Herma

by MacDonald Harris

  At five hundred meters he looked around. The town of Luxeuil lay under his wing, a kilometer or two from the field. The rain clouds were still piled up along the horizon to the west. To the south the rolling country ran away toward Lure and the plain of the Franche-Comté. Ahead, to the east, the convoluted slopes of the Vosges rose away toward Mulhouse, the German border, and the Rhine. He banked into a turn again and settled back on the approach to the field.

  In a down-angling power glide the Nieuport picked up speed rapidly. The wind sang in the wires and the farmland below flashed by with increasing speed. The field—the Escadrille hangar to the left and the others at the far end—staggered up rapidly ahead. A glance at the altimeter—three hundred. He nudged the throttle a little and pulled the stick back as he went into the roll, so that he rolled up and not down and came back out almost on the same level where he had started. As he went over, everything below him—the mountains to the east, the hangars, the rain clouds on the horizon—revolved slowly, hung sideways, and then turned upside down. At the top he was looking straight down at the hangar and the little cluster of men standing in front of it watching him. The horizon swung on rapidly around, wobbled, and came to a stop. He was out of it and flying flat, only a little dizzied from hanging upside down for a second or two.

  He set the throttle at about three-quarters and began the climb up to twelve hundred. Thirty-nine hundred feet; he still converted mentally to the altitudes he had learned to fly on in America. He pulled up into a slow stall and kicked the rudder over.

  The Nieuport spun beautifully. Seeming to pivot on the tip of the left wing, it sank in a tight spiral. Fred kept his eyes on the altimeter. The strap of the shock helmet cut into his throat and irritated him; he jerked the snap free. At three hundred—only about a thousand feet—he centered the controls and then carefully pulled back the stick. He had no idea whether the thing was going to come out of it, but it was the easiest machine to handle he had ever flown. It leveled out flat with the wires screaming a hundred meters above the hangars, and he banked it around to climb up for the spin to the other side.

  The right vrille was the same. The torque effect of the Le Rhône rotary, in fact, made it even easier to recover from the spin to the right. As the wings leveled and he started pulling out of the dive he stuck his head out from behind the cowl to line up on the horizon and his helmet came off with a single snap, the metal fitting on the flap dealing him a nasty thwack over the eye. The wind flogged at his hair, slapping it against the side of his head. The hell with the bloody thing anyhow. It was no good and it was uncomfortable. He permitted himself a glance behind. A tiny dot like a dead bird sank down in the air far below him: the lost helmet.

  He banked around and turned into his approach over the main street of Luxeuil with its double row of stone houses. Two hundred meters, half throttle. A little crosswind from the left. He corrected with a touch of stick and rudder. As he went over the gap in the trees, a little before the field, he cut back the throttle and the note of the Le Rhône dropped to a sputtering bark. The fence at the edge of the field went by. As the grass rushed up at him he deliberately touched down a little hard, so that the Nieuport bounced up and floated along with its wheels just brushing the tops of the grass, across the depression and down onto the solid ground beyond.

  He taxied back with his skid bumping. When he came to his place in the line he gave it a burst of throttle and kicked the Nieuport around with the skid digging up grass and dirt. He came to a stop and cut the engine with the baton exactly between the wheels. He climbed out without a word, while the others watched.

  “Where’s your helmet?” said Thénault.

  “I forgot to snap it.”

  Thénault had nothing to say to this.

  In the office Thénault spread out a map on the table.

  “We came here originally to fly escorts for the British.” With a motion of his head he indicated the Sopwiths at the other end of the field. “They’re Canadians actually. They’re from the Third Wing Royal Naval Air Service. They came here from the Dardanelles. But they’re holding the Sopwiths for a big raid on Oberndorf that’s to take place in a little while. In the meantime we’ve been flying mainly defensive missions.”

  He stopped and turned to the map.

  “The Germans have Albatros bombers based here at Habsheim, near Mulhouse. The Albatros is not a very good machine. It’s heavy and it tends to fall apart when it is stressed. But it will carry a heavy load of bombs. They come over usually at dawn, to raid our own fields west of Belfort. We’re stationed here at Luxeuil, near the border, in a good position to cut them off without using unnecessary fuel for a long flight.”

  Fred looked at the map. The distances were greater than he thought: it was forty kilometers from Belfort to Mulhouse and about seventy from Mulhouse back to Luxeuil.

  “At first they were escorting them with Fokker III monoplanes. But they weren’t much good and we could outfly them easily. Now they’ve started escorting them with two-seater Aviatik scouts. This is another matter. The observer in the rear of the Aviatik has got a heavy-caliber Parabellum gun with a hundred-and-sixty-degree firing arc. It’s very dangerous to come up at him from the rear. There are two theories on how to deal with them. They come out of the east at dawn, so one tactic is to attack them from behind, so that you will come at them out of the sun. The trouble with this is that the Aviatik’s guns are ranged to the rear. So some people think it’s better to wait until they’ve made their bombing run and are on their way home. Then you can come at them head on, still from the east, but out of the way of the guns on the Aviatiks.”

  Fred studied the triangle on the map: Mulhouse-Belfort-Luxeuil.

  He could see that to chase the Albatrosses back to the Rhine and return would take the maximum two-hour endurance of the Nieuports.

  “Why let them bomb the fields? I would think you could take them right away.”

  “Because that way you have to come at them from the rear,” said Thénault.

  He opened the drawer of the table and took out, one by one, three small mahogany boxes. He lined them up on the table.

  “I have here three Croix de Guerre which were awarded last week to aviators of this group.” He said, “I have to wrap them up and send them to their families.”

  He put the boxes back in the drawer and got up from the table. “It was the rear gunners on the Aviatiks that did that. Wait till they turn back to the east. Otherwise it’s suicide.”

  In Luxeuil the Escadrille was quartered in a villa adjoining the old Roman baths. The whole situation was luxurious. The spa town was almost deserted because of the war and, along with the Canadians who were quartered in the Centre Hospital nearby, they had the place to themselves. Except for breakfast they ate their meals at the Hôtel de la Pomme d’Or, the best hotel in town, whose proprietor was an excellent chef.

  It was a two-story villa with a bathroom on each floor. Fred’s room, which he shared with an officer named Raoul Lufbery, was on the ground floor, and the bathroom was a curious arrangement with an entrance in the hall and another separate entrance outside in the garden. There was a large mirror, not over the washbowl but over the bathtub. If you wanted to see anything of yourself below your waist you had to stand in the bathtub, but perhaps whoever planned it hadn’t considered that.

  In the central room—it was an old stone house, built in the eighteenth century, and you could hardly call it a salon—the phonograph was kept wound up incessantly. Fritz Kreisler was playing the Chanson sans paroles, and this was followed by Oh Movin’ Man, Don’t Take Ma Baby Grand. When Fred came out in his riding breeches and leather jacket it was playing Poor Butterfly. The room was full of officers in various bizarre costumes—fur-lined jackets, motheaten sweaters, parts of French, English, and Foreign Legion uniforms, Prince in his fur coat. Some of them wore their hats indoors: flowing berets, Foreign Legion pillboxes, long elfin stocking caps. A cognac bottle was going around. Thénault looked up and said noth
ing. “This is Fred Hite,” shouted Prince over the racket.

  Just at that moment the record ended and somebody lifted off the arm. There was a silence.

  “Where’s your mustache, Freddy?” said someone.

  It was a tall, broad, red-faced man who had evidently drunk quite a little cognac. His hair was combed in a pompadour, with a strand that stuck out over his ear.

  “That’s just Roy Willkie,” said Prince. “Don’t pay any attention to him.”

  Fred looked around. It was true that almost everybody else had a mustache. Some were bushy like Theodore Roosevelt’s, some were long and drooping, others like Thénault’s neatly clipped.

  “My old lady,” said Willkie not to Fred but to the others, “that’s my Paris old lady, says kissing a guy without a mustache is like eating an egg without salt.”

  “He does have a little peach-down there,” said somebody else.

  “There’s no way you can fly a Nieuport without a mustache,” said Willkie.

  “I saw him fly this afternoon,” said Prince quietly.

  “How did he do?”

  “His shock helmet fell off.”

  “Those fucking things are no good anyhow.”

  “What happened to the music?”

  Somebody put on Minnie the Mermaid.

  “Have a drink, Freddy,” said Willkie.

  The tinny voice sang:

  “She lost her morals

  Down among the corals

  Gee but she was good to me …”

  It was only five minutes’ walk down the main street of the small resort town to the Pomme d’Or, but Prince insisted on taking his car. He and Fred got in, along with Lufbery and another officer named Bill Thaw who was carrying a half-grown lion cub with him. This was Whiskey, the squadron mascot, who, as Prince explained, was born on a transatlantic liner, acquired in some fashion by a Brazilian dentist, and bought by a syndicate of a half dozen of them when the squadron was on leave in Paris. But as he got bigger the only one who could handle him was Bill Thaw. If anyone else approached him he was likely to take a piece out of your hand. Thaw was a large, rather heavy man with a gentle smile and a wisp of a mustache, and perhaps Whiskey thought he was his mother. Thaw got into the back seat with Whiskey and prevented him from eating the leather upholstery. The Packard started and they went off down the narrow cobbled street.

  Prince parked on the wrong side of the street in front of the hotel. There was no other traffic and everybody knew the American car anyhow. They got out. The others were coming along down the street.

  Prince wrinkled his nose and looked into the back seat.

  “Oh, balls.”

  “What is it, Norman?”

  “This animal has shitted in my beautiful car.”

  “Well, tell Bill,” said Lufbery. “Bill should have housebroken him. It’s his fault.”

  “But what am I going to do?”

  “You’re going to come in to dinner.”

  “It’s only lion dung,” said Thaw. “In Africa they eat it. It’s said to make you brave.”

  “The ill-mannered beast,” said Prince.

  They went in. Whiskey was tied to a hat rack in the foyer, where he couldn’t attack anyone. Monsieur Groscolas himself, in his white apron, came out of the kitchen to greet them. He and his wife ran the hotel themselves, along with a female cousin from the country and a boy to serve as waiter. In the dining room the table was set with a white cloth and antique sterling silver. Every piece of furniture in the room, according to Monsieur Groscolas, was an heirloom and had been in the family since before the Revolution. There was an enormous sideboard, grotesque and intricately carved, that might have been used for a set of Tales of Hoffman. Through the door at the other end Fred caught a glimpse of a billiard room. The billiard table too was in the same style.

  Madame Groscolas appeared, moist-faced and smiling, and referred to them all as “mes enfants.” She could never get their American names straight. They all sat down at the long table. There was an empty chair near the head of the table, an odd-looking one with elaborately carved hardwood arms. Fred moved toward it, but Prince said, “Don’t sit there.”

  Everyone had fallen silent. Fred took another chair. He was between Prince and Lufbery, a wiry compact man with his hair clipped short like a tight helmet. He was reserved and didn’t say very much. He had an unconscious habit of tightening his jaw muscles every two seconds or so, as though some slow and even pulse were working in his head. He didn’t seem very friendly, but he was correct toward Fred and he hadn’t joined in the jibes about the mustache.

  As Madame Groscolas was opening the wine Prince told Fred in an offhand tone, “That’s where Rockwell always sat. We ought to get rid of that chair.”

  The dinner was Lucullan. There was trout, then a baked hare, and roasted grouse en casserole. The wine was a good Médoc, better wine than you could get in Paris during the war. At the end you could have café filtre or American coffee. Fred elected for American coffee and it was passed to him in a large crockery cup without a handle.

  He looked around the table. “Sugar?”

  There was a delay of perhaps three seconds. Then Willkie reached behind him and took a sugar dispenser from the sideboard. Amid a certain amount of groping and fumbling this was passed down the table to Fred. Willkie was watching him with a sly rustic smile. Fred put the sugar in, stirred it, and took a sip.

  It was all he could do not to choke. It was horribly salty; it was like drinking brine. Everybody was watching him. Lufbery, stone-faced, with the little shadow working at the corner of his jaw.

  Without showing any sign that there was anything wrong with it, he drank the whole cup, sip by sip. Then he set the cup down and took a spoon from the table.

  “Excuse me.”

  He went out through the front door of the hotel and crossed the sidewalk to the car. There was no street lighting of course and it was pitch dark inside the back seat. He had to find what he was looking for mainly by odor. Finally he got a piece of it in the spoon and, balancing it carefully, took it back into the hotel.

  The others hardly seemed to have missed him and had gone back to talking. Only one or two looked up as he came back in. Fred went around the table to Willkie’s place and carefully dropped the lump of lion dung into his coffee. Then, handing the spoon to Madame Groscolas to be washed, he went back to his own chair and sat down.

  Now everyone was looking at Willkie. His face reddened. He started to get up and then changed his mind.

  Prince said, “Go ahead and drink it, Roy.”

  17.

  Herma went down the road in the starlight, a canvas musette bag slung over her shoulder, feeling a feminine satisfaction even in the darkness with her smartly cut Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps uniform with the American-flag patch on the shoulder. The road led out past the Roman baths and around a public park to a cluster of Nissen huts erected on what was formerly a polo field. She was not sure where to turn off the road. Then in the starlight she made out the sign on the fence: B.E.F. Rest Camp Luxeuil-les-Bains. There was no one in sight in the area around the temporary corrugated-iron buildings. She had to wander around in the darkness for some time before she found the rec hut. Finally she noticed some noise coming from one of the larger huts, and glimmers of light through scratches in the painted-over windows. She pushed open the door and went in.

  Inside the air was thick with cigarette smoke and the odor of beer and fried food. There were perhaps a hundred men crowded into a room only thirty feet or so long and half as wide. At the other end of the room an Anzac soldier was inexpertly playing a piano. Three or four soldiers were leaning on the piano singing. Most of the others were sitting at table with tin cups of tea or glasses of beer before them, talking, leafing through old copies of Punch, or slapping down Solitaire games.

  “Smokes, boys?”

  A soldier at the nearest table looked up.

  “Hi, it’s the cigarette miss.”

  “But it’s no
t the same one.”

  “Of course it’s not the same one, you bloody idiot. This one’s a Yank.”

  “When’s America coming in, Miss?”

  The others at the table grinned at this.

  “In a while. But in the meantime, have a smoke.”

  Others in the room had noticed her now and were getting up, a little sheepishly, to come her way. She opened the musette and began passing out blue packs of Caporals. But there were too many hands and finally she was flinging the packs out to the small crowd that gathered around her. In only a few minutes the cigarettes were gone.

  They all tried to talk at once. She could hardly make sense out of it, since some of them were speaking Cockney and others some north- country accent or other that was practically incomprehensible. A soldier who had broken open a pack of Caporals passed her one and lit it. She drew on it and then looked around the room again.

  There were men from almost every regiment on the Somme and Meuse fronts. She didn’t know all the badges but she recognized the Cheshire Regiment and Royal Fusiliers. At first the men pressing around her seemed animated. But when you looked more carefully there was fatigue and strain in almost every face. Most of them were hollow-eyed and underweight, and here and there the white of an old fear showed in a pair of eyes, a hag-ridden face out of an Edvard Munch painting. A good many wore bandages or supported themselves on canes. One of them, a boy not more than eighteen, simply stared at her out of eyes sunk deep in shadows. Finally he spoke.