Flight to Arras (8 page)

It is hard to find a reason.

Here is a runner engaged in the race of life against other runners of his own class. The starter fires, the runner springs forward—and he discovers that he has a ball and chain attached to his leg. He quits.

“This race doesn't count,” he says.

“It docs though, it does!” you protest.

What are you going to tell a man to make him put his heart into a race that is not a race? Alias knew what those fugitives were thinking. “This race doesn't count,” was what they were thinking.

Alias put his gun back into the holster and tried to find a better argument.

 

There is but one better argument, but one logical argument, and I challenge anybody to find another. It is this: “Your death will have no effect at all. Defeat is inescapable. But it is proper that a defeat manifest itself by dead. There must be mourning. Your part is to play the dead.”

“Very good, sir.”

Alias did not despise the fugitives. He knew well enough that his argument always worked. He himself accepted the expectancy of death. All his crews accepted the expectancy of death. His argument, slightly disguised, never failed to work with us: “It's damned awkward. But the General Staff want it done. They very much want it done.... And that's that.”

“Very good, sir.”

Alias knew that we had accepted.

 

My very simple notion is that those who died served as bondsmen for the rest.

I have aged so much that all that I was is left behind me. I stare out through the great glittering plate of my windscreen. Below me are men. Infusoria wriggling under a microscope. Who can work up interest in a family of infusoria?

Were it not for this twinge of pain that seems to me a living thing, I could sink into drowsy rumination, like an aged tyrant. It is only ten minutes since I spoke of our crews as supernumeraries. Pure rhetoric and sickeningly false. When I saw the German fighters below, did my fancy speak of tender sighs? It spoke of poisonous wasps. That was reality. They were tiny, and they were obscene. It is hard to believe that I invented that disgusting literary image of a dress with a train. I couldn't have! For one thing, I have never seen the wake of my ship. Here in this cockpit, in which I fit like a pipe in its case, I can see nothing behind me. I see behind me through the eyes of my gunner. And then only if the inter-com is working. My gunner never called down to me, “Adoring suitors aft in the wake of our train!”

All this is mere juggling with words. Of course I should like to believe, I should like to fight, I should like to win. But try as a man will to pretend to believe, pretend to fight, pretend to win by setting fire to his own villages, it is hard to feel elation over pretense.

It is hard to exist. Man is a knot into which relationships are tied, and my ties serve me hardly at all.

What is this in me that has broken down? What is the secret of substitutions? Whence comes it that a gesture, a word, can give rise to endless ripples in a human destiny? Whence comes it that in other circumstances I should be overwhelmed by what seems to me now remote and abstract? Whence comes it that if I were Pasteur, the play of true infusoria would seem to me pathetic to the point where a slide under a microscope would represent something infinitely more vast than a virgin forest, and the watching of that slide would seem to me the most thrilling kind of adventure? Whence comes it that that black dot below, which is a house of men....

But again a childhood memory returns to me.

 

When I was a small boy.... I speak of my early childhood, that is to say, of a vast region out of which all men emerge. Whence come I? I come from my childhood. I come from childhood as from a homeland.... When I was a small boy, then, I had a queer experience.

I must have been five or six years old. It was eight in the evening. At eight o'clock children ought to be in bed. Particularly in winter, when night has already fallen. For some reason I had been forgotten.

On the ground floor of our house in the country—which was big—there was a hall that seemed to me immense. It led into the warm room at the back in which we children were fed our supper. I had always been afraid of that hall, perhaps because of the feeble light of the lamp that hung in the middle of it and scarcely drew it forth from the darkness. A signal rather than a light. The hall was paneled high up, and the paneling creaked, which was another reason for my fear. And it was cold. Coming into it out of the warm and lamplit rooms that lined it was like coming into a cavern.

But that evening, seeing that I had been forgotten, I gave way to the demon of evil in me, reached up on tiptoe for the handle of our supper-room door, pushed the door softly in, and embarked upon my illicit exploration of the world.

The creaking of the paneling was the first warning I received of heavenly anger. I could see in the shadow the great reproving panels. Not daring to explore farther, I climbed up on a console table, and there, resting against the wall and letting my legs hang, I sat with beating heart like every shipwrecked sailor before me on his reef in mid-sea.

At that moment the drawing-room door opened. Two uncles who absolutely terrified me shut the door behind them upon the lights and the hubbub of voices, and began to pace the hall.

I trembled lest I be discovered. Uncle Hubert was in my eyes the very image of severity, A delegate of divine justice. This man, who never in his life had tweaked a child's ear or pinched its cheek affectionately, always threatened me when I had been naughty with a terrifying frown and these words: “The next time that I go to America I shall bring back a whipping machine. American machines are the most modern in the world. That is why American children are the best behaved in the world. And a very good thing for their parents, too.”

I did not like America.

Here they were, then, strolling back and forth through the interminable hall while I almost fainted holding my breath and following them with my eyes and ears. “In times like these,” they said; and they moved off with their secret meant only for grown people. “In times like these,” I memorized the phrase. Then, as if a tide had rolled up to me another of its indecipherable treasures—“It's pure madness, positive madness,” one uncle said to the other. And I fished up that phrase as if it were a priceless thing, and to myself I said slowly, testing its power upon the consciousness of a five-year-old, “It's pure madness, positive madness.”

The tide carried my uncles away, the tide rolled them up again. With a kind of sidereal regularity, like a gravitational phenomenon, this going and coming repeated itself and suggested to me fitfully lighted glimpses of the life of man. I was marooned on my console for eternity, the clandestine listener to a solemn consultation in the course of which my uncles, who knew all there was to know, were collaborating in the creation of the world. The house might stand a thousand years: for all that thousand years my two uncles, pacing the hall with the patience of a pendulum, would continue to fill the air with the apprehension of eternity.

 

That black dot at which I stare is surely a human habitation thirty-three thousand feet below me. And I receive nothing from it. Yet it is possibly a great country house, and there may be two uncles in it pacing to and fro and slowly constructing in the consciousness of a child something as fabulous as the immensity of the seas.

My field of vision embraces a territory as large as a province, yet round me space has shrunk to the point of suffocation. In all this space I have less space at my disposal than was available to me in the replica of that black dot. I have lost the sense of distance, am blind to distance. But I feel now a kind of thirst for it. And it seems to me that I have stumbled here upon a common denominator of all the aspirations of mankind.

When chance awakens love, everything takes its place in a man in obedience to that love, and love brings him the sense of distance. When, in the Sahara, the Arabs would surge up in the night round our campfires and warn us of a coming danger, the desert would spring to life for us and take on meaning. Those messengers had lent it distance. Music does something like this. The humble odor of an old cupboard does it when it awakens and brings memories to life. Pathos is the sense of distance.

But I know that nothing which truly concerns man is calculable, weighable, measurable. True distance is not the concern of the eye; it is granted only to the spirit. Its value is the value of language, for it is language which binds things together.

And now it seems to me that I begin to see what a civilization is. A civilization is a heritage of beliefs, customs, and knowledge slowly accumulated in the course of centuries, elements difficult at times to justify by logic, but justifying themselves as paths when they lead somewhere, since they open up for man his inner distance.

There is a cheap literature that speaks to us of the need of escape. It is true that when we travel we are in search of distance. But distance is not to be found. It melts away. And escape has never led anywhere. The moment a man finds that he must play the races, go to the Arctic, or make war in order to feel himself alive, that man has begun to spin the strands that bind him to other men and to the world. But what wretched strands! A civilization that is really strong fills man to the brim, though he never stir. What are we worth when motionless, is the question.

There is a density of being in a Dominican at prayer. He is never so much alive as when prostrate and motionless before his God. In Pasteur, holding his breath over the microscope, there is a density of being. Pasteur is never more alive than in that moment of scrutiny. At that moment he is moving forward. He is hurrying. He is advancing in seven-league boots, exploring distance despite his immobility. Cezanne, mute and motionless before his sketch, is an inestimable presence. He is never more alive than when silent, when feeling and pondering. At that moment his canvas becomes for him something wider than the seas.

Distance granted man by the childhood home, by the chamber at Orconte, by the field of vision of Pasteur's microscope; distance opened up by a poem. What are these but the fragile and magical gifts that only a civilization is able to distribute? For distance is the property of the spirit, not of the eye; and there is no distance without language.

 

But how am I to quicken the sense of my language when all is confusion? When the trees round the house are at one and the same time a ship transporting the generations of a family and a mere screen in the way of an artilleryman? When the press of the German bombers bearing down upon the villages has squeezed out a whole people and sent it flowing down the highways like a black syrup? When France displays the sordid disorder of a scattered ant-hill? When we must fight, not against a flesh-and-blood opponent, but against rudders that freeze, throttles that jam, bolts that stick?

“You may drop down now, Captain.”

I may drop down. I shall drop down. I shall drop down upon Arras. I shall carry out the second half of our mission—the low-altitude sortie. Behind me I have a thousand years of civilization to help me. But they have not helped me yet. I dare say this is not the moment for rewards.

 

At five hundred miles an hour I lose altitude. Banking, I have left behind me a polar sun exaggeratedly red. Ahead and three or four miles below me, I see the broad surface of a rectilinear mass of cloud that looks like an ice-floe. A whole province of France lies buried in its shadow. Arras lies shadowed by it. Beneath my ice-floe, I imagine, the world has a blackish tinge. The war must be stewing there as in the belly of a giant soup-kettle. Jammed roads, flaming houses, tools lying where they were flung down, villages in ruins, muddle, endless muddle.

To drop down here is like tumbling into a ruin. We shall have to splash about in their mud. We shall have to live with those below in their barbarous dilapidation. Below us lies a world in decomposition. We are like travelers who, after long years amid coral and palm, are on our way home penniless. We face the prospect of a return to our native sordidness—the greasy food of avaricious relatives, the cantankerousness of family squabbles, the bad conscience born of money cares, the disappointed hopes, the degrading flight before the rent-collector, the arrogance of the landlord; squalor, and the stinking death in hospital. Up here at any rate death is clean. A death of flame and ice. Of sun and sky and flame and ice. But below! That digestion stewing in slime...

Dutertre's voice came down the inter-com.

“Due south, Captain.”

Quite right. Safer to lose altitude over our own zone than the enemy's.

Looking down on those swarming highways I understood more clearly than ever what peace meant. In time of peace the world is self-contained. The villagers come home at dusk from their fields. The grain is stored up in the barns. The folded linen is piled up in the cupboards. In time of peace each thing is in its place, easily found. Each friend is where he belongs, easily reached. All men know where they will sleep when night comes. Ah, but peace dies when the framework is ripped apart. When there is no longer a place that is yours in the world. When you know no longer where your friend is to be found. Peace is present when man can see the face that is composed of things that have meaning and are in their place. Peace is present when things form part of a whole greater than their sum, as the divers minerals in the ground collect to become the tree.

But this is war.

 

I can see from my plane the long swarming highways, that interminable syrup flowing endless to the horizon. The inhabitants of the war zone are being evacuated. This, at any rate, is the official version. But it is no longer true. They are evacuating themselves. There is a crazy contagion in this exodus. Where are these vagabonds going? They are going south—as if in the south there was room for them, food for them, tender hands waiting to welcome them. But southward there are only villages filled to bursting,
men and women sleeping in sheds, stocks of food running out. Southward the most generous hearts are beginning little by little to harden at the sight of this mad invasion which little by little, like a sluggish river of mud, is beginning to suffocate them. Can a single province lodge and nourish all France?