Flight to Arras (15 page)

Hochedé is a former sergeant recently promoted second lieutenant. I can imagine that his culture is slight. He is unable to shed any light upon himself. But he is constructed, he is complete. The word duty loses all bombast when applied to Hochedé. Any man would be happy to accept his duty as Hochedé does. When I think of Hochedé I reproach myself for all my petty renunciations, my negligences, my laziness, and my moments of intellectualism, which is to say scepticism. This is not a sign in me of virtue but of intelligent jealousy. I should like to exist as completely as Hochedé does. A tree solidly planted on its roots is a beautiful thing. The permanence of Hochedé is a beautiful thing. Hochedé could never disappoint.

Volunteer? We were all volunteers on all our sorties. For the rest of us, the reason was a vague need to believe in ourselves. By volunteering, we outdid ourselves a little. Hochedé was a volunteer by nature. He was, in essence, this war. The fact was so evident that when a plane was bound to be sacrificed the major thought automatically of Hochedé. “Look here, Hochedé....” Hochedé was steeped in this war as a monk is steeped in religion. For whom did he fight? For himself, since he was interwoven with the war, with the Group, with France. Hochedé was fused together with a certain substance, and that substance, which was his own significance, had to be saved. At Hochedé's level, life and death are somewhat the same thing. Hochedé was already part of both. Perhaps without realizing it, he hardly feared death. Stick it out; make others stick it out—that was what mattered. For Hochedé, life and death had become reconciled.

The first time that Hochedé amazed me was when, he being still a sergeant, Gavoille tried to borrow his stop-watch in order to clock a ship.

“Lieutenant, sir. I.... I'd rather not lend it.”

“Don't be a fool! I'll give it back to you in ten minutes.”

“Sir, there's a stop-watch at the squadron depot.”

“Yes, a broken one. I know it.”

“Sir, I ... Nobody lends stop-watches, sir. I don't have to lend it to the lieutenant. It's not in orders. The lieutenant hasn't the right to insist.”

Military discipline and respect for the hierarchy may demand that a Hochedé just unlimbered from a parachute and out of a burning plane jump instantly into another plane and take off on a sortie twice as dangerous. It may not demand that he turn over to an officer a stop-watch that has cost him three months' pay and that seems to him as precious and fragile as a baby. You can tell by the way some men wave their arms that they have no respect for stopwatches. Gavoille seemed to Hochedé just such a man. And when Hochedé, still fuming with indignation, but having won out, left the room with his stop-watch over his heart, I could have embraced him. Hochedé was a man with a heart. He would fight to the death for his stop-watch. His stopwatch existed. He would die for his country. His country existed. Hochedé existed, being interwoven with both. He was shaped and heightened by his ties with watch and country.

And so Hochedé was precious in my eyes, though there was no need to tell him so. For like reasons, when Guillaumet, the best friend I ever had, was killed in the course of duty, there was no need for me to speak of him. We had flown the same airlines. Participated in the building of the same structures. Were of the same substance. Something of me died in him. Guillaumet became one of the companions of my silence. I am part of Guillaumet, and Guillaumet is part of me.

I am part of Guillaumet, of Gavoille, of Hochedé, and they are part of me. I am part of Group 2-33, and it of me. I am part of my country, and it of me. My country and I are one. And all the men of Group 2-33 are one with their country.

I have changed a good deal. I had been bitter these last days, Major Alias—these last days when the armored invasion was meeting no resistance, when our sacrificial offerings cost the Group seventeen out of twenty-three crews. It had seemed to me that we—that you in particular—were agreeing to play the part of dead men merely because the show called for dead supernumeraries. I had been bitter, Major Alias; and I had been wrong.

You in particular, but the rest of us too, had clung to the letter of a duty whose spirit had ceased to be visible for us. You had driven us intuitively not towards victory, which was impossible, but towards self-fulfillment. You knew as well as we did that the intelligence we brought back would never reach the Staff. But you were salvaging rites whose power none of us could perceive. Each time that you examined us on the lorries, the barges, the railway trains we had spotted, examined us as soberly as if our answers could possibly serve a purpose, you seemed to me revoltingly hypocritical. But you were right, Major Alias.

Until I learnt what I learnt over Arras, I could feel no responsibility for this stream of refugees over which once more I fly. I can be bound to no men except those to whom I give. I understand no men except those to whom I am bound. I exist only to the degree that I am nourished by the springs at my roots. I am bound to that mob on the highways, and it is bound to me. At three hundred miles an hour and an elevation of six hundred feet, now that I have come down out of the clouds, I have become one with that mob. I, flying in the descending night, am like a shepherd who in a single glance counts and collects and welds his scattered sheep into a flock again. That mob is no longer a mob, it is a people.

We dwell in the rot of defeat, yet I am filled with a solemn and abiding jubilation, as if I had just come from a sacrament. I am steeped in chaos, yet I have won a victory. Is there a single pilot of the Group who ever flew home without this feeling of victory in his breast? This very day, when Pénicot came in from a morning's low-altitude sortie and was telling me about it, this was how he spoke: “Whenever one of their ground batteries seemed to me to be aiming too well for my comfort, I would zoom down just above the ground and make straight for the battery at full speed, and the spray from my guns would blow out their ruddy fire as if it was a candle. Before they knew it, I was on their gun crew, and you would have thought I was a bursting shell.
Bang!
The crew would scatter and flop in every direction. I swear, I felt as if I was scattering nine-pins.” And Pénicot, victorious captain, roared with glee, as pleased with himself as Gavoille's gunner when they flew through the vault of the enemy searchlights like a military wedding-party marching under an arch of swords.

 

“Ninety-four, captain.”

Dutertre had picked up a landmark along the Seine, and we were down now to four hundred feet. Flowing beneath me at three hundred miles an hour, the earth was drawing great rectangles of wheat and alfalfa, great triangles of forest, across my glass windscreen. Divided by the stem of the plane, the flow of the broken landscape to left and right filled me with a curious satisfaction. The Seine shone below, and when I crossed its winding course at an angle it seemed to speed past and pivot upon itself. The swirl of the river was as lovely in my sight as the curve of a sickle in a field. I felt restored to my element. I was captain of my ship. The fuel tanks were holding out. I should certainly win a drink at poker dice from Pénicot and then beat Lacordaire at chess. That was how I was when my team had won.

“Captain! Firing at us! We are in forbidden territory.”

Forbidden, that is, by our own people. A rectangle in which our own people fired on any plane, friend or enemy. We had orders to fly round it, but the Group never bothered to observe these traffic regulations. Well, it was Dutertre who set the course, not I. Nobody could blame me.

“Firing hard?”

“Doing as well as they can.”

“Want to go back and round?”

“Oh, no.”

His tone was matter-of-fact. We had been through our storm. For men like us, this anti-aircraft fire was a mere April shower. Still....

“Dutertre, wouldn't it be silly to be brought down by our own guns?”

“They won't bring anything down. Just giving themselves a little exercise.”

Dutertre was in a sarcastic mood. Not I. I was happy. I was impatient to be back with the Group again.

“They are, for a fact. Firing like....”

The gunner! Come to, has he? This is the first time on board that he has opened his mouth without being spoken to. He took in the whole jaunt without feeling the need of speech. Unless that was he who muttered “Boy! oh, boy!” when the shells were thickest. But you wouldn't call that blabbing, exactly. He spoke now because machine guns are his specialty—and how can you keep a specialist quiet about his specialty?

It was impossible for me not to contrast in my mind the two worlds of plane and earth. I had led Dutertre and my gunner this day beyond the bourne at which reasonable men would stop. We had seen France in flames. We had seen the sun shining on the sea. We had grown old in the upper altitudes. We had bent our glance upon a distant earth as over the cases of a museum. We had sported in the sunlight with the dust of enemy fighter planes. Thereafter we had dropped earthward again and flung ourselves into the holocaust. What we could offer up, we had sacrificed. And in that sacrifice we had learnt even more about ourselves than we should have done after ten years in a monastery. We had come forth again after ten years in a monastery.

And in the little time we had taken to wander so far, the caravan of refugees over which we flew had perhaps advanced five hundred yards. In less time than it would take them to lift a motorcar out of a ditch and set it back on the road again, in less time than many a driver would sit drumming impatiently on the wheel as he waited for a stream of traffic to empty itself out of a crossroad, we should be safely back in our haven.

At a single bound we had leapt over the whole defeat. We were above and beyond it, pilgrims stronger than the desert through which they toil because already in their hearts they have reached the holy city that is their destination. This night now falling would park that unhappy people of refugees in its stable of misery. The flock would huddle together for comfort, but to whom, to what would it cry out? Whereas we fly towards comrades and a kind of celebration. A lamplight gleaming from the humblest hut can change the rudest winter night into Christmas Eve. We in this plane are bound for a place where there will be comrades to welcome us. We in this plane are bound for the communion of our daily bread.

Sufficient unto this day is the weariness and the bliss thereof. I shall turn over to the ground crew my ship made noble by her scars. I shall strip off my cumbrous flying clothes; and as it is now too late to win that drink from Pénicot, I shall go directly to table and dine among my comrades. We are late. Those who are late never get back. Late, are they? If late, then too late. Then nothing can be done for them. The night has swung them into eternity.

Yet at the dinner hour, when the Group takes a census of its dead, one thing is done for them: they are made handsomer than was their wont. They are sketched for ever in their most luminous smile. But we in this plane are surrendering that privilege. We shall surge up out of nowhere, like demons, like poachers in a wood. The major's hand will stop with his bread half way to his mouth. He will stare at us. Perhaps he will say, “Oh! ... Oh, there you are!” The rest will say nothing. They will scarcely throw us a glance.

There was a time when I had small respect for grown-ups. I was wrong. Men do not really grow old. Men are as pure when you come back to them as when you left them. “Oh, there you are, you who are of our kind!” The words thought and not spoken, out of delicacy of feeling.

Major Alias, that communion of spirit with the Group was to me as is the fire in the hearth to the blind. The blind sit down and put forth their palms, not seeing the source of the gladness they feel. We come home from our sortie ready for our silent reward. Its quality is unique, for it is the quality of love. We do not recognize it as love. Love, when ordinarily we think of it, implies a more tumultuous pathos. But this is the veritable love—a web woven of strands in which we are fulfilled.

When I got back to my billet I found my farmer at table with his wife and niece.

“Tell me,” I said to him; “how many instruments do you think a pilot has to look after?”

“How should I know? Not my trade,” he answered. “Must be some missing, though, to my way of thinking. The ones you win a war with. Have some supper?”

I said I'd had supper at the mess, but already he wasn't listening to me.

“You, our niece, there. Shove along a little. Make room for the captain.”

I was made to sit down between the girl and her aunt. Here was something besides the Group that I formed part of. Through my comrades I was woven into the whole of my country. Love is a seed: it has only to sprout, and its roots spread far and wide.

Silently my farmer broke the bread and handed it round. Unruffled, austere, the cares of his day had clothed him in dignity. Perhaps for the last time at this table, he shared his bread with us as in an act of worship. I sat thinking of the wide fields out of which that substance had come. To-morrow those fields would be invaded by the enemy. Oh, there would be no tumult of men and clashing arms! The earth is vast. My farmer would see no more of the invasion than a solitary sentinel posted against the wide sky on the edge of the fields. In appearance nothing would have changed; but a single sign is enough to tell man that everything has changed.

The wind running through the field of grain will still resemble a wind running over the sea. But the wind in the grain is a more wonderful sweep, for as it ruffles the tips of the wheat it takes a census of a patrimony. It takes stock of a future. The wind in the grain is the caress to the spouse, it is the hand of peace stroking her hair.

To-morrow that wheat will have changed. Wheat is something more than carnal fodder. To nourish man is not the same as to fatten cattle. Bread has more than one meaning. We have learnt to see in bread a means of communion between men, for men break bread together. We have learnt to see in bread the symbol of the dignity of labor, for bread is earned in the sweat of the brow. We have learnt to see in bread the essential vessel of compassion, for it is bread that is distributed to the miserable. There is no savor like that of bread shared between men. And I saw of a sudden that the energy contained in this spiritual food, this bread of the spirit generated by that field of wheat, was in peril. To-morrow, perhaps, when he broke bread again and sent it round the table, my farmer would not be celebrating the same household rite. To-morrow, perhaps, his bread would not bring the same glow into these faces round the table. For bread is like the oil of the lamp: its merit is in the light it sheds.