by Max Hennessy
And when I tell them
How wonderful you are,
They’ll never believe me—
Life wasn’t a bit like that, I decided, and I thought of people who couldn’t all have been married to beautiful or handsome people. I’d never thought of my father as being particularly good-looking and I knew I wasn’t, and I don’t think my mother was ever particularly beautiful. She’d probably been pretty when she’d been young and she still had a strange fey charm about her, but that wasn’t the same. Yet they’d seemed to have lived happily together, and I knew it wouldn’t somehow be the same with Marie-Ange.
The weather was awful now, with mist and flurries of rain, and we were all hoping they’d stop us flying, but it seemed essential that the war went on to the bitter bloody end so that we lost three men – all newcomers – in as many days. One dead, one wounded and one with his jaw broken in a crash-landing.
‘I thought the damn’ war was o’er,’ Munro said bitterly. ‘Do yon fools at Wing want tae kill us all tae prove it?’
But the flying still went on and the losses went on until we were all shaken, sullen and a little bewildered. If the war were about to end there seemed no point in getting us all killed. But that seemed to be the policy and, by now, apart from Munro and Jones and the major, there seemed to be no one left in the mess I knew, while those who had gone I could only remember after they’d been dimmed by the gentleness of memory so that they all seemed to have been brave and true and good – which I’m sure they weren’t.
By this time the continued low flying had brought my nerves to bowstring tightness and I was doing the work with a numb indifference that was dangerous. I’d ceased to care and that, I knew, was the worst time of all, and I knew I was lethargic with fatigue and growing edgy because, while I’d never imagined I could be killed in an aeroplane, now I was beginning to think luck might just be against me for once. Because I seemed to have been flying in battle half my life, I was terrified that I’d been doing it just too long.
There was one blessed day of relief when it rained and I took the opportunity to go to Douai again. By this time it was well behind the line and not so full of fighting troops, and the stores people and the headquarters clerks and the lines of communications troops were much more in evidence. I was feeling so low I even made my peace with Fatface, buying a bottle of the best wine I could find at an officers’ store and taking it in to him. He was so overcome he could barely speak.
I didn’t stay and drove out to the hospital between all the hurrying people. The nurse at the entrance didn’t argue any more and simply picked up the telephone. The same limping orderly arrived and led me down the endless corridors. The Belgian nun escorted me without speaking down the ward to the screen and because she said nothing I began to fear the worst, and all the old bugaboos of what Marie-Ange might be expecting of me rose up again. Then I thought perhaps she really was dying now and that made me feel even worse because I considered it was my fault for escaping and leaving her behind to face the music.
But as we reached the screen and the nun pulled the curtain back I was startled by the improvement in her. This time she was half-sitting up, propped on pillows with a bunch of letters in her hand, and was clearly much better. Something had happened and the nun knew it too.
‘Quel change!’ she said gaily. ‘Elle a récouvré la santé. C’est miraculeux, n’est-ce pas? Maintenant elle se porte bien et avec beaucoup de nourriture, dans une quinzaine elle demandera les souliers de danse.’
Marie-Ange looked up at me and smiled and her nose wrinkled so that I realized just why I’d managed to fall so heavily for her the year before.
‘You understand the words she say?’ she asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not all of them. She went a bit fast.’
‘She say, “What a change. I have recovered the health and it is a miracle because I am become well once more. With much nourishment, in a fifteen-day I will be asking for the shoes of the dance”.’
‘Dance shoes,’ I corrected.
‘So – the dance shoes.’
The change was so wonderful my worries disappeared and I felt as happy as she did.
‘I was much pleased to see you come,’ she said. ‘All the time I am in the prison I know you will, of course. I want you to. I much look forward to it.’
I hadn’t the heart to tell her I’d almost forgotten her in that time. ‘And now you are back,’ she went on. ‘When the war is over, we will have the wedding.’
‘The wedding?’
‘Mais oui. Le mariage.’
‘Oh!’
She was rushing things a little, I thought. ‘Whose wedding?’ I asked nervously, all the worries coming back.
‘But, mine. As soon as I am well. You must be there, of course.’
‘Of course.’ She had it all planned, it seemed. ‘But when I came last time, you were so ill—’
‘Much has happened.’ Her eyes were bright. She was still pale but it was quite clear she was on the road to recovery now. ‘I wait for much time and then he comes back.’
Yes, I thought, and now he’s wondering what the hell he’s going to tell Charley.
‘I think I shall never see him again,’ she went on, ‘and then suddenly he appears. From the nowhere. He has much medals. He is an officer. Everybody will be so pleased and I shall be so much proud.’
‘Yes,’ I said again.
‘We shall have the colonel to come. And the English Major Sykes. And all the comrades. We shall be married here and eventually go back to the farm. My father’s factory is free also from the Germans now and we shall be able to make the machines for sewing and have money again. He will be able to take over from my father who grows old and we shall keep the farm for the eggs and the milk and the week-end in the country.’
I hadn’t really thought of running a sewing machine factory and I didn’t even see myself much as a farmer.
‘And you will be the – what do you call it – the most good man—’
But of course. The bridegroom always was the most good man.
She was wrinkling her brows, not satisfied with her English. ‘Not the “most good” man,’ she said. ‘Good, better, most better. How do you say it?’
‘Best,’ I said. ‘Best man—’ I stared and then I almost shouted the words ‘—best man!’
‘That is right.’ She laughed gaily. ‘The man who is the most important next to the bridegroom. He stand alongside to clutch the ring.’
Suddenly the whole atmosphere changed. I’d got it all wrong. ‘Who’re you marrying, Marie-Ange?’ I asked.
‘Mais Hyacinthe,’ she said. ‘You will recall Hyacinthe?’ Then I remembered the Belgian boy she’d been keen on who’d gone away and who she’d thought was dead.
‘The chap with the funny name?’ I said.
‘Théophile Hyppolite Hyacinthe d’Ydewalle is not a funny name,’ she said sternly.
It seemed funny to me. ‘You thought it was funny last year,’ I pointed out.
She gave a shrug, as Gallic a one as you could get. ‘Last year I am frightened and a little stupid. Last year I think he is just a nice boy, that is all. Now I know he is a fine man. He has been very brave and is très bien décoré like you. I shall be Madame d’Ydewalle.’ She gave a little giggle. ‘I tell him about you and how you hide at the farm. I tell him also your name. He laughs but I think he is much jealous. You know what he say?’
‘What?’
‘Quel drôle nom!’
‘Funny name? Mine? Why?’ It had never seemed funny to me, or, to my knowledge, to anybody else either.
‘He speaks good English,’ she said. ‘More good than me. He knows many words. Un grand vocabulaire. He say, “But he has the name of two birds!” And “How strange the father must be, to give his son the name of two birds”.’
‘Two birds! Me?’ Then the light dawned. ‘Oh! Martin – Falconer! Of course!’ Suddenly the day which had started out being so awful was full of cheer. ‘You kno
w,’ I said, ‘when I first arrived and you started talking about marriage I thought—’
She gazed at me solemnly. ‘You thought—?’
‘Yes, I thought – well, it was silly really—’
‘You thought I mean you – you think I – oh là là!’ She giggled. ‘I cannot marry you. I am only eighteen.’
‘You told me last year you were eighteen. That makes you nineteen now.’
She pulled a face. ‘Perhaps then I am – what do you say—’
‘Too enthusiastic?’
‘Yes. And you are so old—’
‘Me! Old!’
‘—and you are the “hot stuff” pilot.’
I grinned, remembering the word we’d always used.
‘And, so, you see,’ she went on, ‘I must marry Hyacinthe. Also, of course, he asks me first.’
The nun shooed me out soon afterwards, saying that Marie-Ange had had enough excitement for one day. I didn’t argue and left happily, hardly touching the floor with relief, but still a little disturbed that Marie-Ange should think me so ancient. Since Krefft had thought so too, however, I decided there must be something in it and that the war had left a few marks on me so that, like Fatface, she’d assumed I was years older than I was. All the same it was wonderful to see her beginning to recover and to know that her future was assured, because she deserved no less for her courage and patriotism. But I could also see her now as a good Belgian housewife, wearing black on Sunday, and sitting in her parlour surrounded by the photographs of all her relatives. It was what she was intended for and it was right that it should be that way, and she’d known all along that what I’d felt the previous year was nothing more than sentiment and loneliness and perhaps a bit of fear. I could even remember her words. ‘This is not a true thing,’ she had said, ‘when the Germans have gone and I see Belgian boys again I will not think so much about you, and when you see English girls you will also feel different.’
She’d been right and I felt as if the weight of the world had been lifted from my back. Somehow I had to get to St Marion the next day to tell Charley what had happened.
Chapter 9
I reckoned without the war. When I got back the major called me into his office, heard my news, laughed and congratulated me on my escape.
‘Shouldn’t think you’d really enjoy being a Belgian,’ he said. ‘All that olive oil.’
‘The beer’s awful, too,’ I said.
He grinned, then his face became sombre again. ‘All the same, I’m glad it’s all settled,’ he said, ‘because we need you. The powers that be are demanding the full treatment. We’re going to be busy. Starting tomorrow.’
Sure enough it all began again the next morning and in forty-eight hours Marie-Ange, even Charley, had slipped from my mind. Despite the weather, there was no pause and we went at it from dawn to dark in a driving endless round in the late autumn mist, hammering at the retreating Germans, shooting up their aerodromes, smashing their transport, killing their horse and mule teams, forcing them off the road and out of every battered red-brick house where they tried to stand. By the end of the week we were all taut-faced with the strain, but there was no halting and not much sleep because the next morning at dawn it started all over again in the same grinding terrifying chore that left us all limp, exhausted and shaking.
To stop the complaints, a batch of decorations all round arrived – including a posthumous one for Bull.
‘Fat lot of good that is,’ I said.
Sometimes, I began to think, I could hear Bullo’s bell tolling myself, because we couldn’t hope to keep up what we were doing for much longer. I was even beginning to dread flying by this time because there’d been too many near misses and I couldn’t face the possibility of another. It wasn’t that I’d lost the love of it – sometimes I longed simply to go up alone and ride on the upper air without fear – it was just that I was getting too much of it and at too low an altitude. Courage, as the air force doctors had found out, was something that wore out, and every time some madman’s wing tips scraped past, every time a spattering of bullets holed the wings, or I limped home with a dead engine to land in a splintering of spars, twanging of wires and tearing of fabric, another little bit was rubbed away from what was left so that the callouses with which I’d covered myself began to wear very thin and there wasn’t much left between the nerves and the daylight.
Someone started a party to celebrate the medals but at dinner the major came in with more orders for more of the same thing the next day and, instead, it fizzled out and we all went to bed early in the vain hope of getting some sleep. By this time, because we never knew where we were going to operate from next, our tenders and lorries roamed ahead of us, the drivers selecting fields and setting up the establishment in any old place among the neglected corn stooks, simply by shooing away the cattle and the people and burying the odd corpse that was lying about. We were moving now through countryside which had been occupied for four years by the Germans and the inscriptions on the houses showed how permanent they had thought their stay.
But there were other inscriptions, too – Deutschland Kaput – that stank of defeat and the same revulsion against the endless war that we were feeling. Black crêpe decorated German coats-of-arms and German soldiers were deserting now in dozens. Once I saw a team of German horses wearing German helmets led in by French women, but there were still plenty of bangs about, and from time to time a party of soldiers moving forward too confidently were wiped out by a vicious splattering of bullets from a clutch of desperate Germans determined not to go down without fighting; and occasionally, even though we lived well behind the line, we came across groups of dark hairy bodies where a machine gun burst had flattened a wagon team. The ground was unspoiled, however, though occasionally there was a huge scorched hole full of pulverized earth, or overgrown with vegetation blackening in the autumn rain. Occasionally even, there was an unburied German’s boots among the undergrowth or sticking out from under a smashed pergola of roses left over from the summer.
It made the whole world seem devoid of humanity, somehow, and gave me a growing feeling of anxiety that began to worry me. I was desperately anxious to survive – though I was never sure what I was hoping to survive for, except to see Charley again – but I often felt that, with almost everyone I had known gone, I’d probably lived too long.
October faded in a flush of yellow sunlight that changed to mist. I got a letter from Sykes to say that the war in the Middle East was as good as over, and one from Charley to say she wished she were home and that I was home, too, and then, just when Jones and Munro and I were convincing ourselves that we were immune from the slaughter, Jones was hit while strafing a column of German troops hurrying eastwards. He seemed to fly straight into the fire of a machine gun and I saw flame come from under his machine. It was only small at first, but it grew larger and smoke began to trail behind him. He was almost low enough to put the machine down in a field and jump out but instead he seemed deliberately to crash into the column and the burning machine, flaring petrol and sparks and scraps of smouldering fabric and wood, tore into the column of men, wiping a dozen of them off the face of the earth before they could get out of its way, smashing them into bloody smears on the pavé as if they’d been a lot of flies on a window. When I got back, I jumped out of the machine to throw up, and I knew that I’d just about had enough. With the glimmer at the end of the long tunnel growing into the glare of daylight with the end of the misery, I didn’t want to fly any more and I didn’t want to kill any more. I felt I could have slept for days and couldn’t believe sometimes that I was only weeks out of my teens and not yet officially an adult.
That night the major called me to his room. His face was hard. ‘From tomorrow it’s an all-out effort,’ he said.
‘Wasn’t it today?’ I said bitterly. ‘And yesterday? And the day before that?’
He didn’t look me in the face, and I knew he was hating it as much as I did. ‘Every man who can get into the a
ir must do so,’ he said. ‘They think we’re going to end the war this year.’
‘This year?’ I couldn’t believe my ears.
‘That’s what they say. They think there’s a good chance the Germans’ll throw their hand in. They’re in trouble on the home front and they think that if they’re not pushed hard enough they might recover, but that if we don’t let up for a minute they’ll decide they can’t go on.’
‘Oh, please God!’ I breathed.
‘Amen to that!’ He picked up a sheet of paper and glanced at it. ‘You’re due for home establishment again,’ he went on. ‘So’s Munro. So am I, for that matter. Curiously, though, I’ve got a feeling I’d like to be here when it all stops.’
‘I think I would, too, sir.’
‘Thought you might.’ He sighed. ‘What it means, though, is that we’ve got to chase the Germans everywhere they go, harry them whenever they try to stand, shoot their columns off the road and generally make life hell for them. The whole squadron’s up from first light and I expect it’ll be like that until they finally throw the towel in.’
* * *
We huddled by our aeroplanes next morning, waiting for it to grow light enough to take off by. I felt cold and wretched and decided that perhaps I was in for a dose of influenza, too, now, because the inside of the aeroplane suddenly seemed a soured stale place I no longer wished to see. I’d never managed to get to see Charley because, now, we’d moved on so much it was too far to go back to St Marion, and it was impossible to telephone because of the demands being put on the hospitals by the wounded. I’d written her a hurried letter, though, telling her all about Marie-Ange and I’d even signed it for the first time ‘with all my love,’ which was quite a step forward, though I’d thought how small and inadequate a comment it seemed for such a big emotion.