemy’s fuselage.
As if I didn’t know.
Then the tips melted away, replaced with clumsy explanations that somewhere I’d been cursed. And that belief inspired them to see me with rage-inducing reverence.
Marcus, take the damn shot.
Descending from above as Luf had taught me, cloaking my Nieuport single-seater in the sunlight, I had settled in behind this poor German pilot like a cat in the night.Â
But like always, my brain would not stop thinking.
Why hadn’t he seen me? The idiot. The foolish idiot. Was he a new pilot? Had he not been trained properly? Didn’t he know that you must always look about you, scan the sky, pay close attention to those terrible blind spots?
My rudder pedals protested against my feet, and the joystick jostled as the wind caught my wings and rudder. Nature tried to pull me off course, tried to stop the violence before it happened.Â
Just a squeeze, little German. That’s all it will take, and you will die. If you’re lucky, one of the machine gun rounds will hit you, so you don’t fall in flames with your machine. The flames would lick your skin and bubble it and the worst fate you could imagine would be to survive the crash.
A quarter inch. That’s all.
But I had never killed a man, no, not after two years at war.
Suddenly, the pilot shifted his head back and forth. He seemed to mock me. His engine screamed in my direction, taunting me, daring me.
It was all getting dangerous now. Every moment I hesitated, the risk grew. He was unlikely to be the only plane nearby. Even if he didn’t take evasive action, his comrades would find him and open fire on his pursuer.Â
The German pilot dipped into a gentle bank. He turned his head and must have seen the tip of my wing, because he turned again, fast now, panicked. His eyes met mine. I should have pulled the trigger then, in that moment when our eyes locked across the clouds and he knew I was there.
But I didn’t. For some reason, I couldn’t.
The German Pfalz dove and banked hard, giving me a brief glimpse of the two black crosses on its wings. I had missed the easy shot. If another presented itself, I could not hesitate again, but now it would be different. Now there would be honor in the kill. He had a sporting chance to beat me.
The plane flipped over several times, curving under me, changing direction before making its climb to get above my machine. I jammed hard on the stick and my Nieuport gave chase. The pull of gravity tugged at my face and insides as the diving speed of my aircraft built so I could propel it upward again. The Pfalz darted so quickly without fear, and it had already twisted around to climb beyond the aim of my machine guns.
We circled one another. I tried to match his movements, but I struggled against the hardiness of the nimble German machine. The Pfalz D.III was known for its sturdiness, its reliability in a dive and sharp turns. My Nieuport 28, new at the front, was a model thrown to the Americans because the French didn’t want it. My turns could not be as sharp as his, for fear the linen on my plane would pull away from the wing’s leading edge and fail.
Yet, I could not risk falling too far behind in this contest to get well above the other. Already he had begun firing his Spandau machine gun to prevent me from taking certain maneuvers. They all went wide as I clung to the strategic defense I’d been taught. These fighters could only shoot forward. If I could just stay clear of his nose…Â
But with every turn, the Pfalz’s heavy wings cut away pieces of my escape route. This couldn’t go on for too long. Though I hadn’t yet shot down a German, I had logged plenty of flying hours. But even experienced pilots could knock themselves unconscious from too much maneuvering.
I spiraled down and dove quickly, trying to sweep beneath him, but he followed me deftly. When I pulled up from the dive he was gone.
Gone?
No. I glanced now at a bank of clouds. He had disappeared into them. A dare and a peace offering. Follow me or go home. I stared at the white plumed wall. I had given this man his chance for a gentleman’s duel. The game was on. To turn back now—Â
I put a hand to my neck, grasping for a glass marble suspended there on a small chain, but I could hardly feel it through the padding of my flight suit and gloves. The movement was automatic, superstitious. What was it pilots said? When it’s your time, there’s no stopping it. Magic marble or no.
It was time for me to get my first.
I flew into the clouds after him.Â
When I emerged on the other side, I saw them. My quarry with two other German fighters, death waiting. They seemed to be laughing at me. Greedy American. You could have gone home.
Instinct took the controls, and I squeezed my trigger. But my guns hardly had time to sing before they jammed. I was defenseless.
No, no, no.
The three planes seemed to hang in the air, as if pausing to comprehend my dilemma. Then in a flash, they closed in.
I flipped my nose downward again and spiraled back into the bank of clouds for cover. I didn’t need to check if they were following. I knew they would be.
I only hoped I could get back to my squad mates. But between my chase with the Pfalz and my scramble to escape its reinforcements, I’d lost significant altitude. Unless my boys were searching for me below our assigned patrol, they might not see me. And besides, they might be busy with their own German warbirds.
The terrible sound erupted. The mechanical, uncaring rat-tat-tat of the German guns. Rounds came zipping through the air. I rolled and banked and clutched at the glass marble around my neck.Â
My hands shook. Gravity and terror assaulted my stomach. The Germans sailed after me, taking turns shooting off rounds. Ten. Twenty. Fifty. One hundred rounds. Any bullet could end my life. I could not stay clear of all their guns, so I crossed their noses in a sporadic pattern of twists and slides. Could I outmaneuver them long enough to exhaust their ammunition? Their fuel?
Psssht.
The sound of a round piercing the canvas of my plane was anti-climactic. There was no explosion. No fanfare. Just a hole now in the wing with air whistling through it.Â
My gut climbed into my throat, condensation clouding on my flight goggles. I tried to wipe them, but my training was running out my ears. Fear, a recurring and unwelcome guest, evicted the smooth, smart evasive maneuvers I’d been taught, and now I let the animalistic instinct of survival take control. My swerves grew more daring, pushing the Nieuport to its limits, unconcerned about how much the wings could take.Â
I needed to get back to the Allied line. If I could fly low enough, perhaps our anti-air guns could help me, or even our artillery or infantry machine gunners.
My panicked maneuvering impeded my forward progress, though, and it was slow going, punctuated with the zips of the German rounds piercing the howl of the wind.
Two years at war. I could not die here.
A jolt on my right wing. Glancing over revealed the trail of holes in the canvas, not so neat as the first, less graceful. I felt that impact as if the French oak frames in the wings were my own bones.Â
I noticed the effect on the plane almost immediately. It did not respond as it had before, and now pushing the Nieuport’s limits wasn’t dangerous—it was suicide. But what else could I do? The Germans were competing now, each jockeying for position to claim my death on his scorecard.
The panic was as deadly as the German guns. It could not end here. My number was still zero. I had not yet claimed that hero’s honor I’d left home to achieve.
Could I stomach a crash landing on rough terrain? Perhaps they would count the downed plane and leave me alone. But I could not crash yet. I was still in German territory. The line was visible, but I was flying dangerously low.Â
My vision soon clouded with the explosive rounds of anti-aircraft fire.Â
Rounds from behind. Rounds from below.Â
I had no choice. I had to climb or Archie on the ground would blow the Allied colors on my wings to bits.
I yanked back on the stick and adjusted my angle before banking into a wide turn away from the approaching battery. Forty-five degrees to the left and shallow enough so as not to flash the tops of my wings at my pursuers. It’d be an easy target.Â
A round fizzed by my head, close enough to take my breath away, but soon they had flown straight past. They split in different directions on their re-approach.
Climb, Marcus. Climb. At least enough to give yourself a better chance against the ground fire.
My plane jerked behind me as another burst of fire poked a few holes in my fuselage. My thoughts drifted to my mother. The little stack of my father’s unopened letters in my luggage.
Their boy downed in God-forsaken Toulon without so much as a single victory, not a single bad guy nabbed in all his time away.
Ahead of me, I thought I saw my reflection, my plane climbing into a suspended pool of still water, breaching the veil separating life and death.Â
But no. It was Campbell!
His propellor dove straight toward me, and I barely had the sense to alter course before the two machine guns mounted in front of his cockpit blazed to life.Â
I swung my plane around just in time to see Uncle Sam’s top hat painted on the side of Campbell’s plane. I regurgitated a burst of air, sweet relief. I had unknowingly masked his attack, and the Germans scattered. I took advantage of the opportunity to continue gaining altitude and circle back to give him some much-needed help. Surprise or no, one pilot against three weren’t odds anyone liked.
Not that it stopped men like Campbell or Luf from trying.Â
A flash of light burst to my left, and I glanced over in time to see a Pfalz, my Pfalz, the one I had so thoughtfully refused to engage, catch fire—a terrible and awesome byproduct of Campbell’s enthusiasm. The plane dropped as the pilot panicked. I banked to see it play out, watching the man’s desperate dive unquestionably lose control and spiral to the earth.
A victory for Campbell.
My breath caught in my chest. Ironically, being in the air made it harder to breathe, and the relief hardly had fuel to swell.
Two on two now, and that changed everything. The Germans resorted quickly to evasive team maneuvers. I recognized the patterns we saw in many German pilots. The machine gun fire calmed, the pilots now reserving rounds for sure shots. We didn’t give them any.
As we danced around one another in the sky, a few more of our boys joined the fight from their nearby patrol. In less than a minute, the remaining Huns turned away to retreat.Â
We lined up to pursue. If we closed the distance quickly, we could count two more German planes out of the Kaiser’s service. But as I settled in between Campbell and Winslow, they glanced over and noticed the state of my aircraft. There was no hesitation. They signaled to turn home immediately.
I flushed bright red but followed.Â
Service in the air was nothing like what I’d seen on the ground. Each machine, each pilot, was precious, and it wouldn’t do to take unnecessary risks. After all, Campbell had already claimed a victory. Better to bring home the whole squadron and fix up a plane to fight another day under more favorable circumstances.
But no one—not a single pilot I knew—ever liked his comrades to make up for his lack.Â
I glanced at my guns. Jammed and harmless. My heart still hammered at over a hundred rounds per minute, but I had a good half hour to calm it down before we landed at Gengoult—thirty minutes to convince myself I’d never been afraid.
