by H. E. Bates
But the hardest part of all, perhaps, is that Capek cannot talk to us. He does not know words that will express what he feels about the end of Machakek’s journey. He does not know words like endurance and determination, imperishable, undefeated, sacrifice, and honour. They are the words, anyway, that are never mentioned at dispersals. He does not know the words for grief and friendship, homesickness and loss. They are never mentioned either. Above all, he does not know the words for himself and what he has done.
I do not know the words for Capek either. Looking at his white hair, his dark eyes, and his long hands, I am silent now.
Sorry, No Saccharine
I knew Pop and Ethel fairly well. As for themselves, they never met each other.
Pop, who was a flight lieutenant and acted sometimes as adjutant when he was not in admin or accounts or somewhere else, was sixty. Ethel, who was a W.A.A.F., was nineteen. Pop was rather seedy and grizzly and looked too bony for his blue service uniform. When he had first ridden down through Pretoria, as a mounted trooper, in his first war, he was just Ethel’s age, and Ethel was not born. Back in England, Ethel’s mother was a small girl of ten watching the herring fleets come in at Yarmouth and the Scottish fisher-girls packing the fish in barrels in late summer. Pop had probably been very handsome in those days and Ethel was rather pretty now. Pop’s trouble now was that he snored very heavily and talked in his sleep and did not get much rest, for various causes, after two or three o’clock in the morning. I dare say Ethel slept very well, and almost the only thing she grumbled about was the wage she used to earn in Civy Street. Pop had a great many medals, but it was doubtful if Ethel could ever get one. All together, they were not very much alike. The only thing you could say about both of them was that they were both in the same service, on the same station, in the same war.
In case there should be any misunderstanding, Ethel was married. At nineteen Pop was riding across the veldt; he kept a picture of himself, youthful and brawny on a horse, in the chest of drawers in his bedroom. At nineteen Ethel had a husband she never saw.
Most of the time Ethel did not know where her husband was; she guessed Cairo, then Malta, then Iraq. Wherever it was, the days were hot and the names on the map confused her. She did not understand much about Africa. It was a long way off, but she did not know how far. It would have been nice if she could have met Pop, who might have explained what it was like to be in the Army in Africa, but she never did.
As it was, she felt alone. On an operational station the W.A.A.F.’s live away from the station. Ethel lived in an old Victorian house, with twenty other girls, two miles away. It was winter; it was dark when she set out for the station in the early mornings. The wind blew bitterly from the east, and the bombers at dispersal were frosted over, the colour of lead.
Pop did not arrive at H.Q. till nine. A man who has been in three wars has a right to think he knows something about it. From Pretoria to Mons and the Somme to Bomber Command, Pop had been through something. “You ought to know, Pop,” people said. Pop spent most of his day filling up forms, or refilling the forms other people had filled up wrongly. Perhaps for this reason Pop liked to sit on the edge of the bed late at night and talk about himself and the Boers.
“Yes, I’m sixty. You wouldn’t think it, would you? I got grandchildren. That’s one for you.”
Later, if you woke up, you would see the glow of Pop’s cigarette in the darkness. Pop could not sleep, and you wondered what he was thinking.
Downstairs, perhaps, Ethel was on late duty in the mess. The flying crews would be coming in to eat, tired, still in flying-kit, still rather cold, a little keyed up, talking about the flight. They rattled the cups when the food did not come. “Hey, sweetheart, some coffee. Please. And more butter.”
Serving with Ethel, perhaps, would be the W.A.A.F. whom everyone called Baby Dumpling. She had a mild moon-face; she could not hear very well. She moved slowly, and whenever you asked for anything, she almost always smiled softly and said, not understanding:
“Sorry, no saccharine.”
In time this became a catchword for anything you hadn’t got. “Sorry, no saccharine.” Ethel knew all the flying crews very well, by sight and name. There was Mr. Christopher, who had dropped one down the funnel of the Scharnhorst; and Mr. Ward, who tried to shoot out every searchlight for fifty miles along the German coast; and Mr. Marlow, who was raging mad because he had been put on instructional. Ethel, serving in the mess, heard a strange, abrupt unheroical language.
“Wrap up, old boy. Pranged it. Everything was u.s. See Jackson go off on full flap? Soared like a Spitfire. Like Johnnie’s landing. Any moment now! Thought he’d had it. But no. Piece of cake. No trouble at all. Must try it some time. See your popsy?”
Ethel waited on the flying crews week after week. She did not understand much about flying and understood still less the language of flight. She was always rushed off her feet; but now and then she became aware that someone whose face and name she knew was there no longer. Soon she was saying: “Sorry, no saccharine,” to somebody new.
Probably Pop didn’t understand much about flying either. It wasn’t like the last war. There were no horses to ride. There was a big difference between riding across the veldt on a bay charger and filling up Air Force forms, and sometimes it was hard to know why he was there. Sometimes he looked like a savage old dog who cannot get his teeth into a bone.
Perhaps it is as well that Pop and Ethel never met. At nineteen Pop was riding across the heart of Africa in his first war; at nineteen Ethel has a husband who is in Africa and whom she never sees. There is something heroic about riding a horse into battle, but there is nothing very heroic about having a husband who is too far away to love. At nineteen Pop had to be careful of dysentery in the heart of Africa; at nineteen Ethel is whipped by the easterly winds that freeze the bombers and she catches cold in her chest. They have not much in common. The only thing you can say about both of them is that Pop will hardly get a medal for filling up forms and that Ethel will hardly get one for waiting on flying crews and smiling back with the catchword:
“Sorry, no saccharine.”
In that case what have Pop and Ethel to do with each other? Why have I put them together? What am I trying to say?
I don’t quite know. I keep trying to make up my mind between the courage of the old, who think they know, and of the young, who do not understand.
Sergeant Carmichael
For some time he had had a feeling that none of them knew where they were going. They had flown over France without seeing the land. Now they were flying in heavy rain without a glimpse of the sea. He was very young, just twenty, and suddenly he had an uneasy idea that they would never see either the land or the sea again.
“Transmitter pretty u.s., sir,” he said.
For a moment there was no answer. Then Davidson, the captain, answered automatically: “Keep trying, Johnny,” and he answered: “O.K.,” quite well knowing there was nothing more he could do. He sat staring straight before him. Momentarily he was no longer part of the aircraft. He was borne away from it on sound-waves of motors and wind and rain, and for a few minutes he was back in England, recalling and reliving odd moments of life there. He recalled for a second or two his first day on the station; it was August and he remembered that some straw had blown in from the fields across the runways and that the wind of the take-offs whirled it madly upward, yellow and shining in the sun. He recalled his father eating red currants in the garden that same summer and how the crimson juice had spurted on to his moustache, so that he looked rather ferocious every time he said: “That, if you want it, is my opinion.” And then he remembered, most curiously of all, a girl in a biscuit-yellow hat sitting in a deck-chair on the sea-front, eating a biscuit-yellow ice cream, and how he had been fascinated because hat and ice were miraculously identical in colour and how he had wanted to ask her, with nervous bravado because he was very young, if she bought her hats to match her ice cream or her ice cream to match her ha
ts, but how he never did. He did not know why he recalled these moments, clear as glass, except perhaps that they were moments of a life he was never going to see again.
He was suddenly ejected out of this past world, fully alert and aware that they were not flying straight. They had not been flying straight for some time. They were stooging round and round, bumping heavily, and losing height. He sat very tense, and became gradually aware that this tension was part of the plane. It existed in each one of them, from Davidson and Porter in the nose, down through Johnson and Hargreaves and himself, to Carmichael in the tail.
He heard Davidson’s voice. “How long since we had contact with base?”
He looked at his watch; it was almost midnight. “A little under an hour and three quarters,” he said.
Again there was silence, and again he felt the tension running through the plane. He was aware of their chances and almost aware, now, of what Davidson was going to say.
“One more try, boys. Sing out if you see anything. If not, it’s down in the drink.”
He sat very still. They were losing a little height. His stomach felt sour and he remembered that he could not swim.
For some reason he never thought of it again. His thoughts were scattered by Davidson’s voice.
“Does anyone see what I see? Isn’t that a light? About two points to starboard.”
He looked out; there was nothing he could see.
“I’m going down to have a look-see,” Davidson said. “It is a light.”
As they were going down he looked out again, but again he could see nothing. Then he heard Davidson speaking to Carmichael.
“Hack the fuselage door off, Joe. This looks like a lightship. If it is we’re as good as home. Tell me when you’re ready and I’ll put her down.”
He sat very still, hearing the sound of hatchet blows as Carmichael struck at the fuselage. He felt colder, and then knew that it must be because Carmichael had finished and that there was a gap where the door had been. He heard again the deep, slow Canadian accent of Carmichael’s voice, saying: “O.K., skipper, all set,” and then the remote, flat English voice of Davidson in reply:
“All right, get the dinghy ready. All three of you. Get ready and heave it out when I put her down.”
Helping Joe and Hargreaves and Johnson with the dinghy, he was no longer aware of fear. He was slung sideways across the aircraft. The dinghy seemed very large and he wondered how they would get it out. This troubled him until he felt the plane roaring down in the darkness, and it continued to trouble him for a second after the plane had hit the water with a great crash that knocked him back against the fuselage. He did not remember getting up. Something was wrong with his left wrist, and he thought of his watch. It was a good watch, a navigational watch, given him by his father on a birthday. The next moment he knew that the dinghy had gone and he knew that he had helped, somehow, to push it out. Carmichael had also gone. The sea was rocking the aircraft violently to and fro, breaking water against his knees and feet. A second later he stretched out his hands and felt nothing before him but the open space in the fuselage where the door had been.
He knew then that it must be his turn to go. He heard Carmichael’s voice calling from what seemed a great distance out of the darkness and the rain. He did not know what he was calling. It was all confused, he did not answer, but a second later he stretched out his hands blindly and went down on his belly into the sea.
II
When he came up again it was to find himself thinking of the girl in the biscuit-coloured hat and how much that day he had liked the sea, opaque and green and smooth on the pieces of sea-washed glass he had picked up on the shore. It flashed through his mind that this was part of the final imagery that comes with drowning, and he struggled wildly to keep his face above water.
He could hear again the voice of Carmichael, shouting, but the shock of sea-water struck like ice on his breast and throat, so that he could not shout in answer. The sea was very rough. It heaved him upward and then down again with sweeps of slow and violent motion. It tossed him about in this way until he realised at last that these slow, barbaric waves were really keeping him up, that the Mae West was working, and that he was sinking away no longer.
From the constancy of Carmichael’s shouts he felt that Carmichael must have seized, and was probably on, the dinghy. But he was not prepared for the shout: “She’s upside down!” and then a moment or two later two voices yelling his name.
“Johnny! Can you hear us? Can you hear us now?”
He let out a great yell in answer, but sea-water broke down his throat and for a moment suffocated him, bearing him down and under the trough of a wave. He came up sick and struggling, spitting water, frightened. His boots were very heavy now under the water, and it seemed as if he were being sucked continually down. He tried to wave his arms above his head, but one arm had no response. It filled him suddenly with violent pain.
“O.K., Johnny, O.K., O.K.,” Carmichael said.
He could not speak. He knew that his arm was broken. He felt Carmichael’s hands painfully clutching his one free hand. He remembered for no reason at all that Carmichael had been a pitcher for a baseball team in Montreal and he felt the hands move down until they clutched his wrist, holding him so strongly that it was almost a pain.
“Can you bear up?” Carmichael said. “Johnny, try bearing up. It’s O.K., Johnny. We’re here, on the dinghy. Hargreaves is here. Johnson’s here. It’s O.K., Johnny. Can you heave? Where’s your other arm?”
“I think it’s bust,” he said.
He tried heaving himself upward. He tried again, helped by Carmichael’s hands, but something each time drew the dinghy away. He tried again and then again. Each time the same thing happened, and once or twice the sea, breaking on the dinghy, hit him in the face, blinding him.
He knew suddenly what was wrong. It was not only his arm but his belt. Each time he heaved upward, the belt caught under the dinghy and pushed it away. In spite of knowing it he heaved again and all at once felt very tired, feeling that only Carmichael’s hands were between this tiredness and instant surrender. This painful heaving and sudden tiredness were repeated. They went on for some time. He heard Carmichael’s voice continually and once or twice the sea hit him again, blinding him, and once, blinded badly, he wanted to wipe his face with his hands.
Suddenly Carmichael was talking again. “Can you hang on? If I can get my knee on something I’ll get leverage. I’ll pull you up. Can you hang on?”
Before he could answer the sea hit him again. The wave seemed to split his contact with Carmichael. It momentarily cut away his hands. For an instant it was as if he were in a bad and terrifying dream, falling through space.
Then Carmichael was holding him again. “I got you now, Johnny. I’m kneeling on Dicky. Your belt ought to clear now. If you try hard it ought to clear first time.”
The sea swung him away. As he came back, the belt did not hit the dinghy so violently. He was kept almost clear. Then the sea swung him away again. On this sudden wave of buoyancy he realised that it was now, or perhaps never, that he must pull himself back. He clenched his hand violently; and then suddenly, before he was ready, and very lightly as if he were a child, the force of the new wave and the strength of Carmichael’s hand threw him on the dinghy, face down.
He wanted to lie there for a long time. He lay for only a second, and then got up. He felt the water heaving in his boots and the salt sickness of it in his stomach. He did not feel at all calm, but was terrified for an instant by the shock of being safe.
“There was a light,” he said. “That’s why he came down here. That’s why he came down. There was a light.”
He looked round at the sea as he spoke. Sea and darkness were one, unbroken except where waves struck the edge of the dinghy with spits of faintly phosphorescent foam. It had ceased raining now, but the wind was very strong and cold, and up above lay the old unbroken ten tenths cloud. There was not even a star that could have be
en mistaken for a light. He knew that perhaps there never had been.
He went into a slight stupor brought on by pain and the icy sea-water. He came out of it to find himself furiously bailing water from the dinghy with one hand. He noticed that the rest were bailing with their caps. He had lost his cap. His one hand made a nerveless cup that might have been stone for all the feeling that was in it now.
The sea had a rhythmical and awful surge that threw the dinghy too lightly up the glassy arcs of oncoming waves and then too steeply over the crest into the trough beyond. Each time they came down into a trough, the dinghy shipped a lot of water. Each time they baled frenziedly, sometimes throwing the water over one another. His good hand remained dead. He still did not feel the water with it, but he felt it on his face, sharp as if the spray were splintered and frozen glass. Then whenever they came to the crest of a wave there was a split second when they could look for a light. “Hell, there should be a light,” he thought. “He saw one. He shouted it out. That’s why he came down”; but each time the sea beyond the crest of the new wave remained utterly dark as before.
“What the hell,” he said. “There should be a light! There was a light.”
“All right, kid,” Carmichael said. “There’ll be one.”
He knew then that he was excited. He tried not to be excited. For a long time he didn’t speak, but his mind remained excited. He felt drunk with the motion of pain and the water and sick with the saltness of the water. There were moments when he ceased bailing and held his one hand strengthlessly at his side, tired out, wanting to give up. He did not know how he kept going after a time or how they kept the water from swamping the dinghy. Looking down, he saw the eight feet of himself and the rest in the well of the dinghy, and he did not know which were his own feet and which were theirs.
