his face cleaned of the afternoon’s oil and his eyes slightly bright
with the wine he had taken.
“We’re relieved to-morrow on account of casualties,” he said. “I’ll
tick you out early and we’ll go joy riding--see what we can teach each
other.” He smiled. “’Night.”
Paterson undressed slowly and threw back the flap of his sleeping
bag. He ran his fingers softly down the muscles of his left arm.
Automatically they stopped at the spot Mallory had been hit. He
stretched his thumb from the arm to his heart--seven inches. He
shrugged. Nice to go that way. Clean and quick. He sat upon the edge
of his cot and pulled on his pajama trousers. Oh, well, this was the
place--the last place he had to go to. This was the cot he would sleep
his last sleep in. If it weren’t a lonely job! That chap in the mess
who wouldn’t be a two-seater pilot for anything. If he could only
feel like that. If he could only feel Hoyt’s complacency. Hoyt, with
his calm smile and the two little ribbons under his wings. Military
Cross and the Legion of Honour, and three months before he had been
green--pucka green!
Paterson blew out the light and turned in. Hoyt was a good
fellow--damned decent. Outside he could hear Phelps-Barrington’s voice
muffled by the snow: “Come on, snap into it! Tender for Amiens! Who’s
coming?” The yell died in the roar from the car’s engine.
Paterson lay for a moment thinking; then suddenly he reached for his
pocket flash, snapped it, and stared nervously at the empty cot across
the room. There was no bedding on it, nor any kit tucked under it; only
the chair beside it, and the cracked mirror.
He got up and padded over in his bare feet. Stencilled on one corner of
the canvas there was a name--J. G. H. Lyons. There had been no Lyons
introduced to him in the mess. Perhaps he was on leave. Perhaps he had
flu with Trent and was down at the base. The spot of fear in his heart
trembled slightly and he knew suddenly where J. G. H. Lyons was. He was
dead! Somewhere out in the snow, miles across the line, J. G. H. Lyons
slept in a shattered cockpit.
The door behind him opened softly. It was Hoyt, in pajamas. “Got a
cigarette?” he asked casually.
Paterson turned sharply and grinned. “Righto,” he said. “There on the
table.”
Hoyt took one and lighted it. “Can’t sleep,” he said. “Come in and take
Mallory’s cot if you want to. I’ve some new magazines and I can tell
you something about our work here until we feel sleepy.”
Hoyt was a good fellow--damned decent.
* * * * *
The cold wet mist lay upon the fields like a soft veil drawn across the
face of an old woman who had died in the night. Mechanics, with their
balaklavas pulled down across their ears, were running about briskly to
keep warm--kicking chocks in front of under-carriage wheels, snapping
propellers down with mighty leaps and sweeps until the cold engines
barked into life and settled to deep concert roaring. Dust and pebbles,
scattered by the backwash, swept into the billowing hangars in a thin
choking cloud that pattered against the canvas walls. Hoyt’s machine
trembled and crept out of the line, with Phelps-Barrington after it.
Trent, who had come back from the base the day before, taxied out next.
Paterson waved to the mechanics to pull out his own chocks. They yanked
mightily on the ropes, and he blipped his motor with his thumb. Behind
him and to the left came Yardley, the new man who had come up from Pool
to fill Mallory’s place. Then MacClintock, sitting high in his cockpit,
rushed out with a roar and a swish of gravel. MacClintock was deputy
leader.
Hoyt waved his hand in a quick nervous sweep, and the flight started.
Through the mist they roared with their engines howling into sharp
echo against the hut walls. A moment later tails whipped up and wheels
bounced lightly upon the uneven ground. Then Hoyt’s nose rose sharply
and he zoomed into the air in a broad climbing turn, with the five
others after him in tight formation.
Paterson glanced at his altimeter--five hundred feet. He looked ahead
and to the left. There was Bapaume in its raggedness, half drowned in
the mist. Suddenly Phelps-Barrington’s machine burst into rose flame
and every strut and wire trembled like molten silver--the sun. He could
see the red rim just peeping up ahead of him and he was warmer for the
sight of it. Below, under the rim of his cockpit, the ground was still
wrapped in its gray shroud.
They were climbing up in close formation. The altimeter gave them four
thousand feet now. He glanced to the left. Yardley waved. Yardley was
going through the agony of his first patrol over the line--the same
agony he had gone through himself the week before. Only Yardley seemed
different, somehow--surer of himself--less imaginative. He was older,
too. Behind them, MacClintock, the watchdog, was closing in on their
tails and climbing above them to be ready to help if the Hun swooped
from behind unexpectedly.
There were clouds above--gray blanket clouds that came together in a
solid roof, with only a torn hole here and there to show the blue.
Bad clouds to be under. Hoyt knew it and kept on climbing. Almost ten
thousand feet now. The ground below had cleared slowly and thrown off
most of its sullen shroud. Here and there, in depressions, the mist
still hung in arabesque ruffles like icing in a confectioner’s window
or the white smoke of a railway engine.
The line was under them now, running south and east like a jagged
dagger cut, in and out, in and out across the land, not stopping for
towns, but cleaving straight through their gray smudgy ruins with a
cold disregard and a ruthless purpose. The first day he had seen it,
it had seemed a dam to him; a breakwater built there to hold something
that must not flow past it; a tourniquet of barbed wire twisted and
held by half the world that the blood of the other half might not flow.
Some day something would break and the whole thing would give way for
good or evil. Curiously, now, like Hoyt, he didn’t care which. And
suddenly he knew how his older brother had felt, on that last leave,
and he had called him unsporting in the pride of his youthful heart!
Hoyt was still climbing. Thin wraiths of cloud vapour groped awkwardly
for the six tiny Camels, like ghost fingers, trying desperately to stop
them and hold them from their work. Paterson glanced again at Yardley.
He had been glad when Yardley came. He was still green himself, but
Yardley was greener. It helped buck him up to think about it.
The line was behind them now. Hoyt turned south to pass below the
anti-aircraft batteries of Cambrai, and presently they crossed the
tarnished silver ribbon of the Somme-Scheldt Canal. Mechanically,
Paterson reached for his Bowden trigger and pressed it for a burst of
ten shots to warm the oil in his Vickers gun against the bite of the
cold air. Then he clamped the joy stick between his knees and reached
up for the Lewis gun on his top plane.
His throat closed abruptly, with a ghastly dryness, and his knees
melted beneath him. The wing fabric beside his gun was ruffling into
torn lace and he could see the wood of the camber ribs splintering as
he watched! For a moment he was paralyzed, then frantically he whipped
around in his seat and swept the air above him. Nothing. There was the
torn fabric and the staring rib and nothing else. MacClintock was gone.
Yardley was still there, lagging, with the smoke coming in puffs and
streaks from his engine. Then Hoyt turned in a wild climb to the left.
Phelps-Barrington dipped his nose suddenly and dived with his engine
full on, and at once, where there had been only six Camels, the sky
was full of gray machines with blunt noses and black crosses.
Blindly he pressed his Bowden trigger and fired into the empty air,
blindly he dived after Phelps-Barrington. Somewhere to the left he saw
a plume of black smoke with something yellow twisting in the sunlight
on its lower end. A blunt nose crossed his propeller--into his stream
of bullets. He screamed and banked wildly, still firing. He saw Hoyt
above him. He forgot the machine in front and reached for his Lewis to
help Hoyt. He tried to wait--something about the outer ring of the rear
sight--but his fingers got the better of him and he fired point-blank.
As quickly as it had begun it ended. There was Hoyt circling back,
and two other Camels to the left and below him--four of them. They
closed in on Hoyt and he wondered where the two others were. He
looked for them--probably chasing after the Huns. He could see dots
to the southward--too far away to make out the markings. Hoyt had
signalled the washout and they were headed back across the line. Funny
those two others didn’t come. He wondered who they were. Probably
Phelps-Barrington and MacClintock, hanging on to the fight until the
last. They worked together that way. He had heard them talk in the mess
about it. They’d be at it again to-night, and to-night he could join
them for the first time. He’d been in a dog fight! Shot and been shot
at! The spot of fear shrank to a pin point.
The brown smudge of the airdrome slid over the horizon. He blipped
his motor and glided in carefully. No use straining that top wing--no
telling what other parts had been hit. No use taking chances.
Hoyt was standing beside his machine with his glove off, staring at
his finger nails. Phelps-Barrington was climbing out. Paterson taxied
in between them. The man in the fourth machine just sat and stared
over the rim of his cockpit. Phelps-Barrington walked slowly across to
Hoyt and laid a hand on his shoulder. Hoyt shrugged and stuffed his
bare hand into his coat pocket. Paterson sat with his goggles still on
and his throat quite dry. The man in the fourth machine vaulted out
suddenly, ripped off his helmet and goggles and hurled them to the
ground. It was Trent.
He climbed out of his own machine and walked over toward
Hoyt. Phelps-Barrington, who had a wild word for all
occasions--Phelps-Barrington, who led the night trips to Amiens--was
silent. When Paterson came up he shrugged and scowled ferociously.
“Is it you, Pat?” said Hoyt. “Thought it was Yardley.”
“’Struth!” said Phelps-Barrington. “Let’s go and have a drink.”
Paterson thrilled as the man slipped an arm through his. For one awful
moment he had thought----
“Well,” Hoyt said, “those things will happen.” And he shrugged again.
“I saw dots to the southward,” said Paterson. “Maybe they’ll be in
later.”
“No, little Rollo,” said Phelps-Barrington. “They won’t be in later or
ever. I saw it with my own eyes--both in flames. I thought it was you,
and until Trent landed, I thought he might be Mac. But I was wrong.
Let’s shut up and have a drink!”
Then suddenly he knew, and his mind froze with the ghastliness of
the thought. If he’d been quicker--if he’d turned and climbed above
Yardley when he saw him lagging, with the smoke squirting from his hit
motor--he could have saved him. If he had kept his eyes open behind,
instead of dreaming, he might have saved MacClintock, too. In a daze,
he stumbled after Phelps-Barrington. That’s why Trent had hurled his
helmet to the ground and walked off. That’s why Hoyt had shrugged and
said, “Those things will happen.” It was his fault--his--Paterson’s.
He’d bolted and lost his head and fired blindly into the empty air.
He hadn’t stuck to his man. He had let Yardley drop back alone to be
murdered.
“Look here, P-B,” he muttered, “I’m not drinking.” He wanted to be
alone--to think. So quick it had all been.
Phelps-Barrington grabbed his arm and pushed him stumbling into the
mess shack. Trent was slumped down at the table with his glass before
him, thumbing over a newspaper. He raised his head as they came in.
“Two more of the same, steward--double.”
They sat down beside him and Phelps-Barrington reached for a section of
the paper.
“It says here,” said Trent, “that Eva Fay didn’t commit suicide. Died
of an overdose of hashish she took at a party in Maida Vale the night
before.”
The steward brought the glasses. Trent raised his and looked at
Paterson. “Good work, son.”
Paterson stared at him in amazement. Trent sipped his whisky and went
on reading as if he had never stopped. Some time later, Paterson left
them and went down to the flight office to find Hoyt. The thought of
the morning still bothered him, in spite of Trent’s words, and he
wanted to clear it up. Hoyt smiled as he came in. “Washed the taste out
in Falernian?” he asked.
“Some. Look here, skipper--this morning--what about it?”
“What about it?”
“My part--I was fast asleep. I saw Yardley lagging, and I had a moment
to cross above him, but I lost my head, I’m afraid, and went wild.”
The smile faded and Hoyt laid down his pencil. “Do you really think you
could have saved him?”
“He was behind me already when I saw him lagging, just as you climbed
and P-B dived.”
“Then you couldn’t have helped him, because Mac was done for when I saw
him and climbed, and half a tick after I climbed, P-B saw Yardley burst
into flames. There you are.”
“But if I’d kept my eyes back, instead of trusting to Mac?”
“Look here,” said Hoyt, “no man can keep his eyes on everything.
Something always happens in the place he isn’t looking. Bear that in
mind and forget this morning. You’ve seen a dog fight from the inside
and lived. Take it easy. You’re not here to do everything. You’re here
to stick to us. You might have run away. Remember that and be afraid
of it. Remember if you get away by leaving a pal--he may live to come
back. Then you’ll have to face him, and engine trouble is a poor excuse.
“Trouble with you youngsters is that you’ve been fed up on poobah. And
the myth of the fearless air fighter. Put it out of your mind. There’s
no such thing. Some are less afraid than others. Some are drunker--take
your choice. Class dismissed.” Hoyt grinned. “Go get cleaned up. We’ll
jog into Amiens for tiffin. Tender in half an hour. Tell Trent and P-B.”
They spent most of the afternoon at Charlie’s Bar with some of the men
from the artillery observation squadron. For dinner they went to the
Du Rhin and the glasses flowed red. Afterward, in another place, there
was a fight, as usual, and chairs crashed like match sticks, until
whistles sounded outside and the A. P. M.’s car, siren screaming, raced
up the street. They poured out into the alleyway and ran, leaving the
waiter praying in high, shrieking French.
Trent had a bottle with him. They rode all the way home singing and
shouting to high heaven, forgetting that there were two empty chairs in
the mess and that there might be more to-morrow.
“Take the cylinders out of my kidneys,
Take the scutcheon pins out of my brain,
Take the cam box from under my backbone
And assemble the engine again!”
They were good fellows--Billy Hoyt, P-B, Pat, and Ray Trent. Have
’nother li’l’ drink.
They roared along like a Juggernaut, with the exhaust splitting the
night air. Sometimes they were on the road and sometimes they were off.
No one cared so long as they kept hurtling into the darkness.
Phelps-Barrington was fast asleep. Pat woke him up at the airdrome and
tumbled him into the hut.
They stumbled over a kit bag in the doorway. P-B straightened up
suddenly. “Good-bye, Mac, old lad, sleep tight.”
Trent kicked the bag out of the way. “Damned adjutant! Take P-B in with
you, Pat. I’m bunking with the skipper. Might have the decency to take
Mac’s kit over to squadron office and not leave it lying around the
passage. ’Night.”
Paterson was quite sober. He tumbled P-B into bed and stood for a
moment at the open window, staring out across the ground mist that
billowed knee high in the faint night breeze. He rested his elbows on
the sill and hid his face in his trembling hands. If he could only be
like the others--casual--calloused. If he had less imagination--more
sand--stamina--something. MacClintock had planned this night himself,
at breakfast. Yardley had left a letter addressed and stamped on his
window sill.
Paterson’s mind jumped miles to the eastward. He saw the two blackened
engines lying somewhere in the bleak fields beyond, ploughed into
the ground, with their mats of twisted wires coiled around them in a
hideous trap.
Their families would get word to-morrow. “Missing,” it would read.
And then later: “Previously reported missing, now reported killed in
action.” And to-morrow--perhaps his own family. Why can’t it be quick?
There was a noise behind him. Someone fumbling at the door latch--Hoyt.
“Had this bit left. Bottoms up! Quick!” He took the glass and drained
it. The liquor bit into his veins and burned him. Hoyt set his own
glass down on the washstand with a sharp click. “Get into bed now, you
idiot. Good-night.”
Spiked drink. Hoyt was a good fellow--damned decent. Do anything for
Hoyt. Never let Hoyt go. Like my brother--before the war. Good old
Hoyt. And he sank suddenly into a dreamless fuddle of sleep.
* * * * *
The weeks crawled on slowly. Paterson felt like a man climbing a
steep ladder. Each day was a rung behind him. Each new rung showed an
infinite number still ahead, waiting for him to go on, luring him with
their apparent safety, waiting for him to reach the one rotten rung
that would do him in. Some day he would reach it, and it would crack
under him, or his fingers would slip and hurtle him into the abyss
under his charred engine.
Offensive patrols and escort for the artillery observation squadron
filled their time, with sometimes a road strafe to vary the monotony.
These he liked best, for some quaint reason--perhaps because there was
less space to fall through. Sometimes there would be a battalion on
those roads--a battalion to scatter and knock down like tin soldiers
on a nursery floor. Quite impersonal. They were never men to Paterson.
Like dolls they ran and like dolls they sprawled awkwardly where they
fell.
P-B and Trent and Hoyt carried him through somehow. Mallory was back
again, but Mallory never counted much with him. P-B and Trent and Hoyt
were a bulwark. They meant safety. It was good to wake up at night and
hear P-B snoring on the other cot, to know that Hoyt and Trent were
asleep in the next cubicle. It was good to see them stamping to keep
warm before the patrol took off in the half light of early morning.
So different from one another and yet so alike underneath. Hoyt was
nearer his kind than the two others. Tall and spindly like his brother,
with a straight, thin nose that quivered slightly at the nostril when
he was annoyed. Hoyt, who smiled and sanctioned the childish depravity
of little P-B, but never quite met it with his own, although always
seeming to, on the night trips to Amiens. Trent, glowering and quiet,
with a keen hatred for everything political that he learned in the
offices of the London and South Western before the war, when the army
to him had meant young wastrels swanking the Guards’ livery in the
boxes of theatres--wastrels who had died on the Charleroi Road three
years before.
Suddenly, from one of his mother’s letters, he found that he had been
in France almost three months. He stiffened with the thought and
remembered what Hoyt had told him that day he had come: “I’ve been here
three months. When I came, I came just as you did to-day--pucka green.”
He knew then that all his hopes were false. He was the same to-day as
he had been that first day. He would always be the same. The spot of
fear would always be with him. Some day it would swell and choke him
and his hands would function without his frozen brain. He should never
have tried to fly. He should have gone into the infantry as his brother
had. Too much imagination--too little something. In three months he had
learned the ropes, that was all; how to fire and when to fire, where
the Archie batteries were near Cambrai, how to ride a cloud and crawl
into it--nothing more.
The weeks went on, creeping closer and closer to the twenty-first of
March--the twenty-first of March--and with them the feeling crept
into Paterson’s heart--a feeling that something frightful was to
happen. Things had been quiet so long and casualties had been few. C
Flight hadn’t been touched in weeks. He brooded over the thought and
slept badly. He went to Amiens with P-B more frequently. If it was
to be any of the three, he knew he wouldn’t be able to stand it. His
bulwark would crumble and break and he would break with it. On the dawn
patrols, those few minutes before they climbed into the cockpits and
took off were agony: “This will be the day. It must be to-day. We can’t
go on this way. Our luck will break.”
One day when they were escorting 119, four dots dived on them from
behind and he knew suddenly what he would do. Stark, logically, the
thing stood before him and beckoned through the wires of his centre
section. If a shot hit his plane, he would go down. They were far over
the lines, taking 110 on a bombing show. He would wabble down slowly,
pushing his joy stick from side to side in a slow ellipse as if he were
out of control. Then he would land and run his nose into the ground
and be taken prisoner. The others would see him and swear that he’d
been hit--and he wouldn’t do it until his machine had been hit. That
for his own conscience’s sake and for the years he would have to live
afterwards.
But A Flight, behind and far above, saw the dots and scattered them,
and the chance was gone.
Then day by day he waited for another. He knew now that he would do it
at the first opportunity. He slept better with the thought, and the
minutes seemed shorter now while he waited at dawn for his bus to be
run out. All the details were worked out in his mind. If any one of
the three were close to him, he’d throw up his hands wildly before he
started down. They’d see that and report it. Then when he landed he’d
pull out the flare quick and burn his machine so that they would think
he had crashed and caught fire. It was so easy!
He spent less time with P-B now. Somehow the old freedom was gone.
Somehow Hoyt wasn’t the same to him either. He was working with three
strangers he had never really known--three casual strangers he would
leave shortly and never see again.
On the morning of the fourteenth of March the caller turned C Flight
out suddenly, without warning, about an hour after P-B and Trent
had returned from Amiens. A special signal had come in from wing
headquarters. B Flight had the regular morning patrol, but there was to
be an additional offensive patrol besides. A Flight had morning escort
and the dusk patrol. That meant C for the special. Paterson could hear
Hoyt swearing about it next door. P-B, across the room, uttered a
mighty curse and rolled over. Paterson got him a bucket of cold water
and doused his feverish head in it. Trent and Hoyt were still cursing
pettishly in the next cubicle.
Sleep-stupid, the four of them stumbled into the mess for hard-boiled
eggs and coffee. Mallory and the new man, Crowe, were already eating,
white-faced and unshaven. They slumped down beside them in silence.
In silence, they trooped across the dark airdrome, buttoning their
coats and fastening helmet straps against the cold wretchedness of the
March wind. The machines were waiting for them in a ghostly line like
staring wasps that had eaten the food of the gods and grown to gigantic
size.
They climbed in and taxied out mechanically. B Flight had already left
on the regular dawn patrol. They blipped their motors and roared away,
leaving their echo and the sharp smell of castor oil behind on the
empty ’drome.
Hoyt led them south to the crumpled ruins of Péronne and out to the
line, climbing high to get the warmth of the sunlight that began to
tint the clouds above them. They were going over to Le Cateau and
beyond. Intelligence wanted pictures to confirm certain reports of new
Hun shell dumps and battery concentration. The photographic planes were
to go out and get them under escort as soon as there was enough light.
As additional precaution, offensive patrols were to be kept up far over
the enemy’s lines to insure the success of the pictures. They passed
the sullen black stain that was Le Câtelet and turned to the eastward.
The ground was already light and the camera busses would be starting.