by Tom McCarthy
He looks across the floor beside the bed, and sees a book. He reaches down and picks it up: selected poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin, in German.
“A friend left it for me last year,” she explains. “An officer.”
“A German officer?”
She shrugs. “They were here first.”
After she falls asleep, he reads it for a while, then sets it down and drifts off watching gnats hovering beneath the ceiling just beyond the bed’s foot. The gnats travel in straight lines towards each other, then separate, each gliding to the spot another occupied seconds ago, before repeating the procedure, again and again…
There are insects forming patterns outside Battery M as well-only these ones aren’t moving. Corps HQ issues a directive that observers should pay a visit to at least one of the batteries with which they work, in order to foment a better understanding between air- and ground-based ends of Artillery Ops. Packed off to M by Walpond-Skinner, Serge finds a cratered moonscape. Rising from its surface like the mast of an interplanetary Marconi station is a fifty-foot pylon held by four guide-ropes. Its copper-gauze earth mat sits across a sheet of hessian on which thousands of dead moths, bees, butterflies and dragonflies lie, their bodies forming contours, swirls and eddies against its surface.
“Poison gas,” the operator explains when he notices Serge looking at them. “The hessian keeps it out-enough to stop it killing us, but not enough to stop us all getting catarrhs.”
“Where’s the receiver?” Serge asks.
“Down here,” the man answers, holding up the sheet for Serge to duck beneath it through the entrance to a kind of burrow.
“You’re listening to my sigs beneath the ground?”
“You wouldn’t have an audience for long if we stayed over it,” the man tells him. “The German kite-balloons pick our flashes up once we start firing, range their batteries on us. Here’s what we’ve got.”
Leaning against one of the burrow’s earth-walls, sitting on a wooden table, is a small Mark 4 receiver.
“Pelican crystals?” Serge asks.
“Two,” the operator says. “And two dials: aerial condenser and signal. We have to keep the first one turning constantly; then once we’ve caught your clicks, we crank the condenser up to max. Makes our ears bleed.”
Serge looks at the man’s ears. He’s not exaggerating: his drums are caked with dried blood, and red streaks run down both sides of his neck.
“Sorry,” Serge murmurs.
“Not your fault. Wouldn’t hear them otherwise.”
“Oh, look,” says Serge, “the gas hasn’t killed all the insects.”
The wall behind the receiver has lice on it. So does the receiver, and the table, chair and floor.
“Curse of the trenches,” shrugs the operator. “Still, I wouldn’t swap with you people for all the world. Need to feel ground beneath my feet. Over my head as well, these days. I get all anxious if I’m in the open for too long-even way back from the lines, on leave or what have you: like something’s going to come and land on me…”
The man’s words give over to coughs. Serge runs his eye around the burrow. There are passages leading off from the main chamber, presumably to other chambers which in turn have passages connecting them. This chamber has a bed in it; beneath the bed, two tins of pork-meat and a tattered copy of A. E. Housman.
“You too?” asks Serge.
“Calms me down,” the operator tells him. “When the ordnance is falling, or taking off from here, or both. I think of Shropshire hedgerows…”
This is what the 104th men say as well. They’ve got at least two copies there-one in the mess, one on his houseboat. He saw a soldier reading Housman on the boat over from Folkestone too. Half the front must be thinking of Shropshire hedgerows. Serge doesn’t get it, and one day finds himself arguing the case out with the other officers, holding his ground against first one, then two, then three opponents.
“It’s deep,” Watson insists indignantly. “He looks at the cherry tree and has a vision of time passing.” Straightening his back and dropping his voice to a solemn register, he starts reciting:
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
That only leaves me fifty more…
“Seventy minus twenty equals fifty,” Serge replies. “That’s deep.”
“You have no sense of poetry, Carrefax,” Baldwick joins in. “These things can take you away from all the rage around you, keep you safe…”
“Why would I want to be taken away?” asks Serge. “Where danger is, there rescue grows.”
“What?”
“Hölderlin.” He tosses Cécile’s copy onto Baldwick’s lap.
“This is a German book!” Baldwick gasps, recoiling.
“He was a German poet,” Serge replies.
“You could be…” stutters Baldwick, “I mean, it’s virtually…”
“It’s virtually treason,” Dickinson helps him out.
“You should read it,” Serge informs them. “Learn some phrases: help you if you get shot down behind enemy lines and they don’t understand what Shropshire hedgerows are…”
None of them take his offer up; the book lies around the mess unopened for one week, then gets returned to Cécile. Serge takes some of its lines into the air with him, though: they start jostling for space with the ones from the Pageant. He still hears the latter every time he shoots his gun; but when Gibbs turns, or dives, or pulls up suddenly and catapults him backwards to the sky, he hears the opening words of “ Patmos ”:
Nah ist
Und schwer zu fassen der Gott…
He feels the schwer inside his stomach, tightening like gravity; the Nah is a kind of measuring, a spacing-out of space in such a way that distant objects and locations loom up close and nearby ones expand, their edges hurtling away beyond all visible horizons to convey and deliver the contents of these to him. The Gott’s not a divine, Christian Creator, but a point within the planes and altitudes the machine’s cutting through-and one of several: the god, not God. And fassen… fassen is like locking onto something: a signal, frequency or groove. The word speaks itself inside his ear each time he taps his spark set or amends his clock-code chart. When arcing shells respond and hit their target, another phrase of Hölderlin’s hums in the struts and wires, its syntax rattling and breaking with the pressure from the rising blasts: the line from “Die Titanen” about der Allerschütterer, the One Who Shakes All Things, reaching down into the deep to make it come to life:
Es komme der Himmlische
Zu Todten herab und gewaltig dämmerts
Im ungebundenen Abgrund
Im allesmerkenden auf.
He thinks of the sky he’s held in as an Abgrund: an abyss, a without-ground-yet one that’s all-remarking, allesmerkenden, scored over by a thousand tracks and traces like the fallen earth below him. Which makes him der Himmlische, the Heavenly One, calling down light, causing it to burst forth and rise upwards, to the partings of the Father’s hair, so that… wenn aber… und es gehet… Here the sentences fade in and out, like wireless stations, before climaxing in a stanza that Serge once spends a whole night sitting on his houseboat’s deck translating:
und der Vogel des Himmels ihm
Es anzeigt. Wunderbar
Im Zorne kommet er drauf.
and the bird of Heaven
Makes it known to him. Upon which,
Wonderful in anger, he comes.
These lines, and others, echo for him on another occasion too: his visit to the sounding range near Battery F. This visit’s not directive-prompted. Quite the opposite: it takes place by accident and, Serge suspects, against the orders of Headquarters, who have always maintained an air of secrecy about what goes on in the woods just north of Vitriers. He’s being driven in a Crossley truck to Nieppe one afternoon, to buy spare aerial copper from a local metalworker (ordering it up from England would take months) when the d
river announces, on the way back, a short detour to drop off some piano wire in Sector Four.
“They’re playing pianos amidst all this racket?” Serge asks him, incredulous.
The driver smiles. They leave the road and slalom between tree trunks, pulling up eventually beside a small cluster of huts. As the driver carries the looped coils to one of these, Serge wanders off among the trees, unzips his trouser-fly and starts to urinate onto the ground-only to be chastised by a voice that issues from the foliage around him like some spirit of the woods:
“Don’t piss against the wire!”
“What wire?” he asks. “Who said that?”
The wood-spirit emerges: a short man with slender fingers.
“Just under the earth’s surface,” he says, before adding, no less obscurely: “You’ll cause interference from the mikes. Who are you?”
“Observer from 104th Squadron,” Serge tells him. “I stopped by to drop off the wire.”
“The wires are already in place,” the slender-fingered man says, pointing at the ground. “Six of them, running from the microphones to here.”
“Microphones in the woods?”
“Yup: six mikes, one for each wire. They’re in cut-out barrels arranged in a semi-circle quarter of a mile away.”
“Attached to piano wire?” asks Serge.
“You brought new piano wire? Why didn’t you say so? Where is it?”
“Being carried into those huts,” Serge tells him.
The man hurries back towards the huts. Serge follows him. Inside the main one, he finds a huge square harp whose six strings are extended out beyond their wooden frame by finer wires that run through the hut’s air before breaching its boundary as well, cutting through little mouse-holes in the east-facing wall. In front of the harp, like an interrogation lamp, a powerful bulb shines straight onto it; behind it, lined up with each string, a row of prisms capture and deflect the light at right angles, through yet another hole cut in the hut’s wall, into an unlit room adjoining this one. There’s a noise coming from the adjoining room: sounds like a small propeller on a stalled plane turning from the wind’s pressure alone.
“What is this place?” Serge asks.
“You’re an observer, right?” the slender-fingered man says. Serge nods.
“Well, you know how, when you’re doing Battery Location flights, you send down K.K. calls each time you see an enemy gun flash?”
“Oh yes,” Serge answers. “I’ve always wondered why we have to do that…”
“Wonder no more,” the man says with an elfin smile. “The receiving operator presses a relay button each time he gets one of those; this starts the camera in the next room rolling; and the camera captures the sound of the battery whose flash you’ve just K.K.’d to us. You with me?”
“No,” Serge answers. “How can it do that?”
“Each gun-boom, when it’s picked up by a mike, sends a current down the wires you just pissed on,” the man continues, “and the current makes the piano wire inside this room heat up and give a little kick, which gets diffracted through the prisms into the next room, and straight into the camera.”
“So you’re filming sound?” Serge asks.
“You could say that, I suppose,” the man concurs.
“What’s the point of that?”
“Here, follow me.”
He leads Serge from this hut towards another. Pausing at the door of this, he knocks; then, when a voice inside shouts “Enter,” opens it no more than a slit’s width and ushers Serge inside. The interior’s suffused with red light. At a trough propped up against the far wall, a man with rolled-up sleeves is dunking yards of film into developing liquid, then feeding it on from there into a fixing tank. As the film’s end emerges from this tank in turn, he holds it up, inspects it and tears off sections, clipping these with clothes pegs to a short stretch of washing line, from where they drip onto the discarded strips on the room’s floor below them.
“Yuk,” Serge whispers beneath his breath.
“What?” the slender-fingered man asks.
“Nothing,” he replies.
“Look here,” Serge’s guide says, unclipping a strip of the developed film and pointing at dark lines that run, lengthways and continuous, along its surface. The lines-six of them-are for the most part flat; occasionally, though, they erupt suddenly, and rise and fall in jagged waves, like some strange Persian script, for half an inch, before settling down and running flat again. On the film’s bottom edge, beside the punch-holes, a time-code is marked, one inch or so for every second. The jagged eruptions appear at different points along each line: staggered, each wave the same shape as the one on the line below it, but occurring a quarter of an inch (or three-tenths of a second) later.
“So,” Serge’s elfin guide continues, “these kicks are made by the sound hitting each mike; and they get laid out on the film at intervals that correspond to each mike’s distance from the sound. You see them?”
“Yes,” Serge answers. “But I still don’t-”
“These ones ready to take through?” the guide asks the developer.
The other man nods; with his piano-player’s fingers, the guide unclips the other drip-dried strips, then leads Serge out to yet another hut. This one’s wall has a large-scale map taped to it; stuck in the map in a neat semi-circle are six pins. Two men are going through a pile of torn-off, line-streaked film-strips, measuring the gaps between the kicks with lengths of string; then, moving the string over to the map slowly, careful to preserve the intervals, they transfer the latter onto its surface by fixing one end of the string to the pin and holding a pencil to the other, swinging it from side to side to mark a broad arc on the map.
“Each pin’s a microphone,” the slender-fingered man explains. “Where the arcs intersect, the gun site must be.”
“So the strings are time, or space?” Serge asks.
“You could say either,” the man answers with a smile. “The film-strip knows no difference. The mathematical answer to your question, though, is that the strings represent the asymptote of the hyperbola on which the gun lies.”
“But there are several guns,” Serge says.
“And several types of kick on the film,” the man replies. “You can tell from their shape and thickness which are primary and which secondary, tertiary and so on. You just keep plotting all the intersections and eventually the whole thing maps itself out. It changes every few days, of course: soon as you people take one battery out, another one pops up for us to pinpoint…”
The Crossley’s engine comes to life outside. Walking back to it, Serge is acutely conscious of his feet percussing on the ground, and starts to tiptoe lest he cause more interference to the wires, even though the truck’s noise is much louder. On the way home, once they’ve left the woods and joined the road, he starts to drift off. To his mind, held in a web of strings and arcs above a darkness lit up by diffracted flashes, it seems that the groaning of the guns now comes as much from below as above. He sees it travelling through earth on worm-like cords, then seeping out like methane. As it rises past him, its vibrations make the truck’s metal bars pronounce, over and over again, the word Allerschütterer; then it rises further, up towards a high spot where a keen ear inclines above a battlefield that’s turned into a giant sounding-board. Just before he loses consciousness entirely, Serge sees Dr. Filip’s thin, filament-eyes glow above metal-grey whiskers-and hears, at a pitch barely audible and issuing from a spot that no amount of intersecting arcs could pinpoint, a little not-quite-German, not-quite-English voice describing twangling instruments humming about his ears.
iii
On days when they’re assigned to Artillery Patrol, Serge and Gibbs fly further over on the German side than the machines on Art Obs duties, sending zone-call rather than clock-code signals back. The sequences are longer, running into double-figured strings of numbers, letters, dots and spaces: BY.NF.B30 C 8690; BY.COL.FAN NW B30C8690… His fingers ache by the end of every mission. Whe
n he’s not tapping sigs out, he’s photographing the ground with a camera attached to the plane’s lower wing. They have to fly in pre-set patterns and maintain a stable altitude to keep their photographs in sequence and to scale. They liaise with the photographic unit regularly; it’s in a former slaughterhouse two miles behind the airfield.
“I’d say this emplacement’s a dummy one,” Lieutenant Pietersen opines as he passes the monocular to Serge. “The tracks leading to the copse are so clear you could see them from ten thousand feet up. They may as well have drawn an arrow on the ground…”
“I see flashes from there a lot,” Serge tells him, “but they never seem quite right. Haven’t got that forward kick…”
“Stage effects,” Pietersen tuts. “Smoke and mirrors.”
He pins the photo to a board-askew, and covering the bottom corner of another photo which is slanted to the other side. Eight or nine more photos cling together to produce a mosaic of landscape across which lines-straight, curved and dotted-cut and swirl like markings on butterflies’ wings.
“Now, this part’s changed since yesterday,” Pietersen says, replacing one tile of the mosaic with a new one that contains a dark, concentric set of ripples moving outwards from a spot covered by trees. “But I’m not sure we’ve knocked the big gun out. When you fly over it tomorrow, try to ascertain whether the scorch marks fall along the main diameter of all these circles, or if they’re off-centre.”
“I’ll snap the area, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to tell that with my naked eye, through all the smoke,” Serge replies.
“Try rubbing cocaine in it,” Pietersen tells him.
“Cocaine?” Serge asks. “Isn’t that for teeth?”
“Yes, but it works wonders on your vision: sharpens it no end. Go pick some up from the Field Hospital in Mirabel.”
Serge does so. He’s given a small make-up tin of white powder, a little of which he daubs onto his retina just prior to take-off the next day. It takes effect as they’re clearing their own kite balloon, which starts beaming up at him taut and alert, a big white eyeball. The lines of tracer-fire stand out more starkly a few seconds later, their velocity and inclination bold, insistent. The mesh of trenches, the coloured flames of guns and flares, distant roads and railway lines, the markings on the ground: all these things come at him more cleanly, more pronounced-but then so do Archie puffs, vapour trails and cordite smoke-clouds, not to mention the real clouds above him and the sky’s deep blue.
