SPITFIRE
PARADE - BIGGLES AT WAR
by Captain W.
E. Johns
VIII. THE LOVE SONG (Pages 138 – 161)
Squadron Leader Bigglesworth lands his
Spitfire. “She’s still inclined to fly a
bit left wing low,” he told the sergeant rigger, as he shed his parachute and
walked over to the office. There he
meets Air Commodore Raymond of Air Intelligence who tells him, that he,
Raymond, is in a mess. Raymond confirms
that Biggles knows Amiens and the country around it pretty well. He asks Biggles if he knows the little church
in the Rue Ste Marie – just behind the Hotel de Ville and Biggles confirms he
does. Raymond says he wants Biggles to
go there. There is a man called Marcel Bregard, formerly a designed with the Rhone Aviation
Company, who was working on a special supercharger for radial engines and he
took the plans to prevent them from falling into German hands. Bregard has had the
misfortune to be knocked down by a motorcycle and had his leg broken. He managed to crawl to a girl he knows called
Rene, who runs a little tobacco business at number 1 Rue Ste Marie, next door
to the church. Biggles asks Raymond how
he knows this and he is told that a British Tommy called Corporal Price was cut
off in the town and Rene hid him in her cellar.
Price had planned to get Bregard out but was
captured and sent to Germany, where he jumped off a train, pinched a bike and
got to Spain and from there, home.
Biggles asks how long is it since he left Amiens and he is told three
weeks. “Anything could have happened in
that time” says Biggles. Biggles is told
there is a password, that Rene, Price and Bregard
used to use. It’s a popular French song
that goes:-
Parlez moi d’armour
Redites-moi des choses tendres
(Which ‘Google’
translates as “Tell me about love; Tell me
again tender things”)
“Biggles stared at the astonishing
spectacle of an Air Commodore crooning.
His mouth twitched in a smile of frank incredulity”. Biggles translates the first line of the song
as “Speak to me of love”, his lip curling in a sneer. “What gave you the idea that I cluttered up
my brain with that sort of stuff?”
Biggles asks why the Air Commodore has picked on him for this task. He is told is it is because he speaks German
and French and can fly an aeroplane.
“There’s no other way of getting in and out of France!” says Raymond,
who asks if Biggles will have a shot at it.
“You know perfectly well that I can’t say no,” answered Biggles
quietly. He is asked to go that night. When Raymond has gone, Biggles plots a course
to a field he knows well as he had once made a forced landing on it. Biggles tells Toddy he is going to practice a
little night flying and will set off at 10.00 pm. Biggles leaves and Toddy notices the map with
a thin pencil line on it. It was in
fact, shortly after 10.00 pm when Biggles left the ante-room and went to his
quarters. He dresses in a light raincoat
of civilian pattern then goes to his Spitfire.
Flight Sergeant Smyth tells him he has lightened the plane as much as he
can and the fuel tanks are only half full.
“She should glide a long way for every thousand feet of height”. Biggles flies off and crosses the coast at
Hastings. He is at twenty-five thousand
feet breathing oxygen when he cuts his engine and begins a long glide. He follows the River Somme until he picks up
a poplar lined road and lands in a large field just north of the town. For a quarter of an hour Biggles sits on the
edge of the cockpit in case he has been seen.
Then he turns his plane by hand.
He did this by “lifting the tail-unit and carried it around so that the
nose was pointing to the longest run the field could provide”. (Is that possible? An empty Spitfire weighed over 4500 pounds,
which is well over 2000 kgs. A Sopwith
Camel was around 420 kg in comparison).
Biggles walks to the trees and to the main road and on into town. Here he is stopped by a loan German and asked
for his pass as he is out during curfew which began at 10.00 pm. Biggles hits the man on the head with the
butt of his heavy service automatic and “the man flopped to the ground like a
suit of clothes from a hook”. Biggles
hides him and walks on “regretting the incident, but feeling that he had no
alternative but to act as he had done”.
Biggles makes his way to the ‘Tabac’ shop by
the church and knocks on the door. A
German soldier answers the door and Biggles asks in French for Mademoiselle
Rene, saying he is a relation. A girl
emerges and Biggles sings the song “Parlez moi d’amour”. Out of
earshot of the others, Biggles says he is a friend of Corporal Price and he
wants to see Marcel Bregard. Biggles says he has come at great risk to
fetch the plans. Rene says she has four
“Boche” soldiers billeted with her and Marcel is having supper with them
now. Biggles is invited in and
introduced as Rene’s cousin. He says he
is not staying and is soon told to wait outside until Rene can get to speak to
Marcel in private. Biggles waits until
gone midnight and is anxious about his aircraft being discovered. Eventually a window opens and he is thrown a
package – the plans! Biggles returns to
the field where he landed his aircraft, but by now it is shrouded in dense fog. He hears voices talking in French and sees
two French peasants loom up in the mist.
(‘We found the machine and didn’t know what to make of it,’ he
explained – is the illustration on page 157). Biggles tells them to go away and forget what
they have seen. The two men insist on
shaking his hand and then fade into the mist.
Biggles has to wait for the fog to begin to lift but when he hears
voices near at hand, he opens the throttle and for a thousand feet roars
blindly through the all-enveloping murk.
Suddenly he is in clear blue air as he takes off. Nearing the coast, Messerschmitts appear and
overhaul him rapidly. Biggles knows that
eventually he will have to turn and fight them.
“His only sensation was one of annoyance that he had so far succeeded in
his mission only to be thwarted at the last moment, for he did not persuade himself
that he could fight a dozen Messerschmitts single-handed and get away with
it”. Suddenly, the Messerschmitts veer
away as nine Spitfires arrive – it’s Biggles’s Squadron! They fall into place behind him as he leads
them home. Raymond is waiting to be
given the plans. Biggles asks Algy how
they knew where he had gone. “Ask
Sherlock,” grinned Algy, pointing at Toddy.
(Obviously, this is a reference to the famous fictional detective
Sherlock Holmes, created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1859 – 1930). “He’s the man who found the map you plotted
your course on”.
This would appear to be a completely unique story. I cannot find a First World War story like
this. Of course, there are a number of
stories when Biggles is sent on a secret mission by Raymond set in the First
World War. “The Packet” springs to mind
as the one most similar. This was the
second story from ‘The Camels are Coming’ first published in the May
1932 issue of ‘Popular Flying’. In that
story the plans Biggles are sent to collect are stuffed down a rabbit
hole. On the way home, Biggles is
attacked by Fokkers but his colleagues in their Sopwith Camels come to his
rescue (although not because of any pencil marks on a map). If anything, this story would be a rewrite of
that but with a more exciting middle section.
The fact that Biggles lifts the plane up by the tail skid to turn it
around would seem to indicate a rewritten First World War story, as you could
do that to a Sopwith Camel.
Interestingly, the moving of the aircraft by its tail skid is not
actually something that happens in “The Packet”.