Flight to Arras (4 page)

“Do you know how many instruments a pilot has to keep his eye on?”

“How do you expect me to know that?”

“No matter. Guess. Name a figure.”

“What figure?”

My farmer is not a man of tact.

“Any figure. Name one.”

“Seven.”

“One hundred and three!”

And I shall smile with satisfaction.

Another thing contributes to my peace of mind—it is that all the instruments that were an encumbrance while I was dressing have now settled into place and acquired meaning. All that tangle of tubes and wiring has become a circulatory network. I am an organism integrated into the plane. I turn this switch, which gradually heats up my overall and my oxygen, and the plane begins to generate my comfort. The oxygen, incidentally, is too hot. It burns my nose. A complicated mechanism releases it in proportion to the altitude at which I fly, and I am flying high. The plane is my wet-nurse. Before we took off, this thought seemed to me inhuman; but now, suckled by the plane itself, I feel a sort of filial affection for it. The affection of a nursling.

My weight, meanwhile, is comfortably distributed over a variety of points of support. I am like a feeble convalescent stripped of bodily consciousness and lying in a chaise-longue. The convalescent exists only as a frail thought. My triple thickness of clothing is without weight in my seat. My parachute, slung behind, lies against the back of my seat. My enormous boots rest on the bar that operates the rudder. My hands that are so awkward when first I slip on the thick stiff gloves, handle the wheel with ease. Handle the wheel. Handle the wheel....

“Dutertre!”

“... t'n?”

“Something's wrong with the inter-com. I can't hear you. Check your contacts.”

“I can ... you ... ctly.”

“Shake it up! Can you still hear me?”

Dutertre's voice came through clearly.

“Hear you perfectly, Captain.”

“Good! Dutertre, the confounded controls are frozen again. The wheel is stiff and the rudder is stuck fast.”

“That's great! What altitude?”

“Thirty-two thousand.”

“Temperature?”

“Fifty-five below zero. How's your oxygen?”

“Coming fine.”

“Gunner! How's your oxygen?”

No answer.

“Hi! Gunner!”

No answer.

“Do you hear the gunner, Dutertre?”

“No.”

“Call him.”

“Gunner! Gunner!”

No answer.

“He must have passed out, Captain. We shall have to dive.”

I didn't want to dive unless I had to. The gunner might have dropped off to sleep. I shook up the plane as roughly as I could.

“Captain, sir?”

“That you, gunner?”

“I ... er ... yes, sir.”

“Not sure it's you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why the devil didn't you answer before?”

“I had pulled the plug, sir. I was testing the radio.”

“You're a bloody fool! Do you think you're alone in this plane? I was just about to dive. I thought you were dead.”

“Er ... no, sir.”

“I'll take your word for it. But don't play that trick on me again. Damn it! Let me know before you cut.”

“Sorry, sir. I will. I'll let you know, sir.”

Had his oxygen flow stopped working, he wouldn't have known it. The human body receives no warning. A vague swooning comes over you. In a few seconds you have fainted. In a few minutes you are dead. The flow has constantly to be tested—particularly by the pilot. I pinched my tube lightly a few times and felt the warm life-bringing puffs blow round my nose.

 

It came to this, that I was working at my trade. All that I felt was the physical pleasure of going through gestures that meant something and were sufficient unto themselves. I was conscious neither of great danger (it had been different while I was dressing) nor of performing a great duty. At this moment the battle between the Nazi and the Occident was reduced to the scale of my job, of my manipulation of certain switches, levers, taps. This was as it should be. The sexton's love of his God becomes a love of lighting candles. The sexton moves with deliberate step through a church of which he is barely conscious, happy to see the candlesticks bloom one after the other as the result of his ministrations. When he has lighted them all, he rubs his hands. He is proud of himself.

I for my part am doing a good job of regulating the revolutions of the propeller, and the needle of my compass lies within a single degree of my course. If Dutertre happens to have his eye on the compass, he must be marvelling at me.

“I say, Dutertre! Compass on the course? How does it look?”

“Won't do, Captain. Too much drift. A little kick to starboard.”

Well, well.

“Crossing our lines, Captain. I've started my camera. What's your altitude?”

“Thirty-three thousand.”

“Your course, Captain!”

He's right. I was drifting to port. And not by chance, either. It was the town of Albert that was putting me off. I could make it faintly out, far ahead. But already it was shouldering me off with all the weight of its
categorically blocked
. Extraordinary, the memory secreted in the recesses of the human body. My body was remembering every sudden crash of the past, every cranial fracture, each of those nights in hospital with their comas as sticky as molasses. My body is afraid of blows. It struggles to avoid Albert. The moment I leave it to itself, we drift to port. It shies left like an old horse fearful for life of the obstacle that had once frightened it. And it is really my body, not my mind that I mean. The moment my mind wanders, my body takes sly advantage of me to slip around Albert.

For it is not I who feel any anxiety. I have stopped wishing to get out of this sortie. On the ground, it had seemed to me that that was what I wanted. I had said to myself hopefully that the inter-com would be out of order. I was weary, and it would be wonderful to sleep. The bed of idleness had seemed to me a magic couch. But deep down I had known perfectly well that nothing could come of getting out of this sortie except a sharp sense of discomfort. As if a necessary moulting had miscarried.

Again I was reminded of school. Of a time when I was very young. How long ago was that? I—.

“Captain!”

“What's up?”

“Er ... nothing. I thought I had seen something.”

I don't like Dutertre seeing things....

Of school, yes. When you are a little boy, in boarding school, they get you up too early. They get you up at six o'clock. It is cold. You rub your eyes, and you hate class long before the bell rings. You think how wonderful it would be if you were ill and were waking up in the infirmary, where the matron would be ready with a hot cup of camomile with lots of sugar in it. The infirmary becomes a kind of paradise in your mind.

I was like that; and naturally, the first time that I caught cold I coughed much more than was called for. And I awoke in the infirmary to the sound of the bell ringing for the others. But that bell punished me for cheating. It changed me into a wraith. It rang out the passing of living hours—hours of class with its austerity, of play-time with its tumult, of the refectory with its warmth. For those who were alive, who were not, like me, in the infirmary, it sounded the realities of an enviable existence filled with jubilations, disappointments, severities, triumphs. And I lay robbed, forgotten, sick of insipid camomiles, of the sweaty bed, the blank hours.

Nothing comes of a sortie you have got out of.

 

Of course there are days like this when a sortie brings no satisfaction. It is too evident that we are playing a game that we call war. We are playing Cops and Robbers. We are abiding scrupulously by the rules of conduct prescribed by the history books and the rules of tactics prescribed by the war manuals. Last night, for example, I drove up to the aerodrome in a motorcar. The sentry, obedient to the rules, presented his bayonet. My car might as easily have been a German tank. We are playing at presenting bayonets to German tanks. But the tanks are playing their own game.

How can we possibly be enthusiastic about these grim charades, in which we play the part of supernumeraries, when we are asked to play on till we are killed? Death is a bit too serious for a charade. Who can dress with enthusiasm for such a part? Nobody ... Even Hochedé who is a sort of saint, a man who has reached that state of permanent grace which surely is the final consummation of man—even Hochedé took refuge in silence. All of us dressed in silence, grumpily—and not because we were heroically modest. That grumpiness concealed no inner exaltation. It told its own story. And I knew what it meant. It was the grumpiness of an agent who is mystified by the instructions of an absentee owner, yet remains faithful to him. All of us longed for our quiet rooms, but there was not one who would really have chosen to go to bed.

For enthusiasm is not the important thing. There is no hope of enthusiasm in defeat. The important thing is to dress, climb aboard, and take off. What we ourselves think of the procedure is of no importance. A little boy in school enthusiastic about his grammar lesson would seem to me a little prig not to be trusted. The important thing is to strive towards a goal which is not immediately visible. That goal is not the concern of the mind, but of the spirit. The spirit knows how to love, but it is asleep. Talk to me about temptation! I know as much about temptation as any church father. To be tempted is to be tempted, when the spirit is asleep, to give in to the reasons of the mind.

What do I accomplish by risking my life in this mountain avalanche? I have no notion. Time and again people would say to me, “I can arrange to have you transferred here or there. That is where you belong. You will be more useful there than in a squadron. Pilots! We can train pilots by the thousand! Whereas you—.” No question but that they were right. My mind agreed with them, but my instinct always prevailed over my mind.

Why was it that their reasoning never convinced me, even though I had no argument with which to defeat it? I would say to myself, “Intellectuals are kept in reserve on the shelves of the Propaganda Ministry, like pots of jam to be eaten when the war is over.” Hardly an argument, I agree!

And now once again, like every other soldier of the Group, I have taken off in the face of every good reason, every obvious argument, every intellectual reflex. The moment will come when I shall know that it was reasonable to fight against reason. I have promised myself that if I am alive I shall walk alone on the highway that runs through our village. Then perhaps I shall dwell at last in my own self. And I shall see.

It may be that I shall have nothing to say about what I then see. When a woman seems to me beautiful, I have no words to say so. I see her smile, and that is all. Intellectuals take her face apart and explain it bit by bit. They do not see that smile.

To know is not to prove, nor to explain. It is to accede to vision. But if we are to have vision, we must learn to participate in the object of the vision. The apprenticeship is hard.

All day long my village was invisible to me. Before the sortie I saw in it nothing but mud walls and peasants more or less grimy. Now it is a handful of gravel thirty-three thousand feet below me. That is my village. But tonight, it may be, a watch dog will waken and bark. I have always loved the enchantment of a village dreaming aloud in the fair night by the voice of a single watch dog. And now what I ask is to see again my village tidied for sleep, its doors prudently shut upon its barns, its cattle, its customs. To see its peasants, home from the fields, their evening meal eaten and their table cleared, their children put to bed and their lamp blown out, dissolved into the silent night. And nothing more—unless perhaps, under the stiff white sheets of the countryside, the slow pulsation of their breathing, like the subsidence of a swell after a storm at sea.

God suspends the use of things and speech for the period of the nocturnal balance sheet. By the play of that irresistible slumber which loosens the fingers until morning, men will appear in my vision with open hands. And then perhaps I shall win a glimpse of that which has no name. I shall walk like the blind whose palms lead them towards the flame in the hearth. The blind cannot describe the flame, yet they have found it. Thus perhaps shall I see what it is in that dark village that we must die to protect—that which is unseen, yet like an ember beneath the ashes, lives on.

Nothing comes of a sortie you have got out of. If you are to understand a thing as simple as a village, you must first—.

“Captain!”

“Yes?”

“Six German fighters on the port bow.”

The words rang in my ears like a thunderclap.

You must first.... You must first.... Ah! I do want very much to be paid off in time. I do want to have the right to love. I do want to win a glimpse of the being for whom I die.

“Gunner!”

“Sir?”

“D'you hear the lieutenant? Six German fighters. Six, on the port bow.”

“I heard the lieutenant, sir.”

“Dutertre! Have they seen us?”

“They have, Captain. Banking towards us. Fifteen hundred feet below us.”

“Hear that, gunner? Fifteen hundred feet below us. Dutertre! How near are they?”

“Say ten seconds.”

“Hear that, gunner? On our tail in a few seconds.”

There they are. I see them. Tiny. A swarm of poisonous wasps.

“Gunner! They're crossing broadside. You'll see them in a second. There!”

“Don't see them yet, sir.... Yes, I do!”

I no longer see them myself.

“They after us?”

“After us, sir.”

“Rising fast?”

“Can't say, sir. Don't think so.... No, sir.”

Dutertre spoke. “What do you say, Captain?”

“What do you expect me to say?”

Nobody said anything. There was nothing to say. We were in God's hands. If I banked, I should narrow the space between us. Luckily, we were flying straight into the sun. At high altitude you cannot go up fifteen hundred feet higher without giving a couple of miles to your game. It was possible therefore that they might lose us entirely in the sun by the time they had reached our altitude and recovered their speed.