The Crew

by Joseph Kessel

  He worked at this fervently until a hard bump sent him crashing into the side of the cockpit. The plane nosedived, leaving a red trail in its wake.

  “The captain must be a hot number in German trenches,” he thought.

  Meanwhile, the plane had taken a perpendicular angle, straightened out, gained new altitude with a brutal momentum, then nosedived again, sending Herbillon knocking around in all directions, bruising his shoulder against the gun turret.

  Accustomed to Thélis taking those kinds of risks, the officer cadet peacefully put up with the aerial acrobatics.

  The plane finally regained its balance and, turning towards Herbillon with a cheerful face, the captain pointed to a spot behind the biplane’s tail.

  Jean didn’t notice anything aside from the fact that the other planes in their group had all vanished. He thought the captain was asking him whether he was afraid to continue the mission without their escort and so he made a gesture of indifference.

  Nevertheless, their sudden disappearance left him feeling pensive.

  “Maybe something happened to our comrades,” he thought, “while the captain had his fun making me dance about inside the cockpit.”

  And, he concluded: “I’ll have to ask him to stop joking around like that, he’s getting in the way of my observing duties.”

  At that exact moment, Thélis sharply banked the plane, allowing Jean to see, far down below, a plane that was creeping towards the rear of the German front.

  His heart skipped a beat. “A Fokker!”

  Vigorously exerting himself, he swung his gun-turret around, and pointing his machine guns at the enemy plane, he fired. The bullets flew fairly close to the plane, but a new turn by Thélis removed the plane from his line of sight.

  “If only he’d let me carry on,” Jean thought, despairing, “I could have brought it down.”

  By the time the captain landed, three of the other planes were already on the field. As soon as they’d jumped out of their cockpits, Thélis turned to Herbillon and said: “Well, are you happy? You got the fight you were looking for?”

  Thinking of the few bursts of gunfire he’d unleashed, Jean replied: “That wasn’t a fight, it was nothing at all.”

  The captain looked at him with genuine admiration. “Congratulations rookie! Seven planes on our tails and we shot one of them down, but all of that isn’t enough for you!”

  A vague uneasiness crept into Jean’s mind, which prevented him from speaking.

  The captain really didn’t seem like he was joking. Incidentally, the other crews drew near and the officer cadet heard Brûlard exclaim: “We got him, didn’t we sir?”

  “We did,” Thélis yelled back. “Neuville and Virense shot it down.”

  Stunned, Herbillon hadn’t quite grasped the extent of his misfortune. Far from being a prank, the captain’s aerial acrobatics had been part of his manoeuvres during the dogfight—and while their comrades, who’d scattered during the attack, had been busy performing heroic feats, Jean had been busy studying the landscape, and, incapable of seeing those planes dance about, he’d missed the entire fight.

  Shame swelled within him and made his cheeks blush, but as he still hadn’t removed his balaclava, nobody noticed anything.

  Overcoming his malaise, he was about to join the conversation when the last aircraft belonging to their patrol landed and rolled along the field. Doc sprang out of his cockpit and ran towards the assembled officers who were standing next to the hangars. His lips were contorted into a comical rage. As soon as he’d reached them, he yelled: “Which one of you beasts almost shot me down?”

  Nobody answered, but Herbillon felt like he was about to faint. He couldn’t even console himself with having at least frightened the enemy. He had shot at one of his own comrades.

  Nevertheless, Captain Thélis pointed him out to everyone and said: “Our Herbillon’s got guts. We took a hard hit, and he didn’t even flinch.”

  CHAPTER V

  WHEN MAURY RETIRED early to his room that evening after dinner, as per his custom, Thélis assembled all the observers in the mess hall.

  “We must,” he said, “replace the Deschamps-Gival crew. Only three of you are still unassigned: Reuillard, Charensole and Herbillon. Being new to their roles as pilots, Sergeant Duchêne and Corporal Boschot still aren’t up to snuff. Maury, on the other hand, is worth as much as an old-timer. Who wants to fly with him? The most senior ones will have first pick of course.”

  Thélis looked at Reuillard, certain he’d happily pick the finest pilot, but the latter instead merely twirled his moustache to the point of almost tearing it out. Thélis’s astonished gaze shifted from Reuillard’s bony face to the others. He noticed the same hesitation on all their features.

  Marbot, who was following the scene with interest, muttered: “They don’t want to fly with him. He’s jinxed!”

  The captain let out a furious curse, but it was too late by then. The podgy lieutenant had perfectly encapsulated the observers’ aversion, and fully aware of how superstitious his men were, since they put their lives at stake every day, he knew it would be difficult to find someone who would volunteer to share Maury’s fate. Nevertheless, he kept trying.

  “You’re nothing but an idiot,” he coolly told Marbot. “Maury’s as good a pilot as I am and I envy his composure.”

  Nobody made an effort to reply, and Jean knew that the exact same ideas—which were incorrect yet highly persuasive—had settled into all of their minds. On his first flight, Maury had got into a dogfight and Deschamps had died trying to reach him.

  This actually didn’t stand up to any reasoning, but nobody wanted to admit it.

  “I would prefer someone younger,” Reuillard muttered. “Add both our ages and you get ninety years—that’s a little heavy for such a little plane!”

  “As for me,” Charensole said, “I’ve already promised Boschot I’d fly with him: we’re from the same regiment.”

  He was about to continue when Claude appeared.

  Despite his usual ability to exercise self-restraint, Thélis couldn’t help making a gesture towards his comrades. Maury’s sensitivity notwithstanding, it wasn’t difficult to notice the awkwardness that his entry into the room had caused. It was so tangible that it physically oppressed him. As though to excuse himself, he hurriedly muttered: “I forgot my book on the table.”

  With everyone’s eyes on him, he clumsily crossed the room, picked up his book, and then withdrew, walking in a more stooped fashion—and looking paler—than usual.

  His sudden apparition did nothing to reassure the assembled men. How could anyone not link his fate to that body of his, which seemed to have already accepted its misfortune in advance? As struck as everyone else, Thélis couldn’t figure out which line of argument to employ in order to continue the conversation.

  At which point, Herbillon made his decision. While Maury’s appearance had merely confirmed the others’ doubts, it had actually reinforced the feeling of pity and respect that the young man felt for Claude. Perhaps all too vividly, Jean’s imagination had pictured exactly the kind of distress his friend must have felt, having been rejected once again, in the cruellest of fashions, deprived of the comradely moral support he so desperately yearned for.

  Needless to say, Maury wasn’t exactly the kind of pilot Jean had dreamed would fly him to his most memorable missions. Yet his misadventure that morning counselled humility, and furthermore, wouldn’t the fact he was volunteering for something everyone else was trying to avoid be the perfect means to show Captain Thélis how brave he was? Without knowing whether he was being prompted by vanity or compassion, Jean declared: “I’ll join Maury’s crew, Captain.”

  From that moment, on, Thélis addressed Jean by his first name.

  Claude launched right into it as soon as the officer cadet entered his room. “So it’s still going on,” he railed. “Always the same hostility, the same unease.”

  Laughing, Herbillon said: “The unease will come later.
For the time being, let’s finish that whisky of yours, it seems I’m going to be your permanent passenger.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s quite simple,” Jean replied. “We’re now a crew.”

  Claude’s overbearingly penetrating eyes met with Jean’s, and filling with boundless bitterness, Maury asked: “The others insisted on entrusting you to my care, didn’t they?”

  Then growing both tender and grave, as though about to swear an oath, he said: “They’re right to do so.”

  Spring had triumphed. There was enthusiasm in the air, lights danced about, and from the heights achieved by the aeroplanes, the cathedral of Reims looked less discoloured. Claude and Jean flew many missions together.

  Together, they experienced all the dawn departures, when the roaring engines stirred the day from its slumber; and the landings at sunset, when they cut out their engine, and slowly descended back to earth, keeping pace with the fading light. The unproblematic surveillance missions, the leisurely, watchful sorties; the dogfights where the mixture of hope and anxiety left a ringing in their ears. They shared the physical adrenaline of the sudden nosedives and the mathematical joys of aerial acrobatics. They learned to become simultaneously intuitive—as though by sheer, blind divination—of the enemy’s approach. In the midst of the propeller’s fury and winds that completely muffled human voices, they also learned to understand one another through gestures and signs. Maury, when turning around to look at his fellow crewman, would find his own thoughts mirrored in Jean’s eyes.

  They finally knew what their comrades meant by the word crew. They weren’t simply two men flying on the same mission, exposing themselves to the same dangers, and reaping the same rewards. They were a moral entity, an organism with two hearts, two sets of instincts that governed a single rhythm. Their cohesiveness wasn’t limited to the cockpit. It extended beyond it, by way of subtle antennae, by virtue of an irrepressible need to observe better and become better acquainted. All they had done was to learn to love one another; they completed one another.

  Nevertheless, their habits and tastes didn’t change. Their natures differed too greatly for that. Yet they were still linked by a mysterious harmony that was both invisible and unfailing, which, when they were flying through that crisp air—electrified with peril and euphoria—simultaneously stamped the same smile or frown on their mouths.

  When the officer cadet was granted a period of leave from the front, Maury tasked him with delivering a letter to his wife.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER I

  THE DAY AFTER Herbillon’s arrival in Paris proved to be quite bizarre.

  Surrounded by his parents’ joy and the sight of those dependable streets, with their familiar shapes and sounds, Jean was pursued by the faces of the men in his squadron. Thélis as he gave orders, Marbot as he smoked his pipe, or Maury’s narrow neck as he bent over a book. The frail sunlight made him think about the fog hanging close to the ground, thwarting all observation efforts.

  Nevertheless, he talked feverishly and voluminously, so as to satisfy the curiosity of the people around him. Yet a secret sense of disharmony prevented him from taking any pleasure in those conversations.

  They expected him not only to regale them with stories, but to present them as though he’d written a book. Their imagination was wild as his own had been before he’d left for the front. It irked him to yield to the desire for amazing adventures that animated his interlocutors, and which forced him, despite himself, to paint a picture of life in the squadron. Would they really have believed him if he’d told them about all those lazy mornings and the mostly tranquil flights? The newspapers’ pathetic penchant for exaggeration had too successfully bloated their imaginations for them to accept such simple, yet astonishing truths.

  However, while he over-dramatized some events and underplayed others, he found himself obsessed by some seemingly unconnected words Maury had once uttered: “Do you know what a bayonet attack is? Cries, bodies swept along by an outside force, a terrible dryness in one’s throat, that’s all.”

  Nevertheless, by the time his first day back home had come to an end, giving Jean the time to became reacquainted with his old habits, the line demarcating his split personalities had become blurred once again. By the following day, when he welcomed Denise into his eager arms in his bachelor flat, Jean realized he was finally on holiday.

  Jean hadn’t initially recognized her thinned face. Judging by the way his heart leaped, he understood how much her body pleased him, and how much he cherished her flame-haired head.

  They had exchanged a great many letters, but found they’d both changed in the interim. He’d been surprised to discover such an intense flavour on her lips, while she’d been astonished to see that only three months into his new life, Jean’s still tender forehead now bore the marks of the tough decisions he’d had to make, and that there was a strange expression in his eyes, which differed from the childish gleam they’d possessed not all that long ago and made them look vaguer and sharper.

  Denise pulled her loose locks up into a bun to get a better look at him. Beneath her gaze, Jean felt once more like the man he’d been when Denise had accompanied him to the station, an image of himself which his experience at the front had slowly withered. In her company, a naive sense of glory once more spread its wings, and when, in the midst of her embraces, he began recounting the tales of his flights and dogfights, embellishing them on an epic scale and peppering them with even more lies, this time Jean actually believed his own stories.

  Their subsequent rendezvous were far less solemn. Picking up where they’d left off, their love affair resumed its usual lewd playfulness and cheerfulness.

  Herbillon spent all his waking hours with Denise. She was always ready to meet him. He occasionally expressed his surprise at the complete freedom she enjoyed—while also choosing not to tamper with the mystery which he felt enveloped her life—but she would simply reply by way of a laugh, whose proud carefreeness revealed the monopoly that his tenderness exercised on her. Nevertheless, on those occasions, Jean thought he could perceive in her eyes a concern he’d never hitherto detected, as though she were repressing a question she didn’t dare ask him…

  One morning, Jean woke up to a feeling of regret. Amidst his confused thoughts, he remembered that his leave would come to an end the next day. This difficult realization came coupled with the memory of a duty which he had yet to fulfil. Day after day he’d repeatedly postponed delivering the letter Maury had entrusted to him, and it had lingered in his travel jacket for the past week.

  He reproached himself sternly, and as he’d made plans with Denise that afternoon, he resolved to go to his friend’s apartment that very morning, without any further delays.

  All of a sudden, a curious sort of impatience took hold of him. He was finally going to meet the woman who’d filled Claude’s life with passion and suffering. Going on the portrait Maury had sketched for him, Jean envisioned a grave, pale face, a flat forehead and features loaded with mystery.

  “Wouldn’t it be funny if I fell in love with her?” he told himself with an incredulous smile.

  He dressed himself with the most meticulous care, used a special kind of polish on his boots, which he looked after himself, put his kepi on his head with studied unkemptness, and went out, quite full of himself.

  The maid invited him to wait, ushering him into a little drawing room. The curtains were cut from a very pale golden silk, which breathed a welcoming cheerfulness into the room. Large white vases were crowned with red marigolds. A low settee was covered with cushions upholstered in faded, precious cloths.

  Herbillon was admiring his reflection in an oval-shaped mirror, which was framed in vintage silver, when the sound of brisk steps made his heart skip a beat. Before he’d had the time to understand why, a young woman had appeared on the threshold.

  Jean let out a cry that he couldn’t finish: “Den…”

  He recognized his mistress, but encount
ering her there seemed so implausible that he initially doubted it was really her. She must have been her double, or maybe his eyes had grown so used to seeing Denise that he now saw her everywhere he went.

  But the young woman lingered in the doorway and her voice—although it was barely audible—was precisely the one he was afraid he’d hear when she weakly said: “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  Herbillon slowly took some steps back, unable to tear his bewildered eyes off her. He was looking for a word or gesture that could pull him out of that dumbfounding reverie. Yet, while still lingering there, she carried on: “Claude has already written to me asking me whether you came by.”

  His friend’s name on his mistress’s lips. The letter in his pocket… Maury’s confessions on the road back from Jonchery. Their embraces in his bachelor flat…

  His brain was in a flurried turmoil. His limbs stiffened with a heavy torpor, and the sitting room around him became blurry. He stammered, as though to convince himself that the impossible had actually happened: “So… you’re Hélène Maury.”

  She hung her head. Jean mopped his sweaty brow.

  The young woman made a gesture of helplessness: it was all obviously clear. Nevertheless, she added: “I first realized it when I saw his address, then his letters confirmed that you’d been assigned to the same squadron. I thought you would have guessed the truth.”

  “What? You think I would have kept my mouth shut if I’d known?”

  “I did what I thought was right!” she exclaimed.

  She was animated by an unaccountable pride. In his anxiousness to understand the situation, Jean didn’t take any heed of it. He confined himself to his own reasoning.