I see him exactly as he was, lying in the hospital bed. His knee had been hooked and broken by the tail-unit of the plane in the course of a parachute jump, but Sagon had not felt the shock. His face and hands were rather badly burnt, but all in all Sagon’s condition was not alarming. Slowly and in a matter of fact voice, as if reporting a bit of fatigue duty, he told us his story.
“I knew they had got me when I saw the air filled with tracer bullets round my plane. My instrument panel was shot to bits. Then I saw a puff of smoke forward. It wasn’t much, you know. I thought it must be ... you know ... there’s a connecting pipe. There wasn’t much flame.”
He stopped, and his lower lip came forward while he turned it over in his mind. It seemed to him important to be able to tell us whether the flames were high or Were not high. He hesitated: “But still, flame is flame. The inter-com was working, and I told the crew they’d better jump.”
In less than ten seconds a plane can turn into a torch.
“Then I opened my escape hatch. I shouldn’t have done that. It let in the air ... and the flame, you know.... I was sorry I’d done it.”
You have a locomotive boiler spitting a torrent of flame at you, twenty thousand feet in the air, and you are sorry you’ve done something. I shall not play Sagon false by talking of his heroism or his modesty. He would not recognize himself in these terms. He would insist that he was sorry he had done it. As we stood round his bed it was plain that he was making a concentrated effort to be precise.
The field of consciousness is tiny. It accepts only one problem at a time. Get into a fist fight, put your mind on the strategy of the fight, and you will not feel the other fellow’s punches. Once, when I thought I was about to drown in a seaplane accident, the freezing water seemed to me tepid. Or, more exactly, my consciousness was not concerned with the temperature of the water. It was absorbed by other thoughts. The temperature of the water has left no trace in my memory. In the same way, Sagon’s consciousness was filled to the brim with the problem of getting away from the plane. His universe was limited successively to the fate of his crew, the handle that governed the sliding hatch, the rip cord of the parachute.
The inter-com seemed to be working. “Are you there?” he had called out.
No answer.
“Nobody on board?” he had asked again.
No answer.
They must have jumped, Sagon had decided. And as he was sorry about those flames (his hands and face were already burnt), he had got out of his seat, climbed out on the fuselage, and crawled forward along the surface of the wing.
“I peered in. I couldn’t see the observer.”
The observer, killed instantly by the German fighters, had slumped down out of sight.
“Then I backed up and looked for the gunner. I couldn’t see him, either.”
But the same thing had happened to the gunner.
“I thought they must have jumped.”
Once again Sagon turned the matter over in his mind.
“If I had known, I could have crawled back into the cockpit. The flames were not so high. I lay there on the wing, I don’t know how long. I had stabilized the plane at an angle before crawling out. The going was smooth, the wind was bearable, and I felt fairly comfortable. I must have been out on that wing for some time. I didn’t know what to do.”
Not that Sagon had been faced with insoluble problems. He thought himself alone on board. The plane was burning. The fighters were still after it and spattering it with bullets, What Sagon was telling us was that he had felt no desire of any kind. He had felt nothing. He had time on his hands. He was floating in a sort of infinite leisure. And point by point I recognized the extraordinary sensation that now and then accompanies the imminence of death—a feeling of unexpected leisure, absolutely the contrary of the picture-book notion of breathless haste. Sagon had lain there on his wing, a creature flung out of the dimension of time.
“And then,” he said, “I jumped. I made a bad job of it. I could feel myself twisting in the air and hesitated to pull the cord, thinking I might get tangled up in the ’chute, I waited until I had straightened out. I waited quite a long time.”
What Sagon really remembered of his whole mishap, from beginning to end, was waiting. Waiting for the flames to rise higher. Then waiting on the wing for Heaven knows what. And finally, falling freely through the air, still waiting.
This was Sagon himself who was doing these things—actually a Sagon more rudimentary, more simple than the Sagon I know: a Sagon a little perplexed, bored and slightly impatient as he felt himself drop into an abyss.