The Complete Flying Officer X Stories

by H. E. Bates

  I do not know how many Auerbach got that night, but by the end of May he and Anderson were still almost equal, and by the beginning of June what they did was in the papers every day. The papers had their photographs too, and I suppose the photographs were something like them. But what the papers printed was really a comic story. It was the story of two men with eagle eyes, though sometimes it was cat’s eyes and sometimes it was hawk’s eyes, who stalked over France every night in the darkness. We liked especially the word “stalk,” since it is the one thing an aeroplane does not do, and thinking of the clear, youthful, exuberant eyes of Anderson and of the crafty, friendly blue eyes of Auerbach, we liked the nonsense about the eyes. From the newspapers you got the impression that Anderson and Auerbach were a pair of very heroic bandits who behaved with copybook courage and were in some way supernatural. This attitude was perhaps excusable, since the newspapers never saw Anderson lying naked in the sun, blaspheming about the luck of Auerbach, or Auerbach playing snooker, with a laughing audience who got more fun out of Auerbach potting the black than they got out of his putting a Heinkel down.

  It was excusable because, after all, the newspapers could not know the feeling that comes from a squadron which is at the crest of things: the warm and positive excitement that we felt all that spring and which went on expanding and flowing outward all that summer. They did not know about Auerbach playing billiards and comic games of snooker, or about his kissing a girl on the forehead in the dark. They did not know about Anderson lying on his back in the sun and looking at the green summer leaves and the green grass spreading to the foot of the dark hills, and saying, a little solemnly, because this was his first year in England since the war began: “You can’t believe how bloody wizard it is. You can’t know what it is to see the leaves so green in the trees.”

  There seemed no reason why this feeling and this squadron, and above all why Anderson and Auerbach, should not have gone on for ever. There seemed no reason why Anderson and Auerbach should ever stop those simple and disastrous journeys over France. But there comes a time when every squadron is held to have earned its rest; when some obscure department somewhere, by something written in a paper, breaks a tension and a feeling that can never be put on paper at all.

  And finally it was time to say good-bye on an evening in July. The weather had broken suddenly and the wind blew cold and gusty between the dispersal huts on the drome, raising dry clouds of sand. The Hurricanes were lined along the perimeter. The pilots were not very happy, but they pretended to be very happy and the sergeant pilots fondled the busts of each other’s Mae Wests and said heavy farewells. There were many people there to say good-bye. We shook hands with everybody again and wished them luck, and then the take-off was delayed and we shook hands with everyone again. We all promised to write and knew that we should never keep the promises. Anderson addressed the pilots in language as if they were going to play football, and we all said good-bye once more. Then for the second time the take-off was delayed and the little W.A.A.F.’s who had at last begun to dry their tears began to cry all over again.

  It was only when the take-off had begun at last that I realised that Auerbach was not there. Auerbach was going one way, the squadron another. Auerbach had not come to say good-bye. The Hurricanes flew once round the drome, in two flights of six, black against the grey evening sky, gradually formating. The little W.A.A.F.’s cried a little harder and the wind blew a little harder in a grey wave over the leaves of the potato patch beside the hut. I lifted my hand and drove away.

  At the mess I found Auerbach alone. The anteroom was almost empty and there was no one laughing in the billiard-room.

  “You didn’t come,” I said to Auerbach.

  “No.”

  “You don’t like good-byes,” I said.

  “No.” He looked at me with the tender and now serious blue eyes that the newspapers had been vainly trying for weeks to describe. “No. I do not like fuss,” he said. “No fuss.”

  I did not say anything. I walked away and into the garden. The grass and the leaves and the meadows under the hills were still green, but it was no longer the wonderful green of early summer. I walked across the grass and looked up at the empty sky and realised suddenly that something had gone.

  All summer there had been something in the air. It was there no longer now.

  How Sleep the Brave

  I

  The sea moved away below us like a stream of feathers smoothed down by a level wind. It was grey and without light as far as we could see. Only against the coast of Holland, in a thin line of trimming that soon lost itself in the grey coasts of the North, did it break into white waves that seemed to remain frozen between sea and land. Down towards Channel the sun, even from six thousand feet, had gone down at last below long layers of cloud. They had been orange and blue at first, then yellow and pale green, and then, as they were now, entirely the colour of slate. Above them there was nothing but a colourless sky that would soon be dark altogether.

  There had been snow all over England that week. For two nights it had drifted against the huge wheels of the Stirlings, in scrolls ten feet high. The wind had partially swept it from the smooth fabric of fuselages as it fell and then frost had frozen what remained of it into uneven drifts of papery dust. In the mornings gangs of soldiers worked at the runways, clearing them to black-white roads edged with low walls of snow, and lorries drove backwards and forwards along them, taking away like huge blocks of salt the carved-out drifts. In two more days the thaw came and yellow pools of snow-water lay in the worn places of the runways. It froze a little again late at night, leaving a muddy skin of ice on pools that looked dangerous with the sunlight level and cold on them in the early morning. It wasn’t dangerous really and the wheels of the Stirlings smashed easily through the ice, splintering it like the silver glass toys on a Christmas tree. Then in the daytime the pools thawed again and if you watched the take-off from the control tower through a pair of glasses you saw the snow-water sparkle up from the wheels like brushes of silver feathers.

  And now, beyond the hazy coast of Holland, with its thin white trimming that grew less white in the twilight as we flew towards it, we could see what reports had already told us. There was snow all over Europe. The day was too advanced to see it clearly. All you could see was a great hazy field of cotton-wool that had fewer marks on it than a layer of cloud. Far ahead of us, south and southwest and east, it ceased even to be white. It became the misty, colourless distances of all Europe, and suddenly as I looked at it, for almost the last time before darkness hid it altogether, I thought of what it would be like to fly on, southward, to the places I had never seen, the places without flak, the places in sunshine, the places beyond the war and the snow. It was one of those detached ideas that you get when flying, or rather that get you: a light-headed idea that seems to belong to the upper air and is gone as soon as its futility has played with you.

  For a few more minutes the trimming of coast lay dead below us and then, in a moment, was gone past us altogether. For just a few minutes longer the misty cotton-wool of the snow over Europe meant something, and then I looked and could see it no longer. Darkness seemed to have floated suddenly between the snow and the Stirling. What was below us was just negative. It was not snow, or land, or Europe. It was just the negative darkness that would flare any moment into hostility.

  This darkness was to be ours for five hours or more. I was already cold and the aircraft was bumping like a goods train. The most violent bumps seemed to jerk a little more blood out of my feet. I remembered this sensation from other trips and now tried moving my toes in my boots. But the boots were too thick and my toes were already partially dead. This was my fifteenth trip as flight engineer but even now I could not get rid of two sensations that had recurred on all those trips since the very first: the feeling that I had no feet and the feeling, even more awful than that, that I had swallowed something horribly sour, like vinegar, which had now congealed between my chest and throat.
I never thought of it as fear. I was always slightly scared, in a numb way, before the trips began, and before Christmas, before the snow fell, I had been more scared than hell on the Brest daylights. But now I only thought of this sourness as discomfort. It always did something to my power of speech. I always kept the inter-comm. mouthpiece ready, but I rarely used it. I could hear other voices over the inter-comm. but I rarely spoke, unless it was very necessary, in reply. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to speak, and it had little to do with the fact that Ellis, Captain of K. 42, did not encourage talking. I think I was scared that by speaking I might give the impression that I was scared. So I kept my mouth shut and let the sourness bump in my throat and pretended, as perhaps the other six of us pretended, that I was tough and taciturn and did not care.

  “A lot of light muck on the port side, skipper.”

  “O.K.”

  The voice of Osborne, from the rear turret, came over the inter-comm., the Northern accent sharp and cold and almost an order in itself. Ossy, from Newcastle, five feet six, with the lean Newcastle face and grey monkey-wrinkled eyes, was the youngest of us. In battle-dress the wads of pictures in his breast pockets gave him a sort of oblong bust. In his Mae West this bust became quite big and handsome, so that he looked out of proportion, like a pouter pigeon. We always kidded Ossy about giving suck. But in his Mae West there was no room for his photographs; so always, before a trip, Ossy took them out and put them in his flying boots, one in each leg. In one leg of his boots he also carried a revolver, and in the other an American machine spanner. No one knew quite what this spanner was for, except perhaps that it was just one of those things that air-crews begin to carry about with them as foolish incidentals and that in the end become as essential as your right arm. So Ossy never came on trips except he had with him, in the legs of his boots, the things that mattered: the revolver, the spanner, and the pictures of a young girl, light-haired, print-frocked, pretty in a pale Northern way, taken in the usual back-garden attitudes on Tyneside. “She’s a wizard kid,” he said.

  As for the spanner, if it was a talisman, I knew that Ed Walker, the second dickey, carried two rabbits’ feet. You might have expected the devotion to a good-luck charm from Ossy, who anyway had the good sense to carry a spanner. But it surprised you that Winchester hadn’t taught Ed Walker anything better than a belief in rabbits’ feet. They were very ordinary rabbits’ feet. The tendons had been neatly severed and the hair was quite neat and tidy and smooth. Ed kept them hidden under his shirts in a drawer in his bedroom and he didn’t know that anyone knew they were there. I shared the room with him and one day when I opened the wrong drawer by mistake there were the rabbits’ feet under the shirts, hidden as a boy might have hidden a packet of cigarettes from his father. Ed was very tall and slow-eyed and limp. He took a long time to dress himself and did not talk much. Between Winchester at eighteen and a Stirling at nineteen there wasn’t much life to be filled in. He was so big that sometimes he looked lost; as if he had suddenly found himself grown up too quickly. And sometimes I used to think he didn’t talk much solely for the reason that he hadn’t much to say. But just because of that, and because of the rabbits’ feet and the big lazy helplessness that went with them and because we could lie in bed and not talk much and yet say the right things when we did talk, we were fairly devoted.

  Between the coast of Holland and the first really heavy German flak I always felt in a half - daze. I always felt my mind foreshorten its view. It was like travelling on a very long journey in a railway train. You didn’t look forward to the ultimate destination, but only to the next station. In this way it did not seem so long. If it were night you could never tell exactly where you were, and sometimes you were suddenly surprised by the lights of a station.

  We had no station lights: that was the only difference. We bumped on against the darkness. I don’t know why I always felt it was against the darkness, and not in it or through it. Darkness on these long winter trips seemed to solidify. The power we generated seemed to cut it. We had to cut it to get through.

  If we got through—but we did not say that except as a joke. At prayer meeting, in intelligence room, before the trips, the Wing-Commander always liked that joke. “When you come back—if you come back”. But he was the only one, I think, who did like it, and most of us had given up laughing now. It might have been rather funnier if, for instance, he had said he hoped we had taken cases of light ale on board, or that we might get drunk on Horlick’s tablets and black coffee. Not that this would have been very funny. And the funniest joke in the world, coming from him, wouldn’t have given us any more faith than we had.

  Faith is a curious thing to talk about. You can’t put your hand on it, but there it is. And I think what we and that crew had faith in was not jokes or beam-approach or navigation or the kite itself, but Ellis.

  “It’s like a duck’s arse back here,” Ossy suddenly said. “One minute I’m in bloody Switzerland and the next I’m up in the North Sea.”

  We laughed over the inter-comm.

  “It’s your ten-ton spanner,” Ellis said.

  “What spanner, Skipper, what spanner?”

  “Drop it overboard!”

  “What spanner, what——”

  “Go on, drop it. I can feel the weight of the bloody thing from here. You’re holding us back.”

  “There’s flak coming up like Blackpool illuminations, Skip. Honest, Skip. Take plenty of evasive action——”

  “Just drop the bloody spanner, Ossy, and shut up.”

  We all laughed again over the inter-comm. There was a long silence, and then Ossy’s voice again, now very slow:

  “Spanner gone.”

  We laughed again but it was broken by the voice of Ellis. “What about this Blackpool stuff?”

  “It’s all Blackpool stuff. Just like the Tower Ball-room on a carnival night.”

  They were pumping it up all round us, heavy and light, and for a few minutes it was fairly violent. We were slapped about inside the kite like a collection of loose tools in a case.

  Then from the navigation seat came the voice of Mac, the big Canadian from Winnipeg, slow and sardonic:

  “Keep the milk warm, Ossy dear. It’s baby’s feed time.” And we laughed again.

  After that, for a long time, none of us spoke again. I always noticed that we did not speak much until Ellis started the talk. The voice of Ellis was rather abrupt. The words were shot out and cut off like sections of metal ejected by a machine. I sometimes wondered what I was doing on these trips, in that kite, with Ellis, as flight-engineer. He knew more about aero-engines generally, and about these aeroengines particularly, than I should ever know. If ever a man had a ground-crew devoted by the terror of knowledge it was Ellis.

  We too were devoted by something of the same feeling. He was a small man of about thirty, two years younger than myself, with those large raw hands that mechanics sometimes have: the large, angular, metallic hands that seem to get their shape and power from the constant handling of tools. These hands, his voice, and finally his eyes were the most remarkable things about him. They were dark eyes that looked at you as impersonally as the lens of a camera. Before them you knew you had better display yourself as you were and not as you hoped you might be.

  If Ed Walker had not begun to live, Ellis had lived enough for both of them. For so small a man it was extraordinary how far you had to look up to him, and I think perhaps we looked up at him because of the fullness of that life. A man like Ed would always be insular, clinging to the two neat rabbits’ feet of English ideals. The sea, on which Ellis had served for five or six years before the war, had beaten the insularity out of him. It had given him the international quality of a piece of chromium. He was small but he gave out a feeling of compression. You had faith in him because time had tested the pressure his resistances could hold. He did not drink much: hardly at all. Most of us got pretty puce after bad trips, or good trips too if it comes to that, and sometimes people like Ossy got tearful
in the bar of The Grenadier and looked waterily into the eyes of strangers and said “We bloody near got wrapped up. Lost as hell. Would have been if it hadn’t been for the Skipper”, and probably in the morning did not remember what they said.

  But all of us knew that, and did remember. We knew too why Ellis did not drink. It was because of us. The sea, I think, had taught him something about the cold results of sobriety.

  The flak was all the time fairly violent and now and then we dropped into pockets of muck that lifted the sourness acidly into my throat and dragged it down again through my stomach. It was always bad here. We were a good way over now and I remembered the met. reports at prayer-meeting: about seven-tenths over Germany and then clearing over the target. We had many bombers out that night and I hoped it would be clear.

  Thinking of the weather, I went for a moment into one of those odd mesmeric dazes that you get on long trips, and thought of myself. I was the eldest of the crew: thirty, with a wife I did not live with now. I had been, a successful under-manager in Birmingham and we had at one time a very nice villa on the outskirts. For some reason, I don’t know why, we quarrelled a lot about little things like my not cleaning the bath after I’d used it, and the fact that my wife liked vinegar with salmon. We were both selfish in the same ways. We were like two beans that want to grow up the same pole and then strangle each other trying to do so. I had been glad of the war because it gave me the chance to break from her, and now flying had beaten some of the Selfishness out of me. My self was no longer assertive. It had lost part of its identity, and I hoped the worst part of its identity, through being part of the crew. It had done me good to become afraid of losing my skin, and my only trouble really was that I suffered badly from cold. I now could not feel my feet at all.