A Fable

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

He had already turned back toward the aerodrome when he saw the Harry Tate. At first he just watched it, merely alerting himself to overshoot it safely; they looked so big and were travelling so slowly that you always made the mistake of overestimating them if you were not careful. Then he saw that the thing obviously not only hoped but actually believed that it could cut him off—a Harry Tate, which usually had two Australians in it or one general-and-pilot, this one indubitably a general since only by some esoteric factor like extreme and even overwhelming rank could an R.E.8 even hope to catch an S.E. and send it to earth.

Which was obviously what this one intended to do, he throttling back now until the S.E. was hanging on its airscrew just above stalling. And it was a general: the two aeroplanes broadside on for a second or so, a hand in a neat walking-out glove from the observer’s seat gesturing him peremptorily downward until he waggled his wings in acknowledgment and put his nose down for home, thinking, Why me? What’ve I done now? Besides, how did they know where I was?——having suddenly a sort of vision of the whole sky full of lumbering R.E.8’s, each containing a general with a list compiled by frantic telephone of every absent unaccounted-for scout on the whole front, hunting them down one by one out of back-areas and harrying them to earth.

Then he reached the aerodrome and saw the ground signal-strip laid out on it; he hadn’t seen one since ground school and for a goodish while he didn’t even know what it was; not until he saw the other aeroplanes on the ground or landing or coming in to land, did he recognise it to be the peremptory emergency signal to all aircraft to come down, landing in his turn faster and harder than people liked to land S.E.’s because of their unhappy ground habits, taxi-ing in to the tarmac where, even before he could switch off, the mechanic was shouting at him: ‘The mess, sir! Right away! The major wants you at the mess right away!’

‘What?’ he said. ‘Me?’

‘Everyone, sir,’ the mechanic said. ‘The whole squadron, sir. Best hurry.’

He jumped down to the tarmac, already running, so young in breathing that he wouldn’t be nineteen for another year yet and so young in war that, although the Royal Air Force was only six weeks old, his was not the universal tunic with RFC badges superposed on the remnants of old regimental insigne which veteran transfers wore, and he didn’t even own the old official Flying Corps tunic at all: his was the new RAF thing not only unmartial but even a little epicene, with its cloth belt and no shoulder-straps like the coat of the adult leader of a neo-Christian boys’ club and the narrow pale blue ring around each cuff and the hat-badge like a field marshal’s until you saw, remarked, noticed the little modest dull gold pin on either side of it like lingerie-clips or say the christening’s gift-choice by godfathers whose good taste had had to match their pocket-books.

A year ago he was still in school, waiting not for his eighteenth birthday and legal age for joining up, but for his seventeenth one and the expiration, discharge, of a promise to his widowed mother (he was the only child) to stick it out until then. Which he did, even making good marks, even while his mind, his whole being, was sleepless and athirst with the ringing heroic catalogue: Ball: McCudden: Mannock: Bishop: Barker: Rhys Davies: and above all, simply: England. Three weeks ago he was still in England, waiting in Pilot’s Pool for posting to the front—a certificated stationary engine scout pilot to whom the King had inscribed We Reposing Trust and Confidence in Our Trusty and Well-Beloved Gerald David … but already too late, gazetted not into the RFC but into the RAF. Because the RFC had ceased to exist on April Fool’s day, two days before his commission came through: whereupon that March midnight had seemed to him a knell. A door had closed on glory; immortality itself had died in unprimered anti-climax: not his to be the old commission in the old glorious corps, the brotherhood of heroes to which he had dedicated himself even at the cost of that wrench to his mother’s heart; not his the old commission which Albert Ball had carried with him into immortality and which Bishop and Mannock and McCudden still bore in their matchless records; his only the new thing not flesh nor fowl nor good red herring: who had waited one whole year acquiescent to his mother’s unrational frantic heart fiercely and irrevocably immune to glory, and then another year in training, working like a beaver, like the very proverbial Trojan, to compensate for his own inability to say no to a woman’s tears.

It was too late; those who had invented for him the lingerie pins and the official slacks in place of pink Bedfords and long boots and ordnance belt, had closed the door even to the anteroom of heroes. In Valhalla’s un-national halls the un-national shades, Frenchman and German and Briton, conqueror and conquered alike—Immelman and Guynemer, Boelcke and Ball—identical not in the vast freemasonry of death but in the closed select one of flying, would clash their bottomless mugs, but not for him. Their inheritors—Bishop and Mannock and Voss and McCudden and Fonck and Barker and Richthofen and Nungesser—would still cleave the earth-foundationed air, pacing their fleeing shadows on the scudding canyon-walls of cumulae, furloughed and immune, secure in immortality even while they still breathed, but it would not be his. Glory and valor would still exist of course as long as men lived to reap them. It would even be the same valor in fact, but the glory would be another glory. And that would be his: some second form of Elysium, a cut above dead infantry perhaps, but little more: who was not the first to think What had I done for motherland’s glory had motherland but matched me with her need.

And now apparently even what remained was to be denied him: three weeks spent in practice, mostly gunnery (he was quite good at it, astonishing even himself), at the aerodrome; one carefully chaperoned trip—the major, Bridesman, his flight commander, himself and one other new and unblooded tyro—up to the lines to show them what they looked like and how to find the way back; and yesterday he was in his hut after lunch trying to compose a letter to his mother when Bridesman thrust his head in and gave him the official notice which he had been waiting for now ever since his seventeenth birthday: ‘Levine. Jobs tomorrow. Eleven oclock. Before we take off, I’ll try again to remind you to try to remember what we have been trying to tell you to remember.’ Then this morning he had gone up for what would be the last of his unchallenged airy privacy, the farewell to his apprenticeship, what might be called the valedictory of his maidenhood, when the general in the Harry Tate sent him back to earth, to spring down almost before the aeroplane stopped rolling and, spurred again by the mechanic, run to the mess, already the last one since everyone else was there except the flight which was still out, finding the major already talking, one knee crooked easily across the corner of the table; he (the major) had just got back from Wing Headquarters, where he had met the general commanding, who had come straight from Poperinghe: the French had asked for an armistice; it would go into effect at noon—twelve hours. But it meant nothing: they (the squadron) were to remember that; the British hadn’t asked for any armistice, nor the Americans either; and having known the French, fought beside them for almost four years now, he (the major) didn’t yet believe it meant anything with them. However, there would be a truce, a remand, for an hour or two hours or perhaps a whole day. But it was a French truce; it wasn’t ours—looking about at them, nonchalant and calm and even negligent, speaking in that same casual negligent voice and manner with which he could carry the whole squadron through a binge night, through exuberance and pandemonium and then, with none realising it until afterward, back into sufficient sobriety to cope with the morrow’s work, which was not the least of the reasons why, even though no hun-getter, he was one of the most popular and capable squadron commanders in France, though he (the child) had not been there long enough to know that. But he did know that here was the true authentic voice of that invincible island which, with not merely the eighteen years he had but the rest of his promised span which he might very likely lose doing it, he would in joy and pride defend and in gratitude preserve: ‘Because we aren’t quitting. Not us nor the Americans either. It’s not over. Nobody declared it for us; nobody but us shall make our peace. Flights will stand by as usual. Carry on.’

He didn’t think Why yet. He just thought What. He had never heard of a recess in war. But then, he knew so little about war; he realised now that he knew nothing about war. He would ask Bridesman, glancing about the room where they were already beginning to disperse, and in the first moment realising that Bridesman was not there, and in the next one that none of the flight commanders were there: not only Bridesman, but Witt and Sibleigh too, which in Witt’s case obviously meant that he still had C Flight out on the mid-morning job, and which—the fact that C Flight was still carrying on with the war—ratified the major’s words; C Flight hadn’t quit, and if he knew Bridesman (and after three weeks he certainly should) B hadn’t either, glancing at his watch now: half after ten, thirty minutes yet before B would go up; he would have time to finish the letter to his mother which Bridesman had interrupted yesterday; he could even—since the war would officially begin for him in thirty minutes—write the other one, the succinct and restrained and modestly heroic one to be found among his gear afterward by whoever went through it and decided what should be sent back to his mother: thinking how the patrol went up at eleven and the remand would begin at twelve, which would leave him an hour—no, it would take them ten minutes to get to the lines, which would leave fifty minutes; if fifty minutes was long enough for him to at least make a start after Bishop’s and McCudden’s and Mannock’s records, it would be long enough for him to get shot down in too: already moving toward the door when he heard engines: a flight: taking off: then running up to the hangars, where he learned that it was not even B Flight, shouting at the sergeant, incredulous and amazed:

‘Do you mean that all three flight commanders and all the deputies have gone out in one patrol?’ and then heard the guns begin, not like any heavy firing he had ever heard before, but furious and simultaneous and vast in extent—a sound already in existence to the south-east before audibility began and still in existence to the north-west when audibility ceased. ‘They’re coming over!’ he shouted. ‘The French have betrayed us! They just got out of the way and let them through!’

‘Yes sir,’ the flight sergeant said. ‘Hadn’t you better get along to the office? They may be wanting you.’

‘Right,’ he said, already running, back up the vacant aerodrome beneath the sky furious with the distant guns, into the office which was worse than empty: the corporal not only sitting as always behind the telephone, but looking at him across the dogeared copy of Punch which he had been looking at when he first saw him three weeks ago. ‘Where’s the major?’ he cried.

‘Down at Wing, sir,’ the corporal said.

‘Down at Wing?’ he cried, incredulous, already running again: through the opposite door, into the mess, and saw everyone of the squadron’s new replacements like himself except himself, all sitting quietly about as though the adjutant had not merely arrested them but was sitting guard over them, and the adjutant himself sitting at the end of the mess table with his pipe and wound stripe and observer’s O and single wing above the Mons Star ribbon, and the squadron chessboard and the folded sheet of last Sunday’s Times chess problem laid out before him; and he (the child) shouting, ‘Cant you hear them? Cant you?’ so that he couldn’t hear the adjutant at all for his own noise, until the adjutant began to shout too:

‘Where have you been?’

‘Hangars,’ he said. ‘I was to go on the patrol.’

‘Didn’t anyone tell you to report to me here?’

‘Report?’ he said. ‘Flight Sergeant Conventicle——No,’ he said.

‘You’re——’

‘Levine.’

‘Levine. You’ve been here three weeks. Not long enough to have learned that this squadron is run by people especially appointed and even qualified for it. In fact, when they gave you those badges, they gave you a book of rules to go with them, to prevent you needing ever to rack your brains like this. Perhaps you haven’t yet had time to glance through it.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘What do you want with me?’

‘To sit down somewhere and be quiet. As far as this squadron is concerned, the war stopped at noon. There’ll be no more flying here until further notice. As for those guns, they began at twelve hours. The major knew that beforehand. They will stop at fifteen hours. Now you know that in advance too——’

‘Stop?’ he said. ‘Dont you see——’

‘Sit down!’ the adjutant said.

‘—if we stop now, we are beat, have lost——’

‘Sit down!’

He stopped then. Then he said: ‘Am I under arrest?’

‘Do you want to be?’

‘Right,’ he said. He sat down. It was twenty-two minutes past twelve hours; now it was not the Nissen walls which trembled, but the air they contained. Presently, or in time that is, it was thirteen hours, then fourteen, all that distant outside fury reduced now to a moiling diastole of motes where the sun slanted into the western windows; getting on for fifteen hours now and the squadron itself reduced to a handful of tyros who barely knew in which direction the front lay, under command of a man who had never been anything but a poor bloody observer to begin with and had even given that up now for a chessboard: they still sat there: he, and the other new men who had—must have—brought out from England with them the same gratitude and pride and thirst and hope——Then he was on his feet, hearing the silence still falling like a millstone into a well; then they were all moving as one, through the door and outside into that topless gape from which the walls and roof of distant gunfire had been ripped, snatched, as a cyclone rips the walls and roof from the rectangle of vacancy which a moment ago had been a hangar, leaving audibility with nothing now to lean against, outbursting into vacuum as the eardrums crack with altitude, until at last even that shocking crash died away.

‘That seems to be it,’ a voice said behind him.

‘Seems to be what?’ he said. ‘It’s not over! Didn’t you hear what the major said? The Americans aren’t quitting either! Do you think Monaghan’ (Monaghan was an American, in B Flight too; although he had been out only ten weeks, he already had a score of three and a fraction) ‘is quitting? And even if they do——’ and stopped, finding them all watching him, soberly and quietly, as if he were a flight commander himself; one said:

‘What do you think, Levine?’

‘Me?’ he said. ‘About what?’ Ask Collyer, he thought. He’s running the nursery now; bitterly too now: Ask Collyer——the pipe, the balding head, the plump bland face which at this moment was England’s sole regent over this whole square half-mile of French dirt, custodian of her honor and pride, who three years ago had probably brought out to France (he, Collyer, according to squadron folklore, had been ridden down by a Uhlan with a lance inside the war’s first weeks and turned flying observer and came out again and within a week of that managed somehow to live through a F.E. crash after his pilot was dead and since then, carrying the same single pip and—the legend said—the same cold pipe, had been a squadron adjutant) the same feeling, belief, hunger—whatever you want to call it—as intolerant and unappeasable as his own, and then lost it or put it aside as he had put the war itself forever away, secure and immune in his ground job where no thirst for victory nor tumescence of valor could trouble him more; thinking, Oh yes, ask Collyer, finishing the thought which the cessation of the guns had interrupted inside the mess: He has quit too. He gave up so long ago that he doesn’t even remember now that he hasn’t even lost anything.—I heard the death of England he said quietly to himself, then aloud: ‘Think about what? That noise? Nothing. That’s what it sounds like, doesn’t it?’

At five oclock the major was delivered almost onto the office stoop by the general commanding the brigade’s Harry Tate. Just before sunset two lorries drove onto the aerodrome; watching from his hut he saw infantry with rifles and tin hats get down and parade for a moment on the dusty grass behind the office and then disperse in squads and at sunset the patrol of flight commanders and deputies which had gone out at noon in the similitude of B Flight had not returned, three times longer than any patrol ever stayed out or than any S.E. could stay up on its petrol. And he dined with a mess (the major was not present though a few of the older men—including the infantry officer—were; he didn’t know where they had been nor when returned) half of whom he knew knew nothing either and the other half he didn’t know how much they knew or cared;—a meal which was not long before the adjutant got up and stopped just long enough to say, not speaking to the older people at all: ‘You aren’t confined to quarters. Just put it that almost any place you can think of is out of bounds.’

‘Even the village?’ someone said.

‘Even Villeneuve Blanche, sink of iniquity though it be not. You might all go home with Levine and curl up with his book. That’s where he should be.’ Then he stopped again. ‘That means the hangars too.’

‘Why should we go to the hangars this time of night?’ one said.

‘I dont know,’ the adjutant said. ‘Dont.’ Then the others dispersed but not he, he was still sitting there after the orderlies had cleared the mess for the night and still there when the motor car came up, not stopping at the mess but going on around to the office and through the thin partition he heard people enter the office and then the voices: the major and Bridesman and the other two flight commanders and no S.E. had landed on this aerodrome after dark even if he hadn’t heard the car but then that was all right, aeroplanes were not even new replacements, they were not only insentient and so couldn’t ask questions and talk back, you could even jettison them where they wouldn’t even need to be watched by infantry and he couldn’t have heard what the voices were saying even if he had tried, just sitting there when the voices stopped short and a second later the door opened and the adjutant paused an instant then came on, pulling the door after him, saying: ‘Get along to your hut.’

‘Right,’ he said, rising. But the adjutant came on into the mess, shutting the door behind him; his voice was really kind now:

‘Why dont you let it alone?’

‘I am,’ he said. ‘I dont know how to do anything else because I dont know how it can be over if it’s not over nor how it can be not over if it’s over——’

‘Go to your hut,’ the adjutant said. He went out into the darkness, the silence, walking on in the direction of the huts as long as anyone from the mess might still see him, then giving himself another twenty steps for good measure before he turned away toward the hangars, thinking how his trouble was probably very simple, really: he simply had never heard silence before; he had been thirteen, almost fourteen, when the guns began, but perhaps even at fourteen you still could not bear silence: you denied it at once and immediately began to try to do something about it as children of six or ten do: as a last resort, when even noise failed, fleeing into closets, cupboards, corners under beds or pianos, lacking any other closeness and darkness in which to escape it; walking around the corner of the hangar as the challenge came, and saw the crack of light under the hangar doors which were not only closed but pad-locked—a thing never before seen by him or anyone else in this or any squadron, himself standing quite still now with the point of the bayonet about six inches from his stomach.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘What do I do now?’

But the man didn’t even answer. ‘Corporal of the guard!’ he shouted. ‘Post Number Four!’ Then the corporal appeared.

‘Second Lieutenant Levine,’ he said. ‘My aeroplane’s in this hangar——’

‘Not if you’re General Haig and your sword’s in there,’ the corporal said.

‘Right,’ he said, and turned. And for a moment he even thought of Conventicle, the Flight Sergeant; he had been a soldier long enough by now to have learned that there were few, if any, military situations which the simple cry of ‘Sergeant!’ would not resolve. It was mainly this of course, yet there was a little of something else too: the rapport, not between himself and Conventicle perhaps, but between their two races—the middle-aged bog-complected man out of that race, all of whom he had ever known were named Evans or Morgan except the two or three named Deuteronomy or Tabernacle or Conventicle out of the Old Testament—that morose and musical people who knew dark things by simply breathing, who seemed to be born without dread or concern into knowledge of and rapport with man’s sunless and subterrene origins which had better never have seen light at all, whose own misty and music-ed names no other men could pronounce even, so that when they emerged from their fens and fastnesses into the rational world where men still tried to forget their sombre beginnings, they permitted themselves to be designated by the jealous and awesome nouns out of the old fierce Hebraic annals in which they as no other people seemed at home, as Napoleon in Austria had had his (the child’s) people with their unpronounceable names fetched before him and said ‘Your name is Wolf’ or ‘Hoff’ or ‘Fox’ or ‘Berg’ or ‘Schneider’, according to what they looked like or where they lived or what they did. But he considered this only a moment. There was only one sure source, knowing now that even this one would not be too certain. But nothing else remained: Bridesman’s and Cowrie’s hut (That was one of the dangled prerequisites for being brave enough to get to be a captain: half a hut to yourself. The major had a whole one.), Cowrie looking at him from the pillow as Bridesman sat up in the other cot and lit the candle and told him.

‘Certainly it’s not over. It’s so far from over that you’re going on jobs tomorrow. Does that satisfy you?’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘But what happened? What is it? An armed sentry stopped me at the hangars thirty minutes ago and turned out the guard and the hangar doors were locked and a light inside and I could hear people doing something, only I couldn’t pass the bayonet and when they drove me away I heard a lorry and saw a torch moving about down at that archie battery this side the village and of course that’s fresh ammo being hurried up since archie quit at noon today too and naturally they’ll need a lot of ammo to quit with too——’

‘If I tell you, will you let be and go to your hut and go to bed?’

‘Right,’ he said. ‘That’s all I ever wanted: just to know. If they’ve beat us, I want to stand my share too——’

‘Beat us be blowed. There’s nobody in this war any longer capable of beating anyone, unless the Americans might in time——’

‘And welcome,’ Cowrie said. But Bridesman was still talking:

‘A French regiment mutinied this morning—refused to go over. When they—the French—began to poke about to learn why, it seems that——But it’s all right.’

‘How all right?’

‘It was only their infantry disaffected. Only troops holding the line. But the other regiments didn’t do anything. The others all seemed to know in advance that the one was going to refuse, but all the others did seem to be just waiting about to see what was going to happen to it. But they—the French—took no chances. They pulled the regiment out and replaced it and moved up guns and put down a heavy barrage all along their front, just like we did this afternoon. To give ourselves time to see what was what. That’s all.’

‘How that’s all?’ he said. Cowrie had put a cigarette into his mouth and, raised onto one elbow, was reaching for the candle when the hand stopped, less than a fraction of a second before it moved on. ‘What was the hun doing all this time?’ He said quietly: ‘So it’s over.’

‘It’s not over,’ Bridesman said harshly. ‘Didn’t you just hear what the major said at noon today?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said serenely. ‘It’s over. All the poor bloody stinking infantry everywhere, Frenchmen, Americans, Germans, us … So that’s what they’re hiding.’

‘Hiding?’ Bridesman said. ‘Hiding what? There’s nothing to hide. It’s not over, I tell you. Didn’t you just hear me say we have a job tomorrow?’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘It’s not over. How can it be not over then?’

‘Because it isn’t. What do you think we put down that barrage for today—we and the French and the Americans too—the whole front from the Channel in—blasting away a half year’s supply of ammo for except to keep the hun off until we can know what to do?’

‘Know to do what? What are they doing in our hangar tonight?’

‘Nothing!’ Bridesman said.

‘What are they doing in B Flight’s hangar, Bridesman?’ he said. The cigarette pack lay on the packing case which served for a table between the two cots. Bridesman half turned and reached his hand but before he had touched the pack Cowrie, lying back on one arm beneath his head, without looking around extended the cigarette already burning in his own hand. Bridesman took it.

‘Thanks,’ he said. He said: ‘I dont know.’ He said harsh and strong: ‘I dont want to know. All I know is, we have a job tomorrow and you’re on it. If you’ve a good reason for not going, say it and I’ll take someone else.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Goodnight.’

‘Goodnight,’ someone said.

But it wasn’t tomorrow. There was nothing tomorrow: only dawn and then daylight and then morning. No dawn patrol went out because he would have heard it, being already and long since awake. Nor were there any aeroplanes on the tarmac when he crossed to the mess for breakfast, and nothing on the blackboard where Collyer occasionally saw fit to scrawl things in chalk which no one really ever read, himself sitting long at the cleared table where Bridesman would more or less have to see him sooner or later, provided he wanted to. From here he could see across the aerodrome to the blank and lifeless hangars and watch the two-hourly relief of the pacing guards through the long coma-ed forenoon, the morning reft of all progress beneath the bland sky and the silence.

Then it was noon; he watched the Harry Tate land and taxi up to the office and switch off, and the trench coat get down from the observer’s seat and remove the helmet and goggles and toss them into the cockpit and draw out the stick and the red and brazen hat. Then all of them at lunch: the general and his pilot and the infantry officer and the whole squadron, the first lunch he could remember from which at least one flight and sometimes two were not absent, the general saying it not quite as well as the major because it took him longer, but saying the same thing:

‘It’s not over. Not that we needed the French. We should simply have drawn back to the Channel ports and let the hun have Paris. It wouldn’t be the first time. ’Change would have got windy, but it wouldn’t have been their first time either. But that’s all past now. We have not only kept the hun fooled, the French have got their backs into it again. Call this a holiday, since like all holidays it will be over soon. And there are some of you I think wont be sorry either’—naming them off because he did keep up with records, knew them all ‘—Thorpe, Osgood, De Marchi, Monaghan—who are doing damned well and will do better because the French have had their lesson now and so next time it will be the long vac. proper because when the guns stop next, it will be on the other side of the Rhine. Plenty of revs, and carry on.’ And no sound, though maybe no one expected any, everyone following outside to where the Harry Tate’s engine was already ticking over and the major helped put the stick and the red hat back into the cockpit and get the helmet out and get it on the general and the general back into the Harry Tate and the major said ‘Shun!’ saluting and the general jerked his thumbed fist upward and the Harry Tate trundled away.

Then afternoon, and nothing either. He still sat in the mess where Bridesman could see or find him if he liked, not waiting now any less than he had been waiting during the forenoon, because he knew now that he had not been waiting then, had not believed it then, not to mention that Bridesman had had to look at him at lunch because he had sat right across the table from him. The whole squadron did in fact: sat or idled about the mess—that is, the new ones, the tyros, the huns like himself—Villeneuve Blanche, even Villeneuve which Collyer called that sink, still out of bounds (which fact—the out of bounds—was probably the first time in all its history that anyone not born there had specifically wanted to go there). He could have gone to his hut too; there was a letter to his mother in it that he had not finished yet, except that now he could not finish it because the cessation of the guns yesterday had not only deleted all meaning from the words but effaced the very foundation of their purpose and aim.

But he went to the hut and got a book out and lay down on his cot with it. Perhaps it was simply to show, prove to, the old flesh, the bones and the meat, that he was not waiting for anything. Or perhaps to teach them to relinquish, abnegate. Or perhaps it was not the bones and meat so much as the nerves, muscles, which had been trained by a government in a serious even though temporary crisis to follow one highly specialised trade, then the government passed the crisis, solved the dilemma needing it, before he had had the chance to repay the cost of the training. Not glory: just to repay the cost. The laurel of glory, provided it was even moderately leafed, had human blood on; that was permissible only when motherland itself was at stake. Peace abolished it, and that man who would choose between glory and peace had best let his voice be small indeed——

But this was not reading; Gaston de la Tour at least deserved to be read by whoever held it open looking at it, even lying down. So he read, peaceful, resigned, no longer thirsting now. Now he even had a future, it would last forever now; all he needed was to find something to do with it, now that the only trade he had been taught—flying armed aircraft in order to shoot down (or try to) other armed aircraft—was now obsolete. It would be dinner time soon, and eating would exhaust, get rid of, a little of it, four, perhaps, counting tea, even five hours out of each twenty-four, if one only remembered to eat slowly enough, then eight off for sleeping or even nine if you remembered to go slowly enough about that too, would leave less than half to have to cope with. Except that he would not go to tea or dinner either today; he had yet almost a quarter-pound of the chocolate his mother had sent last week and whether he preferred chocolate to tea and dinner would not matter. Because they—the new ones, the tyros, the huns—would probably be sent back home tomorrow, and he would return to London if he must without ribbons on his coat, but at least he would not go back with a quarter-pound of chocolate melting in his hand like a boy returning half asleep from a market fair. And anyone capable of spreading eating and sleeping over fourteen hours out of twenty-four, should be able to stretch Gaston de la Tour over what remained of this coma-ed and widowed day, until it met the night: the dark: and the sleep.

Then tomorrow, it had just gone three Pip Emma, he was not only not waiting for anything, it had been twenty-four hours now since he had had to remind himself that he was not waiting for anything, when the orderly room corporal stood suddenly in the door of the hut.

‘What?’ he said. ‘What?’

‘Yes sir,’ the corporal said. ‘A patrol sir. Going up in thirty minutes.’

‘The whole squadron?’

‘Captain Bridesman just said you, sir.’

‘In only thirty minutes?’ he said. ‘Damn it, why couldn’t——Right,’ he said. ‘Thirty minutes. Thanks.’ Because he would have to finish the letter now, and it was not that thirty minutes was not long enough to finish it in, but that they were not long enough to get back into the mood, belief in which the letter had been necessary. Except for signing it and folding it into the envelope, he would not even have needed to get the letter out. Because he remembered it:

… not dangerous at all, really. I knew I could fly before I came out, and I have got to be pretty good on the range and even Captain Bridesman admits now that I’m not a complete menace to life in formation, so maybe when I settle down I might be of some value in the squadron after all

and what else could one add? what else say to a woman who was not only a mother, but an only and half-orphan mother too? which was backward, of course, but anybody would know what he meant; who knew? perhaps one of the anybody could even suggest a postscript: like this say:

P.S. A delightful joke on you: they declared a recess at noon two days ago and if you had only known it, you would not have needed to worry at all from then until three oclock this afternoon; you could have gone out to tea two afternoons with a clear conscience, which I hope you did, and even stayed for dinner too though I do hope you remembered what sherry always does to your complexion

Except that there was not even time for that. He heard engines; looking out, he saw three busses outside now in front of the hangar, the engines running and mechanics about them and the sentry standing again in front of the closed hangar doors. Then he saw a strange staff-car on the grass plot beside the office and he wrote ‘love, David’ at the foot of the letter and folded and licked it into the envelope and in the mess again now he saw the major’s batman cross toward the office carrying an armful of flying kit; apparently Bridesman hadn’t left the office at all, except that a moment later he saw Bridesman coming up from the hangars already dressed for the patrol, so the gear was not his. Then the office door opened and Bridesman came out, saying, ‘All right, get your——’ and stopped, because he already had it: maps, gloves, helmet, scarf, his pistol inside the knee pocket of the sidcott. Then they were outside, walking toward the three aeroplanes in front of B hangar.

‘Just three,’ he said. ‘Who else is going?’

‘The major,’ Bridesman said.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Why did he pick me?’

‘I dont know. Out of a hat, I think. I can wash you out if you dont like it. It wont matter. I think he really picked you out of a hat.’

‘Why should I not like it?’ he said. Then he said, ‘I just thought——’ and then stopped.

‘Thought what?’ Bridesman said.

‘Nothing,’ he said. Then he was telling it, he didn’t know why: ‘I thought that maybe the major found out about it somehow, and when he wanted one of the new blokes on this job, he remembered about me—’ telling it: that morning when he had been supposed simply to be out practicing, contour chasing probably, and instead had spent that forty or fifty seconds right down on the carpet with the unarmed aeroplane over the hun trenches or at least what he thought was the hun front line: ‘You dont get frightened then; it’s not until later, afterward. And then——It’s like the dentist’s drill, already buzzing before you have even opened your mouth. You’ve got to open your mouth and you know you’re going to all right, only you know at the same time that neither knowing you are going to nor opening it either, is going to help because even after you have closed it again, the thing will buzz at you again and you’ll have to open it again the next moment or tomorrow or maybe it wont be until six months from now, but it will buzz again and you will have to open again because there’s nowhere else you can go …’ He said: ‘Maybe that’s all of it. Maybe when it’s too late and you cant help yourself anymore, you dont really mind getting killed——’

‘I dont know,’ Bridesman said. ‘You didn’t get even one bullet hole?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Maybe I shall this time.’ And this time Bridesman did stop.

‘Listen,’ Bridesman said. ‘This is a job. You know what jobs in this squadron are for.’

‘Yes. To find huns.’

‘And then bust them.’

‘You sound like Monaghan: “Oh, I just ran up behind and busted the ass off the son of a bitch.” ’

‘You do that too,’ Bridesman said. ‘Come on.’ They went on. But he had needed only one glance at the three aeroplanes.

‘Your bus is not back yet,’ he said.

‘No,’ Bridesman said. ‘I’m taking Monaghan’s.’ Then the major came and they took off. As he passed the office, he saw a smallish closed van turn in from the road but he didn’t have time to look then, not until he was off and up and from the turn could really look down. It was the sort of van provost marshals’ people used; and climbing for formation, he saw not one car but two behind the mess—not ordinary muddy staff cars but the sort which detached Life and Horse Guards officers on the staffs of corps- and army-commanders were chauffeured about in. Now he drew in opposite Bridesman across the major’s tail-plane, still climbing but to the southward, so that they would approach the lines squarely, and did so, still climbing; Bridesman waggled his wings and turned away and he did likewise long enough to clear the Vickers, into Germany or anyway toward Germans, and traversed the Lewis on its quadrant and fired it off too and closed in again. Now the major turned back north-west parallel above the front, still climbing and nothing below now to reveal, expose it as front lines although he hadn’t seen it but twice to have learned to know it again—only two kite balloons about a mile apart above the British trenches and two others almost exactly opposite them above the German ones, no dust no murk no gout and drift of smoke purposeless and unorigined and convoluted with no sound out of nothing and already fading and already replaced, no wink of guns as he had seen them once though perhaps at this height you didn’t see flashes anyway: nothing now but the correlative to a map, looking now as it would look on that day when as the general said the last gun would cease beyond the Rhine—for that little space before the earth with one convulsive surge would rush to cover and hide it from the light of day and the sight of man——

He broke off to turn when the major did. They were crossing now, still climbing, right over the upper British balloon, heading straight for the German one. Then he saw it too—a white salvo bursting well below them and in front and then four single bursts pointing away eastward like four asterisks. But he never had time to look where it was pointing because at the same instant German archie burst all around them—or would have, because the major was diving slightly now, going east. But still he could see nothing yet except the black hun archie. It seemed to be everywhere; he flew right through a burst of it, cringing, shrinking convulsively into himself while he waited for the clang and whine which he had heard before. But maybe they were going too fast now, he and the major really diving now, and he noticed for the first time that Bridesman was gone, he didn’t know what had become of him nor when, and then he saw it: a two-seater: he didn’t know what kind because he had never seen a German two-seater in the air before nor any other German for that matter. Then Bridesman came vertically down in front of him and putting his nose down after Bridesman, he discovered that the major had vanished and forgot that too, he and Bridesman going almost straight down, the German right under them now, going west; he could see Bridesman’s tracer going right into it until Bridesman pulled out and away, then his own tracer though he never could seem to get right on the two-seater before he had to pull out and away too, the archie already waiting for him before he was clear even, as though the hun batteries were simply shooting it up here without caring whom it hit or even watching to see. One actually seemed to burst between his upper and lower right-hand planes; he thought, Maybe the reason I dont hear any clang is because this one is going to shoot me down before I have time to. Then he found the two-seater again. That is, not the aeroplane but the white bursts of British archie telling him or them where it was, and an S.E. (it would have to be the major; Bridesman couldn’t possibly have got that far by now) diving toward the bursts. Then Bridesman was just off his wing-tip again, the two of them going full out now in the pocking cloud of black archie like two sparrows through a swirl of dead leaves; and then he saw the balloons and noticed or remembered or perhaps simply saw the sun.

He saw them all—the two-seater apparently emerged neatly and exactly from between the two German balloons and, in its aureole of white archie, flying perfectly straight and perfectly level on a line which would carry it across No-man’s Land and exactly between the two British ones, the major behind and above the two-seater and Bridesman and himself perhaps a mile back in their cloud of black archie, the four of them like four beads sliding on a string and two of them not even going very fast because he and Bridesman were up with the major almost at once. And perhaps it was the look on his face, the major glancing quickly at him then motioning him and Bridesman back into formation. But he didn’t even throttle back and then Bridesman was following him, the two of them passing the major and he thought, Maybe I was wrong, maybe hun archie doesn’t clang and it was ours I heard that day, still thinking that when, slightly ahead of Bridesman, they closed that gap too and flew into the white archie enclosing the two-seater before someone could tell the gunners they could stop now too, the last white wisp of it vanishing in the last fading drift about him and Bridesman now and there was the two-seater flying straight and level and sedate toward the afternoon sun and he pressed the button and nudged and ruddered the tracer right onto it, walking the tracer the whole length of it and return—the engine, the back of the pilot’s head then the observer sitting as motionless as though in a saloon car on the way to the opera, the unfired machine gun slanting back and down from its quadrant behind the observer like a rolled umbrella hanging from a rail, then the observer turned without haste and looked right into the tracer, right at him, and with one hand deliberately raised the goggles—a Prussian face, a Prussian general’s face; he had seen too many caricatures of the Hohenzollern Crown Prince in the last three years not to know a Prussian general when he saw one—and with the other hand put up a monocle at him and looked at him through it, then removed the monocle and faced front again.

Then he pulled away and went past; there was the aerodrome right under them now, until he remembered the archie battery just outside the village where he had seen the torch last night and heard the lorry; from the tight vertical turn he could look straight down at the gunners, shaking his hand at them and yelling: ‘Come on! Come on! This is your last chance!’ and slanted away and came back diving, walking the tracer right through the gun and the pale still up-turned discs of the faces watching him about it; as he pulled up he saw another man whom he had not seen before standing just on the edge of the wood behind the battery; the gentlest nudge on stick and rudder brought this one squarely into the Aldis itself this time and, pulling up at last to get over the trees, he knew that he should have got something very close to a possible ten somewhere about that one’s navel. Then the aerodrome again; he saw the two-seater squaring away to land, the two S.E.’s above and behind it, herding it down; he himself was too high even if he had not been much too fast; even after the vicious sideslip he might still wipe off the S.E.’s frail undercarriage, which was easy enough to do even with sedate landings. But it held, stood up; he was down first, rolling now and for a moment he couldn’t remember where he had seen it then he did remember, beginning to turn as soon as he dared (Someday they would put brakes on them; those who flew them now and lived would probably see it.) and turning: a glimpse of brass and scarlet somewhere near the office, and the infantry in column coming around the corner of the office; he was taxi-ing fast now back along the tarmac past the hangars where three mechanics began to run toward him until he waved them off, taxi-ing on toward the corner of the field and there it was where he had seen it last week and he switched off and got down, the two-seater on the ground too now and Bridesman and the major landing while he watched, the three of them taxi-ing on in a clump like three waddling geese toward the office where the scarlet and brass gleamed beautiful and refulgent in the sun in front of the halted infantry. But he was running a little heavily now in his flying boots and so the ritual had already begun when he arrived—the major and Bridesman on foot now with the adjutant and Thorpe and Monaghan and the rest of B Flight, in the center of them the three Poperinghe a.d.c.’s splendid in scarlet and brass and glittering Guards badges, behind them the infantry officer with his halted platoon deployed into two open files, all facing the German aeroplane.

‘Bridesman,’ he said but at that moment the major said ‘’Shun!’ and the infantry officer shouted ‘Present——harms!’ and at salute now he watched the German pilot jump down and jerk to attention beside the wing while the man in the observer’s seat removed the helmet and goggles and dropped them somewhere and from somewhere inside the cockpit drew out a cap and put it on and did something rapidly with his empty hand like a magician producing a card and set the monocle into his eye and got down from the aeroplane and faced the pilot and said something rapid in German and the pilot stood himself back at ease and then snapped something else at the pilot and the pilot jerked back to attention and then with no more haste than when he had removed the helmet but still a little quicker than anyone could have stopped it drew a pistol from somewhere and even aimed it for a second while the rigid pilot (he looked about eighteen himself) stared not even at the pistol’s muzzle but at the monocle and shot the pilot through the center of the face and turned almost before the body jerked and began to fall and swapped the pistol to the other gloved hand and had started to return the salute when Monaghan jumped across the pilot’s body and flung the other German back into the aeroplane before Bridesman and Thorpe caught and held him.

‘Fool,’ Bridesman said. ‘Dont you know hun generals dont fight strangers?’

‘Strangers?’ Monaghan said. ‘I’m no stranger. I’m trying to kill the son of a bitch. That’s why I came two thousand miles over here: to kill them all so I can get to hell back home!’

‘Bridesman,’ he said again but again the major said ‘’Shun there! Shun!’ and at salute again he watched the German straighten up (he hadn’t even lost the monocle) and flip the pistol over until he held it by the barrel and extend it butt first to the major who took it, and then draw a handkerchief from his cuff and brush off the breast and sleeve of his tunic where Monaghan had touched him and look at Monaghan for just a second with nothing behind the monocle at all as he put the handkerchief back into the cuff and clicked and jerked as he returned the salute and walked forward straight at the group as though it were not there and he didn’t even need to see it part and even scramble a little to get out of the way for him to stride through, the three Guards officers falling in behind, between the two open infantry files, toward the mess; the major said to Collyer:

‘Move this. I dont know whether they want it or not, but neither do we, here.’

‘Bridesman,’ he said again.

‘Pah,’ Bridesman said, spitting, hard. ‘We shant need to go to the mess. I’ve a bottle in the hut.’ Then Bridesman overtook him. ‘Where are you going?’

‘It will only take a moment,’ he said. Then apparently Bridesman saw, noticed the aeroplane too.

‘What’s wrong with your bus? You got down all right.’

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I left it there because there’s an empty petrol tin in the weeds we can set the tail up on.’ The tin was there: a faint and rusting gleam in the dying end of day. ‘Because it’s over, isn’t it? That’s what they want with that hun general of course. Though why they had to do it this way, when all somebody needed was just to hold out a white sheet or tablecloth; they must have a tablecloth at Pop and surely jerry’s got one at his headquarters that he took away from a Frenchwoman; and somebody owes something for that poor bloodstained taxi-driver he——Which was not like the book either: he did it backward; first he should have unpinned the iron cross from his own coat and hung it on the other one and then shot him——’

‘You fool,’ Bridesman said. ‘You bloody fool.’

‘All right. This will only take a moment.’

‘Let it be,’ Bridesman said. ‘Just let it be.’

‘I just want to see,’ he said. ‘Then I shall. It wont take but a moment.’

‘Will you let it be then? Will you promise?’

‘Of course. What else can I do? I just want to see’—and set the empty petrol tin in position and lifted the S.E.’s tail and swung it around onto the tin and it was just right: in a little better than flying angle: almost in a flat shallow glide, the nose coming down just right; and Bridesman really saying No now.

‘I’ll be damned if I will.’

‘Then I’ll have to get …’ he hesitated: a second: then rapidly, cunningly: ‘… Monaghan. He’ll do it. Especially if I can overtake the van or the staff-car or whichever it is, and borrow the jerry general’s hat. Or maybe just the monocle will be enough——no: just the pistol to hold in my hand.’

‘Take your own word for it,’ Bridesman said. ‘You were there. You saw what they shot at us, and what we were shooting at that two-seater. You were right on him for five or six seconds once. I watched your tracer rake him from the engine right on back through the monocle.’

‘So were you,’ he said. ‘Get in.’

‘Why dont you just let it be?’

‘I have. Long ago. Get in.’

‘Do you call this letting be?’

‘It’s like a cracked record on the gramophone, isn’t it?’

‘Chock the wheels,’ Bridesman said. He found two chocks for the wheels and steadied the fuselage while Bridesman got into the cockpit. Then he went around to face the nose and it was all right; he could see the slant of the cowl and the Aldis slanting a little since he was taller than most, a little high still. But then he could raise himself on his toes and he intended to put his arms over his face anyway in case there was something left of whatever it was they had loaded the cartridges with last night by the time it had travelled twenty feet, though he never had actually seen any of them strike, bounce off the two-seater, and he had been right on top of it for the five or six seconds Bridesman had talked about. And the airscrew was already in open position so the constantinesco would be working or not working or whatever it was doing when it let bullets pass. So all he had to do was line up the tube of the Aldis on Bridesman’s head behind the wind screen, except that Bridesman was leaning out around the screen, talking again: ‘You promised.’

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘It will be all right then.’

‘You’re too close,’ Bridesman said. ‘It’s still tracer. It can still burn you.’

‘Yes,’ he said, backing away, still facing the little black port out of which the gun shot, ‘I wondered how they did that. I thought tracer was the bullet itself burning up. However did they make tracer without a bullet in it? do you know? I mean, what are they? bread pellets maybe? No, bread would have burned up in the breech. Maybe they are wood pellets dipped in phosphorus. Which is a little amusing, isn’t it? our hangar last night locked tight as .… with an armed guard walking back and forth in the dark and the cold outside and inside somebody, maybe Collyer; a chess player ought to be good with a knife, whittling sounds philosophical too and they say chess is a philosopher’s game, or maybe it was a mechanic who will be a corporal tomorrow or a corporal who will be a sergeant tomorrow even if it is over because they can give a corporal another stripe even on the way home or at least before he is demobbed. Or maybe they’ll even still keep the Air Force since a lot of people came into it out of the cradle before they had time to learn to do anything else but fly, and even in peace these ones will still have to eat at least now and then——’ still backing away because Bridesman was still waving him back, still keeping the Aldis aligned; ‘—out here three years, and nothing, then one night he sits in a locked hangar with a pen knife and a lap-full of wooden blocks and does what Ball nor McCudden nor Mannock nor Bishop nor none of them ever did: brought down a whole German general: and get the barnacle at Buckingham palace his next leave—except that there wont be any, there’s nothing now to be on leave from, and even if there was, what decoration will they give for that, Bridesman?—All right,’ he said, ‘all right, I’ll cover my face too——’

Except that he wouldn’t really need to now; the line of fire was already slanting into the ground, and this much further away it would cross well down his chest. And so he took one last sight on the Aldis for alignment and bowed his head a little and crossed both arms before his face and said, ‘All right.’ Then the chattering rattle, the dusky rose winking in miniature in the watch-crystal on his lifted wrist and the hard light stinging (They were pellets of some sort; if he had been three feet from the muzzle instead of about thirty, they would have killed him as quickly as actual bullets would have. And even as it was, he had leaned into the burst, not to keep from being beaten back but to keep from being knocked down: during which—the falling backward—the angle, pattern, would have walked up his chest and he would probably have taken the last of the burst in his face before Bridesman could have stopped it.) bitter thock-thock-thock-thock on his chest and the slow virulent smell of burning cloth before he felt the heat.

‘Get it off!’ Bridesman was shouting. ‘You cant put it out! Get the sidcott off, damn it!’ Then Bridesman was wrenching at the overall too, ripping it down as he kicked out of the flying boots and then out of the overall and the slow invisible smoldering stink. ‘Are you satisfied now?’ Bridesman said. ‘Are you?’

‘Yes, thanks,’ he said. ‘It’s all right now.—Why did he have to shoot his pilot?’

‘Here,’ Bridesman said, ‘get it away from the bus——’ catching up the overall by one leg as though to fling it away until he caught hold of it.

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to get my pistol out. If I dont, they’ll charge me with it!’ He took the pistol from the sidcott’s knee pocket and dropped it into his tunic pocket.

‘Now then,’ Bridesman said. But he held on.

‘Incinerator,’ he said. ‘We cant leave it lying about here.’

‘All right,’ Bridesman said. ‘Come along.’

‘I’ll put it in the incinerator and meet you at the hut.’

‘Bring it on to the hut and let the batman put it in the incinerator.’

‘It’s like the cracked record again isn’t it?’ he said. Then Bridesman released his leg of the sidcott though he didn’t move yet.

‘Then you’ll come along to the hut.’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Besides, I’ll have to stop at the hangars and tell them to roll me in.—But why did he have to shoot his pilot, Bridesman?’

‘Because he is a German,’ Bridesman said with a sort of calm and raging patience. ‘Germans fight wars by the rule-books. By the book, a German pilot who lands an undamaged German aeroplane containing a German lieutenant general on an enemy aerodrome, is either a traitor or a coward, and he must die for it. That poor bloody bugger probably knew while he was eating his breakfast sausage and beer this morning what was going to happen to him. If the general hadn’t done it here, they would probably shoot the general himself as soon as they got their hands on him again. Now get rid of that thing and come on to the hut.’

‘Right,’ he said. Then Bridesman went on and at first he didn’t dare roll up the overall to carry it. Then he thought what difference could it possibly make now. So he rolled up the overall and picked up his flying boots and went back to the hangars. B’s was open now and they were just rolling in the major’s and Bridesman’s busses; the rule-book wouldn’t let them put the German two-seater under a British shed probably, but on the contrary it would doubtless compel at least six Britons (who, since the infantry were probably all gone now, would be air mechanics unaccustomed both to rifles and having to stop up all night) to pass the night in relays walking with guns around it. ‘I had a stoppage,’ he told the first mechanic. ‘There was a live shell in. Captain Bridesman helped me clear it. You can roll me in now.’

‘Yes sir,’ the mechanic said. He went on, carrying the rolled overall gingerly, around the hangars and on in the dusk toward the incinerator behind the men’s mess, then suddenly he turned sharply again and went to the latrines; it would be pitch dark inside, unless someone was already there with a torch (Collyer had a tin candle-stick; passed going or coming from the latrines, cloistral indeed he would look, tonsured and with his braces knotted about his waist under his open warm). It was dark and the smell of the sidcott was stronger than ever inside. He put the flying boots down and unrolled it but even in the pitch dark there was nothing to see: only the slow thick invisible burning; and he had heard that too: a man in B Flight last year who had got a tracer between the bones of his lower leg and they were still whittling the bone away as the phosphorus rotted it; Thorpe told him that next time they were going to take off the whole leg at the knee to see if that would stop it. Of course the bloke’s mistake was in not putting off until day after tomorrow say, going on that patrol (Or tomorrow, for that matter. Or today, except that Collyer wouldn’t have let him.) only how could he have known that a year ago, when he himself knew one in the squadron who hadn’t discovered it until people shot blank archie at him and couldn’t seem to believe it even then? rolling up the sidcott again and fumbling for a moment in the pitch dark (It wasn’t quite dark after you got used to it. The canvas walls had gathered a little luminousness, as if delayed day would even begin inside them after it was done outdoors.) until he found the boots. Outside, it was not at all night yet; night wouldn’t even begin for two or three hours yet and this time he went straight to Bridesman’s hut, pausing only long enough to lay the rolled sidcott against the wall beside the door. Bridesman was in his shirt sleeves, washing; on the box between his and Cowrie’s beds a bottle of whisky sat between his and Cowrie’s toothmugs. Bridesman dried his hands and without stopping to roll down his sleeves, dumped the two toothbrushes from the mugs and poured whisky into them and passed Cowrie’s mug to him.

‘Down with it,’ Bridesman said. ‘If the whisky’s any good at all, it will burn up whatever germs Cowrie put in it or that you’ll leave.’ They drank. ‘More?’ Bridesman said.

‘No thanks. What will they do with the aeroplanes?’

‘What will what?’ Bridesman said.

‘The aeroplanes. Our busses. I didn’t have time to do anything with mine. But I might have, if I had had time. You know: wash it out. Taxi it into something—another aeroplane standing on the tarmac, yours maybe. Finish it, do for two of them at once, before they can sell them to South America or the Levantine. So nobody in a comic opera general’s suit can lead the squadron’s aeroplanes in some air force that wasn’t even in this at all. Maybe Collyer’ll let me fly mine once more. Then I shall crash it——’

Bridesman was walking steadily toward him with the bottle. ‘Up the mug,’ Bridesman said.

‘No thanks. I suppose you dont know just when we’ll go home.’

‘Will you drink, or wont you?’ Bridesman said. ‘No thanks.’

‘All right,’ Bridesman said. ‘I’ll give you a choice: drink, or shut up—let be—napoo. Which will you have?’

‘Why do you keep on saying let be? Let be what? Of course I know the infantry must go home first—the p.b.i. in the mud for four years, out after two weeks and no reason to be glad or even amazed that you are still alive, because all you came out for is to get your rifle clean and count your iron rations so you can go back in for two weeks, and so no reason to be amazed until it’s over. Of course they must go home first, throw the bloody rifle away forever and maybe after two weeks even get rid of the lice. Then nothing to do forever more but work all day and sit in pubs in the evenings and then go home and sleep in a clean bed with your wife——’

Bridesman held the bottle almost like he was going to strike him with it. ‘Your word’s worth damn all. Up the mug.’

‘Thanks,’ he said. He put the mug back on the box.—‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ve let be.’

‘Then cut along and wash and come to the mess. We’ll get one or two others and go to Madame Milhaud’s to eat.’

‘Collyer told us again this morning none of us were to leave the aerodrome. He probably knows. It’s probably as hard to stop a war as it is to start one. Thanks for the whisky.’ He went out. He could already smell it even before he was outside the hut and he stooped and took up the overall and went to his hut. It was empty of course; there would probably be a celebration, perhaps even a binge in the mess tonight. Nor did he light the lamp: dropping the flying boots and shoving them under his bed with his foot, then he put the rolled sidcott carefully on the floor beside the bed and lay down on it, lying quietly on his back in that spurious semblance of darkness and the time for sleeping which walls held, smelling the slow burning, and still there when he heard Burk cursing something or someone and the door banged back and Burk said,

‘Holy Christ, what’s that stink?’

‘It’s my sidcott,’ he said from the bed while someone lit the lamp. ‘It’s on fire.’

‘What the bloody hell did you bring it in here for?’ Burk said. ‘Do you want to burn down the hut?’

‘All right,’ he said, swinging his legs over and getting up and then taking up the overall while the others watched him curiously for a moment more, De Marchi at the lamp still holding the burning match in one hand. ‘What’s the matter? No binge tonight?’ Then Burk was cursing Collyer again even before De Marchi said,

‘Collyer closed the bar.’ He went outside; it was not even night yet, he could still read his watch: twenty-two hours (no, simple ten oclock p.m. now because now time was back in mufti too) and he went around the corner of the hut and put the overall on the ground beside the wall, not too close to it, the whole northwest one vast fading church window while he listened to the silence crowded and myriad with tiny sounds which he had never heard before in France and didn’t know even existed there because they were England. Then he couldn’t remember whether he had actually heard them in English nights either or whether someone had told him about them, because four years ago when such peaceful nightsounds were legal or at least de rigeur, he had been a child looking forward to no other uniform save that of the Boy Scouts. Then he turned; he could still smell it right up to the door and even inside too though inside of course he couldn’t really have sworn whether he actually smelled it or not. They were all in bed now and he got into pyjamas and put out the lamp and got into bed properly, rigid and quiet on his back. The snoring had already begun—Burk always snored and always cursed anyone who told him he did—so he could hear nothing but night passing, time passing, the grains of it whispering in a faint rustling whisper from or into whatever it was it ran from or into, and he swung his legs quietly over again and reached under the bed and found the flying boots and put them on and stood up and found his warm quietly and put it on and went out, already smelling it before he reached the door and on around the corner and sat down with his back against the wall beside the overall, not any darker now than it had been at twenty-two (no, ten p.m. now), the vast church window merely wheeling slowly eastward until almost before you knew it now it would fill, renew with light and then the sun, and then tomorrow.

But they would not wait for that. Already the long lines of infantry would be creeping in the darkness up out of the savage bitter fatal stinking ditches and scars and caves where they had lived for four years now, blinking with amazement and unbelief, looking about them with dawning incredulous surmise, and he tried listening, quite hard, because surely he should be able to hear it since it would be much louder, noisier than any mere dawning surmise and unbelief: the single voice of all the women in the western world, from what used to be the Russian front to the Atlantic ocean and beyond it too, Germans and French and English and Italians and Canadians and Americans and Australians—not just the ones who had already lost sons and husbands and brothers and sweethearts, because that sound had been in the air from the moment the first one fell, troops had been living with that sound for four years now; but the one which had begun only yesterday or this morning or whenever the actual instant had been, from the women who would have lost a son or brother or husband or sweetheart today or tomorrow if it hadn’t stopped and now wouldn’t have to since it had (not his women, his mother of course because she had lost nothing and had really risked nothing; there hadn’t been that much time)—a sound much noisier than mere surmise, so much noisier that men couldn’t believe it quite yet even, where women could and did believe anything they wanted to, making (didn’t want to nor even need to make) no distinction between the sound of relief and the sound of anguish.

Not his mother in the house on the River beyond Lambeth where he had been born and lived ever since and from which, until he died ten years ago, his father would go in to the City each day to manage the London office of a vast American cotton establishment; they—his father and mother—had begun too late if he were the man on whom she was to bestow her woman’s capacity for fond anguish, she the woman for whom (as history insisted—and from the talk he had had to listen to in messes he was inclined to admit that at least history believed it knew what it was talking about—men always had) he was to seek garlands or anyway sprigs of laurel at the cannon’s mouth. He remembered, it was the only time, he and two others were celebrating their commissions, pooled their resources and went to the Savoy and McCudden came in, either just finished getting some more ribbons or some more huns, very likely both, in fact indubitably both, and it was an ovation, not of men but of women, the three of them watching while women who seemed to them more beautiful and almost as myriad as angels, flung themselves upward like living bouquets about that hero’s feet; and how, watching, they thought it whether they said it aloud or not: ‘Wait.’

But there hadn’t been time; there was only his mother still, and he thought with despair how women were not moved one jot by glory and when they were mothers too, they were even irascible about uniforms. And suddenly he knew that his mother would be the noisiest of any anywhere, the noisiest of all, who had never for one instant had any intention of losing anything in the war and now had been proved in the sight of the whole world to have been right. Because women didn’t care who won or lost wars, they didn’t even care whether anybody did. And then he knew that it really didn’t matter, not to England: Ludendorff could come on over Amiens and turn for the coast and get into his boats and cross the Channel and storm whatever he thought fit between Goodwin Sands and Land’s End and Bishop’s Rock and take London too and it wouldn’t matter. Because London signified England like the foam signifies the beer, but the foam is not the beer and nobody would waste much time or breath grieving, nor would Ludendorff have time to breathe either or spend gloating, because he would still have to envelop and reduce every tree in every wood and every stone in every wall in all England, not to mention three men in every pub that he would have to tear down brick by brick to get to them. And it would not matter when he did, because there would be another pub at the next crossroads with three more men in it and there were simply just not that many Germans nor anybody else in Europe or anywhere else, and he unrolled the sidcott; at first there had been a series of little smoldering overlapping rings across the front of it, but now it had become one single sprawling ragged loop spreading, creeping up toward the collar and down toward the belt and across toward each armpit, until by morning the whole front would be gone probably. Because it was constant, steadfast, invincible and undeviable; you could depend on it as Ball had, and McCudden and Bishop and Rhys Davies and Barker, and Boelcke and Richthofen and Immelman and Guynemer and Nungesser and the Americans like Monaghan who had been willing to die even before their country was even in it to give them a roster of names to brag about; and the troops on the ground, in the mud, the poor bloody infantry—all of them who hadn’t asked to be safe nor even to not be let down again tomorrow always by the brass hats who had done the best they could too probably, but asked only that the need for the unsafeness and the fact that all of them had dared it and a lot of them had accepted it and in consequence were now no more, be held by the nations at Paris and Berlin and Washington and London and Rome immune and unchallengeable above all save brave victory itself and as brave defeat, to the one of which it would give glory and from the other efface the shame.