What will they do to the birds?

We fly across the line in ragged order, through a dirty boiling mass of sickly green and swirling grey. Their side has sent gas upon our trenches with devastating effect; behind us men and horses choke and vomit and stagger blindly in the mud. Neither machine-gun nor barbed wire can halt the rolling fog; it parts beneath us as our wake reaches down, but then silently heals itself and creeps stealthily upon an evil course.

We have bombs slung hurriedly beneath our wings, and full belts clipped into the ugly Vickers sitting snugly in our humps. Yellow ribbons flutter gaily from the Flight-Leader's struts, and we have been told to not lose sight of them for any reason save death. There is to be no exploring, no playful forays over haystacks to look for amorous encounters amidst the noise of war. This is deadly serious, the war has begun to reach into the skies with this pollution of the innocent air.

I heard the news as I drove back south before getting hit by a different biological weapon, Scotland has the poultry pestilence. What horrors are we now going to face? I was living in Cornwall when they began gassing the Badgers, because the government scientists had determined that they caused TB in cattle. One of my closest friends worked to stoke the pyres five years ago as they shot and cremated herds of animals that were unfortunate enough to have contacted what I suspect to be a man-made disease. Killed, not vaccinated, because vaccination was thought to be potentially damaging to the economy.

What are they going to do to the birds in the name of economic stability? Sometimes, I feel that I understand the animal rights activists who take the cruelty to those whom they see as guilty of plotting it and profiting from it. Who, I wonder, is more de-humanised? The government workers with the gas bottles and the captive bolts, the laboratory staff patiently studying the reactions of caged creatures, or the revolutionaries dreaming of reversing the roles and tormenting the tormentors? How long before we start treating people that way? (Again).

We find what we are looking for, the choking gas has no way to conceal the smokescreen it creates, and we have followed the foul river to the source. To our left three streams of tracer draw patterns across ugly containers on their horse-drawn wagons, and as we hurry on towards the next emission point dull thuds and thumps rush up to overtake us. We are too low for shells to reach us but the bullets are beginning to whisper hello, and then we are replying, dropping the nose and pulling the toggle when the cross-wires are filled with ugly belching fumes.

There is a crash and shudder and bloody wetness everywhere. Goggles go red, the smooth arc of the blades has jagged patterns through it, the engine noise is no longer a purr but an angry snarl. Pushing up the goggles to see the earth standing up in front of us like a curtain, hauling in a panic on the stick, levelling out in a rough and bumpy path, we are confused. A plane bobs up alongside, shreds of yellow ribbon still clinging to the struts. The pilot waves at us, angrily. Turn back. Go round. What, again? With no bombs or bullets? The wave is repeated. We turn round and crawl back, towards the lines, over the sites where the gas had been let loose, over the heaps of twitching horses and shuffling cripples, the yellow-streamered plane pacing us, while, to his right, where his friend of two years had faithfully kept station, there is a vast emptiness.

At the field anxious voices ask where we have been hit. “Nowhere”, I reply, “I'm alright”. The flight-leader has reached us, looks questioningly at the blood on our face and chest, the smashed tips of the propeller, and then turns to the lead mechanic, who is fumbling in the engine cowling. I wait, sick with guilt, as the mangled remains of two birds are produced. They had been fleeing the deadly gas as we came hurtling through on our merciless mission. Around me, the body language says that the flight-leader's friend and two others will not be coming back, and I am here instead, unharmed, a mere killer of birds. He turns accusingly to me and points at my blood-spattered mouth and chin. “The least you could have done,” he says, “is brought a couple more back for us to have a chew on”.

The gloomy spell is broken as officers and mechanics double up together and scream with laughter, forgetting the dead as the brandy-flasks pop open.