The sudden arrival of M.E. 109’s over the island in these early days was not pleasant. Even when they ran away they were good. They were very fast and after the Macchis they seemed very formidable, and in the evenings there used to be long discussions in the squadron on how to get them down.
McAlister was then about twenty — one of those people who are learning elementary physics one day, while a war is being planned by older men, and who are wearing medals the next, by which time older men are already discussing what should happen when the war is over. The war was not over for McAlister by any means. The war and his life were the same thing; he did not want either to end. A D.F.C. and bar and four Macchis and six dive-bombers down were only part of life: a few strips torn off, a wizard time, the beginning of things. He had been very scared most of the time, and at the same time very eager, very tense, and very excited. He had a nice word for being scared, but it is not printable, and he had another for the war, but that is not printable either. Unfortunately I do not know what he thought of the men who made it, but no doubt that is unprintable too.
The spring weather was already hot on Malta when the first M.E.’s began to appear. The young wheat was high and green in the fields, and the sea very blue on the hot afternoons beyond the harbour. It was cool at night and on the nine o’clock watch in the mornings.
One morning the Hurricanes scrambled shortly after nine. Soon they were over Luca at twenty thousand. Far over Luca they were still climbing when the first M.E.’s swooped down on them out of the sun. They swooped down very fast, screaming, and the Hurricanes split apart into a circle. This was as they had planned and McAlister took his place in the circle and looked about him. Just then the second M.E.’s came down out of the sun, screaming like the first, trying to break the segment of the circle where McAlister was.
It all happened very quickly. McAlister turned back under the M.E.’s and they overshot him. He looked round and there was nothing to see. And then he turned back and there in front of him was the M.E. he wanted. It was the M.E. he had wanted for a long time, the one they had all wanted. He felt that if he could shoot it down, it would be more than a personal triumph. It would be perhaps even more than a squadron triumph. It would be the first M.E. shot down over the island and it would be a victory for morale. He wanted it very badly. His hands were shaking and his blood was thumping very heavily in his throat, and his mouth was sour as it watered. He was closing in very fast and he felt that nothing could stop him now.
The moment the crash came in his own cockpit he knew what an awful fool he had been. He had been much too excited to look in the mirror. And now he had made that utterly foolish, perhaps utterly fatal mistake. The cockpit was full of flying metal and the spray of blood. He went at once into a steep spiral dive. He was very angry with himself — very, very angry that he had been such a fool and had been beaten so easily, for the first time, at his own game.
When he came out of the dive, he saw that his left arm was dripping with blood, and when he tried to lift it, it would not move. He did not know quite what else was happening. He afterwards remembered standing up in the cockpit. He remembered quite clearly, before that, how he opened the hood and disconnected his oxygen. He remembered making the R/T connections too. But between the moment of standing up and the moment of seeing his kite dive away from him and of hearing the fading roar of the engines as it fell to earth he did not remember anything at all. He remembered nothing of being angry any longer, or scared, or even in pain.
He knew only that it was a wonderful feeling to be out of the kite, in the air, quite free and at least temporarily safe, in the enormous peaceful space of sky. He could hear nothing except the dying roar of his kite going down to earth and once, above it, a long burst of cannon fire. He knew quite well, and quite intelligently, that he was upside down. It was a little ridiculous; his legs cut off his upward view. His arm was beginning suddenly to pain him very much, and because of this he decided to pull the cord. He had been struck by the notion that he might faint and never pull it at all.
When he went to pull the cord, it was not there. For a moment it seemed to him that the chute must have been torn away from him as he left the kite. He was falling upside down and this was the end. He afterwards remembered thinking how very simple it was. You were shot down and you fell upside down and you found there was no chute and really, after all, it was a simpler, less painful, less horrible business than you had always imagined dying to be. You would fall a very long way and would hit the deck with a very hard thud, but the impact and the pain would by that time no longer matter. Your arm would cease hurting for ever and nobody would ever attack you from behind again. At home your parents would read the telegram about your death and perhaps there would be a notice of it in The Times. Your mother would cry and the real pain, the pain of loss and emptiness and sacrifice and despair, would not be yours, but theirs, and it would be far away and you would never know.
And finally, thinking this, he made one last effort to see if his parachute was with him. He snatched for the cord and suddenly it was there. He held it in his hands. He pulled it violently, and it was as if he were being hanged. The upward force of the chute opening seemed to wrench the upper part of his body away from the rest. The harness tightened with great power. He could not breathe and he felt very ill. Waves of darkness began to float over him and blood flashed back into his face, in windy spurts, from the wounded arm. The pain of the arm was savage and the pain of not being able to breathe, stupefying him, was worse. He saw Malta far below him, like a misty map in the sun, and all he wanted now was to be there, to lie on this map like the inanimate mark of a town, peacefully, without movement and without pain.
He must have gone off at this moment into a stupor, perhaps a faint, brought on by pain and shock and the loss of blood. He came out of it to hear the noise of an aircraft. It seemed to be bearing down on him and he had a notion at that moment, once again, that all was over. He was going to be holed like a bloody colander by an M.E. who had followed him down. This, and nothing else, was the experience of being shot down, this was the killing part; you were hung up like a half-dead pheasant on a string and an M.E. who had nothing else to do came down and did circles round you at leisure and fired until you just ran out like jelly.
He looked up at last and saw not an M.E. but a Hurricane. “Thank Christ!” he thought. “Oh, thank Christ for that!”
The Hurricane circled a few times, but he was too tired, too weak, and still too much in pain to show his joy. He was holding the raw stump of the wounded arm with his other arm and he could not wave his hands. He shut his eyes and drifted away, swinging, as if he were drunk and the world were spinning round.
When he opened his eyes again, the Hurricane had gone and he could see the town more clearly. But it was still far down and once or twice he swung very violently, and because of his hands he could not stop the swinging. He felt very sick and then finally he fell faster, not caring much until he looked down and felt that the roofs of the town, hot in the sun, were flying upward like enormous missiles that would hit him and lift him skyward again. Then for a time he drifted away, more to the edge of the town, and soon it was only the flat roof of a little house that was rushing up to meet him. There was the little house and beside it was a little patch of wheat. The wheat was very green and McAlister saw it wave and shimmer in the wind and sun.
He hit the ground with great violence and rolled over. He lay still and this, at last he thought, was the moment. “I have been falling twenty-five thousand feet for the privilege of this moment, for the sweetness, the calm, the painlessness, and the silence of being able to die. There is nothing else now. The chute does not matter, nor the arm, nor the pain. It is enough to lie in the wheat and shut my eyes against the sun and wait for the moment, and myself, to end.”
The crowd of gesticulating Maltese who rushed up to him, trampling the wheat and tearing off his chute and holding up his head, made him very furious; they stopped all his thoughts about dying. He was not going to be bumped about like a piece of beef by anybody and he let out with extraordinary strength with his feet; it was as if the Maltese wanted to tear him to pieces for souvenirs. He kicked very hard for a few moments, just to show how very living he was, and then his strength slipped out of him and he lay emptily on the earth, too tired to be angry again, only telling the Maltese how to give him morphia and how to bind the tourniquet.
A little later they carried him across the little field of wheat to the advanced dressing-station, and then to the town. He did not know much what happened. Two days later they took off his arm and in the night he was very restless and used to amuse himself sometimes scaring the Sister by telling her he would die because he did not want her to go away. The arm did not smell very nice in the days before they took it off and he was terrified that, without the arm, he would never fly again. But in fifteen days from that moment he was flying solo.
He is flying solo still. He flies beautifully and dangerously and they have fitted him up with an arm that has many intricate devices. You can see in his face the delight of being able to fly. It is one of the faces of those who fight wars they do not make and for whom flying and life are one: the faces of those who should be watched, the faces of the young — and not of the young who die, but of the young who are shot down and live, of those who are at the beginning of things.