by H. E. Bates
Suddenly I could not feel anything. Something hit us with a crack that seemed to lift us straight up as if we had been shot through a funnel. The shock tore me sideways. It flung me violently down and up and down again as if I had been a loose nut in a revolving cylinder.
II
“O.K. everybody?”
We had been shaken like that before, on other trips, but never with quite that violent upward force. I lay on the floor of the aircraft and said something in answer to Ellis’ voice. I hadn’t any idea what it was. I wasn’t thinking of myself, but only, at that moment, of the aircraft. I felt the blow had belted us miles upward, like a rocket.
I staggered about a bit and felt a little dazed. It seemed after a few moments that everybody was O.K. I looked at Mac, huge face immobile over the navigator’s table, pinning down his charts and papers even harder with a violent thumb. I looked at his table and it was almost level. It did not tilt much with the motion of the aircraft and I knew, then we were flying in a straight line. I looked at Allison, the radio operator, and his eyes, framed in a white circle between the earphones, looked back at me. He did not look any paler than usual. He did not look more fixed, more vacant, or more eaten up by trouble than usual. That was just the way he always looked. There had been a kind of cancerous emptiness on his face ever since a blitz had killed his child.
I grinned at him and then the next moment was not thinking of what had happened. The kite was flying well and I heard Ellis’ voice again.
“Must be getting near, Mac?”
“About ten minutes, flying time.”
“O.K.”
She bumped violently once or twice as they spoke and seemed to slide into troughs of muck. The sick lump of tension bumped about in my throat and down into my bowels and up again.
“If I see so much as a flea’s eyelash I’ll feel bloody lucky,” Mac said.
He got up and began to grope his way towards the forward hatch. In those days the navigator did the bomb aiming. Huge and ponderous and blown out, he looked in the dim light like the man in the adverts, for Michelin tyres. I sat down at his table. I felt sick and my head ached. Once, as a boy, I had had scarlet fever and my head, as the fever came on, seemed to grow enormous and heavy, many times too large for my body. Now it was the same. It seemed like a colossal lump of helpless pulp on my shoulders. The light above the table seemed, to flicker and splinter against my eyes.
I knew suddenly what it was. I wasn’t getting my oxygen. It scared me for a moment and then I knew it must have been the fall. I don’t quite know what I did. I must have fumbled about with the connections for a time and succeeded in finding what was wrong at last.
I felt as if I began to filter slowly back into the aircraft. I came back with that awful mental unhappiness, split finally apart by relief, that you get as you struggle out of anæsthesia. I came back to hear the voices of Ellis and Mac, exchanging what I knew must be the instructions over the target. They seemed like disembodied voices. I tried to shake my brain into clarity. It seemed muddy and weak.
At last I got some sense into myself, but it was like exchanging one trouble for another. By the voices over the inter-comm. I knew that we had trouble. The weather was violent and sticky and Mac could not see. Something very dirty and unexpected had come up to change that serene met. forecast at prayer-meeting: clearing over the target. It was not clearing. We were in the middle of something violent, caught up by one of those sinister weather changes that make you hate wind and rain and ice with impotent stupidity.
“Try again, Skip? I can’t see a bloody thing.”
“O.K. Again.”
Whether it cleared or not I never knew. Ellis took her in hand and it was something like driving a springless car down a mountain pass half blocked by the blast of rocks. We went in as steadily as that. The flak beat under the body of the aircraft and once or twice seemed to suck it aside. I held myself tense, throttling my whole body back. If all you needed was good insides and no capacity for thought I was only half equipped. I was not thinking, but my’ emotions had dissolved into my guts like water.
“Bombs gone!”
“O.K.” Ellis said. “Thank Christ for that.”
A second later I felt the aircraft pull upward, as if, bombless, she were suddenly more powerful than the weather. The force of that upward surge seemed to pull me together. It seemed to clean the heaving taste of oil and sickness out of my throat. I was glad too of the voice of Ellis, ejecting smoothly the repeated “O.K. everybody?” We rocked violently, but I did not mind it. Whatever came now must be, I thought, an anti-climax to that moment. We had been in twice and out again. It was all that mattered now.
III
After two days digging the rescue squad found the body of Allison’s child, untouched but dead, pinned down into a cavity by a fallen door; and then Allison himself, his clothes plastered white as a limeworker’s from the dust of debris washed by rain, crawled into the ruins and carried out the child in his own arms. She was still in her night-dress and she must have died as she was, the door falling but not striking her, making the little protective cavity, like a triangular coffin, in which she lay until they found her. Allison walked out of the bombed house and then, not knowing what he was doing, began to walk up the street, still carrying the, child. He must have walked quite a long way, and quite fast, before anyone could stop him. He did not know what he was doing. He vaguely remembered a policeman and he remembered another man who took the child out of his arms. His idea was to take the child to his wife, who lay in hospital with a crushed shoulder and who had been crying out for the baby constantly for two days. He had an idea that it might help her if she saw the face of the child again.
It was my job among other things to watch the dials of the various engine pressures on the panel before me and to switch over the fuel tanks as and when it became necessary. On me depended, to a large extent, the balance of the aircraft. Sometimes you got a tank hit and the business of transferring the weight of fuel from one wing to another needed skill. There had been records of flight-engineers who, in situations of this kind, and by their skill, had really brought an aircraft home.
I had never done anything as important as that and as I sat watching the dials on the panel I was thinking of Allison. You could never tell by his calm, white face what Allison was thinking. After the bomb had destroyed his house and child he had been away from the station for a couple of weeks. His wife got slowly better. He went back to see her quite often, for some days at a time, during the next six months. During this time he had fits of mutinous depression in which he wrote long letters to the boys, myself among them. They were always the same letters: the story of the child. He had nothing else to say because, obviously, there was nothing else in his life. He would always go back, for ever, to that moment; the moment when he carried the child from the house and up the street, himself like a dead person walking, until someone stopped him and took the child away. When he came back to operations with us he never once spoke of this; and none of us ever spoke of it either. I tried to understand for a time what Allison felt. Then I gave it up. I should have been surprised if he had felt anything at all. All that could be felt, whether it was fear or terror or anger or the mutilation of everything normal in you to utter despair, must have already been felt by Allison. He was inoculated for ever against terror and despair.
“Hell, it’s the bloodiest night you ever saw,” Mac said.
“I could have told you that,” Thompson said. The voice of the sergeant in the mid-upper turret came over the inter-comm. “And Skip., they’ll have us in a bloody cone any minute.”
“God, it’s dirty,” Mac said.
“They’re heading for the straight,” Ossy said. “Arse-end Charlie two lengths behind. Sergeant Thompson well up——”
“Stop nattering!” Ellis said.
We were hit a moment later. It was not so violent as the hit which had forced us upward, earlier, as in a funnel. It seemed like a colossal hand-clap. Te
rrific and shattering, it beat at us from both port and starboard sides. There was a moment as if you were in a vacuum. Then you were blown out pf it. It was like the impact of an enormous and violent wave at sea.
I don’t know what happened, but the next moment we were on fire. The flames made a noise like the hiss of a rocket before it leaves the ground. They shot with a slight explosive sound all along the port side of the fuselage, forward from where I sat. I yelled something through the inter-comm. and I heard Mac yelling too. I got hold of the fire extinguisher and began to work it madly. I remember the aircraft bumping so violently that it knocked my hands upward and I shot the extinguisher liquid on the roof. I fell down and got up again, still playing the extinguisher. Then I got the jet straight on to the flames and for a moment it transformed them into smoke, which began to fill the fuselage, so that we could not see. Then the flames shot up again. They blew outward suddenly and violently like the blowback from a furnace. I felt them slap my face, scorching my eyeballs. Then I saw them shoot back and they ran fiercely up the window curtains. At that moment the extinguisher ran dry and I began to tear down the curtains with my bare hands, which were already numb with cold so that I could not feel the flames. I don’t know quite what I did with those curtains. I must have beaten the flames out of them by banging them against my boots because I remember once looking down and seeing the sheepskin smouldering, and I remember how the idea of being on fire myself terrified me more than the idea of the plane itself being on fire.
Some time before this the inter-comm. had gone and suddenly I saw Ellis, who until that moment could not have known much of what we were doing back there, open the door behind the pilot’s seat. His face ejected itself and remained for a second transfixed, yellow beyond the smoke. I shall never forget it. I saw the mouth open and move, and I must have yelled something in reply before the door closed again. I had an awful feeling suddenly that Ellis had gone for ever. We were shut off, alone, with the fire, Mac and Allison and myself, and there was nothing Ellis could do.
All this time Allison sat there as if nothing was happening. You hear of wireless operators at sea, when the ship is sinking, having a kind of supernatural power of concentration. Allison had that concentration. Mac and I must have behaved like madmen. We hit the flames with the screwed-up curtains and with our bare hands and once I saw Mac press his huge Michelin body against the fuselage and kill the flames by pressure as he might have killed an insect on his back. The flames had a sort of maddening elasticity. It was like putting back the inner tube of a bicycle tyre. You pushed it back in one place and it leapt out again in another. Several times the aircraft rocked violently and we fell on the floor. When we got up again we fell against each other. All the time Allison sat there. And I knew that although it was amazing it was also right. He had to sit there. Somehow, if it killed us, we had to keep the flames from him. There was no room for three of us in the confined space of the fuselage, and it was the best thing that Allison should sit there, as if nothing had happened, clamped down by his earphones, as if in a world of his own. Allison was our salvation.
It was very hot by this time and suddenly I was very tired. I could not see very clearly. It was as if the blow-back of the flames had scorched the pupils of my eyes. They were terribly raw and painful, and the smoke seemed to soak into them like acid. I had no idea where we were. There were no voices in the inter-comm., but after a time the pilot’s door opened and Ed Walker crawled back to Allison, with a written message. Allison read it and nodded. I tried to shout something at Ed, but I began to cough badly and it was useless. Then the flames broke out in two new places; on the port side, aft of where I had been sitting, and in the roof above my head. When I went to lift my hands to beat the flames they would not rise. It was like trying to lift the whole aircraft. I felt sick and the sickness ran weakly and coldly down the arteries of my arms and out of the fingers.
Then suddenly I made a great effort. I had been standing there helplessly for what seemed a long time. It could not have been more than a few seconds but it was like a gap of agony in a dream. I wanted to move but I could not move, and so at last because I could not throw my hands against the flames I threw my whole body. I let it fall with outstretched arms against the fuselage and I felt the slight bounce of my Mae West as it hit the metal. I lay there for about a second, very tired. My head was limp against the hot metal of the fuselage and my eyes were crying from the acid of the smoke. Then I raised my head. I had come to the moment of not caring. The flames were burning my legs and I was too tired to beat them out again. I was going to burn and die and it did not matter.
Then I lifted my eyes. Shrapnel had torn a hole in the fuselage and I could just see at an angle through the gap. It was like looking out of a window and seeing out in the darkness the reflection of the fire in the room. It was only that this fire was magnified. It was like a huge level dish of flame. It was horizontal and the edges of it were torn to violent shreds in the night.
“Oh! Christ,” I said. “Oh! Christ, Christ Jesus!”
I expected at any moment to see that burning wing tear past my face. It was fantastic to see it riding with us. It did not seem part of us. It was like an enormous orange and crimson torch sailing wildly through the darkness.
All the time I knew that it must split and break, that in a moment now we were at the end. And in some curious way the idea gave me strength. For the first time since the fire began I could think clearly. My hands and my mind were not tired. I thought of my helmet and took it off. The fire must have burnt a hole in the fuselage somewhere forward, for air was now blowing violently in, clearing a gulley through the smoke. I held my helmet and then swung it. The moment was very clear. The flames crawled like big, yellow insects up the slope of the fuselage and I began to hit them, with a sort of delirious and final calm, with the helmet. At the same time I saw the face of Mac and Allison. Mac too must have known about the fire on the wing. His eyes were big and protuberant with desperation. But Allison still sat there as if nothing had happened; thin, pale, his head manacled by the earphones.
Then something happened. It was Ed Walker, coming in through the pilot’s door with a message. I saw him go to Allison and again I saw Allison nod his head. Then he beckoned us and we went to Allison’s seat. Leaning over, we read the message. “Over the sea. Take up ditching stations. Stand by for landing.” We were coming down.
I must have put my helmet back on my head. I must have strapped it quite carefully in the few seconds’ interval between reading the message and beginning to haul out the dinghy. Then Ed Walker came back with Ossy, the rear-gunner, and then the mid-upper gunner climbed down. The five of us stood there, braced for about a minute. The fuselage was still burning and through the window the flat plate of flame along the wing had thickened and broadened and looked more fantastic than ever.
I stood braced and ready with the axe. I no longer felt tired and I knew that I might have to hit the door, if it jammed, with all the strength I had. As we came down, throttled back, but the speed violent still, I drew in my insides and held them so taut that they seemed to tie themselves in a single knot of pain.
Next moment we hit the water. And in that moment, as the violence of the impact lifted all of us upward, I looked at Ossy. It was one of these silly moments that remained with me, clear and alive, long after the more confused moments of terror.
Ossy too was clenching something tightly in his hand. It was the spanner.
IV
K. 42 went down almost immediately, and except for a second or two when she was caught up in the light of her own fire, we never saw her again. I heard the port wing split with a crack before she went down, and I heard the explosive hiss of the sea beating over the flames. I could smell too the smell of fire and steam, dirty and hot and acid, blown at us on the wind. It remained in my mouth, sharp with the sourness of the sea-water, for a long time.
The next thing I knew was that we were in the dinghy. It was floating; it was right side u
p; and we were all there. I never knew at all how it happened. It was like a moment when, in a London raid, I had dived under a seat on a railway station. One moment I was standing waiting for the train; the next I was lying under the seat, my head under my arms, with a soldier and a girl. When I finally got up and looked under the seat it did not seem that there was room under it for a dog.
“Everybody O.K.?” Ellis said. “I can’t see you. Better answer your names,”
“I got a torch,” Mac said.
“O.K. Let’s have a look at you.”
He shone the torch in our faces. The light burnt my eyes when I looked up.
“O.K. Everybody feel all right?”
“No, sir,” Ossy said. “I’m bloody wet.”
We all laughed with extra heartiness at that.
“What was the last contact with base?”
“Half an hour before we hit the drink,” Allison said.
“You think they got you?”
“They were getting me then,” Allison said. “But afterwards we were off course. The transmitter was u.s. after the fix.
“All right,” Ellis said. “And listen to me.” He shone the torch on his wrist. “It’s now eleven ten. I’m going to call out the time every half hour.”
The torch went out. It seemed darker than ever. The dinghy “rocked on the sea.
“Remember what the wind was, Mac?”
“She was north north-east,” Mac said. “About thirty on the ground.”
“Any idea where we should be?”
“We were on course until that bloody fire started. But Jesus, you did some evasive action after that. Christ knows where we went.”
“We ought to be in the North Sea somewhere, just north-west of Holland.”