C

by Tom McCarthy

  ii

  One afternoon in January, Walpond-Skinner gathers the men together in the red-gabled house’s main room and informs them that a major push is being prepared. Serge, Gibbs and several other pilots and observers are taken off flying duties above the front and sent ten miles back to practise Contact Patrol work. This turns out to consist of flying low over advancing infantry who have mirrors attached to their backs, sounding a klaxon from the cockpit to solicit from the ground flares which, in turn, indicate positions and accomplishments. Bengal lights mean a wood has been captured, Aldis ones a trench, and Hucks a battery-or is it Aldis for battery and Hucks for woods? And is a copse a wood? How many trees…? Serge suspects, even as they learn the signals and run through the klaxon sequences, that the system’s flawed. The mock-battles that they act out over unmined, undefended fields usually manage to degenerate into confusion. In the week he spends there, three machines crash: two of them into each other, pilots glare-blinded by mirrors…

  Serge finds it hard to sleep. It’s not the gentle rocking of the houseboat that he misses so much as the front’s sounds all around him: they’ve become his nightly lullaby. He can still hear the howitzers from here, of course, but they’re too distant-and besides, their sound is drowned out by the noise of Crossleys carrying troops eastward: convoy after convoy of them, trundling past the window of his cabin in an unbroken supply chain. Infantry march by round the clock as well, the rhythm of their step setting off in Serge’s head the lead-up lines from Sonnet 65:

  Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back,

  Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?

  Returning to the 104th at the week’s end, he whoops for joy as the poplars, Bessoneaus and grazing cows appear beneath his wing, then runs along the path that leads through the wood (or copse) to the river and, throwing himself on the bed, flips Stanley’s book open so that he can read 65’s riposte line, already firmly scrawled across his memory, with his own eyes:

  O none, unless this miracle have might,

  That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

  “So when’s the big day, then?” he asks Walpond-Skinner.

  “Firstly, Carrefax, it’s ‘big day, sir’-or, strictly speaking, ‘big day, sir, then.’ ”

  “Sir, then,” Serge corrects himself. “Then when-?”

  “And secondly, that’s privileged information. I would tell you that it’s mine to know and yours to wonder about-if I knew myself, that is, which I’m afraid I don’t. The moles have to finish their work first.”

  “Moles, sir?”

  “The tunnellers. They’re digging all the way through no man’s land, so they can lay explosives underneath the trenches, gun emplacements and what have you. Got to proceed slowly: make sure it doesn’t cave in, make sure they keep quiet, listen out for Germans counter-tunnelling beneath them, all that sort of thing…”

  Serge becomes fascinated with these tunnellers, these moles. He pictures their noses twitching as they alternately dig and strap on stethoscopes that, pressing to the ground, they listen through for sounds of netherer moles undermining their undermining. If they did hear them doing this, he tells himself, then they could dig an even lower tunnel, undermine the under-undermining: on and on forever, or at least for as long as the volume and mass of the globe allowed it-until earth gave over to a molten core, or, bypassing this, they emerged in Australia to find there was no war there and, unable to return in time for action, sat around aimlessly blinking in the daylight…

  In anticipation of the push, there’s almost constant bombardment of the German side. It’s barrage bombardment: the shells advance in lines, like the teeth of a giant comb moving up warp fibres, ten or so yards each time. For Serge, sleeping in his houseboat once again, the booms of the guns’ discharge to the west, spread out along a line of well over a mile yet sounding almost simultaneously, and the consequent, equally elongated blasts of their detonation to the east, a little further away with each round, become the sounds of waves rolling past him, moving towards a shoreline that’s retreating; no sooner does the longest-travelling one peter out on distant shingle than a new, close-range set swells up and starts bursting energetically. After five days and nights of this, though, he wakes up to silence. Not only have the shells stopped: so, too, have most of the small-gauge gunfire, Archie pops and flares. Nothing at all seems to be happening. All of the squadron’s flights are in the hangars. Scouring the unusually bright winter sky, he fails to pick out a single aeroplane against its blue. It looks desolate and sad, as though aware that it’s being spurned by beautiful machinery and at a loss to understand why.

  The push begins the next day. Almost all the 104th’s planes are involved in it in one way or another. The RE8s are to fly in holding patterns until the tunnellers’ mines are detonated at half past eleven on the dot-their cue to swoop down low and monitor the progress of the infantry battalion to which each of them has been assigned, tracking the soldiers through no-man’s-land towards the target destination. They’re to report the battalion’s advance to stations set up a mile or so behind the front for this very occasion, which in turn will relay the troops’ positions back to HQ-where, Serge presumes, they must have a warlike version of the Realtor’s Game laid out across a table, with helmets instead of top hats, trucks instead of cars and rabid, snarling dogs being shunted over flattened icons representing trenches, hills and machine-gun nests. Serge and Gibbs have been assigned the 10th Battalion; their target destination is a spinney.

  “Spinney, now, is it?” Gibbs snorts. “They should’ve given us a course on forestry before sending us out here.”

  “What are you taking a shaving set with you for, Sassen?” Walpond-Skinner asks a pilot in the front row.

  “Case I get shot down and taken prisoner, sir. Want to keep up appearances.”

  “Why not just send your silk pyjamas over, and arrange for your mail to be forwarded? Go and put it back in your quarters! The only thing you’ll need with you if you get shot down and end up in one piece is a Verey gun, to torch the machine with.”

  “I’ve got to pop over to the Floaters too,” Serge mumbles to Gibbs. “Our medicine box is low.”

  Gibbs shrugs. He’s tried the cocaine-in-the-eyeballs trick, but doesn’t get the point of snorting it, and even less so of injecting stuff into one’s arm. Serge, for his part, can’t imagine flying without diacetylmorphine. He’s been making regular trips into Mirabel for months now, appointing himself, as far as the quartermaster there’s concerned, the squadron’s pharmaceutical liaison officer. Back on the boat, he stabs a phial into his wrist, then, catching sight of Cécile’s stocking, two round peep-holes snipped out of its fabric, picks that up and slips it over his head, brushing his face briefly with a honey-like genital scent. He pockets two more phials on his way out, then pauses for a last look at the river and the poplars, still and impassive against all the excitement. He can hear the engines catching on the field, the first planes moving through the long grass. The diacetylmorphine takes hold as he glides back up the path and over to his RE8, turning the machines’ manoeuvres as they taxi, pause and pirouette, escorting one another into position, into ballroom-dance steps, the roar of their engines into symphonies whose every chord is laden with insinuation…

  Flying towards the lines, Serge has the same sensation as he had in massage sessions with Tania towards the end of his Kloděbrady sojourn. The whole front has a weekend feel. No round, white balloons are up; no blue and red lights flicker in the trenches. There’s no cordite smoke, no vapour blanket, nothing. It looks like the entire war effort has been stood down-or, rather, put into a casual mode in which formalities have been relaxed and, consequently, anything is possible. As he nears the English lines, he notices a change in the texture and colouration of the ground behind them. Its surface, previously pale and washed-out, has become darkened by spiky dots. They’re everywhere, crowded together like ants. In the relatively quiet air, Gibbs has no problem making himself heard a
s he shouts back to Serge:

  “Men!”

  They spill out of the trenches, flecking the circles and mandalas of the ruined roads and pathways. In some places Serge can make out subdivisions in their mass, semi-discrete clusters; in others the clusters are so large that they’ve run together and eclipsed the ground entirely. Unlike ants, though, they’re not moving: packed together with their bayoneted rifles pointing upwards, they’re sitting still as encrustations on a rock or hull, waiting for the signal to move. Serge reaches down between his legs and lowers his copper aerial. Testing the sigs, he leads Gibbs to above their interim receiving station, marked by a semi-circle of white cloth beside which, in place of Popham strips, a black-and-white Venetian blind opens and closes, winking Morse OKs at him. Then they turn back towards the lines and climb. Their route is slightly different to the normal one; the shift adds to the sense of strangeness brought about by the guns’ silence. The men in the German trenches seem to have noticed the changes too, to sense that something new is coming their way: they’re too nervous to send more than a token spattering of tracer fire towards him. The German kite balloons have picked up on the break with protocol as well: all down the line they’re up as high as they can go. The one emerging from beneath his tail doesn’t bother to winch itself out of range, so intent is it on fixing its gaze on the dots massing on the far side-and Serge, caught in the same spell of anticipation, doesn’t bother to strafe it.

  They find their position just back from the German lines at three-and-a-half thousand feet. Serge looks up and sees the squadron’s SE5s patrolling in formation high above them. He looks at his watch: twenty-eight minutes past eleven. He looks down: the whole battlefield is static, calm; only the planes move, serenely etching out their patterns. As Gibbs turns, then turns again, Serge runs his eye along the earth below, wondering in which part of it the moles have secreted their explosive droppings. For a while, he feels the presence, composited from blocks of air and tricks of the light, of that faceless diviner Baron Karl von Arnow: he’s hovering beside him, holding a dowser’s stick; and the wind buffeting the struts and wires is pronouncing his name-insistently, repeating it over and over: Are-NOW, Are-NOW, Are-NOW…

  Then, as though summoned upwards by this incantation, the earth rises towards him. At first it looks like a set of welts bubbling up across its surface; the welts grow into large domes with smooth, convex roofs; the roofs, still rising upwards and expanding, start to crack, then break open completely; and through their ruptured crusts shoot long, straight jets of earth: huge, rushing geysers that look as though they’re being propelled upwards by nothing but their own force and volume, the dull brown matter defying both height and gravity through sheer self-will. As the closest geyser funnels up past the machine, its dizzy clods glitter in the air. Serge looks out horizontally, first north, then south: the whole German line is punctuated by these earth jets. They look like columns holding up the sky; it seems that if they crumbled it would fall. Their apex is much higher than his plane; for the first time, he has the impression that he’s flying not above the earth’s surface but below it-or, rather, within some kind of enclave contained inside it. A few seconds later, particles start raining down on the machine: small clumps and flecks, beating against the wings and sprinkling his cabin. The jets evaporate, and Serge looks down again to see two enormous holes in the ground beneath him. They gape like hollow eyes, the sockets of some giant who’s been lying beneath the landscape buried-perhaps for centuries, or perhaps even longer-and is only now, part by part, being disinterred.

  “Shall I go down?” Gibbs shouts.

  Serge doesn’t answer, hypnotised by the evacuated eyes.

  “Shall I go down?” Gibbs shouts again.

  Slowly, Serge moves his gaze to the east. The spiky dot-men on the ground have started moving. They’re swarming forwards, trickling through no-man’s-land’s rills and gullies. Every so often parts of their mass are thrown into the air by landmine explosions that, compared to the enormous ones that have just preceded them, seem no more substantial than the bursting of small spots. Shells have started falling too, machine guns chattering. Serge can pick out the starting-flare of 10th Battalion; he signals to Gibbs to fly towards it. As they make their first pass, the mirrors on the men’s backs flash; by the time they’ve turned around and made their second, there’s so much smoke around that none of the sky’s luminescence makes its way down to the mirrors and back up to Serge; by the third he can’t even see the men. He sounds his klaxon, but its noise is lost amidst gunfire. He can hear another machine’s klaxon sounding too, and presses his own again, to let it know he’s nearby; other planes apply their horns as well, like ships in fog. Serge taps Gibbs on the back and shouts:

  “Up again.”

  Gibbs points to his ear and shakes his head: too loud to hear each other now. Serge jerks his finger upwards. As they climb out of the smoke, he tries to send a signal to his ground station, but finds he can’t: the hurled-up earth has gritted up the spark set, jamming its parts. When he bangs it on the cockpit’s side in an attempt to shake the earth out, the whole tapper-key comes loose; trying to reattach it, he severs a wire. Gibbs is holding a position at three thousand feet, awaiting instructions, but Serge has none to issue. His spark set’s demise is giving him a strange, almost electric sensation: it feels as though he were flying naked, as though a layer of insulating hardware and a softer, inner one of message-lace had suddenly been stripped away and he himself were the thing riding the air’s frequency, pulsing right up against it. Despite his diacetylmorphine-induced languor, he begins to feel a buzzing in his groin again. More blood runs to it as Gibbs plunges back towards the smoke. Tilted back and facing upwards, hardening, Serge can see why Gibbs is diving: a whole Jasta has descended on the SE5s. The colourful German planes and the more sombre English ones turn around each other in confused whirlpools, their vapour trails forming a vortex that’s drifting to the side with the wind. They look like bees swirling around a honey jar. One of the English machines is on fire. Two of the German ones have broken loose and are now hurtling downwards.

  “Albatroses,” Gibbs shouts back to him, his voice amplified and made audible by fear.

  As they sink through the smoke-cloud, Serge sounds his klaxon again, then looks down. The battlefield’s now strewn with fragments: of machine parts, mirrors, men. Legs, wedged in by earth, stand upright in athletic postures, crooked at the knee as though to sprint or straightened into sprightly leaps but, lacking bodies to direct and complement their action, remain still; detached arms semaphore quite randomly across the ground; torsos, cut off at the waist, mimic the statues of antiquity. Gibbs flies above them for a while, then pulls the plane up and takes them back for a peep above the smoke. No sooner have they cleared it than Serge hears a rhythmic tapping: it’s as though a mechanic were standing beside the machine rapping on the fuselage to get their attention. The taps make the canvas on the plane’s back section tauten and jump; little holes appear in a straight line along it. They look like a row of popper-buttons springing open, starting at the tail and advancing towards his cabin, which they then move across as well, pocking its floor. A mass of shadow runs behind them, bringing with it a loud sound he doesn’t recognise. As the sound climaxes and falls off, Serge looks up and sees, coming from where the sun should be, a wave of brightly-coloured metal hurtling downwards. It sinks beneath them; he swivels his head to follow it, and watches the mass resolve itself into the shape of an Albatros. It’s turning below them, getting ready to come back; then it’s climbing behind them, just out of range, amassing altitude so it can dive again. Colours radiate from its underbelly-the central part of which, the lower wing, has words painted across it. He can’t make the words out, but he can see some of their letters: there’s a K, an m, a c…

  “Shoot at them when they come back!” Gibbs shouts, pointing to the Lewis gun.

  Serge turns away and gazes at the Albatros as it turns gracefully above them. He looks at the gun: s
hould he shoot? The German aeroplane is beautiful, elegant and agile; and it’s selected them, of all the men and machines in the battlefield, to bear down on with its colour and its words-as though, like an annunciating angel, it had a message to convey, one just for them, for him. It’s hovering five hundred feet above him, shedding speed, nose angling downwards; then it starts diving, its front spitting out streaks of yellow and orange, like a splashing paintbrush. More buttons pop along the fuselage; struts leap out from between the wings. It passes above the RE8 this time; as it does, the phrase painted on its lower wing streaks by again: the m is actually two n’s; the c’s part of the sequence sch, like in schwer. Serge sees a t, then loses sight of the plane; Gibbs, meanwhile, turns, then turns again, trying to shake it off their tail.

  “Shoot!” he screams back at Serge.

  Serge isn’t going to shoot. He feels tranquil, passive. He wants the Albatros to come and pluck him from his nest and carry him away in a long, whispered rush of consonants. He still can’t see it-but a set of bumps rising from the undercarriage lets him know it’s coming back at them from the shark angle, the blind spot. The bumps are followed by a jolting at his back. He turns around to see Gibbs’s shoulders first straighten suddenly, straining against the belt, then slacken and slump forwards. One of the plane’s wings snaps; the machine lists to the side as the landscape below it starts elevating. As the smoke cloud rises up to meet them, the Albatros looms once more into Serge’s vision. It hovers above them, the one bright object in the darkened sky, the phrase written across its lower wing now finally legible. Painted in black, Gothic script on a red background, it reads: