When the winter broke up at last and the weather became mild and soft and very clear again and the Spitfires shone like gulls in the sunlight as they flew above the creeks, we began the first of the assaults over the sea. Lying in the shelter of the hills, the earth of the drome had become dried by sun, and whenever the planes took off, three at a time, the spring dust was scattered in a furious pale brown cloud. The planes always went inland over the hills to formate, and for a time you lost them there. Then all at once they came back, beautiful and orderly and clean in formation, sliding across the air as if tied together and drawn along by one piece of invisible string, and in a few moments you lost them altogether over the sea.
The Spitfires are still the most beautiful planes in the world; in the bright spring air it was always hard to think of them as fighters. The light shone on the pale green fuselage and softened still further the sweeping soft line, and as they turned together over the bright light of the coast they looked as if made for nothing else but showing the beauty of flight.
The morning of the first big assault was calm and clear and there was a little cloud, ruffled and broken, far above. It was early morning and the sunlight slanted in under the cloud. The squadrons went out like two flocks of birds flying southward, one at three thousand, the other much higher, just under the cloud. As I saw them go I could not help thinking of the long, arduous, cumbersome flight of the bombers: how you saw them take off in the afternoon and how you then went away to work or to eat or to see a film and how you came back long afterwards, almost forgetting they had gone, and heard them droning in above the flare-path in the cold darkness. But now no sooner had the Spits melted away into the warm air than you began to listen for the sound of them coming back.
That morning some enemy shipping was steaming up the French coast, and the Spits could see an odd enemy fighter circling above. But it was not until a few moments later that they saw the main fighter force coming out to sea from the coast and it was not until then that the Spits went in to attack. They went in swiftly and confidently — confidently because far up above, just under the cloud, the second squadron sat watching, and because while they sat there, protecting, nothing hostile would come down. It was a little ironical that that squadron should be sitting there, protecting the other; for there had been, until that day, a little embittered feeling between them. It was a little thing that no one else would understand. It was a little grain of friction about a dispersal hut. The hut was dirty and cramped and the winter rain used to come in the roof and lie in pools on the concrete floor about the coke stove. It was either sleepy and hot in there or cold and raw and wet. There was no colour except the faded green of the chair cushions and no decoration on the walls except the usual pictures of naked girls with their breasts uplifted against the light and a diagram showing how your oxygen works at thirty thousand feet and another asking: “Will your guns fire?” It was just a place for pilots to sit and read and change their clothes and go to sleep and be rude to one another, if they felt like that, between flights. It was the sort of place you would think no one would get fond of; it was the sort of place you could never imagine causing a minor war if one party took it away from another.
But that’s how fighter pilots are. They are in a sense like race-horses: touchy and high-strung and finicky and, justifiably of course, a little proud. They like the stall they’re used to; they kick if it’s taken away. Very likely they would hate it if you called them creatures of temperament; but there they are, flying one moment like wild geese over the sea, disciplined and remote, quarrelling the next because someone takes away from them a dirty little hut that let in the winter rain and is warmed by a smoky stove.
Perhaps neither squadron was thinking about this that morning over the sea. Like most dog-fights it was over quite quickly. The first M.E.’s came out of the sun. In the squadron there was a little fair-haired pilot named Chalky. Chalky looks rather mild and debonair and harmless. It is sometimes extraordinarily surprising what people will do. As the M.E.’s came out of the sun, Chalky turned and attacked them with great ferocity. You do not need to weigh two hundred and fifty pounds and have the strength of a professional wrestler in order to press successfully the teat of a gun, and the target was easy for Chalky at about a hundred and fifty yards. The M.E. pulled up, stalled very suddenly, and went straight down; long trails of black and white smoke wound downward to the calm surface of the sea. Two minutes later Chalky did the same thing again and, looking down, saw the first big double white splashes, like smoke, breaking the face of the water far below. All about him the same sort of thing was happening, until finally no M.E.’s were left in the air. It was all very swift and positive and devastating. You read about it in the papers.
You read about it in the papers, but the papers did not tell you how one squadron sat over another and gave it confidence and made its achievement possible. They did not tell you that these were the squadrons between whom there was a little friction about a hut that let in the winter rain. They are not concerned with the significance of a little thing like that.
Coming back, the two squadrons were broken up. The Spits came back singly or perhaps two at a time, circling the drome and darting away over the hills and then coming in low between the red spring elms to bounce exuberantly across the field. They seemed to have a certain furious individual excitement as they bounced in alone.
In the afternoon they were out together again. The papers did not tell you about that. The weather was like spring and the air was warm and the sky clear and cloudless for miles over the sea. The squadrons went out as they had done in the morning, one above the other, over the coast, the sea, and then the coast again. But this time there were no ships, no planes, and no battles.
They came back together late in the afternoon. The spring sunlight was golden on the hills, and the sky very clear and blue. The squadrons flew close now, almost at the same height, bright in the clear air and in formation. The planes looked so perfect and impersonal, flying and turning confidently together as if drawn along by an invisible thread of string, that they seemed to have nothing to do with men. You could never have guessed from their impersonal and long order that there were men in them who had felt rather keenly, for some time, the friction about a dirty little hut that let in the rain.
You would never have guessed there had been a morning victory.