He catches Clara’s hand, and pulls her to him again and kisses her, then goes to get his coat.
“As soon as I can,” he says. “I promise.” She smiles, a watery smile, halfway convinced. He opens the door and goes out onto the landing. While he is waiting there for the clanking elevator to slide up the metal shaft, he thinks he hears from inside the apartment the sound of something heavy falling, shattering on the floor. It is a strangely clean noise, as though an object were lifted and dropped onto the floor, not the clattering fall of something knocked from its perch by accident. He listens again, but he can hear nothing, and the sounds from within are obscured by the hiss of the elevator as it comes to a stop in front of him. He thinks probably it was nothing, and anyway, he is just annoyed enough at her resentfulness that he doesn’t feel like opening the door again now.
Surely it was nothing. He opens the elevator and steps inside.
SEVEN
July 1, 1918
WHEN THE OBSERVERS collected at the edge of the airfield the morning after Clark’s death, Edward saw that they were quieter than usual, and for the first time they reminded him of the men he’d known at St-Omer. Only Lutz asked, “We are going back there, aren’t we?” and Edward nodded yes in reply. They were all thinking, he knew, of the dead boy, how he had looked fallen forward like that, his body already stiffening, still in the harness.
Today, things done routinely for weeks had a new weight to them. The way McIntyre scowled up at the sky as he buttoned his jacket, then climbed into the front seat; how the plane rose, then banked sharply so the ground tilted up beside them like the face of a cliff. Edward, too, was thinking of Clark, and how his hair had been soaked with sweat when they peeled his leather hat away. They circled the airfield once and then set out, northwest, following the river. The weather was ambivalent. Big clouds wandered across the sky, looking lost.
When he saw the front approaching in the distance, Edward felt a new tension rise inside him, and he scanned ahead looking for enemy planes. The first bursts of antiaircraft fire made clouds of black smoke in their wake. They pushed through, gaining altitude, and soon they were in clear air on the far side. Below them, the curve of the Aisne salient—German territory.
They turned north near the town of Mézy, where the lines were almost at the river’s edge, and flew back over the terrain they had crossed the previous day. Looking down, Edward could begin to make out familiar landmarks: the destroyed town he had seen, the crossroads beyond it. The army was gone now, but he could see impressions they had left, the trampled grass and the distressed surface of the road.
Which direction had they gone? From this height he couldn’t tell. They would have to go down to find the clues, the hoof marks and boot prints in the mud at the roadside. He could perhaps get a photograph that would give him the information he needed. But he wanted to fly down and see it for himself. He found he was yearning for the sensation of speed that came from the ground rushing past underneath; the beauty of the ruins, and the army asleep in their shadows. He wanted to feel that they were outrunning the hollow, heavy feeling inside him.
He leaned forward, tapped McIntyre on the shoulder and yelled to him to take them down. McIntyre nodded and put the plane into a dive. The ground rose toward them, its intricacies becoming clearer, and soon Edward could see black and gray circles where fires had been. He picked up his camera and trained it downward, and then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw something dark and fast flash out of a cloud bank a quarter of a mile away to their left. He turned toward the movement in time to see three monoplanes of a type he didn’t recognize flying straight toward them. They were black with yellow bands around the fuselage. Single-seaters. Close enough now that Edward could see the men inside them.
Quickly, McIntyre pulled the plane’s nose up, and Edward was pressed into his seat as they rose sharply. He could hear the engines of those other planes, a high growl above the wind. They came on, boring a hole through the sky, filling it with their ragged sound. Behind McIntyre the rest of the squadron rose together as though borne up by the same sea-swell. And then the German planes were in among them.
The sound of bullets: something insect about it, something electric in the way it cut the air to shreds, and Edward ducked as the three planes sped through the middle of the squadron, sending an arc of tracers out in front of them. The air around him was filled with that hard, fiery noise, and he felt, rather than saw, the volley knife past above him.
As soon as they had passed, Edward lunged toward his gun. He swung it up, aiming at where the enemy planes were preparing to dive. He squinted into the gun sights, following the progress of the first plane, but then he saw the second German plane branch off and begin to swing around toward them. He turned his gun on it. He waited until it was clear of the others. Then he opened fire.
The gun rattled out its stream of bullets, and he held on, guiding it as well as he could. He saw the plane still coming toward them and fired again. Then he heard McIntyre shouting something and the plane begin to tilt beneath him. His stomach leapt sickeningly, and he held on to the edge of the cockpit with both hands as they banked, then straightened out. When they were level again, he could see that the first German plane had dropped down and come up on their other side; McIntyre had pulled them out of the way just in time.
Around them, the DH-4’s were scattering and turning back toward the lines, flying as fast as they could for home. As they began to pull away, Edward could see that one of them was trailing pale smoke in a steady stream. It lagged behind, the distance that separated it from the others growing greater by the second. The German planes wheeled around it, firing and then breaking away, their lightness a taunt. Edward couldn’t tell whose plane it was, couldn’t make out the men inside it through the smoke that enveloped the machine.
“Should we go back?” he shouted. McIntyre didn’t reply.
Behind them, the damaged plane began to tilt and fall, sliding into a head-first dive and then spinning nose over tail down toward the earth. It plummeted past them, smoke paying out behind it in a slender white ribbon. Edward heard himself cry out, a wordless shout, and then the plane hit the ground and became a fire, the smoke turning black around the flames as its fuel tanks went up.
THE GERMAN PLANES didn’t follow them across the lines. After the crash they took off in the other direction, flying in procession back the way they had come. The squadron arrived at the airfield and landed. The damage to the planes was worse than the previous day, but everyone who landed was alive. There were injuries: Kelsey had been nicked by a bullet in the arm. He was bleeding a lot, but he was conscious and swearing when the stretcher-bearers pulled him from the plane.
“Goddamn it, goddamn it, goddamn it,” he said as they lowered him over the side. Then he caught sight of Edward coming toward him. “Who was it?” he asked. “Whose plane?”
“I don’t know,” Edward said. And over his shoulder he heard Dawson say:
“It was Sergeant Daniels, sir.” Kelsey let his head drop back against the stretcher, and they carried him toward the ambulance.
Lutz came and stood beside Edward, watching them carry the stretcher away. After a minute he asked, “Do you think there’s any chance that Daniels could have got out?” Edward turned to look at him: Lutz was gripping his flying hat in his hands nervously, but his face was full of a luminous, unwarranted hope. Suddenly, the responsibility of providing reassurance was just too much for Edward.
“No, I don’t,” he said, and began to walk away.
At the door of the pavilion he met van Horn.
“You lost a plane out there,” he said.
“Yes, sir. We were attacked.”
“Which of your men was it?”
“Sergeant Daniels.
“Well.” The colonel paused, as though waiting for Edward to say something to allay his disappointment. Then he said: “Sergeant Daniels was assistant to Lieutenant Lutz, wasn’t he?” Edward nodded. “You’ll need a replacement
for him to help oversee the work of the interpreters. Have a recommendation to me by the end of the day. All right, Captain?”
“Yes, sir.” It was that simple: replace the old parts with spares and go on. Edward watched van Horn start toward the hangars.
“Sir …”
“Yes?”
“Is there any possibility that we could get that escort of scouts we requested? Since we’re losing so many men …”
“Two is not so many, Captain,” van Horn said, and walked away across the field.
VISIBILITY: FAIR; PATCHY cloud cover. Troops: nil. Enemy planes: Three, unidentified type, with distinguishing yellow stripes around rear of fuselage. Encountered at 2,000 feet, coordinates … Edward stopped typing. He would finish the report later, he thought. Instead, he started to go through an inventory of supplies, something he’d been meaning to do for days. Cameras, 24 K-2s. Plates, glass, 4x5 inches. Developer, potassium oxalate. Beyond the window, the wandering clouds of the morning had joined to become a wall of white, sealing the world in like a lid. The wind had picked up; he could hear its low sound around the building. He couldn’t concentrate. He put down the inventory. He put his head on the desk and folded his arms over it. If he stayed like this, he could blot out his desk with its stacks of papers, his office, the view of the airfield, everything.
Daniels was gone, vanished. Edward had hardly had time to know the man, and now he had simply disappeared. It was the randomness that felt so shocking: with slightly different luck, he might have been over in the smoking lounge right now, playing cards. Someone else, or no one, might have been killed in his place.
Edward went over and locked his office door. He cleared a space on his desk and took out a pen and a sheet of paper: he felt that he must try to tell someone what had happened, but he stared at the paper and no words came. He did not know how he could describe this to people who were not part of the war, who had not experienced it themselves. Angrily, he crumpled the paper up and threw it away. Outside, the rain began. He heard it drumming like impatient fingers on the window glass. He thought about that crossroads twenty miles away on the other side of the lines where it would wash away the footprints of departed soldiers, the tracks of their trucks and guns, slurring and dimming the evidence that they had been there, the marks that might have told him where they had gone. And then a little further on, in the middle of a field, there was the remains of an American plane that looked like it might have been a two-seater but was hard to identify by its wreckage, twisted by fire and the impact when it hit the ground.
On a new piece of paper he wrote: Dear Marion. He paused, looking down at her name written in his slanting hand, then he continued: Today one of our observers was shot down and killed. His plane fell on the far side of the lines. This morning he was here and now he is gone, and I am in the process of choosing someone to take his job. I look at the men who are left and they begin to seem transparent. Tomorrow, they might vanish, too. This war has begun erasing us, one by one. He knew even as he wrote that he would not send the letter. But he felt certain that if he did, she would understand what he meant; and somehow that was sufficient.
THAT EVENING, AFTER supper, Edward went into the officers’ lounge and found Lutz and one of the pilots at the piano there. Lutz was singing something he didn’t recognize. He sat down and flipped through a copy of the newspaper left over from the morning.
After a little while he heard a familiar progression of notes from the far corner, and then the opening refrain of Non più andrai, farfallone amoroso from The Marriage of Figaro, in Lutz’s rich round tones.
“What’s that?” asked someone sitting near him.
“It’s Mozart,” Edward said.
“Hey, isn’t that Hun music? Should he be singing that?”
Edward looked around. He didn’t know the man who had spoken.
“Oh, no,” he said. “Listen: it’s in Italian.”
“Oh, well in that case …”
“He’s singing to his friend who is going off to war for the first time.”
From the corner, Lutz glanced over at Edward and mimed tipping his hat. Here’s an end to your days in the sun, lad / Here’s an end to your games with the girls, he sang. Among great warriors, holding your pack/a gun on your shoulder, a saber at your right/in place of dancing, a march through the mud.
THE RAIN CONTINUED all night, but by morning it was another mottled day, with lines of high cloud like furrows in a plowed field. They flew up the river course. Below them, already, the guns were awake, sending shells over the lines in a sleepy, disinterested way. For a while they didn’t see anything else in the air.
They flew past Mézy on their own side of the lines, then they cut north and east into the salient. It had been McIntyre’s idea to go by a new route, one that took them away from the major towns and roads near the front. It might give them the chance to cover more ground before they ran into any enemy.
We’ll have to be our own escort, McIntyre had said when Edward had conveyed the news that there were still no scouts to come with them. We’ll go the long way round, and we’ll keep our altitude. No barnstorming at two hundred feet. High and safe, he told the pilots before they went out that morning. Let the interpreters find the answers later: that is their job, but they can only do it if we all come home in one piece. Boring! Edward heard someone say, and he looked around to see Tom Cundall half-grin, half-grimace at him. McIntyre heard him: Yes, he said. It’s work. It’s boring. You want to go joyriding, wait until the war is over.
In the middle of the run, Edward saw something on the ground that he couldn’t identify. It was rectangular, the dimensions of a medium-sized building, but there was something strange about it. Around it there was grass, but inside it there was only a dark space without distinguishing features. It was at the edge of a field, some distance away from a small farmhouse. A little further on, he saw another one: rectangular, dark and blurred. He kept taking pictures, hoping that they would show enough detail to tell him what it was.
From the east a group of four Albatroses came climbing toward them. McIntyre put out blue flags on his wings to signal the others. Two of the observation planes hung back to deliver covering fire while the rest turned directly for home. The Albatroses scattered and looped, then came back shooting. When Edward looked back, the fight seemed to be taking place underwater, all the elements slowed down, so he could see with hypnotic clarity the movements of the planes as they circled each other. Then one of the observation planes was losing altitude. Edward watched it descend over No Man’s Land until it dipped behind a hill on the safe side of the lines. He just had time to remember its number before it vanished from view.
When he arrived back at the airfield, he realized it was Dawson’s plane that had been downed.
FIRE IN THE corner of a field: a diagonal of dark gray thinned as it rose to become translucent. What was it from? What was burning? He looked again, and through the eyepieces of the stereoscope, the landscape resolved into its three dimensions, depth coming from frozen consecutive seconds superimposed one on another. Here was the road, the field that they had seen from the air, the fire. How big was the blaze? It was in the corner of a field, so it was probably a barn, nothing more, though would a barn really burn that fiercely? What had been inside it? Could it have been an ammunition dump? That was certainly possible. He made notes on the tablet of paper at his elbow.
Standing beside Edward, Lutz asked, “Do you see it, sir? In the bottom left-hand corner.”
They were in the developing laboratory at the airfield. Behind them men moved around the large central table, putting together the photographs from that morning into a mosaic map of the landscape. Edward refocused the stereoscope so now the bottom of the picture sprang into clarity. The curve of the road. An outcropping of trees along a slight rise in the shape of a laughing mouth. And there: another of the strange imprints he had seen during the morning’s flight, square and dark, a little way back from the road.
; “Got it,” he said.
“What do you think it is?” Lutz asked. Edward looked up.
“I don’t know. I thought that the stereoscope would give us a sense of its height. But it doesn’t seem to have any.”
“Right, sir. It’s just a mark on the ground.” Edward looked again. Lutz was right: it was no more than a discoloration, a darkening, and the contrast to its surroundings made it seem real, gave it the illusion of solidity.
“It looks like there was a building there, and now it’s gone,” Edward said. “Nothing left but an outline. I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it. We’ll just have to report it and keep watching.” Lutz nodded. “Let me have a look at the rest of the prints.”
More fires, one in Bois de Brulit, one in Etrepilly. Soldiers in the streets of Vaux, forming up into companies in the town square. Vaux had been shelled by the French at dawn that day: the troops might be evacuating for someplace new. Also, a work party on the outskirts of the town, about fifteen men, clustered around an old wooden outbuilding, maybe a dairy. They had two wagons with them, two teams of horses. He made a note of their coordinates, then went back to scanning through the photographs.
A downed plane, French, just outside Bussiares. Some activity in a woods just north of the same town: men entering and leaving the cover of the trees; something big had been dragged up the rise toward it; that was all he could tell. Along the road from Château-Thierry, a line of ambulances, six of them, made their way toward the town. Piles of leaves and branches covered their canvas backs: camouflage. But they were all the same shape, and it gave them away.
Behind him, someone called out: “Dawson just telephoned from a communications post near Mézy. They had a bumpy landing in the middle of a cow pasture, but he is all right. The pilot, too.”
A cheer went up from the men around the table. For a moment it didn’t matter that they had to go out again that evening, only that for now, one of their number was safe.
The Last Summer of the World Page 16
