Flight to Arras (12 page)

“One seventy-four.”

“Right! One seventy-four.”

Call it one seventy-four. Must change that epitaph.

Strange, how of a sudden life has collected in a heap. I have packed up my memories. They will never be of use to me again. Nor to anyone else. I remember a great love. My mother would say to us: “Paula sends kisses to you all.” And my mother would kiss us all for Paula.

“Does Paula know I am bigger?”

“Naturally.”

Paula knew everything.

“Captain, they are beginning to fire.”

Paula, they are firing at me! I glanced at the altimeter: two thousand one hundred and fifty feet. Clouds at two thousand three hundred. Well. Nothing to be done about it. What astonishes me is that beneath my cloudbank the world is not black, as I had thought it would be. It is blue. Marvellously blue. Twilight has come, and all the plain is blue. Here and there I see rain falling. Rain-blue.

“One sixty-eight.”

“Right! One sixty-eight.”

Call it one sixty-eight. Interesting, that the road to eternity should be zigzag. And so peaceful! The earth here looks like an orchard. A moment ago it seemed to me skeletal, inhumanly desiccated. But I am flying low in a sort of intimacy with it. There are trees, some standing isolated, others in clusters. You meet them. And green fields. And houses with red tile roofs and people out of doors. And lovely blue showers pouring all round them. The kind of weather in which Paula must have hustled us rapidly indoors.

“One seventy-five.”

My epitaph has lost a good deal of its laconic dignity: “Maintained his course on 172°, 174°, 168°, 175°....” I shall seem a very versatile fellow. What's that? Engine coughing? Growing cold. I shut the ventilators of the hood. Good. Time to change over to the reserve tanks. I pull the lever. Have I forgotten anything? I glance at the oil gauge. Everything shipshape.

“Beginning to get a bit nasty, Captain.”

Hear that, Paula? Beginning to get nasty. And yet I cannot help being astonished by the blue of the evening. It is so extraordinary. The color is so deep. And those fruit trees, plum trees, perhaps, flowing by. I am part of the countryside now. Gone are the museum cases. I am a marauder who has jumped over the wall. I am running through the wet alfalfa, stealing plums. This is a funny war, Paula. A war nostalgic and beautifully blue. I got lost somehow, and strayed into this strange country in my old age.... Oh, no, I am not frightened. It's a little melancholy, that's all.

“Zigzag, Captain!”

Here is a new game, Paula. You kick the rudder bar with your right foot and then your left, and the anti-aircraft battery can't touch you. When I fell down I used to bruise myself and raise swellings. I am sure you used to cure me with compresses of arnica. I am going to need arnica awfully, I think. But still, you know, this evening air is marvellously blue!

Forward of my plane I saw suddenly three lance-strokes aimed at my machine. Three long brilliant vertical twigs. The paths of tracer-bullets fired from a small-calibre gun. They were golden. Suddenly in the blue of the evening I had seen the spurting glow of a three-branched candlestick.

“Captain! Firing very fast to port. Hard down!”

I kicked my rudder.

“Getting worse!”

Worse?

Getting worse; but I am seated at the heart of the world. All my memories, all my needs, all my loves are now available to me. My childhood, lost in darkness like a root, is at my disposal. My life here begins with the nostalgia of a memory. Yes, it is getting worse; but I feel none of those things I thought I should feel when facing the claws of these shooting stars.

I am in a country that moves my heart. Day is dying. On the left I see great slabs of light among the showers. They are like panes in a cathedral window. Almost within reach, I can all but handle the good things of the earth. There are those plum trees with their plums. There is that earth-smelling earth. It must be wonderful to tramp over damp earth. You know, Paula, I am going gently forward, swaying to right and left like a loaded hay wain. You think an aeroplane moves fast; and indeed it does, if you think of it. But if you forget the machine, if you simply look on, why, you are merely taking a stroll in the country.

“Arras!”

Yes. Very far ahead. But Arras is not a town. Arras thus far is no more than a red plume against a blue background of night. Against a background of storm. For unmistakably, forward on the left, an awful squall is collecting. Twilight alone would not explain this half-light. It wants blocks of clouds to filter a glow so somber.

The flame of Arras is bigger now. You wouldn't call it the flame of a conflagration. A conflagration spreads like a chancre surrounded by no more than a narrow fringe of living flesh. That red plume permanently alight is the gleam of a lamp that might be smoking a bit. It is a flame without flicker, sure to last, well fed with oil. I can feel it moulded and kneaded out of a compact substance, something almost solid that the wind stirs from time to time and bends as it bends a tree. That's it: a tree. Arras is caught up in the mesh of roots of this tree. And all the pith of Arras, all the substance of Arras, all the treasures of Arras leap, now become sap, to nourish this tree.

I can see that occasionally top-heavy flame lose its equilibrium to right or left, belch forth an even blacker cloud of smoke, and then collect itself again. But I am still unable to make out the town.

The whole war is summed up in that glow. Dutertre says that it is getting worse. Perched up forward, he can see better than I can. Nevertheless, I am astonished by a sort of indulgence shown us: this venomous plain shoots forth few stars.

Yes, but....

You remember, Paula, that in the fairy-tales of our childhood there was always a knight who passed through frightful experiences before reaching the enchanted castle. He scaled glaciers, leapt across abysses, outwitted villains. And in the end the castle rose before him out of a blue plain gentler beneath the galloping hoofs than a green lawn. Already he thought himself victorious. Ah, Paula, you can't fool an old faity-tale reader! The worst of his trials was still before him—the ogre, the dragon, the guardian of the castle.

Like that knight, I ride in the blue of the evening towards my castle of flame. And not for the first time. You had already left us when we began to play games. You missed the game called Aklin the Knight. We had invented it ourselves, for we sneered at games that other children could play. This one was played out of doors in stormy weather when, after the first flashes of lightning, we could tell from the rising smell of the earth and the sudden quivering of the leaves that the cloud was about to burst. There was a moment when the thickness in the boughs turned into a lightly soughing moss. That was the signal. Nothing could hold us back.

We would run as fast as we could from the deep end of the park towards the house, flying breathlessly across the lawns. The first drops of that rain were always scattered and heavy. The child first touched by them was beaten. Then the next. Then the third. Then the rest. He who survived longest was acknowledged the darling of the gods, the invulnerable. Until the next storm came he had the right to call himself Aklin the Knight. It was only a matter of seconds, and the result was each time a hecatomb of children.

I fly my plane, playing at being Aklin the Knight. I am running slowly and out of breath towards my castle of flame.

“Captain! Captain! I've never seen anything like it!”

Nor have I.

Where now is my vulnerability? Unknown to myself, I had been hoping....

Despite my lack of altitude, I had been hoping. Despite the tank parks, despite the flame over Arras. Desperately, I had been hoping. I had escaped into a memory of early childhood in order to recapture the sense of sovereign protection. For man there is no protection. Once you arc a man you are left to yourself. But who can avail against a little boy whose hand is firmly clasped in the hand of an all-powerful Paula? Paula, I have used thy shade as a shield.

I have used every trick in my bag. When Dutertre said to me, “It's getting worse,” I used even that threat as a source of hope. We were at war: necessarily, then, there had to be evidence of war. The evidence was no more than a few streaks of light. “Is this your terrible danger of death over Arras? Don't make me laugh!”

The man condemned had imagined that the executioner would look like a pallid robot. Arrives a quite ordinary decent-appearing fellow who is able to sneeze, even to smile. The man condemned clings to that smile as to a promise of reprieve. The promise is a wraith. The headsman sneezes—and the head falls nevertheless. But who can reject hope?

I myself could not but be deceived by the smile I saw—since this whole world was snug and verdant, since the wet slate and tile shone so cordially, since from minute to minute nothing changed nor promised to change. Since we three, Dutertre, the gunner, and I, were men walking across fields, sauntering idly home without so much as the need to raise our collars, so little was it raining. Since here at the heart of the German zone nothing stood forth that was really worth telling about, whence it must follow that farther on the war need not of necessity be different to this. Since it seemed that the enemy had scattered and melted into the wide and rural plain, standing perhaps at the rate of one soldier to a house, one soldier to a tree, one of whom, remembering now and then the war, would fire. The order had been drummed into the fellows ears: “Fire on all enemy planes.” But he had been daydreaming, and the order had been dimmed by the dream. He let fly his three rounds without much expectation of results. Thus at dusk I used to shoot ducks that meant very little to me if the evening invited my soul. I would fire while talking about something else. It hardly disturbed the ducks.

It is so easy to spin fine tales to oneself. The enemy takes aim, but without firm purpose; and he misses me. Others in turn let us pass. Those who might trip us up are perhaps at this moment inhaling with pleasure the smell of the night, or lighting cigarettes, or finishing a funny story—and they let us pass. Still others, in the village where they are billeted, are perhaps dipping their tin cups into the soup. A roar rises and dies away. Friend or enemy? There isn't time for them to find out: their eyes are on the cup now filling—they let us pass. And I, whistling a tune and my hands in my pockets, do my best to walk as casually as I can through this garden forbidden to trespassers where every guard, counting on the next guard, lets us pass.

How vulnerable I was! Yet it seemed to me that my very vulnerability was a trap, a means of cajoling them: “Why fire? Your friends are sure to bring me down a little farther on.” And they would shrug their shoulders: “Go break your neck somewhere else.” They were leaving the chore to the next battery—because they were anxious not to miss their turn at the soup, were finishing their funny story, or were simply enjoying the evening breeze. I was taking advantage of their negligence, and I was saved by the seeming coincidence that all of them at once appeared to be weary of war. And why not? Already I was thinking vaguely that from soldier to soldier, squad to squad, village to village, I should get through this sortie. After all, what were we but a passing plane in the evening sky? Not enough to make a man raise his eyes.

Of course I hoped to get back. But I could feel at the same time that something was in the air. You are sentenced: a penalty hangs over you; but the gaol in which you are locked up continues silent. You cling to that silence. Every second that drops is like the one that went before. There is no reason why the second about to drop should change the world. Such a task is too heavy for a single second. Each second that follows safeguards your silence. Already this silence seems perpetual.

But the step of him who must come sounds in the corridor.

 

Something in this countryside suddenly exploded. So a log that seemed burnt out crackles suddenly and shoots forth its sparks. How did it happen that the whole plain started up at the same moment? When spring comes, all the trees at once drop their seed. Why this sudden springtime of arms? Why this luminous flood rising towards us and, of a sudden, universal?

My first feeling was that I had been careless. I had ruined everything. A wink, a single gesture is enough to topple you from the tight-rope. A mountain climber coughs, and he releases an avalanche. Once he has released the avalanche, all is over.

We had been swaying heavily through this blue swamp already drowned in night. We had stirred up this silent slime; and now, in tens of thousands, it was sending towards us its golden bubbles. A nation of jugglers had burst into dance. A nation of jugglers was dribbling its projectiles in tens of thousands in our direction. Because they came straight at us, at first they appeared to be motionless. Like colored balls which jugglers seem not so much to fling into the air as to release upwards, they rose in a lingering ascension. I could see those tears of light flowing towards me through a silence as of oil. That silence in which jugglers perform.

Each burst of a machine gun or a rapid-fire cannon shot forth hundreds of these phosphorescent bullets that followed one another like the beads of a rosary. A thousand elastic rosaries strung themselves out towards the plain, drew themselves out to the breaking point, and burst at our height. When, missing us, the string went off at a tangent, its speed was dizzying. The bullets were transformed into lightning. And I flew drowned in a crop of trajectories as golden as stalks of wheat. I flew at the center of a thicket of lance strokes. I flew threatened by a vast and dizzying flutter of knitting needles. All the plain was now bound to me, woven and wound round me, a coruscating web of golden wire.

I leant towards the earth and saw those storied levels of luminous bubbles rising with the tardy movement of veils of fog. I saw as I stared the slow vortex of seed, swirling like the husks of threshed grain. And when I raised my head I saw on the horizon those stacks of lances. Guns firing? Not at all! I am attacked by cold steel. These are swords of light. I feel ... certainly not in danger! Dazzled I am by the luxury that envelopes me.