Flight to Arras (5 page)

“Still after us, gunner?”

“Still after us, sir.”

“We gaining on them?”

“Well, sir. No.... Perhaps.”

It was God's business—and the sun's.

Fighters do not fight, they murder. Still, it might turn into a fight, and I made ready for it. I pressed with both feet as hard as I could, trying to free the frozen rudder. A wave of something strange went over me. But my eyes were still on the Germans, and I bore with all my weight down upon the rigid bar.

Once again I discovered that I was in fact much less upset in this moment of action—if “action” was the word for this vain expectancy—than I had been while dressing. A kind of anger was going through me. A beneficent anger. God knows, no ecstasy of sacrifice. Rather an urge to bite hard into something.

“Gunner! Are we losing them?”

“We are losing them, sir.”

Good job.

“Dutertre! Dutertre!”

“Captain?”

“I ... nothing.”

“Anything the matter?”

“Nothing. I thought... Nothing.”

 

I decided not to mention it. No good worrying them. If I went into a dive they would know it soon enough. They would know that I had gone into a dive.

It was not natural that I should be running with sweat in a temperature sixty degrees below zero. Not natural. I knew perfectly well what was happening. Gently, very gently, I was fainting.

I could see the instrument panel. Now I couldn't. My hands were losing their grip on the wheel. I hadn't even the strength to speak. I was letting myself go. So pleasant, letting oneself go....

Then I squeezed the rubber tube. A gust of air blew into my nose and brought me life. The oxygen supply was not out of order! Then it must be.... Of course! How stupid I had been! It was the rudder. I had exerted myself like a man trying to pick up a grand piano. Flying thirty-three thousand feet in the air, I had struggled like a professional wrestler. The oxygen was being doled out to me. It was my business to use it up economically. I was paying for my orgy.

I began to inhale in swift repeated gasps. My heart beat faster and faster. It was like a faint tinkle. What good would it do to speak of it? If I went into a dive, they would know soon enough. Now I could see my instrument panel.... No, that wasn't true. I couldn't see it. Sitting there in my sweat, I was sad.

 

Life came back as gently as it had flowed out of me.

“Dutertre!”

“Captain?”

I should have liked to tell him what had happened.

“I ... I thought ... No.”

I gave it up. Words consume oxygen too fast. Already I was out of breath. I was very weak. A convalescent.

“You were about to say something, Captain?”

“No.... Nothing.”

“Quite sure, Captain? You puzzle me?”

I puzzle him. But I am alive.

“We are alive.”

“Well, yes. For the time being.”

For the time being. There was still Arras.

 

Thus for a minute or two I had the feeling that I should not pull through; and yet I had not observed in myself that poignant anxiety which, people say, turns the hair white in an instant. I began to think of Sagon, of what Sagon had said when, two months earlier, we had gone to see him only a few hours after he had been shot down behind our own lines. What had gone through his mind when the German fighters had surrounded him and nailed him to the stake.

I see him exactly as he was, lying in the hospital bed. His knee had been hooked and broken by the tail-unit of the plane in the course of a parachute jump, but Sagon had not felt the shock. His face and hands were rather badly burnt, but all in all Sagon's condition was not alarming. Slowly and in a matter of fact voice, as if reporting a bit of fatigue duty, he told us his story.

“I knew they had got me when I saw the air filled with tracer bullets round my plane. My instrument panel was shot to bits. Then I saw a puff of smoke forward. It wasn't much, you know. I thought it must be ... you know ... there's a connecting pipe. There wasn't much flame.”

He stopped, and his lower lip came forward while he turned it over in his mind. It seemed to him important to be able to tell us whether the flames were high or Were not high. He hesitated: “But still, flame is flame. The inter-com was working, and I told the crew they'd better jump.”

In less than ten seconds a plane can turn into a torch.

“Then I opened my escape hatch. I shouldn't have done that. It let in the air ... and the flame, you know.... I was sorry I'd done it.”

You have a locomotive boiler spitting a torrent of flame at you, twenty thousand feet in the air, and you are sorry you've done something. I shall not play Sagon false by talking of his heroism or his modesty. He would not recognize himself in these terms. He would insist that he was sorry he had done it. As we stood round his bed it was plain that he was making a concentrated effort to be precise.

The field of consciousness is tiny. It accepts only one problem at a time. Get into a fist fight, put your mind on the strategy of the fight, and you will not feel the other fellow's punches. Once, when I thought I was about to drown in a seaplane accident, the freezing water seemed to me tepid. Or, more exactly, my consciousness was not concerned with the temperature of the water. It was absorbed by other thoughts. The temperature of the water has left no trace in my memory. In the same way, Sagon's consciousness was filled to the brim with the problem of getting away from the plane. His universe was limited successively to the fate of his crew, the handle that governed the sliding hatch, the rip cord of the parachute.

The inter-com seemed to be working. “Are you there?” he had called out.

No answer.

“Nobody on board?” he had asked again.

No answer.

They must have jumped, Sagon had decided. And as he was sorry about those flames (his hands and face were already burnt), he had got out of his seat, climbed out on the fuselage, and crawled forward along the surface of the wing.

“I peered in. I couldn't see the observer.”

The observer, killed instantly by the German fighters, had slumped down out of sight.

“Then I backed up and looked for the gunner. I couldn't see him, either.”

But the same thing had happened to the gunner.

“I thought they must have jumped.”

Once again Sagon turned the matter over in his mind.

“If I had known, I could have crawled back into the cockpit. The flames were not so high. I lay there on the wing, I don't know how long. I had stabilized the plane at an angle before crawling out. The going was smooth, the wind was bearable, and I felt fairly comfortable. I must have been out on that wing for some time. I didn't know what to do.”

Not that Sagon had been faced with insoluble problems. He thought himself alone on board. The plane was burning. The fighters were still after it and spattering it with bullets, What Sagon was telling us was that he had felt no desire of any kind. He had felt nothing. He had time on his hands. He was floating in a sort of infinite leisure. And point by point I recognized the extraordinary sensation that now and then accompanies the imminence of death—a feeling of unexpected leisure, absolutely the contrary of the picture-book notion of breathless haste. Sagon had lain there on his wing, a creature flung out of the dimension of time.

“And then,” he said, “I jumped. I made a bad job of it. I could feel myself twisting in the air and hesitated to pull the cord, thinking I might get tangled up in the 'chute, I waited until I had straightened out. I waited quite a long time.”

What Sagon really remembered of his whole mishap, from beginning to end, was waiting. Waiting for the flames to rise higher. Then waiting on the wing for Heaven knows what. And finally, falling freely through the air, still waiting.

This was Sagon himself who was doing these things—actually a Sagon more rudimentary, more simple than the Sagon I know: a Sagon a little perplexed, bored and slightly impatient as he felt himself drop into an abyss.

We had been living for two hours at the centre of an external pressure reduced to two thirds of normal. The crew were being gradually used up. We exchanged hardly a word. Once or twice, very cautiously, I tried to work my rudder. I was not obstinate about it. Each time the same sensation, the same feeling of a gentle exhaustion, had come over me.

Dutertre, at work with his camera, was careful to let me know in plenty of time when his photography required that I bank. I would do the best I could with such control of the wheel as was still left to me. I would tilt the plane and pull towards me; and in a dozen or twenty separate efforts I would set her where Dutertre wanted her.

“Altitude?”

“Thirty-three thousand seven.”

I was still thinking of Sagon. Man is always himself. In myself I have never met another than myself. Sagon knew only Sagon. He who dies, dies as he was. In the death of an ordinary miner, it is an ordinary miner who dies. Where is it to be found—that haggard dementia that writers have invented to fascinate us with?

I saw once in Spain a man hauled up, after several days of excavation, out of the cellar of a house that had been destroyed by a bomb. He was blinking, for the daylight hurt his eyes; and men were holding him up, for he was tottering.

A crowd stood round him in silence and with what seemed to me a sudden timidity. This man, resuscitated almost from the beyond, still covered in the rubble in which he had been buried, half stupefied by suffocation and hunger, was like some dim monster. When someone grew bold enough to ask him questions, and to the questions he lent a kind of pallid attention, the timidity of the crowd changed to uneasiness.

Those round him tried to unlock his secret with bungling keys—for who is there can formulate the right question? They asked him what he had felt, what he had thought of, what he had done in that grave. They flung bridges at random across an abyss, like men seeking to reach the night of the mind of one blind and deaf and dumb, and bring him help. But when, finally, he was able to answer, what he said was, “Yes, I heard a long tearing sound.” Or he said, “I was terribly worried. I was down there a long time. I thought it would never end.” Or, “My back hurt. It hurt pretty badly.” It was a decent fellow talking only about a decent fellow.

“I was worried about my watch,” he said. “It was a wedding present. I couldn't get my hand into my pocket. I wondered if the cave-in had...”

It goes without saying that life had taught this man suffering and impatience, taught him the love of familiar things. He had made use of the man he was to take account of his universe, though it were the universe of a cave-in in the night. And the fundamental question, the question nobody thought of asking him but which governed all their blundering questions—“Who were you? Who surged up in you?”—this question he would have been unable to answer before time had allowed him little by little to build up the legend of himself. He would have been able to answer only—“Why, me ... myself.”

No single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born. It would be a bit too easy if we could go about borrowing ready-made souls.

It is true that a sudden illumination may now and then light up a destiny and impel a man in a new direction. But illumination is vision, suddenly granted the spirit, at the end of a long and gradual preparation. Bit by bit I learnt my grammar. I was taught my syntax. My sentiments were awakened. And now suddenly a poem strikes me in the heart.

Piloting now my plane, I feel no love; but if this evening something is revealed to me, it will be because I shall have carried my heavy stones toward the building of the invisible structure. I am preparing a celebration. I shall not have the right to speak of the sudden apparition in me of another than myself, since it is I who am struggling to awaken that other within me.

There is nothing that I may expect of the hazard of war except this slow apprenticeship. Like grammar, it will repay me later.

 

For us in the plane, life was losing its edge, blunted by a slow wearing away of ourselves. We were aging. The sortie was aging. What price high altitude? An hour of life spent at thirty-three thousand feet is equivalent to what? To a week? three weeks? a month of organic life, of the work of the heart, the lungs, the arteries? Not that it signifies. My semi-swoonings have added centuries to me: I float in the serenity of old age.

How far away now is the agitation in which I dressed! In what a distant past it is lost! And Arras is infinitely far in the future. The adventure of war? Where is there adventure in war? I have this day taken an even chance to disappear, and I have nothing to report unless it is that passage of tiny wasps seen for three seconds. The real adventure would have lasted but the tenth of a second; and those among us who go through it do not come back, never come back, to tell the story.

“Give her a kick to starboard, Captain.”

Dutertre has forgotten that my rudder is frozen. I was thinking of a picture that used to fascinate me when I was a child. Against the background of an aurora borealis it showed a graveyard of fantastic ships, motionless in the Antarctic seas. In the ashen glow of an eternal night the ships raised their crystallized arms. The atmosphere was of death, but they still spread sails that bore the impress of the wind as a bed bears the impress of a shoulder, and the sails were stiff and cracking.

Here too everything was frozen. My controls were frozen. My machine-guns were frozen. And when I had asked the gunner about his, the answer had come back, “Nothing doing, sir.”

Into the exhaust pipe of my mask I spat icicles fine as needles. From time to time I had to crush the stopper of frost that continued to form inside the flexible rubber, lest it suffocate me. When I squeezed the tube I felt it grate in my palm.

“Gunner! Oxygen all right?”