He wondered if she thought about him.
COLONEL VAN HORN was growing impatient. Two weeks these observers had been flying. Morning and evening they went out. The photographs were piling up in his office, sorted and dated, and still they had found nothing.
It was nearly the end of June. There would be a push, and it would come soon, and they still didn’t know where. Each day more deserters slipped over the lines, cut their way through the barbed wire and came crawling over the shell holes toward the enemy hoping to be captured rather than killed. Those who succeeded talked about a big advance being planned. Sometime in the next few weeks, they said. Some claimed to know when it would be, stabbing at this date or that one with nervous insistence. July 17, one said. July 9. Near Amiens. North from the St-Mihiel salient. None of the claims agreed.
Van Horn had driven up to interview some of them, behind the lines near Compiègne. They were being held in a disused warehouse, seven or eight men, scruffy and thin, their eyes wide with fear or hunger or both. Rations had been cut again in March, they said. When they reached the British trenches after the first advances of the spring and saw what the enemy left behind, discarding as refuse foods that they hadn’t eaten for years, tobacco, lamp oil, leaving the boots on their dead … that was when I knew we would lose, one of them said. No matter how far we advanced. I didn’t want to die for nothing, for some ground we would only have to retreat over in a few weeks’ time. He looked down and spat into the dirt. The others were nodding in agreement.
Where will the advance come? This big show you are describing to me. The men were silent. Maybe near St-Quentin, one offered. Maybe near Arras, said another. Van Horn sighed. They didn’t know. They were cowards who had left their posts. They revolted him. He left them and drove back to Épernay.
Now he stood at the window of his office and watched the evening reconnaissance flight land. The men climbed from their planes and moved with that odd wooden gait toward the hangars. He heard them call greetings to each other, the sound carrying on the still air. They were boys, the pilots and these new observers too, and they had the enthusiasm and callowness of boys. And these men who were in charge of them. Who were they? What had they been doing last year at this time? Painting portraits? Taking pictures? Writing newspaper articles? What did they know about fighting a war?
Van Horn had been at war for a long time. He had seen boys come to France before these ones. He had seen bad pilots grind their airplanes through mission after mission, making it home safe, while brilliantly skilled pilots were shot from the sky because they flew low, or went further afield, or just happened, one day, to have bad luck. In the end, whether you survived or not had more to do with chance than anything else.
These boys, like the others, wouldn’t last: they would have to become something else, something harder, if they were going to survive. They would change to resemble, more and more, the prisoners he had met in Compiègne. He had wanted to give them time before they were transformed. He had sent them up to trace the front from a high altitude, knowing that this would allow them to get used to flying. He had hoped that they could get the information they needed without losing any men or any airplanes. But he couldn’t afford to keep them safe any longer.
He rang for his secretary.
“I need to see Captain Steichen and Captain McIntyre,” he said. “Send them up when they are done filling out their reports.”
He sat down to wait and turned his chair to face the window. A group of pilots were walking toward the barracks from the hangars on the far side of the field. At this distance he couldn’t tell them apart from each other and he thought that, in fact, it was better this way, not to see them as individuals. That way there would be no sense of loss to impede his thinking. He slid open the drawer of his desk, took out the bottle of bourbon he kept there, and poured himself a glass. He took a long drink. The men were almost at the building now, and one by one they disappeared from view as they climbed the front steps to the entrance below him. He wondered which of them would be the first to go.
“HENCEFORTH ALL RECONNAISSANCE flights will go a specified minimum distance into enemy territory. Routes will be revised on a daily basis. Additionally, we will be expected to investigate any suspicious activity firsthand.”
“Meaning what, sir?” someone asked.
“Meaning,” said McIntyre, “if you see a group of Jerries pulling something heavy between them, fly down and find out what it is.”
There was a dry ripple of laughter. While McIntyre spoke, Edward surveyed the faces of the men. Most looked serious but resigned. Some looked anxious. One or two were grimacing, and Edward noted that among these was Kelsey, the pugilist he’d seen at the station that first day. Deveraux, standing near the back of the room, rubbed his hands together nervously. Sergeant Daniels sat with his brow furrowed staring at the floor fixedly.
Edward thought of Rodin’s statue of the Burghers of Calais: This is the moment when they know. One of the pilots raised his hand: “What is it, Shapiro?” asked McIntyre.
“How long will this go on?”
“The situation will be reviewed every three days and if necessary the distance required on each flight will be extended depending on the progress we make in intelligence gathering. If we find information that allows us to determine the place and direction of their next advance, then we will be able to return to more routine procedures.”
There were grumbles from among the pilots. Another hand shot up: “Sir? Will we be getting an escort of scouts? Since we’re flying such big, slow buses.”
McIntyre shot Edward a look before replying.
“No, we will not be getting an escort. We asked about that, but the colonel informs us—” McIntyre’s voice was drowned out by the men, all beginning to talk at once.
“What does he think we are flying?” someone shouted.
“Come on! What are we? Little girls? We don’t need help to do our jobs.” When Edward looked around, he saw that it was Tom Cundall who had spoken.
McIntyre let them go on for a minute, then he held up his hand for quiet and said: “The colonel has informed us that there are no scouts that can be spared from their regular duties at the moment, so we have to fly these missions on our own. But we will be revisiting the subject with him at the earliest possible juncture.” He looked over at Edward again, who nodded in agreement.
“Yes,” he said. “You can rest assured of that.”
FROM 10, 000 FEET he saw it, at the horizon, something gray and dispersed. The day was hazy, blurring the boundaries between earth and sky, making objects bleed into each other. It was the fourth day that they had flown routes that took them many miles across the lines.
At first Edward couldn’t identify what he was seeing: not earth, not buildings, a darkness scattered across two adjoining fields. As he looked, it seemed to move inside itself, shifting and rearranging. It could be an illusion created by the heat rising from the earth as the first daylight moved across it, making the fields appear strangely alive. Or it could be something solid. He leaned forward, squinted to try to see more clearly.
In the front seat, McIntyre had spotted it too. He looked around and pointed. “Let’s go down and have a look.”
Edward sat back, bracing in his seat as McIntyre arched into a dive. The rest of the squadron swooped to follow them. The ground surged up, and McIntyre eased back on the throttle until they were flying level, the fields racing beneath them. When Edward peered forward again, his sight lines were blocked: the ruins of a town obscured his view.
Below them were the remains of buildings, brick and sandstone, the outlines of streets nearly buried by rubble. Disemboweled houses, their walls tumbled out into what had been kitchen gardens. In places he could see inside them, into rooms where people once ate and slept. Among the spewed stones were tatters of curtains, a mangled brass bed frame. On another house the roof was gone and he could see, standing like sentries along the walls of a drawing room, shelves still filled wi
th books.
McIntyre was gesturing to him. Up ahead the town ended, and in a minute they would be flying over open country. Now when he peered over the side of the cockpit, Edward saw clearly what they had glimpsed from miles back. There was an army camped out in these fields.
Their bodies covered the ground like leaves. They had spread themselves on either side of the road, so that for half a mile in every direction a carpet of men lay scattered. They were out in the open, no dugouts, a few tents here and there: they must have intended to reach somewhere farther along the front by nightfall. Then when it was too dark to see, they had halted in the shadow of the ruined town. They had parked the artillery beside the road and tied up the horses. They climbed into the fields to sleep.
In the east, the sun had come up and some of the men on the ground were stirring awake, lighting canister stoves, huddling around to watch them burn; they were boiling water in cans; frying their breakfasts. Thin columns of smoke rose from fires here and there. A few men looked up as they passed over and waved, not seeing the insignia and assuming, this far in the rear, that the planes would be their own. But then some of them began to point and shout, and run toward the road where the guns were.
Edward began taking pictures as quickly as he could: the road, the expanse of the army, the number of guns and horses, canteens—things by which the numbers of men might be estimated. More men were running now, and in a minute they reached their objective and stopped, clustering around one of the Spandau guns. They swung its nozzle upward and Edward saw bursts of flames at its mouth, heard the metallic, choked sound of its firing. Then there were bullets in the air around them, and McIntyre began to climb, pulling them out of range. Looking over the side of the cockpit, Edward saw that they had been hit. The bullet holes in the fuselage began about a foot behind where he sat. He could have reached out and touched them. He felt suddenly colder, as if they had passed into a deep shadow, though around them the day was bright. McIntyre turned west and began to head toward home, with the rest of the flight following.
They made good speed at first, riding a tailwind for about ten minutes, when a new sound reached Edward’s hearing. Above the growling of their own engine came a furious buzzing that resolved itself into the rising pitch of an airplane approaching from the east. He looked around, but he couldn’t see it, only hear its threatening noise. Louder and louder it descended, and then there were tracer bullets coming down around them, plowing into the upper plane and the end of the fuselage but missing the rudder and the tail. He heard one whiz close to his head and ducked down into the cockpit; over its lip, he could see the slim white trails the bullets left. He scanned the air around them, but the plane that had been shooting remained hidden from view. Where was it? He could hear it still circling, still dangerously close.
And then he saw it dart out behind them: a Fokker Eindecker, skimming away and up on its single tier of wings, slipping out of sight again. He lurched toward the gun mounted behind him and swung it around, in time to fire uselessly into thin air. Behind him he saw one of the other pilots from the squadron fire at it with his forward guns, but he also missed it. McIntyre put the plane into a dive, and when he leveled out began to let it sideslip so it would be less easy to hit. He turned and yelled back to Edward: “Don’t let go of that gun. He’ll be back around for another try.”
On the second pass it came from below. Edward saw the tiny plane loop and dive beneath them, and he followed it with the gun until it dipped out of range. It was coming up at their tail, into the blind spot, the place where they had no defense. McIntyre dived again, but some of the bullets caught them on the way down, striking the underside of the fuselage. McIntyre cursed. They could see the other planes taking shots at the Fokker and missing it, the DH-4s, too slow and clumsy, and the observers too untrained to hit a small, agile monoplane. It would sail out of reach and come around again, moving at twice the speed of the two-seaters. In the distance they could see the lines and safety; still so far away.
Suddenly, the Fokker rose and spun like a corkscrew, turning on its own axis. The light glanced off its wings and Edward was struck through his fear by its beauty. This war, he thought, it tears men to pieces, but its machines dance. For a moment it seemed suspended, then it righted itself and turned east, moving away from them as fast as it could. Edward didn’t understand why it had retreated: had it grown bored of this game, lost interest? He realized he was imagining that the plane possessed its own intelligence.
But then McIntyre pointed, and Edward saw a group of five Sopwith Camels coming toward them. They pursued the German pilot a short way, then turned and followed the two-seaters back up to the lines. When they were over onto their own side, the leader waved at McIntyre, who saluted, grinning.
WHEN THEY REACHED the airfield, they discovered that one of the observers, a man in Dawson’s section named Clark, was dead. A bullet had caught him just between his shoulder blade and his spine. He had slumped forward, still strapped into his seat, kept upright by the belts around his torso until they cut him loose. His camera was still around his neck, but most of the plates had been exposed.
“I hope we didn’t lose anything important there,” said van Horn, looking at the ruined glass squares. “Anything you can do with those?”
“I don’t know,” Edward said.
“Well, send them over to the lab. See if some images can be salvaged from them.” Van Horn watched the stretcher-bearers tilt the body upright and gently press its eyes closed. “Lieutenant Dawson will have to write the letter to his people.”
The observers who’d gathered around fell back as the stretcher men lifted the body from the plane and lowered it onto a waiting truss. They set off with it suspended between them. Dawson followed as they carried it to the edge of the field. He watched over Clark’s body until the tender came to take him away.
LATER, LUTZ BROUGHT EDWARD the pictures they had taken of the army that morning. A gray accident of men. From above they could have been thousands of versions of the same man, the barrier of their uniforms turning them into repetitions, making each individual invisible. Perhaps this was the truth revealed by distance, Edward thought, revealed by speed. All of us sleep poorly now, all of us dream of home. If you take away enough from men, if you boil us down to our physical needs, if you take away the people we love, we will lose the things that made us unique. We’ll become identical. Machine parts. Components of the war.
Mary and Her Mother. Montparnasse, 1908. Pigment print.
MARY HAS HER own language. Mary, with her demanding blue eyes, who has never in her life slept for more than a few hours at a time, who has learned to run before she can even really stand, her momentum carrying her forward at a speed she can’t control, so she falls daily, bruising her hands and scraping her knees. Clara says that this little girl is entirely and completely his daughter, sprung fully formed from his head, like the goddess in the story. I had nothing to do with how she turned out, she tells people. I was merely the vessel. Mary is Edward through and through.
Mary’s language is as varied and subtle as any spoken by adults, with a grammar that sometimes uses her entire small body for punctuation, and a vocabulary ranging from intricate whispers to shouts of utter joy or unmitigated despair. She talks all the time. She is endlessly articulate.
The only difficulty is that no one else speaks her language, and this causes her immense frustration. Try as she might, they are all slow learners. Even her parents can only manage a pidgin version at best. Sometimes they don’t even get that right.
They do know the more obvious, straightforward constructions: the command form, for example. Even though Papa has let himself quietly into the apartment, hoping not to disturb them, Mama and Mary, if they are resting in the middle of the afternoon; even though he’s put his bags down softly beside the front door, Mary has heard him. She nearly trips over the doorjamb as she comes charging out of the bedroom toward him and lunges for his legs to steady herself on his trouser cuff. Sh
e looks up at him with his own eyes.
“Dadadadada,” she shouts, tugging at the cloth of his pant leg, and this at least, he understands: Up!
He reaches and lifts her over his head, swings her back down, cradling her against his chest. She squeals, a single formless word of delight, then begins to gurgle earnestly at him. She pulls on his shirt collar. She tries to put it into her mouth but can’t twist it around the right way.
Clara has chased Mary from the bedroom and now she is leaning, looking at them, one arm against the doorframe for support. Smiling sleepily, she watches Edward as he carries his daughter around the room in a victory lap.
“She seems recovered,” Edward says. “Her color is good.”
“She’s much better,” Clara replies. “No sign of that cough for weeks now. Careful—don’t let her chew on your shirt buttons. She might swallow one. She’s been putting things in her mouth all month. She’s got two new teeth on the bottom. Take a look.” And indeed, when Mary smiles, he can glimpse two tiny white squares, perfectly formed, poking through the pink of her gums into her mouth. Edward feels that it is immensely clever of his daughter to grow teeth; it is obviously the sign of innate brilliance and he feels proud. Surely no other child had managed this business of teething quite so well before now. She is trying to eat his collar again. He gently pulls it out of her grip.
The Last Summer of the World Page 14