Joe MacIntyre, who is a navigator, comes from the wheat country east of Edmonton, Alberta. There are some things that make MacIntyre madder than Nazism, and one is Magna Charta.
“Heck, are we still tied up with Magna Charter?” he says. “Sometimes I think we’re bloody well fightin’ the war with bows and arrows.”
Possibly MacIntyre thinks of Magna Charta as a game, like crib or knockers or poker, that was played a long time ago. It is anyway something identified in his mind with bows and arrows, cavalry charges, muzzle loaders, brass hats, and other generally obsolete tactics of war. MacIntyre, who is a large straightforward man from a large straightforward country, understands only one tactic of war. It, too, is very large and straightforward; it is so large and straightfoward and so devastating that he cannot understand why other people do not understand it as well as he does. MacIntyre’s tactic of war is the bomb.
It is a very long way from Edmonton, Alberta, to the place in England from which MacIntyre navigates Stirlings. Everything is different too. London and Edmonton are not the same.
“Jeez,” MacIntyre says to me, “you know this Whitehall?”
No need to tell him that.
“Heck,” he says, “out in Canada I heard all about this Whitehall. So as soon as I get my first leave I go tearing down there to have a look at it. Jeez, boy, I never seen nuthin’ like it. I walk up and down it once and by that time I ain’t got a right arm left. The damn thing’s dropped off, saluting brass hats. If it ain’t brass hats it’s admirals. Jeez, no wonder they’re crying out for ships. They got so many goddam spare admirals around.”
MacIntyre sometimes makes a snorting noise, like a prize-fighter going into action.
“And then I go on to Westminster. I heard all about that too. And jeez, boy, the guys I seen there walkin’ in and out of the House of Commons. Jeez, I guess some guy does an awful good trade in bath-chairs around there.”
MacIntyre makes another noise like a snorting prizefighter.
“And, for Pete’s sake, these are the guys who are running the war! Sometimes I think all I need is one hell of a good big bomb.”
“Design one,” I say.
“I’m doin’ better. I’m designing a bomb-sight. It keeps me awake nights.”
“Well,” MacIntyre says, “if it acts the way I figure, it’ll do more to shorten the war than these bow-and-arrow guys’ll do in a couple of centuries.”
Presently I try to explain to MacIntyre that when you get six or seven hundred men together, if you ever get them together, it takes time for everyone to speak his mind. “And everyone’s got a right to speak his mind,” I say. “You know that.”
“Then, for Pete’s sake, why don’t they damn well speak it?” he says. “Instead of fooling around with this tradition stuff.”
“Well, it’s an old institution,” I say, “with old laws, old customs, old privileges.”
“Jeez, every goddam thing you got’s old. You got old schools, old ideas, old men, old heroes, old every damn thing.”
“It’s an old country.”
“Jeez, you’re telling me it’s old. Back out there we got a brand-new spanking country that nobody knows anything about. Jeez, boy, we got no Whitehall nor no Westminster. But we got some swell wheat land and swell hamburgers, and that ain’t all.”
So MacIntyre goes on pretending, for some reason or other, that he doesn’t like us much. Now and then he goes out on an operational trip, in a good big Stirling, to drop several good big bombs on Brest or Emden or Berlin or Hamburg, and after these trips he comes back to work with renewed vigour on his bomb-sight, feeling better. It is clear that he lives almost solely for his bombsight and his bombs. He lives for the day when he can drop forty-thousand-pounders. All I want to ask him is why, if he does not like us, he has come so far to fight for what we stand for.
One evening MacIntyre and I are sitting in the lounge of the Angel Hotel; we are in the lounge, which is reputedly a select place, because we have with us the little blonde W.A.A.F. officer who is our friend. We think of her as a lady; we expect the lounge to be a decent, well-mannered place. We like the little W.A.A.F. officer for several reasons. She too is in the war because she hates something; she too would like to see the war more directly, more vigorously, more angrily conducted; she too has given up the things which are dear to her, soft frocks, gay hats, fur coats, the chance of a home where she can fry eggs for breakfast and bake scones for tea and sun-bathe on the lawn in summer, and she too, young, pretty, disillusioned, sometimes bitter, has come a long way from the life she knew, the life where the smallest things, but above all friendship, seemed to have a fair prospect of permanency.
“What about something to eat?” I say. “Some sandwiches?”
“O.K.,” MacIntyre says, “you fix them.”
I walk to the other end of the lounge, hoping to find a waiter. The lounge is very crowded; the waiters are old and few. I stand for a moment looking about me. Then suddenly I look back across the lounge, and I see that something has happened. The little W.A.A.F. is standing up and looks frightened. MacIntyre is also standing up and his cap is far on the back of his head. I know that attitude.
I go back across the bar. “What’s up?” I say. “What’s going on?”
“Just a little matter,” MacIntyre says. “This guy thinks Blondie is public property.”
“Don’t fight,” Blondie says. “Please.”
“The runt,” MacIntyre says, “the dirty dead-beat.”
“All I did was sit down!”
“Yeah, but in the wrong goddam place.”
“All I —”
“And undressing the lady with your eyes, too.”
“I resent that! I hope I’m a gentleman, I —”
“You hope. You dirty dead-beat,” MacIntyre says, “get out.”
“Who’re you talking to? Who’re you talking to? I got my rights!”
“Yeah, you got your rights,” MacIntyre says. “Bloody well stand up for them now!”
This reasonable, simple proposition, so much a fundamental part of MacIntyre’s nature, does not seem to appeal to the man. He is thin and tall and his civilian clothes look loose and out of date, almost as if belonging to another age. Behind him stand five or six of his friends; their clothes look loose and flabby too. Now and then the man strikes a dramatic attitude of injured perplexity and his friends look on with the immobile glumness of scene-shifters standing just off the stage.
“Please don’t fight,” Blondie says.
“Nobody’s fighting,” MacIntyre says, “yet. All I’m asking this guy is to apologise or else.”
“Apologise?” the man says. “Apologise? Apologise to a bloody pilot officer?”
“Oh, God,” I say.
It seems for a moment as if the faces in the lounge are part of a coloured wheel. They spin violently, and when I can look clearly again neither MacIntyre nor the man is among them. Standing silent, still like scene-shifters, the dead-beats look uneasy, nervous of what may happen. Only Blondie and I, looking at each other, thinking perhaps of the same thing, thinking of MacIntyre lying on his belly for forty trips in the bombing hatch over ghastly fountains of fire, can measure the extent of what MacIntyre may do.
When he finally comes back into the lounge, MacIntyre is alone.
“Where is he? What happened?” I say.
“It’s O.K.,” MacIntyre says. “I don’t hit guys who won’t stand up even for their goddam mistakes.”
Soon we drive home in the darkness. We do not talk a great deal; we do not talk at all of what we are really thinking. And unless I am mistaken MacIntyre is thinking of the way he has come six thousand miles from home, to lie on his belly in a bomb-hatch and dream in his spare moments of an apparatus that would miraculously end the war he hates; and unless I am mistaken Blondie is thinking also of the life she knew, where friendship had its tolerable chance of endurance, and not of the life she knows, where the friendships she makes are destroyed day by day as relentlessly as the castles of a small child are destroyed on the shore by the tide.
And thinking of this and remembering what has happened, I seem to know MacIntyre better. I know that if I ever shot up or shot down, if there is invasion, if I am about to lose something, if my rights are to be questioned or lessened or taken from me or if there is to be any trouble at all, I should like MacIntyre to be somewhere close to me.
For MacIntyre has a Magna Charta of his own. And it involves things so deep, so simple, and so clear that perhaps it would be foolish to put them down.