At eight thousand feet the top of the cloud was flattened and slightly tattered, like spume beaten white on a heaving sea. The sun shone up here, having nothing to stop it, and Woolley flew low across the endless expanse, his wheels ripping casually through ridges and humps. Behind and on either side flew Gabriel and the third replacement pilot, Delaforce, his SE5a patched up with a new propeller to replace the one which had smashed itself against the panicking birds.
Woolley waved them in closer. He was flying toward the sun, and the glare off the cloud was painful. Gabriel moved his wingtip behind Woolley’s, almost opposite his rudder. Delaforce twitched about, his position never steady. Woolley lost speed fractionally so that the others found themselves of necessity creeping in; then, when he decided they were close enough, he took them down in a dive.
Delaforce’s first feeling was relief that they were going home. They had been flying for two hours, and the nervous excitement made him very hungry; he had been sick shortly before takeoff, also from excitement, and now his stomach insisted on food.
Woolley had led them around this stupendous universe of sky as if it were an estate which he had poached all his life. He showed them passing aircraft, often pointing them out seconds before these tiny flecks became visible to them. He stalked planes through the naked sky, placing his own aircraft where the sun and the angle made them least visible, and closing in with endless, painstaking patience; until the quarry lay below, as shining-innocent and unaware as trout in a clear pool.
Then, when Woolley had made Gabriel and Delaforce understand how all things moved toward a favorable conjunction—height, sun, distance, angle of attack, drift of wind—he would take them right up to that perfect instant and drop on the droning French Nieuport or British two-seater RE8 or whatever it was, in a lethal gathering pounce that could have only one ending; except that he cut it short after a hundred feet and curled away to do it all over again somewhere else. It was fascinating and exhilarating and draining, and Delaforce wanted urgently to get some good food inside himself so that he could go up and do it all again.
Now they plunged through the first layer of cloud into a gray cavern where wisps and flecks floated up like bits of broken barricades. Woolley deepened the dive and waved Gabriel and Delaforce in closer. The brittle clatter of engines merged into a hoarse roar. Each airplane spoke its individual strains and pressures: loose fabric drummed furiously, struts wheezed or ticked, wires whistled. Delaforce sensed a steadily mounting throb which possessed his entire machine: it shivered his limbs. The flimsy obstacles grew bigger, and Woolley started swinging over or under each puffball; or sometimes he banked left and careered round it only to bank right and skid past another. Each decision he delayed until the very end, like a skier gauging the last inch he needed to whip round a rock.
The canyon narrowed, the barricading cloudlets grew, and still Woolley swept on down, skidding and skedaddling like a lunatic. Gabriel and Delaforce hung on, losing him a little more at every turn, but rarely clipping an obstacle, either. The dirty, blank wall at the bottom rushed up, and its gray face began to reveal cracks and hollows. Woolley flew right into it.
Delaforce hunched his shoulders as he smacked into the woolly gloom. At once all sense of speed dissolved, and then all sense of altitude or direction. He was going forward; that was all. The gloom slipped past, muffling his engine and burying his comrades. There was literally nothing he could do. He even closed his eyes and listened to the soft howl of the slipstream. Then he was out in the clear, hard open again, and Woolley was wheeling the dive into a long, slow corkscrew to the right, where a funnel of sky pushed a hole through the murk. He spiraled down the walls of this funnel, losing speed with each turn and flattening the coils until the three aircraft were lazily chasing their trails over a bank of cloud as firm as blancmange. Delaforce laughed aloud at the sheer pleasure of it.
Without warning, Woolley switched off his engine and let the plane slip sideways into the cloud. This caught Gabriel and Delaforce by surprise: he had told them to follow him, but they didn’t expect this. They flew another circuit. Delaforce cut his engine and let the plane drop. Gabriel went round once more and followed him.
Delaforce came out of the cloud about three hundred feet above the ground. After the empty oceans, this seemed frighteningly close and definite. He grabbed the plane out of its side-slip and thrust it into a shallow dive. Then he saw that it was the airfield underneath. Down there on his left was Woolley, drifting in for the touchdown. Delaforce felt stupid: what was he doing up here? Hastily he side-slipped again. It never occurred to him to re-start his engine. Woolley hadn’t. Delaforce landed as near the old man as he could. Gabriel came in about twenty seconds later.
Delaforce undid his straps. He stretched his legs and arms, and filled his lungs. He put his head back and rubbed his eyes, and luxuriated in doing absolutely nothing for the first time in two hours. Woolley said: “Get your fat ass out of there.” He turned and walked over to Gabriel’s machine and spat on the hot exhaust. Gabriel, climbing down, looked at him like a private tutor meeting a difficult child for the first time.
“You piss-proud ponce,” Woolley said. “You drive that miserable sodding airplane around as if you’re mowing the bleeding lawn. You drive it, you cruel bastard. You get your great horny hands on it and you drive it, you son of a bitch. Jesus, I’d hate to be the first woman you climb on top of.”
Gabriel listened carefully. “In what respects did you find my technique faulty?” he asked.
Woolley stared with a kind of weary disgust. “Your bloody technique is word-perfect,” he said bitterly. “It’s just that you’re sterile, frigid and impotent. You treat this aircraft as if it owes you money.”
Gabriel stood stiffly. “Yes, sir,” he said.
“Take off your gloves,” Woolley ordered. “Roll up your sleeve.”
Gabriel did these actions with a semi-medical air. Woolley took his wrist and felt the pulse. After a moment he let go. “Does flying bore you?” he asked.
“No, sir.”
“Doesn’t excite you, does it? I don’t suppose you ever get scared up there.”
“One tries to keep a clear head, sir.”
“Good Christ … Don’t you ever lose your temper, you bloody fillet?”
“As I said, sir, one tries to stay in control of oneself.”
“Prick!” Woolley swung his right leg, heavily booted, and swept Gabriel’s legs from under him. Gabriel landed hard on his rump, on the frozen ground. Tears of pain came to his eyes. Woolley advanced on him, delivering short, jabbing kicks. Gabriel rolled away, but Woolley went after him, so Gabriel had to roll faster. “You craven little sod!” Woolley bawled. “Don’t you have any balls at all?” His boots thudded into Gabriel’s ribs. Gabriel grappled, seeking to smother, but Woolley was too strong: the kicks hurt more and more. “Fool! Infant! Coward! Lawnmower!” Woolley shouted. “Gutless bloody lawnmower!” He hounded Gabriel, going after the vulnerable parts of his body.
At last Gabriel lurched to his knees and grabbed Woolley’s legs. Woolley pounded him about the head with his fists. Gabriel roared and tried to butt Woolley in the gut. They fell, rolled and punched, and came apart. Gabriel drew back his boot to lash out—and stopped.
Woolley, on his hands and knees, was watching him, looking into his eyes, searching. Gabriel stared back and hated him. Their breath gasped harshly in the cold air. “Did you keep a cool head then, lawnmower?” Woolley panted. “Were you in bloody control of yourself then? That’s what you have to do up there. Turn into a bloody assassin! Kill! Understand, you bastard Boy Scout? Kill. Only a maniac would do this job, and you’re too sane by half. You madden up, lawnmower, before some madman beats you to it, or I’ll kill you myself. Understand? Understand?”
Woolley got up. Delaforce was open-mouthed, wide-eyed. “As for you,” Woolley said stonily, “you’re putting your gallant little heart and soul into it, aren’t you? Start using your tiny brain too, or you’ll end up with your lights all over the cockpit floor.”
He trudged off to the marquee where the pilots ate their meals.
Half the squadron was eating lunch when Woolley went in. Dangerfield was reading a letter, Church was staring into space, Lambert was nursing a headache, and Kimberley and Killion were arguing.
“But there’s millions of things that have nothing to do with sex,” Kimberley insisted. He was a farmer’s son from Derbyshire: sturdy, skeptical, with the rapid, almost stuttering speech of his region. “Coal mines, for instance. Nothing sexy about them, is there? Or … or wood.” He rapped on the table. “Or anything around here. Flying. What’s flying have to do with sex?”
“Starting with coal mines,” Killion said. He was twenty; a slightly built, intense-looking man who could have been a very young schoolmaster or a very old schoolboy. In fact, he had failed his exams after a year as a medical student in a London hospital, and joined the RFC the same day, on impulse. “Here we have man creating, as it were, an opening in Mother Earth. What does he do then? He explores it, testing its limits. Goodness gracious, Kimberley, coal mining is practically an act of rape! You force an entrance, my dear chap, in order to reach the source of all power. Honestly, I blush at your innocence, I do really.”
“I went spelunking once,” Lambert said. “I never thought of it like that. Awfully mucky down there.”
“That,” said Killion, “only goes to show how much you have idealized and disinfected the act of penetration. If anything, I should say that you were in a worse condition than Kimberley. He has his eyes shut, but you are facing in the wrong direction.”
“You haven’t done wood,” Woolley grunted.
“Wood? You seriously ask me to explain the sexuality of wood?” Killion looked at them. Dangerfield stopped reading his letter. “Wood is what trees consist of. Have you never looked at a tree?” He stood his knife on end. “Have you never appreciated the thrusting trunk …?”
“God, Killion, you’ve a mind like … like a …” Kimberley gave up.
“Like a choirboy,” Killion said. “Pure and sensitive and ready for anything.”
“Do flying,” said Lambert. Dangerfield went back to his letter.
“I’ll do flying,” Woolley said. He slouched on the table, one hand rubbing his chest, the other forking stew into his thin-lipped mouth. Lambert studied him and saw that it wasn’t really the skin that was grubby; it was the cast of the face that was sour. Woolley’s expression could never be washed clean.
Woolley pushed his plate away and took a bottle of Guinness from his pocket. “Why is flying like sex?” Gabriel and Delaforce came in and stopped. “Because you get on top and batter away with your weapon until you’ve won.”
“Then you both go limp,” Killion said. Gabriel and Delaforce sat down.
“That’s no good,” Lambert complained. “On that basis you couldn’t shoot down two planes in five minutes.”
“Well, can you?” Killion asked.
“Me? No. But other people have.”
“Sex maniacs,” Woolley suggested.
“You have,” Lambert said.
Woolley said nothing. He drank from the bottle and looked at Kimberley. Kimberley looked at a tent-pole. Dangerfield finished reading his letter and put it away. “I seem to have inherited a farm,” he said.
“What luck!” Kimberley cried. “Where?”
“Somewhere in Cumberland. It belonged to a cousin. He got shot by a sniper last month and it seems I’m the next in line.”
“Wonderful! Congratulations. Cumberland—that’s probably sheep. Do you know the place? How big is it?”
“Not the slightest idea.” Dangerfield took out a pocket mirror and scissors, and trimmed his neat black mustache. “I shall sell it, anyway. Sell and be thankful.”
“Church!” Woolley called. “Church, have you had any lunch?”
Church looked up and smiled. His smile turned the corners of his mouth down, as if in self-deprecation. He had been leaning back, arms folded and head down, studying the grass beyond his feet; an attractively ugly little man, well muscled like an amateur jockey. First he smiled at Gabriel, who looked at Woolley. Church then smiled at Woolley and cocked his head a fraction.
“What will you do with the money?” Lambert asked Dangerfield.
“Go to dances, of course. What else is there to do with money?”
“Well …” Kimberley was appalled. “I knew you were keen on dancing and all that, but to throw away a good farm for the sake of slithering about some stuffy dance-floor—”
Church got up. Dangerfield, who was next to him, feigned surprise. “With me?” he said, lisping. “You want to dance with little me?” Church stood awkwardly, trying to keep his smile steady, and gripped the back of his chair. Dangerfield rose, managing to make his neat figure look almost voluptuous. He took Church by the arms and led him into a hopeless waltz. Chairs went down, mess-waiters grabbed other chairs before Dangerfield could steer Church into them. Near the entrance to the tent Church ducked free and trotted out. He stumbled and fell, and took his time over getting up, and stood swaying. Woolley, his elbow on the table and his head propped against his hand, saw this and said nothing.
Rogers came in, swinging a cricket bat. “Ah, there you are, sir,” he said. “There’s someone to see you. An enormous American. Chap we met last night.”
“Nothing to do with me,” Woolley said firmly. “Shove him on to Woody.”
“I have, sir. He wants to see you, too.”
“What about?”
“More pilots, I think.”
Woolley finished his Guinness and got up. “See me in ten minutes,” he told Delaforce. He went out. Delaforce tried to appear normal but he was so excited he could hardly eat.
Rogers glanced at the food on the table and moved away. “Funny, I don’t feel very hungry,” he said. He played an imaginary shot with his cricket bat. Kimberley watched.
“Find something sexual in cricket, Killion,” he challenged.
Killion glanced at Rogers, who was now holding the bat low and facing an imaginary bowler. “Observe how the handle seems to emerge from the groin,” he said. “Then look at the remarkable length of the bat. Did you ever see such boasting?”
“What nonsense,” Rogers said angrily. “Utter nonsense. If that’s all you know about cricket, Killion, it’s no wonder you failed your exams.”
“Medicine’s loss,” Killion said, “is aviation’s gain.”
“That’s what I like about you, Killion,” Lambert said. “You quit while you were still behind, and it shows.”
Woolley found the adjutant in his tent, drinking Scotch with a truly enormous American.
“Sir, this is Mr. Martin, of the United States Army. He was extremely kind to us last night in Montigny.”
“How do you do?” Woolley shook hands. “I don’t understand your American ranks.”
“Stameetcha. That’s all right, Major. Just call me Chuck.”
“Dudley promised our friend a flight,” Woodruffe said.
“Dudley’s a bloody fool,” Woolley told him. “I’m sorry you’ve had a wasted journey. My squadron only flies SE5as, and they’re all single-seat planes.”
“Oh, well,” said Martin. “Give me enough Scotch and I’ll fly home anyway.” The adjutant topped up his glass.
“If I could have a word with you, sir,” he said. They went outside.
“Bad news, I’m afraid,” Woodruffe said. “O’Shea died in the hospital last night. There must have been some hidden brain damage, they think.”
Woolley scratched his face and looked in his fingernails. “Who?” he asked.
“O’Shea. You know, yesterday morning. He went through those trees.”
“I thought you were going to get them chopped down.”
“I am, as soon as—”
“Was that aircraft a complete write-off?”
“No,” Woodruffe said miserably. “Just the wings. The wings were smashed.”
“Oh.” Woolley lost interest.
“I wondered if you intended to write to O’Shea’s parents,” the adjutant said.
“Have they written to me?”
Woodruffe set his teeth. “No, sir. But—”
“The hell with them. What d’you say his name was?”
“O’Shea.”
“Never heard of him. Useless goddam pilot, too. Do you have a replacement yet?”
“I wanted to ask you about that. D’you think I should get two?”
“What for?”
“Well … in anticipation, so to speak.”
Woolley stared at him stonily. “Good idea,” he said. “Get three.”
Delaforce came over. Woolley went to meet him. “I’m starting you on combat practice,” he said. “Draw a Very pistol, take off and climb to five thousand feet. I’m going to fly to Montdidier and back. If you can surprise me and shoot a flare so that it falls within fifty feet of my plane, I’ll give you a medal. Understand?”
Delaforce couldn’t speak for joy. He nodded, saluted, and sprinted away to Stores, to get his pistol. He hadn’t felt so wonderful since he got elected Head Boy at school, last year.
After he had flown around for an hour, Delaforce had a sick feeling that Woolley had played a joke on him.
It was not his first misgiving. After twenty minutes Delaforce had developed a sudden doubt about the destination which Woolley had named. Was it Grandvilliers, or was it Montdidier? Perhaps he was patrolling the wrong piece of sky.
Five minutes later Delaforce had convinced himself he was in the right place. Five minutes after that, he began to wonder if the wind had blown him off Woolley’s route. He had flown a consistent box pattern, with a slight overlap on one side to compensate for wind-drift. Maybe the wind was stronger than he thought.
Or weaker.
Delaforce thrust the stick forward. He came out of cloud at about eight hundred feet and immediately recognized landmarks. He was a mile or so off course, not enough to make any difference if he kept his eyes open. He climbed hard and won back the mile of drift. It took a long time to reach five thousand feet again. By the time he’d made it, Delaforce was worrying whether Woolley might have gone overhead while he was down below.
From then on, he searched the sky in both directions. Because he wasn’t tall enough to get a good look over the side of the cockpit he flew at a slight angle, one wing dipped. This made one buttock stiff and numb. He reversed his flight pattern and rested on the other cheek. It too became stiff and numb. The other merely stayed numb.
Then Delaforce began to suspect a joke. Woolley thought him too cocksure … Or maybe this was some kind of squadron initiation … If so, it was a feeble rite. And passive jokes didn’t sound like Woolley’s way of doing things. Then maybe Woolley’s plane had given trouble. An important visitor. A phone call.
An SE5a came out of a cloud about a thousand feet below him and a mile behind, heading for Montdidier.
Delaforce swung hard away and climbed, presenting as small an outline as possible. Viewed from either end, an SE was skimpy: just a barrel with thin wings and fins. If he could hide quickly and lie in wait, he could dive on Woolley from above and behind—the hardest angle for a defending pilot to turn his head. Delaforce bounced excitedly in his seat.
He flew behind a bank of cloud and throttled back to just above stalling speed. Woolley had been a mile behind, so he would take well over a minute to catch up. Delaforce loaded the Very pistol.
After a minute and a quarter he couldn’t wait. “Right, chaps?” he asked himself. He dropped one wing in a steep side-slip. When he cleared the cloud he was diving almost vertically.
Woolley wasn’t there.
Delaforce pulled up quickly and went into a searching circle, looking everywhere. The sky lay bare for two thousand feet below. Delaforce felt cheated. A flicker of black on gray, no more than a wandering eyelash, caught his attention. Half a mile away and climbing straight at him was Woolley’s SE. He’d been seen. Delaforce opened the throttle and roared around in a hard-climbing turn.
Crimson fire bloomed on his right and seemed to leap toward him, trailing smoke, before it curled sharply and dropped away out of sight under his tail plane. He was so astonished that he first looked backward, trying to see what it was; then down, suspecting anti-aircraft fire; and then—too late—up. An SE5a hurtled over the top wing and curved up and away in a celebratory loop, at the top of which it half-rolled and flew complacently on.
It couldn’t be Woolley; Woolley was still climbing. It looked like Gabriel. How humiliating, to be scored against by Gabriel! The memory of that hot-red flare made Delaforce flinch and sweat. He must have been blind.
What mattered now was to get Woolley. That mattered more than ever.
Delaforce flew into cloud and turned back toward where he had last seen Woolley. He flew straight and level through the murk while he counted to twenty, and then eased up into daylight.
Gabriel was off to one side, cruising around, so that was all right. Delaforce took out the Very pistol again, and slipped down the side of the cloud, eyes wide open.
Woolley, exasperatingly, was now a thousand feet below, and flying the opposite way. So perhaps he’d already been to Montdidier after all. For the second time, Delaforce pushed the stick forward and leaned the airplane into a dive. The whistling of air became a screaming; the clatter of the engine a bellow. As Woolley’s machine came into view through the shimmering arc of the propeller, Delaforce concentrated on nursing the controls toward a precise intersection. There would be only one chance. If he fluffed this, Woolley would never let him get close enough again.
At five hundred feet range he raised the Very pistol and thumbed the safety-catch back. He held his angle, letting Woolley pull away just a bit. He would fire the flare dead ahead and over the top of his own propeller when he was about four lengths away, and then drop behind him. The flare should fall under Woolley’s wing. Three hundred feet.
A sound like tearing canvas made Delaforce grab at the stick: was his SE breaking up? Again the angry crackle. It wasn’t his plane. He was being machine-gunned.
Delaforce twisted violently and saw flames spurting from the gun mounted high over the upper wing of yet another SE5a, diving behind him, fifty feet to one side. The pilot signaled, pointing forward. Delaforce recognized him. That was Woolley.
He jerked round to see his target looming up fast but now off to one side. Angrily he corrected, bullying his plane over, kicking it for his mistakes, and fired; the flare trailed badly wide: not within a hundred feet; a miss. He pulled out of the dive. Woolley flashed past him, heading for home. Instinctively, Delaforce climbed. Making height gave him something to do: a substitute for success, or competence, or something.
At six thousand feet he found Gabriel, fell in alongside him and fired a shot from his Very pistol. The flare actually went between the wheels and Gabriel dived away in a great hurry. Delaforce took little comfort in the achievement. He had flown very stupidly. He wondered who had been flying the plane which he had missed. Richards, probably.
Woolley was waiting for them when they landed. “A right old cock-up you all made of that,” he said. “Not one of you got near me, and I could have pissed into your cockpits, all three of you, one after the other, and drowned you, which you might say is a wonderful way to go, but it’s still a bloody awful waste of government money. What did you think you were doing at five thousand feet?” he asked Delaforce.
“Sir, I was patrolling,” Delaforce said. “That was what you said. I was waiting for you. To intercept you, sir.”
“Who told you to piss about at five thousand? I told you to get up there. What you did after that was up to you. You could have come back here and gotten me as I took off. You could have gotten me over Montdidier. You could have hung around and sneaked up on me as I came in to land. Come to that, you could have walloped one past my nose while I was still on the ground. Couldn’t you, you mental pygmy?”
“Yes, sir,” Delaforce said, white and blinking.
“But you didn’t, did you? You did exactly what you thought I wanted you to do.” He turned to Richards. “I said five thousand feet, so you all flew at five thousand feet, forever. Combat practice, you horseman, is practice for combat. It’s not sodding pistols at dawn. Just now, I was your enemy. En-em-y.” Woolley screwed up his face and shut his eyes and took a little stamping, circular walk. “Oh Christ, what words do you understand? You wouldn’t know an enemy if he bit you in the ass, you’d think he was a great big affectionate dog …” He heaved a deep breath. “An enemy,” he declared, speaking with tremendous clarity, “is a man … who is trying … to kill you … before you can … see … him.” Woolley stared hard at Gabriel. “Has anybody ever tried to kill you, lawnmower?”
“Only drunkards,” Gabriel replied.
“Why did they fail?”
“I suppose I saw them coming.”
“You didn’t see me coming, this afternoon.”
“No, sir.”
“Why not?”
“I’m afraid I was concentrating too much on Delaforce. Besides, I didn’t expect you.”
“Why not? You expected to attack him, but you weren’t prepared to be attacked yourself?”
Gabriel said nothing.
“When nothing happened after an hour, sir,” Richards said, “I rather assumed that combat practice had fallen through, you see, so I went home. That was when I was … well, dived upon.”
“Do you expect the enemy to stop fighting when you stop fighting?” Woolley asked.
Richards said nothing.
“Every second you are in the air,” Woolley said, “someone is trying to kill you. If he does it properly you will never know. You must look for him, because he’s always there.” He stared at them, and his black, pouchy eyes were full of anger at their stupid humanitarianism. “God damn it,” he said, “you’re murderers turned loose against murderers! Some will come at you head-on with an ax. But the ones that think, the good ones, the professionals—they hide behind a tree and stick you through the ribs from behind. They are up there now. They go up every day and murder nice chaps like you,” Woolley made nice chap sound like a genetic defect.
Gabriel studied him thoughtfully. “Speaking for myself, sir,” he said, “I feel sure that I could have given a better account of myself if I had been aware of the true circumstances.”
Woolley licked his narrow lips. When he spoke, it was in a harsh whisper. “There are no true circumstances in this war,” he said. “There is only what happens.”
“Well, exactly.”
“No, not exactly,” Woolley said, “there is no exactly, God blast you! You want me to tell you the rules of this tennis club, don’t you, and I am trying to make you see that the first rule is to stop looking for any bloody rules. Up there you will live among murderers and victims. Now make up your decent, law-abiding little minds which you want to be.”
Delaforce felt sick. All the excitement of the hunt had turned sour; Woolley made it seem squalid and callous, vicious and cold. Delaforce desperately wanted to rescue something from this shabby summary. “I can see now, sir,” he said, “that I could have gone after you when you were taking off, but I suppose I didn’t think of that at the time because I sort of wanted it to be more of a fair fight, you see.”
Woolley grabbed him by the lapels and slammed him hard against the side of Gabriel’s plane. His twitching face was thrust so close that Delaforce could smell the Guinness on his breath. “You will never use that word again,” Woolley said thickly. “That is a filthy, obscene, disgusting word and I will not have it used by any man on my squadron. That word disgusts me.”
He let go and turned round and walked away. Outside the adjutant’s tent he saw Woodruffe and Chuck Martin. They were still drinking whisky. Woolley went over and took Woodruffe’s glass and sipped the Scotch. “Mr. Martin has been telling me about America, sir,” the adjutant said. “It seems that he has done quite a bit of flying himself.”
“I was an instructor, see,” Martin said. “They wouldn’t release me to come over here and fly. So I faked a bum eardrum and transferred to the infantry.” He swilled the Scotch around in his glass and patted a little arc of grass flat with an enormous foot. “What are the chances of getting transferred to your outfit, Major?” he asked, not looking up.
Woolley hunched his shoulders. He had a sudden, vivid memory of sitting alone in the empty, late-afternoon sunshine on the top of a Welsh mountain, and watching the rabbits hop about the slopes far below. He felt his skin cringe at this treachery, and forced himself to look up at the hulking American. The man had a hard, almost brutal look; not the look of a willing victim. “Do you think you can fly one of these?” he asked.
Martin glanced at the SEs, wrinkled his brown brow, and pretended to weigh the matter up. “I think I can,” he said softly.
“No parachutes, you know.”
“I know.”
“We have a spare plane sir,” Woodruffe said. “O’Shea’s machine—they’ve replaced it.” Woolley saw that the adjutant was every man’s friend today.
“Take that up if you like,” he said. “After that I’ll see.” He went inside the tent. Rogers was sitting, reading an old newspaper. “Hello, sir,” he said. “I’ve found a most comfortable château near here, completely empty. It would make a perfect home for the squadron. Honestly.”
“Bugger off,” Woolley said.
“Jolly good, sir.”
Woolley cranked the adjutant’s telephone and asked for the military hospital at Abbeville. While they were getting the number he sat and looked at the stains on the canvas walls. Once he shuddered like a man entering a fever; the rest of the time his pessimistic face remained slack and empty.
An aircraft started up, and the noise made the field telephone resonate. Woolley ignored it. The roar receded; swelled and deepened; and slowly turned brittle as it climbed away. Woolley yawned. The telephone rang and he answered it. There was a long pause at the other end, at the military hospital in Abbeville. The noise of the airplane gradually returned, then rapidly enlarged to a thunder as it flew low overhead. Woolley pressed the receiver hard against his ear.
The radiating shock-waves of the explosion sent little tremors up the legs of the camp chair. Men were shouting and running. Far away a woman’s voice spoke. “Hello, bitch,” he said, “I need you. I need you now.”