C (17 page)

“Intermission,” Serge says, to no one, or perhaps the rat.

For a moment, the flickering stops and the whole countryside falls silent. A calcium flare descends noiselessly not far away, silhouetting the poplars and rimming their leaves with frozen light, as though with hoarfrost. Behind it other, smaller lights glow on and off, like fireflies. Then their pops arrive, then louder stutters, then high, booming eruptions: sounds and lights meshing together as the air comes back to life, like a magnificent engine warming up.

i

Z
ero hour today is 7 a.m. Serge is up two hours before it, woken by the plash of a tug’s wake against his houseboat’s hull. He performs his ablutions, makes his way over to the mess and eats two slices of dry toast washed down with gunfire tea. Fifteen or so other pilots and observers shuffle into seats around him, bleary-eyed, coughing and farting themselves towards full consciousness. Cigarettes are smoked throughout the meal, stabbed into mouths still full with food, balanced on the sides of plates, stubbed out in hollow eggshells. Walpond-Skinner marches in at six to hand out copy orders.

“Five machines on Art Obs today; three SE5s escorting them. Four batteries to each machine: two to be ranged in the first hour, two in the second, all four kept on target during the third. Individual calls on all your sheets.”

Serge glances down at his. His batteries are E through H, his own call 3. The print on his paper is mauve and imprecise: third in a CC’d triplicate, the furthest from the ribbon and keys’ touch. Beneath the copy order sheet, on whiter and less grainy paper that’s been folded and compressed, is a large map. Serge opens it across the table top and sees, among grid squares bent out of line by cup and toast-rack, his objectives marked with arrows, their coordinates written beside them in red ink: two hostile batteries, an ammunition dump, a crossroads. The dump and crossroads are new for him; the batteries he’s been targeting for over a week now, on and off.

“Memo from Central Wireless Station: ground operators still reporting too much jambing,” Walpond-Skinner reads. “Keep to the wavelengths and notes that you’ve been allotted. And make sure you’re always half a mile—at
minimum
—from the next machine. Any questions?”

His eyes skirt the floor; the men’s eyes do the same.

“Then up, Bellerophons, and at ’em!” Walpond-Skinner snaps.

Chairs slide back, cups are swilled from and abandoned, burps sounded like last calls above remains of plates; then the men trudge outside. The sun’s not up yet; dew still hangs about the long grass; the odd strand of spider-web filament floats just above this: it’s not cold. The mildness of the summer morning makes the behaviour of the men as they slip into thick leather jackets, gloves and fur-lined boots seem quite incongruous. The pilots and observers of the SE5s are pulling muskrat gauntlets over the silk inners on their hands and feet and rubbing whale oil on their cheeks and foreheads: they’ll be flying much higher. In the field beside them, mechanics pace round the machines, patting their tails and engines as though leading greyhounds or racehorses to their starting boxes. Serge’s RE8 is near the pack’s rear; Gibbs is already inside it. Serge climbs into its back seat, wedges the biscuit-box and brandy-flask that he’s been carrying under his right arm in between the spark set and its six-volt battery, gives the Lewis gun a swivel, then eases himself into a dew-damped seat as the mechanics throw propellers into motion all around the field, cutting arrowhead-shaped streaks into the grass where it’s blown down in diagonal lines behind the wings.

They take off to the west, then turn across the wood, skimming the treetops. The poplars opposite the houseboats bend as they pass over them. Gibbs puts one wing down; for a while the machine seems to drag, as though still connected psychologically if not physically to the ground. Serge feels gravity tautening around him, like elastic. Then the wing rises, the elastic snaps and he’s flung, back first, into the sky. It feels like falling, not ascending—but falling upwards, as if sucked towards some vortex so high that it’s above height itself. The land accelerates away, its surface area expanding even as it shrinks. Gibbs levels the plane; the countryside slants till it’s horizontal and starts running from beneath the fuselage like a ticker-tape strip issuing from a telegraph machine, the flickering band of the Lys racing away beside a thicker belt of forest, villages and hamlets popping up to punctuate the strip like news reports or stock-price fluctuations before Nieppe’s large brown stain pushes these out to the margins. A heat bump throws them as Gibbs angles up again; the landscape shakes beneath them and becomes illegible, just for a moment, before settling back into its horizontal run, its centre perfectly aligned with the plane’s tail. The bumps continue till they clear a haze that’s been invisible up to now: it always is when they’re inside it. As it sinks from him like a pneumatic platform being lowered, Serge can make its upper surface out, clear-cut and definite, a second horizon hovering like a muslin cover just above the first …

They pass a kite balloon. It, too, seems to strain upwards, pulling at the winch-line tethering it to its truck. Serge waves to the man in its basket; one of the man’s hands flies up in response; the other clasps the basket’s rail, as though to hold him back. The front can’t be far now. Gibbs turns the machine round and Serge, now facing east, looks down onto a vapour blanket that’s darker and more murky. Through it, further off, he can see gun flashes twinkling all around the countryside in little points of blue flame. Flares glow down in the trenches. A mile or two behind the German ones, the white plume of a train forms a clear, silky thread. He runs his eye along its tracks, the telephone lines beside these, the cables of a bridge, a pipeline leading from this across open ground before it burrows down to carry out of sight the metal and electric musculature of the land. A new flash appears on the horizon and grows brighter, dazzling him and warming his face: sunrise. Serge takes his watch out: twenty-two minutes to seven, time to test the sigs …

Reaching down between his legs, he turns the aerial crank. He pauses after a few revolutions, looks over the side and sees the copper aerial trailing in the slipstream like a fishing reel, a lead weight at its end. He takes his spark set out and starts transmitting B signals to Battery E. They pass the kite balloon again, heading the other way, then fly over a pockmarked village, a road down which a transport column’s moving, then some woods until they find, nestled among these, the battery. The Popham strip’s already laid out for him on the ground: three white cloth lines, one upright like a backbone, the other two angled into this like a lesser-than sign to form a
K
. Serge turns round, taps Gibbs on the shoulder and gives him the thumbs-up; they turn and fly out east again.

The sun, although at Serge’s back now, bounces off the top wing’s underside to light up his little cabin. Once more the kite balloon, its occupant now busy talking on his phone line; then a mandala of small roads and pathways, at least half of them unusable, criss-crossing and looping over open ground; then rows of empty trenches—last month’s, or last year’s, the year before’s; more open ground; more tracks. It’s only when the tracers start to rise towards him that Serge realises he’s passed onto the German side. It’s always like that: on his first few outings he’d anticipate the moment when he’d move across the deadly threshold, bracing himself for it, as though there were a real line strung across the air like a finishing ribbon for the machine to thrust its chest against and breach. But that moment never came—or rather, turned out always to have come already, the threshold to have lain unmarked, been glided over quite unnoticed. Even looking down, it’s hard to see which are the front positions: trench after trench slides into view, parallel lines conjoined in places by small runnels as communication trenches link up with evacuation trenches, third-line and supply trenches … At times the network opens into a wide mesh; at others it closes up, compact. The tracers rising from it lend structure to the air, mesh it as well. Puff balls of smoke appear as if by magic all round the machine.

“Archie pretty light today,” Gibbs leans back and shouts into his ear, quite nonchalantly.

A German kite balloon emerges from beneath their tail. Serge thinks about strafing it, but sees that it’s being hurriedly winched down out of his range. It rises again as he draws away from it—strangely elongated, like a floating intestine. He unfolds his map and, holding it across his knees, runs his finger to the square in which the first hostile battery position’s marked out: should be about here … He taps Gibbs’s shoulder again and signals for him to fly in a square holding pattern. As Gibbs turns, then turns again, patrolling their small area’s boundaries, Serge can see the machines to his left and right describing the same patterns half a mile away. He looks down and, moving his eyes first in diagonals from corner to corner of his quadrant, then in smaller, darting cat’s cradles between landmarks, picks up the battery, secreted within a copse but nonetheless betrayed by the anachronistically autumnal patch of scorched and thinned-out leaves made by its discharges. He picks his spark set up again and taps in
C3E
, then
A
, then
MX12
, the target’s map coordinates. Then he signals to Gibbs to fly back to their side.

Travelling in this direction, the tracer fire appears only after it’s already passed the plane, cutting long, slanted corridors into the air above him. It tilts up vertical, then starts angling forward, managing, through some optical and geometric sleight of hand, to reverse its direction without altering its flow until it’s rising at him from the ground. The intestinal kite balloon’s down again, then up; the magic puffs materialise beside them; the front line slides by unperceived once more, revealing in its wake a mesh of interlocking trenches which the same old English kite balloon announces as their own. The pockmarked village, road and woods run past below them one more time, then they’re back above Battery E. One of the Popham strip’s white lesser-than lines has been removed, the other straightened and lowered to the backbone cloth’s base, joining it at a right angle to form an
L
. Serge points Gibbs back towards the lines again, sending down A signals from his spark set as they go.

They’re back above their target with three minutes to spare. The other machines are in position too: two to the north of him, one to the south, each marking out its assigned grid square, while a fifth machine moves up and down in long, straight lines behind them. It reminds Serge of a ritual he once saw illustrated in
Boy’s Comic Journal:
a ceremonial Red Indian dance to call down rain. The men in feathers marked their patterns out across the ground and the gods, summoned into action by these, sent down water. As the second-hand needle moves across the final quarter-segment of his watch’s face, Serge feels an almost sacred tingling, as though he himself had become godlike, elevated by machinery and signal code to a higher post within the overall structure of things, a vantage point from which the vectors and control lines linking earth and heaven, the hermetic language of the invocations, its very lettering and script, have become visible, tangible even, all concentrated at a spot just underneath the index finger of his right hand which is tapping out, right now, the sequence
C3E MX12 G …

Almost immediately, a white rip appears amidst the wood’s green cover on the English side. A small jet of smoke spills up into the air from this like cushion stuffing; out of it, a shell rises. It arcs above the trench-meshes and track-marked open ground, then dips and falls into the copse beneath Serge, blossoming there in vibrant red and yellow flame. A second follows it, then a third. The same is happening in the two-mile strip between Battery I and its target, and Battery M and its one, right on down the line: whole swathes of space becoming animated by the plumed trajectories of plans and orders metamorphosed into steel and cordite, speed and noise. Everything seems connected: disparate locations twitch and burst into activity like limbs reacting to impulses sent from elsewhere in the body, booms and jibs obeying levers at the far end of a complex set of ropes and cogs and relays. The salvos pause; Serge plots the points of impact on his clock-code chart, then sends adjustments back to Battery E, which fires new salvos that land slightly to the north of the first ones. Each one’s fall draws from the wood a new yellow-and-red flame-flower, with an outer white smoke-leaf that lingers after the bloom has faded. Serge sends one more correction; the shells shift fifteen or so yards to the east, and start arriving in regular fifteen-second bursts, their percussions overlapping with those falling in the neighbouring zones in sequences that speed up and slow down, like church bells’ chimes. A larger, darker bloom erupts from the copse beneath him: it seems to have more volume to it, more mass, billowing out and upwards like a dense, black chrysanthemum …

“I think we got it,” Serge turns round and shouts to Gibbs.

Gibbs points to his ear and shakes his head. Easier to communicate with the ground than with the man in the machine beside you. Serge sends an
OK
down to Battery E, then signals to Gibbs to move on to Battery F. They fly back across the lines and find this in the ruins of a village, Popham strips K’d up in response to their B sigs. They fly back again; Serge ranges the guns, plots the shells’ points of impact on his clock-code chart; then they move on to Battery G and do the same. Each time they shuttle to and fro, they pass through residues of tracer, Archie smoke and their own exhaust fumes hanging in the air. The shapes made when trails intersect, lines cutting across other lines at odd angles or bisecting puffballs’ circles to form strange figures, remind Serge of the phonetic characters his father would draw across the schoolroom’s whiteboard, the way the sequences would run and overlap. The lower section of this board’s become so crowded that it’s half-occluded: the morning’s light vapour blanket’s thickened to an opaque shawl. They have to fly lower to see where shells are landing, or even to get their own bearings. At one point a howitzer shell appears right beside them, travelling in the same direction—one of their own, surfacing above the smoke-bank like a porpoise swimming alongside a ship, slowly rotating in the air to show its underbelly as it hovers at its peak before beginning its descent. It’s so close that its wind-stream gently lifts and lowers the machine, making it bob. Serge knows that planes get hit by their own shells, but this one seems so placid, so companionable—and besides, if they’re travelling at the same speed then both it and they are just still bodies in space, harmless blocks of matter. In the instant before their paths diverge, it seems to Serge that the shell and the plane are interchangeable—and that the shell and
he
are interchangeable, just like the radians and secants on his clock-code chart, the smoke-and-vapour-marked points and trajectories around him, the angles of his holding pattern’s quadrant and the Popham strips’ abrupt cloth lines. Within the reaches of this space become pure geometry, the shell’s a pencil drawing a perfect arc across a sheet of graph paper; he’s the clamp that holds the pencil to the compass, moving as one with the lead; he
is
the lead, smearing across the paper’s surface to become geometry himself …