C (16 page)

“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
Long
horns, 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.