Hell's Handmaid

War with the Huns is hell. 

The rusty operation of the hangar door ushered in the thin morning wind and dew. Dawn hauled itself over the horizon, where all the world shrank to the sound of passing wind on the airstrip, and the pungent smell of tar. 

A Nieuport 17 fighter waited in front of the hanger, where my boots were scuffed with dirt. The sides of the fighter were patched with thin metal sheets, strewn on roughly with nails and a mechanic’s blessing. It was not unlike cavalry bandaged from arrow wounds. At the head of the plane where a two-winged propeller was fitted, a piece of the blue sky was dragged from above the clouds where the sun rode. It was cut up into bullets, and ground down till a slippery blood-like viscosity formed. Hurling towards the ground from the sky were burning planes, and those capable of bearing the weight of five of them were marked. Slathered across the nose of my plane was a cerulean blue—the mark of an ace pilot, one who shrewd bullets into five airborne engines. 

***

In a sense, the engine of a pilot's plane was their soul, their heart. The wind dragged my cheek back as the blue nose of my plane spearheaded at 120 km/h, 500 feet up in the air. The cold press of my leather gloves stuck to my hands as they trembled slightly. 

As captain and flight commander of C Flight at my local HQ, No. 60 squadron, I had the authority to carry out solo missions with Major Alan Scott’s silent blessings. My eyes grazed over the sun-bathed dirt, tracing its way to a line of German Albatros on the runway. And yet something was off about them. SHOOP! An anti-air bullet grazed the left side of my aircraft, cranking my arms to the right in a bank. 

The hissing of faint bullets dotted the sky around me. My vision could see nothing but the newly broken dawn and blue sky, and yet the embers in my heart were set ablaze with joy—or rather it was adrenaline. I didn’t need to see the runway, or the planes, or the ground—I already knew. Because the moment a fighter takes to the skies, that hunk of metal is filled with the life of the pilot. 

I took another look at the line of planes, their propellers spinning, pilots boarded, and lookouts ready. All four Albatros were taxiing across the strip, moments away from take-off. I steadied my sights onto the head of the line, the first Albatros was still pulling itself across the runway when I shot through the engine with a clean burst. The second fell sixty feet from the air, eating up fifteen rounds. The third machine climbed into my sights, just to fall back to earth about 150 yards from my position. As the Albatros neared the trees I could see his face. 

A shower of bullets clipped the bottom wing from somewhere off my seven; I dived hard and eased on the throttle, with the engine coughing below me. The Hun banked trying to lose me, but I braided into his flight—finding the seams of his defense as I eased the trigger into a clean shower of bullets that burst his fuselage into a fall of smoke. 

As the plane began to sink itself into the earth, he said something, a single breath of a word I could not catch at speed: Magd der Hölle. He mouthed it as if naming me. Hell’s handmaid, he said. A wretched compliment. Just like the Huns.