The Complete Flying Officer X Stories

by H. E. Bates

  The sun had suddenly gone down. Already above the sunset the sky was clear and green and I could feel the frost in the air.

  IX

  I held Allison’s body with my knees all that night and his face with my damaged hands. My legs are long and gradually the feeling went out of them. But once I had got into that position it was too complicated to move.

  As darkness came down ice began to form like thin rough glass on the outer sides of the dinghy, where the snow had first settled and thawed. Frost seemed to tighten up the rubber, which cracked off the ice as it moved with the waves. It was bitterly cold, very clear and brittle, without much wind. The sky was very clear too and there was a splintering brightness in the stars.

  At intervals of about an hour we gave Allison drinks of rum. At these moments he did not speak. He would make the gentle, bubbling noise with his lips and then leave his mouth open, so that a little of the rum ran out again. I would shut his mouth with my hand. Sometimes I put my unbandaged wrists on his face and it was as cold as stone.

  All that night, in between these times, I thought a lot. The cold seemed to clear my brain. All the feeling had gone from my hands and from my legs and thighs, and my head seemed almost the only part of me alive. For the first time I thought of what might be happening, or what might yet happen, at home. I thought of base, where they would be wondering about us. I could see the Mess anteroom: the long cream room with the fire at one end, the pictures of Stirlings on the walls, the chaps playing cards, someone drumming to a Duke Ellington record on the lid of the radio. I wondered if they had given us up. I wondered too about the papers. If they had already said anything about us it could only be in the dead phrase: one of our aircraft is missing. Hearing it, did anyone think about it again? We had been drifting for two days on the sea and for a long time we had been on fire in the air. If we didn’t come back no one would ever know. If we did come back the boys at the station would be glad, and perhaps the papers would give us a line in a bottom corner. I didn’t feel very bitter but that night, as I sat there, holding Allison with my burnt hands, I saw the whole thing very clearly. We had been doing things that no one had ever done before. Almost every week you read of aircraft on fire in the air. You read it in the papers and then you turned over and read the sports news. You heard it on the radio and the next moment you heard a dance band. You sat eating in restaurants and read casually of men floating for days in dinghies. God, I was hungry. I began to think of food, sickly and ravenously, and then put it out of my mind. You read and heard of these things, and they stopped having meaning. Well, they had meaning for me now. I suddenly realised that what we were doing was a new experience in the world. Until our time no one had ever been on fire in the air. Until our time there had never been so many people to hear of such things and then to forget them again.

  I wanted to speak. Where my stomach should have been there was a distended bladder of air. I pressed Allison’s head against it. I must have moved sharply, not thinking, and he groaned.

  “Ally?” I said. “Are you all right, Ally?”

  He did not answer. Ellis gave him a little more rum and then I held his mouth closed again.

  I looked at the stars and went on thinking. The stars were very frosty and brittle and green. One of them grew bright enough to be reflected, broken up, in the black water. Did my wife care? This, I thought, is a nice moment to reason it out. Neither of us had wanted to have children. We hadn’t really wanted much at all except a flat, a lot of small social show, and a good time. Looking back, I felt we were pretty despicable. We had really been attracted by a mutual selfishness. And then we got to hating each other because the selfishness of one threatened the selfishness of another. A selfishness that surrenders is unselfishness. Neither of us would surrender. We were too selfish to have children; we were too selfish to trouble about obligations. Finally, we were too selfish to want each other.

  All this, it seemed, had happened a long time ago. Life in the dinghy had gone on a thousand years. I had never had the use of my hands, and I had never eaten anything but chocolate and biscuit and rum. Curious that they were luxuries. I had never sat anywhere exception the edge of that dinghy, with the sea beating me up and down, the ice cracking on the sides, and my feet in freezing water. I had never done anything except hold Allison with my hands and knees. And now I had held him so long that we seemed frozen together.

  Every time we gave Allison the rum that night, I smelled it for a long time in the air, thick and sweet. Once it ran down out of his open mouth over my wrists and very slowly, so as not to disturb him, I raised my wrists and licked it off. My lips were sore with salt and, because it was not like drinking from a cup, the rum burnt the cracks in them. I was cold too and moving my hands was like moving some part of Allison’s body, not my own.

  Then once more the rum ran out of Allison’s mouth and poured over my hands, and suddenly I thought it strange that he could not hold it. I waited for Ellis to crawl back across the dinghy and sit down. Then I tried to find Allison’s hands. They were loose and heavy at his sides. I tried to move his head, so that I could speak to him. His face was white in the starlight. I bent down at last and touched it with my own.

  “Ally,” I thought. “Jesus, Ally. Jesus, Jesus.”

  His mouth was stiff and open and his face was colder than the frost could ever make it.

  I held him for the rest of that night, not telling even Ellis he was dead. It was then about three o’clock. I felt that it was not the frost or the sea or the wind that had killed him. He had been dead for a long time, He had been dead ever since he walked out of the bombed house with the child in his arms.

  The death of Allison made me feel very small. Until morning, when the others knew, it did not depress me. For the rest of the night, in the darkness, with the frost terribly vicious in the hours up to seven o’clock, my jacket stiff with ice where the spray had frozen and the ice thin and crackling in the well of the dinghy, I felt it was a personal thing between myself and Allison. I had got myself into the war because, at first, it was an escape from my wife. It was an escape from the wrong way of doing the toast in the morning, the way she spilled powder on her dressing-gown, the silly songs she sang in the bathroom. It was an escape from little things that I magnified by selfishness into big things. I think I wanted to show her, too, that I was capable of some sort of bravery; as if I had any idea what that was.

  Now, whatever I had done seemed small beside what Allison had done. I remember how Allison and his wife had wanted the baby, how it had come after Allison had joined up, how its responsibilities excited them. I saw now what he must have felt when he walked out of the bombed house with all his excitement, his joy and his responsibilities compressed into a piece of dead flesh in his hands. I understood why he had been dead a long time.

  Just before seven o’clock, when it became light enough for us to see each other, I called Ellis and told him Allison was dead. The thing was a great shock to the rest of us and I saw a look of terror on Ossy’s face. Then Ellis and Mac took Allison and laid him, as best they could, in the bottom of the dinghy. None of us felt like saying much and it was Mac who covered Allison’s face with his handkerchief, which fluttered and threatened to blow away in the wind.

  “It’s tough tit, Ally boy. It’s tough tit,” he said.

  I felt very lonely.

  XI

  The wind blew away the handkerchief about ten minutes later, leaving the face bare and staring up at us. The handkerchief floated on the sea and floated away, fast on bars of foam that were coming up stronger now with the morning wind. We stared for a moment at the disappearing handkerchief, because it was a more living thing than Allison’s face lying in the sloppy yellow ice water in the dinghy, and then Thompson, who never spoke much unless he had something real to say, suggested we should wrap him in his parachute.

  “At least we can cover him with it,” he said.

  So while Ed and Ossy paddled and Thompson baled what water he could
and I sat there helpless, trying to get some flexibility into the arms cramped by holding Allison all night, Mac and Ellis wrapped the body roughly, as best they could, in the parachute. Mac lifted the body in his arms while Ellis and Thompson baled ice and water from the dinghy, and then Ellis spread the parachute. Together they wrapped Allison in it like a mummy.

  “Christ, why didn’t we think of this before?” Ellis said. “It would have kept him warm. I blame myself.”

  “He died a long time ago,” I said.

  “He what?”

  “You couldn’t have done anything,” I said. Soon they finished wrapping him in the parachute and he seemed to cover almost all the space in the dinghy, so that we had nowhere to put our feet and we kept pushing them against him. The sun was up now, pale yellow in a flat sky, but it was still freezing. The sea seemed to be going past at a tremendous pace, black and white and rough, as if we were travelling with a current or a tide.

  I could see that Ossy and Ed, Walker were terribly dejected. We were all pale and tired, with bluish dark eyes, and stubby beards which seemed to have sucked all the flesh from our cheek-bones. But Ossy and Ed, partly through the intense cold, much more through the shock of Allison’s death, seemed to have sunk into that vacant and silent state in which Allison himself had been on the previous afternoon. They were staring flatly at the sea.

  “O.K., chaps,” Ellis said, “breakfast now.”

  He began to ration out the biscuits and the chocolate, One piece of chocolate had a piece of white paper round it. As Ellis unwrapped it the wind tore it overboard. It too, like the handkerchief, went away at great speed, as if we were travelling on a tide.

  Suddenly Ellis stopped in the act of holding a piece of chocolate to my mouth. I opened my mouth ready to bite it. So we both sat transfixed, I with my mouth open, Ellis holding the chocolate about three inches away.

  “You see it?” he said. “You see it? You see?”

  “Looks like a floating elephant,” Mac said.

  “It’s a buoy!” Ellis said. “Don’t you see, it’s a buoy!”

  “Holy Moses,” Mac said.

  “Paddle!” Ellis said. “For Christ’s sake, paddle! All of you, paddle.”

  I made a violent grab at the chocolate with my mouth, partly biting it and Ellis’s finger before it was snatched away. Ellis swore and we all laughed like hell. The sight of that buoy, rocking about half a mile westwards, like a drunken elephant, encouraged us into a light-hearted frenzy, in which at intervals we laughed again for no reason at all.

  “We’re going in with the tide,” I said. “I’ve been watching it.”

  “Paddle like hell!” Ellis said. “Straight for the buoy. Paddle!”

  I paddled with my mind. They said afterwards that I paddled also with my hands. The buoy seemed to go past us, two or three minutes later, at a devil of a speed, though it was we who were travelling. The wind had freshened with the sun and we seemed to bounce on the waves, shipping water. But we had forgotten about bailing now. We had forgotten almost about the body of Allison, rolling slightly in the white parachute in the dirty sea water at our feet. We had forgotten about everything except frantically paddling with the tide.

  It was likely that we should have seen land a long time before this, except that it was without cliffs and was a low line of sand unlit by sun. In the far distance there was a slight haze which turned to blue and amber as the sun rose. Then across the mist and the colour, the line of land broke like a long wave of brown.

  Ten minutes later there was hardly any need to paddle at all. The tide was taking us in fast, in a calmer stretch of water, towards a flat, wide beach of sand. Beyond it there was no town. There were only telegraph wires stretching up and down the empty coast, and soon we were so near that I could see where the snow had beaten and frozen on the black poles, in white strips on the seaward side.

  I looked at my watch as we floated in, not paddling now, on the tide. It was about eight o’clock and we had been, as far as I could tell, nearly sixty hours in the dinghy.

  Then as we came in, and the exhilaration of beating in towards the coast on that fast tide began to lessen, I became aware of things. I became aware of my hands. They were swollen from lack of attention and stiff from holding Allison. I became aware of hunger. The hollowness of my stomach filled at intervals with the sickness of hunger and then emptied again. I became aware again of Allison, wrapped in the parachute, once very white, now dirty with sea-water and the excited marks of our feet, and I became aware, in one clear moment before the dinghy struck the sand, of Ellis and Mac and Ed and Thompson and all that they now meant to me. I became aware of Ossy, standing in the dinghy like a crazy person, waving his spanner.

  When the dinghy hit the sand and would go no further I jumped overboard. There was no feeling of impact as my legs struck the shore. They seemed hollow and dead. They folded under me as if made of straw and I fell on my face on the wet sand of the beach, helpless, and lay there like a fool.

  And as I lay there, the sand wet and cold and yet good on my face, I became aware of a final thing. We had been out a long way, and through a great deal together. We had been through fire and water, death and frost, and had come home.

  And soon we should go out again.

  Croix de Guerre

  It was rather difficult to imagine what sort of man he had been in France, in the days before the War, because even with the uniform of the French pilot he did not look very French. He looked more than anything else like an English publican: large, stolid, bright-eyed, with very red cheeks flushed raw with blue. You might otherwise perhaps have thought of him as a taxi-driver in Boulogne, which is where he came from, sitting-half the day in the sun on the running board of the taxi while waiting for the boats to come in and now and then going heavily across the street, cap on the back of his head, for a drink or two in the shade of the café. He looked less French than any Frenchman in the Squadron and more English, perhaps, than any Englishman. The only very French thing about him was a slight pout of the lips and a shrug of the shoulders as he used his favourite expression—“C’est tout”—by which he always minimised any achievement that you thought remarkable. He said what he had to say in the heavy and formal manner of an English police sergeant giving evidence straight from the note book at the local petty sessions. He was the sort of man who did not stop to describe the view. What he had done was, according to him, very straightforward, very simple, very dull, and he gave the impression, entirely without fuss, that there might even have been a mistake about the Croix de Guerre.

  He had, in fact, been a civilian pilot before the War, operating, I daresay, on one of the French internal airways. He had all the calm tenacity of temperament that makes the good bomber-pilot and from his description of life in the early part of the War, if you could call his flat statement of facts a description, you got a picture of a routine that was duller than the driving of English tourists from the docks at Boulogne to the cathedral in a taxi on hot summer afternoons. You could picture the French pilots, though he did not describe it, playing banque in the crew rooms of the dispersal hut, and the ground crews playing strange games with sous in the dust outside. You could picture them off duty, rather swagger in their dark-blue uniforms with much gold braid, as they sauntered on spring evenings in the local town, wondering perhaps not of what kind of War it was and if it would ever end, but also if it would ever begin.

  When it did begin, with shocking suddenness, in the May of 1940, Poirot was almost immediately shot down and the end of things was already very near. But three or four days of the life of France still remained when he got back to his unit near Boulogne—just long enough for him to discover that there were no longer any planes, that there would be no planes, and that all he could do now was to see that his men were armed and that they understood the state of things and were ready. There was no swaggering in blue and gold uniforms in the evening sunlight now. Poirot and his men moved into Le Touquet. They were no longer part of the Fre
nch Air Force. Having no planes they were, sooner perhaps than most Frenchmen, disinherited. The British were leaving, but Poirot and his men had no orders to leave and when the time at last became very short, they dug themselves into the casino.

  I do not know how long they remained there: three or four days perhaps; at any rate until things became hopeless. They were—I gathered it more from the expression on Poirot’s face than from anything he said—very tenacious. As it became hopeless a few of them slipped out under cover of darkness. The rest, with Poirot, remained, and they remained there until there was nothing to do but surrender, or be captured, whichever way it was.

  “They began to march us back to Germany,” Poirot said, as if it were no more than a walk along the coast from Le Touquet. The weather was very beautiful in the early summer of that year and the nights were starry and dark and fine and I could imagine Poirot being driven eastward along the hot roads like one of a string of cattle, his red, solid bovine face giving no sort of hint of the man he was. The second night—or it might have been the third or fourth night, at least while they were still in France—Poirot escaped. If the impression is that he turned round and walked back, as if the walk beyond Le Touquet had begun to bore him, the impression is as good as any other. In two days he was back in Boulogne. It was full of Nazis now and the war, for all that mattered, was over.

  For three weeks Poirot hid there with friends. They may have been bakers or taxi-drivers, or café proprietors or grocers, or officials from the port. Poirot, for very good reasons, does not give the artistic details. Supposing they were bakers, it became necessary in time to move to the café. It had become very dangerous. But in time, as June came on, it began to seem safer. Poirot then got hold of a bicycle and began to ride south, and I seem to see him, very hot, very red, very tenacious, pounding along the straight French roads between the pillars of poplar leaves in the bright June nights like a competitor in one of those non-stop national bicycle races of which the French were so fond. He must have ridden for a long time, sleeping by day, riding by night, until he came to within reach of the unoccupied zone. There all the bridges over the Loire were guarded and so Poirot left the bicycle and swam the river, and once again I seem to see him, huge, red, tenacious, pounding now at the water with his sun-brown arms in immense determination. Swimming across the river, bicycling down the roads, walking back to Le Touquet, hiding in the casino, Poirot all the time seems to exhibit qualities for which we give the French no credit. He moves along to predetermined places like an ox. “C’est tout,” he says, as if he had no imagination at all.