THE CAMELS ARE COMING

by W. E. Johns

IX. THE ZONE CALL (Pages 125 – 138)

There is a party in the officer’s mess at Biggles’ Squadron and Wilks is over from 287 Squadron. They step outside for a breath of fresh air and hear German Mercedes aero-engines. Biggles stops the party and everyone rushes to their planes. Biggles is first off and finds a loan German Pfalz aircraft which he forces to land in a nearby field. The German pilot says he is unarmed and merely taking the new Pfalz to Lille when he became lost and was running low on benzine. The next morning, Biggles has to have a tooth out at Clarmes and he is forbidden to fly. He returns to the aerodrome to find every machine in the air except his own. Biggles asks “Wat” Tyler, the Recording Officer where everyone is and he is told that the German they had captured had mentioned when drunk that three new Staffels were being formed at Lagnicourt and now every bomber in the district was going to bomb the area off the map and the Squadron was escorting them. Biggles goes to search the captured German machine and finds a torn strip of paper that had been used to mark a map at some stage. It has some German writing on it and Biggles gets it translated by a member of ground crew who speaks German. “- any flieger – flyer, that is – falling into the hands of the enemy will therefore repeat that three Jagdstaffels are being assembled at Lagni – can’t read the place, sir. By doing so, he will be doing service by assisting – can’t read that, sir. It ends, expires on July 21^st at twelve, midnight. This order must on no account be taken into the air. That’s all, sir”. Biggles rings Colonel Raymond at Wing Headquarters to tell him. “It would be a hell of a joke to send forty machines to drop twenty thousand quids worth of bombs on a lot of obsolete spare parts,” mused Biggles after the call, “but there’s more in it than that. The Boche want our machines out of the way. Why?” Knowing that Lagnicourt lies north-west, Biggles decides to fly north-east and see what’s going on. He encounters an unusual amount of ‘archie’ (anti-aircraft fire) but it eases off when he goes in certain directions. Biggles heads to where it is thickest and flies low over a forest where soldiers fire at him. By continually flying over the forest and noting the twinkling flashes of soldiers’ rifles firing at him, he judges there to be over fifty thousand men in the timber. “What did those orders say? June 21^st? (No, this is a typing error – the orders said July 21^st! This error is corrected in later editions of the book) Great God, that’s to-morrow. They’ll attack this afternoon, or at latest to-night”. Biggles flies to a nearby R.E.8 aircraft marking the position for gunners and using his arms to send a morse code message, sends “Zone Call, Wood”. A footnote tells us that a ‘Zone Call’ is a special call to artillery only used in exceptional circumstances, and every calibre gun within range opens fire on a map reference. “The result can be better imagined than described. Obviously such treatment was terribly expensive, costing possibly £10,000 a minute while it lasted”. In five minutes the wood is an inferno of fire and German soldiers stream out to try and get away. “Well, I should think I’ve saved our chaps in the line a lot of trouble” says Biggles. He returns to his aerodrome and tells a returning Mahoney that he has been having a little fun and games with the German army.