The Last Summer of the World

by Emily Mitchell

  The

  LAST

  SUMMER

  of the

  WORLD

  Emily Mitchell

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  New York London

  For Joshua

  The

  LAST

  SUMMER

  of the

  WORLD

  ONE

  June 1918

  ON THE DAY before he was due to leave for Paris, Edward woke early. He hadn’t slept well since arriving in St-Omer, his natural tendency to restlessness exacerbated by the cold, the damp, the discomfort of the straw mattress under him. He was never sure when he crossed the boundary between uneasy sleep and wakefulness. He came up into darkness, blinking, and for a minute or two, didn’t understand where he was. Still tangled in the frayed ends of a dream. He lay motionless, staring at the place where the walls must be, until his eyes adjusted and he saw the outlines of his room: the thin window showing sky still black, the high ceiling rimmed with crumbling moldings, the wooden crucifix mounted on the wall above his bed. These rooms had been part of a seminary before the war, and the Englishmen who slept in them now liked to tip their hats to the displayed figures of Jesus and ask Him whether He wouldn’t like a cup of tea, or whether His arms were getting tired. They seemed to find this joke endlessly amusing.

  He felt on the floor for his lamp and some matches, lit it, dimmed the surge of flame. He pulled his legs out from under the blanket, flinched at his bare feet on the cold floor. He rose and made his way across the room, the circle of brightness bobbing with his steps.

  Some days it seemed that, as long as he could remember, he’d risen before first light, unfolded sore limbs, washed and shaved at the corner basin, cold water by unsteady lamplight; other times, he felt he’d only just arrived. Standing before the sink, he saw his face emerge into the dusty square of mirror, pale, suspended in darkness. In truth, he had been here a little more than a month. His ship had docked at Brest on the same day the Germans hit the Place de la République with a long-range shell. He’d boarded a train and come here, to St-Omer, where the British trained their observers and pilots to do aerial reconnaissance. It had not been very long since then. But the repetitive nature of army life simultaneously stretched and condensed time, so he lost track of how many days, how many nights, how many weeks had passed. It did not seem so important after a while.

  He was learning to take photographs: this was what mattered. It was a skill he’d thought he already possessed, but these were not the kind of photographs he was accustomed to. Their purpose was wholly different; they were not made to be beautiful, but to be clear. The pilots and observers went out each day, taking pictures of this sector of the lines, which were then developed, printed and assessed. Had the observer managed to bring the ground into focus from 10,000 feet above it? Had he compensated for the movement of the airplane, for the angles of flight? When they were ready, the prints were put together into a mosaic, showing an area miles long and wide, the work that used to take cartographers painstaking years reduced by the new technology to a matter of hours. Then the interpreters would examine the pictures, decipher them, and this Edward was learning, too: how to see what these pictures had to reveal, to interpret their language of shape and line. A columnar darkness, the sign of smoke and therefore fire; this cluster of buildings, appeared since yesterday and therefore not really buildings at all, but tents, a sign of soldiers on the move. He’d worked with the British observers, trying to absorb as much of their knowledge as he could, all the while waiting for the orders that would send him out along the front to do the same work for his own army under his own command. Now he had his orders; they had arrived by courier two days ago. He would make one more flight at St-Omer and then he would be gone.

  He soaped his neck and face and drew the razor carefully over his skin. An image from a half-lost dream, a darkness, rose up in his mind, like a flock of birds startled out of a field, but when he tried to lay hold of it, it slipped from his grasp and vanished. He stood still and waited for it to return. It didn’t come, but it left an uneasy hollow in his chest. He finished shaving, and got dressed, pulling on the quilted flying suit over his shirt and trousers. It was heavy canvas padded with down, and it made him sweat even in the cold air of the dormitory. There was a knock at his door, and his batman, Jones, opened it and looked in.

  “’Morning, sir,” he said, and tugged his cap at Edward, then, discreetly, at Jesus.

  “Good morning,” Edward replied. He finished doing up the buttons on the front of his suit.

  “Tender’s leaving in five minutes,” Jones reported. “You’re to fly with Knightly for your last trip. Is there anything you need?”

  “No. I’m ready.” He went to get his gloves and jacket.

  “A letter came for you by the first post this morning. I had it sent over to your office.”

  “Well, I’ll read it when I’m back. There’s no time now.”

  “As you like, sir.”

  When he arrived downstairs, the other men were already waiting outside on the front steps for the driver to collect them and take them to the airfield. They greeted each other with nods, exchanged looks, and he thought that this was the last time he would see them like this, waiting expectantly in the half-dark of early morning. He scanned the circle of faces; he liked them all, but among them he felt out of place. They were men in their early twenties; he was thirty-nine, and as a captain he outranked them all—noncoms, sergeants and corporals, a few lieutenants who had worked their way up through the ranks. He was older; he was supposed to know more of life, and in some ways he did. But in men who had served at the front as infantry or gunners, the war upset the normal course of aging. This group preferred silence and were terse when they did speak; their shoulders sagged as though they carried something heavy and invisible on their backs. More than Edward himself, they seemed to resemble his father after he left the mines for the last time, when he was no longer strong enough to work and instead gardened and growled at his children to pass the time. They were wary, irritable when disturbed, always tired. They did not ask him much about his life before the war. They seemed to have lost the knack of curiosity, and Edward found that he was grateful for this; it saved him the wearying effort of trying to explain the past or trying, one more time, to understand it himself. But when he was with them for a while, he saw the wild blankness that sometimes stole into their eyes; he knew that he had somehow become years younger than the men who’d been at the Somme. What had he been doing at their age? He’d been at art school in Paris. He’d been courting Clara. He could see their unlined faces and buried eyes in light spilled from the dormitory windows.

  The squadron leader called the roll of pilots and observers slated to go out that day, and after each name came a single-syllable reply. A couple of other stragglers came noisily downstairs, saying, “We’re here, we’re here. Don’t leave without us.”

  “How are you this morning, Yank?” someone asked.

  “Oh, fine,” Edward replied. “Room service at this place could be better …” The men chuckled, the sound moving through them like wind in grass. A darkness inside his head turned over. It was the same one that had come to him before while he was shaving, leftover from his dream but now it was a little clearer. It was the black mass of a woman’s hair, shifting, catching light among its tangles. Clara’s hair. He must have been dreaming about his wife. In bed some mornings she used to open her eyes and ask him this same question: how are you this morning? When she asked him that, he knew it would be one of her good days, that there would be no fights or shouting, that they would get along, and he would always say, Yes, yes, I’m well, even if it was a lie.

&n
bsp; The truck came and the men loaded up their equipment and huddled together in back. The driver passed around canteens of coffee that tasted like charcoal. They drank it anyway, heads bowed forward, elbows propped on knees. They listened to the engine whine and judder over the stone-filled road until they reached the airfield. The CO passed out route maps. Edward and the other observers picked up cases of plates and heavy K-2 cameras in their metal carapaces.

  Then they went out to the planes.

  In the blue light of predawn the airfield seemed full of quietly grazing animals, noiseless and peaceful. When he looked at the still machines, it struck him as impossible that they could ever get off the ground, these cradles of string and wood and canvas. The men moved among their silhouettes in pairs. Edward found Knightly and they shook hands. Together they walked among the shadows to Knightly’s RE-8.

  Knightly went to say something to the mechanics, while Edward hoisted himself up the stepladder into the second cockpit. He heard the first cough of an engine from somewhere across the field, the first propeller whirr. One by one, the planes were towed to the foot of the runway, gathered speed, rose, and shrank to dark dots against the lightening sky.

  The mechanic flung the propeller and the engine stuttered, then burst into life. Edward’s heart punched the inside of his chest as they started to move, and he fought an urge that came to him at the start of every flight to undo the seat belts linked across his chest and jump over the side, back onto solid ground. Instead, he clamped his fingers around the rim of the cockpit, gritted his teeth, and tried to remember the words to “Delilah,” all of them, in the right order. Someone had put that record on the Victrola in the officer’s lounge a few days before and then annoyed everyone by singing along out of tune. Edward would recite things during takeoff, songs or poems, or sometimes, if nothing else came to mind, just multiplication tables until the rhythm met his pulse and he felt calmer. Now he mumbled the first verse under his breath, words falling rapidly out of his mouth. He got to the chorus where they danced all night (Holding one another tight) as he heard the motor run higher, the cylinders drumming their steel casings. The plane began to gather speed, and he kept reciting, verse, chorus, next verse, until he felt the machine around him gather its force and lift, carried up by air that speed made solid, flung into the waiting sky. At the moment the wheels left the ground, he exploded into song, his voice swallowed by the roaring all around them: Oh, oh, lovely Delilah, she left him standing, standing in the rain, and very faintly he heard his words joined and echoed in Knightly’s gruff baritone: Standing, standing in the rain, they sang, and they arched up into the sky.

  They climbed among the invisible tides of air until they reached 18,000 feet. Around them, the day was clear, just a few lost low clouds. Dawn shot over the horizon, its bright blades sliding into the sky. Knightly said something over his shoulder that was instantly snatched away, and Edward disentangled himself from his seat belts, shaking the worst of the kinks from his arms. He unclipped the lens cover from the snout of his camera and checked to make sure the first plate was ready. Then he leaned out into the wind.

  At last, he thought, at last, the earth made some kind of crooked sense. Looking over the airplane’s side, he could see design, function in the cuneiform inscription of trenches, embankments, derelict towns. There was the front-line trench, S-curved, a set of jagged teeth grinning upward. There was the sap pushing forward at a zigzag until it stopped abruptly out in No Man’s Land.

  There were men down there, too, though from this height he couldn’t see them. Right then, he guessed, two or three of them would be crouched against sandbags in the sap’s dead end, wrapped in rubber ground sheets against the early morning cold, sharing a cigarette. They’d pass it between them, watching the orange bud move gently in the gloom, imagining the taste of the tobacco until their turn came; the dream of smoke, powerful as the real thing. Perhaps they were silent. Or perhaps they talked about someone they knew who got shrapnel in his arm and had to be taken out of the line, who was lying in hospital waiting to be sent home. Old so-and-so, he’ll be just fine, they’d say. Surrounded by pretty nurses. Some fellows, one of them might have joked, have all the luck, and over their words would come the sound of the day’s first barrage, a high whine growing louder like the sound of a train in the distance.

  Edward, from his plane, could see the guns begin, the simultaneous flash and boom far across the lines on the German side. Then nothing, the shells’ invisible flight. Spasms of fire, the blast of smoke and flying debris, momentary silence, followed by more firings in quick succession, illuminating the fields. He always thought (he couldn’t help himself) how beautiful it looked. The barrage started at dawn, earlier and heavier if an attack was planned, but otherwise regular as clockwork, anticipating day by a few hours. Then the British guns answered in kind. Day began.

  Through the sights of his camera, he had watched this system taking shape day by day, an infection spreading through the soil, repeating itself. Down there, they were preparing for another round of offensives. This year will be the year, they’d say as they dug into the already blighted ground, this year will be the year—without really believing it, bone-weary hands white from cold around the rough handles of their shovels. They worked at night because it was safer, seeing no more by their lanterns than the ditch they were digging and their own pale faces mirrored in the other men. Occasionally, a flare called the world back into existence, or the red flutter of shell fire. They fell asleep for a few hours when they reached an exhaustion that even artillery couldn’t tear. Then they were kicked awake, given a shot of whisky to pour into their shivering skeletons, and told to prepare for an enemy attack by standing on the firing step, peering into the dawn.

  Each morning he looked down and saw the results of the work parties’ nighttime labors, how the system had embedded itself deeper in the world’s skin. After months in these positions the men were well dug in. Behind the front line, connection trenches wormed back to the support trench and then again to the reserve trench. Out in front, spools of wire and then No Man’s Land, boiling with craters.

  What he could also see, unlike those on the ground, was that the pattern repeated, identical in every detail, on the other side. The Germans had their front-line trench, support, reserve, their supply lines, gun emplacements, saps and wire, to match the British. But only from the air could you know it. The hours he’d spent above the lines had given him time to think of how to describe this new map: characters from a lost language; the root system for the shell craters that bloom between the wire; the plans for a city drawn by a lunatic.

  Gazing down, he felt weightless, wordless, without history. He’d escaped, and all the things he’d loved and hated and struggled for were confined to that flat print of the ground: houses huddled together in corners of spring fields, and slender lines of roads that ambled through the green, then disintegrated as they neared the front. There, he could see them vanish into ruins that had once been towns, or sink into nightmares that had once been fields. Above it all, the blue hung imperturbable.

  THERE WAS A story that the British pilots told about how the war in the air began.

  In the early days, back when the fighting was going to be over by Christmas, the aviators on both sides went out unarmed. They considered themselves gentlemen, and even though war made them officially enemies, they viewed this as unfortunate and ignored it as best they could. They waved greetings when they caught sight of each other’s planes.

  Then one day in the sky over Ypres, or Soissons or Reims, a pilot saw his counterpart bank to take a second pass over a section of the front. Instead of waving, he drew a long-barreled rifle from his cockpit and fired. He missed the pilot but punctured the fuselage, hitting a fuel tank. Gasoline poured out, a glinting translucent thread, fanning across the air currents in the plane’s wake. The man who had fired just had time to see fuel spinning through shafts of sunlight, before a spark from the combustion chamber caught and the engine burst in
to flames. He watched the pilot struggle for control as the plane began to lose altitude, tilting sharply. He watched as black smoke swallowed the man inside it, as the plane became a cruciform darkness falling back to earth.

  After that all the pilots carried guns. When Edward asked which country the first man to shoot came from, the British pilots laughed and said that the French insisted he was German; but that in the German story, he was a Frenchman.

  By now, 1918, all observers doubled as gunners, and the planes had machine guns mounted behind the second cockpit. In training in the States, Edward had practiced swinging the gun through its long arc, firing rounds of blanks at an imaginary target. The gun was heavier than it looked; once he got it moving, it was difficult to stop or change direction until it slammed into the limit of its radius, sending a shock back up his arms. Eventually, he got so that he could control where the bullets went, throwing his whole body as a counterweight against the inertia of the gun as it moved on its steel ball-and-socket. His aim was good enough to hit a plane at close range, he thought, though to date he’d never had to test it out.

  The pilot had a machine gun, too, forward-facing, pointed ominously toward the propeller’s long arms. When he first saw it, Edward had asked how the pilot avoided damaging his own plane when he fired. The man training him laughed, and then explained that the plane was equipped with a synchronizer. Its mechanism allowed the bullets from the pilot’s machine gun to pass between the whirling blades of the propeller by timing their release. It regulated them to within a fraction of a second. At least, he was told, and again the instructor laughed, that is how we all hope it works.

  EDWARD SLID THE last plate from the camera into its paper envelope and locked it back into the case. In the east, light was climbing up the day, shifting away from golden. He leaned forward and tapped Knightly once on top of his head, to signal that he was finished. The pilot looked back at him, grinned, then banked the plane and began to descend. At 8,000 feet, with the airfield in sight, he cut the engine. This was the most fantastical part of the flight, the time that it felt most unreal. Nothing around them but the air cradling them back to earth. They glided smoothly home, the wheels touching gently onto the runway. As the brakes hauled them to a stop, Edward thought, The next time I fly, I’ll be over the Marne, seeing my old home from far above. He felt again the bittersweet excitement he’d experienced when his orders arrived. He was going home! Although what that meant, he was no longer completely sure.