The Complete Flying Officer X Stories (10 page)

The moment the crash came in his own cockpit he knew what an awful fool he had been. He had been much too excited to look in the mirror. And now he had made that utterly foolish, perhaps utterly fatal mistake. The cockpit was full of flying metal and the spray of blood. He went at once into a steep spiral dive. He was very angry with himself — very, very angry that he had been such a fool and had been beaten so easily, for the first time, at his own game.

When he came out of the dive, he saw that his left arm was dripping with blood, and when he tried to lift it, it would not move. He did not know quite what else was happening. He afterwards remembered standing up in the cockpit. He remembered quite clearly, before that, how he opened the hood and disconnected his oxygen. He remembered making the R/T connections too. But between the moment of standing up and the moment of seeing his kite dive away from him and of hearing the fading roar of the engines as it fell to earth he did not remember anything at all. He remembered nothing of being angry any longer, or scared, or even in pain.

He knew only that it was a wonderful feeling to be out of the kite, in the air, quite free and at least temporarily safe, in the enormous peaceful space of sky. He could hear nothing except the dying roar of his kite going down to earth and once, above it, a long burst of cannon fire.
He knew quite well, and quite intelligently, that he was upside down. It was a little ridiculous; his legs cut off his upward view. His arm was beginning suddenly to pain him very much, and because of this he decided to pull the cord. He had been struck by the notion that he might faint and never pull it at all.

When he went to pull the cord, it was not there. For a moment it seemed to him that the chute must have been torn away from him as he left the kite. He was falling upside down and this was the end. He afterwards remembered thinking how very simple it was. You were shot down and you fell upside down and you found there was no chute and really, after all, it was a simpler, less painful, less horrible business than you had always imagined dying to be. You would fall a very long way and would hit the deck with a very hard thud, but the impact and the pain would by that time no longer matter. Your arm would cease hurting for ever and nobody would ever attack you from behind again. At home your parents would read the telegram about your death and perhaps there would be a notice of it in
The Times
. Your mother would cry and the real pain, the pain of loss and emptiness and sacrifice and despair, would not be yours, but theirs, and it would be far away and you would never know.

And finally, thinking this, he made one last effort to see if his parachute was with him. He snatched for the cord and suddenly it was there. He held it in his hands. He pulled it violently, and it was as if he were being
hanged. The upward force of the chute opening seemed to wrench the upper part of his body away from the rest. The harness tightened with great power. He could not breathe and he felt very ill. Waves of darkness began to float over him and blood flashed back into his face, in windy spurts, from the wounded arm. The pain of the arm was savage and the pain of not being able to breathe, stupefying him, was worse. He saw Malta far below him, like a misty map in the sun, and all he wanted now was to be there, to lie on this map like the inanimate mark of a town, peacefully, without movement and without pain.

He must have gone off at this moment into a stupor, perhaps a faint, brought on by pain and shock and the loss of blood. He came out of it to hear the noise of an aircraft. It seemed to be bearing down on him and he had a notion at that moment, once again, that all was over. He was going to be holed like a bloody colander by an M.E. who had followed him down. This, and nothing else, was the experience of being shot down, this was the killing part; you were hung up like a half-dead pheasant on a string and an M.E. who had nothing else to do came down and did circles round you at leisure and fired until you just ran out like jelly.

He looked up at last and saw not an M.E. but a Hurricane. “Thank Christ!” he thought. “Oh, thank Christ for that!”

The Hurricane circled a few times, but he was too tired, too weak, and still too much in pain to show his joy. He
was holding the raw stump of the wounded arm with his other arm and he could not wave his hands. He shut his eyes and drifted away, swinging, as if he were drunk and the world were spinning round.

When he opened his eyes again, the Hurricane had gone and he could see the town more clearly. But it was still far down and once or twice he swung very violently, and because of his hands he could not stop the swinging. He felt very sick and then finally he fell faster, not caring much until he looked down and felt that the roofs of the town, hot in the sun, were flying upward like enormous missiles that would hit him and lift him skyward again. Then for a time he drifted away, more to the edge of the town, and soon it was only the flat roof of a little house that was rushing up to meet him. There was the little house and beside it was a little patch of wheat. The wheat was very green and McAlister saw it wave and shimmer in the wind and sun.

He hit the ground with great violence and rolled over. He lay still and this, at last he thought, was the moment. “I have been falling twenty-five thousand feet for the privilege of this moment, for the sweetness, the calm, the painlessness, and the silence of being able to die. There is nothing else now. The chute does not matter, nor the arm, nor the pain. It is enough to lie in the wheat and shut my eyes against the sun and wait for the moment, and myself, to end.”

The crowd of gesticulating Maltese who rushed up to him, trampling the wheat and tearing off his chute and
holding up his head, made him very furious; they stopped all his thoughts about dying. He was not going to be bumped about like a piece of beef by anybody and he let out with extraordinary strength with his feet; it was as if the Maltese wanted to tear him to pieces for souvenirs. He kicked very hard for a few moments, just to show how very living he was, and then his strength slipped out of him and he lay emptily on the earth, too tired to be angry again, only telling the Maltese how to give him morphia and how to bind the tourniquet.

A little later they carried him across the little field of wheat to the advanced dressing-station, and then to the town. He did not know much what happened. Two days later they took off his arm and in the night he was very restless and used to amuse himself sometimes scaring the Sister by telling her he would die because he did not want her to go away. The arm did not smell very nice in the days before they took it off and he was terrified that, without the arm, he would never fly again. But in fifteen days from that moment he was flying solo.

He is flying solo still. He flies beautifully and dangerously and they have fitted him up with an arm that has many intricate devices. You can see in his face the delight of being able to fly. It is one of the faces of those who fight wars they do not make and for whom flying and life are one: the faces of those who should be watched, the faces of the young — and not of the young who die, but of the young who are shot down and live, of those who are at the beginning of things.

Rex and Johnnie, who are pilots, and Scottie, who is the navigator, and I, who do not belong to a crew at all, went into the bar of the Grenadier. It was early and Joe was wiping the counter, which was not dirty, with a bright yellow duster.

“What shall it be?” Rex said. “Li tale?”

“Li tale it is,” we said.

“That's four li tales,” Rex said. “And you, Joe?”

“Thank you,” Joe said, “a bitter.”

Joe drew the four light ales and set them on the bar. He drew the bitter and held it in his hand.

“Cheers,” we said.

“Cheers, boys,” said Joe.

We drank. Joe drank too and then automatically polished the clean brown counter with the duster. There was no one else in the bar except a young man without a hat, with a long scarf of many colours round his neck. The weather was very mild and I do not know why he was
wearing the scarf, except that perhaps he was suffering from something.

“Hello,” he said. He was drinking a long dark beer.

“Good evening,” we said.

“You fellows from Stanton?” he said.

We were from Stanton but we did not say anything.

“That's a big station now,” he said.

We did not say anything.

“How big a station would it be?” he asked.

Rex and Johnnie and Mac were all drinking and could not speak.

“Four or five hundred?”

“Possibly. There are a great many W.A.A.F.,” I said.

“Do you operate Stirlings and Wellingtons from there,” he said, “or only Stirlings?”

“We have quite a few Moths,” I said.

“That's a kite I like,” Rex said. Rex is a Canadian and comes from Saskatchewan. At that time he had done six Berlin trips, four daylights on Brest, two to Turin, and some others. “That's a kite you can have fun in. You get 'way up there and have no one to talk to but yourself.”

“In a bomber,” the young man said, “it's very different.”

“Four more li tales,” Scottie said.

The young man drank his beer and moved closer up the bar.

“Have this one with me,” he said, “won't you?”

“Thanks,” we said. “We have one coming up.”

The young man slung one end of his scarf over his
shoulder. I looked at his face and his hands. They were very pink and very clean and very healthy and it seemed to me that, after all, he could not be suffering from anything. I could only think that perhaps he was studying something instead.

“That was a nasty affair you had this week,” he said.

We did not say anything.

“Do aircraft often catch fire? I mean, in that way?”

We did not say anything.

“Do you suppose the crash rate over here is higher than the losses over there?” he said.

Perhaps we did not feel very talkative, but once more we did not speak.

“What happens when people crash?” the young man said. “I mean, what's it feel like in the mess — when you hear?”

I honestly wanted to answer him. I honestly had something to say to him that was clear and important and unmistakable, but I could not frame it into words.

“It must be awfully embarrassing,” he said.

“Awfully,” I said.

“There is nothing much you can say,” he said.

“No,” I said, “there is nothing much you can say.”

Rex and Johnnie and Scottie were staring into their beer. Rex has come all the way from Canada because he hates something; he has a farm in Saskatchewan and a young wife who, in the picture he carries in his wallet, has a face that is brave and shining in the snow. Scottie is thirty-five and has children and says: “I'm not a young
man any more,” because he hopes you will tell him he is not too old. Johnnie is very young and has blue clear eyes that are cool and glassy and far distant. Only his flying life has begun.

“It must be very interesting to see the different reactions,” the young man said:

“To what?”

“Well, you know.”

“No.”

“The times when people don't come back. There must be a feeling in the mess — a sort of — well, you know.”

“Sort of,” I said.

I do not know if, for a moment or two, he went on talking. I kept looking at the long loose scarf, that seemed to have no purpose, and the pink clean hands that clasped the mug of beer.

“You must have had a lot of people go from that station,” he said.

“What do you expect?” I said. “There's a war.”

“Yes, I suppose that's it,” he said. “I suppose they must know.”

We did not say anything. Joe came along the bar, wiping the counter with the yellow duster. He looked at us and we looked at him. The foam had broken in the glasses and the beer looked flat and dead.

“Now you will have this one with me, won't you?” the young man said.

We did not look at each other and we did not drink.

We know when we have had enough.

On that station we had pilots from all over the world, so that the sound of the mess, as someone said, was like that of a Russian bazaar. They came from Holland and Poland, Belgium and Czechoslovakia, France and Norway. We had many French and they had with them brown and yellow men from the colonial empire who at dispersal on warm spring afternoons played strange games with pennies in the dry white dust on the edge of the perimeter. We had many Canadians and New Zealanders, Australians and Africans. There was a West Indian boy, the colour of milky coffee, who was a barrister, and a Lithuanian who played international football. There was a man from Indo-China and another from Tahiti. There was an American and a Swiss and there were Negroes, very black and curly, among the ground crews. We had men who had done everything and been everywhere, who had had everything and had lost it all. They had escaped across frontiers and over mountains and down
the river valleys of central Europe; they had come through Libya and Iran and Turkey and round the Cape; they had come through Spain and Portugal or nailed under the planks of little ships wherever a little ship could put safely to sea. They had things in common that men had nowhere else on earth, and you saw on their faces sometimes a look of sombre silence that could only have been the expression of recollected hatred. But among them all there was only one who had something which no one else had, and he was Capek the Czech. Capek had white hair.

Capek was a night fighter pilot, so that mostly in the day-time you would find him in the hut at dispersal. The hut was very pleasant and there was a walnut piano and a radio and a miniature billiard table and easy chairs that had been presented by the mayor of the town. No one ever played the piano, but it was charming all the same. On the walls there were pictures, some in colour, of girls in their underwear and without any underwear at all, and rude remarks about pilots who forgot to check their guns. Pilots who had been flying at night lay on the camp beds, sleeping a little, their eyes puffed, using their flying-jackets as pillows; or they played cards and groused and talked shop among themselves. They were bored because they were flying too much. They argued about the merits of a four-cannon job as opposed to those of a single gun that fired through the air-screw. They argued about the climate of New Zealand, whether it could be compared with the climate of England. They were restless and temperamental, as fighter pilots are apt to be, and it seemed
always as if they would have been happier doing anything but the things they were doing.