C (20 page)

i

B
y September, more than two-thirds of the pilots and observers who made up the 104th when Serge arrived have been killed. The ones who remain undergo a similar set of transformations to the landscapes in Pietersen’s photographs. Their faces turn to leather—thick, nickwax-smeared leather each of whose pores stands out like a pothole in a rock surface—and grow deep furrows. Eyelids twitch; lips tremble and convulse in nervous spasms. Arriving back from flights, they stumble from their machines with the effects of acceleration and deceleration, of ungradated transit through modes of gravity alternately positive and negative, sculpted in the open mouths, sucked-in cheeks and swollen tongues that they present to the airfield’s personnel for the next few hours.
Clown Bodners
, Serge tells himself. Sometimes they laugh uncontrollably, as though a passing shell had whispered to them the funniest joke imaginable, although often it’s hard to tell if they’re laughing or crying. The engines’ pulses have bored through their flesh and bones and set up small vibrating motors in their very core: their hands struggle to hold teacups still, light cigarettes, unbutton jackets …

“It’s the flying circuses,” Clegg croaks shakily to the mess orderly in front of Serge one afternoon. “The Jastas. They move up and down the front in huge formations. When they get all around you there’s not that much you can do. They come at you from everywhere …”

“I’m rigging my plane up against them,” Stanley, a recent arrival, tells them.

“How?” ask Serge and Clegg in unison.

“Pike principle,” answers Stanley, enigmatically.

“You mean the fish?” Serge says.

“No, pikestaffs,” Stanley tuts. “You’ll see.”

The following day he wheels out of the Bessoneau an SE5 to which no fewer than seven Lewis guns have been attached. They poke out of the machine in every conceivable direction; there’s even one hanging below the tail.

“To guard against the bites of sharks,” Stanley explains as he taps this last one.

“How will you operate them all?” Serge asks.

“I’ll dart from one gun to another, depending on where they’re coming at me from. I’ll learn to play the whole contraption like an instrument—an organ, say: you can’t be at all the stops and pedals at the same time, but you can still make it do its thing when you know how …”

Walpond-Skinner nixes Stanley’s pikery:

“If the RFC had wanted three-hundred-and-sixty-degree bullet dispensers, they’d have built them. Your task is to fly. Two guns for each machine—that’s it!”

Stanley is killed a week later. Serge inherits his copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and finds, in the very first one, Widsun’s line about being the world’s fresh ornament, herald to the spring and so on. The phrase that his mind snags on, though, comes from a later sonnet, number 65: the line about love shining bright in black ink. He keeps on hearing it: as he reads copy orders, wipes tar from his face, or watches the dark water flowing by the Floaters. Clegg and Watson, meanwhile, scoop fish from the river and, placing them in a glass tank in the mess, study their formations.

“He was right, you know,” says Watson. “You do need an anti-shark gun. That spot beneath the tail’s unguarded and unsighted.”

“Look at this one,” Clegg says, pointing to an upward-angled perch that’s nibbling a toast crumb on the water’s surface. “It’s hanging on the propeller.”

“These two orange ones have taken up a good position,” Watson comments. “No one below them, lots of clear air to rise through …”

The fish-tank modelling affects the way Serge sees things in the sky: now heavy clouds above him look like the huddled bellies of a school of whales; the tall, waving poplars become fronds of seaweed; the ashen ruins of bombed villages, clusters of coral.
To the seas
. On days when rain, uninterrupted, washes away the line dividing river-water from the air above it, the men move around the mess like fish inside a tank, with liquid sluicing through their gills.

“Says here two measures whiskey, one Champagne,” Gibbs announces as he pours the contents of three bottles into a metal bucket.

“Ella’s stopped singing,” Clegg complains, face sunken in guppy-like despondency.

“Then give the gramophone a drink,” Gibbs tells him.

“The Bellerophone!” the others shout out drunkenly. They commandeer the bucket, drag it over to the music corner, crank the machine up again and start dribbling the cocktail down the speaking horn’s throat. As it trickles out across the disc at the horn’s other end, the music goes faint and warbly, as though it were being performed underwater. The men fall about laughing. When Ella drowns completely, they burst into song themselves:

Take the cylinder out of my kidneys
,
    
The connecting rod out of my brain, my brain
,
From the small of my back take the camshaft
    
And assemble the engine again
.

In the lulls between songs, the conversation reverts, like a pickup’s arm returning to its cradle, to discussions of the dead.

“I saw it all,” some pilot says of some other one who could as well be here describing yet another. “The fuel tank caught fire at the front of the machine, and so he put the tail down, to keep the flames from the cockpit. But they’d spread already. Then he tried to swat them out. When that didn’t work, he climbed out of his seat and started walking back along the fuselage. By the end he was crouching on the tail. Then he jumped.”

“Did they find his body?”

“In some old woman’s laundry yard.”

“That Trenchard is a lunatic,” snarls Gibbs. “The kite balloon-men, who’ve got winches tied to them like apron-strings, are issued parachutes. But we, who fly ten times as high without any cord to haul us back, get nothing.”

“He thinks they’d slow the machines down,” Serge tells him, “also, that they’d encourage us to jump instead of land each time we had a problem. Then there’s the silk shortage …”

“What silk shortage?” Gibbs sputters through his drink. “The Germans have parachutes made from British silk! We’ve got enough to sell it to them, but not enough for our own side?”

Serge says nothing, but in his mind sees tall piles of fresh crêpe, Jacquard and moiré being stitched into large jellyfish-shapes by women who, at least in the scenario his mind’s concocting for him right now, cavort with lions and sheep beneath a hybrid Sino-German flag, while generals smile and whisper in the background. His mother’s somewhere in this picture, consorting with a buyer who, his face obscured by a thin silk sheet, talks loudly in an accent as strange as her own, pronouncing words Serge can’t make out.

“I dream of going down in flames each night,” Clegg mumbles. “It’s always the same: the bed’s on fire. It starts at its foot, and moves up. I try to tip the whole thing back, then stall and side-slip down, but it never works.”

“You could put it out by wetting yourself,” Serge tells him.

The men all burst into laughter again, but this time it’s hollow. They’re all terrified of becoming
carboneezay
, flamers. Candles are now banned on board the houseboat lest, by setting fire to its wooden beams, they allow the “orange death” that stalks them in the sky to catch up with them even on the ground; paraffin lamps have been replaced by electric bulbs inside the mess; even sparking up cigarettes causes the men to shudder as they flip the lighter’s lid shut with a kind of angry vehemence. Of all the pilots and observers, Serge alone remains unhaunted by the prospect of a fiery airborne end. He’s not unaware of it: just unbothered. The idea that his flesh could melt and fuse with the machine parts pleases him. When they sing their song about taking cylinders out of kidneys, he imagines the whole process playing itself out backwards: brain and connecting rod merging to form one, ultra-intelligent organ, his back quivering in pleasure as pumps and pistons plunge into it, heart and liver being spliced with valve and filter to create a whole new, streamlined mechanism. Sometimes he dreams he’s growing wings and, waking up, prods at his breastbone, trying to discern an outward swelling in it; each rib feels like a strut. He shakes after flights just like the others, but he doesn’t mind: the vibrations make him feel alive. He buzzes with kinetic potency as he carries them to Vitriers, to Cécile, where they make the brass knobs above her bedstead shake and bore their way on into her flesh too …

Cécile’s place is unheated. By October, evenings there are cold. He brings her a dead observer’s jacket to keep warm in.

“If he was killed, how come his jacket came back?” she asks, slipping it over her bare skin.

“Oh, he came back too,” Serge answers. “Just not alive. Look, you can see the bullet holes.”

Her eyes peer down her nose while her hand presses the leather to her stomach.

“On the left side,” he helps her out.

“Ah yes,” she purrs, poking her finger through a hole. “Direct dans la poitrine.”

She keeps it on while they make love again. Serge, kneeling behind her with his face pressed into collar fur, imagines the bullet piercing the jacket’s leather and travelling onwards through both the observer and Cécile, then, broken down into a million particles, lodging in him not only harmlessly but also beneficially, as though he were both its and the other two’s final destination, the natural conclusion of a process whose trajectory conjoined them all. Afterwards, he picks one of her stockings from the floor and, holding it up to his face, stretches its fabric.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“If you could spare this, it would really keep me warm up in the air.”

“Your legs will be too big for it,” she says.

“It’s not for my legs,” he says. “I’d wear it on my head, beneath the helmet.”

Cécile shrugs. A clunking sound comes from the street outside. People are moving stuff around all the time these days: chests of drawers, tables, bathtubs, cookers, sinks. The German ordnance has been falling closer and closer to the town, destroying outlying villages and pitching their inhabitants up on the doorsteps of relatives who themselves are beginning, as stray shells start breaching civic limits, to gather together family heirlooms or at least saleable objects, tie them to carts and trundle down potholed roads towards imagined safety. Those who’ve stayed lug buckets and cylinders from house to pump and shop to house: the water and gas pipes feeding half the populace have been destroyed. Drains and sewers have been snapped and dragged up from beneath the ground to spew their mess across the cobblestones. Even a graveyard on the edge of town has been blown up; the stench of unearthed corpses carries through air whose coldness crystallises and preserves it. Serge can see the graveyard from Cécile’s window. Beyond it, two dead horses lie with swollen stomachs in a field. Beyond them, past the rubble of the farmhouse that once marked the field’s boundary, blackened and splintered tree-stumps litter a winter landscape that he couldn’t imagine ever having been another way.

ii

One afternoon in January, Walpond-Skinner gathers the men together in the red-gabled house’s main room and informs them that a major push is being prepared. Serge, Gibbs and several other pilots and observers are taken off flying duties above the front and sent ten miles back to practise Contact Patrol work. This turns out to consist of flying low over advancing infantry who have mirrors attached to their backs, sounding a klaxon from the cockpit to solicit from the ground flares which, in turn, indicate positions and accomplishments. Bengal lights mean a wood has been captured, Aldis ones a trench, and Hucks a battery—or is it Aldis for battery and Hucks for woods? And is a copse a wood? How many trees … ? Serge suspects, even as they learn the signals and run through the klaxon sequences, that the system’s flawed. The mock-battles that they act out over unmined, undefended fields usually manage to degenerate into confusion. In the week he spends there, three machines crash: two of them into each other, pilots glare-blinded by mirrors …

Serge finds it hard to sleep. It’s not the gentle rocking of the houseboat that he misses so much as the front’s sounds all around him: they’ve become his nightly lullaby. He can still hear the howitzers from here, of course, but they’re too distant—and besides, their sound is drowned out by the noise of Crossleys carrying troops eastward: convoy after convoy of them, trundling past the window of his cabin in an unbroken supply chain. Infantry march by round the clock as well, the rhythm of their step setting off in Serge’s head the lead-up lines from Sonnet 65:

Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back
,
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?

Returning to the 104th at the week’s end, he whoops for joy as the poplars, Bessoneaus and grazing cows appear beneath his wing, then runs along the path that leads through the wood (or copse) to the river and, throwing himself on the bed, flips Stanley’s book open so that he can read 65’s riposte line, already firmly scrawled across his memory, with his own eyes:

O none, unless this miracle have might
,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright
.

“So when’s the big day, then?” he asks Walpond-Skinner.

“Firstly, Carrefax, it’s ‘big day, sir’—or, strictly speaking, ‘big day, sir, then.’ ”

“Sir, then,” Serge corrects himself. “Then when—?”

“And secondly, that’s privileged information. I would tell you that it’s mine to know and yours to wonder about—if I knew myself, that is, which I’m afraid I don’t. The moles have to finish their work first.”

“Moles, sir?”

“The tunnellers. They’re digging all the way through no man’s land, so they can lay explosives underneath the trenches, gun emplacements and what have you. Got to proceed slowly: make sure it doesn’t cave in, make sure they keep quiet, listen out for Germans counter-tunnelling beneath them, all that sort of thing …”

Serge becomes fascinated with these tunnellers, these moles. He pictures their noses twitching as they alternately dig and strap on stethoscopes that, pressing to the ground, they listen through for sounds of netherer moles undermining their undermining. If they did hear them doing this, he tells himself, then they could dig an even lower tunnel, undermine the under-undermining: on and on forever, or at least for as long as the volume and mass of the globe allowed it—until earth gave over to a molten core, or, bypassing this, they emerged in Australia to find there was no war there and, unable to return in time for action, sat around aimlessly blinking in the daylight …

In anticipation of the push, there’s almost constant bombardment of the German side. It’s barrage bombardment: the shells advance in lines, like the teeth of a giant comb moving up warp fibres, ten or so yards each time. For Serge, sleeping in his houseboat once again, the booms of the guns’ discharge to the west, spread out along a line of well over a mile yet sounding almost simultaneously, and the consequent, equally elongated blasts of their detonation to the east, a little further away with each round, become the sounds of waves rolling past him, moving towards a shoreline that’s retreating; no sooner does the longest-travelling one peter out on distant shingle than a new, close-range set swells up and starts bursting energetically. After five days and nights of this, though, he wakes up to silence. Not only have the shells stopped: so, too, have most of the small-gauge gunfire, Archie pops and flares. Nothing at all seems to be happening. All of the squadron’s flights are in the hangars. Scouring the unusually bright winter sky, he fails to pick out a single aeroplane against its blue. It looks desolate and sad, as though aware that it’s being spurned by beautiful machinery and at a loss to understand why.

The push begins the next day. Almost all the 104th’s planes are involved in it in one way or another. The RE8s are to fly in holding patterns until the tunnellers’ mines are detonated at half past eleven on the dot—their cue to swoop down low and monitor the progress of the infantry battalion to which each of them has been assigned, tracking the soldiers through no-man’s-land towards the target destination. They’re to report the battalion’s advance to stations set up a mile or so behind the front for this very occasion, which in turn will relay the troops’ positions back to HQ—where, Serge presumes, they must have a warlike version of the Realtor’s Game laid out across a table, with helmets instead of top hats, trucks instead of cars and rabid, snarling dogs being shunted over flattened icons representing trenches, hills and machine-gun nests. Serge and Gibbs have been assigned the 10th Battalion; their target destination is a spinney.

“Spinney, now, is it?” Gibbs snorts. “They should’ve given us a course on forestry before sending us out here.”

“What are you taking a shaving set with you for, Sassen?” Walpond-Skinner asks a pilot in the front row.

“Case I get shot down and taken prisoner, sir. Want to keep up appearances.”

“Why not just send your silk pyjamas over, and arrange for your mail to be forwarded? Go and put it back in your quarters! The only thing you’ll need with you if you get shot down and end up in one piece is a Verey gun, to torch the machine with.”

“I’ve got to pop over to the Floaters too,” Serge mumbles to Gibbs. “Our medicine box is low.”

Gibbs shrugs. He’s tried the cocaine-in-the-eyeballs trick, but doesn’t get the point of snorting it, and even less so of injecting stuff into one’s arm. Serge, for his part, can’t imagine flying without diacetylmorphine. He’s been making regular trips into Mirabel for months now, appointing himself, as far as the quartermaster there’s concerned, the squadron’s pharmaceutical liaison officer. Back on the boat, he stabs a phial into his wrist, then, catching sight of Cécile’s stocking, two round peep-holes snipped out of its fabric, picks that up and slips it over his head, brushing his face briefly with a honey-like genital scent. He pockets two more phials on his way out, then pauses for a last look at the river and the poplars, still and impassive against all the excitement. He can hear the engines catching on the field, the first planes moving through the long grass. The diacetylmorphine takes hold as he glides back up the path and over to his RE8, turning the machines’ manoeuvres as they taxi, pause and pirouette, escorting one another into position, into ballroom-dance steps, the roar of their engines into symphonies whose every chord is laden with insinuation …

Flying towards the lines, Serge has the same sensation as he had in massage sessions with Tania towards the end of his Kloděbrady sojourn. The whole front has a weekend feel. No round, white balloons are up; no blue and red lights flicker in the trenches. There’s no cordite smoke, no vapour blanket, nothing. It looks like the entire war effort has been stood down—or, rather, put into a casual mode in which formalities have been relaxed and, consequently, anything is possible. As he nears the English lines, he notices a change in the texture and colouration of the ground behind them. Its surface, previously pale and washed-out, has become darkened by spiky dots. They’re everywhere, crowded together like ants. In the relatively quiet air, Gibbs has no problem making himself heard as he shouts back to Serge:

“Men!”

They spill out of the trenches, flecking the circles and mandalas of the ruined roads and pathways. In some places Serge can make out subdivisions in their mass, semi-discrete clusters; in others the clusters are so large that they’ve run together and eclipsed the ground entirely. Unlike ants, though, they’re not moving: packed together with their bayoneted rifles pointing upwards, they’re sitting still as encrustations on a rock or hull, waiting for the signal to move. Serge reaches down between his legs and lowers his copper aerial. Testing the sigs, he leads Gibbs to above their interim receiving station, marked by a semi-circle of white cloth beside which, in place of Popham strips, a black-and-white Venetian blind opens and closes, winking Morse
OKs
at him. Then they turn back towards the lines and climb. Their route is slightly different to the normal one; the shift adds to the sense of strangeness brought about by the guns’ silence. The men in the German trenches seem to have noticed the changes too, to sense that something new is coming their way: they’re too nervous to send more than a token spattering of tracer fire towards him. The German kite balloons have picked up on the break with protocol as well: all down the line they’re up as high as they can go. The one emerging from beneath his tail doesn’t bother to winch itself out of range, so intent is it on fixing its gaze on the dots massing on the far side—and Serge, caught in the same spell of anticipation, doesn’t bother to strafe it.

They find their position just back from the German lines at three-and-a-half thousand feet. Serge looks up and sees the squadron’s SE5s patrolling in formation high above them. He looks at his watch: twenty-eight minutes past eleven. He looks down: the whole battlefield is static, calm; only the planes move, serenely etching out their patterns. As Gibbs turns, then turns again, Serge runs his eye along the earth below, wondering in which part of it the moles have secreted their explosive droppings. For a while, he feels the presence, composited from blocks of air and tricks of the light, of that faceless diviner Baron Karl von Arnow: he’s hovering beside him, holding a dowser’s stick; and the wind buffeting the struts and wires is pronouncing his name—insistently, repeating it over and over:
Are-NOW, Are-NOW, Are-NOW …

Then, as though summoned upwards by this incantation, the earth rises towards him. At first it looks like a set of welts bubbling up across its surface; the welts grow into large domes with smooth, convex roofs; the roofs, still rising upwards and expanding, start to crack, then break open completely; and through their ruptured crusts shoot long, straight jets of earth: huge, rushing geysers that look as though they’re being propelled upwards by nothing but their own force and volume, the dull brown matter defying both height and gravity through sheer self-will. As the closest geyser funnels up past the machine, its dizzy clods glitter in the air. Serge looks out horizontally, first north, then south: the whole German line is punctuated by these earth jets. They look like columns holding up the sky; it seems that if they crumbled it would fall. Their apex is much higher than his plane; for the first time, he has the impression that he’s flying not above the earth’s surface but below it—or, rather, within some kind of enclave contained inside it. A few seconds later, particles start raining down on the machine: small clumps and flecks, beating against the wings and sprinkling his cabin. The jets evaporate, and Serge looks down again to see two enormous holes in the ground beneath him. They gape like hollow eyes, the sockets of some giant who’s been lying beneath the landscape buried—perhaps for centuries, or perhaps even longer—and is only now, part by part, being disinterred.

“Shall I go down?” Gibbs shouts.

Serge doesn’t answer, hypnotised by the evacuated eyes.

“Shall I go down?” Gibbs shouts again.

Slowly, Serge moves his gaze to the east. The spiky dot-men on the ground have started moving. They’re swarming forwards, trickling through no-man’s-land’s rills and gullies. Every so often parts of their mass are thrown into the air by landmine explosions that, compared to the enormous ones that have just preceded them, seem no more substantial than the bursting of small spots. Shells have started falling too, machine guns chattering. Serge can pick out the starting-flare of 10th Battalion; he signals to Gibbs to fly towards it. As they make their first pass, the mirrors on the men’s backs flash; by the time they’ve turned around and made their second, there’s so much smoke around that none of the sky’s luminescence makes its way down to the mirrors and back up to Serge; by the third he can’t even see the men. He sounds his klaxon, but its noise is lost amidst gunfire. He can hear another machine’s klaxon sounding too, and presses his own again, to let it know he’s nearby; other planes apply their horns as well, like ships in fog. Serge taps Gibbs on the back and shouts:

“Up again.”

Gibbs points to his ear and shakes his head: too loud to hear each other now. Serge jerks his finger upwards. As they climb out of the smoke, he tries to send a signal to his ground station, but finds he can’t: the hurled-up earth has gritted up the spark set, jamming its parts. When he bangs it on the cockpit’s side in an attempt to shake the earth out, the whole tapper-key comes loose; trying to reattach it, he severs a wire. Gibbs is holding a position at three thousand feet, awaiting instructions, but Serge has none to issue. His spark set’s demise is giving him a strange, almost electric sensation: it feels as though he were flying naked, as though a layer of insulating hardware and a softer, inner one of message-lace had suddenly been stripped away and he himself were the thing riding the air’s frequency, pulsing right up against it. Despite his diacetylmorphine-induced languor, he begins to feel a buzzing in his groin again. More blood runs to it as Gibbs plunges back towards the smoke. Tilted back and facing upwards, hardening, Serge can see why Gibbs is diving: a whole Jasta has descended on the SE5s. The colourful German planes and the more sombre English ones turn around each other in confused whirlpools, their vapour trails forming a vortex that’s drifting to the side with the wind. They look like bees swirling around a honey jar. One of the English machines is on fire. Two of the German ones have broken loose and are now hurtling downwards.