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
rumpitee
s 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 …”