“Get going! Where are my gloves?... No, not those. Have a look in my bag.”
“Sorry, sir. Can’t find them.”
“God, you’re a fool!”
Everybody is a fool. My orderly, who doesn’t know where my gloves are. Hitler, who unloosed this mad war. And that fellow on the General Staff, obsessed by low-altitude sorties.
“I asked you to get me a pencil. I have been asking you for ten minutes to find me a pencil. Haven’t you got a pencil?”
“Here it is, sir.”
One man, at least, who is not a fool.
“Tie a string round it. Now knot the string through this buttonhole.... I say, gunner, you seem to be taking things very easily.”
“I’m all ready, sir.”
“Oh!”
And my observer. I swung round to him.
“Everything shipshape, Dutertre? Nothing missing? Worked out your course?”
He has worked out his course. “Awkward” sortie indeed! Where is the sense, I ask you, in sending a crew out to be murdered for the sake of intelligence that is sure to be useless and will never reach the Staff anyway, even if one of us lives to report it?
“Mediums,” I said aloud. “They must have a crew of mediums on the General Staff.”
“What do you mean, Captain?”
“How do you think we’ll report to them? They are going to communicate with us. Table tipping. Automatic writing.”
Not very funny; but I went on grousing.
“General Staffs! Let them fly their own damned sorties!”
It takes a long time to dress for a sortie that you know is a hopeless one. A long time to harness yourself only for the fun of being blasted to bits. There are three thicknesses of clothing to be put on, one over the other: that takes time. And this clutter of accessories that you carry about like an itinerant pedlar! All this complication of oxygen tubes, heating equipment; these speaking tubes that form the “inter-com” running between the members of the crew. This mask through which I breathe. I am attached to the plane by a rubber tube as indispensable as an umbilical cord. The plane is plugged in to the circulation of my blood. Organs have been added to my being, and they seem to intervene between me and my heart. From one minute to the next I grow heavier, more cumbrous, harder to handle. I turn round all of a piece, and when I bend down to tighten my straps or pull at buckles that resist, all my joints creak aloud. My old fractures begin to hurt again.
“Hand me another helmet. I’ve told you twenty times that my own won’t do. It’s too tight.”
God knows why, but a man’s skull swells at high altitude. A helmet that fits perfectly on the ground becomes a vise pressing on the skull at thirty thousand feet.
“But this is another helmet, sir. I sent back your old one.”
“Huh!”
I cannot stop grousing, and I grouse without remorse. A lot of good it does! Not that it is important. This is the moment of timelessness. This is the crossing of the inner desert of anguish. There is no god here. There is no face to love. There is no France, no Europe, no civilization. There are particles, detritus, nothing more. I feel no shame at this moment in praying for a miracle that should change the course of this afternoon. The miracle, for instance, of a speaking tube out of order. Speaking tubes are always going out of order. Trashy stuff! A speaking tube out of order would preserve us from the holocaust.
Captain Vezin came in with a gloomy look. No pilot ever got off the ground without a dose of Captain Vezin’s gloom. His job was to report upon the position of the Germain air outposts. To tell us where they were. Vezin is my friend and I am very fond of him; but he is a bird of ill omen. I prefer not to meet him when I am about to take off.
“Looks bad, old boy,” said Vezin. “Very bad. Very bad indeed.”
And didn’t he pull a sheaf of papers out of his pocket, to impress me! Then, looking as me suspiciously, he said:
“How are you going out?”
“By the town of Albert.”
“I thought so. I knew it. Bad business.”
“Stop talking like a bloody fool! What’s up?”
“You’ll never make it. You’ll have to give up this sortie.”
Give up this sortie! Very kind of him to say so. Let him tell that to God the Father. Perhaps He’ll put a curse on our speaking tubes.
“You’ll never get through, I tell you.”
“And why will I never get through?”
“Because there are three groups of German fighters circling permanently over Albert. One at eighteen thousand feet, another at twenty-five thousand, and a third at thirty-three thousand. They fly in relays and hang on until they are relieved. It’s what I call categorically blocked. You’ll fly into a German net. See here....”
He shoved a sheet of paper at me on which he had scribbled an absolutely unintelligible demonstration of his argument.
Vezin had done much better to keep his nose out of my affairs. His pompous categorically blocked had impressed me, confound him! I thought instantly of red lights and traffic tickets. Only, this was a place where a ticket meant death. It was his categorically that particularly galled me. It seemed to be aimed at me personally.
I made a great effort to think clearly. “The enemy,” I said to myself, “always defends his position categorically. Damned nonsense, these big words! And besides, why should I worry about German fighter planes? At thirty thousand feet they would get me before I so much as suspected their presence, and at two thousand feet it was the anti-aircraft that would bring me down, not the fighters. It couldn’t possibly miss me.” Suddenly I became belligerent.
“In short, what you’re telling me is that the Germans have an air force, and therefore my sortie is not altogether advisable. Run along and tell that to the General.”
It wouldn’t have cost Vezin anything to reassure me pleasantly, instead of upsetting me. Why couldn’t he have said, “Oh, by the way. The Germans have a few fighters aloft over Albert”?
It would have come to the same thing.
We climbed in. I had still to test the inter-com.
“Can you hear me, Dutertre?”
“I hear you, Captain.”
“You, gunner! Hear me?”
“I ... Yes, sir. Clearly.”
“Dutertre! Can you hear the gunner?”
“Clearly, Captain.”
“Gunner! Can you hear Lieutenant Dutertre?”
“I ... er ... Yes, sir. Clearly.”
“What makes you stutter back there? What are you hesitating about?”
“Sorry, sir. I was looking for my pencil.”
The speaking tubes were not out of order.
“Gunner! Have a look at your oxygen bottles. Air-pressure normal?”
“I ... Yes, sir. Normal.”
“In all three bottles?”
“All three, sir.”
“All set, Dutertre?”
“All set, Captain.”
“All set, gunner?”
“All set, sir.”
We took off.