Part Two – Chute
7
i
Circumferenced by first brass and then mahogany, the steel minute hand of the large wall clock jumps forwards, its point lodging in the gap between the X and the first I of XII. The invigilator announces:
“You may now begin.”
Like so many extensions of spring, fusee and escapement, thirty-eight left forearms and two rights reach across desktops and turn back the covering page of the School of Military Aeronautics ’ General Knowledge Paper. Serge, seated four desks from the front of the row nearest the window, reads:
1. What causes an eclipse of (a) the sun (b) the moon? What will be the state of the moon in the latter case?
He smiles and, without hesitation, picks his pencil up and writes:
Eclipses occur when two celestial bodies arrange themselves in linear formation with a star, such that one crosses the plane between
He pauses, turns his pencil on its head and erases the last seven words, then resumes:
such that the body closest to the star casts a shadow over the one furthest. This is also known as syzygy.
He writes each letter of “syzygy” separately, relishing its vowel-less repetition.
Thus,
he continues scribbling,
in a solar eclipse the moon casts a shadow on the earth; in a lunar eclipse, vice versa. This shadow can be divided into umbra (area of total occultation), penumbra (partial) and antumbra (in which the shadow nestles in the sun like a dark pupil in a bright eye).
He sits back, sets his pencil down and looks out of the window. Turreted stone walls and wrought-iron weathercocks shape the Oxford skyline. Below them, out of view, a bicycle squeaks and tinkles over cobblestones. Serge turns back to his paper and re-reads the question’s second part. He closes his eyes, thinks for a while, then, leaving a space beneath his previous paragraph, writes:
Dark.
The next question requires him to draw arcs and tangents, and compute their lengths and angles. He slides open a pencil case, removes a compass and a ruler and does this. The third reads:
3. What precautions are taken on railways to prevent the train from leaving the rails when rounding a curve? Do any extra precautions have to be taken in this respect in the case of a single-track railway which carries traffic in both directions?
Once more Serge raises his left forearm, and holds it three inches above the desktop, the hand flat, palm down, fingers pressed together and extended. The wrist swivels to the right to form a curve, and from his elbow to his fingernails he runs an imaginary train, inclining the track inwards as the speeding engine rattles past the bump of his sleeve’s hem. Dismantling train and track to hold his paper down, he writes:
The track should be banked, such that the inside of the curve is lower than the outside.
And if the direction were reversed? The forearm’s up again, and a second train run from nails to elbow. The banking should remain the same, it seems to him. “No further precautions need be taken”: he composes the words in his head but doesn’t write them yet because he’s still looking at his forearm. The new train’s hurtling up it, tilting as it runs into the wrist-curve-but the first train’s still there too, racing down to meet it. He moves his head back, hoping that the extra surface view created by this action will reveal a switch, branch-line or siding into which one of the trains could be diverted-or, if not, at least a signal further back to warn each of the other’s presence. Yet even as these things take shape in his imagination he realises that not only will they fail to prevent the collision, but it was they themselves, in their amalgam, who caused it in the first place: the catastrophe was hatched within the network, from among its nodes and relays, in its miles and miles of track, splitting and expanding as they run on beyond the scope of any one controlling vision; it was hatched by the network, at some distant point no longer capable of being pinned down but nonetheless decisive, so much so that ever since this point was passed-hours, days or even years ago-the collision’s been inevitable, just a matter of time. The exam hall and its rows of desks fade for a while, and Serge finds himself carried on the buffer of his mind into a storm of steel rods, axels, crankshafts and combustion chambers, all impacting: pistons plunging through sheet metal, ripping seats from gangways, gangways from their chassis; valves screaming ecstatically and flying loose; pure-molten brake shoes splashing streaks of light; track lifted and contorted beyond recognition, as though space itself were crumpling under the weight and force of the demands being made of it, the sheer insistence of machinery breaking its bonds as it comes into its own…
Two days after sitting the examination, Serge takes a real train down to London. He travels through winter fog made luminescent by a sun that won’t reveal itself. When he emerges from St. Pancras the fog’s lifted but the air’s still hazy; taxicabs leave knee-high smoke-clouds that drift slowly over pavements as he makes his way by foot through Bloomsbury towards St. James’s. A thin mist sits above the park; the roofs of Whitehall Court, black pyramids that join with domes and cupolas as they mount upwards, fuzz and blur in this like spires and bell-towers of some legendary castle. The War Office building is bathed in pale sunlight, but its deep-sunk windows cut dark shadow-sockets in the alabaster façade. Serge tells the soldier at the main door that he has an appointment.
“Who with?”
“Lieutenant General Widsun.”
The soldier looks him over for a second time, as though taken aback. He asks Serge’s name, then steps into a cabin and picks up a telephone, watching him through the glass while mouthing inaudible words. After half a minute he emerges and, pointing into a courtyard, says:
“This way, sir: up the staircase to room 615A.”
The building’s corridors have marble floors; Serge’s feet click as he moves across them. In one, twenty or so men his age fill forms out as they wait on benches; one of them shuffles over to make space for Serge-but he, shunning this gesture, clicks his way onwards, turns a corner, heads up a smaller staircase and enters a new corridor in which plush armchairs overhung by large plants offer themselves up to older men in clean-creased uniforms. The door of 615A leads to an inner waiting area; a secretary seats Serge here, beneath a portrait of a sly-looking Tudor or Elizabethan man holding a quill above a sheet of paper covered in black ciphers, slips through a second door, then slips back out again and tells him to go through.
Widsun’s office is large; his desk alone could have a model battlefield laid out on it. Behind it, framed by the grid-squares of a double-sash window, Widsun’s face beams at him from atop stiff folds of khaki.
“Serge, my boy!”
“Hello, sir.”
“Sir, nothing! Sit yourself down.”
Serge sits across the desk from him.
“My Kinetoscope enthusiast!” Widsun guffaws. “My feathered witness! Twice the size, at least! And handsome as a prince: the world’s fresh ornament, and only herald to the gaudy spring!”
Serge looks down at the desktop, towards a blotting pad and ink set. Instinctively, his hand reaches for the stamp, before pausing and retreating.
“You hungry?” Widsun asks.
“I suppose so,” Serge says.
On the way out, Widsun hands his secretary a sheet of paper and instructs her to CC it to three of his colleagues. While he slips on his jacket, Serge watches her line up three sheets of white paper with two black ones, alternating tones; the click and hammer of the keys against the five-deep stack starts up as they pass through the outer door and follows them along the corridor.
They lunch at the Criterion in Piccadilly. Widsun orders beef Chateaubriand for the two of them, and a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape.
“Your health’s fine now, I take it?” he enquires.
“Oh yes,” answers Serge. “They tested us for everything at SOMA: measles, polio, consumption…”
“SOMA: so you’ll be one of Boom Trenchard’s bird-men. Have they filled your head with sky and wind, then?”
“Well, we haven’t actually flown yet. It was mainly theory. We did mapwork, and learnt how to use compasses, correctors, stuff like that. And we learnt principles of gunnery: line, elevation, aiming points and mean points, all those things.”
“Ligne de foi: that’s all I remember. What you aim down, isn’t it? ‘Faith Line’: has a nice ring to it.”
“They didn’t mention that,” Serge tells him. “We were led more down the artillery side of things. They’d give us distances and ranges, and we’d have to calculate the angle of sight from the horizontal; then we’d have to set this off against the error of the day, and work out the trajectory and angle of descent and-”
“Error of the day?” asks Widsun.
“Oh, you know: atmospherics, wind speed…”
A pianist starts playing. The room is filling up. Waiters glide up and down the rows of tables as though slotted into grooves laid in the floor. Widsun holds Serge with his gaze and tells him, in a voice full of affection:
“I never had you down as a mathematician.”
“Oh, I don’t think of it as mathematics,” Serge replies. “I just see space: surfaces and lines… and the odd blind spot…”
A waiter turns up with their wine. Widsun inspects the label and nods approval; the man sets about opening the bottle. Widsun turns to Serge again and asks:
“What about wireless? I was informed some time ago that you were quite the little radio bug…”
“I was,” Serge smiles. “But at the school it was different. They’d put eight or ten Morse buzzers in a room, and you’d have to learn the tone of each, and transcribe from first one and then another. It’s to train your ear. And we were told the principles of signalling from the air, like don’t send on a turn, or right over the ground station; or not to make the dots too short or dashes too long; or how you don’t need to send the number after the squadron letter-that kind of thing.”
The cork’s pop rises above the piano music and room’s murmur. A mouthful of wine is poured into Widsun’s glass. He holds it up towards the large, arched windows.
“How are your eyes?” he asks Serge while he’s doing this. “Still sharp as ever?”
“Oh,” says Serge, “they gave us wool balls full of different-coloured strands to pick out and unravel.”
“How’s your mother?” Widsun enquires, rolling the wine around the glass to check its legs.
“She’s busy,” Serge replies. “There’s lots of demand for silk these days.”
Widsun’s swilling the liquid round his mouth now, looking intrigued. Eventually the look goes; he swallows and nods at the waiter, who pours two glasses out and glides away again.
“Lots of demand for silk,” says Widsun. “Yes, indeed there is. Well, here’s to the demand for silk, and your good health.”
They clink glasses. Serge sits back again, but Widsun’s upper body stays above the table, leaning forward; it makes it look as though the arches and gilded ceiling of the room were being held up by his shoulders. Cigarette smoke curls round these as he murmurs:
“Error of the day…”
ii
Serge is sent to Hythe. He’s lodged with five other cadets in the dormitory of a requisitioned school. From Romney Marsh, where they do four-mile runs along the Royal Military Canal, the rumble of the guns in Ypres can be picked up. He thought it was distant thunder the first time he heard it, but the sky was blue and cloudless.
“Fifteen-inch howitzers, I’d say,” their instructor smiles at them as they scour the heavens. “Carries nicely, dissent it? Now pick thet pace ap!”
The instructor’s name’s Lieutenant Langeveldt; he’s from Port Elizabeth, South Africa. One of his eyes, the right one, points slightly to the side, as though trained down a line of sight that, although different to that of his vision’s central axis, nonetheless complements it, like a corrector.
On Serge’s third day in the school he takes the cadets to the airfield and introduces them to the machines.
“A Maurice Farman Shorthorn,” he announces as mechanics wheel out from a hangar a large boxed kite made from odds and ends of wood bound together by bailing wire. Its two wings are held up, one above the other, by a flimsy set of vertical struts; in the space between them, a rectangular box five or six feet long seems to float unsupported as it protrudes forwards from the frame. Two makeshift chairs are lodged within the box which, like the wings, has canvas patches sewn around it; the rest of the fuselage is naked.
“Also known as a Rumpitee,” Lieutenant Langeveldt continues. “A monosoupape pusher, twin-seater. This part is the nacelle: that’s where you sit. This part behind it is the engine, with propeller mounted on it; here’s where the explosive mixture enters, through the skirt.”
“Is this one finished?” Serge asks.
“Finished as it’ll ever be, Carrefix. You can be first ap with me.”
He’s thrown a leather jacket, a soft helmet and some goggles. Tentatively, he grabs a vertical strut, climbs onto the lower wing and hoists himself up into the back seat.
“Not there,” snaps Langeveldt. “Thet’s my seat!”
“Why’s it called a Rumpitee?” Serge asks as he clambers over to the front.
“You’ll soon find out,” says Langeveldt. “You others, stend beck.”
The mechanic plants himself behind the nacelle and yanks at the propeller. Nothing happens. He pulls it down again, this time with both hands, and the engine catches. Black smoke fills the space between the wings. Serge coughs and turns to face the front. The engine noise increases, and the grass beneath the wheels starts rolling backwards as though a giant winch were pulling it away from under them. The faces of the other cadets are shaking-not just up and down with the bumping of the wheels over the grass’s surface, but also with the faster and more regular vibration of the engine, which shouts from behind Serge, in a mechanical voice amplified by the plane’s frame:
Rumpiteerumpiteerumpiteerumpiteerumpitee…
The shaking faces swing away, as do the hangars and the woods behind them, the whole disc of ground revolving till the field’s main expanse lies in front of him. The rumpitees heighten their speed and tone, growing hysterical; the grass races away beneath him, so fast that its bumps disappear. The rumpitees smooth out too, merging together in a constant high-pitched whine-and then he’s up, his face slicing the air in two, a slit right down the middle of its fabric as it rushes past him. He looks down: as the landscape falls away, it flattens, voids itself of depth. Hills lose their height; roads lose their camber, bounce, the texture of their paving, and turn into marks across a map. The greens and browns of field and wood seem artificial and provisional, as though they’d just now fallen from the sky. Now the land’s surface starts to tip, its horizontal line rotating round the Farman’s nose as though the vegetation, soil and brick that formed it were all one big front propeller. Buildings, ditches, hedgerows turn and re-align themselves like parts of a machine, then shift and re-align themselves again as the line rotates back the other way, cogs and arms swivelling around an axis at whose centre Serge’s own head sits. He feels a tapping on his back, and turns round: Langeveldt, strangely outlandish now that his offset eyes have disappeared beneath goggles, is pointing to the right. Serge looks that way, and sees the town: the parallel rows of its terraces, the plan view of a St. Leonard robbed of elevation, steeple pushed down and compacted like a collapsed telescope. Beyond the town, the canal forms a dark line across the marsh; beyond that, the rim of shore is marked in white by waves that have become entirely static, as though no independent movement were permitted of the landscape anymore: all displacement and acceleration, all shifts and realignments must proceed from the machine…
The coast peels away now and the land tilts towards him, swinging from a hinge running perpendicular to him and his box, along the same line as the Farman’s wheel axle. It lifts up to meet him: a flat earth-plane rising to join a wooden rectangle held in a wiry frame set in a huge white-and-blue circle of sky. As it does, depth starts returning. Detail too: he can pick out the airfield, the hangars, the cluster of cadets. Then these things are right on him as they land with a bump and rumpitee across the grass back to the group, who wave and cheer.
“Your face is black!” they shout at him as he steps out of the nacelle and slides down off the lower wing.
“Tar in the explosive mixture,” Langeveldt says as he peels his helmet off. “How did you like it?”
“I liked it a lot,” Serge replies. “It was just right.”
“Just right?”
“Yes, sir: just how things should be.”
They fly on most days for the next month. Only when the clouds are too low or the air is plagued by thunderstorms do they stay earthbound. They’re shown how to ascend in gyres, stall, dive, pull out of spins, stand the machine on its tail and hang on the propeller, perform sideslips and Immelmann turns. The fallen landscape prints itself on Serge’s mind by dint of his repeated passage over it: its flattened progression of greens, browns and yellows, patches of light and shade; the layout of the town and of the marsh beyond it; the ribbon of the Hythe-to-Folkestone road; the thread of the Light Railway joining Dymchurch and St. Mary’s Bay, then running on across the Romney sands; the dots of the Gypsy encampment outside Dungeness. He likes to move these things around from his nacelle, take them apart and reassemble them like pieces of a jigsaw. When he loops, they disappear completely, the whole horizon sinking from the bottom of his gaze and everything becoming sky, then, after a pause in which time itself seems to be held in abeyance, the rim reappearing at his vision’s upper edge and sliding down his eyes like a decorated screen being lowered just in front of them…
For the first two weeks they fly with dual controls. Langeveldt and his assistants will guide the Farmans up, then, at a moment chosen at their whimsy, tap the cadets on the back and hold their hands up in the air-their passenger’s cue to unclip the paddles by his seat and ply the side-wires till the rudder starts responding. Sometimes the instructor stalls or goes into a spin just prior to handing over, leaving the cadet to coax the chaotic world back into shape. By the end of April they’re going up unsupervised, in pairs. In early May Langeveldt starts poking holes in the machines’ canvas hides and knocking the odd strut out with a mallet before sending them up.
“Brought a machine down safely with the whole tail shot off once myself!” he tells them. “If you can’t do without a strut or two then you’re not made for the high life.”
Serge has been paired off with a Londoner named Stedman. Stedman does most of the flying: Serge himself, it’s been decided at some juncture higher up-a meeting in a room thick with cigar smoke, or an encrypted communication sent down wires from Oxford via London via who-knows-where-has all the makings of a good observer. He’s given extra lessons in cartography, and taught Zone Call and Clock Code systems. When he and Stedman go up in the air they’re given a list of spots to drop flares on, or photograph, or, if the spot’s a military barracks, land at and persuade the CO to sign their logbook. After a few days of this, a camera-gun is mounted on the nose of his nacelle, and he and Stedman have to careen around the Kent coast photo-strafing castles, churches, train stations and gasworks. The results are developed as soon as they land, and posted in the School of Aerial Gunnery ’s briefing room for Langeveldt to grade in front of them.
“Pepperdine, three hits. Biswick, two. Spurrier, three. Carrefix, five-on top of which you’ve taken out the Dover pier, which wasn’t on the list. What did you do thet for?”
“It looked nice,” Serge replies. “I wanted to photograph it.”
“It looked nice?”
“Yes, sir. I liked its shape.”
By mid-May they’re firing live rounds out of Lewis guns. The guns have Aldis sights, harmonised for deflection. Serge likes the way the reticules grid space up when he looks through them, but finds he can perform their main task on his own. The trick’s to point the gun not where the target is right now, but to discern its line of movement as it travels through your vision and to run that on into the space in front of it, shooting there instead. Serge develops a knack of splitting his gaze in two, locking the line with one eye while the other slides ahead, setting up camp in the spot at which a successful hit “happens” and thus bringing this event to pass. He experiences a strange sense of intermission each time he does this, as though he’d somehow inflated or hollowed out a stretch of time, found room to move around inside it. It occurs to him that perhaps doing this is what made Langeveldt’s eyes go off-kilter, and wonders if his own eyes look like the lieutenant’s when he shoots…
They do most of their target practice over water, peppering rafts moored just off the shoreline. Serge gets into the habit of firing in certain rhythms, ones that carry with them first words, then whole phrases, spoken in the boom and sent up his arm into his body by the recoil. His favourite consists of a first, short burst of six shots followed by a longer one of eight; each time he fires it out he hears a line that’s stuck in his head from the Versoie Pageant, from the year when Widsun visited:
of purpose that your thought
Might also to the seas be known…
The words fly from his gun into the sea, hammering and splintering its surface, etching themselves out across the rafts’ wood: of-PUR, pose-THAT, your-THOUGHT… Later, they fire over land, swooping low to take out rabbits, foxes, badgers, hares and hedgehogs, then touching down to bag their sometimes still-quivering score. They gun down the odd farm animal as well, although it’s against regulations and draws complaints from irate farmers.
“Another accidental lamb-strike?” Langeveldt tuts as Serge and Stedman unload their bloodied tribute at his feet. “Thet’s the third this week. Take it over to the kitchen.”
The guns jam all the time. On days when there’s no flying to be had they’re made to take them apart and assemble them again-six, seven, eight times, all day long. The other cadets try to force the trigger sears and firing pins together, swearing when they won’t fit, but not Serge: he finds the process pleasing, an extension of the logic he’s developed from the Farman’s front seat. In the click and swivel of machinery being slotted together, moved around and realigned, its clockwork choreography, he relives, in miniature, the mechanical command of landscape and its boundaries that flight affords him, the mastery of hedgerows, fields and lanes, their shapes and volumes…
Sometimes, when he’s out free-flying, and especially when Stedman loops the loop, Serge experiences an exhilarating loosening of his stomach. As they level out one afternoon above some little village, he turns round and points down towards the ground.
“You want to land?” shouts Stedman. “What’s here?”
“I’ve got to shit,” Serge shouts back.
They bounce across the village cricket pitch. Serge slides down off the wing, lowers his trousers and relieves himself above the wicket, just short of a length on middle and off.
“What village is this anyway?” he asks as he strolls back towards Stedman, who’s stretching his legs beside the machine as he consults a map.
“Tenterden, I think,” Stedman answers. “Population six hundred and twenty-nine.”
“Six hundred and thirty now,” Serge tells him. “Let’s go.”
The next day they spot what looks like a small battle taking place on a square field below them, and descend to take a closer look. The combatants turn out to be girls playing lacrosse. The game stops as they pass above it, pink and white faces staring up at them through netted sticks. Stedman climbs two thousand feet and pulls the Farman up into a loop that levels out low, just above the playing field, sending sticks and faces scattering. He turns the plane around and lands more or less exactly on the centre circle.
“You could have killed one of my girls!” the whistle-necklaced mistress shouts at them as they pull off their helmets and goggles.
“Terribly sorry, madam,” Stedman smiles back. “Thing is, a part seems to have come loose and fallen off the engine just as we passed by.”
“Will you be able to fix it?” she asks him, softening.
“Depends. Some of these things just won’t fly without the requisite bits and bobs.”
“I think I saw it fall behind those bushes,” Serge says, shuffling off towards them.
When he strolls back a few minutes later, the girls are gathered round the machine, being treated to a lecture on aerodynamics.
“What does he do?” the tallest one asks Stedman as Serge sidles up to him.
“I observe,” says Serge, “and navigate. I make everything fit together.”
“No luck finding the whatsit?” Stedman asks.
Serge sadly shakes his head.
“I’ve worked out what it is,” Stedman announces. “A bolt’s come out in the skirt. It’s simple to fix, but will take a while. Be dark before we’re finished: we won’t be able to take off again until tomorrow. Perhaps we could use your phone to contact our headquarters, tell them not to worry…”
“But of course,” the mistress tells him, all smiles now. “We’ll put you up for the night.”
“Where will they sleep, miss?” a round-faced girl asks, fingering her net.
“They can sleep in the Bursar’s lodging; he’s away.”
“Oh, we couldn’t leave our machine unattended,” Stedman tells her in a solemn voice. “We’ll sleep right out here with it. It’s not cold…”
“Well, at least let us bring you sandwiches and a flask.”
“Too kind, madam,” Stedman answers. “I’ll come in and fetch them myself.”
It’s the tall one and the round-faced one who sneak out to see them after dark: two distinctive silhouettes making their way across the field. Stedman and the round-faced one do it on the grass beneath the lower wing; Serge helps the tall one into the nacelle, where, wrapping her arms around the Lewis gun (whose safety catch, fortunately, is on), she bends forward and lets him wriggle off her pants from behind. They leave at dawn. Over the following two weeks, three more planes lose parts above the same spot.
In all his time at Hythe, Serge sees two accidents. The first one happens right in front of him: he and Stedman are waiting to take off when Quinnell and Kirk, who’ve gone up just ahead of them, stall, go into a spin and hurtle back down to the airfield, landing in the right place but the wrong direction, nose-first. Kirk is killed; Quinnell’s spine is broken and he’s carted off to hospital in Dover. Their machine stays in the field for several days; the cadets gather round it every morning after breakfast to stare in contemplation at the strange and useless geometry of its upended beams, the decorative wind vanes of its rudders.
“It looks like the Eiffel Tower,” says Serge. “The Eiffel Tower if one of its legs snapped off and it started tilting.”
“Or an oil well,” Payton counters; “a slant one: those bits that they build above the ground to mount the pumps in.”
The other accident he doesn’t see take place-only its aftermath. Beswick forgets to strap himself into his seat and falls out when his pilot loops the loop. He plunges three thousand feet and lands in a nearby field. A Beswick-shaped mark stays in the grass for weeks: head, torso, legs and outstretched arms.
“The acid from his body,” Stedman says as he and Serge stand above the patch one afternoon. “Stops new grass growing.”
“It’s a good likeness,” Serge says.
“All his memories, and everything he ever thought about or did, reduced to battery chemicals.”
“Why not?” asks Serge. “It’s what we are.”
iii
He’s passed out in June, and assigned to the 104th Squadron as an observer. He leaves from just down the road, in Folkestone, travelling on a hospital ship alongside several thousand troops, all armed.
“Isn’t that cheating?” Serge asks the loading sergeant when he sees the green strip and red cross painted on the hull.
“It’s what’s available,” the sergeant replies. “Came here for disinfection, needs to go to France. If you’d prefer to swim…”
They all embark, then for some reason disembark again, spend the night in a dirty hotel, then re-embark and set sail the next day. Serge wonders what disease the ship had on it before it was disinfected; he pictures it floating above the decks, licking its way around the stays and pulleys of the lifeboats’ gantries in a yellow cloud, like cholera. Arriving in Boulogne, he finds the whole dock area turned into one giant hospital ward, with sick men lying in rows on stretchers, waiting for evacuation. The landscape around the town looks sick too: trees droop languidly; fields that should be full of wheat at this time of year stand bare. Following the instructions he was handed before leaving Hythe, he joins a transport barge at a small inland jetty, and is carried slowly to Saint-Omer along melancholic waterways, past tin-roofed sheds on edges of ramshackle villages. Rusty cans and floating refuse strew the boat’s route like sarcastic flowers. Further down, the river opens out more, splitting into channels in which water-weeds stream indolently in long swathes below the surface. Sedge and bulrushes blur its edges; from within their dense thatch Serge can hear the calls of wild ducks, coots and herons sounding and responding cryptically across the water, as though issuing and forwarding their own sets of instructions. Over this noise, like a low mist, hangs the sound of guns, more substantial than it was in Hythe: the front may still be distant, but the rumble’s here now, graticuled, almost tangible…
The same melancholic lethargy prevails in Saint-Omer. All around town, men are sleeping: on benches and grass verges, outside cafés, on the requisitioned Pétanque court. Serge can’t tell if the omnipresent rumbling here is guns or snoring. He picks his way past eighteen or twenty legs sprawled out across the steps of the building he’s been ordered to report to, and finds a bored NCO sitting behind a table smoking cigarettes, one straight after the other.
“One hundred and fourth?” the NCO says when he reads the piece of paper Serge hands him. “They’re fully manned at the moment. You’ll have to wait.”
“What for?” Serge asks.
“Someone to die.” The NCO stubs out his cigarette and lights another before adding: “It shouldn’t take long.”
“What do I do while I wait?” Serge asks him.
“Sleep, have an omelette in the bistro, pick your nose-what do I care?”
Serge has an omelette in the bistro. He gets talking to some other RFC men awaiting deployment. They laugh when he tells them that he trained on Shorthorns.
“That’s like learning to drive horse-carts before being sent out in a motor-car race!”
“What did you learn in?” Serge asks.
“Well, we started out on Longhorns, then moved on to Avros.”
“An Avro is a pile of shit,” another man says. “Its ailerons are useless, it stalls on right turns and it’s got no elevator. Three of the cadets I trained with died on them while I was there.”
“We lost three too,” Serge says. “Only one was just crippled.”
“We lost five!” the first man asserts triumphantly, thrusting his spread fingers out across the table top. “And two more have died just in the time that I’ve been here.”
“How?” Serge asks.
“This flight sergeant went out swimming and drowned in a deep pool. And then another man got crushed unloading coal.”
“There was another one too,” a third man chips in. “Got shot through the heart when someone else’s gun went off.”
“That was his own gun,” a fourth man says.
“No, that was another man who died the week before,” the third man corrects him.
Serge, chewing on his omelette, wonders if it’s really necessary to fight the Germans after all: they could all just lounge around, each on their own side, dying in random accidents until nobody’s left and the war’s over by default… He does a brief tour of the town after his meal, then settles down beside a pond in the main square and, gazing at a lotus flower lying on its surface, drifts off like everybody else.
He spends the next few days like this: reporting to the smoking NCO each morning, eating in the bistro, wandering, dozing. Eventually, on the fourth or fifth day, the NCO informs him that a squadron slot’s become available for him. He’s taken in a Crossley lorry alongside ten others. They sit in the back, on cushions that do little to absorb the shock and rattle of steel-studded tires on cobbled roads. The air smells of castor oil; Serge can’t tell if it’s the lorry or the landscape. The landscape is vast and empty; skylarks cut across it, making for no spot or destination that he can discern. At one point they pass a group of Hindu soldiers bathing in a stream. Three of them are splashing around, calling to each other in their language; two more stand facing outwards, backs to the road, their lower halves submerged while their cupped hands scoop water up and hold it aloft in a kind of votive gesture before pouring it across their foreheads. Every so often the lorry stops, the driver calls a name out and a man slips off to become swallowed by the terrain as the Crossley trundles on. Serge finds himself among the last three left in the back; then the last two; then the last one. The driver cuts the ignition and steps down to the ground to take a leak. With the engine’s noise gone, Serge can hear the front’s rumble loud and clear; it makes the truck’s metal bars vibrate against the wood. The driver, as he heads back to his cabin, turns to him and says:
“May as well join me up front.”
The road ahead is split. As Serge climbs inside, the driver’s looking down first one fork, then another. He has a map in front of him, but he’s not consulting it: instead, he’s sitting still and listening, ears perked, as though homing in on some signal lodged in the guns’ static. He seems to find what he was listening out for, sparks the ignition up again, heads down the left fork and trundles on.
Eventually they turn off at a farm and bump along the ruts of a small, winding track. The track leads between two colonnades of poplars, passes a potato field, then runs down to an L-shaped airfield flanked by woods.
“The runway’s got cows grazing on it!” Serge says.
“You want it to look like an aerodrome?” the driver asks. “Besides, they keep the grass down.”
At the woods’ edge, Serge can see a large Bessoneau hangar with about ten machines drawn up inside it. They look much solider than Shorthorns; their fuselage is brown and has concentric circles painted on the side. From this angle, it looks as though their propellers have been placed at the wrong end. Some eighty yards away, beside a small copse, more planes are parked inside a makeshift hangar topped with canvas. Nissen huts are planted thirty feet from this, near a farmhouse with red gables. The driver draws up by the farmhouse’s front porch and lets Serge out.
The 104th Squadron’s commander’s name is Walpond-Skinner. He must be in his mid-forties. He seems pressured, and avoids eye contact.
“How many flying hours have you got?” is his first question when Serge steps into his office.
“I’m not sure, sir. Maybe twenty.”
“Jesus Christ! Like feeding children up to Baal. I see they’re still only giving you half-wings.”
Serge runs his fingers over the badge on his lapel: a single wing with a round O beside it.
“That’ll change soon,” Walpond-Skinner says, his gaze travelling on past Serge to flit across the wall and doorway. “You people are just as important. In the early days it was the observer who was in command of the machine; pilot was just a chauffeur.”
“Early days?” Serge asks.
Commander Walpond-Skinner’s eyes alight on Serge’s for the first time as he answers, with a bemused look:
“Of the war. At least now they’re giving you full officer status. As they should. I see you boys as grand interpreters. High priests.” He leafs through a dossier, then says: “From Lydium, Masedown.”
“Near there, sir,” Serge answers.
“Train on Salisbury Plain?”
“No: Hythe.”
“That’s strange. Says here you have a good eye. And a protector among the Whitehall gods. Let’s hope you haven’t skimped on hecatombs of late.”
Serge doesn’t answer. Walpond-Skinner taps a bell lying on his desktop. He flips open a black ledger, takes a rubber and erases something from it, then continues:
“We have three flights here; six machines in each. You’ll be in C-Flight. Any questions?”
“I don’t think so,” Serge says.
A batman arrives and is instructed to escort Serge to “the Floaters.” As he leaves, Walpond-Skinner wipes the rubber residue from the ledger’s page, picks up a pen lying beside it, then, realising his mistake, sets it down again in favour of a pencil, with which he writes on the spot he’s just cleared, murmuring:
“Carrefax, C-eee.”
The batman leads Serge across the field. Outside the Nissen huts he sees a group of men in pilots’ jackets standing as though on parade-although they’re scruffily dressed and their formation isn’t one he’s ever learnt: it seems to consist of four men planting themselves in a kind of square, all facing inwards, then each rotating forty-five degrees (two in a clockwise direction, two anti-) to face down the square’s side, towards the man positioned at an adjacent corner, whereupon the two sets of two men start to circle one another in slow pasodobles, before looping round and rejoining the square with each man at a different corner so that, while the positions shift, the overall formation stays the same.
“If he turns left,” one of the men is saying, “you turn right. If he turns right, you turn left. If he then turns left after that, you turn left too; and if he turns right, you turn left as well.”
The men act these moves out, pacing and turning, as he speaks.
“You mean right,” another of them says, halting in his tracks. The whole formation grinds to a halt too. The first man continues:
“No, I mean left. Then you come back at him from below the tail.”
The belt of internal movement shuffles into action once again. Serge follows the batman on towards the woods at the field’s edge. Taking a little path through these, they come to a row of houseboats moored on a canalised section of river.
“This is your one, sir,” the batman tells him as he ducks through a low doorframe. Inside, there’s a small stove, a bookshelf and four beds. Three of the beds are in a state of disarray, with sheets pulled back and clothes flung across them; the fourth is neatly made, and has a package bound with string lying on its surface.
“… should have been sent to his family already,” the batman mutters. “I’ll take it. Why don’t you settle in, then I can show you round the airfield.”
Serge unpacks, then steps onto the deck. On the canal’s far side another row of slender poplars sways lightly above reeds that bend over the water. The poplars’ leaves are dancing, but Serge can’t hear the rustle: the guns’ noise is loud here-loud and precise, its tangled thunder now unravelled into distinct volleys and retorts. A scow passes by, carrying scrap or machine parts covered by tarpaulin. Its captain looks at Serge, then at his load, then dead in front.
He’s taken to the Bessoneau hangar first. Machine parts lie around this too: propellers, wheels and engine cylinders, sorted into groups or mounted on laths and workbenches over which mechanics bend and solder as though studying and dissecting specimens. Towering above these are the aeroplanes he saw from the lorry: large, brown solid things with no nacelle, just a scooped-out hollow in the fuselage between the wings with two seats in it.
“RE8s,” the mechanic informs him, tapping an exhaust pipe running above a set of gill-like silver slits. “Hispano-Suiza engine, air-cooled.”
“Why’s the engine at the front?” Serge asks.
“The RE8’s a tractor, not a pusher.”
“Doesn’t the propeller block the observer’s view?”
“Observer sits in the back, facing backwards.”
“Backwards?” Serge asks. “How can I see where we’re going?”
“You can see where you’ve come from,” the mechanic smiles back. “Don’t worry: you’ll come to like it. It’s a great, sturdy machine. Both the pilot and the observer can get killed and it’ll fly on for a hundred miles and land itself quite safely back on our side of the lines-if it’s facing that way, of course; bit of a disaster if it’s not…”
They stroll on to the Nissen huts, and Serge is introduced to the other pilots and observers.
“This is Gibbs, then Watson, Dickinson, Baldwick, Clegg…”
The men are dressed in non-uniform shirts unbuttoned halfway down the front. Their hair is grown out in long locks. They greet him casually.
“Which flight you in, then?” Clegg asks.
“C-Flight.”
“Aha: you’re hosting us tonight. Better break out the good stuff.”
The good stuff turns out to be local dessert wine with a glowing yellow hue and bittersweet taste. As they hold their glasses up, the men sing:
We meet neath the sounding rafters;
The walls all around us are bare (are bare);
They echo the peals of laughter;
It seems that the dead are there (dead are there).
Serge doesn’t know the words, but kind of murmurs as he half-mouths to them, rising with the others for the second verse:
So stand by your glasses steady,
The world is a web of lies (of lies).
Then here’s to the dead already,
And hurrah for the next man who dies (man who dies)!
After the meal, they crank up a gramophone and play music-hall songs. Serge slips out and makes his way in the dark through long grass, then across the shorter grass beside the woods, back to his houseboat. He sits on its deck and watches another barge slide through the oily water, laden once more with objects whose shapes beneath the covering suggest broken and twisted metal, or perhaps animals, the bumps and folds of their limbs and torsos. In the waves left by its passage when it’s gone, Serge sees a water rat swimming towards the far bank. The black surface of the water around the rat’s head is laced with garish streaks of colour: orange-yellow, greenish white, reflections of the gunfire flickering across the sky. The sound of each volley arrives late, often after its own flash has faded from both sky and river; new waves of flashes catch up with the residual noise, overtake and lap it.
“Intermission,” Serge says, to no one, or perhaps the rat.
For a moment, the flickering stops and the whole countryside falls silent. A calcium flare descends noiselessly not far away, silhouetting the poplars and rimming their leaves with frozen light, as though with hoarfrost. Behind it other, smaller lights glow on and off, like fireflies. Then their pops arrive, then louder stutters, then high, booming eruptions: sounds and lights meshing together as the air comes back to life, like a magnificent engine warming up.
i
Circumferenced by first brass and then mahogany, the steel minute hand of the large wall clock jumps forwards, its point lodging in the gap between the X and the first I of XII. The invigilator announces:
“You may now begin.”
Like so many extensions of spring, fusee and escapement, thirty-eight left forearms and two rights reach across desktops and turn back the covering page of the School of Military Aeronautics ’ General Knowledge Paper. Serge, seated four desks from the front of the row nearest the window, reads:
1. What causes an eclipse of (a) the sun (b) the moon? What will be the state of the moon in the latter case?
He smiles and, without hesitation, picks his pencil up and writes:
Eclipses occur when two celestial bodies arrange themselves in linear formation with a star, such that one crosses the plane between
He pauses, turns his pencil on its head and erases the last seven words, then resumes:
such that the body closest to the star casts a shadow over the one furthest. This is also known as syzygy.
He writes each letter of “syzygy” separately, relishing its vowel-less repetition.
Thus,
he continues scribbling,
in a solar eclipse the moon casts a shadow on the earth; in a lunar eclipse, vice versa. This shadow can be divided into umbra (area of total occultation), penumbra (partial) and antumbra (in which the shadow nestles in the sun like a dark pupil in a bright eye).
He sits back, sets his pencil down and looks out of the window. Turreted stone walls and wrought-iron weathercocks shape the Oxford skyline. Below them, out of view, a bicycle squeaks and tinkles over cobblestones. Serge turns back to his paper and re-reads the question’s second part. He closes his eyes, thinks for a while, then, leaving a space beneath his previous paragraph, writes:
Dark.
The next question requires him to draw arcs and tangents, and compute their lengths and angles. He slides open a pencil case, removes a compass and a ruler and does this. The third reads:
3. What precautions are taken on railways to prevent the train from leaving the rails when rounding a curve? Do any extra precautions have to be taken in this respect in the case of a single-track railway which carries traffic in both directions?
Once more Serge raises his left forearm, and holds it three inches above the desktop, the hand flat, palm down, fingers pressed together and extended. The wrist swivels to the right to form a curve, and from his elbow to his fingernails he runs an imaginary train, inclining the track inwards as the speeding engine rattles past the bump of his sleeve’s hem. Dismantling train and track to hold his paper down, he writes:
The track should be banked, such that the inside of the curve is lower than the outside.
And if the direction were reversed? The forearm’s up again, and a second train run from nails to elbow. The banking should remain the same, it seems to him. “No further precautions need be taken”: he composes the words in his head but doesn’t write them yet because he’s still looking at his forearm. The new train’s hurtling up it, tilting as it runs into the wrist-curve-but the first train’s still there too, racing down to meet it. He moves his head back, hoping that the extra surface view created by this action will reveal a switch, branch-line or siding into which one of the trains could be diverted-or, if not, at least a signal further back to warn each of the other’s presence. Yet even as these things take shape in his imagination he realises that not only will they fail to prevent the collision, but it was they themselves, in their amalgam, who caused it in the first place: the catastrophe was hatched within the network, from among its nodes and relays, in its miles and miles of track, splitting and expanding as they run on beyond the scope of any one controlling vision; it was hatched by the network, at some distant point no longer capable of being pinned down but nonetheless decisive, so much so that ever since this point was passed-hours, days or even years ago-the collision’s been inevitable, just a matter of time. The exam hall and its rows of desks fade for a while, and Serge finds himself carried on the buffer of his mind into a storm of steel rods, axels, crankshafts and combustion chambers, all impacting: pistons plunging through sheet metal, ripping seats from gangways, gangways from their chassis; valves screaming ecstatically and flying loose; pure-molten brake shoes splashing streaks of light; track lifted and contorted beyond recognition, as though space itself were crumpling under the weight and force of the demands being made of it, the sheer insistence of machinery breaking its bonds as it comes into its own…
Two days after sitting the examination, Serge takes a real train down to London. He travels through winter fog made luminescent by a sun that won’t reveal itself. When he emerges from St. Pancras the fog’s lifted but the air’s still hazy; taxicabs leave knee-high smoke-clouds that drift slowly over pavements as he makes his way by foot through Bloomsbury towards St. James’s. A thin mist sits above the park; the roofs of Whitehall Court, black pyramids that join with domes and cupolas as they mount upwards, fuzz and blur in this like spires and bell-towers of some legendary castle. The War Office building is bathed in pale sunlight, but its deep-sunk windows cut dark shadow-sockets in the alabaster façade. Serge tells the soldier at the main door that he has an appointment.
“Who with?”
“Lieutenant General Widsun.”
The soldier looks him over for a second time, as though taken aback. He asks Serge’s name, then steps into a cabin and picks up a telephone, watching him through the glass while mouthing inaudible words. After half a minute he emerges and, pointing into a courtyard, says:
“This way, sir: up the staircase to room 615A.”
The building’s corridors have marble floors; Serge’s feet click as he moves across them. In one, twenty or so men his age fill forms out as they wait on benches; one of them shuffles over to make space for Serge-but he, shunning this gesture, clicks his way onwards, turns a corner, heads up a smaller staircase and enters a new corridor in which plush armchairs overhung by large plants offer themselves up to older men in clean-creased uniforms. The door of 615A leads to an inner waiting area; a secretary seats Serge here, beneath a portrait of a sly-looking Tudor or Elizabethan man holding a quill above a sheet of paper covered in black ciphers, slips through a second door, then slips back out again and tells him to go through.
Widsun’s office is large; his desk alone could have a model battlefield laid out on it. Behind it, framed by the grid-squares of a double-sash window, Widsun’s face beams at him from atop stiff folds of khaki.
“Serge, my boy!”
“Hello, sir.”
“Sir, nothing! Sit yourself down.”
Serge sits across the desk from him.
“My Kinetoscope enthusiast!” Widsun guffaws. “My feathered witness! Twice the size, at least! And handsome as a prince: the world’s fresh ornament, and only herald to the gaudy spring!”
Serge looks down at the desktop, towards a blotting pad and ink set. Instinctively, his hand reaches for the stamp, before pausing and retreating.
“You hungry?” Widsun asks.
“I suppose so,” Serge says.
On the way out, Widsun hands his secretary a sheet of paper and instructs her to CC it to three of his colleagues. While he slips on his jacket, Serge watches her line up three sheets of white paper with two black ones, alternating tones; the click and hammer of the keys against the five-deep stack starts up as they pass through the outer door and follows them along the corridor.
They lunch at the Criterion in Piccadilly. Widsun orders beef Chateaubriand for the two of them, and a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape.
“Your health’s fine now, I take it?” he enquires.
“Oh yes,” answers Serge. “They tested us for everything at SOMA: measles, polio, consumption…”
“SOMA: so you’ll be one of Boom Trenchard’s bird-men. Have they filled your head with sky and wind, then?”
“Well, we haven’t actually flown yet. It was mainly theory. We did mapwork, and learnt how to use compasses, correctors, stuff like that. And we learnt principles of gunnery: line, elevation, aiming points and mean points, all those things.”
“Ligne de foi: that’s all I remember. What you aim down, isn’t it? ‘Faith Line’: has a nice ring to it.”
“They didn’t mention that,” Serge tells him. “We were led more down the artillery side of things. They’d give us distances and ranges, and we’d have to calculate the angle of sight from the horizontal; then we’d have to set this off against the error of the day, and work out the trajectory and angle of descent and-”
“Error of the day?” asks Widsun.
“Oh, you know: atmospherics, wind speed…”
A pianist starts playing. The room is filling up. Waiters glide up and down the rows of tables as though slotted into grooves laid in the floor. Widsun holds Serge with his gaze and tells him, in a voice full of affection:
“I never had you down as a mathematician.”
“Oh, I don’t think of it as mathematics,” Serge replies. “I just see space: surfaces and lines… and the odd blind spot…”
A waiter turns up with their wine. Widsun inspects the label and nods approval; the man sets about opening the bottle. Widsun turns to Serge again and asks:
“What about wireless? I was informed some time ago that you were quite the little radio bug…”
“I was,” Serge smiles. “But at the school it was different. They’d put eight or ten Morse buzzers in a room, and you’d have to learn the tone of each, and transcribe from first one and then another. It’s to train your ear. And we were told the principles of signalling from the air, like don’t send on a turn, or right over the ground station; or not to make the dots too short or dashes too long; or how you don’t need to send the number after the squadron letter-that kind of thing.”
The cork’s pop rises above the piano music and room’s murmur. A mouthful of wine is poured into Widsun’s glass. He holds it up towards the large, arched windows.
“How are your eyes?” he asks Serge while he’s doing this. “Still sharp as ever?”
“Oh,” says Serge, “they gave us wool balls full of different-coloured strands to pick out and unravel.”
“How’s your mother?” Widsun enquires, rolling the wine around the glass to check its legs.
“She’s busy,” Serge replies. “There’s lots of demand for silk these days.”
Widsun’s swilling the liquid round his mouth now, looking intrigued. Eventually the look goes; he swallows and nods at the waiter, who pours two glasses out and glides away again.
“Lots of demand for silk,” says Widsun. “Yes, indeed there is. Well, here’s to the demand for silk, and your good health.”
They clink glasses. Serge sits back again, but Widsun’s upper body stays above the table, leaning forward; it makes it look as though the arches and gilded ceiling of the room were being held up by his shoulders. Cigarette smoke curls round these as he murmurs:
“Error of the day…”
ii
Serge is sent to Hythe. He’s lodged with five other cadets in the dormitory of a requisitioned school. From Romney Marsh, where they do four-mile runs along the Royal Military Canal, the rumble of the guns in Ypres can be picked up. He thought it was distant thunder the first time he heard it, but the sky was blue and cloudless.
“Fifteen-inch howitzers, I’d say,” their instructor smiles at them as they scour the heavens. “Carries nicely, dissent it? Now pick thet pace ap!”
The instructor’s name’s Lieutenant Langeveldt; he’s from Port Elizabeth, South Africa. One of his eyes, the right one, points slightly to the side, as though trained down a line of sight that, although different to that of his vision’s central axis, nonetheless complements it, like a corrector.
On Serge’s third day in the school he takes the cadets to the airfield and introduces them to the machines.
“A Maurice Farman Shorthorn,” he announces as mechanics wheel out from a hangar a large boxed kite made from odds and ends of wood bound together by bailing wire. Its two wings are held up, one above the other, by a flimsy set of vertical struts; in the space between them, a rectangular box five or six feet long seems to float unsupported as it protrudes forwards from the frame. Two makeshift chairs are lodged within the box which, like the wings, has canvas patches sewn around it; the rest of the fuselage is naked.
“Also known as a Rumpitee,” Lieutenant Langeveldt continues. “A monosoupape pusher, twin-seater. This part is the nacelle: that’s where you sit. This part behind it is the engine, with propeller mounted on it; here’s where the explosive mixture enters, through the skirt.”
“Is this one finished?” Serge asks.
“Finished as it’ll ever be, Carrefix. You can be first ap with me.”
He’s thrown a leather jacket, a soft helmet and some goggles. Tentatively, he grabs a vertical strut, climbs onto the lower wing and hoists himself up into the back seat.
“Not there,” snaps Langeveldt. “Thet’s my seat!”
“Why’s it called a Rumpitee?” Serge asks as he clambers over to the front.
“You’ll soon find out,” says Langeveldt. “You others, stend beck.”
The mechanic plants himself behind the nacelle and yanks at the propeller. Nothing happens. He pulls it down again, this time with both hands, and the engine catches. Black smoke fills the space between the wings. Serge coughs and turns to face the front. The engine noise increases, and the grass beneath the wheels starts rolling backwards as though a giant winch were pulling it away from under them. The faces of the other cadets are shaking-not just up and down with the bumping of the wheels over the grass’s surface, but also with the faster and more regular vibration of the engine, which shouts from behind Serge, in a mechanical voice amplified by the plane’s frame:
Rumpiteerumpiteerumpiteerumpiteerumpitee…
The shaking faces swing away, as do the hangars and the woods behind them, the whole disc of ground revolving till the field’s main expanse lies in front of him. The rumpitees heighten their speed and tone, growing hysterical; the grass races away beneath him, so fast that its bumps disappear. The rumpitees smooth out too, merging together in a constant high-pitched whine-and then he’s up, his face slicing the air in two, a slit right down the middle of its fabric as it rushes past him. He looks down: as the landscape falls away, it flattens, voids itself of depth. Hills lose their height; roads lose their camber, bounce, the texture of their paving, and turn into marks across a map. The greens and browns of field and wood seem artificial and provisional, as though they’d just now fallen from the sky. Now the land’s surface starts to tip, its horizontal line rotating round the Farman’s nose as though the vegetation, soil and brick that formed it were all one big front propeller. Buildings, ditches, hedgerows turn and re-align themselves like parts of a machine, then shift and re-align themselves again as the line rotates back the other way, cogs and arms swivelling around an axis at whose centre Serge’s own head sits. He feels a tapping on his back, and turns round: Langeveldt, strangely outlandish now that his offset eyes have disappeared beneath goggles, is pointing to the right. Serge looks that way, and sees the town: the parallel rows of its terraces, the plan view of a St. Leonard robbed of elevation, steeple pushed down and compacted like a collapsed telescope. Beyond the town, the canal forms a dark line across the marsh; beyond that, the rim of shore is marked in white by waves that have become entirely static, as though no independent movement were permitted of the landscape anymore: all displacement and acceleration, all shifts and realignments must proceed from the machine…
The coast peels away now and the land tilts towards him, swinging from a hinge running perpendicular to him and his box, along the same line as the Farman’s wheel axle. It lifts up to meet him: a flat earth-plane rising to join a wooden rectangle held in a wiry frame set in a huge white-and-blue circle of sky. As it does, depth starts returning. Detail too: he can pick out the airfield, the hangars, the cluster of cadets. Then these things are right on him as they land with a bump and rumpitee across the grass back to the group, who wave and cheer.
“Your face is black!” they shout at him as he steps out of the nacelle and slides down off the lower wing.
“Tar in the explosive mixture,” Langeveldt says as he peels his helmet off. “How did you like it?”
“I liked it a lot,” Serge replies. “It was just right.”
“Just right?”
“Yes, sir: just how things should be.”
They fly on most days for the next month. Only when the clouds are too low or the air is plagued by thunderstorms do they stay earthbound. They’re shown how to ascend in gyres, stall, dive, pull out of spins, stand the machine on its tail and hang on the propeller, perform sideslips and Immelmann turns. The fallen landscape prints itself on Serge’s mind by dint of his repeated passage over it: its flattened progression of greens, browns and yellows, patches of light and shade; the layout of the town and of the marsh beyond it; the ribbon of the Hythe-to-Folkestone road; the thread of the Light Railway joining Dymchurch and St. Mary’s Bay, then running on across the Romney sands; the dots of the Gypsy encampment outside Dungeness. He likes to move these things around from his nacelle, take them apart and reassemble them like pieces of a jigsaw. When he loops, they disappear completely, the whole horizon sinking from the bottom of his gaze and everything becoming sky, then, after a pause in which time itself seems to be held in abeyance, the rim reappearing at his vision’s upper edge and sliding down his eyes like a decorated screen being lowered just in front of them…
For the first two weeks they fly with dual controls. Langeveldt and his assistants will guide the Farmans up, then, at a moment chosen at their whimsy, tap the cadets on the back and hold their hands up in the air-their passenger’s cue to unclip the paddles by his seat and ply the side-wires till the rudder starts responding. Sometimes the instructor stalls or goes into a spin just prior to handing over, leaving the cadet to coax the chaotic world back into shape. By the end of April they’re going up unsupervised, in pairs. In early May Langeveldt starts poking holes in the machines’ canvas hides and knocking the odd strut out with a mallet before sending them up.
“Brought a machine down safely with the whole tail shot off once myself!” he tells them. “If you can’t do without a strut or two then you’re not made for the high life.”
Serge has been paired off with a Londoner named Stedman. Stedman does most of the flying: Serge himself, it’s been decided at some juncture higher up-a meeting in a room thick with cigar smoke, or an encrypted communication sent down wires from Oxford via London via who-knows-where-has all the makings of a good observer. He’s given extra lessons in cartography, and taught Zone Call and Clock Code systems. When he and Stedman go up in the air they’re given a list of spots to drop flares on, or photograph, or, if the spot’s a military barracks, land at and persuade the CO to sign their logbook. After a few days of this, a camera-gun is mounted on the nose of his nacelle, and he and Stedman have to careen around the Kent coast photo-strafing castles, churches, train stations and gasworks. The results are developed as soon as they land, and posted in the School of Aerial Gunnery ’s briefing room for Langeveldt to grade in front of them.
“Pepperdine, three hits. Biswick, two. Spurrier, three. Carrefix, five-on top of which you’ve taken out the Dover pier, which wasn’t on the list. What did you do thet for?”
“It looked nice,” Serge replies. “I wanted to photograph it.”
“It looked nice?”
“Yes, sir. I liked its shape.”
By mid-May they’re firing live rounds out of Lewis guns. The guns have Aldis sights, harmonised for deflection. Serge likes the way the reticules grid space up when he looks through them, but finds he can perform their main task on his own. The trick’s to point the gun not where the target is right now, but to discern its line of movement as it travels through your vision and to run that on into the space in front of it, shooting there instead. Serge develops a knack of splitting his gaze in two, locking the line with one eye while the other slides ahead, setting up camp in the spot at which a successful hit “happens” and thus bringing this event to pass. He experiences a strange sense of intermission each time he does this, as though he’d somehow inflated or hollowed out a stretch of time, found room to move around inside it. It occurs to him that perhaps doing this is what made Langeveldt’s eyes go off-kilter, and wonders if his own eyes look like the lieutenant’s when he shoots…
They do most of their target practice over water, peppering rafts moored just off the shoreline. Serge gets into the habit of firing in certain rhythms, ones that carry with them first words, then whole phrases, spoken in the boom and sent up his arm into his body by the recoil. His favourite consists of a first, short burst of six shots followed by a longer one of eight; each time he fires it out he hears a line that’s stuck in his head from the Versoie Pageant, from the year when Widsun visited:
of purpose that your thought
Might also to the seas be known…
The words fly from his gun into the sea, hammering and splintering its surface, etching themselves out across the rafts’ wood: of-PUR, pose-THAT, your-THOUGHT… Later, they fire over land, swooping low to take out rabbits, foxes, badgers, hares and hedgehogs, then touching down to bag their sometimes still-quivering score. They gun down the odd farm animal as well, although it’s against regulations and draws complaints from irate farmers.
“Another accidental lamb-strike?” Langeveldt tuts as Serge and Stedman unload their bloodied tribute at his feet. “Thet’s the third this week. Take it over to the kitchen.”
The guns jam all the time. On days when there’s no flying to be had they’re made to take them apart and assemble them again-six, seven, eight times, all day long. The other cadets try to force the trigger sears and firing pins together, swearing when they won’t fit, but not Serge: he finds the process pleasing, an extension of the logic he’s developed from the Farman’s front seat. In the click and swivel of machinery being slotted together, moved around and realigned, its clockwork choreography, he relives, in miniature, the mechanical command of landscape and its boundaries that flight affords him, the mastery of hedgerows, fields and lanes, their shapes and volumes…
Sometimes, when he’s out free-flying, and especially when Stedman loops the loop, Serge experiences an exhilarating loosening of his stomach. As they level out one afternoon above some little village, he turns round and points down towards the ground.
“You want to land?” shouts Stedman. “What’s here?”
“I’ve got to shit,” Serge shouts back.
They bounce across the village cricket pitch. Serge slides down off the wing, lowers his trousers and relieves himself above the wicket, just short of a length on middle and off.
“What village is this anyway?” he asks as he strolls back towards Stedman, who’s stretching his legs beside the machine as he consults a map.
“Tenterden, I think,” Stedman answers. “Population six hundred and twenty-nine.”
“Six hundred and thirty now,” Serge tells him. “Let’s go.”
The next day they spot what looks like a small battle taking place on a square field below them, and descend to take a closer look. The combatants turn out to be girls playing lacrosse. The game stops as they pass above it, pink and white faces staring up at them through netted sticks. Stedman climbs two thousand feet and pulls the Farman up into a loop that levels out low, just above the playing field, sending sticks and faces scattering. He turns the plane around and lands more or less exactly on the centre circle.
“You could have killed one of my girls!” the whistle-necklaced mistress shouts at them as they pull off their helmets and goggles.
“Terribly sorry, madam,” Stedman smiles back. “Thing is, a part seems to have come loose and fallen off the engine just as we passed by.”
“Will you be able to fix it?” she asks him, softening.
“Depends. Some of these things just won’t fly without the requisite bits and bobs.”
“I think I saw it fall behind those bushes,” Serge says, shuffling off towards them.
When he strolls back a few minutes later, the girls are gathered round the machine, being treated to a lecture on aerodynamics.
“What does he do?” the tallest one asks Stedman as Serge sidles up to him.
“I observe,” says Serge, “and navigate. I make everything fit together.”
“No luck finding the whatsit?” Stedman asks.
Serge sadly shakes his head.
“I’ve worked out what it is,” Stedman announces. “A bolt’s come out in the skirt. It’s simple to fix, but will take a while. Be dark before we’re finished: we won’t be able to take off again until tomorrow. Perhaps we could use your phone to contact our headquarters, tell them not to worry…”
“But of course,” the mistress tells him, all smiles now. “We’ll put you up for the night.”
“Where will they sleep, miss?” a round-faced girl asks, fingering her net.
“They can sleep in the Bursar’s lodging; he’s away.”
“Oh, we couldn’t leave our machine unattended,” Stedman tells her in a solemn voice. “We’ll sleep right out here with it. It’s not cold…”
“Well, at least let us bring you sandwiches and a flask.”
“Too kind, madam,” Stedman answers. “I’ll come in and fetch them myself.”
It’s the tall one and the round-faced one who sneak out to see them after dark: two distinctive silhouettes making their way across the field. Stedman and the round-faced one do it on the grass beneath the lower wing; Serge helps the tall one into the nacelle, where, wrapping her arms around the Lewis gun (whose safety catch, fortunately, is on), she bends forward and lets him wriggle off her pants from behind. They leave at dawn. Over the following two weeks, three more planes lose parts above the same spot.
In all his time at Hythe, Serge sees two accidents. The first one happens right in front of him: he and Stedman are waiting to take off when Quinnell and Kirk, who’ve gone up just ahead of them, stall, go into a spin and hurtle back down to the airfield, landing in the right place but the wrong direction, nose-first. Kirk is killed; Quinnell’s spine is broken and he’s carted off to hospital in Dover. Their machine stays in the field for several days; the cadets gather round it every morning after breakfast to stare in contemplation at the strange and useless geometry of its upended beams, the decorative wind vanes of its rudders.
“It looks like the Eiffel Tower,” says Serge. “The Eiffel Tower if one of its legs snapped off and it started tilting.”
“Or an oil well,” Payton counters; “a slant one: those bits that they build above the ground to mount the pumps in.”
The other accident he doesn’t see take place-only its aftermath. Beswick forgets to strap himself into his seat and falls out when his pilot loops the loop. He plunges three thousand feet and lands in a nearby field. A Beswick-shaped mark stays in the grass for weeks: head, torso, legs and outstretched arms.
“The acid from his body,” Stedman says as he and Serge stand above the patch one afternoon. “Stops new grass growing.”
“It’s a good likeness,” Serge says.
“All his memories, and everything he ever thought about or did, reduced to battery chemicals.”
“Why not?” asks Serge. “It’s what we are.”
iii
He’s passed out in June, and assigned to the 104th Squadron as an observer. He leaves from just down the road, in Folkestone, travelling on a hospital ship alongside several thousand troops, all armed.
“Isn’t that cheating?” Serge asks the loading sergeant when he sees the green strip and red cross painted on the hull.
“It’s what’s available,” the sergeant replies. “Came here for disinfection, needs to go to France. If you’d prefer to swim…”
They all embark, then for some reason disembark again, spend the night in a dirty hotel, then re-embark and set sail the next day. Serge wonders what disease the ship had on it before it was disinfected; he pictures it floating above the decks, licking its way around the stays and pulleys of the lifeboats’ gantries in a yellow cloud, like cholera. Arriving in Boulogne, he finds the whole dock area turned into one giant hospital ward, with sick men lying in rows on stretchers, waiting for evacuation. The landscape around the town looks sick too: trees droop languidly; fields that should be full of wheat at this time of year stand bare. Following the instructions he was handed before leaving Hythe, he joins a transport barge at a small inland jetty, and is carried slowly to Saint-Omer along melancholic waterways, past tin-roofed sheds on edges of ramshackle villages. Rusty cans and floating refuse strew the boat’s route like sarcastic flowers. Further down, the river opens out more, splitting into channels in which water-weeds stream indolently in long swathes below the surface. Sedge and bulrushes blur its edges; from within their dense thatch Serge can hear the calls of wild ducks, coots and herons sounding and responding cryptically across the water, as though issuing and forwarding their own sets of instructions. Over this noise, like a low mist, hangs the sound of guns, more substantial than it was in Hythe: the front may still be distant, but the rumble’s here now, graticuled, almost tangible…
The same melancholic lethargy prevails in Saint-Omer. All around town, men are sleeping: on benches and grass verges, outside cafés, on the requisitioned Pétanque court. Serge can’t tell if the omnipresent rumbling here is guns or snoring. He picks his way past eighteen or twenty legs sprawled out across the steps of the building he’s been ordered to report to, and finds a bored NCO sitting behind a table smoking cigarettes, one straight after the other.
“One hundred and fourth?” the NCO says when he reads the piece of paper Serge hands him. “They’re fully manned at the moment. You’ll have to wait.”
“What for?” Serge asks.
“Someone to die.” The NCO stubs out his cigarette and lights another before adding: “It shouldn’t take long.”
“What do I do while I wait?” Serge asks him.
“Sleep, have an omelette in the bistro, pick your nose-what do I care?”
Serge has an omelette in the bistro. He gets talking to some other RFC men awaiting deployment. They laugh when he tells them that he trained on Shorthorns.
“That’s like learning to drive horse-carts before being sent out in a motor-car race!”
“What did you learn in?” Serge asks.
“Well, we started out on Longhorns, then moved on to Avros.”
“An Avro is a pile of shit,” another man says. “Its ailerons are useless, it stalls on right turns and it’s got no elevator. Three of the cadets I trained with died on them while I was there.”
“We lost three too,” Serge says. “Only one was just crippled.”
“We lost five!” the first man asserts triumphantly, thrusting his spread fingers out across the table top. “And two more have died just in the time that I’ve been here.”
“How?” Serge asks.
“This flight sergeant went out swimming and drowned in a deep pool. And then another man got crushed unloading coal.”
“There was another one too,” a third man chips in. “Got shot through the heart when someone else’s gun went off.”
“That was his own gun,” a fourth man says.
“No, that was another man who died the week before,” the third man corrects him.
Serge, chewing on his omelette, wonders if it’s really necessary to fight the Germans after all: they could all just lounge around, each on their own side, dying in random accidents until nobody’s left and the war’s over by default… He does a brief tour of the town after his meal, then settles down beside a pond in the main square and, gazing at a lotus flower lying on its surface, drifts off like everybody else.
He spends the next few days like this: reporting to the smoking NCO each morning, eating in the bistro, wandering, dozing. Eventually, on the fourth or fifth day, the NCO informs him that a squadron slot’s become available for him. He’s taken in a Crossley lorry alongside ten others. They sit in the back, on cushions that do little to absorb the shock and rattle of steel-studded tires on cobbled roads. The air smells of castor oil; Serge can’t tell if it’s the lorry or the landscape. The landscape is vast and empty; skylarks cut across it, making for no spot or destination that he can discern. At one point they pass a group of Hindu soldiers bathing in a stream. Three of them are splashing around, calling to each other in their language; two more stand facing outwards, backs to the road, their lower halves submerged while their cupped hands scoop water up and hold it aloft in a kind of votive gesture before pouring it across their foreheads. Every so often the lorry stops, the driver calls a name out and a man slips off to become swallowed by the terrain as the Crossley trundles on. Serge finds himself among the last three left in the back; then the last two; then the last one. The driver cuts the ignition and steps down to the ground to take a leak. With the engine’s noise gone, Serge can hear the front’s rumble loud and clear; it makes the truck’s metal bars vibrate against the wood. The driver, as he heads back to his cabin, turns to him and says:
“May as well join me up front.”
The road ahead is split. As Serge climbs inside, the driver’s looking down first one fork, then another. He has a map in front of him, but he’s not consulting it: instead, he’s sitting still and listening, ears perked, as though homing in on some signal lodged in the guns’ static. He seems to find what he was listening out for, sparks the ignition up again, heads down the left fork and trundles on.
Eventually they turn off at a farm and bump along the ruts of a small, winding track. The track leads between two colonnades of poplars, passes a potato field, then runs down to an L-shaped airfield flanked by woods.
“The runway’s got cows grazing on it!” Serge says.
“You want it to look like an aerodrome?” the driver asks. “Besides, they keep the grass down.”
At the woods’ edge, Serge can see a large Bessoneau hangar with about ten machines drawn up inside it. They look much solider than Shorthorns; their fuselage is brown and has concentric circles painted on the side. From this angle, it looks as though their propellers have been placed at the wrong end. Some eighty yards away, beside a small copse, more planes are parked inside a makeshift hangar topped with canvas. Nissen huts are planted thirty feet from this, near a farmhouse with red gables. The driver draws up by the farmhouse’s front porch and lets Serge out.
The 104th Squadron’s commander’s name is Walpond-Skinner. He must be in his mid-forties. He seems pressured, and avoids eye contact.
“How many flying hours have you got?” is his first question when Serge steps into his office.
“I’m not sure, sir. Maybe twenty.”
“Jesus Christ! Like feeding children up to Baal. I see they’re still only giving you half-wings.”
Serge runs his fingers over the badge on his lapel: a single wing with a round O beside it.
“That’ll change soon,” Walpond-Skinner says, his gaze travelling on past Serge to flit across the wall and doorway. “You people are just as important. In the early days it was the observer who was in command of the machine; pilot was just a chauffeur.”
“Early days?” Serge asks.
Commander Walpond-Skinner’s eyes alight on Serge’s for the first time as he answers, with a bemused look:
“Of the war. At least now they’re giving you full officer status. As they should. I see you boys as grand interpreters. High priests.” He leafs through a dossier, then says: “From Lydium, Masedown.”
“Near there, sir,” Serge answers.
“Train on Salisbury Plain?”
“No: Hythe.”
“That’s strange. Says here you have a good eye. And a protector among the Whitehall gods. Let’s hope you haven’t skimped on hecatombs of late.”
Serge doesn’t answer. Walpond-Skinner taps a bell lying on his desktop. He flips open a black ledger, takes a rubber and erases something from it, then continues:
“We have three flights here; six machines in each. You’ll be in C-Flight. Any questions?”
“I don’t think so,” Serge says.
A batman arrives and is instructed to escort Serge to “the Floaters.” As he leaves, Walpond-Skinner wipes the rubber residue from the ledger’s page, picks up a pen lying beside it, then, realising his mistake, sets it down again in favour of a pencil, with which he writes on the spot he’s just cleared, murmuring:
“Carrefax, C-eee.”
The batman leads Serge across the field. Outside the Nissen huts he sees a group of men in pilots’ jackets standing as though on parade-although they’re scruffily dressed and their formation isn’t one he’s ever learnt: it seems to consist of four men planting themselves in a kind of square, all facing inwards, then each rotating forty-five degrees (two in a clockwise direction, two anti-) to face down the square’s side, towards the man positioned at an adjacent corner, whereupon the two sets of two men start to circle one another in slow pasodobles, before looping round and rejoining the square with each man at a different corner so that, while the positions shift, the overall formation stays the same.
“If he turns left,” one of the men is saying, “you turn right. If he turns right, you turn left. If he then turns left after that, you turn left too; and if he turns right, you turn left as well.”
The men act these moves out, pacing and turning, as he speaks.
“You mean right,” another of them says, halting in his tracks. The whole formation grinds to a halt too. The first man continues:
“No, I mean left. Then you come back at him from below the tail.”
The belt of internal movement shuffles into action once again. Serge follows the batman on towards the woods at the field’s edge. Taking a little path through these, they come to a row of houseboats moored on a canalised section of river.
“This is your one, sir,” the batman tells him as he ducks through a low doorframe. Inside, there’s a small stove, a bookshelf and four beds. Three of the beds are in a state of disarray, with sheets pulled back and clothes flung across them; the fourth is neatly made, and has a package bound with string lying on its surface.
“… should have been sent to his family already,” the batman mutters. “I’ll take it. Why don’t you settle in, then I can show you round the airfield.”
Serge unpacks, then steps onto the deck. On the canal’s far side another row of slender poplars sways lightly above reeds that bend over the water. The poplars’ leaves are dancing, but Serge can’t hear the rustle: the guns’ noise is loud here-loud and precise, its tangled thunder now unravelled into distinct volleys and retorts. A scow passes by, carrying scrap or machine parts covered by tarpaulin. Its captain looks at Serge, then at his load, then dead in front.
He’s taken to the Bessoneau hangar first. Machine parts lie around this too: propellers, wheels and engine cylinders, sorted into groups or mounted on laths and workbenches over which mechanics bend and solder as though studying and dissecting specimens. Towering above these are the aeroplanes he saw from the lorry: large, brown solid things with no nacelle, just a scooped-out hollow in the fuselage between the wings with two seats in it.
“RE8s,” the mechanic informs him, tapping an exhaust pipe running above a set of gill-like silver slits. “Hispano-Suiza engine, air-cooled.”
“Why’s the engine at the front?” Serge asks.
“The RE8’s a tractor, not a pusher.”
“Doesn’t the propeller block the observer’s view?”
“Observer sits in the back, facing backwards.”
“Backwards?” Serge asks. “How can I see where we’re going?”
“You can see where you’ve come from,” the mechanic smiles back. “Don’t worry: you’ll come to like it. It’s a great, sturdy machine. Both the pilot and the observer can get killed and it’ll fly on for a hundred miles and land itself quite safely back on our side of the lines-if it’s facing that way, of course; bit of a disaster if it’s not…”
They stroll on to the Nissen huts, and Serge is introduced to the other pilots and observers.
“This is Gibbs, then Watson, Dickinson, Baldwick, Clegg…”
The men are dressed in non-uniform shirts unbuttoned halfway down the front. Their hair is grown out in long locks. They greet him casually.
“Which flight you in, then?” Clegg asks.
“C-Flight.”
“Aha: you’re hosting us tonight. Better break out the good stuff.”
The good stuff turns out to be local dessert wine with a glowing yellow hue and bittersweet taste. As they hold their glasses up, the men sing:
We meet neath the sounding rafters;
The walls all around us are bare (are bare);
They echo the peals of laughter;
It seems that the dead are there (dead are there).
Serge doesn’t know the words, but kind of murmurs as he half-mouths to them, rising with the others for the second verse:
So stand by your glasses steady,
The world is a web of lies (of lies).
Then here’s to the dead already,
And hurrah for the next man who dies (man who dies)!
After the meal, they crank up a gramophone and play music-hall songs. Serge slips out and makes his way in the dark through long grass, then across the shorter grass beside the woods, back to his houseboat. He sits on its deck and watches another barge slide through the oily water, laden once more with objects whose shapes beneath the covering suggest broken and twisted metal, or perhaps animals, the bumps and folds of their limbs and torsos. In the waves left by its passage when it’s gone, Serge sees a water rat swimming towards the far bank. The black surface of the water around the rat’s head is laced with garish streaks of colour: orange-yellow, greenish white, reflections of the gunfire flickering across the sky. The sound of each volley arrives late, often after its own flash has faded from both sky and river; new waves of flashes catch up with the residual noise, overtake and lap it.
“Intermission,” Serge says, to no one, or perhaps the rat.
For a moment, the flickering stops and the whole countryside falls silent. A calcium flare descends noiselessly not far away, silhouetting the poplars and rimming their leaves with frozen light, as though with hoarfrost. Behind it other, smaller lights glow on and off, like fireflies. Then their pops arrive, then louder stutters, then high, booming eruptions: sounds and lights meshing together as the air comes back to life, like a magnificent engine warming up.
8
i
Zero hour today is 7 a.m. Serge is up two hours before it, woken by the plash of a tug’s wake against his houseboat’s hull. He performs his ablutions, makes his way over to the mess and eats two slices of dry toast washed down with gunfire tea. Fifteen or so other pilots and observers shuffle into seats around him, bleary-eyed, coughing and farting themselves towards full consciousness. Cigarettes are smoked throughout the meal, stabbed into mouths still full with food, balanced on the sides of plates, stubbed out in hollow eggshells. Walpond-Skinner marches in at six to hand out copy orders.
“Five machines on Art Obs today; three SE5s escorting them. Four batteries to each machine: two to be ranged in the first hour, two in the second, all four kept on target during the third. Individual calls on all your sheets.”
Serge glances down at his. His batteries are E through H, his own call 3. The print on his paper is mauve and imprecise: third in a CC’d triplicate, the furthest from the ribbon and keys’ touch. Beneath the copy order sheet, on whiter and less grainy paper that’s been folded and compressed, is a large map. Serge opens it across the table top and sees, among grid squares bent out of line by cup and toast-rack, his objectives marked with arrows, their coordinates written beside them in red ink: two hostile batteries, an ammunition dump, a crossroads. The dump and crossroads are new for him; the batteries he’s been targeting for over a week now, on and off.
“Memo from Central Wireless Station: ground operators still reporting too much jambing,” Walpond-Skinner reads. “Keep to the wavelengths and notes that you’ve been allotted. And make sure you’re always half a mile-at minimum-from the next machine. Any questions?”
His eyes skirt the floor; the men’s eyes do the same.
“Then up, Bellerophons, and at ’em!” Walpond-Skinner snaps.
Chairs slide back, cups are swilled from and abandoned, burps sounded like last calls above remains of plates; then the men trudge outside. The sun’s not up yet; dew still hangs about the long grass; the odd strand of spider-web filament floats just above this: it’s not cold. The mildness of the summer morning makes the behaviour of the men as they slip into thick leather jackets, gloves and fur-lined boots seem quite incongruous. The pilots and observers of the SE5s are pulling muskrat gauntlets over the silk inners on their hands and feet and rubbing whale oil on their cheeks and foreheads: they’ll be flying much higher. In the field beside them, mechanics pace round the machines, patting their tails and engines as though leading greyhounds or racehorses to their starting boxes. Serge’s RE8 is near the pack’s rear; Gibbs is already inside it. Serge climbs into its back seat, wedges the biscuit-box and brandy-flask that he’s been carrying under his right arm in between the spark set and its six-volt battery, gives the Lewis gun a swivel, then eases himself into a dew-damped seat as the mechanics throw propellers into motion all around the field, cutting arrowhead-shaped streaks into the grass where it’s blown down in diagonal lines behind the wings.
They take off to the west, then turn across the wood, skimming the treetops. The poplars opposite the houseboats bend as they pass over them. Gibbs puts one wing down; for a while the machine seems to drag, as though still connected psychologically if not physically to the ground. Serge feels gravity tautening around him, like elastic. Then the wing rises, the elastic snaps and he’s flung, back first, into the sky. It feels like falling, not ascending-but falling upwards, as if sucked towards some vortex so high that it’s above height itself. The land accelerates away, its surface area expanding even as it shrinks. Gibbs levels the plane; the countryside slants till it’s horizontal and starts running from beneath the fuselage like a ticker-tape strip issuing from a telegraph machine, the flickering band of the Lys racing away beside a thicker belt of forest, villages and hamlets popping up to punctuate the strip like news reports or stock-price fluctuations before Nieppe’s large brown stain pushes these out to the margins. A heat bump throws them as Gibbs angles up again; the landscape shakes beneath them and becomes illegible, just for a moment, before settling back into its horizontal run, its centre perfectly aligned with the plane’s tail. The bumps continue till they clear a haze that’s been invisible up to now: it always is when they’re inside it. As it sinks from him like a pneumatic platform being lowered, Serge can make its upper surface out, clear-cut and definite, a second horizon hovering like a muslin cover just above the first…
They pass a kite balloon. It, too, seems to strain upwards, pulling at the winch-line tethering it to its truck. Serge waves to the man in its basket; one of the man’s hands flies up in response; the other clasps the basket’s rail, as though to hold him back. The front can’t be far now. Gibbs turns the machine round and Serge, now facing east, looks down onto a vapour blanket that’s darker and more murky. Through it, further off, he can see gun flashes twinkling all around the countryside in little points of blue flame. Flares glow down in the trenches. A mile or two behind the German ones, the white plume of a train forms a clear, silky thread. He runs his eye along its tracks, the telephone lines beside these, the cables of a bridge, a pipeline leading from this across open ground before it burrows down to carry out of sight the metal and electric musculature of the land. A new flash appears on the horizon and grows brighter, dazzling him and warming his face: sunrise. Serge takes his watch out: twenty-two minutes to seven, time to test the sigs…
Reaching down between his legs, he turns the aerial crank. He pauses after a few revolutions, looks over the side and sees the copper aerial trailing in the slipstream like a fishing reel, a lead weight at its end. He takes his spark set out and starts transmitting B signals to Battery E. They pass the kite balloon again, heading the other way, then fly over a pockmarked village, a road down which a transport column’s moving, then some woods until they find, nestled among these, the battery. The Popham strip’s already laid out for him on the ground: three white cloth lines, one upright like a backbone, the other two angled into this like a lesser-than sign to form a K. Serge turns round, taps Gibbs on the shoulder and gives him the thumbs-up; they turn and fly out east again.
The sun, although at Serge’s back now, bounces off the top wing’s underside to light up his little cabin. Once more the kite balloon, its occupant now busy talking on his phone line; then a mandala of small roads and pathways, at least half of them unusable, criss-crossing and looping over open ground; then rows of empty trenches-last month’s, or last year’s, the year before’s; more open ground; more tracks. It’s only when the tracers start to rise towards him that Serge realises he’s passed onto the German side. It’s always like that: on his first few outings he’d anticipate the moment when he’d move across the deadly threshold, bracing himself for it, as though there were a real line strung across the air like a finishing ribbon for the machine to thrust its chest against and breach. But that moment never came-or rather, turned out always to have come already, the threshold to have lain unmarked, been glided over quite unnoticed. Even looking down, it’s hard to see which are the front positions: trench after trench slides into view, parallel lines conjoined in places by small runnels as communication trenches link up with evacuation trenches, third-line and supply trenches… At times the network opens into a wide mesh; at others it closes up, compact. The tracers rising from it lend structure to the air, mesh it as well. Puff balls of smoke appear as if by magic all round the machine.
“Archie pretty light today,” Gibbs leans back and shouts into his ear, quite nonchalantly.
A German kite balloon emerges from beneath their tail. Serge thinks about strafing it, but sees that it’s being hurriedly winched down out of his range. It rises again as he draws away from it-strangely elongated, like a floating intestine. He unfolds his map and, holding it across his knees, runs his finger to the square in which the first hostile battery position’s marked out: should be about here… He taps Gibbs’s shoulder again and signals for him to fly in a square holding pattern. As Gibbs turns, then turns again, patrolling their small area’s boundaries, Serge can see the machines to his left and right describing the same patterns half a mile away. He looks down and, moving his eyes first in diagonals from corner to corner of his quadrant, then in smaller, darting cat’s cradles between landmarks, picks up the battery, secreted within a copse but nonetheless betrayed by the anachronistically autumnal patch of scorched and thinned-out leaves made by its discharges. He picks his spark set up again and taps in C3E, then A, then MX12, the target’s map coordinates. Then he signals to Gibbs to fly back to their side.
Travelling in this direction, the tracer fire appears only after it’s already passed the plane, cutting long, slanted corridors into the air above him. It tilts up vertical, then starts angling forward, managing, through some optical and geometric sleight of hand, to reverse its direction without altering its flow until it’s rising at him from the ground. The intestinal kite balloon’s down again, then up; the magic puffs materialise beside them; the front line slides by unperceived once more, revealing in its wake a mesh of interlocking trenches which the same old English kite balloon announces as their own. The pockmarked village, road and woods run past below them one more time, then they’re back above Battery E. One of the Popham strip’s white lesser-than lines has been removed, the other straightened and lowered to the backbone cloth’s base, joining it at a right angle to form an L. Serge points Gibbs back towards the lines again, sending down A signals from his spark set as they go.
They’re back above their target with three minutes to spare. The other machines are in position too: two to the north of him, one to the south, each marking out its assigned grid square, while a fifth machine moves up and down in long, straight lines behind them. It reminds Serge of a ritual he once saw illustrated in Boy’s Comic Journal: a ceremonial Red Indian dance to call down rain. The men in feathers marked their patterns out across the ground and the gods, summoned into action by these, sent down water. As the second-hand needle moves across the final quarter-segment of his watch’s face, Serge feels an almost sacred tingling, as though he himself had become godlike, elevated by machinery and signal code to a higher post within the overall structure of things, a vantage point from which the vectors and control lines linking earth and heaven, the hermetic language of the invocations, its very lettering and script, have become visible, tangible even, all concentrated at a spot just underneath the index finger of his right hand which is tapping out, right now, the sequence C3E MX12 G…
Almost immediately, a white rip appears amidst the wood’s green cover on the English side. A small jet of smoke spills up into the air from this like cushion stuffing; out of it, a shell rises. It arcs above the trench-meshes and track-marked open ground, then dips and falls into the copse beneath Serge, blossoming there in vibrant red and yellow flame. A second follows it, then a third. The same is happening in the two-mile strip between Battery I and its target, and Battery M and its one, right on down the line: whole swathes of space becoming animated by the plumed trajectories of plans and orders metamorphosed into steel and cordite, speed and noise. Everything seems connected: disparate locations twitch and burst into activity like limbs reacting to impulses sent from elsewhere in the body, booms and jibs obeying levers at the far end of a complex set of ropes and cogs and relays. The salvos pause; Serge plots the points of impact on his clock-code chart, then sends adjustments back to Battery E, which fires new salvos that land slightly to the north of the first ones. Each one’s fall draws from the wood a new yellow-and-red flame-flower, with an outer white smoke-leaf that lingers after the bloom has faded. Serge sends one more correction; the shells shift fifteen or so yards to the east, and start arriving in regular fifteen-second bursts, their percussions overlapping with those falling in the neighbouring zones in sequences that speed up and slow down, like church bells’ chimes. A larger, darker bloom erupts from the copse beneath him: it seems to have more volume to it, more mass, billowing out and upwards like a dense, black chrysanthemum…
“I think we got it,” Serge turns round and shouts to Gibbs.
Gibbs points to his ear and shakes his head. Easier to communicate with the ground than with the man in the machine beside you. Serge sends an OK down to Battery E, then signals to Gibbs to move on to Battery F. They fly back across the lines and find this in the ruins of a village, Popham strips K’d up in response to their B sigs. They fly back again; Serge ranges the guns, plots the shells’ points of impact on his clock-code chart; then they move on to Battery G and do the same. Each time they shuttle to and fro, they pass through residues of tracer, Archie smoke and their own exhaust fumes hanging in the air. The shapes made when trails intersect, lines cutting across other lines at odd angles or bisecting puffballs’ circles to form strange figures, remind Serge of the phonetic characters his father would draw across the schoolroom’s whiteboard, the way the sequences would run and overlap. The lower section of this board’s become so crowded that it’s half-occluded: the morning’s light vapour blanket’s thickened to an opaque shawl. They have to fly lower to see where shells are landing, or even to get their own bearings. At one point a howitzer shell appears right beside them, travelling in the same direction-one of their own, surfacing above the smoke-bank like a porpoise swimming alongside a ship, slowly rotating in the air to show its underbelly as it hovers at its peak before beginning its descent. It’s so close that its wind-stream gently lifts and lowers the machine, making it bob. Serge knows that planes get hit by their own shells, but this one seems so placid, so companionable-and besides, if they’re travelling at the same speed then both it and they are just still bodies in space, harmless blocks of matter. In the instant before their paths diverge, it seems to Serge that the shell and the plane are interchangeable-and that the shell and he are interchangeable, just like the radians and secants on his clock-code chart, the smoke-and-vapour-marked points and trajectories around him, the angles of his holding pattern’s quadrant and the Popham strips’ abrupt cloth lines. Within the reaches of this space become pure geometry, the shell’s a pencil drawing a perfect arc across a sheet of graph paper; he’s the clamp that holds the pencil to the compass, moving as one with the lead; he is the lead, smearing across the paper’s surface to become geometry himself…
On their way back to base, they strafe the German trenches. While Gibbs holds his line above them, Serge points his Lewis gun down and nudges it from side to side until its point seems to slot into their groove. A sixth sense tells him when he’s found it: he just feels it go in, somehow; when it does, it starts to play, the same track every time: of-PUR, pose-THAT, your-THOUGHT… Enemy gunfire crackles back at them like angry static. They reach the limit of their area, pull out and turn towards their own lines. The air over no-man’s-land is thick with cordite smoke: it has the rich, livery smell of homecoming. The kite balloon’s on the ground being deflated, the Popham strips rolled back up. The woods beside the airfield rustle as they skim them; the row of poplars bends the other way. Gibbs puts the wing down; the ground locks them in its drag; and then they’re taxiing across the field towards the Bessoneaus. Serge jumps out before the machine’s come to a complete standstill, while mechanics are still harnessing it with chocks and halters. With his brandy-flask and biscuit-box beneath his arm, he strolls towards the Nissen huts.
“Narrative, Carrefax.” The recording officer, seated behind a table with a stack of papers at the hangar’s exit, stops him.
“What?” asks Serge, taking his glove off and wiping his hand across his face.
“Flight narrative for Corps HQ. I have to remind you every time.”
“Oh,” says Serge. “Well…” His hand has gathered a thick wedge of tar. He looks at it, then up at the recording officer. “We went up; we saw stuff; it was good.”
ii
Once, returning from the lines in fading light, zigzagging to dodge blue-black storm clouds, Serge and Gibbs find themselves landing on an aerodrome that’s not their own. They’re pretty sure it’s not a German one: the way the rain-curtains that sweep the ground are lit up, gold and precise with miniature rainbows in them, lets them know they’ve being flying west-but you can never be sure. The machines lying across the field are neither RE8s nor SE5s, and have storks painted on their fuselage. When Serge and Gibbs descend from theirs, mechanics greet them in a foreign language.
“Perdu la route…” one of them shouts.
“Oh, fuck!” snarls Gibbs. “Distract them while I climb back in and get my pistol. We can take off again before those others by the huts get over here.”
“They’re French,” Serge tells him.
“Français,” the mechanic nods-before, as though to prove it, launching into a rendition of “ La Marseillaise.” Four pilots saunter over and serve them glasses of eau-de-vie, then stroll away across the field towards two sleek black cars against which elegantly dressed ladies lean smoking cigarettes through long ivory holders.
“Bloody Cigognes,” snaps Clegg when Serge recounts the episode back in the mess. “Nothing but playboys: race-car drivers, fly-half of the national rugby team, the Compte de Trou-de-Cul. Balloon-busters: all they ever dare attack. Show them an EA and they’ll cack their French pantalons faster than the jardin de mon oncle. But soon as they get down from each day’s chicken run they’ve got Parisian hostesses whisking them off to see Manon and Salammbô while we sit here listening to scratched-up Felix Powell. There’s no justice in this war.”
The Felix Powell is pretty scratched, it’s true. So are the Marie Lloyd, the Vesta Tilley and the Ella Shields. As they play them in the evenings, some of the officers dance together, drawing lots to see who’ll do the woman’s steps; others, meanwhile, reminisce about the war’s “golden era”:
“Pity we don’t use parasols and Moranes anymore,” Watson sighs nostalgically. “Do you remember drop bags?”
“Those things were great fun,” Dickinson says. “You’d scrawl your message in them, then just hurl them overboard above the reporting station, watch them drop. Radio killed all that.”
“There was this pilot here when I first came,” Baldwick tells them. “Said he used to wave at EA pilots when he passed them. You had no beef with one another. He said the first time one of them took a pop at him, he couldn’t believe it: seemed so low…”
“What happened to him?” Watson asks.
“What do you think?” answers Baldwick. “Last year, or maybe late in ’fifteen. He was a flamer: carbonisé.”
“Carbo-nee-zay,” Dickinson and Watson repeat in unison, as though the word held some kind of mantric power, like an “Amen.”
“He was a real old-timer,” Baldwick tells them; “twenty-four or so.”
Baldwick is twenty, one year older than Serge; Watson, twenty-one. They could have been flying with the 104th before he was born, as far as he’s concerned. Each month is like a generation here. This makes the twenty-four-year-old who used to wave at passing Germans like a distant ancestor, belonging more to an order of stone reliefs, illuminated manuscripts and tapestries whose stories don’t quite lend themselves to comprehension than to any present in which Serge might also have a place. Mess talk is full of predecessors such as him: the dead get more attention than the living. Each week, one or two more airmen join their Olympiad; as new ones replace them, Serge and the others move up the ancestral chain, one generation with every arrival. Before they take off for Artillery Observation or Contact Patrol work, pilots and observers pool their wages in a small iron commode that’s been chosen for this purpose for a reason-a precise one, yet one whose particulars have become so subject to conjecture and apocrypha that they’ve grown obscure; if one of the men doesn’t come back, his portion buys the rest an outing to the Encas Estaminet in Vitriers.
The Encas’s décor is low-key. The walls of its two rooms are panelled with fly-brown mirrors; the zinc bar-top looks like it’s been reclaimed from a shot-down aeroplane or crashed Crossley truck, and hammered repeatedly in an attempt to flatten it that’s had the opposite effect: it’s all but impossible to keep a glass upright on its surface. The table tops are marble slabs that must have lost their lustre many years ago, worn down by greasy hands and dirty elbows, stained with wine. The whole place smells of spilt wine. Two waiters with hair so greasy that Gibbs once drunkenly accuses them of pilfering from the squadron’s engine-oil supplies move like slow spiders though a web of grey cigarette smoke that lingers as insistently as vapour trails and Archie-puffs above the battlefield.
“Hey, garsson!” Clegg says as one of them sets two bottles down in front of him. “Send two more to those homosexuals from the Eighty-ninth in the next room. Comprennay? Two bootay; ’omosexuelle, katrer-vangt-nerf…”
Serge explains in French to the waiter what Clegg means, and takes the bottles through himself. They often see the 89th men here; their aerodrome’s only four miles away. There’s one man named Carlisle whom Serge gets talking to each time they meet. Carlisle ’s neither a pilot nor an observer, but an artist. He was studying at the Slade before the war, and got assigned to camouflage work, devising a whole system based on Goethe’s theory of colours and applying it to machines, painting blue, violet and yellow stripes across their wings and fuselage-before discovering that these only camouflaged the planes when seen against the ground, an asset deemed of such limited value that it was scrapped after only two machines had been thus decorated. Rather than recall him, the war office has kept him out here as an official War Artist, on secondment to the 89th. He hasn’t taken to his new post well.
“It doesn’t work,” he moans as Serge pours him a glass. “It’s just not possible once you’re in flight.”
“What’s not?” Serge asks.
“Art! Tell me, Counterfax: what’s the first rule of landscape painting?”
“Carrefax.” Serge thinks back to his afternoon sessions with Clair, but draws a blank. “Don’t know.”
“Horizon!” Carlisle slaps the table. “Got to have a damn horizon if you’re going to paint a landscape! And what’s the first thing to disappear when some madman at your back is loopy-looping?”
“Horizon?” Serge ventures.
“Carvers, you’re a man of intellect. But you don’t understand the half of it, my friend! It’s not just the horizon that goes. Oh no. Look at this.” He moves three half-full wineglasses together. “Here are some clouds. And here,” he continues, dipping his finger in a wine-puddle and smearing it around the table top, “are the French fields with all their pretty patterned colours. When you look at them from here-” he pulls Serge’s head across to where his own was-“they run together. Which is cloud? Which land? Can you tell what part of the liquid’s in the glass and what’s on the table top?”
“Does it matter?” Serge asks.
“Course it bloody matters!” Carlisle shouts back. “How you going to paint something if you can’t even see what it is?” His voice goes hushed and urgent as he grasps a bottle and, moving it slowly above the three glasses, says: “A thundercloud passes over; a patch of woodland goes dark-or was it dark already? Who knows? And then, to make it worse, you suddenly come across a block of writing set bang in the middle of a clearing.”
“Popham strips,” Serge tells him. “It’s because the batteries can’t send back wireless signals: only rec-”
“I can’t paint words!” Carlisle ’s voice rises half an octave. “Painting’s painting, writing writing. Never the twain. It’s all wrong, aesthetically speaking: all the depth and texture of a summer countryside steamrollered into a flat page.”
“That’s what I like about it,” Serge says.
“I try not to look down,” Carlisle carries on, ignoring him as he drinks one of the clouds. “But looking up is just as bad! There’s no perspective in the sky, my friend. Some dot in front of you could be an EA swooping down to kill you, or a fly that’s landed on your nose, or for all I know the moon of Jupiter. You don’t have any measure to position yourself with…”
“Yes you do,” Serge tells him. “You’re connected to everything around you: all the streaks and puffs…”
“Ah, right: but how do you show those? The aircraft shell burst lasts a second-at its peak, I mean, the explosion itself, the bit I should be painting, seeing as I’m a War Artist and all that. A cloud is there forever-or at least for longer. What’s the honest thing to do, then? Give the shell the same substance as the cloud? How am I meant to paint time? How am I meant to paint anything?”
“Why not just paint it as you see it?” Serge asks.
“Can’t even do that,” Carlisle wails. “The stuff won’t stay still to be painted! Ground won’t stay still, air won’t stay still, nothing bloody stays still. Even the paint jumps from its bottles, gets all over me.”
“Maybe that’s the art,” Serge says. “I mean the action, all the mess…”
“Now, Carefors, you’re just talking rubbish,” Carlisle admonishes him in a disappointed tone. He drains another glass, then mutters bitterly: “It all comes from that show.”
“What show?” Serge asks.
“The bloody show!” Carlisle hisses. “Fry and his buddies. All this… this-” he gestures at the ceiling, or rather the sky, then at the cloud-glasses and field-puddle on the table top-“is just an extension of that.” He jabs a finger towards London. “Soon as the cork popped at the Grafton and the poison genie seeped out, this war was a foregone conclusion. Just a matter of time.”
Cécile slips into the room through a side-door and walks towards the exit. Serge catches her eye and she waits.
“Headquarters are complaining that my images aren’t photographic enough,” Carlisle ’s grumbling. “I tell them: ‘Well, take photographs.’ Jesus! Meanwhile, the officers in the mess want me to paint their caricatures. I studied under Tudor-Hart and I’m being asked to churn out caricatures!”
Serge rises from his seat and moves over to Cécile.
“You weren’t here in over a week,” she says.
“I was flying,” he tells her. “Can I see you?”
“Come to my place,” she says, slipping a key into his hand. “Wait for ten minutes, then follow.”
She leaves. Serge returns to the first room to drink with the 104th, then slips away and walks through a maze of unlit streets, past open windows through which he sees meagre suppers being laid out on cracked and termite-eaten tables. Cécile’s lock is well-oiled; her staircase is dark. He feels his way up it towards her room, which a paraffin lamp illuminates in dim, flickering patches; as Serge brushes past it, the room’s shadows elongate and wobble over the bare walls and floor. There’s not much there: most of the space is taken by a double bedstead whose black, shiny frame’s surmounted by brass knobs. A coverlet of coarse crotchet-work has been peeled and folded back on the side nearest the door. The one small window’s covered by a blind. In front of it a table stands; a mug on this has coffee dregs in; beside the mug, two empty eggshells sit in blue cups, flanked by wooden spoons.
“My breakfast from yesterday,” Cécile says.
“You eat two eggs every day?” he asks.
“No,” she replies, undressing. “Just one.”
They don’t talk much-not beforehand, at any rate. Serge turns Cécile away from him, towards the blind, and kneels behind her on the bed, running his hand up and down her back. Her sounds are feline: quiet wails that lose themselves among the shadows on the wall. Afterwards, she lies on her back beneath him and he scours her stomach.
“You’ve had something blasted away here,” he says, prodding a spot beside her belly button.
“It was a mole,” she tells him. “I burnt it off.”
“You can see that,” Serge says. “The scorch marks are still there.”
He looks across the floor beside the bed, and sees a book. He reaches down and picks it up: selected poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin, in German.
“A friend left it for me last year,” she explains. “An officer.”
“A German officer?”
She shrugs. “They were here first.”
After she falls asleep, he reads it for a while, then sets it down and drifts off watching gnats hovering beneath the ceiling just beyond the bed’s foot. The gnats travel in straight lines towards each other, then separate, each gliding to the spot another occupied seconds ago, before repeating the procedure, again and again…
There are insects forming patterns outside Battery M as well-only these ones aren’t moving. Corps HQ issues a directive that observers should pay a visit to at least one of the batteries with which they work, in order to foment a better understanding between air- and ground-based ends of Artillery Ops. Packed off to M by Walpond-Skinner, Serge finds a cratered moonscape. Rising from its surface like the mast of an interplanetary Marconi station is a fifty-foot pylon held by four guide-ropes. Its copper-gauze earth mat sits across a sheet of hessian on which thousands of dead moths, bees, butterflies and dragonflies lie, their bodies forming contours, swirls and eddies against its surface.
“Poison gas,” the operator explains when he notices Serge looking at them. “The hessian keeps it out-enough to stop it killing us, but not enough to stop us all getting catarrhs.”
“Where’s the receiver?” Serge asks.
“Down here,” the man answers, holding up the sheet for Serge to duck beneath it through the entrance to a kind of burrow.
“You’re listening to my sigs beneath the ground?”
“You wouldn’t have an audience for long if we stayed over it,” the man tells him. “The German kite-balloons pick our flashes up once we start firing, range their batteries on us. Here’s what we’ve got.”
Leaning against one of the burrow’s earth-walls, sitting on a wooden table, is a small Mark 4 receiver.
“Pelican crystals?” Serge asks.
“Two,” the operator says. “And two dials: aerial condenser and signal. We have to keep the first one turning constantly; then once we’ve caught your clicks, we crank the condenser up to max. Makes our ears bleed.”
Serge looks at the man’s ears. He’s not exaggerating: his drums are caked with dried blood, and red streaks run down both sides of his neck.
“Sorry,” Serge murmurs.
“Not your fault. Wouldn’t hear them otherwise.”
“Oh, look,” says Serge, “the gas hasn’t killed all the insects.”
The wall behind the receiver has lice on it. So does the receiver, and the table, chair and floor.
“Curse of the trenches,” shrugs the operator. “Still, I wouldn’t swap with you people for all the world. Need to feel ground beneath my feet. Over my head as well, these days. I get all anxious if I’m in the open for too long-even way back from the lines, on leave or what have you: like something’s going to come and land on me…”
The man’s words give over to coughs. Serge runs his eye around the burrow. There are passages leading off from the main chamber, presumably to other chambers which in turn have passages connecting them. This chamber has a bed in it; beneath the bed, two tins of pork-meat and a tattered copy of A. E. Housman.
“You too?” asks Serge.
“Calms me down,” the operator tells him. “When the ordnance is falling, or taking off from here, or both. I think of Shropshire hedgerows…”
This is what the 104th men say as well. They’ve got at least two copies there-one in the mess, one on his houseboat. He saw a soldier reading Housman on the boat over from Folkestone too. Half the front must be thinking of Shropshire hedgerows. Serge doesn’t get it, and one day finds himself arguing the case out with the other officers, holding his ground against first one, then two, then three opponents.
“It’s deep,” Watson insists indignantly. “He looks at the cherry tree and has a vision of time passing.” Straightening his back and dropping his voice to a solemn register, he starts reciting:
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
That only leaves me fifty more…
“Seventy minus twenty equals fifty,” Serge replies. “That’s deep.”
“You have no sense of poetry, Carrefax,” Baldwick joins in. “These things can take you away from all the rage around you, keep you safe…”
“Why would I want to be taken away?” asks Serge. “Where danger is, there rescue grows.”
“What?”
“Hölderlin.” He tosses Cécile’s copy onto Baldwick’s lap.
“This is a German book!” Baldwick gasps, recoiling.
“He was a German poet,” Serge replies.
“You could be…” stutters Baldwick, “I mean, it’s virtually…”
“It’s virtually treason,” Dickinson helps him out.
“You should read it,” Serge informs them. “Learn some phrases: help you if you get shot down behind enemy lines and they don’t understand what Shropshire hedgerows are…”
None of them take his offer up; the book lies around the mess unopened for one week, then gets returned to Cécile. Serge takes some of its lines into the air with him, though: they start jostling for space with the ones from the Pageant. He still hears the latter every time he shoots his gun; but when Gibbs turns, or dives, or pulls up suddenly and catapults him backwards to the sky, he hears the opening words of “ Patmos ”:
Nah ist
Und schwer zu fassen der Gott…
He feels the schwer inside his stomach, tightening like gravity; the Nah is a kind of measuring, a spacing-out of space in such a way that distant objects and locations loom up close and nearby ones expand, their edges hurtling away beyond all visible horizons to convey and deliver the contents of these to him. The Gott’s not a divine, Christian Creator, but a point within the planes and altitudes the machine’s cutting through-and one of several: the god, not God. And fassen… fassen is like locking onto something: a signal, frequency or groove. The word speaks itself inside his ear each time he taps his spark set or amends his clock-code chart. When arcing shells respond and hit their target, another phrase of Hölderlin’s hums in the struts and wires, its syntax rattling and breaking with the pressure from the rising blasts: the line from “Die Titanen” about der Allerschütterer, the One Who Shakes All Things, reaching down into the deep to make it come to life:
Es komme der Himmlische
Zu Todten herab und gewaltig dämmerts
Im ungebundenen Abgrund
Im allesmerkenden auf.
He thinks of the sky he’s held in as an Abgrund: an abyss, a without-ground-yet one that’s all-remarking, allesmerkenden, scored over by a thousand tracks and traces like the fallen earth below him. Which makes him der Himmlische, the Heavenly One, calling down light, causing it to burst forth and rise upwards, to the partings of the Father’s hair, so that… wenn aber… und es gehet… Here the sentences fade in and out, like wireless stations, before climaxing in a stanza that Serge once spends a whole night sitting on his houseboat’s deck translating:
und der Vogel des Himmels ihm
Es anzeigt. Wunderbar
Im Zorne kommet er drauf.
and the bird of Heaven
Makes it known to him. Upon which,
Wonderful in anger, he comes.
These lines, and others, echo for him on another occasion too: his visit to the sounding range near Battery F. This visit’s not directive-prompted. Quite the opposite: it takes place by accident and, Serge suspects, against the orders of Headquarters, who have always maintained an air of secrecy about what goes on in the woods just north of Vitriers. He’s being driven in a Crossley truck to Nieppe one afternoon, to buy spare aerial copper from a local metalworker (ordering it up from England would take months) when the driver announces, on the way back, a short detour to drop off some piano wire in Sector Four.
“They’re playing pianos amidst all this racket?” Serge asks him, incredulous.
The driver smiles. They leave the road and slalom between tree trunks, pulling up eventually beside a small cluster of huts. As the driver carries the looped coils to one of these, Serge wanders off among the trees, unzips his trouser-fly and starts to urinate onto the ground-only to be chastised by a voice that issues from the foliage around him like some spirit of the woods:
“Don’t piss against the wire!”
“What wire?” he asks. “Who said that?”
The wood-spirit emerges: a short man with slender fingers.
“Just under the earth’s surface,” he says, before adding, no less obscurely: “You’ll cause interference from the mikes. Who are you?”
“Observer from 104th Squadron,” Serge tells him. “I stopped by to drop off the wire.”
“The wires are already in place,” the slender-fingered man says, pointing at the ground. “Six of them, running from the microphones to here.”
“Microphones in the woods?”
“Yup: six mikes, one for each wire. They’re in cut-out barrels arranged in a semi-circle quarter of a mile away.”
“Attached to piano wire?” asks Serge.
“You brought new piano wire? Why didn’t you say so? Where is it?”
“Being carried into those huts,” Serge tells him.
The man hurries back towards the huts. Serge follows him. Inside the main one, he finds a huge square harp whose six strings are extended out beyond their wooden frame by finer wires that run through the hut’s air before breaching its boundary as well, cutting through little mouse-holes in the east-facing wall. In front of the harp, like an interrogation lamp, a powerful bulb shines straight onto it; behind it, lined up with each string, a row of prisms capture and deflect the light at right angles, through yet another hole cut in the hut’s wall, into an unlit room adjoining this one. There’s a noise coming from the adjoining room: sounds like a small propeller on a stalled plane turning from the wind’s pressure alone.
“What is this place?” Serge asks.
“You’re an observer, right?” the slender-fingered man says. Serge nods.
“Well, you know how, when you’re doing Battery Location flights, you send down K.K. calls each time you see an enemy gun flash?”
“Oh yes,” Serge answers. “I’ve always wondered why we have to do that…”
“Wonder no more,” the man says with an elfin smile. “The receiving operator presses a relay button each time he gets one of those; this starts the camera in the next room rolling; and the camera captures the sound of the battery whose flash you’ve just K.K.’d to us. You with me?”
“No,” Serge answers. “How can it do that?”
“Each gun-boom, when it’s picked up by a mike, sends a current down the wires you just pissed on,” the man continues, “and the current makes the piano wire inside this room heat up and give a little kick, which gets diffracted through the prisms into the next room, and straight into the camera.”
“So you’re filming sound?” Serge asks.
“You could say that, I suppose,” the man concurs.
“What’s the point of that?”
“Here, follow me.”
He leads Serge from this hut towards another. Pausing at the door of this, he knocks; then, when a voice inside shouts “Enter,” opens it no more than a slit’s width and ushers Serge inside. The interior’s suffused with red light. At a trough propped up against the far wall, a man with rolled-up sleeves is dunking yards of film into developing liquid, then feeding it on from there into a fixing tank. As the film’s end emerges from this tank in turn, he holds it up, inspects it and tears off sections, clipping these with clothes pegs to a short stretch of washing line, from where they drip onto the discarded strips on the room’s floor below them.
“Yuk,” Serge whispers beneath his breath.
“What?” the slender-fingered man asks.
“Nothing,” he replies.
“Look here,” Serge’s guide says, unclipping a strip of the developed film and pointing at dark lines that run, lengthways and continuous, along its surface. The lines-six of them-are for the most part flat; occasionally, though, they erupt suddenly, and rise and fall in jagged waves, like some strange Persian script, for half an inch, before settling down and running flat again. On the film’s bottom edge, beside the punch-holes, a time-code is marked, one inch or so for every second. The jagged eruptions appear at different points along each line: staggered, each wave the same shape as the one on the line below it, but occurring a quarter of an inch (or three-tenths of a second) later.
“So,” Serge’s elfin guide continues, “these kicks are made by the sound hitting each mike; and they get laid out on the film at intervals that correspond to each mike’s distance from the sound. You see them?”
“Yes,” Serge answers. “But I still don’t-”
“These ones ready to take through?” the guide asks the developer.
The other man nods; with his piano-player’s fingers, the guide unclips the other drip-dried strips, then leads Serge out to yet another hut. This one’s wall has a large-scale map taped to it; stuck in the map in a neat semi-circle are six pins. Two men are going through a pile of torn-off, line-streaked film-strips, measuring the gaps between the kicks with lengths of string; then, moving the string over to the map slowly, careful to preserve the intervals, they transfer the latter onto its surface by fixing one end of the string to the pin and holding a pencil to the other, swinging it from side to side to mark a broad arc on the map.
“Each pin’s a microphone,” the slender-fingered man explains. “Where the arcs intersect, the gun site must be.”
“So the strings are time, or space?” Serge asks.
“You could say either,” the man answers with a smile. “The film-strip knows no difference. The mathematical answer to your question, though, is that the strings represent the asymptote of the hyperbola on which the gun lies.”
“But there are several guns,” Serge says.
“And several types of kick on the film,” the man replies. “You can tell from their shape and thickness which are primary and which secondary, tertiary and so on. You just keep plotting all the intersections and eventually the whole thing maps itself out. It changes every few days, of course: soon as you people take one battery out, another one pops up for us to pinpoint…”
The Crossley’s engine comes to life outside. Walking back to it, Serge is acutely conscious of his feet percussing on the ground, and starts to tiptoe lest he cause more interference to the wires, even though the truck’s noise is much louder. On the way home, once they’ve left the woods and joined the road, he starts to drift off. To his mind, held in a web of strings and arcs above a darkness lit up by diffracted flashes, it seems that the groaning of the guns now comes as much from below as above. He sees it travelling through earth on worm-like cords, then seeping out like methane. As it rises past him, its vibrations make the truck’s metal bars pronounce, over and over again, the word Allerschütterer; then it rises further, up towards a high spot where a keen ear inclines above a battlefield that’s turned into a giant sounding-board. Just before he loses consciousness entirely, Serge sees Dr. Filip’s thin, filament-eyes glow above metal-grey whiskers-and hears, at a pitch barely audible and issuing from a spot that no amount of intersecting arcs could pinpoint, a little not-quite-German, not-quite-English voice describing twangling instruments humming about his ears.
iii
On days when they’re assigned to Artillery Patrol, Serge and Gibbs fly further over on the German side than the machines on Art Obs duties, sending zone-call rather than clock-code signals back. The sequences are longer, running into double-figured strings of numbers, letters, dots and spaces: BY.NF.B30 C 8690; BY.COL.FAN NW B30C8690… His fingers ache by the end of every mission. When he’s not tapping sigs out, he’s photographing the ground with a camera attached to the plane’s lower wing. They have to fly in pre-set patterns and maintain a stable altitude to keep their photographs in sequence and to scale. They liaise with the photographic unit regularly; it’s in a former slaughterhouse two miles behind the airfield.
“I’d say this emplacement’s a dummy one,” Lieutenant Pietersen opines as he passes the monocular to Serge. “The tracks leading to the copse are so clear you could see them from ten thousand feet up. They may as well have drawn an arrow on the ground…”
“I see flashes from there a lot,” Serge tells him, “but they never seem quite right. Haven’t got that forward kick…”
“Stage effects,” Pietersen tuts. “Smoke and mirrors.”
He pins the photo to a board-askew, and covering the bottom corner of another photo which is slanted to the other side. Eight or nine more photos cling together to produce a mosaic of landscape across which lines-straight, curved and dotted-cut and swirl like markings on butterflies’ wings.
“Now, this part’s changed since yesterday,” Pietersen says, replacing one tile of the mosaic with a new one that contains a dark, concentric set of ripples moving outwards from a spot covered by trees. “But I’m not sure we’ve knocked the big gun out. When you fly over it tomorrow, try to ascertain whether the scorch marks fall along the main diameter of all these circles, or if they’re off-centre.”
“I’ll snap the area, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to tell that with my naked eye, through all the smoke,” Serge replies.
“Try rubbing cocaine in it,” Pietersen tells him.
“Cocaine?” Serge asks. “Isn’t that for teeth?”
“Yes, but it works wonders on your vision: sharpens it no end. Go pick some up from the Field Hospital in Mirabel.”
Serge does so. He’s given a small make-up tin of white powder, a little of which he daubs onto his retina just prior to take-off the next day. It takes effect as they’re clearing their own kite balloon, which starts beaming up at him taut and alert, a big white eyeball. The lines of tracer-fire stand out more starkly a few seconds later, their velocity and inclination bold, insistent. The mesh of trenches, the coloured flames of guns and flares, distant roads and railway lines, the markings on the ground: all these things come at him more cleanly, more pronounced-but then so do Archie puffs, vapour trails and cordite smoke-clouds, not to mention the real clouds above him and the sky’s deep blue.
“Did it work?” Pietersen asks him next time he visits the slaughterhouse.
“I’m not sure,” he answers.
“You can get a stronger effect by snorting it,” Pietersen tells him.
“What, like snuff?”
“Knock a little out across a table top or mirror,” Pietersen says. “Lay it in a line, and snort it through a rolled-up banknote. I’m afraid the scorch-marks are off-centre.”
“Sorry?”
Pietersen’s finger taps the mosaic on the board. This shows the same territory as it did yesterday, but most of the landmarks on this have mutated: changed their shape, grown blast-wrinkles, become scarred by craters or even, in some cases, simply disappeared. Sliding his mind’s gaze between the old images and these updated ones, Serge has a flickering apprehension that the landscape’s somehow moving, as though animated.
“Like a cat’s leg,” he says.
“What is? Which bit?”
“The whole thing.”
Pietersen steps back and tilts his head at the elongated spit of land formed by the collated images. After a while he nods and murmurs:
“I suppose it does have that shape, a little.”
The next day, Serge taps a small mound of cocaine onto his shaving mirror, pushes it into a line, rolls up a twenty-franc note and breathes the powder up towards his cranium. It stings behind his eyes, then numbs the upper part of his face. As Gibbs takes off, Serge feels a lump of phlegm grow in his throat. He swallows; it tastes bitter, chemical. The tracer-lines this time are vibrant and electric: it’s as though the air were laced with wires. Higher up, the vapour trails of SE5s form straight white lines against the blue, as though the sky’s surface were a mirror too. Scorch-marks and crater contours on the ground look powdery; it seems that if he swooped above them low enough, then he could breathe them up as well, snort the whole landscape into his head. The three hours pass in minutes. As they dip low to strafe the trenches on the way back, he feels the blood rush to his groin. He whips his belt off, leaps bolt upright and has barely got his trousers down before the seed shoots from him, arcs over the machine’s tail and falls in a fine thread towards the slit earth down below.
“From all the Cs!” he shouts. “The bird of Heaven!”
From this day onwards, he develops a keen interest in the contents of the medicine box in the RE8’s cabin, tucked between the aerial’s copper reel and the second set of controls. He experiments with benzoic acid, amyl nitrate, ether and bromide before discovering diacetylmorphine. Held in injectable phials, the liquid floods him with euphoria each time he pushes it into his flesh: a murky, earthy warmth that spreads out from his abdomen in waves. Then everything slows down and seems to float: the tracers rise towards him languidly, like bubbles in a glass; Archie puff-clouds hang about his head like party bunting. He likes it when the bullets come close-really close, so that they’re almost grazing the machine’s side: when this happens he feels like he’s a matador being passed by the bull’s horn, the two previously antagonistic objects brought together in an arrangement of force and balance so perfectly proportioned that it’s been removed from time, gathered up by a pantheon of immortals to adorn their walls. The sky takes on a timeless aspect too: the intersecting lines of ordnance residue and exhaust fumes form a grid in which all past manoeuvres have become recorded and in which, by extension, history itself seems to hang suspended. Flashes tincture the lines green, lace them with yellow, spatter them with incandescent reds. The colours look synthetic, as though they’d been daubed and splashed on from bottles, like Carlisle ’s oils, aquarelles and acrylics; it seems to Serge that if he had a jar of turpentine or camphor and a sponge then he could wipe the whole sky clear…
In states such as this, he finds his attention captivated by the German kite balloons. He’ll gaze at them for endless stretches, measuring his position not from the grid squares on his map but from these strange, distended objects as they rotate to his view. Unlike the English ones, they’re coloured the dark, putrid tone of rotting flesh. They may have the shape of intestines, but their rising, falling and eventual deflation makes him think of lungs-diseased ones, like the catarrh-ridden lungs of the burrow dwellers whose flashes they pinpoint. When he sees one being inflated on the ground, it calls to his mind the image of ticks swelling as they gorge themselves on blood. He fires on airborne ones that come into his range not out of hatred or a sense of duty, but to see what happens when the bullets touch their surface, in the way a child might poke an insect. When flame-tendrils push outwards from inside the balloons and climb up their surface before bursting into bloom, he watches the men in their baskets throw their parachutes over the side and jump. Often they get stuck halfway down, tangled in the ropes and netting. Seeing them wriggling as the flame crawls down the twine towards them, he thinks of flies caught in spiders’ webs; when they roast, they look like dead flies, round and blackened.
He starts picturing the batteries he’s targeting as insects too, ticks that have burrowed into the ground’s skin and embedded themselves there: his task’s unpicking them. Pinned to the slaughterhouse’s wall, the photographs take on the air of dermatological slides.
“I don’t think that one’ll be troubling our boys much more,” Pietersen declares triumphantly, tapping a deeply pockmarked patch on his mosaic. “The whole sector’s dead now.”
“Dead?” asks Serge.
“Yes,” Pietersen replies. “You’ve killed it.”
“I don’t see it that way,” Serge murmurs back.
“You think there’s still an emplacement there?”
“That’s not what I mean… It’s just that…”
He can’t explain it. What he means is that he doesn’t think of what he’s doing as a deadening. Quite the opposite: it’s a quickening, a bringing to life. He feels this viscerally, not just intellectually, every time his tapping finger draws shells up into their arcs, or sends instructions buzzing through the woods to kick-start piano wires for whirring cameras, or causes the ground’s scars and wrinkles to shift and contort from one photo to another: it’s an awakening, a setting into motion. In these moments Serge is like the Eiffel Tower, a pylon animating the whole world, calling the zero hour of a new age of metal and explosive, geometry and connectedness-and calling it over and over again, so that its birth can be played out in votive repetition through these elaborate and ecstatic acts of sacrifice…
And in the background of these iterations, like a relic of an old order, the sun: intoxicated, spewing gas and sulphur, black with cordite smoke and tar. As the summer months draw on, it seems to sicken. Rising beneath him on early-morning flights, its light’s infected by the ghostly pallor of the salient’s mists, driven a nauseous hue by green and yellow flashes. It darkens, not lightens, as each day progresses and the puffballs, vapour clouds and tracer-lines build up. Its transit through the air seems laboured, as though the whirring mechanism that dragged it along its tracks were damaged and worn out. As afternoons run into evenings, it becomes so saturated with the toxins all around it that it can no longer hold itself up and, grown heavy and feeble, sinks. Serge watches it die time and time again, watches its derelict disc slip into silvery, metallic marshland, where it drowns and dissolves. When this happens, a chemical transformation spreads across land and sky, turning both acidic. In these moments, he feels better than he’s ever felt before-as though his rising were commensurate with the sun’s sinking. As space runs out backwards like a strip of film from his tail, the world seems to anoint him, through its very presence, as the gate, bulb, aperture and general projection point that’s brought it about: a new, tar-coated orb around which all things turn.
i
Zero hour today is 7 a.m. Serge is up two hours before it, woken by the plash of a tug’s wake against his houseboat’s hull. He performs his ablutions, makes his way over to the mess and eats two slices of dry toast washed down with gunfire tea. Fifteen or so other pilots and observers shuffle into seats around him, bleary-eyed, coughing and farting themselves towards full consciousness. Cigarettes are smoked throughout the meal, stabbed into mouths still full with food, balanced on the sides of plates, stubbed out in hollow eggshells. Walpond-Skinner marches in at six to hand out copy orders.
“Five machines on Art Obs today; three SE5s escorting them. Four batteries to each machine: two to be ranged in the first hour, two in the second, all four kept on target during the third. Individual calls on all your sheets.”
Serge glances down at his. His batteries are E through H, his own call 3. The print on his paper is mauve and imprecise: third in a CC’d triplicate, the furthest from the ribbon and keys’ touch. Beneath the copy order sheet, on whiter and less grainy paper that’s been folded and compressed, is a large map. Serge opens it across the table top and sees, among grid squares bent out of line by cup and toast-rack, his objectives marked with arrows, their coordinates written beside them in red ink: two hostile batteries, an ammunition dump, a crossroads. The dump and crossroads are new for him; the batteries he’s been targeting for over a week now, on and off.
“Memo from Central Wireless Station: ground operators still reporting too much jambing,” Walpond-Skinner reads. “Keep to the wavelengths and notes that you’ve been allotted. And make sure you’re always half a mile-at minimum-from the next machine. Any questions?”
His eyes skirt the floor; the men’s eyes do the same.
“Then up, Bellerophons, and at ’em!” Walpond-Skinner snaps.
Chairs slide back, cups are swilled from and abandoned, burps sounded like last calls above remains of plates; then the men trudge outside. The sun’s not up yet; dew still hangs about the long grass; the odd strand of spider-web filament floats just above this: it’s not cold. The mildness of the summer morning makes the behaviour of the men as they slip into thick leather jackets, gloves and fur-lined boots seem quite incongruous. The pilots and observers of the SE5s are pulling muskrat gauntlets over the silk inners on their hands and feet and rubbing whale oil on their cheeks and foreheads: they’ll be flying much higher. In the field beside them, mechanics pace round the machines, patting their tails and engines as though leading greyhounds or racehorses to their starting boxes. Serge’s RE8 is near the pack’s rear; Gibbs is already inside it. Serge climbs into its back seat, wedges the biscuit-box and brandy-flask that he’s been carrying under his right arm in between the spark set and its six-volt battery, gives the Lewis gun a swivel, then eases himself into a dew-damped seat as the mechanics throw propellers into motion all around the field, cutting arrowhead-shaped streaks into the grass where it’s blown down in diagonal lines behind the wings.
They take off to the west, then turn across the wood, skimming the treetops. The poplars opposite the houseboats bend as they pass over them. Gibbs puts one wing down; for a while the machine seems to drag, as though still connected psychologically if not physically to the ground. Serge feels gravity tautening around him, like elastic. Then the wing rises, the elastic snaps and he’s flung, back first, into the sky. It feels like falling, not ascending-but falling upwards, as if sucked towards some vortex so high that it’s above height itself. The land accelerates away, its surface area expanding even as it shrinks. Gibbs levels the plane; the countryside slants till it’s horizontal and starts running from beneath the fuselage like a ticker-tape strip issuing from a telegraph machine, the flickering band of the Lys racing away beside a thicker belt of forest, villages and hamlets popping up to punctuate the strip like news reports or stock-price fluctuations before Nieppe’s large brown stain pushes these out to the margins. A heat bump throws them as Gibbs angles up again; the landscape shakes beneath them and becomes illegible, just for a moment, before settling back into its horizontal run, its centre perfectly aligned with the plane’s tail. The bumps continue till they clear a haze that’s been invisible up to now: it always is when they’re inside it. As it sinks from him like a pneumatic platform being lowered, Serge can make its upper surface out, clear-cut and definite, a second horizon hovering like a muslin cover just above the first…
They pass a kite balloon. It, too, seems to strain upwards, pulling at the winch-line tethering it to its truck. Serge waves to the man in its basket; one of the man’s hands flies up in response; the other clasps the basket’s rail, as though to hold him back. The front can’t be far now. Gibbs turns the machine round and Serge, now facing east, looks down onto a vapour blanket that’s darker and more murky. Through it, further off, he can see gun flashes twinkling all around the countryside in little points of blue flame. Flares glow down in the trenches. A mile or two behind the German ones, the white plume of a train forms a clear, silky thread. He runs his eye along its tracks, the telephone lines beside these, the cables of a bridge, a pipeline leading from this across open ground before it burrows down to carry out of sight the metal and electric musculature of the land. A new flash appears on the horizon and grows brighter, dazzling him and warming his face: sunrise. Serge takes his watch out: twenty-two minutes to seven, time to test the sigs…
Reaching down between his legs, he turns the aerial crank. He pauses after a few revolutions, looks over the side and sees the copper aerial trailing in the slipstream like a fishing reel, a lead weight at its end. He takes his spark set out and starts transmitting B signals to Battery E. They pass the kite balloon again, heading the other way, then fly over a pockmarked village, a road down which a transport column’s moving, then some woods until they find, nestled among these, the battery. The Popham strip’s already laid out for him on the ground: three white cloth lines, one upright like a backbone, the other two angled into this like a lesser-than sign to form a K. Serge turns round, taps Gibbs on the shoulder and gives him the thumbs-up; they turn and fly out east again.
The sun, although at Serge’s back now, bounces off the top wing’s underside to light up his little cabin. Once more the kite balloon, its occupant now busy talking on his phone line; then a mandala of small roads and pathways, at least half of them unusable, criss-crossing and looping over open ground; then rows of empty trenches-last month’s, or last year’s, the year before’s; more open ground; more tracks. It’s only when the tracers start to rise towards him that Serge realises he’s passed onto the German side. It’s always like that: on his first few outings he’d anticipate the moment when he’d move across the deadly threshold, bracing himself for it, as though there were a real line strung across the air like a finishing ribbon for the machine to thrust its chest against and breach. But that moment never came-or rather, turned out always to have come already, the threshold to have lain unmarked, been glided over quite unnoticed. Even looking down, it’s hard to see which are the front positions: trench after trench slides into view, parallel lines conjoined in places by small runnels as communication trenches link up with evacuation trenches, third-line and supply trenches… At times the network opens into a wide mesh; at others it closes up, compact. The tracers rising from it lend structure to the air, mesh it as well. Puff balls of smoke appear as if by magic all round the machine.
“Archie pretty light today,” Gibbs leans back and shouts into his ear, quite nonchalantly.
A German kite balloon emerges from beneath their tail. Serge thinks about strafing it, but sees that it’s being hurriedly winched down out of his range. It rises again as he draws away from it-strangely elongated, like a floating intestine. He unfolds his map and, holding it across his knees, runs his finger to the square in which the first hostile battery position’s marked out: should be about here… He taps Gibbs’s shoulder again and signals for him to fly in a square holding pattern. As Gibbs turns, then turns again, patrolling their small area’s boundaries, Serge can see the machines to his left and right describing the same patterns half a mile away. He looks down and, moving his eyes first in diagonals from corner to corner of his quadrant, then in smaller, darting cat’s cradles between landmarks, picks up the battery, secreted within a copse but nonetheless betrayed by the anachronistically autumnal patch of scorched and thinned-out leaves made by its discharges. He picks his spark set up again and taps in C3E, then A, then MX12, the target’s map coordinates. Then he signals to Gibbs to fly back to their side.
Travelling in this direction, the tracer fire appears only after it’s already passed the plane, cutting long, slanted corridors into the air above him. It tilts up vertical, then starts angling forward, managing, through some optical and geometric sleight of hand, to reverse its direction without altering its flow until it’s rising at him from the ground. The intestinal kite balloon’s down again, then up; the magic puffs materialise beside them; the front line slides by unperceived once more, revealing in its wake a mesh of interlocking trenches which the same old English kite balloon announces as their own. The pockmarked village, road and woods run past below them one more time, then they’re back above Battery E. One of the Popham strip’s white lesser-than lines has been removed, the other straightened and lowered to the backbone cloth’s base, joining it at a right angle to form an L. Serge points Gibbs back towards the lines again, sending down A signals from his spark set as they go.
They’re back above their target with three minutes to spare. The other machines are in position too: two to the north of him, one to the south, each marking out its assigned grid square, while a fifth machine moves up and down in long, straight lines behind them. It reminds Serge of a ritual he once saw illustrated in Boy’s Comic Journal: a ceremonial Red Indian dance to call down rain. The men in feathers marked their patterns out across the ground and the gods, summoned into action by these, sent down water. As the second-hand needle moves across the final quarter-segment of his watch’s face, Serge feels an almost sacred tingling, as though he himself had become godlike, elevated by machinery and signal code to a higher post within the overall structure of things, a vantage point from which the vectors and control lines linking earth and heaven, the hermetic language of the invocations, its very lettering and script, have become visible, tangible even, all concentrated at a spot just underneath the index finger of his right hand which is tapping out, right now, the sequence C3E MX12 G…
Almost immediately, a white rip appears amidst the wood’s green cover on the English side. A small jet of smoke spills up into the air from this like cushion stuffing; out of it, a shell rises. It arcs above the trench-meshes and track-marked open ground, then dips and falls into the copse beneath Serge, blossoming there in vibrant red and yellow flame. A second follows it, then a third. The same is happening in the two-mile strip between Battery I and its target, and Battery M and its one, right on down the line: whole swathes of space becoming animated by the plumed trajectories of plans and orders metamorphosed into steel and cordite, speed and noise. Everything seems connected: disparate locations twitch and burst into activity like limbs reacting to impulses sent from elsewhere in the body, booms and jibs obeying levers at the far end of a complex set of ropes and cogs and relays. The salvos pause; Serge plots the points of impact on his clock-code chart, then sends adjustments back to Battery E, which fires new salvos that land slightly to the north of the first ones. Each one’s fall draws from the wood a new yellow-and-red flame-flower, with an outer white smoke-leaf that lingers after the bloom has faded. Serge sends one more correction; the shells shift fifteen or so yards to the east, and start arriving in regular fifteen-second bursts, their percussions overlapping with those falling in the neighbouring zones in sequences that speed up and slow down, like church bells’ chimes. A larger, darker bloom erupts from the copse beneath him: it seems to have more volume to it, more mass, billowing out and upwards like a dense, black chrysanthemum…
“I think we got it,” Serge turns round and shouts to Gibbs.
Gibbs points to his ear and shakes his head. Easier to communicate with the ground than with the man in the machine beside you. Serge sends an OK down to Battery E, then signals to Gibbs to move on to Battery F. They fly back across the lines and find this in the ruins of a village, Popham strips K’d up in response to their B sigs. They fly back again; Serge ranges the guns, plots the shells’ points of impact on his clock-code chart; then they move on to Battery G and do the same. Each time they shuttle to and fro, they pass through residues of tracer, Archie smoke and their own exhaust fumes hanging in the air. The shapes made when trails intersect, lines cutting across other lines at odd angles or bisecting puffballs’ circles to form strange figures, remind Serge of the phonetic characters his father would draw across the schoolroom’s whiteboard, the way the sequences would run and overlap. The lower section of this board’s become so crowded that it’s half-occluded: the morning’s light vapour blanket’s thickened to an opaque shawl. They have to fly lower to see where shells are landing, or even to get their own bearings. At one point a howitzer shell appears right beside them, travelling in the same direction-one of their own, surfacing above the smoke-bank like a porpoise swimming alongside a ship, slowly rotating in the air to show its underbelly as it hovers at its peak before beginning its descent. It’s so close that its wind-stream gently lifts and lowers the machine, making it bob. Serge knows that planes get hit by their own shells, but this one seems so placid, so companionable-and besides, if they’re travelling at the same speed then both it and they are just still bodies in space, harmless blocks of matter. In the instant before their paths diverge, it seems to Serge that the shell and the plane are interchangeable-and that the shell and he are interchangeable, just like the radians and secants on his clock-code chart, the smoke-and-vapour-marked points and trajectories around him, the angles of his holding pattern’s quadrant and the Popham strips’ abrupt cloth lines. Within the reaches of this space become pure geometry, the shell’s a pencil drawing a perfect arc across a sheet of graph paper; he’s the clamp that holds the pencil to the compass, moving as one with the lead; he is the lead, smearing across the paper’s surface to become geometry himself…
On their way back to base, they strafe the German trenches. While Gibbs holds his line above them, Serge points his Lewis gun down and nudges it from side to side until its point seems to slot into their groove. A sixth sense tells him when he’s found it: he just feels it go in, somehow; when it does, it starts to play, the same track every time: of-PUR, pose-THAT, your-THOUGHT… Enemy gunfire crackles back at them like angry static. They reach the limit of their area, pull out and turn towards their own lines. The air over no-man’s-land is thick with cordite smoke: it has the rich, livery smell of homecoming. The kite balloon’s on the ground being deflated, the Popham strips rolled back up. The woods beside the airfield rustle as they skim them; the row of poplars bends the other way. Gibbs puts the wing down; the ground locks them in its drag; and then they’re taxiing across the field towards the Bessoneaus. Serge jumps out before the machine’s come to a complete standstill, while mechanics are still harnessing it with chocks and halters. With his brandy-flask and biscuit-box beneath his arm, he strolls towards the Nissen huts.
“Narrative, Carrefax.” The recording officer, seated behind a table with a stack of papers at the hangar’s exit, stops him.
“What?” asks Serge, taking his glove off and wiping his hand across his face.
“Flight narrative for Corps HQ. I have to remind you every time.”
“Oh,” says Serge. “Well…” His hand has gathered a thick wedge of tar. He looks at it, then up at the recording officer. “We went up; we saw stuff; it was good.”
ii
Once, returning from the lines in fading light, zigzagging to dodge blue-black storm clouds, Serge and Gibbs find themselves landing on an aerodrome that’s not their own. They’re pretty sure it’s not a German one: the way the rain-curtains that sweep the ground are lit up, gold and precise with miniature rainbows in them, lets them know they’ve being flying west-but you can never be sure. The machines lying across the field are neither RE8s nor SE5s, and have storks painted on their fuselage. When Serge and Gibbs descend from theirs, mechanics greet them in a foreign language.
“Perdu la route…” one of them shouts.
“Oh, fuck!” snarls Gibbs. “Distract them while I climb back in and get my pistol. We can take off again before those others by the huts get over here.”
“They’re French,” Serge tells him.
“Français,” the mechanic nods-before, as though to prove it, launching into a rendition of “ La Marseillaise.” Four pilots saunter over and serve them glasses of eau-de-vie, then stroll away across the field towards two sleek black cars against which elegantly dressed ladies lean smoking cigarettes through long ivory holders.
“Bloody Cigognes,” snaps Clegg when Serge recounts the episode back in the mess. “Nothing but playboys: race-car drivers, fly-half of the national rugby team, the Compte de Trou-de-Cul. Balloon-busters: all they ever dare attack. Show them an EA and they’ll cack their French pantalons faster than the jardin de mon oncle. But soon as they get down from each day’s chicken run they’ve got Parisian hostesses whisking them off to see Manon and Salammbô while we sit here listening to scratched-up Felix Powell. There’s no justice in this war.”
The Felix Powell is pretty scratched, it’s true. So are the Marie Lloyd, the Vesta Tilley and the Ella Shields. As they play them in the evenings, some of the officers dance together, drawing lots to see who’ll do the woman’s steps; others, meanwhile, reminisce about the war’s “golden era”:
“Pity we don’t use parasols and Moranes anymore,” Watson sighs nostalgically. “Do you remember drop bags?”
“Those things were great fun,” Dickinson says. “You’d scrawl your message in them, then just hurl them overboard above the reporting station, watch them drop. Radio killed all that.”
“There was this pilot here when I first came,” Baldwick tells them. “Said he used to wave at EA pilots when he passed them. You had no beef with one another. He said the first time one of them took a pop at him, he couldn’t believe it: seemed so low…”
“What happened to him?” Watson asks.
“What do you think?” answers Baldwick. “Last year, or maybe late in ’fifteen. He was a flamer: carbonisé.”
“Carbo-nee-zay,” Dickinson and Watson repeat in unison, as though the word held some kind of mantric power, like an “Amen.”
“He was a real old-timer,” Baldwick tells them; “twenty-four or so.”
Baldwick is twenty, one year older than Serge; Watson, twenty-one. They could have been flying with the 104th before he was born, as far as he’s concerned. Each month is like a generation here. This makes the twenty-four-year-old who used to wave at passing Germans like a distant ancestor, belonging more to an order of stone reliefs, illuminated manuscripts and tapestries whose stories don’t quite lend themselves to comprehension than to any present in which Serge might also have a place. Mess talk is full of predecessors such as him: the dead get more attention than the living. Each week, one or two more airmen join their Olympiad; as new ones replace them, Serge and the others move up the ancestral chain, one generation with every arrival. Before they take off for Artillery Observation or Contact Patrol work, pilots and observers pool their wages in a small iron commode that’s been chosen for this purpose for a reason-a precise one, yet one whose particulars have become so subject to conjecture and apocrypha that they’ve grown obscure; if one of the men doesn’t come back, his portion buys the rest an outing to the Encas Estaminet in Vitriers.
The Encas’s décor is low-key. The walls of its two rooms are panelled with fly-brown mirrors; the zinc bar-top looks like it’s been reclaimed from a shot-down aeroplane or crashed Crossley truck, and hammered repeatedly in an attempt to flatten it that’s had the opposite effect: it’s all but impossible to keep a glass upright on its surface. The table tops are marble slabs that must have lost their lustre many years ago, worn down by greasy hands and dirty elbows, stained with wine. The whole place smells of spilt wine. Two waiters with hair so greasy that Gibbs once drunkenly accuses them of pilfering from the squadron’s engine-oil supplies move like slow spiders though a web of grey cigarette smoke that lingers as insistently as vapour trails and Archie-puffs above the battlefield.
“Hey, garsson!” Clegg says as one of them sets two bottles down in front of him. “Send two more to those homosexuals from the Eighty-ninth in the next room. Comprennay? Two bootay; ’omosexuelle, katrer-vangt-nerf…”
Serge explains in French to the waiter what Clegg means, and takes the bottles through himself. They often see the 89th men here; their aerodrome’s only four miles away. There’s one man named Carlisle whom Serge gets talking to each time they meet. Carlisle ’s neither a pilot nor an observer, but an artist. He was studying at the Slade before the war, and got assigned to camouflage work, devising a whole system based on Goethe’s theory of colours and applying it to machines, painting blue, violet and yellow stripes across their wings and fuselage-before discovering that these only camouflaged the planes when seen against the ground, an asset deemed of such limited value that it was scrapped after only two machines had been thus decorated. Rather than recall him, the war office has kept him out here as an official War Artist, on secondment to the 89th. He hasn’t taken to his new post well.
“It doesn’t work,” he moans as Serge pours him a glass. “It’s just not possible once you’re in flight.”
“What’s not?” Serge asks.
“Art! Tell me, Counterfax: what’s the first rule of landscape painting?”
“Carrefax.” Serge thinks back to his afternoon sessions with Clair, but draws a blank. “Don’t know.”
“Horizon!” Carlisle slaps the table. “Got to have a damn horizon if you’re going to paint a landscape! And what’s the first thing to disappear when some madman at your back is loopy-looping?”
“Horizon?” Serge ventures.
“Carvers, you’re a man of intellect. But you don’t understand the half of it, my friend! It’s not just the horizon that goes. Oh no. Look at this.” He moves three half-full wineglasses together. “Here are some clouds. And here,” he continues, dipping his finger in a wine-puddle and smearing it around the table top, “are the French fields with all their pretty patterned colours. When you look at them from here-” he pulls Serge’s head across to where his own was-“they run together. Which is cloud? Which land? Can you tell what part of the liquid’s in the glass and what’s on the table top?”
“Does it matter?” Serge asks.
“Course it bloody matters!” Carlisle shouts back. “How you going to paint something if you can’t even see what it is?” His voice goes hushed and urgent as he grasps a bottle and, moving it slowly above the three glasses, says: “A thundercloud passes over; a patch of woodland goes dark-or was it dark already? Who knows? And then, to make it worse, you suddenly come across a block of writing set bang in the middle of a clearing.”
“Popham strips,” Serge tells him. “It’s because the batteries can’t send back wireless signals: only rec-”
“I can’t paint words!” Carlisle ’s voice rises half an octave. “Painting’s painting, writing writing. Never the twain. It’s all wrong, aesthetically speaking: all the depth and texture of a summer countryside steamrollered into a flat page.”
“That’s what I like about it,” Serge says.
“I try not to look down,” Carlisle carries on, ignoring him as he drinks one of the clouds. “But looking up is just as bad! There’s no perspective in the sky, my friend. Some dot in front of you could be an EA swooping down to kill you, or a fly that’s landed on your nose, or for all I know the moon of Jupiter. You don’t have any measure to position yourself with…”
“Yes you do,” Serge tells him. “You’re connected to everything around you: all the streaks and puffs…”
“Ah, right: but how do you show those? The aircraft shell burst lasts a second-at its peak, I mean, the explosion itself, the bit I should be painting, seeing as I’m a War Artist and all that. A cloud is there forever-or at least for longer. What’s the honest thing to do, then? Give the shell the same substance as the cloud? How am I meant to paint time? How am I meant to paint anything?”
“Why not just paint it as you see it?” Serge asks.
“Can’t even do that,” Carlisle wails. “The stuff won’t stay still to be painted! Ground won’t stay still, air won’t stay still, nothing bloody stays still. Even the paint jumps from its bottles, gets all over me.”
“Maybe that’s the art,” Serge says. “I mean the action, all the mess…”
“Now, Carefors, you’re just talking rubbish,” Carlisle admonishes him in a disappointed tone. He drains another glass, then mutters bitterly: “It all comes from that show.”
“What show?” Serge asks.
“The bloody show!” Carlisle hisses. “Fry and his buddies. All this… this-” he gestures at the ceiling, or rather the sky, then at the cloud-glasses and field-puddle on the table top-“is just an extension of that.” He jabs a finger towards London. “Soon as the cork popped at the Grafton and the poison genie seeped out, this war was a foregone conclusion. Just a matter of time.”
Cécile slips into the room through a side-door and walks towards the exit. Serge catches her eye and she waits.
“Headquarters are complaining that my images aren’t photographic enough,” Carlisle ’s grumbling. “I tell them: ‘Well, take photographs.’ Jesus! Meanwhile, the officers in the mess want me to paint their caricatures. I studied under Tudor-Hart and I’m being asked to churn out caricatures!”
Serge rises from his seat and moves over to Cécile.
“You weren’t here in over a week,” she says.
“I was flying,” he tells her. “Can I see you?”
“Come to my place,” she says, slipping a key into his hand. “Wait for ten minutes, then follow.”
She leaves. Serge returns to the first room to drink with the 104th, then slips away and walks through a maze of unlit streets, past open windows through which he sees meagre suppers being laid out on cracked and termite-eaten tables. Cécile’s lock is well-oiled; her staircase is dark. He feels his way up it towards her room, which a paraffin lamp illuminates in dim, flickering patches; as Serge brushes past it, the room’s shadows elongate and wobble over the bare walls and floor. There’s not much there: most of the space is taken by a double bedstead whose black, shiny frame’s surmounted by brass knobs. A coverlet of coarse crotchet-work has been peeled and folded back on the side nearest the door. The one small window’s covered by a blind. In front of it a table stands; a mug on this has coffee dregs in; beside the mug, two empty eggshells sit in blue cups, flanked by wooden spoons.
“My breakfast from yesterday,” Cécile says.
“You eat two eggs every day?” he asks.
“No,” she replies, undressing. “Just one.”
They don’t talk much-not beforehand, at any rate. Serge turns Cécile away from him, towards the blind, and kneels behind her on the bed, running his hand up and down her back. Her sounds are feline: quiet wails that lose themselves among the shadows on the wall. Afterwards, she lies on her back beneath him and he scours her stomach.
“You’ve had something blasted away here,” he says, prodding a spot beside her belly button.
“It was a mole,” she tells him. “I burnt it off.”
“You can see that,” Serge says. “The scorch marks are still there.”
He looks across the floor beside the bed, and sees a book. He reaches down and picks it up: selected poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin, in German.
“A friend left it for me last year,” she explains. “An officer.”
“A German officer?”
She shrugs. “They were here first.”
After she falls asleep, he reads it for a while, then sets it down and drifts off watching gnats hovering beneath the ceiling just beyond the bed’s foot. The gnats travel in straight lines towards each other, then separate, each gliding to the spot another occupied seconds ago, before repeating the procedure, again and again…
There are insects forming patterns outside Battery M as well-only these ones aren’t moving. Corps HQ issues a directive that observers should pay a visit to at least one of the batteries with which they work, in order to foment a better understanding between air- and ground-based ends of Artillery Ops. Packed off to M by Walpond-Skinner, Serge finds a cratered moonscape. Rising from its surface like the mast of an interplanetary Marconi station is a fifty-foot pylon held by four guide-ropes. Its copper-gauze earth mat sits across a sheet of hessian on which thousands of dead moths, bees, butterflies and dragonflies lie, their bodies forming contours, swirls and eddies against its surface.
“Poison gas,” the operator explains when he notices Serge looking at them. “The hessian keeps it out-enough to stop it killing us, but not enough to stop us all getting catarrhs.”
“Where’s the receiver?” Serge asks.
“Down here,” the man answers, holding up the sheet for Serge to duck beneath it through the entrance to a kind of burrow.
“You’re listening to my sigs beneath the ground?”
“You wouldn’t have an audience for long if we stayed over it,” the man tells him. “The German kite-balloons pick our flashes up once we start firing, range their batteries on us. Here’s what we’ve got.”
Leaning against one of the burrow’s earth-walls, sitting on a wooden table, is a small Mark 4 receiver.
“Pelican crystals?” Serge asks.
“Two,” the operator says. “And two dials: aerial condenser and signal. We have to keep the first one turning constantly; then once we’ve caught your clicks, we crank the condenser up to max. Makes our ears bleed.”
Serge looks at the man’s ears. He’s not exaggerating: his drums are caked with dried blood, and red streaks run down both sides of his neck.
“Sorry,” Serge murmurs.
“Not your fault. Wouldn’t hear them otherwise.”
“Oh, look,” says Serge, “the gas hasn’t killed all the insects.”
The wall behind the receiver has lice on it. So does the receiver, and the table, chair and floor.
“Curse of the trenches,” shrugs the operator. “Still, I wouldn’t swap with you people for all the world. Need to feel ground beneath my feet. Over my head as well, these days. I get all anxious if I’m in the open for too long-even way back from the lines, on leave or what have you: like something’s going to come and land on me…”
The man’s words give over to coughs. Serge runs his eye around the burrow. There are passages leading off from the main chamber, presumably to other chambers which in turn have passages connecting them. This chamber has a bed in it; beneath the bed, two tins of pork-meat and a tattered copy of A. E. Housman.
“You too?” asks Serge.
“Calms me down,” the operator tells him. “When the ordnance is falling, or taking off from here, or both. I think of Shropshire hedgerows…”
This is what the 104th men say as well. They’ve got at least two copies there-one in the mess, one on his houseboat. He saw a soldier reading Housman on the boat over from Folkestone too. Half the front must be thinking of Shropshire hedgerows. Serge doesn’t get it, and one day finds himself arguing the case out with the other officers, holding his ground against first one, then two, then three opponents.
“It’s deep,” Watson insists indignantly. “He looks at the cherry tree and has a vision of time passing.” Straightening his back and dropping his voice to a solemn register, he starts reciting:
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
That only leaves me fifty more…
“Seventy minus twenty equals fifty,” Serge replies. “That’s deep.”
“You have no sense of poetry, Carrefax,” Baldwick joins in. “These things can take you away from all the rage around you, keep you safe…”
“Why would I want to be taken away?” asks Serge. “Where danger is, there rescue grows.”
“What?”
“Hölderlin.” He tosses Cécile’s copy onto Baldwick’s lap.
“This is a German book!” Baldwick gasps, recoiling.
“He was a German poet,” Serge replies.
“You could be…” stutters Baldwick, “I mean, it’s virtually…”
“It’s virtually treason,” Dickinson helps him out.
“You should read it,” Serge informs them. “Learn some phrases: help you if you get shot down behind enemy lines and they don’t understand what Shropshire hedgerows are…”
None of them take his offer up; the book lies around the mess unopened for one week, then gets returned to Cécile. Serge takes some of its lines into the air with him, though: they start jostling for space with the ones from the Pageant. He still hears the latter every time he shoots his gun; but when Gibbs turns, or dives, or pulls up suddenly and catapults him backwards to the sky, he hears the opening words of “ Patmos ”:
Nah ist
Und schwer zu fassen der Gott…
He feels the schwer inside his stomach, tightening like gravity; the Nah is a kind of measuring, a spacing-out of space in such a way that distant objects and locations loom up close and nearby ones expand, their edges hurtling away beyond all visible horizons to convey and deliver the contents of these to him. The Gott’s not a divine, Christian Creator, but a point within the planes and altitudes the machine’s cutting through-and one of several: the god, not God. And fassen… fassen is like locking onto something: a signal, frequency or groove. The word speaks itself inside his ear each time he taps his spark set or amends his clock-code chart. When arcing shells respond and hit their target, another phrase of Hölderlin’s hums in the struts and wires, its syntax rattling and breaking with the pressure from the rising blasts: the line from “Die Titanen” about der Allerschütterer, the One Who Shakes All Things, reaching down into the deep to make it come to life:
Es komme der Himmlische
Zu Todten herab und gewaltig dämmerts
Im ungebundenen Abgrund
Im allesmerkenden auf.
He thinks of the sky he’s held in as an Abgrund: an abyss, a without-ground-yet one that’s all-remarking, allesmerkenden, scored over by a thousand tracks and traces like the fallen earth below him. Which makes him der Himmlische, the Heavenly One, calling down light, causing it to burst forth and rise upwards, to the partings of the Father’s hair, so that… wenn aber… und es gehet… Here the sentences fade in and out, like wireless stations, before climaxing in a stanza that Serge once spends a whole night sitting on his houseboat’s deck translating:
und der Vogel des Himmels ihm
Es anzeigt. Wunderbar
Im Zorne kommet er drauf.
and the bird of Heaven
Makes it known to him. Upon which,
Wonderful in anger, he comes.
These lines, and others, echo for him on another occasion too: his visit to the sounding range near Battery F. This visit’s not directive-prompted. Quite the opposite: it takes place by accident and, Serge suspects, against the orders of Headquarters, who have always maintained an air of secrecy about what goes on in the woods just north of Vitriers. He’s being driven in a Crossley truck to Nieppe one afternoon, to buy spare aerial copper from a local metalworker (ordering it up from England would take months) when the driver announces, on the way back, a short detour to drop off some piano wire in Sector Four.
“They’re playing pianos amidst all this racket?” Serge asks him, incredulous.
The driver smiles. They leave the road and slalom between tree trunks, pulling up eventually beside a small cluster of huts. As the driver carries the looped coils to one of these, Serge wanders off among the trees, unzips his trouser-fly and starts to urinate onto the ground-only to be chastised by a voice that issues from the foliage around him like some spirit of the woods:
“Don’t piss against the wire!”
“What wire?” he asks. “Who said that?”
The wood-spirit emerges: a short man with slender fingers.
“Just under the earth’s surface,” he says, before adding, no less obscurely: “You’ll cause interference from the mikes. Who are you?”
“Observer from 104th Squadron,” Serge tells him. “I stopped by to drop off the wire.”
“The wires are already in place,” the slender-fingered man says, pointing at the ground. “Six of them, running from the microphones to here.”
“Microphones in the woods?”
“Yup: six mikes, one for each wire. They’re in cut-out barrels arranged in a semi-circle quarter of a mile away.”
“Attached to piano wire?” asks Serge.
“You brought new piano wire? Why didn’t you say so? Where is it?”
“Being carried into those huts,” Serge tells him.
The man hurries back towards the huts. Serge follows him. Inside the main one, he finds a huge square harp whose six strings are extended out beyond their wooden frame by finer wires that run through the hut’s air before breaching its boundary as well, cutting through little mouse-holes in the east-facing wall. In front of the harp, like an interrogation lamp, a powerful bulb shines straight onto it; behind it, lined up with each string, a row of prisms capture and deflect the light at right angles, through yet another hole cut in the hut’s wall, into an unlit room adjoining this one. There’s a noise coming from the adjoining room: sounds like a small propeller on a stalled plane turning from the wind’s pressure alone.
“What is this place?” Serge asks.
“You’re an observer, right?” the slender-fingered man says. Serge nods.
“Well, you know how, when you’re doing Battery Location flights, you send down K.K. calls each time you see an enemy gun flash?”
“Oh yes,” Serge answers. “I’ve always wondered why we have to do that…”
“Wonder no more,” the man says with an elfin smile. “The receiving operator presses a relay button each time he gets one of those; this starts the camera in the next room rolling; and the camera captures the sound of the battery whose flash you’ve just K.K.’d to us. You with me?”
“No,” Serge answers. “How can it do that?”
“Each gun-boom, when it’s picked up by a mike, sends a current down the wires you just pissed on,” the man continues, “and the current makes the piano wire inside this room heat up and give a little kick, which gets diffracted through the prisms into the next room, and straight into the camera.”
“So you’re filming sound?” Serge asks.
“You could say that, I suppose,” the man concurs.
“What’s the point of that?”
“Here, follow me.”
He leads Serge from this hut towards another. Pausing at the door of this, he knocks; then, when a voice inside shouts “Enter,” opens it no more than a slit’s width and ushers Serge inside. The interior’s suffused with red light. At a trough propped up against the far wall, a man with rolled-up sleeves is dunking yards of film into developing liquid, then feeding it on from there into a fixing tank. As the film’s end emerges from this tank in turn, he holds it up, inspects it and tears off sections, clipping these with clothes pegs to a short stretch of washing line, from where they drip onto the discarded strips on the room’s floor below them.
“Yuk,” Serge whispers beneath his breath.
“What?” the slender-fingered man asks.
“Nothing,” he replies.
“Look here,” Serge’s guide says, unclipping a strip of the developed film and pointing at dark lines that run, lengthways and continuous, along its surface. The lines-six of them-are for the most part flat; occasionally, though, they erupt suddenly, and rise and fall in jagged waves, like some strange Persian script, for half an inch, before settling down and running flat again. On the film’s bottom edge, beside the punch-holes, a time-code is marked, one inch or so for every second. The jagged eruptions appear at different points along each line: staggered, each wave the same shape as the one on the line below it, but occurring a quarter of an inch (or three-tenths of a second) later.
“So,” Serge’s elfin guide continues, “these kicks are made by the sound hitting each mike; and they get laid out on the film at intervals that correspond to each mike’s distance from the sound. You see them?”
“Yes,” Serge answers. “But I still don’t-”
“These ones ready to take through?” the guide asks the developer.
The other man nods; with his piano-player’s fingers, the guide unclips the other drip-dried strips, then leads Serge out to yet another hut. This one’s wall has a large-scale map taped to it; stuck in the map in a neat semi-circle are six pins. Two men are going through a pile of torn-off, line-streaked film-strips, measuring the gaps between the kicks with lengths of string; then, moving the string over to the map slowly, careful to preserve the intervals, they transfer the latter onto its surface by fixing one end of the string to the pin and holding a pencil to the other, swinging it from side to side to mark a broad arc on the map.
“Each pin’s a microphone,” the slender-fingered man explains. “Where the arcs intersect, the gun site must be.”
“So the strings are time, or space?” Serge asks.
“You could say either,” the man answers with a smile. “The film-strip knows no difference. The mathematical answer to your question, though, is that the strings represent the asymptote of the hyperbola on which the gun lies.”
“But there are several guns,” Serge says.
“And several types of kick on the film,” the man replies. “You can tell from their shape and thickness which are primary and which secondary, tertiary and so on. You just keep plotting all the intersections and eventually the whole thing maps itself out. It changes every few days, of course: soon as you people take one battery out, another one pops up for us to pinpoint…”
The Crossley’s engine comes to life outside. Walking back to it, Serge is acutely conscious of his feet percussing on the ground, and starts to tiptoe lest he cause more interference to the wires, even though the truck’s noise is much louder. On the way home, once they’ve left the woods and joined the road, he starts to drift off. To his mind, held in a web of strings and arcs above a darkness lit up by diffracted flashes, it seems that the groaning of the guns now comes as much from below as above. He sees it travelling through earth on worm-like cords, then seeping out like methane. As it rises past him, its vibrations make the truck’s metal bars pronounce, over and over again, the word Allerschütterer; then it rises further, up towards a high spot where a keen ear inclines above a battlefield that’s turned into a giant sounding-board. Just before he loses consciousness entirely, Serge sees Dr. Filip’s thin, filament-eyes glow above metal-grey whiskers-and hears, at a pitch barely audible and issuing from a spot that no amount of intersecting arcs could pinpoint, a little not-quite-German, not-quite-English voice describing twangling instruments humming about his ears.
iii
On days when they’re assigned to Artillery Patrol, Serge and Gibbs fly further over on the German side than the machines on Art Obs duties, sending zone-call rather than clock-code signals back. The sequences are longer, running into double-figured strings of numbers, letters, dots and spaces: BY.NF.B30 C 8690; BY.COL.FAN NW B30C8690… His fingers ache by the end of every mission. When he’s not tapping sigs out, he’s photographing the ground with a camera attached to the plane’s lower wing. They have to fly in pre-set patterns and maintain a stable altitude to keep their photographs in sequence and to scale. They liaise with the photographic unit regularly; it’s in a former slaughterhouse two miles behind the airfield.
“I’d say this emplacement’s a dummy one,” Lieutenant Pietersen opines as he passes the monocular to Serge. “The tracks leading to the copse are so clear you could see them from ten thousand feet up. They may as well have drawn an arrow on the ground…”
“I see flashes from there a lot,” Serge tells him, “but they never seem quite right. Haven’t got that forward kick…”
“Stage effects,” Pietersen tuts. “Smoke and mirrors.”
He pins the photo to a board-askew, and covering the bottom corner of another photo which is slanted to the other side. Eight or nine more photos cling together to produce a mosaic of landscape across which lines-straight, curved and dotted-cut and swirl like markings on butterflies’ wings.
“Now, this part’s changed since yesterday,” Pietersen says, replacing one tile of the mosaic with a new one that contains a dark, concentric set of ripples moving outwards from a spot covered by trees. “But I’m not sure we’ve knocked the big gun out. When you fly over it tomorrow, try to ascertain whether the scorch marks fall along the main diameter of all these circles, or if they’re off-centre.”
“I’ll snap the area, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to tell that with my naked eye, through all the smoke,” Serge replies.
“Try rubbing cocaine in it,” Pietersen tells him.
“Cocaine?” Serge asks. “Isn’t that for teeth?”
“Yes, but it works wonders on your vision: sharpens it no end. Go pick some up from the Field Hospital in Mirabel.”
Serge does so. He’s given a small make-up tin of white powder, a little of which he daubs onto his retina just prior to take-off the next day. It takes effect as they’re clearing their own kite balloon, which starts beaming up at him taut and alert, a big white eyeball. The lines of tracer-fire stand out more starkly a few seconds later, their velocity and inclination bold, insistent. The mesh of trenches, the coloured flames of guns and flares, distant roads and railway lines, the markings on the ground: all these things come at him more cleanly, more pronounced-but then so do Archie puffs, vapour trails and cordite smoke-clouds, not to mention the real clouds above him and the sky’s deep blue.
“Did it work?” Pietersen asks him next time he visits the slaughterhouse.
“I’m not sure,” he answers.
“You can get a stronger effect by snorting it,” Pietersen tells him.
“What, like snuff?”
“Knock a little out across a table top or mirror,” Pietersen says. “Lay it in a line, and snort it through a rolled-up banknote. I’m afraid the scorch-marks are off-centre.”
“Sorry?”
Pietersen’s finger taps the mosaic on the board. This shows the same territory as it did yesterday, but most of the landmarks on this have mutated: changed their shape, grown blast-wrinkles, become scarred by craters or even, in some cases, simply disappeared. Sliding his mind’s gaze between the old images and these updated ones, Serge has a flickering apprehension that the landscape’s somehow moving, as though animated.
“Like a cat’s leg,” he says.
“What is? Which bit?”
“The whole thing.”
Pietersen steps back and tilts his head at the elongated spit of land formed by the collated images. After a while he nods and murmurs:
“I suppose it does have that shape, a little.”
The next day, Serge taps a small mound of cocaine onto his shaving mirror, pushes it into a line, rolls up a twenty-franc note and breathes the powder up towards his cranium. It stings behind his eyes, then numbs the upper part of his face. As Gibbs takes off, Serge feels a lump of phlegm grow in his throat. He swallows; it tastes bitter, chemical. The tracer-lines this time are vibrant and electric: it’s as though the air were laced with wires. Higher up, the vapour trails of SE5s form straight white lines against the blue, as though the sky’s surface were a mirror too. Scorch-marks and crater contours on the ground look powdery; it seems that if he swooped above them low enough, then he could breathe them up as well, snort the whole landscape into his head. The three hours pass in minutes. As they dip low to strafe the trenches on the way back, he feels the blood rush to his groin. He whips his belt off, leaps bolt upright and has barely got his trousers down before the seed shoots from him, arcs over the machine’s tail and falls in a fine thread towards the slit earth down below.
“From all the Cs!” he shouts. “The bird of Heaven!”
From this day onwards, he develops a keen interest in the contents of the medicine box in the RE8’s cabin, tucked between the aerial’s copper reel and the second set of controls. He experiments with benzoic acid, amyl nitrate, ether and bromide before discovering diacetylmorphine. Held in injectable phials, the liquid floods him with euphoria each time he pushes it into his flesh: a murky, earthy warmth that spreads out from his abdomen in waves. Then everything slows down and seems to float: the tracers rise towards him languidly, like bubbles in a glass; Archie puff-clouds hang about his head like party bunting. He likes it when the bullets come close-really close, so that they’re almost grazing the machine’s side: when this happens he feels like he’s a matador being passed by the bull’s horn, the two previously antagonistic objects brought together in an arrangement of force and balance so perfectly proportioned that it’s been removed from time, gathered up by a pantheon of immortals to adorn their walls. The sky takes on a timeless aspect too: the intersecting lines of ordnance residue and exhaust fumes form a grid in which all past manoeuvres have become recorded and in which, by extension, history itself seems to hang suspended. Flashes tincture the lines green, lace them with yellow, spatter them with incandescent reds. The colours look synthetic, as though they’d been daubed and splashed on from bottles, like Carlisle ’s oils, aquarelles and acrylics; it seems to Serge that if he had a jar of turpentine or camphor and a sponge then he could wipe the whole sky clear…
In states such as this, he finds his attention captivated by the German kite balloons. He’ll gaze at them for endless stretches, measuring his position not from the grid squares on his map but from these strange, distended objects as they rotate to his view. Unlike the English ones, they’re coloured the dark, putrid tone of rotting flesh. They may have the shape of intestines, but their rising, falling and eventual deflation makes him think of lungs-diseased ones, like the catarrh-ridden lungs of the burrow dwellers whose flashes they pinpoint. When he sees one being inflated on the ground, it calls to his mind the image of ticks swelling as they gorge themselves on blood. He fires on airborne ones that come into his range not out of hatred or a sense of duty, but to see what happens when the bullets touch their surface, in the way a child might poke an insect. When flame-tendrils push outwards from inside the balloons and climb up their surface before bursting into bloom, he watches the men in their baskets throw their parachutes over the side and jump. Often they get stuck halfway down, tangled in the ropes and netting. Seeing them wriggling as the flame crawls down the twine towards them, he thinks of flies caught in spiders’ webs; when they roast, they look like dead flies, round and blackened.
He starts picturing the batteries he’s targeting as insects too, ticks that have burrowed into the ground’s skin and embedded themselves there: his task’s unpicking them. Pinned to the slaughterhouse’s wall, the photographs take on the air of dermatological slides.
“I don’t think that one’ll be troubling our boys much more,” Pietersen declares triumphantly, tapping a deeply pockmarked patch on his mosaic. “The whole sector’s dead now.”
“Dead?” asks Serge.
“Yes,” Pietersen replies. “You’ve killed it.”
“I don’t see it that way,” Serge murmurs back.
“You think there’s still an emplacement there?”
“That’s not what I mean… It’s just that…”
He can’t explain it. What he means is that he doesn’t think of what he’s doing as a deadening. Quite the opposite: it’s a quickening, a bringing to life. He feels this viscerally, not just intellectually, every time his tapping finger draws shells up into their arcs, or sends instructions buzzing through the woods to kick-start piano wires for whirring cameras, or causes the ground’s scars and wrinkles to shift and contort from one photo to another: it’s an awakening, a setting into motion. In these moments Serge is like the Eiffel Tower, a pylon animating the whole world, calling the zero hour of a new age of metal and explosive, geometry and connectedness-and calling it over and over again, so that its birth can be played out in votive repetition through these elaborate and ecstatic acts of sacrifice…
And in the background of these iterations, like a relic of an old order, the sun: intoxicated, spewing gas and sulphur, black with cordite smoke and tar. As the summer months draw on, it seems to sicken. Rising beneath him on early-morning flights, its light’s infected by the ghostly pallor of the salient’s mists, driven a nauseous hue by green and yellow flashes. It darkens, not lightens, as each day progresses and the puffballs, vapour clouds and tracer-lines build up. Its transit through the air seems laboured, as though the whirring mechanism that dragged it along its tracks were damaged and worn out. As afternoons run into evenings, it becomes so saturated with the toxins all around it that it can no longer hold itself up and, grown heavy and feeble, sinks. Serge watches it die time and time again, watches its derelict disc slip into silvery, metallic marshland, where it drowns and dissolves. When this happens, a chemical transformation spreads across land and sky, turning both acidic. In these moments, he feels better than he’s ever felt before-as though his rising were commensurate with the sun’s sinking. As space runs out backwards like a strip of film from his tail, the world seems to anoint him, through its very presence, as the gate, bulb, aperture and general projection point that’s brought it about: a new, tar-coated orb around which all things turn.
9
i
By September, more than two-thirds of the pilots and observers who made up the 104th when Serge arrived have been killed. The ones who remain undergo a similar set of transformations to the landscapes in Pietersen’s photographs. Their faces turn to leather-thick, nickwax-smeared leather each of whose pores stands out like a pothole in a rock surface-and grow deep furrows. Eyelids twitch; lips tremble and convulse in nervous spasms. Arriving back from flights, they stumble from their machines with the effects of acceleration and deceleration, of ungradated transit through modes of gravity alternately positive and negative, sculpted in the open mouths, sucked-in cheeks and swollen tongues that they present to the airfield’s personnel for the next few hours. Clown Bodners, Serge tells himself. Sometimes they laugh uncontrollably, as though a passing shell had whispered to them the funniest joke imaginable, although often it’s hard to tell if they’re laughing or crying. The engines’ pulses have bored through their flesh and bones and set up small vibrating motors in their very core: their hands struggle to hold teacups still, light cigarettes, unbutton jackets…
“It’s the flying circuses,” Clegg croaks shakily to the mess orderly in front of Serge one afternoon. “The Jastas. They move up and down the front in huge formations. When they get all around you there’s not that much you can do. They come at you from everywhere…”
“I’m rigging my plane up against them,” Stanley, a recent arrival, tells them.
“How?” ask Serge and Clegg in unison.
“Pike principle,” answers Stanley, enigmatically.
“You mean the fish?” Serge says.
“No, pikestaffs,” Stanley tuts. “You’ll see.”
The following day he wheels out of the Bessoneau an SE5 to which no fewer than seven Lewis guns have been attached. They poke out of the machine in every conceivable direction; there’s even one hanging below the tail.
“To guard against the bites of sharks,” Stanley explains as he taps this last one.
“How will you operate them all?” Serge asks.
“I’ll dart from one gun to another, depending on where they’re coming at me from. I’ll learn to play the whole contraption like an instrument-an organ, say: you can’t be at all the stops and pedals at the same time, but you can still make it do its thing when you know how…”
Walpond-Skinner nixes Stanley ’s pikery:
“If the RFC had wanted three-hundred-and-sixty-degree bullet dispensers, they’d have built them. Your task is to fly. Two guns for each machine-that’s it!”
Stanley is killed a week later. Serge inherits his copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and finds, in the very first one, Widsun’s line about being the world’s fresh ornament, herald to the spring and so on. The phrase that his mind snags on, though, comes from a later sonnet, number 65: the line about love shining bright in black ink. He keeps on hearing it: as he reads copy orders, wipes tar from his face, or watches the dark water flowing by the Floaters. Clegg and Watson, meanwhile, scoop fish from the river and, placing them in a glass tank in the mess, study their formations.
“He was right, you know,” says Watson. “You do need an anti-shark gun. That spot beneath the tail’s unguarded and unsighted.”
“Look at this one,” Clegg says, pointing to an upward-angled perch that’s nibbling a toast crumb on the water’s surface. “It’s hanging on the propeller.”
“These two orange ones have taken up a good position,” Watson comments. “No one below them, lots of clear air to rise through…”
The fish-tank modelling affects the way Serge sees things in the sky: now heavy clouds above him look like the huddled bellies of a school of whales; the tall, waving poplars become fronds of seaweed; the ashen ruins of bombed villages, clusters of coral. To the seas. On days when rain, uninterrupted, washes away the line dividing river-water from the air above it, the men move around the mess like fish inside a tank, with liquid sluicing through their gills.
“Says here two measures whiskey, one Champagne,” Gibbs announces as he pours the contents of three bottles into a metal bucket.
“Ella’s stopped singing,” Clegg complains, face sunken in guppy-like despondency.
“Then give the gramophone a drink,” Gibbs tells him.
“The Bellerophone!” the others shout out drunkenly. They commandeer the bucket, drag it over to the music corner, crank the machine up again and start dribbling the cocktail down the speaking horn’s throat. As it trickles out across the disc at the horn’s other end, the music goes faint and warbly, as though it were being performed underwater. The men fall about laughing. When Ella drowns completely, they burst into song themselves:
Take the cylinder out of my kidneys,
The connecting rod out of my brain, my brain,
From the small of my back take the camshaft
And assemble the engine again.
In the lulls between songs, the conversation reverts, like a pickup’s arm returning to its cradle, to discussions of the dead.
“I saw it all,” some pilot says of some other one who could as well be here describing yet another. “The fuel tank caught fire at the front of the machine, and so he put the tail down, to keep the flames from the cockpit. But they’d spread already. Then he tried to swat them out. When that didn’t work, he climbed out of his seat and started walking back along the fuselage. By the end he was crouching on the tail. Then he jumped.”
“Did they find his body?”
“In some old woman’s laundry yard.”
“That Trenchard is a lunatic,” snarls Gibbs. “The kite balloon-men, who’ve got winches tied to them like apron-strings, are issued parachutes. But we, who fly ten times as high without any cord to haul us back, get nothing.”
“He thinks they’d slow the machines down,” Serge tells him, “also, that they’d encourage us to jump instead of land each time we had a problem. Then there’s the silk shortage…”
“What silk shortage?” Gibbs sputters through his drink. “The Germans have parachutes made from British silk! We’ve got enough to sell it to them, but not enough for our own side?”
Serge says nothing, but in his mind sees tall piles of fresh crêpe, Jacquard and moiré being stitched into large jellyfish-shapes by women who, at least in the scenario his mind’s concocting for him right now, cavort with lions and sheep beneath a hybrid Sino-German flag, while generals smile and whisper in the background. His mother’s somewhere in this picture, consorting with a buyer who, his face obscured by a thin silk sheet, talks loudly in an accent as strange as her own, pronouncing words Serge can’t make out.
“I dream of going down in flames each night,” Clegg mumbles. “It’s always the same: the bed’s on fire. It starts at its foot, and moves up. I try to tip the whole thing back, then stall and side-slip down, but it never works.”
“You could put it out by wetting yourself,” Serge tells him.
The men all burst into laughter again, but this time it’s hollow. They’re all terrified of becoming carboneezay, flamers. Candles are now banned on board the houseboat lest, by setting fire to its wooden beams, they allow the “orange death” that stalks them in the sky to catch up with them even on the ground; paraffin lamps have been replaced by electric bulbs inside the mess; even sparking up cigarettes causes the men to shudder as they flip the lighter’s lid shut with a kind of angry vehemence. Of all the pilots and observers, Serge alone remains unhaunted by the prospect of a fiery airborne end. He’s not unaware of it: just unbothered. The idea that his flesh could melt and fuse with the machine parts pleases him. When they sing their song about taking cylinders out of kidneys, he imagines the whole process playing itself out backwards: brain and connecting rod merging to form one, ultra-intelligent organ, his back quivering in pleasure as pumps and pistons plunge into it, heart and liver being spliced with valve and filter to create a whole new, streamlined mechanism. Sometimes he dreams he’s growing wings and, waking up, prods at his breastbone, trying to discern an outward swelling in it; each rib feels like a strut. He shakes after flights just like the others, but he doesn’t mind: the vibrations make him feel alive. He buzzes with kinetic potency as he carries them to Vitriers, to Cécile, where they make the brass knobs above her bedstead shake and bore their way on into her flesh too…
Cécile’s place is unheated. By October, evenings there are cold. He brings her a dead observer’s jacket to keep warm in.
“If he was killed, how come his jacket came back?” she asks, slipping it over her bare skin.
“Oh, he came back too,” Serge answers. “Just not alive. Look, you can see the bullet holes.”
Her eyes peer down her nose while her hand presses the leather to her stomach.
“On the left side,” he helps her out.
“Ah yes,” she purrs, poking her finger through a hole. “Direct dans la poitrine.”
She keeps it on while they make love again. Serge, kneeling behind her with his face pressed into collar fur, imagines the bullet piercing the jacket’s leather and travelling onwards through both the observer and Cécile, then, broken down into a million particles, lodging in him not only harmlessly but also beneficially, as though he were both its and the other two’s final destination, the natural conclusion of a process whose trajectory conjoined them all. Afterwards, he picks one of her stockings from the floor and, holding it up to his face, stretches its fabric.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“If you could spare this, it would really keep me warm up in the air.”
“Your legs will be too big for it,” she says.
“It’s not for my legs,” he says. “I’d wear it on my head, beneath the helmet.”
Cécile shrugs. A clunking sound comes from the street outside. People are moving stuff around all the time these days: chests of drawers, tables, bathtubs, cookers, sinks. The German ordnance has been falling closer and closer to the town, destroying outlying villages and pitching their inhabitants up on the doorsteps of relatives who themselves are beginning, as stray shells start breaching civic limits, to gather together family heirlooms or at least saleable objects, tie them to carts and trundle down potholed roads towards imagined safety. Those who’ve stayed lug buckets and cylinders from house to pump and shop to house: the water and gas pipes feeding half the populace have been destroyed. Drains and sewers have been snapped and dragged up from beneath the ground to spew their mess across the cobblestones. Even a graveyard on the edge of town has been blown up; the stench of unearthed corpses carries through air whose coldness crystallises and preserves it. Serge can see the graveyard from Cécile’s window. Beyond it, two dead horses lie with swollen stomachs in a field. Beyond them, past the rubble of the farmhouse that once marked the field’s boundary, blackened and splintered tree-stumps litter a winter landscape that he couldn’t imagine ever having been another way.
ii
One afternoon in January, Walpond-Skinner gathers the men together in the red-gabled house’s main room and informs them that a major push is being prepared. Serge, Gibbs and several other pilots and observers are taken off flying duties above the front and sent ten miles back to practise Contact Patrol work. This turns out to consist of flying low over advancing infantry who have mirrors attached to their backs, sounding a klaxon from the cockpit to solicit from the ground flares which, in turn, indicate positions and accomplishments. Bengal lights mean a wood has been captured, Aldis ones a trench, and Hucks a battery-or is it Aldis for battery and Hucks for woods? And is a copse a wood? How many trees…? Serge suspects, even as they learn the signals and run through the klaxon sequences, that the system’s flawed. The mock-battles that they act out over unmined, undefended fields usually manage to degenerate into confusion. In the week he spends there, three machines crash: two of them into each other, pilots glare-blinded by mirrors…
Serge finds it hard to sleep. It’s not the gentle rocking of the houseboat that he misses so much as the front’s sounds all around him: they’ve become his nightly lullaby. He can still hear the howitzers from here, of course, but they’re too distant-and besides, their sound is drowned out by the noise of Crossleys carrying troops eastward: convoy after convoy of them, trundling past the window of his cabin in an unbroken supply chain. Infantry march by round the clock as well, the rhythm of their step setting off in Serge’s head the lead-up lines from Sonnet 65:
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back,
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
Returning to the 104th at the week’s end, he whoops for joy as the poplars, Bessoneaus and grazing cows appear beneath his wing, then runs along the path that leads through the wood (or copse) to the river and, throwing himself on the bed, flips Stanley’s book open so that he can read 65’s riposte line, already firmly scrawled across his memory, with his own eyes:
O none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.
“So when’s the big day, then?” he asks Walpond-Skinner.
“Firstly, Carrefax, it’s ‘big day, sir’-or, strictly speaking, ‘big day, sir, then.’ ”
“Sir, then,” Serge corrects himself. “Then when-?”
“And secondly, that’s privileged information. I would tell you that it’s mine to know and yours to wonder about-if I knew myself, that is, which I’m afraid I don’t. The moles have to finish their work first.”
“Moles, sir?”
“The tunnellers. They’re digging all the way through no man’s land, so they can lay explosives underneath the trenches, gun emplacements and what have you. Got to proceed slowly: make sure it doesn’t cave in, make sure they keep quiet, listen out for Germans counter-tunnelling beneath them, all that sort of thing…”
Serge becomes fascinated with these tunnellers, these moles. He pictures their noses twitching as they alternately dig and strap on stethoscopes that, pressing to the ground, they listen through for sounds of netherer moles undermining their undermining. If they did hear them doing this, he tells himself, then they could dig an even lower tunnel, undermine the under-undermining: on and on forever, or at least for as long as the volume and mass of the globe allowed it-until earth gave over to a molten core, or, bypassing this, they emerged in Australia to find there was no war there and, unable to return in time for action, sat around aimlessly blinking in the daylight…
In anticipation of the push, there’s almost constant bombardment of the German side. It’s barrage bombardment: the shells advance in lines, like the teeth of a giant comb moving up warp fibres, ten or so yards each time. For Serge, sleeping in his houseboat once again, the booms of the guns’ discharge to the west, spread out along a line of well over a mile yet sounding almost simultaneously, and the consequent, equally elongated blasts of their detonation to the east, a little further away with each round, become the sounds of waves rolling past him, moving towards a shoreline that’s retreating; no sooner does the longest-travelling one peter out on distant shingle than a new, close-range set swells up and starts bursting energetically. After five days and nights of this, though, he wakes up to silence. Not only have the shells stopped: so, too, have most of the small-gauge gunfire, Archie pops and flares. Nothing at all seems to be happening. All of the squadron’s flights are in the hangars. Scouring the unusually bright winter sky, he fails to pick out a single aeroplane against its blue. It looks desolate and sad, as though aware that it’s being spurned by beautiful machinery and at a loss to understand why.
The push begins the next day. Almost all the 104th’s planes are involved in it in one way or another. The RE8s are to fly in holding patterns until the tunnellers’ mines are detonated at half past eleven on the dot-their cue to swoop down low and monitor the progress of the infantry battalion to which each of them has been assigned, tracking the soldiers through no-man’s-land towards the target destination. They’re to report the battalion’s advance to stations set up a mile or so behind the front for this very occasion, which in turn will relay the troops’ positions back to HQ-where, Serge presumes, they must have a warlike version of the Realtor’s Game laid out across a table, with helmets instead of top hats, trucks instead of cars and rabid, snarling dogs being shunted over flattened icons representing trenches, hills and machine-gun nests. Serge and Gibbs have been assigned the 10th Battalion; their target destination is a spinney.
“Spinney, now, is it?” Gibbs snorts. “They should’ve given us a course on forestry before sending us out here.”
“What are you taking a shaving set with you for, Sassen?” Walpond-Skinner asks a pilot in the front row.
“Case I get shot down and taken prisoner, sir. Want to keep up appearances.”
“Why not just send your silk pyjamas over, and arrange for your mail to be forwarded? Go and put it back in your quarters! The only thing you’ll need with you if you get shot down and end up in one piece is a Verey gun, to torch the machine with.”
“I’ve got to pop over to the Floaters too,” Serge mumbles to Gibbs. “Our medicine box is low.”
Gibbs shrugs. He’s tried the cocaine-in-the-eyeballs trick, but doesn’t get the point of snorting it, and even less so of injecting stuff into one’s arm. Serge, for his part, can’t imagine flying without diacetylmorphine. He’s been making regular trips into Mirabel for months now, appointing himself, as far as the quartermaster there’s concerned, the squadron’s pharmaceutical liaison officer. Back on the boat, he stabs a phial into his wrist, then, catching sight of Cécile’s stocking, two round peep-holes snipped out of its fabric, picks that up and slips it over his head, brushing his face briefly with a honey-like genital scent. He pockets two more phials on his way out, then pauses for a last look at the river and the poplars, still and impassive against all the excitement. He can hear the engines catching on the field, the first planes moving through the long grass. The diacetylmorphine takes hold as he glides back up the path and over to his RE8, turning the machines’ manoeuvres as they taxi, pause and pirouette, escorting one another into position, into ballroom-dance steps, the roar of their engines into symphonies whose every chord is laden with insinuation…
Flying towards the lines, Serge has the same sensation as he had in massage sessions with Tania towards the end of his Kloděbrady sojourn. The whole front has a weekend feel. No round, white balloons are up; no blue and red lights flicker in the trenches. There’s no cordite smoke, no vapour blanket, nothing. It looks like the entire war effort has been stood down-or, rather, put into a casual mode in which formalities have been relaxed and, consequently, anything is possible. As he nears the English lines, he notices a change in the texture and colouration of the ground behind them. Its surface, previously pale and washed-out, has become darkened by spiky dots. They’re everywhere, crowded together like ants. In the relatively quiet air, Gibbs has no problem making himself heard as he shouts back to Serge:
“Men!”
They spill out of the trenches, flecking the circles and mandalas of the ruined roads and pathways. In some places Serge can make out subdivisions in their mass, semi-discrete clusters; in others the clusters are so large that they’ve run together and eclipsed the ground entirely. Unlike ants, though, they’re not moving: packed together with their bayoneted rifles pointing upwards, they’re sitting still as encrustations on a rock or hull, waiting for the signal to move. Serge reaches down between his legs and lowers his copper aerial. Testing the sigs, he leads Gibbs to above their interim receiving station, marked by a semi-circle of white cloth beside which, in place of Popham strips, a black-and-white Venetian blind opens and closes, winking Morse OKs at him. Then they turn back towards the lines and climb. Their route is slightly different to the normal one; the shift adds to the sense of strangeness brought about by the guns’ silence. The men in the German trenches seem to have noticed the changes too, to sense that something new is coming their way: they’re too nervous to send more than a token spattering of tracer fire towards him. The German kite balloons have picked up on the break with protocol as well: all down the line they’re up as high as they can go. The one emerging from beneath his tail doesn’t bother to winch itself out of range, so intent is it on fixing its gaze on the dots massing on the far side-and Serge, caught in the same spell of anticipation, doesn’t bother to strafe it.
They find their position just back from the German lines at three-and-a-half thousand feet. Serge looks up and sees the squadron’s SE5s patrolling in formation high above them. He looks at his watch: twenty-eight minutes past eleven. He looks down: the whole battlefield is static, calm; only the planes move, serenely etching out their patterns. As Gibbs turns, then turns again, Serge runs his eye along the earth below, wondering in which part of it the moles have secreted their explosive droppings. For a while, he feels the presence, composited from blocks of air and tricks of the light, of that faceless diviner Baron Karl von Arnow: he’s hovering beside him, holding a dowser’s stick; and the wind buffeting the struts and wires is pronouncing his name-insistently, repeating it over and over: Are-NOW, Are-NOW, Are-NOW…
Then, as though summoned upwards by this incantation, the earth rises towards him. At first it looks like a set of welts bubbling up across its surface; the welts grow into large domes with smooth, convex roofs; the roofs, still rising upwards and expanding, start to crack, then break open completely; and through their ruptured crusts shoot long, straight jets of earth: huge, rushing geysers that look as though they’re being propelled upwards by nothing but their own force and volume, the dull brown matter defying both height and gravity through sheer self-will. As the closest geyser funnels up past the machine, its dizzy clods glitter in the air. Serge looks out horizontally, first north, then south: the whole German line is punctuated by these earth jets. They look like columns holding up the sky; it seems that if they crumbled it would fall. Their apex is much higher than his plane; for the first time, he has the impression that he’s flying not above the earth’s surface but below it-or, rather, within some kind of enclave contained inside it. A few seconds later, particles start raining down on the machine: small clumps and flecks, beating against the wings and sprinkling his cabin. The jets evaporate, and Serge looks down again to see two enormous holes in the ground beneath him. They gape like hollow eyes, the sockets of some giant who’s been lying beneath the landscape buried-perhaps for centuries, or perhaps even longer-and is only now, part by part, being disinterred.
“Shall I go down?” Gibbs shouts.
Serge doesn’t answer, hypnotised by the evacuated eyes.
“Shall I go down?” Gibbs shouts again.
Slowly, Serge moves his gaze to the east. The spiky dot-men on the ground have started moving. They’re swarming forwards, trickling through no-man’s-land’s rills and gullies. Every so often parts of their mass are thrown into the air by landmine explosions that, compared to the enormous ones that have just preceded them, seem no more substantial than the bursting of small spots. Shells have started falling too, machine guns chattering. Serge can pick out the starting-flare of 10th Battalion; he signals to Gibbs to fly towards it. As they make their first pass, the mirrors on the men’s backs flash; by the time they’ve turned around and made their second, there’s so much smoke around that none of the sky’s luminescence makes its way down to the mirrors and back up to Serge; by the third he can’t even see the men. He sounds his klaxon, but its noise is lost amidst gunfire. He can hear another machine’s klaxon sounding too, and presses his own again, to let it know he’s nearby; other planes apply their horns as well, like ships in fog. Serge taps Gibbs on the back and shouts:
“Up again.”
Gibbs points to his ear and shakes his head: too loud to hear each other now. Serge jerks his finger upwards. As they climb out of the smoke, he tries to send a signal to his ground station, but finds he can’t: the hurled-up earth has gritted up the spark set, jamming its parts. When he bangs it on the cockpit’s side in an attempt to shake the earth out, the whole tapper-key comes loose; trying to reattach it, he severs a wire. Gibbs is holding a position at three thousand feet, awaiting instructions, but Serge has none to issue. His spark set’s demise is giving him a strange, almost electric sensation: it feels as though he were flying naked, as though a layer of insulating hardware and a softer, inner one of message-lace had suddenly been stripped away and he himself were the thing riding the air’s frequency, pulsing right up against it. Despite his diacetylmorphine-induced languor, he begins to feel a buzzing in his groin again. More blood runs to it as Gibbs plunges back towards the smoke. Tilted back and facing upwards, hardening, Serge can see why Gibbs is diving: a whole Jasta has descended on the SE5s. The colourful German planes and the more sombre English ones turn around each other in confused whirlpools, their vapour trails forming a vortex that’s drifting to the side with the wind. They look like bees swirling around a honey jar. One of the English machines is on fire. Two of the German ones have broken loose and are now hurtling downwards.
“Albatroses,” Gibbs shouts back to him, his voice amplified and made audible by fear.
As they sink through the smoke-cloud, Serge sounds his klaxon again, then looks down. The battlefield’s now strewn with fragments: of machine parts, mirrors, men. Legs, wedged in by earth, stand upright in athletic postures, crooked at the knee as though to sprint or straightened into sprightly leaps but, lacking bodies to direct and complement their action, remain still; detached arms semaphore quite randomly across the ground; torsos, cut off at the waist, mimic the statues of antiquity. Gibbs flies above them for a while, then pulls the plane up and takes them back for a peep above the smoke. No sooner have they cleared it than Serge hears a rhythmic tapping: it’s as though a mechanic were standing beside the machine rapping on the fuselage to get their attention. The taps make the canvas on the plane’s back section tauten and jump; little holes appear in a straight line along it. They look like a row of popper-buttons springing open, starting at the tail and advancing towards his cabin, which they then move across as well, pocking its floor. A mass of shadow runs behind them, bringing with it a loud sound he doesn’t recognise. As the sound climaxes and falls off, Serge looks up and sees, coming from where the sun should be, a wave of brightly-coloured metal hurtling downwards. It sinks beneath them; he swivels his head to follow it, and watches the mass resolve itself into the shape of an Albatros. It’s turning below them, getting ready to come back; then it’s climbing behind them, just out of range, amassing altitude so it can dive again. Colours radiate from its underbelly-the central part of which, the lower wing, has words painted across it. He can’t make the words out, but he can see some of their letters: there’s a K, an m, a c…
“Shoot at them when they come back!” Gibbs shouts, pointing to the Lewis gun.
Serge turns away and gazes at the Albatros as it turns gracefully above them. He looks at the gun: should he shoot? The German aeroplane is beautiful, elegant and agile; and it’s selected them, of all the men and machines in the battlefield, to bear down on with its colour and its words-as though, like an annunciating angel, it had a message to convey, one just for them, for him. It’s hovering five hundred feet above him, shedding speed, nose angling downwards; then it starts diving, its front spitting out streaks of yellow and orange, like a splashing paintbrush. More buttons pop along the fuselage; struts leap out from between the wings. It passes above the RE8 this time; as it does, the phrase painted on its lower wing streaks by again: the m is actually two n’s; the c’s part of the sequence sch, like in schwer. Serge sees a t, then loses sight of the plane; Gibbs, meanwhile, turns, then turns again, trying to shake it off their tail.
“Shoot!” he screams back at Serge.
Serge isn’t going to shoot. He feels tranquil, passive. He wants the Albatros to come and pluck him from his nest and carry him away in a long, whispered rush of consonants. He still can’t see it-but a set of bumps rising from the undercarriage lets him know it’s coming back at them from the shark angle, the blind spot. The bumps are followed by a jolting at his back. He turns around to see Gibbs’s shoulders first straighten suddenly, straining against the belt, then slacken and slump forwards. One of the plane’s wings snaps; the machine lists to the side as the landscape below it starts elevating. As the smoke cloud rises up to meet them, the Albatros looms once more into Serge’s vision. It hovers above them, the one bright object in the darkened sky, the phrase written across its lower wing now finally legible. Painted in black, Gothic script on a red background, it reads:
Kennscht mi noch?
The phrase stays with him as the sky falls away. It seems to flicker all around the machine, seeding the air with a significance whose essence eludes him. “Do you still recognise me?” the painted words have asked him. Tilting his head back as he waits for earth to gather him, he wonders who the “me” is, or what time, what tense, what moment might be indicated by the “still.” The RE8 flattens out a little. A last dark, elongated kite balloon flashes by, burning. The plane hits something, but it’s not the ground: it feels more like a buffer, a soft boundary beyond which the air has a heavier, slower texture. He can feel this texture all around him too-see it as well: it’s silken, swirling about his shoulders and enveloping the whole machine, thin fibres at its rear expanding and contracting in the slipstream like a jellyfish’s tentacles, shooing the world away. Within its canopy, the humming of the plane’s struts and wires is amplified and softened; light is filtered, made to glow. Then the light dims, the sound fades out and there’s nothing.
iii
When he wakes up, there’s brown fabric covering his vision. It’s right up against his eyes: a diagonal grid that stays still as he glances left and right. Inhaling, he breathes in again the rich and honeyed smell of cunt. Touching his hand to his face, he feels the thread of Cécile’s stocking. The peep-holes have slipped down towards his mouth; he gouges a finger into one of them and tears the whole thing off. His view’s still blocked by fabric, though: the white, silky stuff that wrapped the machine as it fell forms a sac around it. Serge runs his eye down past the tail, to where the sac’s thinner fibres are-and sees, at their end, lying on the ground fifteen feet away, a human figure in a harness.
“It’s a parachute,” he says to Gibbs. “We hit a parachute on the way down.”
His voice is strangely muffled: he can hear himself-but only silently, inside his head. Gibbs doesn’t seem to hear him either: he doesn’t answer-or if he does then his voice isn’t loud enough for Serge to pick it up. Serge turns round. Gibbs is dead: stuff from his chest is spattered about the cockpit. Serge unclips his own harness, levers himself from his seat and drops to the silk-coated ground. Pushing his hands against a roof and walls of silk, he makes his way along the soft, white tube towards the opening by the strings and, emerging through this, prods the man tied to them. He’s dead too, head split open from its impact against the earth. He must have jumped from the burning kite balloon, only for his parachute to be run into by their machine and carried along horizontally-or, rather, on a diagonal descent-dragging him with it.
Serge looks around him. The landscape is nondescript, brown and broken, like all the front’s terrain. Twenty or so yards away, a section of it jumps into the air as a shell lands on it. The explosion is silent: it’s as though he were watching one of Widsun’s films. Even the rushing air and the earth clods it brings smacking against his face carry no sound in their wake. He traps one of the clods against his skin, holds it out and inspects it. Viewed from this close, the earth takes on a similar resolution to the one it has in those photographs he shoots for Pietersen, pockmarked and lined with patterns. He lets it drop, from sympathy: it’s been churned up enough. Watching it fall past his groin, he realises he’s still got an erection. He looks about him, embarrassed, before remembering that there’s no one else around. He could be anywhere. The fact that they hit a German kite balloon’s occupant, or ex-occupant, on the way down suggests they were heading east, in which case… Should he torch the machine? As he wonders this, the pressure grows inside his ears-and with it comes, at last, a sound. It’s a quiet one, resonating at a low frequency and emerging from inside the parachute: an electric buzzing spilling out of the inflated pod. He heads back through its opening towards the broken wings and bent propeller blades that, like a set of irregular tent-poles, hold the structure up. The buzzing’s coming from the cockpit-from the back half of it, his half…
Pulling himself up again and peering in, he sees that it’s his spark set making it. The six-volt battery has fallen from its spot and half-smashed on the cabin’s floor; the wires issuing from it are sparking intermittently; and the unregulated flow of electricity into the tapper key is making the latter twitch, as though the current-and with it, the entire signalling regime-had been reversed and the set were now receiving rather than transmitting. Serge reaches past it for the medicine box, then realises that the two phials he picked up from the houseboat are still in his pocket. He takes one out, rolls back his sleeve and injects its contents into his forearm, then leans over Gibbs and grabs hold of his Verey gun.
“Silk pyjamas.”
Did he say that or just hear it in his muffled head? He looks at the buzzing radio set again. The sparks are spreading further down the wires now, spreading too across the cockpit’s floor, where engine oil is flickering alight. Serge drops the Verey gun, yanks what remains of the transmitter loose, lowers himself to the ground once more and walks slowly down the tube again, then past the dead parachutist and across the churned-up landscape. He turns back after a while and, cradling the spark set in his arms, watches the parachute and machine burning. The silk turns black, then orange, then falls away to reveal the wooden skeleton beneath it blackening as well. Small collapses and eruptions take place within the flames’ mass, but they make no noise: the only sound’s the low-resonating buzzing which, despite the spark set being both smashed and disconnected, is still echoing inside his head. He stares at the flames for what could be seconds, minutes or hours, then turns again and walks away.
After a while he finds himself strolling beneath mutilated willows at the edge of what must once have been a picturesque country pond. The water, frosted over in parts, has a rust-brown texture laced with silver threads of mercury. Pieces of shell-casing, ripped and jagged, protrude from its surface. At its sides yellow, erect reeds tremble and shudder. Serge can’t tell if it’s wind or buffeting from ordnance fall making them move. He can’t hear any rustling-but he does start hearing a high-pitched note, breaking through the buzzing in his head: it seems to come from somewhere else, somewhere exterior. Is it connected with the reeds, their oscillation? He can’t tell. The ground around the pond is coated with military refuse and metallic dust, as though fragments of the sky had flaked off and fallen to earth. Birds are moving among these: jackdaws, crows and ravens, picking through the pieces with gestures as mechanical and irregular as the broken parts themselves. Smoke drifts around their beaks. As Serge comes near they all take off and fly in a long, funerary procession towards nearby woodland, their shadows strafing the ground.
He follows them. What draws him towards the woods isn’t a reasoned need to find cover or hide, but rather the high-pitched note piercing his ears: it seems to carry from among the trees-to emanate from within their dense mass with a kind of intent, like an electric summons. The sound grows louder as he threads his way between the trunks, as though held in and concentrated by the canopies and branches, bounced back up by moss to linger at head height. Listening to it more carefully, he discovers that it’s actually composed of several notes and pitches, weaving into and out of one another like the strands of interference you get when you nudge through the dial. When he stands still and tunes his ear to them more finely, the notes amalgamate into two trunk-tones: the high-pitched one he first picked up and, nestling within its sonic shadow, a deeper one that has the pitch of trumpets. Together, the two tones form a melancholy wail, like the long-drawn-out scream of a fall that never hits the surface towards which it’s falling.
An animal darts past his feet and vanishes as soon as it appears. Was it a fox? A dog? It had something in its mouth. Serge, still cradling the broken spark set, presses on into the woods. More animals disperse as he comes near. They’re all holding things between their teeth, grey morsels laced with scarlet; even the black birds perching in the trees pinch titbits in the beaks down which they peer at him disdainfully. He’s come to a spot where all the trees are crippled: trunks riven, branches snapped, both scorched and covered in large patches of tar. Tar coats the ground in intermittent patches too, countering its winter hardness with soft, insulating accretions. The accretions grow more frequent as he treads towards a small clearing secreted among the trees: the tar-coat covers the floor of this almost completely. Men are sitting on the tar as though on a padded blanket, backs propped against the trees’ bases, packs and weapons at their feet. There must be ten or fifteen of them, wearing German uniforms. They’re all dead. They slump against the trunks like over-ripened fruit that’s lost its shape, begun to rot. Their faces all wear grimaces, as though frozen in a grotesque laughter bordering on the insane. Serge looks at their mouths: some of the jaws are dislocated and hang loose; two of them have been ripped open by shrapnel wounds extending from the chest, or neck, or cheek; one has been blown off entirely, leaving a hole through which broken shards of jawbone poke.
The sound’s loud here. The men’s deformed mouths seem to be either transmitting it or, if not, then at least shaping it, their twisted surfaces and turned-out membranes forming receptacles in which its frequencies and timbres are unravelled, recombined, then sent back out into the air both transformed and augmented, relayed onwards. Their eyes, despite being empty of perception or reaction, seem electrified, shot through with a current that, being too strong for them, has shattered them and left them with a burnt-out, hungry look. Their clothes have streaks of red on them. The tar’s black is streaked with red as well, just like the Albatros’s fuselage. It’s a bright red: a kind of scarlet, rippling across the tree trunks like an ensign fluttering in wind. It gives the tiny, overhung clearing a cosy glow that complements the sweet smell of tar and corruption lingering about its air. The sound vibrates about the air too, infusing the whole scene with what feels like a kind of heat: it seems as though, despite the cold, the earth were sweating, yielding up these phantoms, passing their bones and flesh on through its strata, up past layers of frosted mulch and tar, delivering them back to life, albeit in a dead form. They almost seem to move. One of them is moving: dragging himself upright against his tree trunk, then, placing one foot in front of the other, lurching forwards along a line that leads past Serge towards the clearing’s far side.
“You’re alive?” Serge asks him as he passes.
The man halts in his lurching for a moment. His head turns in Serge’s direction and bobs unsteadily above its shoulders while the eyes take in the spark set and still-bulging groin, before turning away again. His neck has a big hole in its side that Serge can see right through. After a while his legs jerk back into action and carry him flat-footedly along his trajectory.
“Where are you going?” Serge asks as he walks away.
The man doesn’t answer. He’s not listening to him: he, too, is tuned in to the high-pitched noise; he’s drawn by it, is following it to its source. Serge watches his thin, feminine form slink away behind more tree trunks. Just before it disappears, it passes something soft and white. Another parachute? Serge starts walking in the same direction. The noise is growing stronger: louder, more precise. As he steps forwards, he starts murmuring zone-call sequences: ones he’s sent in the past, or might have sent, or might be sending even now, somehow, to someone waiting at the far end of this air that seems to have become all noise and signal:
“BY.NF. BADSAC7 SC-CS 1911; BY.VER. BUC2 SC-CS 1913…”
He murmurs whole strings of them, one after the other, repeating and mutating as they travel from his lips into the woods. He does this for no reason other than that it makes him feel good: at one with the blasted trees, the electricity, the tar and deformation. It produces an effect, though: after a long, repetitive stretch in which he might or might not retrace his own steps at least once (the sequences of trees seem to repeat as well, but never quite in the same way; the soft, white thing among the trees glides half-into, then out of, view again), men in German uniforms appear from among the trunks and branches. These ones are definitely alive. Their weapons point at him; their undeformed mouths move; they eye the spark set with suspicion.
“What?” Serge asks. He can’t hear them.
Their guns jerk upwards; their mouths move again.
“Was?” he switches to German.
“… Feng ennerf,” one of their voices weaves its way into the high-pitched noise’s mesh.
“Was?” Serge asks again. It sounded like “Thing enough,” “Fending off,” something along those lines. He points to his ear. “Schwer zu fassen.”
“… Enner,” the man says, mouthing the word slowly.
“Enna?” Serge asks.
“… Engnis,” the man tells him, not unkindly.
Serge smiles back apologetically. It was somewhere like “End this”-or perhaps, conversely, “Endless”… A new soldier appears and the others turn to him and talk. This one is more smartly dressed, an officer. He steps over to Serge and takes the spark set from him; as he does, the high-pitched noise stops suddenly and Serge can clearly hear the man say:
“Zu Gefängnis. Prison. You are prisoner.”
iv
He’s sent away from the frontier: eastwards, to the interior. Having ascertained that he’s an officer, his captors group him with his peers and transport them initially in first-class carriages, then second-class, then third, downgrading their conveyance every hundred miles or so. Eventually they find themselves in cattle trucks. A German corporal and three privates stand guard above them, jerking and swaying in front of neat fields, canals, factories and towns that follow one another with a progression whose logic seems both perfect and impenetrable. Occasionally, they pause at stations; while they’re handed bread and coffee, women stare at them malevolently from the platforms; as the train pulls off again, sliding past houses whose doors wear wreaths and crosses and whose windows, covered by black blinds, transmit in Venetian Morse the same message each time, Serge understands why. On every road, in every town and village, columns of soldiers pass by marching in the opposite direction, the neat stamp-and-click of their swift footfall drawing briefly into line with the rhythm of the steam and pistons’ chug and hissing before disengaging, fading and dying away…
He gets passed through a series of processing stations and transit camps. At each one they ask his name and rank. His answer to the former question never fails to elicit a humorous comment:
“Chafer? You are Insekt, beetle?”
“Carrefax,” Serge answers, stretching the x out into a long, steam-like release of breath.
“Käfers? Then you are more than one: many Insekts!”
After running through the fourth or fifth variation on this exchange, he finds himself inducted into an Offizierslage in Hammelburg. Hammelburg is a barracks town: the prison’s just a section of the town that’s been wired off from the surrounding streets. The dormitories in which the prisoners sleep eight or ten to a room line a cobbled square that’s hemmed in by sharp-angled red- and brown-slate roofs rising above the yellow and red houses, tradesmen’s premises and municipal buildings that jostle and collide with one another with Germanic closeness and compression. The guards who police the penned-in sector of the town are old, shoddily dressed, confused. Several of them limp; one of them’s missing an eye. On the far side of the wire, in the same square, new recruits are drill-marched up and down all day long. Often, when the prisoners are lined up in the open during roll call, the recruits cast anxious glances their way, as though trying to catch a glimpse of what awaits them. Serge tries to smile back each time one of their eyes meets his, as though to reassure them that it’s not that bad-until it strikes him that what’s putting the fear into their faces might not be the enemy but rather their own veterans: the thought that they’ll end up like that…
Roll-call is taken round the clock: in the square, in the dormitories, routinely first thing every morning, without warning in the middle of the night. When they’re not standing to attention, prisoners mooch around, play bridge, attend (or deliver) lectures on a variety of subjects ranging from history and medicine to religion, or study French, German or Latin. Serge inscribes himself in Moreton’s course on Problems in Philosophy.
“The history of our thinking on free will hinges around the question of determinism: are events pre-scripted, as it were-by God, our cells or an invisible engine driving history’s course? And even if they are, are we still free to choose to do what we were destined to do anyway-standing face-to-face with its implications, in full awareness of its consequences? Hume thought so, and allowed this liberty to, as he put it, ‘everyone who is not a prisoner and in chains.’ ”
“Our current situation kind of pisses over that one, doesn’t it?” Serge asks.
“Not necessarily,” Moreton answers, pushing his glasses up his nose’s bridge, “not necessarily. To find our way round that we’d have to look to our captors’ philosophical tradition. Rudolf Steiner has recently argued, after Schopenhauer, that we’re free when we’re able to bridge the gap between our sensory impressions of the outer world, on the one hand, and, on the other, our own thoughts.”
“So if I think of barbed wire fences, then I’m free?”
The nose wrinkles as the glasses slide down them again. “Well, I suppose, if you put it that way: yes.”
The men in the Offizierslage are definitely free to queue-for food, mail, laundry, medical supplies or almost anything else. Queues form around the camp at the slightest provocation. One day, bored, Serge persuades two pilots to line up with him in front of the door to a coal cellar just for the hell of it: within five minutes twenty other men have fallen into line behind them without even asking what it is they’re queuing for. The food queues break down into two types: those for the camp food with which all prisoners are provided, and those for the food sent in Red Cross parcels to individuals and distributed among recipients’ compatriots. The French eat the best: their tables are adorned with marinated mackerel, cold chicken, foie gras, peas and ham, all sent in tins. The Russians eat the worst: sustained by nothing but dried fish, they spend their time and energy building a chapel with ad-hoc interior decorations. Serge visits it one day to find they’ve fashioned icons out of wood splinters and strips of cloth, using dirt, resin, wax and blood to paint emaciated saints with sorrowful faces: eyes turned ever upwards, importuning the skies for delivery, or at least for an explanation of their circumstances. The English are somewhere in between: they get sent tins of tongue, pork shoulder, broad beans, brawn, the odd plum pudding. All of them eat better than the guards, though, who are restricted to the very slop they serve out to the prisoners: turnip stew, broth with horse-meat in it, liquid cheese and nine-tenths of a loaf of black bread every week. They’re visibly hungry. They make the prisoners kick back a little of their Red Cross supplies, but know better than to demand too high a cut: the parcels would stop coming if they did…
It’s not just the guards who are hungry: townspeople habitually gather beneath a third-floor dormitory window overlooking Hammelburg’s “free” sector to beg food from the prisoners, who toss hunks of their regulation black bread to them. Sometimes they’ll throw in a chunk of meat, wrapping it in paper after removing it from its tin. The tins themselves they never throw: these are precious.
“Why?” asks Serge as a lieutenant holds his wrist back when he makes to chuck one from the window on his first day in the camp.
“Tunnelling,” the lieutenant nods back at him.
“You do that here too?”
“All the time, young fellow, all the time: what keeps us sane.”
He’s not overstating the amount of time spent tunnelling-although whether it keeps them sane or not is another question. On Serge’s very first evening, and all subsequent ones, as soon as roll-call has been taken and the lights turned out, the men, moving with balletic deftness, cover the window with a blanket, light several candles, remove a bed from the room’s corner, lift up two of the floorboards beneath it and, tying a long cord around the designated tunneller’s feet, send him head-first into the hole armed with two empty tins to dig with. As the roll-call’s fall and cadence is repeated in the dorms along the corridor one after the other, fainter and fainter every time, they watch the cord worming its way into the ground-two cords: a second, smaller string held in the burrower’s hand is attached, Ting-a-Ling-style, to a third tin that’s perched on a shelf back in the room. If the tunnel collapses or the tunneller begins to faint, he pulls on this, the tin falls and his comrades yank him back, feet first. That’s the idea, at least. Yet more tins, bases all removed, have been laced together to form a loose tube: this is shoved down the hole as far as it will go, to provide air in the manner of a snorkel. It amuses Serge to see the vegetables on the tins’ labels heading into the ground, in a long column, one after the other-as though, having shed the grit and lowness of their origins, become refined to the point of weightless, bulkless images, they’d now come full circle and were sinking back down to rejoin their dirty, material roots. The sound of hacking, scraping and panting spills from the tube’s opening into the room’s air; some tunnellers sing quietly to themselves, or strike up strange, subterranean monologues whose sense, if they had any in the first place, is distorted beyond any comprehension by the hollowed-out reaches along which they travel.
“Where does this tunnel go?” Serge asks one night as a man they all, despite his shortness, call “Lofty” toils away beneath them.
“Go?” the dormitory captain, a colonel named Craddock, counters.
“Where will it come out?”
“That’s proscribed knowledge. Escapee Committee take care of all that. They dispense info on a firm need-to-know basis.”
“Shouldn’t it be ‘Escaper Committee’?” Serge asks. “I mean, strictly speaking, the prison is the escapee, the thing escaped from. We’re escapers-and in fact not even that, not having yet escaped. More like escaper-aspirants. Who are ‘they,’ anyway?”
“That’s proscribed knowledge too.”
“You mean you’ve never met them?”
“I’ll have passed them in the square, chatted with them, played cards and so on. Perhaps we even share this dormitory with one or more of them. But their identity qua Escapee Committee members is at all times and in every circumstance withheld.”
“Then how do you know which direction to dig in?”
“It’s communicated to us via intermediaries, on a need-to-know basis, as I intimated. The committee have it all worked out: I’ve heard they’ve got a chart of all the gas-pipes, sewers and what have you, and are using those as guidelines-following them, crossing them, whatever. There’s a logic to it all…”
The man listening at the door hisses and signals to them to restore the room to its original state. No sooner has the corner bed been slid back, candles snuffed out and men reinserted beneath sheets than a guard shuffles into the dorm and moves up and down the rows, counting heads. As he passes the bunk on whose top half Lofty should be lying, the man in the lower half pulls a string to make the dummy that’s been placed above him roll over in its sleep.
“Did you see the way his hand flopped?” Craddock asks as soon as they’re all up and at it again. “Wasn’t realistic enough. We should stitch it to his face: that’s how people sleep.”
“Or have another string to control the whole arm,” another man says.
A third, spurred by talk of strings, retrieves the alarm-tin from its hiding spot beneath the bed and returns it to its shelf.
“You okay down there, Lofty?” Craddock stage-whispers down the tube. He lowers his ear to it, then decides: “We’d better haul him up.”
Lofty throws up across the floor when he emerges. Someone else goes down to bring up his loose earth, which they add to the mass stuffed in draws and cupboards, behind wall-panels, beneath other loose floorboards. As the weeks and months go by, it occurs to Serge that, far from removing earth between them and the outside world, they’re adding it around them: digging themselves in, not out. Men throw up often when they emerge from the hole; several of them, over time, become too scared to tunnel. Not Serge: he likes being down there, for one reason more than any other: it’s the only place in camp where he can masturbate. There’s nowhere else you get the requisite solitude. He wonders if the others do that too: wonders if that’s what lies behind the panting, or if the murmurs unravelling along the breathing tube are fragments of dialogues held in the dark with soft, imaginary mistresses…
He never gets brought face-to-face in full awareness with an Escapee (“Escape,” he realises as spring runs into summer, would have avoided the inaccuracies of that term) Committee member, and by autumn has started harbouring doubts about their existence. Their logic, if there is one, is skewed: tunnels frequently run headlong into impassable sunken metal joists, or into one another, or surface in other dormitories, or even, on more than one occasion, cause small sections of the cobbled square to collapse while prisoners and guards are standing on it. One tunnel still in progress in November, not originating in his room, is rumoured among the inmates of several dormitories to have breached the camp’s wire fence, although nobody will say which dorm it leads out of, where and when it will eventually surface or who will exit the camp through it-facts that lead Serge to suspect that it, too, might be no more than a collective daydream. He never finds out whether or not he’s right: in February, by which time not a single prisoner has managed to escape, he’s transferred to another camp.
This new one’s several hundred miles away, in Berchtesgaden. He’s moved around by rail again, one train after the other. The landscape changes: lowlands criss-crossed by canals give over to ravines along which brooks sparkle and fall. Sheep and cows become lopsided, grazing on sharp inclines; the shuffle and click of soldier columns is replaced by solitary figures weaving their way down hillside paths towards small stations, heading back from leave. The train starts groaning as it strains against the gradient; its puffs grow shorter and more frequent, as though it were running out of breath, which it could well be: the air does seem thinner. More refined too: Serge misses the smell of smoke, of oil and tar…
The Offizierslage in Berchtesgaden turns out to be just beyond it, separated by a stretch of rocky scrubland from the village above which it perches: used to be a monastery, one of the guards tells him. The guards here are more on-the-ball than their Trier counterparts. The officers are sharper too, but not unfriendly. The Feldwebel runs a bridge club composed mainly of his prisoners, jovially telling them they’d better not escape as it would break the fours up. He even lets them leave the camp-but only on parole. The parole system’s so absurd and contradictory it could have been devised by one of Moreton’s philosophers: prisoners are handed their freedom on condition they won’t use it, and must pledge to this condition with their word-whence the convention’s name. They trade this word against a pass that’s issued to them at the front gate as they leave; on returning an hour or so later, they hand the pass back, and their word becomes their own again. For Serge, the whole practice belongs to the same order as the sleeping dummy: it’s as though, each time he takes the word-card out, he duplicates himself and leaves a double behind as a marker. Or perhaps the other way round: he’s the double, his sensations and encounters as he wanders round the village and the fields no more than dummy ones, hallucinations given the air of veracity by contractual and linguistic strings. He even dreams once that he’s strolling around an airfield nestled in the monastery’s shadow (in reality there is none), climbing into a machine, taxiing across the grass-all perfectly legitimately, sanctioned by parole-then, as he takes off, trying to explain to some vague, airborne invigilator that the word, the word, has altered, and now lies back in the camp with his stuffed simulacrum, leaving him at liberty to fly back to the front. The invigilator, still faceless, asks what the new word (password? keyword? call sign? it’s not clear) is, posing the question by quietly whispering: “Kennscht mi noch?”
One day, during the second spring of his captivity, American prisoners arrive in the camp. They receive much better parcels than the others: salami from New York, ground beef from Chicago, endless medical supplies. Serge sets about befriending their dispensing medical officer, and trades several jars of honey and crab-apple jelly sent to him from Versoie against phials of diacetylmorphine.
“You like your sister, huh?” the dispensing officer, a Barney from Queens, New York, joshes him the third time he negotiates a trade-off.
“Sorry?” The question takes Serge aback.
“It’s what the Negroes call it up in Harlem.”
“Call what?”
“This,” Barney answers, pointing at the phials. “Sister, dope, Big H: heroin. You don’t call it that here? I mean in England?”
“No,” Serge answers him after a pause. “I don’t think we do.”
The arrangement becomes a regular one: every week Serge hands over to Barney the fruit of Versoie’s trees and beehives, Barney hands over the goods, and sister roils and courses through his veins. Out on parole, he’ll sit among the scrub, his mind at once both perfectly replete and empty. Airfields, tennis courts and cityscapes merge into and out of one another across contours of rock and hill. Gorse curls around his forearms; lichen stains his clothes: the landscape seems to penetrate his skin and grow inside him, replacing viscera and brain with heather, lavender and fern, as though he really were no more than a stuffed dummy…
The tennis courts, or at least one of them, have some basis in reality: there’s one down in the village. Officers less lethargic than him play games on it regularly, while others look on, mingling with villagers whose resentment of the enemy’s been pushed to one side by their need for food. This suits the prisoners just fine: they trade some of their tins (useless for tunnelling in this rocky terrain) against civilian clothes, which they then smuggle back into the camp and mix and match in covert fashion shows conducted with a view to finding what the French officers call “un look” that will enable them to sneak past the gate wordlessly and uncontracted. Serge, happy to spend whole afternoons watching the ball arcing back and forth across the gridded net and bouncing among painted lines, gets charged one day with slipping some of these clothes on under his own, but, too lazy to take his shirt off, pulls them on over it instead, an oversight that results in him getting caught out at the gate and sent, sisterless, to solitary for two weeks.
The first few days are dreadful, full of fits and fever. By the fifth these have subsided, leaving him wakeful and alert. He notices that two veins on his forearm have collapsed, like shallow tunnels. By the second week he feels quite good: resilient, self-sufficient-and besides, there are advantages to being alone. He spends the last three days of his confinement masturbating. There’s a smell that seeps from the cell’s walls, floor and ceiling when he does this, and only when he does: it’s musty, earthy, old but somehow fresh at the same time. Although he always starts out trying to picture Cécile-her back, the blind, the brass knobs of her bedstead, wobbling shadows on her wall and broken eggshells-these images soon give way to new ones of tunnels viewed from the interior, of fruit and vegetables being returned to earth, of tins with strings attached…
By the time autumn’s come round again, the Lage’s guards have become lax. They start going around without their uniforms, in civvies. They don’t bother checking prisoners’ parole cards, instructing them instead to collect them from and slot them back into a set of pigeonholes outside their cabin. “Punching the parole clock,” the Americans call it. As the men sally out around the village, its inhabitants come up to them and, speaking in whispers even when there’s no one there to overhear them, say:
“Kaiser kaput…”
The officers start wearing civvies too. They appear in camp less and less frequently, then withdraw from it completely, leaving a dwindling number of guards behind. In late October it’s decided by someone or other, and communicated down to all the men, that the escape plan will be put into action. Two prisoners, dressed as local tradesmen, collars turned up to cover their faces, walk out of the gate. Not only does their exit go unchallenged, but their absence isn’t even noticed in the following days. Two more men leave, disguised as cooks; then three more, hauling rubbish bins; then four, got up as nothing in particular. Then there’s an exodus: men leave at will, realising that the remaining guards simply don’t care enough to stop them.
Serge travels through the countryside with one other prisoner, a pilot from the 55th Squadron named Hodge. They stick to small paths and open fields, sleeping in ditches, pilfering from farmsteads clinging to the edge of hills: eggs, chickens, even dried maize. On the roads below them, they sometimes see troops marching away from the front. One day, they’re sitting on a wooded slope watching a battalion of infantry cross a river, waiting until they’ve disappeared so that they can cross it in the other direction, when a British aeroplane, an SE5, appears overhead and starts strafing the soldiers. They all run for cover: some of them duck beneath the bridge’s columns where these join the land; others throw their packs and rifles to the ground and plunge into the water; the majority of them, however, crawl up the very slope on which Serge and Hodge are sitting.
“English Offiz-ee-er!” Hodge says, a tad unwisely given what’s just happened on the bridge, to the soldiers who surround them with bemused looks. No longer having guns to point at them, the soldiers just stand facing them, motionless. The sound of the SE5’s engine dwindles as it goes in search of other prey. A sergeant, one arm streaked with blood, shows up.
“Wer sind die?” he barks at his men.
The men repeat what Hodge has told them. The sergeant steps right up to Hodge and, with the arm that’s not hurt, pulls Hodge’s coat back. He lifts his jersey up, then tugs the shirt loose from his trousers.
“Das ist keine Englische Uniform!” he growls.
“What’s he saying?” Hodge asks Serge.
“You’re not in uniform,” Serge translates for him.
The injured sergeant looks at Serge, then yanks at his clothes too. He’s civvy-clad as well, cap-à-pied.
“Deshalb sind sie Spione!” shouts the sergeant.
“What’s he saying now?” Hodge asks.
“He says we’re spies,” Serge tells him. “Technically, he’s right.”
“So what does that mean?”
“I imagine we’ll be shot.”
He’s spot on. The next morning, after being held in the same woods (the battalion camps there while it licks its wounds), Hodge and he are marched towards an area where the trees clear and the hillside flattens off.
“A pleasant location,” Serge comments. They didn’t pass it on the way through the woods yesterday, despite coming from the direction in which it lies.
Hodge doesn’t answer. He’s gone white. The sergeant who captured them presides over the ceremony. Still holding his bad arm in his good one, he orders his soldiers into line and, standing to the side of them, barks commands. As these mix with the click and shuffle of the rifles’ pins being pulled back, Serge experiences a familiar buzzing in his groin. He looks up. The trees’ trunks seem to incline slightly inwards as they rise. The sun’s out: blocked by the trunks in places, it casts shadows on the ground. Among the mesh of twigs and moss an insect’s moving, traversing the huge geometric patchwork of triangles and semi-circles formed by the alternating light and shade. At one point it pauses briefly, as though remembering something, and then trundles on. Finding its path barred a moment later at an obtuse angle by a twig that, to it, must seem as monumental as a fallen oak, the Käfer mounts this, then slips off again, then mounts once more. Watching it rise several times its own height, Serge gets a sense of elevation too: without leaving his body, he can look down on the whole scene. The arrangement of the soldiers, their position in relation to the clearing’s edge, the shapes formed by their planted feet, the angle of the guns against their shoulders: somehow it all makes sense. Seeing it this way, as though from above, appreciating all its lines and vectors, its vertical and horizontal axes, and at the same time from the only place from which he can see it, the spot to which he’s rooted, affords him, hand in hand with the feeling of rising, the vertiginous and pleasant sense of falling. It’s not just him; everything seems to be falling back into this moment, even the sky: a breeze is touching down now, making the trees rustle. From among the sound’s static there forms, like a clear signal, a familiar phrase:
Kennscht mi noch?
Serge murmurs the words himself this time, letting them echo from him as though he were some kind of sounding box, hollow and resonant. As he does this, their meaning becomes clear; he knows exactly what he’s saying. The question of who “me” is, or what time the “still” refers to, is no longer irksome: the dispersed, exterior mi previously held captive by the air, carried within its grain and texture, has joined with the interior one, their union then expanding to become a general condition, until “me” is every name in history; all times have fused into a now. It all makes sense. He’s been skirting this conjunction, edging his way towards it along a set of detours that have curved and meandered like the relays of a complex chart, for years-for his whole life, perhaps-and now the conjunction, its consummation, tired of waiting, has found its way to him: it’s hurtling back towards him on the line along which the bullets will come any second now. As he waits for the sergeant to give the command to shoot, Serge feels ecstatic.
The soldiers await the order too, with a perfect immobility, as though time had stopped, or run into itself so fully that it’s breached and flooded its own borders, overflowed. They could have shot already; Serge could be already dead, his consciousness held back within some kind of intermission that’s been opened up by the intricate physics of it all, or held suspended while time loops: it’s just a matter of waiting for its rim to reappear and slide back down his vision; then he’ll be gathered up by the overlap, disappear into its soft accretion. It’s not until he notices some motion behind the soldiers that he realises there’s a reason for the pause: a man, some other kind of sergeant, captain or subaltern, has appeared and called the first sergeant over to him. They’re talking together. They talk for a while-and while they do, time seems to fall back into its old shape, the accretion to withdraw. It’s not a pleasant feeling. Now the sergeant’s talking to the firing squad: he mutters something to them and they drop their guns.
“Was passiert?” Serge asks, indignant.
It’s the subaltern who answers him, in English:
“Finished. It’s over…” He starts to walk away.
“What do you mean it’s over?” Serge calls after him. “It hasn’t even started yet!”
“War over,” the subaltern shouts back across his shoulder.
Hodge drops to his knees and starts to cry. The soldiers begin walking away too, withdrawing. Superimposed across the clearing, as though projected there, Serge sees the image of a boat pulling off from a jetty at a point where several canals intersect: as the boat draws away, it takes the intersection with it, leaving him behind. For the first time in the whole course of the war, he feels scared.
“Hey!” he calls after the soldiers. “You can’t do that. Wait!”
i
By September, more than two-thirds of the pilots and observers who made up the 104th when Serge arrived have been killed. The ones who remain undergo a similar set of transformations to the landscapes in Pietersen’s photographs. Their faces turn to leather-thick, nickwax-smeared leather each of whose pores stands out like a pothole in a rock surface-and grow deep furrows. Eyelids twitch; lips tremble and convulse in nervous spasms. Arriving back from flights, they stumble from their machines with the effects of acceleration and deceleration, of ungradated transit through modes of gravity alternately positive and negative, sculpted in the open mouths, sucked-in cheeks and swollen tongues that they present to the airfield’s personnel for the next few hours. Clown Bodners, Serge tells himself. Sometimes they laugh uncontrollably, as though a passing shell had whispered to them the funniest joke imaginable, although often it’s hard to tell if they’re laughing or crying. The engines’ pulses have bored through their flesh and bones and set up small vibrating motors in their very core: their hands struggle to hold teacups still, light cigarettes, unbutton jackets…
“It’s the flying circuses,” Clegg croaks shakily to the mess orderly in front of Serge one afternoon. “The Jastas. They move up and down the front in huge formations. When they get all around you there’s not that much you can do. They come at you from everywhere…”
“I’m rigging my plane up against them,” Stanley, a recent arrival, tells them.
“How?” ask Serge and Clegg in unison.
“Pike principle,” answers Stanley, enigmatically.
“You mean the fish?” Serge says.
“No, pikestaffs,” Stanley tuts. “You’ll see.”
The following day he wheels out of the Bessoneau an SE5 to which no fewer than seven Lewis guns have been attached. They poke out of the machine in every conceivable direction; there’s even one hanging below the tail.
“To guard against the bites of sharks,” Stanley explains as he taps this last one.
“How will you operate them all?” Serge asks.
“I’ll dart from one gun to another, depending on where they’re coming at me from. I’ll learn to play the whole contraption like an instrument-an organ, say: you can’t be at all the stops and pedals at the same time, but you can still make it do its thing when you know how…”
Walpond-Skinner nixes Stanley ’s pikery:
“If the RFC had wanted three-hundred-and-sixty-degree bullet dispensers, they’d have built them. Your task is to fly. Two guns for each machine-that’s it!”
Stanley is killed a week later. Serge inherits his copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and finds, in the very first one, Widsun’s line about being the world’s fresh ornament, herald to the spring and so on. The phrase that his mind snags on, though, comes from a later sonnet, number 65: the line about love shining bright in black ink. He keeps on hearing it: as he reads copy orders, wipes tar from his face, or watches the dark water flowing by the Floaters. Clegg and Watson, meanwhile, scoop fish from the river and, placing them in a glass tank in the mess, study their formations.
“He was right, you know,” says Watson. “You do need an anti-shark gun. That spot beneath the tail’s unguarded and unsighted.”
“Look at this one,” Clegg says, pointing to an upward-angled perch that’s nibbling a toast crumb on the water’s surface. “It’s hanging on the propeller.”
“These two orange ones have taken up a good position,” Watson comments. “No one below them, lots of clear air to rise through…”
The fish-tank modelling affects the way Serge sees things in the sky: now heavy clouds above him look like the huddled bellies of a school of whales; the tall, waving poplars become fronds of seaweed; the ashen ruins of bombed villages, clusters of coral. To the seas. On days when rain, uninterrupted, washes away the line dividing river-water from the air above it, the men move around the mess like fish inside a tank, with liquid sluicing through their gills.
“Says here two measures whiskey, one Champagne,” Gibbs announces as he pours the contents of three bottles into a metal bucket.
“Ella’s stopped singing,” Clegg complains, face sunken in guppy-like despondency.
“Then give the gramophone a drink,” Gibbs tells him.
“The Bellerophone!” the others shout out drunkenly. They commandeer the bucket, drag it over to the music corner, crank the machine up again and start dribbling the cocktail down the speaking horn’s throat. As it trickles out across the disc at the horn’s other end, the music goes faint and warbly, as though it were being performed underwater. The men fall about laughing. When Ella drowns completely, they burst into song themselves:
Take the cylinder out of my kidneys,
The connecting rod out of my brain, my brain,
From the small of my back take the camshaft
And assemble the engine again.
In the lulls between songs, the conversation reverts, like a pickup’s arm returning to its cradle, to discussions of the dead.
“I saw it all,” some pilot says of some other one who could as well be here describing yet another. “The fuel tank caught fire at the front of the machine, and so he put the tail down, to keep the flames from the cockpit. But they’d spread already. Then he tried to swat them out. When that didn’t work, he climbed out of his seat and started walking back along the fuselage. By the end he was crouching on the tail. Then he jumped.”
“Did they find his body?”
“In some old woman’s laundry yard.”
“That Trenchard is a lunatic,” snarls Gibbs. “The kite balloon-men, who’ve got winches tied to them like apron-strings, are issued parachutes. But we, who fly ten times as high without any cord to haul us back, get nothing.”
“He thinks they’d slow the machines down,” Serge tells him, “also, that they’d encourage us to jump instead of land each time we had a problem. Then there’s the silk shortage…”
“What silk shortage?” Gibbs sputters through his drink. “The Germans have parachutes made from British silk! We’ve got enough to sell it to them, but not enough for our own side?”
Serge says nothing, but in his mind sees tall piles of fresh crêpe, Jacquard and moiré being stitched into large jellyfish-shapes by women who, at least in the scenario his mind’s concocting for him right now, cavort with lions and sheep beneath a hybrid Sino-German flag, while generals smile and whisper in the background. His mother’s somewhere in this picture, consorting with a buyer who, his face obscured by a thin silk sheet, talks loudly in an accent as strange as her own, pronouncing words Serge can’t make out.
“I dream of going down in flames each night,” Clegg mumbles. “It’s always the same: the bed’s on fire. It starts at its foot, and moves up. I try to tip the whole thing back, then stall and side-slip down, but it never works.”
“You could put it out by wetting yourself,” Serge tells him.
The men all burst into laughter again, but this time it’s hollow. They’re all terrified of becoming carboneezay, flamers. Candles are now banned on board the houseboat lest, by setting fire to its wooden beams, they allow the “orange death” that stalks them in the sky to catch up with them even on the ground; paraffin lamps have been replaced by electric bulbs inside the mess; even sparking up cigarettes causes the men to shudder as they flip the lighter’s lid shut with a kind of angry vehemence. Of all the pilots and observers, Serge alone remains unhaunted by the prospect of a fiery airborne end. He’s not unaware of it: just unbothered. The idea that his flesh could melt and fuse with the machine parts pleases him. When they sing their song about taking cylinders out of kidneys, he imagines the whole process playing itself out backwards: brain and connecting rod merging to form one, ultra-intelligent organ, his back quivering in pleasure as pumps and pistons plunge into it, heart and liver being spliced with valve and filter to create a whole new, streamlined mechanism. Sometimes he dreams he’s growing wings and, waking up, prods at his breastbone, trying to discern an outward swelling in it; each rib feels like a strut. He shakes after flights just like the others, but he doesn’t mind: the vibrations make him feel alive. He buzzes with kinetic potency as he carries them to Vitriers, to Cécile, where they make the brass knobs above her bedstead shake and bore their way on into her flesh too…
Cécile’s place is unheated. By October, evenings there are cold. He brings her a dead observer’s jacket to keep warm in.
“If he was killed, how come his jacket came back?” she asks, slipping it over her bare skin.
“Oh, he came back too,” Serge answers. “Just not alive. Look, you can see the bullet holes.”
Her eyes peer down her nose while her hand presses the leather to her stomach.
“On the left side,” he helps her out.
“Ah yes,” she purrs, poking her finger through a hole. “Direct dans la poitrine.”
She keeps it on while they make love again. Serge, kneeling behind her with his face pressed into collar fur, imagines the bullet piercing the jacket’s leather and travelling onwards through both the observer and Cécile, then, broken down into a million particles, lodging in him not only harmlessly but also beneficially, as though he were both its and the other two’s final destination, the natural conclusion of a process whose trajectory conjoined them all. Afterwards, he picks one of her stockings from the floor and, holding it up to his face, stretches its fabric.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“If you could spare this, it would really keep me warm up in the air.”
“Your legs will be too big for it,” she says.
“It’s not for my legs,” he says. “I’d wear it on my head, beneath the helmet.”
Cécile shrugs. A clunking sound comes from the street outside. People are moving stuff around all the time these days: chests of drawers, tables, bathtubs, cookers, sinks. The German ordnance has been falling closer and closer to the town, destroying outlying villages and pitching their inhabitants up on the doorsteps of relatives who themselves are beginning, as stray shells start breaching civic limits, to gather together family heirlooms or at least saleable objects, tie them to carts and trundle down potholed roads towards imagined safety. Those who’ve stayed lug buckets and cylinders from house to pump and shop to house: the water and gas pipes feeding half the populace have been destroyed. Drains and sewers have been snapped and dragged up from beneath the ground to spew their mess across the cobblestones. Even a graveyard on the edge of town has been blown up; the stench of unearthed corpses carries through air whose coldness crystallises and preserves it. Serge can see the graveyard from Cécile’s window. Beyond it, two dead horses lie with swollen stomachs in a field. Beyond them, past the rubble of the farmhouse that once marked the field’s boundary, blackened and splintered tree-stumps litter a winter landscape that he couldn’t imagine ever having been another way.
ii
One afternoon in January, Walpond-Skinner gathers the men together in the red-gabled house’s main room and informs them that a major push is being prepared. Serge, Gibbs and several other pilots and observers are taken off flying duties above the front and sent ten miles back to practise Contact Patrol work. This turns out to consist of flying low over advancing infantry who have mirrors attached to their backs, sounding a klaxon from the cockpit to solicit from the ground flares which, in turn, indicate positions and accomplishments. Bengal lights mean a wood has been captured, Aldis ones a trench, and Hucks a battery-or is it Aldis for battery and Hucks for woods? And is a copse a wood? How many trees…? Serge suspects, even as they learn the signals and run through the klaxon sequences, that the system’s flawed. The mock-battles that they act out over unmined, undefended fields usually manage to degenerate into confusion. In the week he spends there, three machines crash: two of them into each other, pilots glare-blinded by mirrors…
Serge finds it hard to sleep. It’s not the gentle rocking of the houseboat that he misses so much as the front’s sounds all around him: they’ve become his nightly lullaby. He can still hear the howitzers from here, of course, but they’re too distant-and besides, their sound is drowned out by the noise of Crossleys carrying troops eastward: convoy after convoy of them, trundling past the window of his cabin in an unbroken supply chain. Infantry march by round the clock as well, the rhythm of their step setting off in Serge’s head the lead-up lines from Sonnet 65:
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back,
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
Returning to the 104th at the week’s end, he whoops for joy as the poplars, Bessoneaus and grazing cows appear beneath his wing, then runs along the path that leads through the wood (or copse) to the river and, throwing himself on the bed, flips Stanley’s book open so that he can read 65’s riposte line, already firmly scrawled across his memory, with his own eyes:
O none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.
“So when’s the big day, then?” he asks Walpond-Skinner.
“Firstly, Carrefax, it’s ‘big day, sir’-or, strictly speaking, ‘big day, sir, then.’ ”
“Sir, then,” Serge corrects himself. “Then when-?”
“And secondly, that’s privileged information. I would tell you that it’s mine to know and yours to wonder about-if I knew myself, that is, which I’m afraid I don’t. The moles have to finish their work first.”
“Moles, sir?”
“The tunnellers. They’re digging all the way through no man’s land, so they can lay explosives underneath the trenches, gun emplacements and what have you. Got to proceed slowly: make sure it doesn’t cave in, make sure they keep quiet, listen out for Germans counter-tunnelling beneath them, all that sort of thing…”
Serge becomes fascinated with these tunnellers, these moles. He pictures their noses twitching as they alternately dig and strap on stethoscopes that, pressing to the ground, they listen through for sounds of netherer moles undermining their undermining. If they did hear them doing this, he tells himself, then they could dig an even lower tunnel, undermine the under-undermining: on and on forever, or at least for as long as the volume and mass of the globe allowed it-until earth gave over to a molten core, or, bypassing this, they emerged in Australia to find there was no war there and, unable to return in time for action, sat around aimlessly blinking in the daylight…
In anticipation of the push, there’s almost constant bombardment of the German side. It’s barrage bombardment: the shells advance in lines, like the teeth of a giant comb moving up warp fibres, ten or so yards each time. For Serge, sleeping in his houseboat once again, the booms of the guns’ discharge to the west, spread out along a line of well over a mile yet sounding almost simultaneously, and the consequent, equally elongated blasts of their detonation to the east, a little further away with each round, become the sounds of waves rolling past him, moving towards a shoreline that’s retreating; no sooner does the longest-travelling one peter out on distant shingle than a new, close-range set swells up and starts bursting energetically. After five days and nights of this, though, he wakes up to silence. Not only have the shells stopped: so, too, have most of the small-gauge gunfire, Archie pops and flares. Nothing at all seems to be happening. All of the squadron’s flights are in the hangars. Scouring the unusually bright winter sky, he fails to pick out a single aeroplane against its blue. It looks desolate and sad, as though aware that it’s being spurned by beautiful machinery and at a loss to understand why.
The push begins the next day. Almost all the 104th’s planes are involved in it in one way or another. The RE8s are to fly in holding patterns until the tunnellers’ mines are detonated at half past eleven on the dot-their cue to swoop down low and monitor the progress of the infantry battalion to which each of them has been assigned, tracking the soldiers through no-man’s-land towards the target destination. They’re to report the battalion’s advance to stations set up a mile or so behind the front for this very occasion, which in turn will relay the troops’ positions back to HQ-where, Serge presumes, they must have a warlike version of the Realtor’s Game laid out across a table, with helmets instead of top hats, trucks instead of cars and rabid, snarling dogs being shunted over flattened icons representing trenches, hills and machine-gun nests. Serge and Gibbs have been assigned the 10th Battalion; their target destination is a spinney.
“Spinney, now, is it?” Gibbs snorts. “They should’ve given us a course on forestry before sending us out here.”
“What are you taking a shaving set with you for, Sassen?” Walpond-Skinner asks a pilot in the front row.
“Case I get shot down and taken prisoner, sir. Want to keep up appearances.”
“Why not just send your silk pyjamas over, and arrange for your mail to be forwarded? Go and put it back in your quarters! The only thing you’ll need with you if you get shot down and end up in one piece is a Verey gun, to torch the machine with.”
“I’ve got to pop over to the Floaters too,” Serge mumbles to Gibbs. “Our medicine box is low.”
Gibbs shrugs. He’s tried the cocaine-in-the-eyeballs trick, but doesn’t get the point of snorting it, and even less so of injecting stuff into one’s arm. Serge, for his part, can’t imagine flying without diacetylmorphine. He’s been making regular trips into Mirabel for months now, appointing himself, as far as the quartermaster there’s concerned, the squadron’s pharmaceutical liaison officer. Back on the boat, he stabs a phial into his wrist, then, catching sight of Cécile’s stocking, two round peep-holes snipped out of its fabric, picks that up and slips it over his head, brushing his face briefly with a honey-like genital scent. He pockets two more phials on his way out, then pauses for a last look at the river and the poplars, still and impassive against all the excitement. He can hear the engines catching on the field, the first planes moving through the long grass. The diacetylmorphine takes hold as he glides back up the path and over to his RE8, turning the machines’ manoeuvres as they taxi, pause and pirouette, escorting one another into position, into ballroom-dance steps, the roar of their engines into symphonies whose every chord is laden with insinuation…
Flying towards the lines, Serge has the same sensation as he had in massage sessions with Tania towards the end of his Kloděbrady sojourn. The whole front has a weekend feel. No round, white balloons are up; no blue and red lights flicker in the trenches. There’s no cordite smoke, no vapour blanket, nothing. It looks like the entire war effort has been stood down-or, rather, put into a casual mode in which formalities have been relaxed and, consequently, anything is possible. As he nears the English lines, he notices a change in the texture and colouration of the ground behind them. Its surface, previously pale and washed-out, has become darkened by spiky dots. They’re everywhere, crowded together like ants. In the relatively quiet air, Gibbs has no problem making himself heard as he shouts back to Serge:
“Men!”
They spill out of the trenches, flecking the circles and mandalas of the ruined roads and pathways. In some places Serge can make out subdivisions in their mass, semi-discrete clusters; in others the clusters are so large that they’ve run together and eclipsed the ground entirely. Unlike ants, though, they’re not moving: packed together with their bayoneted rifles pointing upwards, they’re sitting still as encrustations on a rock or hull, waiting for the signal to move. Serge reaches down between his legs and lowers his copper aerial. Testing the sigs, he leads Gibbs to above their interim receiving station, marked by a semi-circle of white cloth beside which, in place of Popham strips, a black-and-white Venetian blind opens and closes, winking Morse OKs at him. Then they turn back towards the lines and climb. Their route is slightly different to the normal one; the shift adds to the sense of strangeness brought about by the guns’ silence. The men in the German trenches seem to have noticed the changes too, to sense that something new is coming their way: they’re too nervous to send more than a token spattering of tracer fire towards him. The German kite balloons have picked up on the break with protocol as well: all down the line they’re up as high as they can go. The one emerging from beneath his tail doesn’t bother to winch itself out of range, so intent is it on fixing its gaze on the dots massing on the far side-and Serge, caught in the same spell of anticipation, doesn’t bother to strafe it.
They find their position just back from the German lines at three-and-a-half thousand feet. Serge looks up and sees the squadron’s SE5s patrolling in formation high above them. He looks at his watch: twenty-eight minutes past eleven. He looks down: the whole battlefield is static, calm; only the planes move, serenely etching out their patterns. As Gibbs turns, then turns again, Serge runs his eye along the earth below, wondering in which part of it the moles have secreted their explosive droppings. For a while, he feels the presence, composited from blocks of air and tricks of the light, of that faceless diviner Baron Karl von Arnow: he’s hovering beside him, holding a dowser’s stick; and the wind buffeting the struts and wires is pronouncing his name-insistently, repeating it over and over: Are-NOW, Are-NOW, Are-NOW…
Then, as though summoned upwards by this incantation, the earth rises towards him. At first it looks like a set of welts bubbling up across its surface; the welts grow into large domes with smooth, convex roofs; the roofs, still rising upwards and expanding, start to crack, then break open completely; and through their ruptured crusts shoot long, straight jets of earth: huge, rushing geysers that look as though they’re being propelled upwards by nothing but their own force and volume, the dull brown matter defying both height and gravity through sheer self-will. As the closest geyser funnels up past the machine, its dizzy clods glitter in the air. Serge looks out horizontally, first north, then south: the whole German line is punctuated by these earth jets. They look like columns holding up the sky; it seems that if they crumbled it would fall. Their apex is much higher than his plane; for the first time, he has the impression that he’s flying not above the earth’s surface but below it-or, rather, within some kind of enclave contained inside it. A few seconds later, particles start raining down on the machine: small clumps and flecks, beating against the wings and sprinkling his cabin. The jets evaporate, and Serge looks down again to see two enormous holes in the ground beneath him. They gape like hollow eyes, the sockets of some giant who’s been lying beneath the landscape buried-perhaps for centuries, or perhaps even longer-and is only now, part by part, being disinterred.
“Shall I go down?” Gibbs shouts.
Serge doesn’t answer, hypnotised by the evacuated eyes.
“Shall I go down?” Gibbs shouts again.
Slowly, Serge moves his gaze to the east. The spiky dot-men on the ground have started moving. They’re swarming forwards, trickling through no-man’s-land’s rills and gullies. Every so often parts of their mass are thrown into the air by landmine explosions that, compared to the enormous ones that have just preceded them, seem no more substantial than the bursting of small spots. Shells have started falling too, machine guns chattering. Serge can pick out the starting-flare of 10th Battalion; he signals to Gibbs to fly towards it. As they make their first pass, the mirrors on the men’s backs flash; by the time they’ve turned around and made their second, there’s so much smoke around that none of the sky’s luminescence makes its way down to the mirrors and back up to Serge; by the third he can’t even see the men. He sounds his klaxon, but its noise is lost amidst gunfire. He can hear another machine’s klaxon sounding too, and presses his own again, to let it know he’s nearby; other planes apply their horns as well, like ships in fog. Serge taps Gibbs on the back and shouts:
“Up again.”
Gibbs points to his ear and shakes his head: too loud to hear each other now. Serge jerks his finger upwards. As they climb out of the smoke, he tries to send a signal to his ground station, but finds he can’t: the hurled-up earth has gritted up the spark set, jamming its parts. When he bangs it on the cockpit’s side in an attempt to shake the earth out, the whole tapper-key comes loose; trying to reattach it, he severs a wire. Gibbs is holding a position at three thousand feet, awaiting instructions, but Serge has none to issue. His spark set’s demise is giving him a strange, almost electric sensation: it feels as though he were flying naked, as though a layer of insulating hardware and a softer, inner one of message-lace had suddenly been stripped away and he himself were the thing riding the air’s frequency, pulsing right up against it. Despite his diacetylmorphine-induced languor, he begins to feel a buzzing in his groin again. More blood runs to it as Gibbs plunges back towards the smoke. Tilted back and facing upwards, hardening, Serge can see why Gibbs is diving: a whole Jasta has descended on the SE5s. The colourful German planes and the more sombre English ones turn around each other in confused whirlpools, their vapour trails forming a vortex that’s drifting to the side with the wind. They look like bees swirling around a honey jar. One of the English machines is on fire. Two of the German ones have broken loose and are now hurtling downwards.
“Albatroses,” Gibbs shouts back to him, his voice amplified and made audible by fear.
As they sink through the smoke-cloud, Serge sounds his klaxon again, then looks down. The battlefield’s now strewn with fragments: of machine parts, mirrors, men. Legs, wedged in by earth, stand upright in athletic postures, crooked at the knee as though to sprint or straightened into sprightly leaps but, lacking bodies to direct and complement their action, remain still; detached arms semaphore quite randomly across the ground; torsos, cut off at the waist, mimic the statues of antiquity. Gibbs flies above them for a while, then pulls the plane up and takes them back for a peep above the smoke. No sooner have they cleared it than Serge hears a rhythmic tapping: it’s as though a mechanic were standing beside the machine rapping on the fuselage to get their attention. The taps make the canvas on the plane’s back section tauten and jump; little holes appear in a straight line along it. They look like a row of popper-buttons springing open, starting at the tail and advancing towards his cabin, which they then move across as well, pocking its floor. A mass of shadow runs behind them, bringing with it a loud sound he doesn’t recognise. As the sound climaxes and falls off, Serge looks up and sees, coming from where the sun should be, a wave of brightly-coloured metal hurtling downwards. It sinks beneath them; he swivels his head to follow it, and watches the mass resolve itself into the shape of an Albatros. It’s turning below them, getting ready to come back; then it’s climbing behind them, just out of range, amassing altitude so it can dive again. Colours radiate from its underbelly-the central part of which, the lower wing, has words painted across it. He can’t make the words out, but he can see some of their letters: there’s a K, an m, a c…
“Shoot at them when they come back!” Gibbs shouts, pointing to the Lewis gun.
Serge turns away and gazes at the Albatros as it turns gracefully above them. He looks at the gun: should he shoot? The German aeroplane is beautiful, elegant and agile; and it’s selected them, of all the men and machines in the battlefield, to bear down on with its colour and its words-as though, like an annunciating angel, it had a message to convey, one just for them, for him. It’s hovering five hundred feet above him, shedding speed, nose angling downwards; then it starts diving, its front spitting out streaks of yellow and orange, like a splashing paintbrush. More buttons pop along the fuselage; struts leap out from between the wings. It passes above the RE8 this time; as it does, the phrase painted on its lower wing streaks by again: the m is actually two n’s; the c’s part of the sequence sch, like in schwer. Serge sees a t, then loses sight of the plane; Gibbs, meanwhile, turns, then turns again, trying to shake it off their tail.
“Shoot!” he screams back at Serge.
Serge isn’t going to shoot. He feels tranquil, passive. He wants the Albatros to come and pluck him from his nest and carry him away in a long, whispered rush of consonants. He still can’t see it-but a set of bumps rising from the undercarriage lets him know it’s coming back at them from the shark angle, the blind spot. The bumps are followed by a jolting at his back. He turns around to see Gibbs’s shoulders first straighten suddenly, straining against the belt, then slacken and slump forwards. One of the plane’s wings snaps; the machine lists to the side as the landscape below it starts elevating. As the smoke cloud rises up to meet them, the Albatros looms once more into Serge’s vision. It hovers above them, the one bright object in the darkened sky, the phrase written across its lower wing now finally legible. Painted in black, Gothic script on a red background, it reads:
Kennscht mi noch?
The phrase stays with him as the sky falls away. It seems to flicker all around the machine, seeding the air with a significance whose essence eludes him. “Do you still recognise me?” the painted words have asked him. Tilting his head back as he waits for earth to gather him, he wonders who the “me” is, or what time, what tense, what moment might be indicated by the “still.” The RE8 flattens out a little. A last dark, elongated kite balloon flashes by, burning. The plane hits something, but it’s not the ground: it feels more like a buffer, a soft boundary beyond which the air has a heavier, slower texture. He can feel this texture all around him too-see it as well: it’s silken, swirling about his shoulders and enveloping the whole machine, thin fibres at its rear expanding and contracting in the slipstream like a jellyfish’s tentacles, shooing the world away. Within its canopy, the humming of the plane’s struts and wires is amplified and softened; light is filtered, made to glow. Then the light dims, the sound fades out and there’s nothing.
iii
When he wakes up, there’s brown fabric covering his vision. It’s right up against his eyes: a diagonal grid that stays still as he glances left and right. Inhaling, he breathes in again the rich and honeyed smell of cunt. Touching his hand to his face, he feels the thread of Cécile’s stocking. The peep-holes have slipped down towards his mouth; he gouges a finger into one of them and tears the whole thing off. His view’s still blocked by fabric, though: the white, silky stuff that wrapped the machine as it fell forms a sac around it. Serge runs his eye down past the tail, to where the sac’s thinner fibres are-and sees, at their end, lying on the ground fifteen feet away, a human figure in a harness.
“It’s a parachute,” he says to Gibbs. “We hit a parachute on the way down.”
His voice is strangely muffled: he can hear himself-but only silently, inside his head. Gibbs doesn’t seem to hear him either: he doesn’t answer-or if he does then his voice isn’t loud enough for Serge to pick it up. Serge turns round. Gibbs is dead: stuff from his chest is spattered about the cockpit. Serge unclips his own harness, levers himself from his seat and drops to the silk-coated ground. Pushing his hands against a roof and walls of silk, he makes his way along the soft, white tube towards the opening by the strings and, emerging through this, prods the man tied to them. He’s dead too, head split open from its impact against the earth. He must have jumped from the burning kite balloon, only for his parachute to be run into by their machine and carried along horizontally-or, rather, on a diagonal descent-dragging him with it.
Serge looks around him. The landscape is nondescript, brown and broken, like all the front’s terrain. Twenty or so yards away, a section of it jumps into the air as a shell lands on it. The explosion is silent: it’s as though he were watching one of Widsun’s films. Even the rushing air and the earth clods it brings smacking against his face carry no sound in their wake. He traps one of the clods against his skin, holds it out and inspects it. Viewed from this close, the earth takes on a similar resolution to the one it has in those photographs he shoots for Pietersen, pockmarked and lined with patterns. He lets it drop, from sympathy: it’s been churned up enough. Watching it fall past his groin, he realises he’s still got an erection. He looks about him, embarrassed, before remembering that there’s no one else around. He could be anywhere. The fact that they hit a German kite balloon’s occupant, or ex-occupant, on the way down suggests they were heading east, in which case… Should he torch the machine? As he wonders this, the pressure grows inside his ears-and with it comes, at last, a sound. It’s a quiet one, resonating at a low frequency and emerging from inside the parachute: an electric buzzing spilling out of the inflated pod. He heads back through its opening towards the broken wings and bent propeller blades that, like a set of irregular tent-poles, hold the structure up. The buzzing’s coming from the cockpit-from the back half of it, his half…
Pulling himself up again and peering in, he sees that it’s his spark set making it. The six-volt battery has fallen from its spot and half-smashed on the cabin’s floor; the wires issuing from it are sparking intermittently; and the unregulated flow of electricity into the tapper key is making the latter twitch, as though the current-and with it, the entire signalling regime-had been reversed and the set were now receiving rather than transmitting. Serge reaches past it for the medicine box, then realises that the two phials he picked up from the houseboat are still in his pocket. He takes one out, rolls back his sleeve and injects its contents into his forearm, then leans over Gibbs and grabs hold of his Verey gun.
“Silk pyjamas.”
Did he say that or just hear it in his muffled head? He looks at the buzzing radio set again. The sparks are spreading further down the wires now, spreading too across the cockpit’s floor, where engine oil is flickering alight. Serge drops the Verey gun, yanks what remains of the transmitter loose, lowers himself to the ground once more and walks slowly down the tube again, then past the dead parachutist and across the churned-up landscape. He turns back after a while and, cradling the spark set in his arms, watches the parachute and machine burning. The silk turns black, then orange, then falls away to reveal the wooden skeleton beneath it blackening as well. Small collapses and eruptions take place within the flames’ mass, but they make no noise: the only sound’s the low-resonating buzzing which, despite the spark set being both smashed and disconnected, is still echoing inside his head. He stares at the flames for what could be seconds, minutes or hours, then turns again and walks away.
After a while he finds himself strolling beneath mutilated willows at the edge of what must once have been a picturesque country pond. The water, frosted over in parts, has a rust-brown texture laced with silver threads of mercury. Pieces of shell-casing, ripped and jagged, protrude from its surface. At its sides yellow, erect reeds tremble and shudder. Serge can’t tell if it’s wind or buffeting from ordnance fall making them move. He can’t hear any rustling-but he does start hearing a high-pitched note, breaking through the buzzing in his head: it seems to come from somewhere else, somewhere exterior. Is it connected with the reeds, their oscillation? He can’t tell. The ground around the pond is coated with military refuse and metallic dust, as though fragments of the sky had flaked off and fallen to earth. Birds are moving among these: jackdaws, crows and ravens, picking through the pieces with gestures as mechanical and irregular as the broken parts themselves. Smoke drifts around their beaks. As Serge comes near they all take off and fly in a long, funerary procession towards nearby woodland, their shadows strafing the ground.
He follows them. What draws him towards the woods isn’t a reasoned need to find cover or hide, but rather the high-pitched note piercing his ears: it seems to carry from among the trees-to emanate from within their dense mass with a kind of intent, like an electric summons. The sound grows louder as he threads his way between the trunks, as though held in and concentrated by the canopies and branches, bounced back up by moss to linger at head height. Listening to it more carefully, he discovers that it’s actually composed of several notes and pitches, weaving into and out of one another like the strands of interference you get when you nudge through the dial. When he stands still and tunes his ear to them more finely, the notes amalgamate into two trunk-tones: the high-pitched one he first picked up and, nestling within its sonic shadow, a deeper one that has the pitch of trumpets. Together, the two tones form a melancholy wail, like the long-drawn-out scream of a fall that never hits the surface towards which it’s falling.
An animal darts past his feet and vanishes as soon as it appears. Was it a fox? A dog? It had something in its mouth. Serge, still cradling the broken spark set, presses on into the woods. More animals disperse as he comes near. They’re all holding things between their teeth, grey morsels laced with scarlet; even the black birds perching in the trees pinch titbits in the beaks down which they peer at him disdainfully. He’s come to a spot where all the trees are crippled: trunks riven, branches snapped, both scorched and covered in large patches of tar. Tar coats the ground in intermittent patches too, countering its winter hardness with soft, insulating accretions. The accretions grow more frequent as he treads towards a small clearing secreted among the trees: the tar-coat covers the floor of this almost completely. Men are sitting on the tar as though on a padded blanket, backs propped against the trees’ bases, packs and weapons at their feet. There must be ten or fifteen of them, wearing German uniforms. They’re all dead. They slump against the trunks like over-ripened fruit that’s lost its shape, begun to rot. Their faces all wear grimaces, as though frozen in a grotesque laughter bordering on the insane. Serge looks at their mouths: some of the jaws are dislocated and hang loose; two of them have been ripped open by shrapnel wounds extending from the chest, or neck, or cheek; one has been blown off entirely, leaving a hole through which broken shards of jawbone poke.
The sound’s loud here. The men’s deformed mouths seem to be either transmitting it or, if not, then at least shaping it, their twisted surfaces and turned-out membranes forming receptacles in which its frequencies and timbres are unravelled, recombined, then sent back out into the air both transformed and augmented, relayed onwards. Their eyes, despite being empty of perception or reaction, seem electrified, shot through with a current that, being too strong for them, has shattered them and left them with a burnt-out, hungry look. Their clothes have streaks of red on them. The tar’s black is streaked with red as well, just like the Albatros’s fuselage. It’s a bright red: a kind of scarlet, rippling across the tree trunks like an ensign fluttering in wind. It gives the tiny, overhung clearing a cosy glow that complements the sweet smell of tar and corruption lingering about its air. The sound vibrates about the air too, infusing the whole scene with what feels like a kind of heat: it seems as though, despite the cold, the earth were sweating, yielding up these phantoms, passing their bones and flesh on through its strata, up past layers of frosted mulch and tar, delivering them back to life, albeit in a dead form. They almost seem to move. One of them is moving: dragging himself upright against his tree trunk, then, placing one foot in front of the other, lurching forwards along a line that leads past Serge towards the clearing’s far side.
“You’re alive?” Serge asks him as he passes.
The man halts in his lurching for a moment. His head turns in Serge’s direction and bobs unsteadily above its shoulders while the eyes take in the spark set and still-bulging groin, before turning away again. His neck has a big hole in its side that Serge can see right through. After a while his legs jerk back into action and carry him flat-footedly along his trajectory.
“Where are you going?” Serge asks as he walks away.
The man doesn’t answer. He’s not listening to him: he, too, is tuned in to the high-pitched noise; he’s drawn by it, is following it to its source. Serge watches his thin, feminine form slink away behind more tree trunks. Just before it disappears, it passes something soft and white. Another parachute? Serge starts walking in the same direction. The noise is growing stronger: louder, more precise. As he steps forwards, he starts murmuring zone-call sequences: ones he’s sent in the past, or might have sent, or might be sending even now, somehow, to someone waiting at the far end of this air that seems to have become all noise and signal:
“BY.NF. BADSAC7 SC-CS 1911; BY.VER. BUC2 SC-CS 1913…”
He murmurs whole strings of them, one after the other, repeating and mutating as they travel from his lips into the woods. He does this for no reason other than that it makes him feel good: at one with the blasted trees, the electricity, the tar and deformation. It produces an effect, though: after a long, repetitive stretch in which he might or might not retrace his own steps at least once (the sequences of trees seem to repeat as well, but never quite in the same way; the soft, white thing among the trees glides half-into, then out of, view again), men in German uniforms appear from among the trunks and branches. These ones are definitely alive. Their weapons point at him; their undeformed mouths move; they eye the spark set with suspicion.
“What?” Serge asks. He can’t hear them.
Their guns jerk upwards; their mouths move again.
“Was?” he switches to German.
“… Feng ennerf,” one of their voices weaves its way into the high-pitched noise’s mesh.
“Was?” Serge asks again. It sounded like “Thing enough,” “Fending off,” something along those lines. He points to his ear. “Schwer zu fassen.”
“… Enner,” the man says, mouthing the word slowly.
“Enna?” Serge asks.
“… Engnis,” the man tells him, not unkindly.
Serge smiles back apologetically. It was somewhere like “End this”-or perhaps, conversely, “Endless”… A new soldier appears and the others turn to him and talk. This one is more smartly dressed, an officer. He steps over to Serge and takes the spark set from him; as he does, the high-pitched noise stops suddenly and Serge can clearly hear the man say:
“Zu Gefängnis. Prison. You are prisoner.”
iv
He’s sent away from the frontier: eastwards, to the interior. Having ascertained that he’s an officer, his captors group him with his peers and transport them initially in first-class carriages, then second-class, then third, downgrading their conveyance every hundred miles or so. Eventually they find themselves in cattle trucks. A German corporal and three privates stand guard above them, jerking and swaying in front of neat fields, canals, factories and towns that follow one another with a progression whose logic seems both perfect and impenetrable. Occasionally, they pause at stations; while they’re handed bread and coffee, women stare at them malevolently from the platforms; as the train pulls off again, sliding past houses whose doors wear wreaths and crosses and whose windows, covered by black blinds, transmit in Venetian Morse the same message each time, Serge understands why. On every road, in every town and village, columns of soldiers pass by marching in the opposite direction, the neat stamp-and-click of their swift footfall drawing briefly into line with the rhythm of the steam and pistons’ chug and hissing before disengaging, fading and dying away…
He gets passed through a series of processing stations and transit camps. At each one they ask his name and rank. His answer to the former question never fails to elicit a humorous comment:
“Chafer? You are Insekt, beetle?”
“Carrefax,” Serge answers, stretching the x out into a long, steam-like release of breath.
“Käfers? Then you are more than one: many Insekts!”
After running through the fourth or fifth variation on this exchange, he finds himself inducted into an Offizierslage in Hammelburg. Hammelburg is a barracks town: the prison’s just a section of the town that’s been wired off from the surrounding streets. The dormitories in which the prisoners sleep eight or ten to a room line a cobbled square that’s hemmed in by sharp-angled red- and brown-slate roofs rising above the yellow and red houses, tradesmen’s premises and municipal buildings that jostle and collide with one another with Germanic closeness and compression. The guards who police the penned-in sector of the town are old, shoddily dressed, confused. Several of them limp; one of them’s missing an eye. On the far side of the wire, in the same square, new recruits are drill-marched up and down all day long. Often, when the prisoners are lined up in the open during roll call, the recruits cast anxious glances their way, as though trying to catch a glimpse of what awaits them. Serge tries to smile back each time one of their eyes meets his, as though to reassure them that it’s not that bad-until it strikes him that what’s putting the fear into their faces might not be the enemy but rather their own veterans: the thought that they’ll end up like that…
Roll-call is taken round the clock: in the square, in the dormitories, routinely first thing every morning, without warning in the middle of the night. When they’re not standing to attention, prisoners mooch around, play bridge, attend (or deliver) lectures on a variety of subjects ranging from history and medicine to religion, or study French, German or Latin. Serge inscribes himself in Moreton’s course on Problems in Philosophy.
“The history of our thinking on free will hinges around the question of determinism: are events pre-scripted, as it were-by God, our cells or an invisible engine driving history’s course? And even if they are, are we still free to choose to do what we were destined to do anyway-standing face-to-face with its implications, in full awareness of its consequences? Hume thought so, and allowed this liberty to, as he put it, ‘everyone who is not a prisoner and in chains.’ ”
“Our current situation kind of pisses over that one, doesn’t it?” Serge asks.
“Not necessarily,” Moreton answers, pushing his glasses up his nose’s bridge, “not necessarily. To find our way round that we’d have to look to our captors’ philosophical tradition. Rudolf Steiner has recently argued, after Schopenhauer, that we’re free when we’re able to bridge the gap between our sensory impressions of the outer world, on the one hand, and, on the other, our own thoughts.”
“So if I think of barbed wire fences, then I’m free?”
The nose wrinkles as the glasses slide down them again. “Well, I suppose, if you put it that way: yes.”
The men in the Offizierslage are definitely free to queue-for food, mail, laundry, medical supplies or almost anything else. Queues form around the camp at the slightest provocation. One day, bored, Serge persuades two pilots to line up with him in front of the door to a coal cellar just for the hell of it: within five minutes twenty other men have fallen into line behind them without even asking what it is they’re queuing for. The food queues break down into two types: those for the camp food with which all prisoners are provided, and those for the food sent in Red Cross parcels to individuals and distributed among recipients’ compatriots. The French eat the best: their tables are adorned with marinated mackerel, cold chicken, foie gras, peas and ham, all sent in tins. The Russians eat the worst: sustained by nothing but dried fish, they spend their time and energy building a chapel with ad-hoc interior decorations. Serge visits it one day to find they’ve fashioned icons out of wood splinters and strips of cloth, using dirt, resin, wax and blood to paint emaciated saints with sorrowful faces: eyes turned ever upwards, importuning the skies for delivery, or at least for an explanation of their circumstances. The English are somewhere in between: they get sent tins of tongue, pork shoulder, broad beans, brawn, the odd plum pudding. All of them eat better than the guards, though, who are restricted to the very slop they serve out to the prisoners: turnip stew, broth with horse-meat in it, liquid cheese and nine-tenths of a loaf of black bread every week. They’re visibly hungry. They make the prisoners kick back a little of their Red Cross supplies, but know better than to demand too high a cut: the parcels would stop coming if they did…
It’s not just the guards who are hungry: townspeople habitually gather beneath a third-floor dormitory window overlooking Hammelburg’s “free” sector to beg food from the prisoners, who toss hunks of their regulation black bread to them. Sometimes they’ll throw in a chunk of meat, wrapping it in paper after removing it from its tin. The tins themselves they never throw: these are precious.
“Why?” asks Serge as a lieutenant holds his wrist back when he makes to chuck one from the window on his first day in the camp.
“Tunnelling,” the lieutenant nods back at him.
“You do that here too?”
“All the time, young fellow, all the time: what keeps us sane.”
He’s not overstating the amount of time spent tunnelling-although whether it keeps them sane or not is another question. On Serge’s very first evening, and all subsequent ones, as soon as roll-call has been taken and the lights turned out, the men, moving with balletic deftness, cover the window with a blanket, light several candles, remove a bed from the room’s corner, lift up two of the floorboards beneath it and, tying a long cord around the designated tunneller’s feet, send him head-first into the hole armed with two empty tins to dig with. As the roll-call’s fall and cadence is repeated in the dorms along the corridor one after the other, fainter and fainter every time, they watch the cord worming its way into the ground-two cords: a second, smaller string held in the burrower’s hand is attached, Ting-a-Ling-style, to a third tin that’s perched on a shelf back in the room. If the tunnel collapses or the tunneller begins to faint, he pulls on this, the tin falls and his comrades yank him back, feet first. That’s the idea, at least. Yet more tins, bases all removed, have been laced together to form a loose tube: this is shoved down the hole as far as it will go, to provide air in the manner of a snorkel. It amuses Serge to see the vegetables on the tins’ labels heading into the ground, in a long column, one after the other-as though, having shed the grit and lowness of their origins, become refined to the point of weightless, bulkless images, they’d now come full circle and were sinking back down to rejoin their dirty, material roots. The sound of hacking, scraping and panting spills from the tube’s opening into the room’s air; some tunnellers sing quietly to themselves, or strike up strange, subterranean monologues whose sense, if they had any in the first place, is distorted beyond any comprehension by the hollowed-out reaches along which they travel.
“Where does this tunnel go?” Serge asks one night as a man they all, despite his shortness, call “Lofty” toils away beneath them.
“Go?” the dormitory captain, a colonel named Craddock, counters.
“Where will it come out?”
“That’s proscribed knowledge. Escapee Committee take care of all that. They dispense info on a firm need-to-know basis.”
“Shouldn’t it be ‘Escaper Committee’?” Serge asks. “I mean, strictly speaking, the prison is the escapee, the thing escaped from. We’re escapers-and in fact not even that, not having yet escaped. More like escaper-aspirants. Who are ‘they,’ anyway?”
“That’s proscribed knowledge too.”
“You mean you’ve never met them?”
“I’ll have passed them in the square, chatted with them, played cards and so on. Perhaps we even share this dormitory with one or more of them. But their identity qua Escapee Committee members is at all times and in every circumstance withheld.”
“Then how do you know which direction to dig in?”
“It’s communicated to us via intermediaries, on a need-to-know basis, as I intimated. The committee have it all worked out: I’ve heard they’ve got a chart of all the gas-pipes, sewers and what have you, and are using those as guidelines-following them, crossing them, whatever. There’s a logic to it all…”
The man listening at the door hisses and signals to them to restore the room to its original state. No sooner has the corner bed been slid back, candles snuffed out and men reinserted beneath sheets than a guard shuffles into the dorm and moves up and down the rows, counting heads. As he passes the bunk on whose top half Lofty should be lying, the man in the lower half pulls a string to make the dummy that’s been placed above him roll over in its sleep.
“Did you see the way his hand flopped?” Craddock asks as soon as they’re all up and at it again. “Wasn’t realistic enough. We should stitch it to his face: that’s how people sleep.”
“Or have another string to control the whole arm,” another man says.
A third, spurred by talk of strings, retrieves the alarm-tin from its hiding spot beneath the bed and returns it to its shelf.
“You okay down there, Lofty?” Craddock stage-whispers down the tube. He lowers his ear to it, then decides: “We’d better haul him up.”
Lofty throws up across the floor when he emerges. Someone else goes down to bring up his loose earth, which they add to the mass stuffed in draws and cupboards, behind wall-panels, beneath other loose floorboards. As the weeks and months go by, it occurs to Serge that, far from removing earth between them and the outside world, they’re adding it around them: digging themselves in, not out. Men throw up often when they emerge from the hole; several of them, over time, become too scared to tunnel. Not Serge: he likes being down there, for one reason more than any other: it’s the only place in camp where he can masturbate. There’s nowhere else you get the requisite solitude. He wonders if the others do that too: wonders if that’s what lies behind the panting, or if the murmurs unravelling along the breathing tube are fragments of dialogues held in the dark with soft, imaginary mistresses…
He never gets brought face-to-face in full awareness with an Escapee (“Escape,” he realises as spring runs into summer, would have avoided the inaccuracies of that term) Committee member, and by autumn has started harbouring doubts about their existence. Their logic, if there is one, is skewed: tunnels frequently run headlong into impassable sunken metal joists, or into one another, or surface in other dormitories, or even, on more than one occasion, cause small sections of the cobbled square to collapse while prisoners and guards are standing on it. One tunnel still in progress in November, not originating in his room, is rumoured among the inmates of several dormitories to have breached the camp’s wire fence, although nobody will say which dorm it leads out of, where and when it will eventually surface or who will exit the camp through it-facts that lead Serge to suspect that it, too, might be no more than a collective daydream. He never finds out whether or not he’s right: in February, by which time not a single prisoner has managed to escape, he’s transferred to another camp.
This new one’s several hundred miles away, in Berchtesgaden. He’s moved around by rail again, one train after the other. The landscape changes: lowlands criss-crossed by canals give over to ravines along which brooks sparkle and fall. Sheep and cows become lopsided, grazing on sharp inclines; the shuffle and click of soldier columns is replaced by solitary figures weaving their way down hillside paths towards small stations, heading back from leave. The train starts groaning as it strains against the gradient; its puffs grow shorter and more frequent, as though it were running out of breath, which it could well be: the air does seem thinner. More refined too: Serge misses the smell of smoke, of oil and tar…
The Offizierslage in Berchtesgaden turns out to be just beyond it, separated by a stretch of rocky scrubland from the village above which it perches: used to be a monastery, one of the guards tells him. The guards here are more on-the-ball than their Trier counterparts. The officers are sharper too, but not unfriendly. The Feldwebel runs a bridge club composed mainly of his prisoners, jovially telling them they’d better not escape as it would break the fours up. He even lets them leave the camp-but only on parole. The parole system’s so absurd and contradictory it could have been devised by one of Moreton’s philosophers: prisoners are handed their freedom on condition they won’t use it, and must pledge to this condition with their word-whence the convention’s name. They trade this word against a pass that’s issued to them at the front gate as they leave; on returning an hour or so later, they hand the pass back, and their word becomes their own again. For Serge, the whole practice belongs to the same order as the sleeping dummy: it’s as though, each time he takes the word-card out, he duplicates himself and leaves a double behind as a marker. Or perhaps the other way round: he’s the double, his sensations and encounters as he wanders round the village and the fields no more than dummy ones, hallucinations given the air of veracity by contractual and linguistic strings. He even dreams once that he’s strolling around an airfield nestled in the monastery’s shadow (in reality there is none), climbing into a machine, taxiing across the grass-all perfectly legitimately, sanctioned by parole-then, as he takes off, trying to explain to some vague, airborne invigilator that the word, the word, has altered, and now lies back in the camp with his stuffed simulacrum, leaving him at liberty to fly back to the front. The invigilator, still faceless, asks what the new word (password? keyword? call sign? it’s not clear) is, posing the question by quietly whispering: “Kennscht mi noch?”
One day, during the second spring of his captivity, American prisoners arrive in the camp. They receive much better parcels than the others: salami from New York, ground beef from Chicago, endless medical supplies. Serge sets about befriending their dispensing medical officer, and trades several jars of honey and crab-apple jelly sent to him from Versoie against phials of diacetylmorphine.
“You like your sister, huh?” the dispensing officer, a Barney from Queens, New York, joshes him the third time he negotiates a trade-off.
“Sorry?” The question takes Serge aback.
“It’s what the Negroes call it up in Harlem.”
“Call what?”
“This,” Barney answers, pointing at the phials. “Sister, dope, Big H: heroin. You don’t call it that here? I mean in England?”
“No,” Serge answers him after a pause. “I don’t think we do.”
The arrangement becomes a regular one: every week Serge hands over to Barney the fruit of Versoie’s trees and beehives, Barney hands over the goods, and sister roils and courses through his veins. Out on parole, he’ll sit among the scrub, his mind at once both perfectly replete and empty. Airfields, tennis courts and cityscapes merge into and out of one another across contours of rock and hill. Gorse curls around his forearms; lichen stains his clothes: the landscape seems to penetrate his skin and grow inside him, replacing viscera and brain with heather, lavender and fern, as though he really were no more than a stuffed dummy…
The tennis courts, or at least one of them, have some basis in reality: there’s one down in the village. Officers less lethargic than him play games on it regularly, while others look on, mingling with villagers whose resentment of the enemy’s been pushed to one side by their need for food. This suits the prisoners just fine: they trade some of their tins (useless for tunnelling in this rocky terrain) against civilian clothes, which they then smuggle back into the camp and mix and match in covert fashion shows conducted with a view to finding what the French officers call “un look” that will enable them to sneak past the gate wordlessly and uncontracted. Serge, happy to spend whole afternoons watching the ball arcing back and forth across the gridded net and bouncing among painted lines, gets charged one day with slipping some of these clothes on under his own, but, too lazy to take his shirt off, pulls them on over it instead, an oversight that results in him getting caught out at the gate and sent, sisterless, to solitary for two weeks.
The first few days are dreadful, full of fits and fever. By the fifth these have subsided, leaving him wakeful and alert. He notices that two veins on his forearm have collapsed, like shallow tunnels. By the second week he feels quite good: resilient, self-sufficient-and besides, there are advantages to being alone. He spends the last three days of his confinement masturbating. There’s a smell that seeps from the cell’s walls, floor and ceiling when he does this, and only when he does: it’s musty, earthy, old but somehow fresh at the same time. Although he always starts out trying to picture Cécile-her back, the blind, the brass knobs of her bedstead, wobbling shadows on her wall and broken eggshells-these images soon give way to new ones of tunnels viewed from the interior, of fruit and vegetables being returned to earth, of tins with strings attached…
By the time autumn’s come round again, the Lage’s guards have become lax. They start going around without their uniforms, in civvies. They don’t bother checking prisoners’ parole cards, instructing them instead to collect them from and slot them back into a set of pigeonholes outside their cabin. “Punching the parole clock,” the Americans call it. As the men sally out around the village, its inhabitants come up to them and, speaking in whispers even when there’s no one there to overhear them, say:
“Kaiser kaput…”
The officers start wearing civvies too. They appear in camp less and less frequently, then withdraw from it completely, leaving a dwindling number of guards behind. In late October it’s decided by someone or other, and communicated down to all the men, that the escape plan will be put into action. Two prisoners, dressed as local tradesmen, collars turned up to cover their faces, walk out of the gate. Not only does their exit go unchallenged, but their absence isn’t even noticed in the following days. Two more men leave, disguised as cooks; then three more, hauling rubbish bins; then four, got up as nothing in particular. Then there’s an exodus: men leave at will, realising that the remaining guards simply don’t care enough to stop them.
Serge travels through the countryside with one other prisoner, a pilot from the 55th Squadron named Hodge. They stick to small paths and open fields, sleeping in ditches, pilfering from farmsteads clinging to the edge of hills: eggs, chickens, even dried maize. On the roads below them, they sometimes see troops marching away from the front. One day, they’re sitting on a wooded slope watching a battalion of infantry cross a river, waiting until they’ve disappeared so that they can cross it in the other direction, when a British aeroplane, an SE5, appears overhead and starts strafing the soldiers. They all run for cover: some of them duck beneath the bridge’s columns where these join the land; others throw their packs and rifles to the ground and plunge into the water; the majority of them, however, crawl up the very slope on which Serge and Hodge are sitting.
“English Offiz-ee-er!” Hodge says, a tad unwisely given what’s just happened on the bridge, to the soldiers who surround them with bemused looks. No longer having guns to point at them, the soldiers just stand facing them, motionless. The sound of the SE5’s engine dwindles as it goes in search of other prey. A sergeant, one arm streaked with blood, shows up.
“Wer sind die?” he barks at his men.
The men repeat what Hodge has told them. The sergeant steps right up to Hodge and, with the arm that’s not hurt, pulls Hodge’s coat back. He lifts his jersey up, then tugs the shirt loose from his trousers.
“Das ist keine Englische Uniform!” he growls.
“What’s he saying?” Hodge asks Serge.
“You’re not in uniform,” Serge translates for him.
The injured sergeant looks at Serge, then yanks at his clothes too. He’s civvy-clad as well, cap-à-pied.
“Deshalb sind sie Spione!” shouts the sergeant.
“What’s he saying now?” Hodge asks.
“He says we’re spies,” Serge tells him. “Technically, he’s right.”
“So what does that mean?”
“I imagine we’ll be shot.”
He’s spot on. The next morning, after being held in the same woods (the battalion camps there while it licks its wounds), Hodge and he are marched towards an area where the trees clear and the hillside flattens off.
“A pleasant location,” Serge comments. They didn’t pass it on the way through the woods yesterday, despite coming from the direction in which it lies.
Hodge doesn’t answer. He’s gone white. The sergeant who captured them presides over the ceremony. Still holding his bad arm in his good one, he orders his soldiers into line and, standing to the side of them, barks commands. As these mix with the click and shuffle of the rifles’ pins being pulled back, Serge experiences a familiar buzzing in his groin. He looks up. The trees’ trunks seem to incline slightly inwards as they rise. The sun’s out: blocked by the trunks in places, it casts shadows on the ground. Among the mesh of twigs and moss an insect’s moving, traversing the huge geometric patchwork of triangles and semi-circles formed by the alternating light and shade. At one point it pauses briefly, as though remembering something, and then trundles on. Finding its path barred a moment later at an obtuse angle by a twig that, to it, must seem as monumental as a fallen oak, the Käfer mounts this, then slips off again, then mounts once more. Watching it rise several times its own height, Serge gets a sense of elevation too: without leaving his body, he can look down on the whole scene. The arrangement of the soldiers, their position in relation to the clearing’s edge, the shapes formed by their planted feet, the angle of the guns against their shoulders: somehow it all makes sense. Seeing it this way, as though from above, appreciating all its lines and vectors, its vertical and horizontal axes, and at the same time from the only place from which he can see it, the spot to which he’s rooted, affords him, hand in hand with the feeling of rising, the vertiginous and pleasant sense of falling. It’s not just him; everything seems to be falling back into this moment, even the sky: a breeze is touching down now, making the trees rustle. From among the sound’s static there forms, like a clear signal, a familiar phrase:
Kennscht mi noch?
Serge murmurs the words himself this time, letting them echo from him as though he were some kind of sounding box, hollow and resonant. As he does this, their meaning becomes clear; he knows exactly what he’s saying. The question of who “me” is, or what time the “still” refers to, is no longer irksome: the dispersed, exterior mi previously held captive by the air, carried within its grain and texture, has joined with the interior one, their union then expanding to become a general condition, until “me” is every name in history; all times have fused into a now. It all makes sense. He’s been skirting this conjunction, edging his way towards it along a set of detours that have curved and meandered like the relays of a complex chart, for years-for his whole life, perhaps-and now the conjunction, its consummation, tired of waiting, has found its way to him: it’s hurtling back towards him on the line along which the bullets will come any second now. As he waits for the sergeant to give the command to shoot, Serge feels ecstatic.
The soldiers await the order too, with a perfect immobility, as though time had stopped, or run into itself so fully that it’s breached and flooded its own borders, overflowed. They could have shot already; Serge could be already dead, his consciousness held back within some kind of intermission that’s been opened up by the intricate physics of it all, or held suspended while time loops: it’s just a matter of waiting for its rim to reappear and slide back down his vision; then he’ll be gathered up by the overlap, disappear into its soft accretion. It’s not until he notices some motion behind the soldiers that he realises there’s a reason for the pause: a man, some other kind of sergeant, captain or subaltern, has appeared and called the first sergeant over to him. They’re talking together. They talk for a while-and while they do, time seems to fall back into its old shape, the accretion to withdraw. It’s not a pleasant feeling. Now the sergeant’s talking to the firing squad: he mutters something to them and they drop their guns.
“Was passiert?” Serge asks, indignant.
It’s the subaltern who answers him, in English:
“Finished. It’s over…” He starts to walk away.
“What do you mean it’s over?” Serge calls after him. “It hasn’t even started yet!”
“War over,” the subaltern shouts back across his shoulder.
Hodge drops to his knees and starts to cry. The soldiers begin walking away too, withdrawing. Superimposed across the clearing, as though projected there, Serge sees the image of a boat pulling off from a jetty at a point where several canals intersect: as the boat draws away, it takes the intersection with it, leaving him behind. For the first time in the whole course of the war, he feels scared.
“Hey!” he calls after the soldiers. “You can’t do that. Wait!”
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