Contact Patrol was carried out by planes and was designed
to provide aerial liaison between the Front Line and the Battalion and Brigade
Headquarters during battles when other means of communication became
impossible. In spite of endless practice
before the big day, this initially proved less effective than hoped, due to the
necessity for ground troops to use flares to signal to their planes which also
meant giving away their position. However, later on Cecil Lewis tells us, “… we got
used to the dangers of low flying over the front line, and used to go right
down to a few hundred feet and find the position of our men by actually seeing
them in their trenches.”
“The war below us was a spectacle. We aided and abetted it,
admiring the tenacity of men who fought in verminous filth to take the next
trench thirty yards away.
Echoing the feelings of WW1 soldier poet Wilfred Owen,
Cecil described the “horrible futility of war, the mountainous waste of life
and wealth to stake a mile or two of earth.
A caricature of common sense, both sides eager, when they had licked
their wounds, to fly at each other’s throats again.” (p. 93)
Source: “Sagittarius Rising” by Cecil Lewis (1898 – 1997),
published by Warner, London 2000 with a new Foreword by Cecil Lewis; first published by Peter Davies in 1936.
