by Tom McCarthy
“Just right?”
“Yes, sir: just how things should be.”
They fly on most days for the next month. Only when the clouds are too low or the air is plagued by thunderstorms do they stay earthbound. They’re shown how to ascend in gyres, stall, dive, pull out of spins, stand the machine on its tail and hang on the propeller, perform sideslips and Immelmann turns. The fallen landscape prints itself on Serge’s mind by dint of his repeated passage over it: its flattened progression of greens, browns and yellows, patches of light and shade; the layout of the town and of the marsh beyond it; the ribbon of the Hythe-to-Folkestone road; the thread of the Light Railway joining Dymchurch and St. Mary’s Bay, then running on across the Romney sands; the dots of the Gypsy encampment outside Dungeness. He likes to move these things around from his nacelle, take them apart and reassemble them like pieces of a jigsaw. When he loops, they disappear completely, the whole horizon sinking from the bottom of his gaze and everything becoming sky, then, after a pause in which time itself seems to be held in abeyance, the rim reappearing at his vision’s upper edge and sliding down his eyes like a decorated screen being lowered just in front of them…
For the first two weeks they fly with dual controls. Langeveldt and his assistants will guide the Farmans up, then, at a moment chosen at their whimsy, tap the cadets on the back and hold their hands up in the air-their passenger’s cue to unclip the paddles by his seat and ply the side-wires till the rudder starts responding. Sometimes the instructor stalls or goes into a spin just prior to handing over, leaving the cadet to coax the chaotic world back into shape. By the end of April they’re going up unsupervised, in pairs. In early May Langeveldt starts poking holes in the machines’ canvas hides and knocking the odd strut out with a mallet before sending them up.
“Brought a machine down safely with the whole tail shot off once myself!” he tells them. “If you can’t do without a strut or two then you’re not made for the high life.”
Serge has been paired off with a Londoner named Stedman. Stedman does most of the flying: Serge himself, it’s been decided at some juncture higher up-a meeting in a room thick with cigar smoke, or an encrypted communication sent down wires from Oxford via London via who-knows-where-has all the makings of a good observer. He’s given extra lessons in cartography, and taught Zone Call and Clock Code systems. When he and Stedman go up in the air they’re given a list of spots to drop flares on, or photograph, or, if the spot’s a military barracks, land at and persuade the CO to sign their logbook. After a few days of this, a camera-gun is mounted on the nose of his nacelle, and he and Stedman have to careen around the Kent coast photo-strafing castles, churches, train stations and gasworks. The results are developed as soon as they land, and posted in the School of Aerial Gunnery ’s briefing room for Langeveldt to grade in front of them.
“Pepperdine, three hits. Biswick, two. Spurrier, three. Carrefix, five-on top of which you’ve taken out the Dover pier, which wasn’t on the list. What did you do thet for?”
“It looked nice,” Serge replies. “I wanted to photograph it.”
“It looked nice?”
“Yes, sir. I liked its shape.”
By mid-May they’re firing live rounds out of Lewis guns. The guns have Aldis sights, harmonised for deflection. Serge likes the way the reticules grid space up when he looks through them, but finds he can perform their main task on his own. The trick’s to point the gun not where the target is right now, but to discern its line of movement as it travels through your vision and to run that on into the space in front of it, shooting there instead. Serge develops a knack of splitting his gaze in two, locking the line with one eye while the other slides ahead, setting up camp in the spot at which a successful hit “happens” and thus bringing this event to pass. He experiences a strange sense of intermission each time he does this, as though he’d somehow inflated or hollowed out a stretch of time, found room to move around inside it. It occurs to him that perhaps doing this is what made Langeveldt’s eyes go off-kilter, and wonders if his own eyes look like the lieutenant’s when he shoots…
They do most of their target practice over water, peppering rafts moored just off the shoreline. Serge gets into the habit of firing in certain rhythms, ones that carry with them first words, then whole phrases, spoken in the boom and sent up his arm into his body by the recoil. His favourite consists of a first, short burst of six shots followed by a longer one of eight; each time he fires it out he hears a line that’s stuck in his head from the Versoie Pageant, from the year when Widsun visited:
of purpose that your thought
Might also to the seas be known…
The words fly from his gun into the sea, hammering and splintering its surface, etching themselves out across the rafts’ wood: of-PUR, pose-THAT, your-THOUGHT… Later, they fire over land, swooping low to take out rabbits, foxes, badgers, hares and hedgehogs, then touching down to bag their sometimes still-quivering score. They gun down the odd farm animal as well, although it’s against regulations and draws complaints from irate farmers.
“Another accidental lamb-strike?” Langeveldt tuts as Serge and Stedman unload their bloodied tribute at his feet. “Thet’s the third this week. Take it over to the kitchen.”
The guns jam all the time. On days when there’s no flying to be had they’re made to take them apart and assemble them again-six, seven, eight times, all day long. The other cadets try to force the trigger sears and firing pins together, swearing when they won’t fit, but not Serge: he finds the process pleasing, an extension of the logic he’s developed from the Farman’s front seat. In the click and swivel of machinery being slotted together, moved around and realigned, its clockwork choreography, he relives, in miniature, the mechanical command of landscape and its boundaries that flight affords him, the mastery of hedgerows, fields and lanes, their shapes and volumes…
Sometimes, when he’s out free-flying, and especially when Stedman loops the loop, Serge experiences an exhilarating loosening of his stomach. As they level out one afternoon above some little village, he turns round and points down towards the ground.
“You want to land?” shouts Stedman. “What’s here?”
“I’ve got to shit,” Serge shouts back.
They bounce across the village cricket pitch. Serge slides down off the wing, lowers his trousers and relieves himself above the wicket, just short of a length on middle and off.
“What village is this anyway?” he asks as he strolls back towards Stedman, who’s stretching his legs beside the machine as he consults a map.
“Tenterden, I think,” Stedman answers. “Population six hundred and twenty-nine.”
“Six hundred and thirty now,” Serge tells him. “Let’s go.”
The next day they spot what looks like a small battle taking place on a square field below them, and descend to take a closer look. The combatants turn out to be girls playing lacrosse. The game stops as they pass above it, pink and white faces staring up at them through netted sticks. Stedman climbs two thousand feet and pulls the Farman up into a loop that levels out low, just above the playing field, sending sticks and faces scattering. He turns the plane around and lands more or less exactly on the centre circle.
“You could have killed one of my girls!” the whistle-necklaced mistress shouts at them as they pull off their helmets and goggles.
“Terribly sorry, madam,” Stedman smiles back. “Thing is, a part seems to have come loose and fallen off the engine just as we passed by.”
“Will you be able to fix it?” she asks him, softening.
“Depends. Some of these things just won’t fly without the requisite bits and bobs.”
“I think I saw it fall behind those bushes,” Serge says, shuffling off towards them.
When he strolls back a few minutes later, the girls are gathered round the machine, being treated to a lecture on aerodynamics.
“What does he do?” the tallest one asks Stedman as Serge sidles up to him.
“I observe,” says Serge, “and navigate. I make everything fit together.”
“No luck finding the whatsit?” Stedman asks.
Serge sadly shakes his head.
“I’ve worked out what it is,” Stedman announces. “A bolt’s come out in the skirt. It’s simple to fix, but will take a while. Be dark before we’re finished: we won’t be able to take off again until tomorrow. Perhaps we could use your phone to contact our headquarters, tell them not to worry…”
“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 Longhorns, 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 d
estination 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.